The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge

Alexander B. Murphy, Department of Geography, University of Oregon

Victoria Lawson, University of Washington The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge is a critical inquiry into how Geography as a field of knowledge has been produced, re-produced, and re-imagined.

Comprehensive without claiming to be encyclopedic, textured and nuanced, this Handbook will be a key resource for all researchers with an interest in the pasts, presents and future Geography. John A. Agnew is Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. David N. Livingstone is Professor at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Cover image © iStockphoto I Cover design by Wendy Scott

The SAGE Handbook of

• ORIENTATIONS: Geography’s Geneaologies; Geography’s Narratives and Intellectual History • GEOGRAPHY’S VENUES: Field; Museums; Laboratory/Observatory; Archive; Botanical Gardens/Zoos; Learned Societies; Geographical Information Systems Laboratory; Art Studio; Weather Station and Meteorological Office; Centre of Calculation; Remote Sensing; Places of Financial Knowledge; Mission; Battlefield; Mathematical Models in Geographical Space; Subaltern Space; Public Sphere; Policy and Government • CRITICAL CONCEPTS AND CONTROVERSIES: Nature and Society; Landscape; Space and Place; Time; Region and Regionalism; Map; Environmental Determinism; Spatial Analysis; Dynamics and Complexity; Social Class; Race/Ethnicity; Gender; Evolution; Ecosystem; Landform; Cycle of Erosion; Glaciation and Ice Ages; Rivers and Drainage Basins; Environmental Change; Climate Change; The City; Urban–Rural; Mobility; Conservation; Development; Geopolitics

Geographical Knowledge

It comprises three sections on Geographical Orientations, Geography’s Venues, and Critical Geographical Concepts and Controversies. The first provides an overview of the genealogy of ‘geography’. The second highlights the types of spatial settings and locations in which geographical knowledge has been produced. The third focuses on venues of primary importance in the historical geography of geographical knowledge.

The SAGE Handbook of

Edited by

‘The Handbook provides a refreshingly innovative approach to charting geographical knowledge. A wide range of authors trace the social construction and contestation of geographical ideas through the sites of their production and their relational geographies of engagement. This creative and comprehensive book offers an extremely valuable tool to professionals and students alike.’

Agnew and Livingstone

‘Agnew and Livingstone have put together a Handbook that recasts geography’s history in original, thoughtprovoking ways. It fleshes out often-neglected aspects of the discipline’s history, even as it consistently encourages thinking about the relationship between geographical practices and the places, circumstances, and understandings in which those practices are embedded.’

Geographical Knowledge

Edited by

John A. Agnew and David N. Livingstone

The SAGE Handbook of

Geographical Knowledge

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Editorial Board

Professor Keith Richards, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Cambridge Professor Robert Mayhew, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol Professor Glen MacDonald, Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Professor Susan Schulten, Department of History, University of Denver, USA

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The SAGE Handbook of

Geographical Knowledge

Edited by

John A. Agnew and David N. Livingstone

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© Editorial Arrangement and Editorial Introduction John A. Agnew and David N. Livingstone 2011 Chapter 1 © Robert J. Mayhew 2011 Chapter 2 © Charles W. J. Withers 2011 Chapter 3 © Keith Richards 2011 Chapter 4 © Simon Naylor and Jude Hill 2011 Chapter 5 © Scott Kirsch 2011 Chapter 6 © Miles Ogborn 2011 Chapter 7 © Nuala C. Johnson 2011 Chapter 8 © Michael Heffernan 2011 Chapter 9 © Michael F. Goodchild 2011 Chapter 10 © Stephen Daniels 2011 Chapter 11 © Keith Richards 2011 Chapter 12 © Heike Jöns 2011 Chapter 13 © Yongwei Sheng 2011 Chapter 14 © Roger Lee 2011 Chapter 15 © Georgina Endfield 2011 Chapter 16 © Gerard Toal/Gearóid Ó Tuathail 2011 Chapter 17 © Stuart N. Lane 2011 Chapter 18 © Daniel Clayton 2011 Chapter 19 © Mustafa Dikeç 2011 Chapter 20 © Tim Unwin 2011 Chapter 21 © Noel Castree 2011 Chapter 22 © John Wylie 2011 Chapter 23 © John A. Agnew 2011

Chapter 24 © Mike Crang 2011 Chapter 25 © J. Nicholas Entrikin 2011 Chapter 26 © Anne Godlewska and Jason Grek Martin 2011 Chapter 27 © David N. Livingstone 2011 Chapter 28 © Trevor J. Barnes 2011 Chapter 29 © Christopher J. Keylock 2011 Chapter 30 © Eric Sheppard and James Glassman 2011 Chapter 31 © Caroline Bressey 2011 Chapter 32 © Joanne Sharp 2011 Chapter 33 © Neil Roberts 2011 Chapter 34 © George P. Malanson 2011 Chapter 35 © Nick Spedding 2011 Chapter 36 © Antony R. Orme 2011 Chapter 37 © Bryan Mark 2011 Chapter 38 © Nick Clifford 2011 Chapter 39 © Andrew Goudie 2011 Chapter 40 © Glen M. Macdonald 2011 Chapter 41 © Phil Hubbard 2011 Chapter 42 © Paul Cloke 2011 Chapter 43 © Tim Cresswell 2011 Chapter 44 © Michael Williams 2011 Chapter 45 © Robert B. Potter and Dennis Conway 2011 Chapter 46 © Gerry Kearns 2011

First published 2011 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP

Library of Congress Control Number 2010929493 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, Post Bag 7 New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-4129-1081-1

Typeset by Glyph International, Bangalore, India Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group, Bodmin, Cornwall Printed on paper from sustainable resources

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Contents

List of Contributors

ix

INTRODUCTION John A. Agnew and David N. Livingstone

1

PART 1

19

1

Geography’s Genealogies Robert J. Mayhew

21

2

Geography’s Narratives and Intellectual History Charles W.J. Withers

39

PART 2

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ORIENTATIONS

GEOGRAPHY’S VENUES

51

3

The Field Keith Richards

53

4

Museums Simon Naylor and Jude Hill

64

5

Laboratory/Observatory Scott Kirsch

76

6

Archive Miles Ogborn

88

7

Botanical Gardens and Zoos Nuala C. Johnson

99

8

Learned Societies Michael Heffernan

111

9

Geographical Information Systems Laboratory Michael F. Goodchild

126

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CONTENTS

10

Art Studio Stephen Daniels

137

11

The Weather Station and the Meteorological Office Keith Richards

149

12

Centre of Calculation Heike Jöns

158

13

Remote Sensing Yongwei Sheng

171

14

Spaces of Hegemony? Circuits of Value, Finance Capital and Places of Financial Knowledge Roger Lee

15

The Mission Georgina Endfield

202

16

Battlefield Gerard Toal/Gearóid Ó Tuathail

217

17

Making Mathematical Models Perform in Geographical Space(s) Stuart N. Lane

228

18

Subaltern Space Daniel Clayton

246

19

Public Sphere Mustafa Dikeç

261

20

The Role of Geography and Geographers in Policy and Government Departments Tim Unwin

PART 3

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185

CRITICAL CONCEPTS AND CONTROVERSIES

271

285

21

Nature and Society Noel Castree

287

22

Landscape John Wylie

300

23

Space and Place John A. Agnew

316

24

Time Mike Crang

331

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CONTENTS

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25

Region and Regionalism J. Nicholas Entrikin

344

26

Map Anne Godlewska and Jason Grek Martin

357

27

Environmental Determinism David N. Livingstone

368

28

Spatial Analysis Trevor J. Barnes

381

29

Dynamics and Complexity Christopher J. Keylock

393

30

Social Class Eric Sheppard and James Glassman

405

31

Race/Ethnicity Caroline Bressey

418

32

Gender Joanne Sharp

430

33

The Idea of Evolution in Geographical Thought Neil Roberts

441

34

Ecosystem George P. Malanson

452

35

Landform Nick Spedding

465

36

The Cycle of Erosion: Changing Times, Changing Science Antony R. Orme

475

37

Glaciation and Ice Ages Bryan Mark

492

38

Rivers and Drainage Basins Nick Clifford

502

39

Environmental Change Andrew Goudie

528

40

Global Climate Change Glen M. MacDonald

540

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CONTENTS

41

The City Phil Hubbard

549

42

Urban–Rural Paul Cloke

563

43

Mobility Tim Cresswell

571

44

Conservation and Environmental Concern Michael Williams

581

45

Development Robert B. Potter and Dennis Conway

595

46

Geopolitics Gerry Kearns

610

Index

623

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List of Contributors

John A. Agnew is Distinguished Professor of Geography at UCLA, Los Angeles, California, USA. In 2008–9 he was President of the Association of American Geographers. He is the author, co-author, or editor of many books and articles including, most recently, Globalization and Sovereignty (2009), Berlusconi’s Italy (2008), and Companion to Human Geography (2011). Trevor Barnes is a Professor and Distinguished University Scholar at the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia,Vancouver. His research interests are in the new economy, the video game and film and tv industries, and in the history of geography. He is currently writing a book, Notes from the Underground, about the influence of World War II and the Cold War on the development of American geography. Caroline Bressey is a lecturer in the Department of Geography, University College London. Her research focuses on the historical geographies of the black presence in Victorian Britain, particularly London. The aim of her research is to recover geographical biographies of black people including their experiences of race and racism. This is closely linked to her examination of the early anti-racist community which emerged in Britain at the end of the Victorian period. Dr Bressey also investigates the representation of these histories in public spaces such as galleries and museums. A member of the London Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage, she has undertaken curatorial roles for the National Portrait Gallery and the Museum in Docklands and is a member of the management committee of BASA (the Black and Asian Studies Association). Noel Castree is a Professor of Geography at Manchester University, England. His main research interest is in the political economy of environmental change. His is managing editor of the journal Progress in Human Geography and author of Nature (2005). He is also co-editor of the books Questioning Geography (2005), David Harvey: A Critical Reader (2006), Social Nature (2001) and Remaking Reality (1998). Daniel Clayton teaches in the School of Geography and Geosciences, University of St Andrews. His teaching and research interests are in the area of cultural and historical geography, and alight on questions of colonialism and postcolonialism. He is the author of Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (2000), and is currently working (with Gavin Bowd) on a book entitled ‘Impure and Worldly Geography’: Pierre Gourou and Tropicality. Nicholas Clifford is a Chartered Geographer, and obtained his undergraduate and post-graduate degrees at the University of Cambridge. He is currently Professor of Physical Geography at King’s College, London, and was formerly Professor of River Science at the University of Nottingham. His research interests span sediment transport in fluvial and estuarine

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environments; hydrodynamic and morphodynamic modelling of river environments; and river restoration design and appraisal. He is Managing Editor of the Sage journal Progress in Physical Geography, and co-editor of Sage’s Key Methods (2010) and Key Concepts (2009) in Geography. He has authored more than 100 academic and conference papers. Paul Cloke is Professor of Human Geography in the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Exeter and has longstanding research interests in rural geography and rural change. He has been the Founder Editor of Journal of Rural Studies since 1985, and is Editor (with Terry Marsden and Patrick Mooney) of The Sage Handbook of Rural Studies. Dennis Conway is Professor Emeritus of Geography at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. He has written over 140 articles and book chapters on Nepalese migration and development, environmental and ecological issues, Caribbean urbanization, migration, economic development, alternative tourism and the environmental consequences of these societal processes. His recent books include Return Migration of the Next Generations: 21st Century Transnational Mobility (with Robert B. Potter, 2009); The Experience of Return Migration: Caribbean Perspectives (with Robert B. Potter and Joan Phillips, 2005); and Globalization’s Contradictions: Geographies of Discipline, Destruction and Transformation (with Nik Heynen, 2006). Mike Crang is a Reader in Geography at Durham University. His research on time has focused upon urban rhythms and the role of Information and communication technologies in changing the organisation of the times and spaces of daily life. He has published several books, including recently co-editing the Handbook of Qualitative Geography (Sage), the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (12 volumes, Elsevier), the Encyclopedia of Urban Studies (2 volumes, Sage) and Cultures of Mass Tourism: the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities (Ashgate). He was the editor of the journal Time & Society from 1997–2006. Tim Cresswell is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests are broadly in issues surrounding the conceptualization of place and mobility, spatialities of ordering and geographical theory more generally. He is currently writing a monograph which reconceptualises place through an account of one hundred years of a Chicago market. He is the author of On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (Routledge, 2006); Place: A Short Introduction (Blackwell, 2004); The Tramp in America (Reaktion, 2001) and In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression (Minnesota, 1996). He has co-edited four volumes, most recently, Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects (Ashgate, 2011). Stephen Daniels is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Nottingham. Since 2005 he has been Director of the AHRC programme in Landscape and Environment. His books include Fields of Vision (1992), Joseph Wright (1999) and Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (1999) also the exhibition catalogues Art of the Garden (Tate, 2004) and Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain (Royal Academy, 2009). He is presently researching the public value of landscape and environment research and continuing his work on the history and theory of eighteenth century landscape art and design. Mustafa Dikeç is Lecturer at the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests include space and politics, histories of time and space, and hospitality. His current research focuses on policies and geographies of asylum in Europe, and the unification and distribution of time in nineteenth century Paris. He is the author of Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy (Blackwell, 2007), and editor (with Nigel

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Clark and Clive Barnett) of Extending Hospitality: Giving Space, Taking Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Georgina Endfield is a Reader in Environmental History in the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on mainly on the environmental and climate history of colonial Mexico and nineteenth century central, southern and eastern Africa. She has published her research in journals across the disciplines of Geography, History, Archaeology and the History of Science and is the author of Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: a Study in Vulnerability (Blackwell, 2008). J. Nicholas Entrikin is an emeritus faculty member in the Department of Geographyat UCLA, where he also served as the Vice-Provost for International Studies and directed the International Institute. Currently, he is Professor of Sociology and Vice President for Internationalization at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of The Betweenness of Place (1991), the co-editor of The Marshall Plan Today: Model and Metaphor (2004), and the editor of Regions (2008). Jim Glassman is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on uneven development and social struggle, including the roles of states in these processes. He has conducted most of his research in Thailand, China, and, more recently, South Korea. He is the author of Thailand at the Margins: Internationalization of the State and the Transformation of Labour (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Bounding the Mekong: The Asian Development Bank, China, and Thailand (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010). Anne Godlewska is a Professor of Geography at Queen’s University and President of the Canadian Association of Geographers. Her work is concerned with trans-cultural communication, the geographic imagination, and the mechanisms and consequences of imperialism. Among her publications are Geography Unbound (1999), The Napoleonic Survey of Egypt (1989) and the co-edited book Geography and Empire (1994). She has also authored a webbased atlas: http://geog.queensu.ca/napoleonatlas/. Michael F. Goodchild is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of UCSB’s Center for Spatial Studies. He received his BA degree from Cambridge University in Physics in 1965 and his PhD in Geography from McMaster University in 1969, and has received four honorary doctorates. He was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and Foreign Member of the Royal Society of Canada (2002), member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006), and Foreign Member of the Royal Society and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (2010); and in 2007 he received the Prix Vautrin Lud. He was editor of Geographical Analysis between 1987 and 1990 and editor of the Methods, Models, and Geographic Information Sciences section of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers from 2000 to 2006. He serves on the editorial boards of ten other journals and book series, and has published more than 15 books and 400 articles. He was Chair of the National Research Council’s Mapping Science Committee from 1997 to 1999, and currently chairs the Advisory Committee on Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation. His current research interests center on geographic information science, spatial analysis, and uncertainty in geographic data. Andrew Goudie is a Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford and the Master of St Cross College. He has spent most of his career working as a geomorphologist in the world’s deserts. He is a recipient of a Royal Medal from the Royal Geographical Society, the Mungo

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Park Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and the Farouk El-Baz Award of the Geological Society of America. He is the author of Great Warm Deserts of the World (2002) and Wheels across the Desert – Exploration of the Libyan Desert by Motorcar 1916–1942 (2009). Jason Grek Martin is a historical-cultural geographer and his recent research has focused on the scientific surveying and exploration of western Canada carried out during the late nineteenth century by George Dawson and the Geological Survey of Canada. He is also embarking on a new research project exploring how people’s attachments to cherished ‘places of nature’ (such as urban parks, national parks, and UNESCO World Heritage Sites) have been/are being altered by profound transformative events, such as natural disasters and climate change. Jude Hill was awarded her PhD on ‘Cultures and Networks of Collecting: The Henry Wellcome Collection’ in 2004 from Royal Holloway, University of London. She then worked at the University of Exeter as lecturer in Human Geography until 2008, when she joined the University of Bristol’s Research Development team. While Jude no longer works as an academic, she still has an enduring interest in: historical and cultural geography; collections, collectors and collecting; museums, and much else besides. Mike Heffernan is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham in the UK. He is interested in the history and politics of geography and cartography in Europe and North America from the 18th century to 20th centuries. Phil Hubbard is Professor of Urban Studies, School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent. He has written widely on the social life of cities, and is author of numerous books including The Sage Compendium of Urban Studies (2008, co-edited with John Short and Tim Hall), Key Thinkers on Space and Place (2011, co-edited with Rob Kitchin) and Key Concepts in Geography The City (2006, Routledge). He is currently working on a monograph that draws on his many studies of the relationship between sexuality and the city (to be published by Routledge, 2011). Nuala C. Johnson is a Reader in Human Geography at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast. She is an historical geographer with research interests in the relationships between memory politics and representation; spaces of scientific knowledge and aesthetics; and place and literary geographies. Her recent books include Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance (2003, Cambridge University Press); A Companion to Cultural Geography (co-editor, 2004, Blackwell); Culture and Society (editor, 2008, Ashgate); Nature Displaced, Nature Displayed: Order and Beauty in Botanic Gardens (2011, IB Tauris). Heike Jöns is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Loughborough University (UK). She received her PhD at the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and spent two years as a Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham (UK). Her research examines historical and contemporary geographies of science and higher education, with a focus on transnational academic mobility. Gerry Kearns is a Co-Convenor of the Historical-Cultural Research Cluster. He is a director of the Centre for Gender Studies at Cambridge, and is Historical Geography Convenor for the European Social Science History Association. His research focuses on the history and cultural politics of public health; geography and imperialism; and geographical imaginaries of Irish

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nationalism. He has published over forty articles and is co-editor of Selling Places: The City as Cultural Capital, Past and Present (1993, with Chris Philo) and Urbanising Britain: Essays on Class and Community in the Nineteenth Century (1991, with Charles Withers). He has recently finished Geopolitics and Empire, a book about the relations between the ideologies of Victorian-British and Neo-Conservative-American imperialism, and Vital Politics, an ESRCfunded international and interdisciplinary seminar series about the political, economic and social circumstances under which the beginning and end of life are culturally and technologically constructed (with Simon Reid-Henry, Queen Mary College, University of London). He is currently working on a book about the geography of Irish nationalism, Young Ireland: Colonialism, Violence, Nationalism. Chris Keylock obtained BA, MSc. and PhD. degrees in Geography from the universities of Oxford, British Columbia and Cambridge, respectively. He is currently a Prize Senior Lecturer in the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, University of Sheffield. His research spans a range of disciplines within Geography but is primarily oriented towards granular mass flows and their risk assessment, turbulence processes and the development of methods for analysing nonlinear processes. Scott Kirsch is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research on nineteenth and twentieth century American science and technology explores the spaces of knowledge production and the relations between science and the state. He is the author of Proving Grounds: Project Plowshare and the Unrealized Dream of Nuclear Earthmoving (Rutgers, 2005) and editor, with Colin Flint, of Reconstructing Conflict: Integrating War and Post-War Geographies (Ashgate, 2011). Stuart Lane has been professeur de géomorphologie at l’Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, since February 2011. Before then he was Director of the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience in Durham University having previously held a Chair in Physical Geography at Leeds University and a Lectureship at the University of Cambridge. His work is concerned with the monitoring and mathematical modelling of hydrological and geomorphological processes and has been recognised by a number of awards including the Jan de Ploey Award of the International Association of Geomorphologists, the Ralph A Bagnold Award of the European Geosciences Union, the Annual Award of the Association of Rivers Trusts for contributions to science and two best paper prizes from scientific journals. Roger Lee (AcSS) is Emeritus Professor of Geography in the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London. His economic geographical interests lie in the socio-material constructions of economic geographies with especial reference to alternative systems of value and to the meanings and effects of money within economic geographies. Recent publications include Interrogating Alterity Alternative Economic and Political Spaces (edited with Duncan Fuller and Andrew Jonas, 2010); Economic society/Social geography (in The Sage Handbook of Social Geographies, edited by Susan J. Smith et al., 2010); Within and outwith/Material and political? Local economic development and the spatialities of economic geographies (in A Handbook of Local and Regional Development edited by Andy Pike et al., 2011); Acts of theory and violence Can the worlds of economic geographies be left intact? (in Postcolonial Economies, edited by Jane Pollard et al., 2011). David N. Livingstone is Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen’s University Belfast and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of numerous books including

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The Geographical Tradition, Putting Science in it Place and Adam’s Ancestors. He is currently working on a geography of Darwinism under the title Dealing with Darwin, and is beginning a major project on the history of climatic determinism entitled The Empire of Climate. George P. Malanson, is the Coleman-Miller Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Iowa. He received his PhD in Geography from UCLA (1983). His research and teaching interests are in biogeography, mountains, physical geography, spatial simulations. He is the North American editor of Progress in Physical Geography and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Bryan Mark researches the nature, extent, and biophysical impact of changes in glacier environments over time. His collaborative group research focuses on modern glacier recession as well as Late-Glacial to Holocene variability, and aims to develop transdisciplinary understanding of climate forcing, hydrologic impacts, social adaptation and vulnerability. He specializes in glacier environmental change in the Andes, but also works in North America and Africa. He earned his PhD in Earth Sciences from Syracuse University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. Robert Mayhew is Professor of Historical Geography and Intellectual History at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Enlightenment Geography (2000) and many articles on the history of British geography in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is currently writing a study of the ideas and intellectual legacy of Thomas Robert Malthus. Simon Naylor is Senior Lecturer in Historical Geography at the University of Exeter. He has written extensively on the spaces of knowledge production and dissemination, including museums, fieldsites, weather observatories, conversaziones and exhibitions. He is the co-editor (with James R. Ryan) of New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century (IB Tauris, 2010). He is the author of Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledges in Victorian England, (Pickering & Chatto, 2010). Miles Ogborn is Professor of Geography at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (1998), Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (2007) and Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (2008). He is currently working on the relationships between talk and text in Britain’s early modern Atlantic world. Antony R. Orme (PhD, 1961, University of Birmingham, England) is Emeritus Professor of Geography in the University of California, Los Angeles. His research involves geomorphology, Quaternary studies, and environmental management, with a focus on the nature and processes of landscape change, interactive tectonic and climatic forcing, human impacts, and Earth science history. He has worked extensively in western North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Britain and Ireland. Recent research papers address river-mouth and beach morphodynamics, multidecadal coastal changes, Pleistocene and Holocene pluvial lakes, coastal dunes and sealevel fluctuations, Clarence Dutton and isostasy, and shifting paradigms in geomorphology. Rob Potter BSc PhD (London) DSc (Reading) AcSS is currently Head of the School of Human and Environmental Sciences and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Reading. His research and teaching interests span development geography and development studies; urban geography; second-generation return migration; transnationality and issues of identity

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and social equity aspects of the use of water in Jordan. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the interdisciplinary journal Progress in Development Studies. He is currently a member of the International Editorial Boards of the journals Third World Quarterly, Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies, and Blackwell Geography Compass. Keith Richards is Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge, where he has been since 1984 as Lecturer, Reader and Professor. His current research focuses on river and catchment science, hydrology and water resource management, especially in East and South-East Asia (he has undertaken field research in Thailand, India, and China). He is also interested in science studies, the nature of interdisciplinarity, and methodology in physical geography and the environmental sciences. He has been Vice President of the RGS-IBG, and has been a member of the Peer Review Colleges of both NERC and ESRC and Chair of the UK Research Assessment Exercise panel for Geography and Environmental Studies. His publications number about 200 (journal articles, chapters, and edited and authored books). Neil Roberts is Professor of Geography at the University of Plymouth in England. He received his PhD from the University of London (UCL), and has been subsequently been researcher at the University of Oxford and Lecturer at Loughborough University. His research emphasizes past climatic and environmental change since the time of the last glacial maximum, specifically derived from lake-sediment archives. He has worked extensively in eastern Africa, the Mediterranean and West Asia, often with close links to archaeology. Since 1993 he has directed a series of field programmes in Turkey. He is author of the key text, the Holocene, and is an editor of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. Professor Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and has served on many national and international committees concerning past global changes. This included the National Academies Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Past 2,000 Years, set up at the request of the US Congress in 2006. In 2007 he was visiting Blaustein research fellow at Stanford University. Joanne Sharp is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Her research interests are in feminist, cultural, political and postcolonial geographies, specifically around issues of identity, geopolitics, and issues of voice and agency in development. She is author of Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity (2000, University of Minnesota) and Geographies of Postcolonialism: Spaces of Power and Representation (2009, Sage), and has published in journals such as Third World Quarterly, Society and Space, Political Geography and Cultural Geographies. Yongwei Sheng is a scientist in the field of Geospatial Information Systems and Technologies (GIST) with research interests in remote sensing, photogrammetry, geographic information systems (GIS), and their applications in large-area environmental monitoring and assessment. He contributes to the development of scientific, theoretical and methodological aspects of GIST, and his research includes regional-scale lake dynamics mapping and monitoring using GIST in the context of climate change through NSF and NASA-funded projects. Eric Sheppard is Regents Professor of Geography and Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. University of Minnesota. He has published The Capitalist Space Economy (with Trevor Barnes), A World of Difference (with Philip Porter, David Faust and Richa Nagar), A Companion to Economic Geography (with Barnes), Scale and Geographic Inquiry (with Robert McMaster), Reading Economic Geography and Politics and Practice in Economic Geography (with Trevor Barnes, Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell),

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Contesting Neoliberalism (with Helga Leitner and Jamie Peck), and over one hundred refereed journal articles. Nick Spedding first became interested in the history of geographical knowledge as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. This interest developed further during his postgraduate studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he completed a PhD in glacial geomorphology. He is now a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, where his work continues to focus on the history and philosophy of the earth and environmental sciences. Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) is Professor of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Tech’s campus in the Washington DC metro region. He was educated in political geography at the National University of Ireland at Maynooth (BA, Hons, 1982), the University of Illinois (MA, 1984), and Syracuse University (PhD, 1989). He is the author of Critical Geopolitics (Routledge, 1996) and an editor of A Companion to Political Geography (Blackwell, 2002) and The Geopolitics Reader (2nd edition Routledge, 2006) amongst other works. His latest book is Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal (Oxford University Press, 2011). Tim Unwin is Professor of Geography and UNESCO Chair in ICT4D. He is also Chair of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission. In 2007–2008 he was Director and then Senior Advisor to the World Economic Forum’s Partnerships for Education programme with UNESCO. From 2001–2004 he led the UK Prime Minister’s Imfundo initiative based in the Department for International Development, creating partnerships to deliver ICT-based educational initiatives in Africa. Since returning to Royal Holloway, University of London, he has created an ICT4D Collective, which undertakes research, teaching and consultancy in the field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development. His other research interests include the interface between ethics and geography, contemporary rural change in Europe, and the historical geography of viticulture and the wine trade. Michael Williams was Professor of Geography and Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. A Fellow of the British Academy, he was the author of several books including The Draining of the Somerset Levels (1970), The Making of the South Australian Landscape (1976), Americans and their Forests (1989) and Deforesting the Earth, From Prehistory to Global Crisis. At the time of his death in October 2009, he was completing a biographical study of Carl Sauer which is now in press. Charles W. J. Withers is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Edinburgh. With David Livingstone, he has co-edited Geography and Enlightenment (1999), Geography and Revolution (2005) and Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science (2011). Other recent publications include Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (2007) and Geography and Science in Britain 1831–1939: A Study of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (2010). He is currently working on exploration, instrumentation and travel writing in the period c.1780–1850. John Wylie is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Geography at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on issues of landscape, performance, spectrality and geographical theory more widely, and he has written a series of articles and book chapters on these topics, as well as a single-authored book, Landscape (Routledge, 2007).

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Introduction John A. Agnew and David N. Livingstone

This Handbook provides an opportunity to think critically about how geography as a field of knowledge, not so much as a restraining discipline with fusty conventions but as a rich set of intellectual traditions producing new knowledge with reworked concepts, has emerged and fared over the course of its modern institutionalization. Unlike some other fields, geographical scholarship is not neatly demarcated. Frequently physical and human geography are separated out from one another as if they had completely different historical trajectories. Yet, over a fairly long period of time, it is their very co-existence that is one of the things that has helped to constitute the field at large. It is quintessentially an interdisciplinary tradition when its various ‘parts’ (physical and human, cultural and economic, etc.) are considered together. Given its catholicity and relatively open boundaries, many of its most compelling practitioners are only viewed as ‘geographical’ in orientation as a result of hindsight. Particularly before the creation of university departments and degree programs in geography, the label ‘geographer’ or ‘geographical writer’ was not a self-evident one for many whom we might judge today as central figures in the ‘geographical canon’ (e.g.

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Immanuel Kant or Alexander von Humboldt). Geography as a discipline is, therefore, very largely a retrospectively constituted tradition. Though there are good grounds for feeling uneasy and self-conscious about the invention of traditions, we cannot do without a tradition if we are to engage in common dialogue, avoid historical superficiality, think critically and creatively about the nature of the discipline, prepare the next generation of students, and ground commitments to our fields of study in rapidly changing institutional settings. Traditions are inescapable (Agnew et al. 1996). The issue is to ensure that they remain vital conversations between past and present without degenerating into repressive or exclusionary regimes. In this Handbook we adopt a relatively broad definition of what constitutes geographical scholarship, but we do so in the belief that there is a stream of knowledge sited in discrete locations but circulating over space and flowing across time that can be plausibly labeled ‘geographical’. This is not to imply some a priori commitment to a canon of geographical thought operating as a transcendental touchstone for all that comes later. Rather, to adopt the metaphor of ancients and moderns, it is to recognize that

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE

new authors discard some ‘ancients’ only to jump back and expropriate others, even as these are mobilized to create new visions to engage with new problematics (e.g. Klibansky 1936). The central issue is not so much the historical selectivity of the canon as the fact that it has been an unreflexive invented tradition that has avoided serious systematic critical scrutiny. As we draw on historical precursors, therefore, we need to be aware of why we draw on them (and not on others) and that what we draw on will not necessarily be the same as they (or their contemporaries) had in mind. A canon may well be fundamental to a discipline but an unexamined one is not. Over the past 30 years or so, students of scientific, social, political and geographical thought and practice have become increasingly sensitive to the questionable ways in which their subject matter has been seen conventionally, often in a so-called Whiggish mode, as leading from a primitive and illinformed past to what is dominant today. A string of canonical authors is typically given center stage in the unfolding linear disciplinary drama. Such an approach is indeed critical to the modern identities of sociologists, biologists, economists, geographers, and so on. This strategy is deficient in itself, however, because it often fails to justify why some authors are canonical and others are not, and it typically fails to situate authors in the context of their places and times. These two critiques have become vital components in the reformulation of textbooks in social and political thought. In geography, however, there is still a tendency to obsess about ‘big names’, partly as a result of the way in which universities have recruited talent by bringing in stars with extensive resumes to bolster their reputations, but also because of the technology of ranking journals, departments, and individuals by their so-called impact. Some commentators have hinted at the significance of, for example, networks of communication and the dynamics of ideas (e.g. Claval 1972; Stoddart 1986). But that is about all. There are relatively few studies that

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successfully devote attention both to what can be called a ‘human interest’ approach, focusing on key intellectual figures, and to the major conceptual controversies that have wracked the field down the years. Powell’s (2005) exciting intellectual history of geographical disputes over the development of the Colorado River and the origins of the Grand Canyon is one that does readily spring to mind. Strangely, at much the same time, modern geography as a discipline has been tremendously influenced by the theoretical interventions of thinkers such as Roland Barthes, who openly proclaimed the ‘death of the author’, and Michel Foucault who spread the idea of the author into what he called the ‘author function’. We could, therefore, claim writers like these as allies in the task of overthrowing the typical conception of how we construe the field. But that would be mistaken. For we are not concerned to deny authorship in the interest of designating discourses that pass through ‘authors’; our project rather is to situate authors in the context of the material and intellectual venues they occupied and the conceptual controversies in which they engaged. For without these their contributions relative to one another cannot be evaluated. Authorship will thus appear in the pages that follow, but not as a cause for celebration in itself. In this Handbook, therefore, we do not aspire to canonize any set of authors. Rather, we propose, on the one hand, to examine the venues or places in which a range of texts, ideas, and concepts from multiple authors have emerged and among which they have circulated; and, on the other hand, to scrutinize critical and contested concepts that have served as both the ‘core’ of the field and whose expropriation, reworking, and elaboration, continue to frame and inform disputes over the direction and power structure of the discipline today. In other words, we seek to balance two critical approaches. First we focus on venues that generate geographical knowledge and are productive of modes of discourse subsequently available to people in

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INTRODUCTION

particular times and places; and secondly we direct attention to the intellectual and social histories of key geographical concepts whose meaning and import have evolved, sometimes controversially, over long periods of time. The endeavor, therefore, is to situate the main ideas and influence of authors who arguably have made fundamental contributions to geographical thought and practice, and to locate them spatially, historically and intellectually. More particularly, the discipline we are addressing here is Western, largely Anglo-American, in provenance. For this we offer no apology. We make no claim to universalism for the Handbook. There are undoubtedly other streams of geographical knowledge than the ones we are concerned with here, but these often have had had little or no direct influence on the traditions we are addressing. Where they are indebted to traditions of scholarship from elsewhere, the essays that follow seek to specify these and to identify the character of the intellectual obligation. To put the more specific approaches to the geographies and conceptual history of geography into a wider frame of reference, however, we do need to provide a set of preliminary orientations that trace the genealogy of terms such as ‘geography’ and ‘the geographical’ and to outline the various broad streams of theoretical and methodological thinking that have informed the field down the years. The Handbook, then, will consist of three sections devoted respectively to Geographical Orientations, Geography’s Venues, and Critical Geographical Concepts and Controversies. The first will provide a brief overview of the genealogy of ‘geography’ in various forms by surveying the dominant narratives of the field that have informed the methodologies and understandings of theory that have animated the discipline. Attention will be given throughout these chapters to the borrowings from and relations with other fields including interdisciplinary ones. The second section will highlight the range of spatial settings and locations in which

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3

geographical knowledge has been generated and around which its main products circulate and are adopted and adapted. We identify 20 or so venues as of primary importance in the historical geography of geographical thought. This list is likely to be far from exhaustive, and the venues identified have waxed and waned in relative significance over time. However, they represent at least some of the key technologies and sites for the production and reproduction of geographical knowledge and its associated texts. At the same time they contribute towards an understanding of intellectual history that takes the role of space and place with great seriousness. Taken together they contribute towards the cultivation of a ‘geography’ of geographical knowledge and practice. The third section will address a range of critical concepts and associated controversies that have served sometimes to unify, sometimes to divide, geographical scholarship; down the years they have been expropriated anew, invested with new meanings, and used to define new ‘intellectual tribes’ that cite their members favorably but subject others to unremitting censure. This section moves beyond the notion of a received canon to identify reworkings and recombinations that have challenged established wisdom. It is again inevitable, as with the section on venues, that not every concept that has had some role in the geographical endeavor can have its own chapter. We have selected those that have had a persistently superordinate status in the hope that other related ones will also be addressed. Thus, for example, such concepts as movement, circulation, diffusion, and iconography should all put in appearances at suitable points in chapters devoted to landscape and nature/culture. Our aim is to be as comprehensive as possible but without claiming to be encyclopedic. In this Introduction we try to do three things. First, we present a general perspective on what can be called ‘geographies of knowledge’ to highlight the perspective that has inspired the focus on venues in the body of the Handbook. If from one viewpoint this

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE

is a negative activity, providing an alternative to the obsession with authors, authorial intent and ‘big names’ in much of what goes for the history of geographic knowledge, from another it is profoundly renewing for the field itself. It points to how much geography is itself implicated in the ideas of geography as a scholarly field of endeavor and as a practical and engaged enterprise; at the same time it brings to prominence the crucial significance of how ideas, technologies and practices circulate, transform and settle. Knowledge production and circulation, therefore, is not that special. The profoundly human processes of everyday life, cultural presuppositions, geopolitical contestation and social competition are at work here as they are in all other aspects of human existence. The second thrust of the chapter is to provide a theoretical perspective on the other major substantive section of the book: the essentially temporal frame by which ideas and concepts are transmitted, reformulated and redefined in disputes as a result of the waxing and waning of various fashions and enthusiasms. Tides of theoretical, methodological and referential fashion seem to have washed geography’s shores at an increasing rate in recent years. As authors move from bandwagon to bandwagon we can trace their moves without having to make coherent ‘whole’ intellectual lives out of their much messier parts. Finally, we provide a brief summary of the substance of the chapters themselves and of how we see them fitting into the overall structure of the Handbook.

GEOGRAPHIES OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE Recent rethinking about where knowledge is produced and how it circulates can helpfully inform our understanding about geographies of knowledge. Such geographies, of course, are not simply ends in themselves. The point is to understand the ontological bases of knowing from perspectives that do not either

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privilege a singular history of knowledge associated with a specific world region such as Europe versus China (a typical relativism), or presume conceptions of knowledge that implicitly or explicitly assume their own self-evident universality (a typical positivism). The specific sites or venues within which geographical knowledge is produced and across which it circulates must be situated within the framework of these larger concerns. There is no ‘view from nowhere’. Knowledge is always ‘local, situated, and embedded’ (Shapin 1998: 6). But this is not to imply that there is no such thing as ‘true’ knowledge. Rather it is to insist that we need to know how knowledge is made in order to judge how well it should ‘travel’. How knowledge is produced and circulates is fundamental to establishing its relative credibility or the trust that can be placed in it. Now that we know how Cyril Burt collected his data and Margaret Mead relied on her informants we can reach more reliable conclusions about what faith to put in their findings and interpretations. Recent rethinking of the geography of knowledge can be considered initially with respect to four dominant tendencies in thinking about the nature of the world and the character of knowledge production – tendencies that need to be identified and contested. Unfortunately, they are rarely raised together and, as a consequence, dealing with any one does not always necessarily involve addressing the others. Subsequently we will turn to how we hope to use various geographies of knowledge in hopes of coming to grips with one or more of these dominant ideas about the nature of the world and the character of knowledge production. First of all, knowledge is often regarded as simply a commodity like any other that is exchanged in a ‘marketplace’ of ideas. The most truthful ones win out in an evolutionary competition based on the professionalization of knowledge accumulation in universities and research institutes. From this viewpoint, there is no separable social influence on knowledge whatsoever. Now, one does not

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INTRODUCTION

need to endorse the view that all explanatory schemes, theoretical positions and empirical claims, are equally truthful to accept that what knowledge becomes ‘normalized’ or dominant and what is marginalized has something to do with who is doing the proposing and where they are located. The marketplace of ideas is not a level playing field. There are both sociologies and geographies of knowledge production and circulation. The positivism that remains defiantly agnostic about the social–geographical sources of its knowledge and the uses to which such knowledge is put is increasingly problematic. Yet knowledge is never simply a prisoner of culture, will, or power. The sort of detachment or ability to look beyond one’s own limited horizons cultivated by ‘academic freedom,’ but also characteristic of people under much less congenial social arrangements (dissidents in Cold War Eastern Europe and contemporary China, for example) means, as Thomas Haskell (1998: 152–3) suggests, that we take seriously both parts of a famous quotation by Nietzsche, usually used to indicate the impossibility of disinterestedness and the inevitability of relativism. The second part judges that some ‘conceptions’ can be more complete than others: There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we are allowed to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing be. Nietzsche 1969: 119.

Haskell (1998: 153) concludes: ‘The ideal of objectivity [if not that of neutrality] requires no more of a foothold than this.’ Of course, a commitment to a modicum of objectivity, at the very least as a regulative ideal, by no means provides a guarantee that it will ever be successful in the outcome, only that it is vital to consider it as a goal rather than, say, cynically acquiescing to the presumption that knowledge always does or should serve power, or that this or that perspective is necessarily wrong simply because we do not like it or it is not from our culture. The main

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claim here is that knowledge emanating from one place is not necessarily incommensurable or unintelligible relative to knowledge produced elsewhere. Cross-cultural communication goes on all the time without everything being entirely lost in translation. Indeed, knowledge in some places gains in both the possibility of greater geographical scope and cultural sensitivity when it is informed by knowledge coming from other places. There is much confusion about such matters in contemporary disputes about epistemology in social science in general with the possibility of constrained objectivity often summarily dismissed in favor of social determinisms of knowledge of various types often justified using a loosely employed language of social construction with extreme cultural relativism as the inevitable outcome. The second presumption is that world geography or global space are conceived of as a ‘surface’ rather than, say, as Doreen Massey (2005: 4) suggests a ‘meeting up of histories’. Such reconceptualisations matter because a surface (at least in a Euclidean sense) presumes total ease of movement, timelessness, no directional bias, and an Archimedean view over the whole. Yet world history has always been a narrative of collisions between conceptions of space (and time) as the world itself was made and remade by the imposition of dominant grids (think of latitude and longitude or dating based on pre-Christian and Christian eras) more than a straightforward incision of history on a passive surface. Any particular theoretical position necessarily contains within it specific grids of space and periodizations of time that deeply trouble standard spatial and temporal designations. It thus makes sense, for example, to ask questions like ‘Whose Middle East?’ or ‘Whose medieval world?’ is under scrutiny. At the same time, this perspective can overstate the linearity of intellectual development in different regions at the expense of noting both the limits of historicism (many ideas are not all specific to time and place but discovered independently in several places and persist

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE

over time) and the complexity of knowledge formation even within particular locations. Failure to acknowledge such possibilities results in a crude spatial reductionism. Another inclination is an impulse to characterize space in terms of temporal periods by categorizing some places as ‘following in the footsteps’ of others as they recapitulate previous history. This was the main move of modernization and other developmental conceptions of space and time when they were brought into circulation in eighteenth-century Europe. From this viewpoint, because some places are more developed economically, they must necessarily be superior in other respects such as the presumed universality of their knowledge claims. Eventually, by learning from their betters, those lower down the global order can potentially catch up. The very possibility that some still think this way is a greater reflection of the global dominance of some places over others than any inherent intellectual superiority reflecting ‘stage’ of development. Typically, national states are taken as the basic units of account arrayed along a developmental continuum. Much social and political theory, in particular, tends to be intimately intertwined with specific nation-states and to assume a world thus divided. At one time larger bounded territorial entities such as ‘civilizations’ were given priority and there are indeed signs that something similar is currently resurfacing. Either way, what is missing is the fact that such hard-walled territories are both relatively modern and anything but universal. Projecting the assumption that they are in fact both ancient and universal produces an image of the world as a mosaic of rigidly bounded ‘peoples’, ‘cultures’ and ‘societies’. It is to these entities that the cultivation of knowledge is thus often fallaciously ascribed. The final tendency is the sharp contrast frequently drawn between space, representing the general or universal, on the one hand; and place, standing in for the local and specific, on the other. Places are often thought of as if they are ‘bunkers’ or isolated communities

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separated from everywhere else. For both nationalism and identity politics more generally, place is commonly seen as the ideal locale in which the group lives hermetically sealed off from all others (Simpson 1995: Chapter 5). To cosmopolitans, in contrast, space is the ideal; a world without borders in which hybridity and cross-cultural intercourse reign in all directions. This opposition, present most clearly in contemporary globalization debates between those locked into a territorialized world and those proclaiming an incipient world of placeless flows, misses both the extent to which places are almost always parts of spatial networks reaching across cultural and political barriers, and at the same time settings in which distinctive social and moral habits and routines take place. Recent thinking in human geography suggests that relational spaces and relatively bounded places co-exist and interrelate rather than being mutually exclusive (Agnew 2005: Chapter 3; Coleman and Agnew 2007). Binary or oppositional views of place and space, therefore, offer a mistaken basis for understanding the workings of geographies of knowledge. Much cultural and literary theory of the past quarter century has been taken up with debating one or more of these issues, though often with different terminology. However, the critical question of ultimate ‘ontological belonging’ has increasingly bedeviled the debate: from the politics of group identity to the ‘clash of civilizations’. In this construction, perhaps too much discussion of the geography of knowledge comes too close to what Timothy Brennan (2006: 6) calls ‘a religious approach to knowledge in general, that is, the creation of like-thinking communities based on transcendental convictions’. In this regard, knowledge is always and everywhere regarded as emanating from incommensurable and totally distinctive worlds reflecting primordial cultural identities that the Western Enlightenment has merely driven ‘underground’. In this way critical reflection is largely abandoned for excavating this or that experiential difference. At an extreme

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INTRODUCTION

the emphasis on ‘local knowledge’ – a stance in which all science [for example] is seen as ethnoscience with standards rooted in a particular culture – withdraws objectivity, turns the abdication of judgment into a principle of judgment, and recalls what was once a right-wing preoccupation with ‘Jewish physics’, ‘Italian mathematics’, and the like. Bronner 2004: 162.

Such extreme cultural relativism critically ignores the fact that cultures in the modern world never exist in isolation and that ‘cultures’ themselves are assemblages of people with often cross-cutting identities and commitments. From this viewpoint, culture is ‘an idiom or vehicle of inter-subjective life, but not its foundation or final cause’ (Jackson 2002: 125). Be that as it may, knowledge creation and dissemination are never innocent of at least weak ontological commitments, be they national, class, gender, or some other particularity. This is precisely the point of referring to the geography of knowledge: the question of where brings together a wide range of potential ontological and epistemological effects under the rubric of spatial difference. At the same time, massive socio-political transformations in the world are shaping changes in how we (whoever and wherever we are) engage in how knowledge is ordered, disciplined, and circulated. Cross-global linkages are arguably more important today than at any time in human history, not so much in terms of the conventional story of producing places that are ever more alike, but more especially in creating opportunities for interaction between local and long-distance effects on the constitution of knowledge. As a result, anomalies in established theories as the world unleashes surprises and the subsequent limits to the conventional theoretical terms in which theories have been organized – states versus markets, West versus the Rest, religion versus secularism, past versus present, the telos of history versus perpetual flux, uniformitarianism versus climate change – pose serious challenges to the disciplinary codes that have long dominated geographical thinking. Perhaps the most

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serious issue concerns the continuing relevance of the idiographic/nomothetic (particulars/universals) opposition that has afflicted Western social science and geography since the Methodenstreit of the late nineteenth century. Knowledge is always made somewhere by particular persons reflecting on their place’s historical experience. ‘Universals’ often arise by projecting these experiences onto the world at large. What is needed are ways of understanding how this happens and drawing attention to the need to negotiate across perspectives so that geographical knowledge can be less the outcome of hegemonic impositions (and a dialogue of the deaf) and more the result of the recognition and understanding of differences, both cultural and theoretical.

VENUES AND CONCEPTIONS OF THE GEOGRAPHY OF KNOWLEDGE There are broadly five different ways in which geography is currently understood as entering into knowledge production and circulation. We are sure that others might characterize this intervention differently or identify themes we have missed. Typologies such as this are inherently problematic, of course, simplifying a much more complex picture in order to achieve some purchase on it. And so our own schema is put forward as a tentative first approximation. As the literature on this expanding field develops a more refined typology will doubtless emerge. The five geographies of knowledge that we identify here are ordered so as to reflect their relative emphases put on particular places or milieus versus the spatial diffusion and circulation of knowledge across places. The various venues that are the subject of later chapters are the practical fruit of how geography as understood in these five ways conditions knowledge creation and diffusion. The first way of conceiving the geography of knowledge is the ethnographic, by which we mean approaches that conceive of

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knowledge as inherently plural and that focus on the venues and sites in which knowledge is produced and consumed. The emphasis here lies in rehabilitating what are sometimes called ‘indigenous knowledges’ or in pointing out how ‘science’ is culturally inflected by local particularity. Another related but distinctive position tends to privilege the role of ‘coloniality’ or the effects of colonialism on knowledge hierarchies. A third derives more immediately from the philosophies of phenomenology that emphasize the intimate relations between particular geographical contexts of ‘being’, on the one hand, and knowledge acquisition, on the other. While also seeing knowledge as produced locally, a fourth lays stress rather more on how the local becomes global given the rise and fall of ideas in tandem with their political/intellectual sponsors. Finally, emphasis has tended to shift recently from knowledge production to knowledge circulation and consumption in the form of highlighting what is called the ‘geography of reading’. To be sure, this distinction should not be pressed too strongly for a clear boundary line between the production and consumption phases of the knowledge circuit cannot be drawn. And it is for this reason that Secord (2004: 661) has encouraged us to ‘shift our focus and think about knowledge-making as a form of communicative action’. Nevertheless, taking seriously the mobility of knowledge has recalled attention to the fact that ideas circulate widely but generate distinctive readings in different places. The cultivation of a greater sensitivity to the diverse geographies of knowledge has much potential. And to illustrate something of its riches, a brief exposition of a few of the perspectives that have been adopted is worthwhile. Our purpose here is neither to argue for the superiority of any one approach, nor to present an all-embracing survey. To put it another way, what follows is illustrative rather than exhaustive, suggestive rather than comprehensive. It is simply intended to demonstrate something of how thinking geographically about geographical knowledge

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might offer distinctive insights into the working and practice of geography itself.

Sites of knowledge Many good examples of this first approach can be found in Laura Nader’s edited collection Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge (Nader 1996). One insight here lies in challenging the notion that a certain idea of ‘science’ as a geographically invariant techno-rational activity beyond society necessarily produces knowledge superior to other ‘ways of knowing’. But science itself also takes on different intellectual inflections in different locations. One of the most relevant and interesting chapters in this regard is a comparison of primatology in Japan and Canada (Asquith 1996). In this case, perspectives on the ‘nature of nature’ reflect unarticulated assumptions about the roles of groups and individuals in the behavior of apes and monkeys. In Japan primatologists engage in long-term observation of groups with an emphasis on inter- and intra-group relations, ranking, and individual to group affiliation. In Canada the focus lies in intense short-term observation of adaptive behaviors of individuals. These differences do not seem to be coincidental. Japanese human society is famously group-oriented compared with Canada or the United States. Like Donna Haraway writing about how the political and the psychological come together in Primate Visions (1989), this study is an arresting example of just how culturally embedded science can be and thus how knowledge is variously constructed in different places even when certain common canons of observation and recording information are still operative. Metaphors, the particularly powerful ways in which scientific ideas are expressed in ordinary language, are often important in interpreting results in some ways rather than others (e.g. Ezrahi 1995; Leary 1995). Various ‘social studies’ of science take these insights down to the level of

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INTRODUCTION

the laboratory and the classroom. In the context of geographical knowledge, what they suggest is that all knowledge, including that claiming the mantle of science, is socially conditioned by the rituals, routines, and recruitment practices of powerful educational and research institutions.

Geopolitics of knowledge The primatology example, like many others, presumes that knowledge comes packaged in territorial containers with labels like ‘Japan’ and ‘Canada’ and thus that practice in both has developed separately. At a world scale, perhaps the outstanding feature of the past centuries has been the way most places have been incorporated into flows of knowledge dominated by Europeans and extensions of Europe overseas, such as the United States. This is the story, in Eric Wolf’s evocative phrase, of Europe and the People without History (Wolf 1982). Raised particularly by Edward Said (1978) and more recently by Walter Mignolo (2000) and others, colonialism is seen as laying the groundwork for a global geopolitics of knowledge. Initially giving rise to the type of knowledge typified by Orientalism, it has subsequently engendered reactions from historically subordinated places to which such phrases as ‘subaltern knowledges’ and ‘border thinking’ are often appended. From this viewpoint, the modernity associated with Europe can no longer be imagined as the only home to epistemology. Mignolo (2000: 95), for example, emphasizes what he calls ‘subaltern reason’ as ‘a diverse set of theoretical practices emerging from and responding to colonial legacies at the intersection of Euro/American modern history’. Much of this writing centers the experience of colonialism (in its various manifestations) as key to knowledge production. Rather than a singular experience, however, knowledge generation is recognized as inescapably plural. The ‘place of theorizing’ – in the sense of being from, coming from,

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and being at particular venues – conditions what can or may be said (Mignolo 2000: 115). This is not to suggest that only people from place x can say so-and-so, but to acknowledge that it is a fusion of ‘historical circumstances and personal sensibilities’ that makes this likely to be the case. Certainly, dependency theories of development and literary genres such as magical realism with their obvious roots in Latin America, and subaltern studies with its strong connections to India, suggest that Mignolo is onto something here. Indeed, he suggests that the United States as a settler society with its own roots in colonialism can also be viewed in a similar light rather than being simply seen as an extension of Europe into the Americas. His slogan ‘I am where I think’ clearly identifies knowledge production as geographically relational, reflecting particular colonial histories and how these stimulate indigenously generated local content. This contrasts with the European-based ‘theo-’ and ‘ego-’ politics of knowledge that systematically devalue what Mignolo (2006) terms the ‘geo-’ and ‘bio-’ graphic politics of knowledge that emphasize epistemological ‘rules’ grounded in the history of political imperialism as differentially experienced around the world. The fact that these ideas now have wide circulation across the globe suggests that flows of knowledge are hardly ‘one-way streets’ in the ways that they once were thought to be.

Geographical ‘being’ and knowledge Our third type of geography of knowledge is phenomenological with its weight on concern for the ways of acting and knowing that humans bring to ‘being in the world’. Drawing from Martin Heidegger and other philosophers, but also having roots in the discipline of geography (Wright 1947; Lowenthal 1961), the interest here lies more in establishing how conceptions of space, place, and time are themselves contingent on

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what Edward Casey (1996: 19) calls the ‘dialectic of perception and place’ because human beings are ‘ineluctably place-bound’. Ontologically, such Heideggerian claims have led some to reconceptualize the human agent as always and necessarily embedded in the world, and thus, even methodologically, not abstractable from it. In the work of anthropologists like Tim Ingold (2000), this conviction has resulted in a resculpting of the idea that the world in which we dwell is a relational one that is brought into being by how we act in it. Of course, it is commonplace today to say that many of us live in a world that is ‘de-localizing’ and ‘de-territorializing’. Yet, it may be more empirically insightful to say that the present situation is one in which for many people there is ‘crisis and a modification of our traditional experience of space and place’ (Hönnighausen 2005: 46) than a total ‘de-spatialization’ of life. As Clifford Geertz says: ‘No one lives in the world in general.’ Actual places, both as experienced and as imagined, serve to anchor conceptions of how the world is structured politically, who is in charge, where, and with what effects, and what matters to us in this place. Thus, Americans and US policy-makers bring to their actions in the world a whole set of presuppositions about geopolitics that emanate from their experiences as ‘Americans’, particularly narratives about US history and the US ‘mission’ in the world, that are often occluded by academic debates about ‘theories’ that fail to take into account such crucial background geographical conditioning. As Lisa Anderson (2003: 90) has noted, much of the ‘liberal tradition’ that has shaped social science in the United States has had ‘a geographical, territorial association’. She quotes Kenneth Prewitt in support: The project of American social science has been America. This project, to be sure, has been in some tension with a different project – to build a science of politics or economics or psychology. But I believe that a close reading of disciplinary history would demonstrate that the ‘American project’ has time and again taken precedence over the ‘science project’ and that our claims to universal

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truths are, empirically, very much about the experience of this society in this historical period. Prewitt 2002: 2.

With something of a note of irony, Heidegger’s view of world politics can be seen as illustrating this point. As Dean Lauer (2005) has recently argued, Heidegger had a geopolitics that was a result of his seemingly ‘academic’ philosophy of ‘being-there.’ The US and the Soviet Union, in this construction, represented the victory of universalizing creeds over being-in-place. In the context of postSecond World War Europe, consequently, ‘Heidegger sees Europe as caught between the millstones of American liberalism and Russian Bolshevism’ (Lauer 2005: 134). In this understanding, they are metaphysically the same because they, ‘Russia and America,’ are locked into a ‘dreary technological frenzy, the same uprooted organization of the average man. At a time when the farthermost corner of the globe has been conquered by technology and opened to economic exploitation.’ (Heidegger 1987: 37). Of course, both creeds did in fact have definite geographical roots, their own ways of being-inplace, even as they embarked on a global hegemonic contest.

The spatial diffusion of hegemonic knowledge How the universalizing and scientific creeds have recruited adherents beyond their places of origin is the main concern of the fourth approach. This could be thought of as a question of spatial diffusion. In the natural sciences, for example, the conventional way of understanding the spread of scientific knowledge is the realist claim that science’s triumphant diffusion is on account of the truthfulness of its findings. But this obscures the labor involved in the successful reproduction of scientific data in different places. The management of laboratory experiment, the calibration of equipment, the training of experts, the disciplining of observation, the

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INTRODUCTION

enshrining of protocols in guidebooks and manuals are all implicated in the circulation of natural knowledge. In the broader cultural arena, some have focused on how ideas about social class and ethnicity are spread by imitation from one country to another, whereas others have traced the influence of intellectual conversion in, for example, the diffusion of neo-liberal fiscal and monetary policies by technocrats educated in US universities. More holistically, however, Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’ is helpful in trying to understand how elites (and populations) accept and even laud ideas and practices that they import from more powerful countries and organizations. If part of American hegemony in the contemporary world, for example, is about ‘enrolling’ others into American practices of consumption and a market mentality (and, crucially, intellectual justifications for them such as those of various management gurus and journalists), it also adapts as it enrolls by adjusting to local norms and practices (Agnew 2005). This is part of its ‘genius’. During the Cold War, the Soviet alternative always risked political fission among adherents because it involved adopting a checklist of political–economic measures rather than a marketing package that could be customized to local circumstances as long as it met certain minimal criteria of conformity to governing norms. Today, the conflict between militant Islam and the United States government is largely about resisting the siren call of an American hegemony associated with globalization that is increasingly detached from direct US sponsorship and with many advocates and passive supporters within the Muslim world itself.

Geography of reading Finally, even in the face of hegemonic trends, not least that of the worldwide diffusion of scientific knowledge, where still matters but with respect to how ideas are understood (how texts are read) more than in terms

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simply of where new knowledge is initially produced. Thus, in accounting for distinct differences in how Darwin’s bio-geographical theory of evolution by natural selection was construed in a number of different settings, David Livingstone (2005) suggests, drawing from one strand of thought in Edward Said (1991) that ‘theory travels’. This is not simply a recognition that texts and ideas move from place to place but that in doing so they are modified. As texts travel, they transform. This is not just because local norms or translation into a different language lead to different readings but also because the ‘writings and reputations of eminent scientific practitioners have often been mobilized as resources in ideological conflicts of various kinds’ (Livingstone 2003: 27). In a sense, therefore, knowledge is made as it circulates; it is never made completely in one place and then simply consumed in another. And this realization renders troublesome any simple bifurcation between knowledge production and consumption. Both are implicated in the intellectual circuitry of knowledge enterprises. As a tradition, geography has long lauded fieldwork, direct observation, measurement, mapping, and inductive inference. At the same time, however, these favored practices have always been conditioned by the social, bureaucratic, political, and intellectual milieus in which research has been pursued (Meusburger et al. 2009). There has never been a geographical ‘blank slate’ from which research emanates and across which it is exchanged. This is not to say that research results are simply invented and then spread as a result of relative power or influence. Rather, it is to say that research arises out of and circulates by courtesy of conventions and practices associated with different venues that are jointly produced by the five geographies of knowledge. As Kohler (2002) has shown for American biology, the border zone between the laboratory and the field site has been a particularly important zone of contention among biologists, not just in terms of defining separate venues with different

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prestige values, but also the distinctive research ‘cultures’ associated with operating within and across the borderline. These spaces arose out of competing intellectual imperatives to emphasize molecular reduction versus ecological complexity, project cognitive authority through emphasizing external as opposed to internal causal validity, and institutional pressures to both define ‘proper’ biology and give its findings credibility in the eyes of the wider public.

GEOGRAPHICAL CONCEPTS AND CONTROVERSIES The history of geographical knowledge is the history of its concepts, practices, and disputes about them in various registers or keys. Modern geographical knowledge is the product of a modern era in which there is a widespread consciousness of the concepts we use; various concepts and their meanings are often the centerpiece of conflicts about theories, methods, and politics among intellectuals and others, and the evolution of concepts (and the language associated with them) is related to the changing character of particular historical periods. Organizing ‘history’ into epochs is an inevitably fraught and contestable exercise. Yet a good case can be made that prior to the eighteenth century (at least in Europe) there was neither much consciousness of previous history in anything other than a sense of key dates and figures and any concepts applied to the past had a timeless quality to them. These are among the sorts of claims made by Reinhart Koselleck (2002) in his attempt at understanding what he calls ‘conceptual history’. In the field of history concepts such as the ‘Reformation’, the ‘Dark Ages’, ‘feudalism’, and, indeed, the idea of ‘modernity’ itself are products of a view of history as ‘open’ to the future but thinkable only in terms of ‘stages’ and ‘epochs’ that not only signal an increasing acceleration of time but also an acceptance of the presumption that the future will be

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distinctive from both present and past. For whatever reason, this did not happen until the Age of Enlightenment. Only at this point could we begin to argue about what this was and whether it was meaningful! Even in history the invention and elaboration of concepts, however, is a more contentious process than just a theoretical debate about the pros and cons of this or that periodization or the naming of different historical episodes as in Koselleck’s account. Indeed, much of what goes today for post-structuralist thought (Derrida, Foucault, et al.) is intimately concerned with precisely the indeterminacy and limitations of all categories and concepts. The claims to rational truth and universality implicit in much conceptual controversy belie the particularism of knowledge claims discussed in the previous section. It is the very lack of fixity and agreement about the meaning of concepts that sparks controversy. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault picks up on this theme: Disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities … [It] could reduce the inefficiency of mass phenomena: reduce what, in multiplicity, makes it much less manageable than a unity … [it] fixes; … it clears up confusion; … it establishes calculated distributions … the disciplines use procedures for partitioning and verticality … they introduce, between the different elements at the same level, as solid separations as possible … [through] continuous registration, perpetual assignment and classification. Foucault 1977: 219–20.

The main point is that rather than just imitating or representing the world, invented concepts also create and circumscribe it. Cognitive science suggests that such an understanding is by no means simply a postEnlightenment phenomenon. All humans are concept-creating entities. Our brains constrain and direct information processing by simplifying signals and classifying them according to categories and concepts that emerge from experiences in the world. Although often inexact and problematic, such processes cannot be transcended as a simple-minded empiricism might have us

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INTRODUCTION

believe. There is no such thing as ‘a purely uncategorized and unconceptualized experience. Neural beings cannot do that’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 19). The dilemma is that such schematic thinking leads to a reliance on closed and stable concepts even as we know that the world itself cannot be simply mapped on the basis of our limited experiences that these concepts often represent. In geography the concepts are of course very different from those addressed by Koselleck and other historians. Moreover, even though it is only since the eighteenth century that much of what now goes for geographical knowledge was first stabilized and dignified theoretically in terms of concepts that we would now designate as ‘scientific’ or resting on some foundation other than that simply of religious faith or of much more than fabulation, it is problematic to claim that previous epochs were somehow ‘concept-free’. Certainly the ancient Greeks and Romans, to say nothing of the Arabs and Chinese, had sophisticated vocabularies that they applied to natural phenomena. In early modern Europe, however, much of what went for geographical knowledge was exotic travel writing without much if any attention to what we would recognize as explicit conceptual claims or arguments (Dunn 1986; Campbell 1988). An empiricist ‘common sense’ colored by fantastic imagination and hoaxes of various sorts tended to constitute much of what was thought of as geographical story telling. How could you trust the stories brought back by travelers? What reliable conceptual basis could be given to such geographical knowledge? Such concerns have hardly disappeared. But their addressing has engendered much of what passes for modern conceptual and methodological debate. Many of the fundamental concepts and methods that we have tended to see as definitive of modern geographical knowledge date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries even if since that time, in line with what Koselleck would expect, they have undergone sweeping question, revision, addition, and reinvention (e.g. Peskin 2004).

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The career of the term ‘space’ is indicative, invented initially in modern form in the seventeenth century to refer to the absolute locational properties of matter. Somewhat later given a more relative meaning as incidental to more substantive qualities of things, it has latterly bifurcated within geography to signify either a reformulated absolute ‘space’ (for those who see the impact of the human hand in the world as better represented by the much older concept of ‘place’) or as something that can itself have effects as it is ‘made’ or molded into different shapes by natural and human processes. A good deal of geographic thought has long involved making and disputing claims about words like ‘space’. But methodological concepts, such as spatial analysis and cartography, and subject-matter concepts such as landscape, urban/rural, nature/culture, and development, as well as more fundamental explanatory concepts, such as social class, race, cycle of erosion, and ecosystem have all had such symptomatic if distinctive careers. Challenges arise on empirical as well as on theoretical grounds. Until recently, and still in some quarters, human-induced climate change, for example, was seen as problematic empirically as it was theoretically. What constitutes ‘proof’ or evidence becomes a way of challenging the very veracity or meaningfulness of a particular concept from those affiliated to either some competing concept or theory (uniformitarianism in this case, perhaps) or with a purely ‘natural’ concept of climate change. The history of geographical concepts and controversies over them, therefore, can be classified in a number of different keys (following Philo 2008). These keys or registers are rarely completely independent of one another but frequently overlap. For reasons of exposition, however, we can distinguish between them. Some conceptual disputation and hence historic shifts in their meaning and significance is pre-eminently philosophical, reflecting on matters of meaning, language, and ontology as well as about the resources for acquiring reliable knowledge about such matters. Questions constantly arise about the

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‘nature’ of such seemingly essential concepts of geographical inquiry as space, place, nature, and landscape, and how these relate to disputes about the causes of natural and social processes. Disagreements arise here, for example, about whether space is ‘something’ material, or is a property revealed through the relations (for instance, distance and direction) between material phenomena, out of which entities that we sometimes decide to call places, environments, and landscapes are then derived. Some concepts and disputes over them are more methodological, in the sense of calling into question the links between the routinized research practices of geography and what goes for ‘the scientific method’, asking about whether geography should be thought of primarily as a ‘science’, with physics or economics invoked variously as role models of rigorous theoretical specification, testing, and verification of research hypotheses using only certain very particular types of data. Much of the argument about ‘region’ in geography in the 1950s was of this quality rather than about its philosophical basis. Questions about statics and dynamics and simplicity and complexity likewise usually arise in this register. Other conceptual disputes can be described better as of a social–normative quality, relating to how well different concepts are held to explain how nature and human society function, change, are divided by inequalities and power differentials, and how society should best be organized or undermined. Conceptual claims and arguments arise in this connection about space, place, nature, and landscape, as entities that can be made and designed or that are inherited and beyond agency. In recent years, for example, race and ethnicity have tended to replace social class as governing concepts in understanding power differentials and place differences within cities. Other concepts are subject to definition and reformulation as a result of more directly theoretical fiat and challenge. Concepts such as evolution, cycle of erosion, and ecosystem, to name a few, are closely associated with specific theoretical positions that when

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subject to dispute throw the nature of the concept itself into question. The history of the cycle of erosion is an excellent example of this sort of linkage from concept to theory. Finally, another set of conceptual disputes are more ethical in character: some relate to either the relative closed and unquestioned adoption or the total rejection of certain concepts without careful consideration of their pros and cons. Some theoretical positions, such as Marxism and humanism, often entail a priori commitments to various theoretical entities, such as a certain historical teleology or a relatively unconstrained view of human agency, respectively, which are not readily subject to empirical corroboration. Critique of such commitments usually ends up as totalistic. Other disputes in this register relate more to ‘new’ concepts – think of gender and development for example – that are invented to address ‘absences’ but which then complicate the use of a range of longer established concepts and methods and when ‘combined’ with others (race, for example) take on different meanings. Other ethical disputes are about how knowledge is ‘made’ on the ground and in the air; in other words the conditions under which fieldwork is carried out, data collected, and the possible harm done to research subjects. From this viewpoint, concepts can be seen as culturally particularistic and imperialistic when applied outside the regions and places in which they were initially developed (see previous section). In some quarters the self-evident superiority of modern, scientific knowledge over indigenous knowledge is no longer acknowledged. The very nature of geographical knowledge as frequently presented is itself called into question on ethical grounds. Concepts such as development, conservation, and geopolitics are particularly subject to such challenge. Elements of conceptual definition and conceptual disputes operating in all five keys – philosophical, scientific, methodological, social-normative, and ethical – will be found in the chapters in the third section, but, as is also apparent, hybrid variants on each

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INTRODUCTION

key – like environmental determinism, spatial analysis, and complexity science – are also in evidence. However, it is also important to note that these considerations also enter into discussion of the venues and practices discussed in the second section. Implicit in those are very different approaches which tend to embody varying balances of the five dimensions, with some being almost wholly philosophical with little else in play (public sphere, subaltern space) and with others being, say, highly fixated on the empirics and ethics of method (e.g. field, archive, and mission station). Other approaches, rather, incorporate shifts across all five registers: battlefield, policy and government, and financial space, for example. One problem inherent in this pluralism, of course, is that many approaches end up talking past one other and defy ready comparison. A further outcome in both sections is that different approaches taken by authors, weighted differentially in the various keys, frequently deploy radically different vocabularies in which even the same words (like ‘space’ and ‘place’ or ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’) have quite different connotations. Buried within our sections, therefore, are the very conceptual distinctions and disputes about which the authors are writing if hidden in their own words rather than simply the explicit focus of the chapters themselves.

THE ORGANIZATION AND CONTENT OF THE HANDBOOK The Handbook begins with two orientating chapters on the shifting connotations of the label ‘geography’ itself and the different ways in which the subject’s narrative has been rehearsed. These chapters are intended to acknowledge the historicity of the very terms we use and the polyvocal character of efforts to capture its genealogy. One critical implication of these interventions is the need to recognize the historical situatedness of this Handbook itself and indeed of all attempts to

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capture the supposed transcendental essence of ‘geography’. For we cannot exempt ourselves from the geographical analysis that we bring to other places and periods. The way we characterize the spaces and concepts that come within the range of this Handbook are necessarily a product of its own time and place. This means that there is an inherent provisionalism and situatedness to the stories contributors tell. But this is not only inescapable, it is desirable; for it underscores the dynamic nature of geographical knowledge and the need for this tradition of learning to engage in dialogue with itself. Geography has no essential definition; it is a dynamic tradition of inquiry that changes over time and place. As Nietzsche (1969: 80) famously put it in On the Genealogy of Morals: ‘Only that which has no history is definable.’ The second section of the Handbook dwells on a series of venues in which geographical knowledge has been produced and from which it circulates from arena to arena. Some of these are readily identifiable as ‘standard’ sites of geographical engagement with the world: the field, the weather station, the laboratory, and the archive, for instance. Such ready specifications, of course, conceal as much as they reveal, for these venues turn out to be anything but monolithic. They are differently shaped, managed, and constituted in different contexts, and the ways in which they condition the knowledge that they generate differ from place to place. At the same time, we call attention to other arenas not so routinely recognized as spaces of geographical knowledge – mission stations and art studios for example. In part their inclusion is to widen the domain of venues that legitimately come within the arc of geographical scrutiny, and at the same time to recognize that geographical knowledge is produced in sites that lie beyond the conventional map of geography’s production sites. This broadens the scope of our thinking about geographical knowledges – who owns them, how they are generated and circulated, and what their audiences are. Drawing attention to the geographies of geographical knowledge also

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contributes to a decentering of ‘the author’ as the privileged site of intellectual history and conceptual change. By locating authors in the midst of their own temporal and spatial circumstances, this approach roots biography ‘like a reclining Gulliver, to the ground of place and time’ (Young 1988: 124). Finally we turn to a range of critical concepts and controversies that have snaked their way – in different manifestations – through the history of modern geographical scholarship. Thus we focus attention on fundamental geographical concepts like space and place, landscape and ecosystem, race and social class, global climatic change and conservation, to name only a few. But we make no claim to comprehensiveness in the concepts we have selected for interrogation. There are doubtless many other candidates whose inclusion could readily be justified. What we do believe is that those that are dealt with have played critically significant roles in the unfolding of geography as both discipline and discourse, and that by conducting a genealogical inquiry into their history and use, we can glimpse something of how critical concepts emerge and evolve, travel and transmute. What our authors have sought to uncover are the circumstances surrounding the generation and mobilization of some of the discipline’s central cognitive commitments, to identify interlocutors in debates over the nature of these ideas, and to portray how they continue to inform geographical scholarship in our own day. This approach is adopted in the conviction that historicizing our own cognitive apparatus is a particularly rich way of grasping the internal dynamic and the external influences that shape the direction in which any tradition of inquiry moves in different times and spaces. There are, of course, many geographical handbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries and the like currently available to readers. What marks out the present one is the consciously geographical analysis we bring to geographical knowledge. By locating geographical theory, practice, and controversy in their spatial–temporal circumstances, we believe

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this Handbook will advance the self-referential project of thinking geographically about geography, and thereby of ‘geographizing’ geography itself.

REFERENCES Agnew, J. (2005) Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Agnew, J., Livingstone, D. and A. Rogers (eds) (1996) Human Geography: An Essential Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell. Anderson, L. (2003) Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Columbia University Press. Asquith, P. (1996) ‘Japanese science and western hegemonies: primatology and the limits set to questions’, in L. Nader (ed.) Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge. New York: Routledge. Brennan, T. (2006) Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right. New York: Columbia University Press. Bronner, S.E. (2004) Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Towards a Politics of Radical Engagement. New York: Columbia University Press. Campbell, M.B. (1988) The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Casey, E. S. (1996) ‘How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time’, in S. Feld and K.H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Claval, P. (1972) La pensée geographique. Introduction à son histoire. Paris: SEDES. Coleman, M. and Agnew, J.A. (2007) ‘The problem with Empire’, in S. Elden and J. Crampton (eds), Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dunn, R.E. (1986) The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler in the 14th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ezrahi, Y. (1995) ‘The theatrics and mechanics of action: the theater and the machine as political metaphors’, Social Research, 62: 299–322. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon. Haraway, D. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge.

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Haskell, T.L. (1998) Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Heidegger, M. (1987) Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hönnighausen, L. (2005) ‘Where we are? Some methodological reflections on space, place, and postmodern reality’, in K. Benesch and K. Schmidt (eds), Space in America: Theory/History/Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press. Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. New York: Routledge. Jackson, M. (2002) The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Klibansky, R. (1936) ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’, Isis, 26: 147–149. Kohler, R.E. (2002) Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Koselleck, R. (2002) The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lauer, D. (2005) ‘“America and Russia are the same:” geopolitics in Heidegger’s Seinsfrage‘, Telos, 132: 132–150. Leary, D.E. (1995) Naming and knowing: giving forms to things unknown. Social Research, 62: 267–298. Livingstone, D.N. (2003) ‘Science, religion and the geography of reading: Sir William Whitla and the editorial staging of Isaac Newton’s writings on biblical prophecy’, British Journal of the History of Science, 36: 27–42. Livingstone, D.N. (2005) ‘Science, text and space: thoughts on the geography of reading’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 30: 391–401. Lowenthal, D. (1961) ‘Geography, experience, imagination: towards a geographical epistemology‘, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 51: 241–260. Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage. Meusburger, P., Funke, J. and Wunder, E. (eds) (2009) Milieus of Creativity. Dordrecht: Springer.

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Mignolo, W.D. (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, W.D. (2006) ‘De-linking: Don Quixote, globalization and the colonies’, Macalester International, 17: 3–35. Nader, L. (ed.) (1996) Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge. London: Routledge. Nietzsche, F. (1969) On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. Peskin, L.A. (2004) ‘Pirates and the geography of knowledge: America and Algiers in the late eighteenth century’, in G. Backhaus and J. Murangi (eds), Earth Ways: Framing Geographical Meanings. Lanham MD: Lexington. Philo, C. (2008) ‘The difficult works in the geographers’ library: reading “theory and methods” in human geography’, in C. Philo (ed.), Theory and Methods: Critical Essays in Human Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate. Powell, J.L. (2005) Grand Canyon: Solving Earth’s Grandest Puzzle. New York: Penguin. Prewitt, K. (2002) The social science project: Then, now and next. Items and issues, ITEMS: Social Science Research Council, 3(1): 1–2, Spring, 2002. Said, E.W. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Harper. Said, E.W. (1991) ‘Traveling theory’, in The World, The Text and the Critic. London: Vintage, Chapter 10. Secord, J.A. (2004) ‘Knowledge in transit’, Isis, 95, 654–672. Shapin, S. (1998) ‘Placing the view from nowhere: historical and sociological problems in the location of science’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 23, 5–12. Simpson, D. (1995) The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stoddart, D.R. (1986) On Geography and its History. Oxford: Blackwell. Wolf, E. (1982) Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wright, J.K. (1947) ‘Terrae Incognitae: the place of the imagination in geography‘, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 37: 1–15. Young, R.M. (1988) ‘Biography: the basic discipline for human sciences’, Free Associations, 9: 108–113.

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PART 1

Orientations

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1 Geography’s Genealogies Robert J. Mayhew

1.1 AN ARBITRARY PRELUDE: SAUER AND HARTSHORNE ON THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GEOGRAPHY Unsurprisingly given their power and influence in twentieth-century American geography, there has been much ink spilt about the geographical visions of both Carl Sauer and Richard Hartshorne, notably pointing to their differing and opposed conceptions of geography (Kenzer 1987; Entriken and Brunn 1989). Similarities also exist, notably the pair’s dependence on German geographical writings to construct their visions, but one matter which has gone unremarked is a strategy of argumentation shared by them and exemplified in their paradigmatic works, ‘The Morphology of Landscape’ (1925) and The Nature of Geography (1939). Both Hartshorne and Sauer attempt to ground their arguments about how geography is and how it should be practised in evidence that the history of geographical writing shows that geography has always been practised thus. More specifically, both develop stories of the origins of ‘true’ geography, of geography as it should be practised, which locate key scholars in the past who founded the inquiry in its essential mould. It is worth looking briefly at their

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arguments as an entrée to the nexus of ideas that this chapter treats whilst recognizing that other points of entry could just as easily have been chosen. Sauer’s ‘Morphology’ was explicitly an attempt to take the ‘diverse opinions regarding the nature of geography’ and ‘seek a common ground upon which a general position may be established’ (Sauer 1969: 315). Sauer argues that geography studies ‘area or landscape’, this being its naively given section of reality. He further argues that this arena would be studied whether geography existed or not, and could therefore be the quarry of another discipline. Sauer then, moving to what interests me in this chapter, turns from a quasi-Kantian argument about the division of experience and how inquiries cover that division, to an historical argument. The interest in landscape existed ‘long before the name [geography] was coined’, was represented in Ancient Greece by numerous inquiries under various labels such as ‘periplus’ and ‘periegesis’, but was then crystallized under the name ‘geography’ ‘more than two thousand years [ago]’. If interest in landscape is a naïve and foundational curiosity we all share, geography has ‘priority of claim … to this field’, by virtue of being the first

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systematic inquiry that codified that curiosity. Furthermore, Sauer argues that etymology itself supports this claim: ‘the simple connotation of the Greek word, which the subject uses as its name … means most properly areal knowledge’ (Sauer 1969: 317). As such, the history of geographical inquiry and the meaning of the very disciplinary term itself reveals what geography in essence is by showing us what it has always been. ‘Ought’ is reached via ‘was’; history discloses essence, this being seen most purely by looking at geography’s originating moment, in Sauer’s view this moment lying in Ancient Greek inquiry. This position leads to several further ramifications in Sauer’s argument about the nexus between geography’s disciplinary history and its core identity. ‘Good’ geography is the passing on of this Greek conception: ‘With this preference of synthetic areal knowledge to general earth science the entire tradition of geography is in agreement’. As this also implies, there are erroneous visions of geography’s identity, most notably those which move geography in the direction of being a physical science, and these are labelled by Sauer as ‘recent schools of geography’, the modern/non-ancient being equated with the mistaken (1969: 317–18). Equally, Sauer sees that this battle was already being played out in ancient times, a scholar such as Strabo having to assert that chorography, or areal description by another name, was geography’s task, not ‘cosmologic philosophy’; as Sauer puts it, true geography is ‘derived from Herodotus rather than Thales’ (1969: 318–19, 321). Positioning geography as an earth science rather than a descriptive practice of landscape study must be erroneous on Sauer’s account because ancient evidence shows only one type of true geography: ‘to discover this “areal connection of phenomena and their order” is a scientific task, according to our position the only one to which geography should devote its energies’ (Sauer, 1969: 318, my emphasis). So, geography’s Ancient Greek origins are pure and singular. True geography is the ramification of that tradition

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down the ages, something which has been obscured by the claims of recent (and by that very fact) erroneous schools of geographical thought which ignore what origins tell us about the essence of geographical inquiry. Fortunately, a school of modern geographers is reasserting the true nature of geography, and Sauer’s aim in ‘Morphology’ is to spread the good news to North America: latterly, Vidal de la Blache in France, Hettner, Passarge, and Krebs in Germany, and others have been reasserting more and more the classical tradition of geography as chorologic relation … we are in the process of returning to our permanent task … Modern geography is the modern expression of the most ancient geography. Sauer 1969: 320–1.

Richard Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography (1939) was in part an attempt to refute Sauer’s position, or rather to argue that Sauer’s concept of ‘landscape’ was so vague as to inadequately ground a clearly defined discipline called ‘geography’ (Hartshorne 1961: 155–6). The position Hartshorne wanted to assert was notably different from Sauer in that he looked to a different timeframe to support a different conception of what geography in its essence should be, namely a regional science. Thus Hartshorne emphasized geography’s scientific character in a way directly contrary to Sauer. Further, Hartshorne initially rejected the relevance of the ancients: ‘although the roots of geography, as a field of study, reach back to Classical Antiquity, its establishment as a modern science was essentially the work of the century from 1750–1850’ (1961: 35). Yet two points should be made which show a kinship in terms of argumentation between Sauer and Hartshorne. First, both want to use historical evidence to show the rectitude of their argument about the essence of geography. Thus Hartshorne constructed an extensive second chapter to the Nature of Geography concerning ‘The Nature of Geography according to its Historical Development’. As the quote above suggests, Hartshorne places great emphasis on the birth of modern geography in the age of

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Ritter and Humboldt, seeing in both the attempt to find scientific ways to divide the earth’s surface and then to describe it. Thus where Sauer’s originary moment for geography lies with the ancients, in Hartshorne it is in the era 1750–1850, but both agree that if we can find when ‘true’ geography begins, we will have a window onto the essence of geographical inquiry, and that this inquiry will ramify down in historically recoverable lineages of good geographers preserving the core geographical tradition. Secondly, if Hartshorne’s focus is on the birth of modern geography, he cannot resist finding echoes of that conception in the ancients. Thus a paragraph after asserting that ‘we are not concerned here with the geographers of Classical Antiquity’, Hartshorne cites Strabo and Kant on the task of geography, adding ‘these statements … are susceptible of translation in terms of modern science’ (1961: 35, 36). Furthermore, shortly thereafter, as Hartshorne canvasses the first attempts to ‘elevate geography from its subordinate position to that of an independent science’, he alights at the eighteenth-century attempts to divide the world by natural rather than political boundaries in the work of Buache and others, discerning here ‘an echo from Strabo’ (1961: 37; see also 41). For all their differences, Sauer and Hartshorne share the nexus of ideas I want to interrogate in this chapter. Their arguments about the nature of geography fuse prescriptive statements about how geography ‘ought’ to be with historical statements about how geography ‘was’, suggesting that the latter confirm their arguments about the former. Furthermore, to perform this conjunction, both look to the history of geography for pure moments of disciplinary ‘origin’: looking at geography at its wellspring is the clearest way to see how geography is supposed to be. This means either going back to the very first geographical writings (as in Sauer) or arguing that there is a distinctive and locatable origin to ‘modern geography’ (as in Hartshorne), although (as just shown) this latter position can collapse into an argument

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about ancient geography too. In this chapter, I want firstly to canvass briefly some of the many ways in which geographers have conjoined the origins, history and essence of geographical inquiry in their writings, showing that this is a persistent strategy in geographical argumentation, not an aberration of Hartshorne’s and Sauer’s. Then I want to look at Nietzsche’s critique of this mode of historical reasoning and his ‘genealogical’ alternative. Finally, I want to use Nietzschean genealogy to develop a very different reading of ancient geography from that we have already seen in Sauer and Hartshorne, the suggestion being that the history of geography can serve similar purposes to those they proposed – the furthering of geographical inquiry in the present – but by very different means and with very different outcomes.

1.2 GEOGRAPHY’S NATURE AND/ OR HISTORY: A BRIEF SURVEY OF FOUNDATION MYTHS There is a recurrent trend in writing about geography to have recourse to stories about the origins of geography as grounding arguments about its nature. These are frequently not as clearly (and crudely) articulated as in Sauer’s ‘Morphology’, but nonetheless the pattern of argumentation is notable for its ubiquity in geographical writing. To give some sense of this, I will briefly look to several examples from the past 50 years, dividing these into two groups according to the intentions of their authors. First, I look to several cases where, akin to Hartshorne and Sauer, the aim has been to create prescriptive arguments about the essence of geography by deploying (inter alia) historical evidence. Secondly, I will look at narratives of the history of geography in terms of their arguments about the origins of geography. As with Hartshorne and Sauer, many geographers who are not avowedly historians of the discipline and whose quarry lies in contributing to the practice of contemporary

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geography have nevertheless drawn on historical evidence to support their contentions. Three examples will suffice to show this trend. If Hartshorne took on Sauer, he was in turn attacked in a (now) famous paper by Fred Schaefer, ‘Exceptionalism in Geography’. Arguing against the idea of regions as unique and therefore beyond the ambit of analysis through law-like statements, Schaefer’s work is now seen as foundational to the emergence of a quantitative vision for geography. It is noticeable from the present perspective that Schaffer in his second sentence says ‘historical accounts of the development of the field are still often mistaken for methodology’, thereby distancing himself from the use of historical evidence as a way into arguments about how geography should be practised (Schaefer 1953: 226). Yet the argument that follows this statement is considerably preoccupied with historical evidence and in ways not wholly discordant with those of its target, Richard Hartshorne. Like Hartshorne, Schaefer argues that Humboldt is ‘rightly called the father of scientific geography’ and that scientific here means the awareness that description in and of itself is not enough (1953: 226). As such, both see a modern geography as emergent at the same time and in the same individuals. Against this tradition of a modern, scientific geography are the efforts of Schaefer’s ‘exceptionalists’ who see geography’s task purely in descriptive terms, arguing as they do that the characteristics of any particular region are so complex and multifaceted as to preclude explanation by recourse to a limited array of laws. Schaefer’s depiction of exceptionalism in fact takes the form of a pedigree, tracing the persistence of this error from its ‘father’, Immanuel Kant, ‘a poor geographer when compared with his contemporaries or even Bernhard Varenius who died more than one hundred and fifty years before him’, through Hettner to Hartshorne (1953: 232; see 232–42 for the full pedigree). Thus Schaefer in fact develops a Manichean history of the dialectical struggle between good, scientific geography and delusive, exceptionalist description.

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Furthermore, and again in a striking parallel to the subject of his attack Hartshorne, Schaefer cannot resist invoking ancient authority for his position: Humboldt and Ritter thus recognized as the major concern of geography the manner in which natural phenomena, including man, were distributed in space. This implies that geographers must describe and explain the manner in which things combine ‘to fill an area’ … Following the Greek geographers, this viewpoint is called the chorographic or chorological one. Schaefer 1953: 228.

Thus from the present perspective Hartshorne and Schaefer are in fact notable for what they share rather than for their disagreement. Both drew on very similar ‘mental maps’ of the history of geography to defend very different views about the correct practice of the discipline: for both, modern geography emerged at the same time and in the same individuals, these being called by both ‘scientific’ geographers; both also bolstered this by seeing a legacy from ancient geography being carried forward; and both also depicted their historical researches as showing a division between true/good and false/bad geography. Where Hartshorne and Schaefer differed was not in their argumentation, nor in their linkage of origin stories and prescriptions, but in what they took their founding fathers to be originating and prescribing for them. If Schaefer was instrumental in pioneering a vision of geography as spatial science, within 20 years it was well enough entrenched to be producing textbooks to train the next generation of geographers in its image. Notable here as the pre-eminent North American textbook was Abler, Adams and Gould’s Spatial Organization: The Geographer’s View of the World (1971), which is of interest as the authors, like Schaefer before them, devoted time to producing a pedigree of geographical practitioners. For them, the transition from mere curiosity about the earth to a self-conscious inquiry by a group of scholars, the point at which we can discern the origins of geography, lay with Eratosthenes, because he ‘was the

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first to call himself a geographer and the first to devise a method which enabled geographers to locate places with some accuracy’. True to Schaefer’s critique of exceptionalism, they continued that Eratosthenes was the originator of scientific geography as ‘by concerning himself with methods of location, Eratosthenes demonstrates his concern with all possible places and the utility of general place knowledge’ rather than engaging in discourse about the unique and non-replicable (Abler et al. 1971: 62). The next member of their pantheon was Ptolemy, whose system of map projections and collation of mathematical–geographical data means ‘we could also argue that much of our geography is a series of footnotes to Ptolemy’ (1971: 64). Once again, we have a pedigree, this time without its erroneous ‘other’, focusing on developing a lineage of individuals doing good geography, this lineage emphasizing the antiquity and thereby the legitimacy of the spatial – scientific understanding of the nature and purpose of geography. Finally, lest it be thought that the prescriptive recourse to ancient geography in defining how geography ought to be is now outmoded, it is worth briefly considering Michael Curry’s recent essay, ‘Towards a Geography of a World without Maps’ (2005). Partly moving against the currents which spatial science initiated in the previous generation, Curry wants to reassert the centrality of ‘place’ and other non-mathematicized ways of knowing location to geographical inquiries (see also Casey 1997; and Olwig 2008). To do so, he has recourse to ancient geography to make good the claim that ‘while there is good reason to believe that places, and the concept of place, are quite ancient, there is equally good reason to believe that the concept of space arose rather recently and that it is, in fact, an invention’ (Curry 2005: 680). Implicit here, as in Sauer, is an identification of the more recent with the erroneous and the more ancient with the disclosure of geography’s true purpose. He anatomizes the ancient terms ‘topos’, ‘choros’ and ‘geos’ to suggest that the first two

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predate the last term and point to different geographical epistemologies. For Curry, space as an inert container, what Newton would later call absolute space, was an idea developed in Aristotle and fully fleshed out in Ptolemy’s version of geographical inquiry. Curry then argues that whilst ‘in a sense, what today counts as the geographic was well established by Ptolemy’ (2005: 685) our daily lives have very little recourse to this conception of the geographic, being rooted in less mathematical conceptions and being more closely prefigured in the alternative spatial epistemologies gestured to by choros and topos. For Curry, to understand the geographies of our lives demands dislodging Ptolemaic understandings; if all geography is a set of footnotes to Ptolemy, that is why geography has failed to grasp the dynamics of the lifeworld. Again with Curry we have the recourse to ancient exemplars to develop a binary of good and bad, or more accurately to depict a hegemonic conception as the source of problems which could be rectified by returning to a more ancient set of knowledges. If Ptolemy is the revered ancient of Abler et al., the conception of geos he represents is recent in comparison with topos and choros for Curry. But Curry’s argumentational structure is one that bears close affinity to those canvassed thus far: history authorizes an understanding of good/useful practice in geography in the present; was translates to ought. When he states that ‘my goal is less to achieve some sort of historical accuracy than to illuminate some features about space and place and of current discourse about them’ (2005: 682), he is both developing a formulation startlingly close to that announced in the subtitle of Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography (‘a critical survey of current thought in the light of the past’) and setting out the relationship between past evidence and present practice which all these authors develop with differing levels of detail and sophistication. Narratives of the history of geography have a slightly different set of orientations to the more prescriptive projects canvassed so

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far, yet they also in their structures and decisions make claims about the origins of geography and how these justify visions of the nature of geography generally. A good example is the highly influential All Possible Worlds, by Geoffrey Martin. Martin’s lengthy exposition of the history of geographical ideas in fact deploys two sets of binaries to build its argument about the structure of the history of geography, both of them prefigured in the more prescriptive deployments of the history of geographical ideas canvassed thus far. Thus the entire book is structured around a binary between ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ geography, the divide between these two practices being located in the course of the nineteenth century. The transition is seen to be due to ‘the labors of Humboldt, of Ritter, of Guyot’, an identical pantheon to that highlighted by Sauer, Hartshorne and even Schaefer (Martin 2005: 131). Another binary is also laid out in the section on ancient geography. Here, contrary to Sauer, it is suggested that ancient geography did not have a singular character, but rather a binary nature, displaying ‘two basic traditions of geographic study … One is the mathematical tradition, starting with Thales … and summarized by Ptolemy. The second is the literary tradition, starting with Homer … and summarized by Strabo’ (2005: 6). Furthermore, Martin depicts a closing of ancient geography in that ‘with the death of Ptolemy, the geographic horizons that had been widened both physically and intellectually by the Greeks closed in again’ (2005: 37). Geography, then, has two sets of origins, ancient and modern, divided by the caesura of the ‘dark ages’ of medieval geography, and it has two sets of traditions, a mathematical and a literary one. Whilst negative judgements are not foregrounded in this treatment as they were in Sauer et al., Martin does suggest that modern geography is in some sense superior to its predecessor, having ‘a more philosophical, and, at the same time, a more imaginative character’ (2005: 131). Other historians of geography have been less concerned with the ancients, but they

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have postulated some sort of origin story for modern geography, or some rationale for their starting point. Thus David Livingstone’s epochal The Geographical Tradition (1992) starts with the Age of Discovery, implicitly suggesting that the challenge to received authority delimits a new starting point in the history of geography. Livingstone is aware of the rather arbitrary nature of his point of departure, and throughout his text reverts to the contingencies not only of geography’s history, but also of the way in which he chooses to narrate that history. The problem here is not with the author, but instead that most in his audience seeking a simple story will take his starting point as delimiting a hinge in history, rather than being an historiographical necessity, a device to allow for the writing of history to take place at all. Picking a slightly later point of departure for ‘modern’ geography, a number of authors have taken the Scientific Revolution, often for geography in the person of Bernhard Varenius, as distinguishing the era when a modern geography could emerge on a truly scientific footing. Fred Lukermann, for example, suggests that Varenius’s mathematically grounded form of geographical inquiry leads us into a version of the discipline recognizable to geographers practising today: ‘The intellectual divide separating ancient and medieval geography from modern geography is generally taken to be the publication of the Geographia Generalis by Bernhard Varenius’ (Lukermann 1999: 7). The fact that Isaac Newton produced two editions of the Geographia Generalis has cemented this depiction of Varenius (Warntz 1989) and ensured that it ramifies down to the present day (Curry 2005: 682). Other historians have plumped for still later dates for the origins of modern geography. A number of scholars, for example, have sought to flesh out the idea that modern geography originates in the Age of Enlightenment. Thus both Margarita Bowen and Anne Marie-Claire Godlewska have taken up the truism of Humboldt’s originary status and sought to provide detail for that

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claim (Bowen 1981; Godlewska 1999). Godlewska’s book is structured around a binary between a stagnant ‘mainstream’ of geographical textbook writers in the eighteenth century and a vanguard of bearers of geographical modernity on the margins, that vanguard being most ably led by Humboldt. Bowen’s book deploys the same basic divide, albeit drawing more on the English experience where Godlewska’s focus is the French case. Yet both are explicitly valorizing a form of geographical inquiry they label as modern or Humboldtian, and locating in that form of inquiry the birth of a recognizably modern geography that is deemed superior to that which went before. Both, then, deploy origin myths to structure their highly scholarly treatments of the history of geographical thought, both also making by their endeavours an intervention into debates about present practice in geography albeit this is far more explicitly the aim in Bowen’s work than in Godlewska’s.1 More stark still, but drawing on the same set of ideas and the same players, is David Stoddart’s claim that a modern, scientific geography originated in ‘1769 – when Cook first entered the Pacific’ and was codified by the work of Forster, Humboldt and Darwin (Stoddart 1986: 33). For Stoddart, geography existed prior to this, but is of no real relevance, falling outside the ambit of modernity: ‘Our standard histories speak of the work of Strabo and Eratosthenes, Varenius, Hakluyt, Purchas. But all these figures seem to us remote. Their contributions have meaning in the contexts only of their own time, not of ours’ (1986: 28). Finally, Gary Dunbar makes a similar category divide, framing the origins of modern geography not in terms of intellectual currents, as have all the authors canvassed thus far, but of institutional shifts. For Dunbar, the modernization of geography equates to its professionalization, the development of formal curricula of geography and such accoutrements as departments, degrees and doctorates, which begins in the German universities in the early nineteenth century (again thanks to Alexander von

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Humboldt and his brother Wilhelm) and then spreads across Europe and North America in the later nineteenth century (Dunbar 2005: 1–7). In summary, geographers have developed a wide range of ‘origin stories’ for their discipline, these both in position statements about the nature of geography and in histories of geography. Different eras have been picked upon as foundational to geography, notably due to the varied historiographies of ‘modern’ geography as a category. Yet in all of these cases it is assumed that a discernible and singular origin (or at least an enumerable multiple set of origins) can be detected and that in that origin we find a key to the nature of the ‘true’ geographical project, both in its own originating era and as it has ramified down the ages to the present practice of the discipline.

1.3 NIETZSCHE AND THE GENEALOGICAL CRITIQUE OF ORIGIN STORIES For all their diversity in terms of archival grounding, intellectual ambitions and origin stories, all of these approaches to the history of geography are, in Nietzschean terms, ‘pedigrees’, a term which Geuss helpfully coins in contradistinction to ‘genealogy’, the style of historiography advocated by Friedrich Nietzsche in his later writings (Geuss 1999: 1–3).2 In a pedigree, Geuss (1999: 3) detects five main characteristics: 1 In the interests of a positive valorization of some item 2 the pedigree, starting from a singular origin 3 which is an actual source of that value 4 traces an unbroken line of succession from the origin to that item 5 by a series of steps that preserve whatever value is in question.

In the approaches to the origins and nature of geography that have been canvassed in this chapter to date, we have several variants on

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this basic conceptual structure, but nothing which moves beyond it (with the possible exception of Livingstone’s work). This is especially clear in the prescriptive accounts of geography, which seek, in Geuss’s terms, to valorize an approach to geography and do so by tracing it to a single origin, as in Sauer’s attempt to find in Ancient Greek geographical practice and indeed the very etymology of the term a justification for his conception of geography as the study of landscapes and only the study of landscapes. The antiquity of this conception becomes, in Sauer, the source of its value. Whilst he did not fill in the ‘unbroken line’ of succession down to the present, he did give elements of that succession in the form of his list of worthies, a list also used for similar purposes of plotting a trajectory of valued bearers of the true tradition by writers as diverse as Hartshorne, Schaefer and Bowen. There are some embellishments in the pedigree thinking of the writers analyzed thus far. Martin, for example, finds two originating moments for geography, a classical and a modern, and likewise finds two traditions ramifying down the centuries, a mathematical and a descriptive/literary one. But he still finds the origins to be multiple but capable of exhaustive enumeration by the patient historian, who can then track their movement down the ages. Likewise, some authors develop a Manichean structure of good and bad traditions that move down the ages, notably Schaefer, but here we still have enumerable and traceable histories of different conceptions of geography, together with a clear set of value distinctions. Finally, Livingstone is keen to emphasize the ‘situated messiness’ of the geographical tradition, and thereby moves still further in the direction of multiplicity in the origins, trajectories and stories which geography’s history yields, but as we will see, this pluralism is still at some remove from the Nietzschean genealogical conception. Nietzsche developed in his later writings a distinct approach to historical writing and analysis he labelled as genealogical.

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Whilst the details of this approach are (appropriately) the subject of numerous contestations (for a sample of which, see Acampora 2006), we can set down some basic pointers to its structure and predispositions which will then guide a rereading of ancient geography’s status as an origin point for geography’s disciplinary identity. First, for all of Nietzsche’s ambiguities about the worth of history as expressed in his earlier Untimely Meditations, we should be clear that genealogy is for Nietzsche an historical method, indeed the only historical method if we want to understand the ways concepts we deploy have come to have the shapes they do.3 As he famously puts it, a genealogist is interested in the ‘gray, which is to say that which can be documented, which can really be ascertained, which has really existed, in short, the very long, difficult-to-decipher hieroglyphic writing of the human moral past!’ (Nietzsche 1998: 6, Preface)4 For Nietzsche, this especially involves linguistic and etymological work, words revealing pasts hidden by subsequent actions (1998: 12; I.4). Secondly, for Nietzsche the genealogist will find through their meticulous attention to the details of the historical record no essences lying at the foundations of our concepts and categories: ‘only that which has no history is definable’ (1998: 53; II.13). This is because there are no singular and pure origins from which traditions ramify down in unbroken continuity, and no value would be created thus in any case; in short, the premises of pedigree thinking are reversed by the genealogist.5 We can take these points in turn. First, there are no singular origins. On the contrary, Nietzsche’s investigations show the multiplicity of the social and conceptual origins of the concepts and categories we deploy. Thus he shows in Book I of the Genealogy of Morality how concepts of ‘goodness’ were multiple, notably with a dichotomy between the aristocratic and priestly conceptions (Nietzsche 1998: 14–17; I.6–7); more plural still are the origins of the concept of punishment outlined in Book II (1998: 53–54; II.13).

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Secondly, there are no pure origins, and this in two senses. First, as Geuss points out, the genealogist, finding no originating point, could in principle keep moving back in the historical record, any starting point adopted being ultimately an arbitrary imposition: The genealogy peters out there either because there is no more information available or because further elaboration of the genealogy at that point would lead too far afield, but in principle if information were available and there were any reason to continue, one could carry on with the genealogy. Geuss 1999: 14.

Secondly, there are no pure origins in another sense, in that all the originating moments we might focus upon were moments of contest and violence, actual and conceptual: ‘the beginning of everything great on earth, was thoroughly and prolongedly drenched in blood’ (Nietzsche 1998: 41; II.6), something Nietzsche attempts to show for both concepts of guilt and shame at this point and later for the idea of the Gods themselves (1998: 60–1; II.19). Thirdly, ideas do not ramify down the ages as traditions cherished, preserved and handed on to succeeding generations. On the contrary, the genealogist traces in history the violent appropriations of pre-existing concepts and categories to new uses that generations foist upon their societies to exercise their wills in the pursuit of power. Thus in historiographical terms Nietzsche posits that history works not by gradual change and ‘organic growing into new conditions, but rather as a break, a leap, a compulsion’ (1998: 58; II.17). We get several such ‘antitraditions’ elaborated in On the Genealogy of Morality: for asceticism as used by the philosophers (1998: 75–6; III.7) and for good as a category seized by the ‘slave revolt’ in morality (1998: 16–17; I.7), for example, but the clearest general account is of the changing uses of the concept of punishment as it is appropriated by several generations: ‘Something extant, something that has somehow or other come into being, is again and again interpreted according to new views,

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monopolized in a new way, transformed and rearranged for a new use by a power superior to it’ (1998: 50–1; II.12). Fourthly, and lying behind this conception of historical change as violent, there is a categorical distinction between the origins of an historical entity and its value, for its value is determined by present appropriations which respond to previous appropriations but reshape them: ‘For history of every kind there is no more important proposition than that … the cause of the genesis of a thing and its final usefulness, its actual employment and integration into a system of purposes, lie toto caelo apart’ (1998: 50; II.12).

1.4 A CONTINGENT INTERLUDE: THE TITLE OF STRABO’S ‘GEOGRAPHY’ As an entrée into why Nietzsche’s genealogical conception of history might matter to us as we think about the history of geography and its present uses, we can start with one minor detail, one grey documentary moment which questions the foundations of many of our origin stories. We tend, lazily, to speak of Strabo’s ‘Geography’ as if it were an historical fact that the work was thus titled. In fact, no title exists for the work stemming from the earliest manuscripts available. The title we deploy has become conventional on the basis of the content of the work and the title given to it in some ancient sources. But in Strabo’s ipsissima verba, the work he has undertaken is labelled in several ways: he does indeed call the book a ‘description of the earth’ (geographia), but also a ‘description of the land’ (chorographia), ‘an outline’ ( periegesis), a ‘circuit of the earth’ ( periodos ges) and a ‘circuit of the land’ ( periodeia tes choras). Other ancient sources do call his work a geographia, but they also give it other cognate names from the array just listed (Dueck 2000: 145). Dueck is doubtless right to say that the book is ‘so named after the contents and on

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the basis of the title in some ancient sources’, (2000: 145) but from a genealogical perspective it is noticeable that it is only once this type of inquiry has been stabilized under an agreed disciplinary label of ‘geography’ at a later date that Strabo’s work is consistently styled thus. In short, he is retrospectively and at some considerable violence to or simplification of his own self-categorization turned into a geographer who authored a book called Geography. And it is only once Strabo’s work is thus labelled that he can be dragooned into histories of geographical thought as the originator of literary geography, or the great codifier of spatial description and so forth. Nietzsche famously argued that the ‘slave revolt in morality’ effected by the Judaic tradition had led to the equation of the poor with the good and that this ‘has only moved out of our sight today because it – has been victorious’ (1998: 17; I.7). Likewise, we might say that it is by sleight of hand that Strabo’s work has been apportioned to a particular disciplinary tradition, or that a minor and fairly arbitrary decision to label Strabo’s work as ‘geography’ (rather than ‘chorography’ or some such) has solidified into a fact of enormous significance to the reception of Strabo and to his deployment in the origin stories we tell of geography as a discipline. By looking to this minor detail, we unpick or at least throw up questions about where geography’s origins are to be found and the retrospective ways, for reasons of power or pure contingency, trajectories have been drawn from this putatively simple and singular origin.

1.5 A GENEALOGICAL REREADING OF ANCIENT GEOGRAPHY The titling of Strabo’s Geography suggests there is capital in revisiting the history of geography more generally to consider what Nietzsche’s genealogical approach to reading the historical record might do to the foundation myths geographers have developed.

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In this context, I will only look to developing a genealogical reading of ancient geography, in part because as we have seen earlier it unsurprisingly figures so frequently in stories about the origins and nature of geography, in part to echo Nietzsche’s claim as a classicist: ‘I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely – that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time’ (Nietzsche 1997: 60). Attending to ancient geography seems, eo ipso, to be likewise untimely to contemporary geography for the simple reason that geography today has become increasingly narrow in its historical range of reference (Jones 2004). Likewise, conducting the forms of inquiry Nietzsche demands – the patient documentary work of etymology – is also cutting against the grain of the currently empowered appropriations of the label ‘geography’, attending as they do to the methodological canons of scientific and social – scientific inquiry in ways which eschew hermeneutics and etymology as foreign practices. It may seem perverse to modern geographers to focus on the geographical works of the ancient world. With some notable exceptions (as well as those discussed in section 1.2, see Cosgrove 2001), geographers now leave the study of ancient geography to classicists in a way the generation of Sauer and Hartshorne did not countenance. Surely similar ‘more relevant’ genealogical projects could be conducted on ‘more important’ moments in the creation of modern geography? Without doubt such projects could be conducted in this chapter, creating re-readings of the other originating moments geographers have enshrined in their histories – the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the creation of modern and professional geography are all ripe for analysis. To simply sketch one example, the past 25 years have seen an array of projects which have attended to Alexander von Humboldt as the progenitor of a modern geography (Bowen 1981; Godlewska 1999), and further works which have drawn on work by historians of science to suggest

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that the broader ether of a ‘Humboldtian science’ was central to the practice of geography in the era of the early nineteenth century (Cannon 1978; Livingstone 1992). In its most extreme form, this has led to the recent argument that the geographic imagination as forged by Ritter and Humboldt was key to the creation of modernity (Tang 2008). And yet a genealogical reading of Humboldt’s summa, Cosmos, could chip away at this edifice. While the details are beyond this chapter’s remit, attending to language and etymology, the simple point is that Humboldt always placed the study of ‘cosmos’, the ‘harmoniously ordered whole’ (Humboldt 1997: 24), at some distance from ‘Erdkunde’ and geography. Thus, whilst he was full of praise for Varenius’s Geographia Generalis, ‘this excellent work’, and for the ‘skillful hand’ of Carl Ritter in delineating his comparative geography (1997: 66–7), Humboldt always stressed the project of geography was not to be confused with that of cosmos: ‘The uncommon, but definite expression of the science of Cosmos recalls to the mind of the inhabitant of the earth that we are treating of a more widely-extended horizon – of the assemblage of all things with which space is filled’ (1997: 68). As such, from a genealogical perspective, attending to language highlights the disjunction between Humboldt and geography and thus points up the violence needed to dragoon him into the role of progenitor of ‘modern’ geography. If it suits the purposes of narrative simplicity and scientific self-image for geography to lay claim to Humboldt, the task of genealogy is to patiently unravel such appropriations. And yet from a genealogical perspective, it is precisely the attitude which suggests that ‘modern’ moments in the ‘creation’ of ‘geography’ are more ‘relevant/interesting’ which needs to be challenged. Such an attitude, of course, is implicitly premised on the idea that a lineage of ideas has ramified from the past down to present and that in this ramification more recent ideas are either better or at the very least ‘closer to us’, and therefore more worthy of our attention. In genealogy this

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image is exactly the point at issue; it is only by historical violence of the variety that we have seen performed on Humboldt’s science of cosmos to mutate it into a progenitor of ‘modern geography’ that such lineages are constructed and such senses of intellectual proximity are created. Genealogically speaking, history is a set of ruptures wherein we are as removed from Humboldt as from Strabo, even if the sleight of hand of creating a lineage obscures that unsettling truth. Within the broad swathe of ancient geographical writings, this chapter will focus on the work of Strabo and Ptolemy, partly due to limitations of space, partly as they are often seen as the twin colossi of ancient geographical writing. Indeed, Strabo at one point likens his Geography to ‘colossal statues’ suggesting his is ‘a colossal work’ (Strabo 1917–32: 1:49; 1.1.23; see also Pothecary 2005).6 A century later, in the second century CE, Claudius Ptolemy penned a tract also now known as Geography, although it should be noted that this work was more commonly known as ‘Chorographia’ than ‘Geographia’ in the Renaissance (Edson 2007: 195), suggesting as with the title of Strabo’s work that the disciplining of ancient inquiries under the singular label of ‘geography’ is non-contemporaneous with the production of the text at which time a more diverse terminology was deployed. For its sophistication and influence, Ptolemy’s work has been depicted by many commentators using similar imagery. Thus Dilke argues ‘Ptolemy … stride[s] like a colossus over the cartographic knowledge of the later Greco-Roman world’ (1987: 277–8). The first point to note is that neither Strabo nor Ptolemy could be depicted as a ‘pure’ origin for the geographical tradition. On the contrary, each depicts himself as in medias res, as part of an ongoing tradition rather than starting de novo. Thus from Strabo, we get a dizzying list at the beginning of the Geography of predecessors ‘who in earliest times ventured to treat the subject’ including Homer, Anaximander of Miletus, Hecataeus, Eratosthenes, Polybius and Posidonius

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amongst others (Strabo 1917–32 1:3; 1.1). Unlike Strabo, Ptolemy does not create a full ancestry for his project, mentioning Hipparchus and a few others, but he does play his own work off against that of Marinos of Tyre at some length. Marinos clearly set himself the task of producing a mathematically rigorous projection of the globe, but his work is only known to us through Ptolemy’s Geography. Marinos plays to Ptolemy’s work the role that Eratosthenes does to Strabo’s, being his most methodical predecessor: Marinos of Tyre seems to be the latest [author] in our time to have undertaken this subject, and he has done it with absolute diligence. He has clearly laid his hands on numerous records of research … and treated those of nearly all his predecessors with care, giving appropriate correction to everything that he found that either they or he himself, at first, had trusted without good reason. Ptolemy 2000: 63–4; 1.6.7

As we only know of Marinos through Ptolemy’s citations, so for Strabo if he is indeed the ‘father of geography’ it is in good part because of something entirely outside his control: his Geography survived intact,8 whilst those of all the others he names as predecessors in the tradition of describing the earth are known almost entirely through their citation in his work. Strabo is, then, an originating point for our knowledge of ancient geographical description, even though he was self-confessedly not the founder of that tradition. And of course, this means that we do not know from a Nietzschean perspective the intricacies of the violence by which both Strabo and Ptolemy appropriated the work of their predecessors to create a pedigree for their own labours, but we can see that each of our originators creates a pedigree for themselves, legitimating their work by showing it to carry forward a bigger project not merely driven by their will. Here the archive does not allow us to go back any further, but Geuss’s point still stands: if we found our modern pedigrees on Strabo and Ptolemy, first, they immediately point us backward; second, they are moments in the history of

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the appropriation of predecessors – our invented traditions are built out of the remains fortuitously surviving by means of their invented traditions. They are arbitrary starting points determined by the exigencies of evidentiary survival. Moreover, neither is a pure origin in the other sense set out earlier, in that both forged their geographical works in contexts ‘drenched in blood’. The common context in which all this activity emerged was not a non-specific and universal ‘curiosity’ as the accounts of Sauer and Martin allege, but rather the expansion of geographical horizons caused by ancient exploration and imperialism. This brought ancient thinkers into direct or mediated contact with geographical difference in both the human and the natural worlds, and it was this difference which drove attempts to both describe and to understand spatial variation. Cultural contact and encounter with geographical difference through the medium of imperial expansion and conflict was central to the biographies of Ptolemy, Strabo and a host of ancient geographers. Thus, both Herodotus and Strabo came from Asia Minor, where the Persian, Greek and (in Strabo’s case) Roman cultures came together. Ptolemy’s very name – Claudius Ptolemaeus – shows the impact of culture contact: ‘“Claudius” indicates Roman citizenship … “Ptolemaeus” shows that he was an inhabitant of Egypt, descended from Greek – or at least Hellenized – stock’ (North 2000: 731). Further, neither Strabo nor Ptolemy can adequately be depicted as a pure disciplinary starting point for geography. Again, the contingencies of what has survived matter here as twinning Strabo with Polybius can show. We think of Strabo as ‘a geographer’ and Polybius as ‘an historian’, but this is driven by what has survived, not by what we know both men actually wrote and were known for in their lifetimes. Polybius (200–118 BCE) in his History argues for several levels of geographical awareness in the historian. First, the historian needs to understand the causes of natural events relevant to their

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narrative. Secondly, topography is seen as essential in explaining the progress of battles. Thirdly, Polybius flirts (as does Herodotus) with the idea that the geographical environment determines the character of peoples (Clarke 1999: 79–97). Polybius included a geographical description of the entire known world as Book XXXIV of his History. This book is now lost except for a few fragments preserved in Strabo’s Geography. Thus Polybius is normally viewed as a historian and Strabo as a geographer, but Strabo reveals to us the depth of Polybius’s engagement with geography that has otherwise not been preserved, and by the same token Strabo was best known in the ancient world not for his Geography but for his historical continuation of Polybius. Indeed there is little evidence that Strabo’s Geography was widely known of in the ancient world itself: Dionysius Periegetes almost certainly does allude to Strabo’s work at one point in his geographical poem of the second century CE, but after that it only resurfaces in the sixth century CE in Stephanus Byzantius’s list of geographical proper names, Ethnica (Diller 1975: 3–24). It is our modern conditions of scholarly production that tend to produce writers who can be labelled under one disciplinary rubric, not those of the ancient world. Similar points could be made about Ptolemy, given that we can only label him as a geographer by ignoring the broader context of his astronomical and astrological labours, as codified in the Almagest and Tetrabiblos. As both texts survive into the present day, there is less of a tendency to forget Ptolemy’s broader project than has been the case for Strabo, but to the extent that geographical histories focus only on his Geography, they too truncate his achievement to create a pure and simple origin for geographical inquiry. In addition, just as the intellectual endeavours of Strabo and Ptolemy are poorly represented by bringing them under a singular disciplinary label, so the disciplinary label of ‘geography’ itself reduces multiplicity to an unhistorical singularity. Strabo’s protean terminology as discussed above is part of a

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wider pattern in the ancient world: while we tend to dragoon authors under the classification of ‘ancient geography’, their own terminology was far less restrictive and has a decidedly less rigid and ‘disciplinary’ flavour (van Paassen 1957: 1). Furthermore, this point does not just apply to those like Strabo and Ptolemy writing in Greek, but also to Latin ‘geography’, in good part because Greek terminology such as chorographia and geographika was naturalized into Latin. Thus, Pomponius Mela’s description of the world (before 44 CE) was entitled de Chorographia and often known in the Renaissance as de Situ Orbis (‘on sites on the globe’) (Mela 1998: 5–9), while the survey of the world in Books III–VI of Pliny’s Natural History is termed by him spectando terrarum situ (‘a viewing of the places of the earth’) and de terris (‘of the land’), both of which are translated as ‘geography’ in the Loeb edition (Pliny 1938–63: 2: 495, 503). Simply put, where we tend to use the term ‘geography’ to cover all these works, their authors were far less bound to any single term in describing their enterprise, a point which applies with equal force to the related term ‘cartography’ (Jacob 2006: 18–21). As Nietzsche suggests, an attention to language use and etymology unpicks the singularities and simplicities of our received origin stories. Do Strabo and Ptolemy provide a site for an ‘untimely meditation’ on the nature of geography? In general, they have been taken as an uncomplicated starting point for geographical inquiry. Furthermore, in the half century after the proselytizing of spatial science, they have been taken – as in Martin’s account in All Possible Worlds – as prefiguring the schism between a literary/humanistic and a mathematical/scientific form of geography, thereby lending value and dignity to that divide by giving it a pedigree. Yet from a genealogical perspective Strabo and Ptolemy can be made to speak some far more untimely thoughts about geography, and this by pointing to what their geographical projects shared rather than the all-too-neat binary opposition under which they have generally been understood.9

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In both Strabo and Ptolemy’s hands geography was a matter of textual collation. This point should not need further elaboration for Strabo but runs counter to the simple pigeonholing of Ptolemy as a mathematical writer and cartographer. Ptolemy’s work in compiling his catalogue of places relied upon collating and adjudicating as to the reliability of travellers’ accounts, just as did the descriptive geography of Strabo. Thus when Ptolemy describes the methods by which his catalogue has been produced, he emphasizes the role of textual collation, not mathematical calculation: The first step in a proceeding of this kind is systematic research, assembling the maximum of knowledge from the reports of people with scientific training who have toured the individual countries. Ptolemy 2000: 59; 1.2.

Obviously, Ptolemy assesses the worth of the findings of travellers by their scientific competence, which in this case means their ability to survey and determine location by mathematical means, but his task as a geographer is to assess and adjudicate the reliability of evidence which comes to him. As it transpires, then, the task of the geographer is not simply nor even primarily mathematical, being instead a textual one. As Ptolemy’s recent translators put it: The localities eventually transcribed in … Ptolemy’s map would have originally been recorded in some kind of text. Few if any of these textual sources would have been composed in the first instance with the cartographer in mind. 2000: 26.

Just as Strabo (1917–32: 1 451–3; 2.5.11) clearly divides what he has seen from what he has heard and believed, and this in turn from what he has merely heard, a procedure in accord with that set out by Herodotus (Hartog 1988; Thomas 2000), so behind Ptolemy’s catalogue of longitudes and latitudes, which appears so objective and mathematical in its final form, lies the self-same process of developing a ‘grammar of assent’ (to borrow a phrase from Newman) by which

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to determine which recordings of longitude and latitude to credit, which to adjust and which to reject (Clarke 1999: 142). Furthermore, we cannot ignore the substantial role Ptolemy accorded to the development of a textual apparatus to support his maps. This textual apparatus came in the form of what Ptolemy called ‘captions’, descriptive summaries of what could be seen in a map. Indeed, while we have directions for and examples of how to produce captions and while the Geography contains details on how construct maps, there is no evidence that Ptolemy’s original work was accompanied by maps (Ptolemy 2000: 45–50). Ptolemy wrote such captions both for his general map of the entire oikumene and for the larger scale regional maps. The caption Ptolemy wrote to accompany his map of the oikumene starts by giving some sense of the boundaries of the known world, then lists the seas of the known world. After this, the known world is broken down into three continents, whose boundaries are sketched, before a listing is given of the major bays and islands. Finally, Ptolemy attempts to give a mathematical reckoning of the dimensions of the oikumene he has just described in prose (2000: 108–11; 7.7). What is most noticeable here is that Ptolemy does see a descriptive catalogue of the oikumene as part of the task of a geographer, and whilst his catalogue is brief, its focus on bounding, enumerating and naming space is very much akin to that of Strabo’s summary depiction of the globe at the close of Book II of his Geography. The affinity is only deepened by looking at the captions which Ptolemy appended to his larger scale regional maps. For each regional map, Ptolemy recommends that the caption states which continent is being depicted, which particular countries from that continent are displayed, and then gives the boundaries of the map (2000: 120; 8.2). In other words, Ptolemy’s regional captions show him to be keenly aware of the interrelations between three spatial scales: the oikumene, the continent and the region. This clearly parallels the descriptive strategy Strabo deployed

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in his Geography, where each regional description in Books III–XVII is related back to the oikumene as a whole. Furthermore, for both writers geography was a descriptive practice far more than one which sought causal explanation (Romm 1992). For Strabo, geography relied upon the findings of mathematics and physics, but the geographer needed no more scientific bent than merely to understand those findings: As for the matters which he regards as fundamental principles of his science, the geographer must rely upon the geometricians who have measured the earth as a whole; and in their turn the geometricians must rely upon the astronomers; and again the astronomers upon the physicists. Strabo 1917–32: 1 423; 2.5.2.

As such, Strabo does not depict geography as a science in any discernible modern sense, but as ‘scientia’, or organized knowledge. The description of the inhabited world is predicated on a scientifically sustainable worldview, but does not actively draw upon or demand comprehension of the inquiries that have generated that worldview. Furthermore, geography is a descriptive not a causal analysis of the earth for Strabo, the latter being the preserve of physics, something which becomes clear in his criticism of Posidonius (Strabo 1917–32: 1 397–99; 2.3.8). Finally, for Strabo description was not just – as he tends to be pigeonholed today – in prose, but also relied on maps. Strabo takes as read from geometers and physicists that the earth is spherical and then seeks to locate the inhabited portion of the earth as a ‘quadrilateral’ or as a mantleshaped segment of the northern hemisphere (1917–32: 1 431–3; 2.5.5; and 1 435; 2.5.6). As such ‘visual’ references to quadrilaterals and mantles suggest, Strabo assumes the reader of his description uses it in conjunction with a map or globe, and the visual prompts in the Geography clearly show Strabo possessed a cartographic imagination (1 447–53; 2.5.10–11). Indeed, he says that ‘in what I have to say hereafter I shall assume that our drawing has been made on a

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plane chart’ (1 451; 2.5.11), in other words that the reader will possess a two-dimensional map to accompany their reading. Putting Strabo’s cartographic side together with Ptolemy’s textual side, we can see in them a shared sense of geography as a structured, descriptive, non-scientific and noncausal inquiry that aimed at the encyclopaedic cataloguing of the known world. The intellectual complex comprised by combining these five characteristics of ancient geography is, it seems, at some considerable distance from modern geographical practice and from the ways in which ancient geography has been presented by modern geographers. In sum, the present analysis of ancient geography amounts to an untimely meditation on diverse possible visions for the practice of geography rather than reassuring testament to the continuity of a geographical tradition handed down from antiquity to ourselves. From a genealogical perspective, then, ancient geography emerges drenched in the blood of imperial aggrandisement and the anxieties of cultural contact. Its origins are beyond our ken, being available to us only through the contingencies of evidentiary survival, these contingencies granting a central place to the appropriations effected by Strabo and Ptolemy in particular. Looking at those two authors, we find that ‘geography’ was one of a constellation of terms deployed to vaguely delimit inquiries describing the earth’s surface and that to explain the preeminence of that term is to look to later projects of self-definition which simplified multiplicitous ancient descriptors into a singular disciplinary label. Furthermore, from a genealogical perspective we can see in Strabo and Ptolemy a very ‘untimely geography’. Seen in these terms, Strabo and Ptolemy point to a mode of earth description driven by textual collation, eschewing causation and scientific procedure. Where they have normally been positioned either as twin founders of a singular geographical tradition, or more recently as the singular origins of a discipline divided, they can in fact be deployed to emphasize the alterity of the ancient, that

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antiquity speaks to entirely different practices of earth description from which we are separated by the ruptures of subsequent shaping wills rather than united with by the passing on of a disciplinary baton.

1.6 A CONSENSUAL CODA A genealogical approach to the history of geography can, as just exemplified, lead us to some very different understandings of the shapes of geography’s history, taking the same evidence and focusing on different elements, perceived through different eyes. This does not just change the narratives we tell of the history of geography, but also questions our evaluative frameworks. This is clear with regard to the stories of our origins we tell, the focus of this chapter, but also applies more broadly. Thus where historians of geography have made much heavy weather of the implied guilt of their subject’s history and whether it should, in Livingstone’s felicitous phrase, be ‘X-rated’ (1992: 1), a Nietzschean perspective would suggest the naivety of expecting anything other than a genesis drenched in blood. It would also warn us of the selfseeking nature of the historico-moral framework which positions ourselves as superior in moral terms to our predecessors on the basis of our ‘objective’ historical practices: ‘Does it perhaps seduce one to a harmful, because all too flattering, prejudice as to the virtues of modern man?’ (Nietzsche 1997: 88) Likewise, genealogy suggests history simply is the tracing of the appropriations of past acts of will by subsequent wills moulding their world; if that is the case, then charges of whiggery levelled against the prescriptive uses of geographical evidence canvassed earlier in this chapter miss the point (Livingstone 1992: 4–12; Mayhew 2001), or rather repeat the same structure of argument. Such charges empower the accuser, laying the grounds on which they can assert their will about the definition of geography’s nature and history, thereby recapitulating the assertion of power of ‘whig’ histories to different ends. Those

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seeking to shape geography will continue to draw pedigrees to justify their visions; those engaged in various forms of grey documentary historical analysis will continue to pick these pedigrees apart. To the extent that the dialectic between these processes gives geography energy and vision, they are in Nietzschean terms mutually affirming of the life of the set of willed appropriations we label ‘geography’.

NOTES 1 For critiques of the historiography of these two texts, see Porter (1983) on Bowen, and Mayhew (2000) on Godlewska. 2 In what follows I am deeply indebted to Geuss’s reading. 3 For Nietzsche’s relationships with historians and history, see Brobjer (2007) and Emden (2008). 4 All references to this work incorporate both page numbers from the Clark and Swensen translation and section numbers for those using other editions and translations. Most discussions render Nietzsche’s title, Zur Genealogie der Moral, as The Genealogy of Morals, following the title used in Kaufman and Hollingdale’s 1967 translation. More recent translations prefer to render this as On the Genealogy of Morality. 5 Interestingly, the recent work of Catherine Nash suggests that traditional modes of genealogy – the tracing of family history (for geography and genealogy in this sense, see Timothy and Guelke 2008) – can likewise, if undertaken with sufficient archival rigour, undermine pedigree thinking about pure lines of descent even if that is what the historian had hoped to uncover (Nash 2002, 2008). 6 References to Strabo include both English page numbers from the Loeb edition and section numbers. 7 References to Ptolemy include both the English page numbers from the Beggren and Jones translation and section numbers. 8 Book VII has a number of caesurae. 9 For a parallel, non-genealogical project to find untimely truths in Strabo, see Koelsch (2004).

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Acampora Christa Davis (ed.) (2006) Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Bowen, Margarita (1981) Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brobjer, Thomas, H. (2007) ‘Nietzsche’s relation to historical methods and nineteenth century German historiography’, History and Theory, 46: 155–179. Cannon, Susan Faye (1978) Science in Culture: the Early Victorian Period. New York: Dawson. Casey, Edward, S. (1997) The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clarke, Katherine (1999) Between Geography and History: Hellenistic Constructions of the Roman World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cosgrove, Denis (2001) Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Curry, Michael, R. (2005) ‘Towards a geography of a world without maps: lessons from Ptolemy and postal codes’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95: 680–691. Dilke, O.A.W. (1987) ‘Cartography in the ancient world: a conclusion’ in J.B. Harley and David Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography: Volume 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 276–279. Diller, Aubrey (1975) The Textual Tradition of Strabo’s Geography. Amsterdam: Hakkert. Dueck, Daniela (2000) Strabo of Amasia: A Greek Man of Letters in Augustan Rome. London: Routledge. Dunbar, Gary, S. (2005) ‘Introduction’ in Gary S. Dunbar (ed.), Geography: Discipline, Profession and Subject since (1870) An International Survey. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 1–7. Edson, Evelyn (2007) The Map of the World, (1300)1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Emden, Christian, J. (2008) Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Entriken, J. Nicholas and Brunn, Stanley (1989) Reflections on Richard Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Geuss, Raymond (1999) ‘Nietzsche and Genealogy’ in Raymond Geuss (ed.), Morality, Culture and History: Essays on German Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–28.

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Godlewska, Anne Marie-Claire (1999) Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hartog, François (1988) The Mirror of Herodotus: the Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hartshorne, Richard (1961) The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of the Past, corrected edn. Lancaster, PA: Association of American Geographers. Humboldt, Alexander (1997) Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E.C. Otté. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jacob, Christian (2006) The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History, trans. Tom Conley; Edward Dahl (ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, Rhys, A. (2004) ‘What time human geography?’, Progress in Human Geography, 28: 287–304. Kenzer, Martin, S. (1987) Carl O. Sauer: A Tribute. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. Koelsch, William A. (2004) ‘Squinting back at Strabo’, Geographical Review, 94: 502–518. Livingstone, David, N. (1992) The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Oxford: Blackwell. Lukermann, Fred (1999) ‘The Praecognita of Varenius: Seven Ways of Knowing’ in Anne Buttimer, Stanley D. Brunn and Ute Wardenga (eds), Text and Image: Social Construction of Regional Knowledges. Leipzig: Institute für Länderkunde, pp. 7–27. Martin, Geoffrey, J. (2005) All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas, 4th edn. New York: Oxford University Press. Mayhew, Robert J. (2000) ‘Proleptic locations: charting the birth of modern geography’, History of European Ideas, 26: 67–73. Mayhew, Robert, J. (2001) ‘The effacement of early modern geography (c. 1600–1850): A historiographical essay’, Progress in Human Geography, 25: 383–401. Mela, Pomponius (1998) Description of the World, trans. F.E. Romer. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press. Nash, Catherine (2002) ‘Genealogical identities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20: 27–52. Nash, Catherine (2008) Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories, Genealogy, and the Politics of Belonging. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1997) Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale; Daniel Breazeale (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich (1998) On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. with intro and notes Maudemarie Clark and Alan, J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. North, John David (2000) ‘Ptolemy’ in Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey Lloyd (eds), Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 731–738. Olwig, Kenneth, R. (2008) ‘Has “Geography” always been modern?: Choros, (Non)representation, performance, and the landscape’, Environment and Planning A, 40: (1843)1861. Pliny the Elder (1938–1962) Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, 10 volumes. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Porter, Roy (1983) ‘Review’, British Journal for the History of Science, 15: 301–302. Pothecary, Sarah (2005) ‘Kolossourgia: “A Colossal Statue of a Work”’ in Daniela Dueck, Hugh Lindsay and Sarah Pothecary (eds), Strabo’s Cultural Geography: The Making of a Kolossourgia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 5–26. Ptolemy (2000) Geography, trans. J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Romm, James (1992) The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration and Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Sauer, Carl (1969) ‘The Morphology of Landscape’, in John Leighly (ed.), Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 315–350. Schaefer, Fred, K. (1953) ‘Exceptionalism in geography: a methodological examination’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 43: 226–249. Stoddart, David (1986) On Geography and its History. Oxford: Blackwell. Strabo of Amasia (1917–1932) Geography, trans. Horace L. Jones, 8 volumes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tang, Chenxi (2008) The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Thomas, Rosalind (2000) Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Timothy, Dallen and Guelke, Jeanne Kay (eds) (2008) Geography and Genealogy: Locating Personal Pasts. Aldershot: Ashgate. Van Paassen, C. (1957) The Classical Tradition of Geography. Groningen: J.B. Wolters. Warntz, William (1989) ‘Newton, the Newtonians and the Geographia Generalis Varenii’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 79: 165–191.

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2 Geography’s Narratives and Intellectual History Charles W.J. Withers

INTRODUCTION ‘Geography’ is easy to define literally. From the Greek, ‘geos’, the Earth, and ‘graphos’, or ‘graphein’, ‘to write’, geography means ‘Earth description’ or ‘writing about the Earth’. Yet even a moment’s glance at the modern subject of geography, with its principal division into human and physical and its many specialist sub-divisions, reveals that the practical expression of this definition varies considerably. Moreover, what has been understood as ‘geography’ has changed over time. Where the literal definition has been constant, differing interpretations have been offered at different times in different places by different people as to geography’s content and purpose, over what it does and for whom. Modern professional geographers and students commonly refer, for example to ‘regional geography’ or to ‘physical geography’, but the meanings they attach to these and other terms bear little relation to others’ usage of them in the past. It is now commonplace to speak of ‘professional geographers’, of geography departments,

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geography students and of a geographical curriculum. It was not always so. Most aspects of the professionalisation and institutionalisation of geography date, in Europe and North America anyway, from the late nineteenth century. If, then, ‘the ‘nature’ of geography is always negotiated’ (Livingstone 1992: 28), so too are the educational and narrative structures, intellectual procedures and material means for geography’s production and dissemination – its books and journals, its expedition guides and mapping manuals, conferences, university departments, popular magazines, school prizes and so on. Acknowledging the diversity behind geography’s ‘definition’, this chapter considers some of the ways in which, over time and in different ways, geography has been undertaken. In here contributing to geography’s orientation, my concern is not with the history of geography’s cognitive content, nor with a narrative of geography’s history. My concern is with geography’s ‘epistemic cultures’ (Knorr Cetina 1999); that is, with the narrative practices and procedures by which geography

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has been carried out and, from that, to show how geography’s intellectual history is also a practical and discursive history. Where others have revealed geography’s history to be an account of geography’s ‘what’ and ‘when’ and, often, its ‘who’ – its changing ‘nature’ and subject matter told in relation to key disciplinary figures (in a rich literature see, e.g. Livingstone 1992; Dunbar 2001; Schulten 2001; Hubbard et al. 2004; Johnston and Sidaway 2004) – my focus is with geography’s ‘how’ and ‘why’. To use modern parlance, this is an essay in geography’s methods with an historical focus. Eight themes and the inter-relationships between them are considered under five headings: writing and reading, mapping and depicting, exploring and trusting, experimenting and gesturing and conversing. Other themes, such as teaching or institutionalising the subject could have been included although the history of geographical education is relatively well covered, for Britain at least (Stoddart 1986; Walford 2001). Practices such as agitating – geography as direct activism – might also have been incorporated since it is a feature of contemporary critical geography (Blomley 2007), and there is a rich historical tradition of ‘radical’ geography (Peet 1977). Of necessity, my attention to the practices selected is relatively brief and my method historical in order to illuminate their differences and connections and changes over time in the hands of different geographers. I am not arguing here for the interpretation of geography’s methods as a narrative of ‘progress’, not least given uncertainties over that term (Livingstone 2006), nor am I assuming any simple equation between geography’s intellectual practices and those material transformations on which they depend, such as printing technologies, the invention of photography or of the computer (Headrick 2000). My concern is to show how, at different times, the art of doing geography (including within that term the science in and of geography) has always also been, in different ways, the act of doing geography.

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GEOGRAPHY’S NARRATIVE FORMS: WRITING, READING AND ARITHMETIC Geography is not just a matter of writing about or describing the Earth. It is also a matter of scale in terms of the object of its writing and of the type and purpose of writing. Scale is crucial to geography’s definition and utility. In being from the Classical period concerned with the Earth, geography was distinguished from ‘cosmography’, the study of the Earth in relation to other planetary bodies, and from ‘chorography’, the study of portions or regions of the Earth. Yet these textual distinctions, while long-running, were never strictly observed: astronomical discussions formed part of geography’s teaching texts until well into the nineteenth century. Modern concerns with planetary geomorphology mark a return to geography’s cosmographic brief. At the same time, the narrative forms used by geographers to write about the Earth have always involved a mixture of words, numbers (words’ mathematical equivalences) and abstract symbols. In early modern Europe, geography took three forms: mathematical geography, descriptive geography and chorography (Cormack 1997). Mathematical geography was influenced by the textual and numerical practices of Classical authorities such as Ptolemy. But it crystallised as a distinctive form of earth description given enduring concerns to fix the absolute geometric location of places on the Earth’s surface in terms of latitude and longitude and because of the rise of mathematics in Europe’s universities, itself a consequence of the mathematicisation of natural philosophy from the later seventeenth century in what is now known as the Scientific Revolution (Shapin 1996). Mathematical geography was closely linked with the emergence of what we would today call geodesy, the science of Earth measurement, and importantly, with practical advances in map making, surveying and navigation. Here, geography’s writing was largely in numbers as coordinates

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and stylised symbols on maps. Mathematical geography was, socially and intellectually, the preserve of a few, none of whom would have termed themselves professional geographers. Descriptive geography, by contrast, focused on the political and physical structures of other lands and territories, incorporated maps as illustrations not as accurate representations and was far from rigorous: ‘It encompassed everything from practical descriptions of European road conditions to outlandish yarns of exotic locales, providing intriguing reading and practical information alike’ (Cormack 1997: 38). Chorography was the most wide ranging geographical subdiscipline and form of geographical writing and was so because it embraced genealogy, local history, even poetry and depictions of antiquities in presenting an essentially qualitative textual account of a region. These different practices of geographical writing – and of reading, since poring over maps with a view to safe navigation is not the same as reading connected prose for private educational benefit – were lent support from the later seventeenth century by two related trends. The first was that rise in instructional rhetoric from people concerned to give order to the written description of the Earth as scientific and geographical discoveries brought new data to light. One such, John Woodward’s 1696 pamphlet Brief Instructions for Making Observations in All Parts of the World, was with others a precedent to later more specialised guides on how to travel and undertake geographical fieldwork. These printed concerns about writing were echoed in the words of practitioners within emergent scientific institutions, such as London’s Royal Society, calling for a ‘proper plainnesse’ of speech and prose in debating new findings. The second trend was the development of what contemporaries called ‘natural’ and ‘political arithmetic’: discourses concerned to enumerate, respectively, the diversity of nature and the circumstances of human affairs. These discourses were closely connected with the emergence

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of the nation state and, thus, with statistics as state knowledge (Poovey 1998). In geography, statistics as a form of numerical testing of recorded observations in natural and social phenomena is thus only one form of writing, albeit that it is now prevalent in association with particular quantitative methods. Statistics as a form of writing became geographical because mathematical writing was associated with the politics of state surveillance, with developments in scientific methodology, with the numerical representation of the unseen and with attempts at prediction. In geography’s history as a discipline, the statistical formulation of space appears only belatedly: in connection with that moment in the 1960s, and with those of its proponents interested in the modelling of spatial relations, known as the ‘Quantitative Revolution’ (Gregory 1976; Barnes 2001). The writing of geography differently and writing about geographical difference have thus always been matters of different writing in geography. This is so whether one looks at book-keeping as a practice of seventeenthcentury English commercial and geographical imperialism (Ogborn 2004, 2007), at geographical writing as a call to national identity in late eighteenth-century America (Brückner 2006), at numerical glacial modelling (Sugden et al. 2002), or at those new inscriptive forms such as computer software codes transforming the contemporary geographies of everyday life (Dodge and Kitchin 2005). And since different types of geography demand different strategies in writing (Darby 1962) and because different strategies reflect different purposes, writing about geography’s history ought not to overlook the fact that geographical writing is never a disembodied practice, never without political consequences (Keith 1992; Kitchin 2005). Neither, if we want to understand how different geographical narratives are received and worked with in an intellectual context, can we ignore the practices of reading. Like writing, reading takes different forms – silent private reading is a relatively modern practice, for example – and the interpretation of

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these forms can highlight how ideas move differently within society and within given intellectual communities (Cavallo and Chartier 1999). Much exciting work remains to be done in this context. For it is clear not only that where scientific texts were read had an important bearing on how they were read, on what meanings were ascribed to the work (Livingstone 2005), but that reading prompts writing – in the interpretive form of marginalia for instance – which can detail how geography’s ideas were received and by whom (Daston 2004; Keighren 2006).

IMAGING AND IMAGINING THE WORLD: MAPPING AND DEPICTING Maps are, arguably, the most prevalent form of geographical writing. Maps incorporate words and other symbols – mathematical representations, lines depicting boundaries or common values, even artistic cartouches aimed at patrons and indications of cartographic prestige – in stylistically representing the Earth or portions of it. Mapping as a practice – as for ‘cartography’, a more modern term dating from the later 1830s in association with the rise of the inductive sciences – thus has its own languages and subpractices. This point, if obvious, matters in respect of maps and mapping as one narrative within geography’s intellectual history since there has been, until recently, a powerful and persistent interpretation of progressive development within the narrative history of mapping and map making. Maps, that is, were held not only to be mirrors to the world, accurate (if stylised) scaled representations of the real, but got progressively better – freer from error, less ‘artistic’ and more ‘scientific’ – over time. Recent work within map history has decisively challenged this understanding of the map, arguing that notions of accuracy and of meaning in maps are always contingent, always contextual (Harley 1987; Jacob 2006). Similarly, understanding the place of

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other depictive traditions within geography – sketching, photography, even filming and satellite remote sensing – needs to be attentive to historical context and geographical difference, and not straightforwardly assume that enhanced technical capability in imaging and imagining the world affords closer approximation to its truthful ‘objective’ comprehension (Daston and Galison 2007; Rose 2007). The different forms taken in mapping and map making and the connections with geography’s other practices may be illustrated by example. The promotion of mathematical geography in the early modern period, for instance, was associated with advances in navigational charts, the development of portolan charts, rhumb lines and, notably, with the adoption of Mercator’s projection as a ‘standard’ way of depicting the Earth’s continental shape and dimensions (Cormack 1997). But these things featured hardly at all in chorography or in descriptive geography where topographic maps, or sketches, accompanied regional description. Similarly, the development of triangulation as the basis to mapping was a consequence of the use of trigonometry and mathematics in figuring the Earth, and began, in national terms anyway, in seventeenth-century France before becoming a feature of Enlightenment cartography throughout Europe and North America (Withers 2007). The development of ‘modern geography’ or, better, of ‘modernising geography’ – taking the latter term to signal that geography is always a ‘becoming’ subject – is intimately connected with the development of mapping, with its mathematicisation and instrumentalisation and with the political importance of knowing one’s geographical limits – or those of one’s enemies. In the nineteenth century especially, geography’s connections in many European nations with the promotion of empire was most apparent in the power of maps and of mapping in delimiting territory, inscribing peoples and, in atlases, colouring the Earth in imperial shades. But geography’s mapping practices

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had different locational and discursive expression. In India, large-scale schemes of triangulation and trigonometric mapping depended on smaller-scale chorographical work to ‘fill in’ local detail (Edney 1997). In British Guiana, the lie of the land did not permit triangulation: there, traverse mapping following river valleys was the norm (Burnett 2000). In Siam, mapping was a form of narrative depiction symbolising royal authority as the embodiment of the nation (Winichakul 1994). In nineteenth-century Tibet and Nepal, mapping ‘the edge of empire’ involved not large-scale triangulation and standard instruments, but the regulation of individual human bodies, a cartography done in secret and in disguise (Raj 2003). Arguments that, from the eighteenth century onwards, geographers with others such as naturalists everywhere embraced new practices of depictive realism in sketching people and nature likewise falter in the face of geographical difference and the evidence for different languages of visualisation: in geology and ‘mineralogical geography’, for example, with its stylisation of subterranean topographies; in anthropology – sometimes called ‘moral geography’ – where Pacific islanders and others were often sketched according to European artistic conventions; or in plant geography with its new graphic forms of representation (Withers 2007). These languages speak to questions of specialisation and different practices within the emergent sciences, trends in which the diverse art in geography has always been vital to the art of geography. Similarly, the geography in and of art, notably in landscape painting, has allowed insight into changing sensitivities toward the environment and its aesthetic portrayal (Kaufman 2005). In the nineteenth century, photography was heralded as a modern art and an accurate science. Photography in the field was essential to the depiction of geographical diversity, natural richness and ethnographic difference. Photographs were presumed to be able to ‘say’ more than lengthy written descriptions. Photographs provided – or so it was

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assumed – accurate images. And, because in books and printed pamphlets, they also afforded a view of the far away for geographical audiences who could not easily see these things for themselves, photography provided new images of natural processes and powerful imaginative geographies (Schwartz 1996; Tucker 1997). But as modern scholars have shown of photography’s place in geography’s intellectual history, it is also a practice of classification and of limitation, not of holistic truthful representation (Ryan 1997; Schwartz and Ryan 2003). Photographs of the whole Earth, for example, affirm the importance of seeing as a geographical practice and connect us historiographically with geography’s cosmographic concerns in doing so, and, in presenting arresting images of planetary fragility, they have been used to illustrate discourses of ‘one-world’ humanism (Cosgrove 1994). Whether it be with pen or camera, via film (Aitken and Zonn 1994), in remote sensing and geographic information systems (Pickles 1995) or via the surveillance cameras in our streets, geography’s practices of depiction are always also about authority, authoritativeness and (more presumed than tested) ‘accuracy’ and ‘authenticity’ in different contexts.

EXPLORING AND TRUSTING: GEOGRAPHY AS FIELDWORK Fieldwork is a familiar term and an established practice. Yet, for one commentator, ‘[I]t’s striking how rarely we have reflected on the place of field-work in our collective disciplinary imagination’ (Driver 2000: 267). Driver’s claim is both true and untrue since as he also noted, considerable attention has been paid to the methodological and ethical implications of field research, especially in human geography. At the same time, ‘surprisingly little attention has been paid to the specifically geographical dimensions of field-work or to its history within the discipline’ (Driver 2000: 267).

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Distinctions between the place of fieldwork within geography (Marsden 2000), the nature of fieldwork as a form of knowing and the construction of ‘the field’ that is geography are helpful, but they are not absolute. Fieldwork has a prominent place in modern geography, a critical literature devoted to its pedagogy and, as the attention of feminist geographers and others has turned to the subject, so critiques about fieldwork as a masculinist and able-bodied practice have mirrored larger debates within geography (Katz 1994; Kent et al. 1997; Job 1999; Gerber and Goh 2000; Hall et al. 2002; Greenhough 2006). Engaging work has been done on fieldwork as a teaching practice and lived experience (Lorimer 2003; Lorimer et al. 2005). For most students and many academics, fieldwork is geography’s epistemological warrant, an irreplaceable experience, their encounter with the real. ‘The field’ is where proper work is done, in contrast to philosophical speculation or textual exegesis, geographical things done in other spaces (like libraries or laboratories): as that leading geomorphologist Richard Chorley once observed, ‘Whenever someone mentions theory to a geomorphologist, he instinctively reaches for his soil auger’ (Chorley 1978: 1). For some, fieldwork in geography is geography, exploration in geography the very lifeblood of the subject (Stoddart 1986: 157). My focus here is on the epistemological procedures intrinsic to fieldwork, such as regulating observation, reliance upon others, the advantages and problems of transience in real world encounters. Below, I also pay attention to some of the methodological matters that underline conversing with others ‘in the field’. Fieldwork is at heart, I suggest, a matter of regulation and of correspondence, a practice itself embodying practices in which, in effect, claims about an ontologically real world are subject to relative epistemological examination. One element of fieldwork involves the testing of theory. Another involves – indeed, requires – direct empirical encounter. Yet another involves the testing through comparison of one representation

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of reality against another. As another distinguished geomorphologist noted, ‘Field work for the geographer consists essentially in comparing the map with the actual ground. … The fundamental principle is that the ground not the map is the primary document’ (Wooldridge 1955: 78–9). But in order to know how to manage being in and dealing with ‘the actual ground’, and whether knowledge gained in the field corresponds or not with knowledge gained elsewhere, fieldwork needs to be regulated. The production of regulatory practices in geographical fieldwork is closely associated with that rise in instructional literature and rhetorical precision we have noted from the later seventeenth century. Advances in scientific methodology included rejecting the uncritical acceptance of ancient authority and accumulating new knowledge by seeing things for one’s self (Shapin 1996). In order that others elsewhere should believe what they were told about things they had not seen by people they did not know, conduct in the field had to be appropriate, one’s standing as a gentleman beyond reproach, and in particular certain practices – such as collecting, naming and preserving – had to be standardised or at least acknowledged and declared. Regulatory practices are about ensuring comprehension of the non-visible – the too small and the out-of-sight – in ways which presume (even if they do not at once establish) agreed standards in their measurement and reporting. Correspondence is at once a narrative practice and an epistemological concern. Above all else, the credibility of claims to secure knowledge through empirical encounters depended on accurate observation, on training the eye. That is why, as Driver has shown, the rise of geography in the nineteenth century was paralleled by the production of guides to fieldwork which stressed the importance of proper observation. From proper observation, all else followed – map work, sketching, instrumental measurement, describing the geographical content of places. Hints to Travellers, first published in 1854 by the Royal Geographical Society, was intended

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to define the geographer’s field of vision, to discipline observation and so to promote the discipline itself (Driver 2001: 49–67). Yet, precisely because fieldwork with its attendant practices of exploring, trusting, observing and regulating is so central a part of geography’s practice and history, we need to be better aware of its historical particularities and epistemological limitations. Fieldwork and exploring does not always distinguish the geographer. In the eighteenth century, for example, such things helped produce geographical knowledge but a geographer then was marked out as such precisely because he did not explore: his was a world of textual compilation, a direct encounter of the work of, in English, explorers and, in French, voyageurs-naturalistes (Withers 2007). More importantly, fieldwork is by its nature suspect as a geographical practice since, in the field, one is subject in several ways to limits to one’s effectiveness. Fieldwork is often about mobility – with being mobile or studying dynamic processes. Yet most fieldwork is time-limited. Bad weather restricts one’s exposure in (and to) the field. Instruments break and fail. Things dazzle by their diversity and connectedness. The real world presents no guides for its own interrogation: sampling, access to ‘type sites’, trusting your colleagues (or the locals or one’s students) is vital but problematic. In encountering the novel, memory is no guide to perception. It is, arguably, far better not to travel or be in the field at all, but to be sedentary. With immobility comes the capacity for reflection, measured comparison of reported difference, and time. In discussing these questions in relation to the fieldwork of the German geographer–scientist Alexander von Humboldt and the sedentary work of his contemporary the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, Outram not only makes clear that ‘Exploration is not merely metropolitan experimental and observational science carried out rather a long way from home’ (Outram 1996: 289), but that movement in and across space – fieldwork – is not the only route or place to secure knowledge.

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‘TRUTH SPOTS’: EXPERIMENTING AND LABORATORY CULTURES Questions in geography concerning the making, practice and reception of experiment, notably within that particular site for doing geography, the laboratory, have not figured as importantly as they might (but see Powell 2007). This lacuna is noteworthy given the insistence upon ‘lab work’ in certain forms of geographical enquiry, what we have seen about fieldwork as a form of experiential culture in geography, and the fact that the laboratory, the experiment and experimentation figure centrally in the history and philosophy of science. Elsewhere, for example, attention has been paid to the role of particular instruments, to the links between experiment and argument, to the connections between representing and realising, the move from ‘doing’ to ‘displaying’ experimental knowledge and what have been called the ‘hallmarks of experiment’, namely matters of reliability, claims to rationality and ideas of tolerance and accuracy (Gooding et al. 1989; Gooding 1990). The laboratory is a significant ‘witness box’, a ‘truth spot’ for modern science (Gieryn 1999: 55). Experimenting, especially in laboratories, is now in geography an established epistemic culture. But just as it is unclear as to when we may first properly talk of experiments in the general sense of a repeated (and repeatable) and instrumentalised ‘time trial’, so it is hard to date geography’s presence in the laboratory with any precision and to know when geographical curricula regularly incorporated lab work or through what social and intellectual authority laboratory practices became a means of acquiring geographical knowledge. There is work to be done here in providing a fuller history of geography’s narratives, both for physical geography (however understood) and of the use of laboratories in a wider sense – computer labs, map laboratories and so on – in establishing geography’s epistemic legitimacy. To be successful, experiments depend in part upon delimiting, then restricting, the

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‘free play’ of instruments and calibrating devices. But in experiential and experimental cultures such as geography the instruments are the human operators; what needs regulating is working practice, not instrumental ‘play’, and the scale of calibration is moral. As for fieldwork, ‘tolerance’ is the ability to withstand exposure to one’s environment whilst working, putting up with less-able colleagues and unreliable machinery, truculent locals and the vagaries of politicians. If fieldwork is about trust and tolerance, so too is work in the laboratory where truth claims made there must travel securely to wider audiences, where experimentation requires tolerance and tolerance requires regulation: of one’s self, of others, of other ‘things’ and of error. We might make a working distinction, then, between moral tolerance (in one’s fellow geographical operators), instrumental tolerance (in devices other than humans), political tolerance (in regard to funding, for example) and epistemic tolerance (What can we say from these results? How much error was allowed in their interpretation?). Laboratories thus demand our attention as sites of geographical practice but not because they are closed venues for the making of certainty. As Lenoir argues, ‘The focus on practice shifts our gaze to the mundane: to the construction of instruments, the manipulation of experimental apparatus in the time and space of the laboratory, and the relationship of these practical activities both to the ‘object’ and to its theoretical representation’ (Lenoir 1997: 9). This matters because narratives of messiness and contingency, not of the rationalist pursuit of exemplary law-like behaviour in the natural and social worlds, come closer to what geography actually does than do progressivist narratives which highlight, falsely, science as the infallible pursuit of certainty.

TALKING GEOGRAPHY: GESTURING AND CONVERSING We talk a lot about geography. Talk in geography and its different forms – instructive

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rhetoric in classrooms, quizzical asides out of class, empathetic ‘in-depth’ interviewing as an ethnographic method and so on – is in one sense a form of performance rather than, like writing or mapping, an inscriptive practice designed to represent the Earth or a theme within its study. Talking as performing might then be bracketed within geography’s non-representational realms (Thrift 2007). Geography, like other things, is worked with – made, defended, argued over – in different conversational and rhetorical spaces (Livingstone 2007). And there is nothing novel about talking as a performative practice in geography’s historical making. Take as an example the case of the French voyageur-naturaliste and geographer Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de Laperouse, whose late eighteenth-century voyage to the Pacific in search of the Northwest Passage involved knowing about Sakhalin in the Russian Far East. At that time, this was a major geographical conundrum, an enduring cartographic curiosity – it was shown as both island and peninsula on different maps – and the locus of competing mercantile and political interests between China, Russia, Japan and Europe’s colonial powers. Encountering a Sakhalin native on the shore, Laperouse and his crew could not communicate their questions so as to be understood. As spoken words failed, gestures about geographical dimensions were enacted. The native sketched a map of sorts in the sand, only for it to be washed away by the tide: Laperouse was lost, and lost for words. As Bravo notes, ‘The episodes of sketching by local people, anxiously observed by the European navigators, were … language performances in which listening, speaking, writing, gesturing, and drawing were each important ingredients in soliciting a geographical gift’ [namely, knowledge about Sakhalin] (Bravo 1999: 211). Such instances were repeated on innumerable occasions in geography’s history: geography’s practices in this regard have been about overcoming in different ways and places moments of incommensurability and different claims to epistemological legitimacy.

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It is for just these reasons, of course, that attention is paid to interviewing as regulated talk acts in geography’s guides to practice (Barbour 2007). Concerns with articulating one’s own voice, with listening and giving voice to others, are central to such work. There is a difference, however, between voices in geography – with whose pedagogic strictures we are generally familiar – and voices about geography, those narratives of geography’s history that are bound up with geographers’ lives (see, for example, Gould and Pitts 2002). In this context, as with several of geography’s practices, there is much to know yet of geography’s intellectual history by listening to and talking with those who also wrote, read and mapped ‘the field’.

CONCLUSION: THE GEOGRAPHER’S ART AND GEOGRAPHERS’ ACTS ‘Geography begins only when geographers begin writing it’ (Wooldridge and East 1951: 161). Geography may, for some, begin in writing, but it does not end there. As this chapter has indicated, one way of interpreting geography’s intellectual history is through its epistemic cultures rather than through a chronology of its changing cognitive content. To do so more completely than is the case here would demand attention to the connections between such cognitive content and geography’s practical expression, and between the technical and productive elements of geography’s practices and geography’s various audiences. The material and metaphorical nature of our different practices demand our continuing attention (Baker 2000). In general terms, however, I hope here to have shown that the geographer’s art – as Haggett’s book to that title illustrated in commenting on the nature of geography and the growth of its delivery structures (geographical journals and departments) (Haggett 1990) – is always a matter of geographers’ acts. Several more specific points may be made in conclusion. Geography’s practices ought not to be studied in isolation since

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whatever geography has been taken to be, its nature has depended upon more than one epistemic practice: to be done in the field, to gain a foothold in the curriculum, in being understood through popular magazines. Attention to geography’s practices must recognise their non-essential nature. Consider, for instance, ‘modelling’. The term now commonly embraces large-scale numerical work in which, as data resolution increases, so the modellers’ presumption is of closer correspondence to real-world complexity. But in the nineteenth century, the term meant working in the classroom with wood and clay to produce three-dimensional miniatures of landscape forms. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, geography’s models were ‘dissected maps’ – jigsaws – through whose use geography, political awareness and politeness were all taught. Attending to practices can disclose not just how geography developed but who acted to do geography and with what consequences. Lastly, if it is the case that geography’s intellectual history is, in these strong senses, a history of epistemic practice, matters of disciplinary history in which geographers agonise about their subject’s distinctiveness become less important than understanding that geography shares its concerns, as well as much of its content, with other arts and sciences.

REFERENCES Aitken, Stuart, and Zonn, L.E. (eds) (1994) Place, Power, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Baker, Victor (2000) ‘Conversing with the Earth: the geological approach to understanding’ in R. Frodemann, (ed.), Earth Matters: The Earth Sciences: Philosophy, and the Claims of Community. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, pp. 1–10. Barbour, R. (2007) Introducing Qualitative Research: A Student Guide to the Craft of Doing Qualitative Research. London: Sage. Barnes, Trevor (2001) ‘Lives lived and lives told: biographies of geography’s quantitative revolution’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19: 409–430.

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Blomley, Nicholas (2007) ‘Critical geography: Anger and hope,’ Progress in Human Geography, 31: 53–65 Bravo, Michael (1999) ‘Ethnographic navigation and the geographical gift’, in D. Livingstone and C. Withers (eds), Geography and Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 199–235. Brückner, Martin (2006) The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, & National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Burnett, Graham (2000) Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cavallo, Guglielmo, and Chartier, R. (eds) (1999) A History of Reading in the West, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chorley, Richard (1978) ‘Bases for theory in geomorphology’ in C. Embleton, D. Brunsden and D.K.C. Jones (eds), Geomorphology: Present Problems and Future Prospects. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–13. Cormack, Lesley (1997) Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cosgrove, Denis (1994) ‘Contested global visions: OneWorld, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo space photographs’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 84: 270–294. Darby, H.C. (1962) ‘The problem of geographical description’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30: 1–14. Daston, Lorraine (2004) ‘Taking note(s)’, Isis, 95: 443–448. Daston, Lorraine, and Galison, P. (2007) Objectivity. New York: Zone Books. Dodge, Martin, and Kitchin, P. (2005) ‘Code and the transduction of space’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95: 162–180. Driver, Felix (2000) ‘Editorial: field-work in geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 25: 267–268. Driver, Felix (2001) Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell. Dunbar, Gary (ed) (2001) Geography: Discipline, Profession and Subject Since 1870. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Edney, Matthew (1997) Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gerber, Rodney, and Goh, K.C. (eds) (2000) Fieldwork in Geography: Reflections, Perspectives and Actions. Berlin: Springer.

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Gieryn, Thomas (1999) Cultural Boundaries of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gooding, David (1990) Experiment and the Making of Meaning. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Gooding, David, Pinch, R. and Schaffer, S. (eds) (1989) The Uses of Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gould, Peter, and Pitts, F.R. (eds) (2002) Geographical Voices: Fourteen Autobiographical Essays. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Greenhough, Beth (2006) ‘Tales of an island-laboratory: defining the field in geography and science studies’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 31: 224–237. Gregory, Stan (1976) ‘On geographical myths and statistical fables’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 1: 385–400. Haggett, Peter (1990) The Geographer’s Art. Oxford: Blackwell. Hall, Tim, Healey, M. and Harrison, M. (2002) ‘Fieldwork and disabled students: discourses of exclusion and inclusion’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 27: 213–231. Harley, Brian (1987) ‘The map and the development of the history of cartography’, in J. Brian Harley and David Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography. Volume 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–42. Headrick, Daniel (2000) When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hubbard, Phil, Kitchin, R. and Valentine, G. (eds) (2004) Key Thinkers on Space and Place. London: Sage. Jacob, Christian (2006) The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History, trans. Tom Conley; Edward H. Dahl (ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Job, David (1999) New Directions in Geographical Fieldwork. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, Ron and Sidaway, J. (2004) Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography Since 1945. London: Hodder Arnold. Katz, Cindy (1994) ‘Playing the field: questions of fieldwork in geography’, The Professional Geographer, 46: 67–72. Kaufmann, Thomas (2005) Toward a Geography of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keighren, Innes (2006) ‘Bringing geography to the book: charting the reception of Influences of

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Geographic Environment’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 31: 525–540. Keith, Michael (1992) ‘Angry writing: (re)presenting the unethical world of the ethnographer’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10: 551–568. Kent, M., Gilbertson, D. and Hunt, C. (1997) ‘Fieldwork in geographical teaching: a critical review of the literature and approaches’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 21: 313–332. Kitchin, Rob (2005) ‘Disrupting and destabilizing Anglo-American and English-language hegemony in geography’, Social & Cultural Geography, 6: 1–15. Knorr Cetina, Karen (1999) Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Lenoir, Timothy (1997) Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Livingstone, David (1992) The Geographical Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. Livingstone, David (2005) ‘Science, text and space: thoughts on the geography of reading’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 30: 391–401. Livingstone, David (2006) ‘Putting progress in its place’, Progress in Human Geography, 30: 559–579. Livingstone, David (2007) ‘Science, site and speech: scientific knowledge and the spaces of rhetoric’, History of the Human Sciences, 20: 71–98. Lorimer, Hayden (2003) ‘The geographical field course as active archive’, Cultural Geographies, 10: 278–308. Lorimer, Hayden, and Spedding, N. (2005) ‘Locating field science: a geographical family expedition to Glen Roy, Scotland’, British Journal for the History of Science, 38: 13–34. Marsden, Bill (2000) ‘A British Historical Perspective on Fieldwork from the 1820s to the 1970s,’ in Rod Gerber and Goh Kim Chuan (eds) 2000: Fieldwork in Geography: Reflections, Perspectives and Actions. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 15–36. Ogborn, Miles (2004) ‘Geographia’s pen: writing, geography and the arts of commerce, 1660–1760’, Journal of Historical Geography, 30: 294–315. Ogborn, Miles (2007) Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East Indian Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Outram, Dorinda (1996) ‘New Spaces in Natural History,’ in Nick Jardine, James A. Secord and Emma C. Spary (eds) Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 249–265.

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Peet, Richard (ed.) (1977) Radical Geography: Alternative Viewpoints on Contemporary Social Issues. London: Methuen. Pickles, John (ed.) (1995) Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems. New York: Guilford. Poovey, Mary (1998) A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Powell, Richard (2007) ‘Geographies of science: histories, localities, practices, futures’, Progress in Human Geography, 31: 309–330. Raj, Kapil (2003) ‘When human travellers become instruments: the Indo-British exploration of Central Asia in the nineteenth century’ in M.-N. Bourguet, C. Licoppe and H.O. Sibum (eds), Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, pp. 156–188. Rose, Gillian (2007) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: Sage. Ryan, James (1997) Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. London: Reaktion. Schulten, Susan (2001) The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schwartz, Joan (1996) ‘The geography lesson : photographs and the construction of imaginative geographies’, Journal of Historical Geography, 22: 16–45. Schwartz, Joan, and Ryan, J. (eds) (2003) Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination. London: I.B. Tauris. Shapin, Steven (1996) The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stoddart, David (1986) On Geography and its History. Oxford: Blackwell. Sugden, David, Hulton, N.R.J. and Purves, R.S. (2002) ‘Modelling the inception of the Patagonian ice sheet’, Quaternary International, 96/6: 55–64. Thrift, Nigel (2007) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. Tucker, Joan (1997) ‘Photography as witness, detective, and imposter: visual representation in Victorian science’, in B. Lightman ed. Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 378–408. Walford, Rex (2001) Geography in British Schools 1850–2000. London: Woburn.

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Winichakul, Thongchai (1994) Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Withers, Charles, W.J. (2007) Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Wooldridge, Sidney (1955) ‘The status of geography and the role of fieldwork’, Geography, 40: 73–83. Wooldridge, Sidney, W. and East, W. Gordon (1951) The Spirit and Purpose of Geography. London: Hutchinson.

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PART 2

Geography’s Venues

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3 The Field Keith Richards

TO BODILY GO One answer we could be given if we ask why the physical sciences are so successful is that they define their own rules for experimental closure in such a way that they can pose tractable questions. The laboratory and its apparatus narrow the field of view, and allow deliberate exercise of control to facilitate prediction and explanation. For other classes of science – environmental and earth sciences, physical and human geography, social sciences – the laboratory is ‘out there’ in the world, uncontrolled, even uncontrollable. In the human sciences, field sites are even occupied by human agents who would normally be excluded from a laboratory space, but whose presence in a field area could be just as directly and indirectly influential in the research process as if they appeared, uninvited, in a laboratory in mid-experiment. Nevertheless, practitioners of these ‘opensystem’ sciences quite reasonably adhere to the principle that they should work in ‘the field’; accordingly, they ‘bodily enter the field of [their] enquiry’ (Baker 2004). Perhaps they do so in part because they consider the distinction between the laboratory and the field in reality to be less than

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absolute – to be different only in degree, rather than in kind. They may be encouraged in this by the reminder that, when scientists claimed to have achieved ‘cold’ atomic fusion, the subsequent scepticism ultimately revealed, amongst other failings, that monitoring in an electrolytic cell had failed to capture the structured internal variation in temperature, resulting in errors in its energy budget (Close 1990). This was not fundamentally different in principle, therefore, to the difficulty of assessing spatial variation in soil moisture in a river basin (for example). However, Latour in his ethnography of field research at the savanna–forest transition at Boa Vista in Amazonia observed the surveying, mapping and enumeration of plots and sites and thought: ‘I was deep in the forest, but the implication of this sign, “234”, [was] that we [were] in a laboratory, albeit a minimalist one, traced by a grid of coordinates’ (1999: 32). In other words, he found that, in the field, we frequently labour to create the conditions that restore some semblance of laboratory control. There are those who bodily go who may wonder ‘does the becoming or being part of that which [we] study diminish [our] objectivity and thereby impair [our] science’

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(Baker 2004: 136); while still others will be unconcerned about the epistemological implications of ‘the field’, since they will regard this as arid, and missing the point. These Romantics prefer a field unconstrained by the Enlightenment (Powell 2002). For the field encourages contradictory views, being more than the place where knowledge in particular fields is formulated and tested; it is also where the personal and the professional collide. Who can have failed to notice that applicants for research studentships in glaciology are frequently climbers and hikers? Whatever their gender, they do this kind of science because they love the challenge and beauty of the outdoors.1 Too theoretical a perspective and they quickly remind us that ‘[w]henever anyone mentions theory to a geomorphologist, he instinctively reaches for his soil auger’ (Chorley 1978: 1). This attachment of some field scientists to ‘the field’ may even extend to the field site itself, in ‘what might be called the “my-tribe” syndrome, the belief that an anthropologist may claim squatter’s rights to a particular field site, from which other researchers are subsequently to keep their distance’ (Brown 1981: 413). Such protective territoriality about field sites can arise in many field-based disciplines, when researchers become defensive about other scientists working at or near their field sites. It may manifest itself in expressed objections to ‘foreign’ scientists entering the research territory (a protectionism that may also be reflected in complex procedures for obtaining research permits). It is less than clear whether the motivation for this territorialism, both personal and institutionalised, is ethical – to protect against exploitation of particular subjects; or exclusive – to protect the status of the expertise and knowledge of individuals or groups. It may often be an unacknowledged mixture of both. In the latter case, it is of course not good scientific practice to inhibit the opportunity for testing, re-assessment and debate; but this observed dichotomy is at least one reflection of the divergence of emphasis between the

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aesthetic of fieldwork and its epistemology. It is nevertheless notable, given the suggestion above that differences between the laboratory and the field can be exaggerated, that aesthetic qualities have been identified as having broad epistemological purchase in the sciences (Kuhn 1970; Tauber 1996). For example, the ‘elegance’ or ‘beauty’ of an experiment or mathematical proposition may in part determine acceptance of its conclusions. Perhaps, however, a distinction is needed between an internal aesthetic of the research process, and an external aesthetic of the object of research; the latter an aesthetic rather more as ontology than as epistemological. Many kinds of scientist display reverence for the beauty of their subject, not only those who are drawn to work in the field. There can, of course, be many different reasons for being in many kinds of ‘field’, and many different styles of working in the field. These variances are not only reflections of Baker’s play on ‘field of enquiry’ and ‘field of endeavour’. In what follows, therefore, we consider epistemological questions while illustrating some of the different kinds of, and reasons for, being in the field.

EXPEDITION AND EXPERIMENT One way in which we may go ‘into the field’ is through participation in an expedition. Such a practice carries its own historical baggage in the geographical project, as general reverence for Darwin and von Humboldt attests. At some stage, however, a transition may occur between exploratory, expeditionary forms of investigation and a more deliberative form of field-based observation and experimentation. Powell (2008) identifies this transition in Canadian Arctic research in the early 1950s, specifically in its developing emphasis ‘on sustained, integrated research, rather than traditional expeditionary fieldwork’ (2008: 556). At the same time, its practitioners were partly drawn to the Arctic by ‘an excitement at exploratory discovery’

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(2008: 559). The transition from exploration to experiment is thus in no sense a universally linear, unidirectional process. Experiments can identify the need for further exploratory investigation, and individuals can embody both the thrill of serendipity and the logic of repetition. Nevertheless, an illustration of the transition is provided in the archival research reported by Carozzi and Newman (1995), who traced the development from expedition to experiment and scientific hypothesis testing exemplified by Horace-Benedict de Saussure and his early glaciological investigations in the Alps. Having visited Chamonix briefly in 1760 and 1761, de Saussure systematically planned a research visit in 1764, and his notebooks reveal a list of 15 broad objectives focusing on the nature of the glacier, its shape and position, its size, and related observations. It is evident that he was not only gathering data; he was theorising and testing hypotheses. Why else would he wish intentionally to ‘observe if the snow is not arranged in layers or in thin sheets and what is the direction of these layers’ (Carozzi and Newman 1995: 34)? And although he may have made an initial expedition, repeated visits to the same locations to answer specific questions look more like fieldwork, however much of an expedition they may have continued to be, logistically.

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[T]hree members of Wheeler’s party with whom Gilbert had worked were killed when Mohave Apache Indians ambushed their stagecoach near Wickenburg, Arizona. In 1875 a party of the Hayden Survey, ambushed by Indians south of the La Sal Mountains, lost their pack train and had to hike 100 mi to La Plata, Colorado. Hunt 1980: 25.

But still Gilbert and others returned, to attempt to answer specific questions suggested by earlier observations. Fieldwork is more than simply doing research, then. It is also a question of travelling, living and even surviving; the logistics and the risks of doing it may dominate the research process itself. Fieldwork in remote locations requires complex organisation of transport, subsistence and accommodation, and often relies heavily on technical support to ensure the continued operation of equipment under extreme conditions. Thus a network of assistance makes an essential contribution to its successful prosecution, and the social aspects of field research are perhaps even more critical than they have been shown to be in laboratory research (Latour and Woolgar 1986). The mess tent is a place to eat, socialise and organise work. In dangerous environments, it is a place to

ACTORS AND ACCOUTREMENTS Today, it is difficult to appreciate that, for de Saussure, the act of visiting his Alpine field sites was one of considerable privation as he rode and walked from Geneva to Chamonix. Such challenges form part of the mythology of the field. Who cannot marvel at the heroic exploits of John Wesley Powell (1961) and Grove Karl Gilbert in the expeditionary surveys of the American mid-West in the late nineteenth century; Gilbert of the iconic image on horseback (Figure 3.1)? Hunt (1980) describes the circumstances graphically:

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Figure 3.1 G.K. Gilbert in the field in Colorado, 1894.

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record the sites where everyone will be working, in case of emergency. And as Powell (2004) shows, using ethnographic research from the Polar Continental Shelf Project base station at Resolute, governmentfunded research in Arctic Canada is equally if not more obviously underpinned by the roles of those who manage the safety of researchers in the field, especially radio operators and ski-plane pilots. Science in the field can only take place because of these networks of support and assistance, and is sometimes constrained to choose particular questions, methods and locations because of logistical problems that preclude others. This social character of field science is evident at all levels, as Lorimer and Spedding (2005) illustrate in describing a family field trip to Glen Roy in Scotland in July 1952. This was planned by Robert Murray, Field Studies Instructor at the Glenmore Lodge Outdoor Centre, to gather data to test his radical hypotheses about the formation of the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy (glacial lake shorelines). It involved his wife, child and sister-in-law, camping in Glen Roy for a week. Lorimer and Spedding (2005) focus on this as an unpublished and vernacular contribution to the development of scientific ideas, illustrative of the routines and travels that characterise field science, representative of the various intersecting geographies and histories that attach to sites of scientific activity, and demonstrative of the social practice of science. However, there is also a deeper intellectual role for the social nature of fieldwork; one that recalls Shapin’s (1988) arguments about the building of gentlemanly trust through which a community of agreement about scientific findings was established in the seventeenth century. Then, laboratories were often in private houses, and the warrant for success of an experiment was how it was reported by those present, and by their credibility. Fieldwork today is quite frequently conducted in groups. Scientists working together in the field contribute, through debate about observations and data, to the development of

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common understandings of the phenomena being studied; they help formulate new research questions, experiments and measurements; and, often being from different disciplinary backgrounds, they provide new insights and connect different kinds of observations in challenging ways. In addition, the field is a place for the intellectual acculturation, socialisation and training of research staff and students in the field practices of a discipline, and in the establishment of continuity of research values. Thus, even in the practice of research itself, once viable field problems and locations have been selected, there is a highly social nature to much field research, but this society is positively engaged in understanding the material world in which it flourishes, and plays a key epistemological role in the construction and warranting of knowledge.

CONTROL AND CAPITAL The disasters that happened to the Wheeler and Hayden Surveys in Arizona and Colorado (see above) of course have to be read and understood against the background of internal colonialism that those surveys represented. Graf (1986) reminds us that the early United States Geological Survey could have played a role not dissimilar to other institutions such as the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), in seeking to catalogue environmental resources, and control access to them. The SCS promoted an over-grazing and erosion hypothesis well after scientific opinion had shifted to consider subtle climatic changes, in order to maintain control over stock densities in the Navajo lands under political pressure from a California dependent on the River Colorado for water resources. Thus, field research may well be undertaken to answer scientific questions, but politics, and the economics both of the research itself and of the use of its results, are also likely to determine which kinds of question receive support, and indeed, where field research may be undertaken.

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To demonstrate effectively these influences on field research can require a combination of archival research into the history of research in particular areas, oral histories of practising scientists, and ethnographies of research in the field. Powell’s (2004, 2007a) research into the history of the Canadian Polar Continental Shelf Project illustrates both this combination, and the range of issues it can expose. Canadian Arctic science changed focus as national needs variously intertwined with research agendas to determine the nature and location of field activity. The politics of Canadian sovereignty had much to do with early high-Arctic field research, which represented a kind of ‘beating the bounds’ for the nation state, and the political determinant of research agendas has returned with changing implications at various stages, first during the Cold War and latterly as part of the nascent statehood of the Inuit nation with the founding of Nunavut in 1999. The focus of field research has shifted in parallel with these political exigencies, from mapping, through resource assessment (with particular reference to hydrocarbons) and communications, to the regional role in and impacts of global environmental change (and especially in the latter case, the effects of climate change on indigenous resource use and livelihoods). As noted above, these changes have also been coupled with changing styles of research, from the exploratory to the hypothesis-driven, from observation to monitoring to forms of field experimentation, and from the local to the global in their implications. The personnel have also evolved, as predominantly rugged male explorers have given way to mixed-gender teams of academic researchers; and the mode and bureaucracy of research funding has also changed (not least in the latter instance in terms of health and safety considerations). This is a clear illustration of the pervasive influence of political agendas in the selection of research questions, if not on the manner in which they are answered. But because much field research is highly dependent on logistical support, it therefore inevitably requires

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significant levels of funding, which implies an over-riding bureaucracy and funding bodies financed by government through taxation. These bodies therefore have to construct cases for support in competition with other beneficiaries of government spending – in the UK in the three-year Comprehensive Spending Review process. This means that they must frequently respond to demands for directed research with evidence of potential economic benefit. But, of course, researchers participate in this by skewing their own agendas, and by lobbying for the importance of research in particular fields. Field research, like all science, is therefore heavily reliant on the various interwoven agendas of scientists, scientific bureaucracies, and politics and policies that characterise the multiple layers of the ‘epistemic cultures’ embedded within the ‘knowledge society’ (Knorr Cetina 2007); and field science is a fertile ground for science studies sensu lato – from the sociology of its internal practices, to its external relations with science at large, and with knowledge, technology and society.

PLACES IN THE FIELD But how are the questions asked in the field answered in ways that lead to the construction of reliable knowledge; and what, therefore, is the epistemological role of the field location, the place chosen to conduct research? Ecologists and geomorphologists have wrestled with this issue, and have concluded that nature conducts the experiments, and scientists must use the ‘particularities of place’ (Kohler 2002) to develop field practices that restore a measure of the control they lose when they leave the laboratory. Pitty (1979) promoted this place-based methodology for research in (physical) geography, arguing for the deliberate choice of a field area because its distinctive characteristics enabled particular phenomena to be better understood. He summarised this geographical approach as a method that ‘utilizes the

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variability at the earth’s surface as a source of natural selectors in its investigations, and depends on the exploration for, and discovery of, localities naturally simplified by the marked presence or absence of selectors of particular interest’ (1979: 279). Wider conclusions were then to be drawn from comparative studies of the same phenomena in other areas. However, the boundary drawn around the field area is rather critical, since the aim of defining the place for fieldwork is that it should exclude variables extraneous to the phenomenon being researched, and which are accordingly liable to confound hypothesised relationships. There is little evidence in the literature that this process has attained the level of deliberative rigour in the field sciences that it has in the laboratory, with field locations sometimes being selected more for convenience, aesthetics, or political reasons than for explicitly epistemological purpose. This is despite the fact that both the covering law model of explanation and the realist’s structuring of the world into unobservable mechanisms and observable events (Sayer 1992) require that explanation should combine statements about both the general nature of the phenomenon under study, and the specificities of its historical and geographical contingency. What these requirements imply is that, unless the contingent nature of the field location is understood and fully elucidated, explanation of observed events cannot be reliably achieved, and the bearing of experiment on theory and hypothesis will accordingly remain uncertain. This may appear to support a view that theory and understanding cannot travel between field locations. Shapin (1991), for example, argues that knowledge that is considered historically and geographically contingent, or ‘situated’, cannot be knowledge that is authentically true; and concludes that to imply situatedness is itself to denigrate the status of knowledge. This view, which seems to undermine much place-based field science, can be countered by the argument that all science is ultimately local knowledge (Rouse

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1987). However, the implication still remains that strategies must be found to legitimate claims that knowledge and understanding obtained in a particular field location can offer us some larger truths. One such strategy is to argue that the case study – although a study of a unique (‘field’) context – can deliver more widely applicable understanding by revealing the mechanisms that underlie function (Ragin and Becker 1992; Richards 1996). The explanation of those mechanisms may be the best achievable at the time, consistent with the then available evidence (Lipton 2004). Following Lipton’s arguments about the role of contrastive explanation, and as Pitty implied, fieldwork in another location may then permit us a comparative view that allows us to infer that one explanation is better than another in particular contexts. And if understanding a phenomenon gained in one location provides a basis for accounting for similar behaviour in another, we have some grounds to believe that we can theorise more generally about the world, at least in relation to similar kinds of location. The difficulty of guaranteeing that the best explanation has been inferred following fieldwork in one location is compounded by the fact that we may never be entirely certain what we actually observe in nature. We seek to classify the entities we observe, but we may not be defining ‘natural kinds’ – entities with real meaning. This is nicely illustrated by attempts to explain the origin of tors (Figure 3.2). Linton (1955) attributed (granite) tors in Dartmoor to deep weathering and subsequent erosion of weathered products, while in the gritstone Peak District, Palmer and Neilson (1962) argued for slope retreat under periglacial conditions. This led to the notion that tors are equifinal entities. But if tors are natural kinds, perhaps there are in reality several distinct types, such as hill-top and hill-side forms, with different origins. Contrastive explanation may therefore assist in the recognition of different kinds, with different origins; and the chimera of equifinality then evaporates. Other problems may arise in the field, as Hamilton et al. (2008) have

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(a)

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(b)

Figure 3.2 Tors – in situ piles of joint-bounded blocks: (a) in granite, on Dartmoor, on a hill-top location; (b) in millstone grit in the Peak District, at the crest of a valley-side slope.

shown; place a geomorphologist and an archaeologist on a hillside littered with boulders and one sees collapsed tors while the other sees human purpose in their organisation. But this may itself generate new insights, and forces careful thinking about the evidence required to convince sceptical others.

FIELDS IN THE FIELD One way of responding to the problem of defining boundaries around field areas in order to control variables is to use the methodology of experimental design. This was developed by Fisher (1960) to deal with prediction and explanation in a rather different kind of field; namely, in agricultural experiments at Rothamsted Experimental Station. These sought to assess, for example, how crop productivity varied under different treatments, with the crop growing on plots in fields across which unknown, potentially confounding variations in soil properties were likely to arise. The experimental design is a classic illustration of what Latour (1999) sees as imposing laboratory control on the natural world; if variables cannot be explicitly excluded, their influence can nevertheless be controlled through the design of a structured experiment involving randomised

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data collection followed by an analysis of variance, which therefore creates a form of statistical control. For example, if we wish to know which of four varieties of a crop is most productive, and we need to exclude the effects of possible variation in soil type on their yields (since we cannot grow all four varieties on the same patch of land) we design an experiment such as that in Figure 3.3. The principles of such an experimental design can be extended to the field, where the effects of different factors or treatments on a dependent variable can be evaluated. For example, if we are interested in controls on the variation in soil moisture, we could measure this at locations that are characterised by their class of slope aspect, their class of gradient, their position on the slope (top, mid-slope, bottom) and their vegetation cover type, giving four ‘factors’, each with a number of treatments. If multiple locations all characterised by the same combination of treatments are measured (replicates), the variability of the dependent variable between the factors can be evaluated relative to the variability within the sample of replicates. This methodology can also be used to examine how a particular phenomenon varies spatially at different scales (Chorley et al. 1966). This mode of statistical experimental control in the field can be highly sophisticated

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Block 1 D C B A

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Block 2 A D B C

Block 3 B D C A

Block 4 D B A C

Block 5 A C D B

Figure 3.3 A randomised block experimental design, in which four crop varieties (A to D) are grown in five blocks, each of which is divided into four plots, in each of which one of the varieties is selected at random to be grown. This design allows the variation between crop types to be assessed against variation between blocks.

(Underwood 1997). However, in conducting such experiments both the romantic and the enlightened can gain succour. For example, if ecological experiments of this kind are carefully performed, there is likely to be some evidence of control exercised by the categorical (classified) independent variables, but this is usually likely to appear out of a fog of unexplained variance. There may therefore be control, but it is likely to be relatively weak, and natural phenomena such as soils and vegetation will defy attempts to link them rigidly to hypothesised independent variables. Thus such field research can enlighten our understanding and satisfy the scientific desire to exercise control over nature through its disciplined representation, while at the same time it satisfies our romantic notion of nature as untamed and untameable.

PERFORMING FIELDWORK Latour (1999) was fascinated by these means through which field researchers transform the messy nature that they enter into a more structured environment: ‘[I]t seems to me that never before has the forest of Boa Vista known such discipline’ (1999: 47). He focused in his 15 days in the field on the range of transformative actions, or mediations, whereby a botanist, pedologist and geomorphologist together discovered, created, invented and constructed (they did all of these) a diagrammatic representation of the

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savanna–forest transition. The action of surveying defined a coordinate frame to enable the spatial coexistences of phenomena to be mapped, while notebooks recorded qualitative observations, numerical data, and sampling positions; and equipment was used to organise soil samples so that patterns began to emerge visually in their arrangement. These mediations are complex and iterative, and are successive codings and reencodings of material evidence that are ultimately rendered invisible in the relationship between the material world and the formal language that represents it. Through these intermediate transformations, Latour (1999: 70–1) concludes that the performance of fieldwork involves a trade-off between losses (‘reduction’) and gains (‘amplification’); we lose locality, particularity, materiality, multiplicity and continuity; but gain compatibility, standardization, text, calculation, circulation and relative universality (Figure 3.4). One performance in the field frequently emphasised as a critical part of geographical interpretation of landscape is that of observation (Rose 1992; Powell 2002), both in its direct concern for an aesthetic (the Romantic ideal), or in its indirect association with measurement (the Enlightenment imperative). The ‘eye for landscape’ is a traditionally valued attribute of the geographer, and ‘the primacy of the visual in the geographical tradition is stressed’ (Powell 2002: 263). The other senses can also be brought into play during the bodily engagement with the field; for example, von Humboldt registered atmospheric pressure through his eyes, and (at some risk to himself) tested the discharge from electric eels with his body (Botting 1973). However, there cannot be a case that concern for the visual is uniquely associated with field-based research, given the extraordinary investment in science more generally in the creation of systems for visualising phenomena in the laboratory and beyond, from microscopes and telescopes (of all kinds) to tomography and satellite imagery (Hacking 1983: 167–209). To theorise the process of observation, Baker (2000) has

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Chain of elements

Upstream Representation

∞

?

?

?

?

?

∞

Downstream

Reduction

Successive stages

Compatibility Standardisation Text Calculation Circulation Relative universality

Locality Particularity Materiality Multiplicity Continuity Amplification

Figure 3.4 (a) A diagrammatic representation by Latour (1999) of a series of transformations that may occur in the field between the material world and its representation in thought and text; and (b) at each step in this series, there is both a gain (amplification) and a loss (reduction).

drawn on semiotics to account for the way in which the nature of the objects seen in the field is interwoven with the prior interpretations of similar phenomena, so that objects are signifiers of meaning. This accounts for the time it may take for observed entities that initially appear equifinal (cf. tors, p. 117) to be redefined as multiple entities, perhaps as a result of evidence that cannot simply be observed in the field. A performance of observation seen in this context is similar to Latour’s successive encodings that mediate between the material world and its representation in communicable forms. Curiously, then, the act of visualising so valued in geographical fieldwork simultaneously renders invisible the multiple translations between object and representational model.

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Latour’s engagement with the process of understanding a field problem ended when a representation had been constructed, and even as he acknowledged that his colleagues were ‘getting ready to leave, but they [were] also preparing to return’ (Latour, 1999: 74; Latour’s italics). They were doing so because their inferences about the savanna–forest boundary led them to conclude that they needed to undertake research on the pedological function of earthworms. And this is surely one of the distinctions between fieldwork and an expedition: the former involves returning to the same place, to examine the same and related scientific problems, perhaps in the company of other, different scientists who will bring new understandings to bear on the phenomenon, and in doing so, recover

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the richness lost in the successive reductions already made. In-depth research – in particular field locations, which constitute intensive case studies (Richards 1996) – may draw on multiple fields of science to build a mutually reinforcing explanation of how certain phenomena function. This may be an iterative process recalling that involved in the mediation of survey and sampling between the world and its textual representation, but it occurs at a different, higher level in the research process, and requires open interaction amongst scientists with different backgrounds. Field research therefore in fact seems to be inherently inter-disciplinary.

must be uncovered during the process of a research which, by virtue of this characteristic of the field, is necessarily a bodily, social, collaborative and inter-disciplinary engagement with the particular locations that constitute the field site.

NOTE 1 While McEwan (1998) has argued that the masculinist nature of fieldwork excluded women from the public, institutionalised field sciences in the nineteenth century, Bracken and Mawdsley (2004) identify the potential for more positive experiences today. The privations and risks of some kinds of fieldwork may tend to limit its appeal, but males are as likely to find their capacities stretched as females. (cf. Whitlock 2001).

THE FIELD AND THE LABORATORY This therefore suggests, in conclusion, one possible difference between the laboratory and the field. Research always requires a degree of extraction of phenomena from the world, in order for study of them to be tractable. In the laboratory, the boundary that delimits the subject isolates entities and processes within a thematic field of enquiry, whereas in the field it isolates a spatial domain within which many interactions continue amongst entities and processes, the study of which transcends single thematic fields. The closure effected in the field must make a virtue of this uncontrolled interaction of process, and this necessarily encourages a parallel interaction amongst different scientists, of the kind Latour (1999) observed in Boa Vista – that is, it encourages and even necessitates an inter-disciplinarity point of view. This may lead us to conclude further, therefore, that at some levels and in contrast with our initial supposition that working in the field is epistemologically different only in degree from working in the laboratory, field-based research does indeed have a different ontology from laboratory-based research. That ontology is one in which the subjects of enquiry are roughly bounded sets of connected phenomena whose interacting behaviour is place-sensitive in ways that

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REFERENCES Baker, V. (2000) ‘Conversing with earth: the geological approach to understanding’ in Frodeman, R. (ed.), Earth Matters: The Earth Sciences, Philosophy and the Claims of Community. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, pp. 2–10. Baker, V. (2004) ‘Fieldwork’, in S. Harrison, S. Pile, and N. Thrift (eds) Patterned Ground. London: Reaktion Books, pp. 136–137. Botting, D. (1973) Humboldt and the Cosmos. London: Sphere Books. Bracken, L.J. and Mawdsley, E. (2004) ‘“Muddy glee”: rounding out the picture of women and physical geography fieldwork’, Area, 36: 280–286. Brown, P.J. (1981) ‘Field-site duplication: case studies and comments on the “My-Tribe” syndrome’, Current Anthropology, 22: 413–414. Carozzi, A.V. and Newman, J.K. (1995) Horace-Benedict de Saussure, Forerunner in Glaciology. Mémoires de la Société de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle de Genève, Volume 48. Geneva: Editions Passé Présent. Chorley, R.J. (1978) ‘Bases for theory in geomorphology’ in C. Embleton, D. Brunsden and D.K.C. Jones (eds), Geomorphology: Present Problems and Future Prospects. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–13. Chorley, R.J., Stoddart, D.R., Haggett, P. and Slaymaker H.O. (1966) ‘Regional and local components in the areal distribution of surface sand facies in the Breckland, eastern England’, Journal of Sedimentary Research, 36: 209–220.

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Close, F. (1990) Too Hot to Handle: The Race for Cold Fusion. London: Penguin. Fisher, R.A. (1960) The Design of Experiments, 7th edn. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 248 pp. Graf, W.L. (1986) ‘Fluvial erosion and federal public policy in the Navajo Nation’, Physical Geography, 7: 97–115. Hacking, I. (1983) Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, S., Harrison, S. and Bender, B. (2008) Conflicting imaginations: archaeology, anthropology and geomorphology on Leskernick Hill, Bodmin Moor, southwest Britain. Geoforum 39(2), 602–615. Hamilton, S., Harrison, S. and Bender, B. (2007) ‘Conflicting imaginations: archaeology, anthropology and geomorphology on Leskernick Hill, Bodmin Moor, southwest Britain’, Geoforum doi: 10.1016/j. geoforum.2006.11.025 Hunt, C.B. (1980) ‘G.K. Gilbert, on laccoliths and intrusive structures’ in E.L. Yochehson (ed.), The Scientific Ideas of G.K. Gilbert: an Assessment on the Occasion of the Centennial of the United States Geological Survey (1879–1979). Geological Society of America, Special Paper 183, pp. 25–34. Kohler, R.E. (2002) Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-field Border in Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Knorr Cetina, K. (2007) ‘Culture in global knowledge societies: knowledge cultures and epistemic cultures’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 32: 361–375. Kuhn, T.S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. (1999) Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1986) Laboratory Life: the Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Linton, D.L. (1955) ‘The problem of tors’, The Geographical Journal, 121: 470–481. Lipton, P. (2004) Inference to the Best Explanation, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Lorimer, H. and Spedding, N. (2005) ‘Locating field science: a geographical family expedition to Glen Roy, Scotland’, British Society for the History of Science, 38: 13–33. McEwan, C. (1998) ‘Gender, science and physical geography in nineteenth-century Britain’, Area, 30: 215–223. Palmer, J, and Neilson, R.A. (1962) ‘The origin or granite tors on Dartmoor, Devonshire’, Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society, 33: 315–340.

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Pitty, A.F. (1979) ‘Conclusions’, in A.F. Pitty (ed.), Geographical Approaches to Fluvial Processes. Norwich: GeoBooks, pp. 261–280. Powell, J.W. (1961) The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons. New York: Dover. (Originally published by Flood & Vincent as Canyons of the Colorado, 1895). Powell, R.C. (2002) ‘The Siren’s voices? Field practices and dialogue in geography’, Area, 34: 261–272. Powell, R.C. (2004) ‘Intemperate spaces: field practices and environmental science in the Canadian Arctic, 1955–2000’. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge. Powell, R.C. (2007a) ‘“The rigours of an arctic experiment”: the precarious authority of field practices in the Canadian High Arctic, 1958–1970’, Environment and Planning A, 39: 1794–1811. Powell, R.C. (2008) ‘Becoming a geographical scientist: oral histories of Arctic fieldwork’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33: 548–565. Ragin, C.C. and Becker, H. (eds) (1992) What is a Case? Exploring the Foundation of Social Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richards, K.S. (1996) ‘Samples and cases: generalisation and explanation in geomorphology’ in B.L. Rhoads and C.E. Thorn (eds), The Scientific Nature of Geomorphology. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, pp. 171–190. Rose, G. (1992) ‘Geography as a science of observation: the landscape, the gaze and masculinity’ in F. Driver and G. Rose (eds), Nature and Science: Essays in the History of Geographical Knowledge. London: Historical Geography Research Series, RGS-IBG, No. 28, pp. 8–18. Rouse, J. (1987) Knowledge and Power: Towards a Political Philosophy of Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sayer, A. (1992) Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach. London: Routledge. Shapin, S. (1988) ‘The house of experiment in seventeenth-century England’, Isis, 79: 373–404. Shapin, S. (1991) ‘“The mind in its own place”: science and solitude in seventeenth century England’, Science in Context, 4: 191–218. Tauber, A.I. (ed.) (1996) The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Underwood, A.J. (1997) Experiments in Ecology: Their Logical Design and Interpretation Using Analysis of Variance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitlock, C. (2001) ‘Doing fieldwork in the mud’, Geographical Review, 91: 19–25.

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4 Museums Simon Naylor and Jude Hill

INTRODUCTION This chapter considers the geographies of the museum – both those in and of the museum. It argues that museums have their own spatial arrangements that are rarely accidental and which actively shape how their contents are received by visitors. The chapter also contends that museums produce geographies of the world beyond their walls. What collections are put on show and how they are arranged and explained all shape visitors’ understandings about the geographical organisation of the peoples, natures and places that are exhibited. Before developing this argument, the chapter considers just how to define a museum in the first place. So, what is a museum? Probably the most obvious answer to that question is to say that a museum is a depository of objects, whether of scientific, historical, artistic or cultural interest, that have been deemed worth preserving and exhibiting. This definition certainly seems to characterise the institutions and buildings that spread across Europe in the early modern period (acknowledging of course the continental European (and later American) use of the term to denote a collection of art, whereas in Britain art works

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were held instead in galleries and museums reserved for material culture). Whilst it would be uncontroversial to state that an institution without objects could not claim to be a museum, there do remain a host of other definitional attributes that are more open to debate and contest. For instance, what should a museum contain and by extension what should it exclude? How large should it be, how should its rooms be arranged and what should its buildings look like? In turn, what should a museum represent about the world, and how? At a more general level, what is a museum’s purpose and functions? And who is it for? Lastly, who should get to make the very decisions about intended users, emphases, accessions and so on? In other words, who should manage or own such an institution? Answers to these questions are markedly different depending on the period in which we ask them. In Renaissance Europe monasteries, aristocratic residences and holy places held collections of natural and cultural objects, from crocodile skins to jewellery made from unicorn tears (López 2005). However, these objects’ presence in a collection did not invest them with a symbolism that connected ‘the world of ideas and the

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world of nature’ (ibid.: 13). Rather, they were treasures – exclusive possessions that were symbols of luxury, wealth, status and power, ‘their only meaning derived from their relationship with their owners’ (ibid.). Objects were generally included according to their exoticism and by extension their rarity and value. The collection’s purpose was to impress and to entertain, while its audience was restricted to the owner and a small circle of friends or adherents. Collections such as these were often contained in cabinets or single rooms. However, by the nineteenth century the scale of collections had changed markedly and would routinely occupy an entire building, often placed at the centre of an urban area. Museums had become collections of objects that were organised to emphasis their scientific and instructional qualities, and not the wealth and status of the objects’ donor (Bennett 1995). Wonder was a much less desirable effect than education, while access for a wide diversity of social groups was emphasised over private delectation – museums were deemed an appropriate form of ‘rational recreation’ for children, women and working men even though they continued to be run by a small, enlightened elite. Of course, these are no more than useful caricatures that help demonstrate the historical diversity of museums. They also, we hope, expose the complex connections between the early modern cabinet of curiosity and the imposing public museums still in existence in our cities today. For instance, were nineteenth- or twentieth-century collections really so different from their predecessors? It was certainly the case that natural history or ethnological museums continued to highlight the exotic and the wonderful, and if they didn’t the museum public continued to seek those objects out, whether in the form of dinosaur bones or shrunken heads. The scope of collections and size of their architectural containers also varied widely – for instance, although nineteenth-century scientific societies aspired to exhibit large collections of objects, often their museums occupied

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no more than a single room and so were still comparable in size and tone to the early modern cabinets. We can also question the modern museum’s public-facing spirit. Just how publicspirited were they really? Nineteenth-century museums could be costly to enter and often had restrictive opening hours that would have prevented many from visiting them. Indeed, for some curators it was entirely undesirable that the public should get anywhere near their valuable collections. Instead, it was assumed, they should be set aside for use exclusively by an informed cultural elite. The fact that many museums were either founded upon private collections (like the British Museum) or were indeed still owned by private collectors (such as Henry Wellcome), further undermines the idea that museums gradually shifted from being private repositories to public institutions over time. One way of making sense of museums is to consider their various geographies. In the remainder of this chapter we will focus on several. We will look at the geographies of the museum itself – its physical architecture; its compartmentalisation into display spaces, research areas, storage spaces and so on; the organisation of the display spaces to convey certain stories; the regulation of visitors; and the lives of the collections themselves. Here we pose the question: how has the spatial organisation of museums affected the ideas that they are trying to convey? In the final section of this chapter we pose a slightly different question: how have museums shaped geographical knowledge about the world beyond their walls? We argue that museums have played a significant role in shaping how people grasp the world both spatially (as being local or foreign, for instance) and regionally – understood as a mosaic of cultures and natures that can be represented through the grouping of objects. Here, for instance, we will consider the role of museums in ordering imperial objects, representing imperial knowledge and justifying the imperial project. We will also look at museums’ place in national building

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endeavours, in the creation of regional identities and in the negotiation between these different geographical scales.

BUILDING MUSEUMS David Livingstone has reminded us that museum architecture is not simply ‘a set of structural answers to practical problems’ (2003: 37). Rather, museum buildings are themselves ‘a symbolic writing of space’ (ibid.: 38). The style, design, layout and location of museums are and have been central to the projection of particular values by the wider culture in which the museum sits, whether that be an urban or national culture. In particular, a museum, located in a city centre location, is meant to act, amongst other things, as a very public expression of a culture’s love of learning and so its very civility. Lewis Mumford, the American historian and critic, claimed that the museum represents ‘the most typical institution of the metropolis, as characteristic of its ideal life as the gymnasium was of the Hellenic city or the hospital of the medieval city’ (quoted in Giebelhausen 2001: 4). They have also acted as expressions of power. As Tony Bennett has noted, museums have ‘stood as embodiments, both material and symbolic, of a power to ‘show and tell’ which, in being deployed in a newly constituted open and public space, sought rhetorically to incorporate the people within the processes of the state’ (1996: 109). The grandeur of the museum’s façade, the size of the building, its location, the value, extent and diversity of its holdings, all combined to exert a power over the populace; to enrol them into particular state ideologies and even to reflect the extension of a state’s power over other parts of the world. Mumford again, in more cynical mode: No doubt the big museum may serve a rational function: but the popular interest in it is a byproduct of the search for pecuniary profits that

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characterizes even the remoter provinces of this pecuniary metropolitan culture. By the patronage of museums, the ruling metropolitan oligarchy of financiers and officeholders establish their own claims to culture: more than that, they fix their own standards of taste, morals, and learning as that of their civilization – thus maintaining and stabilizing the favored pattern of acquisitive living. Mumford 1946 [1938]: 263.

The choice of architectural style of the new public museums in late eighteenthcentury and early nineteenth-century Europe was certainly no coincidence. Bennett notes that state-sponsored architectural competitions for the design of museums was meant to shift attention away from spaces of display for the private pleasure of the prince or aristocrat, ‘towards an organisation of space and vision that would enable museums to function as organs of public constitution’ (Bennett 1996: 90). Many of these buildings emulated traditional ceremonial monuments like classical temples, medieval cathedrals and Renaissance palaces and so employed a long history of architectural semiotics to assert themselves upon their surroundings. Duncan argues that much museum architecture actually suggests their character as sites of ‘secular ritual’ (Duncan 1991: 91). It was fitting, she claims, that for 200 years the temple façade was the most popular signifier for the public art museum, one very good example being Sir Robert Smirke’s grand neo-classical British Museum, built in the Greek Revival style. Temple façades such as that which adorns the British Museum’s south front, called up secular, sacred and ritual associations. On the one hand, in their reference ‘to a preChristian world of highly evolved civic institutions, classical looking buildings could well suggest secular, Enlightenment principles and purposes’ (ibid.). On the other, many of the early modern museums were built – often literally – to mirror sacred architecture, particularly that of Noah’s Ark and Solomon’s Temple (Bennett and Mandelbrote 1989). The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for instance, was built to house Elias Ashmole’s

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collection, which was in turn founded on John Tradescant’s collection of natural objects. These had been held in Tradescant’s home in South Lambeth – known as Tradescant’s Ark – before Ashmole seized them from Tradescant’s widow and later donated them to the University of Oxford (Yanni 1999). The building that housed them was probably built by Sir Christopher Wren in the Renaissance style, with an elaborate portal framed by Ionic columns. The fact that the building contained three storeys was significant as this was meant to mirror the architecture of the Ark (Bennett and Mandelbrote 1998). It is no coincidence that later museums of natural history, such as the Natural History Museum in London’s South Kensington, were often referred to as ‘nature’s cathedrals’ or ‘temples of science’ (Livingstone 2003). This was not just because their size and architectural form copied religious sites (London’s Natural History Museum and Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History were both built in the Gothic Revival style, which referred back to medieval Gothic architecture); for the likes of Richard Owen, the first director of the South Kensington museum, the Natural History Museum was a site for the propagation of natural theology. For others, however, such labels had more subversive overtones: to Thomas Huxley and others, natural history museums were part of a battle ‘to wrest social authority from the clergy and deliver it into the hands of a new scientific elite’ (ibid.: 38). Museums did and do not simply resemble temples architecturally, they also function like temples or shrines. Museums have been both designated and regarded as precious places, ‘where representational or interpretive truth has been the sanctuary of a narrowly defined and largely self-appointed museological priesthood’ (Cameron 1972: 1). While public display areas encourage quiet contemplation and even a sort of worship from visitors, other parts of the museum are roped or walled off and accessible to only a small elite group. Like religious sites then,

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museums are public, but not entirely so. Indeed, beyond logistical issues like object storage, debates about who museums were for and so how they were to be constructed and organised, were intensely fought over. Again, a prime example is that of the Natural History Museum in London. In 1865 Richard Owen was appointed Superintendent of Natural History at the British Museum. In 1858 more than 100 naturalists, probably encouraged by Owen, signed a petition to the Chancellor of the Exchequer complaining of inadequate space for natural history at the British Museum in Bloomsbury: too many specimens were hidden from view in damp storage spaces, and those that were on display were overstuffed into the cabinets (Yanni 1999). It was agreed that natural history needed to be removed from the British Museum and re-sited, although the debate over the design of the new site was dominated by conflicting ideas over the relative importance of popular collections for viewing by the general public, and working collections for use by men of science. Owen took one side of the argument. He wanted the new museum to ‘show the divine unity which lay beneath the diversity of animal structures, thus proving godly design’ (ibid.: 115). This resulted in what Yanni has termed ‘Owen’s encyclopaedic museum’ – a wish to have the entirely of the collection on display (ibid.: 129; for more on Owen see Rupke 1994). Thomas Huxley personified the other side of the argument. Unlike Owen, Huxley argued that only ‘didactic displays of selected specimens’ (ibid.) should be available to the public and that an encyclopaedic exhibition would be an expensive nuisance. The remainder of the collection would be stored elsewhere and available only to curators, naturalists and students of a certain scientific literacy. Owen’s ideas eventually won out although by the time the museum opened in 1881, its division of specimens and its encyclopaedic planning were widely viewed as ‘physical manifestations of antiquated science’ (ibid.: 144). Owen’s successor,

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William Henry Flower, a friend of Huxley’s, quickly set about reorganising the museum. Certainly an attentive visitor to the museum today can identify aspects of both Owen’s and Huxley’s visions of how the museum should be organised, with expansive public galleries as well as doors off them that open into restricted-access research and library spaces where specimens can be handled and books consulted. Other Victorian museums had been much more bullish about differential access. The Manchester Museum for instance, which became part of Owens College in 1868, opened to the public three days a week and to College students alone on the other two, while the Sheffield Public Museum set Fridays aside for researchers (Alberti 2007a). By the late nineteenth century multiple access criteria were in play: On the one hand, a broader public was constructed for municipal and national museums, as part of a programme of rational recreation and science education. On the other, the educated and elite were accorded privileged access to these same public collections; and medical and other specialized museums remained behind closed doors. Ibid.: 380.

DISPLAYING OBJECTS AND HISTORIES It has been argued that in the nineteenth century a new emphasis was placed on how displayed objects might be known and used in the production of knowledge. Objects, Hooper-Greenhill (2000) has argued, were seen as sources of knowledge, fragments of a real world about which fixed and finite meanings could be discovered; meanings which in turn could be represented through particular configurations of those objects. The display of certain objects and the careful organisation of objects in relation to one another was thought to demonstrate the universal laws of science and to make those laws visible and available to the general populace. In this sense, the nineteenth-century museum

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operated like a map – bringing ‘the world into an apparent single, rational framework, with unified, ordered and assigned relationships between nature, the arts, and cultures’ (ibid.: 18). In turn, museum display cases ‘acted as ways of dividing up both the objects and the statements made by the grouped objects – the cases acted as punctuation marks to better articulate the message of the museum’ (ibid.: 129–30). Labels explaining the displayed object were important too but were by no means universal until at least the 1870s. Despite the sense conveyed by museum displays of clear truths and natural orders, exhibits in fact spoke just as eloquently about particular disciplinary belief systems, the preoccupations of individual curators not to mention the often arbitrary nature of collecting and acquisition practices. In relation to the second of these, we have already witnessed the conflict between Owen and Huxley over the establishment of London’s Natural History Museum. Indeed, as well as fighting to impose his vision of science onto the architecture of the museum, Owen also made sure that the arrangement of the objects reflected his own conception of natural history. The same was true of the Museum of Practical Geology, also in London, where the geological displays were organised to support the version of stratigraphy held by Sir Roderick Murchison, who was the museum’s director (Livingstone 2003). Battles over the organisation of museum displays took place in other countries too of course. In France two eminent natural historians – George Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck – fought over the organisation of Paris’s Muséum National d’Histoire. Dorinda Outram has noted that the organisation of the Muséum’s space was a microcosm that mirrored broader debates during the late eighteenth century over the future direction of natural history: ‘Cuvier, for example, expanded the space allotted to his collections in the anatomy galleries, at the expense of other professors, notably Lamarck, with whose classification systems he disagreed’

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(Outram 1996: 251). As Outram notes, the Muséum wasn’t just a space for personal conflict, it was also a site for the creation of new approaches to nature. In particular, Cuvier used the Muséum to develop the new science of comparative anatomy, which required the juxtaposition of the internal structures of living beings. This system placed greater emphasis on function than on form and demanded a corresponding reorganisation of Muséum space. The organisation of objects to reflect particular systems of belief is perhaps best illustrated with recourse to the display of human artefacts. Up to the late eighteenth century displays of human remains tended to place an emphasis on anatomical peculiarities, viewed primarily as a testimony to the rich diversity of the chain of universal being. This changed in the nineteenth century, with human remains most typically displayed as parts of evolutionary series with the remains of still extant peoples being allocated the earliest position within them. Bennett 1996: 100–1.

In other words then, by the late nineteenth century the display of human history was organised around the temporal development of people and their possessions, where the theory of evolution was used to explain change (Bennett 2004). One notable example was Henry Wellcome’s Historical Medical Museum on London’s Wigmore Street, which embodied and expressed its founder’s belief in evolutionary theory. Wellcome’s commitment to evolutionary principles could be read in the location of exhibits – visitors were obliged to pass through the Hall of Primitive Medicine before moving on to encounter other displays. This room therefore acted as a baseline for the exploration of medicine and mankind within the wider museum (Skinner 1986). The dark, cramped, cluttered layout and content of displays in the Hall of Primitive Medicine certainly heightened the emphasis on the ‘primitive’ and supposedly undeveloped nature of material as presented within it, especially as the visitor moved on to displays depicting snapshots of historical

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progress amongst ‘civilised races’, whether of the evolution of surgical instruments or relics of important medical men such as Galen, Augustus Vesalius or Joseph Priestley (Hill 2007: 68). Wellcome constantly reiterated his wish that the museum express his views – senior staff member L.W.G. Malcolm stating on more than one occasion that he was ‘on all fours’ in his attempts to comply with Wellcome’s wishes to use an evolutionary framework as the basis for the displays (Hill 2004). In fact, Wellcome had intended to add a Prehistoric Hall to the museum, which would have been entered before the Hall of Primitive Medicine, explaining that: The plan which I propose for the Prehistoric Hall is to depict on the walls, pictorially, the story of the epoch of chaos, then of creation, celestial and terrestrial – the inorganic period or periods – the evolution from inorganic to organic etc … It is my view that when the Hall is completed and opened, the visitors entering the turnstile should first view the scenes of chaos then the creation and so on in sequence from right to left following around to the exit leading into the Primitive Medicine Hall. Ibid.: 16.

Although the plans never came to fruition, they do further highlight Wellcome’s intention that his museum should emphasis a strong developmental narrative in its representation of human history. In the display of human history, as with natural history, there was conflict. In the American Museum of Natural History in 1930s New York, William King Gregory and Henry Fairfield Osborn expressed their differing views on evolution in their respective exhibition halls. In the ‘Hall of the Natural History of Man’, Gregory ‘stressed the evolutionary continuity between the different human races, whereas Osborn’s ‘Hall of the Age of Man’ sought to undermine the theory of ape ancestry, to stress parallel development, and to portray the different human races as discrete ‘species’ (Livingstone 2003: 33). Conflicts also played out in the display of archaeology, notably at the US National Museum at the Smithsonian. There Franz Boas

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Figure 4.1 First Floor Plan of the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, 1913. It is worth noting the American usage of the term ‘first floor’. This was actually the ground floor as understood in British terminology. Thank you to the Wellcome Library, London, for permission to reproduce this image.

criticised Otis Mason for his use of typological principles in displaying their ethnographic materials (where artefacts were grouped by their place within evolutionary sequences). Instead, Boas argued that ‘artefacts could only be understood in the context of the particular historical and geographical culture to which they belonged and had their specific meaning and use’ (Bennett 2004: 132). As museums sought to impose a temporal narrative onto human history so too did their exhibitionary policies have their own lifepaths. Differences of opinion over how best to represent human history weren’t confined to curators working at the same time; wider

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shifts in understanding over time also forced museums to periodically alter their displays. For instance, at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter in the southwest of England, ethnographic objects in the 1860s were arranged to be geographically and ethnologically sequent (Levell 2001). In the first decade of the twentieth century they were reorganised into a typological schema where objects of the same type from different places were grouped together and then arranged in a sequential order, with objects considered ‘more natural’ and organic at the beginning of a series and more specialised and ‘complex’ at the end, such that an evolutionary progression of material culture was suggested. The displays were reorganised again in the mid-1920s, with the ethnographic objects rearticulated to tell a story – the story of ‘Man’s evolution’ (ibid.: 195). The museum guidebook further reinforced this visual, evolutionary narrative. Levell notes that this organisational trope was ‘one of the most long lived paradigms for the organisation of displays of material culture from nonwestern societies’ (ibid.: 196). Indeed, the Exeter Museum retained it until the late 1960s. However, the longevity of the evolutionary paradigm at the Exeter Museum shouldn’t be understood as the result of a widespread acceptance of that way of displaying ethnographic objects. Lack of funds, a paucity of anthropological training amongst the curators, little time to keep abreast with the latest academic debates, as well as pureand-simple inertia also played significant roles in maintaining displays beyond their shelf-life. It is important therefore to pay attention to the ‘extent to which institutional contingency and the training and interests of specific personnel shape the disciplinary territory occupied by museum ethnography’ (Alberti 2006: 16). The stories that museums try to tell about the world’s orderings are not only disrupted by architectural limitations, financial constraints or academic shortcomings on the part of the curators. Visitors and objects play their part too. In relation to the former, Bennett,

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following Foucault, has written persuasively of Western society’s impulse to differentiate and regulate the populace. Museums he claims, like schools and prisons, were institutions where the behaviour of large populations were subject to new forms of social management in the nineteenth century (Bennett 1995: 99). Museums, Alberti has argued, attempted to employ rigorous behaviour codes so as to ‘transform the manyheaded mob into an orderly crowd, to promote appropriate tastes and generate a genteel, mixed-sex environment’ (2007a: 376–7). Museums were instruments ‘capable of inducing a reform of public manners’ (Bennett 1995), not to mention a space (alongside libraries and mechanics’ institutes) in which particular social groups could be exposed to the improving influence of science. All that said, there was and is a limit to the extent of a museum’s power over the visitor. To take one of our earlier examples, the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum placed great emphasis on providing an evolutionary narrative throughout its exhibits. However, once through the Hall of Primitive Medicine visitors were free to move through the museum as they wished, even if particular paths were suggested to them. Of course, even where museums provided only a single route to a visitor there was little that could be done to stop an individual ignoring certain displays, dwelling on others, seeking out only certain exhibits or objects, doubling back on themselves or even ignoring the whole lot and spending the majority of their visit in the shop or café. Just as museum directors and curators impose their own epistemological geographies onto their collections so too do visitors walk out their own. As museums have moved from seeing visitors as passive consumers of knowledge to active, sensing and politicised subjects, so too have museum theorists argued for a similar treatment of objects. It is certainly the case that objects, whether singularly or en masse, whether at the behest of the curator or

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not, establish certain relations with museum users. Put another way, museum objects have the capacity to enchant. This is perhaps most obvious for charismatic exhibits like Egyptian mummies: ‘the organisational core of many museum exhibits’ (Wieczorkiewicz 2006: 52). Other objects, with seemingly less personality, also enthral visitors. Although the fragment of moon rock collected as part of the Apollo 11 mission and exhibited at the Manchester Museum in 1969 was described as resembling ‘a little bit of cigarette ash’ visitors nonetheless flocked to see it. ‘Through travel and ritual’, Alberti argues, one of 300 samples of moon rock collected during the Apollo mission ‘was rendered singular and iconic’ (Alberti 2007b: 145). Hill (2007) makes a similar argument about museum objects with less impressive biographies. Discussing the collections of amulets, charms and talismans held at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, Hill suggests that these objects retained intense significance even when removed from their owners and placed together in display cases. In doing so, she argues, the blurring multitude of manifold stories became all the more apparent, thus countering curatorial intentions to remove any sense of enchantment (Hill 2007).

PRESENTING THE WORLD So far we have focused on the geographies in museums – the way in which we might think geographically about museum buildings, their internal layout, the organisation of displays in particular spatial constellations and the way visitors interact with those spaces and the objects displayed there. In their various ways, these geographies were crucial to the shaping of the knowledge the museum was concerned with conveying. Of course, another way of thinking about the geographies of museums is in terms of their role in the shaping of the geographies beyond their walls. In the final section of this chapter we

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want to think about three such geographies: imperial, national and local. European exploration and expansion in the early modern period presented a host of new opportunities to collect objects from around the world. Many of these fed the collecting appetites of Europe’s wealthy gentlemen, although with the establishment of large museums in the eighteenth century many of these private collections eventually found their way into public hands. Indeed, the British Museum was actually founded on the private collection of Sir Hans Sloane. Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society and naturalist onboard Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific, also donated his private collection to the British Museum, where his herbarium and library were taken in 1827, so joining the many other objects Banks had donated to the institution over more than 50 years. Objects also came to the museum after the British gained territory from their imperial competitors – the Rosetta Stone, for instance, came to Britain after the British defeated the French at the Battle of the Nile and seized their archaeological finds. The collections of naturalists employed by Britain’s Royal Navy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were also regarded as properties of the state and their collectors were required to give them up to appropriate institutions like the British Museum’s Natural History Department, the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons or the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. In many ways these museums were empires in microcosm. In other words they were expressions of the extent, diversity and grandeur of the British Empire, located at the very centre of that empire, in London. The Victorian ethnological and ethnographic museums, such as the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the Wellcome Museum in London, and other provincial museums in places like Exeter and Liverpool, also supported an imperial vision of the world. Although these museums weren’t always grouped by geography, they nonetheless conveyed the idea of a global

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geography of civility and primitiveness, which in turn helped support contemporary moral arguments for imperial rule. Museums were not only useful to nations seeking to give their empires some coherence and legitimacy; they were also invaluable in providing coherence within their own borders. This was aided by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinking that ascribed clear natural limits to the geographies of humans, animals and plants (although the breaking of those limits was nonetheless easily explained through the logics of imperialism). For instance, Browne has discussed the growth of biogeography and highlighted the importance of the concept of biological provinces: ‘By investigating the qualities of biological provinces – their boundaries, their member species, their physical attributes and topographical features – scholars could pursue their subject with a clearer focus’ (Browne 1983: 32). Museums were ideal for the representation of these provincial groupings and one good example is that of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Hinsley (1992) has noted the close connections between collecting and national identity in nineteenth-century United States, especially during the period where the country’s western regions remained unexplored and undefined. Indeed, while European naturalists looked overseas for new specimens, Americans spent much of their time acquainted themselves with their own nation. Such was the strength of feeling that Joseph Henry, the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, felt moved to assure people that ‘Collections illustrating the general Natural History of North America [will] become … an object of primary importance’ for the museum (Kohlstedt 2007: 4). Founded officially in 1846, the Smithsonian benefited from a number of territorial acquisitions – the Louisiana Purchase, and land from Mexico and the British Canadians – and expeditions, such as the Wilkes Expedition of 1838–42 and the Lewis and Clarke Expedition of 1804–6, with an explicit remit to collect

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species from areas under or anticipated soon to be under the authority of the United States. The museum therefore acted as a repository for materials acquired by military and agency voyages as they traced their way across land and along the coasts of the continent and so became central to the display of the objects of the expanding nation and implicated in the implementation of its presumed ‘manifest destiny’ (ibid.: 5). Such was its success that by 1855 Henry was able to report that no other animal collections could ‘now pretend to rival the richness of the museum of the Smithsonian Institution in specimens which tend to illustrate the natural history of the

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continent of North America’ (ibid.: 7). In doing so the museum played a key role in establishing, and perhaps after the Civil War, re-establishing, a sense of national identity that was closely connected to the American West (ibid.: 13). Large museums like the Smithsonian or the British Museum had the resources and collections to be able to organise their collections geographically. It was much more difficult for provincial collections to present their collections in this way. This was certainly the case in terms of ethnological collections, where by the end of the nineteenth century regional museums were encouraged

Figure 4.2 Printed as a supplement to the West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, 20 January 1887.

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not to attempt this and instead to present objects using a typological schema (Levell 2001). This isn’t to say that provincial museums played no part in the promotion of geographical knowledge. A notable example was Patrick Geddes’ Outlook Tower in Edinburgh – a museum dedicated to geographical education. Individual floors were devoted to different geographical scales; the building ‘an instrument for local and national knowledge and global understanding’ (Withers 2001: 227). Geddes’s Tower was somewhat exceptional in the emphasis it placed on geography. However, although few museums made it their aim to provide an explicitly geographical education many were concerned about which geographies they should concern themselves with and how to best represent them. There were fraught debates for instance over whether to emphasis the local or the distant in their exhibitions. Exotic objects – whether the Egyptian mummies, mentioned earlier, or stuffed zoological trophies – were certainly a draw for visitors, although many curators worried about the motivations behind this. For many, regional museums were (literally) much better placed to educate visitors in the history of the local area. For instance, the Royal Institution of Cornwall in the town of Truro treated its museum as a site of regional instruction, where individual rooms were dedicated to scientific specialisms – natural history, antiquities, geology, zoology and mineralogy – that were of particular significance to the county (see Figure 4.2). Other museums, such as that run by the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society, just down the coast from Truro, hoped for the best of both worlds by choosing to organise their museum by separating local and foreign specimens, the latter distinguished by pieces of brightly coloured paper placed in the display cases. Mixing the local and foreign, they argued, would have meant that specimens from ‘the tropics or distant lands’ would have so dominated their Cornish equivalents, that the latter would have been ‘practically lost

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from view’ (Penzance museum curator, 1888, quoted in Naylor 2002: 501).

CONCLUSION Museums are caught up in a complex set of geographies. Museums were and indeed are still central to the building of place-based identities, such as the English county of Cornwall, but equally so for American states, Canadian provinces, French départements or other spaces not necessarily defined as administrative units. In similar manner they have been important in helping cohere nations and collecting and displaying far-flung empires. As we have seen, museums have also promoted a variety of disciplinary knowledge – ethnology and ethnography, as well as antiquarianism, archaeology, natural history, and folklore for instance. In doing so museums became spaces not only for the dissemination of ideas but also for conflict and dispute, as we saw with Owen and Huxley, and Boas and Mason. The echoes of those disputes are still to be heard in the architectures and arrangements of museums today. Museums’ geographies extend out into the world in other ways too. They have strong connections, interactions and overlaps with other spaces involved in knowledge production, discussed elsewhere in this volume – spaces like the laboratory, the botanical garden, the archive and the classroom. Museums have been each of these things too. Lastly, we have only been able to gesture at another geography of museums – those of the objects that fill them and the collectors and donors that brought them there. Indeed, in many ways we might see museums as nothing more than temporary holding depots for things on the move, some stopping long enough to gather dust, some taking short journeys between display cases, or exhibits and store, while others speed through on loan or on tour, en route to other museums elsewhere.

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REFERENCES Alberti, Samuel, J.M.M. (2006) ‘Culture and nature: The place of anthropology in the Manchester Museum’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 18: 7–21. Alberti, Samuel, J.M.M. (2007a) ‘The museum affect: visiting collections of anatomy and natural history’ in A. Fyfe, and B. Lightman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 371–403. Alberti, Samuel, J.M.M. (2007b) ‘Molluscs, mummies and moon rock: the Manchester Museum and Manchester Science’, Manchester Region History Review, 18: 108–132. Bennett, Jim, and Mandelbrote, Scott (1998) The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Museum of the History of Science. Bennett, Tony (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge. Bennett, Tony (1996) ‘The exhibitionary complex’, in R. Greenberg, B. Ferguson, and S. Nairne (eds), Thinking About Exhibitions. London: Routledge, pp. 81–112. Bennett, Tony (2004) Pasts Beyond Museums: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism. London: Routledge. Browne, Janet (1983) The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cameron, Duncan (1972) ‘The museum: a temple or a forum’, Journal of World History, 14: 197–201. Duncan, Carol (1991) ‘Art museums and the ritual of citizenship’ in I. Karp, and S. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: the Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 88–103. Giebelhausen, Michaela (2001) ‘Introduction’, in M. Giebelhausen, (ed.), The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 1–14. Hill, Jude (2004) ‘Cultures and networks of collecting: Henry Wellcome’s collection’. PhD thesis, University of London. Hill, Jude (2007) ‘The story of the amulet: locating the enchantment of collections’, Journal of Material Culture, 12: 65–87. Hinsley, Curtis (1992) ‘Collecting culture and the cultures of collecting: the lure of the American

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Southwest, 1880–1915’, Museum Anthropology, 16: 12–20. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000) Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Kohlstedt, Sally (2007) ‘Place and museum space: the Smithsonian Institution and the American West, 1850 to 1900’, paper presented at the Historical Geographies of Science Conference, University of Edinburgh, UK. Levell, Nicky (2001) ‘Discontinuous histories: The Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter and its African collection, 1868–1996’, in A. Shelton (ed.), Collectors: Expressions of Self and Other. London: The Horniman Museum, pp. 181–204. Livingstone, David (2003) Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: Chicago University Press. López, Susana, G. (2005) ‘Natural collections in the Spanish Renaissance’ in M. Beretta (ed.), From Private to Public: Natural Collections and Museums. Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, pp. 13–40. Mumford, Lewis (1946 [1938]) The Culture of Cities. London: Secker & Warburg. Naylor, Simon (2002) ‘The field, the museum, and the lecture hall: the spaces of natural history in Victorian Cornwall’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 27: 494–513. Outram, Dorinda (1996) ‘New spaces in natural history’ in N. Jardine, J. Secord, and E. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 249–265. Rupke, Nicolaas (1994) Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist. New Haven: Yale University Press. Skinner, G. (1986) ‘Sir Henry Wellcome’s Museum for the Science of History’, Medical History, 30: 383–418. Wieczorkiewicz, Anna (2006) ‘Unwrapping mummies and telling their stories: Egyptian mummies in museum rhetoric’ in M. Bouquet and N. Porto (eds), Science, Magic and Religion: The Ritual Process of Museum Magic. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 51–71. Withers, Charles, W.J. (2001) Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland Since 1520. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yanni, Carla (1999) Nature’s Museum: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display. London: The Athlone Press.

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5 Laboratory/Observatory Scott Kirsch

INTRODUCTION In considering the settings where geographical knowledge is produced, the laboratory and the observatory appear, at first glance, as places safely ignored. While geography developed as a science describing and explaining variation across the earth’s surface, laboratories, it has been argued, are spaces designed precisely for overcoming geographical variation, chiefly through experimental technologies and rhetorics of replicability and standardization. It is perhaps the mark of their success that knowledge produced in laboratories appears to come from nowhere, and to be applicable anywhere. The observatory, another great fixed site of modern science, has historically been oriented toward what is now ‘outer space’, not the terrestrial sphere of geography. As spaces for science’s technological instrumentation, and as models for the organization of scientific work, the laboratory and the observatory would also appear to contrast sharply with those modes of spatial organization more commonly associated with the making of geographical knowledge, such as exploration, survey, and reconnaissance – all premised, seemingly unlike

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laboratory work, on the spatial mobility of the observer. We do not tend to imagine the makers of geographical knowledge as residing in laboratories. Daring or blundering explorers, plucky fieldworkers, tweedy academics, yes, but a team of investigators in white lab coats, or engineers with clipboards and coveralls? These figures are caricatures, of course, but to the extent that they either meet or unsettle our expectations about the subjects of geographical knowledge, and about the diverse spaces where geographical knowledge is made, they can be highly suggestive. How has geographical knowledge been transformed in science’s recent technological revolutions, and by the institutional transformations that have reshaped the modern scientific landscape? This chapter explores the nature of geographical knowledge as a laboratory product, particularly after the rise of laboratory-based Big Science in the mid-twentieth century. It also raises questions about how laboratories and other sites of observation have themselves been transformed to accommodate geographical scientific practices. The laboratory genealogies of remotely sensed geographical imagery – the tip of the iceberg of

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a rapidly transforming, geo-referenced knowledge base (Cloud 2002; Pickles 2004) – are still easily taken for granted, whether in geographic information systems or more widely distributed Internet-based mapping systems. Meanwhile, as the evolving nature of the observatory – and space-based platforms for earth observation, and unprecedented outer space visualizations – has stretched the terrestrial limits of the observatory, the relations between the earth and the heavens, a long standing concern of ancient and early modern geographers, have once again become increasingly difficult to disentangle (Livingstone 1992; Cosgrove 2001; MacDonald 2007). The ‘final frontier,’ as Peter Redfield (2000: 259) has observed, ‘is less “finished” than reduced to the level of function, for human space now extends into outer space, with the planet itself woven into a vast technical system of satellites’. Taken together, a historical geography of laboratory and observatory, albeit sketched very loosely in this chapter, suggests not only the persistence of the laboratory but its widespread diffusion, in hybrid forms, in the trajectories of modern geographical knowledge production. Before turning more explicitly to these trajectories, the chapter proceeds in the next section with a brief reconsideration of the laboratory as, in Knorr-Cetina’s (1992) terms, an enhanced environment for producing natural knowledge and objects. If the laboratory works, in this sense, as a peculiar ‘reconfiguration of the natural and social order’ (KnorrCetina 1992: 113–14), then clearly the nature of laboratory sites and practices have shifted considerably over time and space. Actual laboratories, in practice, encompass a wide range of settings – not only places for housing experimental apparati but also as sites for scientific, technical and medical manufacturing and processing. At the same time, laboratory practices have not remained only at laboratories, as we conventionally think of them; they have been distributed to different social sites, and across disciplines and professions. We live in a world of testing and

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simulation, experiments and proving grounds. The earth itself has been fitted out to be something like a laboratory (or so we are told!), and the changing dimensions of geographical knowledge are part of these developments. Following a discussion of the interpenetration of laboratory and field sciences, the second half of the chapter turns to two profound transformations of geographical knowledge in the twentieth century: the transportation of laboratory techniques to the field in twentieth-century ecology (and later ecosystems ecology and earth-systems science); and the cartographic revolution launched by satellite and remote-sensing technologies. The purpose of the chapter is therefore to trace some of the more general transformations in the settings of scientific practices, pairing the rise of the laboratory and modern observatory with broadly changing geographic fields of vision.

SCIENCE’S WORKSHOPS Laboratories, like geographers, are easily caricatured. In popular imagery, one characteristic that stands out is a sense of spatial separation or ‘boundedness’: the sterile environment of a modern biomedical laboratory, the secured gates and passageways of a classified weapons laboratory (see Figure 5.1), or alternately, the social isolation of the Victorian ‘country physics laboratory.’1 The need for separation is of course often a practical matter, reflecting requirements for setting controlled conditions for experiments, spaces free of biological contamination, secured settings for secret military or industrial research, and spaces for storing and operating valuable and bulky machines. But the development of tropes of separation in the laboratory sciences is also the result of the cultural work of scientists themselves, who have often been at pains to set their work apart as separate, in the landscape and within built environments as well as in its cognitive authority, from intervening influences. The history of the

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Figure 5.1 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,occupying one square mile of land forty miles southeast of Berkeley, California, was constructed on a site which had been used to house a particle accelerator as part of the Manhattan Project. Before that, the site had been in use as a naval air station. Source: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [llnl.gov (public domain)].

laboratory as a site for concentrated scientific and technical work, however, is not just a story of isolation from external influences; the enduring cultural power of the laboratory as a bounded space suggest not a separation from but rather the intricate and subtle interconnections between the laboratory and its larger social worlds. Laboratory has its etymological roots in laboratorium, from the turn of the seventeenth century, as in a specialized site for particular forms of labor; that is, a workshop. Science’s early modern workshops could take shape as relatively private spaces within an otherwise public household, as Livingstone (2003) describes the workspace that the English natural philosopher John Dee carved out from his family residence, or it could be defined by more complex spatial arrangements, as exemplified by the separate street access to Robert Boyle’s basement laboratory, which provided a separate entry point, from otherwise posh Pall Mall quarters, to accommodate the need for the public (albeit socially regulated) witnessing of Boyle’s experiments (Shapin and Schaffer 1985;

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Livingstone 2003: 21–29). Shapin’s (1988) analysis of the circulation of experimental practices within and across different kinds of scientific spaces also sheds light, in particular, on the relational qualities of scientific spaces, and the patterns of circulation between workshops for private experimentation – places for tinkering with things, for getting the experiments to work properly – and more public settings for experimental demonstrations and rhetoric. But while experimentation has, perhaps ever since, occupied a central place in notions of the laboratory, it is also important to recognize the persistence of different but related meanings that the laboratory has come to embody. Webster’s for instance, in its first definition for laboratory, indicates ‘a building, part of a building, or other place equipped to conduct scientific experiments, tests, investigations, etc., or to manufacture chemicals, medicines, or the like.’2 The two processes – experimentation and manufacturing – were indeed intertwined in the rise of the modern scientific laboratory. While laboratories have for long functioned as productive workshops for scientific and technical knowledge, invention and artifacts, it was during the so-called laboratory revolution of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, against the backdrop of rapid industrialization in Europe and North America, that laboratories became more strongly associated with technical manufacturing and industrial methods. Aided by improved microscopy and other new technologies of instrumentation and experimentation, the laboratory came to acquire greater prestige during this period as the pre-eminent site for investigating natural phenomena in expanding areas in the life sciences such as animal and plant physiology. At the same time, the commercial, military, pharmacological and public health applications of laboratory products created new demands, and new opportunities, for the industrialization of laboratory processes. Thus, Pasteur’s development of an anthrax vaccine at his Paris laboratory in 1881, the result of interplay between the

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laboratory and agricultural sites of the anthrax cattle disease and, ultimately, the extension of specific laboratory techniques to the farm (Latour 1983), was organized not just as a space for experimentation but also as one of production tied to the extension of laboratory products across rural France. In Germany, to take a nearby example from the same era, industrializing cities fitted out with gas lines provided the settings for the small power engines that were becoming de rigueur for the new ‘factory–laboratories’ of experimental physiology, churning cranks attached to machines which simulated aspects of bodily motion, breathing, and circulation processes, and helping to produce a regularity of force that matched well with industrial ideals of precision and standardization (Dierig 2003). The physiology laboratories did more than just draw power from the new industrial infrastructure; they also borrowed industrial modes of organization for managing the increasing volume of laboratory work. The physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond, for one, sought explicitly to direct his Berlin institute ‘like a factory’, modeled, most likely, after departmental divisions of labor in the Siemens & Halske Company, when he established separate units under the management of department supervisors, physiologists, laboratory assistants and other technical workers (Dierig 2003). It can be assumed that, by the time the US established its Bureau of Government Laboratories (later Bureau of Science) in Manila, Philippines, in 1901, tasked with a battery of chemical and biological tests for gauging the nature of America’s new tropical possessions (e.g., of tropical soils, food and crops, water, coal and minerals and vast quantities of bodily emissions) for various branches of the colonial state, and the extraction, processing and bottling of serums (Anderson 2006), the intertwining of experimentation, materials processing and manufacture had been normalized in the mission of the large-scale government laboratory. These trends would persist in the expansion of large-scale

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industrial research laboratories in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory to the Bell Labs, which bridged the transition from traditional workshop to industrial management methods. The multiple functions of the modern laboratory can be considered together through what the phenomenologist Knorr-Cetina (1992) calls the configuration model – or ‘processing approach’ – for understanding the laboratory sciences. For Knorr-Cetina (1992: 116), the laboratory is ‘an enhanced environment which improves upon the natural order in relation to the social order’. Through the development of a range of social, experimental and machine technologies, laboratory settings allow for the isolation of natural variables, the reshaping of relations between people and things, and a reconfiguration of nature as new objects opened for interpellation. This reconfiguration, she argues, has relied on three key advantages provided by the laboratory wherein some of the fundamental limits of nature may be practically transcended: (1) nature does not have to be accommodated as is; it can be investigated in partial forms; (2) natural objects do not have to be accommodated where they normally reside (i.e., in their local ecological settings); they can be brought to the laboratory in different forms and investigated or processed there; and (3) events do not have to be examined only when they occur naturally; natural processes can be replicated to allow for continuing investigation. Thus, ‘escaping the need to accommodate objects within the natural order … is epistemologically advantageous; it is the detachment of objects from a natural environment and their installation in a new phenomenal field defined by social agents’ (Knorr-Cetina 1992: 117). Before exploring the question of how geography’s natural objects may be extracted from the earth’s surface and installed elsewhere, it is useful to turn briefly, with Knorr-Cetina, to the case of astronomy, which constitutes an important forerunner to the rise of Big Science in the

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twentieth century, and which is also suggestive of the centrality of image processing in the contemporary earth and environmental sciences. Astronomy was in some ways at the vanguard of the industrialization of scientific knowledge production during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Investment in large telescopes, and the development of vertically structured research organizations – which included unskilled and semi-skilled (and gendered) divisions of labor, along with mechanized data collection procedures – contributed to the making of the modern observatory as a proto-site for the large-scale, heavily capitalized, coordinated research projects that would, after World War II, become known as Big Science (Galison 1992; Lankford and Slavings 1996). The development of photometric and spectroscopic techniques enabled the wholesale acquisition of data at sites such as the Dudley and Harvard College Observatories in Massachusetts, the US Naval Observatory in Washington and the Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar Observatories in Southern California, facilitating the publication of vast catalogs mapping tens of thousands of stellar observations. Some of these same observatories, with the support of the Carnegie Institution, still sponsored astronomical expeditions for viewing the southern skies from, for example, Peru and Argentina, and worked toward the establishment of new observatories in South America and the Pacific in the first decades of the twentieth century. But astronomy was no longer limited to direct observation by telescope; imaging technologies – made possible by investment in large-scale scientific technology at the observatories, and the emerging planetary network of observatories – allowed the objects of astronomical research to ‘become detached from their natural environment and … made to be continually present and available for inquiry in the laboratory’ (Knorr-Cetina 1992: 118). Thus reworking scales of space and time in the business of data collection and analysis, Knorr-Cetina argues, the field

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of astronomy shifted from one organized, in the first instance, around field observation, to an ‘image processing laboratory science’. Such changes were not limited to the starry fields of astronomy – it is precisely the similarities between astronomy and the experimental laboratory sciences, each reprocessing bits and pieces of nature across transitory states, to which Knorr-Cetina draws our attention (1992: 127), as kernels of nature are put through standardizing processes, ‘smashed into fragments, made to evaporate into gases, dissolved into acids, reduced to extractions, mixed up with countless substances, shaken, heated and frozen, reconstituted and rebred into workable objects’. The laboratory and the observatory, in this view, persist as workshops of a kind, dedicated settings for nature’s scientific and technical overhaul. These practices are not, however, fully contained within the physical, architectural space of the laboratory. While the rapid growth of Big Science during the second half of the twentieth century was significantly anchored to laboratory settings, the lab has also become something more socially generalized as well. Knorr-Cetina’s description of the emergence of laboratory techniques in matters as diverse as psychoanalysis and military war games underscores this point; the laboratory has also become a virtual space coexistent with practices of experimentation, simulation and scientific manipulation. Laboratories have traveled, in this sense, as methods; that is, experimental technologies and epistemologies adapted to the field, but also, it should not be overlooked, as communities. For many environmental scientists today, the lab is thought of as a research working group, a relational community rather than a brick and mortar scientific laboratory, although such labs of course still require certain spatial and technical infrastructures to function. The colloquial modern abbreviation of ‘the lab’, when used to describe a research community, however, even with its interesting removal of labor from the laboratory, still draws its metaphorical power from

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traditional laboratory settings, including the classroom laboratory. Returning to Webster’s, this social diffusion of the laboratory turns out to be reflected in an expansive, secondary definition of laboratory as ‘any place, situation, or set of conditions … conducive to scientific experimentation, investigation, observation, etc.,’ or, for that matter, ‘anything suggestive of a scientific laboratory.’3 The next section of the chapter turns to the intersection of the laboratory, and laboratory methods, with external environments, and in particular to the twentieth-century transformations of North American ecology and cartography which remain, in some ways, at the heart of twenty-first-century geographical knowledge.

LABORATORY EARTH Laboratory Earth continues to grind out the answer – experimentally. Schneider 1996: 96.

The very idea of ‘the field’ in the biological sciences, the historian of science Rob Kohler (2002) suggests, may have been product of the mid-nineteenth-century laboratory revolution in physiology, a new category for describing scientific settings which were not the laboratory. Although laboratory- and field-based sciences are often considered in opposition to one another, a number of recent studies, including Kohler’s Landscapes and Labscapes, have begun to focus instead on the evolving interconnections between the two orientations, in the environmental as well as the engineering sciences.4 Kohler explores in particular the intellectually productive ‘labfield border zone’ in biology, illustrating how laboratory methods have shaped scientific practices in the field, both directly and indirectly. This was the case in the wake of the nineteenth century, as field scientists – née natural historians – sought to keep pace with the increased prestige and credibility of the laboratory sciences, turning to

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increased quantification and instrumentation in data collection, along with the development of new experimental approaches in natural and quasi-natural settings. But while distinctions between lab and field have collapsed in some areas, Kohler’s work also makes explicit a number of the fundamental ontological differences between the two categories: while laboratories have been prized for their uniformity, facilitating the development of generic and rule-bound conceptualizations of the natural, nature in the field tends to be valued for its particularity, complexity and historical–geographical contingency; whereas the creation of laboratory spaces has generally involved the work of fitting out places, technically and architecturally, for running experimental programs, and using standardized equipment or standardized organisms such as mice or flies, the natural objects and processes under investigation in the field are often valued for being geographically variable, unrepeatable, and less controlled by investigators working outside the laboratory apparatus (see also Kuklick and Kohler 1996). The field, in this sense, remained at some level that which could not be produced or simulated. But could it nevertheless be turned into something ‘suggestive of a scientific laboratory’? Kohler’s answer, for the history of the biological field sciences at least, is yes, but only by balancing the need for elements of observational and experimental control with the need for the natural variability and historical–geographical particularity of places and landscapes. The development of lab-like practices in ecology and field biology, in technologies, research design and experimental rhetoric, adapted to the more contextually authentic, less socially enhanced, and often quite challenging conditions of the field, took shape as hybrid practices, a range of solutions to both practical and epistemological problems. Among these solutions was the language of experiment – experimental methods and philosophy that could be adapted to different kinds of scientific settings.

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Experimentalism in the field was not always an end in itself, nor, in the environmental sciences more generally, was experiment ever the only means of abstracting and generalizing data – the spatial survey continued to compel scientists into the field, and to provide useful forms of data storage and organization, most obviously, the map, through which spatial variation and place-based qualities could be compared and expressed in relation to one another. But Kohler’s lab– field border zone does suggest a kind of diffusion of the laboratory into the field as part of a more general shift away from esthetic, narrative and personal engagements with nature in scientific writing among early twentieth-century ecologists, and toward increasing quantification, statistical analysis and ideals of experimentally produced knowledge and elements of laboratory control (see also Mitman 1996). The starting point for field scientists to make their worksites more like laboratories was to rig their field sites up with instruments. Some physiological laboratory technologies, such as sensors, were made more mobile or durable for the field, either to be transported by scientists and technicians or to be installed in ‘outdoor laboratories’ and field stations as permanent observational features. It was a short step from here to deliberately modify aspects of the field site itself; for example, putting up fences to keep particular species in or out of an area, or creating experimental quadrats in which species might be removed or introduced and compared, to modify the natural conditions of field-based experiments. By fitting field sites with instruments, and extending specific controls over the conditions of nature in which their experiments resided, field researchers developed scientific spaces which could be thought of as natural laboratories, but as labs in which natural objects and processes nevertheless retained more elements of their historically and geographically situated complexity. If, for Knorr-Cetina, the laboratory constituted an enhanced environment, then for Kohler, the early twentieth-century

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ecologists had constituted the natural environment as a kind of enhanced laboratory for studying nature in situ.5 Human and cultural ecologists – most prominent on the American scene were the Chicago School urban sociologists – similarly extended and adapted the ideal of the laboratory to more complex environments (see Gieryn 2006). Later, the abundant buffer zones surrounding nuclear reactors, production and testing facilities (many of them condemned rural landscapes left to grow over) offered ecologists the space to experiment on a grander scale, and the emergence of American ecosystems ecology, with wide-reaching implications across the environmental and engineering sciences, followed such studies of environmental impact, ecological succession and engineering remediation at nuclear production sites such as the Hanford nuclear reservation and the Savannah River Plant (Kirsch 2007). Although it is widely acknowledged that World War II and the ensuing Cold War mobilization profoundly transformed American science and technology research, and certainly in some ways, the international scientific landscape, scholars have only recently begun to explore how these processes changed the nature of geographic knowledge.6 Expanding that historiography will also require a repositioning of the laboratory in the history of geography. In John Cloud’s revealing genealogies of geographic information systems (and other contemporary mapping systems), for example, the entire history of their creation, and that of the geodetic earth more broadly, is threaded through laboratory and lab-like settings, such as the MIT Photogrametric Laboratory, Boston University’s Optical Research Laboratory, the US Navy Photographic Interpretation Center, the Mapping and Charting Research Laboratory at Ohio State University, among others. The sites recall the continuous image processing first enabled in the industrial observatory. The expanding place of the laboratory in the production of geographic knowledge, bound up at these sites in the development of new technologies

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of observation, image processing and automated cartography, contributed to the geodetic revolution underlying subsequent digital cartographic transformations (see Figure 5.2). These facilities, stretching technically into rocketry and the orbital paths of space-based earth observation, were developed, or transformed from existing uses, to enable a great reconvergence of cartography, geography and geodesy, Cloud argues, around geo-strategic demands for a precise figure of the earth, which was required for the positioning of nuclear missiles and other military surveillance and targeting systems. The result of this reconvergence, much of which occurred in settings in which access to information was secreted and complexly differentiated, Cloud (2002: 262) describes as a ‘reconfiguration of the geospatial sciences in their entirety’ during this period. The point is not, of course, to reduce these developments to products of their physical settings or built environments, nor to limit developments in geographic knowledge to only those rendered by the image-processing laboratory sciences. It is rather to put forward a view of the laboratory model as something diffuse, but nonetheless quite real,

in geography. In particular, the striking ascendancy of laboratory techniques of experiment and simulation for organizing scientific work during this period in many ways set the contexts and conditions in which the makers of geographical knowledge – from academic geography professors to computer scientists and image processing technicians to NASA systems engineers and astronauts – could work. In situating the changing nature of geographic knowledge production in terms of an expansion of laboratory sites and technologies across multiple nodes of a military– industrial–scientific complex, it is useful then to recover the more expansive notion of the laboratory as a site of scientific and technical processing and manufacturing, a space designated, though not always exclusively, for integrated scientific and technical work. The large nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore and the development of a US ‘national laboratory’ system, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (among others) were all developed with the participation – and typically, the administration – of universities, and they later diversified into massive, multi-program

(a)

(b)

Figure 5.2 Google Earth views of Cuba. Without the Cold War convergence of geography, laboratory-based image processing, and space-based observation, cartographic images like these, and the technological capabilities that they reflect, would be unthinkable. Source: “Cuba and vicinity.” 21°31’18.33” N and 77°46’52.20” W; “Havana, Cuba.” 23°07’58.61” N and 82°22’00.00” W. Both images created through Google Earth, accessed 10/10/2007.

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laboratories characterized by group and interdisciplinary models of scientific work (Westwick 2003).7 Much of this World War II and post-war growth, as Cloud’s story suggests, also occurred within universities, beginning during World War II when federal research funding to universities increased fifty-fold, an environment in which both large and small-scale laboratories continue to proliferate. In 1950, with the onset of the Korean War and a hardening of Cold War policies, US federal research funding to universities doubled to $1.3 billion annually; by 1953, it had already surpassed its World War II peak (Leslie 1993). Overall, university budgets expanded by twenty times (in constant dollars) between 1946 and 1991. While the Department of Defense and the Office of Naval Research remained major contributors to these ends, they were joined, during the 1960s, by the NSF, NASA and NIH, among others, as key US federal funders of university-based scientific research. Until the establishment of the International Biological Program in 1968, the Atomic Energy Commission was the largest funder of ecological research in the US, helping to create what Haraway (1997: 12) would describe as the ‘technoscientific planetary habitat space called the ecosystem’. Geography was not immune from the impacts of these changes in the conditions of scientific and technical knowledge production; transformations in geographical knowledge were in fact a part of these developments, changes which quickly became internal to the geographical, cartographic and ecological sciences. As Barnes and Farish (2006: 807) have argued, during the Second World War and ensuing remobilization, ‘a different model of science emerged’, one that was often mathematical and theoretically abstract, and worked conceptually through the development of models and simulation. The model was expensive, organized around the interdisciplinary collaboration of scientists working in teams toward specific goals, and bound up in a pervasive militarist geopolitics wherein the ‘entire Earth became a

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generalized space of American military strategy’ (ibid.: 808). The authors turn for insight to Pynchon’s Percival Pointsman, from Gravity’s Rainbow, who asks, ‘Suppose we consider the war itself as a laboratory?’ But for Barnes and Farish: This is no supposition. It happened. The Second World War and the Cold War, whether intentionally or not … served as and produced a series of laboratories, experiments producing new kinds of knowledge that spiraled out to refashion the world. Barnes and Farish 2006: 821.

No longer, in a world orbited in perpetuity by observation and communications satellites which help to define our planet and ourselves, can the boundaries between laboratory and ‘the world’, and the knowledge that circulates between them, be taken for granted. Barnes and Farish argue that these changes made their way, though haltingly, into postwar American human geography in, for example, new conceptions of the region, often oriented around geopolitical visions, and in the increased use of mathematics in the social sciences at the time. But the laboratory model is clearly most evident today in physical and environmental geography, and in the recently emerged subfields of remote sensing and geographical information systems (GIS), now defined more broadly under the umbrella of geographic information science.8 Laboratories continue to evolve in different forms. On one hand, there are environmental quasi-laboratories, like the 26 sites included in the US Long Term Ecological Research network (LTER), a National Science Foundation-funded initiative since 1980 in which geographers have actively participated, dedicated to observation and modeling among environmental and social scientists over relatively long time periods. The program has supported active experimental programs in areas such as restoration ecology, urban hydrology, and more recently, socalled ecosystems services. The sites are located in diverse settings, from the Arctic to the Baltimore ecosystem, with the LTER

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network now fashioning its mission to ‘provide the scientific community, policy makers, and society with the knowledge and predictive understanding necessary to conserve, protect, and manage the nation’s ecosystems, their biodiversity, and the services they provide’ (LTER 2007). On the other hand, labs continue to proliferate in perhaps more banal settings than the LTER site, and the tradition of the field station and natural laboratory into which it taps: it is hard to imagine that the near ubiquitous ‘GIS lab’ in university geography departments will not, one day, be studied as a paradigmatic architecture of late twentieth and early twentyfirst-century geography. As a site for both teaching and research, even as geo-visualization technologies are becoming increasingly mobile, and Google Earth resides on every desktop, the GIS lab evokes a new version of the old geography of the laboratory, paradoxically located everywhere, nowhere and somewhere. And yet, if the modern laboratory was designed – like the factory – to fulfill the peculiar social needs of replicability and standardization, a space which could, theoretically, be anywhere, then the explosion of geo-referenced data and mapping interfaces, notwithstanding the history of computation, processing and cartographic visualization that have gone into their making, thus appears as something slightly different: the space of geo-informatics is one of every place. The changing character of geographic knowledge, of which the digital transition reflects one critical dimension, reflects not so much the disappearance of the laboratory as its extension into the infrastructure of continuous, planetary observation. ‘Laboratory Earth’, as the American climate scientist and public intellectual Schneider (1996: 96) puts it, continues – through science – to ‘grind out the answer –experimentally’. It is an odd geographical construction, reflecting the semantic shift from earlier notions of the laboratory as a dedicated space for scientific and technical work which have made the laboratory also

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mean something like a laboratory, something suggestive of one, possibly a less socially exclusive scientific space. But in some ways, Schneider is right – not in describing the entire planet as a laboratory, but in exploding the distinction between lab and field. Laboratory Earth, a metaphoric space evoking, unsettlingly, both the controlled and the uncontrollable, containing the possibility of an experiment’s unexpected outcomes, is a space that geographers have helped to produce. It is also a hybrid, resource-rich setting for the production of new information, knowledge and technologies. The laboratory and observatory, as historians of science have shown, are neither timeless nor placeless architectures of scientific work, and their ongoing transformations will likely continue to set the conditions for the production of geographical knowledge in ways that are both important and unforeseen.

NOTES 1 The latter, set in bucolic landscapes, are described, by Simon Schaffer (1998: 149–50), as ‘production utopias’, wherein social withdrawal could be seen as ‘a precondition of access to universal truths’. For a reflection of the utopian scientific landscape in a contemporary high tech research park, see Havlick and Kirsch (2004). 2 Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (1996) my emphasis. 3 Ibid., my emphasis. 4 See, for example, Outram (1996); Latour (1999); Livingstone (2003: 135–78); Kirsch (2005). 5 This comparison can only be taken so far, for there are also key differences in the commitments of Knorr-Cetina and Kohler. While Kohler limits the scope of his observations to the practical and intellectual history of science, and (2002: 1–22) argues against the need for new theorizations of space, Knorr-Cetina expresses a clear interest in the positive distribution of the laboratory and laboratory sciences beyond the domain of science, and her laboratory studies have contributed explicitly toward constructivist theorizations of the laboratory as a social space. 6 See, for example, Cloud (2001, 2002); Smith (2003: 235–69); Barnes (2006); Barnes and Farish (2006).

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7 As Peter Galison (1992) has observed, the emergence of the Big Science model in the United States during this period can also be attributed partly to the different relationships with engineers and engineering among American (and US-based) physicists as compared with physicists in Europe, exemplified in the development of particle accelerator technologies at sites such as Berkeley, Cornell and Stanford, wherein joint physics and engineering projects were seen as worthwhile endeavors. 8 As Johnston’s (2003) recent study of the journal publication outlets of physical and human geographers indicates, geography’s natural scientists tend to publish more frequently in interdisciplinary (mainly environmental science) journals than their social scientist and historical geographical counterparts, who tend to publish in disciplinary geography journals more regularly. The pattern suggests, among physical geographers, an identity as scientists somewhat ‘above’ the disciplinary level of affiliation and a perhaps more active sense of participation in interdisciplinary practices and in the large-scale institutional infrastructures of contemporary science.

REFERENCES Anderson, Warwick (2006) Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barnes, Trevor, J. (2006) ‘Geographical intelligence: American geographers and research and analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1941–1945’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32: 149–168. Barnes, Trevor, J., and Farish, Matthew (2006) ‘Between regions: Science, militarism, and American geography from World War to Cold War’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96: 807–826. Cloud, John (2001) ‘Imaging the world in a barrel: CORONA and the clandestine convergence of the earth sciences’, Social Studies of Science, 31: 231–251. Cloud, John (2002) ‘American cartographic transformations during the Cold War’, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 29: 261–282. Cosgrove, Denis (2001) Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Dierig, Sven (2003) Engines for experiment: Laboratory revolution and industrial laboratory in the nineteenth-century city. Osiris, 18: 116–134. Galison, Peter (1992) ‘Introduction: The Many Faces of Big Science’ in P. Galison and B. Hevly (eds),

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Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 1–17. Gieryn, Thomas F. (2006) ‘City as truth-spot: Laboratories and field-sites in urban studies’, Social Studies of Science, 36: 5–38. Haraway, Donna (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_ Millenium.FemaleMan__Meets_OncoMouse™. London: Routledge. Havlick, David, and Kirsch, Scott (2004) ‘A production utopia? RTP and the North Carolina Research Triangle’, Southeastern Geographer, 44: 263–277. Johnston, R.J. (2003) ‘Geography: A different sort of discipline?’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 28: 133–141. Kirsch, Scott (2005) Proving Grounds: Project Plowshare and the Unrealized Dream of Nuclear Earthmoving. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Kirsch, Scott (2007) ‘Ecologists and the experimental landscape: The nature of science at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site’, Cultural Geographies, 14: 485–510. Knorr-Cetina, Karin (1992) ‘The couch, the cathedral, and the laboratory: On the relationship between experiment and laboratory in science’ in A. Pickering (ed.) Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 113–138. Kohler, Robert, E. (2002) Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Kuklick, Henrika, and Kohler, Robert E. (1996) ‘Introduction’ in H. Kuklick and R. Kohler (eds), Science in the Field, Osiris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–14. Lankford, John, and Slavings, Ricky L. (1996) ‘The industrialization of American astronomy, 1880–1940’, Physics Today, January 1996: 34–40. Latour, Bruno (1983) ‘Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world’ in K. Knorr-Cetina and M. Mulkay (eds), Science Observed. London, Beverly Hills, New Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 141–170. Latour, Bruno (1999) ‘Circulating reference’ in Pandora’s Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 24–79. Leslie, Stuart, W. (1993) The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press. Livingstone, David, N. (1992) The Geographical Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. Livingstone, David, N. (2003) Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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LTER (2007) The US Long Term Ecological Research Network. Available at: www.lternet.edu/ MacDonald, Fraser (2007) ‘Anti-Astropolitik: Outer space and the orbit of geography’, Progress in Human Geography, 31: 592–615. Mitman, Gregg (1996) ‘When nature is the zoo: Vision and power in the art and science of natural history’, Osiris, 11: 117–143. Outram, Dorinda (1996) ‘New spaces in natural history’ in N. Jardine, J. Secord, E. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 249–265. Pickles, John (2004) A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World. London: Routledge. Redfield, Peter (2000) Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schaffer, Simon (1998) ‘Physics laboratories and the Victorian Country House’ in C. Smith and

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J. Agar (eds), Making Space for Science. London: Macmillan Press, pp. 149–180. Schneider, Stephen, H. (1996) Laboratory Earth: The Planetary Gamble We Can’t Afford to Lose. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Shapin, Steven (1988) ‘The house of experiment in seventeenth-century England’, Isis, 79: 373–404. Shapin, Steven, and Schaffer, Simon (1985) Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, Neil (2003) American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (1996) New York: Barnes and Noble Books. Westwick, Peter, J. (2003) The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947–1974. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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6 Archive Miles Ogborn

INTRODUCTION An archive is always a place for at least a double production of knowledge. First, it is a venue for the localisation of knowledge. It is where certain singular and original material, and the information it contains, is stored ready for future use, whether or not that use ever comes. Second, it is a place through which those who wish to produce a certain sort of validated knowledge of the past must pass in order to reinscribe or reproduce that original material in other forms prior to its still further recycling, reinscription and reproduction within other stories, other interpretations and other explanations. The archive is a special place for making knowledge, but it is a contradictory one. It is a place of memory and a place of loss. It is a place of power and a place of weakness. It is a place of excitement and a place of tedium. Perhaps most importantly in relation to the production of knowledge, it is at present usually the place of a particular sort of original – a thing of uniqueness and authenticity – for a certain culture of knowledge whose readers read things that were not written with them in mind. It is the place of the hand-made record: the letter, the minute book, the ledger, the file.

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A place that holds no handwritten and paperbased originals may still be an archive, but it might also be better described another way: a library, a museum, an art gallery, a photographic collection, an e-mail inbox. This chapter deals with the place of a particular material and practical form – writing on paper – and the specific idea of the original that it brings with it, as a vitally important part of a general system for the production of knowledge of the past and its geographies.

MAKING AN ARCHIVE Archive is a verb as well as a noun. It is a complicated word that both precisely designates its subject and contains within it a vast system of differences. The process – to archive – produces at one and the same time the huge multiplicity of different potential archives and also the possibility of a totality contained in the notion of ‘The Archive’. It is impossible to detail the range of archives that might exist. We only need to put something aside for later consultation to start an archive. My grandfather’s many letters to his mother in the late 1920s and early 1930s are

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in a large supermarket cardboard box, just like so many of the other documents of other families. As she saved them I doubt she thought of them as an archive. She kept them from love, and because he was so far away, and later because they were all she had to remember him by. Eventually she passed them on. More things were added: things that seemed to go with his letters, other letters from other relations on that side of the family, photographs, newspaper clippings, obituaries. The box is a site of memory. We have visited it in order to recall him. It gives us some power over the past, and helps to bring him back. As George Orwell (1934: 295) wrote, ‘an Englishman who dies in Burma is so soon forgotten’. The archive allows us to remember. Just putting things in a box is a beginning. It is a manual process of ordering things, of sorting objects in space, which is also a mental process of classification that goes to work on the structures of information (Latour 1999). Save or discard? What goes with what? From there, and through other more distanced means and mechanisms, we can work our way all the way up to the serried ranks of books of class lists, or digital page after digital page of online catalogues, which are the key to the miles of shelving and the millions of documents at any national archive. Vastly different in scale and scope, but with the same purpose of establishing memory and exercising power (Ogborn 2010). This, of course, depends on retrieval, and retrieval depends upon putting the contents of the archive in some order, and on having a key. Someone has been through my grandfather’s letters. They dated the envelopes and put them in a rough order. We have now been more thorough with the chronology. It will help us find the letters where he reveals something to us, but we don’t want only those ones. We want them all in order. More complex archives have more complex systems. Order is the key. It is the key to remembering the past, distant or recent, in order to have some purchase on it. It is the key to using the archive to bring the past back for

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the benefit of those in the present and the future. But different orders may produce different accounts of the past. Thinking in this way about the places where things get put and how they are kept means we have to take a step back and start with what gets recorded, what gets destroyed and what gets saved. In each situation we need to ask what was being written down. How was it being written down? Why was it being written down? What was outside the purview of the record takers and the record keepers? Whose voice gets heard? Whose story gets told? What does a silence mean? Doing so opens up a much broader history and geography of knowledge that provides the contours into which the history of all archives can be fitted. What sort of record keeping, what ideas of permanence, and what stability of materials allow the archive to come into being? Can stories remembered and retold be an archive or do they need to be written down or otherwise recorded? Does their mutability have to be stilled in order for them to be effectively archived? In this way the history and the geography of the archive always returns to the history and geography of reading and writing, if only because literacy remade the processes by which knowledge is connected to power and memory. The written record is a technology of memory and power that has been structured by, and has structured, social differences and inequalities wherever it has been devised or imposed (Clanchy 1979; Mignolo 1995). This allows us to write an historical geography of the archive that is an historical geography of knowledge produced, stored and reused.

THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE ARCHIVE Put simply, the historical geography of the archive is part of the history of state formation. There is a longer and broader history of the archive – one that is religious, personal,

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domestic, civic, even anti-statist – but that whole history is given new shape by the rise of a special sort of archive, the public archive of state administration, which has a particular historical geography. In Europe, this history can be mapped out as a geography of state power charted through the chronology of the establishment of official archives: [T]he modern European public archive came into being in order to solidify and memorialise first monarchical and then state power: the House of Savoy established an archive in Turin in the early eighteenth century; Peter the Great did the same at St Petersburg in 1720, Maria Theresa in Vienna in 1749. Princely and civic archives were instituted in Warsaw, Venice and Florence in the 1760s and 1770s. The National Archives were founded in France in 1790; the [British] Public Record Office in 1838. Steedman 2001: 69.

Within this simple map is another historical geography, a geography of the relationships between central and local government that were crucial to the making of modern states able to claim monopolies of violence, administration and the rule of law over their territories (Giddens 1985). As a result, there are tiers of public archives. Each level of the state has its archives: city and county record offices in England and Wales, as well as the National Archives; the departmental archives and Archives Nationales in France. Just as there were and are conflicts, negotiations and agreements over what powers were and are to be exercised at what level of the state, there are similar processes at work determining what sorts of information would and will be kept at each level of administration. The historical geography of the archive is also the historical geography of processes of centralisation and of local autonomy. Yet, as recent work on state formation has insisted, the history of European states cannot be simply an internal national history (Armitage 2000). It is necessarily an imperial history too. So the historical geography of the archive must also be a colonial and imperial historical geography. The mechanisms of information creation, storage and

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retrieval were worked out not only between local and national government but across a series of imperial geographies of colonies, trading stations and ongoing imperial warfare. For example, Ireland and India were crucial testing and proving grounds for the creation, systematisation and storage of geographical information by the British state (Edney 1997; Carroll 2006). The colonial information order then shaped the postcolonial archive. The Jamaica Archives in Spanish Town traces its history back to the establishment of the Office of Island Secretary in 1659, four years after English soldiers and settlers captured the island from Spain. With independence in 1962 a new building was constructed and the ‘Colonial Archives’ were amalgamated with other records to form the Jamaica Archives. The forms of state power and imperial power in each period shaped the nature and contents of the archive. It shaped their architecture: from neoclassical grandeur to the functional municipal office block. It also shaped what they contain. In its origins and until relatively recently this was essentially a scribal culture. Such matters of state were put down on paper with pencil, pen and ink (and later by typewriter and carbon paper, still a scribal process). It was the world of the handwritten original, and small numbers of copies. Printing was unnecessary or unavailable. Many clerks were on hand and were ready, if not willing, to do the job of copying (Ogborn 2007). The documents that mattered, either to the everyday running of administration or to its high-level communications and transformations, were in manuscript. Originals were for orders, information and accountability. Copies were for distribution, filing and reference. Printing was reserved for a broader public sphere with which the state communicated. The special nature of the archive, the primacy of the original manuscript, is part of this historical geography of the archive and its particular relationships of power and knowledge over space (Ogborn 2003).

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What this means is that the power relations of state, colony and empire are structured into these archives, shaping what was kept and what remains (Duncan 1999). It also means that there is a more recent history of state restructuring and decolonisation that has subsequently reworked the archives. This is most evident, and most telling, as a story of the colonial present (Gregory 2004). On an everyday level the ongoing history and geography of the post-colonial paper and ink archive is a history and geography of the presence or absence of technologies of temperature control, of fungicide, of non-acidic paper, of reproduction (printing, microfilm, scanning), and of the expertise of conservation. Archives are disappearing as their supposedly durable and immutable contents rot and change according to the different time-scale of biological and chemical processes (Ogborn 2004). It is, however, also a more violent contemporary history of destruction in warfare, and of struggles over the archive as part of struggles over state power (see, for example, the Memory of the World project run by UNESCO). For instance, in April 2003 the Association of Turkish Archivists reported that there had been deliberate attempts in the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Kirkuk to destroy the archival records (title deeds and material from the registry office) relating to the presence of the local Turkmen minority. This concern over the relationship between Turkey and the Kurds is set against the background of widespread destruction and looting of historical documents and artefacts across Iraq. Human Rights Watch and others called upon US and allied forces to take immediate action to safeguard archives, stating Future insecurity could be prevented if documents are preserved. For many displaced Iraqis, official government records are all they have to establish their identities, place of birth, ethnicity, or ownership of property. Human Rights Watch has reported on the confiscation of nationality correction forms, expulsion orders, and ration cards before Iraqis were forcibly displaced from their homes, making the copies available in official government

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repositories even more important. Current occupants of property abandoned by displaced people have an interest in seeing these documents destroyed. More generally, if these records are not preserved, displaced people will not be able to make property claims, or even to establish their identities or those of their children. Human Rights Watch website.1

The absence of an archival record is a matter of power too. The nature of the archive founded on the paper-based handwritten original means that there is an historical geography of the destruction of knowledge as well as one of its production. In different ways in different contexts the archive is, and has always been, the site of an array of competing interests. Since this is the case it is important not to assign too much singular power to ‘The Archive’. There is a danger in putting too much emphasis on the systematic ordering of information. Archives contain too many forms of order that have changed over time for that to be the case. There is also a danger in putting too much emphasis on the active and continuing use of archival material in ongoing projects of power. Archives contain too much that never again sees the light of day for that to be true. Finally, there is a danger in putting too much emphasis on the power of the official written record. There are too many counter-archives and alternative archives for that to be an adequate account of the relationships between knowledge and power. In our uses of archives – and in thinking about the ways in which their localisation of information plays a part in the process of the production of knowledge – we are always dealing with partial and multiple accounts, albeit ones that may make strong claims of originality, authenticity and singularity. Those of us who seek to make use of archival materials must bear that in mind too.

WORKING IN THE ARCHIVE With so many sorts of archives in existence it is almost impossible to generalise about the

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ways in which their actual use shapes the production of knowledge. They are certainly places that are more for reading than writing, although those forms of writing that aid reading and later rewritings – copying, note taking, personal memoranda, lists – are a necessary part of working in the archives. They are also places that often enforce and support particular and peculiar reading practices that are shaped by the primacy of the handwritten paper-based original. There may be cushions on which books rest, orders banishing the pen in favour of the pencil (or laptop), lengths of weighted string to hold pages open, readers wearing thin white gloves, or with their heads stuck into whirring microfilm readers. Reading may be restricted: particular times when orders can go in; a certain number of items ordered at any one time; a wait while the archivist goes to the stacks; the counting out and the counting in of the volumes, files and boxes. All of this demonstrates a certain reverence for the materials which is even more notable when it is absent or applied to seemingly unworthy objects. These practices mark the act of reading something precious, or something that should be held precious. The necessity of reading the original, of going to the place where that particular combination of paper and ink is kept, shapes this experience of reading. How familiar is Carolyn Steedman’s account of working in the public archive? You sit all day long, reading in the particular manner of the trade, to save time and money, and in the sure knowledge that out of the thousand lines of handwriting that you decipher, you will perhaps use one or two. … You scarcely move, partly to conserve body heat, but mainly because you want to finish, and not to have to come back, because the PRO is so far away, so difficult to get to. That is the immediate ambition that excites you: to leave; though there exist of course the wider passions, of finding it (whatever it is you are searching for), and writing the article or book, writing history. Steedman 2001: 29 (emphasis in the original).

As she says, this need to go to that place to see those things to produce our account

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means that all those working with historical materials have tales to tell of the archive. These are the very stuff of academic historical scholarship. They are often tales of deprivation: desolate and disordered municipal outposts; the grim accommodation, and the long evenings of takeaways and TV; the fierce guardians of the records. Maximising time in the chair, saving eating, smoking a cigarette and visits to the toilet as welcome breaks to be taken when deserved, or forgoing them to make sure as much as possible gets read, no matter how unproductive the saved minutes might be. There are even tales of bribery to have orders fulfilled, or access allowed. Yet archives are so varied that there are also stories of comfort and kindness, of beautiful surroundings, and cups of tea and cheese sandwiches shared with the archivists; of inside knowledge of the collections passed on; a favourite seat; a view from the window; or a cool place on a hot day. What is the purpose of these stories? As Steedman (2001) argues, they signal the fact that since the middle of the nineteenth century ‘proper’ historical work has been archival work. Studies of the past came to be built upon archival foundations. That is a change in the production of knowledge that we are still living with. There is a value, for good or ill, attached to work based on the manuscript archive that does not accrue to the use of things in print – too many copies, too far from the source; or to oral testimony – uncertain verification, too near the source. The historian or historical geographer must go to the archive and bring something worthwhile back. There must, therefore, be a story of how hard or easy this was; a story from the archive. These stories are also dealing with what is perhaps an inevitable dissatisfaction, a built-in frustration, a feeling of loss and weakness. Like a tongue probing the hole where a tooth once was, they seek out the absence, the gap. What was not recorded and what was not kept constantly weighs on the reader’s mind as they consult what was

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recorded and what did get kept. Moreover, the archive is a place for reading things that were not written for your eyes. This means that there is never quite enough. The reader is always left wanting more. There is also always a chance that something was kept that you don’t know about or won’t be able to find. There is always a feeling of the unknown. You don’t really know how much stuff is there for you. You don’t really know what each file, folder, box, roll or volume will contain until you see it. You don’t know whether something has been misfiled, miscatalogued, or presumed destroyed when it is only misplaced. The call numbers – Adm 1/598, IOR E/3/38 – may be the signs of gold or dross, or, even more disappointingly, fool’s gold. You must match your time (and money) against the archive and hope that you do not strike a rich vein just before you must leave. In fact, it is almost inevitably the case that this relationship between the reader and the archive means that the remaining pages, folios or bundles of what you are looking at just before you are required to stop at closing time on your last day will feel full to bursting with the promise of just what you were looking for. However, at some point you have to return the item, pack up your notes and your pencil, shut your laptop, and leave the archive to tell your stories.

WRITING FROM THE ARCHIVE The dual production of knowledge involved in the process of making and working with the archive means that the nature of the archive must always be incorporated into the historical and geographical knowledge that is produced from it in some way. This raises the question of what gets written about the process of archival knowledge production and what does not. Working in the archive must inevitably involve the conditions of their use. These are the substance of the stories of comfort and discomfort that scholars tell to each

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other about their archival work. However, unlike contemporary fashions in ethnography for what counts as full disclosure of the partial nature of research, few seem to wish to acknowledge that those conditions in themselves shaped in fundamental ways the accounts of the past produced from the archive (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Rose 1997). That would appear to undermine the seriousness and completeness of the enterprise, the nature of the reading that is done there, the control of the scholar over him or herself and their material, and the validity of what was being argued from the evidence. The centrality of the archive, and of its culture of the original, to the production of validated forms of historical and geographical knowledge therefore shapes what gets said about it as a place of knowledge production. Most authors allow themselves only an acknowledgement of help received, and keep their tales of archives good and bad for a predominantly oral culture of academic life (although see Rose 2000). What is discussed, and what is in the end more important, is the role that the making of the archive plays in knowledge production. How what is there and what is not there, the ways it is organised, and our orientation towards it, shapes what can be said. Yet what gets written about the archive’s effect also differs between studies and has changed over time. It has done so in ways that reflect broader changes in ideas about knowledge and knowledge production. In what follows I want to use some brief examples to trace a shift from the discussion of gaps in archival sources, to the interrogation of the production of the archival source itself, and on to the role of the making and (re)ordering of the whole archive.

Lacunae The most familiar way in which the archive shapes what can be written about the past is through its gaps: through what is missing

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from the archive, and through what is unclear and ambiguous. For example, in his pioneering work of historical geography H.C. Darby considered the making of the unique written source, itself an archive, from which his Domesday Geography of England was reconstructed. The Domesday Book was, of course, a great administrative record of conquest and power. William the Conqueror ‘sent his men into each shire to enquire in great detail about its resources and who held them’ (Darby 1977: 3). As Darby wrote, any scholar who works on it ‘can have nothing but admiration for what is the oldest “public record” in England and probably the most remarkable statistical document in the history of Europe’. Yet this record was not, as he put it, ‘a straightforward document’ (1977: 12, 13). There are the many mistakes characteristic of a multitude of clerks working with abbreviations and the mathematics of Roman numerals. Moreover, the Domesday Book itself was compiled from other records, such as the so-called Exeter Domesday Book, which help reveal what was omitted – for example, the detailed accounting of sheep and swine – as the main account was put together. There are also the inconsistencies introduced in the process of compilation itself. There seem to have been at least seven different circuits each visited by a team of commissioners, whose different protocols meant they each differed in the recording of markets, meadowlands and churches. Even within the circuits ‘the returns for different counties, and even for different hundreds, also display idiosyncrasies’ (1977: 6). Moreover, this is not simply a problem of omission. The very purpose of the survey shaped the material gathered, and its future uses. As Darby succinctly put it, ‘the nature of the units of assessment for taxation is such that they throw no light upon the geographical realities of the time’ (1977: 9). Places with the same tax assessment could have quite different populations and resources. In the end, as well as compiling a monumental work of historical geography on this foundation, he concluded:

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[I]t would be more correct to speak not of ‘the Domesday Geography of England’, but of ‘the Geography of the Domesday Book’. The two may not have been quite the same thing, and how near the record was to the reality of the time we can never know; the gaps can never be filled; the perplexities may never be resolved. Darby 1977:13.

The archive only allows the landscape of the past to be glimpsed through a glass darkly.

Power, knowledge and writing Another manoeuvre, however, is to take H.C. Darby’s predicament seriously and to investigate the historical geography of the archival record itself. This is perhaps most evident in the shift from an historical geography that uses archived maps to recount changes in land and life to an historical geography that takes seriously the history of cartography for understanding the role of the production of those maps in making new relationships of property, power and knowledge (Edney 1997; Harley 2002). Each map from the archive then becomes an object to be investigated in itself rather than for what it can tell of another, separate historical reality. As far as the written record is concerned, in my own work on state formation, and on the development of mercantile trading networks and the beginnings of the British Empire in India, I have attempted to trace the geographies and histories of the production and use of the very records which provide the archive of these constellations of power and knowledge. The document that ends up in the archive is, then, the subject of these historical geographies rather than simply the means by which they are told. This might be a matter of the historical geography of a single source, or a small set of similar sources. For example, three handwritten notebooks in the British Library’s manuscript collection were used, alongside other sources, to reconstruct the active work of the excise commissioner Charles Davenant as he set about the process of establishing accuracy of measurement

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within the taxation system of late seventeenthcentury Britain (see Ogborn 1998, 2003). What was important was considering these notebooks as part of the active work of reordering and transforming a part of the state apparatus. These documents did not simply record the process for posterity. Their presence in Davenant’s saddlebags, in his hand as he visited excise officers throughout southern England and Wales and on his table at night as he wrote up reports and made recommendations, made them a key part of the process of state formation. It can also be a matter of a whole archive of written communication. The transoceanic historical geography of the letter-writing and account-making procedures of the late seventeenth-century English East India Company, as they were reformed and reordered, can also be seen as vital to the process of defining and securing the social relations of global trade (Ogborn 2007). In each of these cases, the focus of attention on the map, document or archive shifts to considering its modes of production, distribution and use as well as, and as informing, consideration of its content and the stories that can be used to tell.

Archival histories This incorporation of the nature of the archive into the history, or historical geography, that is being written requires an acknowledgement of the role of archival construction itself as an active process of history making. This, in turn, highlights the role of the archive in the service of particular accounts of the past. In his work on the processes by which Vancouver Island became transformed and incorporated into different varieties of imperial space from the late eighteenth century onwards, Dan Clayton (2000) adopts a triple vision of this historical geography which places the archive itself both centre stage and under question. First, is a complex account of Captain James Cook’s sojourn at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island’s west coast in 1778 during his third Pacific voyage.

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This sets the events as recorded in Cook’s journal off against the writings of other crew members and the accounts from the oral record of the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples they encountered. Doing so reveals the multiple perspectives on the encounter, the alwaysmediated nature of any source and the need to recognise the basis for the particular claims to truth made in manuscript journals like Cook’s in relationships of empire and Enlightenment. Second, is the self-conscious and careful variety of post-colonial accounting of the past and its implications for the present that Clayton himself is engaged in, and which proceeds in the context of the claims for land rights on the part of first nations in Canada. Finally, between the two, both historically and practically, is the archive Clayton is using in Victoria, British Columbia to write his account. This was, he shows, put together in the early twentieth century to produce a particular version of those past events for another colonial present. In a wonderful piece of historical geography Clayton weaves these three ways of making history into and out of each other to provide a subtle account of what we must ask of the archive. He shows how British Columbia’s interwar historians and archivists – F.W. Howay, E.O.S. Scholefield, G.M. Sproat and C.F. Newcombe – were engaged in the construction of new varieties of local and regional history that could support new forms of regional identity. These needed to negotiate the claims of the ‘natives’ and to position British Columbia within a broader colonial geography. As Clayton shows, the archive these men constructed – often from copies of manuscript originals from European repositories – was the means to that end. This was evident both in practical terms and in the ways in which they could construct the act of evidence gathering and history writing as a continuation of the forms of exploration and discovery of men like Cook and George Vancouver whose voyages they thereby installed as the founding moments of these local and regional histories. In the process, however, as Clayton recounts,

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‘Native peoples were again being erased from the local historical imagination’ (Clayton 2000: 58), and the ‘truths’ against which the post-colonial archive needed to be constructed and read were being established and fixed.

Reworking the archive This reworking of the archive as a particular place of memory requires new conceptual and practical tools which take seriously the questioning of the implications of established methods of classification, ordering, decontextualisation and conservation for how archives make meaning, and which try to find other methods adequate to the contingencies, multiplicities, context dependencies, transformations and open future uses of the past and its relics. Here, the archive can perhaps learn from the museum or the collection, and from those whose materials are not simply written documents. For example, Caitlin DeSilvey has attempted to think this through in her work curating an abandoned Montana homestead and its discarded materials. Her initial approach to the task sought order: ‘As with any other archival or collection practice, I was working to stabilise the homestead’s objects and fit them into a system that rendered them legible, and so available for scholarship and instruction’ (DeSilvey 2007: 880). Yet as she proceeded that systematisation felt inadequate to the task of understanding memory in that place. The plethora of objects she found resisted classification – ‘tattered clothes and torn blankets, lists and letters, broken tools and battered tin cans, harnesses and halters, baskets and brooms’ (DeSilvey 2007: 879) – and often refused to be indexed to time, place or person. Deciding what to keep and what to consign to the dustbin of non-history ‘seemed impossibly random’ (DeSilvey 2007: 881), and the processes of classification seemed to strip the objects of the very associations between place, practice and materiality that had made them interesting in the first place. As she puts

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it, ‘a kind of semiotic thinning was necessary in order for these objects to behave appropriately in the archive. Although my intention was to preserve the traces of cultural memory encoded in the artefacts, the shades of memory I managed to capture often seemed static and stale’ (2007: 880). She stopped trying. She then recounts how she returned eighteen months later with exactly this problem on her mind: ‘[I]nstead of rejecting the practice of collection and inventory altogether I began to work with its ambiguities to tease out the shape of an alternative engagement with a place and its discards’ (2007: 881). Working between and across the objects and documents themselves, critical engagements with archivisation, and the contemporary practice of artists such as Nikolaus Lang, Susan Hillier, Ilya Kabakov, Mark Dion and Christian Boltanski, DeSilvey tried to find new ways to engage in the memory-work of curating the homestead. Among other things, this involved a reflexive appreciation of the simultaneous necessity and absurdity of total classification which was put to work inventorying the homestead’s junk drawer. It also involved a recasting of the process of archiving as a continuation of the previous inhabitants’ collecting practices rather than something that halted or worked against them. It made room for many curators and many collectors operating within the same space, working with different purposes and using different logics. And it made for a fluid boundary around the archive that objects might cross as they found new uses out on the homestead again, being inventoried as they made their journeys hither and thither. With the intention of bringing to the fore the relationships between materiality and memory as lived experience, archival practice had to change. As DeSilvey (2007: 900) puts it, these new methods ‘allowed me to shed the sense that there was any “true” memory to be salvaged from these things’ and instead work towards a ‘creative recuperation’ of what relationships of memory might be. In the process a new sort of archive

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was made, and made use of, which found, explored and drew meaning from the very limits of the practice of archiving and its forms of inventory, classification and preservation. That archive itself became the subject of study.

THE FUTURE OF THE ARCHIVE? These challenging archival practices will not be appropriate to all archives. Yet all archives, and all those who work with archives, are being challenged by these and other questions about the relationship between the nature of the archive – its geography, its history and its order of things – and the changing forms of knowledge production that archival work involves. This is especially evident in the challenges that a world of digital information poses to the archive. Digitisation means that the archive’s geographies are transformed by being redistributed out across the landscapes, networks and sites of the World Wide Web. Archives are under pressure to make their collections available on the Internet. Research projects attract funding by promising to digitise sources and make them more widely available. Archivists have to find ways of accommodating digital material – e-mails, webpages, mp3 files – which share some similarities with manuscripts, but are also different too. In turn, digitisation preserves the visual form of the handwritten paper-based original, but its singular geography is made multiple as it is deor rematerialised through servers, search engines and printers. The visit to the archive may now be a virtual one, remaking the relationship to the original. At the same time, however, there are also attempts to interrogate what the written archive can still tell us in response to new questions, new sources and new theoretical positions which emphasise materiality, performativity, and the unspoken and the unwritten (Gagen et al. 2007). Here, and in a variety of different ways across the humanities, there is a new

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concern for the materiality of the written word. This means understanding archival texts alongside material objects, and as material objects, in rematerialised cultures of reading and writing (Secord 2000; Brayman Hackel 2005; Ogborn 2007). Here the handwritten and paper-based original is repositioned and its singularity remains crucial to what truths it can speak. It is, therefore, between these conflicting forces that the dual production of knowledge in the archive will continue to take place.

NOTE 1 Human Rights Watch website: http://hrw.org/ english/docs/2003/04/10/iraq5929.htm. Last accessed 6 July 2010.

REFERENCES Armitage, David (2000) The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brayman Hackel, Heidi (2005) Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carroll, Patrick (2006) Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clanchy, Michael T. (1979) From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307. London: Edward Arnold. Clayton, Daniel W. (2000) Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island. Vancouver: UBC Press. Clifford, James, and George, E. Marcus (eds) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Darby, H. C. (1977) Domesday England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeSilvey, Caitlin (2007) ‘Art and archive: memory-work on a Montana homestead’, Journal of Historical Geography, 33: 878–900. Duncan, James S. (1999) ‘Complicity and resistance in the colonial archive: some issues of method and

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theory in historical geography’, Historical Geography, 27: 119–128. Edney, Matthew H. (1997) Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gagen, Elizabeth, Hayden Lorimer, and Alex Vasudevan (eds) (2007) Practising the Archive: Reflections on Method and Practice in Historical Geography. Historical Geography Research Series 40. Historical Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG, London. Giddens, Anthony (1985) The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gregory, Derek (2004) The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. Harley, J. Brian (2002) The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Latour, B. (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mignolo, Walter D. (1995) The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ogborn, Miles (1998) ‘The capacities of the state: Charles Davenant, and the management of the excise, 1683–1698,’ Journal Of Historical Geography, 24: 289–312. Ogborn, Miles (2003) ‘Knowledge is power: using archival research to interpret state formation’ in

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Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder (eds), Cultural Geography in Practice. London: Edward Arnold, pp. 9–20. Ogborn, Miles (2004) ‘Archives’ in Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift (eds), Patterned Ground. London: Reaktion, pp. 240–242. Ogborn, Miles (2007) Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ogborn, Miles (2010) ‘Finding historical sources,’ in Nicholas Clifford, Shaun French and Gill Valentine (eds), Key Methods in Geography. London: Sage, pp. 89–102. Orwell, George (1986) Burmese Days. London: Penguin Books. (Originally published in 1934). Rose, Gillian (1997) ‘Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics’, Progress in Human Geography, 21: 305–320. Rose, Gillian (2000) ‘Practising photography: an archive, a study, some photographs, and a researcher’, Journal of Historical Geography, 26: 555–571. Secord, James A. (2000) Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Steedman, Carolyn (2001) Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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7 Botanical Gardens and Zoos Nuala C. Johnson

INTRODUCTION ‘What did Thought do?’ ‘Stuck a feather in the ground and thought it would grow a hen.’ Rod by rod we pegged the drill for sweetpea with light brittle sticks, twiggy and unlikely in fresh mould, and stalk by stalk we snipped the coming blooms. Seamus Heaney, Sweetpea.1

The labour, practice and pleasure of cultivating sweetpeas anchors Seamus Heaney’s arresting poem on our relationships with the natural world. Juxtaposing thought with action this verse spotlights the act of training this plant in drills dug by gardeners into the soil, with blooms trained, supported and pruned along vertical woody twigs. Growing plants and creating a garden is not just, or perhaps even primarily, an intellectual activity, it is more often a set of procedures and practices learned over generations of experience and of accumulated knowledge about how nature can be re-worked and under what conditions plants might prosper. This knowledge can take many forms, from texts and treatises on gardening, to demonstrations and trials of planting techniques. Cultivating nature

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through gardening has a long genealogy in the history of humanity and the image of an original, Edenic garden has had a powerful resonance in Christian theology, while gardens more generally have exerted a powerful spiritual hold in many religious traditions as diverse as Islam and Buddhism. Botanical gardening directed towards medicinal and scientific ends, however, is of more recent vintage, dating approximately from the late Middle Ages and evolving into a specific form of gardening with its own set of aesthetic, taxonomic and design principles. Of course gardens are only one expression of the human cultivation of nature; collecting, controlling and domesticating the earth’s fauna similarly has had a long history originating in the development of early agricultural systems. Moreover, although the taming of animals has been an important element in the development of various food economies, fauna also have had an important significance in human societies as sources of pleasure, entertainment and in advancing scientific theories. While placing animals in zoological gardens for academic study and human amusement shares some of the same concerns as botanical collections, they also differ in significant ways in relation to

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representational practices and their relative agency. Both, however, have been important locales for the accumulation and dissemination of geographical knowledge. Within geography there has been a fairly lengthy history of the examination of the relationships between nature and society, environment and culture, and in contemporary geographical research conceptualising these connections has generated a host of theoretical and empirical studies some of which directly relate to botanical gardens and zoos. In this chapter I will first highlight three main conceptual strands that characterise this research. This will be followed by a discussion of botanical gardens both in their historical and contemporary contexts. Finally research on the spaces, which animals occupy in zoological settings, will be analysed.

MAKING SENSE OF NATURE There have been numerous recent reviews of the approaches that geographers have been deploying to interpret and conceptualise nature (see Castree 2005). These overviews have highlighted the conceptual and methodological terrains being mapped by students of nature and some have investigated the ontological and epistemological bases for different theoretical approaches to the natural world. Where botanical gardens and zoos are concerned there are at least three main ways of approaching the topic. The first, broadly speaking, is to treat nature as an intensely socially constructed phenomenon, that is to say, a domain made intellectually and in some cases, empirically, by human societies. Early contributions in this field were developed by Marxist thinkers. They highlighted how nature is produced and transformed in capitalist societies for profit (e.g. breeding methods, plant modification), thus emphasising that nature is not an immutable category separate from society. As Neil Smith has put it: ‘Uneven development is the concrete process and pattern of the production of

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nature under capitalism’ (1990: xiv). Revisions to this Marxist approach have emphasised the gendered and racialised bases to the production of nature as well as the class ones (Castree and Braun 2001). Other versions of constructionist thinking have been much more influenced by cultural rather than political economy imperatives. In what David Demeritt (2002) calls ‘construction-as-refutation’, the natural world is seen to be as powerfully shaped by the human imagination as much as by any material manipulation of nature. Nature here is constituted and imagined at the level of representational practices and the slippery relationship between what is real and what is projected surfaces. Under such a reckoning all we know about nature and the way in which we conceive of it is culturally mediated in time and space. William Cronon’s (1996) analysis of the idea of wilderness in North American culture is an exemplar of this tradition. Cronon powerfully elucidates how in the American imagination the notion of an untamed nature – the wilderness – emerged to form a dominant discourse in popular culture about the formation and maintenance of an American identity. He traces the historical development of complex aesthetic, moral and cognitive meanings attached to the idea of wilderness as a response to an increasingly industrialising and urbanising society. The final type of thinking about nature’s social construction moves again towards issues of material constructionism and transformation. That is to say, to a position that claims that nature is so fundamentally altered by societies that it makes no sense to talk of any ‘truly’ natural state of affairs. Studies in this field have tracked the history of the material metamorphosis of nature (genetic modification of seeds in laboratories) and its recirculation back into the ‘natural’ world through agriculture and gardening so that the ‘artificial’ alteration is forgotten or lost. In this area of constructivism emphasis is firmly placed on the material manipulation of nature and how this process reformulates the ‘nature’ of the

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very items that have been changed in ways that normalise them as natural phenomena. The second way in which botanical and zoological gardens have been investigated is from a perspective which draws theoretical inspiration from the history of science and from garden history. Among historians of science nature is analysed from the point of view of differing and competing discourses of scientific theory and practice. At the centre of this tradition of work is a concern with how scientific knowledge about the ‘natural’ is made and how what counts as scientific explanation of particular phenomena changes over time. In the history of medicine, for instance, studies have highlighted the changing connections between ideas of climate, disease transmission and race in the nineteenth-century tropics (Arnold 1996). Moreover researchers have undertaken detailed historical examinations of how the material of the environment has been manipulated and rearranged in laboratories, museums, botanical and zoological gardens to ‘reveal’ how nature is ordered and to expose the efficacy of particular scientific theories. Acclimatisation societies, for instance, used botanical gardens to test the moveability of particular plant species to new climates particularly in Europe’s overseas colonies. Such studies highlight the contingencies surrounding scientific explanation and the social, political and cultural structures that help shape science’s claims. Recently, geographers have been establishing a case for a geographical dimension to scientific knowledge-making practices and theories, where the sites for the investigation of nature become important in the constitution of that nature and its scientific exegesis (Livingstone 2003). The geographies of scientific knowledge have thus taken site, circulation and region to be significant spatial categories in understanding how nature is theorised, explained and disseminated. Like the work of some social constructivists, issues surrounding the representation of nature through scientific texts (e.g. floras of a region) or through specific scientific practices

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(e.g. public experiments) have been central to these investigations. While the ontological status of nature is mainly set to one side in these types of enquiries, the contingency of the epistemological claims of science about nature are well acknowledged. Running in tandem with the work of those influenced by the history of science are cultural geographers who focus on the constitution of different natures through an analysis of the history of gardening. In particular this work has focused on how the landscape as both a material expression and a ‘way of seeing’ the environment has been shot through with symbolic meaning (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988). Taking their cue from the theoretical insights of landscape architects, creative writers, gardeners, art critics and painters, geographers have stressed how questions of taste, landscape aesthetics and order were regularly deployed to create naturalised gardens that might elevate the owner’s social as well as moral and emotional standing. The practices of significant landscape gardeners (e.g. Daniels 1999 on Humphry Repton) in fashioning the English landscape have been analysed. In addition the relationship between scientific and aesthetic concerns has been receiving increased attention in relation to emergence of nineteenth-century arboretums and their impact on the appearance and representation of nature (Elliott et al. 2007). The final way that geographers have tackled the relationships between the natural and the social has been to radically challenge the legitimacy of the binary distinction. They suggest that human beings are an intrinsic part of a ‘more than human’ world, hence attempts to view this world as a set of separate human and non-human components is mistaken. By contrast the two are treated as a set of mutually constitutive encounters (Thrift 2003). Critical of an emphasis on representational ways of understanding ‘nature’ that focus on the visual, this non-representational view seeks to underscore the performative interplay of the human and non-human in a complex unfolding of material, multi-sensual relationships. Applied research on zoos or

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botanical gardens drawing from this framework is only in its infancy. The culture– nature dualism has also been questioned by scholars who draw on both feminists thinking about the body and actor-network theory in science studies (Latour 1987; Haraway 1991). The boundaries between the social and the ‘natural’ are deemed opaque as contemporary technologies (such as genetic engineering) increasingly dissolve the distinction and foreground the hybridity of human/natural phenomena. Thus notions of agency have been redefined to incorporate the role of non-human agents (actants) in the fabrication and practice of everyday life for both organic and inorganic matter. Vital to this way to thinking is the employment of the concept of networks – the world is theorised as a series of complex, messy and multiply cross-hatching relationships between humans and non-humans in alignments that are, to varying degrees, ordered. This approach rejects any ontological separation between the social and the natural and instead concentrates on the hybrid character of the socialnatural world. Actor network thinking has been used to examine zoo management at elephant enclosures in contemporary Paignton zoological and botanical garden in Britain, as well as to the practices of environmental conservancy at organisations such as Earthwatch’s elephant protection programme in a Botswana wildlife park (Whatmore 2002). However the insights of actor-network theory have been relatively infrequently applied to historical studies of botanical and zoological gardens. Consequently in the sections that follow I will trace some of the key moments in the emergence of scientific botanical gardens and zoos using a variety of the perspectives outlined here.

TRACING BOTANICAL GARDENS: FROM PHYSIC TO ENLIGHTENMENT SPACES While there is some reference to botanical gardens in the ancient world, for instance,

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Aristotle is said to have kept a garden, and there are references to Renaissance princes having botanical gardens, it is not until Europe expands its exploration overseas and develops an empire that modern botanical gardens are born and the idea of bringing together the flora of the earth in a single space is inaugurated. The first of these new, modern gardens is founded in Padua in 1545 and reflects the interest that the university city of Venice had in geographical exploration. Gathering plants from all over the globe into a single garden was matched by textual efforts to devise compilations of flora in plant books. For instance, the apothecary and botanist John Parkinson’s herbal Theatrum Botanicum published in 1640 reflected the increased accumulation of plant specimens and knowledge about them. Studies focused on these early gardens have investigated the relationship between medicine, theology and exploration in the conception and design of these early botanical sites. Although a number of new gardens emerged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the garden at the University of Leiden proved to be one of the most important. When the university was instituted in 1575 medicine as well as law and theology were the foundation disciplines. It was believed that physicians were so important that they must be instructed in nature as well as ‘examining, dissecting, dissolving and transmuting the bodies of animals, vegetables and minerals’ (quoted in Cook 2007: 110). To this end the university would need a botanical garden and from the outset tried to establish one. Many of the founding curators of the new university were well-to-do and were keen gardeners and interested in the natural world as these were the leisure pursuits of the day for the monied classes. The university was one of the centres of Calvinist education at this time in the Netherlands yet it had a complicated relationship with other religions, especially Catholicism. It initially appointed professor Rembert Dodoens, a famous Catholic

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botanist and physician in 1582, but he died prematurely in 1585. A plot of land to establish a garden was acquired by the University in 1587 and Pieter Pauw joined the faculty as a botanical professor. A noted anatomist with experience of studying in Padua and the Baltic he advanced medical knowledge but did little to develop the garden. The university curators continued to search for a professor for their garden and after much negotiation eventually got the well-known botanist and lawyer Carolus Clusius to come to Leiden. Having had the experience of establishing a botanical garden for the Emperor of Austria in Vienna, as well as a good plant collection that included tulips, his knowledge was considered invaluable for Leiden. He arrived in the autumn of 1593 and began preliminary work on the garden. But because of ill health and a complex contract with the university Clusius did not physically work in the garden, and consequently the apothecary Cluyt did much of the labour and planning. The latter was appointed professor with responsibilities for teaching the students about plants in the garden in summer and teaching them about minerals and other natural phenomena in winter. By the end of 1594 the garden was complete. Like other botanical gardens of this early period it was divided into four quarters and in this respect it resembled many Renaissance gardens that were geometrical in form. Three of the quarters contained 16 beds and the final quarter contained 12 beds (Cook 2007). The idea of dividing a square enclosure by paths into four quarters, often with a fountain at the centre, was a style of design popular in western European physic gardens, and ‘gardeners were perhaps particularly receptive to the idea that these might correspond to the four continents’ (Prest 1981: 40). In Leiden the four quarters contained around 1400 plants, and only about one third of these were of materia medica. The remainder were ornamentals or exotics which were of interest to Clusius and Cluyt (Cook 2007). In 1599 a glass gallery was added at the southern end of

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the garden and in it delicate plants were over-wintered while the professor could give instruction on other naturalia contained there including mineral and animal specimens. Like many early physic gardens the area covered by the original garden was quite small. In the early decades plants would be obtained through the Dutch East India Company from its trading posts and possessions in south Asia and thus many plants of exotic provenance as well as of medicinal value were in the collection. Other gardens founded around the same period as Leiden included the garden at Montpellier in 1593, the Jardin de Roi in Paris in 1626, and Oxford University garden in 1621. The guides to all these gardens indicate a desire to expand the collection of plants from around the world, and in some instances, to theoretically have the four quarters of the gardens represent the four continents of the earth, illustrative of their diverse bounty. To that end they represented spaces in which geographical knowledge could be accumulated. But to collect the world’s plant variety in a single space also harkened back to earlier Edenic images of gardens as living catalogues of creation. As botanical spaces were developing in Europe, colonial gardens were concomitantly beginning to be established in Europe’s overseas possessions. Colonial gardens, which could meet medicinal needs, would also importantly nurture an economic botany and a move towards the development of a complex network of plant exchange between the colonies and home (McCracken 1997).

GARDENS AND THE PURSUIT OF SCIENTIFIC BOTANY By the eighteenth century the intellectual underpinnings of botanical gardens began to shift as the older physic gardens attached to universities expanded and a host of new gardens were established, some of which were

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subsidised by the state. In a British context the gardens at Edinburgh (1670), Dublin (1795) and Kew (1759) were the most important publicly funded gardens and gradually Kew came to be regarded as the nucleus of Britain’s plant exchange network and the central node in the practice of economic botany. It became the lynchpin in a discourse about agricultural improvement and the introduction of new commercial crops. The transformative effect of an intensified plant exchange system had repercussions throughout the botanical network. Gardens now began to serve the interests of an expanding science of botany and using these spaces to order ‘nature’ in some scientifically meaningful way became increasingly significant. As the historian of science, Emma Spary has claimed, ‘For eighteenth century naturalists … plants were moving, changing, politically and chemically potent beings’ (2000: 198). These changes were reflected not only in the spatial ordering of the gardens themselves but also in the role that the plants would play in the gardens and in the dialogue and debates surrounding the broader scientific interpretation of plants. In Cambridge, for instance, the older physic garden located in the city’s centre was replaced by a newer garden on the outskirts of the town. This change was proposed by the Professor of Botany, John Stevens Henslow, in an effort to render the location more suitable for the pursuit of ‘modern science’ (Johnson 2006). The design of the space changed from the geometrical pattern common in physic gardens to a more varied arrangement that included formal and naturalistic elements. This reflected the emerging status of botany as a discipline across Europe and the desire to order plants, at least in the outdoor collections according to one of the dominant classification systems. Richard Drayton (2000) has reminded us that the very shock of the globe’s botanical heterogeneity, made clear as the empire expanded, undermined earlier hopes that the botanical garden would contain all of nature’s diversity. Instead the

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gardens of the enlightenment had to recognise that they could only contain a representative sample of plants and thus ‘the ideal of the microcosm yielded to that of the map’ (Drayton 2000: 24). This sample included, in many cases, the planting of an arboretum or tree collection, which would be arranged according to the Linnaean or a natural system of plant classification. For instance, in the gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin, an arboretum lay at the heart of the garden’s design yet it generated much debate about the accuracy of naming procedures of particular species and the material difficulties with producing and maintaining labels (Johnson 2007). These newer gardens, almost universally, sought to display their outdoor shrubs and plants in beds ordered according to their genera and class. They would become sites of scientific demonstration, displaying taxonomic systems and reflecting debates about the effectiveness of particular systems. At the Jardin du Roi in Paris in the eighteenth century, for example, the practice of natural history began to develop for itself a sensory epistemology that privileged the visual above other faculties, and this would be crucial to the development of Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu’s méthode naturelle of plant classification where the visual inspection of plants would lead to the discernment of natural families. This prioritisation of the visual has been noted by historians of science as ‘Rapports were true, not arbitrary, and evident to the eye of the trained observer’ (Spary 2000: 199). Botanical gardens acted as one of the spheres in which scientific dispute could be settled and also where a wider public could be educated in the practices of natural history. Geographers are only beginning to grapple with the ways in which these gardens acted as hubs of popular scientific education as they developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover recent scholarship has also been stressing the aesthetic and pleasure-yielding roles botanical gardens have played in the civic life of towns and cities. Although scientific concerns have

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seemed to undergird the spatial layout of botanical gardens, questions of beauty, as well as the limiting constraints imposed by nature itself also had powerful influences on the composition of these spaces. The intricate relationship between garden aesthetics and the promotion of botanical knowledge is starting to be investigated particularly in relation to indoor collections. Fundamental to the development of modern botanical institutions had been the erection of glasshouses. The complex alliances between civil engineering, glass manufacture, heating systems, plant agency, public expectation and finance, all influenced the type of knowledge performed in glasshouses. Virtually all botanical gardens wished to build alluring hothouses and put on display species considered to be exotic (Figure 7.1). In European gardens this included plants from tropical and desert zones and often these hothouses were the closest to tropical nature that many visitors would ever experience, and to some

Figure 7.1 The Palm House, Botanical Gardens, Belfast.

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degree, they became a synecdoche of that nature (Philo and Wilbert 2000; Stepan 2001). Furthermore hothouses seemed to engage more directly a broader suite of senses as the hot, humid temperatures of the stove houses, as well as the aroma of tropical plants, and the hum of the sprinkling systems, literally hit the visitor upon entry. They also featured strongly in guides to visitors of botanical gardens and they operated as indicators of the success of a garden in the intergarden race to have more exotic species in situ. Bringing the Victoria regia water lily to flowering stage, for instance, was a source of much competition in nineteenth-century British botanical institutions. While the techno-scientific dimension of glasshouse development has received scholarly attention in a historical context, the role of contemporary glasshouses is just beginning to receive attention. The development of the geodesic dome greenhouse at the Eden Project in Cornwall, opened in 2000, marks a new era in the creation of virtual ecosystems for public education and amusement. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s writing about finde-siécle cultural anxieties about nature, Bartram and Shobrook (2000) analyse the Cornwall glasshouse as an exemplar of these tensions where environmental conservation attempts, through technological simulation, to protect and reclaim nature’s reality. But adopting Baudrillard’s idea of the fourth order of simulacra – where simulation has accelerated to the point where nature’s reality is lost – Bartram and Shobrook demonstrate this process at the Eden Project. By examining the design of the geodesic-dome greenhouse and the ideas surrounding it they claim: ‘[D]istinguishing between nature and the Eden Project’s version of nature … will become impossible as the natural world and the “virtual” ecosystems are systemically replenished … the process of duplication eventually erodes a sense of the real’ (Bartram and Shobrook 2000: 374). What the future holds for new botanical gardens, like the Eden Project, is unclear, but the public popularity of such projects, old and new, suggests

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that their continued existence is not yet under threat. Although zoological gardens share many of the same scientific and civic concerns as botanical gardens, and have had wide popular appeal, the fact that they house animals rather than plants has raised other issues where their design, micro-geography and purpose is concerned. And it is to these issues that I now wish to direct our attention.

MENACING MENAGERIES One can hardly turn on the television set these days without encountering some natural history programme centred on the animal kingdom. From lavish documentaries about big cat behaviour in the African savannah to fly-on-the-wall commentaries about the everyday management of places like Belfast Zoo, our media are awash with visual imagery about the conservation, protection and actions of ‘wild’ and often endangered species of animal. However, assembling collections of fauna in enclosed spaces has a long global history. The earliest menageries are thought to have existed in ancient Egypt around 2500 BC. Archaeological and visual evidence points to assemblages of cattle, antelope and cranes. Some efforts were made to domesticate them, while other species like baboons and falcons were kept for religious rituals. There are some hints that the Ancient Egyptians gathered animals in their palace grounds and tried to acclimatise them for human use. The early Greeks also had menageries although royal collecting was less intensified here than in other parts of the world. Biblical references to exotic animal collections, particularly in the Old Testament, may have encouraged in the Christian world the desire to incarcerate animals. Menageries provided entertainment for royal courts as well as for common people, indeed travelling animal shows proved especially popular in the ancient world. Scholars have noted that ‘[a] menagerie, whatever its physical form, is

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primarily concerned with the symbolic role of animals within a culture’ (Veltre 1996: 20), and this would vary over time and in space. Gathering exotic species in one place reached something of an apogee during the Roman Empire where exhibiting and killing animals for public entertainment was widely practised. Arenas for blood sports were numerous across Roman Europe but went out of fashion as that empire declined. Collecting and holding ‘wild’ animals was not just a European practice; from China to Latin America European explorers reported the existence of local imperial animal collections. While the demand for exotic animals declined in Europe during the Middle Ages as public entertainment through blood spectacles was abandoned, collections became more closely and exclusively tied to private, royal, aristocratic and wealthy merchant families. This intensified as European exploration widened and new species were introduced into royal parks and game reserves and were used as food on wealthy people’s dining tables. From the sixteenth century onwards menageries in Europe and North Africa increasingly began to gravitate to urban centres and transmute into zoological gardens. One of the earliest such institutions was the Schönbrunn Zoo established at the summer residence of the Hapsburg royal family on the outskirts of Vienna. Emerging from a deer garden (1569) the site evolved as the oldest extant zoo. The space was redesigned in the seventeenth century following the example provided at Versailles, and the revised animal collection was presented by Emperor Francis I to his wife as a gift in 1752. The collection widened as overseas explorations expanded and by 1770 the zoo could boast having elephants among its species. The public was allowed to view the animals occasionally, although in essence it was a private royal collection, but it does mark the transition from a menagerie to a ‘modern’ zoo and it continues to attract large numbers of visitors as a public amenity in Vienna to the present day.

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ZEBRAS, ZOOS AND ZONES OF CULTURE The historian of science, Harriet Ritvo (1987), has traced the relationship between the rise of enlightenment science, the expansion of empire and the philosophy underpinning the emergence of public zoos. She has highlighted the significance of scientific nomenclature in the transformation of ideas of nature from ‘wild’ to ordered. She claims that ‘[s]cientific classification was hailed as both symbol and agent of a larger intellectual triumph, one that would ultimately reverse the traditional relationship between humans and the natural world’ (Ritvo 1997: 336). This mastery over the intellectual domain of natural history was matched by a European hegemony over the physical terrain of the globe through the acquisition (formally and informally) of overseas territories. In both cases, however, European mastery was never complete. Disputes over nomenclature and the identification of species were a regular feature of nineteenth-century naming practices, while territorial colonisation and control of the ‘exotic’ world was a fragile enterprise. Subaltern constituencies regularly, and sometimes successfully, challenged European imperial authority. Arguments over naming however, Ritvo (1997) concludes, were as much about the assertion of power as scientific knowledge. Battles over the authority to name were in large part conflicts over the geopolitical positioning of particular national cultures and their possession of overseas territories. American naturalists, for instance, resisted outsiders’ efforts to name and describe, and so claim, species indigenous to North America. Patterns of power expressed through naming, counter-naming and the subversion of authority points to the political and social role of zoological gardens and their ability to decide what passes as scientific in the nineteenth century. Issues of power form the centrepiece of the historian Richard Burkhardt’s (2007) analysis of the zoological section of the Muséum Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle in

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Paris of the 1800s. From the initial introduction of animals to the Paris Museum in the late 1790s (the Paris Commune outlawed the exhibiting of animals in the streets of the city and hence animals were brought to the museum), zoologists and others debated and struggled over the control of specimens and ultimately the role of place in reflecting and regulating the conflicts between different parties working in the museum. Using the attractive image of ‘the leopard in the garden’ Burkhardt traces the tensions between different scientists about the role of zoology as a scientific discipline as well as tensions between expert and popular audiences as the wider public gained increasing access to the zoo. How to transport, display, preserve, label and interpret animals exercised diverse interests within the museum and as Burkhardt puts it, ‘[W]e find the power of place was integrally related to the power to place’ (2007: 677). The design of zoological space is central to Ritvo’s (1996) analysis of Regent’s Park zoo in London. The Zoological Society of London, founded by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1824, was moved by a desire to establish an animal collection in London that matched Britain’s pre-eminence as a geopolitical and imperial power. Home from establishing his economic empire in the East Indies, Raffles was keen to have the best collection of the earth’s exotic creatures on display in London. By 1828 the Regent’s Park Zoo was opened initially to members of the Zoological Society and their guests. The choice of animals to inhabit the zoo was influenced by two different, and sometimes, opposing viewpoints. The first, mainly articulated by landowners, was driven by the desire to introduce exotic animals that might be acclimatised and bred, and ultimately introduced to the parks and tables of the British aristocracy. The second constituency, comprised primarily of naturalists, wished to have a collection of exotic animals that would be of scientific interest especially in relation to animal taxonomy. The Zoological Society initially attempted to satisfy both parties, but given their divergent

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objectives this proved difficult over time and the scientific wing held sway. Nevertheless, as Ritvo has pointed out, they did share a more common underlying purpose: ‘to acquire, maintain, and display representatives of the animal kingdom in a way that echoed and emphasised British pre-eminence’ (1996: 46). Moreover the design of the collection was to represent the triumph of reason over the chaos and disorder of nature. Naturalists at the zoo sought to spatially represent this by arranging animals along strict taxonomic principles that would illustrate the broader order of the animal kingdom. Large carnivores – like big cats housed in cages – was the ultimate expression of this human domination and was central to any important zoo. Regent’s Park housed many large cats in the mid-nineteenth century and their average life expectancy, under such conditions, was two years. In addition to housing ‘exotic’ animals in cages zoos were laid out, in ‘artificial settings, using a variety of plants that also mirrored the nation’s global reach. Ordering collections became the dominant motif and zoo guidebooks were inveterately linear. No matter what the shape of a zoo, its official guidebook would prescribe a single route through the exhibits’ (Ritvo 1996: 47). For amateur and expert alike the zoo experience in London was an effort to represent the supremacy of reason over unreason, order over chaos, and just as importantly, British superiority over its imperial rivals and its imperial subjects. On a broader canvas John Berger notes that the zoos of Paris, Berlin and London ‘brought considerable prestige to the national capitals … The capturing of animals was a symbolic representation of the conquest of all distant and exotic lands’ (quoted in Rothfels 2002: 21). Historians have therefore emphasised both the evolution of zoological gardens as exercises in the development of an enlightenment science and simultaneously the projection of cultural, geopolitical and social power. Geographers over the past decade have taken up the theme of the social production

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of nature especially with respect to animal collections (Wolch and Emel 1998; Philo and Wilbert 2000). The connections between zoos and a socially produced nature has been explored in some depth in Kay Anderson’s (1995, 1998) analysis of the development of the zoo in Adelaide Australia. She claims that ‘the zoo is a cultural institution which reflects not nature itself – as if such an unmediated thing exists – but a human adaptation of the ensemble of life forms that bears the name “nature” ’ (Anderson 1995: 276). Taking the zoo as a quintessential expression of humans’ desire to offer an iconic expression of control Anderson claims that they represent boundary-making exercises, in a double sense, where humans and animals are separated and also where intra-animal boundaries are erected; for instance, reptiles separated from birds. Drawing on feminist thinking, Anderson (1995) highlights the masculinity of the scopic regime imposed in zoos’ geographies. She also draws attention to the ambivalent attitudes sometimes expressed about holding animals in captivity particularly as zoos were located in cities and were viewed, by some, as emblems of the increasing removal and separation of animals from their ‘natural’ environment. In Australia, as in other ‘new world’ societies, there was a desire to establish institutions that would engender civic and national pride. In the case of Adelaide the zoo emerged from the formation in 1878 of the Acclimatisation Society of South Australia (later renamed the Royal Zoological Society of South Australia), itself a colonial offshoot of its English parent. For white Australians acclimatising animals, insects and birds from England to the Australian environment would transform the indigenous landscape into one made in the image of the English countryside. A tract of land next to the Botanic Gardens was granted by the state legislature and by 1883 the foundations of the zoo had been laid. The early collection included cattle as well as monkeys, parrots and a bearpit. Importing exotic animals was encouraged so that Adelaide could assert its

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pre-eminence as a city within Australia and within the wider colonial context. By the end of the nineteenth century the zoo ‘was incorporated into a well-coordinated imperial network of animal trading, itself the arm of the regime of extractive capitalism’ (Anderson 1995: 282). While the zoo played a significant role as a recreational space in Adelaide members of the Royal Zoological Society of South Australia were never satisfied that this would be the sole role of the zoo; they also wanted it to have an educational and research function. Consequently the animals were arranged taxonomically, rather than in terms of their social patterns, cultural life or habitat. Adelaide, in this respect, followed a familiar pattern. Exhibit labels and maps of the global distribution of species were provided to offer popular audiences with a scientific and rationalist rendition of nature’s kingdom. Anderson (1998) tracks how debates about the purpose and organisation of the zoo altered in the twentieth century as attitudes towards the display and control of animals also changed. This included the provision of a Children’s Zoo in 1965 and the introduction of a section with native species which would represent, using the language of nationalism ‘our own creatures’. From the 1970s onward radical alterations to exhibits have been informed by aesthetic considerations and shifts in attitudes away from confined enclosures and caging to seemingly more ‘naturalised’ open landscapes. Recent research has begun to focus on the role of contemporary zoos in the consolidation and social structuring of family relationships. Taking zoos as one site of recreational activity it has been claimed that the zoo experience feeds into an emotional geography where family cultures are built, practised and reproduced. Drawing on the evidence of photographs that families take at zoos, Hallman and Benbow (2007) direct our attention to the manner in which zoos carve out and reinforce certain dominant ideas of family life. Specifically they assert that ‘zoos are inscribed with a feminized depiction of

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nature as a bountiful and caring mother’ (Hallman and Benbow 2007: 875) and this invokes images of home and animal families, as well as human family-friendly spaces. The photographs they analyse provide a narrative and a book of evidence in the practice of family life, with the animals regularly playing backdrop to these value systems. This case study highlights a much longer tradition of zoos being seen to play an important role as spaces of recreation and consumption in increasingly urbanised societies.

CONCLUSION Studying botanical and zoological gardens has a long trajectory in the histories of science. They formed important spaces in which debates about the status of natural history as a discipline gained a foothold and as material expressions of wider scientific claims. They were particularly important in relation to classification and naming practices. In Britain, for instance, Kew gardens, was central in the regulation of the identification of species and in the management of Britain’s network of colonial and domestic gardens. In the nineteenth century they were also significant sites for carrying out experiments and for the education of professional and amateur botanists, zoologists and gardeners. It is only in the last decade or so that geographers have begun to study, in some detail, these institutions. Having said that, they are making important contributions to foregrounding the role of space in the constitution of science in these places as well as furthering our theoretical and empirical understanding of the relationship between nature and culture in the twenty-first century.

NOTE 1 This is the first stanza of the poem ‘Sweetpea’ which appeared in Seamus Heaney (1984) Station Island. London: Faber and Faber, p. 46.

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REFERENCES Anderson, Kay (1995) ‘Culture and nature at the Adelaide Zoo: at the frontiers of “human” geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 20: 275–294. Anderson, Kay (1998) ‘Animals, science and spectacle in the city’ in J. Wolch and J. Emel (eds), Animal Geographies. London: Verso, pp. 27–50. Arnold, David (ed.) (1996) Warm Climates, Warm Medicine. London: Rodopi. Bartram, Rob and Shobrook, Sarah (2000) ‘Endless/ end-less natures: environmental futures at the fin de millennium’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90: 370–380. Burkhardt, Richard, W. (2007) ‘The leopard in the garden: life in close quarters at The Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle’, Isis, 98: 675–694. Castree, Noel (2005) Nature. London: Routledge. Castree, Noel and Braun, Bruce (eds) (2001) Social Nature: Theory, Practice and Politics. Oxford: Blackwell. Cook, Harold, J. (2007) Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cosgrove, Denis and Daniels, Stephen (eds) (1988) The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cronon, William (1996) ‘The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature’ in William Cronon (ed.) , Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 69–90. Daniels, Stephen (1999) Humphry Repton. New Haven: Yale University Press. Demeritt, David (2002) ‘What is “the social construction of nature”?’, Progress in Human Geography, 26: 767–790. Drayton, Richard (2000) Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elliott, Paul, Watkins, Charles and Daniels, Stephen (2007) ‘“Combining science with recreation and pleasure”: cultural geographies of nineteenth century arboretums’, Garden History, 35: 6–27. Hallman, Bonnie, C. and Benbow, Mary, P. (2007) ‘Family leisure, family photography and zoos: exploring the emotional geographies of families’, Social and Cultural Geography, 8: 871–888. Haraway, Donna (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. San Francisco: Free Association Books. Johnson, Nuala, C. (2006) ‘Cultivating science and planting beauty: the spaces of display in Cambridge’s

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Botanical Gardens’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 42–57. Johnson, Nuala C. (2007) ‘Names, labels and planting regimes: regulating trees at Glasnevin Botanic Gardens, Dublin, 1795–1850’, Garden History, 35: 53–70. Latour, Bruno (1987) Science in Action. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Livingstone, David (2003) Putting Science in its Place. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCracken, Donal P. (1997) Gardens of Empire. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Philo, C. and Wilbert, C. (eds) (2000) Animal Spaces, Beastly Places. London: Routledge. Prest, John (1981) The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-creation of Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ritvo, Harriet (1987) Animal Estate: The English and other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Ritvo, Harriet (1996) ‘The order of nature: constructing the collections of Victorian Zoos’ in R.J. Hoage, and W.A. Deiss (eds), New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 43–50. Ritvo, Harriet (1997) ‘Zoological nomenclature and the empire of Victorian science’ in B. Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 334–353. Rothfels, Nigel (2002) Savages and Beasts: the Birth of the Modern Zoo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Smith, Neil (1996) ‘The production of nature’ in G. Robertson, M. Mash, L. Tickner, J. Bird, B. Curtis and T. Putnam (eds), Future Natural. London: Routledge, pp. 35–54. Spary, Emma C. (2000) Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stepan, Nancy L. (2001) Picturing Tropical Nature. London: Reaktion Books. Thrift, Nigel (2003) ‘Summoning life’ in P. Cloke (ed.), Envisioning Human Geography. London: Arnold, pp. 65–77. Veltre, Thomas (1996) ‘Menageries, metaphors and meanings’ in R.J. Hoage and W.A. Deiss (eds), New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 19–32. Whatmore, Sarah (2002) Hybrid Geographies. London: Sage. Wolch, J. and Emel, J. (eds) (1998) Animal Geographies. London: Verso.

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8 Learned Societies Michael Heffernan

INTRODUCTION Learned societies are associations of individuals sharing common intellectual interests and objectives, usually outlined in a formal constitution. They vary in size from small amateur associations communicating by occasional newsletters, to large international organisations with thousands of members, regular conferences, and prestigious, high-impact journals. Membership criteria range from open societies that require only an annual subscription, to highly selective associations reserved for the smallest elites. Most are non-profit, private organisations, though many larger associations have impressive financial resources. Some venerable societies were established by royal or government patronage and retain a measure of official recognition. Others cherish their independence from all external influences. The relationship between learned societies and higher education has generally been mutually sustaining, though some older organisations were founded specifically to promote ideas and practices ignored or rejected by universities. Learned societies frequently represent disciplinary or sub-disciplinary constituencies, either nationally or internationally. In the case of geography, the

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International Geographical Union, established in its current form in Brussels in 1922, is the principal international agency to which the majority of national geographical associations are affiliated. Other learned societies have multidisciplinary remits, both nationally and internationally. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), established in 1848, claims to be the world’s largest general scientific society with 262 affiliated societies and one million readers of its main journal, Science. Learned societies have been among the most important creative sites within which scientific theories have developed and circulated since the Renaissance (Livingstone 2003). Most modern sciences, including geography, first took shape in learned societies during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were then formalised into national and international associations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

AN HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LEARNED SOCIETIES The Scholarly Societies Project (SSP), established in 1994 by the University of Waterloo

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Library in Canada, provides a regularly updated website listing over 4,000 learned societies, cross-referenced by discipline, location and date of foundation, from the early fourteenth century to the present (www. scholarly-societies.org). The SSP list is by no means exhaustive and its existing complexity underlines the impossibility of applying modern ideas, including the concept of ‘science’ itself, to historical periods when such categories would have had little or no meaning (see, however, Gascoigne 1992). This important reservation notwithstanding, the SSP catalogue helps to reveal general patterns and trends in the enthusiasm for scholarly association over time and space (see also Taylor et al 2008). The database suggests an exponential growth in the number of foundations, with significant annual variations and some longer periods when the rate of growth slackened. About 30 learned societies existed prior to 1600, 18 located in the Renaissance Italian city states, the original heartland of scholarly association. According to the SSP website, the wonderfully named Compagnie du Gai Savoir was the first learned society worthy of the term. The Consistory of the Gay Science, to use its most common English title, was established in Toulouse in 1323 to promote the study of music and poetry, particularly of the Occitan troubadours. Other claimants include the Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana, established in Cracow by the German humanist Conrad Celtes in 1488; and the Academia Secretorum Naturae founded in Naples in 1560 by Giambattista della Porta. The latter was suppressed in 1578 by the Catholic Church, which suspected diabolical motives, a significant episode in the ongoing conflict between religion and science. The Accademia dei Lincei, founded in Rome in 1603 by Frederico Cesi, sought to revive this failed initiative and survived until 1630, its delightful name selected in honour of the far-seeing lynx whose visual acuity was deemed to exemplify the power that science bestowed on humanity.

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The number of learned societies more than doubled during the seventeenth century, the expanding cities of western and northern Europe leading the way (Shapin 1996; Dear 2001). Seven new societies were established in Paris, five in Rome, and four each in London, Edinburgh and Florence. France was home to over 40 percent of seventeenthcentury learned societies. More associations implied greater specialisation, particularly between the arts and the sciences. The Académie Française, created in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu to standardise the French language and ensure its hegemony within and beyond Europe, is an early example of a specialised academic association designed to achieve a specific objective. The same co-ordinating disciplinary motives inspired the other Parisian academies devoted to painting and sculpture (1648), the arts and humanities (1663), the sciences (1666), music (1669) and architecture (1671). The Académie Royale des Sciences, the fourth in this sequence, has special significance alongside the Royal Society of London, established six years earlier in 1660. These two rival associations developed organisational structures and publication strategies that were emulated by at least 70 eighteenth-century scientific societies, beginning with the Academy of Sciences in Berlin founded in 1700. The London and Paris associations were the twin pillars around which the edifice of modern science was constructed (McClellan 1985). Some 228 learned societies were established during the eighteenth century at a steadily increasing rate: 14 (1700–19), 23 (1720–39), 43 (1740–59), 72 (1760–79) and 76 (1780–99). The diminishing rate of increase in the last two decades of the century, coupled with the fact that only 78 new societies were created between 1800 and 1819, suggests that the revolutionary upheavals and warfare of this period dampened, but did not reverse, the propensity for scholarly association. Indeed, 18 new societies were established in revolutionary and Napoleonic Paris, the eye of the late eighteenth and early

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nineteenth-century storm, and a further 11 in London. Prominent among the new Parisian institutions was the Institut National, created in 1795 to replace the Ancien Régime academies. The Institut was itself suppressed by Napoleon in 1803 before being finally re-established in its modern form in 1832. As these events imply, many well-known eighteenth-century associations did not survive this uncertain period, even though the overall number of learned societies continued to grow (Gillispie 1980, 2004; Outram 1983). The geography of Enlightenment societies was more complex than the preceding pattern. French cities remained the most intellectually dynamic, as measured by their enthusiasm for establishing learned societies (Roche 1978), but the network of German and British associations was scarcely less significant. Nearly half of all eighteenthcentury societies were established in French, German and British cities. London and Paris were the most prominent centres, with 13 new societies each, but most Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish and Danish cities boasted at least one learned society by the end of the eighteenth century. New academies were established in St Petersburg and Moscow in Russia, alongside 13 North American associations from Boston in the north-east to Lexington in the south (Oleson and Brown 1976), and a handful of societies in Latin America, Asia and North Africa. The diffusion of eighteenth-century learned societies from Europe to other parts of the world facilitated the globalisation of European scientific practice, part of a wider process of European cultural imperialism, yet the activities undertaken within these institutions were shaped by processes of exchange, circulation, translation and dialogue between western and non-western knowledge systems (Bala 2006; Raj 2007). Learned societies developed in distinctive ways in different parts of Europe. These differences were determined partly by the nature and level of state patronage, and partly by the character of their memberships and

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audiences (Henry 2005). At one end of the spectrum were the French Academies, directly sponsored by the crown, the provincial governments, and subsequently the postRevolutionary state (Crosland 1992). The Parisian Academies were part of a deliberate political project, formulated by Richelieu under Louis XIII and continued by Colbert under Louis XIV, to establish an official French intellectual culture, embracing the arts and the sciences, arguably the first systematic attempt by an early modern European state to harness science and scholarship to the nation-building programme (Stroup 1987, 1990). There were obvious advantages to this arrangement. French academicians were salaried state officials, selected by their peers on the basis of scholarly credentials rather than their social rank. They could rely, in theory at least, on long-term financial support for investigations of practical public utility (Briggs 1991). But the academies were relatively ‘closed’ associations, dominated by small, self-perpetuating élites who were subjected to a greater measure of political interference and frequently obliged to compromise their disinterested intellectual curiosity. As a result, it has been claimed that French academicians, particularly the members of the secretive Académie Royale des Sciences, contributed less fulsomely than their peers in less centralised countries to the loose and informal correspondence networks sometimes called the ‘Republic of Letters’ (Lux and Cook 1998; Mayhew 2005; Utlee 1987; though see Daston, 1991; Spary 2000, 49–98; Brockliss 2002). The centralised French model was copied across much of continental Europe, however, notably in Spain, Portugal and Russia, as well as in the independent Latin American republics through the early nineteenth century. Elsewhere, in the German and Italian states, the networks of learned societies that developed included a more complex mix of official, state-controlled and relatively ‘closed’ associations and more independent establishments. British learned societies exemplified the latter, independent tradition. Most British

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societies were private associations supported by larger, fee-paying memberships drawn from the educated middle classes, with the occasional wealthy aristocrat providing additional financial resource and a measure of social prestige (Hunter 1981; Stewart 1992). They ranged from older associations in Bristol, Cambridge, Dublin, Oxford and the Scottish university towns, to the literary and philosophical societies and gentlemen’s clubs established in burgeoning industrialising cities such as Manchester and Derby, and in smaller market towns such as Spalding, Peterborough and Stamford (see, for example, Elliot 2009). These associations were dominated by amateurs and were therefore less professional and more social than their French equivalents. They were also less dependent on external political influence and therefore more attractive to innovative, freethinking radicals whose extensive but informal correspondence networks allowed new ideas, theories and practices to be exchanged, cultivated and refined freed from external influence (Lux and Cook 1998). Even in the case of the Royal Society, the patronage of the crown meant little in either financial or constitutional terms (Hunter 1989; Sorrenson 1999). The Lunar Society, established under that name in Birmingham in 1775, demonstrates how an absence of patronage could yield extraordinary intellectual rewards. This society comprised a small group of likeminded friends, including Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestley, all animated by a commitment to unconventional and experimental learning and by a strong, politically radical sense of the public good. The society’s monthly meetings were hosted by different members at dates selected so that a full moon would allow participants to find their way home after long evenings enjoying what Darwin called ‘a little philosophical laughing’ that involved lectures, heated debates, and public experiments staged to delight, amaze and educate, the whole experience accompanied by impressive quantities of wine and food (Uglow 2002; Jones 2008).

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This network of private, independent societies expanded throughout the British imperial arena and the United States. The vast majority of the 600 or more societies established across the globe during the nineteenth century were private initiatives, including those established in France and the rest of continental Europe. Many represented specific disciplinary endeavours, including geography. London was the single most important focus of activity during the 1800s with 89 new foundations, almost twice the number established in Paris, its nearest rival. Within their national urban hierarchies, London was more dominant than Paris, despite the latter city’s reputation as the unrivalled centre of French intellectual life. Three-quarters of British (and 93 percent of English) nineteenth-century learned societies were based in London, whereas over a third of French societies were located in provincial towns and cities. Europe’s dominance of learned association was challenged by North America’s expanding intellectual infrastructure during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Well over 100 US scholarly societies existed by 1900, half established in the preceding two decades and a third located in Washington DC, together with 50 new societies in Latin America, Asia and Africa. More than 3,000 associations were established during the twentieth century. Seventy-five percent of all learned societies in existence today are therefore less than a century old. Over half are post-1945 foundations.

A PLACE AT THE HIGH TABLE: GEOGRAPHY AND THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES BEFORE 1800 To understand how the modern discipline of geography emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, based on a network of specialised national associations, it is first necessary to investigate how the subject developed within the general scientific

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societies established during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is no easy task because many early-modern scientific societies were dedicated to the Baconian ideal of the unity of knowledge. Baconians believed there were no clear-cut categories in nature and therefore nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, by creating discrete disciplinary arenas for the study of nature. The Royal Society in London was the epitome of Baconian thinking. The presence of towering figures such as Newton, Boyle, Halley and Hooke notwithstanding, the great majority of Royal Society fellows were wealthy, selfconsciously amateur enthusiasts who saw nature as an undifferentiated ‘tissue of analogies and reiterated themes’ that defied neat disciplinary compartments (Daston 1992: 207). These men (and the society was an exclusively male preserve) sought broad, polite learning rather than narrow specialisation and steadfastly refused to categorise their many and varied activities. The Society’s principal published record, the Philosophical Transactions (PTRS), gave free rein to the eclectic, seemingly random eccentricities of the fellowship and made no reference to thematic organising principles, either in the tables of content, or in the sporadically published indices. Several attempts have been to classify the Royal Society’s publications into modern disciplinary categories, the most recent suggesting that geography – defined as works devoted to cartography, navigation, surveying, the debate about the size and shape of the earth, and the fixing of latitude and longitude – accounted for seven percent of the Society’s published output during the middle decades of the eighteenth century (Sorrenson 1996; see also Gascoigne 1995).1 There are, of course, some obvious methodological problems with this analysis for there is no evidence that any modern classification would have made sense at the time. Fortunately, the Academy of Sciences in Paris, forged in different philosophical and political circumstances, was more willing to classify its own activities into discrete

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disciplines in line with Cartesian thinking which held that the unity of knowledge could only be fully appreciated as the sum of its constituent parts, each requiring separate and specialised investigation (Hahn 1971). Aside from electing the Academy members to lifelong, salaried positions within one of six master disciplines, three in mathematical sciences (astronomy, geometry and mechanics) and three in the physical sciences (anatomy, botany and chemistry), the Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences (HARS), the Academy’s annual publication, also included opening commentaries on the mémoires presented each year that further classified these contributions into about a dozen disciplinary categories used more or less consistently from 1699 to 1783. The relative importance of these ‘disciplines’ waxed and waned over time in line with changing scientific practices and shifts in the nature of the classificatory system itself, but the continuous and systematic organisation of the HARS makes it possible to discern what kind of science the Paris academicians thought they were undertaking for most of the eighteenth century (McClellan 1981, 2001, 2003; Brian and DemeulenaereDouyère 1996; Halleux et al 2001; Demeulenaere-Douyère and Brian 2002). The term geography featured as a descriptive heading in about half the HARS volumes, less often than astronomy (which was used to describe fully one-third of all HARS mémoires), general physics, anatomy, chemistry and botany but more frequently than algebra, acoustics and optics. But this still meant that only about 50 mémoires were defined as geography in this entire period, less than two percent of the total. Viewed in these simple terms, geography seems to have been even less significant for the scientific community of eighteenth-century Paris than it was among their contemporaries in London. This is rather perplexing conclusion when one considers the remarkable range of quintessentially geographical activities pioneered by the membership of the Paris Academy in this period. This was, after all, the institution of the Cassinis, Maupertuis, La Condamine and

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Clairaut, the directors of some of most celebrated exploratory expeditions and surveys of land and sea undertaken during the eighteenth century. The Academy was at the heart of the highly contentious geodetic debates about the earth’s shape and was responsible for the first really accurate, triangulated maps based on meticulously surveyed meridian lines and carefully measured lines of longitude and latitude. These were the Academy’s core activities and can reasonably be regarded as part of modern geography’s Enlightenment heritage. The problem for the modern historian of geography, however, is that these activities, including the preparation the Carte de France, the first really accurate national map and the monument to Enlightenment cartography, were more commonly defined at the time as astronomy rather than geography (Pelletier 2002). The four generations of the Cassini family who directed this mapping project regarded themselves as astronomers and were defined as such by their peers within the Academy. The maps they produced were seen as immensely valuable, culturally prestigious and politically important by-products of scientific measurements, calculations and experiments that were fundamentally astronomical. So what did geography mean within the Academy? Most of the mémoires defined as geography in the opening decades of the eighteenth century were exercises in historical geography that compared geographical descriptions in classic texts with the latest maps, the objective being to draw contrasts and parallels between the ancient and modern worlds. The leading advocate of this perspective was Guillaume Delisle, one of Academy’s team of astronomers but also a renowned commercial cartographer and map-seller who served as geography tutor at Court and became First Geographer to the King (Louis XV) in 1718 (Dawson 2000; see also Sponberg Pedley 2005). Insofar as geography had a discernible status at all in the early eighteenth-century French scientific community, it was regarded as an adjunct to history, a general educational subject quite distinct

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from the technical processes of measurement and calculation that were involved in exploration, survey, and mapping, all part of the hegemonic intellectual empire of astronomy. After 1730, however, geography began to be used more frequently as a descriptive heading, partly because new areas of practical scientific investigation, notably in regard to agriculture and water management, were allocated to this new category, but also because some existing scientific activities previously attributed to astronomy were redefined as geography. The decision to establish a new, permanent chair within the Academy dedicated to geography, the first modification of the 1699 constitution, reflected and sustained this development (Sturdy 1995: 372–4). Philippe Buache, sonin-law and heir to the aforementioned Delisle, was elected to the new position and presented a significant proportion of the mid-century geographical mémoires, all of which sought to underline the new subject’s scientific credentials and public value (Broc 1971; Lagarde 1985). His 1752 mémoire on physical geography, the first scientific discussion of the drainage basin as a basic geographical concept, was an ambitious attempt to explain the global configuration of mountain ranges and river valleys within a generalised geographical theory, a contribution celebrated by the Academy’s secretary as ‘opening a new career for geography’ within the firmament of modern science (Buache 1752: 124; see also Debarbieux 2008). Also important to the mid-century rise of geography was a ‘turf war’ that developed within the Academy in the 1730s between the all-powerful astronomers, led by Jacques Cassini, and a small group of influential Newtonian mathematicians, led by PierreLouis Moreau de Maupertuis. The details of this conflict, which focused on the impact of gravity on the shape of the earth, need not detain us but the eventual triumph of Maupertuis and his followers significantly diminished the previously unchecked authority of the astronomers and lent tacit support to other disciplines, including geography,

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that were challenging astronomy’s overblown authority (Terrall 2002; Safier 2008; Shank 2008). Maupertuis enthusiastically endorsed geography’s scientific value and public utility in his Élémens de Géographie (1740). The idea that geography was the most appropriate description for the science of terraqueous exploration, survey and mapping, as well the commercial analysis of newly discovered or recently reclaimed territories, was underlined by the new generation of learned societies established in other countries during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The Russian Academy of Sciences and Arts, initiated by Peter the Great just before his death in 1725, established a separate geography department to oversee its cartographic work on the recommendation of JosephNicolas Delisle, Guillaume’s younger brother and a fellow astronomer from the Paris Academy who was recruited to direct the Observatory in St Petersburg (Schulze 1985). Maupertuis, tempted from Paris by Frederick the Great to direct the re-organised Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1745, likewise insisted that geography should be recognised as a separate science of exploration, mapping, and the commercial exploitation of land and sea (Terrall 2002: 231–69). Similar arguments were advanced by Benjamin Franklin in his 1743 recommendations for the Philadelphia association that eventually evolved into the American Philosophical Society (Withers 2007: 216). Most of these institutions were transformed by the political upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Science moved steadily away from the Baconian ideal of knowledge as an integrated whole, overseen by a few unifying institutions. Learned societies fragmented after 1800 into a welter of specialised disciplinary associations, including those dedicated specifically to geography. These centrifugal forces were partly a consequence of the expanding size of the scientific community but the trend was reinforced by the demands of centralised, militarised and confrontational nation states for specialised scientific and technical knowledge.

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A PLACE OF ONE’S OWN: THE GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETIES Specialised geographical societies did not exist prior to the nineteenth century but it is possible to trace an earlier, proto-disciplinary institutional genealogy. In the early 1680s, the Franciscan cosmographer and cartographer Vincenzo Maria Coronelli established what is sometimes regarded as the world’s first geographical society, the Accademia Cosmografica degli Argonauti, in his native Venice. This mysterious organisation claimed 260 members by the mid-1690s, including JeanDominique Cassini, and was organised into colleges in Rome, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Paris and Moscow. Its primary function was to promote Coronelli’s commercial interests and capitalise on the reputation he had secured as the designer of two enormous globes, one terrestrial, the other celestial, commissioned by Louis XIV (Cosgrove 1999: 34–50). A century later, in 1785, Jean-Nicolas Buache de Neuville, who had three years earlier inherited the Academy of Sciences chair previously occupied by his uncle, Philippe Buache, sought to establish a geographical society in the French capital, an initiative that came to nought (Lejeune 1993: 21–2). Energised by this unsuccessful venture, a group of London scientists, soldiers and explorers led by Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, and James Rennell, the Chief Surveyor of the East India Company, established the Association for the Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa in 1788, a reflection of the widespread belief in the fabulous untapped potential of the continent lying to the south of Europe, though an initiative also linked to the intensifying debate about the future of the Atlantic slave trade (Gascoigne 1998; Lambert 2009). Over the next decades, the African Association sponsored several pioneering expeditions into the African interior, including those of Jean-Louis Burckhardt, Mungo Park, Hugh Clapperton and Alexander Gordon Laing (Withers 2004).

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Thirty-three years later, the world’s first geographical society, the Société de Géographie de Paris (SGP), held its inaugural séance in July 1821. Most of the 217 founder members were youthful veterans of the Napoleonic campaigns – well-educated, widely travelled men who had experienced at first hand the drama, speed and spectacle of the Revolution and the First Empire and were no doubt rather bored by the genteel civility of life in Restoration Paris. The French capital had long been a magnet for exiles and refugees and one-fifth of the SGP’s founder members were born outside France. Prominent among the exiles were Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian polymath and explorer who settled in Paris in 1808 after his celebrated journeys in Latin America, and Conrad Malte-Brun, the SGP’s first Secretary and an ardent republican turned Bonapartist who sought sanctuary in Paris in 1799 after criticising the monarchy in his native Denmark (Lejeune 1993; and more generally Godlewska 1999 and Staum 2000). The SGP sought to challenge the African Association by offering a 10,000 franc prize in 1824 to the first European to reach and return from the fabled city of Timbuctoo, most of the cash provided by government ministries. The prize was claimed four years later by a Frenchmen, René Caillié, a decision that sparked controversy when British commentators, led the redoubtable conservative journalist and diplomat John Barrow, argued that Caillié’s achievements were invalidated by his decision to travel incognito, disguised as a Muslim. According to Barrow, the real hero of Timbuctoo was the Scottish explorer Andrew Gordon Laing who had reached the city in advance of Caillié, as all sides fully acknowledged, only to be killed on the return journey. Unlike Caillié, Laing had worn European dress throughout his fateful journey, a decision that almost certainly cost him his life but which underlined his status as a gentlemen of honour and integrity, at least in the eyes of his British supporters (Heffernan 2001). Barrow was one of a group of British travellers and amateur scientists who planned to

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launch their own geographical society in London, inspired by the success of other disciplinary associations in the British capital, including the Linnean Society for natural history (1788), the Geological Society (1807), the Astronomical Society (1820), and the Zoological Society (1826) (Fleming 1998). Barrow’s hostility to the SGP was designed to discredit the French society and endorse his campaign for a more serious British equivalent, a task made more urgent by the foundation in April 1828 of a second continental geographical society, the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (GEB), at the instigation of the German cartographer Heinrich Berghaus with a foundation membership of 53, including von Humboldt and Carl Ritter, the new society’s inaugural president (see Lenz 1978; and more generally Tang 2008). The disingenuous and self-serving squabbles between British and French geographers about the nature and purpose of exploration in the early nineteenth century demonstrate the intensity of national rivalries, to be sure, but they also highlight geography’s questionable scientific status. If the discipline was defined as the science of exploration, what rules governed this activity? More importantly, how could such rules be fashioned into a formal scientific method? These were difficult questions because the veracity of any geographical description ultimately relied on the trustworthiness of the explorer. So long as the debates in the salons and lecture halls of the leading geographical societies hinged on which individuals possessed the moral and scientific authority to carry out the task of exploration, a decidedly non-scientific question, it was difficult to see how geography could be regarded as a legitimate science. This was certainly the view of the early champions of laboratory science, men such as Georges Cuvier, who insisted that all knowledge acquired in the field was inherently suspect because it was dependent on moral and social judgements about the observer. Geography could never aspire to the status of a real science, claimed Cuvier, because it possessed no replicable methodology and its findings could

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not be proven through experimentation (Outram 1984, 1999). This existential critique arose partly because of the nature of international disputes between rival geographical communities, which tended to focus on questions of integrity, morality, and trust, but it also provided a potentially unifying challenge that all geographical societies, regardless of their national prejudices, were obliged to confront. Ultimately, the geographical societies needed to demonstrate that knowledge acquired in the field was as scientifically valid as knowledge acquired through controlled experimentation in the laboratory. It remains a moot point whether geographers were ever able to answer this criticism satisfactorily, though the foundation in 1830 of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London provided a major new focus for this campaign (Driver 2001: 24–48). With an initial fellowship of 460, the RGS was already larger than the Paris and Berlin societies combined. Within a year, it had absorbed the African Association, the Palestine Association (established in 1804 to encourage the exploration and mapping of the Holy Land) and the Raleigh Club (created in 1826 as a dining club whose members claimed collectively to visited all parts of the known world). By 1840, the RGS had become the unrivalled centre of exploratory expertise in the British capital. Early fellows included ambitious, self-made men whose reputations had been forged in the Royal Navy, the East India Company and government service, including Barrow, John Franklin (the Arctic explorer and naval officer), Francis Beaufort (the naval hydrographer) and Robert Brown (the pioneering Australian explorer and botanist). The size and pre-eminence of the RGS increased steadily over subsequent decades. By 1850, it had nearly 800 fellows and was twice the size of the Berlin society and eight times as large as the Paris society where the membership had slumped. Two decades later, there were 2,400 RGS fellows, including some of the most prominent natural sciences from across the British Empire. The young Charles Darwin was elected on his return from

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the voyages of the Beagle in 1838. The dominant individual was Sir Roderick Murchison, the Society’s president for more than 16 years in three separate periods from the mid-1840s to the early 1870s. A talented geologist, publicist and entrepreneur, Murchison advocated geographical exploration as a precursor to British commercial and military expansion throughout Asia and Africa (Stafford 1989). Other geographical societies offered mainly post hoc awards and medals for successfully completed voyages but the RGS used its substantial resources to sponsor exploration in advance by providing money, setting precise scientific objectives, lending equipment and arbitrating on ensuing disputes. The society developed one of the world’s largest private map collections and published general advice through its Hints to Travellers from 1854, a largely unconvincing attempt to establish systematic scientific ground rules for exploration (Driver 2001: 49–67). The success of the RGS reflected the strength of British natural sciences, the wealth of the country’s upper middle classes from which the bulk of the fellowship was drawn, and the confidence that a large navy and overseas empire provided for prospective British explorers (Stoddart 1986: 59–76). Skilfully exploiting a vicarious national passion for muscular ‘heroism’ in exotic places, cultivated by a highly competitive British press, the RGS became firmly associated in the public mind with the image of the intrepid explorer, selflessly pitting himself against the elements and hostile ‘natives’ in the remotest regions of the earth for the greater glory of science and nation. The image of the explorer was resolutely masculine, to be sure, and this largely explains why the RGS remained a male preserve until the eve of World War One, when the fellowship topped 5,000, even overturning an initial decision to admit women in the early 1890s, an exclusivity not replicated in continental Europe where several geographical societies, including the SGP, had elected female members from the early 1850s (Bell and McEwan 1996; and more generally Maddrell 2009).

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The societies in Paris and Berlin also grew steadily in size and influence after 1850, the former under the leadership of the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat, Napoleon III’s Naval and Colonial Minister; the latter directed by Heinrich Barth, the leading German explorer of Africa. Several new societies also sprang up in other European cities including Vienna (1856) and Rome (1867), part of an emerging global network that included associations in Mexico (1833) and New York (1851). The American societies focused on the vast unexplored regions of their own continent, north and south, but Africa loomed especially large in the mid-nineteenth-century European geographical imagination, notably within the RGS, the institution at the heart of the many controversies about the configuration of the continent’s interior associated with explorers such as Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley (Driver 2001: 117–45). By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many larger geographical societies began to shift their attention towards the unexplored regions of central Asia, the polar ice caps and the vertical challenges of high mountain ascents in the Himalayas, an especially noticeable trend in the RGS under the charismatic direction of Sir Clements Markham and later Lord Curzon, the latter also facilitating the society’s transfer to its impressive premises in Kensington Gore on the eve of World War One from its former, much smaller headquarters on Savile Row. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and the subsequent shift in the European balance of power, gave a major boost to geography. Aggressive extra-European colonial expansion was identified as one way to reassert a threatened or vulnerable national power within Europe. The later decades of the nineteenth century were characterised by a surge of colonial expansion in many parts of the world, most notably in Africa, as each imperial power sought comparative advantage over its enemies, both real and imagined. This competitive land grab emphasised the practical utility of geography and cartography. By the

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end of the nineteenth century, the ‘high-water mark’ of European imperial expansion, geography had become ‘unquestionably the queen of all imperial sciences … inseparable from the domain of official and unofficial state knowledge’ (Richards 1993: 13). There were over 120 geographical societies by 1900, the great majority in Europe, and the subject had also re-established itself within the new nineteenth-century general scientific organisations (Withers et al. 2006, 2008). Nineteen new geographical societies were established in the later years of the nineteenth century in German cities, including the former French towns of Metz (1878) and Strasbourg (1897), ceded to the Reich in 1871. There were 27 French societies by 1900, one in virtually every major city and no fewer than four in French Algeria. Several provincial French societies focused on commercial geography and sought to encourage trading links with different parts of the French overseas empire (Schneider 1990). At this point, fully onethird of the world’s geographers were based in France. The RGS in London remained the largest and wealthiest geographical society in the world, and only a handful of other geographical associations were established elsewhere in the UK, the most important being the Manchester and Royal Scottish Geographical Societies, both dating from 1884 (MacKenzie 1995). These organisations represented the intellectual, commercial and political interests of the cities and nations in which they were located. They were in competition with each other and yet the expanding global network of associations also began to function as an integrated, international disciplinary system, publishing and exchanging journals and reports, developing substantial collections of maps, artefacts and photographs, and eventually pooling resources and expertise through international conferences and collaborative ventures under the auspices of the International Geographical Congress, inaugurated in Antwerp in 1871, and the precursor of the modern International Geographical

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Union which began in 1922 (Robic et al. 1996). The late nineteenth-century internationalisation of geography was a hesitant and uneven process, one that is no means complete even today. It reflected a common realisation that geography’s traditional focus on exploration and travel was an inadequate justification for the continued prosecution of the discipline as a socially and politically useful science. From the 1870s, most geographical societies began to alter the focus on their activities to include the promotion of the so-called ‘new geography’ as a school and university subject worthy of inclusion in reformed educational programmes being designed in all major countries to cultivate patriotic civic identities. By the 1880s, most major geographical societies were providing expertise, resources and funds to establish new chairs of geography in universities, develop new teaching programmes for secondary schools, and convince political leaders that an adequate knowledge of local, regional, national and imperial geographies was essential for any modern, patriotic citizen (Stoddart 1986: 59–127; Wise 1986). The emphasis on geography as a civic, educational subject reflected a wider debate about the discipline’s future in the twentieth century. In 1904, the British geographer Halford Mackinder delivered a famous lecture at the RGS in which he argued that the age of exploration heralded four centuries earlier by the voyages of discovery and circumnavigation undertaken by Columbus and his peers was now at an end. The modern imperial frontiers had closed and the last unclaimed territories had been acquired by one or other of the major powers. Global closure had worrying geopolitical implications, particularly for a naval power like Britain with a maritime empire scattered around the world, argued Mackinder, but it also posed a serious challenge to the idea of geography as the science of exploration and purposeful travel. The twentieth century would produce a new and potentially unstable political order, predicted Mackinder, and

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this would require a new kind of geography, one that would go beyond exploration and mapping to embrace serious scientific research on the optimum strategies for the systematic economic, social and political development of territory, whilst simultaneously functioning in an educational capacity to establish an active, engaged and patriotic civil society (Kearns 2009). This vision of geography as a integrative discipline, uniting the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities, was strongly endorsed during and after World War One when the resources and personnel of several leading geographical societies, including the RGS, the SGP, the GEB and the AGS, were mobilised by their respective national governments to provide much-needed skills and research expertise (Heffernan 2000). By the inter-war period, the traditional geographical societies were finding it difficult to accommodate divergent geographical perspectives. A process of internal institutional fragmentation ensued in most countries which spelt the end for many of the smaller, more traditional geographical societies. A more complex network of associations emerged, based on three distinct kinds of society that have since co-existed, generally amicably and with overlapping memberships, though orientated towards different constituencies. The surviving older societies have continued to emphasise amateur travel and exploration, increasingly framed in terms of education, nature conservation and a wider environmentalism. Specialised associations of geography school teachers began to appear in the later years of the nineteenth century, the Geographical Association (GA) in the UK, established in 1891, being one of the largest and most successful examples. The discipline’s representatives in higher education also embarked on a path towards independence, the academic geographers in US universities establishing their own specialist organisation, the Association of American Geographers (AAG), as early as 1904. Similar developments took place in other countries, includ-

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ing the UK where university geographers created a separate organisation, the Institute of British Geographers (IBG), in 1933. The UK provides an interesting exception to this general trend, however, because the RGS and IBG decided to merge in the 1995, following a lengthy and at times fractious debate. This ultimately successful manoeuvre created a reinvigorated new RGS-IBG that remains one of the world’s largest and most influential geographical societies, despite ongoing tensions between the exploratory and academic–educational constituencies within the fellowship.

CONCLUSION The learned societies that have encompassed or represented the discipline of geography since the seventeenth century reveal many of the subject’s strengths and weaknesses through its long history. The existing network of geographical societies reflects a twentieth-century fragmentation in which three constituencies – amateur explorers, travellers and environmentalists; secondary level teaching professionals; and academic researchers in higher education – each promote different versions of the discipline. These differing perspectives, which are for the most part mutually sustaining rather than contradictory, are complicated by other, more paradoxical divisions within geography’s institutional architecture. Although geography is, by definition, an expansive, global project, concerned to encompass and represent the environments and inhabitants of all parts of the world, its institutions remain sharply divided along national and linguistic lines, despite the efforts of the international associations. Other disciplines, most obviously the mathematical sciences, have operated very effectively at the international level, partly because they draw on a common conceptual language equally accessible to all practitioners, but geography still functions largely at the national scale institutionally

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and within discrete, sometimes mutually antagonistic linguistic arenas. The intensifying global hegemony of English-speaking geography manifestly does not encompass all possible perspectives and it can plausibly be argued that geography is today less international in terms of its institutions and less multilingual in terms of its debates and publications than it was a century ago, a worrying conclusion for the discipline’s future potential as an inclusive, innovative science.

NOTE 1 According to Sorrenson’s analysis, geography was part of a more general field of ‘mixed mathematics’, which also included astronomy, mechanics and optics, and accounted for 31 percent of the published output of this category. As ‘mixed mathematics’ accounted for 21 percent of the Royal Society’s total published output in this period, it follows that geography represented seven per cent overall.

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Cosgrove, Denis (1999) ‘Global illumination and enlightenment in the geographies of Vincenzo Coronelli and Athanasius Kircher’ in David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers (eds), Geography and Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 33–66. Crosland, Maurice (1992) Science under Control: The French Academy of Sciences 1795–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daston, Lorraine (1991) The ideal and the reality of the Republic of Letters, Science in Context 2: 367–386. Daston, Lorraine (1992) ‘Classifications of knowledge in the age of Louis XIV’ in David Lee Rubin (ed), Sun King: The Ascendancy of French Culture during the Reign of Louis XIV. Washington DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, pp. 207–220. Dawson, Nelson-Martin (2000) L’Atelier Delisle: l‘Amérique du Nord sur la table à dessin. Sillery, Québec: Les Éditions du Septentrion. Dear, Peter (2001) Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambition 1500–1700. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Debarbieux, Bernard (2008) ‘The mountains between corporeal experience and pure rationality: the contradictory theories of Philippe Buache and Alexander von Humboldt’ in Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora (eds), High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science. London: I.B. Tauris. Demeulenaere-Douyère, Christiane and Brian, Eric (eds) (2002) Règlement, usages et science dans la France de l‘absolutisme à l‘occasion du troisième centenaire du règlement instituant l’Académie Royale des Sciences (26 janvier 1699). Paris: Éditions Tec & Doc. Driver, Felix (2001) Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell. Elliott, Paul (2009) The Derby Philosophers: Science and Culture in British Urban Society, 1700–1850. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fleming, Fergus (1998) Barrow’s Boys. London: Granta. Gascoigne, John (1992) The historical demography of the scientific community, 1450–1900, Social Studies of Science, 22: 545–573. Gascoigne, John (1995) ‘The eighteenth-century scientific community: a prosopographical study’, Social Studies of Science, 25: 575–581. Gascoigne, John (1998) Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gillispie, Charles Coulston (1980) Science and Polity in France at the end of the Old Regime. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Lux, David S. and Cook, Harold J. (1998) Closed circles and open networks? Communicating at a distance during the Scientific Revolution, History of Science 36: 179–211. MacKenzie, John (1995) ‘The provincial geographical societies in Britain, 1884–1914’ in Morag Bell, Robin Butlin and Michael Heffernan (eds), Geography and Imperialism 1820–1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 93–124. Madrell, Avril (2009) Complex Locations: Women’s Geographical Work in the UK, 1850–1970. Oxford: Blackwell. Mayhew, Robert (2005) Mapping science’s imagined community: geography as a Republic of Letters, 1600–1800, British Journal for the History of Science 38: 73–92. McClellan, James E. (1981) ‘The Académie Royale des Sciences, 1699–1793: a statistical portrait’, Isis, 72: 541–567. McClellan, James E. (1985) Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press. McClellan, James E. (2001) ‘The mémoires of the Académie Royale des Sciences, 1699–1790: a statistical overview’ in Robert Halleux, James E. McClellan, Daniella Berrieu, and Geneviève Xhayet (eds), Les publications de l’Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris (1666–1793): Tome II – Étude statistique; Index généraux. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, pp. 7–36. McClellan, James E. (2003) ‘Specialist control: the publications committee of the Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris) 1700–1793’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 93: 3. Oleson, Alexandra and Brown, Sanborn C. (eds) (1976) The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic: American Scientific and Learned Societies from Colonial Times to the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Outram, Dorinda (1983) ‘The ordeal of vocation: the Paris Academy of Sciences and the Terror, 1793–95’, History of Science, 21: 257–273. Outram, Dorinda (1984) Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science and Authority in Post Revolutionary France. London: Macmillan. Outram, Dorinda (1999) ‘On being Perseus: new knowledge, dislocation, and Enlightenment exploration’ in David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers (eds), Geography and Enlightenment. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 281–294 Pelletier, Monique (2002) Les cartes de Cassini: la science au service de l’État et des régions. Paris: Éditions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques.

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Raj, Kapil (2007) Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan. Richards, Thomas (1993) The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London: Verso. Robic, Marie-Claire, Briend, Anne-Marie and Rössler, Mechtild (eds) (1996) Géographes face au monde: l’Union Géographique Internationale et les Congrès Internationaux de Géographie. Paris: L’Harmatten. Roche, Daniel (1978) Le siècle de lumières en province: Académies et Académiciens provinciaux, 1680– 1789, 2 vols. Paris: Mouton. Safier, Neil (2008) Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schneider, William H. (1990) ‘Geographical reform and municipal imperialism in France, 1870–1880’ in John Mackenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 90–117. Schulze, Ludmilla (1985) ‘The Russification of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and Arts in the eighteenth century’, British Journal for the History of Science, 18: 305–335. Shank, John Bennett (2008) The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shapin, Steven (1996) The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sorrenson, Richard (1996) ‘Towards a history of the Royal Society in the eighteenth century’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 50: 29–46. Sorrenson, Richard (ed.) (1999) ‘Did the Royal Society matter in the eighteenth century?’, British Journal for the History of Science, Special Issue, 32: 130–221. Spary, Emma (2000) Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sponberg Pedley, Mary (2005) The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stafford, Robert, A. (1989) Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Staum, Martin (2000) ‘The Paris Geographical Society constructs the “other”, 1821–1850’, Journal of Historical Geography, 26: 222–238. Stewart, Larry (1992) The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Stoddart, David R. (1986) On Geography and Its History. Oxford: Blackwell. Stroup, Alice (1987) ‘Royal funding of the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences during the 1690s’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 77: 4. Stroup, Alice (1990) A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at the Seventeenth Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sturdy, David J. (1995) Science and Social Status: The Members of the Académie des Sciences, 1666–1750. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Tang, Chenxi (2008) The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Taylor, Peter J, Hoyler, Michael and Evans, David M. (2008) A geo-historical study of the “rise of modern science”: mapping scientific practice through urban networks 1500–1900, Minerva 46: 391–410. Terrall, Mary (2002) The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences of the Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Uglow, Jenny (2002) The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future. London: Faber and Faber.

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9 Geographical Information Systems Laboratory Michael F. Goodchild

INTRODUCTION Geographical information systems (GIS) have evolved over the past four decades to provide a unique lens on the Earth’s surface and nearsurface – a lens that is increasingly important in a wide range of tasks associated with geographical information, from simple inventory and map-making to analysis, modeling and spatial decision support. The power of the lens has grown steadily as its functionality, and the methods of representation that underlie it, have grown more and more sophisticated. GIS has become an indispensable tool in the geographical kit, as well as in the broader set of disciplines whose domain covers the surface and near-surface of the Earth. This essay begins with a review of the evolution and current status of GIS, and the nature of the specific perspective that it provides. GIS was born at an early stage in the development of computers, at a time when the costs of computing were far higher than they are now, when the most powerful computers had no more power than today’s laptop, and when there were no electronic networks to connect computers and users.

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In today’s world of the Internet, wireless connections, and the World Wide Web the power and scope of digital geographical information has expanded enormously, far outstripping any earlier conception of GIS and bringing the ideas and tools of GIS within everyday reach of anyone on the enabled side of the digital divide. Exactly what part of this domain should still be termed GIS is debatable, and several other terms are in current use, perhaps the most popular of which is the adjective geospatial. In this essay I will take a broad view, and equate GIS with systems designed for the acquisition, compilation, analysis, storage and display of geographical information. Thus the later sections describe this much larger world, and the ways in which it complements and builds on the earlier, limited view of the GIS lens.

GIS AS A LENS: THE EARLY YEARS The paper map and its relatives the atlas and the globe have long played a key role in expressing humanity’s knowledge of the

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geographical space it calls home. Maps are informative, playing a vital role in way-finding, and are also often decorative. As ways of storing information they are remarkably efficient, since it would take many pages of text or speech to express the contents of a single topographical map with comparable precision. Maps are also effective devices for answering simple queries of the form ‘What is at x?’ or ‘Where is z?’ or ‘How do I get from x1 to x2?’ Nevertheless maps are distinctly limited in their ability to express geographical knowledge, in several ways. First, their emphasis on linking properties z to locations x addresses only one form of geographical knowledge, about the specific properties of places, knowledge that is often termed idiographic. However many geographers, and the academy in general, place much greater value on nomothetic knowledge, or knowledge that is abstracted from space and time and thus true everywhere at all times. Newton’s Laws of Motion would be of little value, for example, if they applied only on Tuesdays and only in Belgium. In this context, the descriptive nature of maps is both their strength and their weakness. Second, the traditional process of mapmaking, involving field observation, compilation, drafting, printing and distribution, is both time-consuming and expensive. Only national governments and large corporations have traditionally been able to afford the very high initial costs of establishing a map-making enterprise, with its stereoplotters, drafting tables, large-format cameras and highly trained staff. To justify these costs, it has been important to ensure that maps, once printed, are of long-lasting value, in as many applications as possible. Thus maps have tended to emphasize the relatively static and dispersed aspects of the Earth’s surface, such as its topography, climate, rivers, roads and buildings, rather than its more transitory aspects of weather, events and human movements, and the high-density and dynamic phenomena of urban environments (Goodchild 1988). Third, since maps are designed to be used by all it is essential that

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their methods of representation be well-defined and that the techniques used be replicable. There is no room in this process for the subjective; instead, the contents of maps tend to be viewed in the same way as one would view measurements of temperature or voltage. Finally, maps are necessarily of limited accuracy, since symbols must be of finite size and a paper substrate is not perfectly stable. GIS owes its origin to a very simple failure of maps: the difficulty of making accurate measurements of such properties as length or area from a paper document. While a map is an effective storehouse of some kinds of geographical knowledge, it is nevertheless difficult to analyze that knowledge in order to address certain types of question. For example, it is possible to measure the length of a feature such as a river or the area of a feature such as a lake using mechanical devices applied to a map, but the process is tedious, time-consuming and unreliable. In the mid1960s the Government of Canada faced the task of obtaining accurate estimates of land area from a series of tens of thousands of maps produced by the Canada Land Inventory. Such estimates were intended to be the main product of the inventory, but the task was complicated by the need to overlay pairs of maps. For example, to estimate the amount of land that was both currently forest and suitable for agriculture one would have to overlay the forest cover and soil inventory maps, ensuring a perfect alignment, before measuring the areas of each patch of land with the requisite characteristics. The process was clearly going to be enormously expensive given the thousands of maps and tabulations involved and the small size of many of the patches. The Canada Geographic Information System was developed directly in response to this need, as a computer-based machine for producing statistical summaries from maps. If the maps could be computerized, it was argued, then areas could be calculated and summed at electronic speed – no matter that the devices to reduce the maps to digital form did not exist, or the strategies for reducing

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the contents of the maps to the binary language of the digital computer, or the algorithms for performing the calculations. All of these problems were successfully solved by contractors, many of the key inventions and breakthroughs in GIS development were made, and by the early 1970s the system was in operation. The task of measuring area from maps is challenging, but scarcely worth the attention that was later lavished on GIS. But during the 1970s a series of parallel developments converged to the realization that it was possible to build a single software package that would eventually be capable of performing almost any conceivable operation on any kind of mapped information. Notable among these developments were efforts to build large integrated databases of the many kinds of map data needed by city government; the efforts of the US Bureau of the Census to modernize its data collection and tabulation; the work of such landscape architects as Ian McHarg (1971) to place planning on a scientific, multidisciplinary basis; and the supply of Earth images from satellites that began with the Landsat program. The first commercial GIS software products appeared around 1980, and by the end of that decade a viable software industry was in place. Functions have been added steadily, and GIS is now a standard part of the toolkit of anyone working with data about the surface and nearsurface of the Earth. GIS has become an indispensable tool in research, in the management of distributed resources by utility companies, in the operations of local government and in a host of other applications. In effect, it liberates the map as the traditional storehouse of geographical knowledge by enabling a host of queries and analyses. However these early conceptualizations of GIS provided a lens that delivered an extremely limited view of the Earth’s surface. Although GIS was often justified on the grounds that different properties of a place, such as topography and hydrography, could be readily integrated, such properties tended to be separated into different layers of representation, making it difficult to see the

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multidimensional nature of geographical variation and the full geographical context of places. Functions were largely analytic: precise and powerful, but able to answer only very limited, well-formed queries, such as ‘Tell me the area of this lake,’ or ‘Find for me the optimum location for a new grocery store using this specified criterion.’ Nevertheless GIS clearly satisfied many of the expectations of geographical analysis, and by the 1990s had become a powerful analytic engine, and the platform of choice for quantitatively minded geographers. Comparisons were made to statistics, and the role of statistical packages in implementing statistical methods, and a number of texts appeared describing the analytic power of GIS (Burrough 1986). In the late 1980s the discipline of cartography was taken in a new and in many ways exciting direction by the work of Brian Harley (2002), who argued that maps could be seen as text and deconstructed to reveal the agendas of their makers – in short, that maps were social constructions. GIS users, on the other hand, could be portrayed as somewhat blindly accepting those same maps as storehouses of scientific truth, as the input for complex analytic procedures. Within a few years a substantial critique of GIS had emerged, as critical social theorists turned their attention to what they saw as the somewhat naïve practices of GIS. The collection of essays edited by Pickles (1995) is perhaps the best compilation of this work. Other lines of argument quickly surfaced: GIS failed to acknowledge the importance of its military roots (Smith 1992); its representations were simplistic and missed much of what was important to our understanding of the world; and its spatial detail and power to link information based on common location presented a significant threat to personal privacy (Curry 1998).

IMPROVING THE LENS The growth of critical GIS, along with the recognition that many aspects of early GIS

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were limited and problematic, and advances being made in computer science, led during the 1990s and the early years of this century to a greatly improved GIS, and to a rich research agenda that held the seeds of future improvements. First, the set of representations has expanded dramatically, and continues to do so, making the GIS database a much more effective storehouse by extending the types of geographical knowledge that it can handle. While early GIS focused on the contents of maps, and thus on a two-dimensional, static view of the world that could be separated into thematic layers, today’s GIS has moved substantially beyond the map metaphor, to embrace types of geographical information that have never been mapped or associated with maps. The principles known as objectoriented database design (Zeiler 1999; Arctur and Zeiler 2004), developed in computer science and widely adopted by the computing industry, began to influence GIS in the early 1990s, and by 2000 had been implemented in the leading software products. They allowed designs to be developed graphically, dealt with the hierarchical relationships that exist between many geographical features, such as counties and states, and addressed the specialization and generalization processes that are so common in cartography. Standard templates, or data models, have been developed in many areas of GIS application, allowing users to standardize database designs and associated terminology. The concept of layers that received so much critical attention has been largely replaced by a much more fluid concept of feature classes. Secondly, a rich area for research and development emerged around the concept of uncertainty, based on the realization that no GIS representation could ever be perfect, and no position on the Earth’s surface could ever be perfectly known (Zhang and Goodchild 2002). The classification schemes used by the makers of soil, land cover and geologic maps are inherently vague, such that two such map-makers will always produce somewhat different maps of the same area. Yet GIS was increasingly popular among

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regulatory agencies because of the apparent replicability of its analytic processes. GIS made it easy to use the contents of maps for purposes for which they were never intended, exposing their users to expensive lawsuits. Critical social theorists pointed out that a technology that presented the boundaries between distinctly classified areas as precise and infinitely thin was ignoring the obvious vagueness and uncertainty inherent in classification – that GIS had too willingly embraced simplistic Boolean classification. Today information on data quality is much more widely available, representations of vagueness are widely employed, and it is no longer usual for analyses to be presented without any discussion of uncertainty. Thirdly, there was a growing acceptance that the early model of a GIS populated with scientific truth and placed in the hands of altruistic government decision makers was far out of line with social reality. Efforts were made to allow for multiple criteria, reflecting the distinct viewpoints of different stakeholders in a decision, by implementing a range of methods such as the Analytical Hierarchy Process (Saaty and Alexander 1989) as GIS functions. Much interest was expressed in a completely redesigned GIS, termed GIS/2, that would be capable of representing individual viewpoints rather than a single God’s-eye view. A new subdiscipline termed public-participation GIS (Craig et al. 2002) captured the imagination of planners and policy specialists, and remains a lively research area. It was abundantly clear from these and related arguments that there was more to GIS than a mere tool – that the use of the tool raised questions of a fundamental nature that were all too easily overpowered by the need to manipulate a complex user interface. They included scale, and related concepts of generalization and inferential fallacy; uncertainty, and the statistical modeling that allows the effects of uncertainty to be analyzed; the social context of GIS, and its role as a social construction; and the extension of representations to include a more complete range of forms of geographical knowledge.

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More traditionally, they included the knowledge accumulated in the disciplines of cartography, photogrammetry, surveying and geodesy, each of which is essential to the successful operation of GIS. Various terms emerged to describe this set of issues; perhaps the most successful of these at the international level has been geographic information science (GIScience; Duckham et al. 2003). In addition to the more traditional disciplines, it also draws on work in spatial statistics (uncertainty), spatial cognition (representation and user-interface design), and spatial databases that is housed in a number of other disciplines. GIScience can be defined as the science behind the systems, or the body of scientific knowledge that guides the design of the systems and is implemented by them. GIScience is now reflected in the names of a number of journals, conference series, degree programs and even academic departments.

BROADENING THE LIMITS OF GIS GIS has always been seen as just one of a number of technologies associated with geographical information. Remote sensing, dating from the 1970s but echoing much earlier work in aerial photography, has evolved into a very rich and profligate source of data, supplied by a mix of satellites, aircraft and unmanned drones. Some of these systems are sponsored by government agencies, such as NASA, while others are commercial, and even developing countries such as China and India now have significant remote-sensing programs. Three properties serve to differentiate imaging sensors: their spatial resolution, or the degree of detail with which variation across the Earth’s surface is captured; their temporal resolution, or the frequency with which a sensor images any part of the Earth’s surface; and their spectral resolution, or the degree to which the electromagnetic spectrum is partitioned by the sensor. While most

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sensors are passive, registering radiation emanating from the surface such as reflected sunlight, others are active, sending pulses of radiation to the surface and measuring response. In the latter category are LiDAR sensors (Light Detection And Ranging) which are now widely used to create detailed records of three-dimensional structures and topography. Some sensors are designed to detect specific properties of the Earth’s surface or atmosphere, such as green vegetation or ocean temperature, while others are designed for more general mapping purposes. In the latter category are an increasing number of sensors mapping the Earth from space at spatial resolutions finer than 1 meter. Remote sensing now provides much of the raw information needed by the GIS enterprise. A wide range of properties, from rainfall to population density, can be inferred from the outputs of various sensors – in the case of population density, for example, interesting work using the night-time illumination of the Earth’s surface has shown that it is possible to derive reliable estimates of the distribution of population density within countries from this source. Nevertheless there will always be important properties that cannot be reliably derived from imagery, including the names of places; and properties that can only be estimated with unacceptably low levels of accuracy, such as average income or ethnicity. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is also commonly lumped with GIS and remote sensing as an important geographical information technology. Based on a constellation of Earth-orbiting satellites, each of which follows a known orbit and emits precisely timed signals, GPS allows position to be determined to better than 10 meters with simple, inexpensive devices (and to much greater accuracy with more expensive devices). GPS receivers can be incorporated into mobile phones, laptops, and even wristwatches, and can be used to track moving objects, including animals and people. It has revolutionized traditional practices in surveying and map-making, and has become indispensable in fieldwork.

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Early GIS was motivated by the need for an efficient set of tools that could aid researchers and others in manipulating and analyzing a body of geographical knowledge. Like many other computer applications, it tended to be used when tasks were too tedious, expensive, inaccurate or time-consuming to perform by hand. To a geographer, a GIS provided a powerful lens on the geographical world that was comparable to the telescope’s role in astronomy – Abler (1987) called GIS ‘simultaneously the microscope, telescope and Xerox machine of geographical analysis and synthesis’. But in the early 1990s the popularization of the Internet and the World Wide Web had a profound effect on this paradigm. Suddenly a means was available to share both the lens and the knowledge base, and to communicate the insights they provided. By 1994, websites had been developed that offered simple maps, and within a few years it became common to use sites such as Mapquest to obtain both maps and driving directions. By the early 1990s it had become clear that traditional arrangements for the production of the geographical knowledge base were not sustainable – that governments were no longer willing to absorb the everincreasing costs of compiling and publishing authoritative maps. Instead, the future would be dominated by a patchwork of local producers, sharing their outputs through a complex network, and orchestrated by national standards. In the United States the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI; National Research Council, 1993) emerged as an umbrella term that encompasses the producers, users, networks, software, hardware and standards that together comprise this new order. Similar spatial data infrastructures have been developed in many countries, and efforts continue at the global level to integrate them. All of this has profoundly impacted the world of GIS. Instead of a GIS being regarded as a lens or even as an intelligent personal assistant – a butler perhaps – the Internet has allowed it to evolve towards a medium for the communication of geographical knowledge.

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In the extreme this might be interpreted as the communication of all that is known about the planet (Sui and Goodchild 2001). Massive repositories of digital geographical information have been developed, known as data warehouses or digital libraries, with the necessary mechanisms that allow users to search, assess and retrieve data sets. Today, the state of development in this area in the United States is perhaps best represented by the Geospatial One-Stop (Goodchild et al. 2007), an effort by the Bush administration to provide a single point of entry into the world of online geographical information. Through a single portal, it allows users to search over the resources of more than 1,000 sites and tens of thousands of data sets. Data may be downloaded, or viewed directly through simple web browsers. Similar efforts exist in many national and local agencies (human nature being what it is, there will always be more than one ‘one-stop’). Mapquest was perhaps the first example of a trend that has accelerated recently: the offering of GIS functions as web-based services, obviating the need for users to install and operate their own complex software. Instead of a personal GIS operating on a personal database, Mapquest allows anyone to send the key parameters of a search for driving directions – an origin and a destination as street addresses – and to obtain directions in return. Today, GIS services are available from a multitude of websites, encompassing virtually any function traditionally performed by a GIS. The term service-oriented architecture is the currently fashionable way of referring to this phenomenon, which in essence allows anyone with a web browser to become a GIS user. In summary, by the early years of the current century GIS had evolved from a desktop application akin to a statistical package or word processor into a complex set of arrangements for the acquisition, compilation, storage, analysis and display of geographical information, based on a range of technologies. Its functions could be installed at the user’s desktop, or obtained from numerous

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websites. Arrangements for the production of data had evolved from a radial system centered on massive investment by national governments into a complex network of producers and users, sustained by a collection of standards. Data continued to be drawn from maps, but augmented by massive flows from Earth-observing satellites and from field measurements with GPS. The number of trained GIS experts was on the order of 100,000 worldwide, each of them having taken courses at the post-secondary level. GIS remains limited, however, in its ability to act as a storehouse for all of geographical knowledge. While advances have been made and it is possible and even routine to represent uncertainty, alternative perspectives, and the kinds of qualitative knowledge expressed as georeferenced images, text, audio or video, there will always be limits to the kinds of knowledge that can be expressed in the limited, binary, and formal world of a digital store.

DEMOCRATIZATION In early 1998 then-Vice-President Al Gore distributed the content of a speech that had been intended for delivery at the opening of the California Science Center in Los Angeles on the subject of Digital Earth, a term he had coined earlier in a 1992 book (Gore 1992). The speech describes a future vision for access to geographical information: Imagine, for example, a young child going to a Digital Earth exhibit at a local museum. After donning a head-mounted display, she sees Earth as it appears from space. Using a data glove, she zooms in, using higher and higher levels of resolution, to see continents, then regions, countries, cities, and finally individual houses, trees, and other natural and man-made objects. Having found an area of the planet she is interested in exploring, she takes the equivalent of a ‘magic carpet ride’ through a 3-D visualization of the terrain. Gore 1992.

At the time the concept of virtual environments implemented through head-mounted

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displays was well known, but the idea of accessing geographical information down to spatial resolutions of 1 meter or finer seemed far beyond then-current capabilities. There are, after all, 5 × 1012 square meters of Earth surface, and dynamic three-dimensional display was still an expensive option. Nevertheless the Clinton Administration pursued the idea at some length, establishing an office in NASA and encouraging the development of Digital Earth prototypes. By 2001 a small group of inspired developers working under contract had produced Earthviewer, a software package that allowed an online user to display and manipulate a representation of the globe, to zoom down to resolutions as fine as 1 meter, and to create Gore’s ‘magic carpet ride’, a function commonly termed a fly-by. Earthviewer required a sophisticated graphics capability, but by 2005 this had become standard in PCs. In 2005 Google acquired Earthviewer, rebranded it, redesigned its look and feel, and released it as Google Earth. Google Earth falls somewhat short of the Gore vision in several respects. It is implemented as a standard application rather than a virtual environment, in which the screen provides a two-dimensional window on a three-dimensional world. Gore referred in the speech to being able to travel into the past, to explore representations of historic worlds, and while many types of historic data are available for viewing from third parties, the imagery provided by Google is more or less current (it may be difficult to discover the precise date on which any part of the imagery coverage was acquired). Gore also referred to simulations of future worlds. However, a central part of the Gore vision – the ability of average citizens to access information about the Earth – is certainly made compellingly real. Perhaps the most significant achievement of Google Earth, and of the many services that have since followed in its footsteps, is its user interface design. Unlike traditional GIS, with its need for extensive training at an advanced level, the interface of Google Earth

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can be mastered by a child of ten in ten minutes. While fly-by was often reserved as an end-of-course treat, its generation in Google Earth is almost trivially easy. All of the complications of map projections disappear in an environment that presents the Earth’s surface as curved, and difficult concepts such as scale are treated using simple metaphors. I have argued that Google Earth represents the democratization of GIS (Butler 2006) – an opening up of the Pandora’s Box to the average citizen, and an opportunity for the basic ideas of digital geographical information to become broadly familiar to all. The lens of a virtual globe such as Google Earth is fundamentally different from that of the traditional GIS. Instead of emphasizing precise and powerful analysis, these systems achieve their power through visual representation, with a base layer of imagery warped onto topography, on which features of interest can be superimposed. The spatial context of features is always visible, whereas it is often lost in GIS displays. I find Google Earth a powerful complement to GIS, allowing patterns and anomalies detected in GIS to be examined in spatial context. For example, Figure 9.1 shows a GISgenerated map of Milwaukee, showing percent black by census tract, as reported by the 1990 US census. Standard tools in GIS allow the distribution to be summarized and compared to the distribution of the population as a whole. Thus it is clear that the black population is strongly clustered, in a pattern that extends from downtown to the northwest. But there is also evidence of a remarkable outlier, and statistical tests available in GIS allow the significance of the outlier to be tested. But the broader context is missing in this analysis based largely on a single variable. What historic events explain the pattern, and why the anomaly? Figure 9.2 shows the Google Earth coverage of the area of the anomalous tract. The population of the tract is a mere 332, far lower than the norm, and it is clear from the coverage that the tract is occupied not by residential land use but by a variety of

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Figure 9.1 Milwaukee by census tract, showing percent black in the 1990 census. The highlighted tract is significantly anomalous: high percent black surrounded by tracts with low percent black.

institutions. A quick search using Google establishes that the tract is a former fairground that is now occupied by a low-security prison, a medical school, parkland and an industrial park. Although this example is almost trivially simple, it serves to illustrate the differences between the lenses of traditional GIS, Google Earth and the contents of the Web, contrasting the precise formal analysis of GIS with much more informal and often serendipitous techniques. Figure 9.3 shows a second example, in this case in the realm of physical geography.

Figure 9.2 Google Earth’s coverage of the anomalous tract in November 2007 showing land uses that are clearly institutional.

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Standard GIS tools allow representations of topography to be used to predict the directions followed by run-off, and thus the development of drainage systems. The d8 algorithm (O’Callaghan and Mark 1984) performs this analysis based on a raster representation of topography, in which the elevation of the Earth’s surface is recorded at every intersection of a square grid. A digital elevation model (DEM) with 30-meter spacing covering part of Orange County, California, has been analyzed to obtain the drainage patterns shown in the figure. When the real hydrography is superimposed, it is clear that a major difference occurs where the Santa Ana River enters the coastal plain. The predicted path of the river enters the ocean more than 10 kilometers away from its actual estuary. While this large difference is spectacular, it is common for small differences to exist between predicted and actual hydrography. As noted earlier, any GIS representation must miss detail to some degree, and in this case any topographic detail less than 30 meters across may be missed. Again Google Earth allows the spatial context of the DEM to be explored. A quick search of the web shows that the lower Santa Ana River experienced numerous shifts of course following major flood events. The levees that now constrain the course are too small to be evident in the DEM, though they are clearly visible in the

Figure 9.3 Predicted surface hydrology (thin white lines) computed from a 30-meter DEM, with actual hydrology from USGS mapping superimposed. Note the divergence in the upper center of the figure, where the real Santa Ana River turns south.

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Google Earth imagery (Figure 9.4). Once again the GIS and Google Earth lenses demonstrate their complementarity. The early web implemented a vision of rapid access to information, with a simple browser able to display text and simple images, and to use hyperlinks to skip from one site to another related one. The first browser software became available in 1993, and shortly thereafter commercial versions followed in the form of Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Websites were developed with increasingly rich information resources, but in the early years the flow of information was strictly one-way, from a site acting as server to a user as client. It was soon apparent, however, that small extensions of the web protocols would allow powerful applications to be developed that relied in part on content generated by users. Airline reservation systems, for example, allow users to complete forms, the contents of which are then compiled in databases, largely avoiding the need for travel agents and reservations clerks. Users of eBay are able to contribute information directly to the site, and to see it displayed along with the information contributed by others, within a framework provided by the site. By the turn of the century these concepts had expanded into the blogs, wikis and other services that emphasize user-generated content (UGC), often as a result of collaborative effort among networks of users. Wikipedia is perhaps the most successful example: a collaborative effort to build a free, open encyclopedia of human knowledge. Various mechanisms, including constant monitoring by volunteers and the ability of anyone to edit and correct, help to ensure that the results are reasonably accurate. The terms crowdsourcing and collective intelligence describe the notion that the results of collective compilation can be surprisingly reliable. In recent months this trend, generally known as Web 2.0 to distinguish it from the earlier one-way web, has emerged as a potent force in the world of geographical information. Efforts are under way to create a global

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CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Figure 9.4 Google Earth’s coverage of the area of diversion. The Santa Ana River emerges onto the coastal plain in the middle right, and is constrained by a concrete channel and levees as it turns south to the coast. Its predicted path flows further west before turning south, as predicted by analysis of the DEM.

gazetteer (Wikimapia), a global map (OpenStreetMap), a global collection of georegistered photographs (Flickr) and many more. All of these efforts rely on simple standardized references to location, known as geo-tags, and on the willingness of thousands of amateurs to compile extensive collections of geographical information. Along with sites such as Google Earth, Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth it has brought the concepts of GIS, remote sensing and georeferencing to the attention of the average citizen, and opened the possibility of a far more intensive engagement between individuals and geographical information technology. That said, it is important to recognize that all this applies only on one side of the digital divide, and that these ideas are still largely beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population. Nevertheless tools such as these are making it possible for communities that have never had access to maps to create them with minimal skills, and in countries such as India where maps have long been regarded as matters of national security and have been hard for the average citizen to obtain, Web 2.0 tools present a powerful opportunity.

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The emphasis in this chapter has been on the role of digital technologies in providing a window to the geographical world, both as a storehouse of geographical knowledge and as a means of querying and analyzing that storehouse, in other words making it useful. That window was initially almost opaque, as the functions of early GIS provided for little more than simple measurement and calculation. As the tools developed, it became possible to believe in a GIS that would eventually be capable of performing virtually any conceivable operation on geographical information. Yet the advent of Google Earth in 2005 made it abundantly clear that GIS had fallen far short of that goal, and that while the lens it provided was precise, powerful and analytic, it nevertheless made it difficult to see the multidimensional spatial context of geographical features and events; required intensive and advanced training; and made it difficult to represent the more uncertain and subjective aspects of geographical understanding. Today, that balance has shifted dramatically as a result of new technologies. It is now easy for a child of ten to learn to manipulate large quantities of geographical information, and to explore the world in much the way Al Gore envisioned in 1998. The average citizen lucky enough to be on the enabled side of the digital divide is now quite familiar with digital geographical information, the systems that allow it to be shared across the Internet, and the products and services that can be obtained from it. Neighborhoods can be explored from above and even from street level, information on individual land parcels is readily available (e.g. zillow.com), and services exist to allow individuals to describe their neighborhoods and favorite places in great detail. One of the most striking features of Web 2.0 services is the willingness of large numbers of amateurs to volunteer information. This willingness stands in sharp contrast to the problems national governments have experienced in recent years in persuading their citizens to contribute to census data collection,

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and suggests a new vision for the role of information in a democratic society. The key difference between the census and Web 2.0 services may be the ability of contributors to keep track of the data they provide. Photographs contributed to Flickr are identified with the contributor, who thus gains some sense of ownership, perhaps mistakenly, over these digital records. Contributing to Wikimapia is altruistic, but at the same time implies some degree of self-promotion, and some sense of territorial extension over part of the ever-increasing volume of web content. The past 40 years have seen a steady and at times dramatic change in the role of geographical information in society. Traditional arrangements, which placed government-sponsored mapping agencies in unique positions of authority, have been substantially eroded, though they continue to survive in some areas, such as the official naming authorities. The new world is one of bidirectional information flow; empowerment of local governments and even citizens in both the creation and use of geographical information; the replacement of uniformity of coverage with an increasingly diverse patchwork; and the emergence of important and rich new sources of information. In this climate of accelerating change it is difficult to see where it is headed – whether the web will eventually collapse under the weight of its ever-expanding content; whether issues of national security will lead to draconian restrictions; whether the altruism of UGC will give way to an increasingly insecure world of malicious attacks, as it has with email; and whether the majority of the world’s population will ever gain access. In all of this, however, it is clear that the GIS laboratory will continue to evolve and to provide interesting insights into the geographical world.

REFERENCES Abler, R.F. (1987) ‘The National Science Foundation National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis’, International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, 1: 303–326.

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Arctur, D. and Zeiler, M. (2004) Designing Geodatabases: Case Studies in GIS Data Modeling. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press. Burrough, P.A. (1986) Principles of Geographical Information Systems for Land Resources Assessment. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Butler, D. (2006) ‘Virtual globes: the web-wide world’, Nature, 439: 776–778. Craig, W.J., Harris, T.M. and Weiner, D. (eds) (2002) Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems. New York: Taylor and Francis. Curry, M.R. (1998) Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge. Duckham, M., Goodchild, M.F. and Worboys, M.F. (eds) (2003) Foundations of Geographic Information Science. New York: Taylor, and Francis. Goodchild, M.F. (1988) ‘Stepping over the line: technological constraints and the new cartography’, American Cartographer, 15: 311–319. Goodchild, M.F., Fu, P. and Rich, P. (2007) ‘Sharing geographic information: an assessment of the Geospatial One-Stop’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97: 249–265. Gore, A. (1992) Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Harley, J.B. (2002) The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. McHarg, I. (1971) Design with Nature. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press. National Research Council (1993) Toward a Coordinated Spatial Data Infrastructure for the Nation. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. O’Callaghan, J.F. and Mark, D.M. (1984) ‘The extraction of drainage networks from digital elevation data’, Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing, 28: 323–344. Pickles, J. (ed.) (1995) Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems. New York: Guilford. Saaty, T.L. and Alexander, J.M. (1989) Conflict Resolution: The Analytic Hierarchy Approach. New York: Praeger. Smith, N. (1992) ‘Real wars, theory wars’, Progress in Human Geography, 16: 257–271. Sui, D.Z. and Goodchild, M.F. (2001) ‘Guest Editorial: GIS as media?’, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 15: 387–389. Zeiler, M. (1999) Modeling Our World: The ESRI Guide to Geodatabase Design. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press. Zhang, J.X. and Goodchild, M.F. (2002) Uncertainty in Geographical Information. New York: Taylor and Francis.

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10 Art Studio Stephen Daniels

INTRODUCTION The art studio is a canonical site of creativity, ‘imagination’s chamber’, enshrined in accounts of art as a form of knowledge, performance and cultural memory, including a long tradition of portraits of artists at work (Peppiatt and Belony-Rewald 1982; Waterfield 2009). The studio is an integral part of a wider art world of sketching grounds, exhibition galleries and auction houses, one that intersects for the landscape arts with further geographies, from field surveys and drawing offices where maps are produced to the workplaces and homes where landscapes are displayed. A pivotal place in a wider world, the art studio is also, in itself, a complex environment. More than a space where materials, implements and people are accommodated, it is a powerful instrument of production, in which various technologies, from hand crafts to reproductive media are co-ordinated. Traditionally one if its main functions is as a light box, a device for the control and manipulation of natural and artificial sources of illumination, notably (in the northern hemisphere) north facing windows to provide a source of steady day light, supplemented by candles and lamps, now electric spot lights,

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and an apparatus of blinds, drapes and mirrors. Size matters. Professional artists producing exhibition pieces, slowly and precisely, have usually aspired to work on a large scale, and sought to convert large workspaces if they could not have them purpose built. In such cases the stove has been as important as the window, to warm artists’ hands and perhaps the bodies of models too. A contrasting tradition of art making is carried out on a modest scale, in small studios or by the windows of other spaces, sometimes by choice as well as necessity, to make a point about the finish and social purpose of art. Studios may be mobile, notably where fieldwork requires more controlled environmental conditions. The commercial manufacture of ready-made paints, in cakes and tubes, not only released painters from the task of preparing their own but made possible plein air work, in sketchbooks or at the easel, but even the most naturalistic artists required some shelter to work and to finish work, carriages and ships’ cabins for travelling eighteenth-century topographical British artists, the bivouacs of Barbizon painters in the Forest of Fontainebleu and Monet’s studio boat on the Seine. While the studios of proverbially struggling artists may be made out of a single

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attic room, and contain spaces for sleeping and eating, as well as making and displaying, the large studios of the successful articulate a series of functions, sometimes in suites of rooms: workshop, visitor venue, showroom, sales space, gallery and archive. The cultural status and complexity of the studio reflects the genealogy of the word itself, as a keyword of cultural performance and production. It use in English spread in the early nineteenth century to combine two aspects of art making, learned scholarship and material production, deriving from the Italian word ‘studiolo’, the private room for study and reflection, stocked with books, casts of artworks, prints, exotic objects, globes and maps, to which artists retreated from the messier, workshop-like space, the ‘bottega’ where the artwork was actually produced. In English the word studio replaced a range of terms describing artists’ premises, principally painting room and showroom, and became codified to describe both new purpose-built spaces, and the conversions of various buildings, from stable blocks to warehouses, to artistic production, some of which pioneered wider processes of gentrification. As a site of creativity, the term studio diffused from the late nineteenth century to describe places for the performance, production and transmission of other art forms, including photography, dance and music, television and film. In Hollywood, a studio came to mean not just extensive new developments on the ground but the company itself, and its institutional power. Meanwhile the studios of major artists of the past have been incorporated in cultural heritage, preserved and reconstructed in museums to their memory. In the first part of this chapter I will examine some iconic paintings of studio scenes in Western art, to explore the wider imaginative geographies implicated in these images. In the second part I will chart the place of studios in the development of the London art world since the eighteenth century. Finally I will consider the role of art studios in twentieth-century museums, and how they condition the afterlife of art and artists.

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STUDIO VISTAS The studio as a subject, as a portrait and scene, showing the artist at work, or the view through a window, has proved to be a powerful genre in Western art, and one in which wider issues of making, viewing and understanding images, of the role of representation and space in the production of knowledge, including the performance of creative power, have been explored. Michel Foucault famously begins his influential 1965 book on ‘the archaeology of knowledge’ Les Mots and Les Choses (‘The Order of Things’) with a chapter discussing Velzáquez’s Las Meninas (1656) (Prado Museum, Madrid) a portrait of the artist at work on a portrait, in a painting room set up in the palace of the King of Spain. Foucault regards the picture as no less than a paradigm of Western knowledge, a threshold between a ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ ‘epistemological space’. He describes how the picture’s various fields of vision are co-ordinated by a complex system of vantage points and sight lines, including windows, mirrors, doorways, the easel of the artists and the space constructed before the picture for spectators. In mapping the junction of contrasting epistemological spaces, the position of representation, as least in its detached, objective form as a locus of truth, is made problematic; the picture is a representation of representation, marking a reflexive modernity in which we are both knower and known (Foucault 1974; Ogborn 1995). We may also observe how the picture represents the spatial hierarchies of court society in its time, not only in terms of where figures stand in relation to another (including the reflected image of the king and queen in the mirror behind the easel) but also the very place of this painting room, or room used for painting. It is the former living quarters of one of the royal family, and is hung with pictures Velzaquez helped assemble in his role as curator of the royal collection as well as court painter, the artist as connoisseur. This was a place king and artist could meet,

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the monarch watch his painter at work, as in a famous story from classical antiquity in which Alexander the Great visited the studio of his painter Appelles. The allusion is significant, for the scene of the picture is set not just in a palace in Madrid, but in the power centre of a modern major empire (StrattonPruitt 2003; Alpers 2005). An almost contemporary studio scene painted in Holland, Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (c.1666) (Kunthistoriches Museum, Vienna) offers an alternative spatial model of making and meaning. We look into a bourgeois domestic interior which the painter has set up his easel, a better class space than the humble workshops in which Dutch artists are usually shown struggling to make a living, with marble tiles and a chandelier. The artist is painting one of the many female models who appear in Vermeer’s art, this one dressed as Clio, the classical muse of history. Filling the wall and rivalling the woman for our attention is a great, decorative map of the Netherlands, depicted with scrupulous attention to its fabric and fine detail. Framed by topographical views of major cities, emblazoned with emblematic cartouches, it shows northern and southern Netherlands united, a lost past when all the provinces were one country. As Svetlana Alpers argues, Vermeer binds the map to the art of painting by placing his name on it; no less than a surveyor, the painter is within the world he represents. The picture elevates the mapping impulse of a highly cartographic nation, with own extensive commercial empire, to a form of knowledge which rivals history, and the tradition of Dutch view making, with extensive surface detail, to the status of history painting (Alpers 1983: 119–68) The painter takes his place with those other key observational figures in Vermeer’s art, The Geographer and The Astronomer, men who are not just looking at but reflecting on the terrestrial and celestial world and its working, in the image of the solitary sage, searching for wisdom, not just acquiring knowledge (Berkel 2001).

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Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of my Artistic Life (1855) (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) places landscape art at the centre of knowledge and power. The imaginary setting is based on the studio of a professional artist in Paris at the time, part workshop, part venue, a cavernous space with canvasses stacked against the walls, the artist at his easel, a semi-draped model and a large number of visitors. The figures are ranged in a widely across the picture space, some – like the poet Baudelaire and philosopher Proudhon – readily recognisable from Courbet’s radical set; others – a poor Irish woman, a wealthy Jewish man, a Catholic priest – all apparently based on real people, but here typifying the range of social types to be represented (politically as well as artistically) in any adequate view of modern life. This metropolitan crowd, most closely the model and urchin by the painter, witness the painter at work on a rural landscape, a scene based on Courbet’s native province of Franche-Comté in the Burgundy region of eastern France. The picture is a panorama showing: a peaceful coexistence and harmony among opposing factions, classes and nations – to create an allegorical ‘balance of power’ in short – organized around the redemptive and productive centering of the artist, himself in harmony with the source and origin of all social and personal reconciliation: unspoiled nature (Nochlin 1988).

Studio scenes combining interior and exterior views are part of a larger cameral tradition of rooms with a view, which is particularly active when the art in question engages with the field of vision outside its walls, and studios may be selected or sited accordingly. The modern art world of Paris drew on this symbiosis, whether with the world of the urban street or the suburban garden. Looking over Paris from Rodin’s studio at Meudon, visitors dilated on the vision of the city as a crucible of elements flowing from all sides (Milner 1988: 24). Matisse made a series of studies of the view of Notre Dame from his

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studio window, each variously arranging the structures and motifs, cathedral and river, ancient and modern, spiritual and commercial, which epitomised this part of Paris. These pictures operate by a process of compression, condensing observations, inside and out, not just of Paris but drawing on the painter’s knowledge and experiences of Spain and North Africa, windows on a much wider world (Hood 2008: 60). This conjunction of interior and exterior spaces was activated by David Hockney in 1980 in Mulholland Drive: the Road to the Studio (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) in a city, Los Angeles, aspiring to become a new paradigm or modernity, even a world art capital. Having abandoned a conventional topographical view of Santa Monica Boulevard outside his studio, Hockney decided to paint a panoramic landscape on a vast (7 × 3 metre) canvas of his daily commute to his studio from his home in the Hollywood hills. The suburban road grid of the San Fernando Valley, Studio City and Burbank, was copied onto the canvas from road maps. The car journey was drawn from memory, of the curving movement along Mulholland Drive, and the glimpses of salient details spotted on the way, roofs, tennis courts, swimming pools, eucalyptus groves, and intended to replicate the experience of driving. Perhaps significantly, the picture was painted by a British artist initially for British spectators for exhibition at the Royal Academy, London. Since architectural critic Reyner Banham’s celebration of the ‘autopian’ dreamworld of Los Angeles as an artwork in itself, driving there has not only been a self conscious rite of passage for culturally conscious British visitors and expatriates, but a mode of reading and celebrating the landscape. With its brilliant colour and shifts in perspective, the painting acts as relay with the modern art of Matisse and Picasso, and with traditional Chinese art in which a long river journey might be unrolled on a single scroll (Banham 1971: 213–33; Hockney 1988).

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‘STUDIOLAND’: THE LONDON ART WORLD The building of art studios in new property developments has been an integral part of the formation of London’s art world, and the building of a British art identity, from the mid-eighteenth century. Purpose built or converted, studios were part of the expansion and renovation of London’s west end, in a cultural geography which included private and public galleries, teaching academies, auction houses and print shops, and other venues like bookshops, coffee houses, pleasure gardens and gentlemen’s clubs in the public sphere. The precise location and regime of these venues could be highly significant, politically so, in disputes between the powers in the art world (Dias 2004). Moreover the very status of visual art as a form of knowledge was being defined and contested. Some exhibition venues included works by designers and engravers as well as painters; others sought to raise its academic register as fine, as opposed to applied art. Some work by William Hodges, the artist who travelled on Cook’s voyages, found its way to art exhibition venues, other work by him was assembled in venues for natural history. The imagery of artworks explored the relative space of art as a working practice and form of knowledge. While he did not produce a specific studio scene, the works of Joseph Wright of Derby explored the affiliations of the spaces of artwork with a series of sites of making and meaning, creation and observation: forges, smithies, laboratories and libraries. (Daniels 1999). In its new premises, Somerset House by the Thames, the Royal Academy was an institution dedicated to raising the academic and aristocratic register of art, but its main entrance on the Strand was uncomfortably close to a popular retail and entertainment quarter of map sellers and dress shops, menageries, puppet shows and panoramas (Dias 2004). Landscape, particularly topographical work, was for long officially looked down upon a lowly genre in

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contrast to history painting (mere ‘map-work’ scoffed one Royal Academy Professor of Painting Henry Fuseli in an annual lecture), and in summer exhibitions kept on a lower floor exhibition space converted from one of the teaching studios (Daniels 2006). By the early nineteenth century, Constable and Turner helped raise landscape art to the main upper floor galleries, as pictures increased in size and cultural ambition. Most artists with professional aspirations lived in London. The poorer put up their easels in rooms of cheap lodging houses, the wealthier persuaded ground landlords to convert upper rooms and stables, and the wealthiest wrote in design specifications for new houses. The studios of successful artists were included in guide books to London: they included showrooms as well as painting rooms, sometimes combining the two, to display work in progress, even the performance of the artist in a piece of self-conscious theatre. Visitors and spectators included actual or potential customers and patrons, and some studios encouraged a wide cross-section of polite society in places where women might be included as conversational equals, the more raffish venues welcoming disgraced society women and courtesans. Built with the middle class family in mind, the standard terrace house on a narrow, extended plot, with front rooms and backrooms off a simple set of stairs, proved remarkably adaptable to different kinds of artwork, including sculpture (with casting pits and storage space in back yards) as it was to a range of other commercial activities, including shops, museums, workshops, schools, pubs, hotels, brothels, banks and offices (Walkley 1994). Painted after his release from a debtor’s prison, George Morland’s sardonic portrait of himself at work (Figure 10.1) (Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Nottingham) is set in a garret room, surrounded by unsold canvases, with his dogs and a manservant cooking sausages, the pretty rustic cottage he is painting on the easel a contrast to his own abject urban dwelling (Postle 2009: 46).

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Most art studios were for male artists, who apart from notable exceptions like academician Angelica Kauffman, dominated the profession. Among the increasing ranks of female amateur artists, few had a studio, or any other room of their own. But as art was highly esteemed as a polite accomplishment for women, which meant mainly copying, imitating or finishing works, rather than creating new ones, and sketching landscapes rather than figures (even Angelica Kauffman was barred from drawing human bodies at life classes), various rooms in larger houses might be adapted to accommodate materials and instruments for drawing and painting (mainly watercolour) as they were for other pursuits for female education, botany in the boudoir or breakfast room, geography in the library or garden. Indeed in conduct literature on the domestication of knowledge, the modest virtues of women drawing, absorbed in observing the world through a home window, were conventionally contrasted with the vanity of music making, particularly the more full-bodied displays, like playing the harp, caught in the reflection of a full-length mirror (Bermingham 2000: 77–228). In the new art quarter of Pall Mall, around the corner from the auction rooms of James Christie, Thomas Gainsborough moved in 1774 into the west wing of a former aristocratic mansion Schomberg House. The east wing was rented to a fashionable textile showroom. The main central house was occupied by the owner John Astley, a minor artist and major fortune hunter, who built a top storey painting room with views over the royal parks; the space was then occupied by an upmarket sex therapy club before being used by artists Maria and Richard Cosway. The top lit staircase in Gainsborough’s house, probably specified by the artist, was hung with his landscapes, and they also lined the corridor to his painting room which was built over an extension into the garden. Visitors, including those coming to have their portrait done, approached Gainsborough’s painting room from the main entrance on Pall Mall,

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Figure 10.1 George Morland, The Artist in his Studio with his Man Gibbs. c. 1801 Nottingham City Museums and Galleries.

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but there may have been a garden entrance to facilitate the various animals, including donkeys, horses and pigs, which appear in his work. A southeast-facing window afforded the only natural light in Gainsborough’s painting room; the artist preferred subdued lighting, sometimes candlelight, for increasingly abstract marks on the canvas, made with a very long and broad brush. Like a number of artists Gainsborough complained about how his works were hung in the Royal Academy’s exhibitions, and after a dispute in 1784 he displayed his works in his studio at Schomberg House, never to exhibit again at Somerset House (Jones and Postle 2003). Some landscape artists moved to the periphery of London, where there was material for their pictures close by, as well as space for bigger, brighter studios. In 1774 Paul Sandby moved to an isolated new terrace St George’s Row which commanded views across Hyde Park to Surrey in one direction, and north across the village of Paddington to the hills of Hampstead in the another. He had built a classically styled studio at the bottom of his garden (Figure 10.2). Glazed like a gazebo, it accommodated his teaching of a succession of wealthy amateurs, some of who also came to the regular Sunday evening salons held there in the summer months (Bonehill and Daniels 2009: 22–5). Some of the next generation, attracted by the natural world and its empirical understanding, moved to scenic suburban villages, along the Thames or on the encircling hills. John Constable joined the early nineteenth-century exodus to Hampstead, along with artist Frederick North who along with his studio included an observatory to study the sky. Constable worked up his sky studies sketched from the heights of Hampstead Heath at home, escaping from his growing family to an improvised studio in the garden shed. Constable maintained a more specialised, fully equipped studio in central London to paint large canvases like The Haywain for exhibition at the Royal Academy. J.M.W. Turner was famous for completing paintings in the gallery of Royal Academy

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itself, just before the exhibition opening, when he seized the chance to outdo his competitors in the brilliance of finishing and final effects (Morris 2000). Turner didn’t buy into the mystique of the studio as a specific building with a special ambience. When asked about the difficulties of painting in the open air, he replied that ‘lights and a room were absurdities, that a picture could be painted anywhere’, for him a studio ‘was less a specific place than a state of mind; and it existed as easily in a boat on the river, the walls of the Academy, stately home, or – in the case of his myriad erotic drawings – a seedy bordello’ (Postle 2009: 47–8). The art studios of wealthy, successful painters in Victorian London were, like other rooms for the rich in the period, increasingly specialised and lavishly equipped and furnished, with workshops below. Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema transformed one villa near Regent Parks and designed a new one in St John’s Wood as many roomed mansions in which studios of various styles, Pompeian for him, Japanese for his wife, were co-ordinated in a programme of themed rooms, including a Spanish boudoir, Gothic library and Dutch bedroom and International conservatory, ‘adventures in space conducted by a practised time traveller’ (Walkley 1994: 128–9). In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Oscar Wilde presents an art studio as a saloon of sensuality, with the rich odours of roses and lilacs wafting in from the garden, and a visitor sprawled on a Persian divan (Wilde 1908; Peltz and Ross 2003: 188–9). The figure of the female model, particularly those used for languid women in antique or orientalist scenes, was, in the public imagination, never far from that of a mistress or prostitute. Respectable artists and architects were keen to create separate rooms for models, separate studio entrances too which opened directly on to the street, a tactic protect the commercial contract of both artist and model without blurring moral boundaries between the private and public sphere (Smith 1996: 199).

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Figure 10.2 Paul Sandby, The Studio of Paul Sandby, St George’s Row. c. 1776. Nottingham City Museums and Galleries.

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In Kensington and Chelsea, and adjacent districts, property developers catered for a wave of demand for studio premises, in art schools and homes, including studios for single, independent women. Mew blocks and top storeys were converted into studio ranges, new blocks of so-called studio flats were built as were detached houses with glazed extensions, some in new aesthetic suburbs like Bedford Park. The extensive window ranges of these developments can be connected to the conspicuous fenestration in a variety of new developments of the time concerned with visual display, from museums to department stores, letting in the new light of modernity. Founded in 1880, The Studio was the leading popular magazine on art, significantly for applied as well as fine art; for example, garden design. Like another lifestyle magazine of the period, Country Life, it catered for those who dreamed of a social and spatial setting as well as those who could afford to actually have it. For more cosmopolitan, progressive artists in London, Paris was the very model of the art city, and Paris Envy was a widespread condition in English culture. The informality and camaraderie of the feepaying atelier system (in which women were allowed into life classes), and the allure of precincts like Montmartre which accommodated temporarily, or affectedly, poor painters with the permanently poor, shaped the bohemian lifestyles of young artists in west London’s ‘Studioland’ (Walkley 1994: 144– 213; Peltz and Ross 2001: 82–123). Twentieth-century London continued to provide a framework for artistic movements, in Camden Town, Soho and Fitzrovia, and in the colonising of the post-industrial East End. The example of New York artists converting lofts on the lower east side of Manhattan to work on large canvasses, along with alluring photographs of Jackson Pollock in blue jeans performing his action paintings, hastened the use of decommissioned warehouses in the former dockland for suites of studios for legions of graduates of the new art schools, at least until agreements on pepper corn rents lapsed, and the buildings were made into

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upmarket apartments and hotels. Short-lease buildings in the east-end like former schools and condemned houses provided studio space, with more radical artists joining neighbouring residents in campaigns to preserve them. Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993–4) a cast of a condemned dwelling in Grove Road Bow typifies the complex of process artistic creation and urban development; despite protests the artwork itself was demolished in 1994 (Peltz and Ross 2001: 106–55).

STUDIO HERITAGE The preservation, restoration and reconstruction of studios is now an integral part of the commemoration of artists, often the centrepiece of museums dedicated to their work. In some cases, as with the Turner Bequest in the purpose-built Clore Gallery at Tate Britain, London, what remains are the sketchbooks and the pictures the artist held onto, along with some bits of equipment, pigment-stained palletes and so on (Brown 1991). In others such as the Musée Delacroix in Paris, the fabric of the building is preserved, and with it a particular image of the artist; in this case it is the painter’s last, highly studious studio, purpose built and architecturally designed, in a quiet courtyard in the Latin Quarter, not the artist’s immense factory-like studio on the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette that first attracted public attention (Milner 1988: 29–31). Studio spaces can be taken out of the neighbourhoods which gave them significance. After his death in 1992 the contents of the studio of Francis Bacon, with its famously chaotic clutter of materials, was transported from South Kensington, where it occupied a former mews coach house, to a space in the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, the city of Bacon’s birth. A team of archaeologists surveyed the original studio space, tagged hundreds of objects with their position, entered them on a computerised data base, and reassembled them in the new gallery, a planned version of the chaos of fragmentary materials, from

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illustrations torn from magazines to LPs and bits of corduroy, which inspired Bacon to create images. Places associated with artists can be turned into studios. In an early example of industrial conversion and cultural regeneration, Flatford Mill, the corn mill owned by Constable’s father, and the subject of some of his son’s paintings, but the very place the landscape artist forsook as a workplace to become a painter, was turned into art studios in the 1920s, before becoming a field studies centre for geography and botany students who were encouraged to sketch what they observed (Daniels 1993: 217–23). The form of cultural retrieval here is similar to that concerned to analyse and reconstruct the studies of famous authors and the recording studios of celebrated rock n’roll and rhythm-and-blues artists from the age of vinyl, and with a very material attention to old or traditional technologies, mahogany desks, fountain pens and handmade paper, microphones, mixing desks and soundproofing. Here are physical environments in which the creative process might be re-imagined, and with it the significance of the work. So at the Musée Atelier Cézanne in Les Lauves, Jan Birksted has surveyed and mapped the artist’s modernist landscape vision from the spatial ensemble of studio and garden. While the north, gridded window is pressed upon by vegetation, the south provides a panorama towards Aix-en-Provence. The garden becomes a ‘transitional garden space [which] migrates into the interior studio … instead of an image, landscape becomes process’ (Birksted 2000: 84). The history this century of the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam exemplifies the growing centrality of studios to art heritage. When it was opened to the public in 1911, Rembrandt’s former home functioned as a gallery in which his prints were exhibited; now, from 1998, in the words of the guidebook, ‘[I]t gives visitors a far more intimate picture of the setting in which one of the world’s greatest artists lived and worked.’ The interior was reconstructed using various forms of historical research, from the inven-

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tory of Rembrandt’s property drawn up after his bankruptcy, and his sketches of the premises, to objects retrieved from the cesspit beneath the kitchen courtyard. Visitors move up through the showroom and cabinet room (filled with a reconstructed collection of curiosities from throughout the then known world) to the large upper storey studio which is the climax of the tour: ‘This [is] where it all happened: between 1639 and 1658 Rembrandt painted many of his masterpieces in this large room.’ The stove and paintmaking table are given as much attention as the easel, as are the props, armour and plaster casts, ranged around the walls. Rembrandt is presented as a ‘man of the world’, both in his wide-ranging curiosity and his down-to-earth observation of everyday life, the very figure of Dutch cultural virtue (Tissink 2003). The studio museums of Britain’s leading twentieth-century sculptors emphasise the landscape profile of artists known for their post-war works in public spaces. Barbara Hepworth first came to live in Cornwall with her husband Ben Nicholson and their young family at the outbreak of war in 1939. She lived and worked in Trewyn studios, now the Hepworth Museum, from 1949 until her death in 1975. When she first arrived, Hepworth was still largely preoccupied with stone and wood carving, but during the 1950s she increasingly made sculpture in bronze as well. This led her to create works on a more monumental scale, for which she used the garden as a viewing area. Following her wish to establish her home and studio as a museum of her work, Trewyn Studio and much of the artist’s work remaining there (including paintings, drawings and archive material as well as sculpture in various materials) was given to the nation and placed in the care of the Tate Gallery in 1980 (Hepworth 1978). The most recent studio heritage project is the most major, the 2006 restoration Henry Moore’s studio complex Hoglands in the Hertfordshire village of Perry Green, with key sites like the etching studio rebuilt as they would have looked about 1970, when Moore’s reputation was at its height and his

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art collection at its most complete. Loans from the family collection are returning to the house, not only valuable artworks, books and furniture but also items of a more domestic and personal nature. While work on the structure and contents of the buildings was taking place, a garden designer supervised the clearing and replanting of the surrounding landscape where some of Moore’s work was to be repositioned.

THE PLACE OF ART Geography as a discipline, within a broad, multidisciplinary field, is well positioned to advance the study of art studios to further enquiry into the place of art in a wider world of culture and society (Daniels 2004). Future directions of study can draw on a repertoire of research approaches. The locational significance of art studios in towns and cities, especially beyond canonical art capitals, remains largely unexplored territory, one that can be surveyed using some conventional databases of urban geography, such as directories and census returns, and large-scale plans and maps. Current approaches to micro-geographies, of rooms and the spaces within rooms, and their role in macro-geographies, sometimes at a global scale, could clearly be extended to studio spaces, particularly with attention to their articulation of craft skills, technologies and materials (Jacobs 2006). As human technological spaces for image making, the history and theory of art studios can be connected with those other chambers of the imagination, the camera obscura and magic lantern (Crary 1996). Recent approaches to sitespecific performance have a bearing on studies of studio practice, for artists have always been highly conscious of the theatricality of their work there. Useful material on art studios is included in popular biographies of artists, and these spaces can be brought out in new forms of research on life worlds and subjectivity, in particular life geographies

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that are framed not just in terms of a succession of spaces and places artists lived and worked but in terms of narrative plot lines current in the times and places in which artists lived and the way they imagined and shaped their worlds (Daniels and Nash 2004). Research on art studios can prompt that on other spaces for the production of visual images, including photographic studios and map-drawing offices, and connect with current work on music recording studios in wider cultural and economic networks and landscapes (Leyshon 2009; Cohen et al. 2010), especially given the multimedia genres of contemporary artwork. Ethnographic encounters between geographers and artists working in situ, including collaborative ventures, of the kind exemplified in the ‘Cultural Geographies in Practice’ section of the journal Cultural Geographies, offer promising new material, as well as approaches, for studio studies, if the academics need to be mindful that their conversations and observations are conditioned by traditions of studio discourse and representation, some of which have been explored in this chapter.

REFERENCES Alpers, Svetlana (1998) The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Alpers, Svetlana (2005) Vexations of the Artist: Velázquez and Others. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Banham, Reyner(1971) Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies. London: Allen Lane. Berkel, Klaus van (2001) ‘Vermeer and the representation of science’ in Wayne E. Franits (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 130–139. Birkstead, Jan (2000) ‘Cézanne’s Property’ in Jan Birksted (ed.) Landscapes of Memory and Experience. London: Spon Press, pp. 77–86. Bermingham, Anne (2001) Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bonehill, John and Daniels, Stephen (eds) (2009) Paul Sandby, Picturing Britain. London: Royal Academy.

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Brown, David Blayney (1991) From Turner’s Studio: Paintings and Oil Sketches from the Turner Bequest. London: Tate Gallery. Cohen, Sara, Lashua, Brett and Schofield, John (2010) ‘Dig the beat’, British Archaeology, January– February: 23–27. Crary, Jonathan (1996) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press. Daniels, Stephen (1993) Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the Unites States. Cambridge: Polity Press. Daniels, Stephen (1999) Joseph Wright. London: Tate. Daniels, Stephen (2004) ‘Landscape and art’ in James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson and Richard H. Schein (eds), A Companion to Cultural Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 430–446. Daniels, Stephen (2006) ‘A prospect for the nation’ in Theresa Fairbanks Harris and Scott Wilcox, (eds), Papermaking and the Art of Watercolor in EighteenthCentury Britain: Paul Sandby and the Whatman Paper Mill. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 23–60. Daniels, Stephen, and Nash, Catherine (2004) ‘Lifepaths: geography and biography’, Journal of Historical Geography, 30: 449–458. Dias, Rosie (2004) ‘“A world of pictures”: Pall Mall and the topography of display, 1780–99’ in Miles Ogborn and Charles W.J. Withers (eds), Georgian Geographies: Essays on Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 92–113. Foucault, Michel (1974) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock Publications. Hepworth, Barbara (1978) A Pictorial Autobiography. Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press. Hockney, David (1988) David Hockney: A Retrospective. Los Angeles and London: Los Angeles County Museum with Thames and Hudson. Hood, Walter (2008) ‘Color fields’ in Marc Treib (ed.), Representing Landscape Architecture. London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 56–61. Jacobs, Jane (2006) ‘A geography of big things’, in Cultural Geographies, 13: 1–28. Jones, Rica and Postle, Martin (2003) ‘Gainsborough in his painting room’ in Michael Rosenthal and Martin Myrone, (eds), Gainsborough. London: Tate, pp. 26–39.

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Leyshon Andrew (2009) ‘The software slump?: digital music, the democratisation of technology, and the decline of the recording studio sector within the musical economy’, Environment and Planning A, 41: 1309–1331. Livingstone, David (2003) Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Milner, John (1988) The Studios of Paris: the Capital of Art in the Late Nineteenth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Morris, Edwards (ed.) (2000) Constable’s Clouds: Paintings and Cloud Studies by John Constable. Edinburgh and Liverpool: National Galleries of Scotland, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside. Nochlin, Linda (1998) ‘Courbet’s real allegory: rereading “The Painter’s Studio”’ in Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin (eds), Courbet Reconsidered. New York: The Brooklyn Museum, pp. 117–128. Ogborn, Miles (1995) ‘Knowing the individual: Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias on Las Meninas and the modern subject’ in Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds), Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 57–76. Peltz, Lucy and Ross Cathy (2001) Artists’ London: Holbein to Hirst. London: Merrell. Peppiatt, Michael and Belony-Rewald (1982) Imagination’s Chamber: Artists and their Studios. Boston: New York Graphic Society. Postle, Martin (2009) ‘Everything, including the kitchen sink: studio squlaor from Barry to Bacon’ in Giles Waterfield (ed.) The Artist’s Studio. Compton Verney: Hogarth Arts, pp. 42–63. Smith, Alison (1996) The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stratton-Pruitt, Suzanne (2003) Velázquez's ”Las Meninas”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tissink, Fieke (2003) The Rembrandt House Museum Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Ludion. Walkley, Giles (1994) Artists Houses in London 1764–1914. London: Scolar Press. Waterfield, Giles. (ed.) (2009) The Artist’s Studio. Compton Verney: Hogarth Arts. Wilde, O. (1908) The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Bemhard Tanditz.

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11 The Weather Station and the Meteorological Office Keith Richards

VERNACULAR OBSERVATIONAL METEOROLOGY The weather swirls about us continuously, so to try to pin it down and represent it is quite a challenge. We inhabit the lowest part of a turbulent gaseous column 8–15 kilometres thick, so we only feel the temperature, wind and rain in an earthbound existence within this so-called ‘boundary layer’. Our immediate experience therefore excludes us from the complete dynamics acting over the whole depth of the troposphere, although we are able to observe the skies above indirectly through the behaviour of clouds. What we are able to experience, of course, is the way in which the weather changes over time; for example, through the seasons and in relation both to the movement of heavenly bodies, and to the rhythm of agricultural production. And as we move about the surface, we can also sense that weather – and even its average, the climate – varies spatially from place to place. Early codification of these temporal and spatial patterns in the weather reflected observations made both by and for the main

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user communities (to use ‘modern’ terminology), such as farmers and sailors. Meteorology is thus a science clearly born of vernacular knowledge. As Liba Taub (2003) has shown, Ancient Greek meteorologists began to codify these observations onto carved almanacs of celestial events ( parapegma), and to use these to predict weather and its changes for farmers. Their explanatory basis for this reflected a theoretical framework predicated on a belief in the unity of the heavens, the atmosphere and the earth, supported by the evidence that (seasonal) changes in the weather were correlated with astronomical events. And still today, Barma farmers in Chad observe the setting of the Pleiades in the west as a precursor of the first rains and an indicator of the time to sow grain – among many other indigenous groups who use similar astrometeorological predictors (Oxby 1999). However, the Greek sages were very aware that these correlations of heavenly bodies and seasonal weather changes were often local associations only, and could not be reliably transposed to other sites. Vernacular meteorology, in the form of folklore with underlying causal significance

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(‘Red sky at night, shepherds’ delight’ – a saying at least having ‘real’ meaning in the British Isles), along with diaries, almanacs and interpretative practices can provide valuable information about weather and climate, albeit of a somewhat haphazard form. Even the Norwegian meteorologist Bjerknes gathered such weather lore well into the twentieth century, travelling the coast of Norway in 1918 to collect it from farmers and fishermen; and farmers’ weather almanacs persist into the twenty-first century. However, the development of meteorology as a formal science, and its embodiment in the meteorological office, has placed a premium on the standardization and systematization of information; indeed, ‘modern’ meteorology required the regulatory apparatus of nineteenth-century metrology, with its construction of reliable common standards of measurement (Schaffer 1997; Naylor 2006). As Latour puts it, metrology is a ‘gigantic enterprise to make of the outside a world in which facts and machines can survive’ (1987: 251); and the Meteorological Office establishes and maintains the network of controlled observers and observations that sustain this enterprise in ‘defining what the weather is, has been and will be’ (1987: 251).

INSTRUMENTS, STANDARDS AND SYSTEMATIC MEASUREMENT Thus, if early ‘meteorology’ relied on observations made by those most closely affected by the weather and most in need of understanding of weather variations, systematic measurement of meteorological quantities was triggered by the conjunction of two rather different trends. The first was the development of reliable instruments capable of representing relevant properties, and the second was the need to manage weather information for centralized purposes. The earliest instruments were the wind vane and rain gauge, while temperature-measuring instruments awaited Galileo’s invention in

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1597 and the barometer was developed by Torricelli in 1643. No measurements of temperature and pressure could pre-date these events, and the weather station is thus a product of the Enlightenment (Golinski 1999, 2007). Instruments are conceived, designed, improved and replicated to capture some theorized property of nature, and once standardized they fix the nature of that property. Through this translation, the weather that was previously a matter of qualitative experience is converted into an outcome of the practice of measurement, which uses instruments designed to reduce it to quantitative data representing a set of pre-determined properties. And, as Hulme argues, ‘[T]he essential loading of climate with culture … is completely lost through such purefying processes’ (2008: 7). Quasi-continuous weather records therefore began in England in the late 1600s and in the Netherlands from the early 1700s; near Burnley from 1677 to 1704, at Upminster from 1697 to 1715, near Oundle from 1726, in Plymouth from 1727, and at Delft from 1715 (Lamb 1977). Robert Hooke (sometimes called the founder of meteorological science) and the Royal Society encouraged the development of an observational network, with daily measurements to make a ‘history of the weather’. The Royal Society was also concerned with the design of instruments and the training of observers. These roles in part defined the manner in which a metropolitan science spread its influence and control to distant places (Naylor 2006). However, the early instruments were unstable, aged rapidly, and often measured in ancient scales that require laborious work to make them comparable to modern readings, and required visits by inspectors to check on the reliability of measurement. Nevertheless, Manley (1953, 1966) created weather data series from 1680 for central England, choosing to represent the data as areal averages, since these are less affected by errors in individual cases, or by changes to either the precise locations of measuring sites, or their surroundings.

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Many early weather records were maintained by interested landowners or by amateur scientists (naturalists), but the first official network of rainfall measurements with gauges was instituted in Korea in AD 1441–2, and is an example of the second trend, since it appears to have been intended as a means of forecasting crop yields for taxation purposes. Thus, a meteorology born of the needs of farmers was systematized for the purpose of their control. Of course, the existence of data could equally be used by farmers to resist taxation, as in parts of Europe during the Little Ice Age in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Grove 1989). This tension is exemplified by the origins of the UK Meteorological Office, established in 1854 as a small department within the Board of Trade as a service to mariners, but later becoming part of the Ministry of Defence (and remaining an executive agency of this ministry today). So that inference about temporal and spatial patterns in weather was free from the effects of measurement error, it was considered essential to standardize instruments, in order to allow direct comparison between values measured in different locations. Of course, technical developments in instruments have continually occurred, and this has frustrated to a degree the desire for consistency. As Stringer notes, there was an apparent change of 1–2°C in monthly mean temperatures for many American stations through the 1960s because the Weather Bureau replaced standard screen-sheltered thermometers with hygrothermometers situated in a continuously aspirated thermal shield (Stringer 1972: 27). In some cases there is a lack of agreement about the best instruments to use for recording some properties; and it has even been impossible to standardize completely between countries. For example, sunshine recording instruments have differed between the US (the Maring–Marvin sunshine duration recorder) and other countries (the Campbell– Stokes recorder), and rather complex relationships exist between measurements by the two instruments (Stringer 1972) making it

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difficult to translate one instrument’s measurements into the metric of the other. However, standardization is not only a matter of the choice of instrument type and design, but also involves instrument deployment in a weather station (Figure 11.1). In the UK, instruments measuring weather variables were placed on level plots, about 10 × 10 metres, with obstructions required to be at least twice as far from the centrally located rain gauge as they were high, and with thermometers in a Stevenson screen (Stringer 1972). The implication is that measurements at a weather station screen out significant microclimatic effects, and while data from such stations allow comparison at the large scale, they flatten out the natural variability that reflects more local factors. Additionally, while deployment at the 10 metre scale may be controllable, beyond a distance of 10 metre such control is illusory, and as the conditions of site environment and exposure change, comparison of data through time becomes more difficult. One issue in the analysis of climate change (global warming) is the degree to which urbanization around existing meteorological stations is to some degree responsible for an apparent warming, although careful assessment leads to the conclusion that it may only account for about 10% of observed warming trends (Jones et al. 1990). The emphasis on systematic and qualitycontrolled data by meteorological offices

Figure 11.1 A typical manned weather station, on a ridge in forest at a Royal Forestry Department research station in north-western Thailand.

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can be misleading, and not only because the reality of observation at the scattered places of knowledge production – the weather stations – is often less systematic than the control exercised by metropolitan authority requires (Naylor 2006). This may mean that although records stretch back to the seventeenth century, only those that have been subject to quality control are deemed ‘reliable’, which in the UK means those postdating 1914. Thus, if a weather event is described as ‘the most extreme since records began’, this means ‘since 1914’. While the event may have been ‘unprecedented’ in the reliable record, the longer history may have included several similar events. This carries the risk that if an event is deemed ‘unprecedented’, agencies responsible for managing the response to such an extreme can use this to defend their poor record – whereas if there is evidence in the longer instrumental record of similar events, such a defence collapses. The rigorous appeal to quality control in meteorology contrasts with hydrology, where historical, oral and even sedimentological evidence may all be used in developing an understanding of the magnitude and frequency of flood events.

WEATHER KNOWS NO BOUNDARIES: INTERNATIONALIZATION Weather patterns neither respect international boundaries, nor confine themselves to the boundary layer and the terrestrial environment. The first of these promiscuities highlights the early requirement for collaboration globally in the monitoring, description and modelling of weather, and led to the first steps towards creating and standardizing an international network. An 1853 meeting in Brussels proposed a conference to consider a uniform system of meteorological observation, but the real beginning of international scientific collaboration (perhaps generally, and not just in meteorology) followed a conference of heads of observatories and

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institutes held in Vienna in 1873. Meteorology may thus claim to have encouraged early global scientific integration. The Vienna conference agreed on the observing hours, the time units, the weather symbols to be used, and on a hierarchy of classes of meteorological stations and offices. In this hierarchy, a ‘Central Office’ was a government-approved office collecting and publishing observational data, while a ‘Central Station’ was a subordinate centre for regional data management. A ‘First-order Station’ was an observatory making hourly or self-recording observations, and ‘Second-order’ and ‘Third-order’ Stations made observations less frequently and/or of fewer variables (Stringer 1972). These nodes in a network of knowledge production controlled from the central meteorological office convert the dynamic continuum of the weather into tables of quantitative data on temperature, sunshine hours, humidity, rainfall, pressure, wind direction and speed. The spatial patterns in these numerical descriptors then allow the central office to use meso-scale meteorological theories to translate the information back into qualitative and quantitative weather forecasts, and to deliver these to a range of publics. The knowledge is transformed, re-interpreted and re-represented as it passes from the network (weather stations) to the centre (meteorological office) and out again. An International Meteorological Committee (IMC) was set up in 1878 at the Utrecht Conference of Directors of Institutes and Observatories; this gradually began to standardize techniques, and in 1947 at its Washington conference, it proposed the establishment of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The IMC and its successor the WMO have recommended most of the conventions of modern meteorology, such as wind velocities measured on the Beaufort scale, the use of the millibar, and the spacing of meteorological stations. This spacing should not be so dense that instrument error is the dominant error source; the optimum density therefore depends on relationship between the spatial gradient of the property being

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measured, and the error associated with the instrument measuring it. Inevitably, different properties have distinctive and temporally variable spatial gradients, and the instruments measuring them have variable error levels. However, the meteorological station is a site where the instruments are co-located, implying that the spacing of such stations is inevitably a compromise. The densities of weather stations are quite variable, being closer together in Europe and North America and more scattered in Africa, for example, where the density of weather stations is about one per 26,000 square kilometres, eight times lower than the minimum recommended by the WMO. This presents problems for the analysis of climate trends, since there is variable representation of different regions and land covers (Davey and Pielke 2005), and variable reliability of estimated temperature trends depending on the station densities. As well as variability in station density between latitudinal bands and continents, there are also changes over time, with decreases noted for quite divergent reasons – for example in the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and following a station modernization programme in the United States. As always, politics and economics together serve to compromise the demands of an international scientific agenda, and at opposite ends of the political spectrum can have surprisingly similar consequences. The other promiscuity noted above is that weather variations are not confined to the terrestrial surface – they penetrate the troposphere and cross the oceans. This means that surface weather stations can only provide a partial picture of the global weather, and in an age that recognizes the importance of the integrated functioning of the ocean–atmosphere system through a range of teleconnections, this is a weakness. A solution to the problem of tropospheric depth is to use radiosondes to measure the upper atmosphere, entailing a theoretical shift from fixed-location Eulerian weather stations to mobile, automatic, weather-tracking Lagrangian

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‘weather stations’ that migrate with the air currents. This introduces a new level of potential inconsistency resolved by the manner in which these different data types can be combined and assimilated in numerical model simulations. A solution to the problem of monitoring oceanic space is to deploy weather ships and buoys – floating manned and automatic weather stations, some fixed (Eulerian) and some free (Lagrangian). And indeed, the use of measurements from oil rigs, commercial shipping and aircraft (although these are carefully quality-controlled), implies that the need for more data than can be provided by traditional land-based weather stations overrides the desire for complete consistency and control in measurement. From encouraging the development of systematic fixed weather stations, the generic meteorological office has begun to recognize that a wider range of types of data can be equally valued in the search for description, understanding and prediction of weather patterns and their climatic averages. That this flexibility is now possible, acceptable and even desirable is partly a reflection of the shift in emphasis from monitoring to modelling in the science of meteorology.

WEATHER FORECASTING: MODELLING AND MEASUREMENT FOR NUMERICAL WEATHER As implied above, most meteorological offices now focus their efforts on weather forecasting, and this implies that their present core activity is numerical modelling. Numerical models generate as their output a much richer spatio-temporal data set than that from traditional measurements at weather stations. Furthermore, even if these measurements provide evidence that can be assimilated into the model in order to update the initial conditions for forecasting purposes, as well as being used to evaluate those forecasts, the fact that a measurement is made at

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a point means that it is a qualitatively different piece of information from the grid-square average obtained from a model. Thus, again, traditional emphasis on standardization and consistency is necessarily relaxed in a meteorology whose promiscuity matches that of its subject matter. Initializing and evaluating the numerical model output from a weather forecasting system requires a wide range of different kinds of data, since that output provides data on a wide range of meteorological variables for each of the grid boxes into which the computational domain – the atmosphere – is divided. In the UK Meteorological Office global model, the grid cells are approximately 40 × 40 kilometres, with the vertical extent of the troposphere divided into about 50 levels; the meso-scale model embedded within this has 11 × 11 kilometre grid cells that better represent the effects of the UK topography on weather patterns. In both models, therefore, the computed values of weather variables for all cells (perhaps about 105 in number in the meso-scale model) far exceed the number of traditional weather stations (of which there are just over 150, including both manned and automatic stations). Thus, it is necessary to take advantage

(a)

of all kinds of data and to develop ways of assimilating them into the model. Valuable sources of such data are those derived from forms of remote sensing. These include rainfall radar (Figure 11.2), an active remote-sensing method in which the atmospheric moisture content can be derived from the intensity of the reflected radar emission, mapped in its spatial and vertical distribution, and converted into rainfall estimates. This is a late-twentieth-century weather station, therefore. Additionally, since the first meteorological satellite was placed in orbit in 1960, passive satellite imagery has been of key importance. This provides synoptic overviews of large areas, in a grid-based form that can be geographically co-registered with numerical model output. Thus, a contemporary weather station is as likely to be a receiving station for satellite imagery as a 10 × 10 metre enclosure on the ground containing traditional instruments. The satellite sources include polar orbiting satellites which orbit the earth in just under two hours, so that they image strips of atmosphere about 25° apart, and re-image a given location daily to provide data on cloud cover and the temperature through the atmosphere; and geostationary satellites that always view the same part

(b)

Figure 11.2 (a) The Om Koi rainfall radar in north-western Thailand; and (b) a rainfall radar image of the rainfall in north Cornwall on 16 August 2004, which caused a severe flash flood in the village of Boscastle (based on Environment Agency 2005).

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of the globe. The European geostationary satellites, Meteosat (there are United States, Japanese and Indian equivalents) give sequences of cloud images that allow calculation of wind fields and tracking of weather systems (Figure 11.3). Thus, as the functions of meteorological offices have changed from predominantly descriptive meteorology based on presumed standardization of measurement practices to the forecasting mode based on numerical methods, so the concept of a weather station has changed; from a 10 × 10 metre controlled plot, to the satellite dish linked to a computer screen. It would seem that there has been a recovery of something of the unified view of heavens, atmosphere and earth held by the Ancient Greeks. Satellites in the firmament now provide a synoptic overview of atmospheric dynamics and their consequences for earth-bound humans. However, there remains space for human agency, for as the UK Meteorological Office notes: ‘[T]here is still an important role for the forecaster’ whose ‘[e]xperience and local knowledge add the fine detail to the computer forecast … [t]here is no doubt that the combination of man (sic) and computer together produces the best forecasting results’.1

A RETURN TO THE VERNACULAR? The flexibility with which a (post-?) modern meteorological office approaches the data it requires to run its computer models successfully also suggests a potential return to the vernacular. In parallel with the frequent privatization of data collected by government agencies such as the meteorological office, there also has been a democratization of data collection by and for the public. It is now easy for researchers, universities, botanic gardens, schools and even households to acquire and operate their own weather stations, from the more sophisticated automatic weather stations (AWS) shown in Figure 11.4(a), deployed on a glacier to monitor solar

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Figure 11.3 A composite of Meteosat-8 images from September 2003 showing the initiation and migration of Hurricane Isabel (© EUMETSAT).

radiation, surface melt and diurnal anabatic and katabatic wind reversal; to an inexpensive set of instruments deployed in a domestic garden (Figure 11.4(b)) and connected to a home computer. Perhaps it will not be long before the meteorological office finds ways of integrating this distributed resource into its data gathering efforts, grateful as it will be for every addition to the weather stations it can draw upon, even if their operational longevity cannot be guaranteed and the purity of their data cannot be considered to meet the highest standard. These data will of course be obtained from more diverse sites, but the regional trends will be recoverable because of their large sample size. This is not so far-fetched. For in the modelling of climate, such appropriation of the resource of the public is already taking place. Environmental modelling is always confronted with the problem of uncertainty; models may have many parameters whose values are poorly constrained by empirical data, but which have to be set at a particular value for a single model run. One way of exploring the uncertainty is to undertake ensemble runs of a model with a range of plausible values for the various parameters. However, this can be computationally extremely expensive, especially if there are many such uncertain parameters. The project climateprediction.net (CPDN) (Allen 1999) has applied a unique methodology to

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(a)

(b)

Figure 11.4 (a) An automatic weather station deployed at the Haut Glacier d’Arolla, south-west Switzerland; and (b) an inexpensive domestic weather station, this receives and displays weather data including wind direction and velocity, rainfall, air pressure, temperature and humidity, dew point, wind chill from the wind, rain and thermo-hygro sensors. This is the La Crosse WS2307 Complete Weather Station, costing around £150.

constrain predictions of future climate variables from large ensemble numerical experiments capable of examining the effects of parameter variability. This uses the distributed computing resources available to members of the public (over 100,000 participants have taken part in this). Individuals download to their home computers screensavers that exploit their underused computer power, each conducting one or more simulations using a predetermined setting of parameter values and initial conditions, in an unprecedented global climate simulation project (Piani et al. 2005). From the Greeks to climateprediction.net is a long way, but throughout this history there have been changing emphases on systematic versus flexible data gathering, and when the former emphasis has held sway, it has had a rhetorical flourish that contrasts somewhat with reality. There has also been an evolving but continuing interrelationship amongst meteorological science, vernacular knowledge, instruments and measurement, human beings and observation, and public

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participation. And there has been a long history to the place of meteorology in a unified science that includes, but even transcends the earth–atmosphere–ocean system. Perhaps, therefore, although the meteorological office and the weather station appear to have been children of the Enlightenment, they also remind us that we have never, truly, been ‘modern’ (Latour 1993); however, much our scientific institutions may seek to imply that we should be.

NOTE 1 http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/education/ secondary/students/forecasting.html

REFERENCES Allen, M. (1999) ‘Do-it-yourself climate prediction’, Nature, 401: 642.

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Davey, C.A. and Pielke, R.A., Sr. (2005) ‘Microclimate exposures of surface-based weather stations – Implications for the assessment of long-term temperature trends’, Bull Amer Meter Soc, 86: 497–504. Environment Agency (2005) The floods in Boscastle and North Cornwall 16 August 2004. Environment Agency, Exeter, 32. Golinski, J. (1999) ‘Barometers of change: meteorological instruments as machines of Enlightenment’ in W. Clark, J. Golinski and S. Schaffer (eds), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 69–93. Golinski, J. (2007) British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Grove, J.M. (1989) The Little Ice Age. London: Routledge. Hulme, M. (2008) ‘Geographical work at the boundaries of climate change’, Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 33: 5–11. Jones, P.D., Groisman, P.Ya., Coughlan, M., Plummer, N., Wang, W.-C. and Karl, T.R. (1990) ‘Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land’, Nature, 347: 169–172. Lamb, H.H. (1977) Climate: Present, Past and Future, vol. 2. Climate History and the Future. London: Methuen & Co. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Manley, G. (1953) ‘The mean temperature of central England, 1968–1952’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 79: 242–261. Manley, G. (1966) ‘A preliminary note on early meteorological observations in the London region with estimates of monthly mean temperatures 1680–1706’, Meteorological Magazine, 90: 303–310. Naylor, S. (2006) ‘Nationalizing provincial weather: meteorology in nineteenth-century Cornwall’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 39: 407–433. Oxby, C. (1999) ‘A review of African ethno-astronomy: with particular reference to Saharan livestockkeepers’, La Ricerca Folklorica, No. 40, Società pastorali d’Africa e d’Asia, 55–64. Piani, C., Frame, D.J., Stainforth, D.A. and Allen, M.R. (2005) ‘Constraints on climate change from a multithousand member ensemble of simulations’, Geophysical Review Letters, 32: L23825. Schaffer, S. (1997) ‘Metrology, metrication and Victorian values’ in Lightman, B. (ed.), Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 438–476. Stringer, E.T. (1972) Techniques of Climatology. San Francisco: WH Freeman & Co. Taub, L. (2003) Ancient Meteorology. London: Routledge.

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12 Centre of Calculation Heike Jöns

INTRODUCTION The notion of ‘centre of calculation’ was developed by the French sociologist Bruno Latour (1987) in his seminal book Science in Action. It is a concept about the venues in which knowledge production builds upon the accumulation of resources through circulatory movements to other places. Centres of calculation have been observed at a variety of scales, from the individual to supranational regions, and have contributed significantly to the construction and dissemination of scientific, geographical and other forms of knowledge in different times and spaces. In this chapter, it is argued that the principles for becoming a ‘centre of calculation’ are generic to the emergence of knowledge centres, while scientific and economic ‘centres of calculation’ became inextricably linked to the rise of European science, capitalism and imperialism and are as such an essentially modern project. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section introduces the basic assumptions of the concept in question and provides some ideas on its wider social and intellectual context. The second section presents an historical perspective on scientific centres of

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calculation by discussing case studies and exploring their relation to imperial projects. In the third section, economic centres of calculation are considered in regard to their role for the production and dissemination of knowledge through cities and their networks.

CONCEPT AND CONTEXT In the late 1970s and early 1980s sociologists from France, England and Germany explored the question of how scientists and engineers work by studying their everyday practices through ethnographical observation (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Knorr Cetina 1981). Based on these laboratory studies, they developed a materialist account of scientific practice that shifted the focus of explanatory resources for knowledge production from the scientists’ ideas, theories and interests to the great variety of inanimate and animate nonhumans that constitute laboratory experiments and fieldwork in the natural and technical sciences. From the perspective of what became known as actor–network theory, scientific practice resembles a networkbuilding process between human and

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nonhuman ‘actants’. Being both outcomes and mediators of scientific network-building, human and nonhuman actants mutually negotiate their roles, attributes and competencies in the process of knowledge production until a well-functioning web of allies is stabilized that makes up a new knowledge claim (Law 1986; Latour 1987, 1999). According to Latour (1987: 179–257), scientific network-building is characterized by a systematic mobilization of human and nonhuman resources, or ‘actants’, in a few ‘centres of calculation’ that can afford the expensive ‘proof race’ of the sciences. His idea that such ‘cycles of accumulation’ are constitutive of ‘centres of calculation’ illustrates that knowledge production displays a complex geography as it is both situated within particular locations and linked to other places through mostly circulatory movements. Regardless of the academic practice involved, the circulation of people and organisms, knowledge and ideas, symbolic and material resources to and between different centres of calculation has also contributed to the emergence of geographical knowledge about the other places involved. Therefore, the following three defining processes of ‘centres of calculation’ are important for understanding the development of geographical and other forms of academic knowledge: first, the mobilization of resources; second, the stabilization of new knowledge claims; and third, the extension of knowledge networks for the validation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge and its products.

Mobilization Scientists use encounters with other people and spatial contexts systematically in order to gather new resources for the production and support of their arguments. Depending on the field of study and period of time, the mobilized research objects, infrastructure and expertise may include documents, books, data, instruments, machines, methods, stones, plants, animals, people, specimen, artefacts,

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questionnaires, diaries, observations, maps and drawings as well as research assistants and collaborators. Latour outlines three important properties of the nonhuman resources mobilized by the scientists: first, they have to be mobile in order to be transported to a ‘centre of calculation’; second, they have to be stable – at least to some extent – in order to be presented and processed in an unchanged way; and third, they have to be combinable in order to be aggregated, transformed and connected to other resources in the process of knowledge production (Latour 1987: 223). Therefore, the terms ‘immutable and combinable mobiles’ were coined to address nonhuman scientific resources (Latour 1987: 227). Latour (1987: 225) points out that the recurring ‘mobilisation of anything that can be made to move and shipped back home’ in scientific centres of calculation – such as the university, the laboratory, the archive and the museum – shaped the cumulative character of European science from the ages of discovery and exploration and established Europe as the centre of the imperial age. Experiences of expeditions and individual travellers that were not transmitted to the place of departure had no impact on the construction of a knowledge centre in this place. Only a full ‘cycle of capitalization’ added to the accumulation of resources in a ‘centre of calculation’ and thus created an advantage in knowledge that made distant places familiar and thereby controllable. Subsequent journeys could build upon these previous experiences, familiarize themselves with the place of interest from a distance and thus generate new insights more quickly (Latour 1987: 219–32). An example is given by an episode from the exploration of the Pacific by Lapérouse (1741–88) on behalf of Louis XVI (1754–93), a voyage that had started in 1785: On 17 July 1787, Lapérouse is weaker than his informants [the natives]; he does not know the shape of the land, does not know where to go; he is at the mercy of his guides. Ten years later, on 5 November 1797 the English ship Neptune on

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landing again at the same bay will be much stronger than the natives since they will have on board maps, descriptions, log books, nautical instructions – which to begin with will allow them to know that this is the ‘same’ bay. For the new navigator entering the bay, the most important features of the land will all be seen for the second time – the first time was when reading in London Lapérouse’s notebooks and considering the maps engraved from the bearings De Lesseps brought back to Versailles. Latour 1987: 217.

It is this linkage between exploration, European imperialism and the modern scientific enterprise that will be further examined in the course of this chapter. The second point to be made is about the close relationship between knowledge and power that grounds Latour’s concerns in the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, adding a profoundly materialist perspective to it. Based on the mobilization of immutable mobiles, the balance of power between the early modern traveller and a particular place shifted from an inferiority of the uninformed traveller during the first encounter to an increasing superiority of the informed traveller during the second and following encounters. At every run of this accumulation cycle, more elements are gathered in the centre … at every run the asymmetry … between the foreigners and the natives grows, ending today in something that indeed looks like a Great Divide, or at least like a disproportionate relation between those equipped with satellites who localise the ‘locals’ on their computer maps without even leaving their airconditioned room in Houston, and the helpless natives who do not even see the satellites passing over their heads. Latour 1987: 221.

How geographical knowledge was produced during the explorers’ encounters en route has been detailed by ethnographer/geographer Michael Bravo (1999) in his re-examination of a particular episode during Lapérouse’s voyage into the Pacific. Reconstructing Lapérouse’s encounters in the Bay of Tartary with the aim of rebutting Latour’s interpretation of the event, he points out that there was not – as Latour implied – a simple transfer

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between sketches drawn by locals into the sand and the explorers’ new geographical knowledge about the region (Bravo 1999: 228–9). Geographical knowledge rather emerged from detailed ethnographic observations and a series of complex and often confusing encounters with locals that aimed at the mobilization of local geographical knowledge. Bravo (1999) elaborates on how both ‘geographical gifts’ (geographical knowledge bequeathed through navigation and local people) and ‘ethnographic navigation’ (based on descriptions of people’s physical appearance, language, manners, habits and religious ideas as well as on comparisons between differently labelled ethnic groups) were crucial for generating new geographical knowledge and thus for settling cartographical disputes at home. By imposing ethnic labels on their informants and by replacing the natives’ sketches with surveys based on precise astronomical instruments, the Europeans, however, contributed to the marginalization of these people and their knowledges as ‘other’, subordinate and less ‘enlightened’.

Stabilization An emerging ‘centre of calculation’ is both place of departure and destination of ‘cycles of accumulation’. Inside such a centre the accumulated resources are systemized, classified, transformed, tied together and re-represented in order to build a strong web of associations that makes up a new knowledge claim when all the assembled human and nonhuman allies successfully control one another and thus act as a unified whole. Based on comparisons and combinations, reductions, transformations and abstractions, the aim of the work conducted inside a centre of calculation is to create efficient inscriptions in the form of maps, diagrams, tables, texts and equations that represent comprehensible and well-communicable knowledge claims about much more complex phenomena – whether these are distant in

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time and space, very tiny or incredibly large (Latour 1987: 232–47). The status of a new knowledge claim ideally resembles that of a ‘black box’ when its complex and heterogeneous history of construction is not relevant for everyday usage and has only to be reconsidered if problems occur (Latour 1987: 130–1). Mobilization and stabilization are equally important and overlapping strategies in the course of knowledge production. Both practices resemble integrating processes of negotiation between heterogeneous elements that aim for an increased mobility, stability and combinability of the research object in question. According to Latour, ‘the logistics of immutable mobiles is what we have to admire and study, not the seemingly miraculous supplement of force gained by scientists thinking hard in their offices’ (1987: 237). Even theorists, he argues, rely on immutable mobiles in their work when they mobilize, combine and transform highly abstract nth order inscriptions. Their particular strategic and admired position results from their argumentations’ high level of abstraction that enables them to connect with a range of debates on a lower level of abstraction: Once every trace has been not only written on paper, but rewritten in geometrical form, and rewritten in equation form, then it is no wonder that those who control geometry and mathematics will be able to intervene almost anywhere. Latour 1987: 245.

The idea of repeated circulatory movements contributing to the construction of narratives in one particular place has also been developed by the French philosopher Michel de Certeau (1986) in an essay first published in French in 1977. De Certeau’s study of Jules Verne’s (1828–1905) travel writing substantiates the two basic characteristics of centres of calculation discussed so far. First, the great voyages and travel adventures narrated by Verne contributed to what de Certeau (1986: 146) calls the ‘stockpiling’ of knowledge through a series of episodic circuits involving

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a repetitive going out into the world and returning to a home base. Second, at the home base, the accumulated data was combined and interwoven to a coherent and often linear narrative. In the words of geographer Mike Crang, ‘each journey returns to the place of writing and reinscribes the centrality of the centre of calculation and inscription’ (2003: 139). De Certeau’s (1986: 146) illustration of a series of circuits adding to the stockpiling of knowledge at the home base in fact resembles a three-dimensional version of what Latour (1987: 220) depicts as cycles of capitalization in a centre of calculation. This confirms that knowledge production in modern Europe – whether in the context of fictional or factual texts – has been linked to successive circular journeys and the systematic mobilization of textual, theoretical and empirical resources in the narrative’s place of production. It has also been related to a particular western strategy of capitalizing on knowledge ‘in terms of deriving status, authority and academic qualifications from it’ (Crang 2003: 139). While the idea of network-building processes in centres of calculation can be applied to knowledge production in all disciplines, Latour (1987: 208–10) argues that scientific and technical arguments often appear to be ‘hard’ facts compared to ‘soft’ facts of other narratives. The scientists’ sedulity of recruiting allies, trying out stronger and weaker associations and creating complex sociomaterial hybrids tends to produce particularly stable and durable ‘black boxes’ as the foundational blocks of the sciences’ cumulative nature. He contends that when evaluating knowledge claims, rationalist approaches to science put too much emphasize on reason, logic and argumentation, or mental abilities, whereas relativist approaches, maintaining that judgements about rationality and irrationality mostly depend on different points of view, overlook the enormous work scientists invest into the mobilization of resources and the stabilization of knowledge claims in order to make their arguments more stable and reliable than other arguments (Latour 1987: 195–8).

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Extension The process of knowledge production is not necessarily completed with the mobilization of resources and their transformation into a new knowledge claim. A new argument has rather to prove itself outside its local context of construction in order to become a widely acknowledged fact. The value of newly constructed truth claims has to be tested in different settings, thus exposing them to what Latour (1987: 78) refers to as ‘trials of strength’. Their dissemination relies on the opportunity for and interest of other people to integrate them into their work. The validation, dissemination and preservation of academic knowledge all depend on the actions of other people in other contexts than the formative centre(s) of calculation. The construction of new facts is thus a collective process that requires the extension of knowledge networks in time and space (Latour 1987: 247–57). Widely praised qualities of scientific knowledge such as its presumed universality and the predictability of events depend on the ability to transform places of knowledge consumption in such a way that remaining differences to the context of construction have no significant impact on the existence of scientific facts and artefacts in these other places. However, as placespecificity makes it impossible to construct the same spatial context elsewhere, the application of scientific and technical knowledge is characterized by many complications through missing, failing or intruding human and nonhuman actants: This dependence and fragility [of facts and machines] is not felt by the observer of science because ‘universality’ offers them the possibility of applying laws of physics, of biology, or of mathematics everywhere in principle. It is quite different in practice. Latour 1987: 250, original emphasis.

If new knowledge claims prove themselves outside of the formative centres of calculation, their spokespersons can expect a positive feedback mechanism that helps to recruit more allies for new research and to support

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their centrality. Based on the three basic characteristics of centres of calculation designated as mobilization, stabilization and extension of knowledge networks, it might thus be possible that ‘a small provincial town, or an obscure laboratory, or a puny little company in a garage, that were at first as weak as any other place will become centres dominating at a distance many other places’ (Latour 1987: 223). For a better understanding of centres of calculation and their wider political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual meaning, it is therefore important to consider the practices conducted in these venues as much as their external linkages in terms of incoming and outgoing flows of people and organisms, knowledge and ideas, symbolic and material resources.

SCIENTIFIC CENTRES OF CALCULATION Scientific centres of calculation seem to be as old as the history of science itself as the beginnings of recorded scientific observations in Europe are marked by a prominent circular journey. At about 600 BC Thales of Milet (c. 625–547 BC) had travelled from Greece to Egypt in order to conduct measurements of shadow lengths at the feet of the pyramids that helped him to generate new knowledge about basic geometrical relations. Widely regarded as the origin of Greek geometry, he taught this knowledge back in Milet to a number of pupils in what became known as the Ionic school (Serres 1995). About 300 years later, in the third century BC, the famous Library of Alexandria was founded by ‘Macedonian rulers who had a vested interest in accumulating oriental knowledge, with the intention of installing a syncretistic Hellenism throughout the imperial world’ (MacLeod 2004: 3). Historian of science Roy MacLeod reasons that [the Library] was the first to underwrite a programme of cultural imperialism, to become a

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‘centre of calculation’, in Bruno Latour’s phrase. For similar reasons, royal libraries were later established in all the Hellenistic centres – for prestige, for cultural intelligence, and for the practical purposes of administration and rule … Alexandria would welcome learned Greeks to come and work together, to pursue mathematics and medicine, literature and poetry, physics and philosophy … It would aim for complete coverage of anything ever written. MacLeod 2004: 3.

The Ionic school and the Library of Alexandria mark powerful centres of calculation in the early centuries of the European intellectual tradition. They were important nodes in a growing network of scientific and philosophical knowledge, linked to the world by the mobilization of scholars and resources and a significant intellectual, cultural and political influence across time and space. By collecting and disseminating geographical knowledge, the Library of Alexandria functioned as a centre of imperial control, thus underlining a close relationship between scholarship and the Hellenistic imperial project. While scientific, geographical and philosophical knowledge acquired some political power in ancient civilizations, these power-geometries kept changing over the centuries to come. Exploring the ordering of knowledge in the Roman Empire, classical scholars Jason König and Tim Whitmarsh (2007: 5) argue that ‘[t]he structures of postclassical knowledge-ordering – in the Arabic, medieval and Renaissance worlds and beyond – are indebted to ancient models’ but that knowledge-ordering texts of the Roman Empire were much less closely linked to imperial ambitions than much of the scientific writing of the British Empire. The meaning of scientific knowledge and its relationship to political power were quite distinct in the European Middle Ages as well. In a period in which churchly religious and secular–political interests were inextricably linked to each other, scientific knowledge was subordinated to religious knowledge and often actively suppressed when it threatened the authority of the Christian Church (Grant 1996). Monasteries, the emerging

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universities and courts of clerics and aristocrats can be regarded as medieval scientific centres of calculation. They introduced Greek and Arabic science to Central Europe and supported those fields of study that turned out to be useful for ecclesiastical and secular authorities (De Ridder-Symoens 2004). It was not until the fifteenth century that events such as the invention of the printing press (c. 1450) by Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz (c. 1400–68), early modern discoveries and expeditions (e.g. Columbus’ discovery of the Americas in 1492) and the Copernican Revolution (1514) launched a cumulative process of cycles of accumulation in scientific centres of calculation that eventually led the triumvirate of European science, capitalism and imperialism to dominate what became known as the modern world-system.

London The interconnection of modern science, commerce and empire was probably most clearly embodied by the life and deeds of Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), the English explorer, botanist, collector and publisher as well as confidant to the king, advisor to the government, the admiralty and the East India Company, and long-term President of the Royal Society (1778–1820). Historian of science David Miller (1996) suggests using a Latourian approach for exploring Banks’ crucial role in the construction of powerful ‘centres of calculation’ in London as these were as much sustained by a complex network of scientific, commercial and imperial practices and shaped by geographical imaginations of unfamiliar places beyond Europe as they sustained and shaped such networks and imaginations. Interpreting ‘centres of calculation’ as a post-Saidian approach, Fulford et al. (2004) also discuss Banks’ achievements in the light of this concept as they aim to extend Edward Said’s (1978) critique of the western academic tradition by considering both representational and materialist aspects

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of interconnected networks of exploration (Fulford et al. 2004: 27). Building upon his schoolboy hobby of botany, great inherited wealth and expeditions to Newfoundland and Labrador, Banks’ scientific authority began to emerge after 1768 when he joined Captain James Cook’s (1728–79) first of three voyages into the Pacific. This journey explored the shores of Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia and is widely regarded as one of the most important scientific explorations in the eighteenth century. Supported by a number of botanists and assistants, Banks’ collection of specimens ‘increased the number of plant species known to science by 25 percent’ (Fulford et al. 2004: 9). Back in London, his house at Soho Square and the Royal Gardens at Kew became part of a multinodal centre of calculation in which his vast collection of rocks, plants, animals and cultural artefacts was preserved, classified and displayed. Using established Royal Society procedures and developing the classification system of Swedish botanist Linnaeus with the help of one of Linnaeus’s students, Banks transformed his collection into systematic knowledge. It was Banks’ ability to establish himself as the spokesperson of the publicly available collection that gained him national and international scientific recognition and increasing political influence (Miller 1996; Fulford et al. 2004). Banks orchestrated a complex network of human and nonhuman resources for the ‘benefit’ of science and the growing British Empire, but often at the expense of other people and places (Fulford et al. 2004). As powerful doyen of science, he imposed his will over which scientific enquiry received validation, thus delaying, for example, the acceptance of vaccination as a useful medical practice. He initiated explorations to Africa, Australia, China, North America and the North Pole and organized the comparison, classification and reproduction of the resources they brought back, thus supporting various ‘scientific’ discourses, including racial categorizations and rankings that had

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dreadful effects for people living in the regions exploited by European mobilization processes. Banks corresponded with gardeners, natural philosophers, politicians and administrators throughout the world, some of which had been trained in London to maintain his global networks abroad. He sent gardeners around the world to collect plants and seeds from remote climates. These were cultivated at Kew in the name of science and redistributed to Britain’s new colonies as inexpensive food sources. By first sending sheep and vine to Australia and smuggling tea plants from China to India Banks supported the emergence of patterns of colonial capitalism that still shape our world today. His network of botanical gardens fuelled a new global capitalism that gave ‘the nation a commercial advantage over its trading rivals’ (Fulford et al. 2004: 44). This expansive capitalism and colonialism was consolidated by sending out military expeditions to Africa in order to bring the goldfields under British control. Banks’ library became ‘a repository of remote places as reconstructed by European knowledge-systems’ (Fulford et al. 2004: 41), and he personally edited and controlled the geographical knowledge released about hitherto unfamiliar places within the reach of his networks. As an individual, Banks used existing institutions and infrastructures in London to created powerful scientific centres of calculation that in turn transformed the city into the commercial and imperial capital of an expanding British Empire.

Tanjore Scientific centres of calculation were not only located in the metropolitan areas of early modern Europe. It has rather been argued that the notion of centres of calculation helps to reveal the inadequacy of the centre/periphery model of science as the knowledge centres are not bound to specific geographical locations but defined by

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particular practices (Nair 2005). Historian Savithri Preetha Nair argues that Raja Serfoji II (1798–1832) of Tanjore, a small city in the South of India, was Banks’ ‘native counterpart, exhibiting similar formal properties, and drawing on those very same ideas and networks of metropolitan practice to systematically produce useful knowledge’, even if on a much smaller scale (Nair 2005: 279). Serfoji had been educated by Halle Lutherian Missionaries and officials associated with the East India Company in Madras, who prepared him for his royal responsibilities as an adult. Considered as a man of knowledge in his twenties, Serfoji had internalized European education and the idea of ‘useful’ knowledge, thus confirming the view that the modern world-system grew, inter alia, through the Europeanization of nonEuropean elites (Taylor 1999: 9). After he had established his court at Tanjore, Serfoji managed to generate and sustain cycles of accumulation for the production and dissemination of knowledge by successfully connecting himself to three larger networks: the Tranquebar missionaries and the Company officials, who both provided important links to the metropolitan Banksian network, and to a ‘large group of native medical practitioners, mechanics, animal carers, painters, musicians, gardeners, hunters, birdsnarers, printers and book binders’ (Nair 2005: 284). Serfoji’s cycles of accumulation were enriched by eminent travellers visiting the Tanjore court; by a wide network of correspondences; by the exchange of books, instruments/machines and research objects with London and elsewhere; and by the creation of a range of institutions for the production and dissemination of new knowledge, including gardens, libraries, printing presses, a pharmacy and educational facilities. Based on translating the most recent developments in western science and English education into Marathi and Tamil, Serfoji’s centre of calculation extended the networks of modern science and education to the south of India.

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There were, however, striking differences between Banks’ and Serfoji’s centres of calculation. First, Nair argues that the systematic collecting project in which Serfoji engaged as a response to the western encounter, was not directed towards establishing a cabinet of curiosities [as in the European tradition] … it was aimed at re-inscribing a field-centred episteme, in resistance to the ‘museum-based’ knowledge production that was fast gaining ground under the Company’s mercantilist regime. Nair 2005: 285–6.

The reason for this was his ‘intuitive and sympathetic understanding of living nature – a socialising of nature – which blurred the boundaries between the object and observer’ (Nair 2005: 294), thus illustrating the impact Serfoji’s Hindu beliefs had on the ways in which he practised science. By not displaying the displaced collections in a museum, his cycle of knowledge production did not produce the kind of hierarchical geographical knowledge that emerged elsewhere when displaced items (and thus the places they came from) were controlled by the eyes and minds of ‘enlightened’ observers. The influence of non-western forms of knowledge production thus altered some of the ways in which Serfoji’s centre of calculation worked. The second considerable difference between Banks and Serfoji was that the Indian prince was subordinated to the administration of the British Empire and thus lacked political authority and economic freedom. This is best expressed in Serfoji’s pilgrimage to Benares (1820–22) that he used ‘as a perfect and legitimate alibi in the face of political confinement, to satisfy both his own curiosity and to sustain his cycle of accumulation, [while] the Company officials viewed the pilgrimage as a distraction that “halted the normal routine of that praiseworthy career”’ (Nair 2005: 300). Despite this subordination to British administration, the example of Serfoji’s early-nineteenth-century ‘centre of calculation’ in the periphery of a Eurocentric world – Tanjore was even

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located in the periphery of India – shows how centres of calculation may emerge in different geographical contexts. They may also vanish abruptly when these practices have no relevance to changing political and economic realities – as Tanjore’s centre of calculation did in the 1850s – or when these practices stop due to discontinuation on the personal level.

Modern institutions Sir Joseph Banks and Raja Serfoji II of Tanjore were outstanding individuals who managed to knot powerful centres of calculation and knowledge networks. In their lifetime, however, the trend was ‘away from a situation in which a private individual, through deferential politics, could array these domains [economics, politics, science, technology, law] in such a way as to make himself [sic!] a center, and towards one in which the center was an administrative unit, or a regulated and coordinated group of administrative units’ (Miller 1996: 33). Accordingly, modern institutions such as corporations (Harris 1998), learned societies (Heffernan 2000), botanical gardens (Johnson 2007), museums (Dritsas 2005), libraries (Craggs 2008), universities (Jöns 2008), government institutions (Barnes 2006) and even coffeehouses (Stewart 1999) have been discussed as ‘centres of calculation’ (Livingstone 2003: 171–8). Lawrence Dritsas (2005), working in the field of science studies, reconstructs the people, practices and institutions involved in the taxonomic description of six freshwater mussel shells collected during David Livingstone’s Zambesi Expedition (1858–64). He critically reflects that ‘[b]y following the mussels through society, the centre of calculation proves to be a fictitious place if it is assumed to be the end of the line where all the further analytical work was performed’ (Dritsas 2005: 50). In his opinion, the metropolitan centre of science rather functioned as ‘an entrepôt for natural history’ than a centre

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of calculation as ‘[t]he work at the [British] museum involved receiving specimens, evaluating them briefly and then sending them on to an appropriate expert for proper analysis, wherever they might be’ (Dritsas 2005: 50–1). This perspective evokes the idea of a spatially distributed, or multinodal, centre of calculation, in which ‘[t]he sites of collection, facilitation and analysis are particular locales that fit into a larger, distributed pattern of knowledge generation necessary for the whole project to succeed’ (Dritsas 2005: 52). However, as Dritsas acknowledges the possibility of the expert being located within the museum, it remains possible to regard the whole institution as a centre of calculation. Historical geographer Michael Heffernan (2000) conceptualizes three major geographical societies as centres of calculation when comparing the involvement of the Royal Geographical Society in London (RGS), the Société de Géographie de Paris (SGP) and the American Geographical Society in New York (AGS) in the wartime effort of their respective countries. His findings highlight very different functions of similar types of centres of calculation in diverse geographical contexts and reveal how the wider political meaning of the geographical knowledge emerging from these venues may vary: While the RGS acted as a metropolitan node in Britain’s ‘imperial archive’ and focused on the production of maps and the development of schemes to project war onto a ‘winnable’ imperial dimension; the SGP became a node in France’s ‘national archive’, a ‘centre of geographical calculation’ that reflected a characteristically French faith that powerful intellectuals … could devise elegant geographical and historical arguments about the sovereignty of the national space. Heffernan 2000: 327.

Heffernan’s analysis of the AGS eventually suggests the notion of a mobile centre of calculation. Based on ‘one of the most exhaustive and ambitious exercises in geographical and historical data collection ever attempted’ (Heffernan 2000: 328), the AGS

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did not produce specific recommendations on Europe’s geopolitical future that could have been consulted by the delegates of the post-war peace conference. US President Woodrow Wilson and his advisers rather ‘hoped that a logical conclusion would emerge during the negotiations based on America’s unique archive of fact’. Therefore, this ‘huge collection of material was duly shipped across to Paris on the USS George Washington to be carefully reassembled … at the US headquarters’ under the supervision of Isaiah Bowman and other academic geographers (Heffernan 2000: 328–9). In the course of the nineteenth century, modern research universities superseded academies and scientific societies as the most prominent scientific centres of calculation (Burke 2000: 49). At Cambridge University, the rise of research culture went hand in hand with the growth and professionalization of academic travel for the purpose of research, visiting appointments, lecturing, conference visits and consulting (Jöns 2008). The increasing circular travels of Cambridge academics in the first half of the twentieth century can be interpreted as a twofold mobilization process in different centres of calculation, namely the home institution and the host institutions. On the one hand, the emerging research university benefited from its travelling academics through the production of new arguments, the linking to academic networks and research centres, and the access to and import of new ideas, prestige, research objects, infrastructure and funds. On the other hand, the temporary recruitment of Cambridge expertise in the United States – mainly through visiting appointments and lecture tours – contributed to the gradual transformation of American universities into new global scientific centres and fostered the development of an Anglo-American academic hegemony in the twentieth century (Jöns 2008). Conceptualizing modern research universities as centres of calculation thus draws attention to their complex external linkages and offers a promising way of

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exploring further the changing geographies of knowledge nodes and networks (Jöns 2009).

ECONOMIC CENTRES OF CALCULATION In addition to individuals and institutions, cities have been characterized as ‘centres of calculation’, or ‘places in which local information from different regions and concerning diverse topics is turned into general knowledge (Burke 2000: 75). The example of the city of Amsterdam as the leading commercial centre in Europe during the seventeenth century highlights some of the ways in which the notion of ‘centre of calculation’ might enhance our understanding of cities as venues in which knowledge is produced through and for economic practices. Historian Woodruff Smith argues that ‘the nature of information as a commodity and as a byproduct of the operations of trade networks led in the seventeenth century to the evolution in Amsterdam of a central information exchange for all of Europe’ (1984: 987). His notion of an ‘information exchange’ resembles that of a ‘centre of calculation’ as it is precisely about a venue in which the production of economically relevant knowledge builds upon the accumulation of resources through circulatory movements to other places (for a different take on these terms’ relationship, see Driver 2001: chapter 2). In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, the assembling of information proceeded through ‘the correspondence of private merchants, the correspondence of business institutions, the actual movement of businessmen to and from Amsterdam, the reports of Dutch consuls in other trading centres, the reports of Dutch diplomatic representatives in political capitals, and special channels of communication set up by particular organizations’ (Smith 1984: 990). Inside the commercial centre, information was exchanged on the basis of ‘face-to-face encounters

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among businessmen and interchange of short-distance correspondence within Amsterdam’ (Smith 1984: 995). Institutions, firms and merchants used standardized procedures to process the collected information with the aim of generating systematic files and trade statistics, to estimate regional demand patterns across Europe, to predict market trends and to develop marketing and business strategies. The dissemination of printed lists about commodity prices, exchange rates and goods for sale at auctions was organized by enterprising publishers in cooperation with the major merchant houses, while newspapers spread political and economic information across Europe (Smith 1984: 998–9). By linking regional and international information networks, Amsterdam was also a venue in which geographical knowledge about economic centres and peripheries was constantly being produced and reproduced through practices of trade and correspondence. Smith (1984) points out that several innovations in the modernization of information handling occurred in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The example of systematic long-term information analysis as ‘one of the central characteristics of modern capitalism’ (Smith 1984: 1004–5) underlines the close linkage between the systematization of knowledge in ‘centres of calculation’ and the rise of European commerce since early modern times. Building upon Smith’s observation that the constitutive processes of Amsterdam’s information exchange ‘can be identified in the operations of practically any modern information exchange, whether it be part of a commercial center such as New York City, or a government, a corporate headquarter, or an intelligence agency’ (1984: 989), the notion of ‘centre of calculation’ appears to be useful for understanding the production and circulation of knowledge in different realms of society. Latour himself suggests that the networks of administration, management and bureaucracy, of science, politics and economics ‘have to be studied with the same method’ (1987: 255).

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Accordingly, he portrays a Wall Street trading room as a ‘centre of calculation’: [A] Wall Street trading room does connect to the ‘whole world’ through the tiny but expeditious conduits of millions of bits of information per second, which, after having been digested by traders, are flashed back to the very same place by the Reuters or Bloomberg trading screens that register all of the transactions and are then wired to the ‘rest of the (connected) world’ to determine someone’s net worth … Don’t focus on capitalism, but don’t stay stuck on the screen of the trading either: follow the connections, ‘follow the actors themselves’. Latour 2005: 178–9.

CONCLUSION Centres of calculation are venues for the production and dissemination of different types of knowledge. Constituted by cycles of accumulation, they are linked to the world by incoming and outgoing flows of people, resources and ideas. This makes them central to the generation and circulation of geographical knowledge about other places, either as a main means or a byproduct. Dominating other places at a distance, centres of calculation can be identified and analyzed on different scales, from Banks’ private home to Serfoji’s royal court, from the Library of Alexandria to the University of Cambridge, from cities such as Amsterdam, London and Tanjore to continents such as Europe and North America. As centres of calculation are defined by particular practices, they are not bound to specific geographical sites or areas but may emerge in a variety of places and contexts, often being linked by hierarchical relations that are subject to change. Tracing back centres of calculation to the beginning of the history of science suggests that the principles for becoming a ‘centre of calculation’ are generic to the emergence of knowledge centres and capitals. This argument is inspired by Peter Taylor’s (2007) discussion of two generic models of urban spatial relations, namely central places and central flows. By emphasizing the ways in

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which the centrality of a place is created and reinforced by circulatory flows of people and resources, the notion of ‘centre of calculation’ provides a link between these two generic models of urban spatial relations. On the other hand, this chapter has shown that both scientific and economic centres of calculation have multiplied in number and scale since early modern times, thus becoming inextricably linked to the global spread of European science, capitalism and imperialism and their ceaseless cycles of accumulation. Latour (1987) himself emphasizes this historically specific link by explaining the cumulative nature of the sciences with modern expeditions and scientific practices. Acknowledging the possibility of generic processes that may become characteristic for a specific period of human history seems to dissolve an apparent contradiction between claims of being non-modern (Latour 1993) – as these refer to generic processes – and claims of being modern (Taylor 1999) – as these concentrate on historically specific processes. Centres of calculation thus provide a suitable analytical focus for understanding the historical and contemporary geographies of scientific, economic and geographical knowledge production in different times and places, including the asymmetric power-geometries resulting from cyclic mobilization processes and selective flows of people, resources and information. Avenues for future study are provided by a need for further case studies in different historical, geographical and institutional contexts as well as by the questions about the origins of centres of calculation beyond the scientific realm, and their relation to other forms of knowledge production, including non-western, prehistoric, religious and everyday knowledges.

REFERENCES Barnes, Trevor J. (2006) ‘Geographical intelligence: American geographers and research and analysis in

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the Office of Strategic Services 1941–1945’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32(1): 150–168. Bravo, Michael (1999) ‘Ethnographic navigation and the geographical gift’ in David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers (eds), Geography and Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 199–235. Burke, Peter (2000) A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot. Cambridge: Polity Press. Craggs, Ruth (2008) ‘Situating the imperial archive: The Royal Empire Society Library, 1868–1945’, Journal of Historical Geography, 34(1): 48–67. Crang, Mike (2003) ‘Telling materials’ in Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose and Sarah Whatmore (eds), Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research. London: Sage, pp. 137–144. De Certeau, Michel (1986) Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Manchester: Manchester University Press. De Ridder-Symoens, Hilde (2004) ‘The changing face of centres of learning, 1400–1700’ in Alasdair A. MacDonald and Michael W. Twomey (eds), Schooling and Society: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages. Leuven: Peeters Publishers, pp. 115–138. Dritsas, Lawrence (2005) ‘From Lake Nyassa to Philadelphia: A geography of the Zambesi Expedition, 1858–64’, British Journal for the History of Science, 38(1): 35–52. Driver, Felix (2001) Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell. Fulford, Tim, Lee, Debbie and Kitson, Peter J. (2004) Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grant, Edward (1996) The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, Steven J. (1998) ‘Long-distance corporations, big sciences, and the geography of knowledge’, Configurations, 6(2): 269–304. Heffernan, Michael (2000) ‘Mars and Minerva: centres of geographical calculation in an age of Total War’, Erdkunde, 54(4): 320–333. Johnson, Nuala (2007) ‘Grand design(er)s: David Moore, natural theology and the Royal Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin, 1838–1879’, Cultural Geographies, 14(1): 29–55. Jöns, Heike (2008) ‘Academic travel from Cambridge University and the formation of centres of knowledge, 1885–1954’, Journal of Historical Geography, 34(2): 338–362.

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Jöns, Heike (2009) ‘“Brain circulation” and transnational knowledge networks: Studying long-term effects of academic mobility to Germany, 1954–2000’, Global Networks, 9(3): 315–338. Knorr Cetina, Karin D. (1981) The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon Press. König, Jason and Whitmarsh, Tim (2007) ‘Ordering knowledge’ in Jason König and Tim Whitmarsh (eds), Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–11. Latour, Bruno (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve (1979) Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. London: Sage. Law, John (ed.) (1986) Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Livingstone, David N. (2003) Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. MacLeod, Roy (2004) ‘Introduction: Alexandria in history and myth’ in Roy MacLeod (ed.), The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 1–15.

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Miller, David (1996) ‘Joseph Banks, empire, and “centers of calculation” in late Hanoverian London’ in David P. Miller and Peter H. Reill (eds), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–37. Nair, Savithri Preetha (2005) ‘Native collecting and natural knowledge (1798–1832): Raja Serfoji II of Tanjore as a “centre of calculation”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 15(3): 279–302. Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Serres, Michel (1995) ‘Gnomon: The beginnings of geometry in Greece’ in Michel Serres (ed.), A History of Scientific Thought: Elements of a History of Science. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 73–123. Smith, Woodruff D. (1984) ‘The function of commercial centers in the modernization of European capitalism: Amsterdam as an information exchange in the seventeenth century’, The Journal of Economic History, 44(4): 985–1005. Stewart, Larry (1999) ‘Other centres of calculation, or, where the Royal Society didn’t count: Commerce, coffee-houses and natural philosophy in early modern London’, British Journal for the History of Science, 32(2): 133–153. Taylor, Peter J. (1999) Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation. Cambridge: Polity Press. Taylor, Peter J. (2007) Cities, World Cities, Networks and Globalization. GaWC Research Bulletin 238. Available at: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb238. html, accessed on 9 July 2009.

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13 Remote Sensing Yongwei Sheng

REMOTE SENSING AND GEOGRAPHIC INQUIRIES Remote sensing is the art, science and technology of obtaining reliable information about the Earth (or other physical objects) and its environment through the process of acquiring, recording, analyzing and interpreting imagery and other representations of energy patterns derived from non-directly-contact sensor systems by means of electromagnetic radiation.1 With electromagnetic radiation traveling at the speed of light, the sensors collect information of the remote objects through an instantaneous process. Reading is such a process, in which our eyes (i.e. the sensors) sense the reading materials (the objects) from about one foot away through the light reflected from the materials (Lillesand et al. 2007). Our brain (the mental computer) analyzes the sensed image and recognizes a collection of letters, words and sentences from the dark areas on the materials, and further interprets the information that the sentences convey. In contrast to the reading process, remote sensing typically senses objects on or near the Earth’s surface. In order to obtain synoptic views of objects on the Earth, the sensor needs to be operated on a moving platform

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(usually aircraft and spacecraft) high above the surface. As such, remote sensing offers important advantages over field-based observations in terms of greater spatial coverage and multi-temporal monitoring capabilities. Remote sensing allows us to collect information repeatedly over remote or dangerous regions and even the entire globe at reasonably low costs and without gaining a direct access. The synoptic coverage that remote sensing provides allows us to discern geographic patterns and processes not easily recognizable from the ground. The shape of the Earth and the distribution of continents, which had puzzled human beings for thousands of years, would become obvious to be readily discovered from geostationary satellite imagery. The multi-temporal monitoring capability of remote sensing provides systematic, timely and periodical data and information for geographic inquiries; thus helping us to understand and address problems of the Earth such as ‘How the Earth is changing?’ In addition, remote sensing can record phenomena in wavelengths invisible to human eyes such as in infrared and microwave bands to explore the Earth from ‘invisible’ visions. Since the term ‘remote sensing’ was first documented in the peer-reviewed literature in

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the 1960s in geographic journals (Bailey 1963; Latham 1966), remote sensing soon became a widely used tool in geographic inquiries and a vigorous field in geography and Earth science. The literature on geography has expanded over the past 40-plus years, but the remote-sensing literature has grown even more rapidly. This can be seen by comparing the annual total number of peer-reviewed papers published with ‘remote* sens*’ as a keyword to the number of papers with ‘geograph*’ as a keyword. Figure 13.1 shows that the annual ratio of the number of remotesensing papers to the number of geography papers has grown steadily from 1963 to the present (i.e. 2009). Nearly 3,500 remotesensing papers have been published in the year 2009 alone, about 27% of the total geography papers published in the same year. Remote sensing nowadays is used in a wide range of geographic and environmental inquiries.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF REMOTE SENSING The history of remote sensing was influenced by developments in a broad range of interrelated technologies such as sensing and platform technologies and was shaped by the

social goals, political agendas and national security issues of the day (Aronoff 2005). Though the term ‘remote sensing’ was coined in the 1960s by geographers in the Office of Naval Research (Colwell 1983), its history often retro-actively dates back to around the 1850s when the principle of aerial photography and photogrammetry appeared. Aerial photography, an early form of remote sensing, was initiated when cameras were carried into the air by pigeons, kites or balloons to take photographs from the air. The invention of piloted airplanes in 1903 provided remote sensing a feasible and navigable platform compared with the early days. Aerial surveillance became a sophisticated intelligencegathering operation during the two world wars. Two influential professional societies on photogrammetry were established during this period: the International Society for Photogrammetry (ISP) in 1910 and the American Society for Photogrammetry (ASP) in 1934. World War II also spurred the development of new remote-sensing technologies including colour infrared photography and radar technologies. After the military value of remote sensing was proven in World War II, remote sensing became an essential component of military intelligence, and state-ofthe-art remote-sensing technologies were classified. On one hand, the military needs stimulated remote-sensing research. On the

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Figure 13.1 Steady growth of the ratio of the number of remote sensing papers to the number of geography papers. The data were extracted from the ISI Web-of-KnowledgeTM archive (accessed in July 2010).

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other hand, security concerns limited the introduction of new sensing technologies to civilian applications. Some advanced remotesensing instruments were developed in the 1950s such as thermal infrared imaging sensors, side-looking radar and syntheticaperture-radar (SAR) imaging systems; and electro-optical scanners were not declassified to civilian data collection until the late 1960s. Remote sensing was largely airborne before the 1960s. A major breakthrough in remote sensing was the introduction of man-made satellites in the early 1960s. Sputnik 1, the first satellite launched in October 1957 by the former Soviet Union, initiated the space age. In August 1960, the United States was able to acquire the first space photographs from a spy satellite mission named Corona. Space exploration quickly led to the design and operation of the first dedicated nonmilitary Earth observation satellite, the Television and Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS-A), which was launched in April 1960. Though TIROS-A was a weather satellite only able to offer coarse-resolution imagery of cloud patterns with little discernible details of the Earth’s surface, it was not only the predecessor of modern geostationary and polar-orbit meteorological satellite series but also provided the basis for the development of Earth resource satellites. Satellite technologies brought remote sensing into a new age by providing a stable high-altitude orbiting platform to payload sensor systems. Satellite remote-sensing systems have several advantages over airborne ones. Satellites have unrestricted repetitive access to the entire globe independent of political boundaries and satellite imagery is collected in a systematic and periodical way, making remote sensing a cost-effective monitoring tool of the Earth. A consistent satellite program would lead to the development of long-term, repeated, systematic multi-purpose data archives of the Earth’s surface. Remote-sensing data collection in the satellite age from the early 1960s was no longer limited to airborne systems and digital

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imagery started to replace camera films and photographs. The field began to grow beyond aerial photography and photogrammetry and it became necessary for the field to embrace new developments. The new name ‘remote sensing’ was coined for this exciting field in the early 1960s. The Institute of Science and Technology at the University of Michigan was credited with organizing in February 1962 the First Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment (IST 1962) under the guidance of Walter H. Bailey and with the support of the US Office of Naval Research. The field of remote sensing has been blooming since then. A new era of civilian remote sensing began with the launch of the first Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS-1, later renamed Landsat-1) in July 1972, the first satellite dedicated to Earth resources remote sensing. The Landsat satellite series, still in operation, provides for the first time a repeated continuous systematic global coverage of the Earth with sufficient details for practical use in many fields. As a major milestone in remote sensing, the Landsat program completely reshaped the field of remote sensing and led to widespread civilian applications with high spatial-resolution imagery. The success of the Landsat program greatly diversified remote-sensing applications and led to an expansion of the remote-sensing community. Both American Society for Photogrammetry (ASP) and International Society for Photogrammetry (ISP) changed their names to ASPRS and ISPRS by adding ‘remote sensing’ (RS) to their titles in 1975 and 1980, respectively, to embrace the new development of satellite remote sensing. The Landsat program provided data for civilian applications in digital image format for the first time and broadly stimulated digital analysis of remotely sensed imagery. Digital image analysis involves the manipulation and interpretation of remotely sensed images with the aid of digital computers. Advances in computing technologies in the 1970s made digital imagery analysis practical and led to the development of computer-based remotely sensed image-analysis systems, which are

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widely used nowadays. Digital remotesensing image processing and analysis has been one of the most active research areas in remote sensing. After continuous development over the past 40 years, remote sensing is currently at a stage where there are hundreds of satellites orbiting the Earth, providing information at various resolutions using various wavelengths. Just to name a few, Terra and Aqua are comprehensive Earth observation satellites that carry multiple sensors, simultaneously sensing the land, the ocean and the atmosphere with nearly daily global coverage. Commercial satellites such as IKONOS and QuickBird were launched in the late 1990s to provide high-resolution imagery at meter and even sub-meter spatial resolutions. A rich set of satellites is acquiring radar imagery in microwave bands at a variety of spatial resolutions. Thanks to the rapid advancements in computing technologies, today we have an unprecedented capability of handling the huge volume of remotesensing data poured in everyday, which are being used to monitor the Earth. The rigorous development of remote sensing in a relatively short period of time would not be possible without steady institutional and individual efforts. In addition to community efforts, several prominent figures have made crucial contributions towards the betterment of the flourishing field of remote sensing, including William A. Fischer, William T. Pecora and Robert Colwell. William A. Fischer (1919–1980), an advocate of Earth observing systems, had the early vision of remote sensing as a means of collecting Earth resources information from space. He was credited for bringing attention and enthusiasm to the US civilian satellite land remote-sensing program in the early planning years of the 1960s. William Pecora (1913–1972), former director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), was a motivating force behind the establishment of the USGS Earth Resource Observation Satellite (EROS) program in 1966. His persistent support initiated the first civil-

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ian space-borne Earth imaging project, which led to the series of Landsat satellites (Pecora 1966). Robert N. Colwell (1918–2005), the late forestry professor at University of California, Berkeley, was an academic pioneer in remote sensing. The ‘multi’ concept he put forth in the 1960s was crucial to remote sensing and is particularly important nowadays when multi-spectral, multi-scale, multi-platform, multi-sensor, multi-temporal remote-sensing data are widely available. He was a great believer in multi-disciplinary integration in remote sensing. The Manual of Photographic Interpretation (Colwell 1960) and Manual of Remote Sensing (Colwell 1983) that he edited are great examples of his multi-disciplinary efforts, bringing hundreds of specialists and scientists from various fields together to develop remote-sensing principles, methodologies and applications. In addition, Compton J. Tucker, a senior Earth scientist at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center, is a leader in advancing remote sensing at regional and global scales. He is one of the most productive and widely cited remote-sensing researchers. Moreover, a number of educators have contributed to the remote-sensing field by producing popular remote-sensing textbooks. Photogrammetry by Francis H. Moffitt (1922– 2007) has provided the photogrammetric fundamentals to thousands of civil engineering and remote-sensing students throughout the world. Elements of Photogrammetry by Paul R. Wolf (1934–2002) is a classic textbook in photogrammetry. Remote Sensing of the Environment: An Earth Resource Perspective and Introductory Digital Image Processing: A Remote Sensing Perspective by John R. Jensen, and Remote Sensing and Image Interpretation by Thomas M. Lillesand et al. have been widely used in higher education. In order to commemorate their contribution to the field of remote sensing, the ASPRS has established William A. Fischer, Robert N. Colwell, Francis H. Moffitt and Paul R. Wolf Memorial Scholarships. The US Department of the Interior and

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NASA in 1974 jointly established the William T. Pecora Award to honor the memory of his visionary contribution, which has become one of the most prestigious awards in the field of remote sensing.

MAIN PROCESSES IN REMOTE SENSING AND BASIC PROPERTIES OF REMOTE SENSING DATA The remote-sensing process is comprised of four major procedures: plan design, data acquisition, data analysis and information application (Aronoff 2005; Jensen 2007; Lillesand 2007). The plan design process is application-oriented. It defines the application purposes and/or problems and evaluates the potential of addressing the problems with remote-sensing technologies. Critical to the effective applications of any remotesensing methods, a thorough understanding of the purposes and problems helps to identify what remote-sensing data is to be acquired at what time and frequency, what data analysis is to be conducted, and what information products are to be generated. The data-acquisition procedure converts the incident electromagnetic radiation into remote-sensing data. Part of the energy illuminating the ground surface after being attenuated by the atmosphere is reflected or emitted to the sensors onboard spacecraft or aircraft. The amount of energy reaching the sensor is detected, recorded and archived as remote-sensing data on films, tapes or disks in user-friendly formats. When users receive the remotely sensed data, the data-analysis procedure begins. Remote-sensing specialists play major roles in this process to extract information about objects of interest and produce remote-sensing products from the acquired data through visual interpretation, computer image processing, or a combination of both. While visual interpretation is irreplaceable in remote-sensing investigation, computer-based image processing has become popular in extracting information

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from the acquired data automatically or semi-automatically. After converting the raw remote-sensing data into meaningful geographic and geophysical quantities of interests, information products including images, maps, tabular summaries and reports are generated for use in subsequent information application procedures. Remote-sensing experts and application scientists need to communicate with each other in the application procedure. The remote-sensing experts provide various information products as well as their quality and reliability, while the scientists use them together with the data from other sources to address the problems identified in the plan design procedure. As such, the four processes are closely integrated in remote-sensing applications. Remotely sensed data mainly include aerial photographs and digital satellite imagery including radar data. Remotely sensed images have several unique properties. First of all, they are images about a specific location on the Earth’s surface; therefore they have a geographic coverage and come with a coordinate system or map projection. They are acquired at a certain time in certain spectral wavelengths by a sensor with certain sensitivity on a platform at an altitude and with a fixed revisiting cycle; thus, they have properties of acquisition date and time, spatial, spectral, radiometric and temporal resolutions. Though remote sensing has long employed optical sensors, high-resolution synthetic-apertureradar imagery became available for Earthsurface remote sensing through the Seasat-1 satellite launched in June 1978. Radar remote sensing is capable of conducting a different surveillance at microwave wavelengths in both day and night and under all weather conditions with better ground penetration capabilities than optical sensors. These advantages have made such radar systems ideal for imaging cloud-covered regions such as tropical rain forests and for geological investigations. In addition, interferometric operation of radar has become a useful tool in three-dimensional surface remote sensing.

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SOME CONTROVERSIES AND CRITICAL ISSUES IN REMOTE SENSING Despite the tremendous value of remote sensing, viewing remotely sensed data sets as perfect depicters of the environment and its change would be a major mistake (Parkinson 1997). The users should be aware of the imperfections and limitations of remote sensing and be cautious in the use of remotesensing data. Remote sensing is full of controversies and critical problems/issues, several of which are here discussed.

What is remote-sensing information about? A thorough understanding of remote-sensing information is essential for effective remotesensing applications. Remote-sensing data are rarely the geophysical variables that scientists intend to measure in the field (Parkinson 1997). A pixel value, the fundamental element of remote-sensing imagery, records the amount of electromagnetic radiation that the sensor receives at a certain range of wavelengths from the objects falling inside the sensor’s instantaneous field of view (IFOV). Everything on the ground within the IFOV and the atmospheric materials encountered on the radiance path contribute to the pixel value, and only one radiation value is recorded at each band over the entire IFOV. In vegetated areas, the ground covered by a pixel certainly is a composition of different species at various density and the background soil. The pixel value recorded by the sensor is related to vegetation type, leaf area index, fractional cover, photosynthesis activity, biomass, stress, the shadow cast by tall species, the background soil and the atmospheric conditions, and many other factors. Generally, a remotesensing model or algorithm is used to convert the radiation values to the desired geophysical parameters. Though the radiation value at certain wavelengths may be particularly sensitive to a geophysical variable, it is rather challenging for remote-sensing algorithms to

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effectively derive a variety of variables using a limited number of spectral bands. In addition, a pixel may present a quite broad area on the ground, and the geophysical parameter of interest such as vegetation density may vary from place to place inside the pixel. When an algorithm produces a value for vegetation density for this pixel, the aim generally is to provide a reasonable average value for the IFOV, which may be different from the field measurement. Moreover, there is a lack of universal algorithms and indices in remote sensing. The relationship between the pixel radiation values and the geophysical variables is often site-dependent. Many remote-sensing algorithms are not generalizable. It is often found that an algorithm developed for one particular area is not applicable to other areas. The users need to keep in mind the site situation, acquisition time, sensing wavelengths, involved energy interactions and the sensing geometry, and need to be analytical when examining the algorithm or the index. Remote sensing is not a panacea that will provide all the required information to conduct physical, biological, or social-science applications (Jensen 2007). The users of satellite data should always be aware of such problems and limitations.

Remote versus in situ observations In situ measurement has to gain physical access to the object, and is often difficult and time-consuming. Since the number of sampling locations during a field campaign usually is quite limited, under-sampling is often an issue of in situ observations due to the sampling design failing to capture the spatial variability of the phenomena. In addition, in situ measurement under many circumstances is intrusive in that the characteristics of the object is disturbed when being measured in the field; in this sense, in situ measurement cannot be considered as the ground truth, but it provides great ground reference data for calibration and validation of remote-sensing data.

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Remote sensing provides systematic data collection, removing the sampling bias in in situ observations. Remote sensing offers affordable synoptic coverage of the Earth at local, regional and global scales with repeated monitoring capability. Remote sensing, especially passive remote sensing making use of natural solar radiation, is unobtrusive, providing objective measurements of undisturbed objects. Remote sensing is able to provide some fundamental information, including x, y location, z elevation or depth, vegetation type, biomass, sea and land surface temperature, and moisture content, to be used as critical inputs for modeling the Earth’s processes. However, remote-sensing instruments do not collect material samples to measure geophysical variables. The users of remote-sensing data need to keep in mind that the variables derived from remote-sensing data are often not the same as the parameters measured in the field, and that remote-sensing and ground observations are different in terms of the scale and the view angle. A field sample is often a point measurement while a pixel in remote-sensing measurement is an overview of a ground area. Remote sensing always observes objects from above while field observations often view objects from below (e.g. in measuring tree crowns) and from the side (e.g. in viewing buildings). Remote sensing, especially when using optical sensors, can only provide measurements of the ground surface due to limited penetration capability. The soil moisture value derived from remote-sensing data reflects the moisture condition near the surface, whereas the in situ measurement is the moisture content of the sample taken at a certain depth.

Single versus multiple remote sensing A single satellite (e.g. Terra) carrying comprehensive sensors has great advantages in remote sensing. This is not only because these sensors observe the ocean, the atmosphere and the land surface simultaneously

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but also because they can be integrated. For example, atmospheric correction has been a bottleneck in quantitative land surface remote sensing largely due to the lack of simultaneous atmospheric data. The simultaneous acquisition of the critical aerosol, water vapour, and ozone data by MODIS and MISR sensors in the Terra mission can be used in the atmospheric correction of land surface images. Such comprehensive satellite missions will produce reliable multi-disciplinary geophysical products and promote quantitative remote sensing. However, it is not possible for a set of super sensors onboard one single satellite platform to satisfy all the application needs. Remote sensing is providing its users diversified data for retrieving a variety of geophysical variables from various platforms and sensors at various resolutions. Choosing appropriate remote-sensing data in an application is not always a straightforward task, and sometimes it is difficult for users to make the decision. The choice of images depends on the specifics of the applications. The study objectives, scale of the phenomena under investigation, availability of wavelength bands, spatial and temporal resolutions, the spatial coverage, delivery timeliness and costs, the length of data archive, data volume and users’ processing capability are among the factors to be considered. A successful application often needs remote-sensing data from various sources at multiple scales. It is important to establish a hierarchical scheme with low-, moderate- and highresolution levels in large-area remote sensing. Remote sensing is efficiently implemented using this multi-resolution hierarchy together with field verification (Aronoff 2005). Cost-effective low-resolution imagery (e.g. AVHRR) covering the entire area is useful for placing moderate-resolution imagery (e.g. Landsat) in its proper regional context, which is commonly used together with highresolution imagery (e.g. IKONOS) of selected sub-areas providing detailed information at the local scale. Within sub-areas sites are selected for in situ investigations at the largest

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possible scale. The details contained in highresolution imagery are most close to the ground observations and serve as a bridge to validate remote sensing results at higher levels. This process can derive more reliable quantitative estimates at a lower cost than using a single scale of imagery for the entire area, optimizing the trade-off between cost and benefit. Geographic inquiries in many cases are not addressed by using remote sensing alone. Multi-scale remote-sensing data are often imported into geographic information systems (GIS) to be analyzed alongside other geographic and environmental data layers to identify patterns, processes and driving mechanisms.

Sensor improvement versus data continuity Remote sensing is a very useful monitoring tool. The monitoring capability requires remote-sensing data to be acquired in a systematic manner over a long period of time – 10 years, 30 years and longer. The longer the data archive, the higher its monitoring value. However, satellites and the onboard sensors have only a limited lifespan and may become degraded and decalibrated after years of operation. Successive satellites in the same mission need to carry the same type of sensors to provide data comparable to their predecessors. To retain the data comparability, these sensors are expected to acquire images with similar spectral bands at similar resolutions at approximately the same time of the day in similar orbits. Remote-sensing algorithms that are used to generate products from multi-satellite data often need to be calibrated so that the records of the multiple instruments match reasonably well. However, there are trade-offs between sensor advancement and data consistency. With technological advancement in the years between successive satellites, we are facing a dilemma whether to upgrade the sensors using the recently available technologies or to keep the sensors consistent. The upgraded sensors are

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expected to provide better images in terms of resolutions and qualities, but will be inconsistent with their ancestors. Visionary planning of satellites and sensors is crucial. The longest available satellite data archive is the Landsat data sets, accumulated since 1972. Technologies have kept on improving during the time span, and the onboard sensors have evolved from Multispectral Scanner (MSS) to Thematic Mapper (TM), Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM)2 and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+). The most recent ETM+ collects images at higher spatial and spectral resolutions, and of better quality than the original MSS sensor. When detecting subtle environmental changes approximately 35 years apart using the two sensors, we run into a problem of whether the detected change is the real environmental change or the drift caused by the sensor divergence. This has to be considered in the analysis of time series and determination of geophysical trends. However, determining whether an observed change is a sensor drift or a geophysical trend can be extremely difficult (Parkinson 1997). When sensors are upgraded with new technology, data continuity and comparability should also be satisfied. The undergoing Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) is a joint effort of USGS and NASA to plan for the continued collection of ‘Landsat-like’ imagery in the future, with the primary concern of maintaining data continuity. The LDCM satellite is planned to be launched later 2012 using the same orbit as Landsat 4–7 and its sensor uses similar spectral bands and spatial resolutions. Longterm satellite missions should consider the balance of reflecting technology advancements and maintaining data continuity.

Beneficial versus detrimental applications Remote sensing is a powerful tool for military and defense purposes, for resource management, and for environmental conservation. Like any other tool, remote sensing

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can be applied constructively or destructively. Beneficial remote-sensing applications help to promote sustainable use of natural resources, conserve the changing environment, and protect the peace of the world. Monitoring El Niño events, mitigating floods and wild fires, and assessing global change impacts are typical examples of beneficial applications. Exploiting natural resources, spying on other nations for non-peaceful purposes, and intruding on privacy using remotesensing tools are examples of detrimental applications. Remote-sensing users should pay attention to the boundary between beneficial and detrimental applications since it is so easy to cross. For example, satelliteobserved sea surface temperature and phytoplankton chlorophyll concentration products are informative to fishery, and their applications could be either beneficial or detrimental. If these products are used for sustainable fishery, then the remote-sensing application is beneficial. If they are abused to exploit fishery resources, leading to over-fishing, then the remote-sensing application becomes detrimental. It is anticipated that remotesensing technologies will be used peacefully and beneficially for all humankind.

REMOTE SENSING OF THE ENVIRONMENT Remote sensing has been widely used in geography, Earth sciences and environmental studies, providing critical environmental and/ or economic information for weather forecasting, water resource management, disaster response and hazardous waste identification, transportation management and urban planning, forest and range inventory and monitoring, ecosystem management and biodiversity inventory, soil mapping and agriculture operations and mineral exploration. Remote sensing can address either shortterm or relatively long-term environmental problems at local, regional and global scales. For short-term incidents such as floods and

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wild fires, the information derived from satellite data can help in the efforts to mitigate floods, contain fires and assess their damage. For long-term environmental issues such as the polar sea ice shrinkage and stratospheric ozone depletion, satellites can help to identify trends with a long-enough image archive. We live in the environment intersecting among the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere of the Earth, but there is a lack of systematic observations of the Earth. Satellite remote sensing enables us to view the Earth system as a whole in a way never before possible. The oceanic and terrestrial surface and the atmosphere can be examined simultaneously and periodically from orbiting satellites, and remote sensing at various scales can provide a variety of geophysical variables, including solar radiation, long-wave radiation emission, air temperature, wind speed, aerosols, water vapour, precipitation, clouds, lightning, atmospheric chemical constituents, terrain elevation models, land surface temperature, soil moisture, evaporation, volcano emission, glaciers and snow/ice cover, vegetation parameters, sea surface temperature, ocean surface topography, phytoplankton chlorophyll and ocean current circulations. These geophysical products derived from remote sensing can reveal the state of the Earth system and monitor the changes. Figure 13.2 illustrates the integrated systematic observation of the Earth system at the global scale. This global image was integrated using the land images, fire maps, the sea surface temperature products and the cloud layers collected by multiple satellite sensors. The 3D clouds are in white floating over the Earth surface; the sea surface temperature anomaly during the 1997–98 El Niño is visible in the Pacific Ocean, while the fire dots on land show the location of forest fires on the background of vegetation. El Niño studies are a great example of satellite applications in Earth system science. El Niño originally referred to the water warming that usually occurs shortly after Christmas along the coast of

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Figure 13.2 Integrated Earth Observation at global scale (Courtesy NASA Visible Earth). This global image was integrated using the land images, fire maps, the sea surface temperature products, and the cloud layers collected by multiple satellite sensors.

Peru. Various satellite data have helped to clarify the El Niño sequence. AVHRR and MODIS sea surface temperature products help to reveal the sequence of temperature effects across the Pacific. Variations of the Pacific sea levels have been detected using TOPEX/Poseidon radar altimetry data to reveal the surface elevation anomaly during El Niño. While meteorological satellites monitor water vapor in the atmosphere and patterns of precipitation, many satellites can monitor vegetation conditions and soil moisture during El Niño. Satellite data show the clear connection of the El Niño occurrences to oceanic conditions throughout the equatorial Pacific and beyond. El Niño linkages could extend worldwide and involve broad impacts. Among these are droughts in Australia and Indonesia, extreme episodes of the Indian monsoon and hurricanes in the Atlantic (Parkinson 1997). A fundamental shift in Earth science priorities occurred in the 1980s with the evolution of the concept of global change research

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(Bretherton 1988), and global change is now getting more attention than ever before from governments, the international community and the general public. The causes, mechanisms and consequences of global change are currently of major concerns. One of NASA’s missions is to address how the Earth is changing. Being useful for regional and global environmental mapping and monitoring, remote sensing becomes an ideal tool for global change studies. It is clear that satellite remote sensing provides globally complete and consistent, spatially unbiased and temporally repetitive measurements of the Earth that are needed to describe how the Earth is changing. Nowadays, many important data products of land use/land cover, atmospheric, biophysical and socioeconomic parameters are derived using remote sensing. Their value is fully evident in global change studies, especially in global carbon cycle, water and energy cycle, sea ice dynamics, climate variability and atmospheric properties. Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) observations show that the Antarctica ozone depletion hole has been expanding significantly over the past several years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/ Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) time series between 1981 and 1991 indicates the lengthening of the active growing season of northern vegetation in response to the Arctic warming (Myneni et al. 1997). These satellite measurements are particularly valuable when ground observations are sparse or unavailable. In fact, satellite remote sensing is currently the only feasible way to collect the global-scale data needed to address global environmental issues. As remote sensing continues to acquire imagery, a longer historic archive of Earth imagery will be more valuable to global change studies. Global land-cover/land-use is changing under the influence of natural processes and human activities. Linking global change to local environmental conditions and anthropogenic impacts requires high-resolution

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observations. With the increasing availability of high spatial-resolution imagery and the rapid advancements in computing technologies, acquisition, processing and analysis of high-resolution images has become affordable and feasible for global change studies. Gradual changes in land characteristics revealed by inter-annual high-resolution observations can be read as diagnostic indicators of climate change or anthropogenic impacts (Defries and Townshend 1999). For example, the expansion and shrinkage of lakes indicate variability in temperature, precipitation, as well as human water consumption. By analyzing Landsat and other satellite images acquired approximately 25 years apart, Smith et al. (2005) found a large number of Arctic lakes had disappeared permanently from West Siberia as a result of permafrost degradation. The observed early responses of Arctic lakes to Arctic warming are important for understanding how climate change may affect the Arctic and its ecosystems. Through timely monitoring of the Earth system, remote sensing increases the

chances to early diagnose critical changes on the Earth and to act promptly to mitigate the problems. Although remote sensing cannot directly sense human and social activities through electromagnetic radiation, this does not prevent it from being applied in social sciences since social activities may be inferred from remotely sensed imagery. The population in major municipal areas can be estimated reasonably well from the low-resolution light data collected by the defense meteorological satellite program (DMSP) at night. The United States/Mexico border region between Imperial Valley, California, US and Mexicali Valley of Baja California, Mexico provides an interesting example to illustrate how remote-sensing data can be employed to infer social activities. Figure 13.3 shows the color composite Landsat ETM+ image acquired on 3 May 2000, at the border region. The political boundary is evident in the image through the contrast of vegetation conditions in the two valleys. The cities of Mexicali and Calexico are adjacent to the border.

Calexico Border

Border

Mexicali

Figure 13.3 United States/Mexico border identifiable on Landsat ETM+ image. The border is visible due to the irrigation manner divergence, an implication of political and economic differences between the developing and the developed countries.

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Both valleys are major areas of irrigated agriculture, containing thousands of acres of farmlands with year-around production. The agricultural parcels of the Imperial Valley and the Mexicali Valley are indicated by the rectangular grid pattern. The croplands north of the border are healthier (indicated by bright red colours in the image) than those in the south. While the physical conditions around the border are the same, the irrigation systems and conventions used by the two countries account for the differences. Irrigation systems are critical to intensive irrigated agriculture in the desert environment. Nearly all crops in the Imperial Valley and the Mexicali Valley are irrigated. The only difference between the two valleys is the need for ground water pumping in Mexico. Imperial Valley agriculture receives all its water from the Colorado River, distributed by the Imperial Irrigation District through a network of canals and laterals over 2,500 kilometers long (Finco and Hepner 1998). The Mexicali Valley uses a mix of Colorado River water and ground water for irrigation but is short of canal networks, leading to a large amount of crop land under-irrigated. Examining the recent developments in remote sensing, we can foresee that the number of orbiting satellites will continue to increase and remote sensing will serve the needs of Earth system science at an unprecedented capacity. Many governmental satellite missions are focusing on scientific and global issues. NASA satellites are primarily science-driven, addressing the issues pertaining to changes on the Earth. In order to provide critical geophysical variables that currently are not being measured from space, a number of ‘specialty’ satellite missions have been recently made available or will soon be available. Grace, the first gravity satellite, is in orbit since 1999 to measure gravity abnormal. Jason-1, a radar altimetry satellite launched in December 2001, is in space replacing TOPEX/Poseidon providing centimeter-level variations of sea levels. Jason-2 was launched in June 2008 to

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continue the Jason mission. Aquarius, the first salinity satellite, planned to launch in 2011, will measure global sea surface salinity to overcome the currently limited global view of salinity variability due to the sparse in situ sampling. The objective of the Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission under planning is to provide details on the world’s ocean and freshwater bodies with repeated elevation measurements through wide-swath altimetry technology, and will complement the sparse hydrological observation network. The recently launched Canadian Radarsat, European Envisat and Japanese ALOS satellites are collecting high-resolution radar images globally. Radar interferometry has been applied to measuring surface deformations related to earthquakes, volcanic activities, landslides and land subsidence, and has been instrumental in producing high-quality digital elevation models (DEMs). Similar to radar, lidar (LIght Detection And Ranging) systems are active remote-sensing systems, offering high-quality terrain and other surface data with vertical accuracies of 15 centimeters or better. ICESat (Ice, Cloud and land Elevation SATellite) is the first space-borne lidar mission in operation since 2003 for measuring ice-sheet mass balance, cloud and aerosol heights, as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. Satellite radar interferometry and lidar remote sensing are revolutionizing our capability of 3D data collection and enhancing our capabilities to measure and monitor the vertical dimension of the Earth. Parallel to governmental satellite missions, commercial satellite programs compete to provide imagery at higher spatial resolutions. Currently the top two superhigh-resolution image providers include the WorldView-I satellite launched in September 2007 collecting images at a spatial resolution of 0.5 meters and the GeoEye-1 satellite launched in September 2008 at a spatial resolution of 0.41 meters. These recent and new sensing systems are anticipated to promote more diversified and comprehensive applications.

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Remote sensing is one of the most active fields and is evolving rapidly. It used to be a highly specialized field – in the early stages of remote sensing, projects were usually implemented in laboratories using expensive specialist equipment such as stereo-plotters, stereo-meters and image-processing systems. However, with the development of computer technology, these complicated and specially designed instruments gave way to generalpurpose computers. Remote-sensing data processing and display can now be handled using affordable computers, and many remote-sensing and photogrammetric tasks, which were implemented manually in the past, are being done automatically using computers. Remote sensing is no longer a field exclusively for remote-sensing experts; it has started to involve application scientists as well as the general public. NASA’s intention is to provide ready-for-use remotely sensed geophysical products directly to scientists and users without much remote-sensing background. NASA, USGS and other organizations are increasingly offering scientists and the public free access to their large remote-sensing data archives. Such efforts have greatly promoted the use of remote sensing in scientific inquiries. Remote sensing is entering ordinary people’s daily life. High-resolution imagery available on Google Earth provides a level of detail close to ‘human-scale’ observations on the ground, and promotes remote sensing to the general public. After its birth in 2002, Google Earth soon became a platform for sharing remotesensing information with the general public without specialized software resource requirements. During the severe Southern California wild fires in late October 2007, NOAA and NASA posted their satellite images nearly real-time on Google Earth, enabling the general public to see the progression of the fires. The general public can readily comprehend the information in many optical remote-sensing images since they are taken using reflective bands similar to human vision. However, until they get necessary training on remote sensing, the general public

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will not be able to make full use of remotesensing data, especially infrared and radar images whose interpretation is significantly different from optical images they see in daily life.

NOTES 1 This definition was adapted from American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) and International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS). 2 The ETM sensor onboard Landsat-6 did not acquire any imagery due to the launch failure in 1993.

REFERENCES Aronoff, S. (2005) Remote Sensing for GIS Managers. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press. Bailey, W.H. (1963) ‘Remote sensing of the environment’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 53: 577. Bretherton, F. (1988) ‘Earth System Science: A Closer View’, report of the Earth Systems Sciences Committee to the NASA Advisory Committee, Washington, DC. Colwell, R.N. (1960) Manual of Photographic Interpretation. Falls Church: ASPRS. Colwell, R.N. (1983) Manual of Remote Sensing. Falls Church: ASPRS. Defries, R.S. and Townshend, J.R.G. (1999) ‘Global land cover characterization from satellite data: from research to operational implementation?’, Global Ecology and Biogeography, 8: 367–379. Finco, M.V. and Hepner, G.F. (1998) ‘Modeling agricultural nonpoint source sediment yield in Imperial Valley, California’, Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 64: 1097–1105. IST (1962) Proceedings of the First Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment. Ann Arbor, MI: IST. Jensen, J.R. (1986) Introductory Digital Image Processing: A Remote Sensing Perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Jensen, J.R. (2007) Remote Sensing of the Environment: An Earth Resource Perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

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Latham, J.P. (1966) ‘Physical geography – remote sensing of environment’, Geographical Review, 56: 288–291. Lillesand, T.M., R.W. Kiefer and J.W. Chipman (2007) Remote Sensing and Image Interpretation. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Moffitt, F.H. (1959) Photogrammetry. Scranton, PA: International Textbook Co. Myneni, R.B., Keeling, C.D., Tucker, C.J., Asrar, G. and Nemani, R.R. (1997) ‘Increased plant growth in the northern high latitudes from 1981 to 1991’, Nature, 386: 698–702. Parkinson, C.L. (1997) Earth from Above: Using Color-Coded Satellite Images to Examine the

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Global Environment. Sausalito, CA: University Science Book. Pecora, W.T. (1966) Earth Resources Observation Satellite (EROS): A Department of Interior Program to Utilize Space-acquired Data for Natural and Human Resource Management. US Department of Interior, US Geological Survey, Washington DC. Smith, L.C., Sheng, Y., MacDonald, G.M. and Hinzman, L.D. (2005) ‘Disappearing Arctic lakes’, Science, 308: 1429. Wolf, P.R. (1974) Elements of Photogrammetry. London: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

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14 Spaces of Hegemony? Circuits of Value, Finance Capital and Places of Financial Knowledge Roger Lee

[I]f you don’t look at how money goes round the world you don’t actually understand the world at all. When you try and join up the dots about how money can be linked to politics, can be linked to culture, then it’s electrifying. Gillian Tett (in Barton 2008). The money market is always, as it were, the headquarters of the capitalist system, from which orders go out to its individual divisions, and that which is debated and decided there is always in essence the settlement of plans for further development. Joseph A Schumpeter 1961: 126. [T]he City is about making money out of money. Chris Hughes 2008: 15. [T]he powers of context – spatial and temporal – should be placed at the centre of any theory of knowledge formation … space lies at the heart of knowledge formation. Ash Amin and Partick Cohendet 2004: 86, 92. 40 years ago … I was admitted for the first time to the Holy of Holies at Baring Bros. This was the open plan office in which sat, each at a resplendent mahogany desk, all of the senior executives of the bank other than the chairman (almost all of whom bore the Baring family name, as did the chairman, Lord Cromer, formerly governor of the

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Bank of England). That arrangement was intended to ensure that all were informed of what was going on in the bank and may have been the more necessary because the bank’s internal communications system at that time was a network of baskets on wire pulleys, operated by uniformed messengers, into which could be placed documents destined for another department or the outside world. Alec McBarnet 2009.

GEOGRAPHY, KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE AND FINANCE Although contemporary finance is arguably the major influence on material lives and livelihood (and not just under conditions of financialisation, in crisis or otherwise1), its wider cultural significance has, it appears, yet fully to register.2 Of the 110 sitters listed as bankers and financiers in the catalogue of the National Portrait Gallery in London, only six are still alive and only one of these (Sheila Valerie Masters, Baroness Noakes of

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Goudhurst in Kent (south-east England), is a woman. Similarly, of the 452 associated with the profession of economics and money, only 13 are currently alive and only one is a woman (Betty Marie Pamela Nicholls – the first woman appointed as a manager in the National Westminster Bank). A similar story may be told of the US National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. Portraits of fewer than 100 ‘bankers’ are held in the gallery and only two, David Rockefeller and Muriel ‘Mickey’ Siebert, are still alive. Both the ‘investment experts’ whose portraits appear in the Gallery – Warren Buffett and Abby Joseph Cohen – are still alive.3 Finance is critically influential in shaping modern economies but, even in centres of finance, financiers are difficult to find – and so to know. And women financiers even more so.4 Furthermore, whilst many portraits reveal an almost exclusive concern for masculine forms of power, most are predictable and unimaginative. Two, however, stand out as representations of the power of financiers at work although both share a common feature with most of these portraits: their place of work – in which, it seems, these images were made – is, apparently, placeless. And the neglect of place is, as this essay will try to show, a major failing of financial economics and one of the reasons for the widespread failure from 2007 to understand the worst financial crisis in over 70 years and the first financial crisis of global proportions. Kenneth Alexander Keith (1916–2004) – Baron Keith of Castleacre, Swaffham in the county of Norfolk5 – was the prime mover behind the formation of Hill Samuel in 1965 and then its deputy chairman and chief executive until 1980. According to his obituarist, he was a prophet of the new landscape of financial capital in the City of London that would follow the ‘big bang’ in 1986: He and Sigmund Warburg were virtually the only revolutionaries in the City of London in the two decades after 1945, both insisting on hard work and professionalism rather than the gentlemanly, amateur networking otherwise universal in the financial community. Faith 2004.

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However, from the early 1970s, Keith gradually withdrew to the field of industrial capital. He was photographed (NPG P409) in 1977 inside a modernist and minimalist building, presumably Hill Samuel’s offices in Wood Street which were, like ‘those of Warburg’s nearby … utilitarian, indeed ugly, with none of the trappings of traditional banks – except a butler’ (Faith 2004). A large globe placed in the centre foreground obscures all but his head and shoulders, but his right hand rests on the ‘top’ of the globe which, allowing for the tilted axis, is approximately over London. Almost 30 years later, Sir Derek Wanless, a former chief executive of NatWest and adviser to the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown was photographed (NPG P1128 (14)) in 2006 reading the Financial Times in a modern, grey office block. From 2000, a non-executive director of Northern Rock, the headquarters of which are based in his home town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, he resigned in November 2007 before the criticism of his role in the bank’s collapse made in January 2008 by the UK House of Commons Select Committee. He subsequently carried out two reviews (2002, 2007) of the funding of the UK National Health Service. So, although both images are placeless in the sense that it is all but impossible to tell where they were made, both are full of geography and both reveal the complex assemblage of issues addressed in this essay. Both underline the importance of finance capital as what matters under certain circumstances in shaping and negotiating geographies of economic and public life well beyond finance. Both point to the central significance of spaces of knowledge in finance, in the globe and in the meeting room. Both reflect the complex geographies and places involved in the relational processes of the formation of knowledge. And both illustrate the profound significance of geography in the failures and biases of financial knowledge. Further, the biographies that led to them are reminders of the influence and complex ordinariness of individuals and of the economic geographies in which they participate.

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Notwithstanding the National Portrait Gallery’s classification, these people are, not just ‘bankers and financiers’. Central to both is the profound significance of geography for identity – as represented here, for example, by the continuing significance of land (especially rural land) in aristocratically derived markers of English status and the powerful role of birthplace in shaping views and knowledge of the world. So, although popular accounts of finance in literature and journalism tend to focus on individuals and groups of individuals,6 the argument in this chapter is that the places and spaces in which, and the social relations of value through which, they work are profoundly formative of their practices. These intersections of geography, knowledge, people and finance are the themes of this essay. It begins by offering a brief critique of economic geographies of knowledge so to reflect on the relationality of knowledge and finance and on the ambivalent significance of place in knowledge production, circulation and use. Such an ambivalence stems from the mutually formative distinctions and connections between relational spaces and territorial spaces. The substantive part of the essay deals with what are here termed spaces of hegemony, by which I mean spaces in which decisions are made and actions taken which have the effect of shaping the trajectories of economic geographies. Between the 1980s and the late 2000s such spaces came to be occupied by finance capital. As such, they were dramatically but widely interpreted7 and practised not merely as economic but as social hegemons. The concluding comments reflect on the significance of financial spaces of knowledge for an understanding of economic geographies and of finance as a crucially significant division of labour within circuits of capital.

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHIES OF KNOWLEDGE: A BRIEF CRITIQUE One definitive practice of human being is that of knowledge. And yet a concern for the

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nature and significance of knowledge itself has, within economic geography at least, been drowned out by more instrumental interests in knowledge as a shaper of these geographies. Thus, despite Neil Coe’s (2005: 381) wideranging description of knowledge in his review of two particularly formative books (Amin and Cohendet 2004; Gertler 2004) on economic geographies of knowledge, in which he refers to ‘a broad set of debates across the social sciences and management studies about the production, transfer, and absorption of different forms of knowledge, both within and across firms, and how these processes relate to economic performance at various scales’, knowledge itself is not considered. Yet Coe’s description of these economic geographies is accurate. Notwithstanding some profound geographical critiques of knowledge,8 attention in economic geography has been focused less on them than on the specifics of the geographies that enable or restrict the development, accumulation and use of these various forms of knowledge and their role in economic development. Presumably, this instrumental bias reflects the economic–geographical interest in the so-called knowledge economy along with the apparently growing significance of knowledge in distinguishing trajectories of contemporary economic development. Writing about the particularities of economic knowledge and the economic geographies of its capture and use has, then, generated a burgeoning literature.9 However, it is rather less common to note that knowledge is mundane – that it must always be, and cannot but remain, central, if far from being all that matters, to economic activity and the economic geographies which enable and shape such activity. For Gavin Bridge and Andrew Wood (2005: 200), the categories of ‘knowledge’ and ‘learning’ tend to be deployed as a way of signalling the presence of the ‘cultural’ in what traditionally have been considered the ‘economic’ realms of trade, investment and innovation.

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But knowledge does not merely signal some kind of presence, it is materially integral to circuits of value10 and is both created and brought into effect through them. Certainly, economic knowledge cannot be understood merely as this kind of add-on. Further, knowledge has always been present and influential in economic geographies. Indeed, it is impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. ‘It would’, Ray Hudson (2000: 92) states, ‘be futile to deny the significance of knowledge, innovation and learning to economic performance’. But, as he (107) goes on to argue, the recent growing interest in – one might almost say obsession with – ‘learning’ and ’knowledge’ … is by no means a guarantee of economic success. Still less is it a universal panacea to the problems of socio-spatial inequality, and in some respects it is used as a cloak behind which some of the harsher realities of capitalism can be hidden.

There is, in short, a critique to be made of economic geographies of knowledge. First, as a necessarily formative feature of circuits of value, knowledge is far from just an add-on, whatever its significance in the ‘knowledge economy’. It is a vital prerequisite for their material effectiveness. Secondly, knowledge is itself a geographical product: it is brought into being through the practice of economic geographies. Economic geographies are constructed as people attempt to establish and to sustain the circuits of value (Figure 14.1a) to which they must be connected if they are to have access to the means of material life. Engagements in circuits of value are purposeful and knowledgeable acts. Consumption, exchange and production necessarily involve enactment of the knowledge needed to enable them to happen and, thereby, to change. Thus, and thirdly, the construction of knowledge and its circulation around, and use

Spaces of financial hegemony “the headquarters of the capitalist system” (Joseph Schumpeter) M′ Spaces of (re/dis) S incorporation Spaces of (realization + [commodity, property, [material/immaterial M labour markets] commodities, property] ≡

Spaces of productive consumption of value Final consumption of value

LP

C′ Spaces of exchange of values (material and immaterial values)

Organisation, logistics and combination of inputs

Logistics of outputs

MP

Spaces of exchange of values (labour power and means of production) Spaces of production

Spaces of prouction of values (production/re-production)

Regulation through profitabiliy/accumulation Spaces of financial reflexivity

Regulation through sustainability/reproducibility

Spaces of political reflexivity

Self regulation External regulation Lower Reflexivity

Higher

Lower

Material

Reflexivity

Logistical Environmental

Higher Calculation / accounting

Circuits of value and their regulation

(a)

Figure 14.1

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Financial analysis / capital switching State-centred policy Diverse economies Calculation / accounting Circuits of capital and their regulation

(b)

Circuits of value (a) and circuits of capital (b) and their regulatory relations.

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in, circuits of value are distinct but mutually formative processes. Fourthly, abstracting knowledge from the materialities of circuits of value and from the social relations which shape and give meaning, direction and interpretative purchase to them, obscures the exploitative relations that underpin these circuits. By shifting attention away from exploitation, knowledge is in danger of taking on the mantle of motherhood and apple pie. And yet economic geographies are simultaneously material and social as well as inherently exploitative (Lee 2006). A failure to recognise this is a significant limitation on the ability of regulatory knowledge to feed into effective regulatory practice, for example (Lee 2008a). As Gavin Bridge and Andrew Wood (2005: 207) argue, [r]ecognizing … the ways in which knowledge networks are shaped by broader political and economic dynamics … provides critical leverage for understanding the dynamics of contemporary economies …

Thus, and finally, any critique of economic knowledge must be informed not only by the formative geographies of knowledge circulation, production and consumption but by the geographies of the social relations which shape these circuits of value.

GEOGRAPHY AND KNOWLEDGE: RELATIONAL SPACES AND PRACTICES In this essay knowledge is understood as discovery through interaction and enactment. As such, knowledge is inherently relational. Whilst it is possible to imagine what may appear to be stocks of knowledge – in memories, encyclopaedias, digital storage or instruction manuals, for example or, more generally in the environment, the community, the firm, the locality – these are, in fact, stores of information which lie mute and unyielding until interrogated and thereby enacted by users. But knowledge is more than mere data or even information.

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Through various processes of codification and ordering (which themselves necessarily involve a sense of purpose), data may be converted into information. Knowledge involves an understanding of such data and information gained through their interrogation in the contexts of frameworks of comprehension and purpose. Knowledge is dependent on the relational geographies and temporalities in which it comes to be transformed. It is, therefore, place- and time-dependent and, almost by definition, knowledge is forever outdated or outplaced. There is, therefore, no such thing as a stock of knowledge. That would be impossibly static. Accordingly, Amin and Cohendet (2004: 8) refer to ‘knowledge as a process and practice, rather than a possession’. Engagement with information and enactment of knowledge is, therefore, key not only to the production, circulation and consumption of knowledge but to its very ontology. And such, engagement and enaction produces, expands and changes knowledge – even if only of its interpretation. Thus knowledge is practised and is constantly changed by its practice. Indeed knowledge changes itself: knowing something changes the world in which it is known. Knowledge is, therefore, relational. It is continuously transformed through practice and so, if incorporated into frameworks of understanding, it simultaneously transforms them. In the guise of the uneven geographies which enable or disable possible engagements with knowledge, geography is, then, central to the nature of knowledge. But this geography is itself complex. It is far from restricted to a bounded territorial form, and certainly not to a localised territory.11 It also encompasses the topologies of relational space brought into being through processes of interaction through space. The influence of geography works in three related ways. First, geography shapes the nature of engagements with information and enactments of knowledge through the historical geographic circumstances – the ‘situated contexts of

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embodied and encultured practice’ (Amin and Cohendet 2004: 8) – in which they take place. Secondly, because it is relational rather than territorial proximity that is crucial in knowledge generation,12 geography enables, directs and constrains the spatial trajectories of what Amin and Cohendet (2004: 103) consider to be ‘travelling or circulating knowledge, coming in from a number of distances and directions and in varied forms’. Thirdly, spaces of knowledge themselves may be defined (Amin and Cohendet 2004: 12) not merely in territorial terms but as ‘organised spaces of varying length, shape and duration, in which knowing, depending on circumstances, can involve all manner of spatial mobilizations’. The significance of these three interconnected geographies of knowledge founded in place, relational and territorial geographies and the range of spatial forms that spaces of knowledge might take, is especially apparent in geographies of finance. One of the most crucial issues in attempts to resolve the financial crisis which began in 2007 was what Gillian Tett (2009: 3) termed the ‘interconnectivity’ of the ‘western banking system where(by) numerous entities are entwined in some unpredictable and near indefinable ways’. In such a context, the regulatory concern is on finding ways to mitigate the ‘interconnectivity’problem by reducing counterparty risks via measures such as the introduction of a centralised clearing platform for derivatives. There is also a strong desire to create more effective coordinated systems of oversight. However, ‘[G]etting national policy makers to agree on that will not be easy. The only thing that is clear is that as long as the regulatory system remains a fragmented patchwork, financers will continue to “arbitrage” the rules, flitting across borders at a speed that leaves policymakers constantly panting to keep up’. It is difficult to imagine a clearer manifestation of the profound importance of the formative significance of geographies in shaping forms and relations of social life which themselves demand reshaping and the construction of new geographies.

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Knowledge, then, ‘is not fixed to particular sites’ (Amin and Cohendet 2004: 102–3) and neither is the local spatially confined. Rather, sites are recipient, combiners, and transmitters of … knowledge … [and] … the knowledge work and challenges of individual sites might be seen as focused less on mobilising and taking advantage of … indigenous capabilities than on working with and making sense of knowledge – in all its forms as an immanent and circulating force. (Amin and Cohendet 2004 ibid.)

Harnessing knowledge as process to achieve the ends of corporate competition and profitability or territorial development cannot, therefore, be restricted to creating certain conditions of interaction within territories or within and between localised firms. Rather, it involves the management and encouragement of ‘relational proximity, achieved through a variety of spatial mobilisations’ (Amin and Cohendet 2004: 101). This relational formulation of knowledge, its spaces and circulation, production and consumption clearly places historical geography at the formative fore and deflects any tendencies towards universalism. It has, however, been challenged, in at least three ways. First, as Meric Gertler (2003, 2004) has it, being there makes a difference. He suggests that ‘regional cultures of production’-shaped by profound differences in, for example, financial systems and investment practices and labour relations – serve to restrict the topological freedom of the circulation of knowledge. Gertler works with a notion of knowledge as possessed. He asks: ‘How is tacit knowledge produced? … How do firms find and appropriate tacit knowledge? … How is tacit knowledge reproduced or shared … and must the participants be geographically proximate in order for effective learning to occur?’ (Gertler 2003: 75). He also retains the distinction between tacit and codified knowledge (but distinguishes between codified and codifiable knowledge which Amin and Cohendet (2004) are at pains to argue cannot simply

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be mapped as a dualism onto the distinction between local and distanciated knowledge spaces). Gertler’s geographically subtle conclusion is that The upshot is that transcending the bonds of spatial proximity may be possible, but it will also be difficult and expensive, because of the fundamentally different institutional environments involved – what we might understand as the distinctive and uneven, though systematic, geography of context. Gertler 2003: 95.

If Gertler focuses on the economic geographical constraints on circulating knowledge and on the consequent value of proximity, Michael Storper and Anthony Venables (2004) are concerned less with knowledge itself and ask what happens in localised spaces of knowledge. Their answer is face-to-face (F2F) communication. They argue that this distinctive form of contact is not only an efficient means of communication and a positive influence on incentives but that it enables socialisation and learning and is a form of psychological motivation. In short F2F generates buzz and is especially significant in conditions of uncertainty and in dynamic and creative environments in which knowledge is not easily codifiable. But they argue that the consequent tendency to localisation is itself dynamic and changes as the complex and unfamiliar become routinised. Thus the boundary between the efficiencies of proximity and of distance constantly shifts and, as new technologies enable dispersion, they also destabilise and so increase uncertainty tending towards localisation. Thirdly, concerned with the always-present external geographical linkages of territorially localised clusters and expressing dissatisfaction with ‘the simple “tacit = local” versus “codified = global” model’, Harald Bathelt, Anders Malmberg and Peter Maskell (2004: 32–45) nevertheless work with the tacit/ codifed distinction to argue that knowledge generated through local buzz needs to be supplemented by global pipelines in what they call a ‘buzz and pipelines model of

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cluster competitiveness’. Rightly emphasising the complex near/far geographies of knowledge creation and pointing to some regional developmental implications, the emphasis here is on a rather static geography as territory and on knowledge as something that can be possessed rather than as a practice of discovery.

THE CRUCIAL BUT AMBIVALENT SIGNIFICANCE OF PLACES OF (FINANCIAL) KNOWLEDGE The connections between geography and knowledge are both profoundly formative and profoundly complex.13 The crucial but ambivalent significance of place and space in financial knowledge is the subject of the remainder of this essay. This significance derives from a double relationality: financial places are relationally formed through geographies of financial practice, just as space and place are formative in the dynamics of financial knowledge and practice. In shaping/ enabling/constraining social, scientific or financial interaction, place/space are formative of knowledge. But place/space are not only territorial and are, of course, as much a relational construction of social interaction as they are a context for it. Thus an understanding of financial spaces of knowledge requires a constant analytical movement between relatively bounded territorial and more open relational notions of space and place. In fact such a movement is inescapable as places are produced through interaction rather than simply being the territorial settings of such interaction. For example, spaces and places of financial hegemony operating at a multitude of scales and sites14 are essential for the formation and implementation of financial knowledge but the nature of the ‘places’ involved may be far from localised or even territorial. Thus the compelling urge for distinction illustrated by, for example, the constant struggle to represent London or New York

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as the world’s ‘leading’ financial centre – reflects local pride rather than any fundamental financial geographies. By some readings (e.g. Gowan 2009), London’s significance may be more a relational consequence of a New York dominated and determined spatial division of global financial labour than a superiority based in some place-based competitive edge. Nevertheless, spaces of the (financial) firm, distinctive localities and regions associated with finance, as well as financial communities of practice are not only very different geographies but they both induce and constrain knowledge circulation, consumption and production. In short, territorialities and relationalities of place constantly intersect in financial practice. Not surprisingly, then, financial centres are of considerable interest to geography and related disciplines.15 And, although finance has come to the fore in economic geography only in the last decade or so, this interest is of long-standing.16 However, despite the powerful role of geography in finance (Wójcik 2009), standard economic treatments of finance – at least in their contemporary manifestations (cf. Revell 1974) scarcely recognise the significance of geography (although, for some recent signs of the economic recognition of the significance of a geographical imagination, see Clark et al. 2009). One reason for this is the assumptions that underlie much financial theory – especially the notion of rational expectations – which simply disallow any influence to stem from geographical context. The financial system is interpreted simplistically in exchange terms (but, again, cf. Revell 1974). Thus for Howells and Bain (2007: 3), ‘[A] financial system channels funds from lenders to borrowers’. And for Frederic S. Mishkin (2007: 3), financial markets are simply ‘markets in which funds are transferred from people with an excess of available funds to people who have a shortage.’ Despite the implication of movement here, geographies of financial production or consumption or of the active and geographically uneven role of knowledge simply don’t come in to it. Even

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Hodder and Lee’s (1974) early attempt to think through a relational concept of economy around notions of market and state forms of coordination did rather better than that.

FINANCIAL SPACES OF HEGEMONY? Before the steel Before the cable Before the concrete A Standard and Poor’s rating. Advertisement for Standard’s and Poor’s Financial Times 14 September 1998: 11. At the end of the day, it’s how good your instincts are. At the beginning of the day, it’s how accurate your information is. Advertisement for Reuters Financial Times 9 September 1999: 13.

The circuits of value which constitute economic geographies are shaped and differentiated by social relations of value. Indeed, the relations between the material necessities of the production, consumption and circulation of value and the ways in which these processes are evaluated through contested social relations of value are the focal point of the politics of political economy (Johnston 2008). If economies were merely material circuits, their evaluation would be brutishly simple – material adequacy or inadequacy – and involve precious little reflexivity (Figure 14.1(a)). But shaped by social relations of value such as those of capitalism (Figure 14.1(b)), circuits of value involve social, and political processes of evaluation. These processes are highly reflexive. They involve sophisticated data gatherers and processors, constructors of knowledge and builders of theory and models. And within circuits of capital17 (Figure 14.1b), they are indifferent to anything other than the criteria of profitability and accumulation in defining and measuring the performance – good/bad, better/worse – of such circuits. But, of course, these criteria of evaluation are themselves relationally constructed and so are constantly challenged – not least in

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times of crisis when they come to threaten the very existence of the circuits of value from which they arise. One way of dealing with this is through a form of dissociation from the realities which these criteria both draw upon and create. In a manner reminiscent of Maurice Godelier’s (1984) comments on the emergence of class relations, financial evaluation may be represented as a service for all founded on a kind of magic. But such magical powers are accessible only to the gods of finance who are able to detach themselves from the economic nitty-gritty whilst, at the same time, both defining the very nature of this nitty-gritty and shaping its future trajectories through their privileged powers of evaluation. The sustenance of spaces of apparent financial hegemony rests, therefore, and with more than a little fragility, on a form of disentanglement and framing (Callon 1998). Certainly, despite their evident power, the hegemony of spaces of hegemony is more apparent than real as they rely upon more or less enduring assemblages of technologies, knowledge and labour to reproduce themselves and their hegemonic relations.

Nervous finance However singular their assessment may appear to be, circuits of capital are not only highly flexible and dynamic; they are conflictridden. And the very flexibility, dynamism and speed of circuits of capital also create difficulties in monitoring their effectiveness. As geographical and technical divisions of labour increase in complexity and circuits of capital extend in geographical reach they become ever more insinuated within, or disengaged from, a wide range of locations. As a result, actual and potential flows of finance and productive capital also fluctuate rapidly in size, complexity and speed to say nothing of their ever more complex and, until the late 2000s at least, their own ever more spatially extensive and assertive geographies. Given the dynamism and the conflictridden nature of value under capitalism in

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which complex geographies and social divisions of labour and capital are perpetually formed, transformed and destroyed at an increasingly rapid pace, keeping track of success within circuits of capital is extremely difficult and subject to almost constant adjustment. Even knowing what counts as ‘success’ at any given moment becomes an almost impossible task. Yet ‘[M]eans have to be found to perform [the] tasks’ (Harvey 2006b, 272) of continuously measuring, monitoring and assessing the profitability over various spaces and times of circuits of capital worldwide. And these means must enable effective responses in the form of appropriate decisions and feedback which thereby shape the conditions under which, and trajectories along which, capital circulates. The performance of these ‘tasks’ may be undertaken in whole or in part through various forms of state intervention and regulation and, most generally, through state planning. However, and unsurprisingly, such centralised systems of information gathering, processing and decision-making acting alone are simply too limited, slow and cumbersome to be able to cope with the multiple sources of rapidly changing information about current conditions within circuits of value. Decentralised markets become inescapable in the performance of this task although the rules under which they operate are set by a struggle between the state and the agents of finance capital within the social relations of value which shape circuits of value. Markets enable coordination to take place in an apparently automatic fashion whereby countless individual and autonomous decisions, including those of non-participation based on constraint or choice, are constantly processed and reprocessed in markets via the price mechanism, which then acts as a source of information and a means of information transmission. Nevertheless, the emergence of financial capital as the means through which circuits of capital may be regulated via the credit system and the analysts, bankers, fund managers, market makers and traders who

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animate it though financial markets is a relatively recent phenomenon, at least in the context of the last 100 years or so. The collapse of the post-war regulatory regime of Bretton Woods in the face of the increasing deterritorialisation of money and capital reduced the scope for national or even international regulation which came, therefore, to be displaced in regulatory terms by financial markets with global reach. And these financial markets were themselves increasingly deregulated throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Thus were the conditions laid for the credit system, operating through financial markets, to emerge as the hegemonic producer of knowledge and means of evaluation and direction within circuits of capital from the early 1980s until the onset of financial crisis in the summer of 2007. Taken as a whole, the credit system may be viewed as a kind of central nervous system through which the overall circulation of capital is coordinated. It permits the reallocation of money capital to and from activities, firms, sectors, regions and countries. It promotes the dovetailing of diverse activities, a burgeoning division of labour and a reduction in turnover times. It facilitates the equalization of the rate of profit and arbitrates between the forces making for the centralisation and decentralization of capital. It helps coordinate the relations between flows of fixed and circulating capital. The interest rate discounts present use against future requirements while forms of fictitious capital link current money capital flows with the anticipation of future fruits of labour. Harvey 2006b: 284.

All of this becomes not only possible but necessary because of the mobility of financial capital and its indifference and lack of attachment to any particular, person or place, or to any particular form of production or consumption other than what they may represent in terms of profitability. Thus finance capital acts as an arbiter of capital in general – assessing and evaluating the profitability of capital wherever and in whatever form it appears. David Harvey 2006b 272: 284 puts it thus: To the degree that the credit system does indeed function as a kind of central nervous system regulating the movement of capital, so [finance capital]

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occupies what seem to be the commanding heights of the economy from whence it confronts the industrial or merchant capitalists as the … common capital of the capitalist class.

Nerve endings? As capital is, by definition, value in search of surplus value (sometimes referred to as self-expanding value), the evaluations of value under capitalism and the redirections that flow from them are made on the basis of continuous evaluations of past profit performance and future risk and profitability. Looking back at the economic geographies of previous rounds of accumulation (see Figure 14.1b), financial analysts operating within spaces of hegemony gather, process and assess information on profitability and trends. On this basis their often fast-moving but also context-dependent knowledge is constructed. And then, with this historical knowledge in mind (although in some financial circumstances it may be only a few seconds old), analysts look forward to evaluate the profit-making potential of alternative economic geographies in the next round of accumulation of the circuit of capital. These data and the evaluative judgements made about them inform decisions on capital investment within circuits of capital and so (re)direct flows of capital along trajectories judged most attractive in terms of profitability and accumulation. In the case of the evaluation of company performance, for example, spaces of hegemony ‘straddle’, to use the Financial Times’ terminology, the product market and the stock market.18 Investment analysts working within spaces of hegemony in such financial centres assess the past performance and future prospects of a company’s products and, on the basis of that information, the stock market evaluates them in terms of the company’s share price which acts as a public signal of performance and attractiveness for investors. Thus in the complex, dynamic and financially sophisticated environments of financial

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centres, evaluative judgements are constantly being made about trade-offs between the risk and profitability of activities within the circuit of capital. The objective of evaluation is not necessarily to minimise risk but to assess and combine risks in such a way as to attempt to maximise both the range and size of profitable outcomes and to switch capital accordingly. Evaluations are governed largely by engagement with financial knowledge, risk/profit assessments and the ability make such assessments. On the basis of assessments of profitability (made, for example, by specialised credit rating agencies) capital may be advanced to or withdrawn from certain activities. Capital is priced (through expected rates of return in the form of interest rates or the pronouncements of financial analysts shaping the expectations of financial markets, for example) according to risk–reward ratios and the time period over which specified rates of return are expected. This complex work is undertaken by capitals operating within spaces of hegemony. They sustain their own profitability by selling their expertise in the form of advice to investors and by engaging in investments on their own account. Thus the mobility of money into and out of its manifestation as capital (value in search of a surplus) lends capital operating within spaces of hegemony its dominance over the circuit of capital as a whole and its various spheres of activity (production and realisation) in particular. However, these criteria are not mechanically given. Rather, they reflect space- and time-dependent judgements on prevailing levels and ratios of profitability and risk deemed acceptable by those capable of gathering, interpreting and assessing the inflow of information into the spaces of investment and switching. The criteria used in these assessments therefore reflect relational processes of space–time convergence and distanciation involving the intersection of values prevailing within particular localities (sometimes nationally defined19) with

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those characteristic of global geographies of the circuit of capital. This constant engagement with multiple spaces of knowledge via the diverse antennae of financial centres shapes their own dynamic geographies. An early study of the system of financial centres in Europe (Lee 1976) prefigured more recent work on systems of financial centres (Taylor et al. 2009) and identified three phases in the evolution of the city system in Europe from 1800, culminating by the late 1960s in a financially shaped system of leading cities. Drawing on Kindleberger (1974), this work demonstrated the significance of the spatialities of financial production and restructuring (Revell 1974) for city development and the geographies of finance. In ways which varied from country to country, the emergence of London, Paris, Frankfurt and Milan as dominant financial centres was driven predominantly through the restructuring, centralisation and concentration of financial institutions both shaped by, and transforming, the geographies of the circuits of financial capital. The hierarchical organisation of financial centres reflects their differential spatial reach and competitive relations across global space (see, for example, Sassen 2002; City of London 2008a, 2008b). Their geographical concentration in localised clusters, often with pronounced internal clustering such as the insurance cluster around the Lloyds Tower in the City of London (2003), enables rapid and diverse face-to-face encounters whilst the spatial arrangements of trading floors and the individuals involved in them (Knorr-Cetina and Preda 2004) reflects the symbiotic relations of knowledge between, for example, investment and foreign exchange. Thus are the geographies of prevailing values and norms of profitability and accumulation, which determine the trajectory and nature of social reproduction within and across capitalist economic geographies, established and insistently applied by practitioners operating within spaces of knowledge which form the geographies of their working practices.

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Hegemony strained However, these circumstances and the associated normalised faith in the effectiveness of financial markets as the means of regulation in capitalist circuits of value contributed to what Alan Greenspan (1996), the then chair of the US Federal Reserve Board, termed the ‘irrational exuberance’ of practitioners in financial markets and the extraordinary sequence of events which led to the emergence from the summer of 2007 of the financial crisis centred on the core economies of Western Europe and the US. But this crisis was not driven merely by the psychological predispositions of market participants and absurd claims for the apparent universality of greed. Nor could it be understood through the notion of financial spaces and the credit system considered merely as the means of coordination and direction, the nervous system, of circuits of value. It was also shaped by the interaction of territorial and relational geographies of money and capital. As a result of a combination of circumstances orchestrated across and within geographical spaces and places and lasting for a decade or so during the nineties and noughties, finance capital came, in an ultimately devastating fashion, to be the driving force of the economy. Finance capitalists persuaded themselves and those that used their products and services and regulated their practices that they and their criteria of economic evaluation were invincible. The geographies through which they worked and the spaces of knowledge with which they were engaged were profoundly causative in this process but they also offer some ways to repair the circuits of value wrecked by this hegemonic but perverted logic of finance capital. How is this so? During the 2000s, continued monetary and financial deterritorialisation and deregulation contributed to the build up of extremely large global macro-economic imbalances. The emergence of such imbalances and the consequences that flow from them are an excellent example of the intersection of territorial

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and relational spaces outlined above. Combined global trade deficits and surpluses reached around $2 trillion (two thousand billion) by 2007. With managed exchange rates and high savings rates in the surplus countries, these claims took the form of central bank reserves, invested primarily in low risk government bonds or government guaranteed bonds. The effect of this was a dramatic reduction in yields and interest rates (and the consequent widespread availability of cheap money) at the same time as investors were searching for higher yielding investments. This combination of cheap money and a desperate search for profit led to what are, within capitalist circuits of value, predictable circumstances.20 Faced by reduced opportunities for higher yield investments and the ready availability of cheap money and buoyed by its own increasing political legitimacy and sense of invincibility, finance capital engaged in what was, under these circumstances, rational behaviour. This included: • the growth of very high levels of leverage within finance capital (ranging from just under 20 percent to just over 60 percent by 2008 in the UK, for example); • the increasingly innovative securitisation of finance along with the complex growth of structured credit instruments (the value of which grew by about 525 percent between 1996 and 2007 in the US and by 800 percent in the UK between 2000 and 2007); • the associated growth of hedging instruments in the form of a range of credit derivatives (growing by 3000 percent from 2003 to a value of $62 trillion by the end of 2007); • the rapid extension of cheap loans with little care for the ability of borrowers to repay despite the consequently dramatic increase in household debt, especially in the UK (where it grew from about 70 percent of GDP to almost 110 percent in the ten years from 1997) and the US; and • falling spread differentials on different risk categories of corporate debt.

These dramatic levels of growth were supposedly underpinned by the geography of the so-called originate and distribute model of

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credit securitisation. In this relational model, exposure to local risks can be distributed away from banks across the financial system and towards end investors so generalising the geography of the risk and thereby reducing the possibility of localised collapse. In essence, this model represents a shift from territorially contained risk to relationally dispersed risk. However, this move was subverted by what, from the perspective of the (il)logic of capitalist accumulation, might again be seen as a form of rationality, into what Adair Turner (2009), chair of the UK’s Financial Services Authority, calls the ‘acquire and arbitrage model’. Rather than being dispersed to end investors, credit risk was sold on to the balance sheets of other banks, hedged by the use of credit derivatives, or used as collateral to increase leverage even further thereby spreading risk, but only by a little, away from banks and, at the same time, increasing the complexity and decreasing the transparency of the geographical trajectories of risk. Related to this, the system-wide growth of reliance on the possibility of shortterm sales of credits (or risks) as a means of bypassing bank reserves in coping with capital adequacy ratios not only enabled further increases in leverage but also further reduced the time available to unwind these increases in the face of a crisis. This is a relational form of coping and, in a telling phrase, Turner (2009) refers to it as ‘liquidity assured by marketability’. It is hardly surprising that the possibilities presented to finance capital by the assemblage of circumstances outlined above, led to a dramatic increase in the size of financial capital within circuits of value. At about 210 percent of UK GDP (110 percent in the US) in 2007, the debt of finance capital on balance sheets amounted to over half of all UK debt (40 percent in the US). Similarly, in terms of market capitalisation, finance capital has grown dramatically over the past 20 years to account for almost 40 percent of the FTSE 500 by 2007. There are good geographical reasons for such growth, not least

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the increasing size and geographical extent and complexity of contemporary circuits of value but there are other reasons too. On the one hand, this growth represents the illusory profits associated with mark to market accounting (although these are but anything but illusory in sustaining the momentum of financial innovation, not least via the bonus system) and the continued rapid extension of leverage on the collaterised profits. And, on the other, it is a manifestation of the extraction of levels of rent, not least by those animating finance capital and taking advantage of its increased opacity, largely independent of the significance of the work of finance capital for circuits of value. In short, finance capital came to work not only with ‘fictitious capital’ but with fictitious profits too.

Geography and the disruption of hegemony These events are, as has been argued in this essay, closely related to their geographies and, especially, to the spaces of knowledge in and through which they unfolded. The geographies of financial production are at once highly localised and extremely globalised. Financial innovations, made possible by cheap money and made necessary (for accumulation) by low yields, were originated and copied within and between financial capitals operating simultaneously in the localised clusters which characterise financial production, and across the global economic geography, the reach of which provided a powerful geographical source of legitimacy for, and sense of invincibility to, finance capital. And the spaces within which financial capital engaged with knowledge in making these innovations were simultaneously territorial and relational. Territorial in, for example, the powerful bonus culture in which microspaces of knowledge and comparison came to play an extremely powerful role within localised financial labour markets and so, along with capitalist competition,21 drove innovation forward. And relational in the

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emergence of the acquire-and-arbitrage model of risk and debt and of the notion of liquidity assured by marketability which globalised the crisis in geographically complex and opaque ways. Thus one response to crisis was a multitude of cries to re-draw the geographies of finance. Despite the rhetoric of globalisation, this took place predominantly through nationally articulated modes of intervention to ameliorate crisis. According to the IMF (2009) total support for the financial system from governments and central banks of the US, the Eurozone and the UK amounted to almost $9 billion. The predominantly national politics of such daunting figures leads to fears of financial isolationism and mercantilism which, within capitalist circuits of value, are contradictions in terms. Ironically (but rationally from with circuits of capital) such politics also meet a powerful response from finance capital. On the one hand, national economies become increasingly subservient to judgements on these interventions by the bond markets definitively materialised in the form of the costs of borrowing. On the other, the reassertion of relational geographies in the form, for example, of financial labour markets that would react to local constraints (on salaries and bonuses etc.) by the international relocation of expertise. If, then, the geographical logic of spaces of financial knowledge is an unconstrained relationality, then a shift to more localised territorial control – national or otherwise – represents a profound geographical challenge to finance capital itself which sustains the contradictions that continue to dynamise geographies of capitalism.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS This essay has sought to argue that spaces of financial knowledge in capitalism are integral to the very nature and operation of finance. Within capitalist circuits of value the spaces of knowledge in which finance capital engages

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are created and constructed through the demands of finance which constructs, draws and represents its ideal geographies of capitalism. Thus spaces of knowledge do not merely sit passively by as a resource on which finance may draw but actively constitute such capital at the same time as the practices of finance constantly reshape such spaces. But these formative spaces of knowledge which inform the financial arbiters of capital can be stretched beyond the point of comprehension by the (il)logical practices of finance and so challenge finance capital in terms of its very ontology. And yet, the restructuring of finance capital around territorial geographies is an impossibility within capitalism. Its spaces of knowledge and practice are also inherently relational. Certainly, finance reveals that the treatment of knowledge within much economic geography is instrumental to a fault and misses the profound significance of the spatiality of knowledge itself as well as the role of knowledge in shaping particular kinds of economic geographies. The significance of spaces of knowledge in the conduct of social life and human being could hardly be better exemplified.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am very grateful to Beth Greenough, Brett Christophers and the editors of this volume, John Agnew and David Livingstone, for offering readings of this chapter which went well beyond my own understanding and so enriched and clarified it enormously.

NOTES 1 Within geography see, for example, Harvey (2003, 2006a and b), Corbridge et al. (1994), Leyshon and Thrift (1997) and Martin (1999). Seventeen definitions of financialisation are offered by Lee et al. (2009). 2 For an international comparison of financial elites in London, Paris and Berlin, see Cassis (1991).

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3 Inspection of other national portrait galleries would reveal similar stories. 4 This is no accident. See, for example, McDowell (1997) for an examination of the multiple dimensions of gendered power relations in the City of London. Despite the frequent lip-service paid to the unequal treatment of women in finance, inequalities remain grotesque (Davies 2009). 5 The precise attribution of place in this title contrasts markedly with the placelessness of the portrait. 6 A partial exception to this tendency is an account of the significance of membership of Palm Beach Country Club (and other similar upmarket country clubs in New York) as a means of getting access to Bernie Madoff and of becoming a client of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities thereby gaining a sense of ‘being in the right place’ to participate in his investment practices (Pilkington 2008). More normal is the stress on individuals (e.g. The Guardian 2009; Financial Times 2009; Pignal 2009). Rather more widely known are the (semi)-fictional characters of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, and Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. 7 By finance capital itself and by other commentators, journalistic, popular and academic. 8 Including critiques which speak well beyond the discipline. Three indicative but diverse examples are Barnes (2004), Greenough (2006) and Livingstone (2003). 9 This literature is underpinned by some major contributions which go well beyond Geography in showing why geographies are so formative in economy. These include Amin and Cohendet (2004), Gertler (2003), Martin and Sunley (2007), Scott (2004) and Storper and Venables (2004). 10 Circuits of value involve the repeated consumption, exchange and production of value across space and through time. They are the socio-material relations and processes of economic geographies vital for the sustenance of social life. 11 However, it should be noted that bounded territorial spaces are themselves the dynamic and often contested product of all kinds of interactions across space. In this sense, then, all spaces are simultaneously territorial and relational. 12 Although this does not mean that the one precludes the other. The territorial is always also relational; and the relational, territorial. 13 This is apparent in the many histories (in fact historical geographies, although rarely, if ever, identified as such) to which places of finance give rise (e.g. for London see Kynaston 1994–2002). 14 I use the terms ‘scales’ and ‘sites’ here to denote the diverse forms of such spaces of financial hegemony ranging from the one-person firm to the largest of trans-national companies and from the household to national and international spaces and the diverse forms of the international state.

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15 Peter Taylor et al. (2009) offer a brief reminder and update of a certain kind of interest in financial centres. A rather different kind of interest is demonstrated by Michael Pryke (e.g. 2006) whilst a special issue of the Journal of Economic Geography (September 2009) offers a range of current interventions. 16 See, for example, Labasse (1973), Porteous (1995). 17 Circuits of capital are capitalist forms of circuits of value. They are driven and evaluated by the norms of capitalist relations of value. 18 This distinction exemplifies that between what is sometimes referred to as the ‘real’ and the ‘financial’ economic geography. Both are interdependent but the former is evaluated in terms of the latter – a relationship which mirrors that exemplified by the role of rating agencies within the economy. 19 Will Hutton (1995) provides a detailed case study of the way in which these values have been shaped within Britain: see especially chapter 3 on the influences on post-war British economic policy of increased financial deregulation, as well as chapter 5 on the long-term evolution of the financial system in Britain and chapter 6 on its contemporary operation. 20 But the failure of orthodox analysis to recognise the distinctive nature of capitalist social relations and their implications for investment behaviour blunted the predictive power of financial economics (see Lee 2008b). 21 For a sophisticated discussion of the connections between capitalist competition and capitalist social relations, see Brenner (1986).

REFERENCES Amin, A. and Cohendet, P. (2004) Architectures of Knowledge Firms, Capabilities and Communities. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Barnes, T.J. (2004) ‘Placing ideas: genius loci, heterotopia and geography’s quantitative revolution’, Progress in Human Geography, 28: 565–595. Barton, L. (2008) ‘On the money’, The Guardian 31 October 2008. Available at: http://www.guardian. co.uk/business/2008/oct/31/creditcrunch-gilliantett-financial-times, accessed 18 September 2009. Bathelt, H., Malmberg, A. and Maskell, P. (2004) ‘Clusters and knowledge: Local buzz, global pipelines and the process of knowledge creation’, Progress in Human Geography, 28: 31–56. Brenner, R. (1986) ‘The social basis of economic development’ in J. Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, pp. 23–53.

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Bridge, G. and Wood, A. (2005) ‘Geographies of knowledge, practices of globalization: learning form the oil exploration and production industry’, Area, 37: 199–208. Callon, N. (1998) The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell. Cassis, Y. (1991) ‘Financial elites in three European centres: London, Paris, Berlin, 1880s–1930s’, Business History, 33: 53–71. City of London (2003) Financial Services Clustering and its Significance for London. London: Manchester Business School/Loughborough University/City University Corporation of London. City of London (2008a) The Competitive Position of the Gulf as a Global Financial Centre. London: Corporation of the City of London. City of London (2008b) The Future of Asian Financial Centres – Challenges and Opportunities for the City of London. London: Corporation of the City of London. Clark, G.L., Dixon, A.D. and Monk, A.H.B. (eds) (2009) Managing Financial Risks: from Global to Local. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coe, N. (2005) ‘Putting knowledge in its place – a review essay’, Journal of Economic Geography, 5: 381–384. Corbridge, S., Thrift, N. and Martin, R. eds (1994) Money, Power and Space. Blackwell, Oxford And Cambridge MA: Basil Blackwell. Davies, C. (2009) ‘Poor pay, worse jobs and terrible bonuses too – sexism in the city lives on’, The Guardian 7 September 2009. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/sep/07/ sexism-city-womens-pay, accessed 16 September 2009. Faith, N. (2004) ‘Lord Keith of Castleacre’, The Independent 3, September 2004. Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/ lord-keith-of-castleacre-550405.html, accessed 24 November 2008. Financial Times (2009) ‘Rogues Gallery: The traders who went off the rails’, FT Weekend Magazine, 24 January: 24–29. Gertler, M.S. (2003) ‘Tacit knowledge and the economic geography of context, or the undefinable tacitness of being (there)’, Journal of Economic Geography, 3: 75–99. Gertler, M. (2004) Manufacturing Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Godelier, M. (1988) The Mental and the Material. London: Verso. Gowan, P. (2009) ‘Crisis in the heartland Consequences of the New Wall Street System’, New Left Review, 55: 5–29.

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Greenough, B. (2006) ‘Tales of an island laboratory: defining the field in geography and science studies’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31: 224–237. Greenspan, A. (1996) ‘The challenge of central banking in a democratic society’, speech to the American Enterprise Institute, 5 December 1996. Available at: http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/ speeches/1996/19961205.htm, accessed 3 February 2009. The Guardian (2009) Road to ruin series, January 2009. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/ series/road-to-ruin, accessed 3 February 2009. Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2006a) Spaces of Global Capitalism Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. London/New York: Verso. Harvey, D. (2006b) The Limits to Capital. London/New York: Verso. Hodder, B.W. and Lee, R. (1974) Economic Geography. London: Methuen. Howells, P. and Bain, K. (2007) Financial Markets and Institutions. London: Prentice Hall. Hudson, R. (2000) ‘The learning economy, the learning firm and the learning region: a sympathetic critique’ in R. Hudson (ed.), Production, Places and Environment Changing Perspectives in Economic Geography. Harlow: Prentice Hall, pp. 92–107. Hughes, C. (2008) ‘No more easy money’, Financial Times, 11 November 2008. Hutton, W. (1995) The State We’re In. London: Jonathan Cape. IMF (2009) Global Financial Stability Report Responding to the Financial Crisis and Measuring Systemic Risks. Washington DC: International Monetary Fund. Johnston, R. (2008) ‘Book review essay’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 98: 941–948. Kindleberger, C.P. (1974) The Formation of Financial Centers: A Study in Comparative Economic History. Princeton Studies in International Finance 36, International Finance Section, Department of Economics, Princeton University. Knorr-Cetina, K.D. and Preda, A. (2004) The Sociology of Financial Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kynaston, D. (1994–2002) The City of London, volumes I–IV. London: Pimlico Labasse, J. (1973) L’espace financier. Paris: Armand Colin. Lee, R. (1976) ‘Integration, spatial structure and the capitalist mode of production in the EEC’ in R. Lee and P.E. Ogden (eds) Economy and Society in

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the EEC Spatial Perspectives. Farnborough: Saxon House. Lee, R. (2006) ‘The ordinary economy’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31: 413–432. Lee, R. (2008a) ‘“Free” market? There can be no such thing’, Financial Times, 22 October 2008. Lee, R. (2008b) ‘Post-Keynesian critique of financial markets needed’, Financial Times, 31 December 2008. Available at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ 6d9f7bac-9fd3-11dd-a3fa-000077b07658.html? nclick_check=1, accessed 4 December 2008. Lee, R., Clark, G.L., Pollard, J. and Leyshon, A. (2009) ‘The remit of financial geography – before and after the crisis’, Journal of Economic Geography, 9: 723–747. Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N. (1997) Moneyspace. London/ New York: Routledge. Livingstone, D. (2003) Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martin, R. (ed. 1999) Money and the Space Economy. Chichester: Wiley. Martin, R. and Sunley, P. (2007) ‘Complexity thinking and evolutionary economic geography’, Journal of Economic Geography, 7: 573–601. McBarnet, A. (2009) ‘Day I stepped into the holy of holies’, available at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ 0/00ed2658-11ca-11de-87b1-0000779fd2ac.html, accessed 26 March 2009. McDowell, L. (1997) Capital Culture Gender at Work in the City. Oxford Malden: Blackwell. Mishkin, F.S. (2007) The Economics of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets, 8th edn. Boston: AddisonWesley. Pignal, S. (2009) ‘They bet the bank’, FT Weekend Magazine, 24 January 2009: 24–29. Pilkington, E. (2008) ‘Tales from the country club’, The Guardian, 20 December 2008: 34–35.

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Porteous, D.J. (1995) The Geography of Finance. Aldershot: Avebury. Pryke, M. (2006) ‘Making finance, making worlds’ in N. Clark, D. Massey and P. Sarre (eds), A World in the Making. Milton Keynes: Open University. Revell, J. (1974) ‘Financial centres, financial institutions and economic change’ in H.G. Johnson (ed.), The New Mercantilism. Oxford: Blackwell. Sassen, S. (2002) The Global City. New York: Columbia University Press. Schumpeter, J.A. (1961) The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle. Harvard Economic Studies Volume XLVI. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scott, A.J. (2004) ‘A perspective of economic geography’, Journal of Economic Geography, 4: 479–499. Storper, M. and Venables, A.J. (2004) ‘Buzz: face-toface contact and the urban economy’, Journal of Economic Geography, 4: 351–370. Taylor, P.J. et al. (2009) ‘The way we were: command and control centres in the global space-economy on the eve of the 2008 geo-economic transition’, Environment and Planning A, 41: 7–12. Tett, G. (2009) ‘Bank policymakers struggle to increase oversight without stifling innovation’, Financial Times, 24 February 2009: 3. Turner, A. (2009) ‘The financial crisis and the future of financial regulation’, The Economist’s Inaugural City Lecture, 21 January 2009. Available at: http://www. fsa.gov.uk/pages/Library/Communication/ Speeches/2009/0121_at.shtml, accessed 3 February 2009. Wójcik, J. (2009) ‘Geography stupid! A note on the credit crunch’, Environment and Planning A , 41: 258–260. Wolfe, T. (1987) The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux.

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15 The Mission Georgina Endfield

LOCATING MISSIONARY SCIENCE On 7 January 1844, Johann Ludwig Krapf of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) arrived at Zanzibar on the coast of East Africa. A German missionary, educated at the University of Basle, he had been employed by the Society to establish a mission base from which to Christianise ‘the interior’, which at this stage was still little known to Europeans. Though primarily and ultimately a Christianising endeavour, Krapf was aware of the scientific opportunity that such a venture could afford, suggesting in 1860 that: The labours of a missionary pioneer must ever form a contribution to geographical and ethnographical science, if as should always be the case, those missionaries who enter unexplored wilds become at the same time promoters of geographical knowledge by carefully investigating their relative positions, the course of rivers, the altitude of mountains, climate and other essential peculiarities and more especially those which appertain to natural science and the development of the human race. Krapf 1860: xlvi (cited in Bridges 1966).

Together with his colleagues, Johann Rebmann and James Ekhardt, Krapf would

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be instrumental in initiating the early exploration of East Africa and by ‘1848 … a large amount of information was garnered as to the far interior’ (Tucker 1911: 1–2). The missionaries’ reports on their topographical, hydrological and geographical observations in the region enjoyed a wide circulation. Krapf’s scientific discoveries proved particularly influential in Germany, leading him to conversations with geographer Carl Ritter and polymath scholar Alexander Baron von Humboldt. Their ‘discoveries’ were also discussed with considerable interest by members of the Paris Geographical Society and Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London. The missionaries’ first hand experience of distant places was their ‘ultimate warrant for a claim of knowledge’ (Shapin 1988: 375), yet they did face significant criticism from the so-called armchair geographers of the RGS, notably Cooley, Beke and MacQueen, for the apparent lack of geographical detail, instrumental evidence and scientific rigour in their exploratory reports and maps (Bridges 1966). Such differences of opinion between ‘open and closed space’ scientists were not uncommon at this time (Outram 1996; Livingstone

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2000: 290), when creditable knowledge was increasingly regarded as that produced through methodical, standardised and instrumental measurement.1 As Krapf’s experiences suggest, however, the missionary was typically at the vanguard of ‘civilised’ settlement in many unchartered places (Dritsas 2005 and was obliged to be both explorer and evangelist. As a result, missionaries provided some of the earliest and most comprehensive written records of distant regions and cultures (Willis 2001: 139), and may have also played a critical role in the application and development of geographical knowledge relating to the distinctive fields in which they worked. At once a missionary and explorer (Driver 2001), for example, at least until his transformation to the latter was complete in 1857, London Missionary Society (LMS) employee, David Livingstone, achieved fame for ‘opening up’ the interior of Africa, earning him such titles as ‘heroscout’ and ‘path-finder’ (Driver 2001: 70). Moreover, the environmental observations and reports of other pioneering missionary figures working in Africa, including John Croumbie Brown and Robert Moffat are thought to have influenced the development of nineteenth-century state conservation practices (Grove 1989). Missionary science, however, was very much a situated practice, bearing the ‘marks of its location’ (Livingstone 2000: 285). Missionaries lived and worked in a wide range of cultural and natural environments and the narratives that they produced were informed and shaped by these varied spatial contexts. Moreover, in contrast to most explorers and travellers who merely visited distant places, missionaries were often located in a particular area for extended periods of time. As Livingstone (2005a: 51) has suggested, this ‘long term residential topophilia’ provided missionaries with something of a unique, first-hand insight into the ‘physical and cultural geography of the landscapes that they inhabited, the

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languages and customs of the cultures with which they worked and the ailments and remedies of the people among whom they settled’. This ‘permanency’ of residency may have also brought with it a ‘place based epistemic authority’ and credibility (Livingstone 2005b: 98) that more transient spectators lacked. The mission itself was also vitally important in the production of geographical knowledge. The nature of the interaction between missionary and subject and of the mission spaces that were created, including the dwellings, school buildings, church house and mission garden, medical missions, dispensary or hospitals, not only reflected, and were a function of, the prevailing geography of a region, but may have also influenced the form of, and the manner in which knowledge was produced. In short, the geographical intelligence that was produced in and around the mission was a function of the ‘particularities of place’ (Livingstone 2005a: 61). This chapter explores the mission station as a knowledgemaking space and emphasizes the locally contingent character of the knowledge produced. The attention focuses on mainly on the nineteenth-century mission and on specific spaces within such missions, including the mission garden, as venues in which knowledge of the geographical characteristics of the missionary field was produced. It will be shown that the mission afforded, in Shapin’s (1988: 373) terminology, a ‘scene’ in which existing geographical knowledge was applied and tested, and new knowledge, including that provided by local informants, was collected, assembled, exchanged and developed. Missions will be highlighted as vital components in trans-national networks that connected the colonial periphery with the metropolitan centre, but also as fora for the ‘swirling interaction of ideas, beliefs and practices’ (Harries 2007: 3) between missionary and subject. It is first useful to outline the changing function, meaning and purpose of the mission over time.

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MISSIONS, EMPIRE AND THE PRODUCTION OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE Mission stations were, in many respects, pioneering institutions, at once necessitating and facilitating exploration and interaction with local environments and cultures. They often led the way where a frontier needed to be crossed or a new territory occupied, yet their role has varied substantially over time and space (Etherington 2005a: 13). Catholic missions, for example, accompanied the expansion of Spain and Portugal during the early modern period, represented a predominantly state sponsored enterprise and followed closely behind military conquest. Jesuit missions of the sixteenth century in particular represented an intellectual vanguard designed to convince local populations of European accomplishments and the benefits of conversion, and are thought to have played a key role in the cartographic surveying and charting of new and unexplored territories (Livingstone 2005a). In the eighteenth century, European pietists ‘launched missions to the most distant corners of the globe’, in order to support the religious needs of emerging colonies (Etherington 2005a: 3, 6). By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, however, and starting with the work of the Baptist Missionary Society (1792) the LMS (1795), the CMS (1799) and, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (1813), greater emphasis began to be placed on conversion work among ‘alien’ societies. The missionary’s work was depicted as a generous endeavour, where Christianity and civilisation went hand in hand, and one that would save the ‘poor benighted’ heathen from spiritual darkness and debasement (Monk 1858). This was to be achieved primarily through the nurturing of pious middleclass values among uncivilised populations, though interestingly the British Victorian missionary movement began as very much a working-class or lower-middle-class initiative (Hastings 1996), attracting gardeners, carpenters, builders and artisans, many of

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whom aspired to missionary life as a passage to social improvement and community standing (Johnston 2005). It should also be noted that to begin with this missionary movement was very much a male preserve. Women were initially excluded from membership of many missionary societies and were restricted to being wives, mothers and helpmates to their husbands (Hill 2007) though as such they were intended to represent role models to which heathen women could aspire.2 There was something of an ‘explosive expansion’ in such evangelical missionary activity across many regions of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, beginning in the late eighteenth century and lasting throughout the nineteenth century (Etherington 2005a: 1). In Africa, south of the Sahara, missionaries from different European nations preceded and were later associated with colonial investment, promoting a civilising as well as evangelical message from mission societies who also sought to combat slave traffic. European missionaries were likewise attracted to the ‘primitive communities’ in Australasia, while Catholic and Protestant missions were active in the Philippines, China, Japan and the West Indies. Missionary activity, however, was not solely a European enterprise, and many Canadian and North American missionaries also operated in these regions throughout the nineteenth century (Etherington 2005a). This escalation in missionary activity around this time coincided with imperial expansion. Yet the early missionary movement was not always necessarily consciously an aspect of empire and missions in different places were at different times in ‘collusion, conflict or strategic co-operation with various colonial structures’ (Johnston 2005: 19). British missionary enterprise, for example, sometimes provided channels through which imperial controls followed and the mission station can be considered as a microcosm or trope of empire (Etherington 2005a: 4), with missionaries often assuming the role of ‘mediators’ between colonial powers and local populations. Yet at other times, missionary activities delayed annexation or

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subverted imperial authority (Hastings 1996: 245; Porter 2005: 40–1). Indeed, those missionary societies that were firmly rooted in humanitarian concerns ‘actively distanced themselves from expanding colonial rule’ (Porter 2005: 49). Whether consciously implicated in promoting or neutralising the imperial endeavour, however, the missionary frontier often ran ‘ahead of empire’ (Barker 2005: 86). Indeed, it has been suggested that although ‘few missionaries were great explorers … “in many districts it was they who first left the beaten tracks” and their explorations inspired the boards of mission societies to undertake transcontinental imperial projects’ (Binder Johnson 1967: 176). Pioneering missionaries were regularly charged with identifying the most appropriate routes to their designated missionary field and the most suitable locations for founding and physically constructing mission stations from which to conduct their evangelical work. The plotting of routes and itineraries was, adopting Driver’s (2001) terminology, a ‘travelling experiment’ in geographical observation, while the natural resources of a region ‘had to be investigated via expeditionary science’ (Dritsas 2005: 38), before a mission could be established. These travel, exploration and expedition narratives often represented the first eye witness accounts of these hitherto little explored places. Once situated ‘in the field’, missionaries ‘sought to tame their unruly environment with the tools of science’ (Harries 2007: 113), ordering and explaining nature in a way that both domesticated it and provided a strategy for its exploitation. By default, some missionaries may have become active practitioners of the then ‘new knowledge’ of the empire of science, as Sivasundaram (2005) suggested in his study of nineteenth-century LMS activities in the Pacific. They observed, described and provided explanations of the variable topographic and hydrological, characteristics of the areas through which they travelled, they surveyed and collected samples of the wildlife, insects and vegetation and some also maintained weather diaries and collected

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daily meteorological data. They drew sketches and compiled maps which regularly contained information on people, itineraries, wells, springs, and the general physical geography of an area (Kokkonen 1993: 165), as well as reference to prominent missionary features in the landscape. Many missionaries of the second half of the nineteenth century also took photographs to supplement their descriptions (Jenkins 1993). The collection of geographical information, and mapping in particular, made manageable the unfamiliar landscape but also allowed the missionary cartographers to take symbolic possession of the land (Harries 2007:115). The collection of this geographical information in the vicinity of mission stations and along itinerary routes between different mission bases or outposts helped to create local and regional geographies of mission fields, often revealing significant gaps between the geographies of places as they had been imagined, anticipated and represented and those that were actually experienced. This geographical knowledge was also distributed between mission stations and between the mission field and ‘home’. The means of communication were of course vital. What was literally foreign to particular observers had to be reported in ways that would permit knowledge to travel to and be understood by distant others (Withers 1999). Many missionaries were prolific writers, compiling diaries, reports, ethnographies, memoirs, translations and grammars, most of which were propagandist in nature and intended to ‘inculcate public support for missionary endeavours’ (Johnston 2005: 6–7). Some of this material was published, appearing in newspapers, periodicals and journals, in some cases offering an ‘almost encyclopaedic’ overview of the cultures and places with which they interacted. (Herbert, in Johnston 2005: 124–5). Missionary correspondence also frequently entered the public domain (Rowbotham 1998: 247; Johnston 2005). Many missionaries were also active public speakers delivering furlough addresses which were most often given to attract funding,

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while others produced travel narratives that would later be published in missionary and popular press. Missionary wives and latterly also female missionaries also made contributions in this respect (McEwan 2000; Semple 2004), and a considerable body of evangelical material from the overseas missionary field was specifically aimed at children. Maps were often included as supplements to reports on excursions, their main purpose being to distribute information about a place and particularly missionary spheres of influence, among supporters in the homeland and to portray the scope of operations of a denomination. Some, however, were put to more practical use. Sketch maps constructed by Finnish missionaries in Ovamboland, northern Namibia for example, are thought to have been used by early Finnish university geographers to produce the first topographic maps of the region (Kokkonen 1993: 165–6). In the same way, missionary reports on their work, their travels and encounters with the landscapes and people of their missionary regions may have been enjoyed by a potentially very large public audience, have informed popular understanding of the geography of the different regions in which they lived and worked (Harries 2007: 38), and also helped furnish intellectual institutions with some very valuable first-hand geographical information. Missionaries’ roles as ‘fieldworkers’, meanwhile, in the pursuit of geographical knowledge provided them with an alternative sense of purpose and a link with the influential centres of knowledge and power at home. In effect, the mission represented a node in a global network through which a wide variety of geographical information was circulated. The following sections explore the role of the mission as a site for the application, collection, experimentation, development and dissemination of knowledge in a series of interlinked and critically important arenas of nineteenthcentury geographical debate: botanical experimentation, climate and health. The role of local agency in developing geographical knowledge is also explored. Attention focuses

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on specific mission spaces where such knowledge was collected, assembled and produced, including the mission garden and the medical mission. In all cases, however, the locally contingent nature of this knowledge will be emphasised.

THE MISSION GARDEN AS A SITE OF EXPERIMENTATION The mission garden in essence represented a site for practising the science of agriculture (Sivasundaram 2005). This was a space where missionaries attempted to domesticate and ‘improve’ the land through the planting of fruit and shade trees, familiar vegetables and by ensuring a steady supply of water. The creation of a mission garden was not only pivotal to both the production of food to support the station and sustain its dependents, but also afforded a semblance of order and familiarity in an otherwise chaotic wilderness (Livingstone 2000: 292). Indeed, the ‘centrality’ of the gardens in the design of missionary settlements suggests that they played a symbolic role as places where the natural world was ‘tamed and made virtuous’ (Bravo 2005: 53), but where local populations could also reap practical and moral benefits. The establishment of irrigated gardens in the vicinity of LMS stations in central southern Africa, for example, served several purposes. First, ‘leading the water out’ to irrigate plots allowed communities to produce their own food, which in turn promoted sedentarisation among an otherwise nomadic, and from the missionaries’ perspective, uncivilized society, and provided the missionaries with a static body of potential converts. Moral improvements among local populations, including the abandonment of ‘heathen’ nomadic practices, followed this ‘blossoming’ of the desert, and souls as well as landscapes were, therefore, apparently capable of being transformed through irrigation (Grove 1989; Endfield and Nash 2002a).

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As Bravo has suggested, like mission stations per se, missionary gardens were very much ‘place responsive’. The range of agricultural and botanical possibilities and opportunities at any one mission site was contingent upon local political, physical and climatic conditions and also the nature of the links forged between the missionary and local communities. In as much, the garden itself represented a testing ground for the acquisition and development of geographical knowledge about a place, but also a site where this knowledge was exchanged between missionary and subject (Bravo 2005: 51–3). For a garden to succeed, the missionaries had to thus first make sense of the surrounding environment (Harries 2007: 123). Some mission societies offered quite clear guidelines on the most suitable mission location and its features. The instructions which were given to the first group of pioneering CMS representatives posted to Uganda in 1875, for example, gave clear counsel on the most appropriate geographical setting for the creation of a suitable garden. Assuming that the missionaries would be given a choice in this matter, the CMS directors suggested that the ideal site was ‘a dry gravelly ridge with fertile land close by’, with an ‘all weather stream flowing from a fountain which passes by or can be made to pass by the station from higher land above’ (Matson 1981: 212). Land should be sown early and missionaries were to be given packets of seeds. Flower seeds were also included so that the humanising influences of aesthetically pleasing (as well as well-kept and productive) gardens would surround the mission station (Matson 1981: 212). The hope was that the missionaries would be self-supporting after the first harvest was secured. Success was, however, also dependent upon the establishment of a reciprocal relationship with local communities. There was a good deal of trial and error in this respect. Soon after founding the CMS intermediate station at Mpwapwa, in modern-day Tanzania, East Africa in September 1876, for example, George Clark and his fellow missionaries began to suffer acute

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food scarcities. They faced difficulties in cultivating the chosen site, received only limited provisions from their colleagues at the coast, and had virtually no amicable links with the local populations in the area at this stage which meant that there was little in the way of support or assistance. By 16 December 1878, the missionaries were ‘in a very bad state’ and ‘on the point of starvation in fact’, and shortly afterwards, the mission had to be temporarily abandoned (CMS Nyanza Mission Papers CA 6 /07). Although the mission garden was ultimately intended to provide foodstuffs necessary for survival, they may have also become key sites in botanical investigation and experimentation (Livingstone 2000: 293). Plant acclimatisation was a ‘key concern’ in the nineteenth century, irrespective of whether plants were to be transported to and grown in Europe or to be produced in the colonies (Schiebinger and Swan 2005: 13) and missionaries’ attention, like that of naturalists, was drawn to a wide variety of plant products used by local populations in this respect (Fan 2003: 2). There was an active exchange of living plants and specimens as well as information about these specimens, between local populations and missionaries, between mission sites and also between missions and botanical gardens in metropolitan centres. Swiss missionary, Henri-Alexandre Junod, for example, arrived in Mozambique in 1889. With a background in philology and theology, he became one of the pioneer entomological and botanical explorers of southern Africa, but also established a herbarium at his mission station in Lourenco Marquez, near Rikatla, and founded a ‘museum’ where he assembled many different samples of lichen, fruits, flowers and roots. Junod’s respect for the indigenous systems of classification and local knowledge of plants for medicinal, magical, sartorial and nutritional purposes greatly informed his own work (Harries 2007: 137). He sent samples of dried plants and seeds, butterflies and insects to Europe to be arranged and classified and supplied the natural history museum in

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Neuchâtel, Switzerland, with numerous specimens (Harries 2007). Other missionaries too sent such environmental and spatial markers to Europe to be classified and placed in botanical gardens, hothouses, natural history museums and zoos back home. Reverend William Carey, a Baptist missionary working in Serampore, for example, established an impressive private botanical garden and, as Sivasundaram (2007) has illustrated, was instrumental in the formation of the Agricultural Society of India. In these cases, the mission garden acted as a place of botanical experimentation, but can also be considered as an entry point into transnational natural history and botanical networks (Bravo 2005: 52). The degree to which missionaries engaged in botanical experimentation was also very much place-dependent. As Fan (2003) has demonstrated, however, French Catholic and to a much lesser extent, British and American Protestant missions in China in the nineteenth century provided both the talent and the infrastructure for botanical research. Some missionaries were active collectors of specimens for ‘fun, self improvement, for ambition, for the intellectual satisfaction of making a contribution to science, for the good feeling of having a respectable hobby’. Individual missionaries played a key role in the processing and distribution of botanical information, contributing to the ‘enterprise of surveying’ in China (Fan 2003: 20). Catholic missions, however, were significantly more involved in natural history experimentation than Protestant missions, largely by dint of their geographical location, their links to local landscapes and people. Catholic missions had long established themselves in the interior of China, had maintained a network of stations across the Chinese Empire and were integrated with local populations. Protestant missions in contrast tended to be located in coastal cities, with little access to good fieldwork sites nearby and tended to maintain their Western traditions and lifestyle in the mission field,

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rendering them somewhat less successful as botanical researchers. Most mission gardens were ‘planted’ primarily to provide food (and medicines) necessary for mission survival. Some missions, however, were directly implicated in commercial botanical experimentation, or what Schiebinger and Swan (2005: 2) have termed ‘colonial botany’ – ‘the study, naming, cultivation and marketing of plants in colonial contexts’. Bravo (2005), for example, has demonstrated how the Moravian Brethren in the Dutch West Indies produced sugar cane for cash. Nineteenth-century missionaries, however, may have become similarly involved in commercial botany. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, the availability of the anti-malarial drug quinine became pivotal to European imperial expansion. From about the 1860s, there was a good deal of experimentation with cinchona trees, from whose bark the drug was manufactured. Seedlings and saplings were transported to different regions of the empire, and notably India, where they were tested in the hill station plantations. Elsewhere, mission stations may have provided similar experimental venues. Writing to the CMS directors in 1878, Dr Felkin, medical missionary, suggested specimens of cinchona could be sent to him for trials at stations in Uganda, requesting of the CMS ‘will you get me some from Kew and send it. This is important for us as well as for mankind at large’ (CMS, Felkin, 17 October 1878). In this sense, the mission garden may have provided a venue for botanical experimentation but also a space in which ‘the moral and economic viabilities of the missionary enterprise’ became intertwined (Bravo 2005: 55).

MISSIONS, AMATEUR METEOROLOGY AND MEDICINE The link between climate and disease was ‘absolute’ throughout much of the eighteenth

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and nineteenth centuries (Kupperman 1984: 238). It was, therefore, essential that the climate of any new missionary field, and the apparent risks it posed to the missionary’s constitution, were understood first and foremost. The collection of meteorological data and information on the weather from mission bases afforded the missionaries an avenue through which to understand more precisely the nature of the risks in their new environment, while greater engagement and familiarity with alien climates through weather observations might have reduced the fear of the unknown. Missionary fascination with the weather also reflected a long history of lay engagement with meteorology. Amateur enthusiasts and societies played a pivotal role in the production of climate knowledge during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, much of this knowledge emerging very much as a result of provincial endeavour (Jankovic´ 2001; Naylor 2005). The climate knowledge produced by missionaries was also an example of amateur science and was similarly ‘a situated practical activity’ (Withers 1999: 501) being linked to the location of mission stations or ‘itineration’ routes. Thanks to a preoccupation with the relationship between climate and health in European medicine throughout much of the nineteenth century, missionary correspondence from overseas mission fields during this period includes anecdotal references to extreme and unusual events such as droughts, floods, storms and extremes of temperature as well as general observations on the weather and changes in rainy or dry seasons, harvest gains or losses and changes in river heights and flows. Collection of this knowledge allowed the missionaries to make sense of and address the problems of climate variability. The collection and collation of weather data, however, appears to have been much more systematised by the second half of the nineteenth century. CMS missionaries posted to Africa in the 1870s, for example, were actually required to maintain daily logs of

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meteorological recordings, observations and general notes on the weather en route to the missionary field and at their ultimate destinations. Many were provided with wet and dry bulb thermometers and barometers and simple rain gauges for this purpose. This development may have been ‘the product of a more general impulse to discipline observation in the field’ (Driver 2001: 58), but also reflected a change in attitude towards the role of missionaries as legitimate scientific observers, though it should also be noted that not all missionaries were necessarily adept at using such instruments. Nevertheless, through the use of such technology, the space of the laboratory was in effect extended into the field (Driver 2001: 55), in this case the overseas mission field. In some contexts, climatic observation was fundamentally linked to the survival of the mission. Climatic variability and general unpredictability of rainfall was a constant concern among both indigenous populations and missionaries in central southern Africa, given that the livelihoods of both could be threatened by the late or non-arrival of the rainy season. Many of the LMS representatives posted to this part of the continent in the early nineteenth century, thus regularly included commentary on the local weather in their diaries, letters, mission station reports and travelogues. Such information was exchanged between missionaries based at different stations across this and neighbouring regions, providing the missionaries with an understanding of the spatial variability of climatic characteristics over southern Africa generally. The substantial body of direct and indirect climate information collected by missionaries, however, has also been used to construct detailed climatic chronologies for some individual stations and to identify spatial variations across the wider area for the period 1815–1900 (Nash and Endfield 2002). This body of data illustrated that there was significant temporal and spatial climate variability in this region during the nineteenth century. Similar reconstructions have been

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conducted on the basis of missionary reports from stations in other mission fields (Kelso and Vogel 2007), highlighting the contemporary geographical value of the locationspecific climatic knowledge collected by missionary men and women. Although gaining a better understanding of the climate of distant regions was germane to the missionary endeavour, medical aid was also deemed as especially important, especially in apparently hostile climates, where the call to mission work could in effect be a ‘death sentence’ (Etherington 2005b: 277). As Jennings (2002) noted, for example, Central Africa gained a reputation as the ‘white man’s grave’. Fifteen of the 18 members of the 1860 LMS expedition to the Zambezi Valley died. Missionaries were often trained in rudimentary Western medicine to address such concerns, often as part of their missionary preparation, prior to embarkation abroad and, where no medic was available, they were often responsible for caring for ailing missionaries as well as converting local populations. Many missionaries also became informal medical advisors for their subject communities, the mission station being transformed into an ad hoc clinic. Mr Wookey, of the LMS, for example, was by his own admission ‘no medical doctor’, yet in a letter to the LMS directors in London, dated 8 August 1872 and written from the Kuruman station in the Kalahari Desert, he highlighted that ‘people come from all parts of the surrounding country to be doctored. Some come as far as seventy or eighty miles’ (LMS, Box 37-Folder 1-Letter A). Many missionary societies also enlisted qualified medical doctors to accompany pioneering missionary parties, in some cases simply to minimise the risks of constitutional degeneration among their employees, but also to provide health care for local populations. Evangelical rather than philanthropic imperatives guided much of the medicine practised. Indeed, mission clinics and hospitals were often regarded as additional or affiliated ‘instruments for saving sinners’

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(Etherington 2005b: 275) as much as they were centres for medical care. Moreover, as Worboys (2001: 208) has suggested ‘how many people were treated by medical missionaries and with what impact is a source of debate’ and the extent of European influence in this respect has been questioned (Prins 1989). Nevertheless, although traditional curatives remained a key ‘first line of defence’ against illness among local populations in many missionary fields, the medical mission represented an important vehicle for the transfer of Western medicine to indigenous peoples (Worboys 2001: 208) and was also among the first in the world to ‘offer the services of medical practitioners free of charge’ (Etherington 2005b: 261). Indeed, in some regions missions are thought to have provided more medical care for local communities than the colonial state (Vaughan 1991). Given that mission stations were often located in geographically remote corners of the globe, they could serve as testing grounds for the application and development of knowledge that was ‘still very much in flux in the metropolis’ (Sivasundaram 2005: 12). Missions and medical missions very much represented ‘scenes’ where medical knowledge was both tested and developed. Dr Albert Ruskin Cook a CMS medical missionary, arrived in Mombasa in 1896 and proceeded to travel inland, establishing a hospital at Mengo on the north shore of Lake Victoria. The detailed medical notes, diaries and letters produced by Dr Cook provide a rich documentary record detailing the nature, incidence and treatment of diseases and insect pests specific to the region as well as more common ailments, but also reveal how developments in tropical medicine in metropolitan centres were played out in the field. Mengo was to become a significant medical ‘laboratory’ in the 1890s and early twentieth century – a crucial time in Ugandan environmental and disease history and a key moment with respect to the disciplinary and institutional development of tropical medicine (Tilley 2004; Webel 2007). Indeed, this

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became an important experimental base for the testing of the new germ theories around the turn of the century, while mission stations across Uganda generally assumed an even more vital role when an epidemic of sleeping sickness swept the region between 1898 and 1920, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. Scientists and financiers in various European metropoles were mobilised to send research commissions to the region to identify the aetiology of the disease (Tilley 2004). The services of non-medical missionaries and local assistants and informants, however, were also enlisted to help identify the distribution of the vector, the tsetse fly. Lieutenant Colonel Bruce, head of the Royal Society’s Sleeping Sickness Commission, contacted the Bishop of Uganda to request the assistance from missionaries based at the 20 widely distributed stations across the region in order to ‘work out the distribution of these flies in Uganda, to find out if the distribution of sleeping sickness coincides’ (Wellcome Trust, Entebbe, 12 May 1903). Bishop Alfred Tucker forwarded a list of CMS missionaries (and addresses) who were then requested to collect samples of flies and to send them onto Dr Bruce near Entebbe where a sleeping sickness laboratory established for the study of the disease had been established. Tucker also suggested that the 2,500 native evangelists and teachers then associated with the missions might also be prevailed upon to help (Wellcome Trust, letters between D.B. Bruce and Bishop of Uganda, 14 May 1903). The geographical context of the stations and the collection sites was all important, as Bruce’s instructions to the missionaries and agents reveal: ‘It is important the position of the place in which the tsetse flies are found should be exactly laid down. The best way to do this would be to make a tracing on the map of the district and on this to mark the exact distribution of the fly and the sickness. The flies themselves must be caught and sent to me for identification’ (Wellcome Trust, Entebbe, 13 June 1903). The mission stations thus

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acted as vital foci where missionary and local knowledge in the form of specimens was assembled, while the spatial distribution of the stations and their particular geographies assumed a pivotal importance in the scientific investigation of this most devastating epidemic and by extension in the development and application of the new bacteriological theories of tropical disease.

MISSIONS, LOCAL AGENCY AND THE ‘CO-PRODUCTION’ OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE As the above example illustrates, local populations were not merely ‘distant recipients’ or ‘passive receptacles’ of ‘European genius’ (Anderson 1998: 522, 525). In many situations, the missionary encountered not only local environmental factors but also an existing body of practice and custom, both of which tempered the spread of missionary knowledge, subverting the simple transfer of information form missionary to subject. The mission station in fact represented a key site of universal interchange, providing the venue for these ‘interactive aspects’ of relations between missionary societies and indigenous cultures (Arnold, cited in Jenkins 1993: 110, footnote 39) and a place of synergy and exchange. It follows that the geographical knowledge produced was a function of resistance, adaptation and accommodation between missionary and subject (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Raj 2001: 119). The mission itself provided a forum for the creation of some of the earliest diplomatic relations with non-Western societies. Language provided, in Hasting’s (1996: 4: 281) terms, ‘the essential bridge’ between the two parties. Learning local languages and translating scriptures into these languages was a precursor to their evangelical work but also afforded the missionary an opportunity of acquiring greater insight into local cultures and environments. Baptist missionaries in the Indian sub-continent, for example, mastered

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various dialects and vernaculars, affording a far more attuned appreciation of the people and places among whom and in which they lived and worked (Raj 2001). As Harries (2007) has shown in his study of Swiss missionaries in southeast Africa, the way in which missionaries defined and delineated local language, may in fact have paralleled and certainly facilitated coincidental ‘discoveries’ and encounters with local environmental and geographical characteristics of the region. Although the local voice is often only made audible through mission texts, it is clear that local people ‘contributed in important ways to scientific knowledge’ (Harries 2007: 123). They may have been critical to the production of some forms of geographical knowledge or at least helped direct the gaze of the European. Often, however, local ‘amateur knowledge’ was subject to validation by the missionary as the ‘accredited professional’ (Livingstone 2000). It was to local people that CMS missionaries turned, for example, when seeking advice about the navigability of the Wami and Kingani Rivers into the interior of East Africa. Writing to his father from the Europa Hotel, Zanzibar on 5 May 1876, prior to his departure inland to Uganda, George Clark had already anticipated ‘some difficulty about the Wami River being navigable’, and highlighted that ‘people here say it is not’. Nevertheless, he added that he would, ‘have to try and make it out for myself’ (CMS, ACC 858/ F2). His colleague, Lieutenant George Shergold Smith, had also learned from local informants that the route ways were impassable. ‘As far as we could learn from the aged natives’, Shergold Smith suggests, ‘no trade by boats had ever been carried out. They all pointed to its tortuous course as a reason for preferring the road to the river’ (CMS C A6/ 016 26 June 1876). The missionaries nonetheless attempted to navigate both waterways by steamer and, notwithstanding local advice, were instructed to do so by the CMS directors, before ultimately finding that the indigenous knowledge of both routes to be entirely correct.

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More often than not, missionaries were trying to create a distinctly Christian society and space, into which local populations were incorporated. Traditional custom and practice stood in the way of progress towards this and was regularly subject to dismissal. Indeed, missionaries tended to re-inscribe local knowledge as non-knowledge in much the same way that more conventional explorers of Africa would nullify the role of the indigenous presence in their tales of ‘discovery’ (Barnett 1998: 244), effectively clearing a path for European ‘improvement’. LMS missionaries in Polynesia, for example, actively attempted to dismantle systems of tapu, religious rites and community relations, all of which they associated with heathenism (Johnston 2005). As long as the local people held onto such traditions, it was believed they would be backward to the Christian gospel and would, as a consequence, remain uncivilised. Similarly, rainmaking ceremonies and in fact a host of climate-related beliefs, which represented key drought responses and local environmental or climatic knowledge among the Tswana communities in nineteenth-century central southern Africa (Grove 1989; Landau 1993: 3), were the subject of ridicule and attack in missionary correspondence of the period. One might argue, however, that this form of local knowledge actually became more visible as a result of the missionaries’ disconcerted accounts. Some aspects of local knowledge were selectively reworked by the missionaries, while the reverse was also true, and Christian knowledge was modified to fit local conditions (Frykenberg 2005: 117), the mission providing the spatial focus for this reflexivity. Missionaries in central southern Africa, for example, tapped into local climate knowledge to find support for theories of continental desiccation in the mid-nineteenth century (Endfield and Nash 2002b), while there appears to have been some degree of accommodation or acceptance of local custom on the part of the missionary, as illustrated by the use of terms and phrases that reflect the

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fusion of the dual goals of civilising and irrigation efforts with local climate myths and belief systems. Missionaries’ references to their own capacity at ‘making rain’ through irrigation, for example, indicate that they may have appropriated the symbolism of rainmaking in an effort to assert authority (Chidester 1991: 40). The phrase also appears to have held significance for local populations. Digging the ‘garden of rain’, for example, represented ‘a heathen ceremony and those who take part in it are considered abettors of rainmaking’ (LMS C 32-5-A, McKenzie, Bamangwato, 27 June 1862). For both missionaries and local populations, therefore, the metaphor of the ‘garden of rain’ held significance and the use of the term implies an emergent co-evolution of both Christian European and indigenous climatic philosophical ideology, symbology and environmental knowledge.

CONCLUSION The evangelical mission has come to be associated with rational theology, ideas of improvement (Sivasundaram 2005), and cultural insensitivity (Johnston 2005: 2). Akin to other apparently ‘non-scientific laymen who have travelled abroad, such as the government official, the business man or the tourist’ the missionary was ‘trained in dogmatics rather than in the methods of scientific investigation’ (Baker 1924: 373–4) and, because of their vocation, few missionaries are thought to have been capable of looking upon subject societies and environments objectively and scientifically. Thus notwithstanding the remarkable contributions of nineteenth-century missionaries to anthropology (Higham 2003; Harries 2005; Livingstone, 2005a) to education (Etherington 2005b) and to the study and preservation of native languages (Landau 2005), the missionary has tended to be written out of scientific history (Livingstone 2005a: 50) and the mission as an institution

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has assumed only marginal status in the history of geographical exploration. Yet it is clear that the Christian mission may have played a vitally important role in the collection, production interpretation and distribution of geographical information about distant places and societies. First and foremost they provided a base from which missionaries oriented themselves in space and time and where they collected, ordered and arranged, tested and shared information about their surroundings (Harries 2007: 3). The physical and human environments that the missionaries encountered and described in turn inevitably helped shape and develop scientific concepts, metaphors and geographical theories about their destinations and continue to inform geographical concerns today, as recent regional climate history reconstructions using missionary records demonstrate. In many cases, working for evangelical societies whose interests were located in many different international spheres, missionaries formed part of a trans-national community through which information was received and discussed, often in places far removed from the mission field. The mission can thus be considered as part of a distributed pattern of knowledge generation and circulation and in some circumstances represented a domestic institution that became bound up with empire and its projects. Indeed, as Bayly (2004) has suggested, there is a ‘lateral history’ to the knowledge produced in and disseminated from the overseas mission, such that, irrespective of its association or non-association with the colonial endeavour, it may have been as crucial to geographical understanding in metropolitan society as any nineteenth-century imperial institution. It is important to consider, however, the different agencies involved in knowledge production at the mission site. The mission should be considered a venue for locating the interaction of the different intellectual traditions of missionaries drawn from distinctive backgrounds, but also as a filter through which ideas about nature and the natural

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world were channelled, modified and re-interpreted through dialogue with local people. Finally, it is also important to ‘maintain a kind of sceptical double vision’ of the texts in which this knowledge was relayed (Johnston 2005: 32–3). Most mission materials, many of which were edited by missionary societies, were imbued with contemporary ideologies about people and places and so must be interpreted with sensitivity to the intellectual, scientific and religious context in which they were produced.

NOTES 1 The criticisms and debates which centred on Krapf’s work helped stimulated a whole suite of sponsored expeditions to the region, led by the likes of Speke, Grant, Burton and Livingstone, in search of ‘accurate’ geographical information (Driver 1991). 2 Their exclusion from overseas work was partly based on contemporary beliefs that women (as well as children) were at greater risk from physical, mental and moral deterioration in hot climates on account of their physically weaker, and supposedly more vulnerable constitutions (Bell 1993; Anderson 1996).

REFERENCES Anderson, W. (1998) ‘Where is the postcolonial history of medicine?’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 72: 522–530. Baker, A.G. (1924) ‘Enlisting the missionary in research work’, The Journal of Religion, 4: 372–382. Barnett, C. (1998) ‘Impure and worldly geography: the Africanist discourse of the Royal Geographical Society, 1831–73’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 23: 239–251. Barker, J. (2005) ‘Where the missionary frontier ran ahead of empire’ in N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire. Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 86–106. Bayly, C. (2004) The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, M. (1993) ‘“The pestilence that walketh in darkness”. Imperial health, gender and images of South

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Africa c.1880–1910‘, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 18: 327–341. Binder Johnson, H. (1967) ‘The location of Christian missions in Africa’, Geographical Review, 57: 168–202. Bravo, M. (2005) ‘Mission gardens: natural history and global expansion’ in L. Schiebinger and C. Swan (eds), Colonial Botany. Science, Commerce and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 49–65. Bridges, R.C. (1966) ‘Introduction’ in J.L. Krapf (1860) Travels, Researches and Missionary Labours During an Eighteen Years’ Residence in Eastern Africa, 2nd edn. London: Thomas Nelson Printers, pp. 7–68. Chidester, D. (1991) Religions of South Africa. London: Routledge. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. (1991) Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Dritsas, L. (2005) ‘From Lake Nyasa to Philadelphia: a geography of the Zambesi Expedition, 1858–1864’, British Journal for the History of Science, 38: 35–52. Driver, F. (1991) ‘Henry Morton Stanley and his critics: geography, exploration and empire’, Past and Present, 133: 134–166. Driver, F. (2001) Geography Militant. Cultures of Exploration and Empire. London: Blackwell Publishers. Endfield, G.H. and Nash, D.J. (2002a) ‘Missionaries and morals: climate discourse in nineteenth century central southern Africa’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92: 727–742. Endfield, G.H. and Nash, D.J. (2002b) ‘Drought, desiccation and discourse: missionary correspondence and nineteenth century climate change in central southern Africa’, The Geographical Journal, 168: 33–47. Etherington, N. (ed.) (2005a) ‘Introduction’ in N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire. Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–18. Etherington, N. (2005b) ‘Education and medicine’ in N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire. Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 261–284. Fan, F.T. (2003) ‘Victorian naturalists in China: science and informal empire’, British Journal for the History of Science, 36: 1–26. Frykenberg, R.E. (2005) ‘Christian missions and the Raj’, in N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire.

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Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 107–131. Grove, R.H. (1989) ‘Scottish missionaries, evangelical discourses and the origins of conservation thinking in Southern Africa, 1820–1900’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15: 163–187. Harries, P. (2005) ‘Anthropology’ in N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire. Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 238–260. Harries, P. (2007) Butterflies and Barbarians. Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in Southeast Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Hastings, A. (1996) The Church in Africa 1450–1950. Oxford: Clarenden Paperbacks. Higham, C.L. (2003) ‘Saviors and scientists: North American Protestant Missionaries and the development of Anthropology’, Pacific Historical Review, 72: 531–559. Hill, M. (2007) ‘Gender, culture and “the Spiritual Empire”: the Irish Protestant female missionary experience’, Women’s History Review, 16: 203–226. Jankovic´, V. (2001) Reading the Skies. A Cultural History of the English Weather. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jenkins, P. (1993) ‘The earliest generation of missionary photographers in West Africa and the portrayal of indigenous people and culture’, History in Africa 20: 89–118. Jennings, M. (2002) ‘“This mysterious and intangible enemy”. Health and disease amongst the Early UMCA Missionaries, 1860–1918’, The Society for the Social History of Medicine, 15: 65–87. Johnston, A. (2005) ‘British missionary publishing, missionary celebrity and empire’, Nineteenth Century Prose, 32: 20. Kelso, C. and Vogel, C. (2007) ‘The climate of Namaqualand in the nineteenth century’, Climatic Change, 83: 357–380. Kokkonen, P. (1993) ‘Religious and colonial realities: cartography of the Finnish mission in Ovamboland, Namibia’, History in Africa, 20: 155–171. Krapf, J.L. (1860) Travels, Researches and Missionary Labours During an Eighteen Years Residence in East Africa. London: Thomas Nelson Printers. Kupperman, K.O. (1984) ‘Fear of hot climates in the Anglo-American colonial experience’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 41: 213–240. Landau, P.S. (1993) ‘When rain falls: rainmaking and community in a Tswana village c. 1870 to recent times’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 26: 1–30.

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Landau, P. (2005) ‘Language’ in N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire. Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 194–215. Livingstone, D.N. (2000) ‘Making space for science’, Erdkunde, 54: 285–296. Livingstone, D.N. (2005a) ‘Scientific enquiry and the missionary enterprise’ in R. Finnegan (ed.), Participating in Knowledge Society. Researchers Beyond the University Walls. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 50–64. Livingstone, D.N. (2005b) ‘Text, talk and testimony: geographical reflections on scientific habits. An afterword’, British Journal for the History of Science, 38: 93–100. Matson, A.T. (1981) ‘The instructions issued in 1876 and 1878 to the pioneer CMS parties to Karagwe and Uganda. Part I’, Journal of Religion in Africa, XII: 192–237. McEwan, C. (2000) Gender, Geography and Empire: Victorian Women Travellers in West Africa. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Monk, Rev. E. (ed.) (1858) Dr Livingstone’s Cambridge Lectures. Cambridge: Deighton Bell and Company. Nash, D.J and Endfield, G.H (2002) ‘A nineteenth century climate chronology for the Kalahari Desert derived from missionary correspondence’, International Journal of Climatology, 22: 821–841. Naylor, S. (2005) ‘Introduction: historical geographies of science- places, contexts and cartographies’, British Journal for the History of Science, 38: 1–12. Outram, D. (1996) ‘New spaces in natural history’ in N. Jardine, J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 249–265. Porter, A. (2005) ‘An overview, 1700–1914’ in: N. Etherington (ed.) Missions and Empire. Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 194–215. Prins, G. (1989) ‘But what was the disease: the present state of health and healing in African studies’, Past and Present, 124: 159–179. Raj, K. (2001) ‘Colonial encounters and the forging of new knowledge and national identities: Great Britain and India, 1760–1850’, Osiris, 15: 119–134. Rowbotham, J. (1998) ‘“Hear an Indian sister’s plea”: reporting the work of 19th century British female missionaries‘, Women’s Studies International Forum, 21: 247–261. Schiebinger, L. and Swan, C. (eds) (2005) Colonial Botany. Science, Commerce and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Semple R.A. (2004) Missionary Women. Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission. Ipswich: Boydell Press. Shapin, S. (1988) ‘The house of the experiment in seventeenth century England’, Isis, 79: 373–404. Sivasundaram, S. (2005) Nature and the Godly Empire. Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sivasundaram, S. (2007) ‘A Christian Benares Orientalism, science and the Serampore Mission of Bengal’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 44: 111–145. Tilley, H. (2004). ‘Ecologies of complexity: tropical environments, Africa Tryoanosomiasis and the science of disease control in British colonial Africa, 1900–1940’, Osiris, 19: 21–38. Tucker, A.R. (1911) Eighteen Years in Uganda and East Africa. London: Elibron Classic (2005 reprint).

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Vaughan, M. (1991) Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Oxford: Polity Press. Webel, M.K. (2007) ‘International, Colonial Transnational: Europe, Africa and Sleeping Sickness before World War I’, LSE–Columbia University 4th Annual Global Seminar, 17 March 2007 (unpublished draft). Willis, J. (2001) ‘The nature of a mission community: the Universities Mission to central Africa in Bonde’, Past and Present, 140: 127–154. Withers, C.W.J. (1999) ‘Reporting, mapping, trusting. Making geographical knowledge in the late seventeenth century’, Isis, 90: 497–521. Worboys, M. (2001) ‘The colonial world as mission and mandate: leprosy and empire, 1900–1940’, Osiris, 15: 207–218.

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16 Battlefield Gerard Toal/Gearóid Ó Tuathail

INTRODUCTION ‘War is the school of space’. To the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), who stated this in his work Politische Geographie (1897), this was a fact of nature. Three-quarters of the way through the battlescarred twentieth century, the French geographer Yves Lacoste pronounced his profession a graduate of such schooling declaring ‘La Géographie ça sert d’abord à faire la guerre’ (geography is first used to make war) (Lacoste 1976). War, that most popular and persistent of human activities, is undeniably an enterprise that has mangled states and knowledge, spatial and otherwise, with its imperatives and demands. The philosopher Eduardo Mendieta writes that [w]ar generates a phenomenology and representation of space that since time immemorial have laid the foundations for our quotidian experience of space. The art of waging war was always about technologies of controlling territory, of surveying spaces, traversing topographies, and circumnavigating the world on the surfaces of the sea. Mendieta 2006.

If war is the school of space, then battlefields – which over the last two centuries have become less localizable as wars have become

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‘unconventional’ (guerilla war and terrorism), ‘total’ (industrial, techno-scientific and absolutist) and ‘global’ (multi-state, nonstate, planetary) – are the most important classrooms. Most states owe their existence to battlefield contingencies so it hardly surprising that competition to master battlefields cajoles and demands forms of geographical knowledge as ‘geographic intelligence’ that has practical military utility. What is assembled as ‘geographic intelligence’ is historically and geographically variable but it usually encompasses both ‘thin’ technocratic spatial knowledge – battlefield cartography, for example – and ‘thick’ geographic knowledge – area descriptions of contested lands – though how these forms converge or diverge depends on the particulars of their institutionalization within states. Further, where battlefield-induced ‘geographic intelligence’ ends and civilian academic geography begins is not always clear. Traces of battlefields past are in our contemporary geographic technologies and inherited concepts, whether we know it or not. Modern geography developed within a competitive European state system that acquired its territorial borders through battlefield tribulations near and far. It was on

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European and Egyptian battlefields in the early nineteenth century that Napoleonic France first announced itself as the herald of a modernity that would reshape how space was conceived and measured, and how people could, and indeed should, live in relationship to their rulers and homelands. Sovereignty resided in ‘the people’ who as a ‘nation’ should have their own homeland. Suppressed but not contained after Napoleon’s defeat, the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe saw the unification of various Germanic lands into a Prussian-led Germanic empire and the defeat of the French state, battlefield events that spurred on the academic institutionalization of geography as requisite disciplinary training for modernizing imperial nation-states. After the trenches of World War I came even more ambitious spatial projects, the desire to reorganize European state structures and settlement patterns through acts of will. The competing totalitarianisms of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany eventually clashed head on amidst a war already launched against the British Empire, spawning ever more battlefields across the European continent and onto the world’s oceans. Each military machine fought with their own assemblages of geographic intelligence, including maps and navigational datums that were national products. Out of the cataclysmic struggle of World War II came a Cold War that projected a bipolar superpower struggle onto the world’s continents and regions, rendering them potential battlefields: swampy jungles, desert planes, ocean floors, polar expanses and the new high frontier of outer space. Advances in the technology of warfare, most especially the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), also globalized the battlefield. Establishing accurate geographic measurements of the figure of the earth became an imperative of Cold War military geographic intelligence. By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed and Communism crumbled in its original heartland, the techno-scientific constellation created by Cold War competition was transforming our conceptualization and

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experience of geography, with technological products like geographic information system (GIS) software packages, global positioning systems (GPS) and, more recently, desktop global imaging packages like Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth based on public remote sensing data (Goodchild, this volume). A global war on terror and unruly climate change in the early twenty-first century has only deepened the hold of these assemblages over how we perceive the earth, organization space and navigate in the world. While these techno-scientific capture systems were induced by a largely American-based military–industrial–academic complex, the intelligence and knowledge generated had multiple uses which, in turn, stimulated a transcendence of their military origins and application. Geography is not beholden to battlefields. Historically and today, it is a shifting set of often distinct assemblages and knowledge practices, with some traditions genealogically connected to a military–industrial–academic complex but others resistant to this and vigorously critical of those who see battlefields wherever they look.

GEOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE AND THE NAPOLEONIC STATE It was on the battlefield that the Napoleonic state established itself as the beacon of a new universalism, a mobilized nation in arms exporting Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity to the rest of Europe. Old regimes were swept away and replaced by a new order proclaimed as founded on reason and science. Galvanized by the Napoleonic military dictatorship were assemblages of geographic knowledge, with origins in the pre-revolutionary French state, which would chart French, European and extra-European space and subject it to the rule of rationality. The first assemblage of knowledge was the technical geography that supported military conquest. Cartography had long been a technology vital to warfare and conquest. Knowledge of enemy terrain,

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transportation possibilities and physical constraints dictated possibilities for offensive and defensive operations. Under Napoleon, cartography gained a new importance as a weapon of war given the importance of rapid movement and planned combinations of forces to tactical battlefield advantage and success. Geodesy, the branch of knowledge devoted to the measurement of the size and shape of the earth, was complimentary. The Napoleonic military geographer was an ingénieurs-géographes, a geographical engineer trained in scientific mapping to support logistics, maneuvers and conquest. Some worked as scouts and spies in regions not yet conquered by the French army; others worked behind the lines as consolidators of control. What they produced were not only maps and charts but also landscape paintings and drawings, visualizations of space that aided conquest. A second assemblage of geographic knowledge was the production of inventories and statistical portraits of regions. Again, this assemblage of knowledge production was not new – it had its roots in enlightened despotism, and mercantilist/cameralist notions of public administration – but it diffused and deepened as an administrative practice in the wake of military expansionism by the Napoleonic state. The modernizing state needed to know a region’s resources and sources of wealth, its established systems of taxation and its potential for reorganization to allow more efficient forms of governance and financial extraction. Regional descriptions and statistical inquiries became the basis for self-consciously rational interventions to produce desired arrangements of populations, agriculture, industry and commerce. Geographical knowledge, in this sense, was thick description and written as an aide to centralized military governance. A famous exemplar of this assemblage of geographic knowledge, and its cultural imperialism, is the 22-volume Description de l’Egypte produced in the wake of the Napoleonic conquest of the country under the editorship of Edme Jomard, one of the

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founders of the Société de Géographie de Paris in 1821. A third assemblage of geographical knowledge that developed under Napoleon was geopolitical. In-depth studies of countries and of major power competition across continents and oceans are assemblages of knowledge stimulated and sustained by the exercise of diplomacy and power in the modern interstate system. Napoleon’s oft quoted observation, ‘The policies of all powers are inherent in their geography’, underscores how he saw geography and power politics as linked. He planned the establishment of a school of geography and history within the Collège de France. His vision for the geography school was as a ‘central information bureau which would gather information on different parts of the world, trace and record any changes, make these known, and provide guidance to those who sought more information’ (Godlewska 1994: 39). Academic geography was to be part of a central intelligence system designed to serve the rationalizing state. Napoleon’s school of geography and history, however, were never institutionalized for reasons that remain unclear. Instead, geopolitical knowledge to serve the Napoleonic state and its national imperialism came together more informally around the journal Annales de Voyages founded in 1807 by Conrad Malte-Brun as a ‘dépôt’ for new geographic information which contributed to the analysis of the comparative strength of states (Godlewska 1994: 42–4). The influence of the Napoleonic state and its wars across Europe was profound. Though its conquests, it spread a revolutionary doctrine that combined Enlightenment universalism with militant nationalism, in turn stimulating a variety of local nationalisms. Other groups took up the vision of territorial nation-states and through nationalist clubs and societies projected an alternative liberal vision of European political space to that structured by conservative dynastic regimes. With Napoleon’s battlefield defeat, the old order was restored but the spatial modernity he unleashed would not be contained.

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BATTLEFIELD ENTANGLEMENTS: GEOGRAPHY AND GEOGRAPHIC INTELLIGENCE A diversity of circumstances and motivations produced varied assemblages of geographical knowledge in the nineteenth century but growth and competition between large modernizing states provided the general context, with the major state governments deepening their hold over their populations through welfare and education policies while also pursuing territorial expansion in neighboring or overseas territories. With professional associations and university systems emerging as institutional centres of geographical expertise, the modern discipline of geography congealed in distinctive ways in different states, each reflecting the particular knowledge assemblages and power relations running though state and society. These congealments included disputes over what constituted the core of geography, and varied marginalization of previously central pursuits like surveying, geodesy and even cartography from this core. Battlefields, near and far, shaped this process and provided motivation and stimulus to new forms of ‘geographic intelligence’ within the emergent constellations of social sciences. Entwined with the battlefields were imperialism, state formation and the growth of the modern capitalist world economy. The distant battlefields were colonial and the imperialist endeavors of the major powers – Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States – found expression and support in their distinctive ‘geographical societies.’ Many were no more than dining clubs for a state and civil elite but the more forward-looking harbored aspirations of institutionalizing geography as a discipline at all levels of state education to promote state modernization, national integration and imperial rule. This matter became urgent after the defeat of Napoleon III by the Prussian military at the battle of Sedan in 1870. Further defeat of the reorganized French forces galvanized the unification of

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the German states under Prussian leadership as an imperial Reich, with Alsace-Lorraine detached from France as a spoil of war. This unification of Germany was followed by a rapid institutionalization of geography as a university discipline across the Reich. By 1885 there were 12 university chairs in geography in Germany; by 1910 there were 23 (Sandner and Rossler 1994: 116). Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), an enthusiastic nationalist, militarist and imperialist, was among the most prominent. French defeat provoked a crisis of confidence, with German success attributed to its superior educational system. From this developed a drive for educational reform that saw, among other things, the academic institutionalization of geography in France. The Paris Geographical Society was central to this effort though it was, on the whole, less successful than in Germany. By 1900 there were 12 chairs of Geography in the French higher educational system though 40 other posts were devoted to teaching the subject (Heffernan 1994). In Britain, some members of the Royal Geographical Society viewed these developments with alarm and, with a rhetoric of ‘national efficiency’ as justification, pushed for the establishment of a lectureship in geography at Oxford University. The person chosen for this position was Halford J. Mackinder (1861–1947). Mackinder was a conservative nationalist who believed that geography was a vital discipline for the ‘education of an imperial race’ (Mackinder 1907). Geography encouraged worldwide thinking and fostered habits of thought connecting physical geography to human landscapes which made it easier for aspirant imperial rulers to grasp the strategic and commercial potential of the various regions that made up the British Empire (Kearns 2009). World War I saw not only the mobilization of soldiers but also of civil society and academic disciplines to serve the war effort. In Britain, the Royal Geographical Society offered its services to the geographical section of the British General Staff. It worked closely with the military to develop

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large-scale military maps of various theatres of war proved to be a significant locus of debate over wartime strategy. A series of handbooks, manuals and geographic notes were also developed under the direction of British Naval Intelligence. In France, a Comité d’Etudes was established in 1917 and produced a series of geographic volumes on France, its colonial empire and the potential outlines of the new European order. Paul Vidal de la Blanche, one of France’s most influential geographers, was a prominent member. Distant from European battlefields but following those generated by US imperial expansionism, the American Geographical Society (AGS) flourished. In 1915 it came under the leadership of a young physical geographer educated at Yale University, Isaiah Bowman (1878–1950). Using the social networks made possible by his position, Bowman came to serve as an advisor to Woodrow Wilson as he launched the United States into World War I and presided over the post-war peace conference at Versailles (Smith 2003). Through a fact finding initiative called the ‘Inquiry’ established in 1917, Bowman and his colleagues endeavored to create what Napoleon had once imagined: a central knowledge bureau available to serve the practical needs of statecraft. Other geographers were involved. The Association of American Geographers, an elite organization of professional geographers, only had 76 members in 1912 yet 51 of these actively served in World War I (Kirby 1994). The emergency of World War I forcefully configured and constituted geography as actionable intelligence for the practical needs of war-making and post-war statecraft. Geography, as a consequence, emerged from the war a transformed discipline. While the impetus for military geographic intelligence was no longer urgent, the central figures in the post-war development of the discipline carried the influence of wartime service into their work. For example, Bowman published a geopolitical textbook The New World (first edition 1921) as a means of educating Americans about the post-war world

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where, like it or not, they had significant international interests and commercial relationships. The Versailles Peace was a bitter pill for Germany to swallow. One German General who had fought on the Eastern Front turned to geography as a second career. Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) became a professor in Munich and was close to some in the Nazi Party as it began its rise to power. Haushofer was not alone among German geographers in calling for a revision of the Versailles Treaty. German geographers wrote a three-volume retort to Bowman’s New World called Macht und Erde (Power and Earth). Haushofer had a general influence over Hitler’s thinking as he composed Mein Kampf but whatever influence he had on state policy when Hitler became Fuhrer faded after the Munich conference of 1939. Haushofer’s predominant influence was on German geopolitical culture through his publications and editorship of the journal Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik (Natter 2002). Haushofer did not command an Institute of Geopolitics at Munich that was the ‘brain trust behind Hitler’ as sensational press reports in the United States suggested during World War II. Instead, the vision of a central geographic intelligence bureau was one the Western Allies pursued. The global battlefields of that war reenergized geographic thinking by placing a renewed emphasis on the importance of geographic intelligence – thin and thick – to winning the war. Various agencies and bureaucracies competed to provide geographic knowledge for the war effort. In the United States, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC was home to a collaboratively funded multi-institutional ‘Ethnogeographic Board’ which produced a series of 21 War Background Studies on locales where American troops would fight and where military governance was required (Farish 2005). In Britain, the Director of Naval Intelligence organized teams of geographers at Oxford and Cambridge to supervise the production of a series of handbooks on geographic areas to support Royal Navy operations and

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the allied war effort. The two teams produced 31 Naval Intelligence Handbooks comprising a total of 58 volumes between 1941 and 1946. Beginning with an emphasis on the physical geography of coastal areas, ports and transportation routes, these volumes also provided valuable thick descriptions of the human geography of states that had become battlefields in the global war (Clout and Gosme 2003). In Germany, many geographers also faithfully served their wartime state, applying innovative geographic models in the process. Walter Christaller’s theorization of central place dynamics in southern Germany was first published in 1933. Under Konrad Meyer, the leading academic administrator for the Nazi regime, he got the opportunity to apply it in western Poland, a former battlefield annexed to the Reich envisioned for colonial settlement by the German diaspora, with locals removed and eliminated. Whether in Poland or the prairie, one of the most influential ideas in twentieth-century geography had battlefield shadows (Barnes 2009). According to the Association of American Geographers (AAG) and the American Geographical Society (AGS), 670 of their members were involved in government agencies serving the war effort. One-hundredand-twenty-nine geographers served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency (Kirby 1994: 306). The mission of the OSS was ‘to collect and analyze all information and data which may bear upon national security’. Whereas some ‘geographic intelligence’ projects during World War I tended to emphasize collecting as an end in itself (developing a centralized archive), the stress during World War II was more on analysis (Barnes 2005: 163–4). The goal of the OSS was to coordinate the intelligence gathering activities of other US agencies and to develop strategic intelligence about the new geopolitical world likely to emerge in Europe and the Pacific after the war. To serve the needs of national security, analysis was structured to emerge from forced interdisciplinary collaboration rather than separate disciplinary paths to

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knowledge. Regional studies were developed alongside systematic analysis of particular issues. The governing methodological paradigm cultivated ‘objectivity’ and marginalized the critical interpretative acts of recognizing, classifying and describing, contributing to the later conceit that there was a clear distinction between ‘raw’ (unbiased) and ‘cooked’ (interpreted) intelligence (Barnes and Farish 2006). Wartime conditions produced collisions of knowledge that left disciplines mangled and entangled in military–industrial complexes as well as in each other, an outcome that conditioned the post-war social sciences in distinctive ways.

COLD WAR GEOGRAPHY The most prominent geographer within the OSS was Richard Hartshorne who had made his professional reputation as the champion of the vision of geography as an exceptionalist discipline dedicated to the study of regions. Hartshorne was a dominant figure in early Cold War geography, presiding over a merger between the elitist AAG and a more dynamic professional organization that had emerged during the war, the American Society for Geographic Research. This organization was home to geographers who were not necessarily professors and did not necessarily share Hartshorne’s vision of geography. Many were, in fact, part of an emergent military– industrial–academic complex that World War II brought into being. They viewed geography as a spatial science and were drawn to mathematical models and techno-scientific systems as means of creating systemic knowledge of the planet, a goal entangled in the priorities of the American state apparatus actively preparing for the possibility of nuclear war, involving missiles and longrange bombers, with the Soviet Union. This entanglement is particularly evident in cartography where advances occurred in a deeply classified world rather than in the public domain. Clarke and Cloud (2000)

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identify four different factors that shaped the growth of ‘analytical cartography’ after World War II: the discovery and use of German advances in analytical mapping methods during World War II, the development of the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) computer-based control system for early warning radar, the invention of the Dual Image Stellar Index Camera (DISIC) camera and integrated set of hardware and methods that automated the geo-rectification process of imagery taken by the US’s clandestine Corona spy satellites and, finally, the Corona Mural camera that enabled three-dimensional terrain maps to be added to the existing automated Corona system (Clarke and Cloud 2000: 197). Capture of German and Russian geodetic materials provided a critical link between existing European and Asiatic datums. Rediscovery of ruined survey towers on the Trans-Siberian railroad using Corona imagery ‘allowed first-order geodetic control to be extended across the great bulk of Eurasia – without setting foot on the “denied territory” there – an unprecedented achievement in the history of geodesy’ (Clarke and Cloud 2000: 199). Unprecedented achievement went hand in hand with the potential for unprecedented catastrophe for the goal of this research was to enable more accurate targeting of nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union by ICBMs. For two decades the US Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency funded research on the development of a more accurate ‘figure of the earth’ at Ohio State University (Cloud 2000). The work benefited from advances in camera optics, photo reconnaissance and remote sensing made possible by new techno-scientific assemblages like Corona. Southern Arizona was turned into a geographic laboratory for the development of first order geodesic measurements and accurate photo-reconnaissance targeting. Photogrammetry, the deduction of the depth and dimensions of objects photographed remotely by airplanes or satellites, burgeoned as a precise techno-scientific form

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of geographic intelligence and became entwined with geodesy in the search for the precise positioning of points on the earth’s surface (Cloud 2002). Advances in computing power and electronic measuring devices furthered the work which yielded the first of a series of world geodetic system measurements, under the imprimatur of the US Department of Defense, in 1960. The use of geodetic satellites in the subsequent decades greatly refined the figure of the earth and culminated in the 1980 Geodetic Reference System (GRS80). A tragic incident from the Cold War – the shooting down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 when it wandered off course over the Soviet Union in 1983 – triggered the controlled release of this satellite system, run by the US military, for worldwide civilian use as an aide to more accurate navigation. Using GRS80, this became the basis for the development of a global positioning system (GPS) set of standards and an associated navigation industry that grew rapidly in the subsequent decades. Computing power and electronics were revolutionizing other longstanding geographic practices as well. A complex confluence of factors went into the development of geographic information systems (GIS), the datamanagement system for storing, integrating, editing, analyzing and displaying geographically referenced information. Part of the impetus came from missile navigation and the desire of the US military to develop more sophisticated visualization of the battlefields it faced in Vietnam to aid its counter-insurgency effort. Military cartography traditionally focused on terrain analysis and, in the 1950s, this was the subject of automation efforts in order to develop accurate guidance systems for short-range missiles, the successors to Wernher von Braun’s V-1 buzz bombs. This lead to the development in 1958 of TERCOM (TERrain COntour Matching) which used stored digitized contour maps as a supplemental guidance system for low-altitude missiles. Contour data obtained during the missile’s flight path is compared to reference contour data in the missile’s inert

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guidance system to, in theory, keep the missile on track towards its programmed target. Digitized terrain systems made it possible to think about adding additional layers of georeferenced data, from aerial photography and satellite images, to create a master visualization of the battlefield. US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s effort to create an ‘electronic battlefield’ provided a stimulus and laboratory to pursue the vision of a fully digital ‘battle space’ as a type of layered military geographic intelligence system. But modern geographic information techniques systems only came together when advances in computing and spatial data visualization concepts made it possible to convert data like aerial photography and satellite images into standardized ortho-pixels. Computing was quickly transforming cartography into spatial data management and to deal with the proliferating forms of geographic intelligence produced by various institutional and technological assemblages, and the turf war between the Department of Defense and CIA over control, the US government established a separate Defense Mapping Agency in 1972 to consolidate all military mapping activities. Deep state and academic tendencies in post-war American geography combined to render the academic discipline hostile to critical inquiry and ethical questioning. Hartshorne helped create a post-war American political geography that studiously avoided controversial political questions. Spatial science geography touted its relevancy to the practical problems of post-war development without serious reflection on questions of militarism, social injustice and racial segregation. It took the widespread social upheaval that accompanied the civil rights struggle in the American south, a bloody US war in Vietnam, and youthful protest against establishment power to puncture this culture of contentment in Anglo-American geography. A younger generation of geographers, from backgrounds more diverse that previous generations of geographers, began asking critical questions about the discipline’s involvement in training graduates to work in corporate

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and defense mapping agencies which they argued deepened inequality and supported imperialism. Radical geography was never more than a minority tendency in Cold War Anglo-American geography but it profoundly influenced the culture and critical achievements of the discipline. By the mid-1980s, the questions posed 20 years earlier were as relevant as the US government under Ronald Reagan pursued imperialist policies in Central America and massive defense spending at home. The Defense Mapping Agency was the largest employer of geography graduates from US universities and parts of the discipline appeared more technocratic and amoral than ever. In reaction to these developments, critical approaches burgeoned in the discipline and had a widespread impact on how human geography was conceptualized and taught.

GEOINT Advances in computing have blurred the lines between cartography, geodesy and remote sensing just as the assemblages creating such techno-scientific geographic intelligence have challenged secret/public, military/ civilian and war/peace distinctions. After the disappearance of the locus of its efforts for 45 years (the Soviet Union), the US government established in 1996 the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) as a combined government agency responsibility for both imagery and mapping. NIMA brought together the culture of the Defense Mapping Agency, which produced cartography for the military, and the different culture of the CIA’s Central Imagery Office, which produced intelligence data for national security intelligence and civilian decision-making, as well as a series of other government agencies involved in imagery exploitation, dissemination and processing. Technological change was rendering previously closely guarded secrets obsolete and redundant by the 1990s. In 1966 the US

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government initiated a program called Earth Resources Observation Satellites that changed its name to Landsat in 1975. The program launched its first satellite in 1972 and, unlike the Corona system, was a public program designed to use remote sensing of the earth for scientific purposes. Yet Cold War competition was the backdrop for its launch, with Landsat designed to demonstrate the superiority of US technology in geoimaging and to promote the ideal of sharing information about the earth’s surface and its environment and natural resources. In 1979, Landsat operation moved from NASA to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), and its privatization recommended. This occurred in 1985 when the Earth Observation Satellite Company (EOSAT), a partnership of Hughes Aircraft and RCA, was selected by NOAA to operate the Landsat system under a ten-year contract. But there were restrictions. The US national security establishment confined Landsat to imaging capabilities no better than 30 meters ground resolution. This restriction and growing competition from other states, especially after the Cold War, led to increasingly fine levels of resolution becoming available. Some states, like Israel, tried to restrict access to images of their terrain completely and were temporarily successful. Other states prohibited photographs of sensitive locations (like the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC where the vice-president lives). But the ability of states to hide secrets territories and sensitive complexes is under challenge. In 2004, NIMA was renamed and reorganized again as the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). With an earth profile shot from space as its seal and ‘know the earth, show the way’ as its motto, the NGA describes itself as ‘the combination of technology, policies, capabilities, doctrine, activities, people, data and communities necessary to produce geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) in an integrated multi-intelligence, multi-domain environment’. GEOINT encompasses ‘all activities involved in the planning, collection, processing, analysis,

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exploitation and dissemination of spatial information in order to gain intelligence about the national security or operational environment, visually depict this knowledge, and fuse the acquired knowledge with other information through analysis and visualization processes’ (Statement of Strategic Intent, March 2007; see www.nga.mil). GEOINT sources include imagery and mapping data, whether collected by commercial satellite, government satellite or by other means, such as UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) or reconnaissance aircraft. Its current mission is to ‘help fight and win the long war’ and the struggle against ‘Islamo-fascism’. Like the Cold War, this war is conceptualized as global with all locations on the planet potentially requiring monitoring and surveillance. The Obama administration may have dropped the neoconservative terminology but it has expanded use of UAV drone strikes against suspected terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hundreds have been killed in Obama’s first two years in office, strikes made possible by round-the-clock aerial surveillance, visual recognition protocols, and precise geographic targeting (O’Loughlin, Witmer and Linke, 2010). On the ground, the result is indiscriminate murder as ordinary homes – full of women, children, parents and grandparents, one a potential terrorist suspect – become global battlefield targets and are pulverized. With the push of a button, drone operators in nondescript office buildings across the United States can wage a war of indiscriminate terror strikes against targets deemed terrorist. GEOINT helps make such state-sanctioned terrorism possible. In Iraq, battle space visualization technologies and digital mapping systems help orchestrate and rationalize military violence (Gregory, 2010). Geography, like most social and physical sciences, has many entanglements in its varied histories with what battlefields have wrought. States with dominant military establishments have constituted geography as instrumental intelligence to serve battlefield needs. But the meaning of

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geographic intelligence is never stable and the workings of military–industrial complexes are embedded in academic institutions rather than hermetically sealed from civilian society. The same GPS that allows ambulances, fire engines and police cars to efficiently find the scene of emergencies is the same technological system designed to guide ICBMs to their targets. The GIS systems developed to facilitate ‘command and control’ of battlefield space can also be used to effectively organize humanitarian relief efforts in the wake of extreme climatic events or other emergencies. Civilizational achievements can also be milestones in the evolution of human cruelty and indifference. Some forms of geographic intelligence are remarkable scientific achievements yet they can co-exist in a state apparatus alongside prejudice and ignorance of the world. Thin geographic intelligence may permit amazing achievements in the use of military force yet failures to grasp basic human geography may create strategic blunders of the first order. We live in a world of such contradictions.

Intelligence Handbooks during World War II in Great Britain. Heffernan, M. (1996) ‘Geography, cartography and military intelligence: the Royal Geographical Society and the First World War’, Transactions, Institute of British Geographers NS21: 504–533.

A beautifully written and informative historical analysis of the role played by key figures in the Royal Geographical Society in British war efforts, including imperial schemes in the Middle East, during World War I. It concludes astutely in arguing that considerations of geography’s past should avoid the temptation of making excessively dark and simplistic claims, depicting the discipline as a putative military science or an elaborate justification for untrammeled imperialist exploitation. Smith, N. (2003) American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Written with robust critical intelligence, this is the definitive biography of Isaiah Bowman, the most prominent and politically connected geographer in the United States in the twentieth century.

REFERENCES FURTHER READING Barnes, T. (2005) ‘Geographical intelligence: American geographers and research and analysis in the Office of Strategic Services 1941–1945’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32: 149–168.

A first-rate discussion of the role of geographers in the American OSS during World War II, the precursor to the CIA. Cloud, J. (2002) ‘American cartographic transformations during the Cold War’, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 29: 261–282.

An ambitious and technically demanding survey of the ways in which American cartography was entwined with the military-industrial-academic complex during the Cold War. Clout, H. and C. Gosme (2003) ‘The Naval Intelligence Handbooks: A monument in geographical writing’, Progress in Human Geography, 27: 153–173.

An appreciative description of the achievement behind the production of Naval

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Barnes, T. (2005) ‘Geographical Intelligence: American geographers and research and analysis in the Office of Strategic Services 1941–1945’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32: 149–168. Barnes, T. (2009) ‘Two men of war and their big idea: Walter Christaller, Edward Ullman, and central place theory’ (to be supplied). Barnes, T. and M. Farish (2006) ‘Between Regions: science, militarism, and American geography from World War to Cold War’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96: 807–826. Clarke, K. and J. Cloud (2000) ‘On the origins of analytical cartography’, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 27: 195–204. Cloud, J. (2000) ‘Crossing the Olentangy River: the figure of the earth and the military–industrial– academic-complex, 1947–1972’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 31: 371–404. Cloud, J. (2002) ‘American cartographic transformations during the Cold War’, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 29: 261–282.

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Clout, H. and C. Gosme (2003) ‘The Naval Intelligence Handbooks: A monument in geographical writing’, Progress in Human Geography, 27: 153–173. Farish, M. (2005) ‘Archiving Areas: The Ethnogeographic Board and the Second World War’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95: 663–679. Godlewska, A. (1994) ‘Napoleon’s geographers (1797– 1815): imperialists and soldiers of modernity’, in A. Godlewska and N. Smith. (eds), Geography and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 31–53. Gregory, D. (2010) ‘Seeing Red: Baghdad and the event-ful city.’ Political Geography 29: 266–279. Heffernan, M. (1994) ‘The science of empire: The French geographical movement and the forms of French imperialism, 1870–1920’ in A. Godlewska and N. Smith (eds), Geography and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 92–114. Kearns, G. (2009) Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirby, A. (1994) ‘What did you do in the war, daddy?’ in A. Godlewska and N. Smith (eds), Geography and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 300–315.

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Lacoste, Y. (1976) La Géographie ça sert d’abord à faire la guerre. Paris: Maspero. Mackinder, H. (1907) ‘On thinking imperially’, lectures on empire. M.E. Sadler., London, privately printed. Mendieta, E. (2006) ‘War the school of space: the space of war and the war of space’, Ethics, Place and Environment, 9: 207–229. Natter, W. (2002) ‘Geopolitics in Germany, 1919– 1945’, in J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G.O’Tuathail (eds), Companion to Political Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. O’Loughlin, J, Witmer, F.D., and Linke, A.M. (2010) ‘The Afghanistan-Pakistan Wars, 2008–2009: Micro-geographies, Conflict Diffusion, and Clusters of Violence,’ Eurasian Geography and Economics, 51: 437–471. Sandner, G. and M. Rossler (1994) ‘Geography and empire in Germany, 1871–1945’, in A. Godlewska and N. Smith (eds), Geography and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 115–129. Smith, N. (2003) American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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17 Making Mathematical Models Perform in Geographical Space(s) Stuart N. Lane

INTRODUCTION I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again … the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul. J.G. Ballard.

Models increasingly underpin much of how we live. Their role in our lives is often unappreciated, hidden, left without scrutiny. Both our individual and our collective experiences of the past remind us that our world is full of surprises, things we wish to avoid. Models become one of the devices that we rely upon to transcend that past through the present into the future, to make futures predictable, and hence controllable. As George Orwell said ‘He who commands the future conquers the past.’ It is not surprising that models, then, increasingly permeate our day-to-day existence in ways that we rarely appreciate. Geographers, for many years, have been involved in their generation and application. However, the extent to which we rely upon models often only emerges when they

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unsettle, undermine or simply fail to deliver the secure and predictable futures that we wish. During such occasions, not only do models come under scrutiny, but so do the very knowledge principles and practices of which they form a part, as we struggle to come to terms with the uncertainty and indeterminacy that is endemic to any consideration of the future. In this chapter, I want to look at some of the knowledge principles and practices that underpin the kinds of mathematical models that I use as a geographer, in an attempt to interrogate the nature of the geographical knowledge that models produce. Although geographers have long prided themselves on the way that they have been able to develop a range of types of models of geographical phenomena, there are almost no accounts written by geographers of the practice of modelling, and what this means for the kind of knowledge that results. Here, I use an autobiographical account of my own experience as a modeller, to reflect upon these practices. I begin by an account of why modelling, as an activity, is important to me

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in generating knowledge about the world that I study. Much of this relates to the question of accessing phenomena that are otherwise beyond understanding or inaccessible. In discussing accessibility, I show that a core theme weaves through my rationale for generating knowledge using models: How do we develop a trust in knowledge generated by models, where there is no other alternative to generating knowledge in that way? How do we come to believe model predictions when they are often beyond scrutiny, beyond validation? To answer this question, I then consider how I model, modelling as a practice. I argue that the essence of this practice is performative, and detail how it is that I make my models perform. The performative nature of modelling as a geographical practice not only challenges the ways modelling is represented formally but may actually subvert some of the other strictures that have come to dominate the practices of knowledge generation, especially in those parts of the discipline that align their practices most strongly with conventional ‘scientific’ method.

MY BEGINNINGS AS A MATHEMATICAL MODELLER I model primarily because many of the things that I am interested in are beyond measurement, even using the most sophisticated measuring devices. This is despite the problem that, for a range of reasons, my models are highly dependent upon measurements, something I will return to below. I first tried to use a model as a school student, in a headwater stream in northern England in the late 1980s; a ‘bucket’ model of hydrological mass balance. Armed with a very early BBC microcomputer and a floppy disk with an embryonic spreadsheet, I proudly went out to find my stream, only to discover that it had dried up. Not knowing then what I know now about how to handle datapoor modelling problems, I gave up on rivers

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(and soils and coasts) and found the industrial decline of a nearby city much more interesting. About two years later my interest in modelling was rekindled through an empirical event: trying to measure sediment transport and channel change in a glacially fed, braided river. I found a conceptual model (Ashworth and Ferguson 1986), a classical systems diagram, of the sort popularised in geography more widely in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This seemed to capture the essence of the phenomena I was trying to understand. My initial reaction was that I must measure all the components in the system, and interrelate them to test the conceptual model. I thought that, in a naively ambitious sense, through quantifying the model components, I could make predictions about how the river would change. However, the more I tried to measure the river, the more I uncovered the limits of my own ability to measure.1 As I moved into graduate studies, I tried to measure even more by getting a host of undergraduate students to assist and by turning to surveillant or synoptic technologies (e.g. remote sensing) to try to capture the spatially distributed data implicit to the systems diagram I found so appealing (Lane et al. 1994a). Yet, underlying all of this, was a growing realisation that, however much I addressed the data collection challenge, my only hope was to move from a conceptual model of the system, to some sort of mathematical model, one that could reproduce numerically the kind of space–time feedbacks in the original Ashworth and Ferguson (1986) model.

WHY DO I MODEL? With this account, I can start to rationalise my engagement with mathematical models as being about generating knowledge of things that are otherwise inaccessible, beyond ‘conventional’ measurement. The reasons for this inaccessibility are not simply associated

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with the difficulties of measuring the world with an appropriate spatial and temporal resolution: inaccessibility arises for at least four other reasons, each of which point to the kinds of situations and associated knowledge that we need models for. First, measurements, just like models, contain encoded and often hidden assumptions (Hacking 1983). Such assumptions mean that our measurements access the world in particular ways. The representations that arise have as much to do with the assumptions we make about the world, as they do about the world itself. In a reversal of the usual primacy given to measurements over models, models can be used to interrogate the norms associated with measurement practice. For instance, I, with others, have used three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models to show that inferences of secondary circulation in river junctions based upon point current meter data (measurements) use auxiliary assumptions that make identification of secondary circulation inevitable (Lane et al. 2000). The point here is not so much that models give better representation of reality than measurements. Rather, measurements, as with models, encode assumptions that lead to the world becoming constructed in particular ways, unsettling the common view that measurements should be used ‘to police’ our models. This is an uncomfortable position: if both models and measurements are abstractions of reality, then I have no hierarchy that says that one should be taken as a better abstraction than the other. How, then, can I make sure that my models are performing properly when I cannot be sure about what that ‘performance’ should be? Second, what I learn from field measurement, is inevitably bound by the possibilities of the place that I am trying to measure. These are not perfectly knowable a priori, but may impact strongly on what I measure. There are strong ontological and epistemological reasons for the kind of case-study research that I have done (e.g. ShraderFrechette and McCoy 1993). But it can also

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be labelled as ‘detailology’2 if it fails to produce the generalisable patterns (i.e. things that might become rules and eventually laws) that were distilled for me, through my training, as the essence of scientific discovery. I can counter claims of a preoccupation with detail by both: an epistemological claim that it is only through engaging with this detail that the nature of a place can be understood (Lane 2001); and a substantive claim that the devil can be in the detail and, in a non-linear system, the detail really matters (Lane and Richards 1997). However, rivers do seem to display properties (e.g. downstream hydraulic geometry; channel pattern relationships; downstream fining) that are emergent from some sort of underlying set of processes. Mathematical models represent an alternative way of accessing this emergence. By mathematically encoding possible process relationships, the interactions between these (the immanent) and the possibilities of particular places and times (the configurational) can be explored. I will routinely, as part of a study (e.g. Bradbrook et al. 2001): (1) undertake intensive laboratory or field measurement of a small number of case examples (a small n study in the language of Richards 1996); (2) develop a model in parallel with, and around, these case examples, in order to establish some sort of trust in the model; and (3) use the model to explore a much larger set of configurations (a large N study, Richards 1996) in the search for emergent properties. The model becomes a means of circumventing both: the impossibility of designing extensive laboratory experiments to explore many configurations; and undertaking field measurement campaigns where controlling the possibilities of the configurational is not possible. In the above, (2) is crucial in the step from small n to large N. The issue of how trust is established in models, the evaluation of their performance, appears for the second time in my account. Third, there are certain processes that I am interested in that are always likely to remain beyond practical measurement. In some cases, these are the kinds of events that are

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rare and the most interesting to understand. They can also be where the pressure to provide that understanding is greatest. Where water goes on an urban floodplain is of material importance to flood risk management, regardless of who that management is for. Of critical importance are the locations of the onset of flooding, followed by being able to trace where water moves across a floodplain as the event happens. Exactly where and when a flood will occur is largely unpredictable, except in larger river basins over the timescales of days and smaller river basins over a few hours. Mobilising technology to get to the right place just at the right time is likely to remain a practical impossibility. At best, measurements provide us with either a map of maximum flood extent (‘wrack lines’ record where water got to, Lane et al. 2003) or a map of flood extent at a single point in time (commonly a remotely sensed image, often on the falling limb of the flood wave as a result of delays in mobilising an aircraft, or at a time dictated by a satellite overpass). Modelling urban flood inundation, provided that there is a proper representation of floodplain topology (Yu and Lane 2006b), gives us space–time information on the flooding process. It also leaves us in a Catch-22 situation during model development: we are using a model to generate the space–time information that our measurements cannot deliver; but, in a conventional sense, to establish trust in the model, we need such measurements to assess that space–time information. The fourth form of inaccessibility relates to things that are beyond intuition through empirical experience, of whatever kind, not just measurement. Sometimes, this involves research into ‘futures’, not to make statements about what the future is going to be, but rather to counteract the framings that have become dominant about what that future will entail. One example is the failure to account for the flood risk arising from land management impacts on sediment delivery as opposed to impacts on river flows (Lane et al. 2008). Here, possible futures had been encoded out of consideration and we were

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able to use modelling to show that they need to be included. This kind of futures modelling is popular in policy-making circles as a means of making policy ‘future-proof’. In making the future more accessible, we can become preoccupied with what those futures tell us, often forgetting that when it comes to the future, the only thing we know is that we will be wrong. However, I find this kind of access more subtle. The surprising nature of the findings and the ways that they unsettle conventional wisdom emphasise that some of what is being accessed is that which goes beyond conventional measurement and even intuition. Beck notes: Computer-based mathematical models are constructed because we cannot reason systematically (in our heads) through all the ramifications of the assumed web of interacting causal connections in the behaviour of the system. We extend the lens of our enquiry down into the detail we know is there, manipulate our sets of equations at this finely resolved level, only to be puzzled by the outcome, if it is counter-intuitive. Indeed, there might otherwise be disappointment, even embarrassment, if the outcome of all the details were to confirm merely what had been supposed to be obvious at the outset. Beck (1999: 6).

In the next sentence, he gets at the essence of why I model: ‘If there is puzzlement, how is enlightenment achieved?’. Models give me enlightenment when they unsettle what I know, causing me to set the bases of that puzzlement in juxtaposition, to challenge the framings implicit in my views of the world (whether models or measurements) and to open up new possibilities for investigation and interpretation. It is when models don’t add up, to reproduce my own personal experience, that they come to gain real meaning, effecting new ways of thinking, researching and measuring. Threading through the above is the issue of how we establish trust in the knowledge that models produce. By far the dominant account of modelling as a practice is that we establish trust in models through the extent to which they reproduce the world around us. However, if models are important because

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they allow us to access the otherwise inaccessible, and if we simultaneously confess to being closet empiricists firm in the belief that we can only accept what we can observe, then we should come out and reject models as a means of generating scientific knowledge. This tension between belief and observation in relation to models is the basis of the argument I develop in the rest of this chapter: modelling is associated with a practice that subverts our conventional definition of legitimate scientific knowledge as being that which can be subject to empirical testing. My belief system, in relation to models, is concerned with a broader practice that is about establishing trust in my models. Establishing trust has three crucial elements. First, models don’t produce themselves, although they are involved in their own production and reproduction. I have a relationship with my models that is performative: I make them perform; and it is the act of making the performance that makes me gain trust in it. Modelling is about practice. Secondly, whilst I may become my own critic, I typically expose my performance to the critique of others, and my practice of modelling is bound within a complex and dynamic web of interactions between models and modellers. Thirdly, as models of geographical spaces, my performances are increasingly subject to scrutiny from a much wider group of critics, ones who bring a particular sense of their world to my own practice, something that not only challenges but also enriches the modelling process.

MODELLING AS PRACTISED Every model that I have worked with can be readily shown to be invalid. Models are numerical approximations of a bunch of selected theoretical–mathematical relationships. As numerical approximations, there will always be a difference between what the model tells me and what a measurement tells me, even if that is infinitesimally small. Error is inevitable and the model has to be wrong.

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For this reason, I often revert to one of the original definitions of validation, by seeking to establish the statistical power of a model. Power in statistics is defined as the probability that a type II error (a false negative) will not be made, where the null hypothesis is accepted when it is actually false. The power of my experiment depends upon the way I design it (e.g. sample size, repetition, choice of statistical test) and a powerful result is one where I can confidently reject the null hypothesis, taken to be the model. A good model is one that, after testing, remains acceptable. However, a statistically powerful result does not necessarily convert into the belief that a model is good enough. In the review comments of the first modelling paper I wrote (Lane et al. 1995), one of the referees noted, ‘For all this effort, you still have a very low level of explained variance,’ even though the levels of explanation were statistically significant (I had no reason to reject the null hypothesis) and despite considerable uncertainty over the reliability of the measurements that I was using to check my model. All of this places the process of empirical assessment of a model in the remit of the subjective, open to debate, such as over what constitutes a sufficient level of agreement (Oreskes and Belitz 2001). But it goes further than this. As a result of the inevitability of error in any model that contains numerical approximations, we commonly divide error into precision and accuracy, the latter manifest as bias. We accept that all models contain error (precision) but are interested in whether or not they contain bias. Unfortunately, demonstrating bias is not independent of a model’s precision (Lane and Richards 2001) because, in statistical formations, a more precise model is more readily found to be inaccurate, or biased, than a less precise model. Indeed, as a result of the way we formulate statistical tests for model bias, as the precision tends to being perfect, the bias will tend to infinity, and the model is more likely to be rejected. If the only thing that we can do with a model is show that it is wrong (Beven 2006) then it

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will become easier to show this for a more precise or, in some senses, a ‘better’ model. The subjective element of model assessment has become one part of a wider critique of mathematical modelling of environmental phenomena (e.g. Oreskes et al. 1994). Mathematical models turn out to be eminently pliable primarily because they contain adjustable parameters which can be used to calibrate the model onto our measured data. Oreskes et al. (1994) call this ‘forcing empirical adequacy’. Unfortunately, many modellers have a tendency to present comparisons between empirically forced model predictions and the empirical information used to do the model forcing, what might be best described as ‘cheating’. Whilst on the surface this might be readily condemned, we need to recognise that, even before a model is compared with measurements, it has been empirically forced through the multitude of ways in which a modeller has used their experience of the environment to decide how to model it. Forcing empirical adequacy, however it is done, is about making a model perform. How do I make a model perform? If I, or others, don’t like my model, I have a series of strategies that I can then use to make the model be seen to perform in other ways. A primary way of doing this is to introduce post hoc auxiliary information that might help to save the model (Klein and Herskovitz 2007). This has included: critique of the data used to assess the model (Lane et al. 1995), causing me to explore means of improving data quality (e.g. Lane et al. 1998); critique of the data used to drive the model (e.g. Lane et al. 1995), in my case leading to a search for new data measurement techniques (e.g. Lane 2000); and critique of the model (e.g. Lane and Richards 1998) causing me to develop new models (Lane et al. 1999). According to some, such as Popper (1957), this is an ‘unscientific’ practice as such activities save ‘the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying or at least lowering its scientific status’ (Popper 1957: 160). But, it is what I do, part of a process better described

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as constructing a ‘web of belief’ (e.g. Quine and Ullian 1970). Almost a social constructivist (but also much more than that), Quine’s (1969) account of science as practised accords with my own experience of modelling as implicitly and inherently pragmatic. First, some of Quine’s account accords very strongly with the issues that I work with on a day-to-day basis. For instance, Quine’s underdetermination thesis identifies the possibility that many different theories could be consistent with the same set of data: the model non-identifiability of Beck (1987); and model equifinality3 of Beven (1993). Model underdetermination is partly a consequence of an experiential and instinctive engagement with the world, where we take as faithful representations of reality those processes we perceive as important. The subsequent fetish with the nitty gritty of process representation is not neutral but commits models to certain scales and resolutions of analysis4 as well as certain forms of expertise. Massey’s (1999) ‘physics envy’ has some relevance here, where our definition of what knowledge a model must contain is more defined by the communities of practice that we seek to emulate than it is any kind of resemblance to the places we are trying to understand.5 As a modeller, I perform for a particular hydrological community, or set of critics, who are commonly given primary emphasis through the practice of peer review. Such critics rarely have ‘place-expertise’ and more commonly have ‘process-expertise’. This is one hypothesis for the preoccupation of hydrological modelling, including my own practice, with the nitty-gritty representation of physical detail. Second, Quine (1969) talks of the ways in which we revise our knowledge in the light of such experiences. The process of introducing post hoc auxiliary information in response to empirical inadequacy is a form of knowledge revision, where other knowledge is brought to bear upon whether or not the model is really inadequate. More fundamentally, though, it leads into revision of my understanding of what constitutes an adequate model.

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When, during my doctoral research (Lane 1994), I looked at propagation of error in velocity estimates to bed shear stress (force exerted per unit area) estimates, I identified severe uncertainty at river junctions where the flow was strongly three-dimensional and the model was not effectively representing secondary circulation impacts upon the displacement of the high velocity core to the river bed. Thus, I revised my modelling through a new project that used a threedimensional treatment. In doing this kind of work, I am finding where a model is going wrong in order to develop it further. Simply rejecting the model would not be of much value (Quine 1969). This is the value of criticism to my modelling performance. It is not just about showing the model to be wrong, but learning what might make it right. Third, Quine’s emphasis upon holism is interesting. Quine (1951) argues that only the bundle of interlocking components that comprise a theory can be tested: the constituent individual hypotheses are not separately falsifiable. When I model, the relevance of any one individual component of a model can only be evaluated as a part of that model. For instance, the Manning equation, on its own, is nonsense for describing anything other than steady, uniform, one-dimensional flow. It is easy to reject. However, where a Manning-type friction law is used as part of a model, as a means of representing a momentum sink, including processes like roughness, secondary circulation and turbulence, it becomes just one of any of a number of possible auxiliary relationships which, if used sensibly, can still deliver the effective momentum loss it is designed to do. As with all criticism, an individual element of performance may be criticised, but that does not necessarily undermine the performance as a whole. The final point that I take from Quine (1969), is the emphasis upon not just knowledge revision but ‘belief revision’, something that reduces the demarcation between science and non-science (Klein and Herskovitz 2007). Quine’s account explicitly incorporates the

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possibility that things besides the empirical should be admitted into model evaluation, such as the conventions that we invoke to help us to produce and to make sense of knowledge (Klein and Herskovitz 2007). Klein and Herskovitz note that Quine’s view is a relativist one, and that it is only a short distance to a social constructivist position in which it is recognised that social factors will be paramount in influencing the theory bundle that comes about, as well as the ways in which we revise out beliefs in response to working with that theory bundle, deciding how to revise it and so on. If I look at how I have assembled my own models (as bundles of theory), it is difficult to exclude the personal experience, chance encounters, relationships nurtured and avoided, and reflexivity to criticism whether founded or not, that end up shaping which models I work with and where I go as I make my models perform. My discussion of Quine is essentially a statement that establishing trust in a model cannot be reduced to the narrow definitions of validation that permeate both the modelling literature but also scientific method more widely. Generating geographical knowledge, using models, involves a much richer process than we normally admit to, one where I establish and revise my beliefs and where a range of other factors, many of which might be viewed as ‘non-scientific’, shape what I do. How do I do this? And, moreover, how do these activities manifest themselves when the models I am working with are not simply models that I am developing for my own sake? The question becomes how do I establish my own trust in my own models and how is that trust articulated to others?

TRUST IN MODELS: LEARNING TO APPRECIATE MY OWN PERFORMANCE The way I come to trust my own models and modelling is a process rather than an end point.

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For this reason, it can be viewed as a performance, one with four interweaving acts. The first is the narrow kind of validation activity that I described above. I have only published two research papers (Hardy et al. 2007; Lane et al. 2006) where I use a model but where I don’t also include some comparison with independent data. However, this hides a much wider range of activities, many of which have arisen in relation to my own concerns about the philosophical and practical limitations of measurement-policed models. The second broad area of activity is concerned with establishing legitimation through opening up the content of a model to scrutiny. As noted above, this activity is meaningless in isolation. Almost any of the model’s auxiliary rules could be found wanting in certain situations. Similarly, simply defining the adequacy of a model by its process content may implicitly limit its performance due to the implications for model resolution and scale of application that result. What is more important is honesty, initially personal, about what the model might be expected to do. One of my growing frustrations with the use of both hydrological and hydraulic models is that the modeller does not always spend enough time understanding the processes that a model contains. The following is an extract from a preliminary review I wrote on a series of models that were being used in a controversial hydrological analysis: The main problem in this respect is with [the model]. It does not have the same history of peer review publication (I could not find any material using a standard bibliographic database search). The same conclusion was reached when I looked on [the model developer’s] website. In terms of the reports provided to [the consultancy that had commissioned the model], there is not enough information with which I can assess the process basis of the model, how the model was applied, how the parameterisation was undertaken, what sensitivity analysis has been undertaken (with what results) and what uncertainty analysis has been undertaken (with what results)… At present, description of the model and how it was applied makes it very difficult for me to assess the modelling work that has been undertaken, other than the extent to which observations have been reproduced by the

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model. This sort of validation may not be sufficient for external scrutiny, especially when there are aspects of the validation that question the extent to which the model is faithfully reproducing those observations. (Personal Record, June 2005).

This situation is a challenge in academic circles as much as it is in consultancy. Take Mason et al. (2003). They present an excellent data assimilation methodology for the derivation of vegetation height information on river floodplains. They then use these data to assign roughness information using relationships developed for a much-restricted range of roughness properties, then associated with flow in pipes. The work contains almost no scrutiny of the origins of these process relationships and hence no attempt to interpret their impacts upon this application. Much of the case for model development that I, and others, cite for doing new research is that what has gone on before needs to be revised. My concerns embodied in Mason et al.’s (2003) paper were demonstrated through showing the inadequacies of roughness parameterisation on urban floodplains (Yu and Lane 2006a), which in turn justified new treatments based upon mass blockage (Yu and Lane 2006b). This process of scrutiny, then, has a hierarchical role, a natural part of the process of science, in which I establish trust in what I am proposing or what I have done, through arguing for the inadequacies of what has gone before. It involves a range of activities, including process scrutiny, comparison with measurements and sensitivity analysis, which when bundled together legitimate a new sort of modelling approach for the generation of knowledge (Lane 2005). Even with models that have been developed, or become settled, the need to open up a model to scrutiny remains: the way that many processes work within a model depends upon the place to which they are being applied, not least because of spatial and temporal feedbacks. Thus, as a model becomes settled, and moves from development to application, the need to understand the model

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also remains. However, models are increasingly shrouded in visually appealing graphical user interfaces in which the ease with which knowledge can be generated and visualised may create a false confidence in an underlying set of processes whose domains of relevance to a particular problem have not been fully established. The process of visualisation is one of the means by which a model becomes trusted: ‘sophisticated models commonly exert a compelling persuasiveness; they are designed to look “real”’ (Yearley 1999: 846). Unpacking such models is not always possible as models are bound to broader influences, notably questions of intellectual property. In a telephone conversation with a model developer (6 June 2005) in a response to some model reviewing that I was undertaking, the developer alleged of a second developer ‘He has been known to leave out key parameters or to make typographic errors in his papers so that his intellectual property cannot be commercialised by others’. Not only can getting at the process content of a model, and how it is being handled in a numerical code, be almost impossible, this quote alleges the kind of practice which mitigates against the development of trust in models. The third aspect through which I seek to establish trust in the models I develop is through what I call a search for ‘coherence’. Philosophically ‘coherence’ has an implied relationship to coherence theory where individual propositions can only be judged with respect to their coherence with the whole body of a theory (i.e. Quine’s holism). In my case, it is a more informal search for what might best be called a logical consistency amongst different sorts of information (which might include measurements, what is in the model, what I think I know about what I am modelling, results from other models). In all of this, my aim is not to compare one piece of knowledge with a second, but to assess the extent to which the model behaviour (i.e. not only predictions) sits within the web of belief that I have about the system that I am modelling. As Beck notes, it is centred on mental images:

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In the end, whether we trust an outcome of the test of the model, and hence place our trust in the model itself, is a matter of whether we have a good mental image – a good understanding – of the inner workings of the mathematical and computational models. The model, large though it may be, must be found to be in accord with our intuitive understanding of the behaviour of the system. Beck 1999: 7.

Two of the activities that I have described above, partly map onto a search for coherence (e.g. measurements, process scrutiny) but activities like model benchmarking (i.e. interpretation of predictions from different models; Lane et al. 1999), sensitivity analysis (i.e. assessing how the model behaves as various parameters or processes are adjusted/ removed, Lane et al. 1994b) and multiple grid calculations (e.g. Hardy et al. 2003) are all examples of the activities that I bring together to help me to trust the model that I am developing. The fourth point relates to modelling in interdisciplinary settings, something that characterises all of my modelling work. It is concerned with the ways in which trust in models is achieved through emulating the value systems of those who are most likely to act in judgement. My original PhD was jointly based in civil engineering and geography. Subsequent engagement with CFD initially involved engineers and then applied mathematicians. Most recently, this developed to include earth scientists and biologists. Working at the interface of disciplinary borders and crossing into other disciplines means that establishing trust within my own communities of practice has never been sufficient. There are a number of senses in which I have had to emulate the standards of others. First, in interdisciplinary terms, CFD has its origins primarily in applied mathematics, although it has been adopted and developed in certain areas of engineering. When we first proposed using CFD in geomorphology, in a National Environment Research Council (NERC) grant application, we sensed the need to cross disciplinary borders to make

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sure that the work we were doing would stand up to scrutiny by others. One of the grant referees actually commented that ‘Involvement of [an engineer working on mathematical modelling of turbulence in ducts] is crucial to this research project [modelling of secondary flows at natural river junctions] as the applicants have no prior experience of using CFD’ (October 1994). Methods to guarantee trust in my models were being imposed before I had done any modelling. The second area where working across borders has influenced the way I establish trust is through the material day-to-day practices of working in an interdisciplinary project. This was felt most strongly in the project I held jointly with applied mathematicians whilst at Leeds University. It is hard to articulate in the conventional pages of an academic account the scrutiny, debate, discussion and reformulation of our work that ultimately drove the project radically further than we even envisaged in the original grant application. None of this appears in the accounts of our method (e.g. Lane et al. 2004; Hardy et al. 2005) even though our methods were critically dependent upon it. Third, and resonating strongly with Porter’s (1995) idea of ‘mechanical objectivity’, this emulation of the standards of others began in earnest when we started to publish in engineering journals, notably the Journal of Hydraulic Research (Bradbrook et al. 2000; Hardy et al. 2005) and the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Journal of Hydraulic Engineering (Bradbrook et al. 2001). The referees of Bradbrook et al. (2001) were a fluid dynamics researcher and an earth scientist (who we eventually collaborated with). Both asked for revisions which ultimately directed the work in different ways. The fluids dynamics research pointed us to the work of H.W. Coleman,6 who was specifically interested in the way in which CFD code is verified. In turn, this took me into the area of fluids engineering and the associated communities of practice where standards of practice were the norm: numerical solution of the basic CFD equations was

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governed by statements on the control of numerical accuracy (e.g. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) 1994). I found a list of nine things that I had to do with my CFD runs and a tenth that is interestingly unsettling: ‘Comparison with reliable experimental results is appropriate, provided experimental uncertainty is established. However, “reasonable agreement” with experimental data alone will not be enough to justify a given single-grid calculation, especially if adjustable parameters are involved.’ The lynchpin of what I thought was my scientific method, assessment of the extent to which the model (a set of hypotheses) corresponds to a set of test data (measurements), appears to be optional. The mandate contained within this list provided me with a means of demonstrating trust in an ‘ultimate’ field of enquiry7 through bringing a mechanical objectivity in my own work which, interestingly upon first reading, appeared to free me from all the difficulties of acquiring field or experimental data. As I crossed disciplinary borders, in order to get the trust of other disciplines, I had to reproduce the ways of working that I saw in their communities of practice. But then I found myself moving those ways of working back into my own communities of practice: the mandate started to travel. We developed methodologies for use in CFD modelling in hydraulics that could be used as part of verification (Hardy et al. 2003) and ultimately redrafted the AIAA statements for the specific case of rivers (Lane et al. 2005). Not only did mechanical objectivity become a means of establishing trust in my models, but also a mandate that I (and others) can bring to judge trust in the models of others. There are two points that follow from this. First, upon reflection, this is an activity that I have to recognise is not entirely neutral. As Porter (1995) notes in relation to statistics, mandates may be used to prevent others from choosing particular ways of working, as a means of controlling what knowledge is admissible, what form criticism should take,

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or what the ‘police’ should see as right and wrong. Second, there was an interesting dimension of border crossing that I was following here, both through the redrafting of the AIAA statements (Lane et al. 2005), and as was implicit to the original reviews of Bradbrook et al. (2001). As I work in a field where at least some things can be measured, I was also facing disciplines like earth sciences, and notably sedimentology, where models are taken in a much more critical vein, and where, for different communities of practice, trust in model predictions can only be accepted if they do indeed reproduce laboratory or field data. This was reinforced by the earth scientist’s comments about the paper that also took me in the direction of the AIAA statements. Thus, in Lane et al. (2005), I also introduced standards associated with the use and interpretation of experimental and field data in model assessment. These were motivated by much of what I have said about the practice of validation above. The kinds of activities I wanted to mandate against included the misinterpretation of the statistics of model comparison, the failure to acknowledge experimental uncertainty, but also a deeper concern that claims to validation could become a smokescreen for deeper model errors. I still review papers where validation involves the comparison of two properties (e.g. a measured and modelled velocity profile) but where the model is then used to predict a third property (e.g. secondary circulation), which is inferred as ‘valid’ upon the basis of correspondence between properties that have no relevance to it. Similar concerns emerge with the use of spatially or temporally integrated or global error statistics that hide routine bias within the model, even though it is the spatial or temporal detail that the modeller is interested in (e.g. Lane 2007). I am not the only one to go down the mandating route. Pappenberger and Beven (2006) have recently advocated the need for a code of practice in relationship to uncertainty analysis in hydrological models, a means of responding to the frustration that they feel

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over the slow take up of their vision for uncertainty analysis. It is clear from the above that the way in which I establish trust in a model has been subject to revision, in the same way that my models themselves have been revised. This has been about mobilising a complex and personal web of trust or belief in the knowledge that my models produce. This is similar to what Porter (1995) calls the ‘network of allies’ necessary to establish trust in statistics, where those allies are ‘things’ (e.g. standards, statistical tests) as much as they are people converted to the models’ cause. It partly explains why I find many of the accounts of the practice of modelling frustratingly naïve, idealistic statements of what scientists might strive to do at best. It also demonstrates that it is almost impossible to separate me from my models in explaining the ways that I use them to generate knowledge. The model without the modeller is not a meaningful unit of enquiry. At once, this is a challenge, as the supposed appeal of a model is that it can ‘travel’; it has generalisable attributes. The question shifts from how we established trust in the model to how trust is established in the modeller.

FROM TRUST IN THE MODEL TO TRUST IN THE MODELLER: EXPOSING MODELS TO CRITICISM If modelling is about the development of a special relationship between the model and the modeller, then how do others come to believe the knowledge that I and my models generate? Notwithstanding the issues raised above, a primary focus of this criticism remains demonstration by the modeller that their model, as they have made it perform, reproduces reality. However, there are at least four other means by which trust in the knowledge produced through mode–modeller assemblages comes about. First, there is the encoding of trust through professional qualification. In my field, the practice of

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hydrological and hydraulic modelling is sustained and reproduced through professional organisations and, notably in the UK, the Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM). The mandatory competencies for membership do not require demonstration of competence in modelling but rather those personal competences that indicate professional standing, one aspect of which might be modelling. Second, trust is encoded through the creation of procedures within particular communities of practice. This is similar to the kind of mechanical objectivity I described above and is part of quality control procedures that sponsoring organisations (such as the Environment Agency of England and Wales) will look for, such as when they evaluate who should be allowed to undertaking modelling work.8 For instance, in commercial modelling, a particular model will be reviewed by a second modeller and, potentially, when it is signed off by a senior company representative. In academic modelling, similar processes exist, predominantly through peer review systems for journal papers or conference proceedings. Indeed, the account above shows how I shape my performance in relation to a group of established critics, those who determine whether or not my work is adequate. This activity is rarely, if ever, concerned with outcomes themselves: almost all of the criticism centres on the methods, the practices, necessary to guarantee reliability in those outcomes; something made clear in the AIAA statements detailed above. What is interesting about this kind of encoding of trust is that it, itself, rests upon an encoded trust, in this case that those doing the reviewing are trusted as practising modellers, as suitable police. Third, trust in the model–modeller assemblage can be through an antithetical response to Leendertse’s quote: if the activities of the scientist (modelling) might be influenced by the scientist themselves (the modeller), then there needs to be a strengthening of the mechanical objectivity, in this case the creation of practices and procedures, or rules,

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that reduce the influence of the modeller over modelling as practised. This is not just about mandates. In response to concerns raised during the Engineering and Physics Science Research Council-funded Conveyance Network (in the period 2001–2003), that modellers set their roughness values in hydraulic models using predominantly expert judgement, a commercial research-anddevelopment company was commissioned. They devised a system, now in use, that means that different modellers should estimate the same conveyance for the same reach of river. Ironically, this system is itself encoded in a model, replacing the expert judgement of modellers in one sort of model with expert judgement in another. Fourthly, and in the most nebulous of terms, most modelling is done in teams, of researchers, of consultants etc. Through the daily practices of being in a modelling team, a division of labour can emerge in which certain modellers are trusted to make a model perform well in certain situations, in ways that self-reinforce emerging divisions. Trust is a component of this day-to-day working but one that it very difficult to articulate in the pages of conventional accounts of modelling research or consultancy reports. This is where the notion of performance becomes particularly relevant: there is a cast who engage in critical interaction, practising modelling, well before the model’s predictions are made public.

NEW TRUSTEES? NEW CRITICS? Oreskes and Belitz (2001: 25) summarise some of what I have found to be the essence of the limits of models and modelling: ‘[T]he most we can do is to say that a model is close to the state of the art (if it is), that is has been grounded in our best understanding of known natural processes (if it has), and that we built it on the basis of abundant, well-constrained empirical input (if we did).’ It is the emphasis upon the ‘we’ in this quote that raises the

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interesting question as to exactly who is involved in the kind of assessment identified in this quote. Who determines when something is state-of-the-art, for instance? Who should the critics (or the police) be? The challenge here is well-phrased by Collins and Evans (2002: 244) in contrasting the similarities between art and artists: ‘The end point of art [a model], after all, is to be experienced, and that is why it is reasonable to suppose that those with special viewing, or experiencing, expertise [the subjects of that modelling] rather than those with special creative expertise – artists [modellers] – would be the best judges.’ This parallel between art and modelling reflects a much richer set of processes by which I establish trust in my models, beyond the special relationship between the model and modeller. However, it goes much further than this, especially in relation to modelling geographical phenomena, and implies a natural imperative to broaden out the range of subjects, including people, allowed to establish trust in models, allowed to be critics. I am currently developing models to improve the well-being of fish, to assist in redesigning reservoir releases to make them happier than they might otherwise be. I begin with what I believe matters (what I think makes a fish happy), I encode that understanding into my models, and then I find that where I predict fish happiness is not where the fish appear to be happy at all. My model needs some belief revision. What I have not done particularly well is allowed the subjects of our models to engage actively in model formulation, let alone revision, of our beliefs. Most belief formulation occurs within communities of practice from which the subjects of our models are generally excluded. Here, the fish need to be allowed to speak back to the modeller (Lane 2008), albeit within the limits of measuring over large areas organisms that, when you try to measure them, swim away. The best critics of my performance are often very difficult to consult. It is not just fish for whom there is a logical imperative in identifying new trustees.

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Flood inundation models now do something increasingly central to policy-makers: make the invisible more visible through informing on-line flood inundation maps. These initially had a strategic planning imperative but have been translated into a mechanism for engendering householder awareness of flood risk and hence preparations in event of a flood. As these maps get published, so they start to travel, such as into the hands of insurers in relation to flood insurance and solicitors in relation to advising their clients’ house purchases. What emerges is a new and critical audience and a heightened democratisation and accountability of models (Yearley 1999), as others become motivated to question the information they are being increasingly exposed to. In terms of flood risk models, we saw the motivation of a host of potentially new critics, but ones, in the main, excluded from the routine practice of flood risk modelling. These new critics have been at once excluded from the act of criticism but, through the consequences of flood inundation modelling, enabled to be very effective critics. The traditional process of establishing trust in models commonly includes a comparison, for a known flood event, of the modelled and measured inundated area. In this comparison, I (e.g. Yu and Lane 2006b) and others (e.g. Horritt and Bates 2001) report on global statistics, such as conditional kappa, in which values of 80% to 90% are deemed indicative of a good model performance. However, where this statistic is less than 100% it means that we have both false positives (locations where flooding is predicted but did not occur) and false negatives (where it was not predicted but did occur). Thus, we disseminate flood maps with a globally acceptable error but these maps are increasingly used to infer which individual properties are or are not at risk, akin to an ecological fallacy. The kind of world (wet and dry), and notably its scale (the model domain), encoded in global validation statistics is in marked contrast to the sort of validation brought by those who

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experience both flooding and the material consequences (e.g. property devaluation) of the technologies that people like myself are using to predict flooding. This kind of validation has much more of the characteristic of a truth spot (Gieryn 2006: 29): ‘delimited geographical locations’, places, that comprise ‘irreducibly: (1) the material stuff agglomerated there, both natural and human-built; and (2) cultural interpretations and narrations (more or less explicit) that give meaning to the spot.’ My own efforts at making my models perform are but one set of the material things that are brought to that truth spot and which, taken together, contribute to the trust in the models that I am developing. It is not surprising to see how the flood maps, and the models behind them, become open to dispute. How do we work with truth spots? This is well established by software developers where ‘the objective in prototype validation is not to reject the prototype but to cooperate with the developer in tweaking and refining the prototype so that it matches with the software consumer’s mental model’ (Klein and Herskovitz 2007: 127). Truth spots enable a more radical challenge for the practice of modelling. The way in which modellers use local knowledge is typically through assimilation into their own frames of reference (how can I make my model fit these new sorts of data). A kind of ‘hoover’ model where the modeller sucks up this local knowledge (and produces considerable hot air in the process). Working with truth spots seems to involve much more than this and goes to the heart of establishing trust in models. Much is now written about the need to communicate uncertainty in the modelling process, this is good in terms of recognising the limits to what science can provide. But there is an irony in the way in which people like me present model predictions simultaneously as things that are both correct and uncertain, with uncertainty expressed as some kind of error. As an internal activity, in the words of Yearley (1999) I am used to presenting both the ‘knowing’ and the ‘not knowing’ (i.e. a

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prediction, plus the conditions under which that prediction might hold, and the residual uncertainty that will remain even if the conditions hold). As the process of establishing trust in models, in practice, is about so much more than just conventional validation, then also, in truth spots, it must become more than just understanding that a prediction is uncertain. It must also involve the relationships, faith and evaluations of the scientific institutions involved in generating the science to which they are subject (Yearley 1999). Who is putting on the performance, why are they putting it on and what are the goals and framings implicit to the way in which the performance is being staged? This is the deeper challenge of working with and in truth spots, blurring conventional definitions of what constitutes legitimate expertise and its supposed separation from the milieu of experience, opinion and argument. Models, including the very question of whether or not we should used modelled knowledge at all, are opened up to much wider scrutiny.

CONCLUSIONS Mathematical modellers, including myself, have invested significant effort in presenting mathematical modelling as a parody of conventional scientific method: an emphasis upon validation by comparison with measured data. Through doing this, we have sought to make the knowledge generated by models legitimate, admissible or, in the language of a performance, well received. The account of my own experience shows that this portrayal disguises a much more complex set of modelling practices, which are rarely described, are much less accountable and require us to think through the kinds of knowledge that models, and modellers generate. I have argued that my own modelling practice is about making my models perform. Through this practice, I have adopted, and in some cases developed and advocated,

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activities that help me to believe in my own performances. Whilst one element of these activities remains comparing what I predict with some form of evidence, validation, it has to be more than this as a primary reason for modelling is researching the unmeasurable. Exposing the content of my model to scrutiny, searching for coherence between model behaviour and my broader experience of the things I am modelling, and setting myself standards (and imposing them on others) derived from related communities of practice have all become a part of what I do. I gain trust (and distrust) in my models through my own experience of the performance, as my own critic. This performance takes place in the presence of other critics, who are often as much concerned with the ways I make my models perform as they are with the ways that the models perform themselves, a concern with modelling as practised. As the position of expert knowledge is reformulated and repositioned within society, and as my own performances are opened up to scrutiny by a wider range of critics, so I find myself with a tension. If trust in modelled knowledge comes from the practice of modelling, and faced with situations where modelled knowledge may make a material difference to individuals or communities, then establishing that trust needs to be moved upstream, to where the problem to be modelled first begins to be defined and formulated.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Ideas in this paper have been developed over a number of years, initially through collaborations with Keith Richards and subsequently through working with graduate students and researchers actively involved in modelling. An earlier version of this manuscript was discussed as part of a Rural Economy and Land Use Project Understanding Knowledge Controversies, which is where, on a personal perspective, some of the

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implications of this material are now being pursued in terms of how flood risk modelling could be done differently. The lengthy reference to my own works is a reflection of writing an academic autobiographical account and is not intended as a reflection of the quality or importance of those works individually or taken together.

NOTES 1 For the river I was studying, the spatial scale that mattered was of the order of 10–2 metres and the shortest temporal scale that matters is of the order of 10–1 seconds. For the small reach of river that became the focus of my PhD, about 50 metres in length (20 metres in depth and on average 0.5 metres deep, studying it with this kind of spatial and temporal resolution would involve about 1017 measurements of the flow alone, let alone all the other things I might be interested in and that might matter (e.g. sediment transport). 2 And my work was, at a gravel-bed rivers workshop in 1996. 3 A situation in which different formulations of the same model are indistinguishable by the data available to interrogate them: the same data can be reproduced to the same degree by the same model with different values of parameters, with different process representations or even by different models. 4 For instance, distributed hydrological models that have a justifiable physical process representation may need to be applied over large spatial scales (i.e. hundreds of kilometres). At these spatial scales, numerical solution is only feasible with a spatial resolution of 50 metres or more, one that may fail to capture the spatial richness of the very processes (e.g. shallow upland drains of 0.3 metres width) that the model is seeking to represent. 5 Indeed, at the end of a paper a research assistant and I gave at the European Geoscience Union in April 2008, concerned with doing modelling differently, an eminent hydrologist introduced his question with ‘It was Lord Rutherford who once said that the only science that matters is physics, the rest is stamp collecting.’ 6 Coleman wrote a very interesting critique of the Science article of Oreskes et al. (1994) arguing that the Oreskes account failed to capture the practice of modelling, notably in computational fluid dynamics, and the role of modelling in making decisions in the absence of other guiding information. Science refused to publish it.

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7 The analogy we often use here is that before a new aircraft can take off, you have to be certain that it can fly. Whilst in the origins of aeronautical engineering, experimental attempts at flight were the norm, nowadays we are pretty certain that a new aircraft will fly before we attempt to fly it. These standards are bound up with this question of safety, where statements upon the control of numerical accuracy are about making sure that model predictions are indeed verified (i.e. internally true to the principles upon which they are based). 8 The Environment Agency periodically appoints a small number of consultants as ‘framework consultants’. In flood risk management, to follow procurement processes for every piece of consultancy work required would create a bureaucratic overload. Hence, consultants can bid to become a framework consultant periodically, for a fixed period of time, and as part of this process they are required to demonstrate certain quality control criteria. They are also evaluated annually by the Environment Agency.

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Collins, H.M. and Evans, R. (2002) ‘The third wave of science studies: Studies of expertise and experience’, Social Studies of Science, 32: 235–296. Gieryn, T.F. (2006) ‘City as truth-spot: laboratories and field-sites in urban studies’, Social Studies of Science, 36: 5–38. Hacking, I. (1983) Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hardy, R.J., Lane, S.N. Ferguson, R.I. and Parsons, D.R. (2003) ‘Assessing the credibility of a computational fluid dynamic code for open channel flows’, Hydrological Processes, 17: 1539–1560. Hardy, R.J., Lane, S.N., Ferguson, R.I. and Parsons, D.R. (2007) ‘Emergence of coherent flow structures over a gravel surface: A numerical experiment’, Water Resources Research, 43: W03422. Hardy, R.J., Lane, S.N., Lawless, M.R., Best, J.L., Elliott, L. and Ingham, D.B. (2005) ‘Development and testing of a numerical code for treatment of complex river channel topography in three-dimensional CFD models with structured grids’, Journal of Hydraulic Research, 43: 468–480. Horritt, M.S. and Bates, P.D. (2001) ‘Predicting floodplain inundation: raster-based modelling versus the finite-element approach’, Hydrological Processes, 15: 825–842. Klein, E.E. and Herskovitz, P.J. (2007) ‘Philosophy of science underpinnings of prototype validation: Popper vs. Quine’, Information Systems Journal, 17: 111–132. Lane, S.N. (1994) ‘Monitoring and modeling flow, sediment transport and channel change in a gravelbed river’. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge. Lane, S.N. (2000) ‘The measurement of river channel morphology using digital photogrammetry’, Photogrammetric Record, 16: 937–957. Lane, S.N. (2001) ‘Constructive comments on D Massey “Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and human geography”,’ Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, 26: 243–256. Lane, S.N. (2005) ‘Roughness – time for a re-evaluation?’, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 30: 251–253. Lane, S.N. (2007) ‘Assessment of rainfall-runoff models based upon wavelet analysis’, Hydrological Processes, 21: 586–607. Lane, S.N. (2008) ‘What makes a fish (hydrologically) happy? A case for inverse modeling’, Hydrological Processes, 22: 4493–4495. Lane, S.N., Biron, P.M., Bradbrook, K.F., Butler, J.B., Chandler, J.H., Crowell, M.D., McLelland, S.J.,

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Richards, K.S. and Roy, A.G. (1998) ‘Threedimensional measurement of river channel flow processes using acoustic Doppler velocimetry’, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 23: 1247–1267. Lane, S.N., Bradbrook, K.F., Richards, K.S., Biron, P.M. and Roy, A.G. (1999) ‘The application of computational fluid dynamics to natural river channels: three-dimensional versus two-dimensional approaches’, Geomorphology, 29: 1–20. Lane, S.N., Bradbrook, K.F., Richards, K.S., Biron, P.M. and Roy, A.G. (2000) ‘Secondary circulation in river channel confluences: measurement myth or coherent flow structure?’, Hydrological Processes, 14: 2047–2071. Lane, S.N., Hardy, R.J., Elliott, L. and Ingham, D.B. (2004) ‘Numerical modelling of flow processes over gravely-surfaces using structured grids and a numerical porosity treatment’, Water Resources Research, W01302. Lane, S.N., Hardy, R.J., Ferguson, R.I. and Parsons, D.R (2005) ‘A framework for model verification and validation of CFD schemes in natural open channel flows’, in P.D. Bates, S.N. Lane and R.I. Ferguson (eds), Computational Fluid Dynamics: Applications in Environmental Hydraulics. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 169–192. Lane, S.N., James, T.D., Pritchard, H. and Saunders, M. (2003) ‘Photogrammetric and laser altimetric reconstruction of water levels for extreme flood event analysis’, Photogrammetric Record, 18: 293–307. Lane, S.N., Mould, D.C., Carbonneau, P.E., Hardy, R. J. and Bergeron, N. (2006) ‘Fuzzy modelling of habitat suitability using 2D and 3D hydrodynamic models: Biological challenges’, Proceedings of the River Flow 2006 Conference. London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 2043–2053. Lane, S.N., Reid, S.C., Tayefi, V., Yu, D. and Hardy, R.J. (2008) ‘Reconceptualising coarse sediment delivery problems in rivers as catchment-scale and diffuse’, Geomorphology, 98: 227–249. Lane, S.N. and Richards, K.S. (1997) ‘Linking river channel form and process: time, space and causality revisited’, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 23: 1247–1267. Lane, S.N. and Richards, K.S. (1998) ‘Two-dimensional modelling of flow processes in a multi-thread channel’, Hydrological Processes, 12: 1279–98. Lane, S.N. and Richards, K.S. (2001) ‘The “validation” of hydrodynamic models: some critical perspectives’ in P.D. Bates and M.G. Anderson (eds), Model Validation for Hydrological and Hydraulic Research. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 413–438.

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Lane, S.N., Richards, K.S. and Chandler, J.H (1994a) ‘Developments in monitoring and terrain modelling of small-scale riverbed topography’, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 19: 349–368. Lane, S.N., Richards, K.S. and Chandler, J.H. (1994b) ‘Distributed sensitivity analysis in modelling environmental systems’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A, 447: 49–63. Lane, S.N., Richards, K.S. and Chandler, J.H. (1995) ‘Within reach spatial patterns of process and channel adjustment’ in E.J. Hickin (ed.), Rivers. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 105–130. Mason, D.C., Cobby, D.M., Horritt, M.S. and Bates, P.D. (2003) ‘Floodplain friction parameterization in two-dimensional river flood models using vegetation heights derived from airborne scanning laser altimetry’, Hydrological Processes, 17: 1711–1732. Massey, D. (1999) ‘Space-time, “science” and the relationship between physical geography and human geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24: 261–276. Oreskes, N., Shrader-Frechette, K. and Belitz, K. (1994) Verification, validation, and confirmation of numerical models in the earth sciences’, Science, 263: 641–646. Oreskes, N. and Belitz, K. (2001) ‘Philosophical issues in model assessment’ in M.G. Anderson and P.D. Bates (eds), Model Validation: Perspectives in Hydrological Science. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 23–41. Pappenberger, F. and Beven, K.J. (2006) ‘Ignorance is bliss: Or seven reasons not to use uncertainty analysis’, Water Resources Research, 42: W05302. Popper, K.R. (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery, trans. J. Freed and L. Freed. New York: Basic Books. Porter, T.M. (1995) Trust in Numbers: the Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Quine, W.V. (1951) ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’, Philosophical Review, 60: 20–43. Quine, W.V. (1969) ‘Epistemology naturalized’ in W.V. Quine (ed.), Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 69–90. Quine, W.V. and Ullian, J.S. (1970) The Web of Belief. New York: Random House. Richards, K.S. (1996) ‘Samples and cases: generalisation and explanation in geomorphology’ in B.L. Rhoads and C.E. Thorn (eds), The Scientific Nature of Geomorphology. Wiley, Chichester, pp. 171–90.

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Shrader-Frechette, K.S. and McCoy, E.D. (1993) Method in Ecology: Strategies for Conservation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yearley, S. (1999) ‘Computer models and the public’s understanding of science: a case-study analysis’, Social Studies of Science, 29: 845–866. Yu, D. and Lane, S.N. (2006a) ‘Urban fluvial flood modelling using a two-dimensional diffusion-wave

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treatment, part 1: mesh resolution effects’, Hydrological Processes, 20: 1541–1565. Yu, D. and Lane, S.N. (2006b) ‘Urban fluvial flood modelling using a two-dimensional diffusionwave treatment, part 2: development of a subgrid-scale treatment’, Hydrological Processes, 20: 1567–1583.

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1 18 Subaltern Space Daniel Clayton

INTRODUCTION Although geographers have seldom used the expression, over the last 20 years ‘subaltern space’ has become an important site of critical engagement within their discipline and key to the way questions of geography have been taken up in the humanities and social sciences. In fine, subaltern space pertains to issues of subordination and oppression, and their relation to questions of voice, agency, representation, situated knowledge and imagined community. However, this site eludes simple definition, in part because the formative theorist of the subaltern, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, provided only a fragmentary account of the term (and bequeathed it a prolific and pliable critical afterlife – see Brennan 2001; Green 2002), now because there is a huge and complex literature on the subject, and in a more theoretical vein because the subaltern can be construed as both a category of analysis and a ground of knowledge and experience, and as a bifurcated figure of constraint and release (of what power and knowledge can and cannot grasp and control). The main (and multifaceted) point I seek to make here is that the genealogy of the subaltern can also be regarded as its

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geography – that there are close links between how the subaltern is known and made, and the locations (historical, geographical, social, political, epistemological, disciplinary, and so on) from which such knowing and making, and the undoing of subalternity (as a condition), takes places. For instance, the subaltern has pivotal yet varying connections to debates about history, capitalism, colonialism, modernity, nationalism, Eurocentrism and now globalisation (and associated problematics of migration, urbanisation, human rights and environmental degradation). The subaltern has been conceived as an object of study, a form of agency and resistance, and a mode of consciousness and critique, approached differently through modalities of gender, sexuality, race, culture and socio-economic differentiation (class and caste), and studied at different spatial scales, with the subnational scale long privileged but with local/ global articulations currently in vogue (Tharu and Niranjana 1996; Heftler 1997; Beverley 1999; Brass 2000 [1991]; Ludden 2001). Little wonder that the subaltern has been dubbed a ‘truly situational’ figure by one of its key theorists, Gayatri Spivak (1990: 141). Conjuring up the question of subaltern space via this locational imperative – of

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showing how it has different meanings in different times, places and projects, and with ‘the locus of [subaltern] enunciation … inseparable from the enunciation of a locus’ (Coronil 1994: 656–7) – comes with risks. A major concern is that the idea of the subaltern can be broken into so many pieces that it loses conceptual coherence, comparative utility and critical bite. Subaltern worlds and agendas can become closed in upon themselves – scattered, disconnected and incommensurable – and their ushering into knowledge can become self-defeating (Pandey 2009; cf. Ginzburg 1999: 1–14). However, while this and other dilemmas are not easily resolved, and lend the subaltern an air of inscrutability, it is possible to find some staple tensions in the configuration of subaltern space. There is a core tension between what I will call ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ visions of how the subaltern creates a politics of knowledge that is geared to how hitherto ignored, disqualified and unapproachable knowledge and perspectives – what Ranajit Guha (1999) calls ‘the small voice of history’ and Gyanendra Pandey (2000) calls ‘voices from the edge’ – might be recognised. The subaltern can be located both outside (exterior to) and at the margins of (but still inside) a social and spatial formation, and, congruently, as both separate from, and an effect of, power (see Pessoa 2003). This split in the subaltern’s location underpins a series of paradoxes, many of which revolve around whether the aim to subaltern resistance and critique is to identify and protect the subaltern’s exteriority or dissolve the subaltern’s interior marginality. In other words, subaltern politics of knowledge are inextricably linked to how the subaltern is placed, ontologically, existentially and geographically. The desire for autonomy, critical–intellectual investment in seeing the subaltern as untouchable, and the search for a subaltern history and geography that can be a record and indicator of these drives, underpins many subaltern projects. So does the recognition that the subaltern is a figure of lack and incompleteness that comes to us

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spoken for, that cannot simply be plucked from the past or present in some full or authentic form and used to turn the tables on domination. This chapter makes three cuts into subaltern space. I will start by describing subaltern space as ‘differential space’ (from Spivak 2004) and by outlining geographers’ connections with it. The configuration of subaltern space as motile and as a project of ‘diversality’ (from Mignolo 2001; 2002) provides us with a second cut. With bold strokes – and the important proviso that other genealogies and geographies are possible – I trace how the subaltern idea travelled from Gramsci’s fascist Italy, into the work of Guha and the celebrated ‘subaltern studies’ book series on India (started in 1982) that he initially edited and which made India and its historiography a fulcrum of subaltern theory and scholarship, and the subsequent repositioning of subaltern inquiry during the 1990s in relation to Latin America and postcolonial studies. And in a short final cut, I try to synthesise elements of the foregoing discussion by characterising subaltern space as ‘paradoxical space’ (from Rose 1993).

SUBALTERN SPACE AS ‘DIFFERENTIAL SPACE’ The word ‘subaltern’ has a dual meaning: first, and at root, a person, group or entity of subordinate status; and second, a junior army officer below the rank of captain (Oxford English Dictionary: Oxford University Press, 1993 p.3115 Green 2002; Ives 2004). Both meanings inflect critical usage of the term. On the one hand, as an object of study, it signals a concern with the most oppressed, disadvantaged and voiceless sectors of society, whose plight and pleas are not heard or heeded, and who, on Gramsci’s (1971: 55) iconic account in his Prison Notebooks and The Southern Question (Gramsci 2006), struggle to fully discern the nature of their oppression, and ‘are always subject to the

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activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up’. The label subaltern has been conferred on a wide range of groups: peasants, workers, the poor, women, indigenous peoples, the colonised, slaves, refugees, and religious and ethnic minorities. It has been used loosely (purposively and emotively, but also to the point of losing its efficacy), as a generic expression for oppression and disenfranchisement, for ‘the silencing effect of domination’ (Coronil 1994: 645), for a project of re-reading ‘history from below’, and as a codeword for writers’ and intellectuals’ attempt ‘to challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalised quiet of unseen power’ (Said 2001: 8). An influential formulation – implicit in Gramsci and pronounced in Spivak’s work – is of the subaltern as ‘cut off’ from society and history, ‘removed from all lines of social mobility’, unable to be ‘generalised according to hegemonic logic’ (Spivak 2004, 2005: 475–6). It is partly on this basis that, for Spivak (2005: 475), the subaltern is ‘a category and therefore repeatable’, or translatable across the surface of the earth. As such a category the subaltern has been put to a wide variety of critical ends. However, the term is usually reserved for non-Western (colonial and Third World) settings, where, it is argued, the subaltern’s exteriority from the production of ‘the colonial [and Western] cultural value-form’ (Spivak 2000: 319), inability to be ‘inserted into the long road to hegemony’ (Spivak 1999: 310), and location ‘outside the space of hegemonic politics’ (Grossberg 2000: 76) is deemed to be more acute (or structural) than in Western subaltern contexts and ‘histories from below’, including acute ones, such as histories documenting the horrors of the Holocaust and Stalin’s Gulag from the standpoint of its victims (e.g. Maier 2000; Figes 2007; Friedlander 2007; Moses 2008), and in current critical exposure of ‘spaces of exception’ (such as the Guantánamo Bay detention camp) that abjure basic human rights (Gregory 2006). Dipesh Chakrabarty (2006: 101) adds that the subaltern has played an important role in

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the twentieth-century ‘global history of the left’, naming the ‘romantic-popular search for a non-industrial revolutionary subject’, connoting displacement from a European original, the proletariat, serving as a means of questioning the premise that class struggle is the primary cause and motor of historical change, and related to a family of terms (‘the people’, ‘the masses’, ‘the popular’, ‘the multitude’ and Frantz Fanon’s ‘les damnés de la terre’). Robert Young (2003: 20) notes that postcolonialism can be construed as ‘a general name for … insurgent knowledges that come from the subaltern, the dispossessed, and seek to change the terms and values under which we live’; and Simon Featherstone (2005: 1–32) highlights how the subaltern is integral to ‘the nervous condition’ of postcolonial studies, its thoroughgoing anxiety about situated knowledge, about who has the authority to speak and from where. On the other hand, the subaltern is an inherently relational concept and category, one that requires us to specify how subordinate groups are connected to ‘hegemony’, a term that Gramsci adapted from Marxist thought to account for how certain social groups attain elite status and the capacity to exercise dominant control in society, how they do so through consent and persuasion as well as coercion – a ‘pedagogy of culture’ as well as a ‘pedagogy of violence’ (Chatterjee 2005: 496) – and with intellectuals for Gramsci playing a vital link between the elite and subaltern masses akin to the link role that a subaltern army officer plays in a military chain of command (see Green 2002). The subaltern is ‘necessarily mixed up with … the dominant mode’ (Radhakrishnan 1996: 167), and from Gramsci onwards has been politicised both negatively, in terms of ‘what it is not’, and in positive and prospective terms, as an oppositional and hybrid figure that carries within it the ‘wounds’ of dominance – or what Gerald Vizenor (1998) calls ‘survivance’ – but also marks the limits of hegemony (Chakrabarty 1994). It follows that subaltern space can be defined as subordinate space – as the socially

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produced medium and outcome of relations of power that split the world and its inhabitants into elite/super-ordinate and subaltern/ subordinate sectors and locations. Subaltern space has a double meaning: first, as a space of domination, the abject and disquieting space in which people are placed and kept in situations of subordination, a closed and contained space of difference; and second, as a resistant and anticipatory space within the past and the present, from which, it is hoped, domination will or can be subverted and overturned. It is common to find subaltern space invoked in this double sense: as a space of denial, denigration and exclusion, in which the subaltern inhabits and is assigned a place in society, and granted an identity, that marks her/him as subordinate, a discrepant place, one diverging and cut off from, yet constituted by, elite authority and its norms; but also as an alternative and counter-hegemonic space in which the desire and ability to fracture and challenge power is imagined and enacted. This doubleness is captured in Spivak’s characterisation of subaltern space as ‘differential space’ – naming a ‘position without identity’ and one that ‘do[es] not permit the formation of a recognisable basis for action’, a group ‘whose identity is its difference’, ‘a muting by heterogeneous circumstances’, and a space where the subaltern is rendered voiceless by being insistently ‘shuttled’ between elite (benevolent as well as brutal) discourses and practices; but also naming a critical intent ‘to clear a space’ in which dominant groups and privileged institutions (including, for her, academics and universities) can learn how to listen to the subaltern, and to ‘take subaltern space apart’, both by questioning how and why subaltern space is created, and by shielding the subaltern from power, and by doing all of this with a critical vigilance towards the perils as well as possibilities involved in taking the subaltern’s side (Spivak 1988: 284; 1999: 272, 308; 2000; 2004; 2005: 476). Much of Spivak’s work is concerned with ‘epistemic violence’ – how ‘[a]ll speaking,

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even seemingly the most immediate, entails a distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception’ (Spivak 1999: 309) – and this core concern of hers with representation, and with how the subaltern is profoundly gendered, is how geography students generally encounter the subaltern in textbooks. Spivak’s subaltern – the subaltern who ‘cannot speak’, accompanied by the worry that all (not just academic) attempts to ‘speak for the subaltern’ can muffle or subsume into hegemonic space the very concerns it seeks to espouse – looms large, for instance, in Dissident Geographies (Blunt and Wills 2000: 190–3) and Geographies of Postcolonialism (Sharp 2009: 110–20). However, subaltern themes cast a longer shadow over the discipline of geography than this, and have been broached in eclectic ways: in work on the history of geography, which, to borrow a few salient buzzwords, alights on ‘geography’s empire’ (Driver 2001) and the ethnocentrism permeating geography’s heritage as a ‘world discipline’ (Bonnett 2008), and that tries to decentre geography’s ‘imperial maps of meaning’ (Barnes and Gregory 1997: 14–23) and challenge ‘the banality of geographical evils’ (derogatory images of otherness) in popular and academic geographical knowledge (Harvey 2000); in regionally focused geographical research on colonialism and development that seeks to ‘learn from other regions’ (Slater 2004) and engage with ‘subaltern struggles and the politics of place’ (Moore 1998); in radical (oppositional, activist and participatory) geography – stretching back to William Bunge’s 1970s ‘geographical expeditions’ into the ghettos of Detroit (see Merrifield 1995) – that is concerned with social movements and anti-systemic projects, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, and the spatiality of exclusion and subversive action (Sharp et. al. 2000; Mitchell 2007); and in a more vexed way, the image of the subaltern as ‘space on the margin’ shadows geographers’ incessant quest (or hyper modern bent) for novelty and variety, their cultivation of ever new margins of study and

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search for unencumbered spaces in which freedom might be restored to speech (sometimes through a surreptitious romancing of resistance). Geographers have bestowed considerable attention on the containment/constraint and historical sides of subaltern space, and how the creation and identity of the subaltern varies between different (sometimes intersecting and sometimes competing) modes of power and forms of dominance. Although rarely using the terminology, they have a strong interest in processes of ‘subalternisation’ at work in different imperial and colonial projects, spaces, networks, discourses and knowledge: plantations, native reserves, trade networks, missionary, mapping and scientific projects, explorers’ journals, administrative systems and colonial settlements (e.g. Lovell 1995; Harris 2002; Myers 2003; Scott 2003; Duncan 2007). The subaltern lurks, too, in a range of work on the lengths that Europeans went to turn their quest for truth into secure knowledge in particular spaces of knowledge and by creating ‘geographies of truth and trust’ (e.g. Livingstone 2003; Ogborn 2007; Withers 2007). Much of this research, along with more disciplinaryfocused work on how geography made itself a modern science of exploration and comparison by appropriating and denigrating indigenous geographical knowledge, construes subalternity as both a general and an intrinsically localised condition, and tries to make space for the subaltern by working ‘along the archival grain,’ as Ann Stoler (2008) puts it: by making the contextually located production and circulation of knowledge a source and scene of contestation; by pointing to moments and processes of reciprocity, exchange and anxiety in elite (colonial and disciplinary) territorialisations of power and knowledge; and thus by implicitly questioning the notion that lines of difference were always and everywhere impermeable and incapacitating for the disqualified subaltern (see McEwan 2000: 178–95; 2008). This body of scholarship makes some connections with Spivak and the Indian subaltern

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studies literature, albeit largely in a theoretical mode, and via the Foucauldian and postcolonial problematics of power/knowledge and governmentality in some of this literature (see Gregory 1994: 183–96; Legg 2007). For the most part, the subaltern is approached indirectly, and Gyan Prakash captures the analytical procedure involved in geographers’ work in this snippet concerning science and superstition in colonial India: We encounter [the subaltern] … in the discourse of the colonizers and Indian elite as icons of the ignorance and darkness both wished to remove. But this was an impossible goal, for the colonial project hinged on the presumed and permanent existence of the superstitious as a subaltern object to be transformed by modern reason. … Thus, if the subaltern was silenced or made to speak only through superstition, the subaltern was also assured an intractable presence in the discourse of colonial science. At once completely known (stubbornly irrational) and entirely unknowable (who can understand the ways of unreason?), the figure of the subaltern occupies a disturbing presence in dominant discourses; it represents the limit of those discourses, a marginal position against which they defined themselves. Gyan Prakash 1999: 40–1.

Geographers expose (but how successfully do they subvert or rectify?) how, from a Western vantage point, the subaltern is the ‘product of the failure of interpellation (on the part of the subaltern itself) or of the refusal to allow the subaltern to enter into the economy of interpellation (on the part of the colonizers)’ (Grossberg 2000: 76–7). There is also a range of geographical research that is more oriented towards the present and approaches the subaltern more directly, as a figure of rupture and release, and participates (with varying degrees of intimacy) in subaltern projects. An inventive geographical vocabulary – of ‘convergence space’ (Routledge 2003), ‘autonomous geographies’ (Pickerill and Chatterton 2006), ‘indigenous geographies’ (Howitt 2003) ‘differential geographies’ (Castree 2004), ‘translocal assemblages’ (McFarlane 2006), ‘subaltern networks’ (Featherstone 2008)

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and ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’ (Gidwani 2006) – is geared to destabilising hierarchies of knowledge and advocating a subaltern politics of place, yet without lapsing into essentialism and the reactionary shibboleths of nativism and its geographical corollary, place-bound identity. Noel Castree (2004: 154–9), for instance, explores how contemporary indigenous peoples’ movements seek to both exploit and break down elite/subaltern divides by revealing that ‘binaries of “progressive”/“regressive” and “‘extroverted”/“introverted” are not mutually exclusive’, that it is possible to ‘express inter-place solidarity and cooperation as well as aspiration for geographical separation and segregation’. In short, geographers treat subaltern space as both a delimited space of oppression and a liminal space of becoming and critical position on the margins. They thus enact the ‘classic fissure’, as Timothy Brennan (2001: 164) sees it, in the subaltern literature ‘between opposition as action and opposition as a demand for recognition’. Yet subaltern space is a more expansive terrain than this. We need to step outside disciplinary bounds. It matters, I suggest, that what we take the subaltern to be has a complex and global historical geography. It matters that subaltern space looks different from sixteenth-century Spanish America, colonial and post-colonial India, or Gramsci’s Fascist Italy, to name just a few pivotal sites in the configuration of this wider space (also see Lee 2005; Cronin 2007).

SUBALTERN SPACE AS A SPACE OF ‘DIVERSALITY’ Following Gramsci (1971: 55, 396–7), subaltern history is conventionally treated as being ‘necessarily fragmentary and episodic’: only accessible through the filters and distortions of ‘official’ history and state archives, and making the search for an authentic and autonomous subaltern subject problematic if not illusory. The point of this second cut into

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subaltern space is to suggest that this historical claim and search is not devoid of geography; indeed, quite the opposite. We will explore the blockages that universalist projects and systems of knowledge that centre on Europe put in the way of subaltern groups, and sketch how tackling this blockage ‘requires that geography – first and third worlds – stop being read in evolutionary terms as a teleological narrative of pre-modern to modern’ (Didur and Heffernan 2003: 10). Subaltern studies and postcolonial studies merge in the way they reconstruct and challenge how the West arrogated to itself the power to orchestrate elite/subaltern differentiation on a world-historical basis by naming itself the harbinger and disseminator of universal (global) values of reason, progress, civilisation, modernity, democracy, and so on (see Prakash 1994). Walter Mignolo’s project of ‘diversality’ – ‘fragmentation’ as a ‘global project’ (Mignolo 2000a: 246) – is a mode of critique that comes from Latin America but places its colonial history in a wider and longer history of colonial othering, and seeks to do so in a non-essentialist way, without valorising a pristine non-Western and precolonial subaltern subject of history. ‘If you can imagine Western civilization as a large circle with a series of satellite circles intersecting that larger one but disconnected from each other,’ he writes (2000b: 745) in cosmographic terms that announce a ‘critical cosmopolitanism’, ‘diversality will be the project that connects the diverse subaltern satellites appropriating and transforming Western global designs’. This subaltern space of diversality is not one that can necessarily be called more inclusionary (for historically, Western liberal and humanist principles of inclusion and recognition have been put to divisive colonial ends). Rather, for Mignolo (2002: 60), subaltern critique comes from the ‘coloniality of power’ – the view that since the emergence of ‘the Atlantic circuit’ during the sixteenth century modernity and colonialism have been mutually constitutive; that the former does not simply constitute a European ‘inside’ that

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bears down on or speaks for the latter, valuecoded as a non-European/colonial ‘outside’. While Europe’s centrality cannot just be spirited away, Mignolo argues, more attention needs to be paid to how subaltern understandings of ‘the centre’ translate and transform dominant ones. ‘The colonial difference’ (Mignolo 2002) is the subaltern experience and memory of incompleteness and belatedness, of never being able to be modern in the same way or in the same time frame as Europe and its Enlightenment-cosmopolitan dream of escaping the past. ‘The colonial difference’ is thus ‘a connector’ that in training thought on ‘the changing faces of colonial differences’ through history, wrests the ‘politics … and loci of enunciation’ away from the West, and ‘de-universalise[s] categories of thought’ by ‘relocat[ing] them in the horizon of modern/colonial local histories’ (Mignolo 2002: 61–5; 2005: 382). Similarly, Spivak (2003: 72) deploys the term ‘planetarity’ to think about a ‘species of alterity, belonging to another [subaltern] system … [one that] is underived from us’ as modern colonial global agents. Chakrabarty argues that the subaltern does not make us choose between being for or against modernity, rationality, the state, or the West, not least because in the Indian context the historic entanglement between modern ideals and colonial power has played into the hands of the Hindu right, which casts off the former due to their sullying in the latter in its divisive invocation of an Indian spiritual essence. Rather, the subaltern makes us peer into ‘the shadows [that] fall between the abstract values of modernity and the historical process [of Western aggrandisement] through which the institutions of modernization come to be built’ – and not just in India of course (Chakrabarty 2003: 80). For him, as with Mignolo, questions of normativity, of whether we can ‘identify anything as “oppressive” … if we cannot say what constitutes well-being or justice’ (Olson and Sayer 2009: 195), questions that have long haunted the field of ‘radical geography’, need historical and geographical scrutiny.

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The story told here may seem straightforward: the subaltern was plotted on Eurocentric axes of time and space, and was part and parcel of the ‘epistemological malaise’ at the heart of European modernity, beginning in the Renaissance, when the idea of ‘humanity’ became pivotal to what it meant ‘to know’, and ‘humanistic valorisation of the state [was deemed] … the proper end of knowledge’ (Gandhi 1998: 50). As Guha (2002: 73) declares: ‘The noise of Worldhistory [Hegel’s expression for this end] and its statist concerns has made historiography insensitive to the sighs and whispers of everyday life’ – to what he calls ‘historicality’ – and left the subaltern ‘deprived of historical initiative’, and ‘in continuous but disorganic expansion’, as Gramsci (1971: 396) put it. A global colonising history mapped on to a colonising geography. Subaltern inquiry finds one of its most important political cues in the recognition that this insensitivity – or Western capacity to channel and control what counts as right, normal and true (and what does not) – has outlived the formal experience of colonialism. As Partha Chatterjee (1997: 275–80) observes, with reference to India (although the point has a wider purchase), because of colonialism ‘we have never quite been able to believe that there exists a universal domain of free discourse [promised by modernity], unfettered by differences of race or nationality … The bitter truth about our present is our subjection, our inability to be subjects in our own right’, creating a need to return to the past, there ‘to clear up a space where we might become the creators of our own modernity.’ This return spotlights the historical agency of the colonised subaltern and makes historiography central to what it means to know the subaltern. But Chatterjee’s ‘bitter truth’ is not just about history. Clearing up a space also prompts us to think about the connections between history and geography (from where the subaltern comes, how the subaltern idea travels, and how different subaltern locations are connected). One small, although significant,

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story to expound on this point will have to suffice. Guha drew ideas from Gramsci, Mao, and the ‘history from below’ tradition of European social history, but by reading this body of thought and historiography selectively, critically, and with more of an eye for subaltern agency and autonomy than Gramsci (Arnold 1984). The initial aim of the subaltern studies group (of mainly Indian and British historians) that Guha spearheaded was to its political motivation to challenge the elitist bias of both the colonial and nationalist historiography of India – to return to ‘the historic failure of the nation to come into its own’, as Guha (1982: 5) famously put it, and not least due to historiography’s failure to speak for ‘the people’, a failure that seemed as urgent in the 1970s, with the failure of Maoist insurgency and the onset of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Rule, as at any time since independence (see Guha 1997b, introduction; Chakrabarty 2003: 3–19). Mignolo (2005: 381) notes that Gramsci ‘was attempting to locate a [subordinate] sector of the population larger than the proletariat’, and that when Guha moved the ‘modern subaltern’ to South Asia, creating the ‘colonial subaltern’, he ‘extended it to encompass all sectors of the [subordinate] population’. Guha (1982) used ‘the people’ and the ‘subaltern classes’ interchangeably, and not, he admitted, without ambiguity, for some Indian groups could be dominant/elite with respect to the Indian population yet subaltern to the British. Indian nationalism before and since independence, Guha argued, was not simply the product of elite initiative and action, as Indian and British, Marxist and imperial, brands of historiography claimed. Picking up on Gramsci’s (1971) ideas about ‘spontaneity’ (his critique of vanguardism), ‘common sense’ and ‘spontaneous grammar’ (elementary subaltern structures and symbols), Guha argued that while subaltern resistance to the British was not ‘powerful enough’ to generate a ‘fully-fledged struggle for national liberation’, peasant consciousness and resistance were neither backwards nor

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immature in the way that European Marxist historians (especially Eric Hobsbawm) had described pre-industrial peasant rebellion in Europe (Guha 1983: 4–19, 224–5; 1982: 4). Guha questioned the class determinism and developmentalism in Western Marxist historiography – such as in E.P. Thompson’s celebrated account of how the English working class came into its own – and found in Gramsci the idea of the subaltern as a multifaceted figure of subordination, and one with no easy route to historical recognition or political representation. For Guha, the peasant insurgent in colonial India had been structurally written out of history (denigrated and assimilated by elite discourses, including a Marxist discourse which saw the seeming spontaneity of peasant rebellion as a throwback in an evolutionary schema of class consciousness). Guha and the subaltern group were concerned with the ‘intimate connection that existed between writing history and running the Raj’ (Guha 1983: 107), and initially characterised the subaltern in two related ways: first, as a collective political agent (and thus highlighting the need to conceptualise mass subaltern agency without recourse to European juridical models of sovereignty and the subject that were based on the individual, models integral to British colonial discourse; see Chakrabarty 2007 The ref here should be to Chakabarty 2007, not 2006); and second, as a political domain that was both articulated with yet autonomous from elite politics. Elite and subaltern ‘run on parallel tracks over the same stretches of history’, Guha (1983: 11) proclaimed, ‘as mutually implied but opposed aspects of a pair of antagonistic consciousnesses’. Peasant rebellion formed the focal point of subaltern inquiry, because it was only when British power was challenged that the mass of the Indian population entered elite/colonialist discourse, and did so through what Guha (1988: 82 [1983]) called a ‘prose of counterinsurgency’: a system of representation in which ‘insurgency is seen as the articulation of a pure spontaneity pitted against the will

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of the State as embodied in the Raj’; a ‘refusal to acknowledge the insurgent as the subject of his [or her] own history’. Reading hundreds of cases of peasant resistance to the British between 1783 and 1947, the subaltern studies group produced an impressive array of monographs and essays that identified a subaltern consciousness and will to resistance that could be excavated from colonial texts, recovered from Indian sources, and used to show, Chakrabarty (2003: 9) notes, that ‘instead of being an anachronism in a modernizing colonial world, the peasant was a real contemporary and a fundamental part of the modernity to which colonial rule gave rise in India’. Through a careful delineation of peasant insurgency – subnational commonalities and differences in strategy and form, with territoriality (consanguinity and contiguity) a crucial modality, localism (‘particles of geography’) a main fetter (see Guha 1983: 305), and a theoretical privileging of the fragment/region-locality over totality/nation – the subaltern was discerned as at once an essence (a constant and compensatory oppositional presence in history) and a substantive object (a variegated conduit of colonialism and its legacies). The former image of subalternity as essence (and the transcendentalism involved) has solicited extensive debate and criticism (see Chaturvedi 2000; O’Hanlon 2000 [1988]; Prakash 2000a). Brennan (2001: 163–7) gives us the gist of the criticism, observing that in being ‘understood as the essential resistance of the voiceless’, the subaltern is construed as a ‘form of life’ or ethical being that is ‘shielded from an imposed and always arrogant rationalism’; but by the same token, ‘a life privileged only insofar as it remains subaltern’. Subalternity ‘would seem to represent a sacred refuge, a dark space of revelation … [and this] occult subalternity is conceived as theory’s deepest and most irreducible value’. However, Guha himself located in India a paradox that had a wider bearing and made the subaltern more than a troubled intellectual apparition. ‘How is it’, he asked in a seminal essay.

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that even after British capital, powered by industrialism, had come of age and the culture corresponding to it had created a homogenous space for itself by overcoming the resistance of all that was parochial and particularistic in metropolitan politics – how it is that even in its hour of triumph the universalist tendency was resigned to live at peace with the heterogeneity and particularity of the indigenous political culture of an Asian colony? How come that in India universalism failed to generate a hegemonic ruling culture like what it had done at home? The answer simply is that colonialism could continue as a relation of power in the subcontinent only on the condition that the colonizing bourgeoisie should fail to live up to its own universalist project. The nature of the state created by the sword made this historically necessary. The colonial state in India did not originate from the activity of Indian society itself. Guha 1989: 273–4.

Capitalism and modernity found their limits in colonialism in India, and in a fundamental displacement of Gramsci’s position, Guha (1997a: 97) claimed that what made India different from Gramsci’s Italy was the fact that hegemony could not necessarily be achieved in India by consent – rather, there was ‘dominance without hegemony’ (Guha 1989: 274; 1997c). While, in Guha’s mind, the Western bourgeoisie could speak for all of society in a recognizably hegemonic voice … in India there was always another voice, a subaltern voice, that spoke for a large part of society which it was not for the bourgeoisie to represent. The voice, unheeded for a long time by those who lived within the walled city of institutional politics and academic scholarship, rang out of the depths of a parallel and autonomous domain, which was only partly penetrated by elite nationalism. Guha 1997a: 134–5.

The limit and parallel tracks that Guha located in India proved instrumental in the transposition of subaltern inquiry to other parts of the world (especially the Americas), as did the publication of a collection of essays from the subaltern studies series in the United States in 1988, edited by Guha and Spivak, and endorsed by Edward Said. Mignolo (2001), for instance, used Guha to insist on the need to see processes of

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subalternisation as stretched over three scales and sets of divides: metropolitan/colonial, coloniser/colonised and collective/individual. Mignolo takes from Guha the need to study the subaltern as part of a global and interstate capitalist and colonialist system, but also respects Guha’s insistence on the need to attend to the contextually located (and sometimes ambiguous) making of the subaltern and critical effect of subaltern inquiry qua different colonial and postcolonial projects. Mignolo emphasises how Guha (1989) contrasts British and India idioms of order and improvement, and a British bourgeoisie detaching itself from feudalism as well as an India being dragging out of feudalism, in order to effect a series of articulations (of Britain and India, class and caste, feudalism and capitalism, bourgeoisie and worker/peasant). For Mignolo (2001), Guha paved the way for the construal of the subaltern as a ‘connector’ of diverse times, spaces and processes of differentiation that have a common denominator in a ‘modern/colonial world-system’, and with what Manu Goswami (2001: 209) describes as ‘the historically specific problem of colonial unevenness, the shared grappling with the mundane and spectacular differentiations wrought by the making of a colonial space-time’. Yet Mignolo (2002) also debates the ways and extent to which ‘Europe’ remains sovereign in subaltern theory and history, and warns of how the radicality of subaltern inquiry as an ex-centric perspective can be weakened through its framing as a ‘school’ of thought. To be sure, European categories and philosophies remain central reference points in academic subaltern projects. Guha’s work is as much a creative battle with Marx and Hegel as it is a recovery of Indian voices and philosophies. Spivak never leaves Kant far behind. The subaltern is not necessarily doomed to a minority position for this reason. Rather, Mignolo (2000a) observes, we need to think about how subaltern satellites subvert Eurocentrism by putting Europe’s grip on meaning in non-linear historical and geographical motion. For example, while a Latin

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American ‘school’ of subaltern studies set up in the 1990s also sought philosophical flight from European thought, it was not from Enlightenment rationalist thought, which animates Indian subalternists due to the timing of conquest and specific nature of colonialism there, but from Renaissance and Christian thought – that of Las Casas and Vitoria, regarding human rights and difference, rather than that of Marx and J.S. Mill – and from a part of the world that was going through the throes of decolonisation from the Spanish as India was just beginning to be colonised by the British.

SUBALTERN SPACE AS PARADOXICAL SPACE Much of the foregoing discussion points to a series of tensions and dilemmas in subaltern space, which might now be usefully pinpointed. A first, and elementary, paradox is that of inside and outside: the idea of the subaltern as separate from, yet only discernible in terms of, an organising centre of meaning and power. J.C.A. Pocock (1998: 220), for example, shows, from the vantage point of the historiography of the British Isles, how this core ontological problem is always likely to bring the genealogy of the subaltern into tension with its geography. The question of subaltern desire for a separate, or ‘autocentric’, history can only be posed retrospectively, and via those processes of connection that have brought putatively autonomous times and spaces into the elite/subaltern relationships that are now a source of consternation. Pocock’s point lies at the heart of postcolonial subalternity too – of how far, and with what intent, centre and periphery can be realigned, and of how to think ‘from the perspective of epistemic forces that … [have] been turned into subaltern (traditional, folkloric, religious, emotional, etc.) knowledge’ (Mignolo 2000c: 11). This core paradox leads to a second one, of language and progress, exemplified by

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José Rabasa (2005) in connection with the Zapatista insurrection in Chiapas, Mexico, one unresolved in Gramsci’s treatment of ‘the folkloric’, and one that has a wider bearing today in situations of internal colonialism (e.g. Aboriginal struggles over land and recognition in former colonial settler states; see Cherniavsky 1996; Johnson 2008): that the ability of subaltern groups to articulate their grievances is seen as a sign that they are no longer subaltern, because such articulation can only occur via subaltern access to the language of hegemony. Rabasa asks whether subaltern groups can have their grievances addressed without having to relinquish the subaltern ground from which a call for change comes, and without ‘nativist’ discourse being either romanticised or trivialised. Do subalterns have to abandon or devalue their languages and lifeworlds in order to undo their subalternity? Joshua Lund and Joel Wainwright (2008: 141) see this as the central ‘aporia of postcolonial geography’, noting that in illuminating subaltern resistance we need to work ‘not only against, but also in and with … a world mapped out precisely through colonial discourse’. A third, related, paradox is of absorption: the worry that the subaltern proves the need for universal principles – of justice, equality, freedom, for example – but threatens their deployment by fixating on their connection to a colonialist and divisive Western epistemology. This leads to fourth paradox, of situated knowledge. How, in rendering the subaltern as a situational figure, will the subaltern inquisitor also account for the locational qualities of her/his own work? For instance, John Beverley (2000: 33) asks, ‘How can the postcolonial intellectual take up the discipline of history when history itself was one of the discourses that rationalised the subordination of the colonial subaltern in the first place?’ The same point can be made about geography and geographers. If subaltern critique has arisen in elite locations (and especially Western universities staffed with ‘Third World intellectuals’ keen to bring

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subalternity into the narrative of modernity), then to what extent do such locations make or reproduce the elite/subaltern relations they apprehend and seek to dismantle? There is a fifth paradox, of impossibility. Is all work on subalternity not always marked, Prakash (2000b: 287) asks, by a constitutive impossibility, ‘that the project of recovering the subaltern as a full-blooded subject-agent must fail, for by definition subalternity implies a “minor” position that cannot be undone retroactively’. Subalternity defined as ‘lack’ and ‘failure’ can, we have seen, be construed as that which evades and exceeds power and comprehension. But how should such evasion be understood and acted on? Can the subaltern be located in a realm of exteriority and yet be rendered inside a space of domination enough to provide a recognisable ground for action and politics? Our sixth paradox, of impurity, slides into irony and lament, and is of key significance in the Indian context, where Chakrabarty (2003: 28–9), with the Hindu right in mind, puts it thus: ‘It may precisely be an irony of any modernist understanding of modernity that we [Indians] are called on to study with the purest of categories that which is necessarily impure and hybrid, to treat [subaltern] translations that are necessarily incomplete as though their incompleteness is nothing but a hurtful betrayal of history.’ However, he worries that this ‘betrayal’ – of Western, liberal and humanist, universals – and the subaltern critic’s conceptual investment in decentring and fragmentation can open the door to not just cultural relativism but also ethnic and religious fundamentalism.

CONCLUSION At the risk of unduly lengthening the list of unanswered questions in this chapter, I will finish speculatively, and by extrapolating from Chakrabarty: How might we make or live with a subaltern geography of impure and hybrid categories? A small voice of

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geography, which, following Gramsci (1971: 396; cf. Bhabha 2004) might operate below and lateral to the state, and an imposed and arrogant reason. A voice and geography that seeks change, but is deeply suspicious of progress (and not just Western models of it). Yet a voice and geography that refuses to leave the subaltern cut off, however critically purposive the flight to and nurturing of ‘space on the margin’ might appear. How might a desire for change be related to a geography that does not try to be fully up to date or in full command of itself, a progressive geography of belatedness and incompleteness?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS An earlier version was presented as a keynote address at the RGS-IBG – Historical Geography Research Group Annual Postgraduate Conference, Edinburgh, November 2008. Thanks to the postgraduate participants, and to David Lambert, Steve Legg, Hayden Lorimer, Chris Philo, Heidi Scott and Charles Withers for their valuable input on that occasion.

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Manu Goswami (2005) ‘Autonomy and Comparability: Notes on the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial’ Boundary 2, 32(2): 201–225. McEwan, C. (2000) Gender, Geography and Empire: Victorian Women Travellers in West Africa. London: Ashgate. McEwan, C. (2008) ‘Subaltern’ in R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (eds), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. London: Elsevier. McFarlane, C. (2006). ‘Crossing borders: development, learning and the North-South divide’, Third World Quarterly, 27: 1413–1437. Merrifield, A. (1995) ‘Situated knowledge through exploration: reflections on Bunge’s “geographical expeditions”’, Antipode, 27: 49–70. Mignolo, W. (2000a) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, W. (2000b) ‘The many faces of cosmo-polis: border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture, 12: 721–748. Mignolo, W. (2000c) ‘Local histories and global designs: an interview with Walter Mignolo’, Discourse, 23: 7–33. Mignolo, W. (2001) ‘Coloniality of power and subalternity’, in I. Rodríguez (ed.), The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Durham NC: Duke University Press, pp. 424–444. Mignolo, W. (2002) ‘The geopolitics of knowledge and the colonial difference’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101: 57–96. Mignolo, W. (2005) ‘On subalterns and other agencies’, Postcolonial Studies, 8: 381–407. Mitchell, K. (2007) ‘Geographies of identity: The intimate cosmopolitan’, Progress in Human Geography, 31: 706–720. Moore, D. (1998) ‘Subaltern struggles and the politics of place: Remapping resistance in Zimbabwe’s eastern highlands’, Cultural Anthropology, 13: 344–381. Moses, D. (ed.) (2008) Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Myers, G. (2003) Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Ogborn, M. (2007) Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Olson, E. and Sayer, A. (2009) ‘Radical geography and its critical standpoints: Embracing the normative,’ Antipode, 41: 180–198.

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Available at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/2001 0917/essay, accessed 27 May 2008. Scott, H. (2003) ‘Contested territories: Arenas of geographical knowledge in early colonial Peru’, Journal of Historical Geography, 29: 166–188. Sharp, J. (2009) Geographies of Postcolonialism. London: Sage. Sharp, J., Routledge, P., Philo, C. and Paddison, R. (eds) (2000) Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/resistance. London and New York: Routledge. Slater, D. (2004) Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations. Oxford: Blackwell. Spivak, G. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–313. Spivak, G. (1990) The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. London and New York: Routledge. Spivak, G. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press; Calcutta: Seagull Press. Spivak, G. (2000) ‘Discussion: An afterword on the new subaltern’ in P. Chatterjee and P. Jeganathan

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(eds), Subaltern Studies XI. London: Hurst & Co., pp. 305–334. Spivak, G. (2003) Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Spivak, G. (2004) ‘The trajectory of the subaltern in my work,’ lecture, University of California, Santa Barbara. Available at: http://www.uctv.tv/search-details. aspx?showID=8840, accessed 09 August 2008. Spivak, G. (2005) ‘Scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular’, Postcolonial Studies, 8: 475–486. Stoler, A. (2008) Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tharu, S. and Niranjana, T. (1996) ‘Problems for a contemporary theory of gender’ in S. Amin and D. Chakrabarty (eds), Subaltern Studies IX. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 232–260. Vizenor, G. (1998) Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Withers, C. (2007) Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Young, R. (2003) Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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19 Public Sphere Mustafa Dikeç

INTRODUCTION In The City of Collective Memory, Boyer suggests a link between ‘public space’ and ‘public sphere’ through an account of Western cities, pointing to historical shifts in the nature and meaning of the former. Following the political revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she argues, public space, previously associated with honorific and ritual places, ‘was extended to include places of public debate and gatherings where the rational voice of the people could be heard’ (Boyer 1996: 7). What she has in mind here is the idea of the rational bourgeois public sphere formulated by Habermas (1991). Unlike Habermas, however, Boyer is concerned with the manifestations of the development of this public sphere on the spaces of the city – with how urban space, in other words, became the model for the rational bourgeois public sphere. A similar concern animates this chapter, although the focus here will be more on the processes that turned the city into a concern for a historically specific form of public sphere. This is not intended as an ‘application’ of Habermas’s theory; nor does it aim to show how off the mark he was with his

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notion of the public sphere. The aim here is to first provide a brief overview of Habermas’s notion and the debates it gave rise to, and then to take the notion in a critical but constructive manner in order to consider some of the lessons we might learn by using it as an analytical tool for inquiry. The object of my inquiry is Musée social, a late-nineteenthcentury think tank based in Paris. The Musée social is an interesting case because it played an important role in the debates over social welfare reform during the early years of the Third Republic (1870– 1940), which has been well documented (see, for example, Chambelland 1998; Horne 2002). As Elwitt (1980: 431) argued, its ‘origins, associations, and connections illuminate the contours of bourgeois social reform in France at the end of the nineteenth century’. This chapter, however, focuses on its impact on the development of French urbanism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

PUBLIC SPHERE Employing the term ‘public sphere’ immediately raises the question of the ‘private sphere’.

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Usually used in the singular, it also raises questions about the existence of other public spheres and of the very meaning of the ‘public’ itself. Even though the notion seemingly raises more questions than it answers, I want to argue that it might still be of use to geographers, among others, as an analytical tool. Habermas’s original inquiry is limited to a historically specific form of public sphere, what he calls the ‘liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere’ – the first functional public sphere, mediating between society and the state, which he locates in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is interested in the conditions of its development, and, later, decline. As Eley (1994) argues, the emergence of the public sphere was the manifest consequence of a fundamental and long-term process of socioeconomic transformation (which Habermas identifies as the transition from feudalism to capitalism). Urban growth, new forms of sociability in urban centres, the spread of publishing and the rise of a reading public, new infrastructures of transportation and social communication were such fundamental transformations. The voluntary association of a successful and increasingly self-conscious bourgeoisie presumed such a prior and deeper transformation. The idea of a public sphere has become an appealing notion for early modern historians because it linked together three important developments in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first is the growth of urban centres and the emergence of ‘new forms of sociability’ in such spaces as coffee houses, literary circles and lecture theatres. The second is the growth in newspapers and periodicals in the eighteenth century, becoming not merely the means through which news were circulated, but also the channels through which ‘public opinion’ was expressed. Related to the emergence of new institutions and the growth of the media, the third development involves the emergence of ‘criticism’, understood as the public discussion of matters of general interest, ranging from government

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policies to art, from scientific theories to literary products (Broman 1998). Habermas’s account of the public sphere has been criticised for its neglect of other, notably plebeian, forms of public spheres and its inattention to the issue of gender. ‘We can no longer assume that the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was simply an unrealized utopian ideal’, writes Fraser (1997: 116); ‘it was also a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule’ (also see Ryan 1997 for a gendered account of public sphere in a different context). Historically, on the other hand, Habermas’s bourgeois public ‘was never the public’ (ibid.). Even in eighteenth-century France, where Habermas locates the (bourgeois) public sphere, there was an effective popular public sphere (Farge 1994). Multiple public spheres (and ‘publics’) Not only existed, but they existed in conflict. This problematises Habermas’s well-delimited inquiry because, in this reading, what is excluded from his study is a constitutive element that changes the very meaning of the public sphere. Furthermore, not all forms of publicly disseminated knowledge and discourse were developed exclusively in relatively autonomous public spheres. As Cooter and Pumfrey note, ‘[m]any early scientific institutions, particularly those modelled on the Paris Académie des Sciences, existed within a traditional, state-sponsored, non-oppositional domain, and hence complicate a Habermasian reading’ (1994: 262; fn 48). This critique, however relevant, deserves further consideration as to the nature of the Habermasian public sphere with regards to its association with and stance towards the state. In an article on the relationship between fiscal conflicts and the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere in Prussia in the second half of the eighteenth century, Schui (forthcoming) addresses this issue. He finds that although critiques of Habermas were right in their identification of Prussia’s so-called ‘public sphere’ as dominated by state officials (i.e. not ‘bourgeois’) and not necessarily opposed

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to state policies (on taxation, in his case) – in short, not really a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ – such questions of association and opposition are not at the heart of Habermas’s notion. First, even though Prussia’s public sphere did not exclusively include the middle-class members, the debates it helped formulate and disseminate were associated with bourgeois modes of production and consumption, as well as notions of privacy. Secondly, it was not so much the content of the debates (i.e. opposition to or acceptance of state policies) that were critical in the functioning of the public sphere, but the very fact that there was a public debate at all. The existence as such of public debate implicitly challenged royal authority because it was, regardless of the specific opinions it contained, a public gesture in the sense that it was a demand on the status quo to hear what the public, however defined, had to say, which was unprecedented, especially on such vital matters as fiscal policy. Eley (1994) also criticises Habermas for subsuming the possibility of broader participation and emancipation under his ‘liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere’. This model idealises the bourgeois character of the public sphere to the neglect of the ways in which its elitism consciously blocked other possibilities for broader participation. It also does not acknowledge the existence of multiple, competing and conflicting publics (such as popular dissent). Therefore, although it is important to recognise, as Habermas does, that the – or one – public sphere became an alternative and independent site of expression for the bourgeoisie, it is equally important to recognise that the defining feature of the bourgeois public sphere is not just emancipation from absolutism. The struggle of the bourgeoisie against established aristocratic and royal privileges and authority was accompanied by the same class’s concern with the containment of popular classes. ‘The emergence of a bourgeois public sphere was never defined solely by the struggle against absolutism and traditional authority, but necessarily addressed the problem of popular

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containment as well’ (Eley 1994: 309). This ‘problem’, as we will see below, was framed as ‘the social question’ in France. The historical flaws of Habermas’s account have been well noted, but as Eley (1994) argues, Habermas’s account was not aimed to be the definitive account on the public sphere, but rather stimulate further investigation. It seems to me that there are two ways to go about the notion of public sphere: as an empirical phenomenon and as an analytical tool for inquiry. The first, strictly Habermasian, approach would be limited to a particular historical period and geographical context. The second approach, on the other hand, would resist the use of the notion merely as a description of a social reality, and would guide inquiry into the formation of concepts, new discourses and ‘publics’ in a given historical and geographical context, paying attention to ‘their intellectual context, their social space, their physical setting’ (Livingstone 1995: 28; see also Withers 1998). This approach, it seems to me, gives a sharper focus to arguments about the situated nature of knowledge production, circulation and consumption. It also resonates well with Fraser’s (1997) argument that public spheres are not merely arenas for the discursive formation of opinions, as the bourgeois conception would have it, but are constitutive of social identities. In other words, participation in them is not simply a contribution to the formation of opinion, but also an enactment of an identity (bourgeois, in Habermas’s account). Who was the particular ‘public’ that was engaged in the production of a particular form of knowledge? Which ‘public’ was the object or subject of this knowledge? What kinds of ‘publics’ were created to formulate and disseminate it? How does the formation of certain ‘publics’ or ‘public spheres’ help define the status and uses of the knowledge produced? This chapter is guided by these questions in its exploration of the Musée social and its influence in the development of ‘urbanism’ as a reform-oriented practice in the late eighteenth and early twentieth century in France.

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THE MUSÉE SOCIAL The so-called ‘social question’ (‘la question sociale’) was an inseparable part of nineteenth-century public discourse in France. This catch-all phrase not only referred to the rise of a new form of poverty linked to industrialisation and urban growth, but also the fear of the bourgeoisie faced with rapid change, workers and labour militancy – Chevalier’s (1978) notorious ‘dangerous classes’. It captured at once a concern with pauperism and working class unrest.1 The context of the late nineteenth century – marked by the defeat of the French Army in 1870, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the increasing use of military force to repress workers’ strikes – had exacerbated the fears of the French elites. The social question became a matter of ‘public’ concern as the negative impacts of industrialisation and urban growth became more visible to them. Not only was it necessary to address ‘the social question’, but it was necessary to do so urgently, as what was at stake was not simply poverty, but pauperism; that is, ‘poverty intensified to the level of social danger: the spectre of the mob; a collective, essentially urban phenomenon’ (Procacci 1993: 158). Late-nineteenth-century reformers – including the Musée social – were ‘heirs to a multiplicity of attempts to resolve [the social question]’ (Horne 2002: 31). In addition to the earlier efforts rooted in Christian charitable relief, public assistance and liberal prévoyance (self-help, individual thrift, insurance), they had also inherited a strong secular philanthropy tradition. Unlike philanthropists acting anonymously, such as many Christian charitable donors, they were rooted within the civil society and ‘their gestures were public, done with the intent of inspiring emulation and cultivating social bonds (Horne 2002: 35; emphasis added). The Musée social was a nineteenthcentury foundation that sought to find solutions to France’s ‘social question’. Founded in 1894 on an ideal of political and religious neutrality, the Musée brought together social

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reformers, social scientists, entrepreneurs, physicians, architects and urbanists, all anxious to respond to problems generated by industrial and urban growth.2 Now a research library in Paris with rich sources on the history of French labour, the Musée was an active centre for studying the so-called ‘social question’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the Musée was much more than a research centre. As Elwitt (1980: 431) wrote, ‘the Musée stood at the centre of an intelligence and propaganda network that monitored developments in labour-capital relations’, and, later, in matters related to urbanism. The Musée was engaged in social reform, and its work was organised under seven sections: urban and rural hygiene, agriculture, workers associations and cooperatives, social security, employers’ associations, law, and a section on studies, surveys and ‘missions’. The ‘missions’ of the Musée provided generous funds for foreign travel, and included studies of the Knights of Labour (a labour organisation founded in Philadelphia in the second half of the nineteenth century), English dock workers, Westphalian coal miners, socialism in the United States, Japanese economy, labour question in New Zealand. In France, the Musée focused on syndicalism, and documented and analysed all the major industrial strikes (Willoughby 1896; Elwitt 1980; Chambelland 1995). The Musée social emerged from the ‘Social Economy’ section of the Paris International Exposition of 1889. Social economy focused on social relations within the industrial world. Social economists of the late nineteenth century were concerned with the disciplining of labour, both morally and materially. Their purpose was to achieve ‘social peace’ in the workplace as well as in broader society, which required a rigorous study of social relations. They were, after all, social scientists, not ideologues, strongly influenced by Le Playist sociology.3 As Rabinow (1989: 182) states, ‘its founders shared much of the Le Playist social scientifically-founded

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model of intervention’. Although the question of labour was among the primary preoccupations of the social economists of the Musée, it was seen from the perspective of capital, not labour (Elwitt 1980). The primary concern of social economy was pauperism and the challenges it posed to the ruling elites, not the reduction of poverty (Procacci 1993). For Horne (2002: 5), the Musée social existed in a ‘parapolitical sphere that existed in the interstices of government, philanthropy, and industry, midway between the public interests of the state and the private interests of individuals’. It was part of a network of independent reform groups and voluntary associations. Although for Horne this parapolitical association went beyond remaining merely an expression of the class-based ideology of the bourgeoisie and the interests of industrial and business lobbies, for Elwitt (1980, 1986) it was part of a conservative ‘bloc’ formed by big business and ruling elites in order to maintain social peace and order. Admittedly, the two main aims of the Musée social were the gathering of information on the so-called social question, in France and abroad, and working towards achieving ‘social peace’. As one of the founding members, Cheysson, put it, the Musée social was to be a ‘machinery for social peace’ (cited in Rabinow 1989: 183). Rather than relying on the more common strategy of ruling-class alliance, the Musée social provided a forum where technical expertise, rather than electoral alliances, was prioritised. It ‘addressed the social problems of the day under the banner of science … The Musée’s self-proclaimed role was technical, not doctrinal’ (Rabinow 1989: 183, 184). The initial concerns of the Musée reflected those of its founder, Jules Siegfried (1837– 1922). Siegfried was born in Mulhouse. His upbringing in a family of cotton textile manufacturers ‘gave him the strong Protestant faith and paternalistic social conscience which were the mark of the Alsatian business elite’ (Sutcliffe 1981: 146). During his time at the municipal council of Le Havre, and then as the mayor of Le Havre (1878–1886),

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Siegfried became interested in housing associations, the design of workers’ housing and public health, creating the first municipal office of hygiene in France. He was involved in the organisation of the ‘social economy’ and workers’ housing exhibits at the Paris Exposition of 1889. He saw workers’ housing as ‘the answer to the social question’ (Rabinow 1989: 180). He was also the cofounder and leader of the Société Française des Habitations à Bon Marché (French Society for Low Cost Housing), formed in 1890. The members of this society were among those who had actively worked to create the Musée social. In this sense, the Musée social shares the features of similar voluntary associations in other contexts. Based on evidence from nineteenth-century Germany, Eley (1994), for example, argues that voluntary association was fundamental to the formation of a bourgeois civil society and the bourgeoisie’s selfaffirmation in three ways. First, it was an alternative way of expressing opinion, providing a ‘public’ space free from the older determinants, such as legal status or heredity. Secondly, associations reinforced and reflected the growing strength of the educated and property-owning bourgeoisie. Finally, voluntary associations became the primary sites of expression for bourgeois aspirations; they provided the theatrical scaffolding for the nineteenth-century bourgeois drama. In this context the underlying principles of bourgeois life – economic, social, moral – were publicly acted out and consciously institutionalized into a model for the other classes, particularly the petty bourgeoisie and the working class, who became the objects of philanthropic support and cultural edification. Eley 1994: 304.

However, the Musée was to play an important role in France, not through philanthropic support, but via a shift away from it – through the promotion of urban planning as an institutionalised practice. Sutcliffe (1981: 139) identifies two main sources behind the emergence of urban planning in France.

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One was the growth of municipal enterprise in the leading provincial cities such as Lyons and Nancy. The other, more important, source was the emergence and growing influence of a group of social reformers and social scientists in Paris, which was keen to draw on foreign experience. The Musée social was a significant part of this latter source.

FROM THE ‘SOCIAL QUESTION’ TO ‘URBANISM’ ‘The existence of “urban problems”, Topalov (1990: 319) writes, ‘is a quite recent idea’. Its origins are to be found among the housing reformers and philanthropists of the early twentieth century. In France, the Musée social played its part in this shift of focus from the social question to urban problems, which was also a move towards rational and institutionalised urban planning. A major shift occurred among the reformers of the Musée, from a late-nineteenthcentury concern with the labour question and workers’ housing to an early-twentiethcentury concern with urban planning and public hygiene (Horne 2002). The sources of this shift may be found in the changing climate of the turn of the century. Already in 1886 Jules Siegfried had pushed for a measure that would require large towns to prepare and enforce public health regulations (a measure that had many common features with the English public health statutes of the 1870s). His bill became law only in 1902, though it was not rigorously applied (Rabinow 1989). Nevertheless, it was the first important measure towards eradicating insanitary housing since the Melun law of 1850. This public health law of 1902 was significant in that it represented a ‘first institutional step away from philanthropy’ (Rabinow 1989: 252) and signalled ‘a change in the general climate of French opinion in regard to the urban environment’ (Sutcliffe 1981: 138). This changing climate was partly a consequence of increased urbanisation from the

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mid-1890s. With increases in housing construction and improvements in public transport, urban areas, Paris in particular, started to expand outward and absorb the growing urban population. From 1861 to 1896, the population of Paris increased about 50 per cent. Following the war and the Commune, population growth increased even further in the 1870s. In only five years, between 1876 and 1881, more than a quarter of a million people came to Paris. Most of these newcomers, which were mainly in-migrants, were poor and lived at the eastern parts of the city. Overcrowded and unhealthy housing, especially in poorer parts of the city, and housing shortage were common problems (Sutcliffe 1981; Rabinow 1989), usually framed with the notion of ‘hygiene’. In nineteenth-century France, hygiene, Horne argues, evolved into a commanding social metaphor that fostered new representations of urban life, industrial society, and even democracy itself. It served as a lever for transforming the traditionally defined relationship between the public and private spheres of liberal bourgeois society. Horne 2002: 225.

Although a concern with workers’ housing and living conditions was not a novelty of the late nineteenth century, the issue took on a specific importance in reform circles given the late-nineteenth-century urban influx. The problem of worker housing, in the words of Jules Siegfried, was ‘the first of all social questions’, not merely because of a concern with hygiene, but also because of a fear of working class challenge to the established order, manifested vividly during the Paris Commune of 1870 (Horne 2002: 230). The concept of hygiene not merely implied a healthy environment, but also correct behaviour, leading to a feeling among social reformers that gardens and open spaces were essential for the well-being (and proper conduct) of working classes (Sutcliffe 1981). Siegfried had presented a housing bill in 1892 (while he was minister of commerce), which was at the origin of the 1894 law – the

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so-called ‘Siegfried housing law’ – on habitations à bon marché (HBM, low-cost housing), the predecessor of French social housing estates, habitations à loyers moderés (HLM). The Musée social was active in the promotion of a more global approach to hygiene, which implied enforcing sanitary standards at the city scale, which, according to Horne (2002: 244) was its ‘most ambitious and successful campaign’. The reformers of the Musée were influential in making the issue of hygiene a ‘public’ one that required rational methods of comprehensive urban planning. The creation of the section on urban and rural hygiene (Section d’hygiène urbaine et rurale) in 1908 was aimed at promoting urban planning, which was seen as a solution to hygiene problems emanating from rapid and chaotic growth of cities. Two issues were on the new section’s agenda: application of rational methods of urban planning to French cities, and the redevelopment of the fortification zone surrounding Paris, which, the members insisted, should have the issue of public hygiene at its core. The zone, at the time, was an extensive area of shanty towns. Indeed, the creation of the section on urban and rural hygiene was partly stimulated by the debate over the future of Paris fortifications, which brought the question of the future extension of the city on the agenda. Convinced by the need for more open spaces in the name of ‘public hygiene’, the members of the section decided to launch a campaign in order to influence public opinion. The Section d’hygiène urbaine et rurale was divided into two working groups: one of these studied perceived problems and proposed solutions, and the other explored legal mechanisms and drafted legislation. The agenda of this section was dominated by the head of the first group, Eugène Hénard, and his proposals put forward in a series of studies, Etudes sur les transformations de Paris, published between 1903 and 1908. Hénard was an important figure in the development of French planning and urban design. As Horne (2002: 254) put it: ‘Between

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Haussmann and Le Corbusier, only Eugène Hénard presented such a variety of proposals for their modernization of the capital, a combination of social objectives and urbanistic thought that inaugurated what has become known as “the French school of urbanism” ’. Hénard called for two major campaigns: for open spaces in the city, which was related to the future of the fortifications, and for a planning law that required the preparation of plans for French cities of over 10,000. Hénard’s scheme, which was formally adopted by the Musée’s hygiene section as its own, proposed nine regional parks to replace the old fortifications, together with the construction of 75,000 apartment units. Although his scheme was widely discussed and supported, it went against real-estate interests. Despite the Musée’s efforts, no comprehensive plan was developed for the fortification zone. The demolition of the fortifications took place between 1919 and 1932. The vast area was sold piecemeal to private developers after the First World War, and was also used to construct the peripheral road that encircles Paris today. The Musée social pursued a campaign for urban planning in coordination with the proposal for open space design for the Paris fortifications. There was a growing concern among the members of the Musée that France was falling behind other European countries in terms of urban planning, a concern which was only heightened with the passage of the Town Planning Act in England in 1909. Indeed, the creation of the urban and rural hygiene section was stimulated by a growing awareness of the developments in other nations, such as zoning in the peripheral areas of German cities, settlement houses and civic centres in the United States, and the decision to build the garden city of Letchworth in England (Wright 1991). Under the leadership of Jules Siegfried, a legislation that would ensure mandatory planning was drafted and presented to the Municipal Council in Paris in 1909. Although it did not go far in the Parliament, this was ‘the first attempt to ensure systematic planning’

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(Rabinow 1989; see also Sutcliffe 1981). Only a decade later, with the passing of the so-called ‘Cornudet law’ of 1919, preparation of plans became obligatory for French cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants.

CONCLUSION: CREATING PUBLICS The first article of the founding statute of the Musée social read: ‘The Société du Musée social’s aim is to put at the public’s disposal, freely and along with information and assistance, the documentation, models, plans, statutes, etc., of social institutions and organisations whose object and result is to improve the material and moral situation of workers’ (cited in Chambelland 1998: 376). Originally set up to ‘improve the material and moral situation of workers’, the Musée social, as we have seen, oriented towards urban planning in the early twentieth century, starting with the creation of a special section on urban and rural hygiene in 1908. This was stimulated both with the new realities of urban life and the developments in other countries. Although this orientation represented a shift in focus in the activities of the Musée, it played a significant role in France in making urbanism a foremost part of social reform projects (Claude and Saunier 1999). The urban and rural hygiene section of the Musée quickly became prominent; by 1911, it included 98 members (about one-third of all the members) from various professional backgrounds (architects, public health professionals, politicians, city administrators), establishing an extensive network. ‘Never before in France’, Horne (2002: 254) writes, ‘had such a mixed group of experts combined efforts to promote public hygiene, urban development, and beautification projects’. The creation of the section on urban and rural hygiene attracted many architects, urbanists and physicians. Many of these architects used the Musée for launching their careers. The Musée social ‘was the

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nursery of most urban planners’ (Berdoulay 2001: 70); it provided a ‘lively meeting ground’ for architects, social scientists and political reformers, all of whom were convinced by the need to have long-term urban plans, although when it came to implementation, there was not much of a reform. Nevertheless, the Musée social ‘dominated urbanism in fin-de-siècle France’ (Wright 1991: 21). In 1911, the leading architects associated with the Musée social formed the Société française des urbanistes (SFU). They were internationally renowned urban designers (including Forestier, Jausseley, Agache, Prost, Hébrard), though they had very limited opportunity to apply their ideas in France, although some Musée reformers later worked in the colonies (see Vacher 1997; also see Rabinow 1989). It is in this period – the early 1900s – that urban planning started to become an ‘object of discussion’, and then transformed into policy and practice. In this sense, the Musée social, with its section on urban and rural hygiene, played a significant role in the transformation of urban planning from simply a militant activity to an institutionalised practice (Claude and Saunier 1999: 27). The convergence of social reform with the idea of planning the city provided the basis of the so-called ‘French school of urbanism’ (Osti 1984). This development also signalled a shift in the reformists’ approach to the ‘social question’ towards interventions in the spaces of the city, rather than framing the issue as a matter of the personal behaviour of workers (Horne 2002). Initially convinced that the solution to the ‘improvement’ of working classes passed through housing, the social reform project of the Musée gradually shifted focus from housing to the scale of the city and public spaces. As Osti (1984: 123) wrote, ‘[t]he streets, public spaces, until then seen as sites of the “dangerous labouring classes” ’ corrupt life, became a new field of action for reform projects. This shift, in a sense, defined the city as a ‘problem’, as ‘an object of public debate’ (Claude and Saunier 1999: 30),

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which was significant in the development of French urbanism in the early twentieth century. The Musée social reformers spoke the language of objectivity and impartiality; theirs was an endeavour of scientific expertise, detached from partisan interests, and geared towards ‘public interest’. Here we find Habermas’s ‘private persons’ assembled together to discuss (and act upon) ‘public matters’. However, as Horne suggests, this could also be read as the reverse image of their bourgeois preoccupation with the rituals and boundaries of private life. Seen from this perspective, their insistence on urban planning reflected an attempt to exert control over the slippery frontiers, not only of neighbourhoods and cities, but also of social class … The bourgeoisie’s gradual appropriation of urban space can be traced from the nineteenthcentury preoccupation with building sewage systems and controlling the stench of refuse and human excrement to the twentieth-century utopia of the planned city and suburbs. This was all part of the ongoing renegotiation of public and private space in twentieth-century France that served as a crucial backdrop to the rise of modern social policy. Horne 2002: 267.

According to Sutcliffe (1981: 149), ‘the Musée social was a great success, at any rate as a debating chamber’. It was ‘a large and brilliant salon for the more socially aware of the Parisian upper class and aspiring young professionals’. To be sure, this was not the public sphere. As I have suggested above, the specific utility of a notion of public sphere lies not merely in its potential to describe a ‘social reality’ in a more limited Habermasian way, but in its use as an analytical tool to understand how a variety of ‘publics’ are constituted and how they function in the development and deployment of new concepts, discourses and knowledge. The Musée social succeeded in bringing together ‘a public’ – however exclusive – conceiving ‘a public’ as the object of its reform projects, and creating ‘publics’ – or making public gestures – to diffuse its ideas and ideals.4 Their endeavour was about creating publics,

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including themselves, not just addressing or responding to them.

NOTES 1 As a response to the so-called ‘social question’, the French state created the Office du Travail in 1891. Run by Le Playists, the office collected information on work conditions in France and abroad (Rabinow 1989). 2 The Musée, like similar associations of the nineteenth century, was gendered; women were denied membership until 1916. 3 Frédéric Le Play (1806–1882) was an influential figure among reformers as he was concerned with bridging positive scientific knowledge and policymaking. 4 The Musée social served as an example in the creation of similar institutions and influenced urbanism in other contexts. See Dogliani (1998) for an account of the development of a Musée social in Italy, and Novick (1998) on the influence of the Musée social on urbanism in Argentina.

REFERENCES Berdoulay, Vincent (2001) ‘Geography in France: context, practice and text’ in Gary S. Dunbar (ed.), Geography: Discipline, Profession and Subject Since 1870. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 45–78. Boyer, Christine (1996) The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments. Cambridge: MIT Press. Broman, Thomas (1998) ‘The Habermasian public sphere and “science in the Enlightenment”’, History of Science, 36: 123–149. Chambelland, Colette (1995) ‘Le Musée social: un champ de recherches’, Le Mouvement Social, 171: 71–78. Chambelland, Colette (ed.) (1998) Le Musée social en son temps. Paris: Presses de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure. Chevalier, Louis (1978) Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris, pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle. Paris: Librairie Générale Française. Claude, Viviane and Saunier, Pierre-Yves (1999) ‘L’urbanisme au début du siècle: de la réforme urbaine à la compétence technique’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire, 64: 25–39.

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Cooter, Roger and Pumfrey, Stephen (1994) ‘Separate spheres and public places: reflections on the history of science popularization and science in popular culture’, History of Science, 32: 237–267. Dogliani, Patrizia (1998) ‘La naissance d’un Musée social en Italie’, in C. Chambelland (ed.) Le Musée social en son temps. Paris: Presses de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, pp. 359–364. Eley, Geoff (1994) ‘Nations, publics, and political cultures: Placing Habermas in the nineteenth century’, in N.B. Dirks, G. Eley, S.B. Ortner (eds), Culture/ Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 297–335. Elwitt, Sanford (1980) ‘Social reform and social order in late nineteenth-century France: the Musée social and its friends’, French Historical Studies, 11: 431–451. Elwitt, Sanford (1986) The Third Republic Defended: Bourgeois Reform in France, 1880–1914. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Farge, Arlette (1994) Subversive Words. London: Polity Press. Fraser, Nancy (1997) ‘Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy’ in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 109–142. Habermas, Jürgen (1991) [1962] The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger. Cambridge: MIT Press. Horne, Janet (2002) A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State. Durham: Duke University Press. Livingstone, David (1995) ‘The spaces of knowledge: Contributions towards a historical geography of science’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13: 5–34. Novick, Alicia (1998) ‘Le Musée social et l’urbanisme en Argentine’ in C. Chambelland (ed.) Le Musée

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social en son temps. Paris: Presses de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, pp. 331–358. Osti, Giovanna (1984) ‘Le Musée social et l’urbanisme au début du siècle: L’action novatrice de sa section d’hygiène urbaine et rurale’, Vie sociale 3: 117–125. Procacci, Giovanna (1993) Gouverner la misère: la question sociale en France, 1789–1848. Paris: Seuil. Rabinow, Paul (1989) French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ryan, Mary (1997) ‘Gender and public access: women’s politics in nineteenth-century America’ in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 259–288. Schui, Florian (forthcoming) ‘Fiscal reform and the development of a critical public in Prussia, c. 1740–1791’. Sutcliffe, Anthony (1981) Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain, the United States and France, 1780–1914. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Topalov, Christian (1990) ‘From the “social question” to “urban problems”: reformers and the working classes at the turn of the twentieth century’, International Social Science Journal, 125: 319–336. Vacher, Hélène (1997) Projection coloniale et ville rationalisée: le rôle de l'espace colonial dans la constitution de l'urbanisme en France, 1900–1931. Aalborg: Aalborg University Press. Willoughby, W.F. (1896) ‘The Musée Social in Paris’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 7: 58–63. Withers, Charles (1998) ‘Towards a history of geography in the public sphere’, History of Science, 36: 2–39. Wright, Gwendolyn (1991) The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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20 The Role of Geography and Geographers in Policy and Government Departments Tim Unwin

INTRODUCTION This chapter explores the ways in which geographers have shaped and been shaped by engagement in the places of policy and government. It begins by disentangling some of the strands of meaning contained within such an exploration. First, we need to understand the contrasting meanings attributed to the ideas of ‘geography’, ‘geographers’ and ‘geographical knowledge’ (Johnston 1997), and second, we need to provide a framework for examining the notions of policy and government with which geographers have been involved.

GEOGRAPHY, GEOGRAPHERS AND GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE Any understanding of how geographers have engaged in policy and government raises

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fundamental questions about the labels that people give themselves, and the ways in which they express their identities. In one sense, those who have a formal qualification in the subject (secondary school, undergraduate or postgraduate) are the easiest to define as geographers: their education has given them some geographical knowledge. However, there are many working in university geography departments who have no formal qualification specifically in ‘geography’, and likewise there are others with degrees in geography who prefer to be known, for example, as soil scientists, quaternary scientists or ‘development’ experts, rather than as ‘geographers’. Furthermore, although the study of geography has increasingly been defined in terms of syllabus content and skills, or what some would define as ‘geographical knowledges’, an alternative definition of geography is that it is the shared practices that people who call themselves ‘geographers’ actually do (Livingstone 2003;

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Rogers and Viles 2003). This raises interesting questions about the production of geographical knowledge, its dissemination, and the ways that it is subsequently used by others. Geographers can also be defined as being those who want to make a claim on the name ‘geography’ by belonging to geographical societies or associations, although many of these do not actually ‘practise’ in any sense as professional geographers. Many travellers and explorers who consider themselves as geographers, thus find it irritating that some academics so often seem to condemn them as not really being ‘geographers’ at all. Indeed, this was one of the underlying reasons for the acrimonious debate between ‘explorers’ and ‘academics’ at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) in 2009 over the funding of big expeditions (Corbyn 2009). One of the pertinent things about this debate was that, although the academics ultimately won, the ‘explorers’ were much more media savvy and gained considerable publicity for their cause in the broadsheets (Thomson 2009). This diversity of meanings and interpretations makes it highly complex to provide a rigorous overview of the engagement between geography and policy. However, for the sake of this contribution, I will draw a distinction between the roles of professional academic geographers, and those who lay claim to the idea of being a geographer through their education. In exploring this domain it is critically important to emphasise that most people still have remarkably little understanding about what it is that geography is, or what geographers do. This failure of academic geographers satisfactorily to inform the wider public in an intelligible format about the importance of their research has very significant implications, not only for the discipline, but also for the development of policies in areas of direct interest to geographers. For many people, geography is simply a subject that they studied at school with various amounts of rigour and interest. It is scarcely surprising that for them, ‘geographical

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knowledge’ remains primarily about the naming and description of places in various parts of the world. In an age when such information can be gained off the web in an instant, through resources such as Google Earth, the implications of such poor public understanding of geography for the continued vitality of the discipline are very significant. Unless academic geographers can show that their practices and research outputs do indeed have wider social, economic and political relevance, the future of the discipline will become subject to ever-greater uncertainty. As Stoddart (1987: 327) argued more than 20 years ago, ‘in the absence of a unified geography (the discipline) will disintegrate into component specialisms at risk of absorption by neighbouring disciplines’. This chapter approaches the intersection between geography and the place of policy and government in three main ways: through the role that geographers have played directly in the practice of government; the influence that the work of geographers has had on policy formulation; and the effects that governments and policy have had on the practice of geography. While there is clearly some overlap between these themes, they provide an overarching framework for this brief exploration. Furthermore, it should be stressed that each of these can be addressed at a variety of scales, from the global through the national to the local. The chapter also seeks to combine three kinds of evidence: published literatures on the questions addressed; responses to a questionnaire survey and interviews among geographers working in government and the policy arena specifically undertaken for this chapter; and my own experiences of working for a UK government department and an independent international foundation. The focus is primarily on the United Kingdom and the United States, but it must also be emphasised that the role of geographers in policy formulation and government varies significantly depending on the country and context. Such an agenda begs important questions about the roles of academics within society

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more generally. While this is not the place to explore this in detail (although see Habermas 1974, 1978; Unwin 1992), there has in recent years been a healthy debate within geography over the extent to which geographical research should indeed be addressing issues of contemporary concern (Unwin 2006). Historically, from the medieval period through to the early twentieth century, geographers participated actively in ‘discovery’, ‘exploration’ and the ‘colonial enterprise’. Thus, writing at the dawn of the Christian era, Strabo (1949: 31) was able to argue convincingly that ‘the greater part of geography subserves the needs of states’ and ‘that geography as a whole has a direct bearing upon the activities of commanders’. Such arguments remained highly pertinent to geographical practice until well into the twentieth century. As Wilbanks (1985: 5–6) has commented from a US perspective, during World War I, ‘geographers made important contributions in helping policy makers understand wartime commodity requirements’ and that ‘[w]ith the onset of World War II, the demand for geographers as specialists – especially in foreign area studies and in transportation – simply exploded’. Since the early 1970s, this heritage has nevertheless increasingly been challenged by those who have sought to emphasise the negative impacts of European and US foreign policy. Indeed, awareness of this heritage has been one reason why more ‘radical’ geographers have somewhat paradoxically often sought to distance themselves from direct engagement in government and contemporary policy agendas.

GEOGRAPHICAL POLICY PRACTICE It is possible to distinguish between two broad streams in geographical policy practice: on the one hand, those who have been active in an ‘applied’ tradition, seeking to engage with existing power structures (Keltie 1908;

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Stamp 1960; Wilbanks 1985; Pacione 1999; Bennett and Wilson 2003; Bailly and Gibson 2004; Herbert and Matthews 2004); and on the other, those who have focused critically on issues of ‘relevance’, and have sought instead to challenge those structures, thereby frequently rejecting the possibility of direct engagement in government policy formulation and instead participating in alternative modes of social activism (Harvey 1974; Peet 1977; Smith 1977, 2003; Maxey 1999). More than 30 years ago, in his Presidential Address to the Institute of British Geographers, Coppock (1974:1) pointed out that ‘Even though geographers have contributed in a professional and advisory role in central and local government, they have made less of a contribution than have members of other disciplines, and this is paradoxical in view of geography’s long-established interest in environmental matters’. As he went on to say, ‘if we do not more actively seek to demonstrate our skills and aptitudes, we shall increasingly find that the opportunities are no longer open to us, that our best students will be attracted elsewhere and that other disciplines will seek to fulfil those roles which we are well qualified to fill. These other actors on the environmental stage are not waiting in the wings; they are already on stage in increasing numbers’ (Coppock 1974: 15–16). Not all have been so pessimistic. Thus, from a US perspective, Wilbanks (1985: 4) in contrast has commented that ‘geographers have played important roles in a great many federal agencies, and other geographers outside the federal service have been leaders in such arenas as environmental and urban policy’. For Wilbanks (1985: 7), the main reason for this ‘is that policymaking in the United States is exquisitely geographic, at least at the national level’. As he goes on to say, ‘Spatial patterns, relationships and structures are at the heart of policymaking’. While geographers have indeed contributed effectively in the arena of policy and government in the intervening years, many of

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Coppock’s concern remain true today, and as the final section of this chapter emphasises the impact on the vitality of the discipline has been marked (see also Eden 2005).

GEOGRAPHERS IN GOVERNMENT In recent years, most professional geographers have played little direct role in government (Johnston and Williams 2003; but see Wilbanks 1985). However, it is important to distinguish clearly here not only between central and local government, but also between politicians and civil servants. Likewise, those who have worked ‘in government’ having completed their geographical studies have played very different roles to those academics who at various points in their careers have been able actively to engage in working for governments in a diversity of ways.

Geographers as politicians Rather few geographers, either professional academics or those trained as students in the discipline, have had successful careers as politicians. A notable, if controversial, exception to this generalisation was General Pinochet, who overthrew the Allende government in Chile in 1973 (Harvey 1974). Pinochet had trained as a geographer, and in 1951 began to teach classes on military geography and geopolitics as a visiting professor at the War Academy, subsequently continuing to teach in these fields for much of the 1950s (Pinochet 1991). Harvey (1974) sees Pinochet’s role as a geographer as having had a significant impact, particularly on the health system in Chile, but it remains difficult to assert that it was explicitly his ‘geographical’ background, rather than his military training or social views that impacted the country in the way that they did.

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In the UK, while some academic geographers have indeed campaigned to enter parliament, very few have been successful. One of those to succeed was John Patten, whose book English Towns 1500–1700 was published in 1978, the year before he was elected as a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) in 1979. Although he served briefly as Secretary of State for Education between 1992 and 1994, he retired at the 1997 General Election. More recently, Jim Knight, who was trained as a geographer, has also achieved growing visibility in the UK political arena, becoming Minister of State for Schools and 14–19 Learners in 2006. He was first elected as a Labour MP in 2001, becoming Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Department of Health in 2004 and then Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Rural Affairs, Landscape and Biodiversity in 2005–6, a role in which his background as a geographer was of particular relevance. Thus, when asked for his views on the areas where geographers can contribute most to government and policy making, he responded ‘Environment policy generally; land use planning and economic development; international policy on migration, climate change and water supply in particular’ (Jim Knight, pers. comm. 2007). Equally pertinent, though, he also commented that ‘as globalisation brings us closer together, and as the dominant political issues are geopolitical (climate change, security and migration) geographical thinking has never been more important in Government and international policy’ (Jim Knight, pers. comm. 2007). Interestingly, he places much value on the role of communication, suggesting that ‘perhaps my training as a geographer has given me a useful intellectual framework to communicate what is going on in the world clearly’ (Jim Knight, pers. comm. 2007). More recently, in the June 2009 Cabinet reshuffle he became Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform in the Department for Work and Pensions.

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Geographers in the civil service If there have been few geographers of any kind who have entered the national and international political scene at the highest level, the same cannot be said of the lower and middle levels of the civil service, both at national and local levels (Wilbanks 1985). As Michael Ratcliffe, who has had a long career specifically as a geographer in the US Census Bureau, comments: While I think it is true that geographers are not generally found at the highest level of government leaders (presidents, prime ministers, etc.), geographers are found at mid levels of government, and thus are in a position to influence and advise policy makers. (Ratcliffe pers. comm. 2007).

As he goes on to suggest, [T]here are many policy decisions made at the agency and program level, and geographers, where they work on these issues, do have influence. Geographers have been involved in moving federal agency programs (like those administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency) to focus on place-based approaches, rather than administering programs at a state level. (Ratcliffe pers. comm. 2007).

However, in a Canadian context, Hare (1974: 25) has been less positive, suggesting that although there are many geographers employed in government, ‘They would claim that their geographical background is useful only in a very general sense’. There are nevertheless some specific areas of government where geographers’ traditional skills and knowledge, notably in cartography and spatial data analysis, have been of particular relevance. This is well reflected in, for example, the US Census Bureau which employs many geographers, but it is also true of the UK’s Ordnance Survey, of which the last two Directors General, David Rhind and Vanessa Lawrence, are geographers. Interestingly, David Rhind,

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who on leaving the Ordnance Survey in 1998 became the Vice-Chancellor of City University, began his academic work as a physicist, before switching to earth sciences, and developing a research career in Geographical Information Systems (Rhind 2003). He is one of the relatively few academic geographers who have managed to combine successful careers in both government and academia, having also served as Chairman of the Statistics Commission and Chairman of the Commission on the Social Sciences. Another successful UK academic geographer who has been actively engaged in shaping government policy is Sir Alan Wilson, who was briefly Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 2007. Like David Rhind, he began his career as a physicist, but has subsequently become best known for his research on the mathematical modelling of cities (Wilson 1970, 1974, 1981). Sir Alan Wilson’s work brought him into contact with many government departments in an advisory capacity, and having served as Vice Chancellor of the University of Leeds between 1991 and 2004, he then took up a formal government role as Director General for Higher Education in the Department for Education and Skills. Another sphere where geographers have always been active in policy and government has been in the military (Johnston and Williams 2003). The work of geographers in producing military intelligence handbooks during the 1939–1945 war, for example, has been described by Clout and Gosme (2003: 153) as the ‘largest programme of geographical writing that has ever been attempted’. Such military involvement of geographers has continued ever since, but within markedly different institutional frameworks (see also Wilbanks 1985). It is thus far more common for geographers to combine their academic lives with their military work in the US than it is in the UK. Eugene Palka, who is Professor and Head of the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering

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at the US Military Academy, West Point, thus comments: I am in a unique position. While I am a professor and chair of an academic department at a military academy (university), I am also a colonel with 29 years of experience in the US Army. Consequently, I have been able to mesh the two professions throughout my career. I am a more competent Army Officer because of my training as a geographer, while my work as a geographer has been enhanced by my association with the military and numerous other government agencies and my travels throughout the world. (Palka pers. comm. 2007).

Academic geographers in government: challenges of applied geography Palka’s experiences in working in two contrasting spheres highlights one of the problems faced by those geographers who have sought to combine an academic job with one in government, and few have been able successfully to manage the balance. The most usual solution is for someone to be appointed on secondment full time to a government department, but even then it is usually hard for that person to maintain sufficient engagement in the academic world to be able to return successfully to academic geography. I distinctly recall one senior advisor in a government department saying that they had no time to read academic papers themselves, but employed staff and consultants to do that for him! Far more difficult than secondment, though, are the instances where academic geographers seek to work part-time in a university while also working for a government department or international policy agency. Although this would seem to be an ideal solution in terms of combining the academic and the policy related worlds of government, the logistical issues involved in these arrangements as well as the very different intellectual demands placed on people in such circumstances, make it very rare indeed for these efforts to be successful. As someone

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interviewed for this chapter commented: ‘I think there is … often a divide between academic “theory” and the reality of government decision making. And it is quite a difficult divide to bridge – I have met only a few people who have been able to do so’. Those academic geographers who have sought to engage with government and embark on an applied career have sometimes felt disparaged by their colleagues who have retained a more ‘purely academic’ career. One respondent to the survey undertaken for this chapter thus commented, ‘I agree with this (and if applied geographers who are academics feel “looked down upon,” just think how applied geographers in government feel). I think there is a tendency for the more theoretically focused geographers to assume that the latest theoretical developments are not taken into consideration by applied geographers’. Another respondent suggested that this tendency is more prevalent within human geography, and is a relatively recent phenomenon associated with the emergence of ‘critical human geography’.

Careers in government for geography graduates In addition to those who have achieved particular prominence in working for government, numerous geography graduates enter careers every year in both local and central government, where their combination of subject specific and generic skills are much sought after. Although not all of these people attain positions where they have a direct impact on the shaping of policy, their role in delivering the agendas of government departments across the world is indeed making a significant contribution. One of the areas where geography graduates have been employed specifically for their ‘geographical knowledge’ in the UK has been in the Department of Military Survey, which became a Defence Agency in 1991 and then merged

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with JARIC (the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre) to become the Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence Agency in 2000. Such employment continues the long tradition whereby geographers have been directly employed in military intelligence. Another area of government where geography graduates also still find employment is in urban planning, but with the emergence of university courses specifically in this field, fewer and fewer geographers are actually gaining employment in this arena. The contribution of geography graduates actually as geographers also does not always seem to be sufficiently appreciated. Based on my own experiences within the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), as well as on discussions with geographers in other government departments, there is a noticeable tendency for certain academic disciplines to be given prominence over geography in policy formulation meetings. Thus, although the term ‘geographers’ was often used within DFID in the early 2000s, it had a very specific meaning, being used to refer exclusively to those working in overseas offices rather than to anyone with a training in geography. It was, and still is, economists who dominate the advisory and senior management cadres within the Department. This is a clear example of the way in which the popular meaning of geography, as being concerned with the distribution of places across the world, has come to be incorporated into government thinking. As a colleague with a Master’s degree in geography commented, ‘Geography is not explicitly recognised in DFID as a key development discipline, unlike economics, social development and governance … DFID appears to value technical/sector knowledge more than geographical knowledge – so there are health advisers but there are not Africa advisers’. This emphasis on the key role of economics in policy making and government is not only relevant in the field of ‘development assistance’ (see Unwin 2007), but is also a much more widespread phenomenon. Jim Knight

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(pers. comm. 2007) thus comments again, that there ‘is an over emphasis on the economic and social in government’, but as he goes on to point out, ‘with the growth of sustainable development thinking there is an opportunity for geographers to assert themselves’. One of the ironies is that despite this growing international interest in areas at the interface between human activity and the physical environment, relatively few geographers have sought to engage politically or within government on these agendas.

THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHERS AND GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE ON POLICY AND GOVERNMENT If geographers actually in government and policy making arenas have had rather little impact, there are markedly different views about the relative influence that geographical writing and the discipline’s professional bodies have had on policy beyond the confines of the discipline itself (see Eden 2005). It is extremely difficult to measure this impact in any direct way, and most evidence is anecdotal, but the balance of opinion among those with whom I have discussed these matters is that few people outside the discipline pay much attention to the work of geographers. Not all would agree with this negative conclusion. Bennett and Wilson (2003: 463–4), for example, comment that, alongside the direct influence of geographers on public policy, ‘Also of crucial importance are the contributions of geography to understanding and decision-making in areas of the broader market dynamics of regions, location and business trading decisions, and spatial aspects of voluntary and other agencies’. Martin (2004: 150) has likewise stressed the importance of research on ‘geographical difference and the local, and how they relate to and intersect with more global scales, whether it be in the context of economic development,

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economic regulation and governance, culture, social relations, or environmental politics’. Geographers have also undoubtedly played a role in the emergence of the field of geographical information systems/science (GIS) particularly in the context of its influence on public policy, and some geographers have also been influential within the global debates on climate change (Hulme and Turnpenny 2004). Furthermore, to read the very short section on geography in policymaking on the website of the UK’s Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), one might be mistaken for thinking that geographers were indeed really influential: Academic and professional geographers work inside Government departments, work as consultants or produce academic research that influences decision making. For example, geographers have made major contributions to recent policymaking in the following UK government departments agencies [sic]: • Department for International Development • Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs • Environment Agency • Home Office country information panel advisory body • Ordnance Survey • Department for Education and Skills Sure Start evaluation. (http://www.rgs.org, accessed 15 September 2007).

Those who believe that geographers really are influential, and that they carry as much clout as economists, historians or medics, are I fear deluding themselves. Undoubtedly, some geographers have indeed contributed to policies relating to the work of these government departments, and it is also important to emphasise that geographers elsewhere continue to have an important role in particular sectors. Antoine Bailly (pers. comm. 2007) thus emphasises that in France many geographers are involved in local politics as mayors or presidents of local councils, and likewise he comments that geographers in Switzerland are frequently involved in local cantonal policy making. Similarly, in the

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Netherlands and Sweden geographers have a long and important tradition of policy engagement in the fields of urban planning and historical landscape interpretation (see, for example, Unwin and Spek 2003). However, the harsh reality across most of the world is that the work of geographers in general remains little known and little respected. As one respondent from a UK government department commented, ‘It’s partly the power of the economists! Partly because the analysts on Government – their term – are divided into economists, scientists, statisticians, social, OR, so there’s no explicit place for geographers. And they are not very interdisciplinary’. Little appears to have changed since the early 1970s when Hare (1974: 25) commented with respect to Canada that ‘academic geography is largely irrelevant to policy’. Part of the reason for this lack of appreciation of geography lies in the observations made at the start of this chapter that the experience that most people have of geography at school is that it is simply about the description of different places. Economists dominate in many government departments because they have positioned themselves as knowing about the economic growth that is so central to the effective functioning of contemporary capitalism. The fact that many of them know actually rather little about the diversity of the real world in which their models are meant to function appears to be of no relevance (for a radical critique, see the work of the post-autistic economics network, available at http://www.paecon.net, accessed 15 September 2007), although it is indeed encouraging to see economists such as Sachs (2005) at last waking up to a realisation of the importance that geography makes. Another way of judging how significant geographers have been in influencing public policy is to note how infrequently they ever appear in the media, particularly on TV or radio. To be sure, there have been exceptions, with Harm de Blij, for example, having been a regular on the popular US daily television

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show Good Morning America for some seven years (Eugene Palka pers. comm. 2007), but geographers feature far less frequently in the media than do academics from many other disciplines, such as economics or political science. In France, for example, it is usually sociologists, psychologists, philosophers and social theorists who appear on the main television channels, although geographers do indeed feature in local television and on the minority channels (Bailly pers. comm. 2007). There are many reasons for the lack of visibility of geographers in the media, with the following being a sample of the explanations suggested by respondents consulted in the preparation of this chapter: ‘the public and the media have to be convinced (and constantly reminded) that geographers can provide valuable insights and analysis’ (Eugene Palka); ‘the critical human geographers do not speak in a language that the media will welcome’ (anon.); ‘too few in the media understand geography, they have little consciousness of geographical concepts as being associated with geography’ (Jim Knight); ‘geographers are interested in long-term trends, rather than short term headlines; because geographers are interested in what is true and proven, rather than spin and speculation; and because the media does not think their audience would be interested’ (anon.). Moreover, where geographers are indeed featured on television, as with Nick Middleton’s popular travelogues Going to Extremes (2003) and Extremes along the Silk Road (2006) which were shown on Channel 4 in the UK and the National Geographic Channel, they are invariably depicted, or indeed depict themselves, as adventurers, rather than as distinguished scientists or scholars who have something to offer to help resolve the economic, social and political challenges of the world in which we live. This failure of geographers to be recognised as having important contributions to make to public policy may well be because much geographical research is indeed irrelevant to the contemporary agendas being

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discussed in global policy arenas – and deliberately so. However, this is by no means true of the discipline as a whole, with many geographers indeed working on topics as significant as climate change, globalisation, world trade, geopolitics in conflict zones and poverty, to suggest but a few. Failure to engage sufficiently in policy arenas reflects both individual and collective choices. While the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) has in recent years made serious attempts to engage in public policy discussions, it is salient to note that the Association of American Geographers’ website (http://www.aag.org, accessed 15 September 2007) makes very little mention at all about such policy agendas. For those who care about policy engagement, there is a clear feeling that the professional bodies representing geography are not doing enough to engage government and to promote the discipline. As one US colleague commented, ‘Most promoting stays within the discipline. Efforts seem to be restricted to sessions during our annual meetings and/or highlighted within our own disciplinary literature. The problem is that policy makers do not attend these meetings, nor do they read our literature.’ Jim Knight likewise commented that geographers ‘need to develop a smarter way of promoting their thinking with the media’. For Michael Ratcliffe, an important issue is the level at which we engage: ‘The AAG and other professional bodies tend to look for ways to insert themselves in policy making at the top echelons of government. They need to do more work in the mid-levels where the practical, day-to-day, longer-term policies are made’. As he also commented, ‘Academic geographers are not aware of how government really works, and government geographers are not talking about this to academics’. One particularly important reason why geographers have not been as influential as they could have been is because many have turned away in recent years from a

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conceptualisation of the discipline as being concerned with the interface between physical environmental and human processes (Goudie 1981; Stoddart 1987; Unwin and Rose 2004). The emergence of numerous ‘environmental’ sub-disciplines in other fields, such as ‘environmental geology’, ‘environmental biology’ and ‘environmental economics’ has challenged one of the traditional core areas of geographical research and teaching, and most geographers seem to have paid little heed to these changing disciplinary contexts. At one level, this should not matter at all, with interdisciplinary research that is focusing on solving and understanding real problems being of most importance (Unwin and Rose 2004). However, at another level, the failure of geographers sufficiently to engage in and address these issues has long-term implications for the wider vitality of the discipline as a whole. It is also possible that the ways in which geographical knowledge is produced and codified have an important influence on the readiness with which they are understood by governments and policy advisers. Most academic geographers continue to publish their papers in peer-reviewed academic journals that few people in government ever read. The pressure for geographers to publish in the top-cited geographical journals, as a result of institutional requirements such as the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), may have gone some way to cause this, but there are other reasons as well. Few academic geographers, for example, choose or have the time to publish material over and above their academic papers in the influential and more popular publications that do indeed influence policy makers. Surprisingly few have likewise become involved in traditional popular media such as television and radio, and there are also very few who have fully embraced the potential of innovative online means of disseminating their research results, through blogs or their own web-sites.

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THE EFFECTS OF POLICY AND GOVERNMENTS ON GEOGRAPHY The failure of most geographers and their professional bodies to engage sufficiently proactively and positively with policy makers and government departments has also had an effect on the way in which policy makers themselves view the discipline and thus seek to affect it. This is particularly well illustrated by the position of geography in national curricula and education systems across the world. Within the United States, for example, Richardson (2007: 1) in discussing the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation comments, ‘We in the geography community have also long been concerned with NCLB because geography is the only “core academic subject” identified within the law that does not receive a specific funding allocation or implementing programs to further teaching of the subject on the K-12 level’. This highlights the relative unimportance that US policy makers gave to geography in the drafting of this legislation. The NCLB was a reauthorisation of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) signed into law in 2002, and came up for reauthorisation in 2007. This provided geographers with an important opportunity to campaign for changes to the legislation, and the Geography Education National Implementation Project (GENIP), a consortium of geographical associations committed to improving the status and quality of geography education in the US, thus used this opportunity to highlight some of the key benefits of a geographical education, noting that Geography is essential to a well-rounded K-12 education: Geographic understanding is important to every American – it is critical to the informed exercise of each citizen’s civic responsibility. Geography helps us understand the connections between people and places – and with the natural environment. Geography education is key to achieving international understanding and economic development, and also provides essential

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workforce skills needed to maintain U.S. competitiveness. The study of geography enables students to access the explanatory power of maps and increasingly ubiquitous geospatial technologies – such as geographic information systems (GIS), global positioning systems (GPS), and internet mapping. Geography helps us to understand and enhance our own communities as American citizens – and informs our understanding of the challenges facing the United States in an uncertain world. (Richardson 2007: 1 and 5).

The effects of the campaign, through which all members of the Association of American Geographers were, for example, encouraged to write to their Representatives and Senators, remain to be seen, but it is unlikely that the US will witness a dramatic resurgence of the discipline, primarily because those in power, be they Republicans or Democrats, continue to consider the work of economists, historians and political scientists to be of much more value to the maintenance of the US’s global position than they do geographical research or teaching. Even in the UK, where the subject of geography has traditionally been stronger, there has been a marked decline in the number of people studying the subject at school, in large part because of changes in the structure of the curriculum, and thus the views of civil servants and politicians responsible for shaping it. In 1988, for example, some 305,575 people sat geography as a GCSE subject (the national examinations that people usually take at 16), but by 2008 there were only some 203,862 taking the exam. Likewise, although in 2008 it was still the tenth most popular subject at A-level (the examinations usually taken at 18), numbers doing geography had fallen almost a quarter from 42,181 in 1999 to a mere 31,714 people in 2008 (RGS-IBG 2010). Not only do relatively small numbers of people therefore have a reasonably detailed understanding of what geography might be, at least defined by these school examination syllabuses, but this number is continuing to decline. The British geographical associations, notably the Geographical Association and the RGS-IBG

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have campaigned actively in support of the discipline, and this did contribute to the UK’s Department for Education and Skills decision to initiate a two-year Action Plan for Geography in 2006. The goal of this plan was ‘[t]o provide everyone – opinion formers, policy makers, schools, parents and pupils – with a clear vision of geography as a relevant and powerful 21st century subject; and to equip teachers with the professional skills and support they need so that pupils enjoy and succeed in geography’ (DFES/GA/RGSIBG 2006: 1). However, there is little evidence as yet that this is about to have a significant impact on the ways in which people understand and value geography, be they in government or elsewhere, although it is salient to note that the Plan was extended for a further three years in 2008.

THE FUTURE OF GEOGRAPHY, POLICY AND GOVERNMENT This review of the work of geographers in policy-making and government has suggested that geographers have not been as influential in shaping key contemporary debates as they could have been, either individually or as a profession. This has had a negative impact on the vitality of the discipline, not only as expressed in schools and colleges, but also in terms of the ability of geographers to respond to some of the significant economic, social and political challenges facing today’s world. There are many reasons for this, but among these, four would seem to be particularly important: • First, there is a tendency for geography to have become over-fragmented, to such an extent that people who are unfamiliar with the discipline now have little idea what it is really about (Stoddart 1987). Research that was favoured in the past on the interface between ‘human’ and ‘physical’ processes, has become distinctly less popular, in the face of increasing emphasis on

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the ‘pure science’ of physical geography on the one hand, and the social and humanities focus of much human geography on the other (Unwin and Rose 2004). • Second, many geographers have tended to disparage the work of their colleagues who have indeed engaged actively in the media or who have focused especially significantly on ‘applied’ research. Instead of being represented all too often as villains, these people should increasingly begin to be seen as heroes. There are very divergent views about the work of geographers who do indeed appear on TV or radio, but it is absolutely essential for professional geographers to become much more visible in the public eye if the discipline is to retain a healthy status. For this to happen, participation in the world beyond the academy must be given an equivalent status in assessment mechanisms to research income and publications in journals that few people ever read. There is indeed some evidence that this may be beginning to happen, at least in the UK. • Third, individual geographers themselves need to take a much more active role in government and policy making. There are indeed geographers, across many areas of the discipline, who engage in policy making with government at a range of scales, and find this both challenging and rewarding. Moreover, many in government do appreciate the advice given by geographers, even if they usually regard the contribution of the individual more highly than they do the fact that the person was trained as a geographer. • Finally, professional bodies representing the discipline need to engage even more proactively than they do at present with policy makers and those in government. The declining numbers of people choosing to study geography is a clear indicator that these bodies have as yet failed sufficiently to convey the importance of the discipline both to policy makers and to the wider public. Declining numbers of students studying geography at school will lead to a decline in the quality and quantity of those going on to study at university, and thus eventually a decline in the numbers of those undertaking research in our subject (Grimwade 2007). This cannot be good!

It may well be that much contemporary geographical research is indeed irrelevant to policy making, and that those who practise it can remain immune to the needs of the wider communities of which we are all a part.

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However, many of the most important contemporary debates, from climate change to poverty and globalisation, are areas in which geographers have a very long tradition of experience and expertise. Geographers do indeed have much to contribute in these areas. The challenge remains for us to combine our traditional strengths with a new willingness to engage more proactively in policy formulation, and thereby to help make the world in which we live a fairer and better place for all.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This chapter owes much to discussions that I have had with numerous colleagues with whom I have worked in the World Economic Forum and the UK’s Department for International Development. I am particularly grateful to Bill Mead, Dai Morgan, David Hilling, David Rhind, Alan Mountjoy, Bill Fisher, John Clarke, Michael Wise, Judith Rees and Derek Diamond for comments and suggestions that helped me craft an earlier piece on applied geography (Unwin 2006); their thoughts have also been of direct relevance to this chapter. I am also very thankful to those who responded to my questions relating to the core focus of this chapter, and especially to Alan Wilson, Antoine Bailly, Eugene Palka, Jim Knight, Michael Ratcliffe and Peter Shelley. Without their advice, this would have been a far less nuanced account of the engagement of geographers in government and policy making.

REFERENCES Bailly, A. and Gibson, L.J. (2004) Applied Geography: A World Perspective. Dordrecht: Klewer. Bennett, R.J. and Wilson, A.G. (2003) ‘Geography applied’ in R. Johnston and M. Williams (eds), A Century of British Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, pp. 463–501.

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Clout, H. and Gosme, C. (2003) ‘The Naval Intelligence Handbooks: a monument in geographical writing’, Progress in Human Geography, 27: 153–173. Coppock, J.T. (1974) ‘Geography and public policy: challenges, opportunities and implications’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 63: 1–16. Corbyn, Z. (2009) ‘“Think big” campaign splits geographers’, Times Higher Education, 4 June 2009. Available at: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story. asp?storycode=406836, accessed 23 July 2009. DFES/GA/RGS-IBG (2006) Geography in Action 2006–2008. London: Department for Education and Skills/Geographical Association/Royal Geographical Society–Institute of British Geographers. Eden, S. (2005) ‘Green, gold and grey geography: legitimating academic and policy expertise’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30: 282–286. Goudie, A. (1981) The Human Impact: Man’s Role in Environmental Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Grimwade, K. (2007) ‘Geographical Futures’, Presidential Lecture, The Geographical Association Annual Conference 2007. Available at: http://www. geography.org.uk/downloads/GA_Conf07 Grimwade.doc, accessed 6 July 2010. Habermas, J. (1974) Theory and Practice. London: Heinemann. Habermas, J. (1978) Knowledge and Human Interests. London: Heinemann. Hare, F.K. (1974) ‘Geography and public policy: a Canadian view’, Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers, 63: 25–28. Harvey, D. (1974) ‘What kind of geography for what kind of public policy?’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 63: 18–24. Herbert, D.T. and Matthews, J.A. (2004) ‘Applied geography: contributing to real world problem solving – introduction’, in J.A. Matthews and D.T. Herbert (eds), Unifying Geography: Common Heritage, Shared Future. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 259–265. Hulme, M. and Turnpenny, J. (2004) ‘Understanding and managing climate change: the UK experience’, Geographical Journal, 170: 115–125. Johnston, R.J. (1997) Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945, 5th edn. London: Arnold. Johnston, R. and Williams, M. (eds) (2003) A Century of British Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy. Keltie, J.S. (1908) Applied Geography: a Preliminary Sketch, 2nd edn. London: G. Philip.

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Livingstone, D. (2003) Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martin, R. (2004) ‘Editorial. Geography: making a difference in a globalizing world’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 29: 147–150. Maxey, I. (1999) ‘Beyond boundaries? Activism, academia, reflexivity and research’, Area, 31: 199–208. Pacione, M. (ed.) (1999) Applied Geography: Principles and Practice. London: Routledge. Patten, J. (1978) English Towns 1500–1700. Hamden: Archon Books. Peet, R. (1977) Radical Geography: Alternative Viewpoints on Contemporary Social Issues. London: Methuen. Pinochet, A. (1991) A Journey through Life, Santiago: Instituto Geografico Militar, 2 vols. RGS-IBG (2007) Results analysis. Available at: http:// www.rgs.org/OurWork/Schools/Geography+ in+the+UK+curriculum/Results+analysis.htm, accessed 27 July 2010. Rhind, D. (2003) ‘The geographical underpinning of society and its radical transition’ in R. Johnston and M. Williams (eds), A Century of British Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, pp. 429–461. Richardson, D. (2007) Educating Congress on Geography education. AAG Newsletter, July/August 2007, 1: 5. Rogers, A. and Viles, H.A. (eds) (2003) The Student’s Companion to Geography, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Sachs, J. (2005) The End of Poverty: How We Can Make it Happen in Our Lifetime. London: Penguin. Smith, D.M. (1977) Human Geography: a Welfare Approach. London: Edward Arnold. Smith, D.M. (2003) ‘Geographers, ethics and social concern’ in R. Johnston and M. Williams (eds), A Century of British Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, pp. 625–641. Stamp, L.D. (1960) Applied Geography. London: Penguin. Stoddart, D.R. (1987) ‘To claim the high ground: geography for the end of the century’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 12: 327–336. Strabo (1949) The Geography of Strabo. London: Heinemann. Thomson, H. (2009) ‘There’s a whole wide world out these still waiting to be explored: geographers who concentrate on research and freeze out big expeditions are missing our on a golden age of discovery’,

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Times Online, 20 May 2009. Available at: http:// www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ guest_contributors/article6322226.ece, accessed 23 July 2009. Unwin, T. (1992) The Place of Geography. Harlow: Longman. Unwin, T. (2006) ‘100 years of British geography: the challenge of relevance’ in M. Vale (ed.), Silva Telles e os 100 Anos do Ensino Superior da Geografia em Portugal. Lisbon: Edicões Colibri, pp. 103–126. Unwin, T. (2007) ‘No end to poverty’, Journal of Development Studies, 43: 929–953. Unwin, T. and Spek, T (eds) (2003) European Landscapes: from Mountain to Sea. Tartu: Huma.

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Unwin, T. and Rose, J. (2004) ‘Regions, area studies and the meaning of place’ in J.A. Matthews and D.T. Herbert (eds), Unifying Geography: Common Heritage, Shared Future. London: Routledge, pp.171–188. Wilbanks, T. (1985) ‘Geography and public policy at the national scale’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 75: 4–10. Wilson, A.G. (1970) Entropy in Urban and Regional Modelling. London: Pion. Wilson, A.G. (1974) Urban and Regional Models in Geography and Planning. Chichester: Wiley. Wilson, A.G. (1981) Geography and the Environment: Systems Analytical Methods. Chichester: Wiley.

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PART 3

Critical Concepts and Controversies

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21 Nature and Society Noel Castree

INTRODUCTION How are society and nature related? How and why do the relationships vary over time and across space? Together, these questions virtually defined the focus and raison d’être of academic geography when it first gained a toe-hold in Western universities over a century ago. Today, they remain key questions for many geographers – and the stakes are not purely academic. When, in 1864, George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action he was in a distinct minority. In the early twenty-first century, by contrast, his warnings about humanity’s capacity to cause irreversible changes to ecosystems and habitats are hardly out of place. Indeed, Marsh’s concerns about our treatment of the biophysical world are today echoed by those anxious about the way we are altering human as much as non-human nature. Ours is the era of genetically modified foods, ‘designer babies’, artificial life (AI), cloned mammals, accelerating species extinctions, global climate change, the deforestation of the Amazon Basin, oil and water scarcity, and much more besides. Such is modern humanity’s capacity to transform natural processes and phenomena

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that the Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen calls our time ‘the anthropocene’. In his view, it is akin to a new geological era and a distinct phase of earth history. What is to be done about the ‘human impact’? This is among the defining questions of our time. In this chapter I describe the changing and diverse ways in which geographers have interrogated society–nature relationships over the last century or so. This is a grand ambition given the word constraints imposed by writing for this Handbook: as we will see, it involves discussing geography as a whole rather than a few select parts of the field. This reflects the continued centrality of the ‘society –nature problematic’ to geography’s identity, even during the long post-1945 period when its human and physical components drifted progressively apart. My review reveals some stark intellectual and ethical differences in the approaches taken by geographers past and present. There has long been little consensus about what dimensions of society– nature relations should be studied, how and to what ends. I speculate on the causes of dissensus, and also consider whether a lack of unity is problem or a plus-point. Throughout, I focus on Anglophone geography – in part because it is quite influential within the

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broader landscape of academic geography globally, in part because I know far less about the subject beyond the Anglophone world. Because I cover so much ground in so few pages, my discussion is necessarily sweeping and lacks the usual subtleties and qualifications. I hope the simplifications made do not amount to misrepresentations. Although I take a chronological approach in what follows, I am in no way assuming that what is newest is, intellectually speaking, intrinsically better or worse than what came before. I’ll explain why towards the end.

FOUNDATIONS: GEOGRAPHY IS THE STUDY OF SOCIETY–ENVIRONMENT RELATIONS? On the evening of Monday, 31 January 1887, Halford Mackinder delivered a now famous address to London’s Royal Geographical Society. In his lecture – entitled ‘On the scope and methods of geography’ – he explained how and why geography should take its place alongside other disciplines within the academic division of labour. His strategy, at once simple and audacious, was to call that division of labour into question. Geography, Mackinder argued, can ‘bridge one of the greatest of all gaps’; namely, that separating ‘the natural sciences and the study of humanity’ (1887: 145). He was not alone in defining geography as ‘the science whose main function is to trace the interaction of man [sic] in society and so much of his environment as varies locally’. At points east and west others were doing much the same, such as William Morris Davis in America, Paul Vidal de la Blache in France, and Friedrich Ratzel in Germany. The four men soon occupied important university positions, and were followed by similarly vigorous prosleytisers who quickly built on the foundations their forebears had laid. So began geography’s career as a university subject and what this book’s co-editor David Livingstone (1992: 177) called ‘the

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geographical experiment’. This was the attempt to keep nature and society under ‘one conceptual umbrella’ in the face of ‘the incipient Balkanisation of knowledge that accompanied the professionalization of scientific specialities’ (ibid.). There were two aspects to this. First, the likes of Mackinder, de la Blache, Ratzel and Davis saw the need to study nature as a whole not as a set of discrete parts. Where subjects like chemistry, physics and botany specialised in investigating select elements of the natural world, geography would study all these elements in combination (as Alexander von Humboldt had famously sought to do early in the nineteenth century). This is what ‘physical geography’ was, according to its nineteenthcentury proponents like Mary Somerville. In her 1849 book of this name, she defined it as ‘a description of the Earth, the sea and the air, with their inhabitants the distribution of these beings, and the causes of their distribution’ (Somerville 1849: 1). Her successors, influenced in part by Charles Darwin’s pathbreaking theory of evolution by means of natural selection (1859), were sometimes given to discussions of ‘human nature’ and how it varied geographically in response to the conditions of regional physical environment. Second, this commitment to studying nature as an integrated, multifaceted system was accompanied by a desire to explore its two-way relationships with human societies. For Mackinder and the other early geographers, it was important that nature be studied in context, as something that forms the basis of (and is affected) by human practices of an economic, cultural and political kind. In this sense, the study of human geography was to be deeply materialist with its roots – quite literally – in the soil. The resulting investigations of ‘human–environment’ relations could be conducted at a range of geographical scales, from the local right up to the global. Clearly, geography had high ambitions in its fledging years as a university subject: it was, in terms of subject matter and scope, very much a ‘world discipline’. But it became increasingly clear that its ‘bridging’ aspirations

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were difficult to realise satisfactorily. The major problem was a practical one. Geography’s perspective on the world was so comprehensive, and its subject matter so compendious, that it proved very difficult to demonstrate causal connections between the component parts of the non-human world, let alone all these parts and various societies worldwide. Some, like Mackinder and Ratzel, had hoped that a geographical equivalent (or version) of the theory of evolution might be developed. But this hope was in vain. It was time consuming enough to provide mere descriptions of different societies and their physical environs, never mind plausible explanations. As a result, most early research publications by geographers were beset by what – with hindsight – were serious intellectual weaknesses. For instance, monographs that focused on specific places or regions were often impressionistic by present-day standards, and filled with unverified speculations about how and why nature and human society were as they were in given situations. At worst, this shaded into what we would now regard as racism founded on supposed ‘natural differences’. For instance, in the US geographers like Ellen Semple and Ellsworth Huntington were apt to argue that certain physical environments produced human ‘races’ less intellectually or physically capable than Europeans. Such beliefs were consistent with certain versions of evolutionary theory – such as the work of Jean Baptiste Lamarck – but not with Darwin’s. As a result, by the 1920s gaps began to appear between the stated ideals of geography’s founding figures and the subject as practised by their successors. On the one side, physical geography began to fragment into sub-fields and these specialisms, in turn, focused more and more on biophysical phenomena as such (rather than their two-way relationships with human societies). For instance, the regional-scale study of landforms (geomorphology) was fairly well developed by the 1920s, and climatic geography was also becoming more sophisticated. On the other side, a relatively free-standing

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human geography began to take shape, with its emerging sub-branches usually lacking any deep grounding in physical geography. For example, the economic geography of George Chisholm in Britain and the political geography expounded by Isaiah Bowman in America were ‘systematic’ rather than ‘synthetic’ in nature. That is, they abstracted specific features of human practice (economics and politics respectively) and focused on their spatial variation across the earth’s surface. The biophysical basis of human activity was not ignored by either geographer, but there was no pretence of offering a robust and in-depth account of physical geography, or of demonstrating its causal influence on human activity in a convincing way. These developments presaged a widespread turn to specialisation, and a fragmentation of academic geography, that set-in after World War II. The weakening of its holistic ambitions was no doubt aided by the increasing sophistication, precision and rigour of other university subjects – such as physics and economics which both produced notable theoretical breakthroughs by the 1930s, underpinned by mathematics, controlled experiments and logic. Even so, geographers’ commitment to study human– environment relationships at a range of scales did not entirely disappear. Instead, it was finessed and narrowed somewhat so that it could be delivered on more readily. For instance, American geographer Carl Sauer’s influential 1925 publication The Morphology of Landscape argued that many natural environments were the products of specific cultural practices, such that culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result. This research agenda focused many geographers’ attention on different cultures and the physical landscapes they created over time, licensing careful fieldwork and archival study – typically in rural settings. The Sauerian cultural geographer would need to know some physical geography germane to their chosen cultural landscape, but the emphasis was on people’s

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land-use practices not the intricacies of biophysical processes or events per se.

POST-1945 FRAGMENTATION World War II was a turning point for geography and its approach to the study of nature–society relations. Many who would subsequently gain positions in university geography departments served in the military between 1939 and 1945. The experience was formative for most, instilling a belief that precision, measurement and rationality were virtues to be aspired to. At the same time three other developments were significant. First, academic geography had failed to produce major books or intellectual innovations comparable to, say, John Maynard Keynes’ 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. This became a cause for concern. Second, many outside geography had successfully argued that the physical sciences and the social sciences (with the humanities) had to be different by virtue of their subject matter. There could be no overarching theory or analysis of people and nature, it was argued, because the former possessed ontological properties quite different from rocks, rivers or ravines. For instance, humans are self-reflexive, linguistic, tool-making beings able to make their own history and geography – so argued philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, among others. This argument drove a wedge between the two spheres – society and nature – that the original geographers had sought to bring together in a single intellectual frame. Finally, the embarrassment of ‘environmental determinism’ – the pre-war argument made by Semple, Huntington and others that some human ‘races’ were mere reflexes of climate and resources – made some geographers determined to ‘raise their game’ intellectually. After 1945 academic geography progressively splintered into two major halves (human and physical), with each fragmenting into relatively discrete ‘systematic’ subdisciplines. The turn to specialisation was undertaken in the hope that human and

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physical geography could become ‘spatial sciences’. They would discover – through careful measurement, hypothesis testing and use of statistics – laws explaining spatial patterns (such as the common tendency of rivers to meander or migration flows to be inversely proportional to the size of destination cities). This implied a splitting of geography’s subject matter into two, with intellectual unity (many hoped) maintained at the level of the perspective taken on the subject matter. Accordingly, human geography increasingly abstracted the analysis of political, economic, social and cultural practices from their biophysical integument. The pre-war fondness of some geographers for discussing ‘human nature’ (in the biological sense) was also quickly abandoned. On the other side, physical geographers produced increasingly ‘scientific’ descriptions, explanations and even predictions of earth surface phenomena. Specialisation, new databases, new remotesensing capabilities and new computer technologies made this possible. But the price paid was intellectual disunity: physical geographers divided nature (in the sense of the physical environment) into the five areas that comprise the field to this day (geomorphology, biogeography, climatology, hydrology and Quaternary environmental change). There was also a move towards small-scale, short time horizon studies because hypothesis testing was very difficult for macro-scale analyses of (say) whole ecosystems or river basins. Where macro-scale physical geography persisted, it was often hived-off to other academic subjects – as happened with meteorology and climatology. Finally, all of the above meant that the study of human–environment relations became a minority pursuit, with ‘spatial analysis’ and the search for general laws, models and theories becoming geography’s new modus operandi. These changes together bolstered geographers’ intellectual self-esteem and improved their external image within the world of higher learning. Ironically, though, geography was effectively abandoning the study of human–environment relations at the very

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moment when the title of William Thomas’s 1956 edited book, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, was becoming as obvious as it was profound. C.P. Snow’s famous complaint about the estrangement of ‘the two cultures’ – one literary–humanistic, the other scientific–rational – was (ironically) applicable to post-war geography, the one subject that had made intellectual unity its raison d’être. Some purposeful efforts to maintain the earlier unity of geography were made, with ‘systems theory’ and ‘models’ two of the suggested ways in which human and physical geographers might make commoncause by the early 1970s. But these efforts could not prevent a growing schism between human and physical geography, with nature effectively erased from the former’s intellectual preoccupations. At the same time, physical geography’s major branches bled into cognate subjects, such as ecology in the case of biogeography. This made them increasingly interdisciplinary, and reflected their inability to police their own turf once the idea of a unified physical geography was progressively abandoned after 1945.

WHITHER SOCIETY–NATURE STUDIES? The developments recounted above meant that the study of society–nature relations was no longer synonymous with geography tout court by the late twentieth century. From the mid-1970s, the terms ‘environmental geography’ and ‘people–environment geography’ signified a relatively small and heterogeneous body of research situated in the middle ground vacated by geography’s two increasingly estranged halves. This research had to somehow negotiate the ontological, epistemological and methodological differences between human and physical geographers, as well as the presumption that ‘nature’ was different in kind from ‘society’ – even though the two domains were joined together in practice. I will describe some of its principal

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strands below, and seek (in brief) to explain their provenance. As we’ll see, these strands were and are largely ‘asymmetrical’; that is, they focused more on the ‘human’ side of the society–nature relation for the most part.

Natural hazards geography After World War II, many Western governments adopted a more hands-on approach to public welfare. This included a new determination to protect people from the effects of natural hazards, such as hurricanes, droughts and landslides. In this context, the American geographer Gilbert White pioneered an approach in which peoples’ perceptions of hazards became the major focus. White argued that many individuals and communities living in high-risk locations did not necessarily perceive themselves to be vulnerable, and so failed to take adequate measures to mitigate the effects of hazard events. In this way, peoples’ cognition was granted a degree of independence and flexibility rather than being assumed to bear the ‘objective’ imprint of their environs. Ian Burton and Robert Kates, among others, built on White’s approach and sought to identify different forms of ‘cognitive rationality’ specific to certain groups in certain hazardous locations (Burton et al. 1978). The presumption was that people’s perceptions of hazards – however inaccurate or distorted – could be rationally explained, leading to tailored policy solutions that might better protect them and their livelihoods. This kind of geographical research was important in United States and Canadian geography, with natural hazards researchers being heavily involved in public policy agendas for hazardous regions in both countries.

Cultural ecology Situated on the marchlands between cultural anthropology and cultural geography, this approach to society–nature study became

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prominent in the late 1960s – especially in American geography. Pioneered by Julian Steward, Andrew Vayda, Roy Rappaport, Marvin Harris and Clifford Geertz, it was a critique of anthropology’s mid-twentieth century ‘culturalism’ – wherein cultural habits were thought to be sui generis. Typically focused on land- and water-based communities in the global South, cultural ecologists sought out those aspects of cultural belief and practice that seemed to be ‘functional’ adaptations to local ecology. In this way they re-materialised culture to its biophysical base, without succumbing to environmental determinism. The typical cultural ecologist would undertake detailed, long-term fieldwork into environmental usage and modification in one locality, as well as everyday and ritualistic cultural practices. The result was a set of holistic studies in which the metaphor of ‘homeostasis’ – borrowed from systems theory – loomed large, and in which ‘culture’ and ‘ecology’ were regarded as co-dependent, mutually adjusted, relatively stable, and internally complex domains of process, relationship and event.

focus on homeostasis and the relative autonomy of different cultures were increasingly being rendered unrealistic by two things: first, the growing reach of state power at the national level; and second the internationalisation of commodity production, distribution and consumption. ‘Political ecology’ was thus tasked with understanding how local resource use was being affected by wider social forces, and the accent was on asymmetries of power between ordinary people and the various actors (e.g. national states and multinational companies) affecting those peoples’ lives. A new generation of researchers, especially in North America, were inspired to uncover the complex chain of connections tying local land and water use decisions by (say) peasant farmers to global shifts in commodity prices, trade agreements and so on. Political ecology was thus ‘political’ in that it was critical of the actors and processes that were destabilising local land use practices. For instance, land users who degraded their local resources were typically seen as relatively blameless victims making difficult decisions in highly constrained circumstances explained by ‘external drivers’ beyond their immediate control.

Political ecology Cultural ecology, for the most part, adopted a resolutely local focus and tended to treat cultural groups and their biophysical milieux in isolation from the national and global scales. But this began to change from the mid-1980s onwards. The reasons were presaged in cultural ecologist Barney Nietschmann’s study of the Miskito Indians of the Nicaraguan coast. A field-trip in the early 1970s made Nietschmann aware that his chosen field area was beginning to be drawn into national and global commodity markets and was losing some of its former independence (Nietschmann 1973). A decade later, Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield formalised this insight in the germinal books The Political Economy of Soil Erosion (Blaikie 1985) and Land Degradation and Society (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). For them, cultural ecology’s

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The geography of hazards vulnerability If political ecology radicalised cultural ecology, and expanded its analytical horizons, so too did a new approach to natural hazards geography from the mid-1980s onwards. The studies of White and fellow travellers tended, like cultural ecology, to bracket the local scale off from its wider geographical context. They also abstracted people’s perceptions of hazards and the process of cognition from any broader consideration of social relations and social identity. This began to change when Kenneth Hewitt – a former adherent to the White approach – edited Interpretations of Calamity (1983). A decade later, Ben Wisner and colleagues published the important book, At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and

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Hazards (1994). These texts had an international impact on Anglophone hazards geography. They suggested that ‘vulnerability’ to hazards was not simply a question of living in a naturally hazardous location: it was also a question of wealth, power, identity and social location. Drawing, like the political ecologists, on the radical ideas that flowered in the Western social sciences from the early 1970s onwards, Hewitt, Wisner and others argued that vulnerability was (i) variable in degree and kind within populations, and (ii) explained by the positions people occupied in regional or national social structures, and in world politics and economics more broadly. This kind of research directed policy makers’ attention away from peoples’ perceptions of hazards (with associated public education programmes), and from ‘technocratic’ policies like building flood walls to defend against storm surges. Instead, the attention was focused on how poverty and powerlessness are socially produced, and on how vulnerable communities can be better protected against the problems triggered when hazard events occur, like a tsunami. Protective policies should, the argument went, be focused as much on social welfare as on physical engineering solutions. Vulnerability was this seen as a social problem whose downsides were starkly exposed when natural hazards occurred.

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY AND THE ‘REDISCOVERY’ OF NATURE Regardless of the intellectual attractions of these four approaches to society–nature analysis, most Anglophone human and physical geographers have been happy to separate ‘social’ from ‘natural’ phenomena over the last 40 years. However, in parts of human geography this is no longer the case. Since the mid-1990s, an intellectually and politically diverse cohort of researchers have ‘brought nature back in’ to their inquiries, but in some unconventional ways. For illustrative purposes, I will make mention of three

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approaches. They share a common determination to ‘denaturalise’ that which we conventionally regard as ‘natural’, or else to challenge the idea that ‘nature’ calls the shots over society.

New natural resource geography ‘Old’ style natural resource geography was a fairly atheoretical enterprise, in which the researcher would seek to describe and explain the location and character of the industries based on coal, steel, oil and the like. The language used was, typically, that of ‘factors of production’ – such as the costs of labour, the weight or bulk of natural resources, and so on. For each industry, a different weight and mixture of factors would be used to explain the local, regional or international geography in question. In additional, the language of ‘finite’ and ‘renewable’ resources was used, along with terms like ‘carrying capacity’ – all of which pointed to supposed intrinsic qualities of resources. Since the early 1990s, this old style form of analysis has been eclipsed by a newer, theoretically conscious approach which places considerable emphasis on the social constitution of natural resource geographies. In other words, it downplays the ‘natural’ aspects of natural resources in the belief that these aspects are by no means central to explaining the geographies in question. It looks, instead, to the structure of the economic system in which ‘factors of production’ are defined and assume varying degrees of importance. One recent example is Mazan Labban’s (2008) Space, Oil and Capital. There are currently concerns that oil reserves will be exhausted by the mid-twenty first century, presaging a turn to a post-petrocapital way of life globally. Labban argues that oil scarcity is not absolute and that it is, in fact, a ‘normal’ part of the global oil industry over the last century. He explains the social creation of oil scarcity with reference to the way in which land-owners in oil states and big oil firms together insure against an over-supply

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of oil, which would reduce its price. He also shows how oil availability is relative to the technical means available to extract it from the ground, and to struggles between land owners and firms over right of access to oil fields. Labban’s Marxist approach thus removes the focus from the supposed ‘natural limits’ imposed on oil producers and consumers by oil itself. His approach, and that of geographers like Gavin Bridge, Scott Prudham, Karen Bakker and Morgan Robertson, directs our attention to how certain biophysical entities become resources, who has material access to them, under what social conditions and to what purposes.

Cultural studies of nature New resource geography has a strong focus on the way commodity production is organised in capitalist, class-divided societies. Coincident with its rise, many cultural and rural geographers preferred to look at ‘nature’ in all its aspects – genes, forests, gardens, rivers, wildlife and much more besides. They did so by inquiring into how supposedly ‘natural’ things were represented as natural, by who and with what effects. Like new resource geographers, these researchers sought to de-emphasise the physical properties of those things we call ‘natural’. Their focus on representation was motivated by the conviction that representations are never faithful ‘mirrors’ held up to the world. Using the theoretical resources of post-modern, post-structural and post-colonial theory, these geographers argued that representations of ‘nature’ – be they written or spoken, verbal or visual – are socially constructed and are often a mechanism for the expression of social power. In effect, these researchers turn geography’s earlier environmental determinism on its head. Let me offer one of many examples. In a now classic essay and related book, Canadian geographer Bruce Braun (1997, 2002) applied Jacques Derrida’s ideas to the topic of nature and wedded them to

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post-colonial theory. His empirical focus was the early-1990s clash between environmentalists and a commercial logging company over whether to fell an area of temperate rainforest in British Columbia called Clayoquot Sound. The former saw Clayoquot as one of the last remaining spaces of ‘pristine nature’, while the latter regarded it as a valuable economic resource that should be logged in a responsible way for the good of the Canadian economy and those communities dependent on forestry jobs. In a detailed analysis of both sides’ representations of Clayoquot, Braun shows how the region’s ‘realities’ were made to appear quite different depending who was doing the looking. There was a clash between representations that made Clayoquot appear wild, intricate, threatened and special on the one side, and those (on the other side) that made it appear as one more ‘resource zone’ to be rationally harvested by hi-tech logging firms. In both cases, the authors of the representations claimed to be depicting Clayoquot as it actually was. But Braun’s point was that these representations – which comprised books, pamphlets and newsletters – reflected the specific agendas of those promoting them. In other words, one could not adjudicate between them by testing their veracity against the non-representational actualities of Clayoquot’s old growth trees. Arresting though this insight was, Braun’s research contained a further surprise. Notwithstanding the differences in content and message between the environmentalists’ and forest company’s representations, Braun argued that they ultimately shared the same symbolic universe: a specifically AngloNorth American one that reflects the linguistic conventions and cultural assumptions of those colonists who spread through the United States and Canada from the seventeenth century onwards. He makes this point with reference to Clayoquot Sound’s small groups of remaining ‘native’ or indigenous peoples. These groups had, historically, lived a peripatetic existence and had used forest, river and shore for generations to meet their

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material and symbolic needs. Yet both the environmentalists and the logging company fighting over Clayoquot’s future assumed that the region was largely empty. This, Braun argued, constituted a geographical expression of a specifically Western belief that nature and society are two separate things. Clayoquot’s indigenous peoples, he concluded, were thus victims of symbolic violence, even in the supposedly post-colonial conditions of modern Canada. Their history and present day claims to control of Clayoquot simply did not register in the unthinking assumptions made by the descendents of the original European colonisers.

Post-natural, post-social geographies A third ‘denaturalising’ approach to ‘nature’ is more intellectually radical than the previous two – so much so that it’s possibly wrong of me to claim it as part of ‘human geography’ because it questions the human–physical dichotomy that largely organises academic geography today. This third approach rejects the ontological distinction between society and nature that underpins not just new natural resource geographies and cultural studies of nature, but much of geography past and present, including all the work reviewed earlier in this chapter. It has roots in continental European philosophy and STS (science and technology studies): thinkers like Isabelle Stengers, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour have strongly influenced several erstwhile ‘human’ geographers since the mid-1990s. The result is two overlapping strands of research, both prevalent in British geography: namely, ‘hybrid geographies’ (closely associated with Sarah Whatmore’s 2002 book of that name) and ‘non-representational geographies’ (closely associated with Nigel Thrift’s 2007 Non-representational Theory). Since I don’t have the space to explore their subtle differences, I will simply describe their commonalities.

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Hybrid and non-representational perspectives maintain that dividing the world into ‘social’ and ‘natural’ entities simplifies reality to the point of misrepresenting it. The suggestion is that there is no neat, Maginot Line that divides the world into two qualitatively different orders that somehow ‘come into contact’ with each other in various ways in different contexts. Instead, Whatmore, Thrift and like-minded geographers insist that we inhabit one reality not two, and that supposedly ‘natural’ things and ‘social’ things cannot be separated if we are to understand their character and effects. They further suggest that human engagements with the world far exceed acts of ‘representation’: they also involve touch, smell, hearing and physical interaction. We are multi-sensual actors, the argument goes, and what we are does not precede our relationships with all manner of other entities. To flesh out these arguments, there have been numerous recent studies of the almost endless ways in which so-called ‘social’ and ‘natural’ things are so entangled as to variously co-constitute, stabilise or alter one another (depending on the case). These studies are highly attentive to the fine details of different situations, and amount to a cognitive, moral and aesthetic call to attend to what the society–nature dualism has so long hidden from view. For example, in some of her work on wildlife conservation, Sarah Whatmore has argued that the seemingly unproblematic category ‘elephant’ needs to be called into question. Becoming an ‘elephant’ is, Whatmore and Lorraine Thorne (2000) show, a process that is contingent on the specific network of actors, institutions and physical environs in which individual pachyderms exist. There is thus, they argue, a notable set of differences between zoo elephants and ‘wild’ elephants, even though they are conventionally regarded as belonging to a single species possessed of stable and singular characteristics common to any creature so-named. Conservationists, they imply, could usefully pay more attention to the differentiated character of that which

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they’re seeking to conserve, and to the varied networks through which ‘becoming an elephant’ is achieved. To conserve ‘nature’ one needs to understand that it is not a discrete object or space to be protected, but a whole set of differentiated entities bound into complex relationship that might be very extensive in space and time. This obliges us to rethink both what is being ‘conserved’ and how in all nature conservation policies (see also Hinchliffe 2008).

THE NATURE OF CONTEMPORARY PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY Before trying to evaluate the intellectual change and diversity recounted in the previous pages, let me end this review with some observations about physical geography, whose various branches examine aspects of the ‘nature’ that many human geographers are now apt to call into question. As I said earlier, physical geography became topically separated from its human counterpart after 1945, though both fields initially sought to maintain a common intellectual approach – at least up until the early 1970s. Since then, the approaches have increasingly diverged, and physical geography’s five main sub-fields (geomorphology, biogeography, climatology, hydrology and quaternary environmental change) today have few if any real commonalities with their human geography equivalents. To be specific, most physical geographers regard their field as a ‘science’, a term that relatively few human geographers would use as a self-descriptor anymore (unlike 30 years ago). Typically, the former see themselves in the business of producing ‘objective’ and ‘truthful’ knowledge of a biophysical world existing ‘out there’, whose properties can be comprehended by asking appropriate questions, by using appropriate field, laboratory and computer methods, and by drawing wellevidenced, verifiable, falsifiable and revisable conclusions. For the most part, physical geographers take ‘nature’ as an ontological

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given: it is presumed to be different in kind from ‘society’, and to amenable to value-free analysis. In short, the majority of physical geographers are ontologically realist about ‘nature’ and epistemically realist about the knowledge they collectively produce. In this respect, their outlook is similar to that of most earth and laboratory scientists, and roughly fits the public stereotype of ‘people in white coats’ (or wellington boots in physical geography’s case!). Clearly, this outlook is a far cry from the second and third perspectives summarised in the previous section, which are, respectively, epistemically anti-realist and ontologically anti-dualist. Even so, there have been recent attempts to reunite physical and human geography around the ‘society–nature question’, and I will say more about these in the next section. At the same time, there are signs that physical geography’s separate branches are looking for greater common ground. This, in part, is a response to anthropogenic global environmental change. A new cross-disciplinary initiative called ‘earth system science’, in which physical geographers have played their part, is an attempt to understand the complex dynamics of interlinked environmental subsystems. In some ways, it is a modern version of Mary Somerville’s nineteenth-century conception of what physical geography ought to be. As the name suggests, earth systems science utilises a meta-vocabulary of concepts derived from systems theory and its more recent descendent ‘complexity theory’ (which, unlike systems theory, accents instability and surprise not order and control). It is the sort of ‘big tent’ approach that would make most contemporary human geographers intellectually nervous. This is because it aims to paint a ‘total picture’ of the world by way of a family of similar concepts, techniques and methods.

EVALUATIONS I have covered a lot of ground in this chapter. To talk about ‘society–nature’ relations in

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geography is, in effect, to talk about the whole discipline, past and present – this much we have seen. We’ve also seen how little agreement there is among geographers about such fundamental questions as: What is nature? What aspects of it should one study? Should one study society and nature separately? Does society determine nature, or vice versa? How should one investigate society, nature or the two together? And so on. The varied answers to these questions define the fault-lines of academic geography as they have emerged over the last century or so. Why have these many fault lines appeared? The answer is simple enough. The sheer ambition of the original ‘geographical experiment’ and the fact that geography’s subject matter is shared with so many adjacent disciplines always held out the potential for intellectual fragmentation. Geographers have taken so much inspiration from such a range of cognate subjects that it was almost inevitable that diversity would, in the end, be its signature characteristic. How are we to evaluate the evident heterogeneity of geographers’ perspectives on the society–nature relationship? This is clearly a normative question because it’s asking us to consider whether the internal organisation of Anglophone geography is all that it could and should be. For example, in the introduction to this chapter I made mention of the ‘anthropocene’ and the threats (and, we should add, opportunities) posed by everything from climate change to new technologies of genetic manipulation. Some see these challenges as a reason to reunify geography intellectually, not least because significant amounts of public and private research money will this century be made available to support the study of ‘coupled human–environment systems’. Echoing the ‘joined-up’ agenda of earth systems science, some have talked of an even more ambitious ‘sustainability science’ (Kates et al. 2001) geared to a holistic analysis of multi-scalar society–environment relationships. A reunified geography could, some believe, occupy an important place in such a transdisciplinary enterprise. From this

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perspective, geography should return to its roots – but in a thoroughly contemporary way – and rediscover some of the high ambition of Mackinder, Ratzel and others. At the very least, it is argued, this would secure the discipline’s immediate future by demonstrating its wider relevance to the societies whose tax revenues support it. If geography reunified around the study of society–nature relations (which, in effect, means that environmental geography grows prodigiously while ‘pure’ human and physical geography shrink), it would likely entail a sharp reduction of the discipline’s current intellectual diversity. For those who think the diversity has gone too far, amounting to a lack of overall coherence or purpose, such a reduction is clearly to be welcomed. Here diversity equals fragmentation in a pejorative sense. But for others, it would recall the old days when a few major ‘paradigms’ dominated the imaginations of practising geographers. Here, diversity equals plurality in a positive sense. If diversity is seen as ‘good’ then the next question is: should it continue to arise ‘spontaneously’ or be more purposefully ‘managed’ looking ahead (and to what ends)? If it is seen as ‘bad’ then the next question becomes: Which approaches do we foster at the expense of others, and how? The answer to these and related questions ultimately depends on a series of others. For example: What is research for? Whose ‘interests’ should it serve, if anybody’s? What, if anything, do geographers do that’s ‘special’ compared to other subjects? These are weighty questions that speak to the role of academic knowledge, academic disciplines, universities and other research institutions in the early twenty-first century. They are far too meaty for me to address here. Therefore, I want to end with a simple caution. In my view, we need to avoid two fallacies about the research reviewed in this chapter. The first is that what is newest is necessarily best (that is to say, it amounts to ‘progress’ over previous approaches). The second, by contrast, is that the present-day intellectual diversity of geography – whatever its other virtues – is a sure

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sign that the aspirations of the discipline’s founding figures have been progressively and fatally betrayed. Let me explain. The first fallacy presumes that academic knowledge improves logically over time, through trial and error, such that earlier insights are finessed, reconfigured or rejected. It further presumes epistemic commensurability between older and newer approaches, such that they are ‘speaking the same language’ and thus talking about ‘the same world’. The second fallacy, by contrast, reverses the ‘progress’ fallacy. It desocialises and dehistoricises academic knowledge and presumes that those who created geography hold a monopoly on its future trajectory – as if knowledge does not and should not change according to the wider socio-economic and political contexts in which it is produced. In my view – and here I agree with those who have provided ‘contextual histories’ of geography, such as Felix Driver (2000) – academic knowledge is never produced in a social vacuum and is always about far more than the world it ostensibly represents epistemically. We need, that is, to see different strands of geographical research of the sort reviewed here as arising from, and seeking to shape, the wider societal environment. As part two of this Handbook shows, this environment also has a geography, such that knowledge has sites of production and routes of social circulation. This perspective on knowledge is broadly consistent with the philosophical approach known as ‘pragmatism’. Developed by John Dewey and William James a century ago, and revived by the recently deceased American philosopher Richard Rorty, pragmatists do not concern themselves with whether any given body of knowledge is intrinsically ‘true’ or ‘false’, ‘fact’ or ‘fiction’, ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Instead, they inquire into the goals of knowledge-producers and the actual effects of their discourses. In its difference forms and genres, knowledge is thus seen as ‘performative’ in a range of ways and to varying degrees. For instance, pragmatists would argue that ‘scientific’ knowledge is not inherently more ‘objective’

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than science-fiction writing. Instead, they would argue that – for historically contingent reasons – ‘objectivity’ is the attribute that self-declared ‘scientists’ have given to the knowledge they produce. This kind of knowledge is especially good at enabling us to manipulate our material environment (and our own bodies) for certain ends. It stabilises our beliefs about certain things so we can use, alter or avoid them. The label ‘objective’ allows this knowledge to gain an often farreaching degree of societal credibility, and therefore considerable power. Seen in a pragmatist light, the variety of intellectual perspectives surveyed in this chapter are each purposeful interventions in the world, not simply alternative ‘representations’ of it. They cannot, therefore, be compared and contrasted according to some supposedly timeless, universal benchmark like ‘truth’, as if material reality provides us with a means of discerning ‘better’ and ‘worse’ perspectives in some absolute sense. Instead, they might each be seen as epistemic projects arising from rather different epistemic communities who co-exist in geography. Each community – using its own repertoire of logic, method, evidence and rhetoric – is seeking to persuade us that its insights are credible and in some way valuable or useful. If this pragmatist perspective holds good, then two things follow. First, the only way to decide which epistemic communities should prosper in a discipline like geography is to stage an open debate about what types of knowledge are preferable and why – which will inevitably be a debate about politics, because even academic knowledge is never ‘above the fray’ but always implicated in questions of social values and goals. We cannot look outside our knowledge practices for answers to the question ‘Which ones are valid and valuable?’. Second, for such a debate to be fair and meaningful, it is important that the various epistemic communities extant at any given moment in time have some real understanding of each other. My own view is that geographers could do better here. When it comes to the research surveyed

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in this chapter, superficial understanding and stereotypes abound: too many of us are so esconced in our epistemic communities that we don’t really understand what other society–nature geographers are doing. We thus need to foster an ethic of what Sheppard and Plummer (2007) call ‘engaged pluralism’. Without this, one can analogise geography to a multi-cultural nation state which is less a ‘melting pot’ and more a collection of noncommunicating island communities. If we are to collectively evaluate our epistemic diversity we must first ensure we actually understand it.

CONCLUSION As is plain to see, the topic of ‘nature and society’ tells us a great deal about what academic geography was, what it now is, and what it might be in the future. In my opinion, geography is one of the most interesting and exciting disciplines in which to research the society–nature nexus. With so much philosophical, theoretical, methodological and topic diversity on offer, there is considerable room for geographers to exercise their academic freedom and to make creative contributions out of the many intellectual resources at their disposal. However, as I have intimated, not everyone sees it this way. If I were to write this chapter in 20 years time, I may well have a very different story to tell. After all, if my survey holds any lessons at all, it is that intellectual change is the only constant in geographer’s attempts to make sense of society–nature relations.

REFERENCES Blaikie, P. (1985) The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries. London: Longman. Blaikie, P. and Brookfield, H. (1987) Land Degradation and Society. London: Methuen.

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Braun, B. (1997) ‘Buried epistemologies’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87: 3–31. Braun, B. (2002) The Intemperate Rainforest. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Burton, I., Kates, R. and White, G. (eds) (1978) The Environment as Hazard. New York: Oxford University Press. Castree, N. (2005) Nature. London and New York: Routledge. Darwin, C. (1859) The Origin of Species. London: John Murray. Driver, F. (2000) Geography Militant. Oxford: Blackwell. Hewitt, K. (1983) Interpretations of Calamity. London: Unwin Hyman. Hinchliffe, S. (2008) ‘Reconstituting nature conservation’, Geoforum, 39: 88–97. Kates, R. et al. (2001) ‘Sustainability science’, Science, 292: 641–642. Keynes, J. M. (1936) General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. Labban, M. (2008) Space, Oil and Capital. New York: Routledge. Livingstone, D. (1992) The Geographical Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. Mackinder, H. (1887) ‘On the scope and methods of geography’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, 9: 141–160. Marsh, G. P. (1864/1965) Man and Nature. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Nietschmann, B. (1973) Between Land and Water. New York: Seminar Press. Sauer, C. (1925/1963) The Morphology of Landscape, reprinted in J. Leighley (ed.) Land and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 315–350. Sheppard, E. and Plummer, P. (2007) ‘Towards engaged pluralism in geography’, Environment and Planning A, 39: 2545–2548. Somerville, M. (1849) Physical Geography. London: John Murray. Thomas, W. L. (ed.) (1956) Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Thrift, N. (2007) Non-representational Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Various (2008) ‘Special issue on “Pragmatism and geography”’, Geoforum, 39: 1527–1632. Whatmore, S. (2002) Hybrid Geographies. London: Sage. Whatmore, S. and Thorne, L. (2000) ‘Elephants on the move: spatial formations of wildlife exchange’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18: 185–203.

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22 Landscape John Wylie

INTRODUCTION ‘Vernacular’ landscapes The landscape: what is it? In due course this chapter will give one specialist answer to this question, by focusing upon how landscape has been defined and used by human geographers. However, to contextualise this, and to offer a particular point of entry for readers, I’d like to begin with some more general, expansive observations. From the reading I’ve done, and from the many conversations about landscape I’ve had over the years, with colleagues from geography and other disciplines, with cohorts of geography students, and, importantly also, with friends, family and various passing strangers, I’ve come to the conclusion (at least for now) that ‘landscape’ is usually and most often understood in three different ways. I am conscious that these may seem obvious and basic to many readers, however as the chapter progresses the point in choosing to start in this way should become clear. First and most basically, many people seem to have a sense that landscape comprises the world around them, and especially the outdoor world. ‘The landscape? It’s [with

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an expansive, circling hand gesture] all this. The world around us’. Two important things to note about this ‘world around us’ understanding is that landscape is defined in terms of a world or environment – built or natural – that is (a) distinctively external, and which is (b) made of material, visible, tangible, really-existing things: roads, houses, rivers, hills, valleys. The landscape is the terrain, the topography, and the features visible within it. The landscape is thus out there, all around us, and it is real, in a prosaic, unremarkable way that chimes with our everyday Western sense of an objective external world whose existence we can take for granted (it doesn’t disappear when we stop looking at it; it will still be there, more or less the same, every morning). Hence from this broad equation of landscape and everyday visible reality we can move onto sub-divisions and ‘types’: urban landscapes, mountainous landscapes. And hence also, in terms of terrain, we can understand some common metaphorical usages such as ‘the political landscape’ or ‘the economic landscape’. In this definition, then, landscape is an unproblematic and given external world; it is our surroundings. A second common understanding of landscape is quite different. This is landscape as

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the visual depiction of a scene or view. This is landscape painting, landscape photography and so on. Many are familiar with the idea that ‘a landscape’ is a picture, most commonly of rural or natural scenery. Or familiar even with the idea that ‘landscape’ is a particular genre of art. Type ‘landscape’ into Google Images and you will straightaway see myriad examples of the sort of rural/natural/ pictorial landscapes to which I am referring here. But lest this seem too rarefied, presuming a familiarity with the major figures and themes of landscape art as they might be showcased in a large metropolitan gallery, it is important to note that the pictorial understanding of landscape can equally be found in many parts of daily life. Examples of landscape art can be found in many homes in the form of family heirlooms or vacation purchases – or landscapes painted by friends and family members, because landscape painting remains a popular pastime. Scattered elsewhere throughout the everyday, holiday postcards, purchased and consumed in their millions, very commonly deploy the formats and conventions of landscape art. Similarly, nearly all digital cameras today offer the user a ‘landscape’ shooting option, usually indicated by a little ideogram of stylised mountain peaks. Word-processing programmes will often offer a choice of portrait and landscape page settings. The understanding of landscape as a pictorial format, as a framework through which the world is pictured and represented, is one that percolates into and through many routine and unremarked elements of daily life. A third and final common response to a question on the lines of ‘What does ‘landscape’ mean to you?’ opens up another set of values and associations. The emphasis here is on design and the practice of landscape gardening and architecture. For some, for example, direct experience of ‘landscape’ may have involved hiring a landscape gardening firm to lay a new lawn or patio. Many others will have witnessed the grounds and spaces of their local parks, schools, streets and workplaces being landscaped; that is, re-laid,

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renewed, planted, improved and so on, with an eye above all to greater amenity and to particular notions of visual aesthetic appeal. Here, therefore, we see landscape in verb form: ‘to landscape’ is to modify and reshape the surface of the earth. The wider sense, perhaps – and perhaps rather dormant, but still just discernable here – is of landscape as a practice of inhabitation. Landscape connotes a sense of how we live amid the earth, in tandem with it. Beyond the particular confines of landscape gardening and landscape planning, for example, landscape may generally conjure up images of the sorts of practices often held commensurate today in the West with the ‘great outdoors’: walking and cycling in the countryside, painting and photographing. Alongside gardening, these are the practices perhaps most commonly associated with the term ‘landscape’, and this is one way in which the concept of landscape is in turn implicated within practices of living, within ways of life.

‘Landscape’ in the dictionaries One notable thing about the three vernacular or ‘lay’ understandings of landscape discussed above is the extent to which they map onto current dictionary definitions of landscape. Perhaps I am forcing the issue a little, but I would argue there is strong congruence here. Furthermore, while commencing a chapter such as this by considering a dictionary definition is something of a cliché, in the case of landscape the exercise pays dividends. This is because the dictionary serves to highlight straightaway a precise ambiguity at the heart of the concept. So, contemporary English dictionaries commonly define landscape in something like the following terms: ‘that portion of land or scenery which the eye can view at once’. Most then go on to note that the term landscape may refer to a picture or image of the land, as well as the land itself. There is also usually an ancillary reference to the verbal

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form, ‘to landscape’ – in other words to physically shape, modify and maybe even improve the land (cognate with the third vernacular ‘landscaping’ understanding just mentioned above). This definition can be parsed in some detail. First there is a clear suggestion that, as a ‘portion of land’, landscape belongs to an external, objectively real world. Landscapes are defined as real; in other words, they are ‘our surroundings, the world around us’, as previously discussed. Secondly, however, the dictionaries state that a landscape is ‘scenery’ – something viewed by an eye; that is, by one, individual person. A landscape is thus not just the land itself, but the land as seen from a particular point of view or perspective (so chiming with the second vernacular notion of landscape-as-picture mentioned above). Landscape is both the phenomena itself and our perception of it. Thus while being linked in one way to what are usually called objective facts, to the real world ‘out there’, landscape is also to be found in the eye of the beholder, and more widely in the realms of human perception and imagination. What I would wish to highlight in the dictionary definition of landscape is this precise ravelling-together of two elements often otherwise held distinct from each other. On the one hand we have landscape as a ‘portion of land’; on the other, landscape is registered in terms of a ‘viewing eye’. This is crucial, I would argue, because it is precisely this imputed co-mingling of the ‘land itself’ and our perception of it, however innocuous it might seem, that has both haunted and stimulated the work of several generations of landscape geographers. Defined thus, landscape is articulated in complex fashion; it shuttles between objective fact and subjective perception, between material substance and symbolic form, between the tangible and the intangible, reality and appearance. Putting this another way, the landscape concept hinges, right from the start, between outer worlds (the material, external world) and inner worlds (the internal world of human meaning, symbolism and imagination).

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The roots of landscape’s essential ambiguity can also be further traced etymologically. The word itself has northern European and Germanic origins. As Kenneth Olwig (2002) discusses, in an ambitious recent attempt to re-sculpt the contours of the concept, landscape first appears historically as a term which described a particular substantive nexus of (1) a people, (2) the lands they inhabited and (3) the laws and customs through which they governed themselves. Parcelled together these constituted a landscape – a certain type of legal, material and political – cultural entity, one common, Olwig argues, in the feudal patchwork of medieval northern Europe. Through time, however, the German term ländschaft came to be tied much more closely to the land itself, to the notion of objective external space, and to words like ‘area’ and ‘region’. In contrast the Dutch equivalent, landschap, came to possess a more strongly visual and artistic connotation, it is much closer to the idea of the land as perceived, or a picture of the land. This most likely reflects the gradual diffusion, northward from Italy, of the genre of ‘landscape art’, a genre grounded (as will be discussed) in perspectival representational techniques, and substantively concerned with picturing (and so popularising) rural and natural scenes. The landscape genre flourished and evolved in seventeenth-century Holland, and, as Simon Schama (1995) writes, it is probably from that cultural source that the word ‘landscape’, with its complex inheritance of meanings already irrevocably scored across materiality and perception, land and gaze, came to enter common English usage by the eighteenth century.

Landscape in geography Let me turn quickly inward at this point, to the question of how the term landscape has been used within geography. Landscape, like its confreres, space, place, region and area, can be understood firstly as a core organising

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lens and badge of disciplinary identification for cohorts of human geographers. The term has long been a cardinal trope of geography, a key prism through which both human and physical worlds have been made visible and apprehended. Indeed at times in the past (though not at present) the term ‘landscape’ has arguably been synonymous with human geographical study in particular, such that human geography has been defined per se as the study of landscapes. Yet the history of the landscape concept within geography is a vexed one. Landscape’s meaning and scope has changed quite radically over time, and has differed also from place to place and according to institutional context. The specific aim of this chapter from this point forward is thus to outline significant phases in landscape’s intellectual histories within the discipline of geography. The chapter will discuss, in roughly chronological order, three major geographical understandings of landscape: (1) landscape as material record; (2) landscape as way of seeing and (3) landscape as dwelling. The quick historical and definitional sketches given above hopefully help to cement the notion that landscape is an inherently ambivalent and multiple concept. The remainder of this chapter can be thought of as an extended discussion of the ways in which landscape geographers in particular have negotiated this fact. What the discussion reveals is that for the most part different approaches have tended to emphasise one particular side of the landscape coin; that is, either the material/ objective side or the perceptual/symbolic side. And over the past 30 years, within UK-based geography in particular, an emphasis upon the discursive and symbolic aspects of landscape has been quite dominant. Nevertheless, as we shall also see, questions around materiality and perception have continued to haunt landscape geographies. I will conclude and summarise by returning, in a different register, and in the light of the chapter’s discussions, to the ‘vernacular’ understandings discussed in section ‘Vernacular’ landscapes’.

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A further warning in advance is necessary: within the constraints of a single short chapter on this subject there is necessarily a large degree of compression and omission – an important element of which is my restriction here to mostly Anglo-American sources and traditions. The focus is also of necessity quite squarely upon landscape in geography, supplemented by key insights from work in the visual arts, cultural anthropology and archaeology. An obvious omission therefore is the broad swathe of work on landscape planning, design and evaluation (this field is represented richly in the journal Landscape Research). The readings supplied at the end of the chapter are, however, an obvious starting point for further study, and readers seeking a fuller examination of the histories of the landscape concept may also wish to consult my book-length treatment of this topic (Wylie 2007).

LANDSCAPE AS MATERIAL RECORD For much of the twentieth century, geographers, archaeologists and landscape historians broadly defined landscape as a material record of human activity. In doing so, they relied upon, and strongly emphasised, a notion of landscape as a tangible externality – landscape, in fact, as the objective world ‘out there’. However, and crucially, this does not mean that ‘landscape’ was equated with an untouched, non-human ‘nature’. Instead, landscape-as-material-record was most commonly spoken of in terms of an interacting meshwork of human and natural forces, in which human cultures across the globe were understood in terms of their adaptation both to and of the natural environment. This understanding of landscape as a dynamic milieu in which the human and the natural both shape and are shaped by each other is perhaps most strongly presented in a classic monograph, The Morphology of Landscape (1963 [1925]), by the American geographer

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Carl Sauer. For Sauer, far from being synonymous with the natural world, landscape was always already cultural landscape, as defined in the following oft-cited statement: ‘The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result’ (1963: 343). The work of Sauer and the ‘Berkeley School’ – comprising several generations of his colleagues and graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley – exercised a strong influence upon much of American human geography from the 1920s to the 1970s, and remains an important legacy today. With this fact in mind, it is worth delineating several elements of this ‘cultural landscape’ approach. First a key feature of the argument presented in Sauer’s Morphology of Landscape is its stress upon the active role of human culture in shaping the natural world. To put this in Sauer’s own terms, the task was to describe the morphology – that is, the material shape, form and structure – of a given landscape, and in so doing to reveal the characteristics, trace, distribution and effectivity of the human cultures that had inhabited and moulded it. Leaving for a later section issues around the definition of the term ‘culture’ here, Sauer’s stress upon people’s ability to not only adapt to but to shape and change their natural, physical environment arose in part from a desire to challenge forms of environmental determinism, and promulgate instead a human geography of how different landscapes come into being via both human and physical processes, and thence to trace the pathways of active, rather than merely reactive, human cultures through landscape. A second key feature of Sauer’s approach was the very high status accorded to the term ‘landscape’ itself: [T]he term ‘landscape’ is proposed to designate the unit concept of geography, to characterise the peculiarly geographic association of facts … Landscape is the English equivalent of the term German geographers are using largely, and strictly

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has the same meaning: a land shape, in which the process of shaping is by no means thought of as simply physical. It may be defined, therefore, as an area made up of a distinct association of forms, both physical and cultural. Sauer 1963: 321.

This citation highlights Sauer concern for the landscape concept per se, seeking here for instance to establish it as core object and medium of geographical inquiry. Usually, landscape is simply one of the things studied by geographers, or is a term used in technical or specialist senses by geographers and others. But for Sauer it takes on an expanded, holistic role. The landscape is geography. Geographers study landscapes. And ‘landscape’ further serves as a general totem for a form of geographical possibilism stressing the active, land-shaping and land-responsive character of the earth’s human inhabitants (analogous here to the concept of pays in the work of the early twentieth-century French geographer Vidal de la Blache). A third and final notable element of the Sauerian approach to landscape is methodological. Precisely because it was a ‘section of reality’, a plaintively material thing, the cultural landscape made empirical, first-hand fieldwork imperative. And because it was a record of human activities, the analysis of landscape was necessarily a deeply historical work of excavation and reconstruction. For Sauer, fieldwork – preferably on foot, with all senses alert, and as part of a group containing both experts and novices – defined both geographers and the landscapes they studied: Geography is first of all knowledge gained by observation … In other words the principal training of the geographer should come, wherever possible, by doing field work. The student and the leader are in running exchange of questions and promptings supplied from the changing scene, engaged in a peripatetic form of dialogue about qualities of and in the landscape … Being afoot, sleeping out, sitting about camp in the evening, seeing the land in all its seasons are proper ways to intensify the experience, of developing impression into larger appreciation and judgement. Sauer 1963: 400.

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In placing this emphasis upon fieldwork and historical–morphological analysis Sauer’s work arguably worked to align landscape geography in the United States very much with the field sciences, with archaeology and biogeography especially, rather than with the then-emergent social sciences such as sociology and psychology (even though these were similarly ‘ecological’ in tenor and approach at this time). Similarly in the mid-twentieth-century UK, the work of the landscape historian W.G. Hoskins (in particular his 1954 landmark text, The Making of the English Landscape) advocated a field-based and observational ethos as the cornerstone of a landscape analysis geared towards historical reconstruction. In this UK context, such an analysis was pursued less through ‘cultural geography’ and more through the linked domains of landscape history and landscape archaeology, and it is important here more broadly to recognise that the term ‘landscape’ has historically been less central to geography in the UK than in North America. This is reflected, for example, in the comparatively weak contemporary linkages between cultural geography, landscape history and archaeology. However, to situate these comments more broadly, academic work on landscape in the UK (and particularly England) throughout the mid-twentieth century was divided along modernist and anti-modernist lines. As the work of David Matless (1998, 1993) discusses, an influential ‘modern’ generation, including the regional surveyor Patrick Geddes, the planner Patrick Abercrombie and the geographer Dudley Stamp, were wedded to a discourse of improvement in which ‘the landscape’ was understood as an object of technological transformation and rationally planned change. On the other hand, an anti-modern sensibility, as expressed by Hoskins, came strongly to the fore following World War II, and here landscape is most vividly pictured as a history and heritage threatened (rather than improved by) modern technology and

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society. It can be argued that Hoskins’ vision in some ways won this ideological battle, such that up until the present day, in both popular and policy imaginations, ‘landscape’ in the UK is commonly associated with a natural, rural and national heritage in need of vigilant preservation and protection. Within UK academia, one legacy of these debates has been a fragmentation of the study of landscape among various specialisms, partly coming to rest in ‘town and country planning’, partly abiding in landscape archaeology and history (e.g. see Muir 1998). To summarise and draw together these observations, the understanding of landscape bequeathed by figures such as Sauer and Hoskins is one in which stress is laid upon an empirical, field-based approach to a landscape conceived as an external, material and historical record of human activity. And for the most part, this landscape is understood as predominantly rural and agrarian. The Sauerian legacy in particular however is multi-faceted and contested. While its assumptions have been extensively critiqued by later cultural geographers (as the next section will detail), it nevertheless abides within the still-very-acute sense, especially in the United States, that landscape analysis involves the historical excavation of everyday material spaces – town squares, residential suburbs, agricultural systems – even if such excavation has become politically charged and informed by contemporary critical agendas. It can also be argued that this legacy percolates into and through more humanistic analyses of landscape’s lived and symbolic meanings, especially via the work of Sauer’s near-contemporary and occasional colleague J.B. Jackson [see Meinig 1979, and more recent re-articulations of a Jacksonian, humanistic sensibility in Adams et al. (2001) Wilson and Groth (2003) and Cresswell (2003)]. Thus, a conception of landscape as material record may segue into an ongoing geographical concern for the everyday worlds of human living.

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LANDSCAPE AS A WAY OF SEEING The study of landscape in human geography was transformed in the 1980s by the advent of a series of new approaches that drew upon the arts and humanities rather than the field sciences. A crucial element of this transformation was a re-definition of landscape as an artistic, pictorial and representational term: landscape as landscape art, primarily, rather than landscape as external, material, everyday world. In tandem with this re-definition, the ‘new cultural geographies’ of the 1980s and 1990s advanced a cultural politics of landscape markedly different in aim and scope from previous understandings of culture. In turning to artistic, pictorial and representational registers, landscape was thus re-defined as a way of seeing the world (see especially Berger 1972; Cosgrove 1985, 2008). In order to understand this phrasing, it is important firstly to appreciate that it is the seeing rather than the seen that is foregrounded here. Landscape as a way of seeing thus foregrounds the question of how we look, rather than what we see. And, importantly, it is predicated upon the understanding that how we look is more a cultural than a biological matter – we see the world from particular cultural perspectives, the ones into which we have been educated and socialised. Studying landscape thus involves thinking about how our way of looking at the world is laden with particular cultural values, attitudes, ideologies and expectations. The cultural beliefs and values which inform practices of seeing, envisioning, picturing and representing thus become the core object of study for landscape geographies. To an extent, this understanding of landscape rests upon a specific narrative concerning the origins of this way of seeing. This narrative is related in a series of influential papers and books by the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove (especially Cosgrove 1998 [1984], 1985). Cosgrove locates the origins of

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landscape in the invention, in fifteenth-century northern Italy, of linear perspective – an artistic technique which enables the ‘realistic’ representation of three-dimensional space upon the flat two-dimensional surface of the painter’s canvas. Linear perspective, which organises the entire space of a picture around a vanishing point on the horizon, is the underlying geometric spine that allows the hills, fields, buildings and people depicted in a work of landscape art to stand upright, fully fleshed and visually rendered in a plausible, coherent and convincing fashion. Cosgrove’s broader focus is upon the cultural–historical implications of perspective, and, by extension, landscape, as a ‘way of seeing’ the world. If by the term ‘landscape’ we refer to artistic representations constructed on the basis of perspective, then from the start, Cosgrove argues, landscape is suffused by connotations of authority, control and ownership. Noting that perspective ‘was regarded as the discovery of the inherent properties of space itself’ (1985: 51), he suggests that by implication, [l]andscape is thus a way of seeing, a composition and structuring of the world so that it may be appropriated by a detached individual spectator to whom an illusion of order and control is offered through the composition of space according to the certainties of geometry. 1985: 55.

In associating landscape with notions of order, control and authority, Cosgrove, and in turn a subsequent generation of cultural geographers, were concerned above all to specify and critique the forms of power encoded within and sustained by cultural products such as landscape art. In terms of its understanding of culture, ‘new’ cultural geography therefore breaks quite sharply from the Sauerian tradition. This ‘cultural turn’ was indeed initially phrased as a critique of the material definition of culture (and thence of landscape) deployed by Sauer and the Berkeley School. As was noted above, North American cultural geography was historically angled towards the field sciences. Thus it was primarily interested in

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visible, material ‘evidence’ of culture in the landscape – in the type and spatial distribution of built forms and artefacts – and not with the ‘inner workings’ of culture in terms of shared cultural beliefs, rituals, ideologies, values, attitudes and so on. In other words, and rather paradoxically, Sauerian cultural geography lacked any real understanding or definition of culture, beyond a concept of ‘superorganicism’, in which culture was understood as an entity independent of individual humans. The consequences for Sauerian cultural geography, as James Duncan (1980) named and elaborated them, were manifold and pernicious. First, the central concept, culture, was placed in abeyance as an unproblematic, given force, and was therefore not subjected to further theoretical scrutiny. Secondly, individuals were rendered passive and homogenous; becoming merely the secondary bearers of cultural habits and styles and the tokens of cultural traits. Finally, a totalising and determinist concept of culture precludes in advance any critical consideration of issues of difference and conflict. Thus the superorganic understanding of culture ‘impedes explanation by masking many problematic social, economic and political relationships’ (Duncan 1980: 198). Pursuing a similar line of argument, the British cultural geographer Peter Jackson (1989: 18) pointed out that by ‘basing explanations in the transcendental realm of a supraindividual culture, [Sauerian] cultural geographers have often failed to address the wider social context in which cultures are constituted and expressed’. In other words, issues of social difference, social stratification, power, inequality and exclusion were inadequately conceptualised and addressed within this ‘old’ cultural geography. Therefore, what new cultural geographers such as Jackson and Duncan highlighted was a comparative lack of a critical engagement with political and ideological issues within this form of landscape study. It was precisely such questions of ideology and politics that Cosgrove sought to place

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centre-stage in defining landscape as a ‘way of seeing’ the world. In the plainest possible sense, if, through perspective, ‘visually, space is rendered the property of the individual detached observer’ (Cosgrove 1985: 49) it thus follows, for Cosgrove, that the landscape way of seeing involves ‘control and domination over space as an absolute, objective entity; its transformation into the property of the individual or the state’ (Cosgrove 1985: 46). Landscape is thus a ‘way of seeing’ complicit with the needs and purposes of an elite, patrician group of capitalist property owners. In a generic sense, therefore, One of the consistent purposes of landscape painting has been to present an image of order and proportioned control … there is an inherent conservatism in the landscape idea, in its celebration of property and of an unchanging status quo, in its suppression of tensions between groups in the landscape. Cosgrove 1985: 58 (original emphasis).

Here, therefore, rather than being an empirical ‘material record’ of human cultural activity, landscape is understood as the vehicle of vested interests and regimes of power, and the task of the critical cultural geographer is to interrogate such regimes. Critical interrogation of landscape representations – in art, literature, photography and cartography – is therefore a leitmotif of much Anglo-American geographical landscape writing through the 1990s and up to the present day. For instance, the metaphor of landscape-as-text, developed in particular by James Duncan (1990; Duncan and Duncan 1988; see also Barnes and Duncan 1992; Duncan and Ley 1993), pursues a critical line in many ways quite similar to that of Cosgrove discussed above. Likening a landscape to a written text invites questions regarding authorship and authority – who has the cultural power to authorise particular visions of landscape, and to ensure that these visions are durable and persistent? The text of landscape, Duncan argues, conveys and cements certain ideological narratives about the organisation of society and relationships

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between culture and nature. ‘Reading’ the landscape, therefore, is not an innocent activity. Instead the metaphor of landscape-as-text calls attention to ways in which particular, dominant readings are expressed and reproduced by powerful cultural elites. The agenda devolving from this realisation is one in which cultural geographers are charged with exposing and laying bare the mechanisms through which dominant ideas and beliefs are reproduced via landscapes, and with supplying alternative readings from a theoretically informed perspective. Equally, Gillian Rose’s (1993) influential psychoanalytically informed analysis of landscape, and, importantly, of geographer’s own landscape imaginaries, pursues a critical reading guided by a nuanced awareness of the intersections of landscape, nature, vision and gender. The landscape way of seeing is, Rose argues, a particularly masculine visual gaze. For Rose, in a critique of therefore, the specific metaphor of ‘landscape as text’ is part of a wider and ongoing process, wherein certain masculinities and forms of vision/gazing constitute the basis of what is counted as true and proper geographical knowledge. Two related ideas further work to perpetuate this configuration. First ‘historically in geographical discourse landscapes are often seen in terms of the female body and the beauty of Nature’ (Rose 1993: 87), a relation cognate in one sense with a Western mythological tradition of identifying the figure of ‘earth’ with that of ‘mother’ through tropes of cyclicality and fecundity. In another sense this relation is heavily sexualised; the female body-as-landscape forms a metaphorical terrain of desire. This metaphor is evident, for example, in processes of European exploration and travel through non-European space, where, time and again, ‘women represent the enticing and inviting land to be explored, mapped, penetrated and known’ (Rose 1993: 92). For Rose, landscape weaves together two dualities: female/male and nature/culture. The weaving works such that the ‘female’ becomes associated with the ‘natural’, the

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‘male’, the ‘cultural’. And a second discursive formation further informs these distinctions, the distinction between mind and body. This separation, fundamental to the Western scientific tradition of detached observation, frees the masculine gaze of geographers upon the landscape from any sensual, fleshy association. Their vision of landscape is thus able to be presented as the disembodied gaze of ‘objectivity’, thereby masking the gendered politics that lie at its heart. Beyond the conceptual lenses developed in work on landscape as text and as gendered gaze, cultural geographers working through an understanding of landscape as a way of seeing have further explored a range of substantive topics. For example, works of landscape and photography play a crucial rule in the formation of particular visions of national identity, and Stephen Daniels’ (1993) Fields of Vision is an influential critical analysis of how British national identities have been formulated, reproduced and contested via visions of landscape. Daniels’ colleague David Matless pursues a related topic in Landscape and Englishness (1998). Here, however, a focus on the ‘masking’ qualities of visual landscape representation is supplemented by a Foucault-inspired historical discussion concerning the disciplinary role of ‘cultures of landscape’ such as walking, driving and boating. Beyond these contexts, much work on landscape as a way of seeing has examined landscape’s role in processes of European exploration, colonialism and imperialism, highlighting in particular the ways in which visual and textual representations of nonEuropean landscape tend to erase indigenous activities and perspectives, installing instead European aesthetic and scientific suppositions. In this way, as W.J.T. Mitchell writes: Landscape might be seen … as something like the ‘dreamwork’ of imperialism, unfolding its own movement in time and space from a central point of origin and folding back on itself to disclose both utopian fantasies of the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance. Mitchell 1994: 10.

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In summary, defining landscape as way of seeing enabled cultural geographers to offer sophisticated critical readings of the ways in which cultural and political power is expressed and sustained via forms of visual representation. In these geographies, landscapes are visual images of cultural meaning, or to put this otherwise, landscape is a ‘visual ideology’ that works to enshrine and perpetuate particular ideas about culture, nature and the organisation of human societies. The shift from ‘seen’ landscape to landscape as a ‘way of seeing’ also indexes a general move towards understanding landscape as representation. Again this may seem unremarkable; geographers have always sought to describe what a given landscape stands for, in other words what cultures and histories it expresses or symbolises. The distinctive gradient of ‘new’ cultural geographies, however, lay in the ascending status they accorded to representation and representational practices. This gradient may be witnessed substantively, methodologically and theoretically. On a substantive level, ‘landscape’ in ‘new’ cultural geography generally referred no longer to a physical environment, but rather to images, paintings, idioms of description in travel accounts. This shift had a methodological correlate, in that the concern of geographers was no longer description, but rather interpretation. Instead of producing representations of landscape, ‘new’ cultural geographies of landscape took these as their primary object of concern, and so moved, perhaps decisively, to the discursive and interpretative approaches of the arts and humanities.

LANDSCAPE AS DWELLING In this section I will outline an understanding of landscape which has, in some ways, a lengthy pedigree, but which has, over the past 15 or so years, come more strongly to fore in landscape research in cultural geography, and also in cultural anthropology.

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This is an understanding in which landscape is defined in terms of dwelling-in-the-world – in terms, that is, of practices and performances of inhabitation. In some ways, this understanding is best introduced in terms of reactions against some of the tendencies evident in research and writing that took landscape to be a way of seeing the world. In particular, voices from various perspectives in the 1990s expressed concern at the treatment of landscape’s materiality within this paradigm. Thus, in a series of influential papers and books, the American geographer Don Mitchell, takes issue with a focus upon landscape representations, and argues that in addition the question of how landscapes are materially produced requires attention. Writing from a Marxist and materialist perspective, Mitchell argues that ‘the production of landscape morphology is an essential moment in the production of surplus value [profit] in capitalism’ (1994: 9). In order to fully understand the forms of land use and occupancy we see when we gaze upon any urban or agricultural scene we thus have to refer to systems of capitalist production and reproduction. While analyses of landscape as text or as way of seeing successfully and critically pinpoint the ideological role of landscape representations in asserting and naturalising specific cultural values, they nonetheless downplay material processes of production. We must recognise that landscapes are ‘a product of human labour, of people going to work on the land to make some-thing out of it’ (Mitchell 2003: 238). From this perspective, ‘landscape’ is best seen as both a work (it is the product of human labour and thus encapsulates the dreams, desires and all the injustices of the social systems that make it), and as something that does work (it acts as a social agent in the further development of a place). Mitchell 1998: 94 (original emphasis).

Writing from a rather different perspective, Kenneth Olwig (1996) also attempts to reclaim the landscape concept from its new cultural association with art, aesthetics and

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hence the symbolic values and tastes of powerful elites. For Olwig, the high tide of the ‘scenic’ understanding of landscape, evident in works such as Cosgrove and Daniel’s (1988) Iconography of Landscape, is ‘the most recent step in its disciplinary dematerialisation’ (Olwig 1996: 630). In place of dematerialisation, Olwig proposes a return to what he terms the ‘substantive nature of landscape’; that is, to a landscape that is real as opposed to artistic, and, furthermore, real in a specifically legal sense: ‘by substantive I mean “real rather than apparent” … I am also concerned with landscape as a “real” phenomenon in the sense that the real relates to things in law, especially fixed, permanent or immovable things (land tenements)’ (1996: 645). Here, landscape suggests a vernacular ‘people’s’ history of cultural use, value and transformation, and not an elite way of seeing. The argument that landscape is dwellingin-the-world is equally critical of tendencies to dematerialise landscape or downplay material processes of production; however, its inspirations are different from those of Mitchell and Olwig. The ‘landscape-asdwelling’ thesis derives instead from a branch of twentieth-century continental philosophy called phenomenology. To abbreviate radically and crudely, phenomenology is an approach which stresses the irreducible nature of embodied human involvement and engagement in the world – what is often called ‘being-in-the-world’ – opposing this to all accounts in which the essence of human being is understood to lie in detached reflection and observation. Phenomenological approaches to landscape in geography may be traced in part to the work of the American J.B. Jackson (1984, 1997), as mentioned briefly in section above. For Jackson – an independent scholar and writer who advocated a definition of landscape grounded in the everyday lives and experiences of ‘average’ Americans – landscape study proceeded from the phenomenological assumption that, ‘far from being spectators of the world, we are participants in

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it’ (Jackson 1997: 2). Equally, a strong phenomenological current is evident in the work of some North American ‘humanistic’ geographers in the 1970s, (see especially Tuan 1977; Seamon 1979), insofar as these stressed the lived and experiential nature of human symbolism and cultural meaning. More recently, however, the work of the cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold has been a major inspiration for geographers seeking to explore notions of landscape and dwelling. This is perhaps primarily because, in order to define landscape as dwelling, Ingold (1993, 2001) explicitly opposes it to understandings of landscape as a way of seeing. He argues that while such a definition might be critically helpful, on a more fundamental level it divisively enshrines and perpetuates a series of dualities – between subject and object, mind and body and, especially, between culture and nature. For example, in their introduction to the influential collection, The Iconography of Landscape, Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (1988: 1) define landscape as ‘a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing or symbolising surroundings’. But, citing this definition, Ingold declares: I do not share this view. To the contrary, I reject the division between inner and outer words – respectively of mind and matter, meaning and substance – upon which such distinction rests. The landscape, I hold, is not a picture in the imagination, surveyed by the mind’s eye, nor however is it an alien and formless substrate awaiting the imposition of human order. Ingold 2000: 191.

Therefore, for Ingold the definition of landscape as a ‘cultural image’; that is, as first and foremost a symbolic representation, is profoundly schismatic. This is because it involves positing on the one hand, a set of disembodied cultural meanings – a symbolic landscape – and on the other, a bare, blank bedrock – a physical landscape – onto which cultural meaning is projected. In other words the definition of landscape as a cultural image, or as a ‘way of seeing’, assumes and reproduces a fundamental distinction between the ideas of

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culture and the matter of nature. As a prime consequence of this division, Ingold writes, conceptualisation of landscape has persistently been bedeviled by a ‘sterile opposition between the naturalistic view of the landscape as a neutral, external backdrop to human activities, and the culturalistic view that every landscape is a particular cognitive or symbolic ordering of space’ (Ingold 2000: 189). The often-implicit presence of this ‘sterile opposition’ is, for Ingold, at the heart of a series of intellectual dilemmas facing academic disciplines such as human geography, anthropology and archaeology. As a consequence, Ingold argues, for much Western thought, ‘meaning does not lie in the relational contexts of the perceiver’s involvement in the world, but is rather laid over the world by the mind’ (Ingold 2000: 51), so perpetuating an understanding of human being in terms of disengaged spectatorship. Ingold’s solution to this problem involves a turn towards phenomenology, and the elaboration of what he terms ‘the dwelling perspective’. This notion of dwelling derives primarily from the later work of Martin Heidegger (1993), and in particular his essay Building Dwelling Thinking. Colloquially, the word dwelling suggests ideas of home and inhabitation, and Heidegger’s understanding is also rooted in these understandings. In this way, as Cloke and Jones describe it, Dwelling is about the rich intimate ongoing togetherness of beings and things which make up landscapes and places, and which bind together nature and culture over time. It thus offers conceptual characteristics which blur the nature/culture divide, [and] emphasise the temporal nature of landscape. Cloke and Jones 2001: 651.

Ingold the anthropologist chooses to describe dwelling first and foremost in terms of practical activity, by both humans and animals, rooted in an essential engagement with the material environment. ‘It is through being inhabited’, he writes (2000: 173) writes, ‘that the world becomes a meaningful environment’. The dwelling perspective thus focuses upon ‘the agent-in-its environment, or what

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phenomenology calls ‘being-in-the-world’, as opposed to the self-contained individual confronting a world ‘out there’ (2000: 173). Here, what is especially pertinent is the manner in which Ingold closely aligns the notion of dwelling with landscape in particular. Indeed, in some ways he presents the two as indissolubly intertwined: for Ingold, landscape is dwelling. Landscape must firstly be understood in terms of human embodiment – an embodiment which Ingold views as an ongoing, generative process of acting in and with the world. In terms of dwelling, however, landscape is yet more closely entwined with temporality. Ingold (2000: 190) explicitly states that his consideration of landscape in tandem with temporality has the aim of ‘dissolving the distinction between them’. To do so, he contrasts the abstract clock-time of chronology and history (as constructs of Western thought) with lived, social time; a temporality grounded in engaged, bodily activity, one in which we perceive time ‘not as spectators, but as participants, in the very performance of our tasks’ (2000: 196). The landscape, both the milieu and the activity of dwelling, thus becomes ontologically saturated with temporality; the two are fused and indissoluble as a phenomenological ‘whole’ – ‘the process of becoming of the world as a whole’ (2000: 201). Thus, at the heart of the landscape-asdwelling thesis is an assertion of ‘the fundamental indissolubility of the connections between persons and landscape’ (2000: 55, original emphasis). For Ingold (2000: 193), ‘landscape is the world as it is known to those who dwell therein’. However, and crucially, it may also be defined as ‘the everyday project of dwelling in the world’ (2000: 191). Landscape is presented by Ingold as a milieu of involvement: it is neither a known and represented environment in or upon which meaningful human practice takes place, nor simply that practice itself. Landscape is both – both performative sensorium and site and source of cultural meaning and symbolism. In this way, Ingold works to describe a landscape that is no longer a cultural frame, a

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‘way of seeing’. Nor is it a physical surface, an inert terrain. Landscape instead becomes the ongoing practice and process of dwelling. As he summarises, The landscape, in short, is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is rather the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view on our surroundings. And it is within the context of this attentive involvement in the landscape that the human imagination gets to work in fashioning ideas about it. For the landscape, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, is not so much the object as ‘the homeland of our thoughts. Ingold 2000: 207 (original emphasis).

Over the past 10 years, within human and especially cultural geography, notions of landscape as dwelling have been taken up and applied in various ways. It is worth noting that this take-up is linked quite strongly with the development, in UK geography in particular, of ‘non-representational theory’ (Thrift 1996, 2008) – this term refers to a broad coalition of agendas and concerns stressing the affective, eventful and emergent nature of life, and the ethical and political possibilities that such an understanding affords, and phenomenological notions of dwelling have to a degree been co-opted within this wider movement. More specifically however, in terms of landscape studies, there has been a shift, both rhetorical and substantive, from studies of representations of landscape, nature, identity, space, place the body and so on, to studies instead investigating various performances of these. In other words, attention has moved partly from landscape texts and images to what Lorimer (2005) aptly terms ‘embodied acts of landscaping’. This further involves a broad methodological shift, moving from a largely interpretive and discursive standpoint towards a more ethnographic and performative ethos. In this way, attentive analysis of, and, quite often, direct personal participation in, embodied acts of landscaping, has become the substantive task for some contemporary landscape studies. Working from the understandings of self and landscape in terms of dwelling discussed above, geographers are

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thus today exploring a range of everyday practices and performances of landscape. Examples of this work would include Cloke and Jones’ (2001) study of orchard growing, Spinney’s (2006) account of landscape and cycling, Lorimer’s (2006) historical phenomenology of reindeer herding in Scotland – and my own work on practices of walking and looking (Wylie 2002, 2005). In these sorts of ways, the thesis that landscape is dwelling-inthe-world finds practical purchase via engaged empirical investigation of particular material contexts in which materiality, culture and perception are intertwined together.

CONCLUSION AND SUMMARY This chapter has discussed three principal human geographical understandings of landscape: as material record, as way of seeing, and as dwelling. In conclusion I would like to reflect upon what these understandings may tell us about the nature of the landscape concept – and also upon how academic, geographical work on landscape may (or may not) relate to the lay or ‘vernacular’ understandings of landscape I discussed at the outset of the chapter. First, it is important to emphasise the differences between the three geographical understandings of landscape identified here. It is difficult to reconcile notions of landscape as (a) as an external empirical field, (b) a pictorial/representational framework and (c) an ensemble of material dwelling practices, or to argue that these share some readily identifiable common ground. It would perhaps not be invidious to suggest that there simply are quite different geographical understandings of landscape, based upon distinctive principles and assumptions, and leading to distinctive forms of research practice – to empirical and archival fieldwork, to discursive interpretation, and to ethnographic encounter. It is not the task of this chapter to produce some overarching statement regarding geographical landscape research, and in any case the

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diversity of work in this area precludes such an ambition from the outset. To put this more positively, it would appear that landscape is a flexible and malleable concept, one that is amenable to modification and indeed outright re-definition at times. And this in turn highlights the dynamism of work in this area. Second, however, it would perhaps be possible to identify some commonality in the work that landscape does within the three different bodies of geographical labour under discussion here. While geographical definitions of landscape might change radically over time, there is, perhaps, some consistency in terms of the concept’s function within different paradigms of inquiry. In particular, landscape consistently acts as a mediating lens through which relationships between ‘human cultures’ and ‘natural environments’ are scrutinised – whether this be landscape as a material record of the imprint of culture and nature upon each other, landscape as frame through which culture pictures nature, or landscape as a milieu in which the ‘cultural’ and natural’ are mutually and indissolubly entangled and emergent via lived practices. David Matless offers a useful metaphor in this regard when he speaks of landscape as a ‘shuttle’ (a device for spinning and weaving thread): [L]andscape can be considered a term which productively migrates through regimes of value sometimes held apart … [Landscape is] always already natural and cultural, deep and superficial … impossible to place on either side of a dualism of nature and culture, shuttling between fields of reference. Matless 2003: 231.

It is also important to note here, however, that in addition to the idea of weaving together that the term ‘shuttle’ implies, landscape may sometimes also be a way of separating and distancing culture and nature: as this chapter has shown landscape both connects and disconnects culture and nature, art and experience, the lived and the symbolic. Finally, at the start of this chapter I suggested that lay or vernacular understandings

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of landscape could plausibly be grouped into three headings: landscape as the world around us – our surroundings; landscape as pictorial format; and landscape as a form of earthy practice, as captured in the term ‘landscaping’. I noted then that these understandings mapped onto common dictionary definitions of landscape. In concluding, I would like to further suggest that there is also a perhaps surprising degree of congruency between vernacular understandings of landscape and those most often deployed by academic geographers. Landscape as material record shares some of the same principles as the notion of landscape as ‘the world around us’, in particular a distinctive sense of landscape as an external everyday reality. Landscape as way of seeing is obviously linked to the widespread cultural understanding of landscape in pictorial terms. And landscape as dwelling also clearly inhabits similar discursive terrain to an understanding of landscape in terms of ‘landscaping’ – in terms, that is, of landscape as a set of practices moving and shaping senses of the cultural and the natural. On one level these congruencies perhaps indicate that, howsoever abstract or rarefied the terms of academic debates over landscape may seem, they nonetheless retain quite strong linkages to more general understandings of landscape at large in the world. This is the strength and the continuing promise of landscape research, perhaps – its grounding within, and therefore ability to speak to, everyday matters of concern. It also however indicates how demanding the very word ‘landscape’ can be: a word whose freight of history and consistency of association seems to demand insistent recapitulation and reworking, as this chapter has tried to do.

REFERENCES Adams, P., Hoelscher, S. and Till, K. (eds.) (2001) Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Barnes, T.J. and Duncan J.S. (1992) ‘Introduction: writing worlds’ in T.J. Barnes and J.S. Duncan (eds.), Writing Worlds. London: Routledge, pp.1–12. Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. Harmandsworth: Penguin Books. Cloke, P. and Jones, O. (2001) ‘Dwelling, place and landscape: an orchard in Somerset’, Environment & Planning A, 33: 649–666. Cosgrove, D. (1985) ‘Prospect, Perspective and the evolution of the Landscape idea’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 10: 45–62. Cosgrove, D (1998) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Cosgrove, D (2008) Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World. London. I.B. Tauris. Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S (eds.) (1988) The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cosgrove, D and Daniels, S. (1988) ‘Introduction’ in S. Daniels and D. Cosgrove (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–8. Cresswell, T. (2003) ‘Landscape and the obliteration of practice’ in K. Anderson, D. Domosh, S. Pile and N. Thrift (eds.), Handbook of Cultural Geography. London: Sage.: 269–283. Daniels, S. (1993) Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Duncan, J. (1980) ‘The superorganic in American cultural geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 70: 181–198. Duncan, J. (1990) The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duncan, N. and Duncan, N. (1988) ‘(Re)reading the Landscape’, Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 6: 117–126. Duncan, J. and Ley, D. (1993) ‘Introduction: representing the place of culture’ in J. Duncan, and D. Ley, (eds.), Place/Culture/Representation. London: Routledge, pp.1–12. Heidegger, M. (1993) ‘Building dwelling thinking’ in D. Krell (ed.), Basic Writings. London: Routledge: 132–145. Hoskins, W. (1954) The Making of the English Landscape. Harmandsworth, Penguin. Ingold, T. (1993) ‘The temporality of the landscape’, World Archaeology, 25: 152–171. Ingold, T. (2001) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.

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Jackson, J.B. (1984) Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jackson, J.B. (1997) Landscape in Sight: Looking at America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jackson, P. (1989) Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography. London: Unwin Hyman. Lorimer, H. (2005). Cultural geography: the busyness of being ‘more-than-representational’. Progress in Human Geography 29(1) 83–94. Lorimer, H. (2006) ‘Herding memories of humans and animals’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24: 497–518. Matless, D. (1993) ‘One man’s England: W.G. Hoskins and the English culture of landscape’, Rural History, 4: 187–207. Matless, D. (1998) Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion. Matless, D. (2003) ‘The properties of landscape’ in K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile and N. Thrift (eds.), Handbook of Cultural Geography. London: Sage: 227–233. Meinig, D. (ed) (1979) The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) ‘Imperial Landscape’ in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power. London: Routledge: 5–35. Mitchell, D. (1994) ‘Landscape and surplus value: the making of the ordinary in Brentwood, CA’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 12: 7–30. Mitchell, D. (2003) ‘California living, California lying: dead labor and the political economy of landscape’ in K. Anderson, S. Pile, and N. Thrift (eds.), Handbook of Cultural Geography. London: Sage, pp. 233–248. Mitchell, D. (1998) Cultural Geography: a Critical Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Muir, R. (1998) Approaches to Landscape. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Olwig, K. (1996) ‘Recovering the substantive nature of landscape’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 86: 630–653. Olwig, K. (2002) Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sauer, C.O. (1963) ‘The morphology of landscape’ in C. Sauer (ed.) Land and Life. Berkeley, University of California Press: 315–351. Schama, S. (1995) Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Collins. Seamon, D. (1979) A Geography of the Lifeworld. London: Croom Helm.

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Spinney, J. (2006) ‘A place of sense: an ethnography of the kinaesthetic sensuous experiences of cyclists on Mt Ventoux’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24: 709–732. Thrift, N. (1996) Spatial Formations. London: Sage. Thrift, N. (2008) Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Sage. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Wilson, C. and Groth, P. (eds.) (2003) Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies After J.B. Jackson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wylie, J. (2002) ‘An essay on ascending Glastonbury Tor’, Geoforum, 33: 441–454. Wylie, J. (2005) ‘A single day’s walking: narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 30: 234–247. Wylie, J. (2007) Landscape. London: Routledge.

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23 Space and Place John A. Agnew

INTRODUCTION The question of space and place in geographical knowledge is ultimately not just about whether the question of ‘where’ matters in the way that ‘when’ does in explaining ‘how’ and even ‘why’ something happens. It is also about how it matters. Given that both space and place are about the ‘where’ of things and their relative invocation has usually signaled different understandings of what ‘where’ means, it is best to examine them together rather than separately. That is the purpose of this chapter. Contrary perhaps to first appearance, space and place are fairly complex words. The Oxford English Dictionary gives over about two pages to space and around three and a half pages to place. Space is regarded largely as a dimension within which matter is located or a grid within which substantive items are contained. Along with its geographic meaning as ‘a portion of space in which people dwell together’ and ‘locality’, place is also a ‘rank’ in a list (as ‘in the first place’), a temporal ordering (as in something ‘took place’), and a ‘position’ in a social order (as in ‘knowing your place’). Notwithstanding this variety, over the greatest span of time it has been the geographic meanings of the term place

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that have been most important, at least in philosophical circles. Both Plato and Aristotle, to name but two foundational thinkers, had recourse to concepts analogous to the modern English geographic place as, respectively, chôra and topos. The modern term ‘space’ descends from the second of these, even though the term itself only dates from the seventeenth century. From this viewpoint, as the Italian geographer Franco Farinelli says, two meanings of place can be clearly distinguished among the ancient Greeks: Place … is a part of the terrestrial surface that is not equivalent to any other, that cannot be exchanged with any other without everything changing. Instead with space [place as location] each part can be substituted for another without anything being altered, precisely how when two things that have the same weight are moved from one side of a scale to another without compromising the balance. Farinelli 2003: 11.

In the second case place is assimilated to space (it is location) whereas in the first place is distinguished from space as having its own special qualities. Much of the open academic debate about ‘space and place’ dates from the nineteenth century rather than from the ancients, although other terms (such as location and region) have often figured

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more prominently in discussion than the terms ‘space’ and ‘place’ themselves. Space and place are now fundamental geographic concepts, to the extent that geography has even been defined as a ‘science of places’ by the famous French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache or as a ‘spatial science’ by an array of writers. The various meanings of the terms can be used to trace the intellectual trends of the field, particularly disputes between that abstract spatial analysis which tends to view places as nodes in space simply reflective of the spatial imprint of universal physical, social or economic processes and that concrete environmental analysis which conceives of places as milieux that exercise a mediating role on physical, social and economic processes and thus affect how such processes operate. The first is a geometric conception of place as a mere part of space and the second is a phenomenological understanding of a place as a distinctive coming together in space. From this viewpoint, if place in the former sense is definable entirely in relation to a singular spatial metric (latitude and longitude, elevation, etc.) or other spatial grid defined by putatively non-spatial processes (core-periphery, city-hinterland, administrative regions, etc.), place in the second sense is constituted by the impact that being somewhere has on the constitution of the processes in question. Good examples of the two understandings at work come from Mediterranean studies. If the classic work of Fernand Braudel (1949) tends to view the Mediterranean over the long term as a grand space or spatial crossroads in exchange, trade, diffusion and connectivity between a set of grand source areas to the south, north and east, the recent revisionist account of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell (2000) views the Mediterranean region as a congeries of micro-ecologies or places separated by distinctive agricultural and social practices in which connectivity and mobility within the region is more a response to the management of environmental and social risks than the simple outcome of extraregional initiatives. Thus, Braudel tends to

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have a geometric or locational view of the geography of the Mediterranean whereas Horden and Purcell have a more holistic, topographic and phenomenological one of the places out of which the Mediterranean world as a whole is constituted. The conflict between these two dominant meanings, space versus place, is longstanding. Indeed, the vicissitudes of argument in geography over such definitional issues as regions, spatial analysis, and human–environment relations involve competing conceptions of space and place as much as distinctive views about the nature of science or the relative virtues of quantitative methods. Outside of geography, little critical attention has been given to either definition, yet, of course, implicitly one has been adopted. By definition, everything happens somewhere. Typically, the definition adopted has been the view of place as a location on a surface where things ‘just happen’ rather than the more holistic view of places as the geographical context for the mediation of physical, social and economic processes. This probably results from the modernist tendency to exalt abstract categories and terms (such as class, ethnicity, interests, identities, etc.) and then generalize about them across time and space rather than focus directly on either the concrete activities to which they supposedly refer or what the categories and terms represent in different places. A classic example is the academic victory of proximate-cause epidemiology (individual ‘risk factors’, etc.) over life-course and communal epidemiology which emphasize everyday life experience in explaining disease morbidity and mortality. Life course hazards, many intimately associated with where and with whom we live, are in fact better predictors of human longevity than are so-called individual level health-adverse behaviors and cardiovascular risk factors (e.g. Diez Roux et al. 2001). Parents, kin, access to junk food, and neighbourhood hazards can be more deadly than simply the configuration of your genes or individual ‘risky’ behavior. Universalizers, from aficionados of the ‘selfish gene’ to those of

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‘homo economicus’, have always had trouble with both space and place. Their stories are truly spaceless and placeless except entirely coincidentally. A review essay such as this necessarily must be selective. After first providing a review of the modern origins and history of the two dominant geographic meanings of the term ‘place’ and then discussing the devaluation of its second meaning down the years, I turn to some recent theoretical attempts at trying to transcend the two dominant meanings and end with recounting some of the main recent arguments within geography about place as an empirically useful concept. It is important to note a couple of caveats. First, sometimes the two terms, space and place, are not clearly distinguished from one another analytically or their meaning is reversed (as in de Certeau 1984). Second, empirical stories based loosely on the effects of places (in the plural) on, say, politics, intellectual history or economic growth, need not always involve sophisticated theorizing about place (in the singular). Indeed, in the end it is the concrete effects of places that matter more than remaining at the abstract level of conceptualizing place. From this perspective ‘place’ (on the second meaning) is a meta-concept that allows for the telling of particular stories associated with specific places. That said, implicit in the meanings ascribed to space and place are various routes to thinking how geography matters to a wide range of both natural and human phenomena (Sack 1980). The main current challenge to both of the dominant meanings comes from the idea that the world itself is increasingly ‘placeless’ as space-spanning connections and flows of information, things and people undermine the rootedness of a wide range of processes anywhere in particular. Space is conquering place (e.g. Friedman 2005). From this perspective, new technologies – the container, the Internet, the cell phone – are making places obsolete (but see for a robust empirical counterview Goldenberg and Levy 2009). Yet, previous rounds in the diffusion of

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technological innovation, even though often touted as likely to do much the same thing (roads, railways, telegraphy, ship canals, etc.), had no such effect. What they did do was help reconstitute and reorganize spatial relations such that places were remade and reconfigured (Pacelli and Marchetti 2007). Distance did not die, its forms and effects were reformulated. What seems to lie behind so much of the intellectual diminution of the role of place, if not yet realized then inherent in the telos of history, is the image of an isolated, traditional and passive ‘place’ increasingly transcended in the march of history (from feudalism to capitalism, etc., or some other linear or stage conception of history) by the increasing power of mobility. Such ideas die hard in a Western thought more committed to very general ideas about how the world works than to an accounting of its concrete geographical realities. The first view of place (as a node in space) is itself a doubtful particularism emerging from a reading of the history of northwest Europe as a progressive overcoming of local places by national spaces (and now by global space) rather than a self-evident and ‘natural’ universal coming about everywhere as a transcendental becoming. Consequently, geography as a field of study has suffered from the marginalization of what it can study beyond a narrow recounting of locations and their names.

SENSES OF SPACE AND PLACE In the simplest sense place refers to either a location somewhere or to the occupation of that location. The first sense is of having an address and the second is about living at that address. Sometimes this distinction is pushed further to separate the physical place from the phenomenal space in which the place is located. Thus place becomes a particular or lived space. Location then refers to the fact that places must be located somewhere. Place is specific and location (or space) is general.

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These definitions are largely uncontroversial. The basic formulation, however, has been subject to two very important points of contention down the years. The first is that the language of location (or space) and place is often elided with the language of geographical scale. Scale has been a major concern of many geographers since the 1990s, often without much explicit linkage to disputes about space versus place. Implicitly, however, the language of space is privileged in much of this writing (e.g. Brenner 2004; Keil and Mahon 2009). Though there is no necessary connection of this type, the usage is very common with place standing in for the local (and traditional) and location/space representing the global (and the modern) (Jessop et al. 2008). This conflation draws attention to a further feature of how the two terms are frequently used. Place is often associated with the world of the past and location/space with the world of the present and future. From one perspective, place is therefore nostalgic, regressive or even reactionary, and space is progressive and radical. Jeff Malpas (2006: 17–27) traces some of the unease with revival of a stronger sense of place than mere location to the fact that the philosopher Martin Heidegger was a major apologist for an ontologically strong concept of place and because of his political views, he was closely associated for a time with the German Nazi regime in the mid-1930s, place has acquired a similarly reprobate reputation, particularly among some geographical scholars on the self-defined political left, such as Richard Peet and Neil Smith, and who are perhaps unfamiliar with Heidegger’s actual writings about place and may ascribe too much significance to them for all understandings of place. From another viewpoint, however, place is being lost to an increasingly homogeneous and alienating sameness. ‘Placelessness’ is conquering place as modernity displaces traditional folkways (Relph 1976). Strip malls and chain stores replace the elemental variety that once characterized the landscape. Everywhere is increasingly alike as we all

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spend more of our time in non-places such as airport lounges, shopping malls and on the Internet, living lives increasingly without any sense of place whatsoever. Totalistic attachment to idealized traditional places has been replaced by life in nowhere land (Augé 1995). Indeed to some, space has dissolved into networks that are placeless in any substantive, even perhaps locational, sense of the term (Marston et al. 2005). From both perspectives – space as scale and place as past – usage reflects a subtle incorporation of time into how the terms are defined. Place is the setting for social rootedness and landscape continuity. Location/space represents the transcending of the past by overcoming the rootedness of social relations and landscape in place through mobility and the increased similarity of everyday life from place to place. Secondly, the priority given to either location/space or place depends broadly on what is made of the nature of space in relation to place. In particular, what is made of the distinction rests in large part on whether Newton’s or Leibniz’s understanding of space prevails (Casati and Varzi 1999: 21). Discussion of location/space, as opposed to place, is a modern concern. Indeed, it could be seen as one of the markers of modernity, dating at most from seventeenth-century Europe, and associated with such intellectual giants as Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, and Kant. From this point of view, argued persuasively by Edward Casey (1993: 8), place became subordinated to space (and both to time) in the seventeenth century and has only become tentatively rehabilitated in the twentieth. The project of a ‘spatial history’ that can be associated with Heidegger and Foucault depends fundamentally on relating place to space as if they are internally related to one another (Elden 2001: 90–1). Much contemporary understanding of space and place, however, seems to depend on relatively unreformed and competing seventeenth-century conceptions of what they mean, specifically Newtonian and Leibnizian ones.

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In the Newtonian view, space is absolute, in the sense that it is an entity in itself, independent of whatever objects and events occupy it, containing these objects and events, and having separate powers from them. Newton’s view is best used to describe the motion of rigid bodies through ‘empty’ space. Newton was a ‘transitional’ figure in the genesis of modernity, so it is not surprising that he would endorse a medieval or thing-like conception of space. In other words, he conceived of absolute space as previous generations of thinkers had always thought of particular places without recourse to modern ideas of space at all: as concrete and real (Disalle 2002). In the Leibnizian view, space is relational, in the sense that it has no powers independent of objects and events but can be construed only from the relations between them. In other words, Leibniz is the founder of the modernist view of space that gives it no powers in itself. Only within a Newtonian view can space be ‘active’ in itself because of the forces, like gravitational and magnetic attraction, that operate through it. Space is only active, therefore, because it is made up of places where things are located within a force-field at any particular moment (Feingold 2004). In a Leibnizian view it is the powers of events and objects taking place that make space appear ‘active’. But space is entirely parasitic on the relations between objects and events occupying places. Space thus exists because of relations between sites at which events and objects are located (Antognazza 2008). In both cases, of course, neither space nor place can exist without the other. But the priorities obviously differ. As a result, subjectivists, emphasizing the subjective orientation of human actors in places that condition them, are usually Newtonian in their understanding of space and emphasize place, whereas objectivists, emphasizing the role of causal ‘forces’ in human life, tend to a Leibnizian position and refer to location and spatial relations. This association often seems to lead to the ‘other’ concept receiving short shrift when anyone becomes committed primarily to one or the other, irrespective of

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whether the thinker is either a self-conscious Newtonian or Leibnizian. Various ‘relational’ and ‘phase shift’ views of space have arisen that try to both transcend the gap between the two conceptions of space and to associate them with temporal changes in the content and/or disposition of space (Jones 2009). Operationalizing them empirically without slipping into favoring one conception of space over another has remained more difficult than has waxing rhapsodic about their abstract possibility (Keil and Mahon 2009). To some up-and-coming British and American geographers in the 1950s and 1960s, the very term ‘place’ (particularly in the form of the analogous concept of region) was associated with the Ancien Régime of geography, and space in itself was to be both the new object of study and the basis for a new and all-conquering intellectual tribe. Like an erstwhile Futurist, pickaxe and shovel to the ready, Peter Gould (1979), for example, wrote of cleaning out the Augean Stables of geography. Giving an explicit privilege to location/space over place, then, goes back at least to the ‘spatial revolution’ in geography in the 1960s but it also been long apparent among those who for political reasons associate place negatively with the past and space positively with the future (e.g. on the one hand, Abler et al. 1971; and, on the other, Harvey 2000). Primary focus was placed on modeling interaction over space – migration flows, diffusion of innovation, spacing of settlements as a function of distance to market, land use specialization and industrial location in terms of transportation costs – more than, say, local/regional differences or place characteristics (see, e.g. Isard 1956; Haggett 1965; Berry 1967). Spatial analysis may have failed to capture the field in its entirety, as a philosophy of ‘spatial separatism’ (Sack 1974) that intended to clear out all other theoretical frameworks, but it has had a long ‘shelf-life’ in the practices of many geographers committed to mapping spatial patterns and reasoning back to the social, economic and/or political processes that putatively may have produced them. So-called geographical

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information science has been largely invented with the advent of fast computers around the older conception of spatial analysis. The focus is still on relationships between events and objects in space by correlating their spatial co-occurrence. This overall approach was challenged in the 1970s by those who claimed that the nature of space and its effects depend on the economic conditions under which space is ‘produced’ (Harvey 1973). What can be called a Zipfian view of space (after George Zipf (1949), the advocate of the idea of the ‘principle of least effort’), in which space was thought of as simply constraining human behavior as people attempted to limit their efforts and maximize the efficiency with which they ‘overcame’ space, was confronted with a Marxist view, in which space was now ‘produced’ by powerful economic forces that commodified land and thereby limited what any one person other then those who owned it could do with it. The focus was on the ways in which economic processes, particularly the establishment of ground rents and the search for profit, produce spatial patterns of investment and divestment. Uneven development within countries as well as globally, therefore, can be put down to the working out of ‘forces and relations of production’ over space and time (Smith 1984). At its most sophisticated this approach can entail a historicist understanding of how the role of space changes as technologies, shifting conditions of production, and allied representations give rise to new patterns of capital accumulation and income distribution (Harvey 1989). With even more historical depth, if less dependent on exegesis from Marx, at a global scale ‘the development of underdevelopment’ between rich and poor regions can be understood as the exploitation of poor people in some parts of the world (the periphery) by (on average) richer people in core regions because of the way in which the global economy has developed since the sixteenth century (e.g. Wallerstein 1979). From a totally different perspective, that of behavioralism, some critics of spatial analysis claimed that what was needed was a

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better understanding of how space is mapped (‘mental maps’) and used by individuals without prior assumptions of distance-minimization and effort reduction (Wolpert 1964; Cox and Golledge 1969). This could even allow for cultural differences in spatial sensibilities and the use of space (Abler et al. 1971; Hägerstrand 1982; Bonnemaison 2005). Notwithstanding the theoretical differences between these various modes of thinking and that associated with ‘spatial overlays’, the privileging of place as simply location has continued. Places themselves are seen as simply incidental (if necessary) to more profound non-spatial processes such as class struggle, perceptual capacity and orientation, capital accumulation, or commodification. To give places any more significance than this is to risk a dangerous ‘spatial fetishism’ that is off-limits in an abstract world of purely social, psychological or economic determination. The second sense involves a primary focus on the first-hand experience of human subjects in places (Sack 1980; Entrikin 1990). Space qua location is bracketed, or put to one side, because its ‘abstractness discourages experiential explorations’ (Casey 2001: 683). In his philosophical rehabilitation of the second sense of place, Casey (1997: x) notes how ‘place has been assimilated to space. … As a result, place came to be considered a mere “modification” of space (in Locke’s revealing term) – a modification that aptly can be called a “site”, that is, leveled-down, monotonous space for building and other human enterprises’ (author’s emphasis). Casey’s goal is to argue for the crucial importance of place in much thinking about community and the public sphere, even though the connections are often not made explicit. He wants to make place different from site and space, even though he acknowledges Michel Foucault’s point that the modern world is largely one of Leibnizian sites and relations (Casey 1997: 298–300). In rethinking space as place, his primary interest lies in phenomenologically linking places to selves.

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The central issue is that of ‘being in place differently’ (Casey 1997: 337) conditioning the various dimensions of selfhood, from the bodily to the psychological, institutional, and architectural. So, though the ‘shape’ of place has changed historically, it is now no mere container but, rather, a taking place, its rediscovery and naming as such is long overdue. Thus: ‘Despite the seduction of endless space (and the allure of serial time), place is beginning to escape from its entombment in the cultural and philosophical underworld of the modern West’ (Casey 1997: 339). In the 1970s and 1980s this conception of place underwent a significant revival in geography. Some of this new interest in a richer sense of place was due to a rejection of the positivist (law-finding) pretensions of spatial analysis (e.g. Gregory 1979) but more was due to the insight that the term place carries with it not only the meaning of spatial location but also those of social position and moral order (Tuan 1974). From this viewpoint, places give as well as acquire meaning in terms of what they offer socially and morally. More specifically, different locations are often associated with certain spirits or sacred purpose, organize space into patterns of ideological meaning (recall monuments and boundaries of all sorts), and define ‘fields of care’ such as turfs and territories with which social groups identify and distinguish themselves from others (e.g. Tuan 1974; Markus 1994). More mundanely, however, as Aristotle was among the first to note, people bring to life the idea that everything belongs somewhere in particular. Or, as Michael Curry (1998: 48) has made the point: ‘[T]he relationship between an object and where it belongs is not simply fortuitous, or a matter of causal forces, but it is rather intrinsic or internal, a matter of what that thing actually is. When things are not where they belong, when they are out of place, they cannot truly be themselves’. Although the impulse to see place in terms of meaning for human agents can be seen as a type of American Romanticism à la Thoreau (Massey and Thrift 2003: 286), this interpretation misses the fact that much of the revival

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of interest in place all over the world (including the United States) focuses on the mediating role of place in both social relations and the acquisition of meaning rather than on some transcendental idealization of place (e.g. Massey 1984; Pred 1984; Agnew 1989; Livingstone 2003). The ransacking of the works of French philosophers (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Latour, etc.) by some British geographers to find a quotation or two to justify their re-animation of place would be just as simple-minded a representation of an equally wide range of writing. What is clear, however, is that place in the second, stronger, sense has made an important return to the agenda of contemporary geography.

DEVALUING THE STRONGER SENSE OF PLACE Until recently, however, the second socially and morally inflected sense of place has not had much appeal beyond geography in particular and certainly not within modern social science in general. I have argued elsewhere (Agnew 1989, 1994) that this has had much to do with the normative association of fields such as political science and sociology with nation-state building and the adoption of a scientific imagination that has tended to ascribe much greater significance in modernity to the preferences and motivations of individual persons (methodological individualism), social groups or neurological syndromes than to the historical–geographical contexts from which individual and group motivations could be seen as deriving. Particularly powerful has been the idea derived from late-nineteenth-century social thought that, in social terms at least, place equates to a collectivist traditional community and that as modern national (and global) society has inevitably eclipsed community so has place lost its significance. This linear, evolutionary narrative is shared by all of the dominant perspectives in social science

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whether it goes under the rubric of from traditional to modern or from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft. Why has this idea become second nature? The first element in the argument is that human history has been seen in analogous terms to that of biological evolution in which an older social form, community, has been replaced by a newer one, society. In this understanding, idiosyncratic traditional communities would be replaced by the more efficient self-regulating modern society based upon ordering individual persons. Places would then naturally go the way of the morally distinctive communities that once mapped onto them. Secondly, the taken-forgranted nationalism that has long afflicted the practitioners of the emerging social sciences has meant that the nation-state has become regarded as not simply the main but the only geographic unit of account. Indeed, to the extent that ‘geography’ now meant anything at all, it was an accounting of ‘facts’ about this or that state with respect to resources, cultural characteristics, commercial possibilities, and so on. Potential geographic entities other than state territories could have no role in a modern world in which the nation-state is the highest form of political and social organization. Territory, therefore, in the sense of a spatial block of sovereign control and authority, has been the main way in which the various social sciences (sociology, political science, in particular) have tended to conceive of and privilege space over place (Delaney 2005; Hirst 2005). Third, to the extent that place has survived it is in backward parts of the world such as the so-called Third World. But once on the path to development, place would inevitably fade in significance. The presumption here is that place is anachronistic and is re-placed by space as modernity comes to prevail (Agnew 2003). Fourthly, such ideas as community and society are in origin theoretical ‘ideal types’ rather then empirical descriptions of actual spatio-social arrangements. Their originators were offering a particular vision of the general historical trajectory taken in

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Europe and, to a degree, elsewhere. But this more tentative understanding of what the concepts were supposed to do has been lost on subsequent exponents who have regarded them as totalistic labels for how things were versus how they are now. Finally, in radical social science place has been practically devalued because as capitalism reduces places to locations when it converts usevalues into exchange-values, a concomitant commodification has detached people from their self-creations in place. In this perspective, a geographical alienation of people from the world around them has been the kiss of death for place. A static view of place as naturally associated with traditional or pre-capitalist society has become enshrined in much modern social science. Living in place, from this point of view, is akin to stepping into a Thomas Kinkade painting and enjoying the unselfconscious sociability of a world long since lost. Today, as we all bowl alone and look back nostalgically on the world we have lost, place takes on a misty glow as a concept whose shelf life has long since run out. This putting place in the past has made it next to impossible to argue the merits of place as a concept with any sort of theoretical equivalence to those such as class, status, nation, state and firm. Only as location, and that of diminishing impact, has the term kept up much of any significance. Recently, however, and in response to the crises of both conventional and radical social thought in the face of such trends as globalization and the collapse of the established socialist regimes in the Soviet Union and elsewhere (a sort of dystopian modernity), some signs of interest in reviving the concept for what it might offer in new circumstances have appeared on the horizon. I turn first to some largely theoretical initiatives in geography that offer various ways of engaging the two meanings of place, bringing space and place together, so to speak, before exploring some more empirically attuned approaches that might make a more convincing case for the conceptual uses of place to a wider audience.

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PUTTING PLACE INTO SPACE THEORETICALLY Much recent effort in geography has gone into trying to theoretically overcome the historic gap between the two senses of place. As we have seen, each of the two meanings tends to assimilate place to one or the other end of a continuum running from nomothetic (generalized) location at one end to idiographic (particularistic) place at the other. Attempts at putting space and place together must necessarily try to bring these meanings of geographic place together. In recent years there have been four theoretical ways in which this task has been approached: the neo-Marxist, the humanist or agency-based, the feminist, and the performative, listed in terms of their approximate relative popularity. Each of these rejects the either/or logic in relation to space and place that has characterized most geographic and social thought from the seventeenth century to the present. Unfortunately, none of these has as yet been given much by way of any sort of empirical grounding except in the most casual way. The neo-Marxist perspective on relating space and place is best represented in the writings of Henri Lefebvre (1991) and his geographic interpreters. In his writing Lefebvre has focused on the social production of the spaces within which social life takes place (Elden 2004; Lefebvre 2009). Under capitalism, ‘abstract space’ (the space produced by economic transactions and state policies) has ‘colonized’ everyday life by means of both spatial practices (commodification and bureaucratization) and representations of space (discourses of planning and surveillance). Lefebvre looked for a movement against this colonization of concrete space (or place) to reclaim the spaces of everyday life. This could be accomplished by insurgent ‘counter-discourses’ based on spaces of representation that build on memories and residues of an older ‘authentic’ existence and new practices in concrete space. Merrifield (1993: 521, 525), for example,

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interprets Lefebvre as seeing space and place as dialectically related such that space is a ‘rootless, fluid reality of material flows’ or ‘the realm of dispassionate “objects” rationally “ordered in space”’, that Lefebvre called the ‘realm of the conceived’, whereas place ‘comprises the locus and a sort of stopping of these flows’, what Lefebvre called the ‘realm of the lived’. But this account seems to understate the degree to which ‘concrete space’ (or place) for Lefebvre (he never uses the term place) signifies a ‘bottom-up’ and autonomous reaction to the depredations of those agents of capital and the state whose dominance has produced abstract space. The use of the phrase ‘dialectically related’ obfuscates rather than clarifies quite what the relationship is between abstract space and concrete place. Nevertheless, this framework does suggest how uneven economic development is jointly produced by dominant practices and discourses but can only be challenged by and on behalf of people in places attempting to recapture concrete (place) space from the abstract space of modern capitalism (Soja 1989). For the second perspective the focus lies in relating location to place through the experiences of human beings as agents. In one of the most sophisticated statements of this perspective, drawing most obviously on the pioneering writing of Tuan (1974), Robert Sack (1997: 58) provides the essential thrust when he writes that his ‘framework draws on the geographical experiences of place, space, home, and world which people use in their lives to integrate forces, perspectives, and selves’. From this point of view: Place implies space, and each home is a place in space. Space is a property of the natural world, but it can be experienced. From the perspective of experience, place differs from space in terms of familiarity and time. A place requires human agency, is something that may take time to know, and a home especially so. As we move along the earth we pass from one place to another. But if we move quickly the places blur; we lose track of their qualities, and they may coalesce into the sense that we are moving through space. Sack 1997: 16.

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In this frame of reference, places are woven together through space by movement and the network ties that produce places as changing constellations of human commitments, capacities and strategies. Places are invariably parts of spaces and spaces provide the resources and the frames of reference in which places are made. Though how free individual persons are in actuality to make and miss opportunities in place making is far from clear. The feminist perspective, broadly construed, is one that is both deeply suspicious of grand narratives that suppress multiplicity, difference, and alterity in their obsession with temporal transitions (from tradition to modern, etc.) and sympathetic to rethinking space in terms of multiplicity and dislocation. In this framework, ‘places may be thought of as open articulations of connections’ and ‘identities of subjects and identities of places constructed through interrelations not only challenge notions of past authenticities but also hold open the possibility of change in the future’ (Massey 1999: 288). Place, then, includes location and a sense of place but without the central focus on individual agency that brings these together in the humanist perspective and the division between representation and practice in the neo-Marxist. Here the emphasis is on places as sites in the flow of social relations. Place is seen as constituted out of space-spanning relationships, place-specific social forms, and a sense of place associated with the relative well-being, disruption, and experience of living somewhere. The experience of place is quite different for different groups, such as children, women, subordinated social classes, minorities, and so on. Feminism claims that many accounts insist on denying this pluralism. In particular, the argument goes, they also privilege space by associating it with ‘high politics’ and ‘Reason’ and denigrate place as personified by home and the mundane lives of women and children (Massey 1994). Reasserting place, therefore, is a political as much as an intellectual move. It is about revalorizing place not as the site of domesticity

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but as a meeting place for a ‘progressive’ political agenda. From this perspective, other conceptualizations, particularly those that privilege space over place, tend to leave little likelihood of political change coming from bottom-up political organization (e.g. Hardt and Negri 2000). Though quite why the politics associated with a ‘progressive sense of place’ must necessarily be progressive is not explained. The performative perspective is similarly suspicious of grand theories but also finds problematic the division between representation and practice that most attempts at relating space and place, particularly the neo-Marxist, tend to take for granted. In this view, as Nigel Thrift (1999: 317) claims, place is associational, weaving together ‘all manner of spaces and times’ but it is never completed because it always depends on ‘further works of association’. Drawing on the post-humanist ‘actor-network theory’ of Bruno Latour and others, but critical of its reluctance to engage with the ‘role of common ground’ or place in ‘how networks echo back and forth’, Thrift (1999: 313) emphasizes the materiality of places as ‘open spaces’ that practices make and that take ‘shape only in their passing’ (Thrift 1999: 310). In this view, the particularities of any situation cannot be read off from the predictions of a grand theory. Rather, places are specific time–space configurations made up of the intersection of many encounters between ‘actants’ (people and things) that reflect ‘practical means of going on rather than something concerned with enabling us to see, contemplatively, the supposedly true nature of what something is’ (Thrift 1999: 304 (author’s emphasis)). Like in an Antonioni film, the placement and displacement of bodies and objects is more important than the chronology of events and actions. So, this theoretical viewpoint is as much epistemological (concerned with how we know) as ontological (concerned with what exists). We always look at ‘the world’ from somewhere, from a place. Though this insight is hardly novel with Thrift, it does serve to reiterate that knowledge is always

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and everywhere geographically contextual and reflexive. Though there may be overtones here of old-fashioned vitalism and animating presences among objects, the meaning of a particular place, ‘its genius loci, depends upon the geniuses we locate there’ (Bell 1997: 813), both living and dead. This position is much the most radical of the four in attempting to relate space and place together by raising the difficulty of ever thinking beyond the confines of the space–time context in which we are embedded and the fact that there is a spatiality to social relationships even when ‘it is no longer necessary to download meaning onto a territory [place] or weave it into a land’ (Jiménez 2003: 150). A problem here, of course, is how one can see over the horizon (as Thrift for one obviously does) if one is entirely limited by one’s immediate associations. We return here paradoxically, given the talk of relational networks, to a rather closed conception of place. Each of these four positions offers a potential route towards overcoming the space– place conundrum. Of course, each emerges out of distinctive intellectual traditions and thus cannot be seen as a substitute for any one of the others on the road to overturning the dominance of either/or thinking about location and place. In other words, as I have tried to show, each has its own problems and potential. Perhaps the most significant shared problem is the failure to show the relevance, except in the most casual way, any has for the substantive empirical agendas of contemporary geography or other fields. But there some shared emphases that are useful in orienting these theoretical positions towards a more operational focus. Perhaps the most important is the common focus on the construction of places through social practices. Gone is the sense of places as natural units inherited from time immemorial. Another, therefore, is the stress on the fluidity and dynamic character of places as they respond to interconnections with other places. Consequently, places tend to have permeable rather than fixed boundaries and are internally diverse rather than homogeneous with

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respect to their social and other attributes even as the express a certain communality of experience and performance.

PUTTING PLACE(S) INTO PRACTICE Clearly, therefore, much of the revived interest in place in its strong sense is processoriented. Rather than just a ‘frame’ for the investigation of categories of gender, ethnic, class, and so on, place now represents the ambition to show how complex and dynamic the cross-germination of such categories and the activities to which they refer can be. But it is hard to show this just theoretically without attention to more detailed mediating concepts that are more suitable for empirical purposes. Theorizing about place in general is only useful as a general orientation to understanding the effects of places in particular. First of all, we need to take some definitional care. Place is used in a variety of ways but its meaning can be specified more clearly in terms of the three dimensions that tend to re-occur across the various theoretical positions and which can be examined empirically (Agnew 1987). The first dimension is place as location or a site in space where an activity or object is located and which relates to other sites or locations because of interaction, movement and diffusion between them. A city or other settlement is often thought of this way as always part of a system of places with mobility inherent in the relations between them. Second is the view of place as a series of locales or settings where everyday-life activities take place. Here the location is not just the mere address but the where of social life and environmental transformation. Examples would be such social settings from everyday life as workplaces, homes, shopping malls, churches, vehicles, and so on, whose structuring of social interaction helps forge values, attitudes, and behaviors. Some locales are not necessarily tied to particular locations and can be of no

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fixed or permanent abode (even though they are located in motion); for example vehicles and Internet chat rooms. The third dimension is place as sense of place or identification with a place as a unique community, landscape, and moral order. In this construction, every place is particular and, thus, singular. A strong sense of ‘belonging’ to a place, either consciously or as shown through everyday behavior such as participating in placerelated affairs, would be indicative of a ‘sense of place’. But this need be neither totalistic, in the sense of excluding other objects of affection or identity nor reactionary and exclusionary. Arguably, however, some sense of place (with a locality, nation-state or world) is a necessary prerequisite for social solidarity and collective action. Second, places are not bounded, isolated entities as conventional regional studies have tended to regard them. Rather, they are usually and perhaps increasingly in a globalizing world located in a series of extensive economic, political, and cultural networks with varying geographical scope. They are best thought of relationally. Ash Amin, for example, argues that all geographical concepts (e.g. place, territory, scale) that stress internal coherency and boundedness reify rather than reveal the logic of socio-spatial relations in a globalizing world. ‘In this emerging new order, spatial configuration and spatial boundaries are no longer purposively territorial or scalar, since the social, economic and political inside and outside are constituted through the topologies of actor networks which are becoming increasingly dynamic and varied in spatial constitution’ (Amin 2004: 33). Of course, geographers have long been interested in diffusion from place to place, from Carl Sauer to Torsten Hägerstrand and Lawrence Brown, but recent relational discussions of place have tended to lack any sense whatsoever of how much the field has actually been here theoretically, if not terminologically, before (see, e.g., Sauer 1952; Brown 1975). Third, and even more radical in terms of uprooting the conventional spatial sense of

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place, nomads, travelers, temporary migrants, commuters and other itinerants even while inherently mobile, also define places (more specifically, locales) with which to move and in which to rest and interact. Thus, rather than the opposite to or disruptive of place, mobility is an inherent part of how some places are defined and operate (Cresswell 2004). For example, commuting paths are very much part of the experience of place of many people and migrants often maintain social ties over long distances and thus acquire different senses of place then those of their more spatially rooted neighbors. The kinship ties, migrant itineraries and ritual exchanges that form personhood do not necessarily require long histories of sedentary habitation. In a ‘frontier region’ of East Java, for example, the anthropologist Konstantinos Retsikas notes that place is a tool of sociality; by which he means that because people move and stop, settle, and move again … places are shifting and changing, always becoming through people’s engagements – material as well as discursive – in, through, and with them … In other words, place is not where social relations simply take place, but an inherent ingredient of their modalities of actualization. Retsikas 2007: 971–2.

Fourth, contexts of place and time are not best thought of as invariably regional or local, although they frequently have elements of one or both. Rather, they are best considered as always located somewhere with some contexts more stretched over space (such as means of mass communication and the spatial division of labour) and others more localized (school, workplace, and residential interactions). The balance of influence on social and political choices between and among the stretched and more local contextual processes can be expected to change over time, giving rise to subsequent shifts in political outlooks and affiliations (e.g. Nicholls 2009). So, for example, as foreign companies introduce branch plants, trade unions must negotiate new

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work practices, which, in turn, erode longaccepted views of the roles of managers and employees. In due course, this sort of configuration of contextual changes can, for example, give an opening to a new political party or a redefined old one as interests, identities and political heuristics (yardsticks) shift and upset established political affiliations (see, e.g. Agnew 2007; Cutler 2007). But changes must always fit into existing cultural templates and cleavages that often show amazing resilience as well as adaptation. Doreen Massey puts the overall point the best when she writes: This is a notion of place where specificity (local uniqueness, a sense of place) derives not from some mythical internal roots nor from a history of isolation – now to be disrupted by globalization – but precisely from the absolute particularity of the mixture of influences found together there. Massey (1999: 22).

Fifth, though much has been made of the general impact of information and communications technologies for the declining significance of terrestrial places (and physical space), the networks they define always are grounded somewhere and in someone’s sociospatial imagination (e.g. Agnew 2009; Legg 2009). Typically, if only because of the power of vested political interests, they reflect visions or fantasies of ‘located connection, not new virtual spaces’ (Green et al. 2005: 817). The new technologies are part of new ‘place-making projects’ rather than simply creating a totally new cyberspace world or making place irrelevant. For example, closely examining the governmental focus across Europe on ‘wiring up’ in the late 1990s shows how much the idea of network was used in practice to further very ‘specific place-making projects such as “Manchester”, “Europe”, and “Britain”’ (Green et al. 2005: 807). Finally, place is fundamental to understanding knowledge production and dissemination or as Livingstone (2007: 71), puts it ‘location and locution’, or the ways in which places provide both the social settings or venues in which new ideas develop (and to

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which they diffuse) and the claims to authority that rest on having been somewhere (doing fieldwork, hanging around, etc.) or, one might suggest, having attachments to certain educational institutions rather than to others (Jacob 2007). Of course, it is also from within places that the wider world is constructed. Indeed, what we understand by ‘space’ emerges from the practices of philosophers, cartographers, scientists, and a host of others in their particular offices, homes, workplaces and laboratories. Knowledge creation and circulation are invariably situated somewhere (Schatzki 1991). Beyond mere location in space, therefore, from this perspective places really matter for what we think abstractly as well as what we do practically.

REFERENCES Abler, R., Adams, J.S. and Gould, P. (1971) Spatial Organization: The Geographer’s View of the World. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Agnew, J.A. (1987) Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and Society. London: Allen and Unwin. Agnew, J.A. (1989) ‘The devaluation of place in social science’, in J. Agnew and J. Duncan (eds.) The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations. London: Unwin Hyman, pp. 9–29. Agnew, J.A. (1994) ‘The territorial trap’, Review of International Political Economy, 1: 53–80. Agnew, J.A. (2003) Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Agnew, J.A. (2007) ‘Remaking Italy: place configurations and electoral politics under the Second Republic’, Modern Italy, 12: 17–38. Agnew, J.A. (2009) Globalization and Sovereignty. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Amin, A. (2004) ‘Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place’, Geografiska Annaler B 36: 33–44. Antognazza, M.R. (2008) Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Augé, M. (1995) Non-places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.

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Bell, M.M. (1997) ‘The ghosts of place’, Theory and Society, 26: 813–836. Berry, B.J.L. (1967) Geography of Market Centers and Retail Distribution. New York: McGraw Hill. Bonnemaison, J. (2005) Culture and Space. London: Tauris. Braudel, F. (1949) La Méditerrannée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l époque de Philippe II. Paris: Gallimard. Brenner, N. (2004) New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, L.A. (1975) ‘The market and infrastructure context of adoption: a spatial perspective on the diffusion of innovation’, Economic Geography, 51: 185–216. Casati, R. and Varzi, A.C. (1999) Parts and Places: The Structures of Spatial Representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Casey, E.S. (1993) Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Casey, E.S. (1997) The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Casey, E.S. (2001) ‘Between geography and philosophy: what does it mean to be in the place-world?’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91: 683–693. Cox, K.R. and Golledge, R. (eds.) (1969) Behavioral Problems in Geography. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Studies in Geography. Cresswell, T. (2004) Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Curry, M.R. (1998) Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge. Cutler, F. (2007) ‘Context and attitude formation: social interaction, default information, or local interests?’, Political Geography, 26: 575–600. de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Delaney, D. (2005) Territory: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Diez Roux, A.V., Merkin, S.S., Arnett, D., Chambliss, L., Massing, M., Nieto F. J., Sorlie, P., Szeklo, M., Tyroler, H.A., Watson, R.L. (2001) ‘Neighborhood of residence and the incidence of coronary heart disease’, New England Journal of Medicine, 345: 99–106. Disalle, R. (2002) ‘Newton’s philosophical analysis of space and time’, in G.E. Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 33–56.

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Elden, S. (2001) Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History. London: Continuum. Elden, S. (2004) Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. London: Continuum. Entrikin, J.N. (1990) The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Farinelli, F. (2003) Geografia. Un’introduzione ai modelli del mondo. Turin: Einaudi. Feingold, M. (2004) The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Friedman, T. (2005) The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Goldenberg, J. and Levy, M. (2009) Distance is not Dead: Social Interaction and Geographical Distance in the Internet Era. Jerusalem: Hebrew University. Gould, P. R. (1979) ‘Geography 1957–1977: the Augean period’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 69: 139–151. Green, S., Harvey, P. and Knox, H. (2005) ‘Scales of place and networks: an ethnography of the imperative to connect through information and communications technologies’, Current Anthropology, 46: 805–826. Gregory, D. (1979) Ideology, Science and Human Geography. London: Hutchinson. Hägerstrand, T. (1982) ‘Diorama, path and project’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 73: 323–339. Haggett. P. (1965) Locational Analysis in Human Geography. London: Arnold. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the City. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hirst, P. (2005) Space and Politics: Politics, War and Architecture. Cambridge: Polity. Horden, P. and Purcell, N. (2000) The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell. Isard, W. (1956) Location and Space-Economy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Jacob, C. (2007) Les lieux de savoir. Tome 1: Espaces et communautés. Paris: Albin Michel. Jessop, B., Brenner, N., and Jones, M. (2008) ‘Theorizing sociospatial relations’, Society and Space 26: 389–401.

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Jiménez, A.C. (2003) ‘On space as a capacity’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9: 137–153. Jones, M. (2009) ‘Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond’, Progress in Human Geography, 33: 802–822. Keil, R. and Mahon, R. (eds.) (2009) Leviathan Undone? Towards a Political Economy of Scale. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (2009) State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Legg, S. (2009) ‘Of scales, networks and assemblages: the League of Nations apparatus and the scalar sovereignty of the Government of India’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34: 234–253. Livingstone, D.N. (2003) Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Livingstone, D.N. (2007) ‘Science, site and speech: scientific knowledge and the spaces of rhetoric’, History of the Human Sciences, 20: 71–98. Malpas, J. (2006) Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Markus, R.A. (1994) ‘How on earth could places become holy? Origins of the Christian idea of holy places’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2: 257–271. Marston, S.A., Jones, J.P III and Woodward, K. (2005) ‘Human geography without scale’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30: 416–432. Massey, D. (1984) Spatial Divisions of Labour. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massey, D. (1999) Power-Geometries and the Politics of Space-Time, Heidelberg: Hettner Lecture, Institute of Geography, University of Heidelberg. Massey, D, and Thrift, N. (2003) ‘The passion of place’ in R. Johnston and M. Williams (eds.), A Century of British Geography. London: British Academy, pp. 275–99. Merrifield, A. (1993) ‘Place and space: a Lefebvrian reconciliation’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 18: 516–531.

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Nicholls, W. (2009) ‘Place, networks, space: theorizing the geographies of social movements’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34: 78–93. Pacelli, D. and Marchetti, M.C. (2007) Tempo, spazio e società. La ridefinizione dell’esperienza collettiva. Milan: Franco Angeli. Pred, A. (1984) ‘Place as historically contingent process: structuration and the time-geography of becoming places’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 74: 279–297. Relph, E. (1976) Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Retsikas, K. (2007) ‘Being and place: movement, ancestors, and personhood in East Java, Indonesia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13: 969–986. Sack, R.D. (1974) ‘The spatial separatist theme in geography’, Economic Geography, 50: 1–19. Sack, R.D. (1980) Conceptions of Space in Social Thought: A Geographic Perspective. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sack, R.D. (1997) Homo Geographicus. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sauer, C. (1952) Agricultural Origins and Dispersals. New York: American Geographical Society. Schatzki, T. (1991) ‘Spatial ontology and explanation’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81: 650–670. Smith, N. (1984) Uneven Development. Oxford: Blackwell. Soja, E.W. (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. Thrift, N. (1999) ‘Steps to an ecology of place’, in D. Massey, J. Allen, and P. Sarre (eds.) Human Geography Today. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 295–322. Tuan, Y-F. (1974) ‘Space and place: humanistic perspective’, Progress in Geography, 6: 211–252. Wallerstein, I. (1979) The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolpert, J. (1964) ‘The decision process in spatial context’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 54: 537–558. Zipf, G. (1949) Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Cambridge, MA: Addison Wesley.

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24 Time Mike Crang

Time is not a thing. Heidegger 1972: 3 On Time and Being: Martin Heidegger; translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York; London: Harper & Row, 1972.

This chapter addresses how time has been treated in geography and argues the summary answer is too often ‘over-simply’. That is, an overstatement, but this essay will suggest that geography has often used an unsophisticated treatment of time. This may be predictable if one thinks of geography as a ‘spatial’ discipline, with rich debates over the nature of space, place and landscape instead of over time. And yet that seems an inadequate explanation for why: ‘different sorts of time’ have not troubled too many geographers much. There is a wealth of work offering sophisticated analyses of space and spatiality, but to see time and temporality given equal treatment is unusual. In Anglophone contexts, this tendency is poorly explained by reference to the ‘nature’ of geography, just as it would be mistaken to look to the discipline of history for an abundance of theorizations of social time or studies of different temporalities. Kurtz 2009: 259.

Although I shall show there is discussion around temporal issues in historical geography this has been limited and revealing in its

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preoccupations. This chapter takes as a starting point the idea that time is not an invariant dimension through which things evolve but a socially constructed medium; that is, time is not a self-evident category against which the world can be measured, nor is it reducible to its forms of measurement. Indeed, thinking for a moment of those forms opens out one avenue of enquiry which is the development and construction of measurements of, and devices for measuring, time. Thus there is a history to tell of the rise of standardised time, and indeed histories and geographies of a variety of temporal categories. Thus different cultures around the world have had and still have different relationships to time and different modes of measuring and experiencing it. There is a veritable anthropological industry looking at different cultures, their different calendars and the like. Time is not universally experienced as equivalent to our modern technologies of measurement. A grand tradition has emerged from this insight looking at the historical emergence of a homogeneous, empty and abstract time, and the forms of its measurement. Instead of seeing a technological progression of ever more exact measurement of time, this story

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asks what the forms of measurement tell us about the societies that invented them. Jacques Le Goff’s (1980) classic account of the emergence of modern, capitalistic time contrasts the medieval city, marked by bells ringing out hours, the diurnal curfew and the like, with the invention of accounting technologies by merchants and its fusion with the time discipline of monasteries. The diffusion of time technologies, especially public clocks, and resulting time consciousness – how they began to influence social conduct and the organisation of daily life – reveals a historical geographical of time-keeping: How we extend ourselves into the past and future, how we pursue immortality and how we temporally manage, organise and regulate our social affairs, however, has been culturally, historically and contextually distinct. Each historical epoch with its new forms of socio-economic expression is simultaneously restructuring its social relations of time. Adam 2002: 14.

These studies have shown that patterns are rather more complex and disrupt the sometimes overgrand narratives (Glennie and Thrift 2009). Too easily the advent of the clock becomes bound in with an academic temporal categorisation – the modern versus the traditional. Taking my cue then from this work, I start with two approaches to time and geography that deal with longer-term evolution: first, where time is seen as thickening places, providing them with tradition as a sort of experiential and temporal depth; and then second, approaches to time that have followed the narratives of a modern time-consciousness to argue for the emergence of accelerated senses of time, and often then consequently thinned and diminished spaces. These approaches I suggest emphasise only one of the four c’s that Adam (2002: 14–5) suggests characterise the long-term evolution of social time. Thus it is they are strong on the commodification of time, and attend then to the creation of time to human design only to the extent

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that such rationalised designs are seen to return to haunt and dominate humanity, as Adorno and Horkheimer (1947) might have it, but pay little regard to technologies and strategies aimed at the control of time, and the colonisation of the future. Those last two aspects bring the chapter to the areas considered by time-geography, and the work that most explicitly focuses upon the allocation of time and space as resources in social life. The chapter will assess the key issues around this approach, before looking at how it can be used to inflect the notion of temporal plurality, by looking at different ‘time regimes’ operating in different places and then looking at the way it addresses, and does not address, multiple and conflicting temporalities in given places. The conclusion will then return to think about the nature of time and how we address it.

TIME AS EPOCHAL TRADITION Space requires the thickness of time, silent repetitions, slow ripening, the work of the social imaginary and standards for it to exist as a place. Marié 1982: 21.

Although time has always appeared in the historical study of places, geographers have often neglected its profound conceptualisation (Jauhiainen 2007: 233). Much British historical geography after H.C. Darby used a very static version of time largely as a result of a heavy reliance on archives based on a single year of record (e.g. Domesday Book, lay subsidies, etc.) to reconstruct past landscapes. Darby’s solution lay in what he called ‘comparative statics’, of sequences of these slices of time. But inevitably it concentrated upon the geographies of given periods rather than the dynamics of change, producing geographies in times rather than through time (Dodgshon 2008: 2). This contrasts with the temporality underpinning the French Annales school and its geohistoire of regional identity and the shaping of landscapes over

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the longue durée of a history slow to run and change, in Braudel’s phrase. This geography attends to the common folk, to their innumerable footfalls and their imprint on the landscape. As an approach it speaks to the emotional attachment to natal soil, which echoes nationalist authors in mobilising the link of place and memory. In the words of the Swedish nationalist scholar Erik Gustaf Geijer, who published Swedish Folk Tales (Svenska folksagor) in 1814–15: Every folk lives not only in the present, but also in its memories: and it lives through them. Every generation propagates itself both physically and morally, bequeathing to the next generation its customs and concepts. This tradition from one time to another unifies a people, fostering their unbroken consciousness of themselves as a nation; it transmits to them, so to speak, their personality in Facos 1998: 33–4.

Both popular and academic accounts depict the power of time experienced as tradition. The same sense of the emergence of place can be traced through to the work of the English Landscape school around W.G. Hoskins. Hoskins looking at traces of life layered through his local landscape from the Saxon period onwards speaks of ‘the cultural humus of sixty generations or more’ (Hoskins 1955: 235). This way of imagining tradition in English landscape history might be seen as a set of habits of thought, in the archaeologist Matt Johnson’s phrase, which foster a set of temporal dispositions to favour continuity, and valorise specific versions and periods of the past. Thus in the work of writers like Hoskins ‘landscape history emerges as a practice and mode of writing seeking form and meaning in a modern world deemed to lack either’ (Matless 2008: 297). Traditional worlds have been written up as operating from time immemorial, in a cyclical temporality of endless unchanging repetition. In contrast modernity has, for better or worse, been seen as melting all that is solid into air, as Marx termed it, and thus with dynamism and

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change. These notions of temporality have come under heavy critique – where the assumed static nature of ‘traditional’ peoples has been seen as pejorative, Western ethnocentrism. The academic, and the Western reader, are left to inhabit the forward rush of modern life while for the others all change is seen as eroding their culture. More recent approaches to the historicity of places have then looked at the creation, preservation and indeed fabrication of historic landscapes that seek to give this sense of temporal depth. Sustained work on social memory and monuments and landscapes has unpacked any notions of simple unity of people and land over time to see the historicity of place as an actively created and active agent in processes of group identification. Time as history is seen as a social resource to be mobilised, contested and deployed. Such versions of past landscapes can be attempts to engineer place affection and identification. They also trade liberally between the fictive and the real where the ‘past gains further weight because we conceive of places not only as we ourselves see them but also as we have heard and read about them’ (Lowenthal 1975: 6). While this work has begun to develop theories now around time and memory it is perhaps notable how little studied are transient landscapes, and indeed landscapes (such as squats, informal gardens) enabled by transience. Here the flickering possibilities of futurity speak of temporary opportunities not slow accumulation or bright new horizons. That latter is the other grand temporality in geography that looks to a hyper-modernism of accelerating societies.

TIME AND ACCELERATION AS EPOCHAL CHANGE Chronological and historical time, time that passes, is replaced by a time that exposes itself instantaneously. Virilio 1997b: 363.

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The second tradition of approaching time in geography looks to epochal transitions in the forms and experiences of time – in other words a historical geography of timeconsciousness and temporal organisation. At the grand level this has led to the tracking of such phenomena as the time–space distantiation of activities or more the frequently used obverse notion of time–space compression (Warf 2008). This picks up on the diffusion of various technologies for the management of time (from public clocks, to calendars, to wristwatches) and to a lesser extent work has looked at the colonisation of night times. It also charts the struggles over the shaping of new forms of temporal organisation, with campaigns over the length of the working day and week (as it became untrammelled by constraints of season and daylight), and attempts to shape temporalities and adoptions of new rhythms to fit new temporal regimes. Currently this approach to time has taken up the sense of epochal change and social organisation from a number of theorists. For instance, Regis Debray argues that the material forms and processes of the communication networks show a quickening pace from the graphosphere based on the linear organisation of ideas with the printing press to the videosphere of the production and circulation of ubiquitous digital images (Hassan 2009: 225). Paul Virilio sees a history of great epochs where a dromocratic revolution of circulation creates an abstracted speed-space. Similarly, Manuel Castells (1996: 411) suggests successive hegemonic forms of temporality such as industrial production, dominated and orchestrated by clock time, and now informational capitalism, producing a time where linearity is replaced by instantaneity and discontinuity. Timeless time … the dominant temporality in our society, occurs when the characteristics of a given context, namely, the informational paradigm and the network society, induce systemic perturbation in the sequential order of phenomena performed in that context … The space of flows … dissolves time

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by disordering the sequence of events and making them simultaneous, thus installing society in an eternal ephemerality. Castells 1996: 464, 467.

This ‘timeless time’ is created by the way long distance, real-time communications coordinate actions across time zones, but also enable the increasing incorporation of the future – in futures markets, derivatives and other devices, so that to a large extent the future has already happened. Virilio’s vision of acceleration and compression does not see society unified over distance, rather the destruction of distance and any (more or less) linear relationship with (more or less) linear time of cause and effect (Crang 2007), leading to disintegration rather than integration and resulting in a ‘crisis in the notion of physical dimension’ where the ‘tyranny of distances’ between geographically scattered people gives way to the ‘tyranny of real time’ (cited in Graham 1998: 170) and thus we move from an urbanisation of real space to an urbanisation of real time (Virilio 1997a: 7). The result is that we are ‘no longer part of chronological time; we have to conceptualize it instead as chronoscopic time. Real space, he suggests, is making room for decontextualised ‘real-time’ processes and intensity takes over from extensity’ (Adam 2003: 68). Speed becomes a primary dimension that defies all temporal and physical measurements (Virilio 1997b: 385). This then erodes the possibility for the historically accreted and thickened landscape in an overexposed city where we instead see ‘the end of the unity of place of the old political theater of the city, and its imminent replacement by a unity of time, a chronopolitics of intensivity and interactivity, “technicity” succeeding the continuity [longue durée] of the City’ (Virilio 1998b: 61). Chronology and history are erased as speed eviscerates the senses of durability and density (Breuer 2009: 233). However, for Virilio and Castells this is a far from uniform process. Virilio sees society split with one part living in ‘an electrical, world of relative speed’, that is one of

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transportation, whilst the second part lives with the ‘absolute speed of transmission of information in real time’ (Virilio 1998a: 185). The latter are a ‘kinetic elite’, where the capacity to ‘compress and accelerate temporal processes is a prime index of wealth and power’ (Roberts 1998: 117), and instead of bureaucrats, the powerbrokers of the age of reason and technology of the graphosphere, there are dromocrats in the age of speed (Virilio 2000: 44). For Castells a dual city of ‘real virtual spaces’ cuts off the elite from slow, embedded places. This reading of headlong acceleration is echoed, if inverted, by social movements such as cittaslow and the slow food campaigns that seek to recreate life at a more human and, indeed naturally, sustainable pace. And yet these epochal proclamations of a space of flows ‘changing our apprehension of space, time and subjectivity’ where places vanish, time becomes instantaneous and the subject becomes decentred, all seem to downplay the variegated ‘texture and conflicting timespaces of everyday life’ (Simonsen 2004: 43–4).

TIME-GEOGRAPHY AND THE SHADOWLESS ETERNAL NOW Some early classics connecting time with space analysed the acceleration created by transport technologies by mapping travel times. So historical geographies examined the time taken to cover distances between places like Lansing and Detroit in Michigan, which were 1,300 minutes apart by stagecoach in 1840, but only 180 minutes apart by train by the 1870s and 80 minutes apart by car in the twentieth century (Warf 2008: 15), or used isochrones – that is, measuring distance travelled in a given time – in studies of expanding commuting such as Schjerning’s 1903 analysis of Berlin (cited in Warf 2008: 119–22). The linkage of distance, travel and the textures of everyday mobility became the staple of time-geography, examining the

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interaction of time and space in the location of activities and the constraints this imposes upon human action. Rather than grand theory, it set to building operative tools out of the diagramming of time, space and travel. For instance ‘activity spaces’ that map out if someone has an hour the maximum distance they can travel and return. Different people have different capacities for and constraints on their speed and mobility deriving from the means at their disposal and their location, so we can map inequalities of access to various services. Pioneered by Torsten Hägerstrand who sought to make geography ‘rise up from the flat map with its static patterns and think in terms of a world on the move, a world of incessant permutations’ (Hägerstrand 1982: 323) it is worth thinking through the disputed implications of this approach. First, it has been argued to be reductive and ‘physicalist’, when Hägerstrand argued that social constraints could be moved from the abstract or invisible social structures and given physical shape in terms of location in space, areal extension, and duration in time. Thus one might see his notion of the project, defined as clusters of acts, individuals and items necessary for the completion of any goal-oriented behaviour, as taking the sense of colonising the future and turning it into a mappable phenomena. However, the sense of creating a territory comprising human and non-human entities seems prescient of recent postphenomenological accounts which see landscapes as a ‘configuration of contacts between countless existents with their own biographies of encounters’ (Schwanen 2007b: 10). This physicalism can both problematically and productively erase ‘the distinction between human and nonhumans because it graphically represents both as matter’ (Gren 2009: 281). A sympathetic reading of the time-geographic enterprise sees it as an attempt to hold onto ‘some of the fundamentals of a unifying geography … by trying to keep nature, society, and technology within a single conceptual framework’ which is

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‘quite reminiscent of an “old geography” interested in the transformation of habitats over time that included not only its people and artifacts but also its natural base’ (Gren 2009: 280). Instead of relying on ‘dematerialized statistical aggregates of living conditions’, it sought to ‘place them and their consequences in actual space–time settings on Earth’ (2009: 280). It has the merit of focusing upon the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of space and time, rather than just the aggregate amounts of time so often derived in sociological studies of time (Schwanen 2006). Secondly, it has been critiqued for focusing upon time–space constraints to action. Conceptually it is open to seeing ‘artefacts as agents [that] not only enable people to overcome capability constraints but are also sources of routinization and stabilization’ (Schwanen 2007b: 11 emphasis in original) and to see the world comprised of resources and artefacts which embed temporalities – but it has rarely done so. It is not then surprising that many ‘still think that time-geography only concentrates on constraints’, and is ‘characterized by underdeveloped notions of power and agency’ (Schwanen 2007b: 9). Instead of dealing with the rich texture of life it has been argued the charting of time–space routes and physical barriers produces an impoverished account of social life, in Anne Buttimer’s phrase only seeing a dans macabre of the traces and pathways of people. Thirdly, ‘Hägerstrand’s coupling of space and time did not invoke a fresh conceptualisation of time or, indeed, of space. It made use of a social or experiential approach to time budgets, but the daily, weekly and seasonal budgets of time that individuals or groups ‘spent’ were measured in standard clock or calendar time’ (Dodgshon 2008: 2). In fact, one can say it tended to develop an even more reductive notion of space and time as an abstract lattice of temporal and spatial coordinates as in the so-called ‘aquarium view’ of the cuboid of abstracted space–time in geo-computational visualisations (e.g. Kwan 2000). The results can reveal stark inequalities but also reduce the stuff of time

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and space. Here we reach the apogee of the tendency for the taken for granted AngloEuropean time to be visualised as ‘an empty container waiting to be filled’ (Hall 1983: 84). Many theorists have argued that conceptually this quantification of time reduces it to being the same as space: Even today the equation of temporal relations with the continuum of numbers assumes that time is isomorphic with space, and that space and time exist as a continuum, a unified totality. Time is capable of representation only through its subordination to space and spatial models. Grosz 1995: 95.

Space becomes simply a series of empty locations (x1, x2 ,…, xn), and time a series of equivalent moments (t1,t2, ,…, tn) that succeed each other. The sense of time as just a series of instants and points denies the sense of qualitative difference – producing what Castoriadis calls ‘identitiary time’ which ‘is but the innumerable (and numbered) repetition of identitiary presents, always identical as such and different only by their place’ (1987: 201). Thus a deeper analysis of ‘time’ in time-geography raises questions about how it is being theorised, or not theorised. It tends to present itself as the ‘shadowless eternal now’ of Nietszche’s midday hour of world. A perpetual present in the ontology of time lies under the recurring everyday routines it analyses. The fundamental question though is whether this does justice to time or space. Geographers have long argued for the need to see space as produced and lively rather than through a geometric lattice. For time, the argument is that we are allowing clock times (of minutes and hours) to drive our understanding of the nature of time, and thus to ‘confuse time and the measurement of time’ (Latour and Serres 1995: 61–2). In this sense time-geography as an analytic has lost its sense of material embeddedness in the world. This comes back to the representation of social action via abstract diagrams and seeing ‘time–space as a supposedly objective, transparent, and neutral frame of reference in

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which human bodies appeared as elementary universal particles erased from social and cultural markings such as gender’ (Gren 2009: 283). It is an odd paradox though that time-geography has received its most sustained critiques for failing to take the gendered, lived nature of bodies seriously enough when as we shall see below in ‘few social areas, other than in studies of gender, has time-geography been so successfully applied’ (2009: 283).

TIME REGIMES ACROSS PLACES The patterns of daily life are socially produced and both express and reinforce the assumptions of societies about time and their social values. For instance, studies have characterised the European Union as having four temporal regimes of how households divide paid and caring time. The first is the Nordic ‘universal breadwinner’ model marked by high labour market participation rates, especially for women, long hours in paid employment and continuity of that pattern for both sexes over the life course. Then a ‘modified breadwinner’ model (for countries such as France), where family formation and motherhood are still associated with withdrawal from labour market for some groups of women, and those mothers who are employed work predominantly full time. A Mediterranean ‘exit or full-time’ model (e.g. in Italy and Spain) sees fewer women employed, but when they are employed they generally work full time. Finally, a group of countries (e.g. the Netherlands, Germany and UK) have a ‘Maternal part-time work’ pattern where motherhood is associated with a smaller reduction in employment rate (less than in the Mediterranean and France), but part time hours are the norm for mothers, even when children are older (Larsen 2004; Anxo et al. 2007). The evolving pattern is one of fragmenting and possibly intensifying temporal rhythms of work, rest and play. There is a real concern

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both about women being expected to work a double shift of paid and unpaid work but also long hours at work for men. Thus in the UK, fathers with children less than 14 years old currently average 46 hours work a week, with 39 percent clocking up more than 60 hours (Cousins and Tang 2004) and if you add commuting then people are out for an additional 10–12 hours (Presser 2003). Coupled with this is the rise of work colonising non-standard hours where in the United States nearly 25 percent married couples with at least one earner work non-standard hours, which rises to 28 percent for dual earner households, and to 30 percent for those with under fives (Presser 2006). This is not to say these workers only work outside of Monday–Friday, 9–6, all the time. In the EU, as many as 43 percent of workers work some evenings, and a slightly higher percentage work at least one Saturday a month and almost a quarter at least one Sunday (Le Bihan and Martin 2004: 567). The four different temporal regimes of care thus connect with different modes of support. For instance, in some countries childcare for non-standard hours is virtually absent or prohibitively expensive, whereas in Finland ‘half the municipalities in Finland would have sufficient amount of places to look after children whose parents work at night, on weekends or shifts’ (Le Bihan and Martin 2004: 570). The state moves time resources as well as material ones to balance the commodification of time via the market (Goodin et al. 2004). However, the increasing diversity of working hours is not the same as flexibilisation for individual workers where issues emerge of both predictability and negotiability. Whilst non-standard hours can be planned and relatively stable solutions arranged, flexible hours that change at short notice require constant reinvention of these solutions. Whilst flexible hours may offer a solution for some workers who can choose to move and modify the times they work, demands for flexibility can impose new constraints on others. This can interact with duties and practices of caring in especially

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complex ways since these tend to be subject to their own rhythms and contingencies – where children fail to sleep on schedule, or people become ill. Time is not then a neutral, transparent medium through which people can plan their projects and tasks but congeries of clashing temporalities (McKie et al. 2002: 917). The physical constraints and textures mapped out by time geography fold into the social resources and facilities embedded in both national and local situations. Patterns of increased labour market participation by women have ‘placed emotional strain on parents, especially mothers, faced with the dilemma of expanding their hours of paid work without adequate physical and social infrastructure to enable them to do so easily’ (McDowell et al. 2005: 222–3). Thus the UK focuses public child care in ‘deprived’ urban areas rather than providing it as a general service in contrast to the welfare regimes of the Nordic countries (McDowell et al. 2006: 145). Equally this means that national regimes are inflected through different neighbourhoods characterised by different patterns of work, social support and child care (Vaiou and Lykogianni 2006). Meanwhile more highly educated women are more likely to be both employed and work longer hours, and to resolve care issues through market solutions, whilst lower income households are more likely to ‘renegotiate their working hours to use time rather than money to bridge the gaps and/or to enable partners and other family members to share the labour of caring’ (McDowell et al. 2006: 146). Thus one in ten families with pre-school children in the UK, utilise non-standard work hours to create a ‘tag-team’ parenting arrangement where typically men working during the day and women in the evenings or at night. These competing temporalities interact over a variety of timescales, from the lifecourse, the daily round and through to the seasonal. The lifecourse can vary in shape according to class or gendered expectations, where normal events such as childrearing or

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the ‘extended adolescence’ of queer lifecourses (Halberstram 2003) can be seen as ‘interruptions’ to ideals of linear development. Meanwhile cyclical time can be as marked as linear flows. Everyday life ‘conveys the fact of repetition; it refers not to the singular or unique but to that which happens “day after day” ’ (Felski 2000: 18). This is not a time of deliberative choices, they: are swamped by a dominant pattern of repetition and routine. We spend very little time each day either deliberating some future action or executing a previously deliberated one. Most of our time is devoted to living out a fairly sophisticated pattern of well ordered and nearly integrated routine. Cullen 1978: 31.

In other words our daily lives have a temporality that is often not the linear flow of time’s arrow but is composed of endless cycles. Getting up, going to work, eating meals, weekdays and weekends all occur with stupendous regularity. Nor are seasonal cycles solely relict features as some industries retain and indeed develop profound seasonal patterns (such as in tourism). However, seasonality is not so simple in practice. Seasons can be transposed – with artificial snow decorating tropical shops at Christmas, or large department-store chains launching their seasonal clothing at the same time everywhere across a region like Scandinavia with the effect that, for example, the spring clothes arrive at the northern city of Oulu two months before the snow melts (Jauhiainen and Mönkkönen 2005: 280). These all suggests a pattern of complexly intersecting temporalities forming conjunctural textures in specific places.

MULTIPLE TIMES IN PLACE Space is nothing but the inscription of time in the world, spaces are the realizations, inscriptions in the simultaneity of the external world of a series of times, the rhythms of the city, the rhythms of urban population … the city will only be rethought

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and reconstructed on its current ruins when we have properly understood that the city is the deployment of time. Lefebvre 1995: 16.

So while social studies of time-use reveal gendered patterns of caring activities (Bianchi et al. 2000; Sullivan 2000), these mean little unless we use the insights from time-geography to embed them in the infrastructures of everyday life (Jarvis 2005). Thus it is not only the case that women undertake more of the domestic responsibilities, these are fixed at points in the day and involve an often increasing number of locations in a less temporally standardised, more individualised society with flexible work time. Even when for many workers the place and time of work are singular and fixed, the spaces and times of care are complex and fluid – the notion of ‘home’ obscures the diversity of places and times that are implicated in childcare be they friends houses, school crèches, [or] doctors’ surgery that are often not readily appreciated by those not involved. McKie et al. 2002: 912.

It is perhaps not surprising that if we move from additive studies of time, to relational ones looking at the when and where of activities we find constrictions of women’s activity spaces and potential opportunities. Temporalities involve the duration of activities, their frequency and issues about coordinating, synchronising and sequencing actions. For example, the banal yet vital issue of chauffeuring children and its role in differentially constraining activity spaces reveals that in ‘split-shift’ chauffeuring by parents, fathers are more likely to drop off than pick up children giving them flexibility over ending work times, a finding reinforced by a negative correlation of responsibility for picking up with seniority of male job (Schwanen 2007a: 456). This suggests how the timespaces of care giving are folded around what is seen as non-discretionary timespaces of work for men, while for mothers work timespaces are often organised around compulsory timespaces of care.

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Time-geographic studies reveal how the operations of space-time constraints are embedded in daily life. For instance to take the much discussed time and space constraints we can see how quickly these can be complicated when we ask whether the spatial or temporal coordinates – the when and where, not the extent or duration – are fixed or flexible. Thus the flexible work times discussed above may revolve around fixed places of work or care, or flexibly located work maybe used to compensate for fixed times of work, and then if we look, by say gender, at for whom these activities might be regarded as optional or required, we see what gets fitted around what else by whom. This is a relational sense of time as how events connect rather than through simple clock time. Table 24.1 thus shows the pattern of combinations of things which are locationally and temporally flexible to those that are specified, and to which can be added whether activities are optional or obligatory. What is notable in empirical studies is that ‘although spatial fixity of bases is important, the temporal constraints in these locations seem to operate in a far more rigid manner’ (Dijst 1999: 196). Equal amounts of time can be experienced differently, as when parents of young children experience free time in short, fragmented episodes, but fathers tend to have some longer periods of leisure meaning women feel the same total time as more rushed (Bittman and Wajcman 2000; Beck and Arnold 2009). It becomes even more complex when we add fuzzier expectations of say what ‘being on time’ might mean in a given circumstance. Table 24.1 Typology of fixed and flexible space–time Place of activity

Time of Fixed activity Flexible

Fixed

Flexible

Activity required Specific place

Activity required Optional place

Activity optional Specific place

Activity optional Optional place

Source : Vilhelmson 1999: 181

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Thus arriving when the school shuts may be on time for some, but the moral economies of the school gate and the felt reproaches from other parents or children for being ‘the last’ may mean that ‘on time’ is not early enough for others. Being always the last to arrive at work, or the last to collect your child, or having the briefest visit to an elderly relative may all be legally permissible but socially unacceptable. Moreover, in scheduling these activities allowances probably have to be made for contingencies, factoring in some slack, and negotiating what different people find acceptable margins entails more than simply measuring clock time (Schwanen 2006, 2008). Currently information and communication technologies may be altering these patterns, first, as ‘constraint relaxation’ (Kwan 2002), enabling us to work from home or shop online and making more activities locationally flexible, and making the time of some activities more flexible. However, paradoxically other elements may be made more fixed, so multi-tasking, flexibilised net-workers, who should be part of a footloose kinetic elite, can in fact be more dependent on locally embedded, immobile support networks to sustain their fragmented time–space patterns (Jarvis 1999). This flexibility is not only about increasing choices though. Workers can be compelled to work the night shift in call centres in Bengalaru in order to service office hours workers in the United States, and the breakdown of old spatial and temporal boundaries that regulated workloads can result in increased demands for availability and hours at work for others. The effect is not just one of acceleration but one of competing temporalities – with global times, national and local all now interacting in one place. Of course clashing temporalities are not entirely novel – Bristol railway station originally fitted its clock with two minute hands, eight minutes apart, for local and national time. But the effect currently is the weaving of ‘timeless time’ and instantaneity into and over existing orderings. Laguerre (2004: 224)

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highlights the contrast of what he sees as a civic calendrical time with a flexible, globalised cyber time. The civic week is stabilised along several axes such as the fixing of activities in spaces, the fixing of time (work time versus rest time), the temporal harmonisation of collective activities (people doing the same types of work at the same time), all of which are enforced by the temporal regulation of activities. This he contrasts with a putative cyber week organised along axes of hybridity (connecting multiple time-spaces in a specific task), multiple temporalities (due to the intrusion of different time zones), flexibility of place and time, recombining tasks that were formerly separate and expansion of work beyond ‘normal’ hours. The result he sees is a blurring of boundaries both temporal and spatial between work and leisure, on diurnal and weekly scales. This results in desynchronisations and resynchronisation of global and local times. These trends connect to how the collective ordering of time is ceding to the individual where shared preordained meal times, and timings, are replaced by a series of flexibly negotiated encounters.

BECOMING SPACES: THE NATURE OF TIME Through this chapter I have been attempting to show that time can, indeed should, be thought of as anything but an empty container or as reducible to its units of measurement. Nor can it be aligned with a singular process of acceleration or indeed a singular mode of experience. If we accept that time flows then it is a turbulent torrent, with that eddies, riffles, slow pools and flows may be braided and overlain (Grosz 1999). That vision of time echoes Michel Serres’ history of Rome tells a story not of simply accumulating ‘cultural humus’, but repetitive cycles of violent foundations where the historical landscape reveals a dissipative time in plant growth and terrain change – returning us to

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landscape as thickening but here with an open non-repetitive time (Assad 1999: 13). He undoes the notion of time as linear succession arguing that no matter how far we dig back ‘another point always interpolates itself iteratively, in front of it. One city demands another city, one history requires another; but we do not really know how time flows’ (Serres 1991: 39). There is instead a spawning of self-perpetuating myth and repetition, until, he argues:

traces of the past and the seeds of the future, like in Hägerstrand’s projects. We are not located in space and time but are made through space–time.

Before imagining time, let’s try to imagine places. The search for the origin covers places as the oxen cover and re-cover the meadow with their tracks. We have read the places where cities are sown around the sea. Does the origin go through all these cities, is each one of them originary? Serres 1991: 41.

My point here is not to counterpose frenetic speed to some rounded, ‘authentic’ time in the past, nor abstract chronological time to a richer lived plenitude, but to suggest our daily rounds are always made up of and shot through with different temporalities that have long been subject to a variety of temporal and spatial modulations, and which are the stuff of our being.

For Serres, moments of temporal order and stability are like archipelagos of islands in an ocean (Assad 1999: 7). Indeed if timegeography tells us anything it is the fragile accomplishment of routines and orderings of daily life. Paradoxically an approach to space and time that is heavily invested in an objectivist view of chronological time and an abstract version of space, actually comes to reveal the relational qualities of both. Our construction of places is through complex webs of spatial–temporal relations between artefacts and activities. Our daily time is as much about time as opportunity and conjunction (Crang 2005), about time as a coming together of multiple competing temporalities as about a comforting depth of experience, or an abstract metric marking our progress. Far from charting the rise of homogeneous empty space and time as we saw at the start of this chapter we come back to complex local temporalities and rhythms as the current geography of time. This version of time sees each moment as bound to the others through complex relations and transformations. ‘It is objective time that is made up of successive moments. The lived present holds a past and a future within its thickness’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 275). Every instant carries within it the

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In so far as I have a body through which I act in the world, space and time are not, for me, a collection of adjacent points nor are they a limitless number of relations synthesised by my consciousness, and into which it draws my body. I am not in space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them. Merleau-Ponty 1962: 140.

REFERENCES Adam, B. (2002) ‘The gendered time politics of globalization: of shadowlands and elusive justice’, Feminist Review, 70: 3–29. Adam, B. (2003) ‘Reflexive modernization temporalized’, Theory Culture and Society 20, (2): 59–78. Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer (1947) The Dialectic of the Enlightenment. London: Verso. Anxo, D., Fagan, C., Cebrian, I. and Moreno, G. (2007) ‘Patterns of labour market integration in Europe – a life course perspective on time policies’, Socio-economic Review, 5: 233–260. Assad, M. (1999) Reading with Michel Serres: an Encounter with Time. New York: SUNY Press. Beck, M., and Arnold, J. (2009) ‘Gendered time use at home: an ethnographic examination of leisure time in middle-class families’, Leisure Studies 28: 121–142. Bianchi, S., Milkie, M., Sayer, L. and Robinson, J. (2000) ‘Is anyone doing the housework? Trends in the gender division of household labor’, Social Forces, 79: 191–228. Bittman, M., and Wajcman, J. (2000) ‘The Rush Hour: the character of leisure time and gender equity’, Social Forces, 79: 165–189.

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Breuer, S. (2009) ‘The nihilism of speed: On the work of Paul Virilio’ in H. Rosa and W. Scheuerman (eds.), High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power and Modernity. Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, pp. 215–242. Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society: Networks and Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society. London: Polity Press. Cousins, C.R. and Tang, N. (2004) ‘Working time and work and family conflict in the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK’, Work Employment and Society, 18: 531–549. Crang, M. (2005) ‘Time–space’ in P. Cloke and R. Johnston (eds.), Spaces of Geographical Thought : Deconstructing Human Geography’s Binaries. London: Sage, pp. 199–217. Crang, M. (2007) ‘Speed = distance/time: chronotopographies of action’ in R. Hassan and R. Purser (eds.), 24/7: Time and Temporality in the Network Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 62–88. Cullen, I. (1978) ‘The treatment of time in the explanation of spatial behaviour’ in T. Carlstein, D. Parkes and N. Thrift (eds.), Timing Space and Spacing Time (vol 2): Human Activity and Time Geography. London: Arnold, pp. 27–39. Dijst, M. (1999) ‘Two-earner families and their action spaces: A case study of two Dutch communities’, Geojournal, 48: 195–206. Dodgshon, R.A. (2008) ‘Geography’s place in time’, Geografiska Annaler B, 90: 1–15. Facos, M. (1998) Nationalism & The Nordic Imagination: Swedish Art of the 1890s. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Felski, R. (2000) ‘The invention of everyday life’, New Formations, 39: 13–32. Glennie, P., and Thrift, N.J. (2009) Shaping the Day: a History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodin, R.E., Parpo, A. and Kangas, O. (2004) ‘The temporal welfare state: the case of Finland’, Journal of Social Policy, 33: 531–552. Graham, S. (1998) ‘The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualizing space, place and information technology’, Progress in Human Geography, 22: 165–185. Gren, M. (2009) ‘Time geography’ in R. Kitchin et al. International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 279–284. Grosz, E. (1995) Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. London: Routledge.

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Grosz, E. (1999) ‘Thinking the new: of futures yet unthought’, in E. Grosz (ed.) Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 15–28. Hägerstrand, T. (1982) ‘Diorama, Path, Project’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 73: 323–339. Halberstram, J. (2003) ‘What’s that smell? Queer temporalities and subcultural lives’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6: 313–333. Hall, E.T. (1983) The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time. New York: Doubleday. Hassan, R. (2009) Empires of Speed: Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society. Leiden: Brill. Hoskins, W.G. (1955) The Making of the English Landscape. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Jarvis, H. (1999) ‘The tangled webs we weave: household strategies to co-ordinate home and work’, Work, Employment and Society, 13: 225–247. Jarvis, H. (2005) ‘Moving to London time: household co-ordination and the infrastructure of everyday life’, Time & Society 14: 133–154. Jauhiainen, J. (2007) ‘Seasonality, rhythms and post-postmodern everyday urban landscapes’ in H. Palang, H. Sooväli and A. Printsmann (eds.), Seasonal Landscapes. Dordrecht: Springer Link, pp. 231–256. Jauhiainen, J. and Mönkkönen, M. (2005) ‘Seasonality: nature, people’s preferences and urban planning in Oulunsalo, Finland’, Landscape Research, 30: 273–281. Kurtz, M. (2009) ‘Time and historical geography’ in R. Kitchin et al. (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 259–265. Kwan, M.-P. (2000) ‘Gender differences in space-time constraints’, Area, 32: 145–156. Kwan, M.-P. (2002) ‘Time, information technologies and the geographies of everyday life’, Urban Geography, 23: 471–482. Laguerre, M. (2004) ‘Virtual Time: The processuality of the cyberweek’, Information, Communication & Society, 7: 223–247. Larsen, T.P. (2004) ‘Work and care strategies of European families: similarities or national differences?’, Social Policy & Administration, 38: 654–677. Latour, B. and Serres, M. (1995) Conversations on Science, Culture and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Le Bihan, B. and Martin, C. (2004) ‘Atypical working hours: consequences for childcare arrangements’, Social Policy & Administration, 38: 565–590.

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Lefebvre, H. (1995) ‘Elements of Rhythmanalysis’ in E. Kofman and E. Lebas (eds.), Henri Lefebvre: Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell, 219–27. Le Goff , J. (1980) Time and Culture in the Middle Ages. Chicago, IL: Unviersity of Chicago Press. Lowenthal, D. (1975) Past time, present place: landscape and memory. Geographical Review 65 (1): 1–36. Marié M. (1982) Un territoire sans nom. Paris: Librairie des méridiens. Matless, D. (2008) ‘Writing English landscape history’, Anglia - Zeitschrift Fur Englische Philologie, 126: 295–311. McDowell, L., Ray, K., Perrons, D., Fagan, C. and Ward. K. (2005) ‘Women’s paid work and moral economies of care’, Social & Cultural Geography, 6: 219–235. McDowell, L., Ward, K., Fagan, C., Perrons, D. and Ray, K. (2006) ‘Connecting time and space: the significance of transformations in women’s work in the city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30: 141–158. McKie, L., Gregory, S. and Bowlby, S. (2002) ‘Shadow times: the temporal and spatial frameworks and experiences of caring and working’, Sociology 36: 897–924. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception. Andover, Hants: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Presser, H. (2003) Working in a 24/7 Economy: Challenges for American Families. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Presser, H. (2006) ‘Employment in a 24/7 Economy: challenges for the family’ in D. Perrons, C. Fagan, L. McDowell, K. Ray and K. Ward (eds.), Gender Divisions and Working Time in the New Economy: Changing Patterns of Work, Care and Public Policy in Europe and North America. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 35–57. Roberts, R. (1998) ‘Time virtuality and the goddess’ in S. Lash, A. Quick and R. Roberts (eds.), Time and Value. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 112–129.

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Schwanen, T. (2006) ‘On “arriving on time”, but what is “on time”?’, Geoforum, 37: 882–894. Schwanen, T. (2007a) ‘Gender differences in chauffeuring children among dual-earner families’, Professional Geographer, 59: 447–462. Schwanen, T. (2007b) ‘Matter(s) of interest: artefacts, spacing and timing’, Geografiska Annaler B, 89: 9–22. Schwanen, T. (2008) ‘Struggling with time: investigating coupling constraints’, Transport Reviews: A Transnational Transdisciplinary Journal, 28: 337–356. Serres, M. (1991) Rome: the Book of Foundations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Simonsen, K. (2004) ‘Spatiality, temporality and the construction of the city’, in J. O. Bærenholdt and K. Simonsen (eds.), Space Odysseys: Spatiality and Spatial Relations in the 21st Century. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, pp. 43–62. Sullivan, O. (2000) ‘The division of domestic labour: twenty years of change?’, Sociology, 34: 437–456. Vaiou, D., and Lykogianni, R. (2006) ‘Women, neighbourhoods and everyday life’, Urban Studies, 43: 731–743. Vilhelmson, B. (1999) ‘Daily mobility and the use of time for different activities. The case of Sweden’, Geojournal, 48: 177–185. Virilio, P. (1997a) Open Sky. London: Verso. Virilio, P. (1997b) ‘The overexposed city’, in N. Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, pp. 380–390. Virilio, P. (1998a) ‘Architecture in the age of its virtual disappearance’, in J. Beckmann (ed.), The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation and Crash Culture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 178–187. Virilio, P. (1998b) ‘Critical space’, in J. Der Derian (ed.) The Virilio Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 58–72. Virilio, P. (2000) Polar Inertia. London: Sage. Warf, B. (2008) Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies. London: Routledge.

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25 Region and Regionalism J. Nicholas Entrikin

REGION AND GEOGRAPHIC THOUGHT The regional concept has been too readily dismissed as a crude tool, whereas it is really a basic tool that has been used crudely. Donald Meinig 1978: 1202.

The history of the regional concept is so thoroughly fused with the history of geography that it is difficult to write about the region without seeming to portray the discipline as a whole. The region has been cast in all the major revolutionary dramas of twentiethcentury geographic thought, from environmental determinism and spatial science to the twenty-first-century concerns of critical studies and globalization. The region’s persistence in a rapidly changing intellectual environment attests to its status as a primitive of geographical understanding, not to its inherent theoretical or causal power (Entrikin 2008). The concept reflects a highly flexible, adaptable, and useful way of viewing the world. Its relational, whole/part form of spatial understanding fits well with geography’s cartographic tradition and has a utility that extends beyond the boundaries of the academic field of geography. Regional geography

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may be a dormant methodological orientation in geography, but the concept of region, the process of regionalization, and the theme of regionalism continue to thrive within parts of the discipline. Today, interest in the region is most evident in the literatures of political and economic geography. This more circumscribed, sub-disciplinary interest parallels the continuing fragmentation of academic geography. Many twenty-first-century geographers view with suspicion arguments in support of unifying methodologies and theoretical perspectives, or of any so-called ‘meta-narratives’ of disciplinary coherence. Such discipline-wide debates were once the primary stage on which the region appeared. Also, early twentieth-century methodological discussions of the region were most often concerned with the region as a means of conceptually drawing together physical and human geography or, more broadly, nature and culture. Current discussions of the region, shaped by the prevailing theory-inspired enthusiasms for themes of social construction, tend to focus on configurations of social phenomena. There are exceptions, such as bioregionalism, but such arguments play a relatively small role in twenty-first-century geography.

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What accounts for this narrowed but notable persistence? Clearly, the regional concept is still useful for making basic, whole/part spatial discriminations. This logical quality can be further unpacked to reveal an often implicit and sometimes explicit recognition of the significance of proximity and connectedness; that is, of how proximate phenomena may influence each other. In this way the region can be understood as semantically related to the historian’s ‘period’ or ‘era’, in which historical narratives draw together or synthesize a diverse set of events to give a sense of relatedness and wholeness to a story that makes the past comprehensible (Veyne 1984; Entrikin 1991; Wishart 2004). Historiographic significance has been described as primarily a matter of values. Each generation rewrites history by selecting from the past those configurations of events that express the interests of their time. The criteria for judging what to include in such syntheses become critical. Geographical significance has received less explicit attention, although the shifting in criteria may be seen indirectly through the lenses of the rapidly changing perspectives of modern geographic thought, from neo-Marxism and humanism to postcolonialism and non-representational theory. The core geographical concepts, such as the region, appear in each of these disciplinary orientations. However, the criteria of geographical significance and selection differ widely across this spectrum. Richard Hartshorne (1939: 240) addressed this problem of identifying criteria of ‘geographic significance’ for regional studies in The Nature of Geography. His favored terms were ‘geographic efficaciousness’ and ‘causal connection’. These phrases are no longer common in human geography, but the ideas behind them have not disappeared. Both express the view that proximity and spatial connectivity matter. It was not enough for the regional geographer to be concerned simply with objects or events that share a common area. There must be a principle or principles of division that highlight the importance of spatial proximity and connectedness of those

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phenomena included. Regionalization itself offers no inherent safeguard against divisions that are insignificant and banal. Criteria of geographic significance serve that function. What changes frequently in human geography is consensus about significance. In the early twentieth century, relations of importance tended to be those highlighting ties between natural and cultural phenomena and were rarely guided by explicit theory. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the relationships tend to be about the spatial extensions of social phenomena and are driven by theoretical commitments. The region itself functions poorly as a theoretical concept but it is often a tool in theoretical analysis. Indeed, its atheoretical character helps in part to explain its persistence. Calls for a ‘new regional geography’ or ‘new regionalism’ are certainly generated by theoretical interests. Most such statements ignore regional geography or chorology as a relic of an atheoretical, apolitical disciplinary past. A work such as Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography plays almost no role in the new regionalism literature. When addressed in a wider disciplinary context, Hartshorne’s arguments are generally portrayed in a negative fashion: darkly as the great retreat from the more theoretically and socially engaged human sciences (Smith 1989), pathetically as a wrong turn away from the power of scientific reason (Gould 1991), conservatively as holding onto forms of analysis best suited for an earlier era (Barnes and Farish 2006), imperialistically as overwhelming and marginalizing other research traditions in geography (Livingstone 1991), and chauvinistically as a peculiarly American simplification of a more complex Germanic heritage (Harvey and Wardenga 2006). The region has been rhetorically separated from a concern with regional geography. Chorology as a disciplinary focus or a significant methodology has gradually disappeared from view. This separation may be seen as part of a more general phenomenon described by Anssi Paasi (2008: 407–8) as a collective ‘amnesia’ in current discussions of spatial

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concepts such as place and region. The consequences of this amnesia are not simply the often noted ones of repeating the mistakes of the past, but are also evident in creating ‘ghosts of the past’ that give fictional support to current conceptual ‘innovation’. This tendency is especially evident is discussions of geographic scale that elicit some primitive disciplinary past when geographers held that geographic scale was essentialist and natural as opposed to contingent and constructed. Such amnesia can also blur the boundaries of substantive conceptual change (Gilbert 1988; Paasi 1996, 2002a, 2002b, 2008). In current discussions of region and place, one of the most significant challenges to the continuing relevance of the regional and place concepts is generated from what could be described as a growing expression of neoBergsonianism in contemporary geography (e.g. Thrift 1999; Jones 2009). The early twentieth-century French philosopher, Henri Bergson, offered an ontology of change, flow, and ‘creative evolution’, in which spatial concepts are conceived as conceptual containers imposing fixity on constant movement and change. Such a view poses a significant challenge to the ‘cartographic imagination’ or ‘cartographic reason’ of the geographer (Gregory 1994; Pickles 2004). Yet, the region’s longevity in geography is related its cartographic qualities. Part of the region’s longstanding appeal may be understood in terms of what John Pickles (2004) describes as the ‘cartographic impulses’ that are behind the geographer’s desire to abstract natural and social processes in ways that allow them to be represented in a spatially legible manner. Joe Painter (2008) has examined the limitations of a cartography-friendly regional concept defined as a bounded whole or totality. He posits a ‘cartographic anxiety’ that weds geographers to viewing the region as bounded spatial wholes or totalities in the face of growing recognition of the overlapping, fluid, rhizomatic, contingent connections that constitute modern spatiality. For Painter, such recognition does not mean the end of regional geography:

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On the contrary, the diverse and distanciated networks, through which all such processes [cultural, political, economic] are constituted, can generate multiple and highly complex patterns of regional differentiation. It is the fact that those patterns so rarely cohere into regional totalities that makes regional geography so difficult – and so important. Painter 2008: 347.

Rather than a crude tool, the region appears to be an elegant, infinitely adaptable one.

REGIONS AND AREAL DIFFERENTIATION: PHENOMENOLOGICAL ROOTS The subject existed long before the name was coined. The literature of geography in the sense of chorology begins with parts of the earliest sagas and myths, vivid as they are with the sense of place and of man’s contest with nature. Carl Sauer 1963: 317.

Chorology emerges from its mythical origins in classical thought, most notably in the writings of the Greek philosophers Hesiod, Strabo and, later, Ptolemy. Strabo’s (1983) chorography referred to the description of the earth in terms of its parts or, in modern parlance, its regions. His was not the first use of this model of earth description, but was one of the earliest systematic treatments of the subject. It centres on an areal or spatial whole/part relationship, which has been sustained through modern descriptions of chorography and chorology. Michael Curry (2005) draws on classical thought to place chorography in the middle of a tripartite classification of topography, chorography and geography. This division is easily and often reduced in the literature to a scalar hierarchy of place, region and globe, but, as Curry notes, such a separation creates an imagined order for what is in fact an overlapping and fluid set of meanings applied to these terms, especially to place and region. The region is conventionally viewed as the primary outcome of chorological analysis, or the process of areal differentiation.

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‘Place’ has also been used in this way, but in recent years has taken on different significance related to the growing interest in the experiential aspects of the human relation to nature. For Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), for example, place is experienced and region is conceptualized. Region and place have been distinguished from one another in many different ways and no commonly accepted convention exists. They are sometimes used synonymously, or with often-tacit acknowledgement of regions being larger in areal extent. Regions may be understood as containers of places or a set of places, but such distinctions between these and other core geographic concepts often carry theoretical or meta-theoretical baggage and become matters of seemingly endless debate and contestation. The lasting appeal of areal differentiation has been attributed to its association with the direct experience of the diversity of the world gained through sensory exposure to the variety of the terrestrial world. For Sauer (1963), geographical understanding is grounded in a naïve curiosity about the variation from place to place of the natural and cultural environment that led to the formal intellectual project of geography through its associations with technical mapping and cartographic practice. Sauer’s contemporary and frequent antagonist in American geography, Richard Hartshorne (1939: 15), shared the same belief about the early origins of the chorological perspective and its fundamental position in geography: ‘the universal curiosity of man about the world beyond his immediate horizon, a world known to differ in varying degrees from the home, is the foundation of all geography’. This basic human curiosity about the world, rooted in one’s experience of home and projected to the world, from the local to the globe was not only seen as the phenomenological root of the geographic but also as the source of geography’s social significance as a form of understanding. It has been used for example, as a means of elevating geographic pedagogy to a core element of civic

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education. Many of the educational systems of advanced economies had an equivalent of home geography in either elementary of secondary levels of their educational systems. Home geography and geography as a whole were weakly developed in the highly decentralized and localized American school system. However, intellectual leaders in American education recognized its value. For example, the influential American pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey, in his classic work, Democracy and Education, identified history and geography as key to civic education through their function in transcending everyday experience to allow understanding of others in different times and places. For Dewey, [g]eography is a topic that originally appeals to imagination … And while local or home geography is the natural starting point in the reconstructive development of the natural environment, it is an intellectual starting-point for moving out into the unknown, not an end in itself. Dewey 1916: 212.

Studying the known and familiar prepares the student for imaginatively exploring the world beyond one’s personal borders: ‘[t]he variety of peoples and environments, their contrast and familiar scenes, furnishes infinite stimulation. The mind is moved from the monotony of the customary’ (Dewey 1914: 212). The Swedish geographer, Thorsten Hagerstrand (1983: 241–2), the intellectual leader in the development of time-geography so influential in the recent neo-Bergsonian turn in geographic thought, offers testimony to this powerful connection of local experience with basic geographic tools of understanding in acknowledging the influence of Swedish ‘home-area study’ on his formative stages as a student. The emphasis on everyday life experience, paired with the use of maps, was a key ingredient in stimulating his geographic curiosity. The region and areal differentiation gave spatial form and order to this local–global, whole–part pedagogical philosophy.

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REGIONS AND AREAL DIFFERENTIATION: ART AND SCIENCE It sometimes seems a pity that the aims and methods of regional geography were encumbered by such a dubious concept as that of synthesis. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines the word as ‘combination, composition, putting together’, and as the ‘building up of separate elements … into a connected whole.’ But different people do not want to, indeed are not able to, put the same things together, nor can they put them together in the same way. H. Clifford Darby 1962: 5.

Areal differentiation is readily accepted as pedagogical tool but it is more controversial as a scientific orientation. For many geographers the region has limited scientific standing, primarily as a means of areal categorization or classification that uses criteria of both similarity and difference for simultaneously distinguishing one areal unit from another and making continuous variation discrete by imposing a set areal of units. Geographers have used a variety of criteria to make such discriminations, ranging across natural and social characteristics, from alluvial processes and climate to economy and religion. Areal differentiation as classification generated one form of region, the generic. The more challenging goal, however, was to comprehend and represent the particular or specific region, a distinctive area, the characteristics of which differentiated it from other areas and created some sense of bounded areal wholeness. It is this form of chorological analysis that demanded the form of difficult synthesis described above by H.C. Darby. Not all geographers shared Darby’s rather dim view of synthesis, but most recognized the difficult challenges that it posed (e.g. see Harris 1971). For scientific critics of chorology, this form of synthesis was unacceptably subjective in that there were no acceptable standards of judgment of either significance or selection (Entrikin 1983). For supporters of regional geography, such criticisms were irrelevant. For example, John Fraser Hart (1982) maintained that

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regional geography was a distinctive intellectual exercise that was neither science nor art. For Hart, the position in-between is what makes geography distinctive and allows it to best fulfill its intellectual promise and social responsibility. German geographers and their American interpreters offered the methodological support for regional geography. French geographers, however, most notably the school of thought associated with Paul Vidal de la Blache, were the celebrated practitioners. Vidal’s Tableau de la géographie de la France (1979) has often been cited as the standard to which all other regional studies are measured. For Georges Chabot (1967: 5) and no doubt many others, France was ‘le fief de la géographie regionale’. French geographers traced the regional identities of France’s ancient provinces which were vaguely specified during l‘Ancien Régime and thus widely variable in terms of interpretations of their areal scale. These provinces gained greater visibility and recognition through their cartographic representation by eighteenth-century geographers before most were undone by the French Revolution and the administrative départements of the new political order. French regional geographers helped to highlight many of these ancient pays and their associated genres de vie at a later time when the modernization of France was eroding their distinctiveness by threatening their ways of life. It has been primarily the next generations of scholars studying this Vidalian tradition who have sought to illuminate its scientific and political underpinnings (e.g. Lukermann 1964; Berdoulay 1978, 1988, 1995; Andrews 1984; Claval 1998). Despite the widely recognized success of the Vidalian tradition in geography, its practitioners were not immune to the then prevailing pressures to defend the scientific credentials of their studies. Vidal, for example, employed the framework of natural science (Lukermann 1964; Berdoulay 1978; Entrikin 1988; Thrift 1991). These arguments took distinctive forms within different national schools and were based on

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varying criteria, issues of identifying distinct objects of study or claims concerning causality and objectivity. The defense of the scientific character of the regional approach faced two distinct epistemological challenges. The first was the geographer’s interest in the specific region, places on the earth’s surface that displayed unique, highly individualized and holistic character. The second is the methodological problem identified by Darby above. Regions involve a particular way of viewing the world that is dependent on the goals of the observer. The first concern appeared in debates about the idiographic nature of geography. The idea of the idiographic derives from debates about scientific concept formation; in geography it often took the form of debates about the uniqueness of particular objects, events, locations and phenomena (Entrikin 1983, 1991). Much was written during the mid-twentieth century about the means of objectively delimiting regions. Regional presentations that progressed through the standard repertoire of landforms, climate, population, economy, and so on, led to the common perception of the intellectual sterility of regional geography. Not all were convinced that such a universal standard for characterizing the region exists: The truth of the matter is that the geographer’s world is so full of a number of unlike things – some of them mobile, others incalculable, and nearly all of them sporadic in occurrence – that it is impossible to use a universal yardstick. Kimble 1951: 155.

For Vernor Finch, [t]he problem of a unified chorologic method does not seem to lie in the difficulty of justifying the recognition of regions. It is in the difficulty of getting geographers to agree upon a means for determining the general significance of locally important features which it is proposed to use as the organizing principles in regional studies. Finch 1939: 14.

Replicability and subjectivity were recognized as major obstacles to a science of areal

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differentiation. These were the problems that those viewing regions through the lenses of spatial science were quick to address. The first step was to turn regionalisation into a form of spatial classification: Once attention has been drawn to the differing terminologies, we can see that taxonomists and geographers are grappling with fundamentally the same methodological problems. This is most aptly shown by comparing the history of classification and that of regionalization: there is a remarkable similarity in the ideas on the natural system and the geographical region. Grigg 1965: 491.

This argument was reinforced in human geography by proponents of spatial science and regional science. It follows from a shift in the landscape of American science associated with the impact of the Second World War and its aftermath. Trevor Barnes and Matthew Farish (2006) describe this change in terms of the growing mid-century significance of government-sponsored laboratories and university geography departments tied to ‘Big Science’. For Barnes and Farish: In the imaginative and material lab spaces of the Second World War and the Cold War, the region was remade and reanimated, becoming a new kind of knowledge … The shifting language and practice of regional geography, from catchall description to an instrumental science, provide a guide through the thicket of Cold War scholarship. Barnes and Farish 2006: 821.

As these authors and others have noted the normative ideals of science do not remain static. The region has been part of the geographer’s perspective on differentiating parts of the earth’s surface and has changed in relation to these normative guides. As the regional concept moves from centre stage in disciplinary debates about the scientific credentials of geography to a different role in the sub-disciplinary fields, the normative guides have shifted from the scientific to the political. Interpretations of past contributions of figures such as Vidal, Hettner, Hartshorne or Herbertson, are similarly

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gauged in terms of political rather than the scientific intent. This change is in part reflected in the growing prominence of the politics of regionalism as a stimulus for the study of regions.

ONTOLOGICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL BORDERLANDS Moreover, we want to argue, ‘regions’ only exist in relation to particular criteria. They are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered; they are our (and others’) constructions. Allen et al. 1998: 2.

The variable use and semantic flexibility of the term ‘region’ inevitably leads to conflicts and confusions about its use (Paasi 2002a). One longstanding point of contention concerns the difference between viewing regions as ways of knowing about the world versus phenomena in the world. This can be put in the form of a question: are regions conceptual constructs or do they exist in the world outside of the realm of ideas? In the nineteenth century, beliefs concerning natural regions, or regions as super-organisms, assumed that regions were something to be discovered in the world (e.g. see Herbertson 1905). Such arguments appear to the modern eye as mistakes of an earlier, naïve pre-scientific era, but the underlying ontological/epistemological tension continues to reappear in various guises. Regionalism and region are distinct yet related terms that sometimes overlap in their meanings. Each has the same polysemous quality, and each offers a relational form of thought, a logic of wholes and parts and a valorizing of spatial proximity. An important difference, however, is that regionalism is a phenomenon in the world and the region is recognized by most as a conceptual construction. Regionalism requires explanation and regions are concepts used to explain. Regionalism has been used to refer to areally defined, non-nation-state forms of political, economic or cultural organization

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or collective solidarity. Its scale is not predetermined and thus it has been used to describe sub-national or supra-national social configurations. It has also been used in reference to multi-state organizations, for example trade organizations such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or more comprehensive multi-state organizations such as the European Union. When areal differentiation was at its peak in terms of disciplinary importance during the mid-twentieth century, geographers were largely dismissive of regionalism. Their critical attitude toward the concept was related to the association of regionalism with traditional societies and ways of life and to group minds and collective consciousness. For example, in the 1954 Association of American Geographers’ publication Geography: Inventory and Prospect, a volume intended as a survey of the state of American geography in the immediate post-war period, the political geographer Derwent Whittlesey reported on ‘The Regional Concept and the Regional Method’. He eliminates regionalism from the working vocabulary of the geographer: Regionalism, although a word much used, is inadmissible in geographic study because it is overlaid with special meanings and generally serves nongeographic interests. A recent critique [Jensen 1951] of regionalism points out that the word represents not only a state of mind (regional consciousness), but also a frame for collecting information about areas, a hypothesis to account for interrelation between areas, a tool of administration and planning, and a cult. Whittlesey 1954: 51.

For others, however, regionalism seemed an appropriate term to address the collective consciousness apparent in culturally distinct areas studied by geographers. European geography seemed especially strong in descriptions of distinctive culture areas that could be identified and fashioned out of the nature over centuries through human adaptation to their environment. Densely textured cultural landscapes were woven from the residual strands of centuries of human habitation, and long-established communities.

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German studies of culture areas and French studies of pays reflected this past. American scholars sought similar culture areas in their home landscapes but with less success. One of the leading proponents of regionalism in the United States, Lewis Mumford, expressed his disappointment over the lack of an authentic and lasting regionalism in a letter to Carl Sauer: As a people, we needed an extra century, before the coming of our spatially unifying technology, in order to develop any sort of appreciation of our regional variety and uniqueness; but only New England had the advantage of that extra century, and enough people – in contrast say to Virginia – to make the most of it. Even the slight sampling I’ve done in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa makes me appalled over the unthinking way we gave up this extraordinary birthright for the sake of a few gadgets and comforts that we would never have missed if they hadn’t been thrust under our noses. Mumford 1963: 1.

To regionalists on both continents, this threat was not simply a pragmatic one related to the preservation and conservation of landscapes, but also a threat to a conservative vision of nation, in which regional ways of life were viewed as fundamental building blocks of national character (Gregory 1994: 41–2; Berdoulay 1995). For the mid-century social scientific critics of regionalism, however, regions were relics. The sociologist Louis Wirth famously wrote: Even if regional contexts between natural and cultural facts should become established in a given area, we must always, especially in modern times reckon with the power of communication and transportation – with the mobility of men and ideas – to undo regions. Wirth 1951: 389.

By mid-century, the shrinking of distance in the modern world, the breakdown of cultural isolation and the homogenizing tendencies associated with the globalization of capitalism and modernization, made regionalism associated with folkways and regionally distinctive ways of life a topic of primarily historical interest.

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From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, however, it is clear that Wirth’s view, while not incorrect, reflects a historically specific conception of regionalism. There are clearly different forms of regionalism that move away from concerns with the persistence of traditional forms of life closely tied to the natural environment to ones that view regionalism as part of urbanizing and globalizing processes. Rather than disappearing in a world dominated by these processes, regionalism has reappeared in atavistic and progressive forms (Keating 1998; Scott 1998). To oversimplify the many nuances of these arguments, the global economy, the rise of global-scale environmental risks, the expansion of supra-national governance, the threat of non-state violence and terrorism, growing rates of international migration, and other currents of twenty-firstcentury life have conspired to undermine the Westphalian model of a world of nation states and to destabilize traditional notions of state hegemony. As John Agnew argues: Rather than the ‘end’ of geography, globalization entails its reformulation away from an economic mapping of the world in terms of state territories toward a more complex mosaic of states, regions, global city-regions, and localities differentially integrated into the global economy. Agnew 2005: 33.

Internationalization and regionalization are simply two parts of the new economic and political order. Thus the region and regionalism once thought to be vestiges of an earlier, preglobal communication and transportation era have re-emerged in current challenges to overriding hierarchies and spatial hegemony. What ages into irrelevancy are the guiding principles behind the choice of the criteria employed in strategies of regionalization. It is ironic that Louis Wirth’s comment about regions, which for many signaled the end of region as a scholarly concept for describing the modern world, should in the twenty-first century offer grounds for its revival. A renewed regionalism emanating out

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of the confluence of economic globalization and geopolitics has breathed new life into the regional concept. As Agnew argues: It is not the ‘global’ that is new in globalization so much as it is a changing geographical logic to the world economy … The main novelty today is the increasing role in economic prosperity and underdevelopment of cross-border flows in relation to national states and to networks linking cities with one another and their hinterlands and the increased differentiation between localities and regions as a result of the spatial biases built into flow-networks. Agnew 2005: 32–3.

Still, representing the regional in terms of networks and flows has presented its own set of challenges.

CURRENTS AND TRACES So, if we are to see cities and regions as spatial formations, they must be summoned up as temporary placements of ever moving material and immanent geographies, as ‘hauntings’ of things that have moved on but left their mark … as situated moments in distanciated networks, as contoured products of the networks that cross a given place. The sum is cities and regions without prescribed or proscribed boundaries. Ash Amin 2004: 34 (original emphasis).

The current interest in regionalism and regions takes on many different forms. In its current manifestation it is more closely connected to political and economic geography than to cultural geography. The so-called ‘cultural turn’ in human geography has addressed issues of place, landscape and spatiality more than the region. Much is written about regional identity in the ‘new regionalism’ literature, but there is little actual cultural analysis. As John Tomaney writes: Although there are important exceptions (see Kajjalaainen and Paasi 1994), in much contemporary social science writing on the subject of regional identity – exemplified by advocates of the so-called ‘relational turn’ in geography – there is surprisingly little analysis of actual narratives (see,

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for example Amin 2004). Rather, the tendency is to make large assumptions, upon which are constructed elaborate, if tendentious, general claims about the role played by regional identities in cultural and political development. Such approaches invariably present a concern with local culture and identity as inherently defensive, introverted, and archaic. Tomaney 2007: 370.

These separate literatures on the geographic characteristics of culture, economy and politics find some common meeting ground in the work of Paasi (e.g. 1996a, 1996b, 2002, 2004). Also, Martin Jones and Gordon MacLeod (2004) have created theoretical space for discussions of regional identity in their distinction between ‘spaces of regionalism’ and ‘regional spaces’. The former incorporates issues of culture and regional identity in relation to strategies of political mobilization and the latter reflects the economic processes at work in creating regional difference. As in most social science research, common interest in regionalism divides into competing theoretical orientations. Materialist arguments about regions give causal priority to the social relations of production that in the end shape political ideology and regional consciousness. Idealist arguments reverse this intellectual ordering to give explanatory power to the symbolic dimension that creates possibilities of social and cultural solidarity and provides the basis for political collectivities. Each in the end addresses the potential of regionalism to shape and influence political community. The politics of new regionalist authors may differ from the politics of mid-century students of regionalism but the tie of regionalism and political community creates an attenuated link between the different traditions. German culture area studies, French monographs on pays, and American regionalists of the interwar period had broadly similar, if less explicit, interests in collective identity and political community (Friedman and Weaver 1979; Gregory 1994: 41–2; Berdoulay 1995; Ditt 2001). As stated in the introduction to this chapter, the most dramatic shift of the use of region

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and regionalism – a shift that pushes its semantic boundaries to new extremes – is what could be described broadly as the importation of neo-Bergsonianism into human geography, a philosophy that in its origins was generally hostile to spatial concepts. Its outlines are evident in the quotation from Amin above. The general target of criticism is the idea of bounded, static, spatial categories that give an artificial sense of permanence to social processes that are contingent, fluid and always changing in magnitude and extension. One manifestation of this form of analysis has been referred to as ‘relational’. According to Martin Jones (2009: 491): ‘Relational thinking is a paradigmatic departure from the concerns of absolute and relative space, because it dissolves the boundaries between objects and space and rejects forms of spatial totality … In short objects are space and space is objects.’ In translating this idea to geography, Jones continues:

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bounded and constraining; for example, as a territory or region. The striking quality of all of these arguments is the extent to which they wish to break from the cartographic conception of the spatial, to incorporate language and narratives compatible with a more dynamic geography of movement, flows, connectivity, and power. Place and region become ‘hauntings’, or traces of a world in constant circulation. Politics based on territory obfuscates the trans-border relational nature of the modern/postmodern world. Emphasizing openness and contextuality, each new formulation seeks to outdo the other with a message of radical empiricism buried within abstract and theoretical logic. It pushes place and region to the limits of their frequently noted semantic elasticity, or at least to the limits of comprehension of those seeking to use the results of this work.

CONCLUSION Advocates suggest that conditions of circulation, hypermobility, time–space compression, and cultural insignia warrant a completely new conceptualization of space. For Thrift ‘(space) is no longer seen as a nested hierarchy moving from “global” to “local”. This absurd scale dependent notion is replaced by the notion that what counts is connectivity’ (Thrift 2004 p. 59). Jones 2009: 492.

Does such a perspective give the region yet another new interpretation or does it leave it behind? For proponents, such as Amin, the region becomes disentangled in its application from territory. Regions become unbounded, open, continuously changing spatial formations (Amin 2004: 34). For Jones, the decision to choose between regions as unbounded or bounded territories is too extreme. He wishes to maintain each alternative in his own argument in favour of yet another new spatial logic, that of ‘phase space’, which recognizes aspects of the relational emphasis on networks and flows but also considers the way space can act as

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[W]e do not need regional geography, but we do need regions in geography. R.J. Johnston 1990: 67.

The regional concept appears as vital in the twenty-first century as it was in earlier eras. The emphases have changed concerning its application, with greater attention paid to theoretical modes of analysis, socially constructed areal configurations and politics. Many of the same conceptual challenges remain, however; for example, the sometimes uncritical mixing of ontological and epistemological arguments and the choices concerning representational and narrative strategies. In spite of the more theory-inspired calls for regional study, there remains an important synthetic element to successfully representing regions. Theories of society and space offer few guides for navigating the array of representational strategies available for comprehending regions (e.g. see Lefebvre 1965; Entrikin and Berdoulay

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2005). It is one thing to write about regions and regionalism, quite another to write regions (Gregory 1989). These representational strategies are as necessary for studying regions as bounded wholes as they are for relational characterizations of the region. When the whole/part quality of regional thought and areal differentiation are used to characterize the movement of actors through space/time with an emphasis on connectivity, the choices of what to include and how to narrate grow in number and complexity. At some point along this continuum, however, the often-noted semantic elasticity of the regional concept reaches its limit. Momentary traces of spatial connectivity seem not to be regions at all. Geographers have been much more nimble in stretching the region and related concepts such as place across the mind/body divide than they have in crossing over from the spatial to the temporal (Agnew 1999). Even as a useful fiction, the region should illuminate and make comprehensible part of earth space. Such a goal is difficult to achieve when the region is torn from its cartographic roots.

REFERENCES Agnew, J. (1999) ‘Regions on the mind does not equal regions of the mind’, Progress in Human Geography, 23: 91–96. Agnew, J. (2005) Hegemony: the New Shape of Global Power. Philadelphia: Temple University. Allen, J., Massey, D., and Cochrane, A. (1998) Rethinking the Region. New York: Routledge. Amin, A. (2004) ‘Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place’, Geografiska annaler: series B: Human Geography, 86: 33–44. Andrews, H.F. (1984) ‘The Durkheimians and human geography: some contextural problems in the sociology of knowledge’, Transactions of the institute of British Geographers, 315–336. Barnes, T.J. and Farish, M. (2006) ‘Between regions: science, militarism, and American geography from World War to Cold War’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96: 807–826. Berdoulay, V. (1978) ‘The Vidal-Durkheim debate’ in D. Ley and M. Samuels (eds), Humanistic

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Geography: Prospects and Problems. Chicago: Maaroufa Press, pp. 77–90. Berdoulay, V. (1988) ‘Géographie: lieux de discours’, Cahiers de géographie du Québec, 32: 245–252. Berdoulay, V. (1995) La formation de l’école française de géographie (1870–1914). Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. Chabot, G. (1967) ‘Les conceptions francaises de la région géographique’, Finistera, 2: 5–16. Claval, P. (1998) Histoire de la géographie française de 1870 à nos jours. Paris: Nathan. Curry, M.R. (2005) ‘Toward a geography of a world without maps: lessons from Ptolemy and postal codes’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95: 680–691. Darby, H.C. (1962) ‘The problem of geographical description’, Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers), 30: 1–14. Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: The Macmillan Company. Ditt, K. (2001) ‘The idea of German cultural regions in the Third Reich: the work of Franz Petri’, Journal of Historical Geography, 27: 241–258. Entrikin, J.N. (1983) ‘Theory, progress, and fragmentation in human geography’, Geographical Analysis, 15: 72–75. Entrikin, J.N. (1988) ‘Diffusion research in the context of the naturalism debate in twentieth century geographic thought’ in P.J. Hugill and D.B. Dickson (eds), The Transfer and Transformation of Ideas and Material Culture. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, pp. 165–178. Entrikin, J.N. (1991) The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Entrikin, J.N. (2008) ‘Introduction’ in J.N. Entrikin (ed.), Regions: Critical Essays in Human Geography. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. xv–xxix. Entrikin, J.N. and Berdoulay, V. (2005) ‘The Pyrenees as place: Lefebvre as guide’, Progress in Human Geography, 29: 129. Entrikin, J.N. and Brunn, S.D. (1989) Reflections on Richard Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Finch, V.C. (1939) ‘Geographical science and social philosophy’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 9: 3–12. Friedman, J. and Weaver, C. (1979) Territory and Function: the Evolution of Regional Planning. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Gilbert, A. (1988) ‘The new regional geography in English and French-speaking countries’, Progress in Human Geography, 12: 208–228. Gould, P. (1991) ‘On Reflections on Richard Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81: 328–334. Gregory, D. (1989) ‘Areal differentiation and postmodern human geography’ in D. Gregory and R. Walford (eds), Horizons in Human Geography. New York: Macmillan, pp. 67–96. Gregory, D. (1994) Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Grigg, D. (1965) ‘The logic of regional systems’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 55: 465–491. Hägerstrand, T. (1983) In search for the sources of concepts. In A. Buttimer (ed), The Practice of Geography. New York: Longman, pp. 238–56. Harris, C. (1971) ‘Theory and synthesis in historical geography’, The Canadian Geographer, 15: 157–172. Hart, J.F. (1982) ‘The highest form of the geographer’s art’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 72: 1–29. Hartshorne, R. (1939) The Nature of Geography. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Harvey, F. and Wardenga, U. (2006) Richard Hartshorne’s adaptation of Alfred Hettner’s system of geography, Journal of Historical Geography, 32: 422–440. Herbertson, A.J. (1905) ‘The major natural regions: an essay in systematic geography’, Geographical Journal, 25: 300–310. Jensen, M. (1951) Regionalism in America. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Johnston, R.J. (1990) ‘The challenge for regional geography: some proposals for research frontiers’ in R.J. Johnston, J. Hauer and G.A. Hoekveld (eds), Regional Geography: Current Developments and Future Prospects. New York: Routledge, pp. 122–139. Jones, M. and MacLeod, G. (2004) ‘Regional spaces, spaces of regionalism: territory, insurgent politics and the English question’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 29: 433–452. Jones, M. (2009) ‘Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond’, Progress in Human Geography, 33: 487–506. Karjalainen, P.T. and Paasi, A. (1994) ‘Contrasting the nature of the written city: Helsinki in regionalist thought and as a dwelling-place’ in P. Preston and P. Simpson-Housley (eds) Writing the City: Eden, Babylon, and the New Jerusalem. New York: Routledge, pp. 59–80.

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Keating, M. (1998) The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Kimble, G.H.T. (1951) ‘The inadequacy of the regional concept’ in L.D. Stamp and S.W. Wooldridge (eds), London Essays in Geography. London: Longmans, Green and Co., pp. 155–174. Lefebvre, H. (1965) Pyrénées. Lausanne: Éditions Rencontre. (Reprinted in 2000 as Pyrénées, Pau: Cairn, without photographs and statistical tables, with a Preface by René Lourau and a Postscript by Pierre Lourau.) Livingstone, D.N. (1991) ‘Does geography have a nature? The dilemmas of a definition’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81: 334–337. Lukermann, F. (1964) ‘Geography as a formal intellectual discipline and the way it contributes to human knowledge‘ Canadian Geographer, 8: 167–172. Meinig, D.W. (1978) ‘The continuous shaping of America: a prospectus for geographers and historians’, The American Historical Review, 83: 1186–1205. Merrill, J. (ed.) (1951) Regionalism in America. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Mumford, L. (1963) Letter from Lewis Mumford to Carl Sauer, 1 September, Sauer Archive, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 4 pages. Paasi, A. (1996a) ‘Regions as social and cultural constructs: reflections on recent geographical debates’ in M. Idvall and A. Salomonssen (eds), Att Skapa en Region om identitet och territorium. Copenhagen: NordREFO, pp. 90–107. Paasi, A. (1996b) Territories, Boundaries, and Consciousness: the Changing Geographies of the Finnish–Russian boundary. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Paasi, A. (2002a) ‘Bounded spaces in the mobile world: deconstructing “regional identity”’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en sociale Geografie, 93: 137–148. Paasi, A. (2002b) ‘Place and region: regional worlds and words’, Progress in Human Geography, 26: 802–811. Paasi, A. (2004) ‘Place and region: looking through the prism of scale’, Progress in Human Geography, 28: 536–546. Paasi, A. (2008) ‘Is the world more complex than our theories of it? TPSN and the perpetual challenge of conceptualization’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26: 405–410. Painter, J. (2008) ‘Cartographic anxiety and the search for regionality’, Environment and Planning A, 40: 342–361.

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Pickles, J. (2004) A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-coded World. New York: Routledge. Sauer, C.O. (1963) ‘The morphology of landscape’ in J. Leighly (ed.), Land and Life: a Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 315–350. Scott, J.W. (1998) ‘Planning cooperation and transboundary regionalism: implementing policies for European border regions in the German-Polish context’, Environment and planning C, 16: 605–624. Smith, N. (1989) ‘Geography as museum: private history and conservative idealism in “The Nature of Geography”’ in J.N. Entrikin and S.D. Brunn (eds), Reflections on Richard Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers, pp. 91–120. Strabo (1983) The Geography of Strabo, trans. H.L. Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thrift, N. (1991) ‘For a new regional geography 2’, Progress in Human Geography, 15: 456–465. Thrift, N. (2004) ‘Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect’, Geografiska Annaler, 86: 57–78.

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Thrift, N. (1999) ‘Steps to an ecology of place’ in D. Massey, J. Allen and P. Sarre (eds), Human Geography Today. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 295–322. Tomaney, J. (2007) ‘Keeping a beat in the dark: narratives of regional identity in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25: 355–375. Tuan, Y. (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Veyne, P. (1984) Writing History: Essay on Epistemology. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Vidal de La Blache, P. (1979) Tableau de la géographie de la France. Paris: J. Tallandier. Whittlesey, D. (1954) ‘The regional concept and the regional method’ in P.E. James and C.F. Jones (eds), American Geography: Inventory and Prospect. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers, pp. 19–68. Wirth, L. (1951) ‘The limitations of regionalism’ in M.J. Jensen (ed.), Regionalism in America. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, pp. 381–393. Wishart, D. (2004) ‘Period and region’, Progress in Human Geography, 28: 305–319.

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26 Map Anne Godlewska and Jason Grek Martin

INTRODUCTION Geography and the map have had a long and complex association as each has undergone profound transformation. If we locate the origins of the Western tradition of geography in the writings of Ptolemy and Strabo, for most of its history the map has been unproblematically integral to geography as one of the (and perhaps the) most powerful of its technologies of earth description. The map underwent significant change over that extensive period, moving from earth description in the Classical period to depicting historical– religious space in the Medieval period and back to earth description in the early modern era. In this latter period geographers developed or rediscovered a regular graticule reflecting an x–y coordinate system, an increasingly consistent, coherent and concise descriptive language and a good choice of projections, while taking advantage of all the technologies of data collection provided by mathematics and methods of dissemination associated with the printing press. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the map and geography began to disassociate. It is difficult to point to a single cause but the increasingly complex mathematics and physics required of mapping in a Newtonian world, on the

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one hand, and dawning awareness of the complexity of physical and social processes that were traditionally the purview of descriptive geographers, on the other, pulled textbased and map-based earth describers in different directions. Increasingly, those concerned with cartographic research and expression began to be educated in technical schools that defined problems appropriate to engineering while those concerned with textual description continued to be trained largely in colleges, universities and apprenticeships, where they concentrated on questions framed either by predecessors or by newly developing cognate fields. There was no rift, no declaration of independence; there was barely an acknowledgement that anything had changed, but by 1839 the distinction between the concerns of geography and the map was sufficiently developed to warrant the creation of a new term: cartography (a neologism credited to the Portuguese scholar Manuel Francisco de Barros e Sousa, Viscount of Santarém). Nevertheless, the map and geography remained firmly associated in both the public and the scientific mind. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the association between the map and geography weakened further. With the development of cheaper and easier modes of

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reproduction, cheaper materials, and sophisticated statistical representation, the small-scale map (covering a large area in limited detail) began to proliferate in publications and to become the purview of researchers from many disciplines concerned to explore the spatial dimensions of not necessarily classically geographic questions. Many of these disciplines were new, were focused on explaining what geographers had either previously described or not observed at all (but came to discern), and they borrowed, modified or developed new methodologies appropriate to their inquiries in economics, anthropology, sociology and politics, as well as in geology, zoology, botany and even genetics. Mapping, especially thematic mapping, was one such borrowed methodology. Large-scale mapping (covering a small area in greater detail) remained a central preoccupation of cartographers, who shared that preoccupation with military engineers, land surveyors, geodesists and astronomers. This work was increasingly managed by state organizations, the only entities with the resources to fund the considerable ongoing costs of such operations. Geographers, then, were involved in both small and large-scale mapping but also wrote about natural phenomena, nations, peoples, regions, war, borders and commerce, amongst other things. After the Second World War, largely as a result of technological developments emanating from war science but also by virtue of advances in literacy and the greater wealth of the population in Western countries, the map burst the bounds of academia and become ubiquitous in Western public and private spheres. From the body to the shopping mall, from the theme park to the cosmos: everything could be mapped and any adult might be expected to use such maps to inform themselves. The simplest ‘you are here’ maps could be made by anyone. Mapping incorporating satellite imagery, large-scale topography, complex databases or a coordinate system not based on geographic space (such as genetic mapping) still required significant

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training and the sophisticated understanding of the conceptual issues behind mapping that geographers, computer scientists, engineers, geneticists and many others, often working in teams, possessed. Digital technology, through web atlases like Google Earth, public databases and readily accessible software platforms, has begun to demonstrate the capacity to bring integrated, multimedia geographical information (cybercartography) to anyone and it looks as though we are on the cusp of another great revolution in the accessibility of maps and map making, a further integration of scientific geography into everyday life.

GEOGRAPHERS AND MAPS: THE ACHIEVEMENT AND LIMITS OF DESCRIPTIVE DESIGNATION AND MEASUREMENT Every phase of the relationship between geography and the map has been dominated by an important and defining problem. Until toward the end of the eighteenth century, the central problem for geographers was earth description, both textual and cartographic. The earliest stage in the development of any science – human, natural or physical – is the development of a language sufficiently rigorous to allow all practitioners to understand and use the terminology, complete enough to suggest areas of interest within the relatively little known, and sufficiently supple to allow the easy development of subtleties in meaning and expansion in vocabulary as new phenomena are encountered and understood. The unnamed and unplaced remain mysterious to us. It is only when phenomena are named and placed that we can begin to discern them and to explore their relations with other designated and situated phenomena. Developing a language for earth description that was both textual and graphic and that could capture the subtlety of important distinction was a slow process lasting centuries – a process that, for the most part, has not been documented. François de

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Dainville initiated an historical inquiry into the evolution of geographic language in his Le langage des géographes but to date no one has taken up the challenge of raising his work to an analysis of that evolution or of extending it beyond French to explore the development of geographic language in other linguistic traditions. The basic descriptive language of the wind, air, forests and waters developed early and was influenced by terms borrowed from regional dialects and national neighbours, the rising professions (e.g. foresters, architects, engineers) and imperial adventure. This basic language began to acquire the precision of systematic naming and measurement in the eighteenth century. The increasing sophistication of projections and data gathering and manipulation effected by mathematical geographers like Gerardus Mercator and compilers like Abraham Ortelius made the map more precise and useful. We can identify strong general trends in the development of the language of geographers: the multiplication of terms as new phenomena were encountered, the refinement and precision of meanings as the nature of phenomena and the relations between them became apparent, the generalization of local or foreign terms, a movement away from the figurative and toward the geometric, a simplification yet expansion and increasing uniformity of graphic expression, and, perhaps most importantly, the elaboration of a hierarchical and structured perspective. The eighteenth century brought accelerated change to the language of geographers. The greatest expansion from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment took place not in neologisms but in the assignment of single and precise meanings to a multiplicity of general, regional or foreign terms. Geographers developed words and cartographic symbols for frontiers, a large variety of administrative divisions both secular and ecclesiastical, towns and settlements, the sea and its dangers, the coasts and their aspects, the commonplaces of agriculture, small-scale industrial production and trade, the rough location of natural obstacles or passages such as mountains, marshes and

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rivers, and the location and even rough characterization of forests. The eighteenth century witnessed a rapid growth in geographic vocabulary in areas that had only just begun to draw the attention of the European mind. In the eighteenth century Europeans began to look at the natural world around them with a new curiosity. Mountains began to seem objects of potential beneficial interest rather than obstacles frequently to be avoided. Maps, the first language of geographers, reflected this new interest: there were some attempts to reveal the chain-like structure of mountains but the most successful mountain depictions were hachures which simulated the course of rain on the mountainside (with heavier lines at the crest and lighter lines at the foot) combined with shading, as if the map were lit from an oblique source (such as a setting or rising sun). If mountains, and increasingly the processes of their formation, were stirring the imagination of geographers in the eighteenth century, it was not until the nineteenth century that geographers began to explore the social realm and to extend their vocabulary to encompass it, in response to the thoughtful and critical explorations of philosopher travellers like Constantin François Volney, social theorists like Adam Smith, Auguste Comte, Saint Simon, Herbert Spencer and Émile Durkheim, and state administrators and engineers like Gilbert-Joseph-Gaspard Chabrol de Volvic. While there was considerable variation in quality, form of expression, and vocabulary across the cartographic scales and genres, there was a decided trend toward geometric rather than pictorial depiction in, for example, town symbols. The map was evolving through the eighteenth century from a mixed-perspective document – with mountains, bridges, forests and towns depicted as seen from the side and rivers, coasts and borders depicted as seen from above – to a unified composition with all features expressed in a consistent symbology derived from the appearance of the object from above. This unified perspective was not truly achieved until the replacement of hachures in the depiction of relief with contours in the nineteenth century. For Peters,

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that cartographic forms of expression became ‘ever more ‘precise’, ever more ‘transparent’, even as they [became] more abstract and less mimetic, less like the ‘topography’ they recorded’, also reflected a preference for an abstract scientific, state-driven and masculine vision over everyday and local experience. This observation finds echoes in the writings of feminist critics of modern GIS. It would be fair to say that, from the Renaissance rediscovery of the geographic knowledge of the ancients (thanks primarily to Islamic sources) to the end of the eighteenth century, the language of geographers acquired refinement and especially precision, even though it remained focused on the surface of the earth, not delving into it, only slowly climbing its mountains and not yet exploring the nature of human societies. Indeed, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the emerging precision of earth measurement seemed to promise a major role for geography. Geographers drawing on the observations of explorers, missionaries, statesmen and military officers had, by the eighteenth century, developed unprecedented knowledge of the configuration of the earth. The depth and quality of this knowledge would only grow through subsequent centuries. This line of inquiry, however, did not explain how the earth and its inhabitants functioned and, increasingly, it was such explanation that was sought by scientists. Geographers were amongst the first to demonstrate the limitations of description and direct measurement during the great eighteenth century debate over the size and shape of the earth. There was much interest in the shape of the earth at this time, both for accurate navigation and, for Newton, as the key to understanding how the place of the earth in the solar system influenced both the earth and the solar system. There was every reason to think that geographers as earth measurers and describers, and especially French geographers who stood at the pinnacle of astronomical geography, could contribute to the debate. In a sense they did, by demonstrating that accurate measurement was not necessarily the most direct path to enlightenment.

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While Newton based his prediction on the hypothetical forces exerted by the sun and the moon on the rotating earth, he and others, particularly geographers, sought to confirm or refute his proposed shape of the earth with direct measurement of its surface. From 1700 to 1744 a series of measurements were undertaken in France, Italy, Spain and England that were used to try to determine the length of a degree of latitude in different locations. Some of these measurements confirmed Newton’s prediction that the earth was an oblate spheroid (pumpkin-shaped) and some, in particular those of the Cassinis (the scientific family synonymous with mapping and geography in France), confirmed that the earth was a prolate spheroid (egg-shaped). Meanwhile, Richer’s 1672 observations of the force of gravity acting on the surface of the earth through the swing of a pendulum at Cayenne as opposed to Paris confirmed Newton’s hypothesis by means having nothing to do with the measurement of the earth. Ultimately, the French Academy of Sciences resolved to send a mission to Lapland and one to Peru to measure a degree of latitude as close to the Arctic Circle and one as close to the Equator as possible to resolve the issue once and for all. Both sets of measurements confirmed Newton’s hypothesis but the techniques of earth measurement available to eighteenth century scientists had proven too laborious and unreliable to determine the shape of the planet. In the subsequent century direct measurement would prove equally difficult for tracking and understanding disease, poverty and dynamic change on the surface of the earth. As a consequence, social scientists and, a little reluctantly, geographers would develop hypothesis-driven maps that sought to explain using partial probabilistic data rather than exhaustive measurement.

A Map for All Disciplines: The Thematic Map Although definitional purists might justifiably argue that there is no fundamental distinction

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MAP

between a thematic map and a general purpose map, historically, thematic maps represented a break with large-scale and small-scale geographic mapping in three ways. First, the impulse behind them was not the collection and presentation of information that might be useful for a variety of activities concerning the area mapped but the collection of enough information to form a particular argument. Thus, they were argument-driven constructions less closely linked to an ongoing process of data collection than to the development of theories and data manipulation and analysis. Second, and as a consequence, their increased sophistication was more closely tied to the sciences from which the argument emerged than to the geographical tradition of mapmaking. Though, arguably, geographers ultimately came to conceive of their terrain not so much as the space of the earth as the spaces of relations between particular phenomena in part through the thematic map. Finally, that thematic mapping became so influential in scientific circles has much to do with both the general availability of reliable maps and new technologies that allowed non-specialists to compose and disseminate such maps. Thematic maps, then, heralded a new relationship between geography and the map in which the map led and geographers followed. Technological change has done much to shape the map and determine its impact over the centuries. More important than trigonometry and its associated optical and observational instrumentation but perhaps as important as the development of differential calculus and probability (the mathematics of change and uncertainty), the technical innovation with the greatest impact was the printing press. As with books and illustrations, the printing press made the rapid and reliable dissemination of cartographic information possible and created a body of knowledge largely shared by scholars, statesmen, church officials, merchants and the relatively well off. The invention of pulp paper and lithographic (‘stone writing’) reproduction in the nineteenth century were additional steps on

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the path to wider access and dissemination initiated by the printing press. Lithography was vitally important in the world of nineteenth century science because, in contrast to copperplate reproduction, it permitted multiple coloured maps and graphs to be drawn by hand using elementary materials wielded with less skill and at low cost. As a consequence non-cartographers drew maps that were widely disseminated within the academic community. Still, lithography did not create the thematic map. Scientists and government officials, interested in spatially significant relations between particular phenomena and struggling to understand and express those relations, created this new approach to mapping, producing early thematic maps well before the invention of lithography. It was the logic of these inquiries (e.g. the concern to prevent flooding of inhabited areas, to provide food to urban citizens, etc.) that drove the impulse to map selected phenomena. At least from the time of Steno’s suggestion that the earth’s rock structure had been formed by horizontal deposition and vertical superposition (1669), there were hypothetical arguments about the origins and formation of the earth and interest in the spatial distribution of rock forms. The gradual acceptance of a geologic time scale and the understanding that the processes of formation were ongoing led, in the early nineteenth century, to the development of a whole new field of study closely linked to Geography: Geology. Mapping was particularly important for geology, as it was only through mapping that individual and widely distributed observations could be linked and buried or otherwise invisible structures could be made visible. Curiosity was not the only impulse behind the search for relationships. Concern to reduce the human and fiscal carnage resulting from shipwreck inspired people like Athanasius Kirchner (1641), Edmond Halley (1701), William Whiston (1718–1720) and J. C. Wilcke (1768) to map magnetic declination. Similarly, the mercantilist conviction that the wealth of nations was fundamentally linked to population stimulated early interest

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in the statistical study of population and its complex dynamics. Mapping of these issues was only attempted beginning in the late eighteenth century, with growing appreciation that the individual behaviour of large numbers of people shaped cities, the countryside and the economy of competing states. In all these lines of inquiry, whether academic or practical, the development of a mathematical and measurement-based approach to the phenomena under examination was fundamental to the introduction of thematic mapping: mapping demanded systematic quantification, but fruitful quantification required ‘a quite highly developed body of theory’ (Kuhn [1961] 1977, 201). It is, then, unsurprising that the innovators in the development of the new language of thematic mapping were either interdisciplinary empirical scholars who had embraced mathematics or government administrators trained in statistics and working to resolve the practical problems of government. Alexander von Humboldt is probably the best example of the former. He has been described as a geologist, a mining engineer, a naturalist, a botanist, a natural historian, an empirical scientist, an explorer, an imperialist and a geographer. In a sense he was all of these, as he was looking for ‘knowledge of the laws of nature’ (Humboldt, 1823, vi.) which played a fundamental (but not necessarily determinative) role in all realms. What fascinated him were the relationships between phenomena: plants, rocks, landforms, climates, soil, human activity and especially the geography, the total picture, of these relationships. Not satisfied with a descriptive geography, he wanted to understand how external form was shaped by structure and function or, expressed another way, what patterns phenomena exhibited and why they did so. Such patterns were generalizations that would only be instructive if based on careful empirical observation. One had to be careful in averaging phenomena that ‘depend by their nature on locality, the constitution of the soil, the disposition vis-à-vis the sun’s rays of the surface of the globe’ (Humboldt, 1817 [1813], 469). What

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was needed was a new language, a more analytical spatial language, that would allow the almost intuitive transfer of understanding from one graphic genre to another and from one specialist body of knowledge to another. He sought a language capable of expressing his vision of the unity of nature with the newly found rigor of the systematic sciences. He experimented with isolines (lines drawn between measures of equal values of a particular phenomena [height, temperature, degrees of cloud cover, etc.]), which proved to be such a simple yet rigorous form of graphic representation that great volumes of data could be managed, compared and taken back into the field to influence further data gathering. He experimented with the graphic representation of the flow of metals between North America and Europe (one of the many consequences of European imperialism to which geography and mapping substantially contributed), taking the first tentative steps toward the representation later adopted by C. J. Minard, showing volume by thickness of arrow. He produced a map of error to demonstrate the inadequacy of the published maps of Mexico and to suggest that the geography practiced by some of his contemporaries was overly imaginative. Following William Playfair, he embraced the political potential of thematic maps when he used proportional squares in a depiction of the territory of the colonies and their European metropoles to suggest the injustice of colonialism. He tried to develop something he called ‘pasigraphy,’ a notational language that he hoped would allow the easy juxtaposition of information on the relative position, alternation and the suppression of particular rock series across space. But his most influential, best remembered and most reproduced graphic was the remarkable multidimensional pictorial graph reproduced in his Essai sur la géographie des plantes. This graphic presented a view of three peaks of a mountain chain carrying the names and appearance of vegetation found at different altitudes. On the sides of the scaled illustration there were columns that provided a wealth of

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information for different elevations: minimum and maximum temperatures; the chemical composition of the air (oxygen, hydrogen, carbon); the lower limits of perpetual snow; typical animals; the temperature at which water boils; the possibility of depicting geologic formations for any given region; the intensity of light; the humidity level; the blueness of the sky; the gravitational force; possible types of agriculture; the incidence of electrical phenomena; and more. These eloquent graphic arguments about distributions, interactions and dynamic relationships in space – which often revealed patterns not visible to the naked eye and created a new systematic, rather than geographic, time/space – seemed to Humboldt to suggest that his intuition about the unity of nature was sound. The unity of nature was his theory and thematic maps and multi-dimensional pictorial graphs were capable of expressing that unity. Many of those who contributed to the development of thematic mapping were not scientists but state officials, civil engineers, mining engineers and public health doctors concerned with the management of territorial space, including the introduction and management of transportation networks (especially railroads), controlling disease (human, plant and animal), strengthening the national economy and improving public education. Such work demanded the integration of a variety of dynamic data, including topography; the location, quality and capacity of mines, ports, waterways, canals and roads; the location and quality of resources, as well as the industrial and commercial establishments that depended on them; the movement of finished goods; the location of agricultural activities, and the location, wealth and movement of human populations. These highly educated state officials elaborated theories to predict the impact of human behaviour in the context of the physical and social structures they were engineering and they developed a graphic vocabulary capable of expressing those theories. The most famous of these graphic innovators was C. J. Minard, an engineer and civil servant

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in nineteenth-century France, whose maps have drawn admiration for their semiotic sophistication. The theories and graphic language developed by Minard and other officials influenced the work and thinking of numerous geographers, including Alexander von Humboldt, Adrien Balbi, Heinrich Berghaus, August Petermann, Walter Christaller, Elisée Reclus and Paul Vidal de la Blache, the latter if only negatively.

GIS: Maps for Everyone? If, in the nineteenth century, the thematic map and geography’s cognate disciplines led while geography followed, in the 20th and 21st centuries the relationship has been much more complex. Since the end of the 20th century geographers have embraced a whole series of spatial problems, from the historic to the numeric and much else besides. They have approach these problems with a diversity of theories and methodologies (some numeric and some not but all shared with other disciplines) that were unimaginable in the nineteenth century. The map too has undergone major transformation. Traditional maps of a variety of scales and types are still important in geography, other disciplines, and the larger society, but the excitement lies in Geographic Information Systems (GIS): analytical mapping using mixed data, huge databases (which, in a sense, is allowing a combination of thematic argument-driven mapping and the ongoing and informed collection of data) and, most recently, the transmission capabilities of the internet. GIS does not belong to geography. Other disciplines have been as important in the identification of problems, the development of infrastructure, the writing of code, the discernment, creation and management of data, and the generation of meaningful maps and interactive mapping systems. Neither is geography a slave to GIS. There are many questions posed by geographers that cannot be mapped. Perhaps the Newtonian lesson has been well learned: mapping is not always the

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best path to enlightenment. Paradoxically, geography is larger than the map and the map is larger than geography but the relationship remains a healthy and productive one. Geography is stimulated by the capacity of a combination of GIS and Remote Sensing (RS) to cast light on the immensely complex infrastructural conundrums involved in regional- or national-scale government, or in multi-scalar environmental issues. GIS has been well served by the questions and techniques of environmental and quantitative geographers, cartographers, remote sensors and many social scientists in human geography, including feminist geographers and others concerned with issues of exclusion and privacy – though, arguably, the market has driven the GIS industry further down that road than have the writings of academics. Conceiving of GIS as a new technology with a focus on the computer, digital databases, digital imaging and the internet, obscures the conceptual continuity between GIS and the history of mapping and undervalues the revolution taking place in geographic imagination. Of course, each element of what many consider GIS technology has its own complex conceptual and social history and it is possible to retrace those histories. If instead of focusing on multi-media technologies, we imagine GIS as part of the history of the map, then GIS no longer emerges fully formed from the head of Zeus in the last half of the twenteeth century: conceptually GIS was alive and already thriving in the thematic maps of the nineteenth century. Nick Chrisman’s definition of GIS, which focuses on the on-going measurement and transformation of data in the context of social interaction, describes the nineteenth century mapping activities of C.J. Minard and many others (Chrisman 1999). The facility to transform geographic representations has been enhanced by computerization, digital databases have increased the volume of data manipulated and the speed of analysis, the media integrated into mapping is more varied and sophisticated, and, through the internet, the potential for expanding the delivery and

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reception of dynamic and interactive mapping is vastly increased. Nevertheless, conceptually, the thematic map and GIS are very similar; that is, the kinds of questions asked through thematic mapping and GIS are much the same. Unsurprisingly, then, GIS has a relationship with geography not unlike that of the thematic map: geographers who are now focused on exploring a wide array of spatial relationships and are engaged in the use and development of innovative mapping technologies are only one component of a broader GIS research community that includes computing scientists, urban planners, businesses, medical researchers, biologists, geologists, archeologists, anthropologists and many others. The most important change brought by the new twenteeth-century technologies is the increased accessibility of mapping and its enhanced potential to play a powerful role in social transformation. Because discerning the importance of geography and spatial relations to virtually everything took time, as did the development of the concepts and technology to allow exploration of that importance, the innovative power of GIS is only just beginning. If for the last half century we have been living in an increasingly map-saturated world, in which maps of some sort are available to almost everyone and almost everyone is mapped, what is important is that today the means of making maps is becoming more accessible. There is no doubt that since the Second World War in the affluent countries of the world, access to maps has exploded. From printed or electronic route maps to mall and airport plans, it would be rare to find an individual who has not seen a map of some sort within the last week. Mark Monmonier (2008; 2006; 2002; 2001; 1999) has traced the proliferation and insinuation of the map deep into the fabric of modern Western society, where nautical charts, weather maps, topographic sheets, satellite images, electoral district maps and a myriad of other taken-forgranted cartographies have fundamentally framed how we perceive and engage with the wider world. Now, thanks to centuries of

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work by geographers, cartographers and others, and with the increasing availability of cheap GPS units and satellite imagery through venues like GoogleEarth, almost anyone can readily combine base map data and other spatial data to make simple maps. And mapping is increasingly relevant to our daily lives, as almost everyone is tracked on a daily basis by satellite and GPS addressing systems, through bank cards, cookies or CCTV systems, in ways that place us on the map: if we conceive of the electronic world as a large multi-faceted virtual map, it is increasingly difficult (and perhaps increasingly undesirable) to be off-grid, so to speak. The commercial value of the voluminous geographical data being collected daily is considerable. To date, however, access to that data and to systems that allow multi-dimensional spatial analysis has been available only to those with the means to purchase the hardware, the software, the databases, and the education to know how to use them. Brian Harley was pessimistic about the possibility that this could ever be otherwise: ‘Though we have entered the age of mass communication by maps, the means of cartographic production, whether commercial or official, is still largely controlled by dominant groups. … Cartography remains a teleological discourse, reifying power, reinforcing the status quo, and freezing social interaction within charted lines.’ (1988: 301–303) Harley has been criticized for problematically (mis)deploying poststructuralist analyses of power (Godlewska 1989; Belyea 1992; Wood 1993) but he might also be challenged for presenting an all-together too bleak prognosis on the possibility for a ‘grassroots’ cartography. Experiments by those concerned to democratize mapping (e.g. Public Participation GIS), combined with the market potential of GIS delivered through the internet, have enticed some of the large software companies to experiment with open platform GIS, but effective analytical use of GIS still requires a high level of specialist education. Still, just as once only a few could extract much of value from computers, it is possible to

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imagine a day, not so far in the future, when average citizens will have the means to create maps, or interactive mapping systems, based on geographically and spatially sophisticated queries of readily available (and ideally restructurable) databases. A physiotherapist, for instance, could map income, education, occupation, foot traffic and age profile to decide where to locate a clinic, or a planner could map the sense of belonging in place against ethnic origin, income, education, occupation, social networks and a fluid conception of neighbourhoods in the city. Getting there will require continued technological innovation, further hard thinking about place and space and their relationship to database structure, and effective and critical geographic education.

REFERENCES Barnes, Trevor J. (2006). ‘Geographical intelligence: American geographers and research and analysis in the Office of Strategic Services 1941–1945’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32(1): 149–168. Belyea, Barbara. (1992). ‘Images of Power: Derrida/ Foucault/Harley’, Cartographica, 29(2): 1–9. Broc, Numa. (1969). Les Montagnes vues par les géographes et les naturalistes de langue française au XVIIIe siècle: contribution à l’histoire de la géographie. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale. Chrisman, Nicholas R. (1998). Academic Origins of GIS in Timothy W. Foresman, (ed.) The History of Geographic Information Systems: Perspectives from the Pioneers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, pp. 33–43. Chrisman, Nicholas R. (1999). ‘What does GIS mean?‘, Transactions in GIS, 3(2): 175–186. Curry, Michael R. (1997). ‘The digital individual and the private realm’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87(4): 681–699. Dainville, François de. (1964). Le Langage des géographes Paris: Editions A. et J. Picard et Cie. Dobson, Jerome E. and Richard C. Durfee. (1998). A Quarter Century of GIS at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Timothy W. Foresman, (ed.) The History of Geographic Information Systems: Perspectives from the Pioneers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR.

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Eisenstein, Elizabeth. (2005). The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2nd ed. Faust, Nickolas. (1998). Raster Based GIS in Timothy W. Foresman, (ed.) The History of Geographic Information Systems: Perspectives from the Pioneers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR. Foresman, Timothy W. (1998). GIS Early Years and the Threads of Evolution, in Timothy W. Foresman, (ed.) The History of Geographic Information Systems: Perspectives from the Pioneers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR. Godlewska, Anne. (1999). Geography Unbound: French Geographical Science from Cassini to Humboldt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Godlewska, Anne. (1989). ‘To Surf or to Swim?’ Cartographica, 26(3&4): 96–98. Goodchild, Michael F. (1998). What Next? Reflections from the Middle of the Growth Curve, in Timothy W. Foresman, (ed.) The History of Geographic Information Systems: Perspectives from the Pioneers, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR. Hall, Stephen. (1992). Mapping the Next Millenium: the Discovery of New Geographies. New York: Random House. Harley, J. B. (1987). The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, (eds). The History of Cartography, Volume I: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1–42. Harley, J.B. (1988). Maps, Knowledge, and Power, in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, (eds) The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 277–312. Humboldt, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von. 1973 [1805] Essai sur la géographie des plantes in Voyage de Humboldt et Bonplan. Voyage aux regions equinoxiales du nouveau continent. Cinquième partie. Facsimilé integral de l’édition Paris 1805– 1834. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Ltd. Humboldt, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von. (1823). A Geognostical Essay on the Superposition of Rocks in Both Hemispheres. London: Longman Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, Paternoster Row. Humboldt, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von.1817 [1813] Des lignes isothermes et de la distrubtion de la chaleur sur le globe in M130moires de physique et de chimie de la Société d’Arcueil. Paris: J. Klostermann fils.

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Kuhn, Thomas S. [1961] 1977. The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science, in The Essential Tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno. (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Massey, Doreen. (2005). For Space. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Miller, Christopher C. (2006). ‘A Beast in the Field: The Google maps mashup as GIS/2’, Cartographica 41 (3): 187–199. Monmonier, Mark. (1999). Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Monmonier, Mark. (2001). Bushmanders and Bullwinkles: How Politicians Manipulate Electronic Maps and Census Data To Win Elections. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Monmonier, Mark. (2008). Coastlines: How Mapmakers Frame the World and Chart Environmental Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Monmonier, Mark. (2006). From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Monmonier, Mark. (2002). Spying With Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nicolson, Majorie. (1959). Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nikolow, Sybilla. (2001). ‘A. F. W. Crome’s Measurements of the “Strength of the State”: Statistical Representations in Central Europe around 1800’, History of Political Economy Annual Supplement to Volume 33: 23–56. Palsky, Gilles. (1996). Des Chiffres et des cartes. Naissance et développement de la cartograpie quantitative française au XIXe siècle. Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques. Peters, Jeffrey N. (2004). Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Poore, Barbara S. and Nicholas R. Chrisman, (2006). ‘Order from noise: Toward a social theory of geographic information’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(3): 2006, 508–523. Porter, Theodore M. (2001). ‘Perspective: Economics and the history of measurement’, History of Political Economy Annual Supplement to Volume 33: 4–22.

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Robinson, Arthur. (1982). Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roger, Jacques. (1971). Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle; la génération des animaux de Descartes à l’encyclopédie. Paris: A. Colin. Schuurman, Nadine. (2005). ‘Social perspectives on semantic interoperability: Constraints on geographical knowledge from a data perspective’, Cartographica 40(4): 47–61. Schuurman, Nadine. (2006). ‘Formalization matters: Critical GIS and ontology research’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 (4): 726–739. Smith, James Raymond. (1986). From Plane to Spheroid: Determining the Figure of the Earth from 3000 B.C. to the 18th Century Lapland and Peruvian Survey

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Expeditions. Rancho Cordova, CA Landmark Enterprises. Taylor, D.R. Fraser, and Sebastien Caquard. (2006). ‘Cybercartography: Maps and mapping in the information era’, Cartographica 41(1): 1–5. Terrall, Mary. (2002). The Man Who Flattened the Earth. Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Tufte, Edward [1983] 2001. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. Wood, Denis. (1993). The fine line between mapping and mapmaking’, Cartographica 30(4): 50–60. Wood, Denis with John Fels. (1992). The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press.

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27 Environmental Determinism David N. Livingstone

DIMENSIONS While environmental determinism can conveniently be described as the claim that human activities are controlled by the environment, such definitional clarity masks historical complexity. Sometimes the behaviour in question is attributed to the configuration of topographic features like rivers, mountains, valleys, deserts, plains, and so on; sometimes climatic conditions are identified as the critical explanans; sometimes the local character of soil is taken to be the critical determining environmental factor. And of course even these causal explanations may be more finely tuned – the role of a tropical sun, or long-term climatic change, or persistent drought may be called upon to explain one aspect or another of human culture. At the same time, the range of human phenomena – at markedly different scales – over which the environment is purported to exert determining influence is no less diverse. Some have ascribed various medical conditions to environmental causes; others have brought the human psyche and its states within its explanatory arc. Others, not least geographers, have found in the earth’s surface topography the determining cause of

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patterns of human settlement; still others have connected economic growth and downturn to weather patterns. The development of science has also been attributed to environmental factors in general and in particular to geographical conditions in those locations where the need for hydrological management fostered the development of hydraulic engineering. The list could easily be elaborated: racial characteristics, cultural collapse, witchhunting, suicidal behaviour, senses of national identity, legislative systems, business fluctuations, moral standards – all these, and many more, have been put down to environmental influences of one sort or another. That this inclination is widespread even in our time is evident from the following observation that opened a piece in the London Times on Saturday 5 May 2001: ‘Months of record rainfall are to blame for rats, divorce, political plots, overweight women and dead bees, according to the French!’ (Bremner 2001). Not surprisingly, environmental determinism has also been freighted with cultural interests. At the scale of disciplinary politics, it was widely embraced as a defining principle for the newly professionalizing geography in the decades around 1900 as its recently minted practitioners sought to carve out a

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secure niche for their pursuits in the rapidly expanding division of academic labour. Identifying the causal role of physical environment in determining the shape of global diversity gave a coherence and significance to the task of bringing human society within the ambit of geographical science. At a different scale of operations, environmental determinism has been read as a legitimating ideology underwriting imperial impulses towards conquest and conflict. The basic idea here is that the naturalistic cast of environmental determinist rhetoric could deliver a scientific justification for the inevitability of imperial expansionism. (And since global geography dictated colonial politics, geography as a discipline took pride of place as the Victorian science of empire par excellence). At other points in time and place, confidence in the moulding power of physical environments has served the interests of racial theorists of one stripe or another – either to condemn certain peoples as the product of inherently defective geographies or to insist that ‘racial constitution’ was pliable and thus subject to environmental modification. Given these fixations, it is not surprising that environmental determinism has found itself connected – on different sides – with such political causes as immigration restriction, eugenics and apartheid. The following historical sketch will touch, to one degree or another, on many of these themes while at the same time disclosing just how persistent the lure of environmental determinism has been at least since classical times. Throughout it will be wise to bear in mind that the ‘determinism’ in environmental determinism comes with varying degrees of compulsion. Philosophical interrogation of such causal verbs as ‘determine’, ‘influence’, ‘condition’, ‘shape’, ‘control’, ‘steer’, ‘mould’ – all of which have been attached to environmental adjectives – would doubtless have epistemic value. But allocating precise definitions to their different nuances would be to impose philosophical precision on historical ambiguity. Epistemological exactitude, then, is not my quarry in what follows;

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rather the aim is to map out something of the major dimensions of what is commonly called environmental determinism since classical times. The whole subject, moreover, is further complicated by two significant strands of thought and practice. First, knowledge of ‘the environment’ and ‘nature’ is itself a cultural product. The practices of science, and the means by which its practitioners glean warranted knowledge of the natural world, are now widely recognized as the products of local venues, which then unevenly spread from their point of origin out into general commerce. That science has a geography, no less than a history and a sociology, recalls attention to the cultural nature of knowing and to the relevance of space, site and location in its generation. This reminds us of the inherent instability of scientific meaning and thus of the flexibility in how nature and environment have been conceived. Secondly, and this is a theme that grips the imagination perhaps more now than ever, the environment itself is a cultural product inasmuch as it bears the stamp of human action and transformation. Fears about the consequences of global warming and the determining influence these will have on history are thus, in part, anxieties about the ways in which a humanly transformed environment may wreak revenge on environmentally transformed humans.

HIPPOCRATIC HUMOURS AND THEIR LEGACY While the idea that the world’s climatic zones – frigid, temperate and torrid – determined global habitability can be found in the writings of Aristotle, the classical source of the idea of environmental influence is generally attributed to the Hippocratic text, On Airs, Water, Places (Glacken 1967). Regardless of precisely who the author of this celebrated treatise actually was, the text connected the characteristics of people in

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particular places to the influence of such environmental factors as humidity, altitude and terrain. In the main this perspective was sustained through the humoral theory which coupled the operation of the body’s good or bad humours (blood, yellow bile, phlegm, black bile) with the conditions of air, water and places. Only when the humours were perfectly mingled did the individual enjoy good health, and so, in critical ways, the human body was subject to environmental influences. When generalized to populations, this principle could give support to the idea that warm climates breed passionate people, frigid zones produce hardiness, while temperate regions generate intellectual excellence. Typical of such reasoning was the Hippocratic declaration that inhabitants of places which are low-lying, abounding in meadows and ill ventilated, and who have a larger proportion of hot than of cold winds, and who make use of warm waters – these are not likely to be of large stature nor well proportioned, but are of a broad make, fleshy, and have black hair; … courage and laborious enterprise are not naturally in them … Those who live on thin, ill-watered, and bare soils, and not well attempered in the changes of the seasons, in such a country they are likely to be in their persons rather hard and well braced, rather of a blond than a dark complexion, and in disposition and passions haughty and self-willed. Hippocrates 1849: 24.

The doctrine of environmental causation, frequently in its Hippocratic guise, found other supporters in the ancient world. Thucydides dwelt on the influences exerted by soils, site and location on the stability or otherwise of cultural traditions, while Xenophon focused on the historical significance of maritime power and the distribution of resources. In Plato’s longest dialogue, the Laws, the relationship between virtue and place featured insofar as he considered that maritime locations rendered their inhabitants vulnerable to cultural incursion, and thus dilution. As for Aristotle, his understanding of the impact of climate on society ended up with ‘the self-flattering conclusion that the most advanced nations are in the temperate

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climates’ (Glacken 1967: 93). In the Problemata he presented in interrogative form a series of assertions presuming that peoples inhabiting conditions of excessive cold were brutish in character and that wisdom was the preserve of the inhabitants of warm regions. In one form or another, the Hippocratic vision continued to captivate writers throughout the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Classical thinking on the subject was transmitted to the Christian West quite early through the work of Isidore of Seville during the late sixth and early seventh centuries which attributed various presumed national characteristics – Roman seriousness, Greek light-heartedness, African cunning, and such like – to environmental causes. Later, in the thirteenth century, Albertus Magnus, in all likelihood drawing on Islamic versions of classical sources, perpetuated the idea that various human attributes were shaped by the characteristics of the globe’s klimata and their subdivisions. At the same time he insisted that more local geographical circumstances were no less active in shaping human bodies and bones (Kimble 1938). During the Renaissance, climatic imperatives were frequently tied, as in the case of Bodin, to astrological convictions that linked the microcosm of the body with the macrocosm of the heavens (Wands 1986). Mobilizing the humoral theory, he championed the idea that illness, sexual activity and national traits were attributable to climatic conditions. Earlier in the sixteenth century Machiavelli had insisted in his Discourses on Livy that fertile soil bred idleness and that laws needed to be put in place to offset this adverse impact. In Machiavelli’s hands, environmental causation was part and parcel of a larger critique of the traditional humanist valorization of timelessness by rooting politics in the messy realities of time and space (Palmer 1984). In England, ideas about environmental causation circulated widely. One group of writers expressed their fears about the adverse effects of a cold climate. In part these concerns were stimulated by the appearance in

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English in the early seventeenth century of Giovanni Botero’s work Relations of the Most Famous Kingdomes which used the humoral theory to support his judgement that northern climates produce strong bodies, courageous spirits, but retarded mental powers; for their part southerners were depicted as physically weak but intellectually subtle. Similar sentiments were also translated from an anonymous French author in 1591 in which the coldness of the air was portrayed as the source of gross northern humours. Given the obvious implications for the English, it is not surprising that the theory of environmental determinism received considerable attention in England. In the early seventeenth century Thomas Wright, for instance, judged that southern political cunning was lacking in northern regions, while John Barclay made a point of saying that while climatic determinism was generally true, there were always notable exceptions. It also made a conspicuous, if ambivalent, appearance in the writings of John Milton. At points during the English Civil War when he felt frustrated by the activities of the nonconformists, he was inclined to turn to the climatic theory to justify his disappointment at their headstrong, foolish and uncivil ways. At such times he craved the introduction of civic virtues from warmer climates. After all he did assert in his Character of the Long Parliament that ‘the sun, which we lack, ripens wits as well as fruits; and as wine and oil are imported to us from abroad, so must ripe understanding, and many civil virtues, be imported into our minds from foreign writings’ (see Fink 1941: 74–5). Medical practitioners, too, continued to conduct their inquiries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in dialogue with the Hippocratic tradition. Thus the seventeenth-century English physician Thomas Sydenham, although criticizing elements in Hippocrates’ thinking, nevertheless retained critical components of the humoral theory, as did other workers on medical topography. A century later, the German medical historian Kurt Sprengel exhibited his confidence in the

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soundness of the Hippocratic vision drawing on the authority of figures like Boerhaave, van Swieten and Morgagni. In 1781 William Falconer resorted to Hippocrates at numerous points in his account of the influence of climate, situation and population on human disposition, government and religion. Thus in one way or the other, the Hippocratic humours continued to exert their influence on medical geography until well into the modern period (Miller 1962).

ENLIGHTENMENT, ENVIRONMENT AND RACIAL POLITICS The extensive circulation of environmental doctrines during the period of the European Enlightenment owed much to the writings of Montesquieu, and in particular to The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Certainly others had cultivated the idea of environmental causation, notably the Abbé Dubos and John Arbuthnot. But Montesquieu’s project of locating legislative regulation within the framework of geographical conditions in which they are to be found, was especially influential. Drawing on a mushrooming travel literature, Montesquieu urged that climatic conditions governed both the rise and decline of cultural traits, and thereby – as it were – brought law down to earth from the lofty sphere of transcendence. Because everything from human physiology to legislative customs, from religious principles to moral standards, were geographically conditioned, he presented the case for cultural relativism. The mechanism by which these causal operations were transacted was the composite product of the Hippocratic humours and the physiological theories of figures like Boerhaave which encouraged him to conceive of the nervous system as consisting of tiny tubules that carried what he referred to as animal spirits, or nerve fluid, around the body. This understanding of the human constitution allowed him to speculate that, for example, inhabitants of cold climates were more vigorous

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since the fibres in their cardiovascular systems contracted in cold air and stimulated faster flowing of the blood. Warm air, by contrast, relaxed and lengthened ‘the extremes of the fibres’ (Montesquieu 1750: 316). Not surprisingly, given the extensive reach of climatic determinism, he famously observed, ‘The empire of the climate is the first, the most powerful of all empires’ (Montesquieu 1750: 327). Montesquieu-style environmental determinism attracted many willing advocates. Buffon, for example, added his support assigning to climate a major role in the generation of racial diversity. To him, the human form was remarkably pliant in the hands of climate. In the New World – much to the disgust of Thomas Jefferson – he claimed that an inferior environment had produced a degenerate anthropology and an impoverished biogeography (see Gerbi 1973). Yet these influences were neither permanent nor irreversible; rather they were simply the superficial imprint of environment on a common constitution. Later in the eighteenth century the medical anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach added his support, arguing that racial divergence was caused by climate and habitat. Owing to the persistent influence of the environment, he was certain that rigid boundaries between racial groups could never be drawn. ‘Races’ simply merged into one another and were persistently undergoing modification in response to environmental stimuli. For more popular audiences, the Anglo-Irish man of letters and sometime medical practitioner Oliver Goldsmith in an essay on the subject ‘Of the Varieties of the Human Race’ likewise insisted that variations in climate, diet, and the like were sufficient to explain racial divergence. As with Blum–bach, environmentalism in his hands happily confirmed the unity of the human race and common descent over against an increasingly fashionable polygenism (see Livingstone 2008). It was the same with the American moral philosopher Samuel Stanhope Smith, who turned to environmental influences in the

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first American treatise on anthropology to preserve the unity of the human race from the assault of Scotland’s Lord Kames who was flirting with the idea of multiple human origins. Climatic determinism, in Smith’s hands, was canvassed to underwrite a common human nature and the superficiality of racial difference. In 1774, Kames had launched a protracted attack on the power of climate to explain human variation and in particular on Montesquieu, that ‘great champion for the climate’ (Kames 1817: vol. 1, 32). Cultural mores, social customs, skin colour, skeletal structure, differences in the very ‘fibres’ on which Montesquieu’s entire edifice was erected – these physical and moral traits were not to be thought of as environmental products; rather they were intrinsic to difference racial groups. As a staunch opponent of environmental determinism, Kames was sure that particular climates had not made races, but that races were made for particular climates. Soon supporting voices were to be heard. The eighteenth-century Royal Navy surgeon, John Atkins, thought climate powerless to explain racial differentiation and looked to what he called originally different protoplasts; so too did the surgeon, Charles White, who argued the case for multiple origins; and the English lawyer and antiquary, Edward King, rejected Montesquieu’s climatic thesis despite its ingenuity arguing that the human races were inherently different species or castes. Smith would have no dealings with such speculations. To him racial differences were literally only skin deep and were simply an epiphenomenon of physical environment. To be sure this did not amount to racial egalitarianism; but it did confirm that racial features were mutable and that differences would largely vanish if peoples were exposed for a sufficient period of time to the same environmental stimuli. Culling a wide range of medical, anthropological and geographical literature, Smith concluded that the unity of the human constitution, inflected in superficial ways by the vicissitudes of environment, was good science. Indeed he paused to issue

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biting criticism of those travellers who were only too willing to generalize from any ‘little deviation from … the ordinary standard’ (Smith 1810: 84). It was also good politics, and good moral philosophy too. For much was at stake in human unity. The whole stability of society and the maintenance of the social order presumed a common humanity. If there were inherently different human constitutions, the ‘foundations of duty and morals, and … the whole science of human nature’ would be undermined. ‘No general principles of conduct, or religion, or even of civil policy’ he went on ‘could be derived from natures originally and essentially different from one another’ (Smith 1810: 149). In the brand new republic of the United States – a society seeking for means to regulate itself in the aftermath of revolution – environmental causation facilitated political stability. Immanuel Kant, too, looked to climate as the source of racial variation, though with rather less benign eyes. In his 1775 essay ‘On the Different Races of Man’, Kant identified four distinct varieties of the human species each with its own natural dispositions. Here he made reference to what he called the ‘stem genus’ of each race and specified ‘that portion of the earth between the 31st and 52nd parallels in the Old World’ as the zone ‘in which the most happy mixture of influences of the colder and hotter regions and also the greatest wealth of earthly creatures is encountered’ (Kant 1950: 23). Conversely, as he made clear in an exposition of national characteristics as reflected in the aesthetic and moral ‘feeling of the beautiful and sublime’, inhabitants of other zones enjoyed ‘no feeling that rises above the trifling’ (Kant 1997: 47, 55). Given these sentiments, it comes as no surprise to find Kant, in his lectures on Physical Geography, elaborating a global cartographic in which the temperate world was exalted to the apogee of human excellence: in ‘the hot countries the human being … does not … reach the perfection of those in the temperate zones. Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the

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whites’. By contrast ‘all inhabitants of the hottest zones are exceptionally lethargic’, he insisted, while the ‘inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world … has a more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his passions, more intelligent than any other race of people in the world’. And the political fallout? ‘That is why at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons’ (Kant 1997: 63–4).

GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE, ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM AND DISCIPLINARY IDENTITY Notwithstanding the critiques of figures like Herder during the second half of the eighteenth century, environmentalism flourished in the early nineteenth century among those like Henry Buckle who sought for a historicist history that subjected human activities to natural law; among regional sociologists like Frédéric Le Play who causally connected up work, family and place; and among ethnologists who accounted for racial differentiation in climatic terms (Stocking 1987). It also found expression in the writings of some philosophers enamoured of teleological metaphysics like Victor Cousin who gave the impression that national psyche could be read straight off topographic cartography: ‘[G]ive me the map of a country … and I pledge myself to tell you, a priori, what the man of that country will be, and what part that country will play in history, not by accident, but of necessity’ (quoted in Febvre 1932: 10). With the advent of Darwinism, inclinations of this sort found further reinforcement with the renewed emphasis on a naturalistic construal of human culture in the categories of natural law. This impulse acted to encourage various forms of environmental causation among those writers working on the interface of geography, history and anthropology who continued to read the human

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story through racial lenses. The role of natural environment in shaping racial ‘progress’ was thus emphasized in writings on physical anthropology like that of A.R. Wallace, John Lubbock and A.H. Keane all of whom found in the physical environment the grounds of racial ‘progress’ (Stepan 1982), while sociological theorists like Edmond Demolins reduced ethnic character and the genesis of civilization to patterns of communication. Throughout, the conviction was that human culture was ineluctably shaped by ‘nature’. Not surprisingly such currents of thought were clearly registered within the geographical tradition and increasingly came to be seen as the foundation stone on which the discipline of geography could be erected. After all, both Friedrich Ratzel and Oscar Peschel in Germany acquired distinguished reputations in anthropology as well as geography. Time and again, the conceptual legitimacy of environmentalist geography was sought in evolution theory, though there is evidence to suggest that it was the neo-Lamarckian rendition of evolution, rather than classical Darwinism, that was more commonly resorted to. Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie, with its cardinal notion of Lebensraum (living space) and his organic conception of the state, drew sustenance from the migration theories of the Lamarckian Moritz Wagner; and while the environmental determinist element in his early work has perhaps been overestimated, the evolutionary outlook of figures like Wagner and Haeckel did much to legitimate any such tendencies in his project. The prominence that Lebensraum received as part of Nazi ideology in the early twentieth century has given rise to the impression that Ratzelian environmental determinism was easily absorbed into the race-theory of the Third Reich. But in fact the presumption of racial plasticity that was embedded in Ratzel’s environmentalism never sat easily with the genetic racialism and the obsession with race hygiene that was firmly lodged in the Nazi Volkish mindset (Livingstone 1992). The Ratzelian programme, in one form, found its American voice largely through the

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writings of Ellen C. Semple. Her American History and Its Geographic Conditions (1903) and Influences of Geographic Environment (1911), while perhaps not so crude as some commentators have implied, nevertheless did much to establish environmental determinism as the dominant mode of explanation in American geography during the early decades of the twentieth century and as the foundation on which the newly professionalizing subject could erect its identity (Keighren 2006). In fact she affected to dissociate herself from determinism, yet determinist sentiments dominated her thinking as the opening passages of Influences abundantly attest: Man is the product of the earth’s surface. This means not merely that he is a child of the earth, dust of her dust; but that the earth has mothered him, fed him, set him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with difficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened his wits … She has entered into his bone and tissue, into his mind and soul. Semple 1911: 1.

Other forces had also conspired to buttress this orientation. In the writings of the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, for example, similar sentiments found voice. Rejecting the common assumption that American institutions and traits were the product of transplanted European ‘germs’, Turner proposed that it was geographical realities on the western frontier that had induced the distinctively American qualities of rugged individualism, a culture of pragmatism, energetic inventiveness and a democratic spirit. In his case too, Lamarckian metaphors of direct environmental impact featured prominently. Albert Perry Brigham and Nathaniel Shaler were no less enamoured of environmentalism. Shaler, for example, traced racial features, patterns of migration, the origins of civilization and mental powers to the vicissitudes of environmental factors like climate, insularity and topography (Livingstone 1987). Reinforcements were also forthcoming from the voluminous writings of Ellsworth

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Huntington on climate and civilization during the early years of the twentieth century in which he amply displayed a predilection for racial typecasting and environmentalist explanations. Among the many connections he sought to draw between human society and environmental influence were his correlations of the distribution of civilization, genius and health with what he called climatic energy; the links he believed he could discern between ancient patterns of migration and climatic oscillations; and the weather’s impact on ‘nervous activity’. In Huntington’s scenario, statecraft, economic forces, religious impulses, technological innovations, and so on, paled into insignificance beside the dominating power of environment. And yet we need to exercise care not to fall into historical stereotype. For even while he read human history through environmental lenses, Huntington constantly reiterated the importance of genetic constitution and thus threw his weight behind various eugenic enterprises. Elsewhere during the early years of the twentieth century similar conceptual manoeuvres were discernible. Griffith Taylor, for example, advocated what he called ‘stop and go’ determinism in the attempt to modulate the shrillest tones of inexorable necessitarianism. Yet he remained convinced, as he put it in Environment and Race (1927), that the physical environment was the most potent element in shaping both biological and social evolution. In Britain Halford Mackinder who, at one point, insisted that the only rational basis for human geography was as a causal science built on physical foundations, nevertheless left space for humanity’s taking the initiative from nature through the exercise of what he came to call the Going Concern. Environmentalism in one or other guise, then, acted as a critical focal point for geography’s disciplinary identity in the decades around 1900. Even those who professed their belief in possibilism and probablism displayed much greater ambivalence than is usually imagined. Vidal de la Blache, for instance, insisted that genres de vie were

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themselves reflective of nature even as they engaged in its transformation, and it would therefore be mistaken to consider his to be an altogether radical voluntarism. Never psychologistic, Vidal always conceived of human geography as a natural, not a social science. Similarly, the anthropologist Franz Boas’s polemical crusade against an unsophisticated environmentalism (a campaign that influenced Carl Sauer’s repudiation) must not be taken to imply an entire dismissal of the conditioning power of environment, as is clearly evident in his celebrated study of the environmental modification of the immigrant headform. In the light of such revelations it seems that the labels ‘determinism’ and ‘possibilism’ were retained with a degree of polemical typecasting compatible with the suspicion that other interests were at stake in the controversies, even while reinforcing the claim that the relations between environment and culture was at the heart of geography’s disciplinary concerns. Considerable debate on the subject also characterized Soviet geography. With the official endorsement of the agronomist Lysenko’s biological Lamarckism, and the stimulus of Plekhanov’s evolutionized Marxism that causally connected the forces and relations of production to natural environment, environmental determinism enjoyed considerable support among the Russians, despite the early critiques of Karl Wittfogel. In this adoption of the doctrine by the far left, Plekhanov’s borrowings from Ratzel were decisively significant, and he used it to contest racial theories of social development and to explain what he considered to be the backwardness of his native Russia. To him Russian history was the outcome of its ‘peculiar geographical milieu’ as indeed all history was ‘controlled by the conditions of the natural environment’ (Bassin 2003). During the second quarter of the century many more came to query environmental determinism in the wake of Stalin’s repudiation and the official banning of Lysenkoism in 1948. Yet despite such spurnings, Anuchin felt justified in reasserting the salience of at least a

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neo-determinism because he was convinced that classical Marxism was implicated in the attempt to trace causal links between the material and the social.

ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM REDIVIVUS For all the criticisms to which environmental determinism was subject during the middle decades of the twentieth century, it has emphatically not disappeared from the intellectual horizon. Rostlund’s acerbic quip in 1962 that ‘environmentalism was disapproved, not disproved’ would seem to have retained committed defenders (Rostlund 1962: 49). In several different arenas the doctrine has resurfaced with marked intensity in recent years. Take, for example, the fundamentally ecological reading of the development of science by Harold Dorn in 1991. This account congregated around a Wittfogel-style narrative that attributed the development of science to the actions of those societies requiring hydraulic management and thus techno-scientific initiative. To explain the development of science, Dorn looked to ‘soil, climate, hydrology, and topographical relief, and to demographic fluctuations, latitude, and the differences between sown fields, steppe, and desert’. Not surprisingly he found that the writings of Ellen Semple still ‘remained fresh’ and insisted that Ellsworth Huntington’s ‘thesis was never really refuted’ (Dorn 1991: xi, xii, xix). Yet more recently, a good deal of debate over environmental determinism has rotated around the interventions of the evolutionary biologist and now professor of geography at UCLA, Jared Diamond. In a number of highprofile works, notably Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) and Collapse (2004), he has pointed to the critical role played by environmental influences in human history. With a powerful inclination to play down ethnic, cultural or individual components of historical change, Diamond sees the physical environment as

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the prime driver of humanity’s story. Successes in animal and plant domestication, patterns of diffusion and migration as shaped by ecological–geographical barriers, and continental differences in population size are called upon to explain Western dominance of the globe. By the same token such factors as desertification, energy depletion, soil salinization, pollution, deforestation, erosion and overpopulation are judged to be critical factors in why cultures collapse. Physical environments thus play the dominant role in determining who wins and who loses in humanity’s struggle for existence, for geographical locations have directly affected the capacity of societies to develop crucial agricultural institutions and to acquire immunity to particular diseases. Thus, when seeking for an explanation for the triumph of Europe, he resorts to matters of topography: its highly indented coastline and the presence of high mountains carving it up into a mosaic of regions account for Europe’s rise to dominance. Not surprisingly when asked in an interview with National Geographic News in July 2005 why, over the past 10,000 years, different societies have developed at different rates, Diamond replied: ‘I say the answer is location, location, location’ (Lovgren 2005). For all that, in the same conversation, Diamond insisted that his perspective was not environmental necessitarianism. ‘People have a misunderstanding that geography means environmental determinism’, he observed, ‘and that poor countries are doomed to be poor and they should just shut up and lie down and play dead. But in fact, knowledge is power. Once you know what it is that’s making you poor, you can use that knowledge to make you rich’. For all his protestations to the contrary, critics have not been slow to highlight what they see as geographical fatalism in Diamond’s writings. Andrew Sluyter, for example, dismissed what he described as Diamond’s ‘Neo-environmental Determinism’ as variously ‘junk science’, ‘pernicious’, and ‘absurd’ (Sluyter 2002: 813, 814). What he found particularly objectionable was the naturalization of destiny, inasmuch as

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‘the horrendous living conditions of millions of people’ were attributed to ‘natural fate’. While acknowledging that Diamond eschews Eurocentric racisms, Sluyter discerns the self-same determinist impulses in his writings and laments the popularity that Guns, Germs and Steel has acquired. In comparable vein, James Blaut (1999) accused Diamond of perpetuating a Eurocentrism that looked to the supposed superiority of Europe’s natural environment as the grounds of its rise and triumph. Blaut’s assault is two-pronged. First, he charges Diamond with being blind to the causal role of human culture in historical change by choosing to dwell on the links between environment and agriculture. Secondly, he presents challenges to the ‘three primordial environmental facts’ – the shapes of continents, the distribution of plants and animals susceptible to domestication, and geographical barriers to diffusion – that Diamond resorts to as ultimate explanations. For example, Blaut fastens upon Diamond’s resort to what he calls continental ‘axes’ to explain diffusion arguing that east–west axes are more favourable for agricultural spread than north–south axes. Blaut questions the facticity of this claim, but also discerns beneath it a valorizing of the temperate world and a denunciation of the tropical through claims about the climatic advantages of midlatitude regions. If Blaut’s analysis is well founded, an agricultural version of the moral climatology that in earlier times was used to castigate the tropical ecumene is plainly discernible. It connects too with Dorn’s ecologistic account of the rise of science for Diamond’s attribution of superiority to European culture is predicated on its supremacy in the cultivation of natural science since the seventeenth century. Blaut also gathered within the radius of his withering critique, the analysis of the historian David Landes as to why some nations are so rich while others remain poor. For Landes, the explanation is to be sought in climate, soil, topography, vegetation and nutrition as well as innovation, cultural values, reproductive habits and institutions.

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Again, Blaut perceives a strong inclination towards tropical denigration in Landes’s account inasmuch as tropical climate is accorded a causal role in economic underdevelopment. He reports too that Landes finds in climate an explanation for the practices of slavery because ‘Europeans could not work under the hot sun, so it was somehow natural to force Africans to work on the plantations’ (Blaut 1999: 405). And of course this sits alongside a corresponding eulogising of what Landes describes as the ‘far more favorable conditions in temperate zones; and within these, in Europe above all; and within Europe, in western Europe first and foremost’ (Landes 1998: 17). Plainly environmental determinism is alive and well in contemporary scholarship. As further testimonial, reference could be made to the range of research on palaeoclimatic shifts during the Holocene. In their review of the pertinent literature, Coombes and Barber identify something of the scope of work connecting climatic change to cultural collapse, notably, in the cases of the Akkadian, Egyptian, Mayan and Moche civilizations. While acknowledging that environmental perturbation may indeed have some impact on demographic and economic patterns, they consider that ‘the present claims of environmental influence upon past cultural transitions should still be treated with a degree of skepticism’ (Coombes and Barber 2005: 309). Other cases could be elaborated showing the degree to which environmentalist explanations continue to attract the public eye. The Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs (2001), for example, has attributed the uneven spread of capitalism to what he terms the poorer geographical endowments afflicting some regions which operate under a kind of geographical blight on account of their soil poverty, climatic extremes, and devastating diseases. Again the bane of the tropics stands in marked contrast to temperate blessings. Indeed there is some justification for the suspicion that, at least on some occasions, environmental determinism underlies the

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current apocalyptic anxieties over climate change. The political ecology of shifting weather patterns comes to the forefront in the observation, published in Weather, that while ‘it may never be possible to prove absolutely that a mild climate in mid-latitudes helps to foster a tolerant society or that an extreme climate may predispose people towards intolerance … the historical record is highly suggestive’ of just such connections (Beck 1993: 63–4). And as one final instance, we might note the observation, reported in the New York Times on 7 January 2007, that according to the climatologist Michael Mann, Washington’s lack of political will, compared with other cities, to curb carbon emissions could be attributed to the fact that east coast of the United States ‘did not warm nearly as much as rest of globe over the twenteeth century’ (Revkin 2007). Given the stimulus that environmental determinism has received for more than a century from Darwinian natural selection with its resolute insistence on the supreme efficacy of organic adaptation to environment, it is worth calling attention to the challenging proposals recently forthcoming from advocates of what is popularly known as evo-devo, namely evolutionary–developmental biology as promulgated by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin among others (Amundson 2005). This growing tradition of research challenges the supremacy accorded to adaptation to ecological conditions in evolutionary history by drawing attention to structural characteristics of the phenotype which undergo modification and the production of novel features independently of adaptation. Mechanisms of gene regulation, it is claimed, may play a much more extensive role in evolutionary transformations than traditional neo-Darwinian natural selection. If this account is in the right neighbourhood then the impulse to seek explanations for everything – from the development of music to the structures of the human mind – in the mechanisms of

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adaptation to environmental demands is much relieved. If the contemporary debates on a resurrected environmental determinism necessarily touch on matters of human agency, political culture and economic forces, they no less need to engage in dialogue with developments in evolutionary embryology and structural genetics.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Environmental determinism has taken many shapes and forms over its lengthy history and any coherent account of its narrative will have to take seriously the different purposes to which it has been put, as well as the plural origins from which it has sprung. There is no doubt that it has subserved the interests of both imperialism and Eurocentrism as has often claimed (Peet 1985; Frenkel 1992). But its manifold dimensions cannot be reduced simply to these forces, critical though they surely have been. Environmental determinism has engaged significant epistemological questions in the philosophy of science and social scientific explanation (Martin 1951; Montefiore and Williams 1955). It has shaped attitudes to labour practices, race relations, housing policies, and the management of colonial regimes, sometimes nourishing an imperial mindset, on other occasions underwriting cultural pluralism. It has contributed, often in contradictory ways, to questions about human anatomy and disease, mental health and moral philosophy, medicine and hygiene, plant and human acclimatization. Within geography, its naturalization of human history provided many with what they considered to be a scientific basis for the subject as a modern university discipline. In our own time it continues to manifest itself in broadbrush accounts of cultural collapse, and to lurk beneath the surface in debates congregating around the impact climate change is predicted to have on the future shape of human history.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am most grateful to John Agnew, Noel Castree and Nuala Johnson for exceptionally helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

REFERENCES Amundson, R. (2005) The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought: Roots of Evo-Devo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bassin, M. (2003) ‘Politics from nature: environment, ideology, and the determinist tradition’ in J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal (eds), A Companion to Political Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 13–29. Beck, R.A. (1993) ‘Viewpoint: climate, liberalism and intolerance’, Weather, 48: 63–64. Blaut, J.M. (1999) ‘Environmentalism and eurocentrism’, Geographical Review, 89: 391–408. Bremner, C. (2001) ‘French drown their sorrows in spring’, The Times, 5 May 2001: 17. Castree, N. (2005) Nature. London: Routledge. Coombes, P. and Barber, K. (2005) ‘Environmental determinism in Holocene research: causality or coincidence?’, Area, 37: 303–311. Diamond, J. (1997) Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton. Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. London: Allen Lane. Dorn, H. (1991) The Geography of Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Febvre, L. (1932) A Geographical Introduction to History. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner. Originally published in 1922 as La terre et l’évolution humaine. Fink, Z.A. (1941) ‘Milton and the theory of climatic influence’, Modern Languages Quarterly, 2: 67–80. Frenkel, S. (1992) ‘Geography, empire, and environmental determinism’, Geographical Review, 82: 143–153. Gerbi, A. (1973) The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Glacken, C.J. (1967) Traces on the Rhodian shore. Nature and Culture in Western thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Hippocrates (1849) On Airs, Waters, and Places, in The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, translated from the Greek by Francis Adams. London: New Sydenham Society. Kames, Henry Home, Lord (1817, orig. 1774) Sketches of the History of Man, 2 vols. Glasgow. Kant, I. (1950, orig. 1775) ‘On the different races of man’, reprinted in Earl W. Count (ed.), This is Race: An Anthology Selected from the International Literature on the Races of Man. New York: Henry Schuman, pp. 16–24. Kant, I. (1997) ‘On countries that are known and unknown to Europeans’ reprinted in E.C. Eze (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 58–64. Kant, I. (1997) ‘Of national characteristics’ reprinted in E.C. Eze (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 49–57. Keighren, I.M. (2006) ‘Bringing geography to the book: charting the reception of Influences of Geographic Environment ’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31: 525–540. Kimble, G.H.T. (1938) Geography in the Middle Ages. London: Methuen. Landes, D.S. (1998) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: W.W. Norton. Lewthwaite, G. (1966) ‘Environmentalism and determinism: a search for clarification’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 56: 1–23. Livingstone, D.N. (1987) Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science. London: University of Alabama Press. Livingstone, D.N. (1992) The Geographical Tradition. Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Oxford: Blackwell. Livingstone, D.N. (2008) Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion and the Politics of Human Origins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lovgren, S. (2005) ‘“Guns, Germs and Steel”: Jared Diamond on geography as power’, National Geographic News, 6 July 6 2005. Available at: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/ 2005/07/0706_050706_diamond.html. Martin, A.F. (1951) ‘The necessity for determinism’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 17: 1–12. Miller, G. (1962) ‘“Airs, Waters, and Places” in History’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 17: 129–140. Montefiore, A. and Williams, W. (1955) ‘Determinism and possibilism’, Geographical Studies, 2: 1–11.

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Montesquieu, M. de Secondat, Baron de, (1750) The Spirit of Laws, trans. from French. London: J. Nourse and P. Vaillant. Palmer, William G. (1984) ‘Environment in utopia: history, climate, and time in renaissance thought’, Environmental Review, 8: 162–178. Peet, R. (1985) ‘The social origins of environmental determinism’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 75: 309–333. Reckin, A. (2007) ‘The Ununited States, when it comes to the weather’, New York Times, 7 June 2007. Rostlund, E. (1962) ‘Twentieth-century magic’ in P.L. Wagner, and M.W. Mikesell (eds), Readings in Cultural Geography. Chicago, pp. 48–53. Sachs, J. (2001) ‘Why are the tropics poor? Assessing the role of politics, economics and ecology’ Journal of Economic History, 61: 521–544. Semple, E.C. (1911) The Influences of Geographic Environment, on the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geographie. New York: Henry Holt. Sluyter, A. (2003) ‘Neo-environmental determinism, intellectual damage control, and nature/society science’, Antipode, 35: 813–817.

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Smith, S.S. (1965 orig. 1810) Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Stepan, N. (1982) The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960. London: Macmillan. Stocking, G.W. Jr. (1987) Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Tatham, G. (1951) ‘Environmentalism and possibilism’ in G. Taylor (ed.) Geography in the Twentieth Century. London: Methuen, pp. 128–164. Taylor, G. (1927) Environment and Race: A Study of the Evolution, Migration, Settlement and Status of the Races of Man. London: Oxford University Press. Wade, P. (2002) Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. London: Pluto Press. Wands, J. (1986) ‘The theory of climate in the English renaissance and Mundus alter et idem’ in I.D. McFarlane (ed.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies. Binghampton, New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, pp. 519–525.

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28 Spatial Analysis Trevor J. Barnes

INTRODUCTION Spatial analysis involves the use of a formal vocabulary to reduce complex geographical patterns to simpler relations, permitting identification of an underlying causal structure. Three separate but interlinked processes are entailed: translation of geographical patterns into a rigorous and precise lexicon, typically taken as mathematics; decomposition of the (now) formally defined geographical pattern into a set of parsimonious and precisely defined elemental relations; and regression to first principles that when grasped provide recognition and understanding of the essential spatial order. While spatial analysis is most often thought of as a geographical pursuit that begins in the mid-twentieth century, associated with the discipline’s ‘quantitative revolution’ (Barnes 2004), it is in fact a practice that goes back much farther, dating to the very beginnings of the subject. The early Greek (possibly Hellenised Egyptian) geographer, Claudius Ptolemy (90–168 CE ), for example, believed that to understand geos, the entire space of the world, required analysis. Examining geos necessitated its transformation into an arithmetical and geometrical language, its

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reduction to basic elements, and the identification of ruling principles. After more than a thousand year gap or so, Ptolemy’s spatial analytical interests resurfaced in the Enlightenment. A key contribution, explicitly drawing on Ptolemy, was Geographia generalis (1650) written by Bernhardus Varenius (1622–50), a young German geographer living in Amsterdam. His text was sufficiently analytical that it was used by Isaac Newton (1643–1727) in his teaching at Cambridge University. Newton, in fact, was so impressed that he produced two new Latin editions, the bases for multiple translations of Varenius’s book into various European languages during the eighteenth century. With the institutionalisation of academic geography in Europe and North America from the mid-nineteenth century, spatial analysis became part of the discipline’s general curriculum, taking the form of instruction in cartography, surveying and geodesy. When the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto first opened in 1935, for example, one of the required courses was mathematical geography with its own dedicated lecturer (Sanderson 1988).1 From the mid-1950s, however, spatial analysis began to be separated from the rest of geography,

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conceptually ratcheted up by adding new, often statistical and mathematical, techniques, and elevated in status, at least by some, to the disciplinary method. This was new, and justified by proponents grounding spatial analysis in the practice and philosophy of science, in particular, positivism. That this change occurred when it did in the mid-1950s had everything to do with the larger post-Second World War context in which it unfolded, and which included: (1) a shift among many US social and environmental sciences, and in which geography was also caught up, towards a ‘new rigorism’ (Schorske 1997); (2) generous financial and institutional support from the military, the Cold War ‘military–industrial–academic complex’ (Leslie 1993), that in this case provided research funds for spatial analytic projects (Barnes and Farish 2006); (3) an energetic interventionist state concerned to fulfil instrumental planning ends, such as highway development or metropolitan growth, and made for the techniques of spatial analysis and (4) the emergence and rapid refinement of the computer, the machine par excellence as it turned out for pursuing and elaborating spatial analysis. All areas of geography were subsequently affected by the swing to spatial analysis: human and physical geography as well as cartography. Narrowly dubbed at the time the ‘quantitative revolution’ (Burton 1963), it was always much more than about just numbers. That this is true was revealed when the ‘revolution’ flagged in human geography during the 1970s, and attacked from a variety of competing perspectives. If spatial analysis had been just another of geography’s internal philosophical paradigm changes it would likely not have survived, consigned like so many other of geography’s post-war ‘-isms’ to the intellectual dustbin. But it wasn’t. Spatial analysis was historically part of the furniture of the discipline, and with resonances to other fields and worlds of practical accomplishment. Further, because of its link to the computer, as the latter developed, becoming the defining machine of the second

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half of the twentieth century, spatial analysis was pulled along with it, burgeoning into a vibrant new endeavour. Consequently, the computerised version of spatial analysis, geographical information systems/science (GIS) as dubbed by Goodchild and Haining (2004), has become increasingly a separate pursuit, different from human and physical geography. Further, because of its practical, instrumental uses (including profit-making potential), and connections to other intellectual pursuits (from electrical engineering to medicine), it has been strongly supported institutionally at universities. For example, Harvard University, which shut down its Department of Geography in 1948 because its Cold War warrior president, James Conant, believed geography was ‘not a university subject’ (quoted in Smith 1987: 159) re-opened a version of the Department in 2005 but based on GIS and spatial analysis. In this guise, the discipline was finally Harvard worthy. The chapter is divided into three unevenly sized sections. The first examines the early development of spatial analysis from Ptolemy to Varenius. The second recounts the rise of spatial analysis in the mid-twentieth century, and its failed bid for disciplinary hegemony within human geography. The final section examines the paradox of the toppling of spatial analysis within human geography, but its rise in another form, GIS, and which in certain respects now rivals human geography as a disciplinary sub-branch.

IN THE BEGINNING Ptolemy At the heart of Classical Greek geography was a triad of terms: topos, choros and geos. Traditionally topos was interpreted as the study of place, choros as the study of the region, and geos as the study of geography; that is, the entire face of the earth. While the difference among the three has been interpreted as one of geographical scale,

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Fred Lukermann (1961), and more recently Michael Curry (2005: 681), suggest that a more appropriate differentiation is in their respective approaches to representation; that is, in their ‘modes of geographical knowing’. Topos and choros, the earlier forms of Classical geography, emerged from an oral culture. Consequently, place and region were represented; that is, ‘geographically known’, through a narrative of words. They came into being from the telling of stories. Geos, in contrast, developed later, and was associated with quite a different form of representation, mathematics. Curry (2005: 695), in fact, argues that the very idea of space itself, ‘invented rather late in the day’, appeared with geos and its quantitative sensibility. From the beginning, space implied a different form of representation. Ptolemy was perhaps the key contributor to understanding geos. While he was a geographer, author of the eight-volume Geographia, a summary of everything known about the second-century Greco-Roman world in which he lived, he was perhaps even better known as an astronomer. Using the geometry of epicycles he ingeniously tried to reconcile astronomical observations with the prevailing geocentric conception of the solar system. Similarly, he used a mathematical approach in his treatment of geography (geos). Defining geos as ‘securing a likeness’ of the earth’s configuration, Ptolemy suggested such an end was possible only by first translating space into a mathematical vocabulary; in this case by imagining the earth ‘as a surface divisible by a mathematical grid’ (Curry 2005: 685). As Ptolemy writes (quoted in Lukermann 1961: 208): Geography … is concerned with the quantitative rather than with qualitative matters, since it has regard in every case for the correct proportion of distances, but only in the case of the more general features does it concern itself with securing a likeness, and then only with respect to configuration … Geography by using mere lines and annotations shows positions and general outlines. For this reason, while chorography does not require the

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mathematical method, in geography this method plays the chief part.

While Ptolemy does not use the term ‘spatial analysis’, he clearly is gesturing towards it in his account of geography (geos). There is mathematical transformation; the identification of more basic elements like ‘lines’ and ‘position’; and the recognition of an explainable spatial order, the world’s ‘configuration’. In addition, Curry (2005) argues that Ptolemy’s mathematical, analytical form of representation contributed to the very development of the map, and which was absent in the earlier chorographic and topographic accounts based on only words.2 Curry (2005: 685) writes, ‘it is difficult … to see the geographic flourishing in the absence of the cartographic, and of a cartographic that uses a medium that is permanent, portable and reproducible’. It is precisely this link between the spatial analytical and the cartographic that continues to the present in GIS, making it so compelling.

Varenius and Newton Ptolemy’s Geographia was lost and re-found several times over the next thousand years or so before finally being translated into Latin in 1406, and published using engraved woodblock illustrations, including maps, in Bologna in 1477. It was this Latin edition that Bernhardus Varenius used in the late 1640s while living in Amsterdam, studying mathematics and medicine, to write in 1650 his own geographical text published by Elzevir press, Geographia generalis. The adjective in the title is critical, linking with Ptolemy’s geos, and his incipient spatial analysis (Lukermann, nd.: 10). William Warntz (1989: 171), himself one of the twentieth century’s most well-known spatial analysts, called Varenius’s work ‘the first modern textbook in geography’ (see also Lukermann, nd.: 4). Following Ptolemy, Varenius envisaged both a ‘general geography’ (corresponding to geos), and a ‘special

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geography’ (corresponding to topos and choros).3 Varenius’s early death at age 28 prevented him writing the planned volume on ‘special geography’ (although he had written a monograph on Siam and Japan the previous year). But as he made clear in the preface to the Generalis, it was general geography that needed setting out and solidifying: [T]hose who have hitherto written on Geography have treated almost exclusively of Special Geography, and at tedious length. They have described very little which concerns General Geography, ignoring or completely omitting many necessary aspects of the subject. The result is that our young men while learning more and more Special Geography were largely ignorant of the foundations of study, and thus Geography scarcely vindicated her claims to be called a Science. I saw this state of affairs, and to remedy what was amiss, I began to bend my thoughts towards supplying the deficiency by composing a General Geography … according to such powers as God has granted me, cultivated by years spent in Mathematics. Varenius quoted in Lukermann, nd.: 7–8.

In particular, Varenius defined general geography as ‘that part of mixed mathematics which one explains the state of the earth and its parts, which concerns quantities; its configuration, its position, its magnitude and its movement with the celestial appearances, etc’ (quoted in Lukerman, nd.: 10). So, like Ptolemy’s geography, Varenius’s general geography required mathematising space using, in his case, geometry, trigonometry and arithmetic; finding universal spatial elements; and recognising general principles of spatial order which are ‘then appl[ied] within Special Geography to their respective areas’ (Varenius quoted in Lukermann, nd.: 16). One of the all time great analysers of space, Isaac Newton (1643–1727), recognised the analytical virtues of Varenius’s book. In 1669 Newton was appointed to the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge which included a stipulation that the Chair’s holder provide instruction in geography (Warntz 1989: 177). It is not known if Newton ever did instruct geography, but it is known that he corrected and amended

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Varenius’ text, arranging for its publication in 1672 and again in revised form in 1681. Newton did so, as the preface to the 1733 English translation of Varenius’s book by Dugdale and Shaw put it, because ‘he thought [Varenius] necessary to be read by his Audience, the Young Gentlemen of Cambridge, while he was delivering Lectures upon the same Subject from the Lucasian Chair’ (quoted in Warntz 1989: 177). The larger point is that elements of what now compose spatial analysis have existed not only for centuries, but for millennia. In making this argument, I am not suggesting that spatial analysis emerged fully formed, Athena-like, out of the head of Ptolemy. But Ptolemy was concerned with space, and was concerned with analysis through the philosophical tradition of Plato, Aristotle and Euclid to which he was heir.4 Not that Ptolemy would have called what he did spatial analysis. But there are elements in his ideas and practices that through mediators like Varenius and Newton were durable and potent, and eventually incorporated into what became contemporary spatial analysis. For spatial analysis to occur, though, took an enormous amount of work and effort. It didn’t emerge simply because of its own rightness, shining by its own internal light. It occurred, as I will now suggest, because of an appropriate wider social, political and economic context that allowed a set of older ideas, practice technologies taken from people like Ptolemy, Varenius and Newton, to be combined, assembled and joined with a new set, and made to flourish in the second half of the twentieth century under the name of spatial analysis.

GEOGRAPHY’S QUANTITATIVE REVOLUTION AND ALL THAT Spatial analysis gained its contemporary prominence from the title of an edited book published in 1968, Spatial Analysis: a Reader in Statistical Geography. Until that time, the term was rarely used, although synonyms

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were like ‘regional analysis’, or ‘locational analysis’ or ‘network analysis’.5 It was perhaps fitting that the book, edited by Brian Berry and Duane Marble (1968), was a ‘best of’ collection of geography’s quantitative revolution from the preceding 10 years. The 37 previously published essays applied statistical and mathematical models to geographical problems, located key spatial axioms, elements, assumptions and behaviours, and above all pursued explanations of spatial order. None of the essays used the expression spatial analysis, but that is what they all did. Moreover, just as Newton said he had stood ‘on the shoulders of Giants’, so had the contributors, including in the case of the geographers standing on Newton’s own shoulders. But how they got there is another story. Berry and Marble’s (1968) account in their introduction has the spatial analytical approach hidden from the discipline during the first half of the twentieth century, but which is re-found, and once taken up allows geography in the post-war period to ‘move back to the mainstream’ in a ‘flush of revolutionary change’ (Berry and Marble 1968: 4). But what was the ‘mainstream,’ how had it been forged, and why was it congruent with spatial analysis? And why had geography taken so long to join, and what happened once it did? These two sets of questions organise the discussion that follows.

The ‘mainstream’ ‘Mainstream’ science which geography tried to join in the 1950s as spatial analysis was recent, and shaped very much by the Second World War and the success it had enjoyed there (science had won the war according to many). Exemplified by both the Manhattan Project responsible for the nuclear bomb, and the RadLab at MIT that developed the radar, science was defined in the post-war period by the same strategies found in these earlier ventures: team-based research; use of large sums of money; inter-institutional cooperation (usually private corporations, the

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state, the military, and universities); and fulfilment of specific, instrumental ends. Called also ‘Big Science’, dedicated labs (like Los Alamos or Lincoln) and research institutes were central, and organised around specific problems and their intellectual and material resolution. Further, the predilection was toward models rather than high theory. Models, of course, were no less mathematical or analytical than theories, but they were more grounded and tractable, more suited to the accomplishment of particular ends that became a guiding motif of Cold War science (Barnes 2008). This post-war paradigm of science was additionally shaped by a machine produced by that very same paradigm, the computer. The computer’s immediate origins were with Alan Turin’s use of the ‘Colossus’ at Bletchley Park, England, during the Second World War to break the encrypted code used by German U-boats, Enigma. However, commercial development of the computer, and its dissemination to labs, institutes and universities did not occur until the early 1950s. Propelling the computer’s development was precisely the ‘Big Science’ model. The computer was developed at MIT’s Lincoln Labs, funded in large part by the US military, especially the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and constructed by IBM (at a cost of $30 million each, and at one point employing 20 percent of the corporation’s workforce). Of course, early computers were lumbering dinosaurs compared with contemporary versions, but even then they could perform calculations with a speed, consistency and stamina that no human could match, and were vital to postwar science and, as we will see, to spatial analysis as well. This ‘mainstream’ model did not stay only within science, however. It also moved into selected social sciences, and even some humanities like philosophy. Economics and psychology were early converts, and incursions were made into sociology, political science and even anthropology. Furthermore, institutes were inaugurated that did for social science what similar institutes did for the

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physical science; for example, the founding of RAND Corporation in 1947. As this occurred, social science was altered and became more team-based, problem-focused, instrumental, mathematical and model- and machine-reliant. There was also a philosophical change that accompanied and justified the shift, initially taking the form of positivism and later a more general analytic philosophy, and which increasingly gained a hold at top US philosophy Departments such as Harvard, Princeton and Chicago, as well as in some research institutes. For example, the image of the positivist philosopher Hans Reichenbach was used to promote RAND in a 1959 advert appearing in Science (Reisch 2005: 249–53; a reproduction of the image is on page 352). As a philosophy emphasising the centrality of formalism, logic, reductionism, analysis and generality, it was made for post-war mainstream science and social science, as well as the first modern forms of spatial analysis.

Spatial analysis and the ‘mainstream’ It was within this larger context that spatial analysis in its modern guise emerged within geography. While spatial science possessed a longstanding disciplinary pedigree, Berry and Marble were right about its later diminishment. Spatial analysis was de-emphasised when geography became a university subject from the late nineteenth century, and instead it stressed topos and especially choros, or in Varenius’s terms, a ‘tedious’ ‘special geography’. In 1939, Richard Hartshorne (1939) even wrote a dense, closely argued 400-page-plus book with the definitive title, The Nature of Geography, to make a philosophical case for ‘tediousness.’ His argument was that geography could never be on par with physical science because the stuff of geography’s study, places and regions, were unique assemblages found no where else. Talk of general theories or principles was therefore a disciplinary

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non-starter. As Hartshorne (1939: 449) wrote, geography ‘is essentially a descriptive science concerned with the description and interpretation of unique cases’. Ptolemy, Varenius and Newton would have rolled over in their graves. But Hartshorne was a powerful disciplinary gatekeeper, well-cited and connected, a past president of the Association of American Geographers, a man who literally wrote the book on geography. Bypassing him would be difficult. But the forces of change represented by mainstream science were also imposing and implacable. Slowly, but inexorably, a modern version of spatial analysis emerged in a process dubbed geography’s ‘quantitative revolution’. In the course of that revolution, geography increasingly joined the ‘mainstream’. An early example was at the Department of Geography, University of Washington. During the mid-1950s two catalytic professors, William Garrison6 and Edward Ullman, drawing on funds from the Federal Government and the military, undertook team-based research with a group of graduate students who serendipitously had arrived at Seattle at the same time, and among whom included Brian Berry and Duane Marble. Making use of statistical methods that Garrison first taught in 1954 (Geog 426: Quantitative Methods in Geography), and a newly installed IBM 650 computer housed in the attic of the chemistry building, the group drew upon a series of spatial models to evaluate a proposed highway development for Seattle. The resulting volume, Studies of Highway Development and Geographic Change (Garrison et al. 1959), was in one way a remarkable volume, unlike anything else published in English up until that time in the name of academic geography. Crammed with calculations, data matrices, statistical techniques, cost curves and demand schedules, even the maps were subverted, overlaid with numbers, arrows, starburst lines and balancing equations. But in another respect the book’s spatial analysis was unremarkable, simply the recouping of the earlier tradition

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of spatial analysis, and following a road already heavily travelled since the end of the Second World War by a number of other sciences and social sciences. The University of Washington along with the University of Iowa were the first of geography’s centres of calculation to practice modern spatial analysis. Such centres quickly burgeoned elsewhere, often brought into being by the bodies of the young revolutionaries themselves as they took up new university appointments on various North American campuses: at Chicago, Northwestern University, Michigan, Ohio State, Illinois, Indiana, Buffalo, Toronto and McMaster. The quantitative revolution was less widespread in Europe, but the work of the iconoclast, Torsten Hägerstrand at Lund University (and visitor to the University of Washington in the late 1950s), was important. Similarly significant were contributions by the ‘terrible twins’ of British geography, Peter Haggett and Richard Chorley, who taught together at Cambridge in the late 1950s (Haggett later became professor at Bristol University in 1966 and also made it a key site for spatial analysis). The spatial analysis that developed was found across the spectrum of geography. Perhaps the greatest discussions occurred within human geography though. Certainly, it was in human geography that the most intense philosophical debates occurred, drawing on the positivist philosophers already mentioned.7 It wasn’t a uniform disciplinary interest, however. Economic and urban geography grabbed most of the attention. In each case they traded heavily in borrowed mathematical models from both economics, such as location theory, and physics, such as the gravity model. Consequently, given their provenance, those models from the outset carried a sophisticated inbuilt analytic structure. Both sub-disciplines also increasingly drew on digitised socio-economic census data allowing computer-based statistical analyses, and, from the late 1960s, the use of pre-packaged statistical programmes (the Statistical Package for Social Sciences – SPSS – was launched in 1968). Brian Berry’s

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arrival from Seattle in 1958 at the University of Chicago as a newly minted assistant professor therefore could have not been more propitious. Within three years Berry was director of the University of Chicago’s Center of Urban Studies. And inside a decade he had made the Center the pre-eminent site for spatial analysis in urban and economic geography, developing spatial models of urban and economic structure, and testing them against an avalanche of numbers using ever-sophisticated statistical techniques, programmes and computers. Then there was physical geography, until the 1950s stuck in the William Morris Davis mould: largely descriptive, non-mathematical and atheoretical. Partly because of greater availability of research funding by the military (the US earth sciences were the recipient of billions of dollars of funds in the post-war years (Cloud 2003)), and strong intellectual links to the physical sciences, physical geography was perhaps even more receptive to spatial analysis than human geography. The early career of geomorphologist Richard Chorley provides a useful illustration. A Cambridge geography undergraduate, Chorley went to the Geology Department, Columbia University in 1951 to do his PhD (and partly funded by an ONR grant). His research supervisor, Arthur Strahler (1992), had begun his own quantitative revolution in geology in the early 1950s (the ‘quantitative/ dynamic’ approach (Strahler 1992)). Arriving at Columbia when he did Chorley realised later that he ‘had stumbled into the control centre of a scholarly revolution’ (quoted in Schumm 2004: 672). It was that revolution that Chorley, in turn, took back to the Cambridge Department of Geography in 1957 when he was hired as a demonstrator, and which later he brought more widely to own discipline: ‘spatial analysis in geomorphology’ (Chorley 1972). A third leg of geography, cartography, was also transformed by spatial analysis, and prepared it for GIS. A central figure in that transformation was another of the students at the University of Washington in the mid-1950s,

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Waldo Tobler. In between his MA and PhD at Washington, Tobler worked in the belly of the beast, within the military–industrial complex, as a cartographer for a spin-off company of RAND charged with preparing plans for defending the country from a nuclear attack (Barnes 2008). Partly out of that work experience, he wrote in 1959 what became a celebrated paper, ‘Automation and cartography’ (Tobler 1959), the first in geography to think through the possibilities of bringing together computers and cartography. With that connection made, Tobler (1976) in the next decade developed what he called ‘analytical cartography,’ the correlative of ‘spatial analysis’. It combined the computer, maps, and formal mathematical and statistical techniques. Analytical cartography, in turn, became ‘the sub-discipline of cartography that l[ay] behind much of the development in geographic information science’ (Clarke and Cloud 2000: 195), and discussed below. By way of conclusion, and also as a transition to what has happened subsequently, let me discuss William Warntz. If any single person embodied spatial analysis it was him. (His last (posthumous) paper fittingly celebrated Newton and Varenius (Warntz 1989)). For a brief shining moment Warntz was even on the cusp of bringing back geography as spatial analysis to Harvard. Warntz had written his PhD in economics at Penn after the war. Unusually for an economist his dissertation was about space. He deployed Newton’s gravity and potential models to present a geographical analysis of price, and empirically illustrated by commodity statistics from the US Department of Agriculture (Warntz 1959). If ever there was a geographical project requiring a computer given the inordinate number of calculations required it was Wartnz’s, and to which he gravitated from the late 1950s. Appointed as research associate to the American Geographical Society in 1956, Warntz’s big break came in 1966 when he was hired at Harvard to work in Howard Fisher’s Harvard Lab for Graphical Design, and then an even bigger break in 1968 when he was made its director (Chrisman 2006).

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The purpose of the lab was to develop computer mapping programmes, initially focused on Fisher’s own, SYMAP (for details see Chrisman 2006: ch. 2). Warntz was hired in autumn 1966 to add ‘factual information, its gathering, manipulation and analysis’ (quoted in Chrisman 2006: 12). When he was made director two years later, Warntz insisted on adding ‘and Spatial Analysis’ to the Lab’s title. That meant for him ‘the study of surfaces and the mathematical structure of spatial distributions’ (Chrisman 2006: 58). To that end, and supported by an ONR grant, Warntz established the series Harvard Papers in Theoretical Geography to disseminate results, and which consisted of mathematical analyses of both familiar geographical surfaces like drainage basins and urban systems, and unfamiliar ones like bovine livers and migratory paths of the artic tern (a full list of papers is given by Chrisman 2006). Warntz’s promotion to director rather than being the crowning glory, however, was the beginning of the end of spatial analysis at Harvard, and in human geography more generally. In 1971 Warntz was forced to resign from his position and went to the University of Western Ontario. By then, his colleagues at the Graduate School of Design were less keen on his kind of design; social science was becoming more social and less scientific; and even old reliable, ONR, and which paid for part of Warntz’s Harvard salary, reined back its grants to human geographers. Larger changes were afoot.

Revolting against the revolution Those changes were quickly seen in human geography, with spatial analysis increasingly criticised from the early 1970s. Spatial analysis, it was claimed, was: out of synch with the discipline’s own intellectual past that emphasised grounded context and geographical singularity (‘special geography’); out of synch with its own historical and political moment of, in particular, the late 1960s and early 1970s that reacted against the violence of abstraction, technology, formal ordering

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and centralised authority, all of which critics said characterised spatial analysis; and even out of synch with scientific logic as detractors revealed in the assorted contradictions, inconsistencies and aporias they found within spatial analysis. David Harvey was a central figure in this subsequent unravelling. In 1969 he had published Explanation in Geography, a lengthy and detailed philosophical justification of spatial analysis based on a close reading of various venerated positivist and analytic philosophers. Even before he finished his tome, however, Harvey had doubts, and which then erupted at the 1971 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Boston. He announced there that: [Geography’s] quantitative revolution has run its course and diminishing marginal returns are apparently setting in as … [it] serve[s] to tell us less and less about anything of great relevance … There is a clear disparity between the sophisticated theoretical and methodological framework which we are using and our ability to say anything really meaningful about events as they unfold around us … In short, our paradigm is not coping well. Harvey 1972: 6.

The rest of the 1970s was a decade in which various elements of spatial analysis in human geography were in turn held up for scrutiny, and found wanting. Harvey (1972) began by attacking the usefulness of theory, models and statistical techniques, portraying them as at best irrelevant and at worst politically regressive (‘counter-revolutionary’). Gunnar Olsson (1975) pitilessly unpicked the logic of Warntz’s cherished gravity model, arguing that its formal reasoning undid any claim to empirical veracity, and when applied it made bad worlds not good ones, worsening the lot of humans not improving it. In a similar vein, Robert Sack (1980) argued that the very idea of a separate analysis of space was logically inconsistent with the scientific principals it invoked. Humanistic geographers (Ley and Samuels 1978) berated the spartan, clinical, de-contextualised, and amoral model of humans and places spatial analysts erected. Derek Gregory (1978: 49) drew on the full

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force of critical theory to ‘kill the Gods’ of positivism. And in case there was still doubt, with forensic precision Andrew Sayer (1979) declared the body well and truly dead right at decade’s end. Drawing on critical realism, Sayer argued that spatial analysis failed to recognise the importance of causal mechanisms, and instead was content with the sop of mere association, and manifest as an endless stream of correlation and regression studies that looked impressive but explained nothing. For some, however, the announcement of the death of spatial analysis was greatly exaggerated. They were not willing to let it shuffle off to the other side, at least not yet. Just as well because there was still a pulse.

SPATIAL ANALYSIS REDUX: GIS Spatial analysis did not so much die as it was reincarnated in the new body of GIS. Of course, GIS did not need to happen. There was no ineluctable force that produced its emergence as some Whig historians of GIS have suggested (see Curry (1998: ch. 4) for references and the counterargument). It was a consequence of contingent factors that while context-specific, and existing in embryonic form since the end of the Second World War, were no less potent. They included many of factors already discussed including the quantitative revolution, the increasing power and user-friendliness of computers, large gobs of Cold War military and later corporate research money, the instrumental ends of government, and increasing academic institutional capacity. The Harvard Lab which embodied so many of these features was the exemplary case, and repeated later in different guises in other places. The move from spatial analysis to GIS occurred almost seamlessly. Certainly, Warntz did not make a distinction, with the two pursuits converging in his renamed laboratory. In addition, several of the Washington ‘space cadets’ wore both hats: Art Getis and Duane Marble, the co-editor of the Spatial

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analysis volume, are now just as well-known for their contributions to GIS as to spatial analysis. Moreover, there are good reasons for the convergence. GIS permits greater extension of existing forms of spatial analysis. It isn’t either/or. Instead, it is a case of having your cake and eating it. GIS does not embody spatial analysis as such. At its most basic, GIS is the cartographical representation of digital geocoded data. But in that form, data is easily manipulated by spatial analysis. As Longley and Batty (1996: 1) write, GIS ‘is part of the wider move to a digital world … and within that digital environment … quantitative geographical methods and techniques can be used … thus enabling the development of rigorous models of spatial distributions, the analysis of locational patterns, and the investigation of forecasting of space-time dynamics.’ In this sense, ‘GIS becomes the new context for spatial analysis’ (Longley and Batty 1996: 2). Goodchild and Haining (2004) go even further, anointing a new discipline, geographical information science (GISci), as a vehicle for combining spatial analysis and GIS. They write: ‘Although GIS and spatial data analysis started out as two more less separate areas of research and application, they have grown closer together over time. We argue that the two areas meet in the field of geographic information science, with each supporting and adding value to the other’ (Goodchild and Haining 2004: 363). Whatever its new mantle might be now called, spatial analysis has clearly survived its near-death experience and is prospering (literally and figuratively). GIS is now a distinct field of inquiry generating its own journals, conferences, academic pecking order, lines of funding, centres and institutions. It is connected to a multi-billion-dollar industry, the products of which now seep into everyday practices. This does not necessarily contribute to the intellectual standing of GIS/ spatial analysis, but within increasingly corporatised universities it certainly attracts their financial attention. Harvard recently has

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followed the money, but whether this will be a backdoor strategy to bring back geography to that university is unclear. If anything, GIS and spatial analysis appear to be going on their own, increasingly detaching from the discipline as a whole. As a model it could be the end of geography as we knew it.

CONCLUSION Spatial analysis as I tried to suggest has been part of the subject almost as long as geography has been a subject. It is bound up with mathematisation, identifying fundamental spatial elements, and explaining spatial order from general principles. Because of these features it has constantly been linked to science, whether that of Ancient Greece, the Enlightenment, or the post-Second World War ‘Big’ kind. Most recently, its tie is to computer science through GIS. Given the commercial possibilities of these connections, spatial analysis may well take off on a life of its own, leaving even its original subject base behind. Of course, spatial analysis and GIS will still be found in geography (especially physical geography), but it will have become too important (and lucrative) to be left only to geographers. However, knowledge does not belong to any one group, a fact geographers should readily appreciate given that they have been one of the great borrowing disciplines since their incorporation into the academy. Neither is knowledge in any sense pure but is always muddied by its historical and geographical context. It is always ‘mangled’, to use Andrew Pickering’s (1995) metaphor, by social ends, or bureaucratic ones, or internal university politics, or by military and commercial imperatives, or even by new material environments such as those given by machines like the computer. Here is the irony: spatial analysis aspires to purity of knowledge, but historically it has been corrupted from the beginning. If it hadn’t there would have been no beginning. Like the other concepts written

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about in this section of this volume, spatial analysis remains vibrant, with a future, because it is messy not because it is pure.

NOTES 1 Clout (2003: 5) also reports that the University College London’s Department of Geography course listings for 1924 included ‘mathematical geography’, albeit taught by surveyors from engineering. 2 Maps existed long before Ptolemy wrote, but Curry’s (2005) point is that they were not connected to earlier forms of geographical inquiry, topos and choros. They were joined to geographical study only once there was movement away from the ‘technology’ of writing to the ‘technology’ of mathematics and which occurred with the examination of earth’s spaces (geos) as opposed to its places and regions. 3 The terms ‘general’ and ‘special’ were used earlier by Bartholomäus Keckermann in his Systema Geographicum (1611) (Livingstone 1992: 83–4). Lukermann (nd.: fn. 5: 49) argues, though, that Keckermann should not be given credit for inventing these terms because their origins lay ‘well back into Hellenistic times,’ and they are ‘the common property of numerous geographers and logicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.’ 4 The word analysis derives from the Greek term analusis meaning loosening up or dissolution, and associated with writings by Plato and Aristotle (Beaney 2007). 5 Using JSTOR which has digitised the contents of ten long-standing geographical journals from their first publication, I carried out a search for the terms ‘spatial’ and ‘analysis’. There is increasing use made of both terms separately from the early 1950s, but they are not used together jointly until William Garrison’s (1959) paper, but even then it is done in passing. The first sustained discussion of spatial analysis as spatial analysis is with Berry and Marble’s edited book. A statistically based content analysis of JSTOR journals is carried out by Jackson et al. (2006). They did not search for the term ‘spatial analysis’ per se, but found that kindred terms like ‘laws’, ‘theories’, ‘correlation’ and ‘regression’ were most prominent within human geography during the 1970s. See also Chrisman’s (2006: 58) pertinent discussion. 6 Berry and Marble (1968: v) dedicate Spatial Analysis to Garrison, ‘the spark that set us all in motion’. 7 The first battle cry in the quantitative revolution came as a philosophical attack on Richard Hartshorne by Fred Schaefer (1953) who avowed a strict positivist position.

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REFERENCES Barnes, T.J. (2004) ‘Placing ideas: genius loci, heterotopia, and geography’s quantitative revolution’, Progress in Human Geography, 28: 565–595. Barnes, T.J. (2008) ‘Geography’s underworld: the military-industrial complex, mathematical modelling, and the quantitative revolution’, Geoforum, 39: 3–16. Barnes, T.J. and Farish, M. (2006) ‘Between regions: Science, militarism, and American geography from World War to Cold War’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96: 807–826. Beaney, M. (2007) ‘Analysis’, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Available at: http://plato.stanford. edu/entries/analysis/, accessed 16 July 2010. Berry, B.J.L. and Marble, D.F. (eds) (1968) Spatial Analysis: A Reader in Statistical Geography. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Burton, I. (1963) ‘The quantitative revolution and theoretical geography’, The Canadian Geographer, 7: 151–162. Chorley, R.J. (1972) ‘Spatial analysis in geomorphology’ in R.J. Chorley (ed.), Spatial Analysis in Geomorophy. London: Methuen, pp. 3–16. Chrisman, N. (2006) Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at Harvard became GIS. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press. Clarke, K.C. and Cloud, J. (2000) ‘On the origins of analytical cartography’, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 27: 195–204. Cloud, J. (2003) ‘Introduction: special guest-edited issue on the earth sciences and the Cold War’, Social Studies of Science, 33: 629–633. Clout, H. (2003) Geography at University College London: A Brief History. London: Department of Geography, UCL. Curry, M.R. (1998) Digital Place: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. London: Routledge. Curry, M.R. (2005) ‘Toward a geography of a world without maps: Lessons from Ptolemy and postal codes’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95: 680–691. Garrison, W.L. (1959) ‘Spatial structure of the economy, II’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 49: 471–482. Garrison, W.L., Berry, B.J.L., Marble, D.F., Nystuen, J.D. and Morrill, R.L. (1959) Studies of Highway Development and Geographic Change. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Goodchild, M.F. and Haining, R.P. (2004) ‘GIS and spatial data analysis: converging perspectives’, Papers in Regional Science, 83, 363–385.

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Gregory, D. (1978) Ideology, Science and Human Geography. London: Hutchinson. Hartshorne, R. (1939) The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of the Past. Lancaster, PA: Association of American Geographers. Harvey, D. (1969) Explanation in Geography. London: Edward Arnold. Harvey, D. (1972) ‘Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary theory in geography and the problem of ghetto formation’, Antipode, 4: 1–13. Jackson, A., Harris, R., Hepple, L.W., Hoare, A.G., Johnston, R.J., Jones, K. and Plummer, P. (2006) ‘Geography’s changing lexicon: measuring disciplinary change in Anglophone human geography through journal content analysis’, Geoforum, 37: 447–454. Leslie, S.W. (1993) The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press. Ley, D. and Samuels, M. (eds) (1978) Humanistic Geography. Chicago: Maroufa Press. Livingstone, D.N. (1992) The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Oxford: Blackwell. Longley, P. and Batty, M. (1996) ‘Analysis, modelling, forecasting, and GIS technology’ in P. Longley and M. Batty (eds), Spatial Analysis: Modelling in a GIS Environment. Cambridge: Geoinformation International, pp. 1–15. Lukermann, F.E. (1961) ‘The concept of location in classical geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 51: 194–210. Lukermann, F.E. (nd) ‘The Praecognita of Varenius: seven ways of knowing’, unpublished manuscript, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota. Olsson, G. (1975) Birds in Egg. Michigan Geographical Publications, number 15. Ann Arbor, MI: Department of Geography, University of Michigan.

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Pickering, A. (1995) The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reisch, G.A. (2005) How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science. To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sack, R.D. (1980) Conceptions of Space: A Geographical Perspective. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sanderson, M. (1988) Griffith Taylor: Antarctic Scientist and Pioneer Geographer. Carleton Library Series, No. 145. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Sayer, A. (1979) ‘Epistemology and conceptions of people and nature in geography’, Geoforum, 10: 19–44. Schaefer, F.K. (1953) ‘Exceptionalism in geography: a methodological introduction’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 43: 226–249. Schorske, C.E. (1997) ‘The new rigorism in the human sciences, 1940–60’, Daedalus, 126: 289–309. Schumm, S.A. (2004) ‘In memoriam: Arthur Newell Strahler (1918–2002)’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94: 671–673. Smith, N. (1987) ‘“Academic war over the field of geography”: the elimination of geography at Harvard, 1947–1951”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 77: 155–172. Strahler, A.N. (1992) ‘Quantitative/dynamic geomorphology at Columbia 1945–60: a retrospective’, Progress in Physical Geography, 16: 65–84. Tobler, W. (1959) ‘Automation and cartography’, The Geographical Review, 49: 526–534. Tobler, W. (1976) ‘Analytical cartography’, The American Cartographer, 3: 21–31. Warntz, W. (1959) Toward a Geography of Price. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Warntz, W. (1989) ‘Newton, the Newtonians, and the Geographia Generalis Varenii’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 79: 165–169.

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29 Dynamics and Complexity Christopher J. Keylock

INTRODUCTION The processes that geographers study are both dynamic and complex. Particularly complex are human geographic systems with autonomous agents who can think and choose to act in a manner contrary to that expected given the prevailing socio-economic and political forces. However, the preferred ontologies in contemporary human geography tend to prioritise the detailed opinions and actions of individuals rather than their collective behaviours. As such, there has been relatively little work within geography that considers social systems from the perspective of either dynamics or complexity theory (although see O’Sullivan 2004). Hence, this chapter largely draws on examples from physical geography.

DYNAMICS Studies of the dynamics of a system necessarily involve a consideration of mass and the acceleration of the masses involved by the forces acting. This can be contrasted with kinematics where the motion of entities

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is considered independent of their mass or mass interactions (the latter condition arises because of the gravitational force generated between two masses). Kinematic wave equations are used a great deal in hydrology for modelling flood waves (see the review by Singh 2001), and have also been used in geomorphology for modelling river channel profile evolution (Whipple and Tucker 2002). However, the majority of physical geographical studies are interested in processes that are formulated, either explicitly or implicitly, in terms of mass and momentum, meaning that dynamics is at the heart of almost all process-based study. While conservation of mass may be formulated by considering an infinitesimal cubic volume and balancing the mass into the volume in a unit time with that leaving, conservation of momentum involves balancing changes in momentum through the volume with the net forces acting upon it by the phenomenon itself (the shear and normal stresses), as well as body forces such as gravity and coriolis. Modelling of dynamics within physical geography takes these principles as its starting point, possibly supplementing them with equations for the thermodynamics too (e.g. in climate modelling).

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From this description it follows that landscape evolution models, which conserve mass but not momentum, are not models of landscape dynamics as such. It is also worth noting that there are modelling approaches in geography that, while purportedly about dynamics, have a somewhat ad hoc formulation (as highlighted by Nicholas 2009) and do not always conserve these fundamental quantities successfully (e.g. Van De Wiel et al. 2007). These should be treated as ‘toy models’, potentially useful for highlighting processes and suggesting new avenues for research, but currently lacking sufficient theoretical understanding to make them appropriate for modelling in a predictive sense.

COMPLEXITY There are various sources of complexity in the dynamics of physical geographic systems. In a recent paper, Bras et al. (2003: 71) state: ‘[W]e define complexity in the sense that earth systems generally involve many different processes. These processes are typically connected via intricate feedbacks and operate across a wide range of space and time scales.’ This definition leads them, in the context of modelling these systems, to suggest: There is a common tendency in model-building to begin with a highly simplified description of a system, and then iteratively add components in search of greater realism. Is this trend toward increasing model complexity warranted? We believe that it is, so long as the level of complexity in a model does not exceed our ability to understand it. Bras et al. 2003: 72.

It should be noted, however, that there are other sources of complexity in process dynamics that emerge from the inherent nonlinearities in the system and require a different definition of what it is to ‘understand’ the processes. In these situations, a numerical model provides data to compare to experiment

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or field data, which leads to understanding at some level. However, the fundamental search for understanding lies elsewhere. This is why in the fluid mechanics literature, direct numerical simulation of the Navier–Stokes equations are used to help understand experiments and flow problems, but the complexity of these equations means that these simulations do not give a fundamental understanding of turbulence. This is still an open problem and is one of the Millennium Problems of the Clay Mathematics Institute. In addition to the occurrence of many different processes and the inherent complexity of some of them, the fact that different locations on the planet have a unique history means that complexity can also arise from the unique set of boundary conditions for a specific process found at different places. In the terminology of Simpson (1963), these latter are the configurational aspects of a place, which are acted upon by a set of immanent processes and forces. In this study I give some examples of the multi-faceted and configurational aspects to geographic complexity, while also providing a fairly informal overview of the complexity inherent to some of the immanent phenomena essential to understanding so many geographic processes.

GEOGRAPHIC COMPLEXITY The fact that there is only one planet Earth means that in many situations, we can not undertake controlled experiments with true replication as may be possible in other sciences. This means that our inferences will always be subject to some uncertainty. Attempts to undertake experiments to gain an understanding under some degree of control not only suffer from issues of closure (where do you subdivide the natural environment?), but are difficult to perform due to scaling complexities. In many situations, geometric scaling is completely inadequate and there is a need to scale the dynamics properly too.

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However, full dynamic similarity is rarely achieved because of the tendency (for cost reasons) to use the same natural substances that occur in the real world (water and air, for example) in the experiment. This means that compromises are required in order to accommodate the complexity of the dynamics in an experimental system. Peakall et al. (1996) provide a number of examples of how dimensional analysis can be used to produce appropriate groups of variables to be scaled, and how decisions need to be made on which assumptions must be relaxed to scale as appropriately as possible. Even with consideration of the scaling of dynamics in experiments, constraints introduced by the experimental equipment can result in unwarranted interpretations of data. See Hunt et al.’s (2002) criticism of the classic experiments of Bagnold (1954) for an example that is relevant to a range of physical geographic phenomena. Understanding environmental processes is then a matter of investigating both the processes themselves and the boundary conditions that are affecting those processes at particular places and at specific times (whether in the laboratory or in nature). In addition, it is important to consider the history of phenomena that have shaped that particular system. The following example illustrates how complexity results from unique events in particular places and the individual history of environmental systems.

Complexity from environmental history Topography in mountain regions is more dissected than that closer to base level with the consequence that drainage basins are generally smaller in the headwaters. In these areas the steep gradients give a very high specific sediment yield (volume of sediment removed from the basin in a unit time as a function of basin area). In the much larger basins further downstream, the actual volume of sediment transported by the river may be greater, but

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the specific yield is expected to be lower due to the greater proportion of flatter surfaces where sediment may be deposited (e.g. Allen et al. 1991) and stored within the basin. However, Church and Slaymaker (1989) reported an interesting example from British Columbia in Canada where, rather than specific sediment yield being inversely related to basin size, it was found that the basins of intermediary size (~30,000 square kilometres) had the greatest specific sediment yield. Perhaps the obvious place to seek an explanation for this result is in the contemporary boundary conditions. For example, perhaps there is a systematic variation in the geology that explains why the smaller basins have a lower than expected specific sediment yield? In fact, the answer comes from a change in the suite of processes operating and, hence, the importance of environmental history in shaping contemporary systems. Previous glacial activity formed sedimentary deposits in the valley bottoms that are now being eroded by the river channels. The fact that the landscape is still responding to historical glaciation suggests that the time taken to recover from a perturbation (relaxation time) is sufficiently great to call into question the equilibrium approach to geomorphology that was a key tenet of the systems approach to geomorphic thinking in the 1970s. If an equilibrium approach to environmental systems is made problematic by this and similar examples, it can also be questioned from the perspective of other concepts that were integral to the systems approach. In the next two sections, I consider how the presence of feedbacks and thresholds in a system can also lead to a complex response.

Feedback and complexity In the 1970s, it was common to see a systems flow diagram included in the process geomorphology literature (Chorley and Kennedy 1971, perhaps represents the zenith of this approach). This perhaps stemmed from the influence of Arthur Strahler and his students

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on the geomorphology of that time (see Strahler 1992 for a review). The work of Mark Melton was of particular note in this respect, including his careful elucidation of the correlation structure of variables affecting drainage basins in Melton (1958a), utilising such flow-feedback diagrams, and the (very early) proposal to study drainage basin evolution using parameter space trajectories in Melton (1958b). Keylock (2003) charts the influence of this work on both sides of the Atlantic for shaping the view of what geomorphic scholarship should be. However, it is an interesting irony that an increased awareness of complex (chaotic) response eventually undermined the use of the flowfeedback diagrams used in the 1958a paper, but that the concept of phase-space embedding (employed informally in the 1958b paper) is the most common way of detecting chaos in a time series. As awareness of the potential for complex response increased, such flow-feedback diagrams all but disappearing from physical geography papers in the 1980s and 1990s. A distinction should be drawn here between using such diagrams to conceptualise a system (as was traditional in geomorphology in the 1970s) and using them to explain the structure of a computational model (e.g. Sitch et al. (2003: 164) uses a flow chart to explain process representations in a dynamic, global vegetation model). The former case implies that ‘this is how the system works’, while the latter merely outlines how the model is structured – how the model works will be evaluated by testing the overall output against data and assessing the sensitivity of different model components to perturbation. An important example of work that shows how the flow diagram fails to give due regard to complex and nonlinear behaviour is an analysis of a wetland system by Phillips (1992). Using a qualitative stability analysis of the type pioneered in ecology by May (1973), he showed that the presence of positive feedback loops in a system relating wetland elevation and sea level (such as the growth of the plants, leading to more efficient

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nutrient trapping, causing greater plant growth) meant that this system was potentially chaotic. However, the key component of the system was the plant successional stage. If the system was in a late successional stage so that plant growth was restricted by the presence of other plants, then this state of potential chaos was the norm. However, if the wetland was in the early successional stage, so that the growth of plants resulted in the growth of more plants, then the system was generally chaotic, with this positive feedback adding a crucial extra level of complexity. Hence, palaeogeographic analyses relating wetland heights to sea level changes need to consider that in early successional stages, the dynamics of wetland accumulation may not be driven by or related to sea level changes at all, but by internal factors. Clearly, the threshold delimiting early and late stages of succession is of some importance to the dynamics of this coastal biogeographic system. While feedback relations themselves can lead to complex (chaotic) responses, this is a case where a switch in the nature of the feedback dictates the degree of complexity.

Thresholds and complexity Brunsden and Thornes suggested that there are three types of threshold that exist in geomorphic systems: Those which lead to rapid changes in the rate of operation of processes within a given domain … Those which separate unstable and stable system states within a given domain … Those which separate two or more process domains. Brunsden and Thornes 1979: 473.

To be honest, this sort of description, so beloved of physical geographers in the 1970s and 1980s, probably overcomplicates things. In many situations a change in process rates will have implications for changes in stability, while a change in the relative rates of two processes may result in a switch in dominance from one to another. However, the general

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message from this definition is clear and the threshold is an important concept in complex systems (as the successional stage threshold demonstrated in the example, above). Because thresholds introduce strong nonlinearity into a system (due to the sharp break from one response to another) they can cause particular difficulties when attempting to model dynamic systems accurately. A well-known case of a system with threshold dependence is that of hurricane initiation. Although the potential intensity of a tropical cyclone is actually dependent upon the temperature profile of the whole troposphere (Emanuel 2005), the sea surface temperature is an important threshold, with temperatures less than 26°C providing insufficient energy for hurricane development and with increases in potential intensity greatest between 26°C and 28°C, when atmospheric instability is greatest (Holland 1997). As an example where thresholds interact with numerics to create an interesting example of equifinality (similar results from different starting points), consider the models used to describe and predict the motion of the dense component of mass movements such as volcanic debris flows (Heinrich et al. 2001), debris flows (Iverson 1997), avalanches (Barbolini et al. 2000) or submarine slides (Elverhøi et al. 2004). These employ the shallow-water equations (depth-averaged expressions for conservation of mass and momentum) with friction laws included that are felt appropriate for the rheology of these flows (see Ancey 2007, for a recent review). Commonly, these models include some or all of the following: Coulomb-based basal drag; a term proportional to the velocity squared to represent ballistic, aerodynamic drag; and, an active/passive pressure term to distinguish between expanding and contracting flow (Savage and Hutter 1989). However, the latter term introduces a threshold, switching the flow sharply from extensional to compressive regimes. Gray et al. (2003) showed that this could be removed from the model equations and that rich classes of behaviour (such as shocks when the flow suddenly

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compresses against an obstacle) could still be produced without the threshold if appropriate shock-capturing numerics were used to solve the equations (rather than the simpler schemes previously used in this literature). Hence, complexity results here from the fact that the methods we use to solve the equations for a dynamic process are coupled to our conceptualisation of the system. While the active/ passive pressure coefficient may be a real element of mass movement flows, the inclusion of this threshold necessitates the use of simpler numerical schemes. Gray et al.’s study highlights that a conceptualisation of a geographic system is not just a function of your formulation for the dynamics, but also the approach taken to solving the equations. Consequently, discriminating between different formulations of the dynamics may require very high-resolution field and laboratory data.

TURBULENCE, COMPLEXITY AND CHAOS The dynamics of rivers, the atmosphere, the ocean as well as biological and cryospheric phenomena that interact with these processes (such as plant growth in rivers) are all complex to some extent because of the role of turbulence, which is known to exhibit chaotic behaviour. Hence, our earlier remark regarding the inherent complexity that occurs in some geographic systems, in addition to complexity resulting from the interaction of many processes. Whether studying bedload transport (Heathershaw and Thorne 1985) or carbon exchange over forests (Oren et al. 2006), understanding how vortices are created, break-up and interact is of some significance, yet defies prediction due to the inherent complexity of turbulence. While we know a great deal about classic, laboratory turbulence forced at a large scale, where eddies decay in size in a statistically similar manner, with dissipation extracting energy at the smallest scales, this process is itself

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complex, and becomes more so when boundary conditions are complicated (e.g. flow forced at the scale of a tree trunk and the branches and the leaves simultaneously; Finnigan 2000). While for very large-scale, earth system processes, turbulence effects can perhaps be safely parameterised in a simple fashion, this is not the case for many of the meso-scale phenomena that geographers traditionally focus their attention upon. Hence, our discussion of complexity in this context leads to an examination of chaos.

are arrived at where periodic behaviour breaks down and the system becomes chaotic. However, there are other routes to chaos that are possibly more relevant to geographic phenomena such as intermittency (Pomeau and Manneville 1980), which is relevant to turbulent flows, and the break-up of ordered structures, which affects various spatial systems far from equilibrium (Ouyang and Flesselles 1996).

CALCULATING CHAOS CHAOTIC SYSTEMS Perhaps the most well-known characteristic of a chaotic system is its sensitive dependence upon initial conditions, which may be expressed more formally in terms of an exponential divergence of system trajectories in an embedding or phase space. It is important to note that chaotic systems have, for a given set of parameters, a bounded response. An exponential function is not chaotic even though it diverges, because of its unbounded nature. Period doubling is a common route to chaos that may be analysed using a bifurcation diagram. This is a plot of the maximum value for the variable under consideration once the system has become stable as a function of the one system parameter that is allowed to vary. In general, there will be a relatively large set of parameter values for which a simple orbit occurs but at some point there is a bifurcation and the orbit gains a second periodicity. After a shorter interval there is another bifurcation to give a period 4 orbit and after a shorter interval again, a period 8 orbit results. A periodic orbit of order 3 for the Rössler equations is shown in Figure 29.1(b). These doubling intervals become successively shorter and for many systems, the ratio of the longer to the shorter interval is given by the Feigenbaum constants until parameter values

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The most common approach to analysing chaotic systems is to study the behaviour through time of one variable relative to the behaviour of that variable at other times. This methodology is due to Takens (1981) and involves plotting the value for the variable at one time against the values for other times and examining how the trajectory of the variable develops in this embedding space through time. Hence, while Melton (1958b) examined the evolution through time of a drainage basin defined in terms of four different variables: the square root of drainage area, the total channel length, basin total relief and basin perimeter, it is more usual for only one variable to be available for analysis and it is studied against delayed versions of itself. Note that not all approaches to chaos detection need to resort to embedding dimensions, however. For example, Gottwald and Melbourne (2004) give a test for chaos that works on the Fourier spectrum of the data. More formally, and following the popular approach of Rosenstein et al. (1993) for embedding-based methods (see Kantz 1994 for a similar but more accurate method), if we select an embedding dimension d* (the number of embedding axes) then for a data series containing n evenly sampled values xi, we can form M

n − (d

)L

(29.1)

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points in the embedding space each given by coordinates: X ={ i

+

+( −

)

}

(29.2)

where L is a lag that is introduced to ensure that these variables are uncorrelated (one calculates the autocorrelation for the variable and looks for when it has decayed a sufficient amount, where the lag for the first zerocrossing is an obvious choice). Once all the vectors Xi are formulated, the next step is to find the nearest neighbour k for each. Here it is common to use the Theiler (1986) correction, which ensures that the nearest neighbours are suitably independent by only including neighbours that are separated in time by more than the mean period of the data. For all nearest neighbours, the initial separation (i.e. Δt = 0) is recorded and then the points found that correspond to an advance by one time interval (Δt = 1) for both of the original values. This new distance is also recorded, Dk(Δt = 1), and one continues this procedure for a sufficiently long period of time. A characteristic property of many chaotic systems is that system trajectories in the phase space diverge exponentially in time. It is this behaviour that limits future predictability as within a given error tolerance we do not know exactly which trajectory we are on and over time, neighbouring pathways separate. Because of the expected exponential response, if we plot the average over all neighbours of the logarithm of the distances log Dk ( Δt ) at each time interval Δt, then a straight line with a positive gradient indicates that the system has a positive maximal Lyapunov exponent and fulfils this requirement for chaos. However, this description of the system is rarely sufficient. In addition to determining the value for the maximal Lyapunov exponent, it is also useful to know how tightly folded the trajectories of the system are. When plotted in their phase space, chaotic systems do not converge on a point or on a

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loop, but follow an infinite distance within a bounded region of the phase space. Hence, the attractors are a fractal and the methods for studying chaotic systems in this phase space are then similar to those used for investigating fractals in the landscape (Lifton and Chase 1992) or in urban form (Batty et al. 1989). The standard measure of this degree of folding (similar but easier to calculate than the fractal dimension of the attractor) was introduced by Grassberger and Proccacia (1983) and is known as the correlation dimension. It also makes use of the embedding dimensions introduced earlier (d* must be greater than the correlation dimension) and for a separation distance s, the correlation integral C(s) is proportional to the number of points on the attractor separated by a distance less than s (divided by the square of the number of points). A log–log plot of C(s) against s gives a straight line with gradient v, the correlation dimension. Grassberger and Proccacia argue that this measure is better than the fractal dimension of the attractor because it includes information on how often a region is visited (its seniority). Hence, using these tools it is possible to determine if paths in a phase space diverge exponentially and if they do, how tightly they are folded on the strange attractor, which gives a good basis for comparing the properties of different dynamical systems. In order to ground some of this discussion, Figure 29.1 shows the output of variable x from the Rössler (1976) set of equations, which were developed as a minimum complexity model of a chaotic system, simpler than the well-known Lorenz attractor (Lorenz 1963) and with domains of chaotic and periodic behaviour. The equations are given by: dx = −y + z dt dy = x + ay dt dz = b z ( x c) dt

(29.3)

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and the results shown in Figure 29.1 are for parameter choices of a = 0.1, b = 0.1, c = 12 (a period 3 orbit around the attractor as seen in Figure 29.1(b)) and a = 0.1, b = 0.1, c = 11 (a chaotic orbit around the attractor as seen in Figure 29.1(c)). That the systems are attracted to a bounded part of the phase space is clear from Figure 29.1(b) and 29.1(c), but while the periodic system is fixed to a closed loop of values, the chaotic path occupies an infinite length within a bounded volume – it is a strange attractor. The Rössler attractor also exhibits a period doubling route to chaos. For the values of a and b used here, orbits with periods of 1, 2, 4 and 8 can be found for values of c of 5, 6, 8.5 and 8.7, before a chaotic region is reached.

Placing confidence on chaos Owing to error in data collection, the finite length of field or experimental datasets and

the uncertainty in choosing values for d* and L. It is useful to have a method of placing confidence limits on whether the value for the maximal Lyapunov exponent is significant or not. Conventional statistical hypothesis testing is problematic in this context and, consequently, the method of surrogate data is commonly used, where the value of the maximal Lyapunov exponent for the actual data is compared to the values for appropriately constructed, linear surrogates. Schreiber and Schmitz (1996) present an iterative scheme for producing such surrogates, which have the same histogram as the original data and the same autocorrelative structure (to some small degree of error). Hence, these surrogates are a linearised variant of the original data and if the calculated value for the maximal Lyapunov exponent from the data exceeds that for all N surrogates, then we can state that we can consider the signal to be chaotic at the 1/(N + 1) percentage significance level. Pseudo-periodic signals such

Figure 29.1 Chaotic and non-chaotic behaviour of the Rössler system. The time series for the x component of a period-3 response is given by the black line in the upper panel, while the grey line is the chaotic response and is displaced vertically by –40 for clarity. The orbits around the attractor in the x–y plane are shown for the period-3 system in (b) and the chaotic system in (c).

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as those shown in Figure 29.1(a) can be problematic to analyse with this surrogate algorithm because a lack of end-matching in the original signal can add a low frequency harmonic that corrupts the surrogates. Wavelet-based methods for surrogate generation have been developed to overcome these limitations (Keylock 2007). To illustrate this procedure, the light grey line in Figure 29.2(a) corresponds to the same chaotic path on the Rössler attractor shown in grey in Figure 29.1(a), and the dotted lines show surrogate data for this time series. The wavelet-based algorithm is shown in dark grey and displaced by –40 and does not suffer from the low frequency instability that affects the classical surrogates in light grey. Figure 29.2(b) shows a plot of log Dk (t ) against Δt for the chaotic path on the Rössler attractor, and nine wavelet-based surrogates for a particular choice of d* and L. The gradient of the line (the value for the

401

maximal Lyapunov exponent) clearly exceeds that for the surrogates, indicating a chaotic response at the 10% significance level (this is a one-tailed hypothesis test).

Chaos in the environment An example of how some of the methods described here can be used to gain an insight into geographic systems comes from a study of a model for the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) by Tziperman et al. (1994). The strength of the coupling between ocean and atmosphere acted as a control parameter in their model, and determined if the system was periodic or chaotic. Based on their analysis, the authors suggested that ENSO was a chaotic phenomenon, locked to the seasonal cycle. Phase space plots and calculations of the correlation dimension were used to study the model and these were

Figure 29.2 Lyapunov exponents for the chaotic Rössler system. The grey line in (a) is the time series for chaotic behaviour shown in Fig. 29.1a. Beneath this are surrogate time series generated using wavelet (displaced by –40) and spectral (displaced by –80) algorithms. The slope of the grey line in (b) gives the calculated value of the maximal Lyapunov exponent for the Rössler system. The dotted lines can be used to estimate the Lyapunov exponents for nine realisations from the surrogates. That the value for the data is higher than all of these is indicative of a significant difference at the 10% significance level.

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coupled to a comparison with surrogate data, to give additional confidence in the conclusions that a chaotic response was present.

CONCLUSION Because the dynamics of so many geographic phenomena are complex in so many different ways, precise definitions of complexity are perhaps not too informative. Consequently, this piece has tried to highlight a variety of ways in which geographic, dynamic processes may be considered complex including the presence of unique environmental histories in the boundary conditions and nonlinearities in the process physics. While physical geographers in the 1970s and early 1980s tended to draw upon ideas from other disciplines as metaphors for conceptualising environmental systems or for advancing the view of a scientific geography (Keylock 2003), today many more physical geographers are actually formulating models of geographic systems, the development and study of which necessitates a direct engagement with issues concerning dynamics and complexity. However, the types of complexity that are seen in environmental systems are many and we perhaps need to be more confident in asserting our own views on the relevant facets of complexity to the outside world. As such, it is important that geography is not seen as a derivative subject when it comes to the study of complex systems. However, with a geographer (Bruce Malamud) as former editor of Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics and with several geographers making contributions that are published in the physics literature, it is to be hoped that this will both raise the profile of work by geographers and lead to methodological developments that are perhaps better suited to the problems that we analyse . As noted in the introduction, concepts of dynamics and complexity are most used by

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those working within physical geography. However, there is certainly an emerging research frontier where both human and physical geography expertise is required and where an understanding of complexity is essential. As climate change science moves from an understanding of processes towards the modelling of anthropogenic responses, global scale modelling of coupled humanphysical geographical systems will be required and necessarily, the broad-scale nature of such work will favour an ontology that views human behaviour in an aggregated sense. This will mean that the combined modelling of such coupled systems should lead to an increased engagement with notions of complexity amongst human geographers.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to Jeffrey Weiss at the University of Colorado for introducing me to Gottwald and Melbourne’s work.

REFERENCES Allen, M.B., Windley, B.F., Zhang, C., Zhao, Z.Y. and Wang, G.R. (1991) ‘Basin evolution within and adjacent to the Tien Shan range, NW China’, Journal of the Geological Society, 148(2): 369–378. Ancey, C. (2007) ‘Plasticity and geophysical flows: A review’, Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics, 142(1–3): 4–35. Bagnold, R.A. (1954) ‘Experiments on a gravity-free dispersion of large solid spheres in a Newtonian fluid under shear’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series A, 225(1160): 49–63. Barbolini, M., Gruber, U., Keylock, C.J., Naaim, M. and Savi, F. (2000) ‘Application of statistical and hydraulic-continuum dense-snow avalanche models to five European sites’, Cold Regions Science and Technology, 31(2): 133–149. Batty, M., Longley, P. and Fotheringham, S. (1989) ‘Urban-growth and form-scaling, fractal geometry, and diffusion-limited aggregation’, Environment and Planning A, 21(11): 1447–1472.

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Bras, R.L., Tucker, G.E. and Teles, V.T. (2003) ‘Six myths about mathematical modeling in geomorphology’ in P. Wilcock and R. Iverson (eds), Prediction in Geomorphology. Washington, DC: American Geophysical Union, pp. 63–79. Brunsden, D. and Thornes, J.B. (1979) ‘Landscape sensitivity and change’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 4(4): 463–484. Chorley, R.J. and Kennedy, B. (1971) Physical Geography: A Systems Approach. London: PrenticeHall. Church, M. and Slaymaker, O. (1989) ‘Disequilibrium of Holocene sediment yield in glaciated British Columbia’, Nature, 337(6206): 452–454. Elverhøi, A., Issler, D., De Blasio, F.V., Ilstad, T., Harbitz, C.B. and Gauer, P. (2004) ‘Emerging insights into the dynamics of submarine debris flows’, Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 5(5): 633–648. Emanuel, K. (2005) ‘Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years’, Nature, 436(7051): 686–688. Finnigan, J. (2000) ‘Turbulence in plant canopies’, Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, 32: 519–571. Gottwald, G.A. and Melbourne, I. (2004) ‘A new test for chaos in deterministic systems’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series A, 460(2042): 603–611. Grassberger, P. and Proccacia, I. (1983) ‘Characterization of strange attractors’, Physical Review Letters, 50(5): 346–349. Gray, J.M.N.T., Tai, Y.-C. and Noelle, S. (2003) ‘Shock waves, dead zones and particle-free regions in rapid granular free-surface flows’, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 491: 161–181. Heathershaw, A.D. and Thorne, P.D. (1985) ‘Sea-bed noises reveal role of turbulent bursting phenomenon in sediment transport by tidal currents’, Nature, 316(6026): 339–342. Heinrich, P., Boudon, G., Komorowski, J.C., Sparks, R.S.J., Herd, R. and Voight, B. (2001) ‘Numerical simulation of the December 1997 debris avalanche in Montserrat, Lesser Antilles’, Geophysical Research Letters, 28(13): 2529–2532. Holland, G.J. (1997) ‘The maximum potential intensity of tropical cyclones’, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 54(21): 2519–2541. Hunt, M.L., Zenit, R., Campbell, C.S. and Brennen, C.E. (2002) ‘Revisiting the 1954 suspension experiments of R.A. Bagnold’, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 452: 1–24. Iverson, R.M. (1997) ‘The physics of debris flows’, Reviews of Geophysics, 35(3): 245–296.

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Kantz, H. (1994) ‘A robust method to estimate the maximal Lyapunov exponent of a time series’, Physics Letters A, 185(1): 77–87. Keylock, C.J. (2003) ‘Mark Melton’s geomorphology and geography’s quantitative revolution’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28(2): 142–157. Keylock, C.J. (2007) ‘A wavelet-based method for surrogate data generation’, Physica D, 225(2): 219–228. Lifton, N.A. and Chase, C.G. (1992) ‘Tectonic, climatic and lithologic influences on landscape fractal dimension and hypsometry – implications for landscape evolution in the San Gabriel Mountains, California’, Geomorphology, 5(1–2): 77–114. Lorenz, E.N. (1963) ‘Deterministic nonperiodic flow’, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 20(2): 130–141. May, R.M. (1973) Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Melton, M.A. (1958a) ‘Correlation structure of morphometric properties of drainage systems and their controlling agents’, Journal of Geology, 66(4): 442–460. Melton, M.A. (1958b) ‘Geometric properties of mature drainage systems and their representation in an E4 phase space’, Journal of Geology, 66(1): 35–56. Nicholas, A.P. (2009) ‘Reduced-complexity flow routing models for sinuous single-thread channels: intercomparison with a physically-based shallow-water equation model’, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 34(5): 641–653. O’Sullivan, D. (2004) ‘Complexity science and human geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 29(3): 282–295. Oren, R., Hseih, C.I., Stoy, P., Albertson, J., McCarthy, H.R., Harrell, P. and Katul, G.G. (2006) ‘Estimating the uncertainty in annual net ecosystem carbon exchange: spatial variation in turbulent fluxes and sampling errors in eddy-covariance measurements’, Global Change Biology, 12(5): 883–896. Ouyang, Q. and Flesselles, J.M. (1996) ‘Transition from spirals to defect turbulence driven by a convective instability’, Nature, 379(6561): 143–146. Peakall, J., Ashworth, P. and Best, J. (1996) ‘Physical modelling in fluvial geomorphology: principles, applications and unresolved issues’ in B.L. Rhoads and C.E. Thorn (eds), The Scientific Nature of Geomorphology. Chichester: Wiley and Sons, pp. 221–253. Phillips, J.D. (1992) ‘Qualitative chaos in geomorphic systems, with an example from wetland response to sea-level rise’, Journal of Geology, 100(3): 365–374.

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Pomeau, Y. and Manneville, P. (1980) ‘Intermittent transition to turbulence in dissipative dynamical systems’, Communications in Mathematical Physics, 74(2): 189–197. Rosenstein, M.T., Collins, J.J. and De Luca, C.J. (1993) ‘A practical method for calculating largest Lyapunov exponents from small data sets’, Physica D, 65(1–2): 117–134. Rössler, O.E. (1976) ‘An equation for continuous chaos’, Physics Letters A, 57(5): 397–398. Savage, S.B. and Hutter, K. (1989) ‘The motion of a finite mass of granular material down a rough incline’, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 199: 177–215. Schreiber, T. and Schmitz, A. (1996) ‘Improved surrogate data for nonlinearity tests’, Physical Review Letters, 77(4): 635–638. Simpson, G.G. (1963) ‘Historical science’, in C.C. Albritton (ed.), The Fabric of Geology. Stanford: Stanford Unversity Press, pp. 24–48. Singh, V.P. (2001) ‘Kinematic wave modelling in water resources: a historical perspective’, Hydrological Processes, 15(4): 671–706. Sitch, S., Smith, B., Prentice, I.C., Arneth, A., Bondeau, A., Cramer, W., Kaplan, J.O., Levis, S., Lucht, W., Sykes, M.T., Thonicke, K. and Venevsky, S. (2003)

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‘Evaluation of ecosystem dynamics, plant geography and terrestrial carbon cycling in the LPJ dynamic global vegetation model’, Global Change Biology, 9(2): 161–185. Strahler, A.N. (1992) ‘Quantitative/dynamic geomorphology at Columbia 1945–60: a retrospective’, Progress in Physical Geography, 16(1): 65–84. Takens, F. (1981) ‘Detecting strange attractors in turbulence’, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, 898: 366–381. Theiler, J. (1986) ‘Spurious dimension from correlation algorithms applied to limited time-series data’, Physical Review A, 34(3): 2427–2432. Tziperman, E., Stone, L., Cane, M.A. and Jarosh, H. (1994) ‘El Niño Chaos: Overlapping of resonances between the seasonal cycle and the Pacific oceanatmosphere oscillator’, Science, 264(5155): 72–74. Van De Wiel, M.J., Coulthard, T.J., Macklin, M.G. and Lewin, J. (2007) ‘Embedding reach-scale fluvial dynamics within the CAESAR cellular automaton landscape evolution model’, Geomorphology, 90(3–4): 283–301. Whipple, K.X. and Tucker, G.E. (2002) ‘Implications of sediment-flux-dependent river incision models for landscape evolution’, Journal of Geophysical Research 107(B2): doi:10.1029/2000JB000044.

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30 Social Class Eric Sheppard and James Glassman

INTRODUCTION Theorizations of social class represent the first attempt in European social theory to systematically account for how the social location of human agents shapes their conditions of possibility in society (now supplemented by a variety of other concepts including race and gender). It took shape in German and French sociological theory in the nineteenth century (associated with Marx, Weber and Durkheim), from which it diffused into the Anglophone social sciences, and eventually (after 1945) into geography. An analysis of geographical applications of class, and geographical theories of class, thus cannot be understood without some attention to its genealogy in social theory. We thus begin the chapter with a brief overview of sociological theories of class, highlighting the (shifting) spatial ontologies embedded in these theories. We then consider how class became influential in human geography; initially as an imported concept for making sense of sociospatial relations, before geographers turned to consider how spatiality should be incorporated into theories of class. We will show that the genealogy of class in Anglophone geography does not replicate that in sociology: Rather, it reflects the shifting theoretical

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fashions in different fields of human geography, and in different regions of the Anglophone world. (We pay particular attention, here, to North America and Britain.)

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF CLASS In the concluding chapter to his edited collection on approaches to class analysis, American social theorist Erik Olin Wright asks (2005, 180), ‘if “class” is the answer, what is the question?’. His query signals that there are many competing theorizations of class, with differing assumptions about what constitutes classes, their roles in social processes, and their overall significance. To discuss class is thus to survey a shifting terrain of interpretive and social struggle over how to know class. Here, we examine the conceptualizations of class canvassed by Wright’s survey, noting their geographical presumptions.

Rent-based approaches Before Karl Marx’s seminal intervention, British political economists had already

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noted important divisions between social groups, which they associated with differential control of property and resources. Adam Smith lamented that the self-regulating market he theorized in The Wealth of Nations (Smith 1976) was utopian, because merchants would lobby against proposals that would free markets from legislation protecting their interests. David Ricardo, writing at a moment when Britain was torn by political struggles between the landed classes and emergent industrial capitalists, decried agrarian elites for the obstacles they placed in the way of the free trade doctrine. Such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts serve in some respects as precursors to what Sørenson (in Wright 2005) calls ‘rent-based’ approaches. Rent-based theories of class conceptualize class as arising from factors external to the competitive capitalist market. Like Smith and Ricardo, and subsequent neoclassical economists, contemporary theorists of rent-based class differentiation conceptualize competitive markets, in their ideal form, as functioning to broadly distribute wealth, thereby minimizing unjustifiable forms of social stratification. In this view, class differences result from a subversion of market forces, when specific social groups procure ‘rent’, or privileged access to property and/or credentials, at the expense of other social groups. Developing this approach, Sørenson suggests that capitalists have been successful in recent years in eliminating the rents created by labor (e.g. through labor unions), producing a relatively unstructured labor market ‘conforming to the assumption of neo-classical economics’ (Wright 2005: 151). At the same time, however, capitalists and higherlevel professionals, through various political and social maneuvers, continue to draw rents from their ownership of different forms of property and possession of rationed credentials. He argues that this has produced a more unequal distribution of wealth than would be countenanced by a fully functioning competitive market.

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Like any social theory, rent-based approaches to class entail geographical assumptions, which typically are not made explicit. For Ricardians, differential access to land (and to land of differential productivity) generates differential rents, implying that agrarian and industrial differentiations of space and differences in land productivity are implicitly important. More generally, however, ‘the market’ seems to occupy a conceptual netherland between an abstract set of universal principles and a specific national market, modelled on economies like those of England or the United States. Geographers have criticized the limitations of this territorial trap of methodological nationalism, characteristic of any ‘macro’ social theory that implicitly or explicitly equates society as a whole with the nation-state (Agnew 1994).

Karl Marx, and neo-Marxist approaches In the middle of the nineteenth century, the German social theorist Marx (writing in an England that had adopted free trade) turned these theories inside out, initiating a conceptualization of class (emanating from his theory of capitalism, which also inverted those of Smith and Ricardo) that placed the dynamics of capitalist class formation squarely within the ambit of the capitalist mode of production and market process, particularly the production of commodities for exchange. For Marx, the economic dynamics of, for example, accumulation and uneven development are the expression of class struggles over the appropriation of surplus. While his chapter on class at the end of the third volume of Kapital famously is less than a page, too fragmented even for Engels to piece together, his theorization of class runs throughout the three volumes. For Marx, the defining feature of class relations is exploitation, the appropriation by one class of the surplus produced by another. While exploitation entails certain elements included

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in rent-based approaches – for example, differential ownership of property – exploitation is a specifically structural relation of interdependence within production, in which there are ongoing, involuntary relations between exploiter and exploited (Wright 2005: 23–25). In a Marxian approach, class emerges from, and is reproduced through, capitalist production and competition – the opposite of rent-based theories where class lies outside, and perverts, the market. Marx inaugurated a tradition of paying especially close attention to two polar classes within any given mode of production, the exploiters and the exploited (e.g., landlords and peasants in feudalism, capitalists and workers in capitalism), even though Marx recognized that class relations in real societies are more complex than such a bi-polar conception. The special emphasis in Marxism on exploiting and exploited classes has led to considerable challenges in analyzing the social positions of other groups, such as ‘middle classes’ (Wright 2005: 15–16). The various Marxist approaches to class all pay some heed to the notion of exploitation within polarized class systems, but many – especially those developed after World War I, when classical Marxism came under fairly intensive reconsideration – also highlight complex webs of social relations seen as supportive of class-based exploitation. Marxist-feminist approaches (developing in North America and Europe especially since the 1960s and 1970s) pay special attention to how gendered household dynamics of social reproduction interpenetrate capitalist social relations of production. Autonomist Marxists (emerging in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s but bearing affinities with earlier anarchist approaches) emphasize the historically increasing penetration of social life by capitalism, turning society into a ‘social factory’ where all activities are part of the production and appropriation of surplus. Core-periphery versions of Marxism (for which Leninism and Maoism, emerging

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in the 1910s and 1920s respectively, serve as early variants) emphasize heterogeneous class structures through which surpluses produced in ‘pre-’ or ‘non-capitalist’ activity are siphoned from the Global South into the Global North. The spatialities of these varied Marxist constructions of class are themselves diverse. Marx’s views are tensed between two poles. One the one hand, he credits capitalism with generating a global market and thus with producing both the possibility and the imperative of international working class solidarity (Marx and Engels 1977: 235). On the other hand, his writings sometimes fall back into methodological nationalism, as when he and Friedrich Engels suggest that in the class struggle ‘The proletariat of each country must, of course, first settle matters with its own bourgeoisie’ (Marx and Engels 1977: 230). Marxist feminism extends class processes to encompass local and household dynamics, bringing the local scale more directly into focus. In autonomist versions, the all-encompassing power of the capitalist market not only subsumes local and household relations but leads increasingly to a highly integrated and relatively undifferentiated spatiality of global capitalism. Core– periphery approaches were historically grounded in claims about the different trajectories of capitalism in the nations of the Global South, due to spatial exploitation, and of the necessity of anti-imperial nationalist struggles as precursors to fully fledged transnational class struggles for socialism. While nationalist anti-imperial struggle is more problematic in the era of ‘post-colonialism’, there remains considerable interest in the complex character of class struggles across globally unevenly developed socio-spatial structures. Recent attention to ongoing ‘primitive accumulation’ – the varied processes by which producers are separated from the means of production and forced onto the wage labor market – has also rekindled interest in the complex class processes highlighted in core-periphery Marxism.

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Max Weber, and neo-Weberian approaches The German sociologist Weber, responding to Marx, developed what has become the other cornerstone theory of class. Weber, like Marx, conceived of class differentiation as generated through (rather than outside) the market, but not as the result of market-based processes of exploitation in the production process. Weber shared the upbeat view of the market held by liberal political economists, arguing that class reflects the production of differential life chances for different individuals, based on their position in the market (reflecting their wealth, education, skills, etc.) (Gerth and Mills 1946: 181). For him, classes are not defined relationally, through struggles for power in the process of commodity production, but are a classification system describing inequalities and shared ‘market interests’ in the sphere of distribution. There is thus no inevitable class conflict, no bipolar classes, and no uniquely important basis of social power associated with class (Wright 2005: 33). A variety of neo-Weberian approaches to class share Weber’s basic premises. Thus, the class categories developed by scholars like John Goldthorpe do not place any special emphasis on capitalists as a class of actors – indeed the haute bourgeoisie are even excluded from one of Goldthorpe’s schemas (Wright 2005: 40) – with much emphasis instead placed on more fine-grained differentiations, even continuities, between different types of capitalists and workers (Gerth and Mills 1946, 181–183). Weber’s conception of the spatiality of class is resolutely and unambiguously nationalist. He ‘accepts national units as historical ultimates that can never be integrated into more comprehensive and harmonious wholes’ (Gerth and Mills 1946: 48). Methodological nationalism is present in the class schemas of most neo-Weberian class theorists and is a challenge to overcome given their strong emphasis on the national state. Yet a few neoWeberian theorists have paid considerable

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attention to the spatiality of class processes, notably Anthony Giddens. Articulating his theory of ‘structuration’ (i.e. the reciprocal relations between structural properties of social systems and the actions of individual social agents), Giddens places great emphasis on locales as environments of social interaction that are themselves mobilized in those relations. He highlights sub-national geographic variegation and its impact on class processes, as well as processes of ‘distanciation’ associated with the global geographic expansion of capitalist social relations (Giddens 1984).

Emile Durkheim, and neo-Durkheimian approaches The French sociologist Durkheim shared Weber’s conception of classes as generated within the market, and as involving more fine-grained occupational distinctions than in Marx’s bipolar theory of class. Durkheim’s arguments, in The Division of Labor in Society (1984), emphasize the increasing specialization of labor – part of the passage from older, smaller-scale social orders based on ‘mechanical solidarity’ to modern, largerscale capitalist societies based on ‘organic solidarity’. While acknowledging possibilities for social conflict early in the process of industrialization, Durkheim (like Smith) sees ‘mature’ societies as relatively conflict-free, and as functioning more or less naturally to procure social welfare (Wright 2005: 54, 59–60). Durkheim differed from Weber, however, in conceiving of class as occupationally based and even finer grained. Weber’s classes, composed of varied occupational groups with similar life chances, are typically larger, aggregate categories – for example, petty bourgeoisie, technicians and supervisors, skilled manual workers (Wright 2005: 32, 41). A trademark of neo-Durkheimian theorists is skepticism about the utility of such aggregates. Thus David Grusky and Gabriela Galescu (in Wright 2005) present a model in

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which classes are equivalent to specific occupational groups, generated within the technical division of labor. Durkheim presents a very explicitly geographical model of class. He explains the development of organic solidarity and the modern capitalist division of labor through the increasing size of populations and the increasing integration of their economic and social activities across previously distinct social units. While this might seem ultimately to lend itself to considering (like Marx) the global capitalist market, Durkheim explicitly conceives of organic solidarity and the social division of labor as bounded by the scale of national political economy (Durkheim 1984: 221–3). By drawing attention to specific occupational groups, neoDurkheimian approaches also draw attention to highly localized processes of structuration, again framed by the national context (Wright 2005: 71).

Pierre Bourdieu French sociologist Bourdieu’s writings on class, almost a century later, draw on Marx, Weber and Durkheim without being reducible to any of these (Wright 2005: 82). He conceives of classes in capitalist societies as being formed both within and beyond the market. Like Marx and Weber, for Bourdieu the market is hierarchically structured, and both produced and reinforced by the power of the state. More akin to Marx than Weber or Durkheim, he sees capitalists as gaining wealth based on their ability to appropriate economic surplus from producers. Yet he differs substantially from all three by developing an account that emphasizes cultural dimensions of class (Wright 2005: 83). He does not merely add culture to a given political economic mix. As Bourdieu states in the ‘Preface to the English-Language Edition’ of Distinction, his work on class is ‘based on an endeavour to rethink Max Weber’s opposition between class and Stand [status]’ (Bourdieu 1984: xii). This is done via

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Bourdieu’s deployment of the concept of habitus, ‘the system of structured, structuring dispositions … always oriented towards practical functions’ (Bourdieu 1990: 52). For him, the habitus enables the (not always conscious) formation of class practices and identities connected to possession of different volumes and compositions of various ‘species’ of capital – economic, cultural, and social. While capitalists (in Marx’s sense) remain the dominant members of the dominant class, possessors of large volumes of cultural capital (e.g. high status artists or intellectuals) compose a dominated fraction of the dominant class (Bourdieu 1984). Bourdieu differs from Marx by defining class in part on the basis of possession of ‘non-economic’ forms of capital, but also by insisting that classes are not pre-existing realities lying outside social theory. (For Marx, classes were objective entities whose existence could be revealed through theoretical analysis of mode of production.) Bourdieu argues that classes are in part brought into existence as a result of social theory, especially its connection to the formation of political projects (e.g. trade unions, leftist parties) that help make class a fully-fledged social reality. He credits Marxism as having helped make class, in its modern sense, a social reality. There is a complex and multi-scalar spatiality to capitalist class relations in Bourdieu’s account. By anchoring class structure in a habitus, which itself incorporates bodily practices, Bourdieu pulls class analysis in the direction of very local forms of social behavior, even as he articulates a perspective that is explicitly modelled on French national realities. He is also cognizant of differentiated regional factors affecting class formation within a national context – between Paris and the provinces (e.g. Bourdieu 1984: 363). He pays attention to how factors referred to under the heading of ‘globalization’ – for example, the development of ‘Americanized’ tastes among leading members of the French haute bourgeoisie (Bourdieu 1984: 314–5) – affect class structure. He also alludes to how

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a variety of socio-spatial forms shape class; for example, regional communities that produce class identities in articulation with local cultures, national political parties that produce class identities through their programmatic demands, and transnational elite networks that produce class identities through their consumption norms.

Post-class approaches Recently, post-class analysts have argued that class has become less important, and should receive no more attention, than other forms of social hierarchy (Pakulski, in Wright 2005). Indeed some argue that class never possessed the kind of primacy that it has been accorded in, for example, Marxist approaches. This position has been grounded in a variety of different claims, ranging from assertions of the historical weakening or disappearance of working class groups, to assertions of the rise of equally or more important (new) social movements, or that class processes are always already deeply intertwined with other equally important social processes. This last argument opens out onto a large array of post-structuralist feminist, Foucauldian, post-colonial, and critical race approaches to class. With respect to spatiality, what Trevor Barnes has called ‘post-prefixed’ theories typically present an extremely variegated array of spatial conceptions, particularly given the active role of some geographers in shaping this most recent paradigm.

SOCIAL CLASS IN GEOGRAPHY Over the 150 years since Marx, the problematic of social class has taken shape around four inter-related questions: • What counts as social class? • What are the consequences of differentiation along lines of social class?

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• What accounts for the emergence of social class? • In which senses does class matter?

As theories of social class began to diffuse into Anglophone geography after 1950, geographers initially focused on the first two questions. Taking the sociological theories on faith, they replicated debates among social theorists on the relative merits of various Weberian and Marxist accounts, and sought to trace how class shaped socio-spatial processes. Subsequently, neo-Marxist geographers turned to the third question, asking what a geographical perspective can contribute to understanding of how classes come into existence, and gain traction. The fourth question has been a persistent theme, taking different modalities across time and space.

Weber and 1960s British social geography British social geographers took to the concept of class before their North American counterparts in the 1960s, when social geography was emerging as a vibrant intellectual community in Britain. (US geographers, influenced by Carl Sauer, emphasized cultural rather than social geography.) British social geographers turned to neo-Weberian theories of class. The initial turn to Weber rather than Marx reversed the chronology within sociology. Radical and critical human geography, and thus Marxian theory, was a minority interest in the Anglophone realm until the late 1970s. British social geographers turned to class, and other sociological theories, to counteract the current disciplinary fascination with rational choice and methodological individualism. From the late 1950s, there had been a turn to theory in geography (the positivist/quantitative revolution) on both sides of the Atlantic, grounded in methodological individualist models of individual choice and action. Dissatisfied with such explanations of human behavior, humanistic and social geographers turned to

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phenomenology and anthropology (in the United States) and sociology (in Britain) for forms of knowledge that paid more attention to the societal context. One aspect of Weber’s conception of class was of particular interest: property ownership (Jackson and Smith 1984: 110–12). British social geographers became engaged in debates with urban sociologists about ‘housing class’. This reflected a desire among social geographers to make sense of the nature and consequences of residential segregation, and spatial variations in housing tenure, within racially diversifying British cities. Rex and Moore argued that while segregation appeared to be along racial lines, in fact it could be accounted for by differences in housing class that tracked race. Distinguishing between five (later expanded to 11) housing class categories, it was argued that housing class shaped access to different spatially separated housing markets, driving residential segregation along lines of income and race (Rex and Moore 1967). These ideas were applied in a series of empirical studies using housing class as an explanandum of residential location, segregation, and unequal life chances. Yet housing class came under criticism for its inability to account for the role of race, and for its lack of rigorous grounding in Weber’s class theory. Peter Saunders (1981) has described it as more about consumption and status than property and class. Studies of social inequality and unequal life chances in British cities drew heavily on Weberian ideas in attending to how wealth, occupation, and status shaped intra-urban geographies. Adopting a Weberian approach implies that class is just one dimension of social inequality to be considered alongside others, that there is no particular expectation that class membership shapes identity and interests, and that the question of how classes emerge is unimportant. Indeed, social geography turned away from class to examine a variety of cross-cutting social inequalities, and focused on analyzing how these have consequences for cities’ socio-spatial

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organization and residents’ access to the means for social success. This scholarship added considerable nuance to Weber’s geographical imaginary by drawing attention to local-scale spatial differentiation, and by showing that the geography of social inequalities is an important, overlooked aspect of how inequality shapes behavior and societal outcomes. North American urban geographers pursued the same problematic, albeit with less explicit acknowledgment of Weber or attention to class, with some exceptions (e.g. Ley 1980). In this body of scholarship, class was regarded as no longer salient in making sense of North American cities.

Marx and US radical geography This disenchantment with Weberian class theory coincided with a turn to Marx as an inspiration for the radical geography, emerging initially in North America in the early 1970s around the journal Antipode located at Clark University and the Union of Socialist Geographers. This was also catalyzed by dissatisfaction with the spatial science and social engineering associated with the positivist/quantitative revolution. Notwithstanding a variety of left philosophies explored in the early volumes of Antipode and the Union of Socialist Geographers Newsletter, reminiscent of recent concerns about race, gender, and nature, Marxism emerged as the most influential formulation, around the prominent writings of David Harvey, Richard Peet and Jim Blaut. In turn, Marxian class theory entered the lexicon of Anglophone human geography. By the middle 1980s, to the distress of Weberian scholars (e.g. Saunders and Williams 1986), class (and much else) was increasingly being conceptualized in Marxian terms on both sides of the Atlantic. Marxian conceptions of class opened up new questions, beyond those of categorizing class and determining its consequences. Questions of class formation, class identity and consciousness, of little interest to Weberians as they lie outside Weber’s class

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theory, became central concerns. Indeed, within geography there has been remarkably little attention even to Marxian debates about class categories, unlike sociology. Discussions of class also migrated from social toward economic and political geography, reflecting the integration of Marxian class theory with political economy. The influence of this shift can be seen in how discussions of class, space and residential segregation in cities changed. In the 1980s, attention turned to the question of whether the spatial organization of cities, combined with the growth of home-ownership among the unionized workers of Fordism, was undermining the coherence of the working class (Pratt 1989). Marx had invoked local geographies in his explanation of the emergence of working class identity (in his terms, consciousness), which he attributed in part to the co-presence of industrial workers in large numbers on the factory floor. Katznelson and others suggested that the increasing physical separation of home from workplace, particularly with suburbanization, undermined class formation and identity since very different issues were important in residential neighborhoods, erecting ‘city trenches’ protecting capitalists from workers’ resistance (Katznelson 1981). Second, it was argued that the processes driving the segregation of differently classed social groups into separate neighborhoods were undermining working class coherence by creating spaces within which different class fractions developed distinct identities and interests – albeit also shaped by contextual factors that vary from one city to another (Harris 1984). Third, it was argued that home-ownership itself (as a property relation) would undermine working class identity (Agnew 1981). Debates around the role of class in processes of gentrification have replicated these differences. Neo-Weberians (when they discuss class) stress how class differences are reinforced through gentrification. Neo-Marxists focus on how gentrification shapes capital–labor relations and entails class-monopoly rents, within the

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broader context of production, accumulation, and finance capital (Bridge 1995). The intensive and inconclusive debates triggered by these propositions are less important for our purposes than the shift in knowledge production around class that they signaled: geographers were becoming increasingly interested in asking how the spatialities of society shape class formation, identity, and politics (within what has become an abiding concern for human geographers: how space matters to social theory). With respect to class, attention has been paid to how place, connectivity, and scale have shaped class dynamics, in ways that may empower but also undermine class coherence, effectiveness, and identity. Early discussions of class and place by Harvey focused on rent and class, discussing how control over absolute space can generate class-monopoly rents (Harvey 1973). He created space for theorizing landownership as an abiding third-class position within capitalism, given the importance of land to a capitalist space-economy, although this has received limited attention (Sheppard and Barnes 1990). More generally, it is argued that place can reinforce mutual interests and shared class identity. This can occur in places dominated by a particular class (in the workplace, working class neighborhoods, working class settlements such as mining towns, or the City of London financial district), where a place-based identity is molded through economic, political, but also cultural activities. At the same time, attachment to place can undermine class identity, as when crossclass alliances coalesce in defense of place or more aggressively as pro-growth coalitions (Hudson and Sadler 1986). In the presence of uneven geographical development, where core regions benefit through unequal exchange with peripheral regions (whether at the global or the local scale), it is argued that labor aristocracies can emerge in the core. A cross-class alliance in core regions can benefit core workers at the expense of those in the periphery, creating intra-class exploitative relations between the core and periphery

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(Harvey 1982; Blaut 1987; Sheppard and Barnes 1990). A third aspect of place affecting labor–capital relations is the differences in the regulatory institutions created in political territories. Where labor is politically active, regulatory regimes have emerged that enhance the influence of labor. Thus Fordism empowered blue collar unionized industrial workers and public sector workers (and patriarchal nuclear families, Cravey 1998; McDowell 1991), in the first-world and third-world countries pursuing state-led industrialization, between 1945 and 1975. Neoliberalism has now reversed such gains, as regulatory institutions (conceptualizing profits, not wages, as key to territorial prosperity) have turned to favor capital. Connections across space can also shape class formation. The uneven spread of industrial capitalism across space combined with the geographically uneven intensification of communications technologies to shape the geography of working class formation and organized labor, in both Europe and North America (Thrift and Williams 1987). At the same time, class-correlated differences in the capacity to move and communicate across space can shape the relative influence of classes, both locally and globally. Thus globally mobile transnational elites seem to have the advantage over more place-oriented labor (Glassman 1999). Recent research on labor geographies, however, has suggested that organized labor is also capable of effective strategies of empowerment that stretch across space (Herod 2001). A third way in which it has been argued that geography shapes Marxian class dynamics is through historical and geographic context. Thus Doreen Massey (1984) argued that capital–labor relations differ substantially between regions. Differently classed economic activities concentrate in different regions, with management and headquarters activities in some places and assembly lines in others. Beyond this, she developed a widely cited geological metaphor to describe how emergent class, gender, and economic relations in a region are necessarily layered

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on top of and shaped by those that already exist. It is thus necessary to take account of geo-historical context (a region’s history, site and situation) if we are to understand how a common theory of class has very different consequences in different places and times. In the UK during the 1980s, an interdisciplinary research group pioneered what became known as localities research. Inspired by Giddens’ structurationist approach to agency and structure, and by Sayer’s realist methodological agenda (Sayer 1992), intensive research was undertaken in several localities to unravel the particularities of placeoriented class, economic and gender dynamics (Bagguley et al. 1990). Recently, there has been extensive discussion of how the politics of scale is central to class dynamics. On the one hand, it is argued that empowerment of working class interests necessitates a process of scale jumping, whereby local initiatives are combined into a larger-scale collective class project. Harvey remains particularly insistent that localized militant particularisms need to be melded into a global working class alliance in order to challenge capitalism, since particular local interests undermine shared interests and class identity (Harvey 2000). From this perspective, Neil Smith and Harvey were highly critical of the localities project, although Smith now concedes that this kind of concrete local scholarship is vital to ‘the necessary work of connecting global with local and mesolevel analyses’ (Smith 2000). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri promote a very different global agenda, stressing the multitude rather than class (Hardt and Negri 2004). Others, again, insist that place-based contestations are essential (Gibson-Graham 1996). Taken together, this scholarship has demonstrated how geographies, themselves produced and socially constructed, are important to a neo-Marxist theorization of class formation, identity, and politics. Geographers have traced a variety of ways in which spatialities shape class dynamics, reinforcing the coherence and power of Marxian classes in some

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times and places, but undermining them elsewhere. The latter possibility, in particular, feeds into high-profile skepticism about the relevance of Marxist classes and class fractions in the face of feminist and post-structural theory, new social movements, identity politics, and an ever more differentiated reality. Some of these debates reflect the older differences between British Weberian social geography and North American radical geography, pitting a North American insistence on class politics against a British skepticism of class and all grand political strategies (Amin and Thrift 2007). Others, however, have approached this from within a Marxian sensibility. Richard Walker has taken up the Durkheimian question of how the division of labor complicates class theory. While rejecting Durkeim’s reduction of class to occupational categories, he argues (using Giddens’ term) that class structuration is complicated by the division of labor and employment, as well as space: Asking whether classes are ‘fragmented’ begs the prior question as to how classes take shape … It presumes an empiricist or structural functionalist notion that class is a singular ‘thing’ which is less real if less unified … But class does not exist in this sense. Class is a dimension of life that people feel more or less strongly depending on circumstances … The only way people can develop a practical understanding of class is in a fragmented form. Walker 1985: 187; italics in original.

Relatedly, Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt tease out how the complex and geographically differentiated relations between class, occupation and gender in Worcester, MA (USA) are constituted in and through space, place, and connectivities (Hanson and Pratt 1995), and McDowell has examined how class identity is complicated by the gendering of capitalist production (McDowell 2003). Recent Bourdieusian and post-class approaches also attempt to transcend neoMarxian class theory, without abandoning Marx’s core claim that class differences emerge from exploitation.

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Bourdieusian and post-class approaches: anti-essentialism While the geographies of class implicit in Bourdieu’s work have received less attention than those in Marx and Weber, some recent work has taken up Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and differing forms of capital to expose workings of class in ways that are neither reductionist nor essentialist, congruent with the notion that class exploitation is neither of decreasing importance nor the uniquely privileged form of oppression. Geography is yet to develop a Bourdieusian ‘school’, but applications of Bourdieu’s ideas illustrate some of the possibilities. In an analysis of shifting relations between caste and class in rural north India, Craig Jeffrey (2001) deploys the notions of habitus and social capital to explain the resilience – albeit shifting forms – of caste power. He argues that the increasing development of commercial, market-oriented activity has made class and exploitation crucial to social relations, but this has by no means undermined or eradicated caste as a form of social power. Rather, while caste as a religiously sanctioned system of resource transfer is being displaced somewhat by class processes, caste as a form of social or symbolic capital for rural elites retains tremendous significance and increasingly articulates their maintenance of social privilege; thus it actually interpenetrates class to some extent. This has enabled Jats in western Uttar Pradesh, for example, to maintain privileged access to jobs and resources, even as new challenges to their status arise from other social groups with the development of capitalism. Jeffrey shows that deployment of caste power and social capital takes a specific regionalized form, congruent with Bourdieu’s sense of the regionalized variations on the habitus structuring behaviors of different social groups. Other geographers have drawn on habitus and varied forms of capital to explain differing kinds of social phenomena, such as the moral significance of class, patterns of gentrification, cultural dimensions of class politics

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in urban settings, struggles over social distinction in the process of labor migration, and historically changing conceptions of communication. Other work has drawn on Bourdieu’s conception of the social and cultural dimensions of class to enable analysis of the embodied geographies of specific class processes connected to gender, domesticity, and sexuality. Although Bourdieu was critical of poststructuralist approaches, the strong anti-essentialism and anti-reductionism in his work on class gives it a family resemblance to the anti-essentialist class analyses developed by J.-K. Gibson-Graham, which can be seen as variants, within geography, of post-class analysis. Gibson-Graham (1996), eclectically drawing on post-structuralist feminism, Althusserian and autonomist Marxism, and older Marxist literatures on complex class formations, insist that class is just one possible starting point for analysis. While resolutely Marxist in identifying class exploitation with the appropriation of surplus labor time, they identify exploitation (and class) as always already functioning in a variety of non-capitalist localities (such as the household) within predominantly capitalist societies. In multiplying the processes through which class operates, they seek to identify and build on the diverse forms of economic activity that coexist with, and have not been subordinated to, the class projects of capitalists, in envisioning alternatives. These strands of anti-essentialist class politics have been developed in a variety of other ways, by geographers who consider class important but neither independent of, nor uniquely powerful in relation to, other social divisions. Thus Pratt has noted how the intersectionality of the class, race, and gender of Filippina migrants to Canada – abetted by Canadian state policies – affects their work processes, social lives, and forms of socio-political empowerment or disempowerment (Pratt 2004). Of the various social processes interconnected with class that have been emphasized in anti-essentialist and post-class approaches,

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race arguably remains the most weakly developed within geography. Older literatures on global capitalist development did, in fact, emphasize a global social division of labor that was highly racialized and built through European colonialism (e.g. Watts 1983). Racial dimensions of class processes within industrial and industrializing societies have also begun to receive more attention, in recent work, including discussions of how racialized patterns of labor migration, labor processes, environmental justice and imprisonment, reflect uneven geographies of power. Interestingly, much of this recent work has been centered in California, a place where the combination of extreme internal sociospatial variegation and intensive global connections has historically produced a shifting but always-powerful mosaic where race strongly articulates with class formation and politics.

KNOWING CLASS IN A GEOGRAPHICALLY DIFFERENTIATED WORLD All knowledge reflects the positionality of those producing it, and this has been particularly the case for social class. More explicitly, perhaps, than in other areas of intellectual endeavor, the production of knowledge about social class has also been bound up with producers’ politics of social change, reminding us that theory and practice are closely intertwined, as praxis. The earlier embrace of Weberian theories in the UK, and the subsequent turn to Marxian theories in the US, reflected distinct trajectories within human geography at that time in the two places, particularly the increasing influence of radical geography. The emergence of a politics of identity and difference undermined interest in questions of class, particularly econocentric approaches. Smith (2000) remarks that skepticism about class came from knowledge producers whose positionality, as successful

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academics in the Global North, distanced them from contexts where class seemed salient. Anglophone geographers’ attention diverted from class analysis precisely when global capitalist development and industrialization were beginning to make even some of the more traditional approaches to class analysis of greater salience to developments in the Global South. Now, public discourse also points to the increasing influence of social class on livelihood possibilities in the United States, perhaps presaging a revival of interest in class theory. The important historical transformations in class structures and theoretical challenges to conventional class analyses do not sanction abandoning class as an analytically useful category. Class differentiation remains a crucial and central feature of the capitalist realities with which most people on the planet today live. The question is not whether to analyze class, but how – particularly in an era when the increasingly complex post-colonial and transnational forms that capitalism takes challenge the methodologically nationalist, masculinist, and Eurocentric approaches that at one time dominated class analysis. Social class needs to be approached in ways that are supple enough to tease out the spatiotemporally variegated class processes at work in a complex and unevenly developed world. Thus it is not simply a question of choosing a particular sociological theory of class, depending upon the questions posed, as suggested by Wright (2005). For example, for questions about surplus appropriation one may need not only a Marxist sense of how surplus is generated and appropriated, but also a Weberian sense of the role of states in facilitating and legitimizing such production and appropriation, a Bourdieusian sense of the cultural dimensions of this process (including consumption), and feminist and critical race theoretic insights into the ways gender and racial aspects of the social division of labor affect the production and appropriation of the surplus, all combined with the insight from geographical scholarship that space and place compound the complexity of

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class processes. Such sensibilities need not slide into facile eclecticism, but the task of integrating these various aspects into a robust and adequately complex theoretical framework remains very much before us.

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Hanson, Susan and Pratt, Geraldine (1995) Gender, Work, and Space. New York: Routledge. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin. Harris, Richard (1984) ‘Residential segregation and class formation in the capitalist city: A review and directions of research’, Progress in Human Geography, 8: 26–49. Harvey, David (1973) Social Justice and the City. London: E. Arnold. Harvey, David (1982) The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Harvey, David (2000) Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press. Herod, Andrew (2001) Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism. New York: Guilford. Hudson, Ray and Sadler, David (1986) ‘Contesting works closures in Western Europe’s old industrial regions: defending place or betraying class?’ in A.J. Scott and M. Storper (eds), Production, Work Territory – the Geographical Anatomy of Industrial Capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 172–193. Jackson, Peter and Smith, Susan J. (1984) Exploring Social Geography. London: George, Allen & Unwin. Jeffrey, C. (2001) ‘“A fist is stronger than five fingers”: caste and dominance in rural north India’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26: 217–236. Katznelson, Ira (1981) City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States. New York City: Pantheon. Ley, David (1980) ‘Liberal ideology and the postindustrial city’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 70: 238–258. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1977) ‘The communist manifesto’ in D. McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 221–247. Massey, Doreen (1984) Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structure and the Geography of Production. London: Methuen. McDowell, Linda (1991) ‘Life without father and Ford: the new gender order of post-Fordism’, Transactions

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of the Insititute of British Geographers, NS 16: 400–419. McDowell, Linda (2003) Redundant Masculinities? Employment Change and Working Class Youth. Oxford: Blackwell. Pratt, Geraldine (1989) ‘Reproduction, class, and the spatial structure of the city’ in Richard Peet and Nigel Thrift (eds), New Models in Geography, vol. 2. London: Unwin Hyman, pp. 84–108. Pratt, Geraldine (2004) Working Feminism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rex, John and Moore, Robert (1967) Race, Community and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook. London: Oxford University Press. Saunders, Peter (1981) Social Theory and the Urban Question. London: Hutchinson. Saunders, Peter and Williams, Peter (1986) ‘The new conservatism: some thoughts on recent and future developments in urban studies’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 4: 393–399. Sayer, R. Andrew (1992) Method in Social Science: a Realist Approach. London and New York: Routledge. Sheppard, Eric and Barnes, Trevor J. (1990) The Capitalist Space Economy: Geographical Analysis after Ricardo, Marx and Sraffa. London: Unwin Hyman. Smith, A. (1976). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Oxford and Toronto: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press. Smith, Neil (2000) ‘What happened to class?’, Environment & Planning A, 32: 1011–1032. Thrift, Nigel and Williams, Peter (1987) Class and Space: The Making or Urban Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Walker, Richard (1985) ‘Class, division of labor and employment in space’ in D. Gregory and J. Urry (eds), Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Macmillan, pp. 164–190. Watts, Michael (1983) Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wright, Erik Olin (2005) Approaches to Class Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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1 31 Race/Ethnicity Caroline Bressey

INTRODUCTION Race/races, mulatto, octoroon, quadroon, negro, nigger, negress, sambo, native, halfcaste, golliwog, coon, woolly-head, visible minority, apartheid, miscegenation, wog, creole, black-a-moor, yid, jim crow, the colo(u)r line, pikey, ethnic minority, ghetto, mongrel, immigrant, coolie, taffy, paki, negroid, half-breed, hottentot, darkie, savage, a touch of the tar brush, uncle tom, alien, segregation, black, white, brown, yellow, red, chink, with a hint of a tint, in the dark continent, black and asian and minority ethnic/ ethnicity. Race and ethnicity are difficult to grasp. They are terms that speak to racism and prejudice as the words above suggest. They are terms that attempt to fix the unfixable. Race is often understood as an idea of difference based on perceived biological differences in the world. Ethnicity is a more recent term, but used more vaguely and is sometimes seen as just a less emotive term for race (Wade 1997). Both act as an umbrella for terms that, as we see above, are political rather than factual; they are social constructions of difference and unstable components of the ongoing politics of racism. The

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continuing power of racism reflects their enduring importance. Race and ethnicity are also terms that are inherently geographical, and reflect theories which locate and attempt to fix people within constructions of space. The racialisation of bodies as members of the human race, nations, continents, as citizens, of the local, as immigrants and so forth, has its origins in the enlightenment, and the evolution of the discipline of geography. Race and ethnicity are ‘not not terms that refer in some way to a transparent reality’ of which geographical study can gives us a clearer picture; ‘instead they are terms embedded in academic, popular and political discourses that are themselves a constitutive part of academic, popular and political relationships and practices’ (Wade 1997: 5). These discourses cannot be disconnected from their historiography, and racial categories have been spatially located into continental divides, national boundaries and geographic localities since their inception (Goldberg 1993). Expressions of race and ethnicity normalised in one decade are often discarded in the next, as those who fight against the injustices, limitations and absurdity of racial categories attempt to replace them and overturn

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phases of epistemology. The legacies of race express themselves differently across the globe. Here I will be focusing on British constructions and experience of race and ethnicity; although the legacies of European led trans-Atlantic enslavement and colonialism mean that there are shared histories of race that can be identified within different geographical contexts throughout the world. The close connections between the establishment of race-thinking and constructions of power and knowledge mean that ideas of race and ethnicity have always been controversial and contested. The role of those who have fought against the imposition of racial categorisations of their bodies have not usually been part of geography’s disciplinary history. This chapter will highlight some of their standpoints. It is not a linear narrative of race and geography, but provides snapshots that illustrate developments and changes in geographical perspectives on race and ethnicities. It moves from the eighteenth century philosophies of Kant to the late Victorians and early PanAfrican politics to ideas of British multiculturalism of the 1980s. Throughout it focuses upon moments when geographers were challenged by those they racialised.

GEOGRAPHY AND RACE Geography’s relationship with the development of race, racism and ethnicity is a long and at times extremely uncomfortable one. The place of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in the history of geography and race thinking is a useful example. The Prussian philosopher is considered by many as an important theoretical godfather to geography. As Livingstone and Harrison have argued: The value of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy for geographical epistemology cannot be restricted either to the content of his specifically geographical writing, notably the Physiche Geographie or indeed to the detailed substance of his critical

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philosophical system. His major significance lies, rather, in the spirit of the transcendental critical inquiry which he instigated. Livingstone and Harrison 1981: 370.

However, the series of lectures Kant gave on geography at the University of Königsberg between 1756 and 1796 have recently come under criticism from those concerned with theories and historiographies of race and ethnicity. Paul Gilroy suggests that the ‘moment Kant compromised himself by associating the figure of the “negro” with stupidity and connecting difference in colour to differences in mental capacity provides a useful symbolic marker’ in the use of race as a means of the debasement of human society (Gilroy 2005: 9). David Harvey argues that it is not surprising that Kant’s Geography (as Harvey refers to the series of lectures) has not been extensively considered within the discipline as it is ‘nothing short of an intellectual and political embarrassment’ (Harvey 2000: 532). Kant was one of the first philosophers to write difference between peoples into space and onto the colour of their skin – a hint of theories of environmental determinism that were to come. In hot countries men mature more quickly in every respect but they do not attain the perfection of the temperate zones. Humanity achieves its greatest perfection with the white race. The yellow Indians have somewhat less talent. The negroes are much inferior and some of the peoples of the Americas are well below them. Kant quoted and translated by Harvey 2000: 533.

Kant is implicated in critiques of the use of race as a means of categorising modernity and the modern world. The critical race theorist David Theo Goldberg has highlighted the painful paradoxes present in the work of Kant and other enlightenment philosophers, works that on the one hand argued for liberty equality and universal identities, while on the other enforced inequalities between people based upon the colour of their skin.

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So the irony of modernity, the liberal paradox comes down to this: As modernity commits itself progressively to idealized principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as it increasingly insists upon the moral irrelevance of race, there is a multiplication of racial identities and the sets of exclusions they prompt and rationalize, enable and sustain. Race is irrelevant, but all is race. The more abstract universal identity, the more it has to be insisted upon, the more it needs to be imposed. The more ideologically hegemonic liberal values seem and the more open to difference liberal modernity declares itself, the more dismissive it becomes and the more closed it seeks to make the circle of acceptability. Goldberg 1993: 6–7, original emphasis.

Kantian categories of thought continue to be used in geography (e.g. see Harvey’s (2000) discussion of Kant’s influence on ideas of the cosmopolitan), but to what degree do racist ideas infect his epistemology more broadly? For those for whom enlightenment modernity is compromised if not undone by the development and tolerance of racial sciences, geographers’ desire to ignore aspects of philosophers’ work that are an embarrassment is a disciplinary conceit that must be faced. A failure to do this has resulted in the possibly inevitable implication of geography in some of the most racist manifestations of Western society including the creation of racial categories, slavery, colonial exploitation and Nazism.

GEOGRAPHY AND RACISM Although Kant remains an important figure in early discussions of geographical knowledge, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the subject began to take shape as a professional body and independent discipline. In Britain efforts to establish geography as an academic subject within universities began in the 1870s with lobbying from the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), itself established in 1830. The RGS was a society proudly implicated in the aspirations of British imperial ambition – and attendant

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racial politics. The men who joined the RGS throughout the century (women were not admitted until 1913) were travellers, soldiers, sailors and natural scientists (Stoddart 1986). Exploration, topographic and social surveys, cartographic representation and regional inventory – essential tools and practices of the emerging geographical professional – were entirely suited to the colonial project (Livingstone 1994: 170). As the nineteenth century progressed overseas explorations became the major focus of the Society’s work, a practice which brought its members into closer contact with race thinking, prejudice and practice. However, narratives which discuss the ‘great achievements’ of men of exploration like Henry Stanley, David Livingstone and Richard Burton consistently fail to include the perspective of those who challenged racialised and racist views of the world. This does not refer to members of the RGS who were also members of the Anti-Slavery Society such as Horace Waller, but the men and women who were the objects of environmental determinism, racist stereotyping and colonial aggression. Extreme theories of racialised environmental determinism and racist stereotyping were personified in the 1860s in the ideas and lectures given by James Hunt, president of the Anthropological Society of London, which included the explorer Richard Burton among its members. In August 1863, Hunt delivered a paper On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of the Negro at the annual conference of the British Association in Newcastle. In his presentation Hunt focused upon ‘the full-blooded, woolly headed, typical Negro, to the exclusion of the half-breed’ (Hunt, discussion printed in Anthropological Review 1863: 386). He declared that it was a patent fact that there were races that had no history, and that ‘from the most remote antiquity the negro race seem to have been what they are now’ and that any ‘civilized’ black people a white person might encounter nearly always had European blood in their

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veins (Hunt, Anthropological Review 1863: 386). When Hunt delivered his paper he was challenged from the floor by William Craft. William and Ellen Craft were escaped slaves from the United States. After arriving in Britain they undertook numerous lecture tours giving speeches about the horrors of enslavement during the 1850s publishing an account of their escape Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, in London in 1860. The Crafts were popular on the lecture circuit and when Craft rose to challenge Hunt he was not unknown. A fluent and modest speaker, Craft began his response by stating that although he was ‘not of pure African descent he was black enough’ to reply (Hunt, Anthropological Review 1863: 388). He made various points in defence of black people, beginning by pointing out the physical diversities that existed among Africans. He was critical of Hunt’s argument that ‘negroes were not erect’, something Craft thought could also be said about the agricultural labourers in southern parts of England, a point that was met by cries of ‘hear, hear’ from the audience (The Times, August 31 1863: 7). Craft then went on to argue that it was not a natural limit to his abilities that kept him uneducated, but the social position that he was forced to occupy in the United States which gave him no chance to prove what he was really capable of. Craft ended by saying that he was sorry that scientific and learned men were wasting their time discussing a subject which did not benefit mankind, and completed his defence with a poem by William Cowper. Fleecy locks and black complexion Cannot alter nature’s claim; Skins may differ, but affection Dwells in white and black the same.

Hunt used his perception of science to dismiss Craft’s points as vague general assumptions and demanded that scientific evidence of the character he had presented ‘should be

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met by scientific argument and not poetical clap-trap, or by gratuitous and worthless assumptions’ (Hunt, Anthropological Review 1863: 389 and 391). Coding Africans as uncivilised savages, unable to present scientific argument refuted any concepts of cultural diversity. Anyone who did not conform to the standards of the society in which an individual, such as Hunt, making such judgements lived was denied the name culture and relegated to ‘nature’. Such thinking offered strong ideological support for the colonial enterprise of the late nineteenth century – savages, be they Africans or Asians were not simply delinquent, they were inherently racially incapable. This refusal to acknowledge the contributions of African and Asian peoples to constructions of knowledge was often reflected in RGS-supported expeditions. The assumptions underpinning these were that what was neither observed by Europe or documented by it was lost until it could be discovered and incorporated by the new sciences including geography. White westerners brought knowledge to spaces and places, Africans were servants and accessories, or so these histories are told. What archives at the RGS show is that histories of race and racism are rather more complex. The explorer David Livingstone is one of the most famous characters associated with the RGS. On his expeditions in Africa he was accompanied by two men from Zanzibar, James Chuma and Abdullah Susi. Both men worked with Livingstone for eight or nine years, and both were among the group who carried Livingstone’s body, maps, instruments and diaries, back to the coast of East Africa so they could be returned to Britain following his death. After Livingstone’s funeral in 1874 both came to England and dictated the last part of Livingstone’s journey to Horace Waller. On 1 June Waller accompanied Chuma and Susi to the RGS in London so they could receive bronze medals in acknowledgement of their contribution to Britain’s ‘knowledge’ of Africa.

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Despite this limited acknowledgement that Africans could be ‘real geographers’, by the end of the nineteenth century racism was becoming institutionalised in the teaching of British geography. The Short Geography of Africa, published for those taking the ‘Cambridge local and other examinations’ in 1889, presented images of the ‘Negro’ which informed stereotypes still recognisable today. Students were told that: The negroes, or ‘black’ men, native to central Africa, are marked generally by their black woolly hair, protruding lips and flattened nose; they are fond of ornament, and above all, dancing; they live for the moment … Lowest of all in African humanity are the wandering Bushmen of the Kalahari deserts, living in holes and caves like wild animals, without dwelling or property, nor any domestic animal, save, it may be, a miserable dog. Johnston 1889: 8.

The author was careful to note that Negroes were not the same as Egyptians (who were Arabs), nor those who lived in Nubia or along the Upper Nile. The latter ‘although of swarthy complexion [were] not negroes’ but strode ‘across the plain with erect graceful figures, armed with spear and buckles’. Separated from these ‘noble savages’ were the Abyssinians, who were described as Semitic in origin with a relationship to Arabs reflected in their brown colour, although towards the north, some Abyssininans became ‘almost white’. With their lighter colouring came the more ‘Caucasian features’ of ‘curved noses’ and ‘oval eyes’ (Johnston 1889: 8). The degradation associated with such racial stereotyping was simultaneously being challenged in the United States and Britain by members of the African diaspora. In Britain the focus of this work was led by Sylvester Williams and the African Association. Sylvester Williams had moved from Trinidad, the country of his birth, to Canada, before arriving in London. In the imperial capital he spoke out against crown colony rule and led a group of Trinidadians living in London to meet Members of

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Parliament. In September 1897 he convened a meeting which saw the birth of the African Association of which he became secretary. Its president was the Rev. Henry Mason Joseph from Antigua, and A.V. Kinloch, a woman from Natal, became its treasurer. The aims of the collective were: To encourage a feeling of unity to facilitate friendly intercourse among Africans in general; to promote and protect the interests of all subjects claiming African descent, wholly or in part, in British Colonies and other places, especially in Africa, by circulating accurate information on all subjects affecting their rights and privileges as subjects of the British empire, by direct appeals to the Imperial and Local Governments. Geiss 1974: 177.

By the end of 1898 the Association had 47 members, mostly students from different colonies. As the Lagos Standard noted, it was significant of the times that ‘an Association of this nature be formed in the Metropolis of Empire’, and it called for their countrymen ‘to rally round the standard of the AFRICAN ASSOCIATION’ (Geiss 1974: 179). Two years later the Association convened a PanAfrican Conference, the first time the phrase ‘Pan-African’ was used to indicate such a political collective (Geiss 1974). As suggested by Craft’s response to James Hunt’s academic paper, and the crass racism of Johnston’s textbook, the location of political black identities within ideas of an African diaspora was an important part of antiracism. This was also reflected in some of the lectures which Williams gave on race that were printed two years after the first Pan-African conference. His presentation on ‘The British Negro’ included a number of observations that criticised ‘established knowledge’ being taught under the name of geography. Archaeology, history and labour were all themes he used to challenge racist theories about the African diaspora. Countering the idea that Africans had no history, he argued that the discovery of ancient remains of gigantic structures and coinage in the Upper

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Nile, Mashonalalnd, and Matabele (then called Rhodesia) told of African tales which went back thousands of years. In this light, he argued that no people regretted more sincerely the demolition of the great Alexandrian library in Egypt than the African, because treasured within it were the writings of eminent historians he described as Assyrians and Arabian who bore testimony to the enlightenment of the so-called Negro, and Negroid races. Williams was also critical of colonial exploitation, arguing that the output of wealth in South and West Africa and Uganda with railways stretching from Mombassa on the East African Coast beyond the snow-capped mountains of El Toro were built by what he called native industry. The African was the labourer constructing these great infrastructural projects, yet, he complained, the British public were continually told, by those such as Earl Grey, that the black African was so lazy that a policy to force people to work needed to be ‘vigorously’ pursued. Just less than a decade later the first Universal Races Congress was held at the University of London in July 1911. Its declared aim was to encourage ‘friendly feeling and co-operation among all races and nations’, but among the papers given were a number that perpetuated the idea of inherent differences between human types based on their geographical origin and the colour of their skin. A few geographers were among the delegates, such as Professor J. Paul Goode from the University of Chicago, and Professors J. Russell Smith and Walter S. Tower both from the University of Pennsylvania. A paper on the ‘climatic control of skin-colour’ was delivered by Lionel Lyde, professor of economic geography at University College London, in which he argued that a ‘definitive scheme of colour zones’ could be created by ‘relating temperature, as conditioned by sunshine and relief, to rainfall, as implying humidity and cloudiness’ (Spiller 1911: 107). Sir Harry Johnston, formerly a British Commissioner and ConsulGeneral in Africa, represented the RGS on

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the executive council and George Chisholm, based within geography at the University of Edinburgh was also present. Johnston gave a paper on The World Position of the Negro and the Negroid, which was concerned with ‘the negroid, that is to say, any human race, nationality, or people sufficiently tinged with negro blood to display the negroid characteristics of a dark skin and a spirally coiled hair’ (Spiller 1911: 328). In a direct response to the papers given at the Universal Races Conference, Dusé Mohamed Ali began publishing the London based African Times and Orient Review in July 1912. Born in Alexandria in November 1866, he was the son of an Egyptian army officer and his Sudanese wife. Ali states in his book In the Land of the Pharaohs (1911) that he was educated in Britain from 1876 and was based there from 1884. He remained until 1923 working with travelling theatres and writing. In the Land of the Pharaohs was his best-known work, but in addition he wrote a novel, playlets, a musical comedy and numerous journalistic pieces. As an actor he did find work but, in a reflection of the increasing colour prejudice operating in British society, Ali found himself confined to stereotyped and often demeaning roles as enslaved Africans, despicable Muslims and background figures. His writing gave him the opportunity to express his anger at the racism he saw in British society and beyond. In In the Land of the Pharaohs, Ali denounced Orientalism in terms that would be reiterated by post-colonial writers over 60 years later. He asserted that colour prejudice was at the root of most ‘Oriental incapacity’ which was so prominent in literature of the time. He attempted to tell a history of Egypt from ‘the inside’ and denounced Western imperial missions. He noted that where Anglo-Saxon educational achievement was celebrated as accounted learning, Oriental educational attainments were labelled as ‘educational veneer’ or ‘a veneer of Western Culture’ and he noted this not only applied to the Orient, but to ‘all coloured races of the world’.

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When the first issue of the African Times and Orient Review appeared it announced itself as a monthly journal devoted to the interests of the coloured races of the world. Ali editorial cited the recent Universal Races Congress as having demonstrated that there was ample need for a Pan-Oriental, PanAfrican journal at the seat of the British Empire which would discuss the aims, desires and intentions of the black, brown and yellow peoples of the world. In time its readership reached almost all areas of the British Empire, as well as the Americas and beyond. For the first issue, Ali sent two questions to politicians, members of the black elite and scientists involved in race thinking. First he asked if a paper run by and reflecting the desires of people of African and Oriental descent would be appreciated by the British public, and secondly if such a paper could produce better understandings between governors and the governed. Among those who had their responses published was the geographer Harry Johnston who had delivered a paper at the Universal Races Congress. To the first question he replied ‘the reading world had not found such papers written by non-Europeans of an impartial or really erudite character’. To the second question he again reinforced his belief in the superiority of Europeans. What has struck me about Africans and Orientals who have received an education along European lines, is their extraordinary ignorance of Africa and Asia – more especially in regard to the real facts of history, and pre-history, archaeology, zoology, philology, botany, ethnography, and geography. The great authorities on the languages of India are Europeans, not Indians. Egyptians know very little Egyptology … negroes know a great deal that is scarcely necessary, nowadays to know about, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but nothing of the inter-relationships of the many forms of African speech … I hope The African Times will set an example in the correct rendering of African and Oriental names of person and places: that we may never see in its pages “Soudan” instead of Sudan, or Mohamed or Mohammed in lieu of the only correct version in phonetic spelling Muhammad. African Times and Orient Review, July 1912.

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The editorial response to Johnston’s comments published two months later was scathing. The average member of the British Imperial Parliament was, it was argued, notoriously ignorant of the geographical positions of some corners of the British Empire. On the issue of language it was pointed out that Johnston had ignored (or did not know of) Raja Raun Mohan Ray, Keshab Chandra San, Maharshi Denendra Nath Tagore, Ameer Ali, Abdulla Yusuf-Ali among a host of other linguistic authorities. It was agreed that it was regrettable that British schools still taught Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but if educated negroes knew too much, it was the fault of colonial schools, not the men educated by them. The editor continued to spell his name ‘Mohamed’.

GEOGRAPHY AND ‘NEW ETHNICITIES’ Geography was slow to incorporate voices such as Ali’s into its theorisations of race in the twentieth century. A desire to understand ‘other races’ after the Second World War focused upon discussions of assimilation and a ‘flurry’ of empirical studies which attempted to measure racial segregation (Peach 2009: 1392). It was a method that failed to include the historical experience or voice of those who attacked racial prejudice. In turn this meant that geography was slow to discuss the social constructions of race and their locations in specific historical and geographical narratives. It was within the realm of cultural studies that deconstructions of race thinking were first rigorously examined. By the 1980s the influence of cultural studies and postcolonial theory on geographical scholars was becoming evident. The United States civil rights movement and the urban uprisings which took place in Britain in the 1980s prompted some geographers to reassess the ‘race relations industry’ and reappraise the critical role of geography. In a ground-breaking collection of essays on race

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and racism, Peter Jackson argued that while geography’s failure to take onboard critiques of race that had been developing in other branches of social sciences was difficult to excuse, the subject still had an important contribution to make by injecting a more thorough conceptualisation of race and space into these discussions (Jackson 1987). As ideas of multi-cultural Britain developed, an attempt to find different ways to talk about race were sought. Again, cultural studies played a leading role, and Stuart Hall’s theorisations of race and ‘new ethnicities’ were inspirational for many geographers and created new spaces in which to think about and frame experiences of race. Hall saw ethnicity as intimately wrapped up in representation and place, arguing that we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience, a particular culture, without being contained by that position … We are all, in that sense, ethnically located and our ethnic identities crucial to our subjective sense of who we are. But this is also recognition that this is not an ethnicity which is doomed to survive, as Englishness was, only by marginalizing, dispossessing, displacing and forgetting other ethnicities. Stuart Hall 1996: 169–70.

Among the ‘new ethnicities’ that came to the fore from these discussions within geography was that of whiteness.

RACE/WHITENESS Present in Jackson’s 1987 edited collection were essays that looked at issues of racism among white communities including Jewish and Irish communities in London. This perhaps reflected a desire to reinforce the socially constructed nature of race as well as the more inclusive anti-racist politics of the 1980s when, in Britain, ‘calling oneself “black” was as much a statement of belief as it was of belonging. It did not primarily indicate affiliation to a particular ancestry

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or ethnicity but to a politics of collective struggle against racism and colonialism’ (Kundnani 2007: 41). bell hook’s (1992) discussion of representations of whiteness in the black American imagination held a mirror up to critical thought about whiteness that did not come from the white community. It was a critique that ridiculed white theorists for believing that oppressed people had believed colonial propaganda and associated whiteness with goodness and benign non-threatening behaviour. She argued that in fact for many black people whiteness was intimately linked to imposition, power, wounds, hurt, torture and terror. In the early 1990s an acknowledgement that whiteness was a historically constructed identity, a lived experience imbued with unacknowledged power and privilege, redirected geographers’ focus towards the racialisation of whiteness. This phase, demarcated by Alastair Bonnett’s 1992 study of white highlands in Britain placed the study of constructions of whiteness on the geographical agenda (McGuinness 2000). The examination of whiteness became fashionable within British geography, but concerns that it was generally being considered only in spaces of marked difference such as ‘the multi-cultural city’ would soon be raised (McGuinness 2000). Rather than taking on others’ representations and knowledges of whiteness, as a body of research, it had become a self-reflected and internalised procedure. There were broader critiques of a concentration on whiteness, which followed those of race more generally. An emphasis on race can overlook connections that occur between ethnicities because of class (e.g. education and income) or differences of experience exacerbated by gender and sexuality (e.g. the experiences of Muslim women or gay black men). Studies of race have also tended to focus upon urban spaces, although an increasing number of empirical studies are challenging the homogenous ideas of whiteness in the countryside as well as formations of race and racism in rural spaces (Askins 2006; Bressey 2009).

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RACE/TERRORISM The terrorist attacks on the United States, Spain and Britain in 2001, 2004 and 2005 respectively, and urban disturbances in a number of Pennine towns in 2001 (Phillips 2008) reignited popular interest in race and its management. In Britain this came to settle on discussions around the perceived failure of multiculturalism and discussions of (failed) integration and assimilation, increasing so-called self-segregation and the development of ‘ghettos’. Spatial metaphors have been used to describe the social and economic impacts of racism at different scales from the conception of ‘White Australia’ to the drawing of the Colo(u)r Line in the United States and later the United Kingdom. Debates around the mapping of ghettos reflected the extent to which it remains a politically explosive, yet slippery term (Peach 2009).1 Wirth (1927) argued that the modern ghetto could trace its development back to Medieval Europe and the creation of an urban institution that enabled the segregation of Jews from the remainder of the population. But in the United States, as whiteness expanded to include European immigrants including the Irish, Italians and Jews (Roediger 2005) the ghetto became closely associated with the geographies of AfricanAmericans. This form of ‘hypersegregation’ saw African-Americans densely segregated within residential spaces (Peach 1996). By 1950, over half the black population in Chicago lived in areas that were 100 per cent black, and not far off 80 per cent lived in areas that were considered 90 per cent black (Duncan and Duncan 1957, referenced in Peach 1996). But these boundaries were not as clearly demarcated as they appeared, for residential segregation in ghettos ‘was (and remains) undergirded by racialised forms of economic integration’ (Tyner 2006: 78). To the anger of civil rights leaders such as Malcom X, white Americans were permitted to buy land and establish businesses in

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black spaces, enabling them to profit from the residential entrapment of AfricanAmericans (Tyner 1996). When Trevor Phillips, as Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, declared that Britain was ‘sleepwalking its way into segregation’, British geographers found themselves on opposing sides of views on multiculturalism. Phillips’ opinion was based upon a discussion of a new geography of ethnicity in Britain by Mike Poulson and Ron Johnston (see Poulson and Johnston 2008).2 Phillips’ position was countered by those such as Lee Jasper (then an advisor to London’s Mayor), who used the State of English Cities, a 2006 report for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister by Danny Dorling and others, to challenge a vision of increasing segregation.3 This research argued that between 1991 and 2001 segregation by ethnicity had fallen in 48 out of 56 cities and Dorling was quick to argue that increasingly Britain was a country segregated by inequality, poverty, wealth and opportunity, not by race and geography (Dorling 2005). This debate is ongoing and its high-profile nature reflects the important role geographers play in debates around race (Phillips 2008; Peach 2009; Poulson and Johnston 2008). It also highlights methodological problems that arise from the desire to capture information embedded in academic, popular and political discourses that are themselves a constitutive part of academic, popular and political relationships and practices.

THE FUTURE OF RACE/ETHNICITY/ GEOGRAPHY Geographers concerned with the complex relationships between the popular, the political and the personal in the formations of race and racism have begun to map more intimate experiences of race and racism and consider the role of history and memory in their formation (Bressey 2008; Dwyer and Bressey 2008; Lim 2008). The importance of

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historical specificity has also been revisited at a larger scale with geographers reinterpreting geographies of exploration (Anderson 2007; Driver and Jones 2009), empire (Lambert 2005; Howell 2009), political violence (Kearns 2007) and political global networks (Featherstone 2007) in the making of theories of race and anti-racism. Locating of race and ethnicity in discussions of segregation, social cohesion and the relationship between race and class, it is important to ask why geographers remain reluctant to recover and connect histories of racism to contemporary geographies of race. For example there are few geographers working on the connections between the African Olaudah Equiano’s relations with London’s eighteenth-century Irish community and signs in London boarding houses in the 1950s which declared ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No dogs’ (Featherstone 2007). What are the connections between the urban uprisings of the early 1980s and those that have occurred in the twenty-first century? Would anti-terrorism laws have been so easily introduced if they had been understood in the context of racism rather than terrorism? Why is racism still such a powerful force? Race and ethnicity, although not always central or indeed mentioned, are key elements in the understanding of many of the themes undertaken in contemporary geographical research. Discussions around HIV/ AIDS, for example, cannot be understood without reference to racism. Researching immigrant, diasporic and asylum-seeking communities is intimately connected to ideas or race and belonging as well as to geographies of wealth and poverty. Understandings of race sit at the heart of any attempt to unpack the meanings of ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘economic migrants’, and ‘genuine asylum seekers’. Geographies of religion also require an acknowledgement of the intersections of race thinking with gender and homophobia. Placing race at the centre of geographical understanding is not about accommodating ‘A.N. Other’ but about challenging and

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deconstructing mythologies and examining the realities of race’s place in the world. The mapping of ethnic difference through new technologies of GIS can reinforce ideas of difference that some human geographers have spent the last two decades attempting to deconstruct – how can these be reconciled? In challenging the history and practice of race, geography is perhaps not helped by the fact that it remains overwhelmingly white in the racial composition of its practitioners. In both Britain and the United States the ethnic diversity of geography remains low at undergraduate, graduate and faculty levels. In an attempt to address this, the Association of American Geographers (AAG) formed a diversity task force which reported at the Association’s annual conference in San Francisco, 2006.4 The survey of US geography departments and higher education institutions upon which it was based made disappointing reading. Of the 74 departments that responded, 49 had no black faculty, 61 had no Hispanic faculty, 31 had no Asian faculty, and 70 had no faculty from Native American communities. Over 90 per cent of professors in US geography departments are white. As the AAG report concluded, geography indeed faces a daunting task.

NOTES 1 For examples of earlier discussions see ‘Pupils Draw the Color Line’, Cleveland Gazette, 21 May 1892 and ‘Creation of the Ghetto’, Cleveland Advocate, 17 May 1919. Both articles can be viewed online at The African-American Experience in Ohio 1850–1920. Ohio Historical Society and the Library of Congress. 2 At a talk to the RGS & Institute of British Geographers’ annual conference in 2006 Phillips did apologise for ‘mangling’ this work. 3 See: www.communities.gov.uk/citiesandregions/ publicationscities/state/ 4 See: http://communicate.aag.org/eseries/Diversity/ Intro.cfm

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REFERENCES Anderson, Kay (2007) Race and the Crisis of Humanism. London and New York: Routledge. Askins, Kye (2006) ‘New Countryside? New Country: visible communities in the English National Parks’, in S. Neal and J. Agyeman (eds), The New Countryside? Ethnicity, nation and exclusion in contemporary rural Britain. Bristol: The Policy Press, pp. 149–171. Bressey, Caroline (2008) ‘It’s only political correctness’ in C. Dwyer and C. Bressey (eds), New Geographies of Race and Racism. Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 29–39. Bressey, Caroline (2009) ‘Cultural archaeology and the black presence in rural England’, Journal of Rural Studies, 25: 386–395. Dorling, Danny (2005) ‘Why Trevor is wrong about race ghettos’, The Observer, 25 September 2005. Driver, Felix and Jones, Lowri (2009) Hidden Histories of Exploration. London: Royal Holloway, University of London in association with the RGS-IBG. Dwyer, Claire and Bressey, Caroline (2008) ‘Island geographies: new geographies of race and racism’, in C. Dwyer and C. Bressey (eds.), New Geographies of Race and Racism. Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 1–13. Featherstone, David (2007) ‘The spatial politics of the past unbound: transnational networks and the making of political identities’, Global Networks, 7: 430–452. Geiss, Imanuel (1974) The Pan-African Movement. London: Methuen. Gilroy, Paul (2005) Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Goldberg, David T. (1993) Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hall, Stuart (1996) New Ethnicities in H. Baker, M. Diawara and R. Lindeborg (eds), Black British Cultural Studies: A reader. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, pp. 163–172. Harvey, David (2000) ‘Cosmopolitanism and the banality of geographical evils’, Public Culture, 12: 529–564. Howell, Philip (2009) Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hooks, bell (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.

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Jackson, Peter (1987) ‘The idea of “race” and the geography of racism’ in Peter Jackson (ed.), Race and Racism: Essays in Social Geography. London: Allen and Unwin, pp. 3–27. Johnston, Keith (1889) A Short Geography of Africa: For the Use of Candidates at the Cambridge Local and Other Examinations. London: Edward Stanford. Kearns, Gerry (2007) ‘Bare life, political violence, and the territorial structure of Britain and Ireland’, in D. Gregory and A.R. Pred (eds), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence. New York and Oxford: Routledge. Kundnani, Arun (2007) The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain. London: Pluto Press. Lambert, David (2005) White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity During the Age of Abolition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lim, Jason (2008) ‘Encountering South Asian masculinity through the event’, in C. Dwyer and C. Bressey (eds), New Geographies of Race and Racism. Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 223–237. Livingstone, L. and Harrison, R. (1981) ‘Immanuel Kant, subjectivism and human geography, a preliminary investigation’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 3: 349–374. Livingstone, David (1994) The Geographical Tradition. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. McGuinness, Mark (2000) ‘Geography matters? Whiteness and contemporary geography’, Area, 32: 225–230. Mohamed Ali, Dusé (1911) In the Land of the Pharaohs: A Short History of Egypt. London: Stanley Paul. Peach, Ceri (1996) ‘Does Britain have ghettos?’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 21: 216–235. Peach, Ceri (2009) ‘Slippery segregation: discovering or manufacturing ghettos?’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 35: 1381–1395. Phillips, Deborah (2008) ‘The problem with segregation: exploring the racialisation of space in northern Pennine towns’, in C. Dwyer and C. Bressey (eds), New Geographies of Race and Racism. Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 179–192. Poulson, M and Johnston R. (2008) The ‘new geography’ of ethnicity in England and Wales? In Dwyer C and Bressey C (2008) New Geographies of Race and Racism, London: Ashgate, pp 157–178. Spiller George (ed.) (1911) Inter-racial Problems: Communicated to the first Universal Races Congress. London: PS King and Son.

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Stoddart, D.R. (1988) On Geography. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Tyner, James (2006) The Geography of Malcolm X: Black Radicalism and the Remaking of American Space. New York and Oxford: Routledge.

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Wade, Peter (1997) Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press. Wirth, Louis (1927) ‘The ghetto’, The American Journal of Sociology, 22: 57–71.

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32 Gender Joanne Sharp

INTRODUCTION For a large part of the discipline’s history, gender was invisible to geography. This does not mean that it did not exist, of course, but that it went unnoticed. The language of geographical scholarship and pedagogy focused upon the relationships between man and the environment, but this gendered language was silently universalised and naturalised to represent the diversity of humanity. While it was clearly the domain of men in its early years of exploration and empire, when women were barred from its institutions and societies and neglected as a subject of study in their own right, once into the twentieth century geography still appeared to be gender-neutral in focus and topics. This was either because of the presumed ‘factual’ nature of both regional and spatial scientific accounts of the world, for which no inherent theoretical bias relating to gender could be imagined, or because theoretical accounts reduced the complexity of human agency to simple models of human behaviour indifferent to gender considerations, such as that of ‘economic man’ in the case of liberal versions of economic geography, or class roles for radical versions.

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The subject of geography was unmarked by gender (and race, ethnicity, physical ability, sexuality and age, for that matter), and yet this unremarkable subject was most definitely male. It was not until the 1970s that the discipline’s focus on man and the surface of the earth was regarded as a constraining one. Pioneering work at this time sought to reinsert women into geographical theories by geographers influenced by the intellectual and political currents of feminism emerging in wider society at the time. Initially then, gender was something of an empirical given – a marker, ‘woman’ – that had been hidden from geography (as it had previously been noted as being ‘hidden from history’ (Rowbotham 1977)). Feminist geography sought explanation for the omission of women from positions of power and influence in society generally, and within the discipline more specifically. Their challenge to the dominance of objective/objectivising masculinist knowledge led to a call for situated knowledge. But, while this allowed for the challenge to the silent dominance of masculinist knowledge, it also opened the way for challenges to the notion of ‘woman’ from which to construct a feminist geography. Gender moved from being a marker of

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women, to a relational concept structuring roles for men and women, to being a fragile construction, performed in different spaces and bearing a more troubled relationship to sex that had previously been assumed. Further challenges to stable gender identities came from working class, third world, disabled and lesbian women. Although gender is now a concept that has become mainstreamed in geography, this does not mean that the changes that feminism had hoped to make have been fully achieved. This chapter will trace the changing ways in which gender has been used in the discipline.

DEFINING GENDER The different roles and identities of men and women have become so deeply embedded within society that these are conventionally naturalised. Women, for instance, are seen as being good carers by dint of their roles as mothers. This characteristic is extended to become part of the constructed gender identity for women. Thus, this has been naturalised within the workforce so that ‘women’s jobs’ have traditionally grouped around caring professions such as nurses and teachers. Conversely, women have been regarded as being unsuited to dangerous jobs and those involving violence, so that, for example, there is debate in most countries, if not actual bans, on women serving on the front line of combat. These gender identities are based around a binary definition of gender: as a result of biological markers, each person is either male or female.1 At the heart of Western Enlightenment thought are binaries, ordering the world into known and separate categories. Perhaps most important is the binary which separate the mind and rationality from nature and the body. This binary is reinforced by the existence of other structuring binaries running through Western thought: reason–passion, culture–nature, production–reproduction, transcendental–experiential, male–female.

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In discussions during the Victorian era for instance, women – but also the lower classes, other races and children – were held to be more embodied than educated white men. They were considered to be more given over to the body and thus to desires that were physical and sexual. This was linked to a perceived lack of control over the senses that it was held was achieved through the mind: women were regarded as closely aligned to natural patterns due to their role as mothers, through the cycles of menstruation, and through hysteria and fainting. They had to be controlled by patriarchy, by elites and fathers. Thus, masculinity and femininity were constructed as opposites but not as equals. These were not equally valued gender identities. As is the case with all binary pairs in Western thought, there is a hierarchy of value. The masculine side of the binary has traditionally been the characteristic which has been regarded as aspirational – rationality, reason, culture, production, etc. whereas feelings, emotion, nature, reproduction have been traits to be removed from important areas of society (government, industry, academia) and kept in the home. In these formal spheres of life there have been attempts to expunge feminine characteristics. Objective research has sought to eliminate the influence of the researcher so as to remove any bias resulting from feelings or emotions. Feminism has as one of its central ambitions the aim to denaturalise these binaries and to challenge the social and economic impact that gender identities have for people. Feminists have conventionally differentiated sex from gender to reinforce their arguments about the social construction of gender roles and identities. This distinction was first articulated in the book The Second Sex (1949) by French theorist Simone de Beauvoir, who famously claimed, ‘One is not born but rather becomes a woman’. Significantly, de Beauvoir was arguing against the essentialist assumption that masculine and feminine traits were the result of biological difference, instead

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insisting that gender identities were social roles that were learnt. Through inherited cultural norms and practices, certain traits became learned as ‘properly’ male or female, from giving girls dolls and boys guns to play with when very small, through to the nurturing that older children get towards particular jobs. This is what Rubin (1975: 159) called a sex/gender system, a ‘set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied’. Through this system, sex becomes gender, and in ‘a vivid analogy Linda Nicholson suggests that this model or relationship between sex and gender is like a coat rack. Sex or biological difference is the basic frame onto which different societies in different historical periods have hung various coats – the socially defined arrangement of gender characteristics’ (McDowell 1999) p. 105. The role that gender plays has been understood in different ways by feminists. There have been three ‘waves’ of feminism, each of which has regarded gender in specific ways. The first wave, the suffragettes of the early twentieth century, regarded the characteristics associated with women to be wrong and instead insisted that it was only the persistence of belief in gendered characteristics that kept women from equality with men. They believed that access to the public sphere of government, education and industry would ensure equality. Second-wave feminists, emerging from the 1960s, offered a much more radical proposition. Rather than regarding men and women as essentially the same but separated by gender stereotypes, secondwave feminists accepted that there were fundamental differences between men and women – sometimes embracing the association of women with nature and caring – to suggest the women could never be equal with men because society itself was modelled around masculinism. Thus, the only way that women could be successful in society as it was currently established would be to adopt masculinist traits. They saw society as being violent and competitive because of this

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masculinism and so wanted to make much deeper social changes than the first-wave feminists, bringing in feminine values to replace dominant masculinist ones. They argued that masculinist society is prone to war because of aggression, inequality and injustice due to competition, and would lead to environmental devastation because of a lack of nurturing and care. Second-wave feminists critiqued the way that gender identities trapped women in less powerful positions than men, and that it provided aspirations for women that prevented them from challenging the status quo. For instance, Wolf (1991) critiqued the ‘beauty myth’, which reduced women to aesthetic objects of the male gaze rather than as active agents themselves, while Bordo (1993) has accused fashion of recreating an image of femininity which is vulnerable and fragile. The nature of women’s fashion (high heels, narrow skirts) has been highlighted as physically constraining the movement of women, thus confining them, in comparison to male fashion which emphasises comfort, practicality and ease of movement. Another expression of secondwave feminism, ecofeminism, argued that because masculinist culture has dominated Western society, the environment has been aggressively stripped of resources, mined for minerals and rendered an economic good. This position believes that women have shared interests with nature due to the common oppression under patriarchal power relations and so a female-dominated culture would be more likely to facilitate sustainable management of nature and a more equitable distribution of resources (Shiva 1989). The feminist claim that ‘the personal is political’ has meant that campaigns around issues such as pregnancy, abortion and maternity leave became an important part of feminist ‘body politics’ (McDowell 1999). Thus, second-wave feminism sometimes accepted the traditional binary separation of men and women (essentialism) but reversed the valorisation – so that co-operation, caring and emotion would be valued more highly than competition, management and reason.

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However, a number of different groups of women have drawn attention to their alienation from the nature of ‘woman’ used in many second-wave claims in their name. For instance, some have been critical of the second-wave construction of a ‘global sisterhood’ which argued that women have a shared identity and interest as a ‘result of a common condition which, despite variations in degree, is experienced by all human beings who are born female’ (Morgan 1984: 4). A number of Third World feminists have challenged this image of a global sisterhood arguing that it ignores all of the differences, inconsistencies and histories that make up the notion of womanhood in different places. Moreover, it ignores the power relations that run between women, for instance the structurally more powerful position held by white and Western women over women of colour and those in the global south. For Mohanty (1997: 83) the uncritical alliance suggested by the idea of a ‘global sisterhood’ erases the agency of women in particular historical struggles, and requires that ‘the categories of race and class have to become invisible for gender to become visible’. Thus, the most recent expression, thirdwave feminism, challenged first- and secondwave feminists’ belief that gender politics lie only between women and men. Thirdwave feminists insist that ‘woman’ cannot be regarded as an undifferentiated category. Drawing particularly from critiques presented by poststructural theory and thirdworld feminists, this position argues for a much more fluid definition of gender than had previously existed, challenging any unchanging, bounded marking of ‘woman’ and ‘man’. Third-wave feminists argue that definitions of women are cross-cut by other power relations, so women in the first world are not simply in a harmonious sisterhood with women in the global south. Western women sometimes benefit from the subjugation of third-world women due to the relationships of race and of neo-colonial exploitation. The experience of gender is transformed by the effects of other differences

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such as class, race, age, nationality and sexuality. Dominant forms of feminism have been challenged for their heterosexism, ableism and class assumptions as well as their blindness to geopolitics. Moreover, what the third-wave critique has highlighted is that men too have a gender identity constructed through practice. As Connell (1995) has suggested, there is a gender politics of masculinity running between dominant modes of masculinity at any time and place, and alternative, minority and resistant forms of masculinity. The language of the waves of feminism suggests that one approach has come and superseded the previous one. While each has emerged in succession, the three approaches continue to be found in different understandings of gender identity and roles in society, and also in the different ways in which gender has been incorporated into geographical study.

GEOGRAPHIES OF WOMEN It was not until the 1970s that geography recognised gender. Until this point, the subject of geography was unnamed, but as was so often the case in dominant forms of Western knowledge, this universal figure was most definitely marked as male. Textbooks proclaimed the focus of the discipline to be ‘man and his environment’, assuming that the interests of man and of humanity were everywhere and always one and the same. It is not surprising that it was in the early 1970s that geography did come to recognise gender. The political protests of the 1960s across Western European and North American cities and university campuses brought a new political consciousness to the discipline (articulated in radical and Marxist geographies emerging at the time.) and feminist politics were also making an impact. Despite the fact that there were few female academic geographers, these social challenges could not be ignored.

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Early work in the 1970s sought to recognise the differences between male and female subjects in the world. As feminists were proclaiming the different roles and choices offered to men and women, so geographers responded by looking at women’s different access to spatial resources. For example, the resources mapped out in time-geographies were highlighted as being those available to men (Tivers 1978). A small number of pioneering papers at this point started to notice the different geographies that women themselves might produce. Time-geographies mapped the use of space as a resource and a constraint for the agents who lived in it. Influential early works noted women’s very different abilities to use spatial resources. While men lived spatially expansive lives, women were limited in their use of spatial resources. Women were less likely to have access to a car on a day-to-day basis, or were constrained in their ability to travel to particular employment due to their having to drop children off at childcare in particular places at particular times (Tivers 1978). For these early works on the geography of women, gender was clearly located within the figure of ‘woman’, and the effects on gender illustrated in their distinct geographies and use of space. In various ways, women were being written into geography, but the role of gender in this process was not well understood.

FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES This adding of women to geographical analysis was not the same thing as analysing gender critically. The significance of gender as an analytical concept (rather than a simple description of difference for women) took off in the 1980s with increasing numbers of publications on the topic and in the UK the establishment of the Women and Geography Study Group (WGSG) of the Institute of British Geographers. This heralded the presence of a politically and philosophically

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feminist approach to geography. They were critical of earlier ‘geographies of women’ approaches: Making women visible is simply not enough … Hence we are concerned to introduce the idea of a feminist geography – a geography which explicitly takes into account the socially-constructed gender structure of society. Women and Geography Study Group 1984: 20–21.

Many of the most influential figures in the establishment of feminist geography such as Linda McDowell, Sophie Bowlby and Doreen Massey were greatly influenced by socialist and Marxist approaches and so their feminism was similarly radical. Capitalist and patriarchal interests were related. Women’s suppression was related to the control of space. Radical feminist geographers took the approach of radical and Marxist geographers to capitalism to understand the ways in which patriarchy similarly used spatial divisions such as scale to shape gender identities, roles and power. Such approaches ‘considered the ways in which capitalist society as a whole, and individual men within it, appropriated women’s domestic labour to ensure the daily reproduction of men as wage labourers, of children as future workers and of the system as a whole’ (McDowell and Sharp 1997: 4). These were structural explanations for the differences between women and men, attempting to understand how society constructed men and women’s identities and capabilities differently rather than simply describing the existence of this difference. From feminism, feminist geographers also began to look to the cultural sphere, once again taking inspiration from the feminist cry, ‘the personal is the political’. Just as feminists had critiqued the impact of the binary structure of gendered identity, feminist geographers looked to the ways in which the spatialisation of these binaries played out. Women were excluded from the political transformation of the public sphere, so they were literally ‘out of place’ in the spaces through which the public was

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articulated: spaces of politics, of industry, of the city. The women’s place was the home, the space of reproduction, of caring, and of the day to day, rather than the space where politics and history happened. Feminist geographers showed how the form of the city reinforced these gender identities with suburbanisation stretching out the gendered spaces of city centre (masculine) and suburbs (feminine). McDowell (1983) took this further to argue that the spatial expression of modern Western cities, with a spatial separation of work and home, in the city centre and suburbs, reinforced the distinction between men and women, and made it all the more difficult for women to access resources and influence. This took on the masculinist binary logic that had rendered the feminine as the domestic, isolated from the space of politics and transformation. No longer would geographers seek politics and power only in the formal arena of political action, but saw power diffused throughout social relations. Feminists highlighted the central importance of the distinction between the public and the private in the control of women, and feminist geographers gave this spatial expression in their examination of the spatial distinction between public and private. The association of women with the domestic and the ‘skills’ required therein (caring, mothering, cleaning, recreation) and men with the public (of work, money, ambition, progress and creativity) ensured a naturalisation of differences in power. Such associations of gender identity with space was the subject of research in the 1980s and 1990s. Given the aforementioned intellectual biographies of many of the first feminist geographers, this did tend to focus on the material questions of economic resources, particularly looking to the spatial division of labour as Massey (1984) called it through which patriarchal relations were written through the economic geographies of particular regions. Other studies also considered the notion of gendered spaces where women might be ‘in’ or ‘out’ of place. Valentine (1989) and Pain

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(1991) both examined the relationship between women’s fear and societal expectations of where women should and should not be. Up until the 1980s in UK courts (and even more recently in terms of some public opinion and tabloid newspaper headlines) women were seen to be partially culpable in their own rape or assault if they were attacked when they were in the city streets or parks after dark: they should have known that they were ‘out of place’, that these were dangerous places and that they should have stayed in the safety of the home. Valentine (1989) and Pain (1991) argue that the reproduction of this sense of fear helps to reinforce an image of femininity as vulnerable and weak in the face of strong masculine aggression. Although the statistics actually show that men are more likely to encounter violence in Western cities, and that women are more likely to face violence in the home from men they know, the image of women being at risk and ‘out of place’ in the city, especially after dark, has helped to keep women in the home. A number of studies have shown that women are afraid to go out unaccompanied after dark. Their absence from the public realm reinforces the gender associations with public and private. With this shift from studying the geography of women to developing a feminist geography, gender had moved from being a marker of women to become a relational and explanatory concept.

GENDER AND SEX As already noted, the sex–gender distinction has been useful to feminists as this separation has allowed them to highlight the power involved in the social construction of gender identities. However, this nature–culture distinction has been challenged. For some, the previously accepted notion of a biological science which identifies a binary order of sex is actually a cultural rather than a natural distinction. The implications of this change in

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understanding means that sexual distinctions must, like gender, be cultural rather than natural identities. Poststructural accounts similarly argue that the apparently natural distinction between male and female sexes ‘below’ the cultural expectations of gender identities is the result of a set of performances rather than being a pre-existing distinction. Such feminists have challenged essentialist arguments of previous feminisms in that gender identity is not defined as stable and bounded but instead as fluid. Rather than regard gender identities as having fixed boundaries this approach regards them as constantly in flux. This rejection of boundaries is considered by some to be epistemologically a feminist move. In particular, French and Italian feminists have been resistant to attempts to delimit and name the feminine, arguing that femininity must always be seen as ‘that which disrupts the security of the boundaries separating spaces and must therefore be controlled by a masculine force’ (Deutsche 1996: 301; Irigaray 1985). Poststructural feminists regard the establishment of boundaries as a fundamentally masculinist move, a will to power through the defining and delimiting of an essence into something known. Feminism is always in excess, always escaping categorisation and limitation, always more than can be known and thus always subversive of accepted ways of knowing. Many poststructural feminists take inspiration from the work of Michel Foucault (1977, 1978) in his theorisation of the subject for their theorisation of gender. For Foucault, ‘subjectivity is an epiphenomenon of discourse: there is no ontological self, but rather a sense of selfhood is an effect of discourse, and a location within networks of power/ knowledge’ (Sharp 1999: 267). For Foucault there is no subject prior to knowledge, power and discourse. Judith Butler has drawn on Foucault’s work to argue that the idea of a pre-existing defined subject performing sex and gender roles is a fiction. Instead, it is through the performance of gender identity that the notion of the pre-existing sexed

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subject is formed. So, culturally feminine performances by a female sexed body is seen as normal, indeed it is not even noted as being a performance, while the same performance by a body marked as male is seen as transgression, drag, clearly a performance. However, Butler argues that both are performances, both reinforcing the idea that the ‘natural’ distinction between male and female sexes pre-exists the cultural gender performances carried out through everyday life. Butler argues that repetition works to reinforce the norm of heterosexuality. It is only through the constant repetition of heterosexualised actions that the illusion of a heterosexual norm can emerge. Everyday practices such as looking at advertising images, following soap opera storylines, placing pictures of families on office desks, unselfconsciously reproduce heterosexuality as the norm (see also Valentine 1993). Butler (1990) argues gay cultural politics simply reverse these performances (gay male bodies performing feminine roles, lesbian female bodies performing male roles). These performances – of ‘correct’ heterosexual performance and ‘resistant’ homosexual performance – produces a normalised conceptual map on which clear and distinct lines can be drawn dividing ‘straight‘ from ‘gay’, ‘normal’ from ‘deviant’. However, drawing on Foucault’s conceptualisation of subjectivity, Butler sees many more possible performances of gender. For her, there is always the possibility of resistance and transgression in this model, which is so dependent on correct repetition. Alternative practices – whether consciously or unconsciously performed – can destabilise and ultimately undermine these fragile assemblages (for instance, lipstick lesbians, gay skinheads and the many other combinations of sex and gendered performances through which people articulate their identities). Feminist geographers have embraced Butler’s ideas particularly the importance she gives to the historical and geographical specificity of each performance rather than viewing gender performance as being fixed and unchanging. As a result, there have been

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studies of the geographies of sexual performance, with feminist geographers considering the role of both public and private spaces in the construction of gender and sexual identities. For example, McDowell (1997) has used the concept of performances to make sense of the presentation of gender identities in spaces of work. Some feminists have argued that space itself should be seen as performatively enacted (Rose 1993), or have suggested that it is important to resist images of space and place that are fixed and quotidian – in a binary gender system, feminine – in comparison to the transformative masculinism of time (see Massey 1993). The concept of gender thus becomes more fragmented and fluid, challenging inherited understandings of a clear binary mapping of male and female (whether considered to be an essential biological fact or the result of social construction). The influence of postmodern and postcolonial theories has similarly challenged coherent gender identity. However, not all feminists are happy with this account of gender and power. Alcoff (1990:73) insists that Foucault ignores the fact that ‘thinking of ourselves as subjects can have, and has had, positive effects contributing to our ability effectively to resist structures of domination’. There are times when speaking ‘for women’ in a united voice can be very powerful and transformative. Other feminists have reacted more forcefully to postmodern and poststructural pronouncements of the ‘death of the subject’ wondering whether this had occurred just when the male white subject might have had to share its status with those formerly excluded from subjectivity: Surely it is no coincidence that the western white male elite proclaimed the death of the subject at precisely the moment at which it might have had to share that status with women and peoples of other races and classes who were beginning to challenge its supremacy. Fox-Genovese 1986; see also Mascia-Lees et al. 1989.

In response, some feminists have taken up Spivak’s (1988) suggestion of a ‘strategic

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essentialism’ from which women can fight patriarchal oppression. Here, rather than simply being a cultural identity (‘I am woman’), strategic essentialism is a political concept (‘I am fighting as a woman’). Mohanty (1988) argues that coalitions are formed not because they are necessarily enjoyable but because they are required for survival. This offers the possibility of retaining the idea of a ‘feminist politics’ and the desire to make things better without the necessity of a belief in biological essentialism or universalism. Other challenges to the coherence of gender identity come from technological and scientific change. Haraway (1991) celebrates new technologies as a way of subverting the culture–nature binary. Our dependence upon various technologies of the body – fertility treatments, mechanical implants, transgenic organ transplants, and even simple correctives such as contact lenses – challenges the possibility of a clear division between the human and non-human, an ambivalence that parallels the celebration of fluidity and indeterminacy that some ascribe to feminist theory. As McDowell (1999) p. 109 has put it, gender ‘seems nowadays to have escaped the constraints of the body, or more accurately the body has been redefined’.

GENDERING KNOWLEDGE The establishment of the discipline in the nineteenth century was a resolutely male event. The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) was a society of and for men. Exploration and discovery were regarded as male pursuits, entirely unsuitable for women. Women did not achieve membership of the society until 1918 but even then, the society remained dominated by men. Such exclusion of women has been maintained, feminist geographers argue, by masculinist accounts of the discipline which refuse to make mention of the contribution of pioneering women, such as Isabella Bird and

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Mary Kingsley, who are now noted as having created important geographies for readers and audiences at their lectures, even although they did not have the institutional affiliation to the RGS. Domosh (1991) took Stoddart (1986) to task for ignoring women in his account of the history of geography, On Geography, and thus reproducing a heroic, masculinist account of the discipline emerging from the deeds of early European explorers. Stoddart (1991) replied that his account included only men because women had not done good science (they had not been part of scientific expeditions due to their exclusion from professional societies) and pointed out that he had also excluded the travel accounts of men who had not produced scientific observations of the world in their explorations. He thus argued that his account was not biased by gender, but by the kind of knowledge that he sought to put at the heart of the discipline. However, Domosh countered Stoddart by insisting that his account did indeed perpetuate a partial, masculinist account of the disciple by virtue of his privileging of the scientific gaze. As a result of their exclusion from formal education and institutions of higher learning, women could not travel as part of scientific expeditions, and nor had they generally had extensive education in science. The knowledge that they would collect from their journeys would inevitably be different. However she goes further to argue that the kind of knowledge produced by women was qualitative, interpretative and embodied, the characteristics attributed to femininity, dismissed by the female travellers’ contemporaries but increasingly valued in geography in the late twentieth century, influenced by the cultural turn. By privileging scientific accounts, Domosh argued that Stoddart did not simply deny other forms of knowledge but other knowers, in this case women, and so in retelling the discipline’s history in such an uncritical way, reinforces the naturalisation of the masculine norm. Rose (1993:4) agrees that the very nature of geographical knowledge is characterised

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by practices that reinforce the domination of men and masculinist ways of knowing: Geography is masculinist … Masculinist work claims to be exhaustive and it therefore thinks that no-one else can add to its knowledge … Masculinism can be seen at work not only in the choice of topics made by geographers, not only in their conceptual apparatus, not only in their epistemological claim to exhaustive knowledge, but also in seminars, in conferences, in common rooms, in job interviews.

Rose argues that the implication of this is that the knowledge produced by geographers is also masculinist, not only those from the explorer forefathers of the discipline but also more contemporary research. She has been critical of the gaze that geographers cast over the landscape. Drawing on Mulvey’s (1989) characterisation of ‘the gaze’ as an element of the ‘uneasy pleasures of power’, she suggests that geographers’ viewing of the landscape casts it as feminine giving the viewer pleasure in his [sic] seeing, knowing and unveiling of its secrets. Rose (1993) warns of the objectifying and voyeuristic position adopted by the expert cultural geographer decoding the landscape. In a patriarchal system, the concept of the gaze represents the binary between the active male surveyor and the passive female who is being surveyed. Feminist theorists argue that dominant constructions of femininity are established through the gaze (Mulvey 1989), thus making it a contradictory position for female geographers to adopt. Given this focus on the gendering of dominant knowledge in the discipline, some effort has been focused on whether there is a feminist method. Some second-wave feminists argued that there is a distinct ‘women’s way of knowing’. Challenging the valorisation of rational and subjective forms of knowledge that had come to dominate academic study, they argued that women value connection rather than separation, and emotion and empathy rather than distanced objective analysis. Many have taken inspiration from Haraway’s (1988) notion of

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‘situated knowledges’ which critiques any claim for objective or total knowledge as performing a ‘God trick’ of at once being everywhere and nowhere. She argues that all knowledge – Western science included – is situated in the historical and spatial context of its conception. From this perspective, feminist methods necessarily move from quantitative approaches focusing on analysis, modelling and prediction to qualitative approaches based around understanding and communication. Certain methods are more or less conducive to developing this feminist politics, or the revealing of gender differences, but many feminists are wary of arguments that essentialise women’s knowledge. Some have argued that ethnographies, and other forms of ‘deep’ qualitative method often seen as being sympathetic to feminist approaches of empathy and understanding (rather than exploration, evaluation and analysis), can be intrusive (Stacey 1988). However, it has more recently been argued that quantitative methods, even GIS (perhaps the most oft quoted example of a distanced masculinist technology which reduces people to objects of computational manipulation) have the potential be used to foreground feminist concerns as the first stage in multi-method research, or can even be entwined with other methods to open up important dimensions of the spatiality of gendered life-worlds (Kwan 2002).

CONCLUSION In contemporary geography, gender has become visible and as a central element in the remaking of the landscapes around us. However, while the concept of gender has become mainstreamed, this does not mean that all of the political concerns of feminism and feminist geography have been addressed. In line with the influence of third-wave perspectives, gender is now most often regarded as one of a list of identities that must be considered when analysing geographical

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issues, rather than being a political cause to take precedence over other divisions.

NOTES 1 There are those who possess the biological characteristics of both men and women. Their existence has been explained away as ‘freaks of nature’ from this binary position rather than being allowed to challenge the logic of binary thinking.

FURTHER READING Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Domosh, M. (1991) ‘Towards a feminist historiography of geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16: 95–104. Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14: 575–599. McDowell, L. and Sharp, J. (eds) (1997) Space/Gender/ Knowledge: Feminist Readings. London: Arnold. Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. Women and Geography Study Group (1984) Geography and Gender. London: RGS-IBG.

REFERENCES Alcoff, L. (1990) ‘Feminist politics and Foucault: the limits to a collaboration’ in A. Dalley and C. Scott (eds), Crises in Continental Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press. de Beauvoir, S. (1949) The Second Sex. Bordo, S. (1993) Unbearable Weight. Berkeley, LA: University of California Press. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Connell, R.W. (1995) Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deutsche, R. (1996) Evictions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Domosh, M. (1991) ‘Towards a feminist historiography of geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16: 95–104.

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Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. London: Allen Lane. Fox-Genovese, E. (1986) ‘The claims of a common culture: gender, race, class and the canon’, Salmagundi, 72: 119–132. Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14: 575–599. Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Irigaray, L. (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kwan, M-P. (2002) ‘Feminist visualization: re-visioning GIS as a method in feminist geographic research’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92: 645–661. Mascia-Lees, F., Sharp, P. and Cohen, C. (1989) ‘The postmodern turn in anthropology: cautions from a feminist perspective’, Signs, 15: 7–33. Massey, D. (1984) Spatial Divisions of Labour. London: Macmillan. Massey, D. (1993) ‘Politics and time-space’ in M. Keith and S. Pile (eds) Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 141–161. McDowell, L. (1983) ‘Towards an understanding of the gender division of urban space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1: 59–72. McDowell, L. (1997) Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. McDowell, L. (1999) ‘Gender’ in L. McDowell and J. Sharp (eds), A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography. London: Arnold, pp. 104–109. McDowell, L. and Sharp, J. (eds) (1997) Space/ Gender/Knowledge: Feminist Readings. London: Arnold. Mohanty, C.T. (1988) ‘Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’, Feminist Review, 30: 61–88. Mohanty, C.T. (1997) ‘Feminist encounters: locating the politics of experience’ in L. McDowell and J. Sharp (eds) Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings. London: Arnold, pp. 82–97.

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Morgan, R. (1984) Sisterhood is Global: the International Women’s Movement Anthology. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Mulvey, L. (1989) Visual Pleasure and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan. Pain, R. (1991) ‘Space, sexual violence and social control: integrating geographical and feminist analyses of women’s fear of crime’, Progress in Human Geography, 15: 415–431. Rowbotham, S. (1977) Hidden from History. London: Pluto. Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. Rubin, G. (1975) ‘The traffic in women: notes on the “political economy” of sex’ in R. Reiter (ed.) Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 157–210. Sharp, J. (1999) ‘Subject/subjectivity’ in L. McDowell and J. Sharp (eds) A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography. London: Arnold, pp. 267–269. Shiva, V. (1989) Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books. Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in L. Grossberg and C. Nelson, (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: Routledge. Stacey, J. (1988) ‘Can there be a feminist ethnography?’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 11: 21–27. Stoddart, D. (1986) On Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. Stoddart, D. (1991) ‘Do we need a feminist historiography of geography – and if we do, what should it be like?’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16: 484–487. Tivers, J. (1978) ‘How the other half lives: the geographical study of women’, Area. Valentine, G. (1989) ‘The geography of women’s fear’, Area, 21: 385–390. Valentine, G. (1993) ‘(Hetero)sexing space: lesbian perceptions and experiences of everyday spaces’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 11: 395–413. Wolf, N. (1991) The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. New York: Doubleday. Women and Geography Study Group (1984) Geography and Gender. London: RGS-IBG.

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33 The Idea of Evolution in Geographical Thought Neil Roberts

INTRODUCTION The idea of evolution has played a formative role in geography as an intellectual project since the mid-nineteenth century, as it has in disciplines across a full spectrum from the humanities to the natural sciences (Ruse and Travis 2009). In geography, the concept has been especially important in relation the evolution of landscapes through both natural and human agencies. The former would encompass long-term (i.e. Phanerozoic) landform evolution, including W.M. Davis’ cycle of erosion theory, while the latter includes the evolution of cultural landscapes over Holocene to historic timescales. Evolution has provided one of the principal frameworks for incorporating time into geographical change. But what do we mean by ‘evolution’? The concept itself has multiple meanings, and those meanings have evolved over the last two centuries (Bowler 1989). Contrary to popular opinion, evolutionary speculation did not begin with Charles Darwin but had been widespread during the century from

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1750 to 1850 (Mayr 1976). In the nineteenth century, the word evolution meant something significantly different from what it does today, and related to pre-ordained growth rather than to open-ended, branching development. This difference is encapsulated in the ideas of Jean Baptiste Lamarck, the ‘founder of the doctrine of evolution’ according the plaque on his statue in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. He came to accept the then radical idea that evolutionary change had occurred within species, but he believed that this could have been accomplished by individual organisms in their own lifetimes. The idea of a giraffe stretching its neck to reach leaves on higher branches has been used to illustrate Lamarck’s argument that acquired characteristics – such as a longer neck – could be inherited by offspring. By contrast, half a century later, Charles Darwin argued that evolutionary change was only possible between, and not within, generations; hence, selective breeding was required to develop new strains of domestic crops and livestock. For this reason Darwin was reluctant to employ the term evolution, which was absent

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from the first (1859) edition of On the Origin of Species. Evolution came to take on its modern usage during the 1930s, following the rediscovery of Mendel’s pioneering studies of plants genetics – in what is sometimes termed the neo-Darwinian synthesis. However, even today, it is necessary to distinguish between evolution in its narrow sense from the ways it is used more broadly in discourse beyond the biosciences. Evolution, sensu stricto, is the biological process leading to the formation of new varieties, species and higher taxonomic orders of plants, fungi and animals. For complex, non-compound organisms like fish or giraffes, evolutionary processes not only have a direction of change, but they also lead to divergence between different taxa. Furthermore, once formed, new species cannot recombine with other, older-established ones; the horse and donkey may be sufficiently close in evolutionary history to breed, but their mule offspring are infertile. It is this non-reversible divergence that gives the tree of life its branching form. In contrast to this narrow meaning, evolution (sensu latu) has simply come to mean directional change over time. The evolution of culture, landscape or climate does not require the process of change to be necessarily divergent in character, nor is the possibility of reconvergence excluded. IndoEuropean and non-Indo-European languages, for example, have ‘evolved’ from separate roots, but words can be exchanged between them at a later time, such as from French ‘coiffure’ to Turkish ‘kuaför’. Similarly Richard Dawkins’ idea of ‘memes’ – or replicating cultural traits – allows not only for the development of new traits but also for them to be subsequently transferred between domains. Cultural traits can therefore have both Darwinian and Lamarckian characteristics. For geography, biological evolution (sensu stricto) has had some limited usage in biogeography, but in general, the term evolution has been more often employed using one of its multiple wider and looser meanings.

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DARWIN, DAVIS AND THE EVOLUTION OF LANDFORMS W.M. Davis’ model of long-term landform evolution had a major impact upon the development of physical geography, specifically Anglo-American geomorphology, from the 1880s to the 1950s (Chorley et al. 1973; Orme, this volume). Davis fused uniformitarian ideas about present-day geomorphic processes operating only over long periods of geological time with principles of organic evolution to provide the first integrated theory of landform genesis and change. His scheme involved a cycle of erosion following upon initial uplift of a land surface, with three subsequent stages: 1 a youthful stage of high relative relief, with landscape dissection by active fluvial and slope processes; 2 a mature stage of rolling valleys and interfluves created by down- or back-wearing of slopes; 3 a long-lived final stage of restricted geomorphic activity, played out on a plain (peneplain) of low relief; he termed this old age.

Because, with hindsight, we associate evolution with Darwin, it is easy to assume that all late nineteenth century evolutionary ideas must have been Darwinian in character, and thus to believe that Davis’ cycle of erosion was inspired by Darwin’s revelatory argument that had been published a few decades earlier. In fact, it is far from clear that this was the case. It is more likely that Davis was influenced by a different, Lamarckian conception of evolution which continued to be widely held even after the publication of the Origin of Species (Livingstone 1992). Davis employed the concept of evolution in the late nineteenth century sense that ‘implied an inevitable, continuous and irreversible process of change producing an orderly sequence of transformations, wherein earlier forms could be considered as stages in a sequence leading to later forms’ (Chorley et al. 1973: 193). This accorded closely with the Victorian zeitgeist about progress, both

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physical and moral. The terms that Davis adopted for his landscape stages pertain to the cycle of life in the same way as Lamarck used them. He made this explicit in his first full exposition of cycle of erosion (or geographical cycle) in 1899, comparing the development of landforms from young mountain block through maturely carved valleys to old peneplain, to the life history of an insect from of larva to pupa to imago, or that of an oak tree from acorn to fallen old trunk. ‘The sequence of land-forms’, wrote Davis (1899), ‘is as systematic as the sequence of changes found in the development of organic forms’. Davis’ non-Darwinian legacy should not be so surprising given his intellectual roots at Harvard (1866–70) as a student of neo-Lamarckian Nathaniel Shaler (Livingstone 1992; Inkpen and Collier 2007) and under the wider influence of Louis Agassiz. Best known as an advocate of the ice age theory, Agassiz was professor at Harvard from 1847 to his death in 1873, but vehemently opposed Darwin’s arguments for the evolution of species. Davis’ model was thus pre-ordained and predictable, whereas Darwinian evolution was open-ended and involved random change. The Davisian model was also clearly cyclical in character, and as such, has parallels with earlier, very different accounts of earth history such as Joseph Adhémar’s (1842) Revolutions of the Sea and even Thomas Burnet’s (1691) Sacred History of the Earth. In that sense, Davis’ ideas may be more closely linked to time’s cycle than to time’s arrow (c.f. Gould 1987; Orme this volume). In short, Darwin’s influence on Davis was by no means as great as has often been assumed, and his cycle of erosion was based on essentially pre-Darwinian conceptions of evolution. Darwin did influence Davis in one specific domain, however; namely in their closely related theories for the evolution of coral reef systems. Traversing the Pacific westwards from the Galapagos islands aboard the Beagle in 1835, Darwin was puzzled at ‘those most curious rings of coral … it seems wonderful

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that these (lagoon islands) are not overwhelmed by the all-powerful and nevertiring waves of the Pacific Sea’ (Darwin 1845). Comparison of these coral lagoon islands with the reefs that fringe volcanic islands such Tahiti suggested a developmental sequence to Darwin, in which the latter evolve to become the former. As the volcano subsides and erodes beneath the waves, the actively growing coral maintains itself at, or close to, the sea surface; in this way, the hollow lagoon comes to occupy the space of the sunken central volcano. This theory for long-term coral reef evolution chimed perfectly with Davis’ stage model for landforms from youth (fringing reef around a young volcano) through maturity (barrier reef now detached from an eroded central volcanic island) to old age (free-standing coral atolls); ‘everything speaks for Darwin’s theory of subsidence’ wrote Davis in 1914 (quoted in Chorley et al. 1973: 404). W.M. Davis’ cycle of erosion theory for landform evolution went into decline during the 1950s and 1960s, when geomorphology’s focus shifted to the measurement of contemporary processes and hence to timescales shorter than those over which landscapes evolve (Gregory 2000; Kennedy 2006; Orme this volume). None the less, since the 1990s there has been renewed interest in long-term landform evolution, albeit using an essentially non-Davisian frame of reference. This has been driven, on the one hand, by improved tools for establishing the age of landforms and land surfaces, and, on the other, by a better understanding of the tectonic and climatic drivers that determine landform genesis and development. Davis’ model begins with orogenesis, whose nature and causes were mysterious prior to the plate tectonics revolution in geology during the 1960s. We now know that most mountain building has occurred as a result of plate collision and that it takes place over at least some millions of years (Ma); for example, during the last 55 Ma in the case of the Himalayas. One consequence of this is that Davis’ ‘youthful’ stage of rapid downcutting

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most often would have been coincident with, rather than being subsequent to, initial mountain uplift. Landscape denudation during this stage is determined not only by exogamous geomorphic processes, such as weathering, but also by ongoing uplift rates caused by tectonic compression and isostatic compensation. Plate tectonics has also provided insights about long-term landform evolution in so-called ‘passive margins’, as around southern Africa, where uplift has occurred for different reasons, such as doming and other forms of epeirogenesis. Over somewhat shorter, multi-millennial timescales, the climatic fluctuations of the Quaternary ice age have played a major role in landform genesis, especially in areas that were formerly glaciated, such as Scandinavia and Canada, and in the world’s coastal zones, most of whose landforms date to the last ~7,000 years when modern sea levels became established. Critical to understanding both tectonics and climate as drivers of landscape evolution has been absolute dating of landforms. Although techniques such as radiocarbon dating became available from the 1950s, they are restricted in their use to depositional landforms, such as alluvial river terraces, and hence speak only indirectly about the history of eroded landscapes. In the 1930s Wooldridge and Linton had been largely frustrated in their attempts to develop a robust ‘denudation chronology’ for the evolution of drainage systems in regions such as the Weald of southeast England. Since the 1990s, new techniques of cosmogenic isotope dating have begun to reveal the ages at which land surfaces first became exposed to cosmic rays (Cockburn and Summerfield 2004). In this way, it is has become possible to answer directly the question ‘How old is the land?’ in a way that was not possible for Wooldridge and Linton. The geomorphic evolution of erosional landscapes such as the Colorado plateau and Grand Canyon has never lost its fascination, and now it is becoming possible to place these events within an increasingly secure time frame.

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BIOGEOGRAPHY, CLIMATE AND EVOLUTION In plant geography, Clements occupied a place that parallels Davis’ role in geomorphology, and an historical perspective also came to have a prominent position in late nineteenth century pedology (Stoddart 1966). Biogeography thus used concepts, such as succession to climax, which employed the life cycle as an analogy for directional change over longer timescales in the same way as Davis’ cycle of erosion. In fact, Cowles seized on the similarity between Davisian geomorphology and Clementsian ecology to propose a ‘physiographical ecology’ (Stoddart 1966). Later work in ecology has cast doubt on whether stable climatic climax states (c.f. old age) really exist. Many ecosystems, especially in the tropics and subtropics, are adapted to disturbance regimes associated with megaherbivores (e.g. African savannas), periodic wildfires (e.g. Mediterranean-type vegetation) or other agencies, and never reach their theoretical climax end-state. So here too, succession as a concept owes more to Lamarck than it does to Darwin. David Stoddart has argued that Darwin’s potentially more important insights into the role of random variation in populations were largely ignored in geography, at least until the 1960s. On the other hand, if geographers studies of the biosphere have drawn less from the Darwinian evolutionary synthesis than they might have done, there is no doubt that Darwin drew on species biogeography as a central piece of the jigsaw in the single ‘long argument’ that formed On the Origin of Species. In the Origin, geographical distribution is the subject of not just one, but two chapters. They include topics such as barriers to dispersal and how these may have been altered by changes to climate or the level of the land, and the colonisation by organisms of oceanic islands and their subsequent modification. The first of these drew especially on Darwin’s experience on the mainland of southern South America, where he spent

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three years; the second drew most obviously on his five-week visit to the Galapagos, as well as his experiences on Capo Verde, the Falkland islands, New Zealand, Tahiti, Keeling Island and Mauritius. Southernmost South America is a tectonically active region, and Darwin both felt and saw the effects of a major earthquake at first hand, in central Chile, in February 1835. The Andes have been rapidly uplifted during Plio-Quaternary times (last 5.4 Ma) creating a barrier between previously contiguous plant and animal populations, and creating contrasting climatic conditions on the western and eastern sides of the Andean cordillera. Darwin saw clear evidence of land uplift from geologically recent marine sediments now exposed onshore. On his visit to the Falklands he reported only few endemic species (notably the Falkland fox, Dusicyon australis, since extinct – as Darwin predicted; and the flightless Falkland steamerduck, Tachyeres brachypterus). It is likely that the Falklands were joined to the mainland at times of low Pleistocene sea levels, or at least were much closer, and the islands themselves provided a very harsh environment at times of glacial climate. By contrast, on the Galapagos Darwin encountered a wide diversity of exotic creatures, apparently related to species found on the South American mainland, but with distinctively different characteristics and behaviour. Among them were the giant land tortoises, aquatic iguanas, mockingbirds and finches, but no endemic mammals. The Galapagos are geologically young volcanic islands, similar in age to recent Andean orogenesis (last 5–8 Ma), and they were never connected to the South American mainland. All colonising organisms therefore had to make a long sea crossing in order to reach the islands, and most were then effectively cut off. The Galapagos and other isolated oceanic islands represented natural laboratories in which evolutionary changes had taken place within isolated populations, and often under specific environmental pressures. For Darwin – and for Alfred Russell Wallace working in the archipelagos of the

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East Indies – they highlighted the importance of geographical factors (barriers, isolation, etc.) in creating the circumstances in which new species could evolve. The idea of using islands as ‘living laboratories’ has had an important role in geographical ecology and biogeography since Darwin, notably via MacArthur and Wilson’s ‘island biogeography’ hypothesis for predicting species richness on oceanic islands. These ideas have, in turn, been applied to virtual islands, such as forest patches set within a landscape of grassland or for isolated mountain top habitats. They have subsequently been transposed to the realm of ecological management via the designation of minimum size and isolation thresholds for habitat conservation and protection areas (e.g. natural parks as ‘islands’ within agricultural landscapes). Notwithstanding the insights provided, a striking feature of the island biogeography model is its ahistorical character; in contrast to Darwin, island ecosystems are assumed to be in a state of dynamic equilibrium rather than actively changing. In reality, as Darwin was well aware, the constantly varying nature of climate and environment has created relict and disjunct species populations which may not necessarily have reached an equilibrium distribution. The global climate is sometimes also described as having ‘evolved’, but this only implies directional change over extremely long geological timescales, notably from the oxygen-free atmosphere of the early preCambrian period to the modern nitrogen– oxygen dominated atmosphere, or – more controversially – from its pre-disturbance Holocene state to one whose carbon balance has been modified by anthropogenic activity in recent centuries. In fact, over Quaternary timescales, climatic change has been strongly cyclical in character rather than directional, with glacial–interglacial cycles linked to astronomical pace-making. The recognition that climate has been constantly changing over multiple timescales is none the less surprisingly recent; and only since about

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1970 has meteorology come to embrace fully the idea of climate change, in large part due to the efforts of British climatologist and geographer, Hubert H. Lamb (1913–1997).

CULTURAL LANDSCAPE EVOLUTION Landscape has been a concept central to the development of geography as an academic discipline (Wylie, this volume). This has included the analysis of landscapes of meaning and power, and synchronic study of regional landscapes at specific time periods. It has also included diachronic analysis of how landscapes have evolved through time, notably from past to present, and how they have been transformed by human actions (Turner et al. 1990). The historical evolution of cultural (i.e. humanly modified) landscapes was central to the work of North American Carl Sauer from the 1920s to the 1950s. In Britain, the local historian W.G. Hoskins was similarly influential, notably via his book The Making of the English Landscape (1954), which informed much British historical geography during the midtwentieth century. The cultural landscape could be read backwards from the present day, with later periods of occupation being superimposed upon earlier ones to create palimpsest landscapes deriving from different time periods. In this way, Mediaeval village forms or field systems are still visible in rural European landscapes despite later additions, while Hispanic colonial place names still predominate across the American southwest. This piecing together of the past resembles the way that, prior to the advent of genetics, evolutionary taxonomies were reconstructed from the morphological homologies between different but apparently related organisms. Landscape reworking by later cultures normally leads to progressive ‘information loss’ through time, as features from earlier periods are reused, buried or destroyed, and so become more or more fragmentary. Because of this, and because complementary

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documentary sources also shrink back with time, a main focus for studies of cultural landscape evolution was initially on the historical period, normally represented by the last millennium or less. Hoskins (1954), for example, began his book with a thousandyear history that could be ‘read’ via the view from his study window at Steeple Barton in Oxfordshire. On the other hand, it is clear that many landscapes had already been substantially transformed by human actions prior to Mediaeval or colonial times. For example, the Domesday Book survey records that only 15 per cent of England was still wooded in AD 1086, and the antiquity of human landscape conversion was substantially longer than this in regions such as China and MesoAmerica. In order to accommodate this greater time depth, studies of landscape evolution have become increasingly multi-disciplinary in character, involving archaeologists and palaeoecologists working alongside historical geographers and landscape historians. Links between geographers and archaeologists on landscape reconstruction are far from new; O.G.S. Crawford pioneered this approach to landscape archaeology in the 1920s as the first archaeology officer of the British Ordnance Survey. One of the first multidisciplinary regional landscape reconstruction projects was developed in the Fenlands region of eastern England soon after this by several influential Cambridge scholars, among them prehistorian Grahame Clark, historical geographer Clifford Darby, and botanist–palynologist Harry Godwin. Other notable subsequent examples of integrated regional multi-period landscape histories include the Ystadt project in southern Sweden under Björn Berglund, studies in the Mediterranean and the New World by German–American geographer and cultural ecologist Karl Butzer, and the synthesis of Irish landscape evolution by Frank Mitchell and others. Sometimes, conflicting evidence from different data sources has given unexpected insights into landscape history. For example, in terms of visible cultural remains,

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the upland landscape of Dartmoor in southwest England shows evidence of two main periods of former usage, namely the Bronze Age, for which numerous field boundaries (reaves) and enclosures imply a society of pastoralists and livestock-keeping, and the Mediaeval period, when there was tin streaming and small-scale farming. In between these times, the landscape was assumed to have been largely abandoned, partly due to the replacement of mid-Holocene open woodland by late Holocene peat and moorland. However, pollen analysis – which does not suffer from the problem of information loss back in time – has shown that Dartmoor’s landscape continued to be used during Iron Age and Roman times, even though archaeological evidence is lacking. Presumably, people continued to use Dartmoor’s resources (e.g. grazing) even if they were no longer living there. Historical perspectives had a prominent place in mid-twentieth century geography in Britain, via historical geography, on the one hand, and a geomorphology dominated by denudation chronology, on the other. However, the timescales for landscape change were very different for the human and physical geographers involved. Geomorphological landscapes had evolved over tens of thousands to millions of years, to create the natural canvas on which human activities only then began to play out in subsequent centuries. There was consequently little real integration between human and physical perspectives, and moreover this approach tended to encourage deterministic explanations for the relationship between the physical environment and subsequent human activity, since the former preceded the latter in their origins. By contrast, regional landscape history projects have attempted – and sometimes achieved – a genuine integration of data between the natural sciences and humanities. A key to this synthesis has been the fact that different contributing disciplines share a common timescale of investigation, normally the Holocene. They benefit from an engagement not only with geomorphological

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changes in the landscape such as soil erosion and alluviation, but also with changes to vegetation and land cover (notably via pollen analysis), aquatic systems (via palaeolimnology and palaeohydrology), and climate. This permits a more holistic, ecosystem-based reconstruction of environmental change (Birks et al. 1988). It has also incorporated two relationships between nature and culture, involving not only environmental influences over human cultural evolution (c.f. Diamond 1997), but also human impacts on the environment, for example, via land cover change (e.g. Simmons 2008). Physical geographers have played a prominent part in the growth of Holocene research, as typified by the success of The Holocene journal (Arnold, later Sage, established in 1991), and by the incorporation of human dimensions within the IGBP PAGES (Past Global Changes) programme under Frank Oldfield’s directorship (1996–2001). Ironically, this has coincided with a decline in ‘traditional’ historical geography, and the rise of a cultural human geography that is less interested in the empirical reconstruction of past landscapes. The progressive transformation of the earth’s surface to create space for human habitation and agriculture has been one of the most powerful ideas concerning our relationship with the natural world. In turn, this idea is predicated on the assumption that there was at some point in the past a time when a natural, undisturbed world existed. The concept of the primitive landscape – or, as Gradmann described it, ‘urlandschaft’ – was particularly influential in the development of late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century historical geography in Europe. How far back we need to go back in time to find the urlandschaft varies over the earth’s surface, but in many regions the process of landscape transformation has been a long one spanning many millennia. In northwest Europe palynologists have reconstructed a dense primaeval forest cover that progressively gave way to an increasingly open landscape during the course of the Holocene (Roberts 1998). Even if pollen curves sometimes indicate reversals

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in this process, the overall trend was one that moved away from wildwood and towards culturally created landscapes. According to this model, a suitable candidate for a pristine pre-disturbance nature might appear to be during the Mesolithic period of advanced hunter-foragers during the early to mid Holocene. However, even supposedly ‘pre-disturbance’ landscapes were rarely devoid of people. George Perkins Marsh distinguished ‘first nature’ (truly pristine without people), from ‘second nature’ where some human imprint was manifest, even if slight. For the most part such human populations would have been hunters and gatherers, fishers, peasant farmers or nomadic pastoralists. It is generally believed that nature’s impact upon these people was far greater than the other way around, with significant human impacts upon the natural world restricted to more complex agrarian or industrial societies. However, early human populations were well capable of altering ‘pristine’ nature. For example, the arrival of the first Polynesians less than a thousand years ago on the previously uninhabited islands of New Zealand, led to the extinction of the giant flightless Moa bird and other endemic species, and opened up large areas of previously forested landscapes notably by burning. Cultural landscape evolution therefore followed very different trajectories and occurred at a different pace across the globe during the Holocene. For instance, of the world’s five Mediterranean-type regions, four (California, Chile, southern Australia, South Africa) have experienced major human modification only during the era of European colonization (i.e. post AD 1500), but the fifth – the Mediterranean basin itself – has a complex record of cultural–environmental relations stretching back to early Holocene times. None the less, at a global scale, the overall direction of landscape evolution over the last ten millennia is clear and significant, as the Ecumene has expanded at the expense of wilderness.

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SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND RACE Although it is in landscape studies that evolutionary ideas have been incorporated most explicitly, they are not the only strand of geography to have done so. Among others to have used evolution as an underpinning concept have been ‘social Darwinism’ and the related field of racial geography. Both of these shaped the development of geography as an academic discipline in its early decades, but subsequently became less acceptable and were quietly discarded by the mid-twentieth century (Livingstone, this volume). To some extent, these traditions therefore represent part of the forgotten history of the discipline. The use of biological analogy to explain social phenomena was a recurrent feature of the nineteenth century, even preceding the publication of On The Origin of Species, for example in the writings of Herbert Spencer (e.g. Social Statics 1851). Victorian social improvement and progress were infused with a strong dose of NeoLamarckism, while Darwinian natural selection (Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest’) provided a natural parallel with the unfettered operation of the capitalist free-market economic system. The establishment of geography as a discipline separate from geology or anthropology in Germany, Britain, France, the United States and elsewhere during the late nineteenth century was justified on academic grounds in terms of the need to fill the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities. Halford Mackinder saw ‘the duty of the geographer (being) to build one bridge over (this) abyss’. But how were nature and culture to be connected? One clear potential connection came through the role that geographic variations in climate and environment played in explaining differences in human culture, including the distribution of races and ‘race temperament’. In these accounts, the evolution of the human race – and of racial variations within it – could be explained in similar ways to those employed by Darwin for the evolution of non-human organisms, that is,

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by adaptation to the prevailing natural environment. These ideas were developed most explicitly by geographers such Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington, but permeated most geographical thinking during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Peet 1985; Livingstone this volume). They also helped to provide ‘scientific’ legitimation for categorising different races within a developmental hierarchy, which in turn underpinned European colonial rule over regions of the humid tropics whose peoples were argued to be at a ‘lower’ stage of development, and European settlement policies in climatically more temperate regions such as Australia and the White Highlands of East Africa. The use of evolutionary ideas to justify racial policies is especially poignant because, as Adrian Desmond and James Moore have argued (2009), Charles Darwin was partly prompted to develop his theory of evolution by the desire to show that all races were united by descent and that slavery had no moral or scientific basis. In this, he stands in marked contrast to Agassiz, who believed that different human races were distinct species, an opinion not surprisingly welcomed by slave owners. Darwin’s work On The Origin of Species was therefore always, if implicitly, also about the origin of human races. The link between climate and the evolution of human races was developed most fully by British–Australian geographer Griffith Taylor (1880–1963) during the interwar period (Taylor 1937, Winlow 2009). He believed – correctly as it has transpired – that all living humans originated from a single source population who subsequently migrated to colonise the rest of the habitable planet. Ostensibly based on the so-called ‘cephalic index’ of skull shape, he and others argued that the founder human population derived from the Mongoloid peoples of central Asia, with the final stages of migration and the most ‘child-like’ stage of evolutionary development occurring in the Negroid races of sub-Saharan Africa and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and Papua-New Guinea. Subsequent anthropological and genetic

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studies have shown Griffith Taylor to have been completely wrong in his placement of the cradle of human origins. All anatomically modern humans are in fact African in origin (as Darwin had suspected), and we appear to have made a single successful exit out of the African continent around 70,000–100,000 years ago, initially into Asia whence we migrated into Australia, Europe and – finally, of the major continents – the Americas, by the end of the Pleistocene (Oppenheimer 2003). It is also now widely accepted that climatic changes during the last 5 Ma, both global and regional, did play a key role in stimulating and directing the course of human evolution and spread, for example, by creating land bridges at times of glacial low sea levels. Thus, as with long-term landform evolution, the relationship between climate and human evolutionary history has now been recast in ways very different from those proposed by geographers a century ago.

CONCLUSION Evolutionary ideas played a seminal part in shaping geography as a discipline between ~1870 and ~1940, in physical geography (e.g. via the Davisian model of landform development), in human geography (e.g. via Sauer’s Cultural Landscape) and in the interface between the two (e.g. via climatic determinism). Those ideas drew as much on Lamarckian as on Darwinian conceptions of evolution, in which the life cycle and progressive development were underpinning frameworks. This may partly explain geographers’ apparent hesitation to recognise their Darwinian legacy (Castree 2009). We have effectively employed evolution as shorthand label to imply directional change through time, although the timescales of change varied greatly between millions of years for Davisian geomorphology to centuries or less for ecological succession. After ~1960, evolutionary models generally fell out of favour as geography became increasingly ahistorical in outlook, focussing

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on spatial variations and contemporary processes rather than on long-term temporal change. Nonetheless, the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries have seen a ‘re-invention’ of several research themes with strong evolutionary perspectives, primarily in physical geography and linked, above all, to the rise of interest in global environmental change. This has included topics such as Quaternary climate variations and hominin evolution, the creation of cultural landscapes during the Holocene, the search for pre-disturbance baseline states as environmental restoration targets, and the potential implications of past land-cover change for global carbon cycling. In other cases, such as potential impacts of climate change on human societies, there has at times been an unwitting tendency to repeat the same neo-determinist lines of argument that characterised geography in its early years as an academic discipline (e.g. DeMenocal 2001), notwithstanding the construction of much more nuanced narratives linking climate and culture by some anthropologists (e.g. McIntosh et al. 2000; Rosen 2007). This alone would seem to be a strong enough argument for geographers to ‘mind the gap’ between the natural sciences and the humanities, rather than simply leaving it to others to attempt to construct the bridge.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I am grateful to Mike Summerfield for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

REFERENCES Adhémar, J.A. (1842) Révolutions de la mer. Paris, published privately by author. Birks, H.H., Birks, H.J.B., Koland, P.E. and Nioe, D. (eds) (1988) The Cultural Landscape: Past, Present and Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowler, P.B. (1989) Evolution. The History of an Idea, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Burnet, T. (1691) Sacred History of the Earth. London: R Norton. Castree, N. (2009) ‘Charles Darwin and the geographers’, Environment and Planning A, 41: 2293–2298. Chorley, R.J., Beckinsale,R.P. and Dunn, A.J. (1973) The History of the Study of Landforms. Vol. II. The Life and Work of William Morris Davis. London: Methuen. Cockburn, H.A.P. and Summerfield, M.A. (2004) ‘Geomorphological applications of cosmogenic isotope analysis’, Progress in Physical Geography, 28: 1–42. Darwin, C. (1845) Journal of Researches into the Natural History and geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of the Beagle Round the World, Under the Command of Captain Fitz Roy, RN. 2nd ed. Darwin, C. (1859) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1st ed. London: Murray. Davis, W.M. (1899) ‘The geographical cycle’, Geographical Journal, 14: 481–504. DeMenocal, P.B. (2001) ‘Cultural responses to climate changes during the Late Holocene’, Science, 292: 667–673. Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (2009) Darwin’s Sacred Cause. Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins. London: Allen Lane. Diamond, J. (1997) Guns, Germs and Steel. A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 years. London: Jonathan Cape. Gould, S.J. (1987) Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. Harvard University Press. Gregory, K.J. (2000) The Changing Nature of Physical Geography. London: Arnold. Hoskins, W. (1954) The Making of the English Landscape. London: Penguin. Inkpen, R.J. and Collier, P.C. (2007) ‘Neo-Lamarckianism and Davisian cycle of erosion’, Geomorphologie: relief, processus, environnement, 2: 113–124. Kennedy, B.A. (2006) Inventing the Earth: Ideas on Landscape Development Since 1740. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Livingstone, D.N. (1992) The Geographical Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. McIntosh, R.J., Tainter, J.A. and McIntosh, S.K. (eds) (2000) The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action. New York: Columbia University Press. Mayr, E. (1976) Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oppenheimer, S. (2003) Out of Eden: the Peopling of the World. London: Constable.

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Peet, R. (1985) ‘The social origins of environmental determinism’, Annals, Association of American Geographers, 75: 309–333. Roberts, N. (1998) The Holocene. An Environmental History, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Rosen, A.M. (2007) Civilizing Climate. Social Responses to Climate Change in the Ancient Near East. Lanham: Altamira Press. Ruse, M. and Travis, J. (eds) (2009) Evolution. The First Four Billion Years. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Simmons, I.G. (2008) Global Environmental History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Spencer, H. (1851) Social Statics, or The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed. London: John Chapman.

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Stoddart, D.R. (1966) ‘Darwin’s impact on Geography’, Annals Association of American Geographers 56: 683–698. (Reproduced as chapter 8 of his On Geography, 1986, Oxford: Blackwell). Taylor, T.G. (1937) Environment, Race, and Migration. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Turner, B.L.II., W.C. Clark, R.W. Kates, J.F. Richards, J.T. Mathews and W.B. Meyer (eds) (1990) The Earth as Transformed by Human Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winlow, H. (2009) ‘Mapping the contours of race: Griffith Taylor’s zones and strata theory’, Geographical Research, 47: 390–407.

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34 Ecosystem George P. Malanson

INTRODUCTION The word ‘ecosystem’ was coined in the 1930s to clarify meaning in studies of organisms and their environment that focused on explaining why species are where they are (but without spatial interaction), including how they change through time in succession. Since then, the word has been appropriated and diffused in broader discourses, but those of ecology and geography will be discussed here. Ecologists, influenced by general systems theory, moved ecosystem into systems ecology, which specifically quantified fluxes of energy and matter and studied them using computer simulations. This usage was dominant in ecology but divided practitioners of systems ecology from those who used traditional approaches or the newer more mathematical approach grounded in population and evolutionary ecology. Geographers, similarly motivated, developed systems ideas separately and primarily in geomorphology and climatology, and with sharp debates. While early authors thought that systems, and specifically ecosystems, could unite physical and human geographers, the latter never adopted this approach. The engineering emphasis and the counterintuitive focus on closed systems closed off this

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research direction. Although the research concerns of most biogeographers in geography are squarely in the area for which the term was coined, they too never developed ecosystem in terms of systems analysis as a research approach. Instead they followed the lead of biogeographers in biology who never embraced system ecology either, focusing instead on spatial relations of species from a demographic perspective. Recent developments in ecology that reject systems ecology on the surface but maintain a systems dynamical theme are being adopted by biogeographers in geography as a way to link their interests in succession with earth surface processes. For the future, while the development of sustainability as a research theme in geography is tied to ‘integrated assessment’ in studies of global change, which uses a systems basis in climate models and include ecosystems at the earth’s surface, the ecology is being done by others, not geographers. The focus of biogeographers in geography will remain on the spatial patterns of species and biodiversity, but these two themes have potential to be integrated in the newer dynamical systems approach. Whether systems, in any usage, become a theme in geography will depend on how the discipline relates to academia writ large.

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Ecosystem. What’s not to like? As a term in geography it has engendered no controversy. More pointedly, it has engendered almost no interest and relatively little use, despite its broader appeal. In this discussion I will focus on the word ‘ecosystem’, on the word ‘system’, and on the concepts they represent. The latter is much used in geography, but why not ecosystem itself?

ECOLOGICAL ROOTS The word ecosystem was first used in print by the British botanist A.G. Tansley (1935) (as a historical footnote, Willis (1997) reported that a young colleague of Tansley, A.R. Clapham, claimed decades later to have coined ecosystem in a discussion with Tansley some time before 1935). Tansley was then engaged in a debate about terminology in ecology. Much of ecology at the time was focused on organisms in the context of their environment, with explanation of natural history or biogeography centered on physiology as adaptation. Plant succession, the temporal changes in the species membership and abundance in the community at a place (whether orderly or predictable is debated now but less-so then), was seen as a process that revealed this explanation and autogenic succession (where the changes were driven by changes in the environment created by the plants) was most interesting [the initial paper in the AAG Annals was on this theme; Cowles (1911)]. The focus of the debate was whether or not vegetation, the group of plants in a place, functioned as, or for elucidation could be called, an organism that developed in the course of succession. Clements (1916) had proposed this organismal view of succession and of nature in general. Tansley (1935), on the surface addressing a fairly extreme statement of the organismal view by Phillips (e.g. Phillips 1934) as a straw man, took exception to the specificity and not synonymy of organism. Thus he found that vegetation was to some

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degree organismal some of the time and so preferred ‘quasi-organism’. It was almost in passing that the term ecosystem was proposed to describe vegetation and its connection to the inorganic. Tansley introduced ecosystem as follows: The Ecosystem I have already given my reasons for rejecting the terms ‘complex organism’ and ‘biotic community.’ Clements’ earlier term ‘biome’ for the whole complex of organisms inhabiting a given region is unobjectionable and for some purposes convenient. But the more fundamental conception is, at it seems to me, the whole system (in the sense of physics), including not only the organism-complex, but also the whole complex of physical factors forming what we call the environment of the biome – the habitat factors in the widest sense. Though the organisms may claim our primary interest, when we are trying to think fundamentally we cannot separate them from their special environment, with which they form one physical system. It is the systems so formed which, from the point of view of the ecologist, are the basic units of nature on the face of the earth. Our natural human prejudices force us to consider the organisms (in the sense of the biologist) as the most important parts of these systems, but certainly the inorganic ‘factors’ are also parts – there could be no systems without them, and there is constant interchange of the most various kinds within each system, no only between the organisms but between the organic and inorganic. These ecosystems, as we may call them, are of the most various kinds and sizes. They form one category of the multitudinous physical systems of the universe, which range from the universe as a whole down to the atom. Tansley 1935 (italics original).

As a historical context of importance, ecosystem combined eco- and -system at a time when system was beginning to be part of the lexicon of the emergence of physics as the king of the sciences. Botkin (1990) noted that the turn toward systems was part of a larger adoption of a mechanistic view of nature that had moved to replace an organismic view over the preceding two centuries. Tansley (1935) did not, however, totally reject an organismic view, and one can imagine an organic system or organism as system.

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Tansley (1935) then refocused his discussion on succession, and brought dynamic equilibrium into the discussion. He expanded on this theme in his presidential address to the British Ecological Society four years later (1939) with more direct reference to the systems view in the physics and chemistry of his time. He strongly emphasized the study of succession as the key to understanding plant ecology because it revealed the nature of equilibrium, or lack thereof, in relation to autogenic and especially allogenic (particularly climate and disturbance) factors, two terms he had adapted for succession a decade earlier (Tansley 1929). In the ecosystem definition, Tansley (1935) focused on the core idea behind the word: that the organic and inorganic interact. He here anticipated the multi-scale nature of systems of interest. Tansley (1935) did not then return to differentiating autogenic and allogenic succession in equilibrium language, but came close. Ecosystem did not find expanded usage for two decades after 1935, but thereafter it found increasing usage in its most common form, as a representation for a piece of the environment that kept its rhetorical link to physics and to the interaction of the organic and inorganic, biotic and abiotic, but without necessarily any specifics about equilibria. Evans (1956) however, reiterated Tansley’s definition, argued that it was useful regardless of being scale-free, and further tied it to physics by invoking ecosystems as open systems and specifically discussing flows of energy and matter. This entry was shortly after von Bertalanffy’s (1950) effort to introduce general systems theory in biology to a wider audience. Ecosystem became the basis for a contest of identity and academic territory within ecology. The bifurcation was defined by Hutchinson (1948), who adopted both a biogeochemical approach and a demographic approach, and some of his students became pillars on both sides of the subsequent divide (e.g. H.T. Odum and R.H. MacArthur, respectively). E.P. Odum, in an important textbook

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(1953), laid the role of studying energy in a thermodynamics frame and how it drives biogeochemical cycles as the core of what ecosystems are about. By the early 1960s, he claimed that ‘The new ecology is thus a systems ecology’ [italics original] (Odum 1964). On one hand he was setting out to provide a basis for a large umbrella view of ecology that could claim a place in biology curricula equivalent to cell biology (including studies of biodiversity and niche as linked to systems), but to a large extent his approach led to more division in ecology between those who followed his call to focus on common exchanges of energy and matter and those for whom the existence of species and their dynamics in terms of numbers, geography and associations were important (this side of the story was also noted by Evans (1956) but ascribed secondary status as ‘[o]f almost equal importance’. This other ecology did not remain as ‘purely descriptive’ as Odum (1964) saw it, but simultaneously developed a rigorous mathematical foundation in theoretical population ecology. Hagen (1992) elaborated the ecosystem ecology side of this contest within ecology, using ‘The New Ecology’ as a chapter title, and McIntosh (1985) reviewed most of it, which I will summarize briefly. Some aspects will sound familiar to geographers. Systems ecology arose in the 1950s with the advent of computers that allowed larger and more complicated representations to be simulated (recall that inputs and outputs of energy and matter are the components commonly computed) and with impetus and funding associated with tracking nuclear fallout from bomb tests (Hagen 1992). This effort was accompanied by a large influence of engineering and operations research practice in ecology (a source of which may have been hydrology). As part of this development, and seen as the core of systems ecology, a subfield of ecoenergetics developed with a complex system of circuit representation introduced and elaborated on by H.T. Odum (1960) (reviewed by Taylor and Blum 1991; n.b. there are two P.J. Taylors cited

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herein; here, the science and society ecologist, and below the geographer with similar concerns); and although flow diagrams had been used in ecology for trophic studies for decades (Summerhayes and Elton 1923) and certainly influenced the earliest expression of systems ecology (i.e. Lindeman 1942), diagrams similar to what we now see did not

appear until the 1950s (Figure 34.1). Those who advocated systems ecology intimated that those ecologists interested in populations and evolution were not up to the challenges of using computers (although in fact their math was more rigorous and elegant). A major development in the history of ecology was the International Biosphere

Kilo-calories per year per m2

486 Import

5060

480

Insolation 1,700,000 Light absorbed by-plants 410,000

Producers 20,810

Photosynthetic biomass Light not absorbed by-plants 1,290,000

Plant respiratory biomass Gross production

4833

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H

21 1478 343 67 TC C

Net plant production 2500 Downstream export

11,977

1890 316 13

4600

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Community 10,796 respiration

To decomposers

Indebted but not assimilated Trophic level 2 P1

I2

P2

A2

R2

Figure 34.1 An early quantified diagram of energy flow through an ecosystem; from H.T. Odum (1957).

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Programme (IBP; running from 1964 to 1974 but strong in the US only in the later years), through which considerable funds flowed and within which many graduate students were trained. The IBP used an explicitly (and exclusionary) systems ecology approach. The imbalance in funding exacerbated tensions in the field. The conclusion of the IBP was variously praised and criticized. Notably, among its advocates one of the most important results was not knowledge about any ecosystem but the impetus it gave systems ecology. Systems ecology thus developed a particular mode of study in which the fluxes of energy (often quantified using carbon as a surrogate) and matter, especially nutrients, were the focus. Paradoxically, many such studies ended up looking quite descriptive, being a quantified catalog of these fluxes rather than a catalog of species. Zimmerer (1994) reported that much of the basis of systems ecology was, at least from some perspectives in ecology and certainly from geography, replaced in the late twentieth century by a ‘new ecology’ (curiously the same phrase used by E.P. Odum in the 1950s and 1960s for systems ecology). This ‘new ecology’ was held to be a turning away from the mechanistic view of nature and the reliance on a physics-based rhetoric about equilibria and homeostasis that pervaded systems ecology, but was not so revolutionary and called on disequilibria and non-linear deterministic systems for touchstones. This split in ecology has implications for geography as discussed later. Most notably, biogeographers in geography (hereafter simply biogeographers; those in biology will be so noted) were aligned with the evolutionary and populations ecologists not the systems ecologists, who later were more strongly linked to climatologists in geography. In a broader context, ecosystem escaped control of its creators and manipulators, as words do, and is generally used to mean the biophysical environment in a vague, hand-waving usage, albeit retaining some hint of interactions, at

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least in the sense that everything is connected to everything else. In this sense it is as much organismal as mechanistic. Ecosystem in its more general (e.g. 50 million hits on Google) usage dominates its place in geographic as well as other discourse. In the journals summarized by ISI Web of Knowledge the term ecosystem is used in titles or abstract of 2,801 articles (as of 11 June 2007) by individuals or teams of coauthors at least one of whom has ‘geog*’ (with * allowing any ending) in their address. But as noted above, ecosystem still retains an emphasis on connections when cited in geography however vaguely and it links to systems more generally as Tansley (1935, 1939) intended it to. This broad usage is common and well illustrated in geography and is discussed later.

GEOGRAPHY SHOOTS In geography ecosystem has both specific and general meanings. In research on organisms and climate it shares some of the meanings used in ecology (cf. Pickett and Cadenasso 2002), while in the discipline in general it mostly has the broader popular usage that Pickett and Cadenasso (2002) identify as metaphor. However, because it is tied to systems ecology it is tied to systems analysis in general and is linked to the rise of systems analysis in physical geography and the critique that developed from human geography. Thus in order to understand the place ecosystems holds in geography, it is necessary to delve into the role of systems in physical geography and beyond. When ecosystem came into the rhetoric of geography in the 1960s, it was within the broader context of general systems theory in geography as well as at a time when increasing specialization in the discipline was seeming to divorce physical and human geography altogether. While system in the sense of ‘systematic’ or ‘organized’ was a major rhetorical device early in the twentieth century (Hartshorne

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1939), the sense used within ecosystem came only in the latter half of the period. The idea of system as a basis for science was much in the air in the 1950s. In addition to von Bertalanffy’s (1950) influential paper, ‘general systems theory’ was being taken up by physical, biological and social scientists. Boulding (1956) was an early proselytizer in general science discourse. Systems theory was introduced to physical geography by A.N. Strahler (1950), who cited von Bertalanffy (1950) as his inspiration. Strahler (1950) saw slopes and geomorphic patterns in general, as open systems with equilibrium states. Strahler’s students further advanced the idea of systems analysis for geomorphology in exemplar papers and advocacy (e.g. Melton 1958; Chorley 1962). Strahler (1980) later summarized systems theory in physical geography up to that point. He identified the importance of thinking of the system as a model, although by that time system had been reified in physical geography as structures and their links in the ‘real world’ (Chorley and Kennedy 1971: 1). He also noted that he had been influenced by H.T. Odum’s (1960) energetics approach and introduced it to geography in texts in environmental science (e.g. Strahler and Strahler 1973). It should be noted that the early editions of the classic introductory text in physical geography (e.g. Strahler 1960) did not even mention systems and later versions did not have ecosystems sections until his son, A.H. Strahler, who was trained in biogeography, became a coauthor. Now almost all introductory textbooks in physical geography present systems analysis as the major approach and include a chapter on ecosystems, and K.J. Gregory (2000) makes it his frame for the field. Calls for a systems approach for geography in general soon arose. Haggett (1965) proposed that general systems theory could be a path to model building in geography, but the locational analysis that his book covered and inspired did not really incorporate it. Likewise Harvey (1969) was positively glowing about the promise of systems theory,

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but did not develop the theme (he of course having opted for Marxism before the book was actually published). The call that one might have expected to draw the most attention was based specifically on ecosystems. Stoddart (1965) argued that ecosystem could be an organizing principle for all of geography (a call still heard; Egner 2006). He saw it as broad enough to encompass human relations with the environment, including agriculture in terms of both its effects and as the energy source for Homo sapiens, keeping human and physical geography together, as well as a frame that would provide a structured methodology for scientific geography. In his view ecosystem could be a foundation for a geography that met the desires of both Hettner (1927) and Schaeffer (1953). In this fairly vague view, people were just another part of the whole system. Systems as a base for all of geography was further argued in a specifically physical geography context. One of the purposes for embracing systems theory in physical geography evoked by Chorley and Kennedy (1971) was to improve the connections between physical geography and human geography. They saw the increasing focus of human geography on models of social and economic processes as too abstract and with insufficient connection to the physical world, and they saw the connection across the divide could come by including ‘control systems’ as a level of systems analysis. This approach was not so much including people in socio-economic systems analysis (as exemplified soon thereafter by Meadows et al.’s (1972) world model) as an engineering approach wherein places in the biophysical system of a place could be acted on by human agents and thus changed (Figure 34.2). The direction taken by Chorley and Kennedy (1971) was the basis for the most significant conflict over ecosystem, actually system more generally, that developed in geography. Bennett and Chorley (1978) amplified the engineering approach of control systems as a basis for geography,

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I

A Morphological system B

O

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(a)

C

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Cascading system

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Process-response system

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A

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O

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Figure 34.2 The types of systems shown by Chorley and Kennedy (1971) culminated in a control system wherein the component A was subject to human manipulation. Control systems became the focus of Bennett and Chorley’s (1978) project.

showing a fully mechanistic view of nature, citing derivation from eighteenth-century steam technology [Botkin (1990) would later refer to this type of approach as what he saw as wrong with a mechanistic view of ecology]. This engineering view was too strong, and left too much of physical geography unexplored, for Kennedy (1979), who rejected this narrow position. But it was D. Gregory (1980) who mounted a vigorous attack on the idea of control systems and of the use of system as a paradigm in geography at all. He argued that control must be control by someone and that a systems analysis privileges technocrats over others in the control and expropriation of natural resources. His stance was based in structuration theory and certainly affected by the radical geography of the time. Meanwhile, a different conception of the idea of system was being developed as ‘world systems theory’ by Wallerstein (1974). This spatially grounded view of the development of global capitalism was welcomed in human geography as a geographical approach to globalization (e.g. Soja 1980; Taylor 1988, 1992; Flint and Shelley 1996). This view had little to do with systems ecology of systems analysis in physical geography at that time, however, but Straussfogel (1997) later argued that it is now a useful engagement of

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human regional geography with complex systems theory, or what is commonly called complexity theory (Malanson 1999) and which Zimmerer (1994) identified as central to the ‘new ecology’ and diametrically opposed to systems ecology (still mechanistic to a degree as noted – but see more below). Straussfogel (1997) further noted that systems theory had failed to gain traction in human geography at any time because its early formulations were too deterministic and dehumanizing. This assessment is probably an accurate explanation why systems theory was never taken beyond the handwaving stage in human geography, as in Haggett (1965) and Harvey (1969), and thus why D. Gregory’s (1980) critique was apparently uninspiring or just late.

BIOGEOGRAPHY – LEAVES? Beyond a part of systems in general, ecosystem had little traction in geography. While geomorphologists were explicitly adopting a systems approach in the 1950s, other geographers were at least exposed to rudimentary ecosystems concepts at this time. Among the discussions appended to the formal papers in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the

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Earth was a definition of ecology as ‘the study of material and energy exchanges in biotic communities’ (Thomas 1956: 939). While a later discussion noted that ‘geographers, of course, are ecologists in their own way’ (Thomas 1956: 945) few geographers were engaged in anything so defined (Cowells and Parker 2004). The ecosystem in this effort to infuse systems into geography seemed to be an afterthought. Chorley and Kennedy (1971) included it as section within their (concluding) chapter on control systems. They note that the biological components and processes can be treated in the same way as storages and fluxes of energy and matter as geomorphological or hydrological subsystems but are also particularly subject to control or intervention by humans, using agriculture as the example. Huggett (1980) in his more introductory text makes ecosystem more central, with many illustrations involving plants and animals. The area of geography most closely allied to ecology is called biogeography. While this term too might seem straightforward, it too is contested in that what is actually studied and taught under this title, at least at graduate levels, in geography programs it is more like what is called ecology than called biogeography in biology programs or their direct descendents (i.e. academic departments of ecology and evolution). So we might expect that in geography biogeographers would be affected by the developments of ecosystem in much the same way as their colleagues in ecology. Given that biogeography is largely seen as a subfield within physical geography [although it once was held as a third pole along with physical and human geography by Kuchler (1953)] and that rest of physical geography is about the inorganic or abiotic portion of the environment, it would be easy to imagine that systems ecology would find allies and/or direct competitors among biogeographers. Wrong! Biogeographers mostly have not engaged in systems ecology. Calls for such participation (e.g. Morgan and Moss 1965; Gersmehl

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1976) have gone unheeded. Some of the work of Meentemeyer (1984, for example) on litter decomposition or Chadwick (Chadwick et al. 2003, for example) and Doyle and Stanley’s (2006) recent study of nutrient retention in a stream are among the very few biogeography studies that would meet the standards of systems ecology (here I am not considering where geographers contribute via remote sensing or GIS). Where ecosystems ecology has been linked to geography it has been in studies, especially models, of global climate change where the collaborations of geographers are in remote sensing or climatology, with systems ecologists doing the ecology. While changes in land cover, especially vegetation, that are linked to climate change have often been studied by biogeographers in recent decades (e.g. Perry and Enright 2006), the land surface processes that are seen as ecosystem functioning – fluxes from the biotic to the abiotic, especially the atmosphere, of water, carbon, nitrogen, and other elements – are modeled by others. Asked to name the most important ecologist of the twentieth century, few biogeographers would name either Odum – Clements or MacArthur would be more likely. Why have biogeographers not engaged in systems ecology directly? Two themes (inter alia?) are intertwined. One is sociological and rhetorical, the other epistemological. Sociologically and rhetorically, biogeographers are more closely aligned in their reading, research, and identity with biogeographers in biology than with systems ecologists; in geography we start by thinking of what else is biogeography and go on to a more ecologically scaled version. This view is tied epistemologically to the long tradition of biogeography focusing on the locations of species. Biogeographers stayed in the ecological tradition that emphasized species primarily because biogeographers in biology remained focused on species and on explaining why species are where they are. Biogeographers did not become systems ecologists in part

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because by word association they were focused on the questions of their more numerous counterparts in biology. These scholars have always been rooted in evolutionary ecology, and even Hutchinson’s biodemographic student, R.H. MacArthur (perhaps the most important biogeographer of the twentieth century) was so positioned. Biogeographers were therefore tied to the wing of ecology most differentiated from systems ecology from its inception. Biogeographers, emphasizing the more ecological end of the biogeographic question, looked at why species are where they are primarily in terms of their association with the abiotic environment and with humans rather than turning attention to energy and matter fluxes. We see the sudiscipline defining itself through the choice of dependent variable, species, with the abiotic environment, connections and fluxes being independent variables (and much of the research in biogeography in the late twentieth century was organized in such a statistical framework). Epistemologically, we biogeographers have our own reasons for aligning with evolutionary ecology. The basic questions of identifying where species are and then explaining distributions has an evolutionary base and even to the extent that it becomes focused on the current physiological adaptations of individuals to their environment, as was the focus of ecology in the early twentieth century, it still was based on knowing where species (or classes thereof) were located. Biogeographers have followed in the tracks laid down by Clements (1916) and Tansley (1929) who were interested in succession because they thought it would best illustrate the connection between the abiotic environment and the physiological characteristics of the organisms, which were adaptations to it. Tansley (1939) wrote further that ecosystem was an idea that provided the basis for synecology (the ecology of multiple species, differentiated from single species autecology). And biogeographers have largely worked in synecology with much

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attention on succession, since the nineteenth century (Cowell and Parker 2004; e.g. Morgan and Moss 1965). In particular, biogeographers have focused on the role of abiotic change in succession (i.e. allogenic succession) and in later years an individualistic (from a plant species perspective) view of synecology in conscious contrast to Clement’s (1916) organismal view (but not necessarily mechanistic; cf. Botkin 1990). This approach was a way to take advantage of knowledge in the other areas of physical geography, but without moving far from the focus on species. A second, and now perhaps first, question of biogeography – and the one that led to the resurgence of biogeography in general late in the twentieth century – was why are the numbers of species distributed as they are (i.e. the geography of biodiversity)? MacArthur and Wilson’s (1967) monograph, The Theory of Island Biogeography, is perhaps the most important biogeographical and even ecological work of the twentieth century and contains no systems ecology; its focus is on demographic processes. It arose directly from the second of the major themes raised by Hutchinson (1948), namely biodemographics. No one has yet brought these two lines of ecology back together. Another reason that biogeographers have avoided systems ecology is that it was necessary to isolate units spatially in order to study them, and this isolation did not seem realistic in geography. Early geographical reactions to systems theory in geography in general identified this problem (Chisholm 1967) and it was later a major factor in Kennedy’s (1979, 2000, pers. comm.) abandonment of the paradigm. While Tansley (1935) had clearly identified the multi-scale nature of systems, in order to do systems analysis it was necessary to isolate an ecosystem. Early ecosystem workers made progress and provided a foundation by working on lakes. Systems geomorphologists did so by working on defined drainage basins. Ultimately the fact that all are open systems, which was always recognized, led to limitations. And while

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systems ecology was always argued to be holistic and opposed to reductionism, as well as not merely descriptive, it sometimes came to be a quantitative description of process at as reduced a level as technology would allow. Thus when Kennedy (2000) says, ‘When an ecologist looks at vegetation, he or she sees biogeochemical cycling’, she is thinking back to her work on systems in geomorphology more generally, and not to the work of her biogeography colleagues in geography. By 2000 biogeographers were instead on the bandwagon of complexity theory (aka complex systems theory (Straussfogel 1997) or complex adaptive systems (Malanson 1999)), given their perceived advantage, at least historically, in addressing spatial scale issues so prominent in the so-called ‘new ecology’ (Zimmerer 1994). Biogeographers and others turned in this direction in large part because their problems (e.g., autogenic versus allogenic succession, as tackled by Tansley 1929, 1935, 1939), when seen in spatially explicit terms encountered positive feedbacks. When mathematicians, physicists, and ecologists revealed that these feedbacks allowed a few simple nonlinear equations to produce widely varying but realistic structures in pattern, many biogeographers found that the theory resonated with their sense of place and history in ecology. At present whether or not the structures that develop are interpretable and thus whether complexity theory provides new insights is an open question (cf. Chisholm (1967) regarding systems theory into geography 40 years ago). However, several [again] see a unifying platform for the discipline in general (e.g. Manson and O’Sullivan 2006; Ratter 2006) or at least for a more expansive biogeography (Brown et al. 2006; Malanson et al. 2006; Stallins 2006).

FROM PLANT TO ECOSYSTEM To stretch the subheadings entendres too far, can we now see if there is a point at which

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ecosystem can be a metaphor for how it, as a word, can further contribute to geography. In its more general usage, ecosystem – as denoting connectedness (with an underlying theme of systems theory) – is an important component of the human–environment identity in geography as described by Turner (2002). Turner (2002) divided identities in geography into two themes, spatial/chorological (the study of patterns and places) and human environment, which is essentially the study of humans and biophysical systems, including ecosystems. While one can find human-environment studies that seem far from systems theory, as in political biogeography (e.g. Robbins, 2001), the connectedness element is always there. It is most explicit in much of Turner’s own work, which links local land use change to global climate change as a cumulative effect (e.g. Turner et al. 1990). Meyer and Turner (1992: 39) identified land-use/land-cover change – a core theme of geography, especially human-environment geography – as being an important contributor to globalscale environmental change because it affects ‘systemic changes’ in ‘the flow of materials and energy’. Such ties are further seen in the work of geographers on ‘integrated assessment’, which tend to be regional studies of possible responses to climate change (Easterling 1997). One important direction in humanenvironment geography has been labeled sustainability science. While in part led by geographers (e.g. Kates et al. 2001), it is not dominated by them, nor is it now the dominant theme in geography, but it provides the place at the table or academic recognition and respect that Turner (2002) desires for geography in a clear and tangible format – and it is explicitly based in a system theory approach to human–environment relations. Straussfogel and Becker (1996) provide a key link between sustainability and systems analysis, bringing in world systems theory and the newer non-systems ecology, but systems ecology may yet be incorporated into this paradigm. As more elaborate tools and

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increased computational capacity make it possible to open up formerly closed systems by making them spatially explicit – in the sense that the spatial units interact across their borders as well as being location dependent for their initial conditions (Malanson 1996), the fluxes of energy and matter so central to systems ecology become more geographical and better aligned with the interests of geographers from the spatialchorological tradition.

CONCLUSION Ecosystem is not a precisely used concept in geography. We should not become too focused on it as a means of engineering the environment, nor should we try to use this one idea or word to fuse the diverse interests of the discipline into one paradigm. For now, ecosystem still has some potential to help advance biogeography. The geography of species has long been known to depend on their functioning in their environment. This was the point that Tansley (1935) was making, and it was the point of much of the ecological research up to that time. But Hutchinson’s (1948) two pillars of twentieth-century ecology diverged with much the same rancor as did regional and systematic geography mid-century. Now we may be seeing a renewed merging of these tracks as the better tools of systems ecology get into the hands of researchers questioning why species are where they are – and how their locations might change given global climate change (e.g. Scuderi 1993; Cairns and Malanson 1998). For the most part, these tools are not yet fully spatially explicit (Yadav and Malanson, 2008), but this is in fact the open door for many biogeographers in geography. Spatially explicit ecosystem simulations can link location and function for species. Our history of dalliance with the ecosystem concept may yet be important for the role of biogeography in earth system science.

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REFERENCES Bennett, R.J. and Chorley, R.J. (1978) Environmental Systems: Philosophy, Analysis, and Control. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Botkin, D.B. (1990) Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Boulding, K.W. (1956) ‘General systems theory: the skeleton of science’, Management Science, 2: 197–208. Brown, D.G., Aspinall, R. and Bennettt, D.A. (2006) ‘Landscape models and explanation in landscape ecology. A space for generative landscape science?’, Professional Geographer, 58: 369–382. Cairns, D.M. and Malanson, G.P. (1998) ‘Examination of the carbon balance hypothesis of alpine treeline location in Glacier National Park, Montana’, Physical Geography, 18: 125–145. Chadwick, O.A., Gavenda, R.T., Kelly, E.F., Ziegler, K., Olson, C.G., Elliott, W.C. and Hendricks, D.M. (2003) ‘The impact of climate of the biogeochemical functioning of volcanic soils’, Chemical Geology, 202: 195–223. Chisholm, M. (1967) ‘General systems theory and geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42: 45–52. Chorley, R.J. (1962) ‘Geomorphology and general systems theory’, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 500-B. Chorley, R.J. and Kennedy, B.A. (1971) Physical Geography: A Systems Approach. London: Prentice-Hall. Clements, F.E. (1916) Plant Succession. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington Publication 242. Cowells, C.M. and Parker, A.J. (2004) ‘Biogeography in the Annals’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94: 256–268. Cowles, H.C. (1911) ‘The causes of vegetation cycles’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1: 3–20. Doyle, M.W. and Stanley, E.H. (2006) ‘Exploring potential spatial-temporal links between fluvial geomorphology and nutrient-periphyton dynamics in streams using simulation models’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96: 687–698. Easterling, W.E. (1997) ‘Why regional studies are needed in the development of full-scale integrated assessment modelling of global change processes’, Global Environmental Change – Human Policy Dimensions, 7: 337–356.

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Egner, H. (2006) ‘Autopoiesis, form and observation – modern systems theory and its potential contribution to the integration of human and physical geography’, Mitteilungen der Osterreichischen Geographischen Gesellschaft, 148: 92–108. Evans, F.C. (1956) ‘Ecosystem as the basic unit in ecology’, Science, 123: 1127–1128. Flint, C. and Shelley, FM. (1996) ‘Structure, agency, and context: The contributions of geography to worldsystems analysis’, Sociological Inquiry, 66: 496–508. Gersmehl, P.J. (1976) ‘An alternative biogeography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 66: 223–241. Gregory, D. (1980) ‘The ideology of control: systems theory and geography’, Tijdschrift voor Economomisse en Sociale Geografie, 71: 327–342. Gregory, K.J. (2000) The Changing Nature of Physical Geography. London: Arnold. Hagen, J.B. (1992) An Entangled Bank. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Haggett, P. (1965) Locational Analysis in Human Geography. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hartshorne, R. (1939) ‘The nature of geography: a critical survey of current thought in light of the past’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 29: 173–412. Harvey, D. (1969) Explanation in Geography. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hettner, A. (1927) Die Geographie: Ihre Geschichte, ihr Wesen, und ihre Methoden. Breslau: Ferdinant Hirt. Huggett, R.J. (1980) Systems Analysis in Geography. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hutchinson, G.E. (1948) ‘Circular causal systems in ecology’, Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 50: 221–246. Kates R.W., Clark, W.C., Corell, R., Hall, J.M., Jaeger, C.C., Lowe, I., McCarthy, J.J., Schellnhuber, H.J., Bolin, B., Dickson, N.M., Faucheux, S., Gallopin, G.C., Grubler, A., Huntley, B., Jager, J., Jodha, N.S., Kasperson, R.E., Mabogunje, A., Matson, P., Mooney, H., Moore, B. 3rd, O’Riordan, T. and Svedlin, U. (2001) ‘Sustainability science’, Science, 292: 641–642. Kennedy, B.A. (1979) ‘A naughty world’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 4: 550–558. Kennedy, B.A. (2000) ‘Trompe l’oeil’, Journal of Biogeography, 27: 37–38. Kuchler, A.W. (1953) ‘The trinity of geography’, Professional Geographer, 5: 3–4. Lindeman, R.L. (1942) ‘The trophic-dynamic aspect of ecology’, Ecology, 23: 399–418. MacArthur, R.H. and Wilson, E.O. (1967) The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Malanson, G.P. (1996) ‘Modelling forest response to climatic change: issues of time and space’ in S.K. Majumdar, E.W. Miller and F.J. Brenner (eds), Forests – A Global Perspective. Easton, PA: Pennsylvania Academy of Sciences, pp. 200–211. Malanson, G.P. (1999) ‘Considering complexity’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 89: 746–753. Malanson, G.P., Zeng, Y. and Walsh, S.J. (2006) ‘Landscape frontiers, geography frontiers: lessons to be learned’, Professional Geographer, 58: 369–382. Manson, S.M. and O’Sullivan, D. (2006) ‘Complexity theory in the study of space and place’, Environment and Planning, A, 38: 677–692. McIntosh, R.P. (1985) The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meadows, D.H. and the Club of Rome. (1972) The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books. Meentemeyer, V. (1984) ‘The geography of organic decomposition rates’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 74: 551–560. Melton, M.A. (1958) ‘Geometric properties of mature drainage systems and their representation in an E4 phase space’, Journal of Geology, 66: 35–54. Meyer, W.B. and Turner, B.L. (1992) ‘Human population growth and global and-use/cover change’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 23: 39–61. Morgan, W. B. and R. P. Moss. (1965) ‘Geography and ecology: The concept of the community and its relationship to environment’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 55: 339–350. Odum, E.P. (1953) Fundamentals of Ecology. Philadelphia, PA: W.B. Saunders Co. Odum, E.P. (1964) ‘The new ecology’, BioScience, 14: 14–16. Odum, H.T. (1957) ‘Trophic structure and productivity of Silver Springs, Florida’, Ecological Monographs, 27: 55–112. Odum, H.T. (1960) ‘Ecological potential and analog circuits for the ecosystem’, Amercian Scientist, 48: 1–8. Perry, G.L.W. and Enright, N.J. (2006) ‘Spatial modeling of vegetation change in dynamic landscapes; a review of methods and applications’, Progress in Physical Geography, 30: 175–200. Phillips, J. (1934) ‘Succession, development, the climax and the complex organism: an analysis of concepts. I’, Journal of Ecology, 22: 554–571. Pickett, S.T.A. and Cadenasso, M.L. (2002) ‘The ecosystem as a multidimensional concept: meaning, model, and metaphor’, Ecosystems, 5: 1–10.

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Ratter, B.M.W. (2006) ‘Complexity theory and geography’, Mitteilungen der Osterreichischen Geographischen Gesellschaft, 148: 109–124. Robbins, P. (2001) ‘Tracking invasive land covers in India, or why our landscapes have never been modern’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91: 637–659. Schaeffer, F.K. (1953) ‘Exceptionalism in geography: a methodological examination’, Annals of the Association American Geographers, 43: 226–249. Scuderi, L.A., Schaaf, C.B., Orth, K.U. and Band, L.E. (1993) ‘Alpine treeline growth variability: simulation using an ecosystem process model,’ Arctic and Alpine Research, 25: 175–182. Soja, E.W. (1980) ‘The socio-spatial dialectic’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 70: 207–225. Stallins, J.A. (2006) ‘Geomorphology and ecology: unifying themes for complex systems in biogeomorphology’, Geomorphology, 77: 207–216. Stoddart, D. (1965) ‘Geography and the ecological approach. The ecosystem as a geographic principle and method’, Geography, 50: 242–251. Strahler, A.N. (1950) ‘Equilibrium theory of erosional slopes approached by frequency distribution analysis. I, II’, American Journal of Science, 248: 673–696, 800–814. Strahler, A.N. (1960) Physical Geography. New York, NY: Wiley. Strahler, A.N. (1980) ‘Systems theory in physical geography’, Physical Geography, 1: 1–27. Strahler, A.N. and Strahler, A.H. (1973) Environmental Geoscience: Interaction between Natural Systems and Man. Santa Barbara, CA: Hamilton. Straussfogel, D. (1997) ‘A systems perspective on world-systems theory’, Journal of Geography, 96: 119–126. Straussfogel, D. and Becker, M.L. (1996) ‘An evolutionary systems approach to policy intervention for achieving ecologically sustainable societies’, Systems Practice, 9: 441–468. Summerhayes, V.S. and Elton, C.S. (1923) ‘Contributions to the ecology of Spitsbergen and Bear Island’, Journal of Ecology, 11: 214–286.

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Tansley, A.G. (1929) ‘Succession: the concept and its values’ in B.M. Duggar (ed.), Proceedings of the International Congress of Plant Sciences, 1926. Menasha, WI: Banta, pp. 677–686. Tansley, A.G. (1935) ‘The use and abuse of vegetational concepts and terms’, Ecology, 16: 284–307. Tansley, A.G. (1939) ‘British ecology during the past quarter-century: the plant community and the ecosystem’, Journal of Ecology, 27: 513–530. Taylor, P.J. (1988) ‘World systems analysis and regional geography’, Professional Geographer, 40: 259–265. Taylor, P.J. (1992) ‘Understanding global inequalities – a world systems approach’, Geography, 77: 10–21. Taylor, P.J. and Blum, A.S. (1991) ‘Ecosystems as circuits: diagrams and the limits of physical analogies’, Biology and Philosophy, 6: 275–294. Thomas, W.L. (ed.) (1956) Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Turner, B.L. (2002) ‘Contested identities: humanenvironment geography and disciplinary implications in a restructuring academy’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92: 52–74. Turner, B.L., Kasperson, R.E., Meyer, W.B., Dow, K.M., Golding, M., Kasperson, J.X., Mitchell, R.C. and Ratick, S.J. (1990) ‘Two types of global environmental change; definitional and spatial-scale issues in their human dimensions’, Global Environmental Change, 1: 14–22. von Bertalanffy, L. (1950) ‘The theory of open systems in physics and biology’, Science, 111: 23–28. Wallerstein, I.M. (1974) The Modern World System. New York, NY: Academic Press. Willis, A.J. (1997) ‘The ecosystem: an evolving concept viewed historically’, Functional Ecology 11: 268–271. Yadav, V. and Malanson, G.P. (2008) ‘Spatially explicit land use land cover and soil organic carbon transformations in southern Illinois’, Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment, 123: 280–292. Zimmerer, K.S. (1994) ‘Human geography and the “new ecology”: the prospect and promise of integration’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 84: 108–125.

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35 Landform Nick Spedding

INTRODUCTION Landform, or at larger scales, landscape, straddles the worlds of the familiar and the esoteric, the here-and-now and the distant in space and time, the empirical and the imaginative. Scientists have often struggled to decide the appropriate questions to ask about the origin, significance and wider relationships of landforms: questions to separate expert from popular knowledge, to distinguish scientific study of landforms from its roots in mapping and regional description, or to repulse threats from other disciplines. ‘Pure’ representations of surface form alone (e.g. Savigear 1965) do not satisfy those who wish to progress beyond ‘mere description’. Similarly, illustration is not explanation – although innovations in visual representations of landform did much to facilitate and popularise the nascent earth sciences (Rudwick 1976). By convention, geomorphology – the discipline that today claims chief responsibility for landform studies – both describes and explains. For example, ‘geomorphology encompasses not only the study of landforms, and their modes of origin, but also direct and detailed study of the processes that produce them, the materials that compose them, and

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their histories of environmental change’ (Cox 2008: 4; see also the various definitions in Rhoads and Thorn 1996). Although explicit definitions are rare, we can define an individual landform as a distinctive feature of the earth’s surface that has a specific process origin (e.g. meander, stack, drumlin, pingo) or relationship with rock type and structure (e.g. cuesta, horst or graben) (cf. Savigear 1965), which is to anticipate discussion of cause. But this chapter is not intended as a review of debates about individual landforms; for this, see the fourth volume of The History of the Study of Landforms (Burt et al. 2008). Working from a historical perspective, it does endeavour to trace some of the more important debates about the wider nature of geomorphic knowledge, and the specific contexts in which it has been constructed.

BEGINNINGS: BEFORE DAVIS … The Republic of Letters and the nascent earth sciences Isolated studies of landform appeared as part of the Renaissance (e.g. Chorley et al. 1964)

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and became more common as the Enlightenment continued. With few institutional structures it was the network of savants who made up the ‘Republic of Letters’ who developed the proto-earth sciences. Rudwick (2005) identified five ‘genres’ of the late 1700s, of which physical geography (study of the earth’s surface features) provided the obvious focus on landform. This was a firmly empirical science, rooted in (often adventurous) fieldwork. To disseminate its findings, it relied on prose and, increasingly, various illustrative proxies for first-hand experience (Rudwick 2005: 71–84). Wider interpretation of landforms was regarded as the preserve of other genres. Earth physics analysed processes; geognosy (later refined as stratigraphy) classified rock types and their structural relations; mineralogy, which at the time incorporated study of both minerals and fossils, catalogued temporal contrasts in lifeform and environment; and geotheory articulated ‘high-level’ systems to account for the state of the earth. Hutton’s Theory of the Earth, first published in 1788, is often regarded as a, if not the, major breakthrough of the period: sufficient for Chorley et al. (1964: 34) to dub him ‘the first great fluvialist’. To identify Hutton specifically as a pioneer geomorphologist is to invoke a science that did not yet exist, and requires selective scrutiny of his work: his accounts of fluvial forms and processes are mixed up with wider explications of ‘deep time’ and what we now call the rock cycle. Indeed Rudwick (2005), writing with a different purpose, gave short shrift to Hutton’s work, preferring case studies that reconstructed the specific details of geohistorical landscape change: Desmarest’s work in the 1770s on the volcanic landscapes of Auvergne, for example, developed further in the 1820s by the work of Scrope and others (Rudwick 2008). This contrast between disciplinary histories that prioritise either the general or the particular illustrates the diverse intellectual heritage of landform studies, and identifies a conceptual tension between timeless/timebound or immanent/ configurational that did much to frame

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subsequent debates (Simpson 1963). Whewell, in 1837, proposed the neologism palaetiology for the new historical–causal earth science that synthesised geohistorical detail (palaeontology, the study not just of fossils, but of all relics of the past) with rational process explanation (aetiology, analysis of the cause of natural entities and events): a combination that, according to Rudwick (2008: 550), defined the modern science of geology. The success of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, reworking Hutton’s uniformitarianism, was important here, but so too was the rise of the glacial theory, and it was landforms that provided the crucial evidence for this.

Flood and ice Fossil/stratigraphic work, exemplified by that of Cuvier (Rudwick 2005), dominated the earth sciences in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century, but the question of the deluge returned landform studies to intellectual centre stage. Although few savants still believed in the literal truth of Genesis and the story of Noah’s flood, some kind of mega-tsunami offered an obvious explanation for the scratched bedrock, dry or over-deepened/over-widened valleys, extensive deposits of gravel or boulder clay, and enormous, stranded blocks of exotic rock type (erratics) found across much of Europe. This was the hypothesis promoted, for example, by Buckland’s Reliquiae Diluvianae (‘Relics of the Deluge’), published in 1823. But it was challenged by those who argued for glaciers as geomorphic agents, and it was Agassiz, building on field studies from the Alps by the likes of de Saussure, Venetz and Charpentier, who emerged as master of the landform evidence – now recast as, for instance, roches moutonnées or moraines. Why then was this important? The success of the glacial theory did not require innovation in the field methods used, nor resolution of wider debates between catastrophists and uniformitarians (or, indeed, between

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neptunists and fluvialists). But, as a gestalt switch that introduced a new way of seeing landscapes, it was a victory that, contra Rudwick, relied on the facts of physical geography taking priority over historical considerations, aided by Lyell’s emphasis in his Principles on the past as the key to the present, working backwards from the most recent times and downwards from the earth’s surface to depth.

Glacial goes social: the Alps This was not the straightforward triumph of rational science. Despite the immediate impact of Agassiz in 1837–40 the debate was not settled quickly, as the outrageous hypothesis of the ice age contradicted the geotheoretical orthodoxies of gradual change accomplished by familiar processes (i.e. substantive uniformitarianism) and progressive global cooling (Rudwick 2008). With limited first-hand experience of glaciers, and vested interest in his own ideas of marine action, Lyell himself continued to flip between the rabbit of terrestrial glaciers and the duck of marine icebergs for two more decades. The debate, its landforms and its field sites were not confined to the scientific elite, but spread to various social spaces occupied by the educated public (e.g. Finnegan 2004). Once attention shifted back from Britain to the Alps, scientific studies became further intertwined with aesthetic and performative considerations as the roles of savant, romantic and adventurer merged to co-construct landforms as natural and cultural phenomena (Fleming 2000). Tyndall’s reputation as a mountaineer matched his reputation as a physicist. His nemesis, Whymper (by trade, an engraver) beat him to the summit of the Matterhorn, as chronicled in Scrambles Amongst the Alps (1871), a book that combined tales of derring-do with detailed, illustrated accounts of the alpine landscape that drew on De Saussure, Lyell and Forbes, and anticipated twentieth century geomorphic studies.

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Whymper claimed that it was close study of the relationship between rock structure and landform that persuaded him to try the Matterhorn’s Hörnli ridge in defiance of the popular wisdom that it was unclimbable!

Into the West Whymper’s ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865 was matched for audacity four years later by John Wesley Powell’s successful expedition down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. A second landscape icon was conquered. If Powell was not the most brilliant of the scientists associated with the western surveys (that accolade goes to his protégé, G.K. Gilbert, whose rigorous work as ‘tireless investigator’ and ‘brilliant hypothesist’ (Chorley et al. 1964) set him up as the ancestral poster boy of the 1950s revolution) he was the most fascinating, and, in many ways, the most modern. A career that began with adventure, driven by the pioneer spirit of individual enterprise, ended with landform science firmly institutionalised as part of the United States Geological Survey, with Powell at its head juggling budgets, blue skies science and the utilitarian demands of environmental management (Worster 2001). The shift in location of fieldwork was decisive. The plateaux and canyons of the semi-arid West now hosted the dramatic encounters between men and landscape that gripped both science and the public. Here the intermittent but intense rainfall, sparse vegetation cover, absence of superficial deposits, straightforward, layer-cake rock structure, and, above all else, the deep, sinuous slots of the canyons left little scope for doubt about the erosive efficacy of rain and rivers. Reluctance to give up on the sea as the chief agent of landscape was exposed as the cultural prejudice of British geologists inhabiting an island with thick soils, continuous vegetation cover and a storm-battered coastline. Reports from the Empire challenged the marine primacy, but the US

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geologists had sheer spectacle on their side. Smith (1924, cited by Chorley et al. 1964: 514) described Powell’s work as ‘physiography on a grand scale’. It was grand too in its contribution to the scientific identity of landforms. Powell took the gradualistic, actualistic fluvialism of Hutton, Playfair and Lyell, and added his concept of base level, which, with episodes of uplift and erosion, defined the framework of the ‘new geology’, or, as it became known, geomorphology. In contrast to geology’s established subsurface concerns with fossils, sediments and stratigraphy, the new discipline set out to decipher earth history by investigation of the surface forms cut by rivers. These scientific achievements did not isolate landform studies from the wider world. Powell used the word ‘geosocial’ to describe this entanglement of science and politics, nature and culture (Frodeman 2003: 141). He made skilful use of illustrations and stereo images to publicise the work of his survey, exploiting popular and political fascination for the western landscapes, so that canyons became commodities. Powell courted the artist Thomas Moran, the fruit of which association was Moran’s giant canvas, The Chasm of the Colorado. Childs (1996) argued that Moran’s art incorporated the Powell Survey’s science of running water, but both Pyne (1998) and Worster (2001) indicated that the relationship was not reciprocal. Dutton, author of the definitive geological memoir on the Grand Canyon, had no need for the spiritual aesthetics that inspired Moran. His work, supported by Holmes’s precise illustrations, reconfigured the sublime in secular terms, but did not divorce science from art. Despite their positivistic bias, Chorley et al. (1964: xii) praised Dutton’s ‘lyrical exaltation’, describing his ‘word paintings’ as an ‘enduring delight’. Pyne argued that, for Dutton ‘[t]he scenic cliff and the geologic cliff were the same cliff. Both could be understood by similar acts of critical imagination, and one could be used to reinforce the other. The shape of the land involved mind as well as rock, reason

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together with impression’ (Pyne 1998: 77; cf. Frodeman 2003, see below).

DAVIS AND THE CYCLE OF EROSION: LANDFORM AS ‘IMMUTABLE MOBILE’ By the late 1800s landform had secured its status as part of popular culture and elite scientific circles. It was W.M. Davis who established it as a fixture of disciplinary identity and pedagogy. If Davis, as the ‘master synthesiser … created nothing – nothing, that is, except coherence and vitality’ (Chorley et al. 1964: 621), this was no mean achievement. In the cycle of erosion, with its simple, central scheme of progressive landscape change, Davis created a neat package that travelled easily across the widening network of professional researchers, lecturers and teachers. The cycle’s popularity was boosted by Davis’s prolific output (aided by a crop of new journals that included Science, National Geographic Magazine, Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, and the Journal of Geology), his artistic skills (Chorley et al. 1973), his attractive prose with its intuitive vocabulary of youth, maturity and old age (rhetoric backed by impeccable neo-Lamarckian credentials: Livingstone 1992; Inkpen and Collier 2007) and his efforts to promote geography as an academic discipline. To borrow from Barnes (2002), after Latour, the cycle was an ‘immutable mobile’ that imparted ‘optical consistency’ and ‘semiotic homogeneity’ to landform. Knowledge of the cycle became an ‘obligatory passage point’ for students. The hegemonic status of the cycle, not its flaws, explained much of Chorley’s frustration. Davis’s concern with presentation of knowledge, as opposed to its production, mitigates much of the criticism directed against the cycle (see Beckinsale and Chorley 1991: 128 for a summary). So too does recent scholarship in the philosophy and sociology of science that offers up alternatives to Whiggish histories, tied to positivist ideals of rational,

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objective progress. Perhaps the charge that sticks best is Davis’s dogmatic defence of his pet theory, sustained by his lack of quantitative, empirical rigour.

THE QUANTITATIVE REVOLUTION IN GEOMORPHOLOGY Strahler’s vindictive dismissal of Davisian geomorphology as a ‘cultural pursuit’, little better than a ‘pleasant nature-lover’s hobby’ (1950: 209) made his intentions clear: the study of landforms was to be recast in unequivocally scientific guise. This did not entail formal engagement with philosophy of science as such; regime change was achieved by deliberate invention of a new tradition centred on the work of Gilbert (Sack 1992), hitherto an ‘under-appreciated fashion dude’ (Sherman 1996), spliced to a mixed bag of ideas and techniques imported from other, ‘harder’ sciences. These involved: (a) a description of landforms/landscapes using numerical, statistical or geometric methods; (b) analysis of geomorphic processes using physics (i.e. Newtonian mechanics) and chemistry; and (c) an introduction of an open systems framework as geomorphology’s overall organising principle. The scope of Strahler’s project was sufficient to merit the label ‘revolution’ (Chorley 2008), but it lacked the single, coherent idea that made the cycle of erosion such a seductive representation of landform. The diversity of approaches, their technical difficulty and the associated hype all contributed to the mixed reception given to geomorphology in the 1950s and 1960s, and the confused, sometimes contradictory, histories that followed. The quantitative revolution is often stereotyped as the invention of process geomorphology – Strahler’s paper on ‘The dynamic basis of geomorphology’ is his most cited (1992) – but this is inaccurate. Strahler was not the first to advocate quantification; dynamic geology (Whewell’s term for the study of process) was established

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before Gilbert (e.g. see Geikie’s Text Book of Geology, first published in 1882), but pushed aside by the dominance of Davis; rational process studies made little impact until the 1960s or later. As it was, the notion that processes were somehow more important, even more ‘real’, than landforms (see Rhoads 2006) faltered, and form retained its status at the heart of geomorphology, if rendered very differently. Strahler’s own work prioritised the quantitative treatment of morphology. Words and pictures were replaced by abstract graphs and formulae: elegant explanation was now defined by mathematical parsimony, not literary evocation. The likes of Columbia’s Department of Geology literally became ‘centres of calculation’ as Strahler and his colleagues enrolled novel instruments (e.g. planks of wood, Abney levels, planimeters, mechanical calculators) and techniques (e.g. means and standard deviations, probability paper, t-tests, lines of best fit) to inscribe landforms in new ways: slopes as histograms, rivers as geometric networks, basin topography as hypsometric integrals (Strahler 1992, and references therein).

Process, form, space and time Strahler’s later papers, for example, on slope shear stress maps or dimensional analysis, picked up on his 1952 exhortation to use maths and physics to frame process studies. Others followed suit, notably Leopold et al.’s 1964 volume on Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology, the top ranked geographical textbook by citation between 1966 and 1984 (Barnes 2002), which presented rational, reductionist accounts of river flow and sediment transport alongside the ‘classic’ functional studies of hydraulic geometry and channel pattern. Further research in the 1970s and 1980s developed the two-fold analysis of process and form, which by the 1990s was established in specialist undergraduate textbooks such as those by Knighton (1998) or Selby (1993). Textbooks from the previous era, which combined qualitative accounts of

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process with Davisian ideals (e.g. Sparks 1960) disappeared from reading lists. Despite the rhetoric of synthesis, at the research frontier form lost out to process. The volume on Spatial Analysis in Geomorphology (Chorley 1972) defined the zenith of the statistical/morphometric approach to representation of form, incorporating innovations such as trend surface analysis, point pattern analysis, spectral analysis and network probability theory. But impressive mathematics did not substitute for the study of causal mechanisms, so that, writing in the second edition of Geomorphological Techniques, Evans (1990) had to note that recent emphasis on process had pushed spatial studies of form (both traditional maps and statistical-geometric work) to the margins of the discipline. The book was headed-up by chapters on scientific method and process studies. Landform recovered its status in the 1990s, helped by the burgeoning critique of reductionist approaches, both within geomorphology and in the wider sciences (e.g. Harrison 2001); by the enthusiasm for intensive field studies in the ‘new’ fluvial geomorphology, in which channel form was understood to control processes of water flow and sediment transport, not just vice-versa; and supported by a raft of technical developments such as total stations, digital photogrammetry, GPS and satellite remote sensing that enabled rapid capture of precise, and accurate topographic data (Lane et al. 1998).

Alternative traditions Tales told of the quantitative revolution tend to disguise the persistence of other approaches. Studies of regional or climatic geomorphology, born out of creative tension with the Davisian cycle (Beckinsale and Chorley 1991) did not disappear after 1950. If anything, advances in cognate subjects, in particular, in our knowledge of climate change and plate tectonics, strengthened their historical components. Histories have not always been

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sensitive to the diversity of approaches adopted within the geomorphic tradition. Gregory (2000), for instance, includes the work of the Quaternary geomorphologist Sissons in his ‘orthodox’ account of progress by process and model, despite Sissons’s distaste for much of the new-fangled research. Although his meticulous fieldwork matched the standards advocated by Columbia and Cambridge, in other respects the approach of Sissons and his Edinburgh school better fitted the historical, interpretive tradition (Simpson 1963). Sissons’s work on the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy differs little from that of T.F. Jamieson in the 1860s for instance. Advocates for historical studies of landform maintain that the earth sciences employ distinct, creative methods of reasoning that cannot be derived from, or reduced to, those of physics. This argument has gained respect over the past decade or so (e.g. Frodeman 2003; Slaymaker 2009). At the same time, improved understanding of tectonics and isostasy, incorporated into new numerical models and supported by new technologies for dating erosion surfaces, has revived historical studies of landscape evolution at large spatial and long temporal scales (e.g. Bishop 2007). Bishop’s review, which uses both Davis and Strahler as its key points of reference, anticipates another ‘golden age’ of cyclic geomorphology.

SYSTEMS AND KINDS Systems have been used since the 1950s to frame landforms as the objects of scientific investigation, and so provide geomorphology with an important element of continuity. This does not necessarily deliver stability or coherence, however; arguably, systems concepts have endured precisely because of their mutability. Initial promotion of ‘timeless’ open systems mixed thermodynamic analogies with morphometric correlation structures with the metanarratives of general systems theory (Sack 1992; Chorley 2008); later developments adapted to accommodate temporal

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change. Kennedy’s (2000) conclusion was that the systems approach offered ‘little fresh insight into the actual workings of the natural environment’, although she did recognise significant contributions to the vocabulary and pedagogical repertoire of physical geography. Her verdict is perhaps over-harsh, and rather dated. Huggett (2007) provides a recent review. Fresh reworkings of systems thinking have been used to inform realist approaches to landform studies that, in aiming to recover ‘ontological depth’, re-examine the relationship between events, forms and processes (Lane 2001). The reappraisal of glacial landsystems (Evans 2003) offers a different take that retains the emphasis on processform linkages, but swaps philosophy for practice, grounded in the tradition of detailed map-making that depicts spatial assemblages of landforms (Evans 2009).

Landform, complexity science and earth surface dynamics Perhaps the most radical reinvention of geomorphic systems is that advanced by the sciences of non-linear dynamics and complexity (e.g. Murray et al. 2009). The prospect of a new, unified science of the earth’s surface, built around ‘morphodynamics’ presents a major challenge to orthodox landform studies. Limited reference to established geomorphic tradition is a striking feature of the bold rhetoric. The esoteric mathematics of pattern form-ation promise a second quantitative revolution that revives the morphometric representations of the 1950s, but distances explanation from the details of individual processes, with surface form re-cast as the product of ‘high-level’ emergent structures that override familiar notions of cause and effect. Suspicions of mathematical obfuscation are inevitable, but shared exemplars (e.g. dendritic slope/channel networks or river braids), techniques (e.g. hardware models of rainfallrunoff) and concepts (e.g. Schumm’s work on complex response) offer prospects to align the old with the new (e.g. Paola et al. 2009).

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Natural kinds The notion of natural kinds, which crops up every so often (e.g. Rhoads and Thorn 1996; Inkpen 2005) offers a useful counterpoint to systems thinking. For those concerned that geomorphologists’ work is dogged by social constructions, arbitrary classifications, excessive taxonomic diversity, artificial closures, derivative methods or shifting fashions the prospect of the answer ‘yes’ in response to the question ‘are landforms natural kinds?’ has distinct advantages for the discipline’s identity and status. If the objects of our investigations – that is, landforms – share properties that are irreducible and independent of human thought, those objects are ‘natural’ (as opposed to ‘nominal’) kinds. And if landforms are really ‘real’, so too is geomorphology, irrespective of its methodological plurality. But for the most part geomorphologists are pragmatists, not philosophers, and do not worry about all of this. Those who do are inclined towards the view that landforms are not natural kinds. Reductionist logic implies that the essence of landforms is found at the microscopic level of quantum behaviour, far outside the established scales of geomorphic studies. Rhoads (2006), for instance, has moved on to consider the more open possibilities of process philosophy. History tells us that what we understand about landforms is not independent of the context of enquiry. The kinds that matter most are kinds of explanations, and these are social phenomena, established by the practice of research, debate and teaching.

EARTH HERITAGE, SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES Geodiversity New directions in science, whether new physics, new technologies, new skill sets, or new demands for integrated super-sciences to address urgent environmental problems, tend to distance landform studies from familiar

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reference points. Recent interest in geodiversity – which Gray (2008a, 2008b) proposed has attained paradigm status – suggests alternative perspectives that reinstate local sites and popular understandings. The abiotic equivalent of biodiversity, geodiversity is ‘the variety of geological environments, rocks, minerals, fossils, landforms, unconsolidated deposits, soils, and active geomorphological processes in a defined area’ (Gordon 2005). Working from the conviction that ‘geology enriches all of our lives’, geodiverse thinking embraces both nature and culture (McKirdy et al. 2007: 7 and 9). If applications of geodiversity to date have followed the pragmatic tradition of landscape classification and management for sustainable development or conservation, other readings point in new directions: towards tourism, education, wellbeing, even inculcation of national identity! These suggest partnerships between geomorphologists, planners, the public and other academic disciplines to generate new types of landform knowledge. For instance, ‘wild’ landscapes can be articulated by ‘scientific’ techniques that map ‘objective’ properties of topography, both natural (scale, relief, ruggedness) and human (distance from roads, travel times, absence of artefacts) (e.g. McMorran et al. 2006), or by subjective literature (e.g. Macfarlane 2007) that invites attention from cultural geographers working with notions of representation or performance.

Towards a cultural geomorphology … and some kind of conclusion? Working from within established boundaries, Gregory (2000) set out some of the prospects for a cultural physical geography, a review that anticipated later authors who lobby for ‘crossover’ knowledge of the environment that unites different disciplines, straddles the expert/popular divide, and seeks to mix, not separate, nature and culture. This includes proponents of geodiversity, but perhaps the most radical proposals are those of Frodeman (2000, 2003). He

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argues that, if we reject the assumption that science, done ‘properly’ as physics, occupies a ‘privileged vantage point’, other forms of knowledge – politics, aesthetics, metaphysics and theology – achieve legitimacy and must be taken seriously. Frodeman’s perspective invokes alternative traditions of applied geography (borrowing from Buttimer, cited by Johnston 2000): paiedia, ‘the circulation of information through teaching and learning strategies’, and poesis, ‘which involves “the evoking of geographic awareness”, eliciting “curiosity and insight” and addressing “critical and emancipatory interests”’, rather than the logos and ergon of established ‘scientific’ applications. If this moves us away from scientific understanding of landform, it reminds us that, in past times, the earth sciences drew inspiration directly from the humanities (Rudwick 2005, 2008) or actively sought alliances with artists and politicians to strengthen their position (e.g. Worster 2001, on Powell). The diverse histories of geomorphology make it clear that knowledge of landforms cannot be fixed or isolated, but must continue to reflect the entanglement of nature and culture (cf. Harrison et al. 2004; Rhodes et al. 2008).

REFERENCES Barnes, T.J. (2002) ‘Performing economic geography: two men, two books, and a cast of thousands’, Environment and Planning A, 34: 487–512. Beckinsale, R.P. and Chorley, R.J. (1991) The History of the Study of Landforms, or the Development of Geomorphology. Volume Three: Historical and Regional Geomorphology, 1890–1950. London: Routledge. Bishop, P. (2007) ‘Long-term landscape evolution: linking tectonics and surface processes’, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 32: 329–365. Burt, T.P., Chorley, R.J., Brunsden, D., Cox, N.J. and Goudie, A.S. (2008) The History of the Study of Landforms, or the Development of Geomorphology. Volume Four: Quaternary and Recent Processes and Forms (1890–1965) and the Mid-Century Revolutions. London: The Geological Society.

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Childs, E.C. (1996) ‘Time’s profile, John Wesley Powell, art and geology at the Grand Canyon’, American Art, 10: 7–35. Chorley, R.J. (ed.) (1972) Spatial Analysis in Geomorphology. London: Methuen. Chorley, R.J. (2008) ‘The mid-century revolution in fluvial geomorphology’ in T.P. Burt, R.J. Chorley, D. Brunsden, N.J. Cox and A.S. Goudie (eds), The History of the Study of Landforms, or the Development of Geomorphology. Volume Four: Quaternary and Recent Processes and Forms (1890–1965) and the Mid-Century Revolutions. London: The Geological Society, pp. 925–960. Chorley, R.J., Dunn, A.J. and Beckinsale, R.P. (1964) The History of the Study of Landforms, or the Development of Geomorphology. Volume One: Geomorphology Before Davis. London: Methuen. Chorley, R.J., Beckinsale, R.P. and Dunn, A.J. (1973) The History of the Study of Landforms, or the Development of Geomorphology. Volume Two: The Life and work of William Morris Davis. London: Methuen. Cox, N.J. (2008) ‘Prologue’, in T.P. Burt, R.J. Chorley, D. Brunsden, N.J. Cox and A.S. Goudie (eds), The History of the Study of Landforms, or the Development of Geomorphology. Volume Four: Quaternary and Recent Processes and Forms (1890–1965) and the Mid-Century Revolutions. London: The Geological Society, pp. 1–9. Evans, I.S. (1990) ‘Cartographic techniques in geomorphology’, in A.S. Goudie (ed.), Geomorphological Techniques, 2nd edn. London: Unwin Hyman, pp. 97–108. Evans, D.J.A. (ed.) (2003) Glacial Landsystems. London: Hodder Arnold. Evans, D.J.A. (2009) ‘Glacial geomorphology at Glasgow’, Scottish Geographical Journal, 125: 285–320. Finnegan, D.A. (2004) ‘The work of ice : glacial theory and scientific culture in early Victorian Edinburgh’, British Journal for the History of Science, 37: 29–52. Fleming, F. (2000) Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps. London: Granta Books. Frodeman, R. (ed.) (2000) Earth Matters: the Earth Sciences, Philosophy and the Claims of Community. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Frodeman, R. (2003) Geo-Logic: Breaking Ground Between Philosophy and the Earth Sciences. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Geikie, A. (1882) Text Book of Geology. London: Macmillan. Gordon, J.E. (2005) ‘Geological conservation’, in R.C. Selley, L.R.M. Cocks and I.R. Plimer (eds), Encyclopedia of Geology. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

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Gray, J.M. (2008a) ‘Geodiversity: evolution of a paradigm’, in C.V. Burek and C.D. Prosser (eds), The History of Geoconservation. Special Publications, 300. London: Geological Society, London, pp. 31–36. Gray, J.M. (2008b) ‘Geodiversity: developing the paradigm’, Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 119: 287–298. Gregory, K.J. (2000) The Changing Nature of Physical Geography. London: Arnold, 368 pp. Harrison, S. (2001) ‘On reductionism and emergence in geomorphology’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 26: 327–339. Harrison, S., Pile, S. and Thrift, N. (eds) (2004) Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Huggett, R. (2007) ‘A history of the systems approach in geomorphology’, Géomorphologie: Relief, Processus, Environnement, Avril–Juin, 2: 145–158. Inkpen, R. (2005) Science, Philosophy and Physical Geography. London: Routledge. Inkpen, R. and Collier, P. (2007) ‘Neo-Lamarckianism and the Davisian cycle of erosion’, Géomorphologie: Relief, Processus, Environnement, Avril–Juin, 2: 113–124. Johnston, R.J. (2000) ‘Applied Geography’ in R.J. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt and M. Watts (eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography, 4th edn. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 30–34. Kennedy, B.L. (2000) ‘Systems’ in D.S.G. Thomas and A.S. Goudie (eds), The Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Physical Geography, 3rd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Knighton, D. (1998) Fluvial Forms and Processes: A New Perspective. London: Arnold. Lane, S.N. (2001) ‘Constructive comments on D. Massey “Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and human geography”’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 26: 243–256. Lane, S.N., J.H. Chandler and K.S. Richards (1998) ‘Landform monitoring, modelling and analysis: land form in geomorphological research’, in S.N. Lane, K.S. Richards and J.H. Chandler (eds), Landform Monitoring, Modelling and Analysis. John Wiley: Chichester, pp. 1–17. Leopold, L.B., Wolman, M.G. and Miller, J.P. (1964) Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. Livingstone, D.N. (1992) The Geographical Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. Macfarlane, R. (2007) The Wild Places. London: Granta Books.

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McKirdy, A., Gordon, J. and Crofts, R. (2007) Land of Mountain and Flood: The Geology and Landforms of Scotland. Edinburgh: Birlinn. McMorran, R., M.F. Price and A. McVittie (2006) ‘A review of the benefits and opportunities attributed to Scotland’s landscapes of wild character’, Scottish Natural Heritage Commissioned Report No. 194 (ROAME No. F04NC18). Inverness: Scottish Natural Heritage. Murray, A.B., Lazarus, E., Ashton, A., Baas, A., Coco, G., Coulthard, T., Fonstad, M., Haff, P., McNamara, D., Paola, C., Pelletier, J. and Reinhardt, L. (2009) ‘Geomorphology, complexity, and the emerging science of the Earth’s surface’, Geomorphology, 103: 496–505. Paola, C., Straub, K., Mohrig, D. and Reinhardt, L. (2009) ‘The “unreasonable effectiveness” of stratigraphic and geomorphic experiments’, Earth Science Reviews, 97: 1–43. Pyne, S.J. (1998) How the Canyon Became Grand. New York: Penguin. Rhoads, B.L. (2006) ‘The dynamic basis of geomorphology reenvisioned’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96: 14–30. Rhoads, B.L. and Thorn, C.E. (1996) ‘Towards a philosophy of geomorphology’ in B.L. Rhoads and C.E. Thorn (eds), The Scientific Nature of Geomorphology. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 115–143. Rhodes, F.T., Stone, R.O. and Malamud, B.D. (2008) Language of the Earth, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Rudwick, M.J.S. (1976) ‘The emergence of a visual language for geological science, 1760–1840’, History of Science, xiv: 149–195. Rudwick, M.J.S. (2005) Bursting the Limits of Time: the Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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Rudwick, M.J.S. (2008) Worlds Before Adam: the Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sack, D. (1992) ‘New wine in old bottles: the historiography of a paradigm change’, Geomorphology, 5: 251–263. Savigear, R.A.G. (1965) ‘A technique of morphological mapping’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 55: 514–538. Selby, M.J. (1993) Hillslope Materials and Processes, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sherman, D.J. (1996) ‘Fashion in geomorphology’ in B.L. Rhoads and C.E. Thorn (eds), The Scientific Nature of Geomorphology. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 87–114. Simpson, G.G. (1963) ‘Historical science’ in C.C. Albritton (ed.), The Fabric of Geology. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, pp. 24–48. Slaymaker, O. (2009) ‘The future of geomorphology’, Geography Compass, 3: 329–349. Sparks, B.W. (1960) Geomorphology. London: Longman. Strahler, A.N. (1950) ‘Davis’ concepts of slope development viewed in the light of recent quantitative investigations’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 40: 209–213. Strahler, A.N. (1992) ‘Quantitative/dynamic geomorphology at Columbia 1945–60: a retrospective’, Progress in Physical Geography, 16: 65–84. Whymper, E. (1981 [1871]). Scrambles Amongst the Alps. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press. Worster, D. (2001) A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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36 The Cycle of Erosion: Changing Times, Changing Science Antony R. Orme

INTRODCUTION In the 1880s, the Harvard geographer William Morris Davis (1850–1934) formulated a cycle of erosion to explain the development of landforms over time. His model received widespread, but not universal, acclamation. Cyclic concepts were common to nineteenthcentury science and Davis’ model offered a seemingly logical explanation of Earth’s landforms in terms of their apparent youth or maturity or old age, and their evolutionary culmination in the peneplain. The model survived well into the twentieth century and generated many followers. There were skeptics, of course, and there were alternative concepts, but not until the emergence of plate tectonics, refined dating of geologic time and improved understanding of Earth’s changing climates and surface processes did the Davisian model wither away. This chapter critiques Davis’ cycle of erosion within the context of the continuing search for explanation in the natural sciences, as recently evaluated in detail by the

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author (Orme 2007b). Six themes are pursued: (1) concepts of cycles and time in scientific enquiry, (2) the cycle mania of the nineteenth century, (3) the ascent and supremacy of the cycle of erosion from the 1880s to 1940, (4) the descent of the cycle that began with challenges during its supremacy and accelerated after 1940, (5) the quantitative revolution and theoretical hiatus from 1960 to 1990, and (6) the development since 1990 of an alternative model based on notions of Earth behavior which Davis ignored. This essay focuses on the cycle of erosion rather than on its originator, whose life and work have been detailed elsewhere (Chorley et al. 1973).

EARTH CYCLES AND TIME Cyclic concepts Change through time has long fascinated scientists and it is perhaps inevitable that

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attempts to interpret emerging information should stimulate a search for cycles. At one time or another in the history of science there have been erosion cycles, sedimentary cycles, climate cycles, life cycles and so forth. Many such concepts trace their origins to the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean and Asia, reappearing in the works of Renaissance scholars like Jean Buridan (~1297–1358) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) to set the stage for more advanced studies of Earth’s natural processes. In its simplest sense, change through time may be viewed as chaotic or unidirectional or cyclic. Chaotic change is unpredictable and reveals no discernible temporal pattern. Unidirectional change may be linear, progressing at a steady rate, or non-linear, involving accelerations, decelerations and interruptions. Many early concepts of Earth systems were linear and brief, beginning with creation and ending in oblivion, notions that encouraged divine explanations or vice versa. Cyclic change may be viewed as proven or presumed. Proven cycles involve events, such as the hydrological cycle, whose recurrence has been confirmed. Presumed cycles involve events that may repeat through time but have yet to be confirmed. Davis’ cycle of erosion falls within the latter category. It is in good company because science is replete with examples of cycles invoked, rejected and sometimes resurrected. The Davisian cycle was eventually rejected in the form presented by its founder and is unlikely to be resurrected. Nevertheless, its prolonged supremacy provides a salutary lesson for all scholars interested in conceptual models.

The time factor The problem with most Earth cycles is that they need time to work but, despite much conjecture, Earth’s age remained unknown until the advent of radiometric dating in the twentieth century. The problem was compounded in 1650 when James Ussher (1581– 1656) wrote that Earth was created in 4004 BC.

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An approximate 6000-year age for Earth was not new. When Moses alleged that a thousand years were but one day in the sight of God (Psalm 90:4), later generations often viewed the six days of creation as 6000 years. Thus, in 1599, Shakespeare’s Rosalind stated that ‘the poor world is almost six thousand years old’ (As You Like It, Act IV, Scene I). Whatever the precedents, Ussher’s status as an Anglican archbishop rendered it folly for God-fearing persons to oppose holy writ. So, just as science was beginning to develop along modern lines, attempts to invoke natural cycles were constrained by time. Not until this biblical notion was found wanting could scientists begin to invoke cyclic models for Earth’s development over longer periods. But attempts there were, as scientists sought to relate their views on Earth’s origins to biblical accounts of creation and Noah’s flood (Figure 36.1). Nicolaus Steno (1638– 1686), Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and Thomas Burnet (1635–1715) were among those who invoked brief cycles of one form or another to explain Earth’s features. But John Ray (1627–1705) questioned how organisms could be preserved as fossils in rocks in so short a time, which Georges-Louis Buffon (1707–1788) later answered by explaining the six days of creation as allegories for longer epochs of Earth history (Buffon 1778). As the eighteenth century progressed, emerging facts generated a need for more time, notably when scholars began asserting the then novel idea that valleys were cut gradually by the streams flowing in them, rather than suddenly by biblical floods, and Auvergne’s volcanic landscapes were shown to have evolved through several époques over extended time. When geologists began dividing the rock record into time periods, the problem became more acute; and from foundry experiments Buffon (1778) concluded that it would take up to 75,000 years for Earth to cool from a molten state, and perhaps three million years to build Earth’s sedimentary record. These developments were grist to the mill of Scottish physician and farmer, James

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Hutton (1726–1795), who presented in 1785 a cyclic concept of Earth history based on observable processes over unlimited time (Hutton 1788). Thus: But if the succession of worlds is established in the system of nature, it is in vain to look for anything higher in the origin of the earth. The result, therefore, of our present enquiry, is that we find no vestige of a beginning, – no prospect of an end. Hutton 1788: 304.

Hutton’s writings initiated a revolution in the Earth sciences, often viewed retrospectively as pitting catastrophism against uniformitarianism. Although these terms were not coined until later, it is still helpful to view the conflict as one between catastrophists, who invoked recurrent cataclysms over brief time, and uniformitarians who followed Hutton in recognizing a ‘succession of worlds’ or cycles over extended time. Hutton emphasized the slow, virtually imperceptible nature of the processes shaping Earth but recognized that, while the underlying physical principles remained uniform, the processes did not. The revolution developed slowly. Hutton wrote in disconcertingly tortuous prose and was no great evangelist for his own ideas. Furthermore, whereas the enlightened intellectual climate favored new ideas, the political and social climate, traumatized by the French Revolution, urged caution. Catastrophism represented religious and social orthodoxy, whereas Hutton’s ‘no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’ implied heresy (Chorley et al. 1964; Orme 1989).

THE CYCLE MANIA OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY It took the literary and scientific acumen of John Playfair (1747–1819) to clarify and augment Hutton’s arguments for a broader audience. Despite these efforts, and those of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) in France, the concept of Earth cycles was not immediately embraced by the scientific

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community. Perhaps surprisingly, initial support for cyclicity came from catastrophists troubled by the emerging complexity of the fossil record. In order to explain the sudden appearance and disappearance of organisms in Cenozoic marine and freshwater strata beneath the Paris Basin, paleontologist ‘Georges’ Cuvier (1769–1832), following Buffon, invoked several révolutions, or cycles, the most recent of which began with Noah’s flood (Cuvier 1812–1821). Cuvier seemed to understand cycles of erosion and deposition, and long episodes of terrestrial stability separated by brief but violent catastrophes. This compromise was welcomed in America, where repeated extinctions found in the Cenozoic fossil record beneath the Atlantic coastal plain were viewed in terms of several creations separated by climate changes involving episodic refrigeration, the latter reflecting the growing evidence for past glaciation. But Hutton’s idea of a ‘succession of worlds’ over unlimited time gradually took hold and, by the early 1830s, Charles Lyell (1797–1875) could present his Principles of Geology (1830–1833) as compelling support for recurrent Earth cycles. Perhaps more than any other work, Lyell’s work made it possible to invoke cycles freed from the fetters of a biblical time scale and thus avoid the need for sudden catastrophes. This in turn provided greater flexibility for biologists, such as Charles Darwin (1809–1892), to nurture ideas of evolution. Nevertheless, Lyell’s uniformitarianism was more rigid than Hutton’s. For most of his life, he ascribed surface deposits to drifting icebergs, which he could see, rather than to continental ice sheets which he could not see. Lyell’s Principles, subtitled Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, reflected his belief in the present as the key to the past and a reluctance to accept anything other than gradual change through time. It left little room for variable rates of change, for causes yet unknown, or for occasional catastrophes. In contrast, Hutton’s model allowed for temporal

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flexibility in sculpturing processes, a theme reformulated by Davis as complications to his cycle of erosion. Lyell’s attribution of surface deposits to icebergs triggered a belief in submergence and marine planation that persisted for several decades, at least until subaerial denudation became better understood. Archibald Geikie (1835–1924) then calculated that it would take just over five million years for Britain to be reduced by rain and rivers to a plain near sea level and emphasized that ‘before the sea could pare off more than a mere marginal strip of land … the whole land would be washed into the ocean by atmospheric denudation’ (Geikie 1868: 254). Toward the mid-nineteenth century, lively debates regarding cyclic phenomena were occurring across the natural sciences. Thus, when Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), a fossilfish paleontologist with impeccable catastrophist credentials, lent his support to the glacial theory, there began a search for the climate changes responsible, and scholars such as Joseph Adhémar and James Croll revisited classical antecedents to ponder the role of known cyclic changes in Earth–Sun relations. The glacial theory also had implications for global sea level but not until multiple Pleistocene glaciations were confirmed in the late nineteenth century were glacioeustatic concepts of cyclic sea-level change developed. Meanwhile, in America, James Dwight Dana (1813–1895) proposed that geologic time involved prolonged periods of quiet that alternated with pulses of rapid change and mountain building, the latter attributable to Earth’s contraction (Figure 36.1). This view of orogenic cycles was expressed by Joseph Le Conte (1823–1902) thus: Geological history, like all other history, has its periods of comparative quiet, during which the forces of change are gathering strength; and periods of revolution, during which the accumulated forces manifest themselves in conspicuous changes in physical geography and climate, and therefore in rapid movements in the march of evolution of organic forms. Le Conte 1877: 100.

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Support for subaerial erosion cycles constrained by uplift then emerged from explorations of the American West where, following the Civil War, John Wesley Powell (1834–1902), Clarence Edward Dutton (1841–1912) and Grove Karl Gilbert (1843– 1918) established a firm basis for the growth of geomorphology (Figure 36.1). Dutton, recognizing that ‘Erosion and sedimentation are the two half-phases of one cycle of causation’ (1882b: 96), stated: All regions are tending to base levels of erosion, and if the time be long enough each region will, in its turn, approach nearer and nearer, and at last sensibly reach it … But the greater portion of the land of the globe … has been subject to repeated throes of elevation or depression. Such a change … at length destroys the pre-existing relation of a region to its base level of erosion. If it is depressed it becomes immediately an area of deposition. If it is elevated new energy is imparted to the agents and machinery of erosion. Dutton 1882b: 102.

From Powell’s observations on the Colorado River (1875), Davis would borrow the concept of base level for the limit of subaerial erosion and invoke changes of base level to explain the rejuvenation of landforms. From Dutton’s description of the ‘great denudation’ of the Colorado Plateau (1882a), Davis acquired a sense of the time needed to complete an erosion cycle. And from Gilbert’s work in the Henry Mountains (1877), Davis would redefine grade and planation. The cycle of erosion gestating in Davis’ mind was thus derived from hypotheses developed earlier, while his frequent reference to the ‘cycle of life’ accorded well with contemporary interest in Darwinian evolution and Huxley’s ‘cycle of changes’. But Davis would select from these works only those elements that would support his model, ignoring other concepts that might pose problems (Orme 2007b). Finally, as the nineteenth century progressed, questions of time became increasingly problematic. Buffon’s notion of Earth’s age could not accommodate emerging concepts of prolonged denudation and evolution.

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Figure 36.1 Formative influences and individuals associated with the rise and fall of the Davisian cycle of erosion and other concepts. Reproduced from Orme 2007b, by permission of Bellwether Publishing.

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At the other extreme, the limitless time of Hutton and Lyell was also challenged. Scientists thus sought to derive Earth’s age from inferred rates of cooling from an initial molten state or from sedimentation rates revealed by the stratigraphic record. Most results suggested that Earth was somewhere between 20 million and 400 million years old. The futility of these approaches was emphasized when W.J. McGee (1853–1912) computed a mean age of 6 billion years but, allowing for possible errors, placed this between a 10-million-year minimum and a 5-trillion-year maximum (McGee 1893)! How Davis reacted to these findings is unclear but, the greater Earth’s age, the more cycles that could be accommodated. In any case, the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 and its subsequent application to the radioactive decay of minerals soon extended Earth’s age far beyond that needed for several erosion cycles.

ASCENT AND SUPREMACY OF THE DAVISIAN CYCLE OF EROSION, 1880–1940 The nature and acceptance of the Davisian model The cycle of erosion formulated by Davis (1889) explained landforms in terms of structure, process and stage. Building on concepts then in vogue, and for simplicity, the model invoked initial rapid uplift of Earth’s crustal framework followed by prolonged structural quiescence during which subaerial denudation led Earth’s surface through stages of youth, maturity and old age (Figure 36.2, A1). This was an evolutionary model that stressed change through time, culminating in old age in a peneplain with just enough relief for rivers to reach the sea. Isolated hills yet to be consumed by peneplanation Davis termed monadnocks. Within these constraints, the model was linear and unidirectional rather than cyclic. It became cyclic because it

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allowed landforms to be rejuvenated by later uplift or falling base level, and thus for fresh cycles to be initiated (Davis 1902). Old peneplains were thereby slowly devoured and the landscape reshaped toward a new peneplain. This model spurred interest in denudation chronology, which in Davisian terms sought to define sequent erosion cycles from supposed evidence for ancient peneplains. The cycle of erosion focused initially on fluvial landscapes in humid temperate lands, with relief between valleys and interfluves increasing during youth and then decreasing into old age. As his ideas matured, however, Davis allowed for complications and interruptions to the cycle caused by changing base levels and volcanic activity (Davis 1905). He viewed the postulate of initial rapid uplift as one of convenience, subject to some flexibility. Preferring a broad brush to detailed measurement, Davis and his followers later applied cyclic hypotheses to deserts, coasts and karst, and to landscapes shaped by glaciation and periglaciation. If one accepted its basic premise, the Davisian model was simple and imaginative, couched in terms that students could understand. It soon became popular and its author, thus emboldened, began presenting it as ‘the geographical cycle’ (Davis 1899, 1909), reflecting the then dominance of physical geography within the discipline. Furthermore, once established, the model began to drive scientific enquiry, and this was to cause problems when its assumptions could not be sustained by evidence to the contrary. The ascent of the cycle of erosion did not occur in an intellectual vacuum. Even as Davis was honing his model, cyclic concepts involving youth, maturity and old age were pervading the natural sciences. By then, such notions had been reinforced by growing evidence for sedimentary rhythms in the stratigraphic record, even as other scientists began fashioning alternative temporal models. In 1888, Eduard Suess (1831–1914) coined the term ‘eustasy’ for rhythmic changes of global sea level, attributing falling seas to episodic

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Figure 36.2 Essential features of cyclic subaerial denudation models and non-cyclic subaerial denudation concepts. The three cyclic models (A1, A2, A3) show presumed modes of denudation over time. For simplicity, initial rapid uplift followed by prolonged structural quiescence is assumed. The two non-cyclic concepts (B1, B2), which ignore cyclic implications, focus on presumed modes of denudation relative to variable tectonic uplift (B1) and isostatic response (B2). Model B2 assumes initial tectonic uplift, ignores subsequent tectonic activity, and infers variable isostatic uplift of the original base level. Reproduced from Orme 2007b, by permission of Bellwether Publishing.

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subsidence of the sea-floor on a contracting Earth, and rising seas to subsequent displacement of ocean waters by sediment shed from emerging continents. In America, Thomas Chamberlin (1843–1928) viewed orogenies as ‘correlated pulsations’ in time and invoked global transgressions and regressions to explain stratigraphic unconformities (Chamberlin 1898). Soon, scientists nearly everywhere were invoking rhythms and cycles, while multiple Pleistocene glaciations and cyclothems deeper in the Phanerozoic record were being attributed to climate changes driven by Earth’s orbital cycles (Chamberlin 1899). Acceptance of the cycle of erosion owes much to Davis as a person – a small dapper man of great intelligence and self-discipline, of boundless enthusiasm and strong will, whose pacifist beliefs in no way impeded his forcefulness in debate. In addition, his appointment at Harvard from 1885 to 1912, his founding of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 1904, and lectures overseas, provided Davis with platforms from which to proselytize (Chorley et al. 1973). For many years, the AAG provided a pulpit for the Davisian scheme in all its persuasive forms, while issues involving crustal instability and geomorphic processes were mostly ignored by geographers (Orme 2004). Davis inspired many students at Harvard but his principal disciples came from beyond its walls. He also brought his missionary zeal to the promotion of geography as a whole, although his specific contributions beyond geomorphology were minimal.

The cycle of erosion as a research tool In view of its inherent weaknesses, it is surprising that Davis’ cycle of erosion should ever have become a research tool. But it did and, as applied to denudation chronology, continued to influence research long after Davis’ death. Research in the Davisian mold was driven by attempts to identify

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stages of landform development toward the peneplain and, by extension, to see remnants of older peneplains in presumed polycyclic landscapes. In short, to believe in the cycle of erosion was to see it expressed in the landscape. This approach seemed to work reasonably well in denuded oldlands where peneplains were presumed from accordant summits and deformed surfaces inherited from earlier base-leveling. In the American East, where the cycle of erosion had been formulated, the so-called Fall Zone and Schooley peneplains of the Appalachians seemed to offer ample evidence for two cycles of prolonged post-Paleozoic denudation, each followed by uplift and deformation (Sharp 1929; Johnson 1931). Imbued with the zeal of disciples, Davis’ followers became ever more extravagant in their claims for multiple erosion cycles. Furthermore, while Davis eschewed elaborate studies that did not feed his model, his followers applied the model extensively to regional interpretations, notably those by Nevin Fenneman (1865–1945). The peneplain concept had its critics of course and, as Davis came to realize, his model worked less well in the active orogens of the American West, but this did not constrain peneplain hunting. The Anglophone world beyond North America also engaged the cycle of erosion. In Britain, generations of students, influenced by Sidney Wooldridge (1900–1963) and David Linton (1906–1971), labored on applying the model to regional denudation chronologies. Wooldridge and Linton’s elegant thesis (1939) on the Cenozoic denudation of southeast England invoked two peneplanation cycles, separated by early Neogene deformation, but the evidence was flimsy. Nevertheless, despite growing unease, the work spawned many denudation chronologies over the next 20 years. In New Zealand, despite the region’s tectonic instability, the Davisian model was initially accepted by Charles Cotton (1885–1970). In Australia, Edwin Hills (1906–1986) similarly explained the landforms of Victoria.

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Beyond Anglophone audiences, the cycle of erosion received less adulation, even hostility in central Europe where it was formally introduced through Davis’ lectures to the University of Berlin. Imbued with strong traditions in structural geology, such worthies as Alfred Hettner (1859–1941), Johannes Walther (1860–1937), Siegfried Passarge (1866–1958) and Davis’ erstwhile friend Albrecht Penck (1858–1945) all opposed the Davisian model. It also fell foul of their understanding of process, and Davis’ cause was not helped by his scathing review of Passarge’s generic landform studies. Opposition was later embodied in Walther Penck’s alternative model (see later). Scientists elsewhere in Europe were more sympathetic; for example, in France where Henri Baulig (1871–1962) and Emmanuel de Martonne (1873–1955) engaged the Davisian model for the Massif Central. When applied beyond fluvial landscapes, the cycle of erosion was even less compelling. Most scholars recognized the improbability of vast landscapes being reduced to near base level solely by glaciers or wind. Nevertheless, attempts were made to define the progress of such cycles, perhaps the most remarkable being that for planation by periglacial processes proposed in 1950, long after enthusiasm for the model had waned.

The cycle of erosion in an educational context While the cycle of erosion as a research tool was questioned during Davis’ lifetime, the model survived much longer in the classroom because it provided a coherent and seemingly logical sequence that appealed to students. In a school text sponsored by the National Geographic Society, to which Gilbert and Davis also contributed, Powell (1896) invoked Davis’ peneplain concept but, anticipating Walther Penck by a quarter century, also described how convex and concave slopes reflected relations between uplift and denudation. Texts by luminaries such as

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Chamberlin, Brigham, Gilbert, Salisbury and Tarr soon followed, but ambivalence toward the Davisian scheme was not uncommon and geographer Rollin Salisbury (1858–1922), who had an uneasy relationship with Davis, avoided the term peneplain in favor of baseleveled surface. Surprisingly, the Davisian scheme was presented less ambivalently in textbooks written after Davis’ death. In America, texts by Worcester (1939), Lobeck (1939), von Engeln (1942) and Thornbury (1954, 1969) perpetuated the Davisian message. In Europe, Wooldridge and Morgan (1937) scripted similar ideas and as late as 1969 the ninth edition of Machatschek’s venerable Geomorphologie still felt obliged to evaluate the Davisian model against those of German geomorphologists. Indeed, texts in the Davisian mold continued to appear into the 1970s.

DESCENT OF THE DAVISIAN CYCLE OF EROSION, 1940–1960 The descent of the cycle of erosion was an erratic process, hastened by younger research scholars but retarded by older textbook scribes. Some scholars had never accepted the concept, but their critiques were little heeded during the clamor to espouse Davisian ideals, more so among geographers than geologists, more so among English speakers than elsewhere.

The Penckian model An early rumbling of discontent with the Davisian model came from central Europe where, despite translation of Davis’ works into German, few scientists had been convinced. Geographer Albrecht Penck (1858– 1945), an astute critic of the Davisian model, reasoned inductively from the particular to the general, from observed evidence toward scientific principle. In contrast, Davis reasoned deductively from a working

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hypothesis, the cycle of erosion, toward the particular, involving a search for facts that would vindicate the model. Then, in 1924, a posthumous book by Albrecht’s son, geologist Walther Penck (1888–1923), presented an alternative model, anticipated by Powell (1896), which sought to explain denudation in response to the intensity and duration of uplift (Penck 1924). Viewing Davis’ cycle of erosion as a special case, the younger Penck believed that crustal mobility should be an integral part of any cyclic theory, although he rejected contemporary notions of continental drift. In the Penckian model, convex slopes formed when uplift rates exceeded denudation rates, concave slopes occurred when denudation exceeded uplift, and straight slopes developed when uplift and denudation were balanced (Figure 36.2, B1). Once established, slope form would persist as long as the uplift–denudation ratio did not change. These aspects of Penck’s model did not imply cyclicity, but the repeatable progression of landforms from an initial surface (Primärrumpf) to a terminal plain (Endrumpf) did. Thus began a debate on the relative merits of the Davisian and Penckian systems that was to last several decades, a debate more thoroughly pursued in the Anglophone world than in Germany where observation and inductive reasoning long held sway. When Davis died in 1934, many believed that the cycle of erosion had stood as critical an examination as any generalization in science. But, in reality, the model was in decline as scientists began more boldly to question its assumptions. A symposium in 1939 provided the forum for contrasting the Davisian and Penckian systems. Ever Davis’ champion, Douglas Johnson (1878–1944) viewed Penck’s belief that slope profiles reflected an uplift–denudation ratio as ‘one of the most fantastic errors ever introduced into geomorphology’ (AAG 1940: 231). But John Leighly (1895–1986) felt that Davis’ assumptions about geomorphic processes ‘left his system with an inadequate foundation’ (AAG 1940: 225). And Kirk Bryan

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(1888–1950) opined that Penck’s radical doctrine, despite its faults, had shocked geomorphologists like ‘the effect of a cold shower on a complaisant reveler … Slightly bemused by long, though mild intoxication on the limpid prose of Davis’s remarkable essays’ (AAG 1940: 254).

Other models and elaborations Elaborations of the Davisian model ranged from Crickmay’s (1933) panplanation, lateral planation by rivers in the later stages of erosion cycles (Figure 36.1), to cyclic pediplanation, advocated by geologist Lester King (1907–1989). King’s pediplanation (1953) invoked Penck’s scarp retreat across widening pediments, with inselbergs as yet unconsumed by erosion rising above the pediplain (Figure 36.2, A2). Davis had viewed pediments as peculiar to arid and semi-arid lands, but King saw pediplanation as a global process. Others, noting the deep regoliths of the humid tropics, proposed a double-planation concept, etchplanation, which involved both downward penetration of the weathering front and later surface stripping of rotted rock in response to falling base level or climate change (Büdel 1957; Figure 36.2, A3). Pediplanation and etchplanation garnered particular support from the long-denuded cratons of Africa and Australia. Nevertheless, these were still evolutionary models which invoked subaerial denudation over time, albeit by different combinations of process. There were also those who, despite Geikie’s admonition, continued to support marine planation over subaerial denudation, or who compromised by integrating subaerial cycles with changing sea levels. Some were stimulated by Suess’ rhythmic eustasy and by stratigraphic evidence for marine transgressions; others were encouraged by eustatic explanations of late Cenozoic shorelines around the Mediterranean Sea. Baulig (1935) compromised by invoking the Davisian model and by extrapolating river profiles to episodic marine stillstands during late

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Cenozoic emergence. Baulig’s 1935 memoir and Wooldridge’s encouragement were enough to dispatch two generations of students in search of partial peneplains, river terraces and former shorelines, at least until the founding assumptions were proven wrong.

Reasons for the decline of the Davisian cycle of erosion The Davisian model declined for several reasons which, by the mid-twentieth century, were moving geomorphology along different paths. First, during the 1940s, a growing awareness of Earth’s crustal mobility weakened notions of initial rapid uplift followed by prolonged structural quiescence. Davis (1905) had recognized this problem but felt that more gradual uplift accompanied by denudation could be accommodated as needs arose. However, Penck’s model was more persuasive in this respect, whereas Davis never came to terms with the reality of denudation during uplift. Then, in the 1950s, advances in marine geology, geophysics and paleomagnetism, combined with earlier circumstantial evidence for continental mobility, paved the way for the plate tectonic revolution of the 1960s. As evidence accumulated for moreor-less continuous crustal generation and sea-flooring spreading, for frequent orogenesis at collisional margins, and for crustal consumption through subduction, the structural premise of the cycle of erosion in its simplest form became, at best, a special case, found perhaps within continental interiors that had escaped tectonic disruption. At worst, this premise was untenable. Secondly, the assumptions of the Davisian model regarding process were increasingly exposed by more sophisticated studies that followed Gilbert’s early lead (1877, 1914), notably the research into fluid mechanics and sediment entrainment conducted by Leighly, Hjulstrom, Rubey and Bagnold in the 1930s (Figure 36.1). Some basic tenets of the Davisian model now came to be questioned,

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including the assumptions that steeper slopes produce greater erosion, that maturity is reflected in grade, reduced downcutting and accelerated stream meandering, and that old age implies reduced mean stream velocity. In short, and increasingly aware of the impacts of climate change on geomorphic process, scientific support for Davis’ evolutionary concepts of youth, maturity and old age waned. The question of grade was (and still is) problematic. Davis had borrowed the term from Gilbert (1877) who initially defined it as a stable condition of stream channels and slopes wherein erosion and deposition are balanced. Such balance was often framed in the context of equilibrium but, when applied to slopes, both grade and equilibrium were confounded by uncertainties regarding rock resistance and debris removal. In essence, Davis’ model implied linear unidirectional change in a repeatable context but, as others recognized, denudation is a non-linear process subject to accelerations, decelerations and thresholds, concepts that were redefined in the 1930s and became central to later research. Thirdly, improved geochronologies posed problems for peneplanation. During Davis’ life, the amount of time needed to shape a peneplain was thought to range from 5 to 40 million years, depending on initial relief. Later, Arthur Holmes (1890–1965), with strong credentials in radiometric dating, observed that ‘A million years or so may suffice to bring comparatively small rivers, like those of Britain, well into the stage of old age, but the great rivers of high Asia may still be far from completing their prodigious task in a hundred million years’ (Holmes 1944: 186). A long time-scale would certainly raise questions about crustal stability. Furthermore, while Davisians could attribute the lack of modern peneplanation to unstable base levels driven by recurrent glaciations over the past few million years, new evidence now began identifying instabilities throughout the deeper geologic past. Ultimately, the cycle of erosion failed in a spatial context because it oversimplified interactions between structure and process.

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It failed in a temporal context because it sought to extend the geologic record by reference to fragmentary, buried, even lost evidence. In Britain, for example, where the onshore stratigraphic record from the deep past mostly ends with the withdrawal of Cretaceous seas, the mode of Cenozoic denudation generates much speculation, fertile ground for generating hypotheses but not for testing them. Rock waste stored beneath nearby seas may reflect denudation but not how it occurred. This problem is exacerbated over time, notably where waste produced under changing conditions from ancient cratons has been consumed and recycled by crustal processes. Under these circumstances, recognition of peneplains, or for that matter panplains, pediplains, etchplains, or Endrümpfe, becomes a matter of faith rather than substance. During the descent of the cycle of erosion, in early 1950s, Wooldridge still believed that Davis had established the core doctrine and methods of geomorphology but, by 1963, Richard Chorley (1927–2002) could state that ‘geomorphology in the half century after 1890 developed by in-breeding into a highlystylized discipline wherein the keen edge of research was blunted’ (Chorley 1965: 32). Such were the perceptions across the generation gap. Collectively, the issues outlined above, combined with the fresh approaches to geomorphology then emerging, sounded the death knell for the cycle of erosion as conceived by Davis.

QUANTITATIVE REVOLUTION AND THEORETICAL HIATUS, 1960–1990 By 1960, the Davisian model as a research tool was dead. Although textbooks might continue to address the model and its shortcomings for some years to come, active scholars were directing their thoughts elsewhere (Orme 2002). From 1945, progress in fluvial geomorphology, the original foundation for the cycle of erosion, had advanced on two fronts (Figure 36.1). First, based on

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concepts promoted by Robert Horton (1875– 1945) and Arthur Strahler (1918–2002), attempts were made to quantify slope forms and drainage networks, and to derive physical ‘laws’ from their statistical relationships (Horton 1945; Strahler 1950). Secondly, geomorphologists were seeking to define more thoroughly the magnitude and frequency of geomorphic processes and quantitative relations between form and process. The coup de grace was applied by publication in 1964 of Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology by Luna Leopold (1915–2006), Gordon Wolman (1924-2010) and John Miller (1923–1961). This book paid scant attention to Davisian concepts and focused instead on present processes and landform responses independent of stage. Thus, deprived of a unifying model and with Davis’ disciples passing from the scene, a new generation of students began embracing other investigative approaches. Neither of these two approaches was new. For example, early work on human arteries had influenced physician Hutton’s view of river networks in the 1780s. But what these ideas did was to redirect geomorphology away from the qualitative cycle of erosion to more quantitative investigations involving force and resistance. Although the so-called ‘laws’ would in turn be challenged, the methods involved have since been widely adopted by scientists investigating the organizational attributes of natural and artificial systems. Furthermore, the revived focus on form– process relations was based firmly on the nonlinear concepts developed by hydraulic engineers in eighteenth-century Europe and later by Gilbert (Orme 1989). Nevertheless, research now effectively divorced form and process from stage of development. While acknowledging Davis’ role in geomorphology, Leopold and his associates concluded that no large surfaces fitting a Davisian peneplain were forming on Earth’s surface today and that the existence of such features in the geologic past needed to be proved rather than inferred from accordant summits. It came as no surprise, therefore, when younger scholars

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found no justification for the peneplains invoked by Davis and his disciples. The quantitative revolution led new research in geomorphology along practical paths that diverged markedly from Davis’ scheme. Whereas the latter had been based on a preconceived notion requiring little or no measurement, research now demanded carefully honed experimental designs, accurate measurements and statistical testing. These approaches were stimulated by technical advances in instrumentation, remote sensing, computers and information processing, which were not available to earlier scholars. Numerical data and computers in turn provided the basis for designing and testing new predictive models. Further, as dating techniques and process studies improved, there developed a better sense of time, space and causality in geomorphology, including interpolations of long-term denudation from short-term sediment yields. Initially, all this was to the good, provided research questions were well conceived and the results carefully interpreted. As time passed, however, it became apparent that studies of process and form were revealing more and more about less and less, as many projects focused on small discrete portions of a practical problem with little attempt to formulate new theory. The fall of the Davisian model thus led to a theoretical hiatus in geomorphology. Ambivalence toward Davis’ model involved both strong criticism (Chorley 1965) and a generous review of Davis’ life and work (Chorley et al. 1973). But to reject one paradigm without proposing another also posed problems. Strahler (1950, 1980) and Chorley (1962) probably recognized this when they recast geomorphology within the mold of systems theory, a supposedly unifying concept based on notions derived from classical thermodynamics. In reality, however, this approach was a functional means of organizing and analyzing data rather than a new paradigm. Scholars imbued with an Earth-systems approach might speak confidently of open and closed systems, positive and negative

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feedbacks, and fluvial systems rather than rivers, but changes in name did not necessarily enhance the explanation of substance. Helpful though the systems approach was in redefining relationships, it did not provide a new genetic model for landform development. There were exceptions during this theoretical hiatus. John Hack (1913–1994) challenged Davisian peneplanation by invoking Gilbert’s concept of dynamic equilibrium within a systems framework (Figure 36.1). Hack (1960) suggested that, once landscapes become adjusted to available energy, continued downwasting occurs at similar rates such that differences in form reflect spatial variations between rocks and energy rather than temporal evolution and changing base levels. Simply stated, the accordance of summit levels, the basis for many presumed peneplains, was mostly an expression of rocks with similar resistance to erosion. And Stanley Schumm (born 1927) defined the role of thresholds in geomorphic systems whereby abrupt changes could occur during landscape evolution as threshold values of stress were exceeded. Apart from extrinsic thresholds posed by changes in tectonics, isostasy, climate and land use, Schumm (1977) showed that abrupt changes could also occur when intrinsic thresholds are crossed, as when accumulating stress leads to sudden slope failure or when increasing stream sinuosity leads to channel avulsion. Threshold events such as these reopened debate on sudden changes in landform development and engaged neocatastrophism. Indeed, whereas Davis’ cycle of erosion was an evolutionary model, we now know that the evolution of life has been interrupted by sudden catastrophes – as Cuvier recognized long ago, but in a different idiom.

RESURRECTION OF AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL Davis’ formulation of the cycle of erosion was much influenced by Dutton’s ‘great

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denudation’ of the Colorado Plateau, for prolonged denudation was a necessary precursor to peneplanation. But Davis ignored isostasy, a term coined by Dutton ‘to express that condition of the terrestrial surface which would follow from the flotation of the crust upon a liquid or highly plastic substratum’ (Dutton 1882c: 283). Earth’s crustal disequilibrium had been debated earlier but it was Dutton who named isostasy, although he did not fully understand it and applied it to the wrong problem (Orme 2007a). While the concept of isostasy was soon accepted by geodesists and geophysicists, and by those who recognized crustal loading by ice sheets and large lakes, most geologists were reluctant to embrace isostatic models based on mathematical massaging of crustal assumptions that could not be proved at the time. Nevertheless, Dutton had specifically suggested that the uplift and displacement of the Colorado Plateau were ‘some of the consequences of the great denudation’ (Dutton 1882a: 69). In short, whereas Davis’ cycle of erosion was predicated on the assumption that uplift leads to denudation, Dutton’s ‘great denudation’ could cause uplift by releasing gravitational loading of Earth’s crust. But isostatic adjustments of this nature were an unwelcome complication to the progress of peneplanation and likely to invalidate the cycle of erosion. Such a complication was best ignored, and that is what Davis did. Astonishingly, he rejected the concept of isostasy because it was inconsistent with evidence for peneplanation (Davis 1910)! As early as 1905, Reginald Daly (1871–1957) had invoked isostatic response to both uplift and denudation in order to explain accordant summits, but had been ignored, and Schumm (1963) later suggested that episodic isostatic adjustments to denudation could promote rejuvenation. However, these were exceptions rather than the rule. Davis could have integrated isostasy into his model but he did not, for which he may be excused because in his time the relevant mechanics and geophysics were poorly understood. Nor did he have the investigative

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techniques available to later scholars. Had he involved isostasy, his model would have become more complex and less attractive. In contrast, Walther Penck’s model of slope response to variable uplift engaged crustal processes but was far more complex, less compelling, and came to be ignored – even in Germany. In its modern form, and after several decades of lip service, isostasy has re-emerged as a concept fundamental to the explanation of Earth’s surface form (e.g. Molnar and England 1990). Wherever these debates focus, whether on long-denuded shields or presently rising mountain ranges, they confront a basic problem, namely the measure to which Earth’s surface reflects the continuing search for balance between crustal and subcrustal forcing of uplift, subsidence and transfers of mass at depth, and climate-induced forcing of denudation, sedimentation and mass transfers of rock waste across the surface (Orme 2007b; Figure 36.2, B2). Isostatic responses of Earth’s crust to denudation in turn raise many spatial and temporal issues, which become much more complex if tectonic movements and igneous activity occur while isostatic adjustments to denudation are in progress. Whatever the response, in such a system there is no place for the cycle of erosion as conceived by Davis.

CONCLUSION Explanations of landforms in terms of structure, process, and time are wholly defensible. This approach assumes that interactions between Earth’s crustal and surface processes are understood and measurable. Furthermore, while some critics objected to Davis’ oversimplification of structure and process, his cycle of erosion also suffered because, with the techniques then available, time was imponderable. Davis assumed that time could be defined by conceptual surrogates – the perceived youth or maturity or old age of landforms – that were both realistic

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and measurable. They were not. As such, his model could not be tested until more reliable methods, including surface-exposure dating by cosmogenic radionuclides and thermochronologies of mineral and rock behavior, emerged for dating landforms alongside the sedimentary record, the complementary phases of Dutton’s ‘cycle of causation’. Stripped of its evolutionary baggage, the Davisian cycle of erosion had merit as an interpretive exercise, and indeed still has merit as an end-member in a range of possible temporal scenarios for Earth’s surface development. The other end member would be a model that assumes perpetual instability, even chaos, characterized by continuously changing surfaces responding to interactive denudational, tectonic and isostatic processes. Such a model, exemplified in the active orogens along the Pacific margins of the Americas, would not be bound by time. The reality for much of Earth’s surface, based on modern notions of structural mobility and climate forcing, lies somewhere in between. Davis deserves credit for formulating an attractive conceptual model that, although not testable at the time, stimulated debate regarding Earth’s changing landscapes. Much the same can be said for those who offered alternative schemes. The model’s eventual demise occurred because it outlived its usefulness and failed to gain support from new facts and methodologies, and because its proponents died and were replaced by a new generation of scholars unfettered by earlier notions. Today, for older scholars, the Davisian cycle of erosion is a distant memory, an interlude in the development of geomorphology, of research by debate. For younger scholars, it is largely irrelevant, although cyclic concepts continue to interest scholars of many disciplines. For geologists, the cycle of erosion was an extension of historical geology which, despite some promise, failed to deliver satisfactory answers. For geographers, it became a noose which choked alternative contributions to the discipline. For modern scientists seeking

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geotechnical solutions to environmental problems and predictions of future change, the cycle of erosion is wholly irrelevant. In retrospect, for geography as for other disciplines, the rise and fall of Davis’ cycle of erosion provide a salutary lesson for all who yearn for knowledge. The experience reaffirms Horace’s 2000-year-old aphorism: Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri (In the words of no master am I bound to believe).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Chase Langford is thanked for his skilful final rendering of the figures. This chapter is based on a longer, extensively referenced, paper by the author (Orme 2007b), by permission of Bellwether Publishing.

REFERENCES AAG (1940) ‘Symposium: Walther Penck’s contribution to geomorphology’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 30: 219–284. Baulig, H. (1935) The Changing Sea Level. London: Institute of British Geographers, 3. George Philip & Son (reissued 1956). Büdel, J. (1957) ‘Die doppelten Einebnungsflächen in den feuchten Tropen’, Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie, 1: 223–225. Buffon, G.L. Leclerc, ‘Comte’ de (1778) Des Epoques de la Nature. Paris (reprinted and edited in 1962 by J. Roger, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturale, Mémoire Série C10, Paris). Chamberlin, T.C. (1898) ‘The ulterior basis of time divisions and the classification of geologic history’, Journal of Geology, 6: 449–462. Chamberlin, T.C. (1899) ‘An attempt to frame a working hypothesis of the cause of glacial periods on an atmospheric basis’, Journal of Geology, 7: 545–584. Chorley, R.J. (1962) ‘Geomorphology and general systems theory’, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 500–B. Chorley, R.J. (1965) ‘A re-evaluation of the geomorphic system of W.M. Davis’ in R.J. Chorley and

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P. Haggett (eds), Frontiers in Geographical Teaching. London: Methuen, pp. 21–38. Chorley, R.J., Dunn, A.J. and Beckinsale, R.P. (1964) The History of the Study of Landforms or the Development of Geomorphology, 1: Geomorphology Before Davis. London: Methuen. Chorley, R.J., Beckinsale, R.P. and Dunn, A.J. (1973) The History of the Study of Landforms, or the Development of Geomorphology, 2: The Life and Work of William Morris Davis. London: Methuen. Crickmay, C.H. (1933) ‘The later stages of the cycle of erosion’, Geological Magazine, 70: 337–347. Cuvier, L.C.F.D. [G] (1812–1821) Discours sur les Révolutions de la Surface du Globe et sur les Changements Qu‘Elles Ont Produit dans le Règne Animal. Paris (Revised edition, 1985, Christian Bourgois, Paris). Daly, R.A. (1905) ‘The accordance of summit levels among alpine mountains: The fact and its significance’, Journal of Geology, 13: 105–125. Davis, W.M. (1889) ‘The rivers and valleys of Pennsylvania’, National Geographic Magazine, 1, 183–253. Davis, W.M. (1899) ‘The geographical cycle’, Geographical Journal, 481–504. Davis, W.M. (1902) ‘Base-level, grade, and peneplain’, Journal of Geology, 10: 77–111. Davis, W.M. (1905) ‘Complications of the geographical cycle’, Eighth International Geographical Congress, Washington, 1904, pp. 150–163. Davis, W.M. (D.W. Johnson, ed.) (1909) Geographical Essays. Boston: Ginn and Co. Davis, W.M. (1910) ‘The theory of isostasy’, Geological Society of America Bulletin, 21: 777. Dutton, C.E. (1882a) ‘The tertiary history of the Grand Cañon District’, U.S. Geological Survey, Monograph 2. Dutton, C.E. (1882b) ‘The physical geology of the Grand Cañon District’, U.S. Geological Survey 2nd Annual Report, pp. 47–166. Dutton, C.E. (1882c) ‘Review of Physics of the Earth’s Crust, by the Rev. Osmond Fisher’, American Journal of Sciences, 23: 283–290. Geikie, A. (1868) ‘On denudation now in progress’, Geological Magazine, 5: 249–254. Gilbert, G.K. (1877) Report on the Geology of the Henry Mountains. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. Gilbert, G.K. (1914) ‘The transportation of debris by running water’, U.S. Geological Survey, Professional Paper 86, Washington, D.C.

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Hack, J.T. (1960) ‘Interpretation of erosional topography in humid temperate regions’, American Journal of Science, 258A: 80–97. Holmes, A. (1944) Principles of Physical Geology. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons. Horton, R.E. (1945) ‘Erosional development of streams and their drainage basins: hydrophysical approach to quantitative morphology’, Geological Society of America Bulletin, 56: 275–370. Hutton, J. (1788) ‘Theory of the Earth; or an investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution, and restoration of land upon the globe’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1 (1788–90): 209–304. Johnson, D.W. (1931) Stream Sculpture on the Atlantic Slope. New York: Columbia University Press. King, L.C. (1953) ‘Canons of landscape evolution’, Geological Society of America Bulletin, 64: 721–752. Le Conte, J. (1877) ‘On critical periods in the history of the Earth and their relation to evolution; and on the Quaternary as such a period’, American Journal of Science, 14: 99–114. Leopold, L.B., Wolman, M.G. and Miller, J.P. (1964) Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology. San Francisco: Freeman. Lobeck, A.K. (1939) Geomorphology: An Introduction to the Study of Landscapes. New York: McGrawHill. Lyell, C. (1830–1833) Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. London: John Murray. Machatschek, F. (1969) Geomorphology (translation by D.J. Davis of the 9th edition of Geomorphologie). New York: Elsevier. McGee, W.J. (1893) ‘Note on the “Age of the earth”’, Science, 21 (540): 309–310. Molnar P. and England P. (1990) ‘Late Cenozoic uplift of mountain ranges and global climate change: Chicken or egg?’, Nature, 346: 29–34. Orme, A.R. (1989) ‘The twin foundations of geomorphology’, in G.L. Davies and A.R. Orme (eds), Two Centuries of Earth Science, 1650–1850. Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, University of California, pp. 29–90. Orme, A.R. (2002) ‘Shifting paradigms in geomorphology: The fate of research ideas in an educational context’, Geomorphology, 47: 325–342. Orme, A.R. (2004) ‘American geomorphology at the dawn of the 20th century’, Physical Geography, 25: 361–381.

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Orme, A.R. (2007a) ‘Clarence Edward Dutton (1841– 1912): Soldier, polymath, and aesthete’ in P.N. Wyse Jackson (ed.), Four Centuries of Geological Travel. London: Geological Society, Special Publications, 287: 271–286. Orme, A.R. (2007b) ‘The rise and fall of the Davisian cycle of erosion: Prelude, fugue, coda, and sequel’, Physical Geography, 28: 474–506. Penck, W. (1924) Die morphologische Analyse: Ein Kapitel der physikalischen Geologie. Geographische Abhandlungungen. Stuttgart: Engelhorn. Powell, J.W. (1875) Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and its Tributaries, 1869–72. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. Powell, J.W. (1896) ‘Physiographic regions of the United States’, in J.W. Powell (ed.) The Physiography of the United States. New York: American Book Company, pp. 65–100. Schumm, S.A. (1963) ‘The disparity between present rates of denudation and isostasy’, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper, 454-H. Schumm, S.A. (1977) The Fluvial System, New York: Wiley.

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Sharp, H.S. (1929) ‘The Fall Zone peneplain’, Science, 69: 544–545. Strahler, A.N. (1950) ‘Davis’ concepts of slope development viewed in the light of recent quantitative investigations’, Annals, Association of American Geographers, 40: 209–213. Strahler, A.N. (1980) ‘Systems theory in physical geography’, Physical Geography, 1: 1–27. Thornbury, W.D. (1954) Principles of Geomorphology (2nd edition, 1969). New York: John Wiley. Von Engeln, O.D. (1942) Geomorphology: Systematic and Regional. New York: Macmillan. Wooldridge, S.W. and Linton, D.L. (1939) Structure, Surface and Drainage in South-East England. London: Institute of British Geographers, 10 (reprinted 1955). Wooldridge, S.W. and Morgan, R.S. (1937) The Physical Basis of Geography: An Outline of Geomorphology. London: Longmans Green. Worcester, P.G. (1939) A Textbook of Geomorphology. New York: Van Nostrand.

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37 Glaciation and Ice Ages Bryan Mark

INTRODUCTION Ideas about and theoretical formulation of processes of glaciation and the periodization of ice ages when glaciers and ice sheets were relatively dominant over the Earth’s surface comprise a vital theme in modern geography. Conceptualizing the global environmental transformation featuring glaciers expanding over entire continents is both familiar and yet fantastically strange, evoking a series of physical–geographic quandaries that have not only framed a dramatic history of scientific discovery since the eighteenth century but are also prompting a reintegration of various disciplines into a unified Earthsystems science. A comprehensive ‘physics of the Earth’ was indeed one of the expressed goals of Alexander von Humboldt, arguably the prime architect of modern geography as an integrative field, which ‘aimed at nothing less than a synthesis of atmospheric, oceanic, geological, ecological, and cultural phenomena across the globe’ (Jackson 2009: 596). Studying the past and present age of ice and its impacts offers one of the most significant entries into the complexity of how the various components among the Earth’s overall ‘system’ interact and affect one another.

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Notwithstanding the name, this Earthsystems approach to glaciation research embodies essentially geographic methods of analysis because it involves at once both a geospatial data-assimilation project and a theoretical climate challenge. From early observations of glacial ‘drift’, the identification of unequivocal ‘glacial’ evidence has always needed to be secured in both space and time. Over the decades, approaches to the problem have focused on a diversity of geographic scales. Initially, local and regional-scale studies were prevalent in identifying stratigraphic evidence of past glaciers. Then, correlating these spatially diverse deposits in time with hypothesized global-scale climatic events rapidly expanded the geographical scope of research. And once again, contemporary research features detailed examination of specific localities with more precise dating techniques and paleoclimatic analyses to test general theories of causation. Many controversies about the nature of glaciation and the existence, causes and length of ice ages have arisen and fundamental questions remain. The conceptual tools and research methods being applied to the linkage between perennial ice and climate change are diverse and also transcend scales from the micro to

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global. Current research is in many regards an attempt to consolidate understanding holistically and with relevance to the urgent possibility that global-scale climate-environmental change is upon us in the form of anthropogenic global warming. What is happening with the Earth’s ice is deeply revealing of what is afoot with climate change. I begin this chapter with a selective examination of the history of how ice ages have been thought about since the nineteenth century and some of the controversies that have arisen in interpreting their causation and impacts. In this, I glance at peer-reviewed geographic literature of the period to illuminate characteristic viewpoints. I then turn to a discussion of some broader scientific dimensions related to glaciations, providing a limited number of examples. Finally I provide an overview of how today’s studies of glaciation have become almost entirely consumed by broader questions of environmental change, specifically how the sensitivity of ice can be used to estimate processes of longterm climate change.

ICE AGE THEORIES: FROM ERRATICS TO ORBITS Glaciation comprises a class of physical– environmental problems that fall into a number of conceptual categories. On one side are those human dimensions of how glaciers capture the imagination and have motivated thinking about the physical environment as coupled systems (Knight 2004). On the other side glaciers offer a tangible link to dynamic forces that over time shape our Earth, which otherwise seems as old as stone, and essentially immutable. In both respects, however, glaciers are understood as powerful. They are also mysterious, even fearful. Our image of them is at once that of the remote, the bizarre, the terrifying. The very idea of an ‘ice age’ causing ice to spread over the landscape evokes notions of chilling apocalyptic doom, or of a strange netherworld ruled by mon-

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strous mega-fauna like mammoths and sabertoothed tigers. Yet, characterized by alternating periods of advance and retreat of continental ice cover, ice ages also exemplify how natural change forces evolution (e.g. Gill et al. 2009). Though strictly speaking, evolution is without direction, there is often a strong appeal to a rhythmic, decipherable pattern to such change. Episodic climatic disturbances or ‘mutations’ were even noted by early evolutionary theorists like Wallace (1880: 228) to have potential to cause more rapid changes to life forms. Glacial theory has gone through a number of phases as an intellectual problem. Initially scoffed at as focused on the geographically marginal, it did not require too many examples of field evidence, such as erratic boulders, to convince most scientists that glaciers once covered much larger areas of the Earth’s surface than they did by the nineteenth century. In this respect, it was a catalyst for innovative thinking about the transformative nature of the climate system more generally. The questions posed were as follows: How could glaciers have become so big? Why did climate change? And very soon, when did climate change, and how often? And how many glaciers and ice sheets were involved? A survey of publications from different decades over the nineteenth to the twentyfirst century reveals both continuity and change in our understanding of glaciation, past and present. To answer the first-order questions of the nature, extent, and timing of glaciations, a systematic exploration of the glacial landscape was called for. Since large portions of the Earth’s human population literally live in the wake of glaciers, this was immediately accessible, at least generally. Given the recent occurrence (in geologic time) of the most recent ice ages, the impact of glaciation on the geomorphology of the landscapes formed by them is readily discerned, discontinuous though the resulting evidence might be. Furthermore, we currently inhabit Earth during a time (rare in Earth history) featuring continental-scale

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glaciers that provide extant analogues to understand the behavior and process of widespread glaciation in previous epochs. It was a Scottish natural philosopher who in 1815 is credited with making one of the first observations about the cause of erratic boulders scattered about a landscape that eventually led to current theories of the ice ages (Herries Davies 1969). James Geikie reviewed an early text on the Alpine ice age by Penck and Bruckner (Die Alpen in Eiszeitalter) for the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (1910), wherein he paid tribute to John Playfair of Edinburgh for debunking older ‘theories’ that explained the origins of erratic displacement as the result of mysterious debacles or cataclysms (notably the Biblical flood). While the term ‘drift’ is still used to describe poorly-sorted, erratic-strewn sediments deposited by glaciers, its origin reflects early interpretations wherein ‘drifting’ ice bergs on a global flood were assumed to have transported and chaotically deposited the large, angular erratics within other poorly sorted sediments. Geikie quoted Playfair thus: When we consider that the present point where the granite is to be found in its native place is at a distance of 70 miles, it will appear no easy matter to assign a conveyance by which this block could have performed such a journey over hills and valleys without considerable injury. A current of water, how-ever powerful, could never have carried it up an acclivity, but would have deposited it in the first valley it came to, and would in a much less distance have rounded its angles, and given to it the shape so characteristic of stones subjected to the action of water. A glacier which fills up valleys in its course, and which conveys the rocks on its surface free from attrition, is the only agent we now see capable of transporting them to such a distance, without destroying that sharpness of the angles so distinctive of these masses. Geikie 1910: 193.

It was not until 15 years after Playfair’s initial comment, however, that a rigorous scientific study of glaciation was undertaken, and Geikie attributes to the likes of Venetz, Charpentier and Agassiz the laying of the foundations for modern glacial theory through a systematic study of geomorphology. In a review written for the 1928 ‘centenary of

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glacial geology’, Leverett (1929: 233–4) attributed the first recognition of periodicity in glaciation to discoveries in the 1850s of multiple glacier extensions over time. This was based on observations of sedimentary stratigraphy and the superposition of different characteristic types of accumulations. Layers of drift were interpreted as evidence of glacials (colder episodes of ice advances), and given names based on the locations identified. Multiple glacial advances over time were evidenced by successive drift deposits and intervening accumulations of vegetation and organic soils between glacial sediments, indicating interglacials (warmer periods between ice advances). A classical scheme of four glacials and three interglacials became established based initially entirely on European land evidence, followed soon by comparable sections (with distinct names) across North America. By the time Geikie wrote his review, over 30 years had already passed since the fundamental conclusions of glacial geomorphology had been established, and summarized by Dr. Penck. They were: (a) the former greater extension of the glaciers, (b) the periodical return of such extensive glaciation, and (c) the effective action of glacier-ice as a modifier of the Earth’s surface. These tenets from primary field-based observations motivated formation of a general theory for glacial causation and process, and still are impetus for a broad tradition of physical geographic and paleoclimatic research. Filling in the theory to explain how, why and when the Earth experienced these episodic environmental revolutions has become integral to the continued development of Earth system science. Geikie (1910: 195) goes on to venerate the ‘glacialists’ for the requisite fieldwork supporting their observations: ‘[O]nly men who are strong both mentally and bodily could have accomplished what they have done’. Nevertheless, there is irony in the coincidental timing of (not quite successful) early polar explorations and the birth of glacial theory from geomorphologic observations as noted by William Herbert Hobbs:

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It is one of the interesting coincidences of science that almost at the moment when Agassiz was hypothecating the great Pleistocene ice sheet of Northern Europe, the greatest of existing continental glaciers was being independently approached by no less than three great exploring expeditions sent out under American, French, and English auspices. Although Wilkes, Dumont d’Urville, and Ross, all arrived at the margins of the great Antarctic ice sheet, no one of them set foot upon it; and thus the conception of earlier continental glaciers took definite shape before any existing example had been studied. Hobbs 1911: 641.

Necessarily, therefore, fieldwork in Antarctica and Greenland became increasingly essential. Signs of what glaciers had done could be found elsewhere in valley shapes, moraines, and so on, but understanding the actual physics of glaciation in large ice sheets required measurement of processes on those ice sheets themselves, as it still does today (e.g. van den Broeke et al. 2009). The quest to establish an absolute chronology for the ice age glacials and interglacials motivated clever inferences based on geographical location and physical processes. Dating ice age events initially relied on assigning a count of absolute years since glaciers occupied landscapes; that is, measuring postglacial time. This often demanded extrapolating time as a function of rates observed in modern analogue processes, such as sedimentation rates, peat accumulation or waterfall incision. One method of counting postglacial time was developed by looking at laminated sediments in pro-glacial settings where annual couplets of laminae (one of coarser, the other of finer grains) found in the sediments deposited at the base of lakes. De Geer was instrumental in providing the detailed study of this process, pioneering its use to count time since glacial events, and coining the term ‘varve’ for the paired layers (De Geer 1912). Varve counting was an advance because unlike other methods, it did not rely on extrapolation dependent on present rates, since each laminae is an actual count of sediments deposited over the time of formation.

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Various other inferences from observations of existing Alpine glaciers provided insights into the climate and spatial context of their ice age predecessors. For the larger past glaciations summer seasons were inferred to be shorter, and overall annual temperatures depressed. Relatively cooler summers and warmer winters would provide the requisite conditions for a glacial event. The idea of the ‘snowline’ as the vertical limit of snow formation essential to glacier growth was also derived under the assumption of persistent vertical temperature lapse in the troposphere. The intersection of this snowline with topography effectively delimited glacier extent. Likewise, how much climate conditions had changed over time could be inferred in the difference between ancient and modern snowlines. This spatial-climatic concept was central in underpinning glacial theory, but can be considered to represent a general “equilibrium-line dynamic” in sedimentary systems broadly defined for the entire Earth system (Gaffin 2009). As the spatial extent and landscape pattern of glaciation became established in early studies, theories of the climatic forcing and causation emerged. These theories were based upon the temporal pacing of glaciations that ultimately would require better chronologic evidence and ideas from an integrated Earth-system perspective to rigorously test. The spatial extent and relative weathering of glacial ‘drift’ sheets and deranged drainage patterns left on the landscape were direct evidence that determined relative extensions and ages of glacials. Organic remains in the facies of moraines subsequently were sought for further contextual understanding of the environmental conditions producing glaciation; for example, evidence of presence (or absence) of trees and plants on either side of Alps, and mollusks, diatoms and fauna fossils (e.g. mammoth teeth). Relative frequencies were established in accord with a high degree of statistical rigor. But it was not until the collection of deep-sea sediment cores that a longer history with many more advances was revealed

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(e.g. Sugden 1978; Knight 2006). Although far removed in distance from the direct imprint of past glaciers on the terrestrial landscape, ocean sediments nonetheless provided a continuous marker of glacial–interglacial events because of systematic linkages in the Earth system between glaciers and the ultimate source of all planetary water, the oceans. Any natural change to the volume of water stored in frozen form would alter the isotopic character of remaining ocean water. Thus, pioneering isotopic analyses of foraminifera casts in the marine sediments furthered understanding of not only the timing but also the nature of glaciations by showing a characteristic ‘sawtooth’ temporal pattern to global glacier fluctuations (Emiliani 1955), suggesting slow build up of ice followed by rapid termination events. The improved insights into the pattern of climate-mediated global environmental changes afforded by ocean sediments also provided the necessary frequency data to affirm an astronomical ‘pacemaker’ for glaciations (Hays et al. 1976). The ocean record of global ice volume changes showed four embedded cyclic components with different periodicities (100,000, 41,000, 23,000 and 19,000 years). All these ocean cycles correlated to astronomical cycles that a Serbian mathematician, Milutin Milankovitch, demonstrated to control solar insolation, and he painstakingly calculated for different Earth latitudes. Following Milankovitch’s reasoned link between ice ages and the insolation at 65°N, the spectral expression of frequencies in the ocean cores thus seemed to confirm astronomical variations as most likely causing glaciations. Still, there are problems. Although the 100,000-year eccentricity cycle predominates, it also relates to the weakest of actual orbital forcings. This ‘100,000-year’ problem is long-standing and not completely resolved. Also, there is an unexplained frequency shift in the pacing from a predominance of 41,000 to 100,000 year periodicity that occurs 700,000 years ago, though recent work supports changing ice sheet dynamics (Sosdian and Rosenthal 2009).

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The story of the triumph of the glacial theory is an exciting science tale involving numerous people, passionate perspectives, keen observations and a slow change in the ‘consensus’ view (e.g. Hevly 1996; Finnegan 2004; Raukas 2008; Sörlin 2009). The human drama and historical details have been effectively recounted by John Imbrie and his daughter, Katherine Palmer Imbrie, in their excellent book, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery (1979). The title reveals a pride-of-place for the significance attributed to evidence published in the mid-1970s supporting the Milankovitch idea of orbital variations pacing the ice ages; after all, Imbrie was one of the co-authors of the 1976 Science paper confirming what has become known as the Milankovitch theory (Hays et al. 1976). In the preface note accompanying the paperback edition of 1986, Imbrie and Imbrie go on to make a direct connection between the ice age problem and global climate change, using interesting phrases that echo in this area of investigation today (also see Lockwood 1980; Beckinsale 1982). They summarize the general scientific mission subsequent to the glacial ice age ‘solution’ as follows: Convinced that this theory should be taken seriously, the international scientific community mounted a fresh assault on the ice-age problem. Within a few years there was a general agreement that the Milankovitch theory was essentially correct. With the fundamental cause of the ice ages now known, the panorama of Pleistocene climate became much more than a historical curiosity. It was now seen as an important opportunity to understand some of the fundamental mechanisms of climate change. Imbrie and Imbrie 1986: 8.

In popularizing this perspective they note the pivotal importance of a 1982 International Symposium held at Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University, NY, sponsored by NATO, NSF and several scientific societies, from which one can trace many subsequent international symposia on glaciation and climate change down to the present.

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In this post-discovery phase, current glacial research constitutes the ‘mopping up operations’ of normal science (i.e. Kuhn 1962) after the major paradigm of glaciations and ice ages had been established. Nevertheless, fundamental understanding of glacial processes requires precise temporal and spatial control. The puzzles that remain are largely ones of scale and chronology. Ongoing current research is carried out in response to issues or challenges to test hypotheses relating to how local shifts in ice conditions affect larger scale trends and vice versa. If the tilt angle of the Earth, for example, is the driving force for glacial conditions, then it would require non-synchronous glacial advances in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Were the ice advances therefore synchronous across hemispheres, as appears to generally be the case? Were there significant ‘leads’ or ‘lags’ that can imply global transmission of glacial climate ‘signals’ via either ocean or atmospheric circulation? In this context, large geographic assimilation projects of glacial-era climate and environmental change data from multiple proxy sources and computer simulations at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) like CLIMAP (1976) and COHMAP (1988) have been transformative, collaborative, interdisciplinary science projects that established large-scale understanding of geographical patterns. Shortly after the CLIMAP assimilations, controversy was drawn to the inconsistency of tropical regions where high elevation records of glacial geomorphology implied large temperature change, coeval with minimal to no change at sea level (i.e. Rind and Peteet 1985). It is not insignificant to note that the premise of solving tropical glacial snowline problems led to elucidation about climate-vapor feedback mechanisms that still underlie some of the biggest uncertainties about our climate system (e.g. Sun and Lindzen 1993). Studies of mountain glaciation beyond the large ice sheets remain important in contemporary research, and technological advances have refined abilities to discern extent and

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chronology at paleo-glacier specific scales. For example, Balco (2009) reviews a recent research paper focused on alpine glacier valleys in New Zealand (Schaefer et al. 2009), showing how the multitude of landscape features (glaciers, lakes, moraines, etc.) shaped by historic ice advances and retreats hold complementary evidence about local response to global climate forcings. Detailed methods can be used to establish vital data for understanding both the course of local glaciation and how this can be tied to broader climatic forces producing glacier expansion and contraction (also see Benn 2007). The ‘geographic footprint of glacial change’, as Balco (2009) terms this approach, strongly suggests that there are regional as well as global drivers, perhaps atmospheric circulation changes particular to the southwest Pacific in this case. The geographically sparse nature of most paleoclimatic data often naturally leads to the idea that global-scale phenomena can be identified by correlating widely separated paleoclimatic records; both hypotheses about Holocene climate discussed above – synchronous versus non-synchronous hemispheric climate forcing – proceed from this premise. Yet, a central concept of modern climate dynamics is that climate variability is expressed in complex regional patterns, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and others. If this was also true in the past – as there is no reason to doubt – then past glacier changes were probably regionally patterned at a geographic scale that may well be smaller than the spacing of the available paleoclimatic data.

IMPLICATIONS OF GLACIAL EVENTS The pursuit of a theory of ice ages has promoted the issue of ancient glaciations from the subject of esoteric curiosity for gentlemen scientists to providing an integral clue of how the Earth’s climate system functions. Importantly, it has also exemplified how understanding would have to come from

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careful integration of multiple scientific disciplines via elegant quantitative expression (i.e. mathematical models). This has promoted new multidisciplinary geographic research exploring broader implications of locating glaciers in space and time, and associated landscape dynamics. A brief survey of some recently published work highlights key insights and controversies in dating glacial deposits, identifying regional- to local-scale glaciations, and postulating processes of glacial erosion and deposition. The need for better constraining the timing of glacial epochs has inspired new techniques of dating. For example, cosmogenic radionuclide (CRN) techniques have allowed scientists to use accumulation of other radionuclides in rock surfaces (e.g. 10Be, 26Al, 36Cl), products of spallation reactions set off by cosmic rays, to date glaciations. CRN dating techniques hold tremendous potential for refining our understanding in glacial regions where material for radiocarbon dating is sparse, or glacial features are older than the radiocarbon limit of ~50,000 years. However, CRN dating requires resolution of uncertainties tied to the many processes that can alter radionuclide concentrations, such as atmospheric attenuation of cosmic rays, differential erosion of rock surfaces and inheritance of nuclides, all requiring careful consideration when dating glacial deposits (i.e. Smith et al. 2005). Discerning the local imprint of global glacial climate events and interpreting landscape formations and processes comprise an important and often controversial area of research. While continental-scale glaciations are unequivocal examples of global climate variability, there is far less certainty about the local-scale expression of these climate events. Once identified, glacial deposits are indicative of a past climate extreme, but they need to be dated and analyzed in terms of sitespecific climate forcing that is often not clear on the scale of the mountain range. Thus, local landscape interpretations are sometimes hotly debated. Some examples of ongoing local controversies include: were the South

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Africa Draakensberg mountains glaciated? Was the entire Tibetan plateau covered in glacial ice during the Last Glacial Maximum? Did the South American tropical Andes experience glacier advance synchronous with the Younger Dryas cold event? The scale-forcing dimension increases the complexity of interpretation when the level of analysis sharpens, considering the power of topography to modify climate variables controlling glacier mass balance such as precipitation and temperature. Given the paucity of dateable material and inaccessibility of high mountain settings, there has been a tendency to overinterpret the regional climate significance of single paleo-glacier sites. Ever more observations compiled and the availability of improved digital terrain data allow for detailed refinement, and motivate standardization of information for inter-comparing regions and inter-comparing climate models (e.g. Harrison 2005). Glaciers have not only been understood to be the passive outcomes of climate and topography across local to global scales but also as dynamic forces shaping the landscape through erosion and deposition. The glacial ‘buzz-saw’ hypothesis identifies the erosive power of glaciers to even limit the height of mountains (Brozovic et al. 1997; Egholm et al. 2009). Where mountains intercept the snowline elevation, glaciers can exist, and a faster rate of lithospheric unloading follows, reinforcing the buoyancy of the crust and thus inducing even more uplift. This dynamic interplay between climate and tectonics has seen an abundance of recent research where geographic information science and its models have been instrumental in directing field studies (Tomkin 2009; Whipple 2009). There is ongoing debate about relative rates of fluvial versus glacial erosion, with implications for climate-landscape dynamics (i.e. Shuster et al. 2005, Koppes and Montgomery 2009), and numerical modeling has provided an important tool for testing hypotheses of scale (Martin and Church 2004). Capable of such intense erosion, glaciers become part of a biogeochemical feedback wherein Cenozoic

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uplift of mountain ranges has been hypothesized to strip the atmosphere of CO2, inducing even further global cooling (Raymo and Ruddiman 1992). Furthermore, it has been hypothesized that the redistribution and exposure to weathering of such tremendous volumes of sediments by glacial events so disturbed geochemical fluxes, that the Earth’s biogeochemistry is literally suffering a ‘glacial hangover’ (Derry 2009; Vance et al. 2009). Finally, glaciation considered in the context of the ice ages is not simply about its implications for climate change or the possibility of future glaciation but also concerns more immediate impacts on the landscape and the evolution of plant and animal communities. Large parts of the world’s flora and fauna live in the wake and under the continuing impact of glaciers in relation to water resources and access to other places and resources, so that tracing glaciers has trans-disciplinary implications (i.e. Mark 2008). A critical assessment of glacial geography can even link past glacial processes and patterns to present physical and human geography, such as the spatial coincidence of the maximum extent of the Des Moines lobe of the Laurentide Ice Sheet with soil development, differential economic development, property value and even educational access and religious worldviews in Iowa (Gersmehl 1998). Paleoanthropology has established the significance of the ice ages for human evolution and the relations between this and human migrations for the long-term history of human settlement and economic activities (e.g. Stringer 2006).

ICE AND CLIMATE CHANGE The discovery of Earth’s ice ages has become a rich context for the development of climate change analysis over immense scales of time and space. In the physical–geographical understanding of the Earth system, this theme arguably provides the nexus and theoretical context for the modern discussion of global

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climate and environmental change. It has also defined the scope of Quaternary studies which began by rewriting geologic history, and is now a vibrant academic field seeking to unite biological and physical approaches to the interpretation of environmental dynamics over time. In purpose, the science of climate is predictive, and hence has led to such scientific funding initiatives as the Paleo Perspectives on Climate Change funded by the US National Science Foundation. The goal in the midst of rapid change is to understand, archive, and interpret past changes. With glaciers, there is a new priority on salvaging the living archives before they melt. The radical environmental change producing the ice ages immediately implicated climatic causation: how could such a thing have happened? Importantly, the very nature of climate stability was challenged. What shifts in the fundamental energy exchange of the planet could initiate such ice sheets to grow and degrade, and to do so multiple times? If the climate system could change like that in the past, could it do so again in the future? Related fields of inquiry further developed and were included in this paleo-climatological endeavor: biogeography (the patterns of life in relationship to climatic zones); evolutionary biology (how did life forms adapt or respond to these environmental alterations); oceanography; glaciology (dynamics and physics of ice); biogeochemistry; astronomy; mathematics; climate modeling. In essence, this confluence witnessed the birth of the various Earth-system sciences. In the most recent period of geologic time, human civilization in general, and Western civilization in particular, has evolved in the wake of glaciers. This context grounds many geographic analyses and processes. Observations of glacial changes provide society with a spatially distributed but visibly obvious metric of climate change. The prospect of large-scale ice sheet collapse raising sea level presents one of the most troubling potential future disturbance to our global environment and to world society (Sabadini 2002). Profound insights have been afforded

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by global-scale imagery from satellites (Quincey and Luckman 2009; Raup et al. 2007). Attention to scale relationships between glacier changes in area and volume is important, as small mountain glacier changes have played a significant role in sealevel rise (Meier et al. 2007). Ultimately, however, geographic research oriented toward understanding glacial processes through time finds relevance to society insofar as the entire Earth system is necessarily affected by the balance of water mass in its frozen form, thus prioritizing a research focus today on polar and alpine regions (Meier 2008).

REFERENCES Balco, G. (2009) ‘The geographic footprint of glacier change’, Science, 324: 599–600. Beckinsale, R.P. (1982) ‘Review of J. Imbrie, and K.P. Imbrie, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery ’, Progress in Physical Geography, 6: 606–608. Benn, D.I. (2007) ‘Glaciers’, Progress in Physical Geography, 31: 337–343. Brozovic, N., Burbank, D. and Meigs, A. (1997) ‘Climatic limits on landscape development in the northwestern Himalaya’, Science, 276: 571–574. CLIMAP Project Members (1976) ‘The surface of the ice-age earth’, Science, 191: 1131–1144. COHMAP Project Members (1988) ‘Climatic changes of the last 18,000 years: observations and model simulations’, Science, 241: 1043–1052. De Geer, G. (1912) ‘A geochronology of the last 12,000 years’, Compte Rendu 11e Congres International, Stockholm, 1: 241–253. Reprinted in R.P. Goldthwait (ed.) (1975) Glacial Deposits. Benchmark Papers in Geology, 21. New York: Halsted Press. Derry, L.A. (2009) ‘A glacial hangover’, Nature, 458: 417–418. Egholm, D.L., Nielsen, S.B., Pederson, V.K. and J.E. Lesemann (2009) ‘Glacial effects limiting mountain height’, Nature, 460: 884–888. Emiliani, C. (1955) ‘Pleistocene temperatures’, The Journal of Geology, 63: 538–578. Finnegan, D.A. (2004) ‘The work of ice: glacial theory and scientific culture in early Victorian Edinburgh’, British Journal for the History of Science, 37: 29–52.

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Gaffin, S.R. (2009) ‘Ubiquity of the relative equilibrium line dynamic and amplified cyclicity in Earth sedimentary systems’, Climatic Change, 96: 203–218. Geikie, J. (1910) ‘The Alps during the Glacial Period’, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, 42: 192–205. Gersmehl, P.J. (1998) ‘This calls for a map’ in P.M. Anderson (ed.), Professors who Believe: the Spiritual Journeys of Christian Faculty. Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 238 pp. Gill, J.L., Williams, J.W. Jackson, S.T. Lininger, K.B. and Robinson, G.B. (2009) ‘Pleistocene megafaunal collapse, novel plant communities, and enhanced fire regimes in North America’, Science, 326: 1100–1103. Harrison, S.P. (2005) ‘Snowlines at the last glacial maximum and tropical cooling’, Quaternary International, 138/9: 5–7. Hays, J.D., Imbrie, J. and Shakelton, N.J. (1976) ‘Variations in the earth’s orbit: pacemakers of the ice ages’, Science, 194: 1121–1132. Hevly, B. (1996) ‘The heroic science of glacier motion’, Osiris, 11: 66–86. Herries Davies, G.L. (1969) The Earth in Decay: A History of British Geomorphology, 1578–1878. London: Macdonald. Hobbs, W.H. (1911) ‘The Pleistocene glaciation of North America viewed in the light of our knowledge of existing continental glaciers’, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, 43: 641–659. Imbrie, J. and Imbrie, K.P. (1979) [1986] Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery. London: Macmillan. Jackson, S.T. (2009) ‘Alexander von Humboldt and the general physics of the Earth’, Science, 324: 596–597. Knight, P.G. (2004) ‘Glaciers: art and history, science and uncertainty’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 29: 385–393. Knight, P.G. (ed.) (2006) Glacier Science and Environmental Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Koppes, M.N. and D.R. Montgomery (2009) ‘The relative efficacy of fluvial and glacial erosion over modern to orogenic timescales’, Nature Geoscience, 2: 644–647. Kuhn, T. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 172 pp. Leverett, F. (1929) ‘Glaciations of the Northern Hemisphere’, Science, 69: 231–239. Lockwood, J.G. (1980) ‘Milankovitch theory and ice ages’, Progress in Physical Geography, 4: 79–87. Mark, B.G. (2008) ‘Tracing Andean glaciers over space and time: some lessons and transdisciplinary

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implications’, Global and Planetary Change, 60: 101–114. Martin, Y. and Church, M. (2004) ‘Numerical modeling of landscape evolution: geomorphological perspectives’, Progress in Physical Geography, 28: 317–339. Meier, M.F., Dyurgerov, M.B., Rick, U.K., O’Neel, S., Pfeffer, W.T., Anderson, R.S., Anderson, S.P. and A.F. Glazovsky (2007) ‘Glaciers dominate eustatic sea-level rise in the 21st century’, Science, 317: 1064–1067. Meier, M. (2008) ‘Review of B. Orlove et al., “Darkening Peaks: glacier retreat, science and society”’, Journal of Glaciology, 54: 763–764. Quincey, D.J. and Luckman, A. (2009) ‘Progress in satellite remote sensing of ice sheets’, Progress in Physical Geography, 33: 547–567. Raukas, A. (2008) ‘Evolution of the theory of continental glaciation in northern and eastern Europe’, in R.H. Grapes, D. Oldroyd, and A. Grigelis (eds), History of Geomorphology and Quaternary Geology. London: Geological Society of London, pp. 79–86. Raup, B., Racoviteanu, A., Khalsa, S.J.S., Helm, C., Armstrong, R. and Y. Arnaud (2007) ‘The GLIMS geospatial glacier database: a new tool for studying glacier change’, Global and Planetary Change, 56: 101–110. Raymo, M. and W.F. Ruddiman (1992) ‘Tectonic forcing of late Cenozoic climate’, Nature, 359: 117–122. Rind, D. and Peteet, D. (1985) ‘Terrestrial conditions at the Last Glacial Maximum and CLIMAP sea-surface temperature estimates-are they consistent?, Quaternary Research, 24: 1–22. Sabadini, R. (2002) ‘Ice sheet collapse and sea level change’, Science, 295: 2376–2377. Schaefer, J.M., Denton, G.H., Kaplan, M., Putnam, A., Finkel, R.C., Barrell, D.J.A., Andersen, B.G., Schwartz, R., Mackintosh, A., Chinn, T., and Schluchter, C. (2009) ‘High-frequency Holocene glacier fluctuations in New Zealand differ from the northern signature’, Science, 324: 622–625. Shuster, D.L., Ehlers, T.A., Rusmore, M.E. and K.A. Farley (2005) ‘Rapid glacial erosion at 1.8 Ma

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revealed by 4He/3He thermochronometry’, Science, 310: 1668–1670. Smith, J.A., Finkel, R.C., Farber, D.L., Rodbell, D.T. and Seltzer, G.O. (2005) ‘Moraine preservation and boulder erosion in the tropical Andes: interpreting old surface exposure ages in glaciated valleys’, Journal of Quaternary Science, 20: 735–758. Sörlin, S. (2009) ‘Narratives and counter-narratives: North Atlantic glaciology and meteorology, c. 1930–1955’, Journal of Historical Geography, 35: 237–255. Sosdian, S. and Rosenthal, Y. (2009) ‘Deep-sea temperature and ice volume changes across the Pliocene–Pleistocene climate transitions’, Science, 325: 306–310. Stringer, C. (2006) Homo Britannicus: The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain. London: Allen Lane. Sugden, D.E. (1978) ‘Glacial geomorphology’, Progress in Physical Geography, 2: 309–320. Sun, D. and Lindzen, R. (1993) ‘Water-vapor feedback and the ice-ages snowline record’, Annales Geophysicae-Atmospheres Hydrospheres and Space Sciences, 11: 204–215. Tomkin, J.H. (2009) ‘Numerically stimulating alpine landscapes: the geomorphologic consequences of incorporating glacial erosion in surface process models’, Geomorphology, 103: 180–188. Vance, D., Teagle, D.A.H. and G.L. Foster (2009) ‘Variable Quaternary chemical weathering flux imbalances in marine geochemical budgets’, Nature, 458: 493–496. van den Broeke, M., Bamber, J., Ettema, J. Rignot, E. Schrama, E. van den Berg, W.J. van Meijgaard, E. Velicogna, I. and Wouters, B. (2009) ‘Partitioning recent Greenland mass loss’, Science, 326: 984–986. Whipple, K.X. (2009) ‘The influence of climate on the tectonic evolution of mountain belts’, Nature Geoscience, 2: 97–104. Wallace, A.R. (1880) Island Life: or the Phenomena and Causes of Insular Faunas and Floras, Including a Revision and Attempted Solution of the Problem of Geological Climates. London: Macmillan.

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38 Rivers and Drainage Basins Nick Clifford

INTRODUCTION Rivers collect and transport water and sediments from higher to lower areas of the land surface, and, in most cases, eventually to the sea. Rivers are, however, not simply linear conveyor belts; they exist as part of wider networks that drain the land surface comprising their drainage basins. These drainage basins are structural (geological) features of the landscape, which define the area, or catchment for the collection of water and sediments, and which are separated (in all but very few instances) topographically from other basins by drainage divides or watersheds. Particularly in North America, the term watershed is frequently used as synonymous with the drainage basin, and the terms such as river basin are also commonly deployed. Drainage basins, their drainage networks and rivers form the backdrop to physical landscape processes, ecological patterns and to all forms of human economic and social activity: they are, in this respect, the essential geographical elements of the physical–environmental and human surface of the earth. Scientific approaches to drainage basins and their management are thus far from simply

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concerned with water resources. Challenges to improved understanding and management are increasing as the scale and complexity of human use and of environmental dynamism increases. In this chapter, some of the fundamental physical and biological principles that govern the form and function of rivers and drainage basins are introduced, together with some indication of the scientific traditions, goals and objectives which have marked the study of these environments. The general context for introducing the foundational science of river basin hydrology, river channel geomorphology and engineering is set by increasing demands on the environment occasioned by human use and need, and latterly, of some recognition of the requirement for, and possibility of, environmental restoration. The sections of the chapter which follow introduce the principal connections between, and techniques of analysis of, the geological evolution, hydrological performance and structure of the drainage network within the context of the drainage basin as a fundamental (geographical) landform unit. Key aspects of, and approaches to, river form and function are then reviewed, since rivers provide the link between the drainage network and the drainage basin.

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DRAINAGE BASINS AS HYBRID LANDSCAPES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE Drainage basins have a long history as fundamental units of scientific and geographical enquiry, dating at least a far as Parrault’s (1674) study of the connection between rainfall, drainage area and runoff of the Seine basin. Parrault concluded that, to sustain the river flow for one year required one sixth of the annual rainfall, and this relation between drainage basin area and river discharge was formalized later by Philippe Buache in 1752 and T.J. Taylor in 1851. Drainage basins and rivers were also chosen in early geographical works as the most identifiable and precise demarcations for regions and boundaries, although not without exaggeration and rather odd consequences. Watersheds, as divides between basins, were often caricatured, and historical maps sometimes exaggerate their representation into mountain chains! Other analyses were based on more sophisticated reasoning, bound-up with the identification and development of the regional framework as a basis for physical and human geography. To Ritter (1862), for example, upper, middle and lower portions of river basins were distinct regions of both human and physical geographical study, while Brunhes (1920) in his study of the human geography of France, argued that rivers provided connections between the physical environment and human occupancy, offering a more enduring demarcation than political divisions. In proposed reorganization of regional government in England (Fawcett 1917), drainage basins were again one of the criteria of demarcation of ‘natural divisions, partly because of the correspondence of resource availability resource provision within theme. For these and other historical references, see Smith, in Chorley (1969) and Gregory (1973). Newson (1992) reviews the history of drainage basin management through the hydraulic civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates,

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the Nile and China; the rise of the science of hydraulics from Roman to Renaissance times; the late medieval reliance on water as a source of power for the pre-industrial revolution; and more contemporary environmental issues in drainage basin planning, management and water resources. One linking theme both in distant history, as well as more contemporary respects, is the central place of water resource production and allocation (first irrigation, subsequently hydroelectric power, and latterly in various forms of integrated environmental planning and management) in underpinning not only scientific investigation, but also legal systems and institutions. As Figure 38.1 demonstrates, rivers and basins are now essentially hybrid human– environmental systems, with increasingly complex, competing and uncertain managerial demands and outcomes. Meybeck (2003) considers rivers as both earth-maintaining links between atmosphere, pedosphere, biosphere and oceans, and as water and aquatic biotic resources, which are progressively used and transformed by humans. Human pressures are now of such scope and scale that even at continental scales, river systems are no longer appropriately considered as controlled only by earth systems processes. This defines a new era, the ‘Anthropocene’, characterized by a set of ‘syndromes’ – flood regulation, fragmentation, sediment imbalance, neo-arheism (flow reduction), salinisation, chemical contamination, acidification, eutrophication and microbial contamination, together with their various causes and symptoms. While this chapter concentrates on the physical processes of water and sediments which characterize the form and process of rivers and their drainage basins, it is also important, therefore, to note that almost no practical or applied managerial interest in them can now afford to neglect ecological perspectives on these environments, nor socio-economic aspects such as land use, catchment planning and environmental sustainability.

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Figure 38.1 The river basin as a human–environmental system, characterized by particular forms of environmental stress and sensitivity to change. Reproduced from Newson (1992) figure vii, after Marchand and Toornstra (1986), by permission from Routledge.

SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES TO DRAINAGE BASIN FORM AND PROCESS Scientific analysis of drainage basin form and process has been of interest to at least three major academic disciplines: geology, hydrology and geomorphology. Each of these has stressed particular attributes according to the time- and space-scale of their enquiry, and, too, the practical or theoretical concern

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involved (see Gregory and Walling 1973). Following the tectonic and structural formation of river basins, river networks evolve over geological timescales in response to the geology and topography of the basin, and also in response to changing climate and vegetation. As networks develop, they help determine or condition their own hydrological performance as collectors and pathways of water. As transporters of sediment and agents of landscape erosion, through rivers,

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networks also change the land surface itself. Biological (including human) life is supported by the physical attributes of the drainage basin, its drainage network and river systems, and also helps condition the shorterterm characteristics of river and basin environments.

The drainage basin as the fundamental unit of landform analysis In an influential review, Chorley (1969) identified the drainage basin as the fundamental unit of landform analysis. This came about both as a response to a long-standing search for a precise definition of landforms, but also because the basin could, at the same time, form the basis for collection, organization and analysis of data (Leopold et al. 1964). Chorley reviewed three strands of geographical methodology which contributed to this fundamental or foundational role: first, regional delimitation (Fenneman 1914) and the definition of physiographic regions based largely on structural geology; second, concern with the facets of landscape such as flats and slopes which made characteristic landscapes (to Wooldridge 1932: 33, the physiographic atoms which constituted the matter of regions); and third, recognition of the physical connection between form and process (historic references given in Chorley 1969). This latter most basic scientific concern recognized that the drainage basin provided a clearly defined, unambiguous unit, within which topography, hydrology and hydraulics could all be inter-related and studied in a nested systems approach. Geological writings, however, have not always placed the basin so centrally. Crickmay’s (1974) examination of the various geographical, geological and engineering traditions in river science, for example, gives virtually no recognition to the basin or to basin hydrology and the drainage network. Instead, there are extensive treatments of ‘flat land’, ‘sloping ground’ multiple levels

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and complex valleys, and some physically grounded theory regarding stream mechanics and quantitative relationships linking flow to channel form. In effect, the basin is subsumed in a wider discourse on the mechanisms and consequences of landform evolution with an emphasis on valley forms, interfluves and slopes. Of the two paragraphs in this volume of almost 300 pages, just two very pertinent comments are given: Basins may vary form a square kilometer of so in area up to hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. The total water area of the dendroid reticule constitutes a small fraction of the basin area, varying widely from about on seven-thousandth to one one-hundred thousandth. Geologically, the actual magnitude of this elusive fraction is of considerable importance: it tells how much of the basin is in active contact with running water at any instant in time. Crickmay 1974: 4.

Even older geographical treatments emphasize the river system rather than the river basin as fundamental. To Davis (1899), for example, the river really extended all over its basin and represented one member of a continuous series of process – form couplings and interactions, with the evolution of drainage patterns largely a response to geology, uplift and topography from consequent, through subsequent streams and the process of river capture (see Glock 1931, and Figure 38.3). It seems, then, that the drainage basin was more clearly identified and used as a fundamental and systematic unit of landscape study with the rise of quantitative hydrology and geomorphology (particularly following the work of Horton in the 1930s and 1940s) and with the rise of systems approaches from the 1960s. Accordingly, Gregory and Walling (1973), who discuss in detail the scientific and geographical context for drainage basin analysis, provide a context set by seven types of study: studies of basin morphometry, basin characteristics and processes, channel geometry, theoretical approaches, basin dynamics and palaeohydrology. Most of these were evident in Chorley’s (1969)

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review and approach, which was essentially an introduction to quantitative description of drainage basin properties following from Leopold et al. (1964). Morphometric analysis (distinguishing between linear aspects, described through topological indices relating to the interconnections of the drainage network) was marked principally by stream ordering and its derivative network properties. Geometrical analysis related to lengths, shapes and orientations of the drainage network, as well as its areal aspects, including basin relief. The potential for linking both forms of analysis with new types of data acquisition and manipulating (digital information from areal photography and the

Figure 38.2

promise of satellite imagery) was also clearly acknowledged, but so too was the potential to fuse newer, quantitative landscape description with older evolutionary ideas of landform development. This is shown in Figure 38.2, which defines a plot of the basin surface area against elevation, and hence a hypsometric curve representing in some instances the relative stage of basin degradation through time with reference to an assumed original block. (Chorley 1969: 97). The curve was used, therefore, not simply to define quantitatively the basin topography, but also to distinguish between the assumed stage of landform evolution according to the Davisian geographical cycle, or cycle of

The calculation and derivation of the hypsometric curve.

Source: Strahler, A.N. (1957), reproduced by permission of the American Geophysical Union.

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erosion. More practical potential of the curve was postulated in estimation of basin floodplain storage, precipitation and evaporation. The hypsometric integral also formed an important link between hydrology, water resources and geomorphology, which is examined later.

Long-term drainage network evolution and network modelling In a seminal paper, Glock (1931) recognized that drainage patterns evolve through geological time (Figure 38.3), starting with initial patterns; developing through growing elaboration and extension to a maximum; and then undergoing a degree of simplification marked by abstraction (stream piracy where an encroaching primary stream engulfs

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a secondary stream) and absorption (disappearance of a stream) in what Glock described as the second, final stage of ‘integration’. The evolution of drainage patterns reflects long-term processes of channel extension, river migration and river capture, while current drainage patterns reflect climate and land use. Thus, channel processes, geology and hydrology are linked over the longest, as well as shorter time-scales. Because of this, channel networks integrate many environmental elements within a drainage basin, such as stream discharge, sediment availability, valley slope, local geology, vegetation and soil cover, and may well give indications of environmental change (Kirkby 1993). At the longest timescale of consideration, surface processes interact with tectonic processes. ‘Deep’ geophysical processes such as lithospheric flexure are coupled to

Figure 38.3 Theoretical model for the development of drainage systems through a progressive sequence of initiation, growth, extension and elaboration, followed by the stage of integration, marked by partial simplification of the network. Source: Glock (1931) figure 8, reproduced by permission from the American Geographical Society.

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‘surface’ erosion and fluvial sediment transport which are significant in governing surface drainage patterns (for a review, see Garcia-Castellanos 2002). Geophysical processes provide a kind of deterministic control or influence on non-linear and non-deterministic drainage network evolution. Channel network classification is based around six basic types (Howard 1967) and reflects the underlying geology and climatic and geologic histories. Dendritic patterns are most common in areas of homogeneous rock without pronounced control and with long histories of drainage development; parallel patterns occur along the steepest slopes where sedimentary strata decline in a consistent direction; rectangular drainage occurs in response to faults or large joints, with trellised patterns in tilted hard and soft strata; radial patterns occur along the maximum gradients of mountain or volcanic domes, with annular patterns in more gentle domed areas. Channel initiation, hillslope rilling and network development have been subjects of various kinds of modelling approach. Modelling of channel initiation and development at the hillslope scale reflects both the processes of initiation through overland flow generation, and hillslope mass movement processes. Thus, the position of each channel head represents a balance between slope processes that tend to fill the channel and stream processes that remove sediment and maintain or extend the network once a threshold has been reached (Montgomery and Dietrich 1989). Physical models of river network (Schumm et al. 1987) are now either replaced or used in combination with numerical modelling, and much statistical and numerical (computer) simulation relies on methods of stream ordering and network topological characterisation. A key concept is that of the topologically distinct channel network (TDCN). In these analyses, drainage networks are characterized as a series of lines (stream segments or a given order) joined at nodes (stream junctions), and are derived from purely statistical,

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random walk models. The TCDN provides a kind of test against which smaller drainage basins may be evaluated for their sensitivity to local environment, and also implies that channel development may be modelled at all scales (that is from the hillslope to the drainage basin) through comparing scaling relationships of variables including their fractal properties (see Rodriguez-Iturbe and Rinaldo 1997, and Raff et al. 2004).

Drainage basin morphometric analysis: linking hydrology and geomorphology Morphometric analysis may be used both to quantitatively describe the characteristics of drainage networks and basins, and to relate one or more drainage network or basin area/ relief properties to the characteristics of the river hydrograph, and so to various aspects of geomorphology, sediment yield, and evolution of basin morphology. All morphometric analyses depend upon quantitative descriptions of drainage basin and drainage network properties. Gardiner (in Goudie et al. 1990) identified six stages in the morphometric analysis of drainage basins: definition and conceptualization, network delimitation, sampling, measurement, variable definition and analysis. Map data are subject to variance because of varying network depiction with map scale and editions; much the same can be said of air photos and digital imaging, particularly where vegetation cover is great, whereas field identification is difficult over large areas and where stream channels are less visible. Within a map or a geographical information system (GIS), streams are defined by contour crenulations or other identifiable notch, or on the basis of a blue line and valley elevation and valley floor slope. Sampling is often dependent on stream ordering technique, while measurement is basic to all forms of analysis. Variable definition is, perhaps, the more interesting aspect of quantitative study: basin size, for example, is better conceptualized as basin scale, but

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can be indexed not simply through planar area, but by the order of drainage networks or network magnitude. Many commonly derived basin properties are summarized in Table 38.1. Stream network properties are discussed in subsequent sections later.

Drainage basin analysis and stream flow There is longstanding interest in morphometric analysis to predict flood characteristics and water resource availability indirectly. Initially, this utilized analysis of maps, but now concentrates on remotely sensed data, often used in conjunction with automated GIS tools and models for attribute extraction and manipulation (Wharton 1994). GIS tools are becoming increasingly refined, and digital elevation models are becoming increasingly fine-scaled, so that network characteristics may be generated indirectly from elevation data, given assumptions of land use and run-off characteristics (see the collection of papers in Beven and Moore 1992). Considerable potential exists for further development and integration of monitoring and modelling techniques. Table 38.1

In England and Wales, the Flood Studies report of the 1970s represented a decade of work deriving flood estimation procedures for ungauged catchments, and has now been updated in a comprehensive flood estimation procedure. The Flood Estimation Handbook (NERC 1999) gives guidance on rainfall and river flood frequency estimation in the United Kingdom. Flood frequency estimates are required for the planning and assessment of flood defences, and the design of other structures such as bridges, culverts and reservoir spillways. There is an increasing demand for estimates that can form the base for flood risk maps, important in the planning of new developments. The Flood Estimation Handbook also provides methods for assessing the rarity of notable rainfalls or floods, which are of interest to insurers and others, and includes methods for incorporating historical and anecdotal evidence of flood occurrence and peaks. With respect to river basin area, the foundational (and rather obvious) concept is that, as basin size increases, so does the amount of precipitation collected, and thus the greater the peak of discharge (river flow). However, this is complicated because basin size is itself

Drainage basin and network parameters after Strahler 1964

Type Variable Elevation Parameters Basin Elevation: minimum, maximum, and mean Basin Relief Network Parameters Total Stream Length Main Stream Length or Basin Length Sum of Stream Length by Stream Order Stream Frequency by Stream Order Slope or Gradient Basin Slope: mean and maximum Parameters Channel Gradient – First Order Streams: mean and maximum Channel Gradient – All Other Order Streams: mean and maximum Mean Slope Outside Stream Channels Others Drainage Area Drainage Density Relief Ratio Ruggedness Number

Symbol Emin, Emax, and Emean

Unit (m)

H L Lm Li Fi Smean and Smax GMEAN1 and GMAX1

(m) (m) (m) (m) (m) (%) (%)

GMEAN>1 and GMAX>1

(%)

SOmean A D = L/A Rh = H/Lm Rn = D*H

(%) (m) (m/m2)

Source: Wang, X. and Yin, Z. Available at: http://gis.esri.com/library/userconf/proc97/proc97/to250/pap215/p215.htm

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often associated with steepness of the land and the river slope and thus, travel times of water. Rainfall intensity is also related to storm size, and hence to the ‘typical’ characteristics of storms over a given basin. Thus, the general form of the relation is given as: Qm = CAn where Q is the mean annual flood, A is basin area, and the constant C varies to reflect these associated factors. The exponent, n, varies principally with climate. Basin shape also affects hydrograph characteristics, with various derivations of a form factor based upon a ratio of basin length to basin width, or involving comparing basin area or basin length to a circle of the same area or diameter (see Table 38.1). Basin elevation – or more precisely, the distribution of elevations (see above on the hypsometric curve) – conditions the type and area (amount) of particular precipitation types. In turn, this is related to vegetation and land use cover. Thus, while individual measures have been difficult to correlate with hydrograph characteristics, early success with combined regressions were found within the UK as follows: Qm = 0.074A0.74S Basin characteristics may be supplemented (and in some cases replaced) by climatic factors characteristic of particular basins, in particular, basin slope by mean annual rainfall, R: Qm = 0.009A0.85R2.2 More comprehensive formulae are simply increasingly elaborate multiple regression models, each of which must be calibrated or derived for particular basins of sets of basins in differing hydro-climatic and topographic environments (see Rhodda in Chorley (1969) for an early review of methods, and NERC (1999) for an update).

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Channel network structure and stream flow Analysis of drainage network structure is founded upon the pioneering work of Robert Horton (1933, 1945) and modifications by Strahler (1957). Leopold et al. (1964) provide the first thoroughgoing attempt to relate stream network structure to the character and performance of rivers, and for comprehensive discussions see Gregory and Walling (1973), Knighton (1998) and Bridge (2003). In these schemes, the stream network is viewed as comprising successive additions of stream segments of increasing order, giving rise first to stream numbering systems, and subsequently in the 1960s to a wide range of topological properties as summarized in Figure 38.4. The elegance of these schemes is that they allow quantitative laws such as: • as stream order increases, both the number and the mean gradient of streams decrease in an inverse geometric ratio; • as stream order increases, mean length of streams, and mean area of the drainage basin served, increase. Thus, shorter, steeper streams occupy smaller, steeper drainage basins.

These laws underlie modern approaches to network growth and simulation, and are essential to methods using the concept of the TDCN. Just as basin shape and size measures have been related to stream discharge, so, too, have the quantitative aspects of the drainage network. Early amongst these was a concentration on drainage density (the ratio of total channel length to drainage area) which reflects rock type and structure, the stage of erosional evolution, climatic conditions, flood peaks and mean annual floods, and sediment yields. By combining basin characteristics such as elevation and main channel gradient with drainage density, predictions of stream discharge were substantially improved in comparison to using only drainage area and precipitation. However, Schumm (1997) draws attention

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511

Smaller divide separating 3rd order basins

1 1

1

Divide of 4th order basin contributes water to 4th order stream

1 1

2 2

1 3

1

1 2

1

1

1 2

1

1

2 Stream orders 1st order stream segments are smallest unbranched segments as seen on a map 2nd order segments are those formed by joining together of 1st order segments 3rd order segments are those formed by joining together of two 2nd order segments

3 3

4

Large river Morphometric laws

bifurcation ratio

Nn =

Nn m–n Nn+1

m = highest order segment Nn = number of segments of order n

length ratio

Ln =

Ln+1 n Ln

Ln = mean length of segments of order n

slope ratio

Sn =

Sn m–n Sn+1

Sn = mean slope of segments of order n

area ratio

An =

An+1 n An

An = mean drainage area of segments of order n

Number and geometric properties of stream segments of successively lower orders increase or decrease as geometric series Bifurcation ratio is 2.5–7.0 for natural basins.

Figure 38.4 Stream ordering system and derivation of common stream network morphometric properties. Reproduced from Bridge (2003) figure 1.2, by permission of Blackwell Publishing.

to serious and ongoing problems in using drainage density as a diagnostic tool, largely because of indeterminate interactions with precipitation characteristics, flood occurrence, lithology, soil, relief, vegetation and human activities, together with practical difficulties in identifying smaller components of the stream network from air photos, maps and digital sources. Generally, drainage density is held to reflect a counterveiling interaction between mean annual precipitation and vegetation, being maximum in

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semi-arid areas, but controlled tests in which variables can be properly isolated have proved elusive: any of the influences (or all of them) may be important in individual basins in different areas with varying histories. A family of curves exists between drainage density and precipitation, such that erodible soils and rocks plot high, resistant rocks low, and the form of the curve changes from run-off dominated to throughflowdominated conditions, with or without anthropogenetic modification.

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Two other critiques have led to increased incorporation of physical process into morphometric analysis. First, is the recognition that, because many morphometric variables share common terms, and are hence corelated, great care is required in correlating these measures with ‘outputs’ such as stream flow (Richards, in Goudie et al. 1990). Secondly, the very fact that the laws of drainage composition seem to apply universally to all dendritic networks (whether fluvial or not) and seem to represent statistical generalizations, makes them insensitive to environmental change or to differing environmental conditions. Kirchner (1993) demonstrated that the structural features of networks are not well represented by stream ordering schemes, with the ratios RB (bifurcation ratio), RL (stream length ratio) and RA (basin area ratio) normally constrained to a fixed range between environments, suggesting that laws may be artifacts of ordering methods. Crucially, then, simple morphometric methods must be supplemented to include other aspects of drainage network form and function, as well as ordering. More contemporary interest in network configuration and environmental correlates relates to methods in which both network topology and geometry are combined with basin morphology. One example is the Geomorphologic Instantaneous Unit Hydrograph (GIUH; Rodriguez-Iturbe and Valdes (1979)), in which the peak discharge (qp) and the time to peak (tp) are calculated as functions of the bifurcation ratio, basin area ratio and stream length ratio, together with the mean length of streams of order Ω, and the water velocity, v: qp = qv

and

tp = k/v

where q = 1.31/LΩRL0.43 and k = 0.44 LΩ RB0.55 RA–0.55 RL–0.38

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The geomorphic unit hydrograph is an illustration of the incorporation of greater process understanding into otherwise morphometric techniques, representing the probability density function of a water particle following a certain path through the overland catchment and channel before reaching the basin outlet. It can be applied in reconstruction as well as predictive manners. Two other parameters, the network width function and the link concentration function, are also of contemporary interest in progressing network analysis from planimetric to other properties. The network width function N(x), 0<x
SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES TO RIVER FORM AND PROCESS The form and operation of rivers may be approached from engineering, geomorphological, hydrological and ecological perspectives. Hydrology is principally concerned with describing and predicting the characteristics of river flow; geomorphology combines treatment of water flow and sediment transport over many time- and space-scales, while engineering approaches stress the maintenance or control of river

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form and function over shorter time periods. Perhaps the seminal combination integrating these different areas of expertise underpinning river science was that of Leopold et al. (1964). Ecological aspects of the river (species assemblages, diversity and productivity in and around the river corridor) depend on the physical, abiotic attributes of the river system, and have been integrated more recently into the field (Clifford 2001). All of the various traditions of analysis and interpretation of river systems are increasingly deployed together, as management of river systems becomes more complex and challenging. The following sections of the chapter introduce various ways of making sense of rivers as physical and biological systems, and outline key concepts and tools which are commonly deployed in contemporary river science. For a historical review of the development of the study of river channel forms and processes from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, see Clifford (2008).

The river system: form and process inter-relationships and indeterminacy The river is a water and sediment transporting system. It is the interplay between water and sediment load which governs river form and river behaviour, and which is characterized by a series of nested inter-relationships and feedbacks operative over distinct timeand space-scales, known as the alluvial channel system (Figure 38.5). Over the longest timescales, factors such as geology, climate and relief of the basin determine river characteristics; over intermediate timescales, land use (which affects rainfall-runoff production and sediment supply) has a controlling influence; over shorter-time periods, local sediment supply and character help determine channel form, as flows of varying discharge are responsible for particular depth–velocity–stress

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combinations eroding, transporting and depositing sediments. Rivers change and adjust their form over multiple time- and space-scales, therefore, and the factors involved may be considered as independent controlling variables or dependent response variables, depending on the time- and spacescales considered. River slope, for example, is adjusted over the longer time-scale and larger spatial scale to basin relief and to sediment calibre, and may be considered an independent control on river processes. As sediments become finer due to the joint processes of abrasion and attrition, and selective sorting during the transport process, sediment is able to move over lower and lower slopes, giving a concave river profile. Over shorter timescales, and smaller spatial-scales, however, slope is a dependent property, since local slope is governed by the accumulation or removal of sediment in a reach, which reflects more immediate flow controls. Similarly, the cross-sectional form of a river controls the distribution of boundary stress which is responsible for sediment transport (and hence, subsequent change in channel form) but it is also a response to sediment supply and transport in the immediate vicinity, and hence depends upon the transport process itself. Isolating cause and effect in river systems is somewhat artificial, therefore, and depends on what type of explanation or prediction is required. Crucially, the feedbacks in Figure 38.5 lead to inherent uncertainty in predicting river form and behaviour: for several combinations of forcing variables (essentially, changes in the discharge and sediment regime of the river), the outcomes are indeterminate: rivers may get wider or narrower, shallower or deeper in any given instance.

River and drainage basin coupling A simple characterization of river form and behaviour reflecting the drainage basin context is obtained by distinguishing between the river as an upland, primarily sediment

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Schematic representation of variables, feedbacks and timescales involved in the functioning of the alluvial channel

Reproduced from Richards (1982) figure 1.8, by permission of Methuen.

Figure 38.5 system.

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evacuating system, dominated by hillslope sediment production and supply, and the river as a lowland system, dominated by sediment accumulation or deposition (Figure 38.6(a)). In between, there are changing patterns or zones of accumulation and degradation, associated with distinct river forms: the planform (e.g. braided, sinuous or straight); the cross-section (e.g. uniform, irregular, incised); and the bedforms (e.g. lateral, medial or alternate bars); and distinct river behaviour (whether the river is unstable and frequently changing, or stable over seasonal and longer periods); as well as distinct

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hydraulic, sedimentological and ecological attributes (Figure 38.6(b)). From upland to lowland, the river is also progressively decoupled from the hillslope, although this transition is neither simple nor continuous in time and space. First, as material moves through the fluvial system, it is subject to significant attrition and abrasion, and an important distinction, with respect to the mode of sediment transport, the bedforms and subsequent channel morphology, is that between gravel-dominated and sand-dominated reaches. Sediments are also sorted by size and shape as part of the transport

Figure 38.6 (a) Zonation of the drainage basin according to sediment status, and associated hillslope-channel coupling and channel routing/sorting of sediments; (b) conceptual model of the co-relations between channel flow, gradient, bed material, nutrient status and biomass in a stream from headwaters to mouth as drainage area increases. Modified from Church (2002) figures 1 and 2, reproduced by permission from Blackwell Science Ltd.

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process, which partly explains the changing characteristics of bed sediments, bed forms and the type and frequency of the sediment transporting events. The sediment yield of a basin is notoriously more difficult to predict than the water yield. Both reflect production from dynamic (and partial) contributing areas of the basin, storages of various magnitudes and episodic transport of various durations between hill slope and channel. Sediment production, storage and transfer, however, are the more intermittent and indeterminate quantities. In any one year, for example, a large proportion of the total sediment yield may be contributed from a small area of the drainage basin, and it may also be delivered in a small number or proportion of the potential transporting events. A classic illustration of a sediment budget, compiled over two time periods for a humid-temperate drainage basin

is given in Figure 38.7 (Trimble 1983). As a crude generalization, the relative yield is greater in smaller basins, because storage potential is less, and hillslopes and channels are more closely coupled over steeper slopes. However, there is a further trade-off between the opposing influences of precipitation and vegetation. Greater precipitation increases runoff and sediment generation/transfer, but then increases vegetation cover which helps to reduce sediment production and transfer. The magnitude and frequency of sediment transporting flows, which may be simple, or threshold dominated, must also be considered. Generally, the sediment load of a river (expressed as an amount, C, in relation to the flow rate, Q) varies as a power function of discharge, and relations are more reliable for solute and suspended loads than for bedload, which has more complex supply limitations (Knighton 1998):

Figure 38.7 A classic illustration of a sediment budget, compiled over two time periods for a humid-temperate drainage basin, Coon Creek, Wisconsin. Reproduced from Trimble, S.W. (1983).

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solute transport C = aQb where –0.4 < b < 0 suspended sediment C = aQb where 1.0 < b < 2.0 bedload transport C = aQb where 1.0 < b < 5? However, the flow which transports the greatest amount of sediment may be that which is of relatively moderate size, but more frequent occurrence, as a result of the cross product of discharge amount and frequency. The precise relation will depend on whether the sediment is moved in solution, suspension or as bedload. Because gravel and sand have different thresholds and different mechanisms of entrainment, stream form will also reflect the fundamental mechanics of sediment transport, as well as geographical and geological controls of sediment supply, and the local channel form. Figure 38.8(a) provides a tentative conceptual scheme illustrating the interdependence of the transport threshold, the transport process, and the local bed conditions. Bedforms depend first, on the dominant size of sediment in transport (principally reflecting the sand–gravel distinction); the local condition of the bed with respect to surface armouring and depletion of fines; and the transport intensity, indexed by the relative fluid shear stress (ratio of mean shear stress of the flow compared to a threshold stress needed to initiate motion of the median grain diameter). Again, because the principal stream is part of a network, its behaviour and character is partly conditioned by tributary inputs of sediment and water, particularly in the upper reaches, where the stream will tend to be smaller, volumes of water less, and the channel size in relation to the largest sediment available will be small. As the stream becomes larger, thresholds are less marked, and different sets of processes are involved over longer timescales as sediments are generally deposited and reworked into floodplains. A change at any one point in the river

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may cause damped, and possibly cyclic changes throughout the river system. A single change in the base level of the river at the mouth may lead to cycles of channel incision and aggradation, as incision moves up through the system, but then creates local oversupply of sediment soon thereafter. A response to a single change is thus complex. The combined effect is that feedbacks between processes and forms are distributed in time and space: reaches, cross-sections, bedforms and bank processes of the river are linked. Behaviour at one point and one time reflects former conditions, conditions upstream (sediment supply) and partially determines conditions for the next downstream sections. In many cases, river behaviour is constantly adjusting as water pathways change, as flow levels and amounts vary, and as sediment is eroded, stored temporarily and supplied from immediately upstream. The local channel form is one that represents the continuing outcome of a spatially distributed form-process feedback system (Ashworth and Ferguson 1986; Figure 38.8(b)).

The river as a hydro-ecological system and the river continuum concept Reference back to Figure 38.6(b) shows that, in analogy with general trends in the water and sediment pathways in a river, the ecological capacity and response of the riverine and basin system may be similarly zoned (Vannote et al. 1980). Upstream penetration of fish, for example, is often limited to the boundary where upland sediment production becomes a dominant control rather than fluvial sediment transport. As channels become larger and more varied, there is greater interplay between channel and floodplain, including more varied habitat and hydrological–fluvial connectivity. As a result, both the type and amounts of biomass increase. The river continuum concept (Figure 38.9) provides a basic predictive and

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gravel bed river

bimodal sand gravel bed r.

sand bed river

10 mobile or no armour

dunes gravel dunes

dunes + armour

τ/τcr, D50

barchans + armour 1 bedload sheets ripples 0.5 sand ribbons + armour 0.2

no motion, armoured bed

no motion

0.1 0%

50%

(a)

100%

% sand in bed sediment

DISCHARGE OF RIVER

CHANNEL GEOMETRY

VELOCITY DISTRIBUTION IN CHANNEL velocity profile

bed roughness

SHEAR STRESS ON BED

CHARACTER OF BED MATERIAL BANK EROSION

selective transport

erosion and deposition

availability of sediment

competence and capacity

BEDLOAD TRANSPORT

(b)

BEDLOAD SUPPLY FROM UPSTREAM

Figure 38.8 (a) A tentative conceptual scheme illustrating the interdependence of the transport threshold, the transport process, and the local bed conditions; (b) the spatially distributed form–process feedback system governing local channel form as part of a continually evolving system in response to local controls, and as a partial determinant of subsequent controls and behaviour. Source: (a) http://www.geog.uu.nl/fg/mkleinhans/publicat/conf/gbr5/kleinhans8.htm; (b) reproduced from Ashworth and Ferguson (1986) by permission of Blackwell Publishing.

interpretative scheme for the way in which biological communities change from headwaters to channel mouth in response to

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physical and chemical gradients. The continuum concept relies on the assumption of a dynamic equilibrium relationship between

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Figure 38.9

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A schematic generalization of invertebrate assemblages in a river.

Reproduced from Ward, D. et al. (1994) figure 4, by permission of the RSPB. Based on an original in Vannote, R.L. et al. (1980).

biotic and abiotic factors in the river. This relationship changes from headwaters to river mouth, primarily in relation to food sources (for invertebrates) and with the gradient of cooler-to-warmer water (for species of fish). The derivation of the river continuum was explicitly linked to dynamic equilibrium concepts from geomorphological studies of the river (see below in relation to hydraulic geometry). As Figure 38.9 illustrates, two of the key variables are: a change in the

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ratio between gross primary productivity to community respiration (P/R); and the changing availability of coarse and fine particulate organic matter (CPOM and FPOM). The P/R ratio reflects changes in the dominant (bio) energy inputs; that is, from terrestrial sources in the headwaters, to rivers relying on algal or rooted plants. The changing availability of CPOM and FPOM alters the food sources for invertebrates. Accordingly, in headwater streams, leaf-shredding macroinvertebrates should

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constitute a large portion of the macro invertebrate population, reflecting the dependence of these smaller streams on surrounding forest for energy and nutrients. By contrast, the shading by forest in these small upland streams will limit the occurrence of grazers, which scrape algae from rock surfaces. Collectors (which filter or gather fine particles from the stream) become increasingly important in larger streams, as fine fragments washed downstream from the headwaters also become more common. Predators should be common throughout the river system. Modern approaches to river systems increasingly stress the multiple forms of coupling between river flows and ecology. Indeed, a new science of eco-hydraulics or eco-hydrology is developing, in which all of the attributes of the flow hydrograph – once interpreted purely from a water resource or a geomorphological (channel forming) perspective – are seen to have ecological potentials and controls (Bunn and Arthington

Figure 38.10

2002; Figure 38.10). In this conceptual model, the natural flow regime of the river influences aquatic biodiversity through several mechanisms which are inter-related and which operate over several temporal and spatial scales (defined by Principles 1–4). Principle 1 reflects the dominant influence of large, episodic flow events on channel form and shape; other aspects of the flow regime, such as seasonality of flow pattern, low flows and droughts influence life history patterns of species (Principle 2); overbank flow events allow lateral dispersal as well as longitudinal dispersal of organisms between different reaches of the channel and between the channel and floodplain (Principle 3); and the overall flow regime is thus marked by a native biota which is adjusted to these hydrological patterns, more likely to resist invasions by exotic species, unless factors such as land-use change and water resource development have recently altered the natural flow regime (Principle 4). To some extent, the scheme offered in Figure 38.10 might be

Aquatic biodiversity and natural flow regimes.

Reproduced by permission of Springer, from Bunn, S.E. and Arthington, A.H. (2002), figure 1.

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extended to include more explicitly aspects of sediment delivery, storage and transport and other abiotic factors influencing channel form and function.

Characterizing river behaviour – hydraulic geometry, equilibrium and regime approaches Most analyses of river form and behaviour simplify both the number of variables considered in the channel system, and, too, the modes, timescales and interactions involved. As Figure 38.6(b) implies, spatial and systematic regularities in behaviour may be characterized statistically, and a popular and enduring concept based on this has been the hydraulic geometry of streams (Leopold and Maddock 1953). Hydraulic geometry relates changes in the width, depth and velocity of the river to changes in the discharge or flow rate (Figure 38.11) as follows: width = cQb depth = cQf and velocity = cQm

Figure 38.11

521

The hydraulic geometries may be derived and applied in two ways: first, at-a-station, as flow increases or decreases in a river crosssection during a single event or over a water year; and second, downstream, reflecting the channel shape and behaviour as discharge increases from the headwaters to the mouth. A further power function relation for sediment load was also suggested. The exponents in the hydraulic geometry relations may reflect the basin physiography and climatic types, so that hydraulic geometry may be used as a kind of shorthand geomorphological description and basis for typologies or classifications of streams (for detailed discussion, see Richards 1982). Both the derivation and the physical veracity of the hydraulic geometries (especially the downstream form) have been subject to periodic criticisms. These criticisms are more prescient than ever, as the relations have recently seen a resurgence of interest as potential design criteria for use in river restoration schemes. Most importantly, the implicit idea of equilibrium as the prevailing characteristic of

The hydraulic geometry of stream channels.

Reproduced from Richards, K.S. (1982), figure 6.3a, by permission of Methuen.

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streams, and with this, the identification of a dominant or representative discharge to which channel form is adjusted, must be carefully evaluated in any applied context. Engineering analysis of river form and process have similarly relied on equilibrium relations operating between a restricted set of river variables, known as regime equations. Regime approaches have greater justification than hydraulic geometry, at least in situations where engineered river reaches are subject to one or more controls on flow, sediments, widths, depths and bank profiles. Given a degree of control on the natural degrees of freedom of river adjustment to controlling variables, then relations can be defined more simply and applied more successfully. As with hydraulic geometries, problems again occur if these restricted relations are used paradigmatically as sources of fundamental insight into the operation of fluvial systems, and as simplified design criteria for river restoration schemes. A basic engineering view of river operation is based upon the idea of a stable stream balance, originally developed in the 1930s (for a detailed discussion, see Church 2002). In the stream balance model, the quantity (Qs) and calibre (D) of sediment carried by the river are related to stream slope (S) and discharge as: Qs/Q ≈ S/D and thus Qs ≈ QS/D The importance of this relation is that, in addition to offering some predictive capability regarding conditions and occurrence of aggradation and degradation, it offers some mechanistic or explanatory insight into river operation. The total transport of sediment load is directly a function of the stream power (QS) and inversely, a function of sediment calibre. The relation is neither dimensionally balanced, nor is it complete with respect to the range of channel morphologies and morphological changes which are seen. As the river transports sediment, the river also sorts sediment according to shape and size, and, in combination with other factors such as

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vegetation, the interaction between load caliber and load transport give rise to distinctive, time- and space-varying channel morphologies and behaviours, as noted above. Church demonstrates that a simple modification, using channel depth, d, dimensionally balances the relation: Qs/Q ≈ dS/D This also improves its physical interpretation, insofar as the sediment concentration is now directly proportional to the force exerted on the bed, and inversely proportional to sediment calibre. This relation may also be scaled for the size or river (via depth and width) and the position in the basin (distance downstream). It may be compared to a similar relation (originally developed by Rubey, see Richards 1982) in which the transport rate, (L), X, the optimum form ratio (mean depth/width) are related by: S X1/6 α L2/3 Q–5/6 which emphasizes that channel form is an essential factor as both response to and control of sediment transport (reference again, the process-form feedback, Figures 38.5 and 38.8(b), and discussion above). A further complication in any equilibrium relationship is the identification of a representative discharge, which has been variously interpreted as the channel forming or dominant discharge. Conventionally, bankfull discharge or mean annual discharge have been used as representative values which allow the equilibrium relation to operate, but channels are formed in response to changing discharges over single events, and seasonally, annually and inter-annually. An ‘effective discharge’, defined from the cross-product of the frequency/duration of flows of given rates and the sediment transport associated with these, represents an improved view of how channels form and respond to changing environmental conditions, but it is still a partial one. The effective discharges vary with the calibre of sediment transported (incluing

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the presence or absence of thresholds of motion as particles become larger; Figure 38.6(a)). Again, at any given cross-section, inherited form, together with vegetation and other upstream and downstream influences, help determine the actual patterns of sediment transport or erosion/deposition seen, which are reflected in (and in turn, conditioned by) the kind, assemblages and stability of bedforms and cross-section morphologies (reference again, Figures 38.8(a) and 38.8(b)).

Channel planform and channel change Use of stream gradient and discharge allow a degree of discrimination between channel planform types (Church 2002; Figure 38.12(a)). This is based upon the relationship between channel form and the quantity of bed material supplied to it: supply of material which is greater than local capacity to transport it causes aggradation, and vice versa, which, over many episodes, establishes a form of equilibrium between the rate of transport and the amount of potentially mobile sediment stored in the bed. If supply of sediment increases beyond transport capacity, the deposition of sediment deflects water around it, possibly leading to lateral erosion, which in turn supplies even more material into the channel. Eventually, with widening, the channel becomes braided, where deposits in the channel are exposed at low and moderate flows, and the channel must steepen to maintain the required rate and frequency of sediment transport. To increase slope, the channel may become straighter, or continue to aggrade towards its source, so the channel shifts its position within Figure 38.12(a). The lines on the figure reflect transitions between channel types and, in addition, relative stabilities of particular channel patterns, which again partly reflects position in the drainage basin. Moving upward through the basin, channels close to the upland and upland valley areas

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more frequently shift their pattern in response to changing sediment supply from tributaries (with and without human modification). Moving downstream through the basin, bank material strength, possibly including vegetation (root) influences become more important. The more resistant the banks, the more likely the occurrence of a single thread channel. The dominant size of bed material in the channel also plays an important factor in determining river planform characteristics. A more complete scheme for assessing planform type and stability is given in Figure 38.12(b) (Schumm 1981), which, while still not perfect, better represents planform as a joint function of mechanistic interactions between physical variables, aspects of the basin physiographic context, and predominant conditions of channel stability and modes of channel change. Thus, the dominant channel pattern lies on a dynamic continuum between braided, meandering and straight types, each of which reflect a moreor-less stable state given prevailing sedimentological conditions and predominant load transport type, and each of which is characterized by a typical form of channel change. Once again, even modified equilibrium relations need to be seen in a basin-scale and temporal context, and, in analogy with many other environmental sciences, there are issues of simplification, complexity and upscaling: how are fundamental hydrodynamic processes appropriately up-scaled and simplified into cross-sectionally averaged hydraulic and/or geomorphological regression-type relations? This fundamental question has still to be answered! Placing channel behaviour into its basin and drainage network context also helps understand the forms and time-scales of channel change in response to environmental shifts (Knox 1972; Figure 38.13). The precipitation regime in a basin reflects decadal, seasonal and longer climatic patterns which tend to change abruptly, and hence which may be modelled as a square wave function (Figure 38.13(a)). Vegetation may respond similarly,

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Figure 38.12 (a) Classification of river channel pattern according to channel slope and channel-forming discharge (bankfull flow or mean annual flow). Sand- and gravel-bedded channels are labelled to illustrate the additional influence of bed material size on channel pattern; upward and downward transitions are distinct, and reflect varying bank materials and bank strength; (b) classification of channel form based on pattern and sediment load. (a) Reproduced from Church (2002), figure 4, by permission from Blackwell Science Ltd; (b) reproduced by permission from Schumm, S.A. (1981) figure 4, by permission of the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists.

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although less abruptly, and is modelled by a square wave with a lag (Figure 38.13(b)). Erosional potential reflects the interaction of precipitation change, vegetation change and runoff generation, such that hillslope erosion varies inversely with vegetation response (Figure 38.13(c)). The outcome in terms of sediment yield (and hence channel activity) is a modification of the precipitation, vegetation and erosion potential curves: there is initial rapid adjustment to a peak,

Figure 38.13 regime.

525

followed by recovery to a minimum until the next shift (Figure 38.13(d)). The precise form of the curves reflects particular basin hydro-climatic environments, and the kind of shifts between regimes. The channel response is reflected in the short term through bed morphological adjustment (Figure 38.8(a)); in the medium term through channel planform (Figure 38.12) and in the long term by the stratigraphic record of sediment deposition.

Environmental control and response of rivers after change in precipitation

Reproduced from Knox, J.C. (1972), by permission of the Association of American Geographers.

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CONCLUSIONS Drainage basins collect water and sediment through their drainage networks. Water and sediments are routed from higher to lower land over many time-scales, involving many pathways and processes. Drainage basins are thus fundamental units of landscape and landscape evolutionary processes, and have been studied through a variety of scientific traditions. River form and processes reflect this routing of water and sediment, and an understanding of river processes and forms is fundamental to the interpretation of landscape and environment (including ecology), as well as to the prediction of water resources. As human influences and demands upon drainage basins increases, so too do the challenges for integrating the many disciplines and aspects of science involved in drainage basin, network and river studies. The concepts outlined in this chapter represent an essential and an underlying geography in the environment (one of spatially distributed and multi-factored form–process feedbacks), and are basic starting points for further studies which, in common with much geographical enquiry, must be ambitious and wide-ranging!

REFERENCES Ashworth, P. and Ferguson, R. (1986) ‘Interrelationships of channel processes, changes and sediments in a proglacial braided river’, Geografiska Annaler, 68A: 361–371. Beven, K.J. and Moore, I.D. (eds) (1992) Terrain Analysis and Distributed Modelling in Hydrology. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Bridge, J.S. (2003) Rivers and Floodplains. Oxford: Blackwell Science. Bunn, S.E. and Arthington, A.H. (2002) ‘Basic principles and ecological consequences of altered flow regimes for aquatic biodiversity’, Environmental Management, 30: 492–507. Chorley, R.J. (ed.) (1969) Water, Earth and Man. London: Methuen and Co. Church, M.A. (2002) ‘Geomorphic thresholds in riverine landscapes’, Freshwater Biology, 47: 541–557.

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Clifford, N.J. (2001) ‘Conservation and the river channel environment’ in A. Warren and J. French (eds), Habitat Conservation: Managing the Physical Environment. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd, pp. 67–104. Clifford, N.J. (2008) ‘Channel form and process, c. 1890–1965’ in T.P. Burt, R.J. Chorley, D. Brunsden, N.J. Cox and A.S. Goudie (eds), History of the Study of Landforms, vol. 4. London: The Geological Society, pp. 217–324. Crickmay, C.H. (1974) The Work of the River. London: Macmillan. Davis, W.M. (1899) ‘The geographical cycle’, Geographical Journal, 14: 481–504. Garcia-Castellanos, D. (2002) ‘Interplay between lithospheric flexure and river transport in foreland basins’, Basin Research, 14: 89–104. Glock, W.S. (1931) ‘The development of drainage systems: a synoptic view’, Geographical Review, 21: 475–482. Goudie, A.S. et al. (eds) (1990) Geomorphological Techniques, 2nd edn. London: Unwin Hyman, pp. 71–81. Gregory, K.J. (1973) ‘Changing river basins’, The Geographical Journal, 142: 237–247. Gregory, K.J. and Walling, D.E. (1973) Drainage Basin Form and Process. London: Arnold. Howard, A.D. (1967) ‘Drainage analysis on geologic interpretation’, Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geology, 51: 2246–2259. Kirchner, J.W. (1993) ‘Statistical inevitability of Horton’s laws and the apparent randomness of stream channel networks’, Geology, 21: 591–594. Kirkby, M.J. (1993) ‘Network hydrology and geomorphology’ in K. Beven and M.J. Kirkby (eds) Channel Network Hydrology. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 1–11. Knighton, A.D. (1998) Fluvial Forms and Processes, a New Perspective. London: Arnold. Knox, J.C. (1972) ‘Valley alluviation in southwestern Wisconsin’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 62: 401–410. Leopold, L.B. and Maddock, T. (1953) ‘The hydraulic geometry of stream channels and some physiographic implications’, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 252. Leopold, L.B., Wolman, M.G. and Miller, J.P. (1964) Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co. Meybeck, M. (2003) ‘Global analysis of river systems: from Earth system controls to Anthropocene syndromes’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, 358: 1935–1955.

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Montgomery, D. and Dietrich, W.E. (1989) ‘Channel initiation, drainage density and slope’, Water Resources Research, 25: 1907–1918. NERC (1999) Flood Estimation Handbook. Wallingford: Institute of Hydrology. Newson, M. (1992) Land, Water and Development. London: Routledge. Raff, D.A., Ramirez, J.A. and Smith, J.L. (2004) ‘Hillslope drainage development with time: a physical experiment’, Geomorphology, 62: 169–180. Richards, K.S. (1982) Rivers, Form and Process in Alluvial Channels. London: Methuen. Rodriguez-Iturbe, I. and Valdes, J. B. (1979) ‘The geomorphologic structure of hydrologic response’, Water Resources Research, 15, 1409–1420. Rodriguez-Iturbe, I. and Rinaldo, A. (1997) Fractal River Basins. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schumm, S.A. (1981) ‘Evolution and response of the fluvial system, sedimentologic implications’, in Etyhridge, F.G. and Flores, R.M. (eds) Recent and Ancient Nonmarine Depositional Environments: Models for Exploration. Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists Special Publication 31, pp. 19–29. Schumm, S.A. (1997) ‘Drainage density: problems of prediction and application’, in D.R. Stoddart (ed.)

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Process and Form in Geomorphology. London: Routledge, pp. 15–45. Schumm, S.A., Mosley, M.P. and Weaver, W.E. (1987) Experimental Fluvial Geomorphology. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. Strahler, A.N. (1957) ‘Quantitative analysis of watershed geomorphology’, American Geophysical Union Transactions 38: 913–920. Strahler, A. (1964) ‘Quantitative geomorphology of drainage basins and Channel networks’ in V.T. Chow (ed.), Handbook of Applied Hydrology. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 439–476. Trimble, S.W. (1983) ‘A sediment budget for Coon Creek basin in the Driftless Area, Wisconsin, 1853– 1977’, American Journal of Science, 283: 454–474. Vannote, R.L., Minshall, G.W., Cummins, J.K., Sedell, J.R. and Cushing, C.E. (1980) ‘The river continuum concept’, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 37: 130–137. Ward, D. et al. (eds) (1994) The New Rivers and Wildlife Handbook. Sandy: Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Wharton, G. (1994) ‘Progress in the use of drainage network indices for rainfall-runoff modelling and runoff prediction’, Progress in Physical Geography, 18: 539–557.

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39 Environmental Change Andrew Goudie

INTRODUCTION Two major questions relate to the linkages between humans and the environment. The first of these is the degree to which humans have modified the environment by processes such as land cover change, often referred to as the human impact. The second of these is the extent to which human history has been influenced by natural environmental changes. The impact of humans is reviewed and the escalation of the human impact is assessed through time, leading up to the present concern with global change. It is, however, evident that it is not always easy to separate human from natural causes of change. In recent years there has been an increasing appreciation that often severe, rapid and frequent climatic changes have impacted on human societies and have significance for phenomena as diverse as human evolution, domestication, urbanisation, the development of social complexity and the rise and fall of particular societies. The two questions come together when one considers the causes and consequences of future climate changes.

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HUMAN INFLUENCES ON THE ENVIRONMENT There are two crucial and persistent questions relating to the linkage between humans and the environment. The first of these is the degree to which humans have transformed the natural environment, and the second is the extent to which human history has been influenced by natural environmental changes. The first of these questions was one which intrigued the Comte de Buffon, an eighteenth-century French natural historian. He was the first Western scientist to be concerned directly and intimately with human impacts on the environment (Glacken 1963 1967). He contrasted the appearance of inhabited and uninhabited lands: the former have few woods, lakes or marshes, but many heaths and much scrub; their mountains are bare, and their soils are less fertile because they lack the humus which woods, felled in inhabited countries, supply. Buffon was also interested in domestication of plants and animals – one of the major transformations in nature caused by human actions.

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Studies of the torrents of the European Alps, undertaken in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contributed to the realization of human capacity to change the environment. These formative studies are reviewed briefly in Goudie (2006). Fabre and Surell studied the flooding, erosion, siltation and braiding of rivers brought about by the felling of forests. Similarly de Saussure showed that Alpine lakes had in recent times suffered a lowering of water levels because of deforestation. In Venezuela, Alexander von Humboldt concluded that the level of Lake Valencia in 1800 (the year of his visit) was lower than it had been previously, and that deforestation, the clearing of plains, and indigo cultivation, were among the causes of its gradual desiccation. Subsequently, the French rural economist, Jean Baptiste Boussingault (1845) went to Lake Valencia some 25 years after Humboldt and noted that the lake was rising rather than falling. He ascribed this reversal to political and social upheavals following the granting of independence to the former Spanish colony. The liberation of slaves had led to a decline in agriculture and a reduction in the application of irrigation water, both of which enabled the re-establishment of forest. The British geologist Charles Lyell, in his Principles of Geology, referred to the human impact and recognized that tree-felling and drainage of lakes and marshes could have profound effects. Overall, however, he believed that the forces exerted by people were insignificant in comparison with those exerted by nature (Lyell 1835: 197). He somewhat modified his views in later editions of the Principles, largely as a result of his experiences in the United States, where recent deforestation in Georgia and Alabama had produced numerous ravines of impressive size. One of the most important physical geographers to show concern with the human impact was Mary Somerville (1858) who clearly appreciated the unexpected results that occurred as man ‘dextrously avails himself of the powers of nature to subdue nature’.

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Considerable interest in conservation, climatic change and extinctions arose amongst European colonialists who witnessed some of the consequences of Western-style economic development in the tropics (Grove 1997). However, the extent of human influence on the environment was not explored in any great detail until the American polymath George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature (1864), in which he dealt with human influence on the woods, the waters and the sands. More than a third of the book is concerned with ‘the woods’; Marsh does not touch upon important themes like the modifications of mid-latitude grasslands, and he is much concerned with the effects of Western civilization. Nevertheless, he stands as a landmark in the study of human impacts on the environment and for the need for conservation (Thomas 1956; Lowenthal 2000). Elisée Reclus, prominent in both France and the United States, also recognized that the ‘action of man may embellish the earth, but it may also disfigure it; according to the manner and social condition of any nation, it contributes either to the degradation or glorification of nature’ (1873: 522). Reclus (1873) also displayed a concern with the relationship between forests, torrents and sedimentation. Friedrich (1904) used the term ‘Raubwirtschaft’ – economic plunder, robber economy or, more simply, devastation. He believed that destructive exploitation of resources leads of necessity to foresight and to improvements, and that after an initial phase of ruthless exploitation and resulting deprivation human measures would, as in the old countries of Europe, result in conservation and improvement. This idea was opposed by Sauer (1938) and Whitaker (1940), the latter pointing out that some soil erosion could well be irreversible. Nonetheless Friedrich’s concept of robber economy was adopted and modified by the great French geographer, Jean Brunhes. He recognized the inter-relationships involved in humanly caused environmental change (1920: 332): ‘Devastation always brings about, not a catastrophe, but a series of catastrophes, for

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in nature things are dependent one upon the other.’ At much the same time other significant studies were made of the same theme. Shaler (1912) was very much concerned with the destruction of mineral resources (a topic largely neglected by Marsh) and with soil erosion in the United States. Also in the United States, Sauer campaigned against destructive exploitation (Speth 1977), reintroduced Marsh to a public that had largely forgotten him, recognized the ecological virtues of some so-called primitive peoples, concerned himself with the great theme of domestication, concentrated on the landscape changes that resulted from human action, and gave clear and far-sighted warnings about the need for conservation (Sauer 1938). Another major milestone was the formation of the USDA-SCS Division of Climatic and Physiographic Studies under the direction of C.W. Thornthwaite in 1936. In 1956, the roles of humans in causing environmental changes were explored in detail in a major symposium volume, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Thomas 1956), a book which Kates et al. (1990: 4) see as probably having anticipated the ecological movement of the 1960s. The theme of the human impact on the environment has been central to some historical geographers studying the evolution of the cultural landscape. The clearing of woodland (Darby 1956; Williams 2003), the domestication process (Sauer 1952), the draining of marshes (Williams 1970), the introduction of alien plants and animals (McKnight 1959) and the transformation of the landscape of the Americas (Whitney 1994; Doolittle 2000; Denevan 2001; Whitmore and Turner 2001) are among some of the recurrent themes of a well established tradition of historical geography. Table 39.1 lists some of the key themes that have engaged researchers working on the human impact. In the last three decades many geographers have contributed to, and been involved in ecological debates. The subject of the human impact on the environment, dealing as it does with such matters as land cover

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change (Turner et al. 2004), environmental degradation, pollution and desertification is once again a theme in many textbooks, encyclopedias and research monographs in geography (see, e.g. Manners and Mikesell 1974; Wagner 1974; Gregory and Walling 1979; Simmons 1979; Goudie 1981, 2002; Table 39.1 impact

Key themes in the human

Theme

Classic or review study

Acid rain

Battarbee et al. 1985

Air pollution Arroyos Channel modification

Elsom 1992 Cooke and Reeves 1976 Brookes 1985

Coastal defence Coral reef decline Deforestation Desertification Domestication Drainage of land Dust bowl Elm decline Excavations Extinctions Fire Flood plain alluviation Forest decline Global warming Heathlands

Nordstrom 1994 Brown et al. 2000 Williams 2003 Middleton and Thomas 1997 Sauer 1952 Green 1978 Worster 1979 Parker et al. 2002 Prince 1962 Martin and Wright 1967 Pyne 1982 Happ et al. 1940 Innes 1992 Hansen et al. 1981 Gimingham and de Smidt 1983 Elton 1958

Introductions and explosions Mass movements Mediterranean vegetation Mires and bogs Melting of permafrost Ozone depletion Prairies River systems Salinisation Sand dune stabilisation Savannas Secondary forests Soil erosion Subsidence Urban climates

Julian and Anthony 1996 Grove and Rackham 2001 Tallis 1985 French 1996 Harris et al. 2003 Whitney 1994 James and Marcus 2006 Ghassemi et al. 1995 Watson 1990 Hopkins 1965 Brown and Lugo 1995 Morgan 1979 Coates 1983 Oke 1978

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Tivy and O’Hare 1981; Turner et al. 1990; Bell and Walker 1992; Middleton 1995; Meyer 1996; Mannion 1997, 2002). Concerns about the human impact have become central to many disciplines and to the public, particularly since the early 1970s, when a range of major developments in the literature and in legislation have taken place (Table 39.2). The concepts of global change or global environmental change have developed. Wide use of the term ‘global change’ seems to have emerged in the 1970s but in that period was used principally though by no means invariably, to refer to changes in international social, economic and political systems (Price 1989). Since the early 1980s the concept of global change has taken on another meaning which is more geocentric in focus, and which can be seen in the development of the International GeosphereBiosphere Programme: A Study of Global Change (IBGP). This was established in 1986 by the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), ‘to describe and understand the interactive physical, chemical and biological processes that regulate the total Earth system, the unique environment that it provides for life, the changes that are occurring in this system, and the manner in which they are influenced by human activities’.

Table 39.2

Milestone

1864

George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature

1892

John Muir founds Sierra Club in US

1935

Establishment of Soil Conservation Service in US

1956

‘Man’s role in changing the face of the Earth’ symposium

1958

First carbon dioxide monitoring at Mauna Loa

1960

First satellite images of planet Earth

1961

Establishment of World Wildlife Fund

1962

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

1969

Friends of the Earth established

1971

Greenpeace established

1971

Ramsar Treaty on International Wetlands

(Contd.)

1972

United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) established

1972

Limits to Growth published by Club of Rome

1973

Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)

1974

F. S. Rowland and M. Molina warn about CFCs and ozone hole

1975

Worldwatch Institute established

1979

Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution

1980

IUCN’s World Conservation Strategy

1985

British Antarctic Survey finds ozone hole over Antarctic

1986

International Geosphere Biosphere Programmme (IGBP)

1986

Chernobyl nuclear disaster

1987

World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission). Our common future

1987

Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer

1988

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established

1989

Global Environmental Facility

1992

Earth Summit in Rio and Agenda 21

1993

United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development

1994

United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification

1996

International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change

1997

Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions

2001

Amsterdam Declaration

2002

Johannesburg Earth Summit

2007

Nobel Peace prize for IPCC and Al Gore

2007

UN Bali Climate Conference

Some environmental milestones

Year

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Table 39.2

Because of the escalating trajectory of environmental transformation it is now possible to talk about global environmental change. There are, however, two components to this (Turner et al. 1990): systemic global change and cumulative global change. In the systemic meaning, ‘global’ refers to the spatial scale of operation and comprises such issues

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as global changes in climate brought about by atmospheric pollution. In the cumulative meaning, ‘global’ refers to the areal or substantive accumulation of localized change, and a change is seen to be ‘global’ if it occurs on a worldwide scale, or represents a significant fraction of the total environmental phenomenon or global resource. Both types of change are closely intertwined. For example, the burning of vegetation can lead to systemic change through such mechanisms as carbon dioxide release and albedo change, and to cumulative change through its impact on soil and biotic diversity. The term ‘global environmental change’ has in many senses come to be used synonymously with the more geocentric use of ‘global change’. In addition to the concept of global change, there is an increasing interest in the manner in which biogeochemical systems interact at a global scale, and an increasing appreciation of the fact that the Earth is a single system. For example, even a seemingly prosaic material like dust has a large number of global implications (Goudie and Middleton 2006). It is for this reason that we now talk of Earth system science and recognize the complex interactions that take place at a multitude of scales on our planet (Steffen et al. 2004). The huge increase in interest in the study of the human impact on the environment and of global change, has not been without its great debates and controversies, and some have argued that environmentalists have overplayed their hand (see, e.g. Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist 2001) and have exaggerated the amount of environmental harm that is being caused by human activities. The evolving impact of humans on the environment has often been expressed in terms of a simple equation: I = PAT where I is the amount of pressure or impact that humans apply on the environment, P is the number of people, A is the affluence (or the demand on resources per person) and T is a technological factor (the power that

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humans can exert through technological change). P, A and T have been seen by some as ‘the three horsemen of the environmental apocalypse’ (Meyer 1996: 24). There may be considerable truth in the equation and in that sentiment; but as Meyer points out, the formula cannot be applied in too mechanistic a way. The ‘cornucopian view’, indeed, sees population not as the ultimate depleter of resources but as itself the ultimate resource capable of causing desirable change (see, e.g. Simon 1981 and 1996). There are cases where strong population growth has appeared to lead to a reduction in environmental degradation (Tiffen et al. 1994). On the other hand, the ‘catastrophist view’ maintains that are clear natural limits to human exploitation and transformation of the environment, and that these cannot be transgressed without disasterous consequences. Catastrophists draw attention to the threats posed by unrestrained growth in population, resource demands and waste use. Likewise, there is debate about whether it is poverty or affluence that creates deterioration in the environment. On the one hand many less developed countries have severe environmental problems and do not have the resources to clear them up, whereas affluent countries do. Conversely it can be argued that affluent countries have plundered and fouled less fortunate countries, and that it would be environmentally catastrophic if all countries used resources at the rate that the rich countries do. Similarly, it would be naïve to see all technologies as malign, or indeed benign. Technology can be a factor either of mitigation and improvement or of damage. Sometimes it is the problem (as when ozone depletion has been caused by a new technology – the use of chlorofluorocarbons) and sometimes it can be the solution (as when renewable energy sources replace the burning of polluting lignite in power stations). In addition to the three factors of population, affluence and technology, environmental changes also depend on variations in the way in which different societies have different economic and social

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structures (see Meyer 1996: 39–49, for an elaboration of this theme). Although there are palpably many ways in which humans, deliberately or accidentally, have modified the environment, there are many examples of debates as to whether a particular environmental change is the result of natural as opposed to human actions. One can ask, for example, how effective prehistoric peoples were in causing environmental modification (see, e.g. Kohen 1995, in the context of Australian Aboriginals), and how significant human actions were in causing animal extinctions at the end of the Ice Age (see, e.g. Martin and Wright 1967). More recently there have been debates about the extent to which humans have been responsible for valley incision and aggradation in the Mediterranean (Vita-Finzi 1969; van Andel et al. 1990), for the alleged more general degradation of Mediterranean landscapes (Grove and Rackham 2001), or for the development of incised valley floors (arroyos) in the American southwest in the late nineteenth century (Cooke and Reeves 1976; Bull 1997; Elliott et al. 1999).

ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES ON HUMANS The second big question is the extent to which human societies have been influenced by environmental changes over time – an issue which relates to Determinism (see Chapter 27). This is a concern which was of great significance to geographers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but which, after a phase of neglect and even contempt, has come back into prominence and serious consideration in recent years. The reason for the phase of neglect was a distrust of ‘crude environmental determinism’, whereas the reason for the recent resurgence of interest is that our knowledge of environmental history has been strengthened because of the availability of relatively reliable dates, our ability to undertake more

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precise environmental reconstruction, and the realisation that climate changes have been frequent, severe and often abrupt. Furthermore, our concerns about the potential impacts of future climate changes has drawn attention to just how significant environmental conditions are for humankind. That said, one still needs to be wary of simplistic unicausal explanations (Judkins et al. 2008). Classic work on the impact of climatic fluctuations on human affairs was undertaken by Elsworth Huntington, who was impressed by the evidence of abandoned civilisations and great migrations in Central Asia. His Pulse of Asia (1907) was a landmark publication. There was a general belief that climates had become drier in the Holocene – the concept of post-glacial progressive desiccation (Goudie 1972) – and that this had in some cases promoted intensification of land use that had led to domestication of plants and animals (Childe 1936). The concept lost credibility in the 1950s (Zeuner 1959; Goudie 1999). In recent years the great variety of scales of climatic change has been revealed (Viles and Goudie 2003), including a whole range of oscillations at less than century to millennial scales (Table 39.3). At longer time scales, of centuries to millennia, there have been such important phenomena as the Dansgaard–Oeschger Cycles, Bond Cycles and Heinrich Events (Anderson et al. 2007). At even longer time scales we have the multiple glacial and interglacial cycles, sometimes with abrupt onset and terminations, that have occurred throughout the Pleistocene. It has now become clear that the many, rapid and severe climate changes of the Quaternary have impacted upon humans in many parts of the world (Table 39.4), and that changes of climate in the Upper Miocene (6–8 million years ago), such as aridification in East Africa, set the scene for hominid evolution itself (Vbra 1995; Sepulchre 2006). The Pleistocene record seems to indicate that hominim species differentially originate and go extinct during periods of extreme climatic variability (Maslin and Christensen 2007).

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Equally, the extreme climatic conditions in Europe during the last glacial may have been crucial for determining the fortunes of the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons in Europe (Gamble et al. 2004), though this is still a matter for debate (Tzedakis et al. 2007). Curiously, whereas hunter-gatherers and foragers were able to move in response to changes in climate, more advanced peoples have become increasingly anchored to particular locations and have been less able to adapt to changing conditions by means of migration (Linder 2006). The ‘Greening of the Sahara’ in the early to mid-Holocene, led to an explosion of activity by Neolithic peoples in the Sahara (Petit-Maire et al. 1999), just as the Medieval Warm Epoch was seen by the English climaTable 39.3

Examples of climate oscillations

At less than century to millennial scales Antarctic circumpolar wave Antarctic oscillation Arctic oscillation El Niño Interdecadal Pacific oscillation La Niña Madden-Julian oscillation North Atlantic oscillation Northern Hemisphere annual mode Pacific decadal oscillation Pacific-North American teleconnection/pattern Quasi-Biennial oscillation Southern annular mode Southern oscillation At century to millennial time scales Bond cycles Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles Heinrich events Neoglaciations (e.g. Little Ice Age) At longer time scales Major glacials Major interglacials Milankovitch cycles

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tologist H.H. Lamb as a time of economic progress in parts of Europe (Lamb 1982). Conversely, some of the cold phases of the Holocene (neoglaciations) had an enormous impact on peoples in high latitudes and at high altitudes (Grove 2004). Abrupt climate episodes have led to the collapse of some civilisations (Fagan 2004; Diamond 2005), and agricultural intensification and domestication may have been stimulated by episodes of increased aridity (Sherratt 1997). There was also an association in the mid-Holocene between desiccation and increasing social complexity in the central Sahara and Egypt (Brooks 2006). Enhanced aridity, Brooks argues, caused population agglomeration in environmental refugia characterised by the presence of surface water (e.g. the Nile Valley). Crucially, some geomorphological environments, such as narrow flood plains in arid regions, home to intensive agricultural societies, are very sensitive to loss of land from flooding and incision (Manners et al. 2007). Sea-level changes will also have been important in controlling human activities, including migration, especially in low-lying areas. Alternating isolation and connection of islands to each other and to their adjacent mainlands, and the emergence and submergence of coastal plains, will have had substantial impacts on human societies, as seems to have been the case in the Neolithic (Turney and Brown 2007). Other significant geomorphological changes with implications for prehistory are those associated with the shifting of river courses, perhaps because of tectonic events. There has, for instance, been as great deal of debate about the role of sudden shifts in the rivers of the north Indian plains in explaining the changes in the fortunes of the Harappan Civilisation (Madella and Fuller 2006). To understand the environmental changes of the Holocene, and indeed of the whole Anthropocene, it behoves us to consider the interaction of both human and natural factors (Roberts 1998; Bell and Walker 2005). This realisation has been strengthened because of

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Table 39.4 Holocene

Examples of some recent studies of climatic influences on human history in the

Location

Approximate date

Source

Collapse of classic Mayan civilisation

1000 AD

Hodell et al. 1995, Neff et al. 2006

Expansion of cattle keepers into the Sahara

Early to mid Holocene

Petit-Maire et al. 1999

Abandonment of Greenland Settlements

1300–1500 AD

Grove 2004

Abandonment of Highland Settlement in SE Scotland

1300–1600 AD

Parry 1978

Anasazi collapse SW US

End of 13th century AD

Grove 2004

Spread of cultivation into highland Britain

Medieval

Lamb 1982

Decline of Middle Eastern empires (e.g. The Akkadian)

4200 BP

Weiss et al. 1993

End of Harappan (Indus) civilisation

4200 BP

Staubwasser et al. 2003, Madella and Fuller 2006

Culture change in the Atacama Desert, Chile

Mid-Holocene

Grosjean et al. 1997

Cultural change in coastal Peru

Mid-Holocene

Wells and Noller 1999

Domestication

Early Holocene/Late Pleistocene

Sherratt 1997

Southwards expansion of Bantu

After c.4200 BP

Burroughs 2005

Neolithic settlement in Harz Mountains

7600–4550 BP

Voigt 2006

Mid-Neolithic decline in NE Morocco

6500–6000 BP

Zielhofer and Linstädter 2006

Collapse of Tiwanaku State

c.1000 BP

Ortloff and Kolata 1993

Emergence of Egyptian Dynastic state and of Pharaonic civilization

c.6000 BP

Brooks 2006, Kuper and Kröpelin 2006

the possibility that some Holocene climatic changes, and not just future changes, are the result of humanly caused land cover changes (Ruddiman 2006).

THE FUTURE It is with respect to coming decades that we see the coming together of the twin themes of climate change impacts on humans, and human impacts on climate change. Since the recognition of the possible impact of greenhouse gas emissions on future climates became evident in the 1980s, geographers have become concerned, following the structure of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with the science of future changes, the current and future impacts of global warming, and policy formulation with

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regard to mitigation. Various universities have established or developed centres to address this particular issue. It is evident that some landscapes will be especially sensitive to the effects of global warming – the so called ‘hotspots (Goudie 2006) – and that some environments (‘tipping points’) will be subject to rapid changes that will have widespread implications for the whole Earth system. This, however, is a theme that is dealt with more fully in Chapter x.

FURTHER READING Anderson, D., Goudie, A.S. and Parker, A.G. (2007) Global Environments Through the Quaternary: Exploring Environmental Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baker, A.R.H. (2003) Geography and History, Bridging the Divide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Goudie, A.S. (ed.) (2002) Encyclopedia of Global Change. New York: Oxford University Press. Goudie, A.S. (2006) The Human Impact on the Natural Environment, 6th edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Meyer, W.B. (1996) Human Impact on the Earth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Middleton, N.J. (2003) The Global Casino. London: Edward Arnold. Simmons, I.G. (1996) Changing the Face of the Earth: Culture, Environment and History, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Steffen, W., Sanderson, A., Tyson, P.D., Jäger, J., Matson, P.A., Moore, B., Oldfield, F., Richardson, K., Schellnuber, H.J., Turner, B.L., and Wasson, R.J. (2004) Global Change and the Earth System. Berlin: Springer. Turner, B.L. II (ed.) (1990) The Earth as Transformed by Human Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Thomas, W.L. (ed.) (1956) Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tiffen, M., Mortimore, M. and Gichuki, F.N. (1994) More People, Less Erosion: Environmental Recovery in Kenya. London: Wiley. Tivy, J. and O’Hare, G. (1981) Human Impact on the Ecosystem. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. Turner, B.L., Kasperson, R.E., Meyer, W.B., Dow, K.M., Golding, D., Kasperson, J.X., Mitchell, R.C. and Ratick, S.J. (1990) ‘Two types of global environmental change: definitional and spatial-scale issues in their human dimensions’, Global Environmental Change, 1: 14–22. Turner, B.L., Geohegan, J. and Foster, D.R. (2004) Integrated Land-change Science and Tropical Deforestation in the Southern Yucatan´ . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turney, C.S.M. and Brown, H. (2007) ‘Catastrophic early Holocene sea level rise, human migration and the Neolithic transition in Europe’, Quaternary Science Reviews, 26: 2036–2041. Tzedakis, P.C., Hughen, K.A., Cacho, I. and Harvati, K. (2007) ‘Placing late Neanderthals in a climatic context’, Nature, 449: 206–208. van Andel, T.H., Zangger, E. and Demitrack, A. (1990) ‘Land use and soil erosion in prehistoric and historical Greece’, Journal of Field Archaeology, 17: 379–396. Vbra, E.S., Denton, G.H., Partridge, T.C., Burckle, L.H. (eds) (1995) Paleoclimate and Evolution with Emphasis on Human Origins. New Haven: Yale University Press. Viles, H.A. and Goudie, A.S. (2003) ‘Interannual decadal and multidecadal scale climatic variability and geomorphology’, Earth-Science Reviews, 61: 105–131. Vita-Finzi, C. (1969) The Mediterranean Valleys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Voigt, R. (2006) ‘Settlement history as reflection of climate change: the case study of Lake Jues (Harz

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40 Global Climate Change Glen M. MacDonald

INTRODUCTION The threat of global climate change due to increased anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gasses has become one of the defining environmental issues of the twenty-first century. At the same time, the scientific community, policy makers and the general public have become aware that even in the absence of anthropogenic factors the climate is prone to significant shifts due to natural causes. A tangible driver of this concern is the fact that global temperatures have increased by 0.76°C since the mid-nineteenth century and 11 of the 12 years between 1995 and 2005 were the warmest since 1850, the year when widespread reliable records become available (IPCC 2007). It is fair to say that humanity is feeling the heat of climate change. Few other issues present such a clear and pressing need to effectively integrate the physical, life and social sciences across geographic scales. The discourse on the causes, impacts and adaptations to changing climate should engage a broad spectrum of geographers. Academic geographers have long claimed as a core strength the ability to draw together the natural and social sciences as they relate to the surface of the earth and human actions

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thereupon. The issues of climate change challenge geographers to live up to these claims. The following chapter will briefly outline the long history of scientific interest in climatic change and then discuss current understanding of some of the most important natural and anthropogenic causal factors that have been associated with recent climatic warming. Of particular interest here are the role of natural solar variability and the importance of increasing levels of greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide (CO2) methane (CH4) and nitrous oxides (NOx). Both these forces have been suggested to lie behind the recent rises in global temperature. The role of academic geography in global climate change research will be considered.

HISTORICAL INTEREST IN CLIMATE CHANGE AND ITS IMPACTS ON SOCIETY Scientific interest in the phenomenon of climate change, the forces that produce it and its impacts on the environment and people can be traced back to ancient times. For example, in the fourth century BC the

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Greek philosopher and natural historian Theophrastus reported on investigations made by Meton regarding the relationship between variations in sunspots and rainfall (Hoyt and Schatten 1997). During Roman times, Pliny the Elder speculated about the role of land clearance and the drainage of wetlands in producing climatic changes deleterious to agriculture in places such as Philippi (Pliny 1855). By the time of the Enlightenment, much interest came to focus upon the impact of climate and climate change on the form and fates of civilizations. In the 1750s the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume used Roman accounts of events such as the freezing of the Tiber to argue that the climate of Europe had been significantly colder during the Classical Period than during the eighteenth century. Hume attributed the change in climate to forest clearance due to the expansion of agriculture. He argued that similar changes in climate would take place in the Americas as agriculture advanced there (Fleming 1998). During the mid-nineteenth century, due in large part to the work of the Swiss-American scientist Louis Aggasiz, it became broadly accepted that the recent geologic past had experienced profound climatic shifts that produced extensive advances and retreats of glacial ice in the northern hemisphere. In his 1840 publication on the glaciations of the Alps and their piedmont, Aggasiz argued forcefully that widespread climatic changes must have occurred in order to produce the large extensions of glaciers and ice caps that he observed (Aggasiz 1840). The Scottish scientist James Croll proposed that these shifts from glacial to non-glacial conditions were linked to natural variations in the orbital geometry of the Earth, a hypothesis that was refined in the early twentieth century by the Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch and eventually supported through the analysis of marine sediment cores (Imbrie and Imbrie 1979). This theory for the cause of glacial–interglacial cycles remains a dominant paradigm today. We now know that there have been as many as 17 shifts between glacial and non-glacial conditions

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over the past two million years (the Quaternary Period) and the average global temperature changes somewhere from 3°C to 7°C between the various glacial and non-glacial conditions The wide acceptance of the existence of past glaciations was important in opening the public mind to the existence of large swings in climate and the potential impacts of such variations. Within academic geography, interest in climate and its impact on the development of society was one of the defining elements of the discipline in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unfortunately, much of this work, often referred to as environmental determinism, came to possess a decidedly racist outlook, attributing various poorly defined differences in the traits and attributes of individuals and societies to the purported influences of climate on the evolution of different races (see, for example, Huntington 1915). Similarly, reconstructing climatic changes and speculating upon their impacts on society was also of wide interest amongst geographers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, in a report from an expedition to Turkestan by Raphael Pumpelly, William Morris Davis and Ellsworth Huntington (all prominent members of the American Association of Geographers) the section on physical geography begins with the following: Both our own observations and the excellent and extensive work of Russian geologists show that the progressive desiccation of the region has greatly diminished both the area of cultivatable land and the volume of water, and greatly reduced the population. Is this change a phase of cyclical phenomena – of cycles of long periodicity?. Pumpelly et al. 1905: 16.

The final sentence of this passage is particularly prophetic as it lies at the root of some recent debates over the potential role of natural cycles of climate change versus human agency in producing climate warming in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Following the widespread disavowal of environmental determinism in the

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mid-twentieth century, research by geographers shifted away from broad questions of the societal impacts of climate and climate change. Geographical research in the area of climate change came to focus particularly upon modern climatology and on the use of historical records and paleo-environmental records such as tree rings, fossil pollen and sedimentary deposits to reconstruct past variations in climate. In addition, inspired by the seminal work of Gilbert White (1945), geographers interested in questions of environment–human response began a tradition of working on specific natural hazards such as floods. However, in geography, anthropology and economics there is now renewed interest in the broad question of the role of climate and climate change in influencing societies as a whole. Such works are typically explicit in their disavowal of the earlier racist framings of environmental determinism (e.g. Diamond 1999).

HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC INTEREST IN SOLAR VARIABILITY AND GREENHOUSE GASSES AS CAUSES OF CLIMATE CHANGE Modern scientific interest in the role of solar variability and anthropogenic greenhouse gasses in causing changes in climate can be traced to the early nineteenth century (Hoyt and Schatten 1997; Fleming 1998; Weart 2003). Sir William Herschel led a revival in the scientific study of sunspots during the period 1800 to 1826 and proposed a linkage between sunspots, solar activity, climate and wheat harvests. Sunspots and solar flares have both short-term (~11-year) cycles and longer centennial scale variations in occurrence. The identification of the 11-year cycle in solar activity as represented by sunspots was initiated by the discoveries of the German astronomer Heinrich Schwab who produced years of meticulous observations of the sun commencing in 1826. Interestingly, his findings did not generate much attention until

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they were relayed by the great geographer Alexander von Humboldt in his 1851–1852 compendium Cosmos. The Swiss scientist Rudolf Wolf initiated the compilation of even longer records of sunspot activity that extended from 1700 to 1868. These long records were critical for refining the 11-year cycle and pointing the way to even longerterm low-frequency variations on solar activity. The English economist William Stanley Jevons is mainly known today for his theories of political economy. However, he was also famous in the late nineteenth century for his theory linking sunspot activity, climate, agriculture and economic crises (Jevons 1878). Up to recent times there remains interest amongst some economists and geographers in the role of solar activity in influencing economic cycles through their impact on agriculture and commodity prices. Sunspots are observable from earth and we now know they are associated with an active sun and small increases in solar radiation. Since sunspots appear dark it could be thought that more sunspots would signal less energy output from the sun. In the nineteenth century there was debate on whether sunspots produced cool and wet climatic conditions on earth or warm and dry conditions. However, the margins of sunspots and other related solar phenomena produce hotter than average conditions on the solar surface. More energy is also associated with sunspot occurrence. Since atmospheric conditions can influence solar irradiance measurements from the earth’s surface, the first definitive measurements of the magnitude of variations in total solar irradiance associated with sunspot activity was provided from space-borne platforms using the Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiance Monitor starting with the Nimbus 7 missions in the late 1970s (Foukal et al. 2006). The twentieth-century measurements of sunspots and solar output indicate that the increased energy during the prolonged active periods associated with sunspots is typically only on the order of 0.05% to 0.07% of the solar constant – surface irradiance may be amplified due to changes in the earth’s

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atmosphere associated with solar activity. The sunspot related variation is thus 1 W/m2 or less compared to a solar constant average of 1366 W/m2. This range is smaller than the change in radiative forcing caused by the increase in atmospheric CO2 since the eighteenth century (IPCC 2007). It remains highly controversial if the very small variations in total solar irradiance could significantly change the climate of the earth. This question is particularly important because the trend towards higher global surface air temperatures since the nineteenth century is associated with both increased greenhouse gas concentrations and increased total solar irradiance. For almost 20 years arguments have been made both for and against a significant role of solar forcing in this long-term temperature trend (see, for example, Schlesinger and Ramankutty 1992). Foukal et al. conclude in a recent review of solar variation and climate that based upon current climate models and understanding of solar forcing ‘brightening of the Sun is unlikely to have had a significant influence on global warming since the seventeenth century’. However, they then go on to add: ‘Additional climate forcing by changes in the Sun’s output of ultraviolet light, and of magnetized plasmas, cannot be ruled out. The suggested mechanisms are, however, too complex to evaluate meaningfully at present’ (Foukal et al. 2006: 161). There is a considerable amount of evidence accruing, particularly from paleoclimatic reconstructions and model experiments, that shows a correlation between long-term variations in total solar irradiance represented by sunspot numbers or through analysis of cosmogenically produced isotopes related to changes in solar activity such as 10 Be and 14C, and changes in temperature, precipitation and ocean temperature, and circulation patterns (e.g. Bond et al. 2001; Hu et al. 2003; MacDonald et al. 2008). Some analyses and climate model research suggests that the temperature increase over the twentieth century could reflect a combination of both increased solar irradiance and

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increased greenhouse gasses (Crowley 2000). It seems clear that understanding if and how very small variations in solar irradiance might be amplified to impact the earth’s ocean–atmosphere system in a significant manner and how they might combine with the impacts of increasing greenhouse gasses remain critical questions for climate change research. Modern studies of the role of various atmospheric gasses in allowing energy in the form of sunlight (shortwave electromagnetic waves) to pass through the atmosphere, yet restricting the release energy in the form of heat (long-wave electromagnetic waves) back into space (essentially the greenhouse effect in simple terms) can be traced to the early nineteenth century (Fleming 1998; Weart 2003). The French physicist, Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, published upon the potential role of such gasses in maintaining planetary temperatures in the 1820s. However, identification of the specific greenhouse gasses which allow light to pass through, but absorb heat energy, remained unresolved until the invention of a simple spectrophotometer by the Irish scientist, John Tyndell. He experimentally demonstrated the greenhouse properties of CO2 in the midnineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century the Swedish scientists Svante Arrhenius and Arvid Högbom conducted research on the possible causes of glacial cycles and calculated that changing the atmospheric CO2 concentrations by a factor of two would cause a 4–5°C change in global temperature and that the burning of fossil fuels could add significant amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere. However, they believed the current rates of additional production CO2 were too low to impact the atmosphere for millennia. By 1908 Arrhenius suggested in an influential book, Worlds in the Making, that the increasing rates of fossil fuel burning and resulting increased concentrations of CO2 could indeed cause global warming and this warming might occur within centuries rather than millennia. In the mid-twentieth century, Arrehenius’ ideas on future global

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warming were largely dismissed and there was little credence given to the idea that the fossil fuel combustion could result in high enough concentrations of CO2 to have any impact upon climate. Reasons for rejection of an anthropogenic greenhouse effect included the then current belief in the inability of CO2 to be an effective additional greenhouse component in the presence of water vapor, a belief in a strong buffering capacity by the oceans and a lack of reliable measurements definitively proving increasing base levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. However, as the century progressed things began to change. The English engineer and amateur meteorologist, Guy Callendar, collated available measurements of atmospheric CO2 and surface temperature records to argue there had been a linked increase in both since the nineteenth century. In the 1950s the physicist, Gilbert Plass, produced new calculations that suggested humans could potentially raise the global average temperature by 1.1°C per century through the greenhouse effect, while the oceanographer, Roger Revelle at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, began to argue forcefully that the oceans could not buffer all of the additional greenhouse gas additions and humans might indeed transform the climate. Still, definitive evidence of increasing CO2 and other greenhouse gasses did not appear until the early 1960s following the careful atmospheric measurements initiated by Charles ‘Dave’ Keeling, also of Scripps. The power of the CO2 measurements that Keeling initiated is that they are taken regularly, use careful standard techniques and are taken from remote areas of the northern and southern hemisphere in order to provide a global base-level measure of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses that is not biased by strong local sources. In addition to measurements of the atmosphere, icecore measurements of trapped atmospheric gasses have been used to extend the CO2 record back in time. The CO2 measurements we have now show that since the start of the industrial revolution and massive human

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population growth at about 1750, atmospheric levels of CO2 have risen from 280 parts per million by volume (ppm) to 379 ppm in 2005 and this level is about 80 ppm higher than at any other time over at least the past 650,000 years (IPCC 2007). We also know that CH4 and NOx are also important greenhouse gasses that have increased due to human activity. The increased radiative forcing due to increases in CO2, CH4 and NOx since 1750 is about 2.30 W/m2. At the same time, increasingly well resolved and spatially extensive instrumental and paleoclimatic temperature records show a general increase in global surface temperatures that may be unprecedented for at least the last 1300 years (IPCC 2007). In recent decades the threat of greenhouse warming has been taken increasingly seriously by scientists and world governments. A powerful symbol of this scientific and societal concern was the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the resulting Nobel Prize winning reports of that organization. The latest of these is the Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC 2007). The Fourth Assessment concludes that by the end of the twenty-first century, global temperatures will increase by 1.8–4°C with greatest warming being at the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere. This warming will be accompanied by a host of other changes including increasing aridity in the sub-tropics, summer melting of the Arctic sea-ice, and a rise in global sea-level of 18–59 cm. However, there is some scientific debate, and much, often politically motivated, public controversy about greenhouse warming. Scientific debate hinges upon questions of whether the current levels of anthropogenically enhanced greenhouse gasses are actually high enough to significantly change climate, problems with instrumental and paleoclimatic records of recent temperature increases, inherent difficulties in climatic modeling, and if the current high temperatures are a result of increased greenhouse gasses or are due to natural warming caused by increased solar irradiance and other nonanthropogenic causes (see, for example,

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Michaels 2005). The current consensus view of the IPCC is that human-produced additional greenhouse gasses are sufficient to cause warming and are more important than solar variability at this time (IPCC 2007).

ROLE OF GEOGRAPHY IN ADDRESSING CLIMATE CHANGE TODAY Geographers are deeply involved in contemporary research on climate change and its impacts. As one high-profile example, William Easterling, professor of geography at Penn State was a coordinating lead author on the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report. The contributions of geographers span the discipline from human to physical geography. There is not space to recount all of the recent contributions of geographers to climate change research. So, in view of space limitations, a few examples will be provided from physical geography of only those studies directly relevant to understanding the climate system and from human geography a few examples of work towards understanding the human dimension of climate change will be cited. Finally, some potential priority areas of integrated geographical research on climate change will be outlined (Liverman, in press). Physical geographers have contributed to the collation and analysis of large climatic and hydrological databases of instrumental observation to produce regional to global syntheses of current conditions and trajectories in climate or hydrology over recent decades. One notable pioneering effort was the compilation of global temperature and precipitation data sets by Legates and Willmott (1990a, 1990b). Efforts by geographers to collect and assess such data at global to continental scales continues, recent work by Rawlins et al. (2006) and Smith et al. (2005, 2007) provide examples of compiling and using such data sets to detect often subtle, but significant recent changes in the hydroclimatic system of northern Eurasia. Indeed, the

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polar regions are anticipated to be extremely sensitive to climatic changes associated with global warming and recent climatic change at high latitudes has been the focus of research by a number of geographers working on contemporary climate dynamics (e.g. Bromwhich et al. 2007; Rogers et al. 2004). Geographers have also contributed to the broad-scale synthesis and mapping of climate-change related phenomena with works such as the Atlas of Climate Change produced by Dow and Downing (2006). Such large georeferenced databases and mapping products are essential in providing baselines for climatic and hydrological conditions to assess if significant changes are occurring in these systems at the present time. The rapid development of geographic information systems and geographic information sciences (GIS) in general has facilitated much of this work. The instrumental records of climate or hydrology extend back only about 100 years in most cases and remote sensing data is typically limited to the past few decades. The temporal span of these records is too limited to produce a true baseline of natural variability in the climate system. One way in which geographers have contributed to extending observational records is through the careful analysis of older meteorological measurements from the nineteenth century and earlier and through the study of other historical records related to climate (e.g. Mock 2000; Mock et al. 2007). A great deal of research is being done by physical geographers on developing and interpreting paleoclimatic records. One of the most controversial of such records was produced by Mann et al. (1999). Bradley received his graduate training in geography at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado. That record, based upon a statistical synthesis of paleoclimatic data for the past 600 years, had the shape of a hockey stick with global temperatures climbing in an exponential manner over the past 100 years or so to reach unprecedented levels in the late twentieth century. Although the Mann et al. record and later iterations drew heated public and political

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denouncement, particularly by some Republican lawmakers, the general pattern of exceptional warming during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries appears to be supported by a number of other broad-scale synthetic studies of temperature changes over the past 400 to 2,000 years, including some which contain contributions by geographers (Mann et al. 2003). Many of the long reconstructions indicate that the last time global and regional temperatures were near or equal to present temperatures was between 900 and 1300 when there was a peak in total solar irradiance and a period of decreased global volcanic activity which allowed more solar energy to pass through the atmosphere to the surface of the earth (Crowley 2000). In recent years a number of studies in which geographers have been involved have linked this period of medieval warming with increased drought in southwestern North America, suggesting that similar aridity could be anticipated there due to future global warming (e.g. Cook et al. 2003; MacDonald et al. 2008). Finally, geographers have been involved in the development, testing and application of spatially explicit models to predict future climate change. A recent climate modeling study by Feddema et al. (2005) showing the importance of global land-cover changes to global climate model estimates of future climate warming stands as a good example of the importance of geographically explicit syntheses of environmental data for predicting future climate. That study, which was outlined in the IPCC (2007) Fourth Assessment Report, demonstrated the critical importance of land-use changes in feeding back and modifying the climate. The result of incorporating land-cover change into IPCC predictive climate models produced in some cases significantly different estimates of the regional climatic conditions that would exist in 2100. In terms of climate change and human response, some of the most interesting and mathematically rigorous analyses of the relationship between solar activity and the

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economy has been done by the eminent human geographer Brian Berry. In that work he identifies solar and lunar cycles as pacemakers of long-wave variations in inflation rates and economic growth (Berry 2000). Both human and physical geographers have built upon the tradition of hazards research and risk analysis pioneered by Gilbert White and have expanded the scope of their work to other climatically linked phenomena. They have also worked on developing general theoretical approaches for the understanding of the impacts on people of climatic change, climate induced environmental changes and natural hazards related to climate. Examples of these developments include the papers in the volume, Climate Impact Assessment: Studies of the Interaction of Climate and Society, edited by Kates et al. (1985) and individual publications by Cutter (1993), Knox (1993), Kasperson et al. (1996), Smit et al. (1999), Polsky (2004), Polsky et al. (2007) and Turner et al. (2007). Clearly, this has been a particularly rich area of contribution by geographers and one of increasing importance. As one example highlighting the importance of space and place in anticipating the socio-economic impacts of climate change, Polsky (2004) examined the impacts of climatic variations in the Great Plains over the period 1969–92 using six spatially explicit econometric models. His results showed that climatic sensitivities are significantly influenced by geographic effects, such as extra-local communication processes and proximity of irrigation sources. He concluded from his study ‘that on balance the Great Plains system of agricultural production, despite a heterogeneous picture of projected impacts, appears to be increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change’ (Polsky 2004: 549). Finally, geographers have revisited some of the larger-scale issues of climate change and general patterns of societal response in the context of how such changes impacted societies in the past and what lessons we might draw from such previous events (Diamond 2005). The lesson that Diamond

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(2005) drew from his analysis is that although climatically induced events such as prolonged drought may be triggers for societal collapse, it is often choices that societies make in terms of management of the environment and their response to climate change that are the real issues in determining if the society can successfully adapt to the change. In a recent review of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the eminent geographer, Diana Liverman outlined a series of research priorities that were widely aimed at environmental scientists in general, but should have a special resonance for geographers. The priorities suggested by Liverman (in press) can be summarized as: 1 Improve estimates of uncertainty and probability of anticipated climatic changes. 2 Assess the barriers to adaptation. 3 Develop broader and consistent scenarios of future climate and societal development. 4 Produce comparative case studies of impacts and vulnerabilities. 5 Further research on the impacts of sudden higher magnitude climate changes. 6 Improve the costing of impacts and adaptation to climate change. 7 Develop geographically balanced studies of the observed climate change impacts and adaptations. 8 Produce targeted sectoral and regional economic analysis in understudies regions such as the tropics. 9 Improve understanding of trade interactions, innovations and vulnerabilities.

Clearly, these priorities cross the sub-disciplinary boundaries within geography and challenge geographers to think imaginatively and interactively with each other and with other disciplines. The challenges and potential stakes of climate change are great. However, these challenges offer geographers a chance to advance the discipline, sharpen our understanding of the natural and social sciences, and provide a tangible and important contribution to human well-being. Global climate change presents both a challenge and opportunity that geographers cannot chose to ignore.

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REFERENCES Agassiz, L. (1840) Études sur les glaciers. Neuchâtel: Jent et Gassman. Berry, B. (2000) ‘A pacemaker for the long wave’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change 63: 1–23. Bond, G., Kromer, B., Beer, J., Muscheler, R., Evans, M.N., Showers, W., Hoffmann, S., Lotti-Bond, R., Hajdas, I. and Bonani, G. (2001) ‘Persistent solar influence on North Atlantic climate during the Holocene’, Science, 294: 2130–2136. Bromwich, D.H., Box, J.E., Fogt, R.L. and Monaghan, A.J. (2007) ‘Contributors to the Antarctic and Nordic sections of “State of the Climate in 2006”’, Bulletin of the Ameriocan Meteorological Society, 88: s72–s74, s104–s106. Cook, E.R., Woodhouse, C.A., Eakin, C.M., Meko, D.M. and Stahle, D.W. (2004) ‘Long-term aridity changes in the Western United States’, Science, 306: 1015–1018. Crowley, T.J. (2000) ‘Causes of climate change over the past 1000 years’, Science 289: 270–227. Cutter, S.L. (1993) Living with Risk. London: Edward Arnold. Diamond, J. (1999) Guns, Germs and Steel. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking. Dow, K. and Downing. T.E. (2006) Atlas of Climate Change. Berkeley: University of California Press. Feddema, J.J., Oleson, K., Bonan, G., Mearns, L.O., Buja, L., Washington, W.M. and Meehl, G. (2005) ‘How important is land cover change for simulating future climates?’ Science, 310: 1674–1678. Fleming, J.R. (1998) Historical Perspectives on Climate Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foukal, P., Fröhlich, C., Spruit, H. and Wigley, T.M.L. (2006) ‘Variations in solar luminosity and their effect on the Earth’s climate’, Nature, 443: 161–166. Hoyt, D.V. and Schatten, K.H. (1997) The Role of the Sun in Climate Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hu, F.S., Kaufman, D., Yoneji, S., Nelson, D., Shemesh, A., Huang, Y., Tian, J., Bond, G., Clegg, B. and Brown, T. (2003) ‘Cyclic variation and solar forcing of Holocene climate in the Alaskan subarctic’, Science, 301: 1890–1893. Huntington, E. (1915) Civilization and Climate. New Haven: Yale University Press. Imbrie, J. and Imbrie, K.P. (1979) Ice Ages – Solving the Mystery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Jevons, W.S. (1878) ‘Commercial crises and sun-spots’, Nature 19: 33–37. Kasperson, J.X., Kasperson, R.E. and Turner, B.L. (1996) ‘Regions at risk: Exploring environmental criticality’, Environment, 38: 4–15. Knox, J.C. (1993) ‘Large increases in flood magnitude in response to modest changes in climate’, Nature, 361: 430–432. Legates, D.R. and Willmott, C.J. (1990a) ‘Mean seasonal and spatial variability global surface air temperature’, Theoretical and Applied Climatology 41: 11–21. Legates, D.R. and Willmott, C.J. (1990b) ‘Mean seasonal and spatial variability in gauge-corrected, global precipitation’, International Journal of Climatology, 10: 111–127. Liverman, D. (in press) Assessing impacts, adaptation and vulnerability: Reflections on the Working Group II Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Global Environmental Change. MacDonald, G.M., Stahle, D.W., Villanueva Diaz, J., Beer, N., Busby, S.J., Cerano-Paredes, J., Cole, J.E., Cook, E.R., Endfield, G., Gutierrez-Garcia, G., Hall, B., Magana, V., Meko, D.M. University, MéndezPérez, M., Sauchyn, D.J., Watson, E., Woodhouse, C.A. (2008) ‘Climate warming and 21st century drought in southwestern North America’, EOS 89: 2. Mann, M., Bradley, R.S. and Hughes, M.K. (1998) ‘Global scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries’, Nature, 392: 779–788. Mann, M.E., Ammann, C.M., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Crowley, T.J., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D., Oppenheimer, M., Osborn, T.J., Overpeck, J.T., Rutherford, S., Trenberth, K.E. and Wigley, T.M.L. (2003) ‘On past temperatures and anomalous late 20th century warmth’, EOS 84: 256–258. Michaels, P.J. (2005) Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Mock, C.J. (2000) ‘Rainfall in the garden of the U.S. Great Plains, 1870–1889’, Climatic Change 44: 173–195. Mock, C.J., Mojzisek, J., Chenoweth, M., McWaters, M. and Stahle, D.W. (2007) ‘The winter of 1827–1828 over eastern North America: a season of extraordinary climatic anomalies, societal impacts, and false spring’, Climatic Change 81: 87–115.

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Pliny (1855) Title, trans. J. Bostock and H.T. Riley. London: H.G. Bohn. Polsky, C. (2004) ‘Putting space and time in Ricardian climate change impact studies: the case of agriculture in the US great plains’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94: 549–564. Polsky, C., Neff, R. and Yarnal, B. (2007) ‘Building comparable global change vulnerability assessments: the vulnerability scoping diagram’, Global Environmental Change, 17: 472–485. Pumpelly, R., Davis, W.M. and Huntington, E. (1905) Explorations in Turkestan Carnegie Institution of Washington. Washington, DC. Rawlins, M.A., Willmott, C.J., Shiklomanov, A., Linder, E., Frolking, S., Lammers, R.B. and Vörösmarty, C.J. (2006) ‘Evaluation of trends in derived snowfall and rainfall across Eurasia and linkages with discharge to the Arctic Ocean’, Geophysical Research Letters 33: L07403. Rogers, J.C., S.-H. Wang, and D.H. Bromwich (2004) ‘On the role of the NAO in the recent northeastern Atlantic Arctic warming’, Geophysical Research Letters, 31: L02201. Schlesinger, M.E. and Ramankutty, N. (1992) ‘Implications for global warming of intercycle solar irradiance variations’, Nature 360: 330–333. Smith L.C., Pavelsky, T.M., MacDonald, G.M., Shiklomanov, A.I. and Lammers, R.B. (2007) ‘Rising minimum daily flows in northern Eurasian rivers: A growing influence of groundwater in the highlatitude hydrologic cycle’, Journal of Geophysical Research, 112: G04S47. Smith, L.C., Sheng, Y., MacDonald, G.M. and Hinzman, L.D. (2005) ‘Disappearing arctic lakes’, Science, 308: 1429. Smit, B., Burton, I., Klein, R.J.T. and Street, R. (1999) ‘The science of adaptation: a framework for assessment’, Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 4: 199–213. Turner, B.L., Lambin, E.F. and Reenberg, A. (2007) ‘The emergence of land change science for global environmental change and sustainability’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105: 20666–20671. Weart, S.R. (2003) The Discovery of Global Warming. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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41 The City Phil Hubbard

INTRODUCTION It has become something of a cliché to ascertain that we now live in an urban world, where the majority of the world’s population resides in settlements described as urban. Given this, it follows logically that the majority of research in human geography relates to cities in some shape or form, and comments on the social, economic or political circumstances faced by urbanised populations. Likewise, the majority of geographical knowledge production occurs in universities and research institutes that are based in cities, making the city both a key venue of geographic knowledge production, as well as its principal field site. Yet despite the fact that the majority of human geographic research can be described as urban – in the sense that it is produced in or relates to specific cities – a surprisingly small amount of geographical work is, I would argue, concerned with the city per se (see Hubbard 2006). To put this somewhat differently, while there is much geographical work carried out in cities that contributes to social, economic, political or cultural theory, the vast majority

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of this work says very little – if anything – about the concept of the city. In fact, in the vast majority of the human geographical research that has the city as its context or backdrop, the question of what constitutes ‘cityness’ remains elusive. Indeed, rural geographers have arguably offered a more sustained and critical exploration of the concept of the countryside in recent times than urban geographers have of the city, and, in so doing, have inadvertently provided more clues as to the essence of the city than urban geographers have (see Cloke, this volume). This said, geographers have, alongside those in cognate disciplines including sociology, architecture, anthropology and planning, contributed to academic and popular understandings of the distinctive nature of cities as sites of human (and non-human) activity. This chapter reviews some of the key ways in which geographers have sought to approach the city as an object worthy of study in its own right (and not just a container or backdrop for social action), developing contrasting and sometimes competing ideas about the production and consumption of the city as a real and imagined entity. In so doing, I will

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move quickly (of essence) between different protagonists, many of whom have been located in, or written of, particular world cities. One important theme that will emerge is that the genealogy of the concept of the city is, at one and the same time, a geography: one that takes in cities including Manchester, Chicago, Berlin, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Vancouver, Singapore and Hong Kong, to name but a few. According to Gieryn, such cities are at once, the object and venue of study. Scholars in urban studies constitute the city both as the empirical referent of analysis and the physical site where investigation takes place. For this reason, urban studies becomes a propitious case for exploring the emplacement of scientific claims, and (in particular) the relationships between the place where knowledge comes from and its bid for credibility. Gieryn 2006: 7.

The way in which certain cities have become paradigmatic of the city in general at particular times is thus worthy of investigation, as it is suggestive of an urban geography whose understanding of the city (as a concept or idea) has always been shaped by its fixation on certain cities as being the ideal laboratories in which urban theory can be generated (Curry and Kenney 1999). In this chapter I therefore offer a brief overview of the development of the concept of ‘the urban’ in geography. In essence, this is an overview that highlights the ideas about cities and cityness that have tended to frame and inform debates within urban geography over the last century or so. Noting key shifts in thinking about the city, the chapter is thus complicit in a process by which certain individuals and cities become totemic of a certain type of urban theory. This chapter accordingly plays an active role in defining the canonicity of works in urban studies – that is, highlighting those whose views have been considered to have most merit in defining the intellectual contours of urban geography. While obviously useful in terms of understanding the development of mainstreamed, hegemonic and disciplined geography, warnings must be sounded. There are

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other ‘secret’ histories of urban studies that might be written – of Outsider geographers, psychogeographers, amateur cartographers and part-time urbanists (see, for example, Pinder 2005; Cloverly 2006) – which might reveal the concept of the city as having a more disputed provenance. As such, the following account may have some claim to be the story of urban geography, but it is of course only one of many possible accounts.

FINDING THE CITY: MANCHESTER, CHICAGO AND THE SHOCK OF THE NEW Whilst the first cities emerged thousands of years previously, it was in the nineteenth century that the city began to be taken seriously as a distinctive and important academic object of study. Perhaps the main reason for this is that until that time, the overall share of the global population living in cities was relatively small. The rapid urbanisation of the nineteenth century changed this, first taking root in the economically dominant states of the European heartland, and then in the cities of the ‘New World’, notably in the United States. What was particularly significant about this process was that it was manifest in cities that contemporary commentators struggled to describe using existing language: in short, their size, appearance and apparent complexity rendered them a new species that demanded to be classified, catalogued and ultimately, diagnosed. Notable examples here included Manchester – the northwestern English market town that transformed into the world-renowned cottonopolis in a few short years, growing from a population of 15,000 in 1750 to over two million by 1900. For Fredreich Engels, who wrote The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 while in the city, Manchester was the prime example of the industrial city – the ‘first manufacturing city of the world’ – but also the scene of ‘filth and ruin’ capable of generating horror and indignation (Engels 1845: 67). Likewise, when visited by French

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political commentator Alexis de Toqueville in 1840, Manchester was described as a ‘putrid sewer’ from which ‘pure gold flows forth’, a city where ‘humanity achieves for itself both perfection and brutalization’. Across the Atlantic Chicago was to gain a similar reputation. Effectively founded in 1830, Chicago’s population surpassed one million in 1890, with sociologist Max Weber (1904) writing that ‘the town goes on for miles and miles until it loses itself in the vastness of the suburbs going on as far as the eye could see’, with ‘a swarming interaction of all the peoples of every human race on every street’. Both cities thus amply earned the epithet, retrospectively coined by historian Asa Briggs, of being ‘shock cities’, settlements where the environmental and social impacts of rapid urban growth provoked both awe and wonder (Platt 2006). Such cities were characterised by perpetual transformation, with new ideas, technologies and practices constantly transforming people’s relation to one another as well as their place within a rapidly changing urban environment. Accordingly, such cities became understood as thoroughly modern, frequently juxtaposed with traditional settlements regarded as socially more secure and predictable. According to Savage et al. (2002) and Tonkiss (2005), sociology emerged at this time as a distinctive discipline, stimulated into being through the existence of questions about the nature of urban life and conduct. Though some sociologists addressed these issues tangentially, and were more concerned with exploring the nature of modern life rather than urban life per se, the inevitable conflation of modernisation, urbanisation and industrialisation served to establish some important ideas about the city. Foremost here was the idea that cities were larger, more crowded and socially mixed than rural settlements, bequeathing them a social character which was less coherent and more individualised. The idea that the city represented the antithesis of traditional ruralism became associated with Ferdinand Tonnies’ (1887) distinction between gemeinschaft communities – characterised by people

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working together for the common good, united by ties of family (kinship), language and folklore – and gesellschaft societies, characterised by rampant individualism and a concomitant lack of community cohesion. Though Tonnies couched the distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft in terms of a pre-industrial/industrial divide rather than an urban/rural one, his description of gesellschaft societies was deemed appropriate for industrial cities where the extended family unit was supplanted by ‘nuclear’ households in which individuals were concerned with their own problems, and seldom those of others – even those in their immediate neighbourhood. Though caricatured, the idea that social cohesion and sense of community would be less evident in a city than the country was a persuasive one, and one which was to guide sociologists as they further explored the nature of modern urban living. However, there were dissenters. For instance, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology, Emile Durkheim, suggested traditional, rural life offered a form of mechanical solidarity with social bonds based on common beliefs, custom, ritual and symbols. Durkheim argued that the emergence of city-state signalled a shift from mechanical to organic solidarity, with social bonds becoming based on specialisation and interdependence. Durkheim consequently suggested that although individuals may perform different tasks and often have different interests, the very survival of urban societies depends on people relying on one another’s ability to perform specific tasks. Hence, in contrast to rural social orders, urban society encouraged the co-existence of social differences, with a complex division of labour (where different people specialise in many different occupations) creating greater freedom and choice for individuals. Irrespective of the emphasis that some sociologists put on the idea that modern cities were socially liberating, a more common prognosis was that cities were essentially cold, calculating and anonymous. Engels’ (1844) work is of particular note in

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this respect, given it documented the inhuman living conditions experienced by workers in the industrialising metropolis. In a more general sense, the work of Georg Simmel (1858–1918) described the impacts of urbanism on social psychology, suggesting that the city demanded human adaptation to cope with its size and complexity. In his much-cited essay ‘The metropolis and mental life’ (1850), he argued that the unique trait of the modern city was the intensification of nervous stimuli with which the city dweller must cope. Describing the contrast between the rural, where the rhythm of life and sensory imagery was slow; and the city, with its ‘swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’, Simmel (1950) thus detailed how individuals psychologically adapted to urban life. Most famously, he spoke of the development of a blasé attitude – the attitude of indifference which urban dwellers adapt as they go about their day-to-day business (something that remains evident in the etiquette of urban life, where ‘civil inattention’ enables the pedestrian to negotiate encounters with the innumerable strangers passed in the street) (Smith and Davidson 2008). The idea that the urban experience is essentially ‘managed’ through a transformation of individual consciousness that involves a filtering out of the detail and minutiae of city existence is thus an important foundation for urban theory. So too is the idea that city life debases human relations, and renders contact between urban dwellers essentially superficial, self-centred and shallow. For Simmel, the impersonality and depthlessness of urban life was related to the fact that the industrial city served the calculative imperatives of money. Simmel essentially suggested this encouraged relations based purely on exchange value and productivity (and thus dissolved bonds constructed on the basis of blood, kinship or loyalty). This, he argued, encouraged a purely logical way of thinking which values punctuality, calculability and exactness (see Hubbard et al. 2002). Hence, while money fulfilled a multitude of tasks in the city by providing a medium of equivalence,

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the comeuppance was to reduce quality to quantity and to effectively destroying the essential ‘form’ and ‘use’ of any object encountered in the city: all was calculable. Simmel contended that this notion of calculation extended to other facets of urban life, something that Simmel’s pupil Siegfried Kracauer was to elaborate. Suggesting that the aesthetic forms and spectacles of the modern city were a product of urbanisation, Kracauer thus explored the development of distinctly urban visual cultures. Examples he cited included the design of housing, the aesthetics of the street, even the bodies of urban dwellers themselves. Noting the ludic pleasures of visually consuming cities, his work also emphasised sheer duplicity of this process, which he suggested was deeply embedded in the emergent structures of the industrial capitalist system. For Kracauer, reading the visual forms and commodities on display in the modern city thus revealed the paradoxes and possibilities of urban life. Yet above all else it was the anonymity of the city that was to be posited as its defining characteristic. Indeed, Max Weber’s celebrated essay ‘The City’ eschewed any attempt to determine a minimum population size for an urban settlement, arguing that the city needed to be defined as ‘a settlement of closely spaced dwellings which form a colony so extensive that the reciprocal personal acquaintance of the inhabitants, elsewhere characteristic of the neighbourhood, is lacking’ (Weber 1923: 1212). Chicago-based scholar Louis Wirth (1938) developed these ideas when he talked of the declining importance of ‘primary’ social relations in urban centres, suggesting that anonymous and fleeting social relations become the norm. For Wirth, the importance of impersonal social relations increased in direct proportion to the urbanity of a settlement, which he described as a function of a settlement’s population size, density and diversity. In his oft-cited words, a city may be conceived as ‘a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals’ (Wirth 1938: 7). As he detailed, increasing any one

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of these, in isolation or combination, was likely to have important impacts on the social life of a given settlement, and result in more people living alone and in social isolation. Wirth himself was a Jewish migrant to Chicago, one of millions who made his home in a city where ‘the areas of the city are distinguished from each other in degrees of cleanliness in accordance with the nationality of the residents’ (Weber 1904). Given this remarkable ‘anatomy’, it is perhaps not surprising that Chicago became the site where the first US Department of Sociology was established. Its co-founders, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, regarded Chicago as an ‘urban laboratory’ in which they could explore how humans adapt to the city. Park (once a pupil of Georg Simmel) thus proposed the concept of human ecology as a perspective applying biological processes to the social world. Hence, while some of the pioneering writers in urban sociology sought to isolate particular characteristics of the urban condition – often diagnosing pathologies of urban living – in the 1920s and 30s Chicago became the centre of an tradition of urban analysis which focused on city ecologies.

THE CITY CENTRED: CHICAGO AS MODEL The influence of Darwinian evolutionary ideas led the Chicago School to propose that people were individual biological units involved in a struggle for scare resources, postulating that cities are driven by competition, and the structure of the city is an outcome of this natural competition (or symbiosis). In particular, it suggested that the most successful urban dwellers would take over the ‘best’ areas of the city to guarantee their ‘survival’, whilst the least successful would end up in insalubrious areas. Taken together, these ideas of ‘natural’ competition suggested the city could be described as a complex ‘super-organism’ containing

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‘natural’ areas of many types: ethnic enclaves, activity-related areas (business, shopping, manufacturing, etc), differently classed housing areas (upper-class suburbs and workingclass tenements, etc.) as well as spaces of sexual and social immorality. Hence, a key legacy of the Chicago School was the urban model – a simplified representation of the city which identified key social divides in the city in diagrammatic form. Most famous, perhaps, was Burgess’ concentric zone model, a neat recapitulation of the theory that as cities grew spatially, patterns of land use would reflect successive phases of social occupation. The general pattern was one of a centralised business core surrounded by four principal zones (a zone in transition where newly arrived migrants would seek lodging; a zone of working class housing; a settled residential zone and a ring of commuter suburbs). Though a description of the social segregation of Chicago, this diagram was often taken to be indicative of the segregation evident in all industrial cities. Urban models of this type were later criticised for attempting to shoe-horn a complex social reality into a grossly simplified model that drew lines that didn’t really exist around areas that didn’t really matter. However, such models became totemic in urban studies, and acted as an important reference point in postwar urban geography. Over this period, as geographers began to draw inspiration from locational theory in economics, this preoccupation with mapping and modelling patterns of urban land-use became probably the most important tradition, and one of the clearest manifestations of a new generation of geographers’ desire to restyle their essentially descriptive discipline as a spatial science. Through the work of Garrison, Marble, Tobler, Morrill, and Dacey in the United States, and Wilson, Haggett and Harvey in the UK, the language of biology was gradually supplanted by the formal language of mathematics and statistics, which held out the promise of more accurate models of urban process. The potential of new technologies (e.g. calculators, computers) to identify

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statistical regularities in quantitative data also helped produce models which were the summation of tested and verifiable hypotheses. Underpinned by positivist principles (see Hubbard et al. 2002), spatial science was an attempt to distance geography (and especially urban geography) from the arts and humanities, and ally it with the ‘hard’ sciences by adopting the principles of scientific method. The new concepts and methods of spatial science thus allowed for the refinement of ecological modelling, with data relating to land use, migration and rental values used to approximate more and more complex models of urban land-use and social organisation. For instance, statistical methods of exploratory data analysis could be used to simplify vast amounts of data relating to different census tracts and neighbourhoods to identify related areas (Berry and Rees 1969). Factor analysis in particular became a widely adopted method for crunching census data and identifying the social, economic and demographic variables most important in differentiating neighbourhoods (following the methods spelt out by Shevky and Bell 1955). Though later critiqued for being socially acquiescent and irrelevant to the problems of the modern city (Harvey 1973), such statistical procedures shed light on the spatial imprints of racism (particularly in the United States, where the ghettoisation of non-white urban residents was regarded as a consequence of ‘white flight’). Following the example of the Chicago School, the city mapped and modelled via such methods was a modern industrial one, where residential segregation reflected the socio-economic status of residents, and where factors of family status and ethnicity remained subordinate to that of class. Likewise, it was also assumed to be a monocentric city where land values declined away from the central business district where competition for land remained highest. For instance, Alonso’s (1964) much-cited model of urban land-use effectively refined von Thunen’s model of agricultural land use to provide a theory of

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how the urban land market organised around the city’s central business district (CBD). His theory aimed to describe and explain the residential location behaviour of individual households and the resulting spatial structure of an urban area. The central concept of this theory was bid-rent, defined as the maximum rent that can be paid for a unit of land (e.g. per hectare) some distance from the city centre if the household is to maintain a given level of utility. Assuming jobs and retailing were concentrated in the city centre, the model implied that the price of both housing and of commuting depended on distance from the city centre, with a distance–decay relationship between land rent and distance from the CBD. This suggested that the further a household lives from the city centre, the more it will have to spend on commuting and the less it will be able to spend on housing. The bid–rent curve of the actual land rents in the city was accordingly interpreted as reflecting the outcome of a bidding process by which land is allocated to competing uses (e.g. residential versus commercial uses). On this basis, bid–rent curves were supposed to be downward sloping (i.e. rent decreasing with distance from the city centre to compensate for commuting costs) and single-valued (so that for a given distance from the CBD only one rent bid is associated with a given level of utility). Latterly, it was suggested these assumptions limit their usefulness of urban models in approximating observed land use patterns. Moreover, spatial science assumed that human actors were rational men (sic), fully aware of variations in land markets and able to judge the optimum location in the city they could afford. In practice, however, people often located in sub-optimal locations because they lack perfect knowledge or ability to act on that knowledge. Acknowledging this, one outgrowth of positivist urban studies was a ‘behavioural turn’ that sought to explore how people act on the basis of distorted, simplified and biased knowledge of their surroundings, inspiring a legion of studies which attempted to see how people

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thought about and acted in their cites, particularly in relation to topics such as spatial wayfinding, navigation and cognitive distance estimation (Holloway and Hubbard 2001). In many cases, this involved an attempt to incorporate people’s decision-making processes into urban models, rejecting utility theory in favour of a more nuanced account of people’s preferences as revealed through questionnaires. Such studies demonstrated that housing choice could not be regarded as rational, and that the process of searching for and evaluating housing is normally based on imperfect information. In other studies, housing preferences were merely inferred from actual behaviour, with data on tenure choices and commuting patterns used to construct models based on random utility theory or entropy maximisation (Thrift 1980). Work on peoples’ urban activity spaces and travel behaviour also encouraged experimentation with computer simulation, gaming approaches and fuzzy set theory, each of which provided the promise of recognising the ambiguous nature of urban decision-making. Though such models still aimed to simplify the messiness of urban life through data reduction, their focus on the spatial preferences and behaviours of individuals provided an important rejoinder to those who suggested urban modelling abstracted individuals ‘out of existence’.

DECENTRING THE CITY: MEGALOPOLIS, THE LA SCHOOL AND BEYOND … In different ways, but aping the Chicago School which regarded the city as both laboratory and field site, urban geographers had begun to explore the internal dynamics of the city, developing theories of the city on the basis of hypothesis testing based on empirical observation. Yet at the same time, geographers were also interested in the external relations of cities, borrowing from the central place theories emerging in

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economic geography (via Walter Christaller). These studies suggested that intercity relations were organised as national urban systems forming urban hierarchies in which smaller cities had lower-level urban functions. The two sides of this urbanism were famously brought together by Berry (1964) in his account of ‘cities as systems within systems of cities’. But no sooner had this neat arrangement been codified and widely disseminated through urban geography textbooks than both urban patterns began to alter: processes of deindustrialisation recast the relationship between the city and its suburbs, with new ‘industrial districts’ based on flexible production emerging often well away from centres of Fordist mass production and towards the periphery and suburban fringes (Scott 1988). At the same time, global shifts and the emergence of new international divisions of labour meant that intercity relations were recast. For example, in relation to the latter it became starkly evident that certain cities were taking on a heightened role in the globalisation of finance, with the triad of New York, London and Tokyo becoming the global hubs around which rapidly circulating flows of real, fictitious and virtual capital circulated (Friedman 1986; Sassen 1991). Increasingly, cities appeared to be decoupled from their regional or even national context, and shaped by their international connectivity as much as their regional hinterland. Thus, while Conzen and Greene (2008: 98) contend that ‘[t]he classical Chicago School of urban ecology … stood for threequarters of a century as virtually the only game in town’, many of the key precepts underpinning their work began to appear wanting in the light of changing empirical realities and emerging theoretical impulses. Pivotal here in relation to the latter was the sustained intellectual challenge of Marxist and radical ideas. Such perspectives on the city began to explore the city not just as shaped by individual decisions, but as a site caught up in, and integral to, wider social structures (notably, capitalism). The urban

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studies that emerged in this period accordingly made great play of their social commitment, being concern with urban exclusion and inequality (Milecevic 2001). Inspired by Marx, Engels and others in the ‘Marxist’ canon (notably Althuser), dialectical thinking was used to identify the contradictions in capitalist societies that needed to be resolved by transformations and adjustments to the mode of production. In effect, Marxism provided a revolutionary urban theory for revolutionary times, shifting the focus of urban studies from quasi-biological metaphors and mathematical models to analyses of the political–economic underpinnings of the urban system. Urban scholars thus embarked on a new era of urban exploration in which the city was deemed a vital ingredient in a wider story of class conflict and ideological control. In the writing of those geographers and urban theorists who most directly engaged with Marxist theory – notably, Harvey, Berman, Castells, and Smith – this type of reasoning was transformed into explications of the role of space in this process of spatial legitimation and crisis avoidance. Simply put, these writers emphasised the importance of capitalism’s spatial fix – the way that spatial differentiation and de-differentiation were implicated in capitalist relations. A prominent example is provided in the Marxian-inspired work of David Harvey, who identified urban space as an active moment, a unit of capital accumulation as well as a site of class struggle. Harvey thus characterised the urban landscape as subject to contradictory impulses of investment and disinvestment, noting there is also an imperative to segregate upper class and working class residential areas to suppress working class agitation. This segregation simultaneously created an urban landscape characterised by high and low land values. In particular, the association of specific areas with the ‘underclass’ drove down land prices in those locales, meaning subsequent development could realise the difference between actual ground rent and the potential rent offered by

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that site (the so-called ‘rent gap’ – Smith 1979). Uneven development was accordingly theorised by Harvey as a crucial means by which capitalism could create for itself new opportunities for capital accumulation, both within and through the city. While Harvey worked these ideas through in a series of celebrated accounts of nineteenth-century Parisian modernisation (see Harvey 2003), others focused on more contemporary processes of suburbanisation and urban restructuring. For instance, Allen Scott (1980) explored the urban land nexus in Southern California, noting the differential locational advantages associated with different sites. In Scott’s account, urban processes were similarly conceived (à la Harvey) as involving the resolution of conflicts between capital and labour. Emphasising the importance of capitalist enterprises, Scott argued that urban development was a function of changing ‘capital to labour’ ratios among firms as they modified their production methods to maximise profits. One dominant trend (in Southern California, at least) was the increased decentralisation of firms from the urban core – a movement enabled by technological innovation and flexibilisation. These changes encouraged suburbanisation as households sought suburban locations closer to employment centres. For Scott, the state became involved in ‘unravelling the spatial knots’ that this process of suburbanisation created. The work of Scott (Scott 1988; Scott and Storper 1992) thus opened up another avenue of Marxist urbanism, one attempting to integrate planning and urban theory to analyse the role of planners in resolving conflicts between capital and labour by intervening in land markets. The work emerging in Southern California underlined that by the 1970s and 1980s the industrial city had mutated into a very different species, and theories evolved in the context of modern, industrial cities no longer held. One significant observation was that many Western cities were decentring. New office complexes, science parks, retail malls and leisure parks were springing up around

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the periphery of most cities, while a rash of gated communities (privatopias) produced new residential foci. In some instances, this peripheral urban development created new ‘edge cities’: cities without centres, in effect. The idea that cities were perhaps more polycentric than implied by Chicago scholarship had been hinted at in Jean Gottmann’s classic study which used the term Megalopolis to describe the urbanised northeast of the United State – ‘an almost continuous stretch of urban and suburban areas from southern New Hampshire to northern Virginia and from the Atlantic shore to the Appalachian foothills’ (Gottmann 1961: 3) (see Vicino et al. 2007). Yet it was on the Western seaboard that the decanting of residential, leisure and workspace to the periphery became more evident, often accompanied by wholesale disinvestment in the central city. Soja (1989) gave a flavour of these centreless urban geographies in his book Postmodern Geographies, which presented Los Angeles as the quintessential postmodern city: There is a dazzling array of sites in this compartmentalised corona of the inner city: the Vietnamese shops and Hong Kong housing of a redeveloping Chinatown; the Big Tokyo financed modernisation; the induced pseudo-SoHo of artist’s lofts and galleries … the strangely anachronistic wholesale markets … the capital of urban homelessness in the Skid Row district; the enormous muralled barrio stretching eastwards toward East Los Angeles … the intentionally yuppifying South Park redevelopment zone hard by the slightly seedy Convention Center, the revenue-milked towers and fortresses of Bunker Hill. Soja 1989: 239–40.

What Soja described was a new type of city permeated by divisions and fractures which could not even have been guessed at by the members of the Chicago School, let alone in Marx and Engels’ day. Soja’s focus on LA is significant as it has become the ‘ur-city’ of postmodern urban theory, spoken of variously as ‘a prototype of our urban future’ (Dear 2002: 10), ‘a polyglot, polycentric, polycultural city’ (Dear and Flusty 1998: 52) and ‘one of the most dramatic and concentrated expressions of the perplexing theoretical and

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practical urban issues that have arisen at the end of the twentieth century’ (Scott and Soja 1998: viii). LA has thus served as the basis of a multitude of models of the postmodern city, with a putative LA School emerging among those urbanists and geographers who have been most influential in developing theories of postmodernity. What is particularly interesting about the LA School is their almost uniform pessimism and identification of LA as teetering on the verge of dystopian meltdown. In particular, Mike Davis (1991) emerged as a widely heralded spokesperson on the ecological disaster, terrorism, inequality and dysfunction that threatens to undermine the sustainability of the city. The attention devoted to Los Angeles gradually shifted geographers’ attention from Chicago as an exemplary city, with Conzen and Greene arguing: The classical Chicago model is best understood as an expression of late-19th and early-20th century industrial urbanism in the United States and as a codification of modernist principles of urbanization, most notably the logic that presupposes that a primary urban core will organize its surrounding hinterlands. But time and knowledge have moved on. In this country, classical industrial cities are no longer built, and core-hinterland relations are in flux. In this sense, the Chicago model is ‘dead’… Conzen and Greene 2008: 98.

The eclipse of Chicago as the archetypal urban laboratory and field site by Los Angeles has rested on two claims – firstly, that LA was a better illustration of contemporary ‘flexible’ capitalism; and secondly, that the epistemological basis on which the Chicago School constructed urban theory was outdated. As Gieryn (2006) argues, the writings of the Chicago School now seem ‘thoroughly “modern” … untroubled by relativism or ideological distortions of Truth’ – with questions of subjectivity, positionality and reflexivity largely effaced in account which sought to present the ‘world as exhibition’ (Gregory 1978). Yet controversies remained. For example, Dear (2000: 76), claimed that both Harvey and Soja established ‘profoundly modernist’

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accounts of LA, characterised by of a lack of attention to ‘the consequences of difference’. Amongst the neglected differences identified by Dear were those of ‘gender and feminism’; concurring, Massey (1991) suggested that when Harvey (1989) describes the experience of being in the postmodern city as having no stable bearings and being unable to impose order one’s surroundings, this is very much a white, male, middle-class academic view. This failure to account for and see the world through other eyes meant that Harvey’s Marxist version of postmodernity (and several other accounts besides) fell back into the language and logic of modernism, imposing an order on the postmodern city which simply did not exist (Watson 1999). Here, it is important to note that one of the key precepts of postmodernism is that being open to difference, and adapting different modes of representating the world, might instigate a politics of change through the cultivation of a new ‘ethics of being’.

REDISCOVERING THE CITY: MATERIALISM, NON-REPRESENTATION AND PATHS OF INHABITATION There has been much discussion in urban studies as to whether Chicago or Los Angeles serve as the ur-city of our times, with Conzen (2006: 35) retaining a belief that ‘Chicago remains the quintessential prototype of the American metropolis … It is older than L.A. so it reveals more’. Others dissent, and Dear et al. (2008) have pointed to the fact that Chicago is actually becoming more like LA as it is overlain by postmodern logics. Yet others have identified other paradigmatic cities, including the urban spectacle that is Las Vegas (Gottdiener et al. 1999), Hong Kong’s polyvalent cityscape (Abbas 2000) and Vancouver’s multicultural urbanism (Hutton 2004) all held up as capturing the essence of the contemporary city. There has, however, been considerable critique of work

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which focuses on such leading ‘world cities’, and which hence fails to consider ‘ordinary’ cities beyond the urban West (Robinson 2006), let alone those smaller provincial cities that are shaped by the same processes of globalisation that are articulated through global centres (McCann 2004). Beauregard (2003), for example, has argued that increased attention to ‘ordinary cities’ and cities in the developing world would help unsettle the ‘theoretical elitism’ of urban geography. Whilst there is merit in considering the value of case study research in geography (Brenner 2003; Castree 2005), much of the discussion about the sites from which the city can be best understood is deeply tedious. Moreover, it possibly distracts from a more deep-seated problem in urban geography: namely that the sub-discipline has become somewhat moribund (Jackson 2005). Commenting on a lack of progress in urban studies, Thrift (1993: 228) contended that urban studies had reached something of an impasse, being characterised by ‘recycled critiques, endlessly circulating the same messages about modernity and postmodernity’. In a review of theorisations of the city, Storper (1997) echoed this, arguing that while urban geography agrees on many of the central aspects of contemporary urbanisation (e.g. the importance of consumerism, the role of global flows of capital, knowledge and goods, and the flexibilisation of production), no theory seems able to put these phenomena together in any meaningful way. Lake (2005: 267) accordingly concludes that in the last quarter of the twentieth century urban geography reached a theoretical nadir, with the urban becoming little more than ‘an epiphenomenon, a barely significant byproduct of structural forces’. This latter quote alludes to a significant problem in urban geography: namely, that most studies take the city as context in which to explore processes relating to contemporary ‘neoliberal’ capitalism but say little of the city. They are accordingly located in the city, but rarely of the city (see Low 1996). Indeed, it is possible to argue the geographies

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so eloquently described and explained by members of the LA School were not urban geographies per se, but more broad brushed accounts of the way space was restructuring and unfolding in accordance with the dictates of postmodern times. Hence, in contrast to the many rural geographers and sociologists who stressed the continuing need for new theories of rurality in the face of rapidly changing socio-spatial relations (see Jackson 2005), urban geographers seemed more concerned with contributing to more general theories of spatiality. Noting these deficiencies, and inspired by non-representational theory (Thrift 2000) and poststructurally infused positions, such as actor network theory (ANT) and hybrid geographies (Whatmore 2006), there have recently been notable attempts to encourage geographers to re-engage with the materiality of the city (e.g. Amin and Thrift 2002; Latham and McCormack 2004; Hubbard 2006; Kraftl and Adey 2008). As distinct from the historical materialism of Marx et al., such approaches consider the capacity of the city’s built and natural forms to produce affect. Adey and Kraftl (2009: 215) argue that such affect is expressed socially as something that pushes, pulls, or is lifting us to fell, think, or act; for Latham and McCormack (2004) such affects are the ‘expressive liveliness’ which results from the entwining of those things traditionally considered immaterial (representations, thoughts, ambiences) with those palpably material things: building, infrastructures, technologies and so on. Opposing the ‘emaciated’ perspective of ‘traditional’ urban geography, Latham and McCormack (2004) propose that there is a need to attend to the remarkable plurality of the city: to ask exactly what the city consists of? This focus on questions of materiality stems not just from a dissatisfaction with urban theory, but also a deep frustration with the basic foundations, assumptions and aspirations of much human geography, related social sciences, and other (overlapping) realms of thought and knowledge, notably

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politics and ethics (Jones 2008). This dissatisfaction is related to the tendency of much work to ‘deaden’ the liveliness of the world, and ignore the ways in which practices and mobilities produce space. As Ingold (2008) insists, we are never in place, as those places are occurrences along our path of life. The city, therefore, is not an object, or setting, but a gathering of lives. More than that, perhaps, it is a gathering of human and non-human lives, an ecology co-fabricated between more-than-human bodies and a ‘lively earth’ (Whatmore 2006). Making a space for ‘nature’ is thus part of a rematerialised urban geography; conversely, this manoeuvre suggests ‘the human’ is no less a subject of ongoing co-fabrication than any other sociomaterial assemblage. For some, a rematerialised urban geography maps out a revised ontology of the urban where species and spaces mingle and where considerable ‘regulation’ is required to construct the ‘systematic network’ that is the city (Amin and Thrift 2004). It is also a notion of the city that recognises its indeterminate and relational spatiality, being both local and global, and more or less stretchedout in space and time (see also Massey 2007). Far from doing away with the concept of the city, however, a materialist ontology seeks to identify the city as the outcome of the relations between different materials, be they ‘urban anglers, foxes, streetlights, airports, computer software, networks of enthusiasm and friendship, computer screens and keyboards, hands and fingers, roller coasters, bacteria and viruses … lawns, automobiles, databases and accounting systems, films and novels and guidebooks, regulations of all kinds, telephone networks’ and so on (Latham 2008: 221). This focus on the ‘stuff’ of cities is to insist on the city as immanent, but never unknowable, the outcome of a profligate coming-together of things that reproduces a certain materiality of space and particular acts of sociality. As Low (1996) puts it, it is to recognise the city as a process, not a ‘type’, ‘thing’ or category of ‘place’.

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Inspired by the poststructuralism of Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi and Haraway – as well as Spinoza, Bergson and Badiou’s reflections on questions of being – how this non-representational or materialist concept of the city will ultimately inform urban geography remains to be seen. There is of course existing work in urban studies that might inform this project; for example, Auge’s urban anthropologies, Latour and Hermant’s photoessays, Benjamin’s arcades project, Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis and even Debord’s situationist peregrinations (notably all on Paris). Yet there remain few urban geographies that offer a sustained analysis of the materiality of the city, and it needs to be stressed that the principal advocates of a nonrepresentational geography are all based in UK geography departments. Beyond the UK, urban geographers continue to work productively within their own fields of enquiry, studying important questions about what is going on in cities – be it gentrification, the revanchism of the central city, racial segregation, the sustainability of urban transport, the forging of new sexual cultures, economic creativity, parenting, consumption practices, and so on. All of this work, no doubt, is important and says something of the geographies unfolding within our cities. But whether it helps further our understanding of what the city is remains a moot point. It is here that a materialist agenda holds out hope for a renewed urban geography in which the discipline revisits one of the questions that animated the earliest urban sociologists: namely, how does the city work as a co-existence of seeming incompatible things?

CONCLUSION In this chapter I have offered a brief synopsis of the concept of the city, noting how it has been differently invoked by practitioners in geography and cognate disciplines. My key argument has been that while the putative ‘discovery’ of the city as a distinctive type or

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species of space provided the springboard for a rich vein of writing in urban sociology, planning, and subsequently urban geography, on the characteristics of the city, this work has ultimately been eclipsed by a morass of work in which the city appears solely as a site of enquiry or as a mere scale to be inserted in pre-formed hierarchies of space. Suggesting this emaciation of the city, and failure to consider its dynamic constitution, has ultimately led urban geography into a theoretical cul-de-sac, I have thus alighted on the emerging body of work that foregrounds the ‘stuff’ of cities. Bringing the city itself into sharper focus, such materialist approaches do not offer easy answers to the question of what the city is. Indeed, there will never been one answer (and never one city that can speak for all). Yet without acknowledging the complex and relational geographies of cities, we will never be in a position to consider how we can best intervene in its heterogeneous materialities.

REFERENCES Abbas, A. (2000) ‘Cosmopolitan descriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong’, Public Culture 12: 769–786. Alonso, W. (1964) Location and Land Use. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002) The City: Reimaging the Urban. Bristol: Policy Press. Beauregard, R. (2003) ‘City of superlatives’, City and Community, 2: 183–199. Berry, B.J.L. (1964) ‘Cities as systems of cities within systems of cities’, Papers of the Regional Science Association, 13: 147–163. Berry, B.J.L. and Rees, P.H. (1969) ‘Factorial ecology of Calcutta’, American Journal of Sociology, 74: 445–491. Brenner, N. (2003) ‘Stereotypes, archetypes, and prototypes: three uses of superlatives in contemporary urban studies’, City & Community, 2: 205–216. Castree, N. (2005) ‘The epistemology of particulars: human geography, case studies and “context”’, Geoforum, 36: 541–544. Cloverly, M. (2006) Psychogeography. London: Pocket Essentials.

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Conzen, M.P. (2006) ‘The historicity of Chicago’s contemporary metropolitan landscapes at three geographical scales’ in R.P. Greene, M.J. Bouman, and D. Grammenos (eds), Chicago’s Geographies: Metropolis for the 21st Century Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers, pp. 35–49. Conzen, M. and Greene, M. (2008) ‘Introduction–all the world is not Los Angeles or Chicago: paradigms, schools, archetypes and the urban process’, Urban Geography, 29: 97–100. Curry, J. and Kenney, M. (1999) ‘The paradigmatic city: Postindustrial illusion and the Los Angeles School’, Antipode, 31: 1–28. Davis, M. (1991) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso. Dear, M. (2000) The Postmodern Urban Condition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Dear, M.J. (2002) ‘Los Angeles and the Chicago School: Invitation to a debate’, City and Community 1: 5–32. Dear, M.J. and Flusty, S. (1998) ‘Postmodern urbanism’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88: 50–72. Dear, M.J., Burridge, A.D., Marlot, P., Peters, J., Seymour, M. (2008) ‘Critical responses to the Los Angeles School of Urbanism’, Urban Geography 29: 101–112. Engels, F. (1845) [1887] The Condition of the WorkingClass in England in 1844. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Friedmann, J. (1986) ‘The world city hypothesis’, Development and Change 17: 69–83. Gieryn, T. (2006) ‘City as truth spot: laboratories and field-sites in urban studies’, Social Studies of Science, 36: 5–38. Gottdiener, M., Collins, C. and Dickens, D.R. (1999) Las Vegas: The Social Production of an All-American City. Berkeley: Westview Press. Gottmann, J. (1961) Megalopolis: the Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. Twentieth Century Fund: New York. Gregory, D. (1978) Ideology, Science and Human Geography. London: Hutchinson. Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the City. London: Arnold. Harvey, D. (1989) The Postmodern Condition: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwells. Harvey, D. (2003) Paris – Capital of Modernity. London: Routledge. Holloway, L. and Hubbard, P. (2001) People and Place: the Extraordinary Geographies of Everyday Life. London: Prentice Hall.

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Hubbard, P., Kitchin, R., Barley, B. and Fuller, D. (2002) Thinking Geographically. London: Continuum. Hubbard, P. (2006) Key Concepts in Geography: the City. London: Routledge. Hutton, R. (2004) ‘Post-industrialism, post-modernism and the reproduction of Vancouver’s central area’, Urban Studies, 41: 1953–1982. Ingold, T. (2008) ‘Bindings against boundaries: entanglements of life in an open world’, Environment and Planning A, 40: 1796–1810. Jackson, P. (2005) ‘The eclipse of urban geography’, Urban Geography, 26: 1–3. Jones, O. (2008) ‘Stepping from the wreckage: geography, pragmatism and anti-representational theory’, Geoforum 39: 1600–1612. Kraftl, P. and Adey, P. (2008) ‘Architecture/affect/ inhabitation) geographies of being-in buildings’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 98: 213–231. Lake, R.W. (2005) ‘Urban crisis redux’, Urban Geography, 26: 266–270. Latham, A. (2008) ‘Amin and Thrift’s City’ in P. Hubbard, R. Kitchin and G. Valentine (eds), Key Texts in Human Geography. London: Sage. Latham, A. and McCormack, D. (2004) ‘Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of human geographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 28: 701–724. Low, S.M. (1996) ‘The anthropology of cities: imagining and theorising the city’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 25: 383–409. McCann, E. (2004) ‘Urban political economy beyond the global city’, Urban Studies, 41: 2315–2333. Massey, D. (1991) ‘Flexible sexism’, Society and Space, 9: 31–57. Massey, D. (2007) World City. Cambridge: Polity. Milicevic, A.S. (2001) ‘Radical intellectuals: whatever happened to the new urban sociology’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25: 769–785. Pinder, D. (2005) ‘The arts of urban exploration’, Cultural Geographies 12: 383–411. Platt, H.L. (2006) Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robinson, J. (2006) Ordinary Cities London: Routledge. Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City: New York. London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Savage, M., Warde, A. and Ward, K. (2002) Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity. London: Palgrave. Scott, A. (1980) The Urban Land Nexus and the State. London: Pion.

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Scott, A. (1988) New Industrial Spaces: Flexible Production, Organization and Regional Development in North America and Western Europe. London: Pion. Scott, A. and Storper, M. (1992) Pathways to Industrialisation. London: Routledge. Scott, A. and Storper, M. (1998) Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shevky, E. and Bell, W. (1955) Social Area Analysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Simmel, G. (1950) ‘The metropolis and mental life’, in K. Wollf (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press. Smith, N. (1979) ‘Towards a theory of gentrification: A back to the city movement of capital not people’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 45: 538–548. Smith, M. and Davidson, J. (2008) ‘Civility and etiquette’ in T. Hall, P. Hubbard and J.R. Short (eds), The Sage Companion to the City. London: Sage. Soja, E. (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. Storper, M. (1997) ‘Territories, flows and hierarchies in the global economy’ in K.R. Cox (ed.), Spaces of Globalization. New York: Guilford. Thrift, N.J. (1980) ‘Behavioural geography’ in N. Wrigley and R.J. Bennett (eds), Quantitative

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Geography – a British View. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Thrift, N. (1993) ‘An urban impasse?’, Theory, Culture, Society 10: 229–238. Thrift, N. (2000) ‘Non-representational theory’ in R.J. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt and M. Watts (eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. Tonkiss, F. (2005) Space, the City and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tonnies, F. (1887) Community and Society. New York: Harper and Row. Vicino, T.J., Hanlon, B.F. and Short, J.R. (2007) ‘Megalopolis 50 years on the transformation of a city region’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 31: 344–367. Watson, S. (1999) ‘Cities of difference’ in J. Allen, D. Massey and M. Pryke (eds), Unruly Cities? London: Routledge/Open University. Weber, M. (1904) [1992] The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (trans. T. Parsons/intro. A. Giddens). London: Routledge. Weber, M. (1923) Economy and Society. Berlin: Gunter Roth. Whatmore, S. (2006) ‘Materialist returns: practising cultural geographies in and for a more-than-human world’, Cultural Geographies, 13: 600–661. Wirth, L. (1938) ‘Urbanism as a way of life’, American Journal of Sociology, 44: 1–24.

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42 Urban–Rural Paul Cloke

THE RISE AND FALL OF URBAN GEOGRAPHY … The distinction between urban and rural has been implicit in the recording and understanding of what might be thought of as geographical phenomena since premodern times, yet over a relatively brief 50-year period of professional geographic endeavour, the city and the country have first peaked, and then dramatically receded as explicit venues from which geographical knowledge has spawned. Their value in contemporary geographical analysis may now be more pronounced as locations for specific ideas about and articulations of society and space rather than as distinctive and discrete material components of that society and space. Although specifically labelled urban and rural geographies only appeared in the twentieth century, we can assume that the significance of urban and rural places and landscapes has been appreciated and understood throughout the history of geography. From the mapping of the universals and the localities of the known world by Eratosthenes, Strabo and Ptolemy, to the exploratory regional geographies of Von Humbolt and Ritter, and the geopolitical treatises on centrality and

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periphery by Ratzel and Mackinder, geography has inhabited a known world of recognisable towns and cities and agricultural or botanical landscapes; of strategic centres, sea ports and centres of political power and of far-flung interiors and various forms of life on the land. Urban–rural distinctions were prominent in historical and literary accounts, but were subsumed in the geographical canon into alternatively fashioned writings of the earth – into regions and empires, industrial revolutions and enlightenment, sensed impressions of things rather than things in their own right. It is often suggested that contemporary urban geography has its roots in the rings and sectors of Chicago, which between the first and second world wars became recognised both as a kind of prototype of rapidly expanding urbanisation and industrialisation, and, in related fashion, as the location for a research school of urban studies which had a very significant influence on both geography and sociology over subsequent years. Here began a prolonged process in which geographers began to translate into spatial terms the insights of urban sociology, and thereby started to develop specifically urban geographies. The Chicago School drew on and

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inspired a range of different approaches. Detailed urban ethnographies provided a detailed account of the changing city in which society and space were integrally linked in contrast to the previous tendency of separating out the sociology and geography of things. Models of urban structure emerged, notably Burgess’ geometrical construction of a series of concentric rings out from the central business district, Hoyt’s recognition of radial sectors of the city, each following transportation corridors out from the centre, and Harris and Ullman’s less abstract picture of multiple urban nuclei. Interestingly, both ethnography and spatial modelling were fed by an acceptance of Tonnies’ ideas about gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, denoting how life in what were perceived as close-knit rural communities, where work and dwelling coexisted and everyone ‘belonged’, was transformed by migration to urban centres where scale led to alienation and an erosion of community amongst social and cultural heterogeneity. Such ideas, although partly fed by both urban and rural myths, helped to open out and sustain a significant intellectual distinction between the urban and the rural. Until the 1940s, literatures on urban geography were sparse, with the first major textbook appearing only in 1949. However, the burgeoning professional presence of geography in postwar academic life led to the fairly rapid establishment of an urban subdiscipline during the second half of the twentieth century, aided and abetted by the suitability of cities as a laboratory for the exploration of successive ‘new’ geographies underpinned by emergent philosophical and methodological approaches. Initially, it was the preoccupation with locational analysis and quantitative methods that sustained the impetus of urban geographies. Studies of urban systems tested out Christaller’s central place theory, and focused on commercial spaces of the city. Models of urban ecology formed the hypotheses for studies of residential areas, using social area analysis to map out the relationships between certain kinds of social groupings and certain areas of living space.

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As these studies often resulted in disparities between theorised and measured geographies of the city, urban geographers also began to turn to more behavioural quantitative approaches, so as to investigate further the time–space routines of different people in different urban environments. By this time, urban geography had become established as a leading specialism within human geography, with its own experts, running their own courses, using their own textbooks and journals. After what Peach (2003: 570) has called ‘the passionate exuberance of the quantitative revolution’, urban geography took on a whole new lease of life during the 1970s based on emergent critiques of the focus and orthodoxy of urban knowledge. Part of this impetus came from humanistic critiques of urban geography which questioned the rigidity of the seemingly essentialised patterns and processes determined by locational analysts and behaviouralists. Here scholars such as Ley (1974) began to question the conventional representations of problematic social spaces such as the ghetto, eschewing ideas which tended (rightly or wrongly) to be seen as blaming the victims, and presenting alternative understandings to processes of identity, segregation and discrimination. At around the same time Marxist-inspired approaches to urban political economy made a significant impact, especially through the work of Harvey (1973) and Castells (1977). Here, previous knowledges of the socio-spatial structures of cities were provided with radical new interpretations. Social segregation was rewritten in terms of class warfare, with the phenomenon of the urban ghetto, for example, being presented as a capitalist solution rather than as a freestanding problem. The focus here, then, was on the role of the urban system to produce profits and to reproduce labour power, especially with the advent of new globalised forms of capitalist enterprise, and new international divisions of labour. Following Castells, Saunders (1981) took these analyses to a logical conclusion by questioning whether there is now anything

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about the prevailing political–economic or socio-spatial order that is specifically ‘urban’. Given the academic infrastructure and career profile invested in a specifically ‘urban’ geography, it is unsurprising that many have defended the focus on the ‘urban’, arguing that cities have distinct roles in changing processes of capital accumulation, and that cities are usually governed and regulated at least to some extent as discrete spaces, and so they function as critically ‘real’ places with their own political characteristics. Despite this spirited defence of the significance of the ‘urban’, it can be argued that urban geography has declined over the last two decades. The textbooks, journals and specialist university courses remain, but the idea of a discrete ‘urban’ category has waned. Much of the research conducted in cities is now covered by other headings, both political and economic, as the urban acts as a laboratory for how capitalism articulates itself, and social and cultural, as postmodern and poststructural influences deconstruct the unifying texts, representations and discourses of the city, and seek out fragmented identities, positionalities and hybridities with which to recognise alternative cartographies of society, nature and space. The search for simplified generalisations of the urban has changed into a recognition of its fragmented fluidity.

… AND RURAL GEOGRAPHY In similar fashion, it can be argued that rural areas have been of implicit interest to geographers throughout the history of geographical inquiry. Rurality was an essential ingredient of the regional paradigm in geography, and rural space came to particular prominence in the studies of rural settlement patterns by Vidal de la Blache and Demangeon, and in the concern for patterns of agricultural land use and settlement systems in the classical models of Von Thunen and Christaller. However, after the slow demise of the old regional geographies, rurality per se was

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relatively neglected. Much of the quantitative revolution was focused on the urban, although an empirical tradition emerged in the study of some of the constituent processes in the countryside, notably in the context of land use and agricultural change. It was not until the 1970s that the specific formation of a ‘rural’ subdiscipline in geography was prompted by the publication of the first rural geography textbook in the UK. Once again, it can be suggested that geographical interest in rurality was fuelled by a translation into spatial terms of previous sociological interest in the countryside. From the 1930s the concept of rurality began to gain academic usage as part of attempts to define the core characteristics of a rural life which was under threat from rapid economic and social transformation. Context played an important role here. In the United States, the preoccupation was with agricultural society and the changing relationship between agricultural production and local community. Rural sociology remained the prominent academic presence here, although geographers such as John Fraser Hart built up significant empirical pictures of landscape and community change. It was not until 2002 that a ‘rural geography’ study group emerged in the Association of American Geographers by merging previous groups with interests in agriculture, rural land use and development. In the UK, concern with agricultural change did not eclipse other interests such as the importance of village life, and as a consequence a grasp of rurality emerged that was not confined to the idea that rural equals agricultural. From the 1970s on, rural geography in the UK, Australasia and parts of mainland Europe quickly blossomed into an energetic subdiscipline, with its own academic paraphernalia of experts, courses and publications. Initially there was a motivation to deal with the perceived ‘Cinderella’ status of rural studies – to make up the ground already lost to the nowmaturing practice of urban geography, and to prove that rurality did not deserve its reputation as an academic backwater. This involved not only the establishment of an integrated

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focus on rural economy, society, politics and land use, but also the development of a closeknit interdisciplinary approach to rural studies, involving sociologists, agricultural economists and planners alongside geographers. The task of highlighting significant changes in rural areas was partly geared to demonstrating that rural areas were experiencing distinctive problems, and partly to insist that generic social issues – for example, poverty and homelessness – were just as important in rural settings as in urban. During the 1980s and 1990s rapid progress was made both in developing the academic niche for rural studies, and in bringing current theoretical perspectives to bear on rural space. Inspired by sociologists such as Buttel and Newby (1980), rural geography embraced ideas from neo-Marxist political economy, and developed understandings of how rural space is implicated in processes of capital accumulation, economic restructuring and political regulation. Previous assumptions about the threat to rural life of economic decline and out-migration were eclipsed by the effects on rural areas first of extended suburbanisation and then full-blown counterurbanisation. Class-based notions of social recomposition were used to help explain how some rural settings were becoming gentrified by key workers from new service economies, and manifestations of social exclusion in rural settings became an important focus. Some 10 years later than in the urban context, these increasingly sophisticated ideas about how rurality fitted into wider processes of restructuring led to a questioning of ‘rural’ as an appropriate category of enquiry (Hoggart 1990). Just as was the case with the city, scholars questioned whether the processes of change should be given more significance than the rural space in which they were articulated. For both institutional and intellectual reasons, a strong defence of rurality as a category of knowledge has ensured the continuation of rural geography. In particular, the question of how and why rurality acts as an object of desire – often regarded as an idyll – continues

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to provide a pivotal focus, such that the cultural turn with its associated genuflexion to postmodern and poststructural ways of thinking has never entirely succeeded in deconstructing the rural metanarrative, although it has certainly led to an emphasis on tropes of difference, otherness and embodied performance in these rural settings. So while rural geography continues, there has been a creeping tendency for its rural focus to be bound up in other, wider foci, specifically different relational forms of nature–society relations, the ethics and aesthetics of food, and the phenomenological performance of landscape. Thus some of the most currently innovative geographies of rural areas are being conducted by geographers who bear little or no allegiance to rural geography, or to the idea that rural space plays a formative role in the creation of knowledge.

SPATIAL HYBRIDITIES? Geographies seemingly based on the intrinsically ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ nature of society and space have therefore become increasingly contested. The use of apparently dichotomous ideas such as gemeinschaft and gesellschaft to denote core differences between the intimate relationships and clear social roles of rural life and the large-scale, impersonal and contractual ties of metropolitan living has been overtaken by events. What started out as a relatively simple rural– urban distinction formed out of the Neolithic revolution in which the development of agriculture made possible a denser form of human population, has become an ever more complex hybridity of relationships between the urban and the rural. Such relations cannot ever simply be about the complexity of different geographical spaces, for as Williams (1973) reminds us in his seminal work The Country and the City, to detect when the purity of the urban–rural difference actually disappeared is to mount an escalator that takes us further and further

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back in time in a nostalgic search for the real rurality of ‘Olde England’. Many authors in the British context point to the First World War as a significant historic moment when the rhythms and relationships of a localised rural life were broken forever by new mobilities and political economic circumstances, and the possibilities for gemeinschaft in rural space receded forever. However, as Williams insists, any such delimitation of the beginnings of universal gessellschaft belies a more processual and nostalgic belief that it is the era just past that best reflects the moralities of the urban–rural dichotomy. So, why not point to the enclosure period after 1861, or the years of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides boyhood in the 1770s, or Thomas More’s Utopia of the early 1500s, or indeed the biblical account of the Garden of Eden, as the key waymarkers of urban–rural distinction? What is clear is that twentieth and twentyfirst-century geographies have quickly recognised the non-dichotomous relationship between urban and rural, first in the idea of an urban–rural continuum – a sliding scale between extremes of city and country – and then in a rather more complex series of intermeshed continua, reflecting social, cultural, political and economic circumstances that crop up unevenly between these extremes. More radically, the existence of a rural ‘extreme’ has been subjected to critical scrutiny, on the grounds that the reach of globalised information and communications technology and media, along with increased rates of mobility and socio-economic fluidity, have culturally urbanised the entire developed world. Residents of the remotest village will thus be subjected to information, entertainment and cultural fashion of city-based processes of globalisation, and only those deliberately choosing to live alternative lifestyles that eschew these technologies and mobilities are able pursue the dream of localised gemeinschaft. These arguments suggest that the explanatory power of particular urban and rural settings has been overtaken by that of other relational vectors – global–local,

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political–economic, social–cultural and nature–society. Within the context of hegemonic cultural urbanisation, there have been important trends which have blurred more specifically the boundaries between urban and rural spaces, and generated new hybrids of urban– rural living and being. Some of these processes are migratory, with the previous assumptions that rural people will forsake the drudgery and low-level opportunity base of the rural and migrate to the bright lights and economic advantages of the city being overturned during the twentieth century. Initially, the growth of suburbanisation meant that suburban dormitories grew up along principal transport routes, but over time this process extended well out into what were previously considered to be rural areas well beyond the edges of cities. These patterns of long-distance commuting brought new complexities to the villages and small towns concerned as the social relations and cultural competencies of urbs in rure (Pahl 1965) spread out from recognised urban centres. In time, more remote rural areas came under the direct influence of new urbanisation, as widespread counter-urbanisation decentralised not only new people and jobs but also new urban norms into the periphery. In light of these trends, the hybridisation of urban and rural space is usually conceptualised as an urbanisation of the rural. The spillover of commercial and industrial land uses into an expanded and fluid city edge has not been prevented by green belt policies, which in many cases have merely caused the city edge to leapfrog further out into the surrounding rural areas. The development of new housing, first in new and expanded towns and then more generally into market towns and key settlements, extended the suburban form and vernacular well beyond the city, and even when attempts were made to ruralise the design of these developments, the resulting style guides often resembled a strange pastiche of architectural hybridity. Even in areas where new residential development was restricted, waves of coastal and

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rural tourism ensured that second-home buyers and more casual visitors turned many places into temporary touristic suburbs, such that in the UK, for example, particular places in Devon and Cornwall became known locally as ‘London-on Sea’ or even ‘Londonon-the-Moor’. In these kinds of ways, the urban invasion of the rural can be seen to have been in full swing for decades. Rural areas are funded and subsidised by the urban, and many urban-based political desires (e.g. the construction of windfarms for the generation of sustainable energy) are played out in rural domains. Spatial hybridity can also, however, be characterised in terms of a ruralisation of the urban. In a general sense, the spread of the city out into the countryside described above constitutes a process by which large tracts of what is now urbanised space has in fact been ruralised. More specifically, Wilson (1992) has provided a graphic account of how recent land development in North America has resulted in suburbs, shopping malls, theme parks and tourist developments that destabilise ideas about urban and rural by bringing nature-into-the-city as much as spreading the city-into-the-country. Spaces such as the West Edmonton Mall in Canada have tended to commodify rural nature into urban forms. This 45-hectare suburban indoor shopping mall includes a one-hectare lake which is home to dolphins and sharks, an 18-hole golf course, a water park with six-foot surfing waves and a zoological collection of animals in cafes and aquariums. The very presence of these pseudo-rural landscapes, creatures and practices opens out imaginations of the rural in these hybrid settings. Equally, there is strong evidence that urban managers are deliberately striving to bring a set of virtues to their cities that are more commonly associated with the rural. Thus urban ‘villages’ are established to mimic rural community characteristics within the city, and more generally target cultures involving solidarity, protection, community spirit and local identity suggest the seeking after rural values in urban contexts.

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IDEAS OF SPACE AND SUBJECTIVITY Many urban and rural geographers resolutely cling on to the idea that urban space is different to rural space, and that these spaces should continue as venues of knowledge in their own right. What is clear to most, however, is that the geographical spaces of urban and rural have become misaligned with the social and cultural spaces that provide their meaning. Geographical spaces are now overlapped by many and varied social and cultural ideas, requiring a reconceptualisation of space as a socially produced set of manifolds (Murdoch 2006), better recognised as territories of becoming able to produce new potentials rather than as fixed territories of identity. As a result, geographers have become interested in the urban and the rural as topological spaces that are performed by particular networks and flows, and that attract characteristic systems of practice and performative events. Ideas of the rural and the urban can therefore retain value per se as spaces of subjectivity from which particular transformative or nostalgic rationalities emerge. As an illustration of the power of these ideas, affordances and articulations, three dimensions of continuing urban–rural purchase can be mentioned briefly. First, there is a continuing moral dimension to the urban and the rural. Ideas of rurality are often associated with some kind of idyll-ised lifestyle characterised by happy, healthy, close-knit communities in close proximity to the landscapes and animalities of nature. Rural life can thus be presented as some kind of organic whole, sanctioned by nostalgic tradition and grounded in the hybridities of nature. What is more, this organic subjectivity space can act as a repository of changeless values, despite the impacts of globalisation and urbanisation. Although a National Trust shop is no more locally unique than a McDonalds outlet, the moral values expressed therein are designed to be a million miles away from the rampant globalisations of the urban. In these kinds of ways,

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rural spaces can be presented as antithetical to the urban, both threatened by urban values, and offering an antidote to them. There is an obvious danger here that socio-economic and political problems in these rural spaces will be cloaked by overarching moral assumptions about goodness and freedom from exclusion or deprivation, but it is still the present idea of idyll that helps to characterise the problematic nature of, say, poverty and homelessness in rural areas. Second, there may also be a series of affective dimensions that attach themselves to the urban and the rural. Amin and Thrift (2002) have argued for new cartographies of cities that map the intermesh between flesh and stone, humans and non-humans, fixtures and flows and emotions and practices. While there is no intrinsic division between the nature of such cartographies in the city and the non-city – non-human nature is a significant presence in cities as well as countrysides – there may be scope for imagining that particular affective landscapes, or psychogeographies, will emerge amongst different place-hybridities. Emotional and affective responses involving, for example, fear, peacefulness, excitement, loathing, enchantment, ghostliness and so on cannot be characterised in terms of urban and rural, but they may emerge from different combinations of human/non-human hybridity, and the performative practices to be found therein. Moreover, scale may be an important factor here. Lines of flight involving, for example, slow food, or community-oriented sustainable lifestyles, may emerge more easily in smaller places, whereas performances of public protest, or the innovative cultural ethics of what Thrift (2004: 92) has called the ‘politics of the creation of the open dimension of being’ may flourish in largerscale environments. Third, there are continuing intellectual dimensions that continue to be shaped by the urban and the rural. In one sense this reflects a continuing conservatism of approach, as urban and rural geographers stake claims to

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expertise based upon what they need to represent as distinctive territories of knowledge. For example, key members of the rural studies academic community have been drafted into the processes of rural policymaking in the UK because of their expertise on rural issues. As a result, not only is the idea of rurality reinforced by such policy categorisations, but expertise in rurality also becomes fashioned by key policy issues – for example, the crises posed by foot and mouth disease and by the broader post-productivisms of agriculture. In this way, the idea that ‘rural [or urban] is what rural [or urban] experts do’ is sustained and the intellectual credence of urban–rural differentiation is ossified. In another sense, however, there is a strand of intellectual effort that opens up new possibilities for recognising interesting lines of flight in particular spaces of subjectivity. While totalising confirmations and deconstructions of urban and rural as significant territories of knowledge have been the principal vectors of contestation, the growing tendency to develop what Deleuze terms ‘minor theory’ may contribute forms of conceptualisation that are more sympathetic to local circumstances. An ability to recognise theory when it arises in unexpected forms and in unanticipated locations may lead to more effective intellectual hybridisation in which knowledge can emerge in as well as across the urban and the rural. In this way, the potency of ideas, affordances and articulations may once more breathe life into spaces of subjectivity perceived as urban and rural in character.

REFERENCES Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002) Cities: Re-imagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buttel, F. and Newby, H. (eds) (1980) The Rural Sociology of Advanced Societies: Critical Perspectives. Montclair, NJ: Allanheld Osmun. Castells, M. (1977) The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. London: Arnold.

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Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice in the City. London: Arnold. Hoggart, K. (1990) ‘Let’s do away with rural’, Journal of Rural Studies, 6: 245–257. Ley, D. (1974) The Black Inner City as Frontier Outpost: Images and Behaviour of a Philadelphia Neighborhood. Washington DC: Association of American Geographers, Monograph Series No. 7. Murdoch, J. (2006) Post-structuralist Geography. London: Sage. Pahl, R. (1965) Urbs in Rure. London School of Economics: Geographical Papers No. 2. Peach, C. (2003) ‘Geographers and the fragmented city’ in R. Johnston and M. Williams M (eds),

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A Century of British Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, pp. 563–582. Saunders, P. (1981) Social Theory and the Urban Question. London: Hutchinson. Thrift, N. (2004) ‘Summoning life’ in P. Cloke, P. Crang and M. Goodwin (eds), Envisioning Human Geographies. London: Arnold, pp. 81–103. Williams, R. (1973) The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus. Wilson, A. (1992) The Culture of Nature. London: Routledge.

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43 Mobility Tim Cresswell

INTRODUCTION In his 1938 paper, ‘On progress in geography’ published in the Scottish Geographical Magazine, P.R. Crowe took geographers to task for their ‘overweening concern with the static elements of the Earth’s surface. Is progressive geography’, he asked, ‘to be solely concerned with the distribution of Homo dormiens?’ (Crowe 1938: 12). Crowe’s plea for a more mobile geography was repeated 27 years later by Peter Haggett in Locational Analysis in Human Geography. Haggett noted that the intervening period had seen ‘a growing recognition of momentum and circulation patterns in geographical research’ such that ‘human population is regarded not as a static feature but as a complex of overlapping particles, with short loops connecting places of sleep, work and recreation, and longer loops connecting old hearths and new areas of migration’ (Haggett 1965: 32). Since then mobility has moved in and out of the orbit of geographical enquiry. In many ways the study of human mobility in geography has a history as long as the discipline itself. The migrations of humanity have always been a central concern from the ideas of origins and dispersals in Sauerian cultural

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geography to the contemporary concerns with hybridity and globalisation (Sauer 1952; Massey and Jess 1995). Crowe’s paper was, in fact an early critique of traditional regional geography with its concern for uniqueness and specificity. In contrast to this, fixed, approach to regions Crowe suggested that ‘Regions are not fossilised, they are active and growing entities, since the men who organise them are moving, working and thinking beings’ (Crowe 1938: 11). Crowe invokes the orbital, mobile worlds of nomadic people to make his point: ‘[W]e have long been aware that in the case of nomadic peoples we have to speak, not of settlement, but of orbit of migration. Are we really on safer ground when discussing “settled” populations?’ (Crowe 1938: 11–12). To Crowe, it was the mobility of transport systems that provided the effective regionalising principle. Aware that a focus on transport might lead to a stress on ‘terminal facilities’ or the ‘pattern of the system’ he urged, instead, a stress ‘upon men and things moving’ (Crowe 1938: 14). The study of things moving will at least take us a step along the right road, for, as compared with static distribution, movement implies three essentials: origin, destination, and an effective will to

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move, Movement does not take place in a vacuum, it is effected upon the surface of the earth and it is very largely through movement that Mankind becomes conscious of its geography. Crowe 1938: 14.

Crowe’s paper was one of the early shots over the bows of regional geography and it foreshadowed the turn to spatial science several decades later. The idea that Man’s social reactions are measurable finds every inch of the way contested. This is perhaps the reason why modern geography shows a tendency to retreat upon things, to become a morphological analysis of all sorts of objects that nobody had previously thought worthy of study. Crowe 1938: 2.

Crowe would undoubtedly have been happy with the plethora of entries on all things mobile in the Dictionary of Human Geography published over 60 years later. There does not, however, seem to have been much progress on the notion of mobility itself. The entry for mobility in the fourth edition of the Dictionary of Human Geography (2000) is written by Philip Ogden. It is very short and states simply that mobility includes ‘all forms of terrestrial movement including migration’ and that migration is not the only form of mobility as there is also ‘circulation’ – a word used to describe the movements back and forth of students, commuters and tourists (Johnston et al. 2000: 507). This division of mobility into migration and circulation reflects a broader distinction in human geography between migration studies (as part of population geography) and transport geography (dedicated to circulation). Compared to entries on key geographical terms such as place, landscape and region the entry on mobility is little more than a footnote. This chapter is based on this curious paradox. While geography has consistently concerned itself with versions of mobility (dispersals, journey to work, exploration, migration, etc.) it has failed to adequately explore and theorise mobility itself. So while an enormous amount of work has been done

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on mobility between Crowe’s paper and the present day, it remains under-theorised. The first half of the chapter considers some of the ways in which mobility has been considered in the last 70 years while the second half asks what the advent of the widely advertised ‘mobility turn’ or, more extravagantly, ‘new mobilities paradigm’ brings to a discipline that has already been focused on issues of mobility for many decades.

MOBILITY AS EMPTY Mobility was never more central to geography’s concerns than during the heyday of spatial science in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Crowe’s concern that the measurability of ‘man’s social reactions’ would always be contested would have been eased. Central to the concerns of spatial science were not ‘things’, as Crowe might put it, but processes and movements. At the heart of these approaches was transport geography. It any subdisciplinary endeavour could be said to be focused on mobility it must be transport geography. And yet, if we look at some of the classic texts of the time mobility remains strangely elusive. Right at the outset of one text we read the following: For the most part the demand for transport is derived. With exceptions such as motorists who simply drive into the country, passengers on cruise liners and ‘railfans’, transport is used as a means to an end: the movement of people and goods from where they are to another place where, for the time being at any rate, their satisfaction of value will be enhanced. Transport creates utilities of place. White and Senior 1983: 1, emphasis in original.

The same logic is repeated at the end of the book: Transport exists for the purpose of bridging spatial gaps, though these gaps can be expressed not only in terms of distance but also of time and cost. It is the means by which people and goods can be moved from the place where they are at the moment to another place where they will be at a

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greater advantage; goods can be sold at a higher price, people can get a better job, or live in the sort of house they prefer, or go for a holiday at the seaside. In short, people and goods are transported from one place where their utility is lower to another where it is higher. Transport as a fundamental human activity may thus be effectively studied in spatial terms: geographical methods are basic to such study and are of practical relevance to the solution of many of the problems associated with the transport industry and with its activities. White and Senior 1983: 207.

Here and elsewhere, transport geographers explain both transport systems (roads, rails, terminals, etc.) and the actual act of moving with reference to the difference between places (expressed as ‘place utility’) and to more general spatial patterns. The actual content of moving remains unexamined. It is simply the outcome of rational choices involving the comparison of one place with another. Only the occasional motorist, cruise ship passenger or train-spotter is allowed to conduct mobility for its own sake. Transport geography is but one example of the wider interest in movement and process within spatial science. Indeed, all kinds of movements have been described in much the same way as transport is discussed above. One leading textbook from 1972 accounts for movements in the following way. Point-to-point moves are basic because all moves can be reduced ultimately to this scale. Consider point-to-point moves in the light of the modified principle of least net effort and returning maximum net benefits (that is benefits minus costs are at a maximum). In an ideal, undistracted, unencumbered movement, a person wastes no time going directly from A to B. Abler et al. 1971: 240, emphasis in original.

The idea of ‘least net effort’ is a key notion in the spatial scientific approach to moving things and people. Moving is ‘effort’ and effort is something which we constantly seek to reduce by producing better spatial arrangements of things – arrangements that require less movement (effort). Note how the ‘undistracted, unencumbered movement’ from A to B is described as ideal. Any deviation from

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this is labelled as dysfunctional – as evidence for either irrationality or a system of movement that does not work efficiently. As with the earlier exceptions made for train-spotters and the like, Abler et al. note the always awkward exceptions to general rules of movement: We stress net effort to emphasize that the very movement process itself may carry benefits at the same time that costs are incurred. A commuter sitting in a traffic jam inhaling gasoline and carbon monoxide fumes pays a high cost for his trip, but he also has relative peace and quiet twice a day, a radio to listen to, and the feeling that for a while at least he is the boss. If his job were to move next door to his house he would probably move. Abler et al. 1971: 253.

Another model for explaining mobility in spatial science are gravity models. Here the interaction between two places is described in the following way. The gravity model, one of the earliest models to be applied in the social sciences, is a simple attempt to treat two basic factors affecting the amount of flow, or interaction, between any two points: population and distance. The greater the population of the two centers, the greater the interaction; the greater the distance, the less the interaction. Taaffe and Gauthier 1973: 73.

Here, and in most other cases of quantitative analysis of movement in the 1960s and 1970s, movement is explained by the points at the end of it. In this case it is the population size of two places and the distance between them that ‘explains’ movement. Movement is an effect, a result. This is but one example of how the practice of moving has been labelled as empty, dead time, dysfunctional and inefficient. It is often a secondary geographical fact made necessary by the arrangement of primary considerations of space and place. So despite Crowe’s call for geographers to focus on ‘men and things moving’ rather than the nodes or networks that provide the material infrastructure for such movement, geographers who worked obsessively on movement continued to relegate movement to something

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curiously inhuman, empty of social and cultural content and logically secondary to the arrangements of space and place. This is why the apparently throwaway references to forms of mobility that do not fit the various models put forward by spatial scientists catch the attention. The ‘motorists who simply drive into the country, passengers on cruise liners and “railfans”’ (White and Senior 1983: 1) and the commuter enjoying ‘relative peace and quiet twice a day, a radio to listen to, and the feeling that for a while at least he is the boss’ (Abler et al. 1971: 253) are, in fact, fascinating. Amongst the rationality and emptiness of movement we suddenly see mobility – movement in a social and cultural context, and movement that is experienced. Turning these experiences into a footnote is a result of thinking of mobility as a cost. The alternative is to see the role of pleasure and politics in moving. This was recognised by Kevin Lynch over 25 years ago:

more direct daily travel patterns of men in the modern West and the more complicated but shorter distance travel patterns of women who not only have to get to work (often) but are more likely than men to do the family shopping as well as dealing with childcare and medical visits (Hanson and Pratt 1995; Law 1999). In an important paper, Robin Law has argued that, despite the significant advances made by feminist research into daily travel patterns and routines, it still remained the case that such research was too narrowly confined to issues of ‘gender and transport’ in ways that often reflect the spatial scientific concerns of transport geography in general. Law suggests that the focus on transport needs to be reconfigured as an interest in mobility that is informed by the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences. One of her suggestions is to foreground those very exceptions that earlier spatial scientists brushed off as bizarre.

Travel can be a positive experience; we need not consider it pure cost. In potential, the access system is a prime piece of educational equipment. It enlarges the individual’s reach, but in addition the act of moving through the city can in itself be an enlightenment … Travel can be a pleasure, if we pay attention to the human experience: the visual sequences, the opportunities to learn or to meet other people. Lynch 1981: 274.

Bodies are a source of pleasure. In conventional transportation theory, transport is a derived demand; people undertake trips for some other purpose, not for the pleasure of movement itself … For a full understanding of mobility we must recognize the physical pleasure of moving bodily though space and exercising embodied skills (such as riding a powerful motorcycle) and the way that these pleasures are differently experienced and made available to men and women. Law 1999: 580.

Since the 1970s, a significant amount of work has been done on mobility by geographers critical of spatial science. Much of this work has been conducted by feminist geographers concerned with the fundamental observation that men and women experience movement differently and that their movements are coded differently by anxious observers. Consider the difference between spatial scientific approaches to mobility and the work on daily travel routines undertaken by feminist geogaphers who have insisted that getting from home to work is considerably more than getting from A to B. Indeed, the simple line on a map is very different once gender is taken into consideration as there are huge differences between the longer distance and

The focus on work-related trips by a strand of feminist geography, Law argued, had blinded them to all the other kinds of ways in which people move – often for pleasure. It also failed to draw on issues such as ‘the experience of social relations in transportrelated settings and participation in a system of cultural beliefs and practices’ (574). In addition to the emphasis on gendered power relations in feminist daily travel analysis, in other words, there was a need to think about what actually happened during travel time and how these practices of mobility have been made meaningful for different people differently. This takes us a long way from the argument put forward in one leading geography textbook from 1971.

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‘Why did Jones go downtown to work?’ Rephrased and generalized, this question becomes: ‘Why do people make a journey to work?’ By answering the second question satisfactorily, we discover a principle applying not only to Jones, but also to anyone else who travels daily to a job. Particularistic knowledge of a unique event is practically useless by itself as a contribution to wider understanding. Abler et al. 1971: 196.

Feminist analysis is just one strand in geographical theory that has complicated and critiqued the emptiness of movement in spatial science. The rational mobile ‘man’ was labelled the ‘neuter commuter’. In different ways elements of humanistic geography, structuration theory, Marxist analysis and post-structuralism have enacted similar developments albeit with different emphases.1 Together they chart a move away from the analysis of movement and towards a rich understanding of mobility as the physical fact of movement in a power-laden and meaningful world.

THE NEW MOBILITIES PARADIGM Through the 1990s and into the next decade interest in different forms of mobility, inspired by developments in social and cultural theory, emerged across the social sciences and the humanities (Van Den Abbeele 1992; Kaplan 1996; Clifford 1997; Urry 2000). This has recently been labelled the ‘new mobilities paradigm’. Given geography’s long-standing interest in all things mobile the need for a ‘new mobilities paradigm’ in the discipline is open to question (Hannam et al. 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006). The term ‘new mobilities paradigm’ is ambiguous. It could refer to ‘new mobilities’ in opposition of ‘old mobilities’ or it could refer to ‘new mobilities’ in contrast to old ‘immobilities’. The former suggests that there are empirically new mobilities in the world that demand a new way of thinking. It could also suggest that there is a new way of thinking that sees mobility differently from

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the ‘old mobilities paradigm’ represented by, say, transport geography and migration studies. The latter suggests that both the world and our ways of thinking about it were more ‘sedentarist’ – fixated on permanence, rootedness and boundedness at the expense of dynamism and flow – and that these ways of thinking (a sedentarist metaphysics) are no longer appropriate. The word ‘paradigm’ is also problematic, suggesting, as it does, a view of ‘normal science’ in which old ways of thinking are overturned by scientific revolutions that bring in new and better ways of doing things (Kuhn 1996). So the question is: do new ways of researching mobility wipe out both a long standing interest in seemingly more immobile notions such as place, landscape and territory, and old ways of thinking about mobility represented by the kinds of analysis mentioned above? In both cases my answer would be ‘no’. Having said that, there are undoubtedly huge contributions being made by a more broadly defined ‘mobility turn’ in human geography and the social sciences in general. The most significant of these is a focus on mobility itself. As we have seen, in the majority of work done on mobilities of one kind or another over the past century in the discipline mobility has most often been seen as an effect, as a problem, and as secondary both ontologically and normatively, to forms of fixity in space. Mobility has most frequently been something that results from other factors. Crowe’s argument that we should stress ‘men and things moving’ rather than terminal facilities or network patterns appears to have gone unheeded. In spatial scientific models (such as spatial interaction theory) movement is seen as the product of spatial arrangement and as a ‘dysfunction’ in the system. As such, it is a product to be rectified by a more efficient spatial system. In classical migration theory mobility is the result of the relative ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors of different places. In much of transport geography, time spent in transit is a problem to be solved – ‘dead time’ which is unproductive and in which nothing of significance

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happens. Work informed by the ‘mobility turn’ provides a rich body of work that fills mobility with content (Adey 2004; Spinney 2006; Merriman 2007). The final section of this chapter seeks to outline some of the rudiments of geographical mobility research in the future.

AXIOMS FOR THE STUDY OF MOBILITIES The phrase ‘its about more than getting from A to B’ may well be the catchphrase on new approaches to mobility. Mobility can be thought of in much the same way as geographers have thought about place. While humanistic, and then critical, geographers have transformed the notion of location into a rich, meaningful and power-laden notion of place, the lines on the maps of the social scientists that connect locations (such as the mythical ‘A’ and ‘B’) have not undergone a similar transformation. Elsewhere I have suggested that one fruitful way of thinking about mobility is to take the fact of movement (the mobile equivalent of location) and reveal its entanglements with meaning and power to produce mobility (the mobile equivalent of place) (Cresswell 2006). While transport geographers, migration theorists and others have been very good at considering the observable, measurable fact of movement they have not been so good at getting at the richness of mobility in the modern (or any other) world. The division of geography into subdisciplines has also mitigated against a more sustained consideration of mobility in toto. While transport geographers have looked at mechanically assisted movement (Ullman 1956; Hoyle and Knowles 1998), demographers and migration theorists have considered more long-term processes of national and international displacements (Adams and Gilder 1976; Salt 1993). Feminist geographers have analysed the mobilities involved in daily work routines on the one

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hand, and adventurous travel on the other (Pickup 1988; Blunt 1994; Morin 1995; Law 1999) while those concerned with geographies of practice and the non-representational have researched mobilities at the bodily level such as in dance (Thrift 1997; McCormack 2003). But while similar mesotheoretical notions such as ‘place’ and ‘landscape’ have received sustained attention in and of themselves, the concept of mobility still remains a very short entry in most accounts of geography. How then, can mobility be theorised in a way that mirrors the richness of approaches to other objects of geographical enquiry such as place, space and landscape? Here are some ‘axioms for the study of mobilities’ as a suggested starting point.2 Axiom 1: Mobility and place. A focus on mobility should not mean the abandonment of geographers’ long-standing interest in forms of relative fixity, obduracy and stillness. The idea of ‘place’ in particular, derives much of its meaning from the possibilities of mobility. It is now widely accepted that places are not fixed, bounded and inward looking but constructed out of multiple flows within and beyond a particular place (Massey 1993; Cresswell 2002; Thrift 1999). The study of mobility should benefit from a recursive awareness that mobility happens in places and passes through places. This twin understanding of place and mobility takes several guises. John Urry and others, for instance, have described the need for ‘moorings’ in the production of mobilities. For members of the kinetic elite to fly around the world, there needs to be airports, hotels, people to work in these places and all of the relatively fixed infrastructure that make mobilities possible. Politically it is also the case that some are effectively immobilised by the mobility of others. When we talk of a dizzyingly mobile world we need to remember those who cannot move and those who are forced to move but would rather stay still. Axiom 2: Multiple mobilities. Just as mobilities need to be understood in relation of forms of relative fixity so they need to be understood in relation to each other. Some mobilities are enabled by others. The mobilities of migrant domestic labour enables the mobilities of the kinetic elite visiting luxury hotels in Dubai or elsewhere.

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There is a similar connection between the mobilities of Filipina domestic servants and Western ex-pats in Hong Kong The mobilities of relatively poor, often Latino, women across Los Angeles on a daily basis are related to the mobility of commuters travelling downtown from the suburbs (Burgos and Pulido 1998). Again, the airport is an instructive site for the analysis of contemporary mobilities. In Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, there is a programme called Privium for business travellers, which allows them to travel smoothly through immigration using iris-scanning biometric technology. Members are allocated the parking spaces nearest to the terminal and do not have to wait in line at immigration. This frees up staff for the much slower lines of not so mobile ‘aliens’ and others. The speed of one line is thus logically connected to the slowness of the others (Cresswell 2006). Axiom 3: Scales of mobility. A thorough understanding of mobilities involves being attentive to the connections between forms of movement from the smallest motion of the body to global migration. Mobilities are often held apart by the division of geography into specialisms such as transport geography or population geography. Thinking of mobility in general allows us to see past these divisions. The relationship between gender and mobilities, for instance, is broadened and deepened by considering the range of instances in which genders are defined, in part, through their mobilities. Iris Marion Young considers how boys and girls exhibit different kinds of bodily movements epitomised by the idea of ‘throwing like a girl’. Here the feminine is correlated with inhibited bodily movements while the masculine is expressed through a reaching out to the world (Young 1990). Studies of daily mobility routines, meanwhile, have established that gender-differentiated roles related to familial maintenance activities place a greater burden on women relative to men in fulfilling these roles resulting in significant differences in mobility patterns (Hanson and Pratt 1995; Law 1999). Connect this observation to Cynthia Enloe’s account of the history of tourism in which she underlines the central role of women in an industry where 75% of workers are underpaid and female and which has long been associated with sex and prostitution: ‘It is not simply that ideas about pleasure, travel, escape, bed-making and sexuality have affected women in rich and poor countries. The very structure of

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international tourism needs patriarchy to survive’ (Enloe 1989: 41). On top of this we could add the feminist analysis of decisions to migrate and the frowned-upon adventures of female explorers such as Mary Kingsley (Blunt 1994). Individually they are interesting stories that tell us specific things about particular forms of mobility. Together they add up to a general account of the role of mobility in the constitution of gender and the role of gender in the production of mobilities (Uteng and Cresswell 2008). Axiom 4: Mobilities are meaningful. Transforming the empty line of movement into mobility is to recognise that movement always occurs within social and cultural worlds of meaning. The act of moving cannot be disconnected from narratives and ideologies of movement. Such narratives and ideologies are widespread and include both positive (mobility as progress, mobility as adventure, etc.) and negative (mobility as threat, mobility as toil (travail), etc.) variants. The construction of a ‘right to mobility’, for instance, situates mobility within a predominantly Western narrative of liberal, individual politics (Blomley 1994). Narratives of immigrant mobilities as a threat, as disease and as a ‘flood’ meanwhile construct mobilities as outside and beyond the law and as ‘out of place’ (Tuitt 1996; White 2002). Axiom 5: Mobilities are practised. Human mobility is practised. Mobility does not just happen – the act of moving is not simply a line on a map but it is actively taken up in experience. Mobility involves all five senses and a more general kinaesthetic sense. As Kevin Lynch recognised (above), mobility can be a source of pleasure and education. But it can also be experienced as mundane, as tedious, as punishment. The line from A to B says nothing about mobility as experienced practice. A line from Beijing to London, for instance, could equally represent the travels of a Chinese businessman or a migrant being smuggled in trucks and containers over many months and in appalling conditions. Even if we stick to the aircraft, the practice of firstclass travel is very different from the practice of economy class. Axiom 6: Mobility, meaning and practice are produced by and productive of power. The entanglement of movement, meaning and practice is produced within relationships of power which impact on all three. Who and what go where and when is often both produced by and productive of power. Global capitalism, systems of patriarchy

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and racial identities are both the products of and producers of myriad mobilities. Consider the relative speeds of lines at immigration at an airport or the relative frequency with which black motorists are stopped by police in North American cities. Think of the movements of Palestinians in the face of the Israeli wall. At a more mundane level consider the relative movement of men and women during their daily work routines. Feminist geographers have documented how men tend to travel further to work but also tend to have simpler journeys which are less reliant on public transport. They do not have to pick up the children or do family shopping as often as women (Hanson and Pratt 1995).

These axioms are, of course, interconnected. Power impacts upon, and is produced by, physical movement, meanings and narratives and forms of practice. There are, for instance, dominant narratives and ideologies of mobility as well as counter-narratives, both of which depend on contrasting narratives of place and fixity. Within the European Union, for instance, there is a heavy emphasis on Europe as a zone of free mobility. This is supported by the iconography of the euro, which features fictional bridges and gateways; statements of law and rights (within which the right to mobility is central); tourist programmes such as the Council of Europe’s heritage trails which focus on international routes (the silk route, the gypsy route, etc.) rather than specific sites; and programmes advocating the mobility of students, workers and others. In the United States there is a long standing narrative of westward movement formalised in Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis (Turner 1947) as well as the founding story of the United States as a land of immigrants (Honig 2001). Alongside both of these, however, are stories of threatening mobilities seeking to undermine the fabric of European and US societies. For all the free mobility of Europe there is the constant threat of unwanted ingress from outside Europe by non-Europeans, by drugs traffickers and criminal gangs. European mobility, in the end, is coded as white, as masculine and as ideally middle class (Verstraete 2001).

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Similarly the mobility at the heart of US stories of identity must always be understood in relation to the ambivalent mobilities of Mexican immigrants and, historically, the unwanted poor of Europe (Kraut 1995; Mitchell 1996) and the native populations who were there in the first place. The experienced practice of mobility is also produced by and productive of power relations. How we experience moving says a great deal about who we are within a given context. As Zygmunt Bauman has noted, those at the top of what we might call a ‘kinetic hierarchy’ tend to move by choice and to experience moving as freedom or luxury. They are frequently pampered as they move and welcomed when they arrive. Those at the bottom of a kinetic hierarchy, meanwhile, often move painfully and through compulsion rather than choice. On arrival they are shunned or sent back where they came from (Bauman 1998). In recent years there has been a sustained output of work on mobility in geography that takes on board these rich and interconnected ways of thinking about mobility. For instance Peter Merriman’s work on Britain’s first motorway, the M1, is a long way from transport geography’s discussions of place utility. It focuses on the road itself, its material construction, how it was represented as it was being built, the aesthetics of mobility involved in its design and the various governed practices involved in driving at high speed on this new kind of mobile space (Merriman 2007). Peter Adey’s work on airports tells a set of stories about the historical development of Liverpool’s airport as a node for the production of mobilities (Adey 2006), and about the ways in which mobilities inside airports are differentiated and surveilled (Adey 2004). Eric Laurier’s work on the ways in which people use their cars (both domestically and for business) has developed new forms of ethnography on the move that reveal the micro-geographies of mobile life (Laurier 2004). Here the car is not a mere functional device from getting from A to B but a moving place – a space of conviviality, organisation

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and inhabitation. Don Mitchell’s work on migrant labour in the California landscape links the flows of migration from south of the border to the everyday painful mobilities of working in the fields (Mitchell 2001). Feminist geographers such as Rachel Silvey and Alison Mountz have brought new complexity and humanity to the embodied and politicised experience of moving as a migrant or a refugee (Mountz 2004; Silvey 2004). New work on mobilities still concerns the fact of moving but it is also rich with meaning and shot through with power. It concerns itself with both the politics and pleasure of moving. At last the ‘trainspotter’, ‘cruiseship passenger’ and distracted commuter are getting the attention they deserve.

NOTES 1 For an account of mobility in humanistic geography see Cresswell (2006). 2 I take this notion from Lewis (1979).

REFERENCES Abler, R., Adams, J. and Gould, P. (1971) Spatial Organization: The Geographer’s View of the World. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Adams, J. and Gilder, K. (1976) ‘Household location and intra-urban migration’ in D. Herbert and R. Johnson (eds), Social Areas in Cities Volume 1: Spatial Processes and Form. New York: Wiley, pp. 159–192. Adey, P. (2004) ‘Secured and sorted mobilities: examples from the airport’, Surveillance and Society, 1: 500–519. Adey, P. (2006) ‘Airports and air-mindedness: spacing, timing and using Liverpool Airport, 1929–1939’, Social and Cultural Geography, 7: 343–363. Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization: the Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. Blomley, N. (1994) ‘Mobility, empowerment and the rights revolution’, Political Geography, 13: 407–422. Blunt, A. (1994) Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York: Guilford.

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Burgos, R. and Pulido, L. (1998) ‘The politics of gender in the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union/ Sindicato de Pasajaros’, Capitalism Nature Society, 9: 75–82. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Later Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cresswell, T. (2002) ‘Theorising place’ in Cresswell, T. and Verstraete, G. (eds), Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility: The Politics of Representation in a Globalized World. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, pp. 11–32. Cresswell, T. (2006) On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge. Crowe, P.R. (1938) ‘On progress in geography’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 54: 1–18. Enloe, C.H. (1989) Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. London: Pandora. Haggett, P. (1965) Locational Analysis in Human Geography. London: Edward Arnold. Hannam, K., Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) ‘Mobilities, immobilities and moorings’, Mobilities, 1: 1–22. Hanson, S. and Pratt, G.J. (1995) Gender, Work, and Space. New York: Routledge. Honig, B. (2001) Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hoyle, B.S. and Knowles, R.D. (1998) Modern Transport Geography. Chichester: Wiley. Johnson, R.J., Gregory, D., Pratt, G. and Watts, M. (2000) Dictionary of Human Geography (Fourth Edition). Oxford: Blackwell. Kaplan, C. (1996) Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kraut, A.M. (1995) Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the ‘Immigrant Menace’. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kuhn, T.S. (1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laurier, E. (2004) ‘Doing office work on the motorway’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21: 261–277. Law, R. (1999) ‘Beyond “women and transport”: towards new geographies of gender and daily mobility’, Progress in Human Geography, 23: 567–588. Lewis, P. (1979) ‘Axioms for reading the landscape’ in D.W. Meinig (ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 11–32. Lynch, K. (1981) A Theory of Good City Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Massey, D. (1993) ‘Power-geometry and progressive sense of place’ in J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson and L. Tickner (eds), Mapping the Futures:

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Local Cultures, Global Change. London: Routledge, pp. 59–69. Massey, D.B. and Jess, P.M. (1995) A Place in the World?: Places, Cultures and Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCormack, D.P. (2003) ‘The event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28: 488–507. Merriman, P. (2007) Driving Spaces: a CulturalHistorical Geography of England’s M1 Motorway. Oxford: Blackwell. Mitchell, D. (1996) The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, D. (2001) ‘The devil’s arm: points of passage, networks of violence and the political economy of landscape’, New Formations, 43: 44–60. Morin, K. (1995) ‘A “female Columbus” in 1887 America: marking new social territory’, Gender, Place and Culture, 2: 191–208. Mountz, A. (2004) ‘Embodying the nation-state: Canada’s response to human smuggling’, Political Geography, 23: 323–345. Pickup, L. (1988) ‘Hard to get around: a study of women’s travel mobility’ in J. Little, L. Peake, and P. Richardson (eds), Women in Cities: Gender and the Urban Environment. New York: New York University Press, pp. 98–116. Salt, J. (1993) Migration and Population Change in Europe. New York: United Nations. Sauer, C.O. (1952) Agricultural Origins and Dispersals. New York: American Geographical Society. Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) ‘The new mobilities paradigm’, Environment and Planning A, 38: 207–226. Silvey, R. (2004) ‘Power, difference, and mobility: feminist advances in migration studies’, Progress in Human Geography, 28: 1–17. Spinney, J. (2006) ‘A place of sense: a kinaesthetic ethnography of cyclists on Mont Ventoux’, Envi-

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ronment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24: 709–732. Taaffe, E.J. and Gauthier, H.L. (1973) Geography of Transportation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Thrift, N. (1997) ‘The still point: resistance, expressiveness embodiment and dance’, in S. Pile and M. Keith (eds) Geographies of Resistance. London: Routledge, pp. 124–151. Thrift, N. (1999) ‘Steps to an ecology of place’, in D.B. Massey, J. Allen, and P. Sarre (eds), Human Geography Today. Cambridge: Polity. Tuitt, P. (1996) False Images: Law’s Construction of the Refugee. London: Pluto Press. Turner, F.J. (1947) The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Ullman, E. (1956) ‘The role of transportation and the bases for interaction’ in W.L. Thomas (ed.), Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 862–880. Urry, J. (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century. London: Routledge. Uteng, T.P. and Cresswell, T. (eds) (2008) Gendered Mobilities. London: Ashgate. Van Den Abbeele, G. (1992) Travel as Metaphor; From Montaigne to Rousseau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Verstraete, G. (2001) ‘Technological frontiers and the politics of mobility in the European Union’, New Formations, 43: 26–43. White, A. (2002) ‘Geographies of asylum, legal knowledge and legal practices’, Political Geography, 21: 1055–1073. White, H.P. and Senior, M.L. (1983) Transport Geography. London: Longman. Young, I.M. (1990) Throwing Like a Girl and other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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44 Conservation and Environmental Concern Michael Williams

INTRODUCTION Conservation and environmental concern about the human changes to the nature of the earth are high on the geographers’ agenda as many would say that geography, at heart, is a study of human–environmental relationships. However, it is not the sole discipline to contribute to the debate, and from time to time, ecologists, biologists, historians, sociologists, to mention only a few, have contributed much to the meaning and substance of human change. Contrary to popular belief, the alteration, manipulation and change of the earth and its biological, climatological and oceanic mantle, are not contemporary events only, but of great antiquity. Since the emergence of homo erectus about half a million years ago, and the subsequent ability of humans to gather wild plants, tend animals, and grow crops, humans have left their imprint on the earth. The only difference between then and modern times is that the actions of people once numbered in their hundreds or thousands has been augmented by the cumulative actions of billions of people,

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which has altered the scale and pace of change. In addition, there is an increased awareness of the human impact of change on the planet. This chapter begins by taking a brief look at the antiquity of human beliefs about the earth, then its main body is divided into two broad themes: conservation and environmental concern. This is largely a matter of the chronology of events and of organizational convenience, but the reader should bear in mind that at times the two themes often run parallel to each other, frequently they are inter-digitating and interlocking, and at other times run seamlessly into each other. During the last few decades, environmental concern has moved to the top of the political, interdisciplinary and world agenda, to become one of ‘the big issues’ alongside international terrorism, and global financial stability.

EARLY BELIEFS ABOUT THE EARTH Clarence Glacken, a geographer, has shown that from earliest times humans have been

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concerned with their place in nature and visà-vis God or some other deity. They ascribed extreme catastrophic events, like floods, earthquakes, and plagues to God’s punishment for evil living and sin, in other words, change on earth was divinely ordained. But by the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century superstition gave way to a more reasoned approach, albeit one infused with the idea that it was the human mission to ‘improve’ the world and ‘rescue’ it from a state of nature, and, in the eyes of some, complete God’s unfinished work of creation (Glacken 1967: 655–705). Global expansion and early scientific advances in knowledge suggested that humans could increase production and thereby the sum total of human happiness. The clearest statement was by Buffon in the mid-eighteenth century, who said that ‘wild nature is hideous and dying.’ It was humans who brought order to nature by controlling it – by draining, clearing, domesticating, and otherwise altering it, and made it ‘agreeable and living’, he wrote. Man was ‘king on earth’ and master of nature, and by his activities brought order out of chaos and ‘improved’ nature to bring it to its current state of magnificence (Glacken 1967: 663, 668).1 This spirit motivated the pioneer settlers of the European expansion throughout the world, whether in the Americas, Australia or the upland moors of Britain, so that the quest was to ‘conquer the wilderness’ and break the chain of savage life and savage peoples. To save and conserve were alien and unthought-of concepts. There was another variant of environmental thinking in vogue from the earliest times until even well into the twentieth century, and that was environmental determinism (see chapter by Livingstone). This was the widely held belief that the environment caused and explained the differentiation of landscapes, peoples, and cultures, and humans were powerless under its forces. It is now largely discredited as an explanatory tool.

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CONSERVATION; THE UTILITARIAN IMPERATIVE In 1863 when George Perkins Marsh first proposed his book which was to become Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action to his publisher, Charles Scribner, in common with most people of the day, was dismayed. ‘Is it true? Does not man act in harmony with nature? Is he not a part of nature?’ asked Scribner. ‘No’, Marsh retorted, nothing is further from my belief, that man is a ‘part of nature’ or that his action is controlled by what are called the laws of nature; in fact a leading object of the book is to enforce the opposite opinion, and to illustrate that man, so far from being, as Buckle supposes, a soul-less, will-less automaton, is a free moral agent working independently of nature. Lowenthal 2000: 291.

Thus, when Man and Nature appeared (Marsh 1864) it was a work well before its time in not only refuting environmental determinism, but more importantly, the current philosophy of hubris and improvement, while striking a blow against the complacency about the abundance of resources and progress. By the mid-nineteenth century, before he wrote the book, Marsh had seen that the ‘signs of artificial improvement’ throughout his native New England were accompanied with ‘the tokens of improvident waste’. Denuded hilltops and slopes, dry streambeds and ravines furrowed by torrents, had all followed agricultural clearing. If a middle-aged farmer returned to his birthplace, Marsh continued, he would look upon ‘another landscape than that which formed the theatre of his youthful toils and pleasures’ (Marsh 1848: 3, 18–19). In a single generation, the visual world had changed markedly through human action. In time Vermont might become like the denuded landscapes of the ancient Mediterranean which Marsh had seen when he was appointed the first American Ambassador to the new kingdom of Italy.

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Written in straightforward, plain language and based on his own observation and an amazing compilation of evidence from a wide range of correspondents around the world, the book revolutionized the way people looked at their environment. He did not dispute the desirability of exploiting nature for human use, but deplored the bungling way it was being done, because this bungling upset ‘the harmonies of nature’. But all was not lost, as restoration (e.g. reforestation), increased environmental awareness, and ceaseless stewardship might redeem the situation. It was largely through Marsh’s warnings and strictures that the conservation movement got under way in the United States. One year after the publication of Man and Nature, Frederick Starr predicted a timber ‘famine,’ which struck fear in many because timber was the essential commodity for cheap construction, cheap fuel and cheap land on which the burgeoning economy of the nineteenth-century United States depended. A federal Division of Forestry was formed in 1886, and in 1897 a total of 47 million acres (19 million hectares) of timber land in the western states was preserved for national use, in order to ensure water runoff and a supply of timber (Williams 1989: 393, 399– 401, 409–411). In 1898, Gifford Pinchot was appointed Head of the new Division of Forestry, and with remarkable acumen and foresight manipulated public and congressional opinion to accept a ‘wise use’ policy for the timber lands, which was basically a utilitarian philosophy of resource extraction that embodied concepts of ‘the most productive use for the permanent good of the whole population’ with ‘the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time’. Conservation was, he declared, simply ‘good business’. Pinchot was the principal adviser and confidante of President Theodore Roosevelt. Both were imbued with the same crusading zeal to change the way of looking at the land and its resources, and both were instrumental in encouraging the anti-big business and ‘trust-busting’ mood that swept the country in the early years of the century,

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of which the lumber companies were some of the largest. Pinchot, through Roosevelt, succeeded in quadrupling the area of reserved forest to a massive 150 million acres (60.7 million hectares) (Williams 1989: 412–25). Pinchot now tried to get conservation to be the accepted philosophy in all resource use, and he pitted his energies against the powerful logging companies in his influential little book The Fight for Conservation (1910). Conservation became part of ‘progressive’ politics, and Pinchot turned it into a moral crusade which eventually permeated all walks of life from resource use to the family. But Pinchot made a lot of enemies, and his alarmism about the dearth of timber, and arbitrary acts as a public servant under White House acquiescence and protection, led to his dismissal once Roosevelt was no longer president. Despite his departure conservation was now firmly entrenched as a philosophy in the federal control of forests and rivers. But Pinchot’s version contained a paradox; on the one hand it was a moral crusade against materialism and waste, on the other hand its wise use policy smacked of rank materialism (Williams 1989: 424, 456–8). The conservation doctrine was, as Sam Hays (1959) has aptly said, ‘a gospel of efficiency’.2 This approach was inevitably going to be in opposition to the aesthetic conservationists who were growing in numbers and influence.

CONSERVATION: THE AESTHETIC IMPERATIVE Wild nature, be it upland moorlands, mountains, forests, or deserts had been abhorred for centuries as ‘waste’ and even the abode of ‘evil’, but by the later seventeenth century there emerged a more sympathetic attitude, particularly to trees, the largest and most obvious living entity in many landscapes. The new sensibility had many sources. In England, tree planting to promote the needs of the all-powerful navy, the essential vehicle for trade, wealth and colonization, gradually succumbed

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to the new ideal of tree planting as a display of the wealth and power by the land-owning classes. Symbolically, trees meant immortality as they were the enduring monuments of continuity of the families who planted them. The typical landscape garden with avenues, clumps, and introduced species became a theatre of ornament, amenity and display (Thomas 1983). Increasingly too, in England, and particularly in the untouched environments of the ‘new countries’, especially America, advances of eighteenth-century science had produced a new wonder and awe of nature, even a feeling that God showed His power and excellence in such places. Also, as the proponents of the picturesque pointed out, wildness had a certain pleasing quality about it, whether it was the Lake District or central Wales in Britain, the Catskills and Hudson Valley in the eastern United States, or the Alps in Europe. It followed, therefore, that humans might be more perfect if they were in closer touch with that environment. Part of the enduring appeal of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) is the suggestion that the primitive life, despite its disadvantages, produced a happiness and wholesomeness not found in the man-made world, especially the urban world. Deism, sublimity, the picturesque, and the primitive fused in the multi-stranded Romantic Movement, which also emphasized the strange, the solitary, and the melancholy. Consequently, Byron’s ‘There is a pleasure in the pathless woods’ and Wordsworth’s ‘One impulse from a vernal wood will tell you more of man’, were more than mere lines of pretty nature poetry; they were a revolution in thinking about the natural world and a substitute for moral philosophy. In the United States, the later writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and particularly of Henry David Thoreau, built on these foundations and both expounded the transcendentalist philosophy that the experience of nature in general, and forests in particular, produced a higher awareness of and sense of reality than did one’s typical physical surrounding, especially urban surroundings typified by greed and

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exploitation. Unlike their Puritan forebears who pioneered and chopped down the wilderness, and thought that morality stopped on the edge of the clearing, the transcendentalists thought it began there. The argument went further. If the forests and other wilderness areas were uniquely American, and if God’s purpose was made more manifest in such places, then the very spirit of America and its creativity came from the forests, from whence came, said Thoreau, ‘the tonics and barks which brace mankind’. ‘In the woods’, echoed Emerson, ‘we return to reason and faith’. The forest had to be protected and preserved. Little wonder, then, that with this moral, aesthetic ethic, and particularly with the writing and actions of John Muir, the almost blind wanderer of the Sierras and their forests during the 1890s, Pinchot, the manipulating public servant, found in Muir his ultimate opponent. ‘Wise use’ and ‘no use’ were opposite ends of the conservation spectrum, which emerged famously over the proposed building of the Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite National Park in the 1890s. Eventually Pinchot won the legal battle to get it built but lost the ideological war. ‘Blind John’s’ views began to dominate, and he went on to found the Sierra Club (Williams 2003: 269–73).

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN The relative simplicity of the central idea of conservation that it is good to prevent the damage of treasured ecosystems, landscapes, environments and even buildings, can be contrasted to the more complex ideas that permeate environmental concern. Broadly they can be said to be of two kinds (1) ecology and balance, and (2) the interacting (and possible feedbacks) of all the major components of the Earth system, lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere and biosphere, and of course, of human society and economies, to form an integrated earth systems science. Again, these are never entirely separate and weave in and out of each other.

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ECOLOGY AND BALANCE The complex idea of ecology runs sotto voce through many of these past narratives on conserving nature and current narrative of environmental concern. The word was coined by the German biologist, Ernst Haeckle, in 1866 to describe the web of linking organisms and their surrounding environment. But it soon became loaded with other meanings, such as ‘economy’, the avoidance of waste and disorder, and the efficient use of ‘energy’. Its most obvious manifestation was in the ecological climax-equilibrium concept within biology propounded by Frederic Clements in the United States, which implied a steadystate, stabile, interacting community, and no change, which appealed to many as it mirrored earlier states of society that were supposedly more stable and happier. The soil erosion of the old tobacco and cotton growinglands of the southern Piedmont (the ‘ruined land’ as the novelist William Faulkner called it) and then the Dustbowl phenomena of the 1930s, seemed to be paralleled by the financial chaos of the Wall Street crash in 1929. All seemed to point to the same thing – the need to sustain the community and its environment in a stable equilibrium (Williams 2003: 385–6, 432–3). When Aldo Leopold wrote about the ‘Land Ethic,’ in his little book – the Sand County Almanac – on trying to farm the lands of the Sand country in Wisconsin ecologically and preserve its wild life – it was initially dismissed as a charming but insignificant little book of nature essays (Leopold 1949). But it contained a new dimension that was to be added to the ecological myth. ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community,’ he wrote. ‘It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ Now conservationists were armed with a simple and powerful message that soon achieved an almost quasi-religious significance. In Britain the biologist Arthur Tansley preferred the concept of the ecosystem to that of the ecological community, and stressed the mechanisms of adjustment inherent in all

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ecosystems, like thermodynamics, nutrient cycling, and energy flows, which created not one but a range of possible climax conditions. It was a more realistic model than that of ecology. Although the classic Clementsian paradigm was abandoned by ecologists decades ago, much of today’s conservation/ environmental literature stills hangs on to this outdated perspective. Nature untouched is good, and technological man is the destroyer. Untouched nature is idealized and environmental interference condemned. Compared with Marsh and his successors who thought that rational managers could cultivate, and even alter, environments, modern environmentalists are more purist and hope that the human impact will be reduced until nature returns to its ‘pristine’ state, whatever that means, because whenever humans have been around it has never existed.

GEOGRAPHY, EARTH SYSTEMS, AND HUMAN CHANGE The geographer, Alexander von Humboldt, can probably be claimed to be the father of a comprehensive earth science that linked all natural phenomena in some way to form an integrated, interacting whole. His explorations around the world from 1799 to1804, to collect zoological, geological and ethnographic specimens, make atmospheric observations and record the geographical location of everything, was the purpose of his travels and observations (Humboldt 1844). His work spurred the development of biogeography, ecology, oceanography and other earth sciences, and in particular inspired Darwin in the formulation of his integrated view of the evolution of organic and human life less than a half a century later. Unfortunately, von Humboldt’s ideal of a unified view of the earth’s systems never developed because academic disciplinary specialisation split knowledge into increasingly fragmented compartments, led to reductionism, and experimentation at a scale far finer than the

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whole earth. Consequently scholars did not follow in his footsteps (Jackson 2009). Geographers, in the meantime, were either held in the thrall of environmental determinism or were more experimental and wrote about the impacts of humans in changing the environment. Élisée Reclus, the radical, socialist French geographer, was one of the latter, but because he was imbued with the old idea of ‘improvement’ his book La Terre (1868) underplayed any destruction by human action because it could be turned into improvement through human inventiveness and skill. This ‘upbeat’ view on the creative power of humans was counterpoised by the Russian geographer Alexander Weikof (1901) who was concerned with the bigger picture of world forces. An increasingly urbanized and industrialized global civilization was leading to a ‘growing disassociation of man and the earth’ and was destroying the environment. Most affected was vegetation, which in turn affected hydrology, soil erosion, and climate, and this could lead to the ultimate destruction of civilization. A few years later the German geographer, Ernst Friedrich (1904), went further, and suggested that European global expansion and resource gathering was based on an exploitative ethos – or Raubwirschaft (broadly, destructive exploitation) – the skimming of the accrued fertility of new lands, that came with initial European expansion that had already destroyed the flora, fauna, and soils over vast areas of the globe. In a series of papers, the American, Nathaniel S. Shaler speculated about the exhaustion of soils, power, and metals (Livingstone 1987: 198–214). Whereas one might have thought that it would have been the French radical socialist, Reclus, who would have been the fiercest critic of the ruthless and thoughtless destruction of the environment, it was an American, Carl Sauer, often thought of as a ‘conservative’, who was the revolutionary and provided the most biting critique. In 1916, aged 26, and still a PhD student at Chicago, he wrote a short ‘Note’ for the Geographical Review on ‘Man’s influences upon the earth,’

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which brought together new evidence from his own field-work in the prairies of Illinois and his reading of the geographers Friedrich, Weikof, and Jean Brunhes on ‘destructive exploitation’. Not only did humans affect river and soils, he said, but also man is an important ecological factor, in other words, is modifying profoundly the paleontological record of the future. The adjustment of plant associations is being disturbed by the introduction of new species, by the clearing and cultivation of the land, by fire, and other means resulting from the voluntary or involuntary meddling of man. Similar revolutionary changes are wrought in the animal world, especially among the larger animals and among numerous parasitic forms. Sauer (1916, 462).

Gradually, Sauer was groping towards a holist view of the destructive forces of humans, and what we might call today an ‘environmental ethos,’ though it is unlikely that he would have used or approved of that term. After a few more explorations of the theme, Sauer was now fired-up to write more on the destruction of the ‘good earth’, and produced a number of devastatingly critical articles on destructive exploitation that finally pulled together the strands of his environmental ethos. The first paper was on ‘Plant and animal destruction’ (Sauer 1938a) given to a conference of economists, political scientists, and the like, whom he berated for their shortcomings, especially their impatience to find universal truths about human behaviour whereby they had ‘neglected dreadfully’ the natural history of man. Social theory was transitory and soon became part of culture; thus, ‘today’s triumph in social theory is tomorrow’s footnote to culture history’. For the environment the central problem was the dominant social science view of cultural history as the growing mastery of humans over their surroundings, but, he warned, there was an antiphonal theme of the ‘revenge of outraged nature against man’. Between the latter part of the eighteenth century and the 1930s, he continued, ‘the space of a century and a half – only two full life times – more damage has been done to the

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productive capacity of the world than in all human history preceding’. He instanced many examples of destructive exploitation of forests, fish stocks, and oil fields. In addition, species had become extinct thereby impoverishing biological evolution, other useful species had been restricted in their range, and soils had been destroyed wantonly. ‘The modern world has built on a progressive using up of its real capital’ to the point where the whole western commercial system ‘looks like a house of cards’. The talk did not go down well with his audience, especially when he told them that no amount of social science planning could avert the ‘suicidal qualities of our commercial economy’. The problem was that the prevailing thinking and central ethic of Western civilization was an ‘optimistic anthropomorphism’, that had its origins in the reckless optimism of the brave, old days when ‘northEuropean freebooters overran the world and put it under tribute. We have not yet learned the difference between yield and loot. We do not like to be economic realists.’ The final paper was ‘Destructive exploitation in modern colonial expansion’, which was probably the most damning critique of environmental destruction and western imperialism since the writings of Karl Marx (Sauer 1938b). Nearly twenty years later, in 1956, Sauer had the opportunity of organizing and masterminding the symposium and publication entitled ‘Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth’, which took stock of ‘what man had done and was doing to change his physical–biological environment on earth’ (Thomas 1956). It was intended to be a successor and tribute to Marsh’s Man and Nature of nearly a century before (1864). Of the 52 participants 15 were geographers. But considering that the symposium was held in an era when nuclear contamination and waste disposal, the beginnings of tropical deforestation, and rising global population numbers, were beginning to loom large, the book was cautious, even optimistic, and displayed a remarkably low level of concern about human

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global impacts. While a feast to read, it did nothing to really further the conservation-environmental debate. A vague sense of optimism ran through it with confidence that the outmoded concept of ecological stability would be regained, and that technology would take care of future problems. Its benign approach showed that many of its eminent participants were out of touch with realworld problems that the public increasingly thought were malign. Nowhere like the same environmental awareness pervaded the writings of British geographers before 1960, although other trends were afoot. The deep-seated and longstanding aesthetic conflict between the tranquillity and beauty of the countryside and the bustle and blight of the urban areas was resolved by the immediate post-war Town and Country Planning Acts. As a result, no country has had such stringent controls over urban and industrial encroachment of the countryside than Britain has had for the last six decades. Not unrelated was the contemporary work of one geographer, J.A. Steers, whose investigations into coastal amenity and degradation led to a survey of the entire coastline of England and Wales for the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, and he organized symposia on the subject of coastal protection. One of the participants in these conferences was John Dower, who eventually went on to produce the Dower report on National Parks in England and Wales that was adopted, and which later spawned the sites of ‘outstanding natural beauty’. The essential fact was that environmental protection in Britain really revolved around the protection and conservation of the ‘heritage’ of land and buildings, and in this movement we cannot disregard the activities of the National Trust, the largest voluntary ‘environmental’ organization in the world and owner and protector of large areas of land and coastline. Perhaps the only utilitarian movement in Britain was the creation of the Forestry Commission, to protect and enlarge the forested area of the country (Eden 2003: 218–19).

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FROM CONSERVATION TO ENVIRONMENTALISM Between 1960 and 1970 the conservation movement was superseded by the environmental movement. Formerly concerns had been largely national, and with tangible things like forests, parks, coastlines, countryside, and even buildings, and were largely the concern of an educated, and often small, elite group or individuals. None of these things died out but there was a decided shift to the global (but note that ‘Man’s Role’ of 1956 was global), and conversely, with the local, as environmental concerns had a mass appeal and became less concerned with less tangible things like say forests, and more to do with and relationships between humans and their environmental surrounds and threats to the human body. Too much should not made of this distinction (as we shall discuss below, for example, in the developing world), but one can pinpoint some clear markers of this shift. For example, prior to 1970 there were only two major international agreements on environmental issues, the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. But in 1972 came the Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment, and in quick succession another 25 conventions by 2000, of Table 44.1

which the most well known are probably the ten are listed in Table 44.1. The massive scale, global reach and jurisdiction of these conventions concerning every part of the environment chart the growing awareness of the global environment. A not dissimilar table could be made of environmental organizations. Approximately a dozen were created to protect wildlife and game, and create parks during the 75 years from 1875 and 1950 (mainly in the United States), and then a shift of pace and emphasis occurred to more activist, broad-based, international movements with four created in the 1960s (including Friends of the Earth), twelve in the 1970s (including Greenpeace) and a further ten during the 1980s, including Earth First! Despite the power and reach of global conventions and organization, as of old, the individual writer still had a place in moulding opinion. If there was one person who altered attitudes it was Rachel Carson in her Silent Spring (1962). Carson was a marine biologist who first became aware of the deleterious effects of the massive post-war use of pesticides and herbicides on marine life. Her book was a full frontal attack on the cosy optimism of past generations, pointing out that the broad of use of pesticides and herbicides (especially DDT) for agriculture was affecting the whole food chain, leading to the

Major international environmental conventions

Year

Convention

1972

London Dumping Convention

1973

Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)

1975

Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar Convention)

1979

Convention on Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution (Acid rain)

1982

United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea

1987

Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Atmosphere

1992

Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (Rio Convention)

1992

Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD)

1994

United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification

1997

Kyoto Protocol on Carbon Emissions

Based on entry on ‘International cooperation’ in A.S. Goudie and D.J Cuff (eds) (2002) Encyclopedia of Global Change: Environmental Change and Human Society, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 691–698.

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death of song birds, hence ‘the silent spring’. She posed the simple question, ‘How could intelligent human beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment?’ In clear, simple, but impeccably accurate scientific language she set out the case for the damage these chemicals were doing, though her style was irresistibly polemic and bristled with confrontation, as some of the arresting chapter headings illustrate – ‘Elixirs of Death’, ‘Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias’, ‘Needless Havoc’. She showed the interconnectedness, the uncertainty and frequently unintended consequences of actions and phenomena which were often carried out wilfully and knowingly by government and its agencies, and especially big business. Silent Spring dealt a fatal blow to public faith in the developed world in ‘experts’. It was anything but comfortable, complacent and benign; rather it was pessimistic, integrative, malign, and decidedly shocking. With it the environmental debate had moved from the realms of science, technology, and knowledge to the realms of politics, society, and human motivations and morals. ‘Rachel’s little book of horrors’, as one reviewer called it, represented and precipitated a major shift in attitudes. In time other fears arose similar to biological deformation through pesticides and herbicides, like nuclear radiation, general waste disposal, new diseases like bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE), the oestrogenization of water, the genetic engineering of plants crops, animals and even humans, and climate change.

THE DEVELOPING WORLD In contrast to the situation in the post1970s developed world, the transition from conservation to environmentalism has not been so clear in the developing world. In many of the post-1945 newly independent countries in Africa and Asia the conservation plans of their ex-imperial rulers are still maintained, in the form of parks, forest reserves

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and game areas, while in Central and Latin America national forest and park models have been imported. The real debate, however, is how to make these reserves, which include large ‘excluded’ areas, acceptable to a largely rural, agricultural population hungry for more land. One answer has been to encourage local communities to be involved in ‘sustainable development’ rather than conservation per se, and to stress their common goals – efficiency, local knowledge, local management and sustained yield. However, one issue seems to transcend these local ones and that is the development of giant irrigation and power projects from local rivers, as in China, India, Brazil and Egypt, which have been far larger than their counterparts in the Western world in the 1930s and 1940s, and have trumped conservation in any shape or form.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL DEBATE DURING THE LAST 30 YEARS It is difficult to chart all the shifts in attitude, awareness and action in the environmental debate from the end of the twentieth century and into the first decade of the current century. It has been 30 years of constant change and widening concern, and one would need another book for that. There are excellent reviews on aspects of this by Pepper (1984), Lowenthal, (1990) and Eden (2003). The huge variation in viewpoints and awareness makes summary difficult to achieve, nonetheless, some general trends and issues can be discerned that lend continuity to this narrative. First, different environmental issues have been of dominant importance at different times during these years. Whaling, acid rain, tree death (Waldsteben), desertification, tropical deforestation, biodiversity loss, ozone layer depletion and fresh water shortages, have all held centre stage at various times. For example, acid rain, tree death and then desertification seemed to dominate the 1980s, then tropical deforestation and biodiversity in the 1990s. Each issue has become progressively

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more politicized, politically motivated, and often exaggerated in an attempt to justify further funds and research, and to shock the public into acceptance of measures to rectify it. But it does seem as though the public’s ability to be shocked and do anything about these is limited and short-term, and it still relies on governments, managers, or technologists to solve the problems. For example, despite the fact that at least 15 × 106 square kilometres of primary tropical forest and 4–6 × 106 square kilometres of secondary forest are disappearing annually, the topic now rarely makes the inner pages of the newspapers, and certainly is not front page news as it once was, unless connected to the latest concern, climate change, which has subsumed all others. Climate change has become the almost obsessive issue in contemporary debate, spawning as never before government and international action. In a way, concern over climate is a return to, and vindication of, von Humboldt’s contention nearly 200 years ago, that in the general physics of the earth, climate is the major control of all earth-surface phenomena. As concern over climate change grows, so the other great issue of population numbers has been swept into the background. If the world seems more crowded than ever, it is! In this author’s life time ‘death control’ has led to the tripling of global numbers from around 1.9 billion to the current 7.0 billion, and is set conservatively to rise to around 8.4 billion by 2100. To a greater or lesser degree each person consumes, alters or otherwise creates environmental impacts, but impacts all the same, and as the general trend is to higher standards of living globally the impact per person is increasing. The oldest of environmental issues, that of population numbers, food supply, resources, well-being, and limitation, first posed by Thomas Malthus (1798) over 200 years ago, is too ‘hot’ to handle culturally, politically, ethically, and even religiously. But it is back on the agenda. One day the world will wonder how it managed to ignore this for so long. Second, the environmental issues have become more truly global in their reach and awareness. For example, climate change,

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ozone depletion and biodiversity all demand international cooperation. But while the photographs of the earth from the moon by the first astronauts show a beautiful, simple and fragile ecosystem, the globe is far from being a single political and social community, and there are many foot-draggers. Related is the question of interconnectedness. Pesticides showed that their effect went through the food chain, and increasingly, the idea that one thing affects the other has seeped through issues, and into general reportage. It is now common enough to say, for example, that growing population numbers in the tropical world may mean more population pressure on the land resources and hence deforestation. But some have gone much further, and climate change has been used to evoke the prospect of political unrest, mass migration, genocide, rising sea levels and coastal inundations, crop failure, hose pipe bans in gardens in the summer and flooded plains in the winter, and the spread of diseases, to mention only some. Interconnectedness gives rise to uncertainty. Uncertainty was predicted by Marsh when he said that it was wrong to assume ‘a force to be insignificant because its measure is unknown or because no physical effect can now be traced to it’ (Marsh 1864: 465). Part of the problem is the slowness of change in the environment compared to the average lifetime, and the shortness of average memory. Coupled with uncertainty is irreversibility – can change be altered by action and technology or simply stopping doing it? The mangled English of Donald Rumsfeld, the erstwhile American Secretary of Defence, did add one useful concept to our repertoire, when he said the outcome of the Iraqi conflict was difficult to predict: There are we know. we don’t unknowns know.

known knowns – things we know There are known unknowns … things know. But there are also unknown – things we don’t know we don’t

It is the ‘unknown unknowns’ of environment deterioration that terrify people. Increasingly, these seemingly intractable issues lead to more extravagant claims and

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social and political polarization, and each declaration of the need for caution has elicited impassioned rebuttals that discredit evidence of impacts or discount deleterious effects. But whichever side one is on, all see that the idea of the conquest of nature is deplorable, and while we enjoy the benefits of technology we can no longer morally justify that mastery.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND ETHICAL DECISIONS As mentioned before, during the last decade one issue more than any other has come to the top of the environmental agenda, and it is climate change. Every act of conservation to some extent requires the alteration of an action or practice that uses some life-supporting process on the planet or promotes the sustained well being of ecosystem functioning, and even social cohesion. Climate change is no different, but it is unique in a number of respects. 1 It focuses on the developed world (North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and the like) and not on distant, far away places, like endangered species, or even tropical deforestation, though increasingly the newly emerging economies of India, China and Brazil are being drawn into the debate. 2 It is commonly accepted that carbon emissions are not the by-product of extreme or unusual actions, but come from the energy that we all use as the basis for our every-day modern living, whether industrial production, travel, food production, domestic heating, trade or recreation. 3 It is theoretically possible to apply a carbon figure (the so-called carbon footprint) to each and every activity, making each person responsible and accountable for every action, from switching on a room light, heating a house, going on a journey or holiday, or choosing one food over another. 4 The act of conservation (reducing the carbon footprint) could be either altruistic or selfsacrificial, or it could be imposed by regulation, or by making it too expensive to be worthwhile.

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Penalties rather than rewards are likely to be the regulatory drivers.

Because of all of the above, individuals in modern Western society find themselves facing ‘ethical’ decisions on a daily basis. For example, should a British consumer buy out-of season tomatoes grown in heated hot houses in nearby Holland, blueberries from Chile, or fresh beans grown by native farmers in Egypt or Kenya, who thereby enjoy an improved standard of living, but which are flown into the country from thousands of miles away? Should one take one’s vacation in one’s own country or fly overseas? If I go on a cruise I expend three times more carbon per kilometre than a flight, or 30 times more than a fast train like Eurostar. Are more expensive designer clothes more ethically responsible than cheaper ones (though the chances are they may come from the same factory in China)? Should all old (pre-1960s) houses be demolished because they are not energy efficient and be replaced by ecohomes, as has been suggested? Constantly, consumers are being bombarded with ethically correct questions and advice, and some advice will be taken on board because, among other things, it makes economic sense to heed it. ‘Ecology’ and ‘economy’ are, after all, derived from the same root word, and they are intimately linked. It is equally possible that advice will be ignored as ‘ethical fatigue’ sets in, resistance to ‘eco-whingeing’ mounts, and advice conflicts with ‘life style’. Coercion is possible in each and every example in the form of green taxes (which may or may not lessen environmental transgressions, but equally may do no more than swell government coffers). It has been suggested that everyone be issued with a ‘Carbon Ration Card’ that records one’s ‘footprint’ and becomes the basis for fining and a penalty once you exceed your limit. The intensity of the debate is extreme. On the one side are the ‘doom-sayers’ who predict future apocalypse, and on the other are the sceptics who make a number of telling points, of which the following are pertinent:

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1 Is it proven beyond doubt that carbon emissions are causing climate change? Natural variability in the climate (so clear in the recent past) has received only limited attention in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predictions, which posit an ever-upward rise of temperatures. Tropical forest clearing certainly accounts for at least 20 percent of the total. A new orthodoxy has set in where contrary views cannot get an airing in scientific journals even in the name of a rational debate. 2 Carbon taxes are usually regressive; that is, they fall most heavily on those least able to pay – the poor and the old – while the more affluent don’t notice them and merely add them on as part of their ‘cost of living’. 3 In the Kyoto agreement to limit emissions, the developing world excluded the burgeoning economies of China, India, and Brazil whose growth tops between 6 and 11 percent per annum. But these countries (China in particular) are going for growth at any environmental cost. The ecologists’ nightmare scenario of some years ago when they posed the question, ‘What if car ownership and use in a country like China with 1.5 billion people reached the same level as is does in the United States?’, is well on the way to becoming a reality. The pollution of their large cities is stifling. While the West agonizes over how to generate electricity by non-polluting, renewable, or nuclear means, China is said to commission one ‘dirty’ coal-fired power station almost weekly. In the new round of talks over limiting emissions, these countries think they should be excluded. After all, they argue, the West has had it chance at raising living standards through industrialization, so why shouldn’t they have their fling? It is truly a moral dilemma. 4 The idea of carbon trading is possibly flawed as it does not reduce emissions, but merely awards subsidies to selected emitters, and carbon offsetting has been described by one critic as ‘a scam’, which resembles the sale of indulgences by the medieval church. 5 Another issue that needs careful monitoring is the substitution of cleaner biofuels for petroleum. The EU in its recent Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) has decreed that 13 percent of all fuel burned in automobiles in the EU must be biofuels by 2020. But the land needed to grow these crops (corn, sugar cane, palm oil and rape seed) has already come into

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competition with the land needed to grow food for a growing world population. As it is, roughly a billion people go hungry now. During the last year 12 oil companies delivered 123 million litres of palm oil to UK filling stations, or put another way, 37.8 million tonnes of vegetable oils have been produced globally, Malaysia and Indonesia accounting for 42 and 44 percent of the total respectively, mainly out of newly cleared forests. The unintended consequences are numerous and verge on the ‘unknown unknowns’. Food riots have occurred in some countries, marginal areas that have been so carefully tended are being ploughed-up anew with disastrous erosional consequences, the forested area is reduced to accommodate fuel crops. As the price of petroleum rises the situation gets worse daily, and makes the ploughing-up and clearing of land more economical to many hard-pressed farmers whose essential products have been undervalued in Western society.3 Consequently, the whole question of using biofuels to reduce petroleum consumption has undergone a revolution recently with protest groups campaigning against biofuel-induced hunger, poverty, and carbon pollution. It is the new ‘environmental’ issue: feed people or fuel my car. 6 A final point that needs consideration is the idea of personal carbon budgets. The degree of intrusion, recording and surveillance that would be needed is a Stalinist nightmare. Not surprisingly, the public has become weary of government intrusion into their daily lives, knowing that governments are prone to lose essential data, and that others can hack into it and misuse it. Individual carbon budgets would be a hackers’ and fraudsters’ dream. Green taxes are increasingly being seen as a revenue-raising ruse with no environmental benefits.

In conclusion one can say, simply, that all conservation and environmental actions, to a greater or lesser extent, entail the curtailment of individual liberties to do as one wants, and most people will accept them for the greater good of humankind. But there are elements in the climate-change agenda which suggest that it could entail a huge diminution of personal liberty and freedom that might be challenged, especially if the global warming and nightmare scenarios do not materialize. Nothing like this has happened in the

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conservation and environmental agenda before. The situation is fluid, and the next decade will hopefully clarify many issues.

THE PRESENT ENVIRONMENT AND THE GAIA HYPOTHESIS Much has been said in environmental circles about the Gaia hypothesis, an idea proposed by James Lovelock (Lovelock 2001), in the early 1960s, that the earth is a complex, homeostatic, regulating feedback system operating unconsciously, that will heal all in the end. He named his ideas after Gaia, the supreme goddess of earth in Greek mythology. Without going into the details of the hypothesis and its qualifications and refinements by Lovelock and his many critics alike, one might say that the idea that ‘earth will abide’ may be tenable in the time-frame of millions of years, but of little comfort in the here and now, or even within the short span of future generational life times. Certainly, there is some evidence that some self-regulation might occur in the constituent parts of the earth’s surface, but it may be highly mobile and rapidly changing, locationally speaking, while populations are largely sedentary and cannot adjust. Whether geographers can add anything to Gaia or to the environmental debate in general, other than point out the interconnectedness of events in place and time, is problematic. In other words is this anything but von Humboldt’s ‘Earth Systems Science’? And can geographers contribute best to the debate by being, simply, geographers?

NOTES 1 In most works on the environment before the 1970s humans were referred to as ‘man’, man here being generic ‘man’ or all human beings who created the non-natural word in contradistinction to God and the creation of the natural world. Curiously, ‘nature’ was (and still is) conventionally feminine.

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2 The concept of utilitarian ‘wise-use’ still exists in the conservation movement in the United States and lives on, in a modified form in the sustained development approach which emphasis economic growth alongside environmental protection. 3 Contrary to popular belief, biofuels are not carbon-neutral. It is estimated that to produce a given amount of biofuel from cleared rainforest may consume many hundreds of times (the exact figure calculated was 420 times) more CO2 than it saves. Certainly new clearing of forest for palm oil plantations contributes 4 percent of the total 20 percent that tropical forest clearing contributes to total global carbon emissions.

REFERENCES Carson, R. [1962] (1982) Silent Spring. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Eden, S. (2003) ‘People and the contemporary environment’ in R.J. Johnston and M.Williams (eds), A Century of British Geography. Oxford: The British Academy/Oxford University Press, pp. 214–243. Friedrich, E. (1904) ‘Wesen und Geographische Verbritung der “Raubwirschaft”’, Petermanns Meiteilungen, 50: 68–79, 92–95. Glacken, C. (1967) Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the end of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hays, S.P. (1959) Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Humboldt, A. von. (1844) Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (trans. from German by E.C. Otté). New York: Harper and Brothers. Jackson, S.T. (2009) ‘Alexander von Humboldt and the general physics of the earth’, Science, 324(5927): 596–597. Leopold, A. (1949) ‘The land ethic’, in A. Leopold (ed.) A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 201–226. Livingstone, D. (1987) Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Lovelock, J. (2001) Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lowenthal, D. (1990) ‘Awareness of human impacts: changing attitudes and emphases’ in B.L. Turner II,

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W.C. Clark, R.W. Kates, J.F. Richards, J.T. Mathews, and W.B. Meyer (eds), The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 121–135. Lowenthal, D. (2000) George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation. Seattle and London: Washington University Press. Malthus, T. (1798) An Essay on the Principle of Population. London: J. Johnson. Marsh, G.P. (1848) Address delivered before the Agricultural Society of Rutland County, September 30, 1847, Rutland, VT. Marsh, G.P. [1864] (1965) ‘Introduction’ in D. Lowenthal (ed.), Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. The John Harvard Library, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. ix–xxix. Pepper, D. (1984) The Roots of Modern Environmentalism. Beckenham: Croom Helm. Pinchot, G. (1910) The Fight for Conservation. New York: Doubleday, Page. Reclus, E. (1868) La Terre. English trans. publ. as A. Keane (ed.), A New Physical Geography. New York: Harper Brothers, 1874.

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Sauer, C.O. (1916). ‘Man’s influence upon the earth’, Geographical Review, 1, 5: 462. Sauer, C.O. (1938a) ‘The theme of plant and animal destruction in economic history’, Journal of Farm Economics, 20: 765–775. Sauer, C.O. (1938b) ‘Destructive exploitation in modern colonial expansion’, Comptes Rendus du Congrés International de Géographie, Amsterdam 1938, 2: 494–99. Thomas, K. (1983) Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. London: Allan Lane. Thomas, W.L. (ed.) (1956) Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weikof, A. (1901) ‘De l’influence de l’homme sur la terre’, Annalés de Géographie, 10: 97–114, 193–215. Williams, M. (1989) Americans and their Forests. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Williams, M. (2003) Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. Chicago: University Press of Chicago.

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45 Development Robert B. Potter and Dennis Conway

OVERVIEW AND INTRODUCTION When considering the genealogy of development, there are many who trace the social and intellectual history of both the term and the concept back to a speech made by the President of the United States, Harry Truman, in 1947 (Escobar 1995; Potter et al. 2008). But in turn, Truman’s speech needs to be set in the context of post-Second World War reconstruction, the emergence of former colonial dependent territories around the world and the creation of several Bretton Woods institutions in the immediate post-war period. Among them, the most significant were the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (later, renamed the World Bank), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and successive rounds of trade negotiations in the form of General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which fostered the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Kothari 2005). While each of these major moments can be seen as causal in the development of the ‘modern’ period and conception of development, as many commentators have been at pains to show, any account of the genealogy of development has to start

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much earlier, specifically with the (Western) Age of Enlightenment. This chapter traces the evolution of the concept of development, from enlightenment thinking to the contemporary period, and in so doing, argues that geography as a strongly Western-centric professional discipline, has shown a surprisingly ambivalent attitude toward ‘development’ as an area of geographical research and teaching (see Gilbert 1987; Potter 1993, 2001). This is surprising given that two-thirds of the contemporary world’s population can be regarded as constituting a ‘poor’, or ‘developing’ realm, the vast majority of whom live in grinding poverty, and are powerless, disenfranchised and neglected as a direct result. Geography’s championing of its ‘relevancy’ to address questions of social justice, help address or solve ‘applied’ problems, or to take an ethical stand and ‘give something back’ to the underprivileged people who are often the focus of human geographical research (Walker 2006, 2007), would appear to have been deliberately, or at least conveniently, forgotten as a part of such ambivalence. It seems likely that the grounding of the modern concept of development in both

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enlightenment thinking and the immediate post-war period of reconstruction and the socalled ‘development mission’ (Escobar 1995) are interconnected strands the legacy of which has served to promulgate a general antipathy towards development as a topic on the part of many professional geographers who earn their living in the academies of rich nations. This stance can also be seen as part of a well-established tendency to downgrade or even discourage, policy-related academic enquiry. It can also be suggested that the relatively scant attention paid to matters pertaining to poverty, inequality and class in substantial sub-areas of human geography since the 1980s may be seen as a correlate of some of the negative and pejorative attitudes shown towards development geography (Potter 2001). In the concluding section, however, our assessment is somewhat more positive as, since the turn of the millennium, matters seem to have been changing for the better. There are signs that the geographical study of critical development-oriented issues is starting to become more valued and more central to geography as a whole. In addition, other development commentators – development economists among them – have incorporated geographical perspectives into their analytical frames, and advocated solutions that seriously engage spatial issues and spatio-temporal relationships, thereby adding further legitimacy to geography’s growing ‘relevance’ to development scholarship. We feel this definitely needs to be the case in the twenty-first century; an era threatened by the ‘unruly’ geographical and environmental realities of globalization, transnationality, global conflict and climate change. But we start less controversially by considering the genealogy of development itself, as a necessary precursor to evaluating what geographers (and other social scientists with geographically derived ideas) have made of this field of knowledge and applied endeavour since the 1940s.

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEVELOPMENT We turn now to the evolution of theory and practice in the field that is commonly referred to as ‘development studies’. But first, it serves our purpose to provide a brief definition of the process of ‘development’ as it is generally conceptualized. The account presented in this section follows that presented by Potter et al. (2008). ‘Development’ as a word is almost ubiquitous within the English language. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines ‘development’ as a ‘(g)radual unfolding, fuller working out; growth; evolution … well-grown state, stage of advancement; product; more elaborate form … Development area, one suffering from or liable to severe unemployment’. In the societal domain of social, economic and political change, it is tempting to define development as socio-economic change that occurs either for the better or for the worse (Potter et al. 2008); but ultimately it must be assumed that progressive and effective development represents change that is intended to lead to the betterment of the lives of the majority around the world – or in a given territory at least. Presumably from the dawn of civilization, some members of society have endeavored to foresee and guide change in ways that improve the lives of the general population, or at least prescribed segments of it, and in that sense were attempting to guide development and improve human welfare. But as noted in the introduction, many writers situate the origins of the modern process of development as practiced by states, international development agencies and international organizations such as non-governmental organizations in a speech made by the President of the United States, Harry Truman, in 1949, in which he employed the term ‘underdeveloped areas’ to describe the regions of the globe that were shortly to be known as the ‘Third World’. In this address, Truman set out what he saw as the duty of the

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West to bring ‘development’ to such relatively underdeveloped nations. Truman maintained that the underdeveloped world’s poverty is ‘a handicap and threat both to them and more prosperous areas … greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge’. As colonialism can be defined as the direct political control and administration of an overseas territory by a foreign state, then effectively Truman was establishing a new colonial, or neo-colonial, role for the United States in its relationship with the newly independent countries that were emerging via the process of decolonization (Potter et al. 2008). In other words, Truman was encouraging so-called ‘underdeveloped nations’ to recognize their condition and to turn to the United States for long-term assistance. For many Western governments, particularly former colonial powers, such views represented a continuation of the late colonial mission to develop colonial peoples within the concept of trusteeship (Cowan and Shenton 1996). Trusteeship can be defined as the holding of property or capital on behalf of another person or group, with the belief that the latter will be better able to look after themselves at some juncture in the future. But in reality, the origins of modern development lay in an earlier period. Specifically, the recognition of the need for development was closely linked with the rise of rationalism and humanism in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively. During this period, the simple definition of development as change became transformed into a more directed and logical form of evolution. Collectively, this period is referred to as the ‘Enlightenment’; a period of European intellectual history that continued through most of the eighteenth century (Power 2003). In broad terms, enlightenment-thinking stressed the belief that it was science and rational thinking that could help human groups progress from barbarianism to civilization

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and from undeveloped to developed. It was argued that by applying rational, scientific thought to the world, change would become more ordered, more predictable and more valuable. Such new perspectives challenged the power of the clergy and by way of substitution represented the rise of a secular intelligencia. A number of themes constituted enlightenment-thinking: the primacy of reason/rationalism; the belief in empiricism; the concept of universal science and reason; the idea of orderly progress; the championing of new freedoms and the ethic of secularism (Power 2003). Those who could not embrace, utilize or adapt to such views were thought of as ‘traditional’, ‘backward’ or ‘uncivilized’. As an example, the Australian Aborigines were denied rights to the land they occupied by the colonizing British in 1788, because they did not organise and farm it in what the British regarded as a systematic, rational way; that is, in what was construed as a ‘Western’ manner (Potter et al. 2008). It was in this fashion, and at this juncture, that the whole idea of development became directly associated with Western values and ideologies. Thus, Power (2003: 73) notes that the ‘emergence of an idea of “the West” was also important to the Enlightenment … it was a very European affair which put Europe and European intellectuals at the very pinnacle of human achievement’. Thus, development was seen as being directly linked to Western religion, science, rationality and principles of justice. It is this notion of development that permeated the colonial mission, firmly equating development with an ordered progress towards a set of standards laid down by the West; or as Esteva views it, ‘robbing people of different cultures of the opportunity to define the terms of their social life’ (1992: 9). Little or no recognition was given to the fact that ‘traditional’ societies had always been responsive to new and more adaptive and productive types of development – had they not done so, they would not have survived. Furthermore, the

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continued economic exploitation of the colonies by their ‘mother countries’ made it virtually impossible for such ‘colonial’ development to meet Western standards and achieve Western levels. In a very real sense, colonial underdevelopment was the ‘maidservant’ of imperial development; an argument chronicled below that in the 1960s would be re-cast as classical ‘dependency theory’ among Latin American peripheral excolonies (Conway and Heynen 2007). Some refer to the ‘development mission’ that stemmed from the post-war period, and which it is argued gave rise to a belief in the process of development, as one of progressive and positive change. Supporters of this view argue that in overall terms the lives of ordinary people around the world have improved over the last 60 years. This view gives rise to a pro-development stance. The extreme opposing argument is that such development initiatives have not worked effectively in the past, and indeed, by definition, that the types of development attempted could never ultimately be successful. This line of argument is referred to as ‘anti-development’, and is associated with what has been described as an ‘impasse’ in development studies, and a crisis in development thinking (as passionately argued by Amin (1977, 1990, 2008) in his extremely severe critiques of sub-Saharan Africa’s colonial and post-colonial development experiences). It has also been associated with essentially pejorative views of development geography and development studies (Potter et al. 2008). From the 1940s and the emergence of the concept and practice of development to the present, successive eras of developmentthinking have emerged, each different from its predecessor(s). And, each of these eras of thinking in respect of the field of development studies was broadly associated with an ascendant paradigm of geography together with its associated epistemologies. But at each stage, we argue that the geographical study of development-related issues was generally accorded a lower status in Anglo-European dominated professional

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geography than might have been anticipated on the basis of the domain’s global salience. This succession of stages is fully elaborated in the next major section on a decade-bydecade basis. While such arguments are necessarily generalized, it is believed that they hold credence nonetheless.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEVELOPMENT GEOGRAPHY FROM THE 1940s TO THE PRESENT The 1940s: development emerges/colonial, military, regional and tropical geography It has previously been noted that the modern roots of development discourse can be traced to the immediate post-Second World War era, the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions and the speech made by US President Truman in 1947. In geography, this period of emergence was characterised by forms of enquiry which may be described as ‘colonial’, ‘military’, ‘tropical’ and regional geographies. As a precursor, the origins of what was to become development geography lay in exploration and discovery during the Victorian era (Power and Sidaway 2004), and this gave rise to what is referred to as ‘colonial’ geography. The Second World War (1939–1945) witnessed involuntary travel to developing regions by a number of British geographers in war time military service; for example, Charles Fisher served in Singapore, Alan Mountjoy in Egypt and the Maghreb and Ben Farmer in India, Ceylon and Singapore. In the 1940s and 1950s others helped produce Naval Intelligence Handbooks as part of the reconstruction effort in recovering war zones (Driver 2001; Power and Sidaway 2004). Power and Sidaway also comment that there was a restatement of colonial geography in the UK from 1945 to 1948 directing it into the service of boosting colonial production, rather than recording exploration.

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The main restatement of development in ‘other men’s worlds’ after the Second World War, however, was that of ‘tropical geography’. The French geographer Pierre Gourou’s (1947) book under that title was most influential, with his text considering the physical circumstances of the wet tropics before turning to agriculture and industrial possibilities. Further attesting to this change of theme, the Malayan Journal of Tropical Geography was launched in the early 1950s (Driver and Yeoh 2000; Power and Sidaway 2004). However, as is clearly attested by Gourou’s text, tropical geography had little in the way of substantive theoretical underpinnings, and the emergence of the concept of ‘underdevelopment’ after Truman’s speech served to question the very assumptions of tropical geography. Indeed, Power and Sidaway (2004) firmly believe it was colonial and tropical geography of the immediate postSecond World War era that gave way to development geography in the 1960s and 1970s. Prior to the 1960s, the paradigm and epistemology of geography was largely based on the eclectic empiricism of regional geography. Notwithstanding tropical geography’s brief atheoretical‚ ‘non-start’, this idea of ‘geographical differences’ between the development trajectories of temperate and tropical worlds would eventually re-emerge and be retheorised by development economists such as Sachs and Warner (2001) and Gallup et al. (1999), whose works we will refer to in later accounts of these more contemporary decades. The low regard in which geography conducted overseas was generally held at this time is amply illustrated by Wooldridge’s Presidential Address to the Annual Meeting of the Institute of British Geographers (IBG) in 1950. In ‘[r]eflections on regional geography in teaching and research’, Wooldridge (1950: 9) referred to ‘[t]he cult, or rather the disease of what I would call ‘otherwhereitis’ [emphasis added], maintaining that this ‘is a real peril to the well-being of geography … At its worst it can only lead to a species of egotistic, impressionistic

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geography.’ In the same address, Wooldridge argued that [t]o some of us the human geography of Somerset is more interesting and in many ways more significant than that of say, Somaliland, and though we should wish both to be studied, it is the former, in general which is neglected. The physical difficulties of doing so are admittedly less, but the intellectual difficulties are incomparatively greater. Wooldridge 1950: 7 (emphasis added).

As we shall record, such startling parochical views of pressing development issues continued to affect much of mainstream geography through to the 2000s.

1950s: Neo-classical economics and development as economic growth/geography as spatial science The ‘modern notion of development’ expressed by Truman in 1947 was implicitly regarded as leading to the ultimate goal of recapturing the historical–developmental experience of the First World in the Third World. It is therefore not surprising that, in its early manifestation in the 1950s, development became synonymous with national economic growth, and thereby effectively would be achieved by economic transformations. This ‘traditional’ approach to the study of development derives from classical and neoclassical economics and its ‘reductionist’ tenets which have dominated policy thinking at the global and national scales to this day. Classical economic theory was firmly based on the writings of Adam Smith (1723–1790) and David Ricardo (1772–1823). Both Smith and Ricardo equated economic development with the growth of world trade and the law of comparative advantage. Neoclassical theories, those having generally been produced since 1945, take an essentially similar worldview, stressing the importance of liberating world trade as the essential path to growth and development.

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In this framework, underdevelopment is an initial state beyond which Western industrial nations have managed to progress. It also envisages that the experience of the West can assist other countries to catch up by sharing both capital and technology. The avowed intention, therefore, is to bring developing countries to the modern age of capitalism and liberal democracy. Hirschman (1958) in his volume The Strategy of Economic Development, saw spatially polarized growth as inevitable, something that would be corrected by subsequent equilibrating market adjustments. Hirschman’s ideas can be seen as part of a wider modernization paradigm, which came into vogue during the 1950s and 1960s. This paradigm was grounded in the view that the gaps in development that exist between the developed and developing worlds can gradually be overcome on an imitative basis. In an empirical context, sets of indices that were held to reflect modernization were mapped and/or subjected to multivariate statistical analysis to reveal ‘modernization surfaces’, and these were constructed for a variety of developing countries. Toward the end of the 1950s, Rostow’s (1960) classic The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto advocated urban-industrial nodes as engines of growth and development for the rural-dominated economies of the Third World (or ‘Global South’ as it later came to be known). As a product of the Cold War it served as the preeminent theory of modernization and Western capitalism to appear at the end of the 1950s. Like Hirschman, all such approaches placed absolute faith on the existence of a linear and rational path to development, based on Western positivism and science, and the possibility that all nations could follow this in an unconstrained manner. With direct links back to the Enlightenment, this top-down approach was enthusiastically promoted during the 1950s, through to the 1960s by the ‘development establishment’ – Western nation’s aid agencies, international development agencies and their cadres of development economists. Taken together, many writers refer to these theories

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as representing ‘Eurocentric development thinking’ (Hettne 1995). In geography the period was associated with the spread of what is still referred to as the ‘new geography’, based on the search for spatial models and quantitative generalizations under the epistemology of logical positivism and the scientific method (Johnston et al. 1994). Thus the same enlightenment views that were promoting neo-classically inspired economics to consider development as the quantitative growth of GDP per capita were underpinning quantitative geography. Regional geography was more and more rejected as old-fashioned and descriptive, and systematic branches such as urban and economic geography grew and flourished. Economic principles started to be applied to spatial issues, as in central place theory, agricultural and industrial location theory, growth-pole planning and city-size distributions. These approaches were all strongly linked to ‘top-down’ assumptions of growth from large to smaller urban places within the national and international urban hierarchies, the assumed outcomes that were being mapped in the form of modernization surfaces, and urban planning and development projects in places like Venezuela and Chile which relied on American spatial consultants’ advocacy of growth pole theories (notably Friedmann 1966, 1969). It might have been imagined that in the wake of de-colonialism in the 1960s, issues of development would have been regarded as central to emergent professional geography. But the new geography was strongly AngloAmerican in its orientation, amounting to a Kuhnian revolution that effectively ‘dethroned’ regional geography (Potter 2001). This is witnessed by the account of an active professional participant of the time, Mansell Prothero, in respect of a paper he submitted for presentation at the 1960 IBG Annual Conference. In ‘Geography Overseas’, Prothero argued that in the immediate postcolonial period, stronger links should be forged with geography departments overseas, and that the IBG should play an important

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role in this. Mansell Prothero notes how the paper was summarily rejected with the response that it would be ‘of insufficient interest to members’ (Prothero pers. comm. cited in Potter 2001). Saliently, Prothero concluded that such negative and pejorative views of overseas geography were ‘endemic and have characterised British geography over all the time that I have been involved, from 1947 onward’ (Potter 2001: 424).

1960s: Neo-Marxist and radical dependency approaches to development/diffusion of the quantitative new geography Emerging out of Latin American academics’ interests in their own societal underdevelopment at the hands of Anglo-American industrial dominance, the dependencia, or dependency school amounted to a direct rebuttal of the neo-classicism of the modernization paradigm (Conway and Heynen 2007). Although some consider that dependency theory developed as a voice from the Third World, others have maintained that its most cogent formulation represents Eurocentric development thinking by virtue of the origins of its most cited author, the German-born economist Andre Gunder Frank. Thus, although in the English-speaking world dependency theory drew almost exclusively on the work of Frank, the main body of contributions derived from Latin America and the Caribbean was much more geographically sensitive, and more widely based on political– economic and social theory as well as Marxist and neo-Marxist tenets (Potter et al. 2008). Before the 1960s, little attention had been paid to the Marxian tradition of social theorizing. The intellectual and political revival of interest in Marx in the 1960s was brought about by a number of factors. It was partly to do with America’s military involvement in Vietnam, the collapse of consensus politics due to the civil rights movement, as well as what was seen as the moribund nature of academic social science in the United States

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and Europe. What is referred to as the ‘New Left’ emerged as a broad progressive movement, which linked directly to the struggles of Third World anti-colonial movements. The radical approach to development had its origins in the writings of Latin American and Caribbean radical structuralists, who focused their explanations on the unseen structures that were shaping the global political economy and giving rise to grave inequalities. Thus, the approach was the outcome of the convergence of Marxist and neo-Marxist ideas on Latin American and Caribbean writings about ‘the development of underdevelopment’. Frank’s 1966 article under that title, and his book, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, (1967) emerged as key writings. Frank had researched in Mexico, Chile and Brazil and he came to the conclusion that development and underdevelopment are the predictable outcome and manifestation of the contradictions of the capitalist system of development: quite simply, for there to be winners, there had to be losers. The thesis presented by Frank was devastatingly simple: that the condition of developing countries is not the outcome of tradition, inertia, misfortune, climatic conditions and such like, but rather a reflection of the manner of their peripheral incorporation into the global capitalist system. Viewed in this manner, socalled underdevelopment, and associated societal dualism and inequality are the direct outcomes and reciprocal of development elsewhere in the core(s). The only real ‘development alternative’ for such peripheral nations is to weaken the grip of the global system by means of trade barriers, controls on transnational corporations and the formation of regional trading areas, along with the encouragement of import substitution industrialization and local or indigenous production and development. Despite this radical ferment in the wider social sciences in the 1960s, it was the quantitative revolution that was coming to full fruition in geography, and as noted in Johnston et al. (1994), pre-1970s geography

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experienced little in the way of a radical critique. The movement towards logical positivism as the epistemological foundation of the new geography in the 1960s, the demise of regional geography and the maintenance of a strong Euro-American focus were key traits of the time. The subject matter of geography remained largely apolitical focussing on examinations of spatial patterns rather than on explanations of underlying structural processes. It would be the early 1970s before a distinctly political and Marxist/neo-Marxist path in ‘geographicalthinking’ about development, social justice and social inequality would emerge.

1970s: Alternative approaches to development/radical-structuralist and humanist approaches in geography The emergence of a radical approach in geography was heralded by the publication of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography out of Clark University in 1969 and of David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City in 1973. Harvey employed the concept of social surplus to show how urban and regional spatial forms are the outcome of the exploititative capitalist world system. Although the work looked at the historical materialist spread of urbanism from the ‘cradles of civilization’, the overall orientation of this socialist critique was to explain contemporary urban and regional problems in advanced capitalist nations. The importance of class struggles and the accumulation of surpus value in space were central to Harvey’s and others’ analyses and this radical critique of classicalmodernist tenets gave rise to an increasing acceptance of political–economic‚ ‘structuralist’ approaches in human geography by the late 1970s and 1980s. Such an orientation was more encouraging to the emergence of development geography as a sub-discipline, although the term itself was little used. Rather, the collective geographical expressions ‘Third World’ and ‘Developing

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Countries‘, ‘Less Developed Counries’ were more frequently encountered in ‘geography of development’ discourses in the academy and among the ‘development establishment’, The inaugeration of the Developing Areas Research Group (DARG) of the IBG in the UK notably dates from the 1970s. However, dissatisfaction with the so-called objectivity of the quantitative revolution and logical positivism also gave rise to an alternative movement towards a more peopleoriented humanistic geography in the 1970s. This approach placed a new emphasis on human agency, experience, consciousness and creativity (Johnston et al. 1994). The early development of humanism was paralled by the rise of behavoural geography, which saw the investigation of space preferences and mental maps, including in some developing nations. The epistemologies associated with the humanistic and radical movements started to bring some aspects of human geography more into line with what was going on in development studies. The expression ‘another development’ is frequently used to denote the watershed in thinking which characterized development at the same juncture (Hettne 1995). From the mid-1970s, a growing critique of top-down, neo-classical development policies argued that such approaches had merely replaced concentration at one locality with concentrated deconcentration at a limited number of new localities. Specifically, in the 1970s, assertions that there was only one linear path to development, and that development is the same thing as economic growth, came to be seriously challenged. Liberal and radical commentators alike averred that top-down approaches to development were acting as the servants of multinational corporate capital. Other writers argued that what had been achieved in the past was economic growth without the redistribution that was needed for true development (Hettne 1995). It was argued that development had been dominated by purely functional concerns relating to economic efficiency and modernity, with all too little consideration having been given to

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the territorial (indigenous) bases of development and change. From 1975 a major new paradigm came to the fore, described as ‘development from below’, which advocated the need to counter the destructive tendencies, or ‘backwash’ effects, of top-down (externally driven) development and the creation of dynamic local development impulses within regions and communities. The first required changes in the interaction between different regions and countries; the second demanded the creation of endogenous factors of change for increasing equity and developmental dynamics. Policy emphasis, therefore, needed to be oriented towards territorially organized, basic-needs services; rural and village development; labour-intensive activities; small and medium-sized projects and technology, permitting the full employment of regional human, natural and institutional resources on a territorially integrated basis (Stohr 1981). The provision of basic needs, as another ‘bottom-up’ development strategy, also became a major focus during the early 1970s. The idea of basic needs originated with a group of Latin American theorists, and was officially launched at the International Labour Organization’s World Employment Conference held in 1976. The approach stressed the importance of creating employment over and above the creation of economic growth. This was because the economic growth that had occurred in developing countries seemed to have gone hand in hand with increases in relative poverty. The argument was that a redistribution of wealth that narrowed inequalities needed to accompany growth. Another major development from the mid1970s was the emergence of environmental consciousness in the arena of development thinking (Hettne 1995), although this was to come to full fruition in the 1980s. Rachael Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring had already been extremely influential in drawing attention to the environmental outcomes of the increasing use of insecticides in agriculture. In 1972 Meadow et al’s Limits of Growth

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examined the complex relationships between economic growth, population and environmental circumstances. This was the start of the environmental movement in development that would lead to the Brundtland Commission on Environment and Development in 1987. It was at this stage that principles of environmental sustainability became a political issue in the development debate. The Brundtland Commission provided the much-quoted definition of sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. This is a far cry from the unilinear, Eurocentric functional perspectives advanced during the 1960s and 1970s. The essential point is that it was in the 1970s that an alignment of much greater potential occurred between the concerns of human geographers and those of specialists interested in development studies, so that by the end of the decade, the conditions for the emergence of a distinct ‘development geography’ had been established.

1980s: The rise of the New Right and neo-liberalism/the cultural turn in geography A salient characteristic of the 1980s was the new interest that was shown in cultural and historical geography, both of these branches having been largely downgraded during the quantitative revolution with its stress on spatial relations rather than environmental contexts; one of the traditional concerns of cultural geographers. As well as issues of nationality and identity, there was a renewed interest in landscape and the cultural geography of multiculturalism. But again, geographically, the primary emphasis was placed on contemporary urban societies in Europe and North America (Johnston et al. 1994). Somewhat later, interest was shown in cultures of commodities and consumption. Meanwhile in the field of development, the 1980s were characterized by the rise of what can be referred to as the ‘New Right’ (in

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Europe) or ‘Neocons’ (in the United States) and the neo-liberal agenda. Arguing that the Keynesian model of social democratic capitalism with its supportive welfare state, together with the trade unions and state bureaucracies, had destabilized the market system, and religiously following the Chicago school economist Thomas Friedman’s (2007) ‘the world is flat’ notion among other neoliberal ‘faiths’ (Cox 1999), the New Right sung the praises of the unrestrained power of the unregulated free market. In so doing, neoliberalism argued both for the global capitalist market’s economic efficiency and its role in liberating the choices of individuals so that they could reach their potential in terms of economic well being. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund pressed for economic liberalization, the elimination of market imperfections and market-inhibiting social institutions. Also, their ’Structural Adjustment Programmes’ (SAPs) enforced a ‘one-size-fits-all’ set of ‘conditionalities’ that ensured the obedience of many by-now severely indebted Third World (or Global South, as their global domain had become known) governments, in order to open their economies to external capital and commerce. In Britain, full-blown neo-liberalism was witnessed by Margaret Thatcher’s ‘popular capitalism’, and in the United States in the guise of Reaganomics (Conway and Heynen 2006; Potter et al. 2008). Both Reagan and Thatcher pushed for the extension of the private market into public-sector institutions such as hospitals, schools and universities. They also ushered in ‘de-regulation’ and set in motion the scaling back of the legal instruments of governmental oversight, that had supposedly limited the profitable capabilities of their private sectors, but would eventually – and precipitated by a severe financial crisis in the United States – bring about a major global recession in the latter half of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and effectively signal neo-liberalism’s demise. However, despite the emergence of common ground in some areas of concern between geography and development studies as

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detailed above, in the mid-1980s to early 1990s, reviews of teaching and research on the geography of development showed that most British geography departments did not have a single member of staff whose research/ teaching was located primarily outside of the Euro-American realm. A survey conducted at the time showed that only 13 departments out of 81 had more than one staff member teaching about developing countries. Eleven departments had just one specialist and 57 did not have any. Likewise, among geographers listed in the IBG Register of Research 1991, only 6.27 percent could be regarded as having a prime interest in development issues (Potter and Unwin 1988; Unwin and Potter 1992).

1990s: Anti-, post- and beyond-development/ post-modernism in geography Post-modernism emerged as an alternative paradigm in the social sciences at the start of the 1990s, not least in geography, with David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1990) becoming one of the most cited books dealing with this ‘challenging’ paradigm. The approach is associated with the rejection of the meta-theories and meta-narratives associated with high modernity, and considerable emphasis was placed on a wide range of views, discourses and voices (Johnston et al. 1994). The fear was expressed early on that the post-modern ‘gaze’ of human geographers might be placed entirely on Western advanced societies, since many traditional societies had not fully experienced ‘modernity’. But the true significance of postmodernity involves its critique of the global reach of accumulation under late capitalism. It is indeed tempting to suggest that the postmodern turn led to the questioning of the concept and practice of development itself, in terms of anti-, post- and beyond-development stances. The question asked was whether the development mission could ever have been successful, given its Eurocentric provenance (Esteva 1992; Escobar 1995; Blaikie 2000).

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Turning to the wider context, abandoning the evolutionary and deterministic modernization paradigm associated historically with the Enlightenment opens up several post-modern options for future development, some of which have been touched on in the previous section on alternative approaches to development. Globally speaking, we are entering a post-modern age, associated with the rise of knowledge-based post-industrial economies – whether advanced, emerging, re-structuring or re-emerging – where the global-to-local links are deepening and spreading ever wider. The age is also associated with greater plurality and hybridity. Viewed in simple terms, the relevance of post-modernity to both geography and development studies derives from moving away from an era dominated by notions of modernity, economic ‘reductionism’ and similarly determined measurement yardsticks of ‘progress’ and change (Yapa 1992, 1998). It involves the rejection of modernism and a re-appreciation of pre-modern and vernacular forms, as well as the creation of distinctly new post-structuralist outcomes (Yapa 1996). It can be seen as a reaction against the functionalism and austerity of the modern period’s lens in favour of a heterogeneity of styles, drawing on the past and on contemporary mass cultures. It found fault with the whole ethos of the modern period which privileged the metropolitan over the provinces, the developed over the developing worlds, North America over the Pacific Rim, the professional expert over the general populace and men over women (Desai and Potter 2006, 2008; Potter et al. 2008). Notably, in one post-structuralist deconstruction (Yapa 2002), the discipline of geography and its ‘spatial tradition’ was even accused of exacerbating poverty in the Global South’s Third World. As a counter-narrative, therefore, the postmodern ‘gaze’ potentially involves a diversity of approaches, which may serve to empower others’ voices and cultures. A strong emphasis on bottom-up, non-hierarchical growth strategies, which endeavour to get away from the international sameness, depthlessness and

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ahistoricism of the modern epoch are part and parcel of the post-modern age. The emphasis should be placed on growth in smaller places rather than bigger, and in the periphery and newly industrializing countries and ‘emerging markets’, not the cores that were in ascendance in the twentieth-century global system of the modern epoch. However, although post-modernism (and post-structuralism) may in certain respects be seen in this optimistic manner, as a liberating force associated with small-scale nonhierarchical development and participatory change, there is another distinct facet to the trend of post-modernism. As well as the rejection of the modern and a hankering for the pre-modern, there is the establishment of ‘after the modern’. This is frequently interpreted as ‘consumerist post-modernism’, involving the celebration of commercialism, commercial vulgarity, the glorification of consumption and the related expression of the self. These socio-cultural trends, though more hypothetical than empirically generalizable as predictable societal transformations of the underprivileged majorities in the ‘stillunderdeveloped world’, represent somewhat disturbing facets of late capitalism that may or may not become pertinent to both development experts – practitioners and human geographers in the next decades of the twenty-first century.

2000 and beyond: global development and the pressing need for a truly global geography As outlined in the foregoing account, although since 1970 there have been growing potential points of linkage between an emergent development geography and the rest of human geography – in terms of radical structuralism, humanism, alternative paradigms and the post-modern critique – overall, pejorative views of development geography and development studies have been common in geography since the 1950s. As was so crudely expressed by Wooldridge, development as a

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topic has been regarded as less theoretically sophisticated and less intellectually challenging, presumably because of its policy orientation and the disease of ‘otherwhereitis’, or in other words due to what can only be described as disciplinary parochialism: odd for a discipline that purports to be about the world. Prothero noted that otherwhereitis was a condition that he had long suffered and from which he never wished to recover (pers. comm. cited in Potter 2001). However, in this final section we conclude that since the turn of the new millennium or thereabouts, there have emerged encouraging grounds for optimism, both inside the discipline and in the development establishment more widely. There are definite signs of a more positive view of development-related issues in geography, albeit borne out of the pressing global developmental geopolitical crises that the world currently faces. This can be seen from the accounts of developments in the 1970s to the 1990s presented above, where it has become more evident that many of the concerns of all manner of geographers are now more global. In addition, ‘development scholars’ in cognate disciplines such as sociology, economics, anthropology – and a geographer-cum-physiologist (Diamond 1997, 2005) have embraced geographical perspectives in their examinations of regional, national and global development, so that geography and development are no longer such ‘estranged bedfellows’(Gallup et al. 1999; Sachs 1999; Sachs and Warner 2001). Reminiscent of earlier concerns about the development potential of tropical lands expressed by the likes of Pierre Gourou (1947), Jeffrey Sachs and his colleagues utilized contemporary economic (geography) insights to point out how tropical regions, even with abundant resource bases, had not fared well in recent decades when compared with resource-poor temperate regions. The former’s overall high population densities and rapid population growth trajectories were hindering them also. They, in effect, resuscitated ‘tropical geography’s’ notions, as they stressed the polarity in the structural

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relationships between geography and economic development, with the temperate regions of the Global North continuing to enjoy the considerable advantages over the tropical regions of the Global South that had prevailed over the last two centuries (Gallup et al. 1999; Sachs and Warner 2001). Also reflecting upon the world’s wide (and widening) geographical differences in geoeconomic and geo-political advantages, Jared Diamond (1997, 2005), a geographer and physiologist, and Blaut (1993) a historical geographer, offered two ‘similar-but-different’ explanations of how the peoples of the Eurasian continent in general (Diamond), and Europe in particular (Blaut) prospered through the use of their technological and geographical advantages to dominate and exploit the other continents. Blaut went further, however, in limiting Europe’s ‘advantages’ over its Asian neighbors to the period from colonial times to the end of the twentieth century, after which time Asia would regain the globally dominant position its civilizations had enjoyed prior to the Rennaissance and Middle Ages. The emergence of today’s BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India and China – as rapidly emerging economic giants, is another derivative idea of this ‘changing of the guard’ in the new world order of the twenty-first century (Wilson and Purushothaman 2003). Adding to the mix and providing further ‘good news’ on this front, development issues are assuming a more central place within geography as a discipline, because mainstream human geography, and revitalized subdisciplinary enquiry into human–environment relationships and biophysical/environmental patterns and processes are becoming increasingly global and international in their focuses. Related to the latter, a growing body of multidisciplinary environmental change research has embraced geographical approaches, such as geographic information science (GIS) and remote-sensing analysis, in which population dynamics and the ‘development’ of rural and forested landscapes feature prominently (Liverman et al. 1998; Moran and

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Ostrom 2005). Thus, inside and beyond geography’s boundaries, globalization, development and environmental change research currently present an exciting frontier of opportunity for inter- and multidisciplinary research in which spatio-temporal issues are central to contextual differentiation and to conceptual explanation and prediction (Conway 2004). The challenges to mega-theorizing, greater openness to subjectivity and individuality and the destructive and distressing realities of globalization and neo-liberalism have all been effective generators or ‘wake-up calls.’ It is argued that two principal contemporary sets of forces are at work in this re-evaluation and re-thinking. First, in at least some quarters, there appears to be increasing public consciousness concerning the pressing global realities of poverty and debt. This is best exemplified by the Millennium Development Goals, which aim by 2015 to reduce poverty and underdevelopment by stated amounts; for example, halving the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty, and enrolling all children in primary education. This is also witnessed in the Make Poverty History campaign and the efforts of the Jubilee 2000 Coalition in respect of debt cancellation/reduction. This is further exemplified by the major anti-development and anti-globalization protests that have occurred at major economic summits since 1999 – the ‘Battle for Seattle’ and successive Global Economic Forums and WTO summits. The world is twice as unequal as it was 30 years ago (Potter et al. 2008) and this huge global geographical inequality is now just too big to be allowed to continue. Second, the growth of within-state sectionalism – localism, regionalism and ethnic separatism – has brought an unsettling degree of fragmentation to the world (Agnew 2006). When coupled with the emerging (some would say ‘promoted’) concerns about global terrorism since 11 September 2001, this fragmentation has aided and abetted a ‘globalization of fear’ as a new global geopolitical

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agenda in which global-to-local security imperatives have become inescapably intertwined with heightened social tensions, notably suspicion, fear and distrust. Also, there has been a proliferation of military responses, which has taken precedence over geo-political discourse and negotiation. In short, ‘fear’ has become a twenty-first century ‘technology of governance and authority’ (Miller 2006), at the expense of reasoned geo-political discourse concerning crisis alleviation and equitable development. Thus, profound debates, critiques and repositionings concerning globalization, transnationalism, poverty and terrorism in the post-colonial, post-modern and post-structuralist eras need to be engaged and incorporated into all branches of contemporary human geography. The relatively recent emergence of a concern with neo-liberalism in economic geography exemplifies this (Dicken 2003; Harvey 2005; Conway and Heynen 2006). The world is now so deeply unequal that the need for a truly global geography has never been greater. So much so that geographers need to be the proud carriers of Wooldridge’s ‘otherwhereitis’, if they are to advance understanding of the pressing issues that face the contemporary world.

REFERENCES Agnew, J. (2006) ‘Globalization has a home address: the geopolitics of globalization’ in D. Conway and N. Heynen (eds), Globalization’s Contradictions: Geographies of Discipline, Destruction and Transformation. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, pp. 127–143. Amin, S. (1977) Imperialism and Unequal Development. New York: Monthly Review Press. Amin, S. (1990) Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure. Tokyo: United Nations University Press; London: Zed Books. Amin, S. (2008) The World We Wish to See: Revolutionary Objectives in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. Blaikie, P. (2000) ‘Development, post-, anti-, and populist: a critical review’, Environment and Planning A, 32: 1033–1050.

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Blaut, J.M. (1993) The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guildford. Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring. Ballentine: New York. Conway, D. (2004) ‘On being part of population geography’s future: population-environment relations and inter-science initiatives’, Population, Space and Place, 10: 295–302. Conway, D. and Heynen, N. (eds) (2006) Globalization’s Contradictions: geographies of discipline, destruction and transformation. London: Routledge. Conway, D. and Heynen, N. (2007) ‘Dependency theories: from ECLA to André Gunder Frank and beyond’ in V. Desai and R.B. Potter (eds), The Companion to Development Studies, 2nd edn. London: Hodder Arnold, pp. 92–95. Cowan, M. and Shenton, R. (1996) Doctrines of Development. London: Routledge. Cox, H. (1999) ‘The market as god’, The Atlantic Monthly, 283, 18–23, March 1999. Desai, V. and Potter, R.B. (2006) Doing Development Research. London, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Desai, V. and Potter, R.B. (2008) The Companion to Development Studies, 2nd edn. Hodder-Arnold: London. Diamond, J.M. (1997) Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton. Diamond, J.M. (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking. Dicken, P. (2003) Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century, 4th edn. New York: Guildford Driver, F. (2001) Geography Militant. Oxford: Blackwell. Driver, F. and Yeoh, B. (2000) ‘Constructing the tropics: introduction’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 21: 1–5. Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development: the Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press: Princeton New Jersey. Esteva, G. (1992) ‘Development’ in W. Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary. London: Zed Books, pp. 6–25. Frank, A.G. (1966) ‘The development of underdevelopment’, Monthly Review, 18: 17–31. Frank, A.G. (1967) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil. New York: Monthly Review Press. Friedman, T.L. (2007) The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty First Century. New York: Picador/ Farrar Strouse and Giroux.

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Friedmann, J. (1966) Regional Development Policy: A Case Study of Venzuela. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Friedmann, J. (1969) Urban and Regional Development in Chile: a Case Study of Innovative Planning. Santiago: The Ford Foundation Urban and Regional Development Program in Chile. Gallup, J.L., Sachs, J.D. and Mellinger, A.D. (1999) ‘Geography and economic development’, International Regional Science Review, 22: 179–232. Gilbert, A. (1987) ‘Research policy review 15: from Little Englanders to Big Englanders: thoughts on the relevance of relevant research’, Environment and Planning A: 19, 143–151. Gourou, P. (1947) Les Pays Tropicaux: Principes d’une Geographie Humaine et Economique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold. Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hettne, B. (1995) Development Theory and the Three Worlds, 2nd edn. Harlow: Longman Scientific and Technical. Hirschman, A.O. (1958) The Strategy of Economic Development. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Johnston, R.J., Gregory, D. and Smith, D.M. (1994) The Dictionary of Human Geography, 3rd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Kothari, U. (2005) (ed.) A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies. New York: Zed Books. Liverman, D., Moran, E.F., Rindfuss, R.R. and Stern, P.C. (1998) People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science. Washington DC: National Academy Press. Meadows, D.H. et al (1972) The Limits of Growth. Universe Books: New York. Miller, B. (2006) ‘The globalization of fear: fear as a technology of governance’ in D. Conway and N. Heynen (eds), Globalization’s Contradictions: Geographies of Discipline, Destruction and Transformation. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, pp. 161–177. Moran, E.F. and Ostrom, E. (2005) Seeing the Forest from the Trees: Human-Environment Interactions in Forest Eco-systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Potter, R.B. (1993) ‘Little England and little geography: reflections on Third World teaching and research’, Area, 25: 291–294. Potter, R.B. (2001) ‘Geography and develoment: core and periphery’? Area, 33: 422–427. Potter, R.B., Binns, J., Elliott, J. and Smith, D. (2008) Geographies of Development: An Introduction to Development Studies, 3rd edn. London: PearsonPrentice Hall. Potter, R.B. and Unwin, T. (1988) ‘Developing areas research in British geography’, Area, 20: 121–126. Power, M. and Sidaway, J.D. (2004) ‘The degeneration of tropical geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94: 585–601. Power, M. (2003) Rethinking Development Geographies. Routledge: Taylor and Francis. Rostow, W.W. (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sachs, J.D. (1999) ‘Helping the world’s poorest’, Economist, 14(352): 17–20. Sachs, J.D. and Warner, A.M. (2001) ‘The curse of natural resources’, European Economic Review, 45: 827–838. Stohr, W.B. (1981) ’Development from below: the bottom-up and periphery-inward development paradigm’ in W.B. Stohr and D.F.R. Taylor (eds), Development from Above or Below? The Dialectics of Regional Planning in Developing Countries. New York: John Wiley, pp. 39–72.

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Unwin, T. and Potter, R.B. (1992) ‘Undergraduate and postgraduate teaching on the geography of the Third World’, Area, 24: 56–62. Walker, P. (2006) ‘Political ecology: where is the policy?’, Progress in Human Geography, 30: 382–395. Walker, P. (2007) ‘Political ecology: where is the politics?’, Progress in Human Geography, 31: 363–369. Wilson, F. and Purushothaman, R. (2003) ‘Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050’, Goldman Sachs, Global Economics Paper No. 99. Wooldridge, S. (1950) ‘Reflections on regional geography in teaching and research’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16: 1–11. Yapa, L. (1992) ‘Why do they map GNP per capita?’ in S.K. Mazumdar, G.S. Forbes, E.W. Miller and R.F. Schmaltz (eds), Natural and Technological Disasters: Causes, Effects, and Preventative Measures. Easton, PA: Pennsylvania Academy of Sciences, pp. 495–510. Yapa, L. (1996) ’What causes poverty? A postmodern view’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87: 709–716. Yapa, L. (1998) ‘Why GIS needs postmodern social theory and vica versa’ in D.F.R. Taylor (ed.), Policy Issues in Modern Cartography. London: Pergamon, pp. 249–269. Yapa, L. (2002) ‘How the discipline of geography exacerbates poverty in the Third World’, Futures, 34: 33–46.

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46 Geopolitics Gerry Kearns

INTRODUCTION Geopolitics developed as the geographical study of the strategic relations between nation-states. Although it had antecedents in works on warfare and on the geography of civilizations, geopolitics cohered around a social-Darwinist ideology in the late nineteenth century. Social Darwinists viewed society primarily as a biological community and argued that human groups, such as states, had to struggle with each other in order to survive. Four scholars were particularly important in framing the geopolitical imaginary: Mahan, Ratzel, Mackinder and Kjellén. These ideas achieved their greatest notoriety when they became part of the official ideology of Nazi imperialism and, although the term was shaded by this infamy, the ideology has returned as a powerful part of current US imperialist ideology (Kearns 2009). Michel Foucault’s work on the discourses of space, knowledge and power opened new and important perspectives upon geopolitics (Coleman and Agnew 2007) and, in framing what he and Simon Dalby (1991) called ‘critical geopolitics’, Gearóid Ó Tuathail was consciously extending ‘Foucault’s own observations on the changing place of space and territory in the history of the art of government’

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(1996: 8). Following the lead of Dalby and Ó Tuathail, there have been studies of geopolitics for each of the three periods I have identified: the imperial rivalries of the early twentieth century (Polelle 1999; GoGwilt 2000; Kearns 2009), the Nazi period (Reuber and Wokersdorfer 2002; Herb 2002), and the Cold War (Dalby 1990; Campbell 1998; Mercille 2008). A brief survey of these three periods provides an introduction to the complex and contested legacy of geopolitics (Teschke 2006).

IMPERIALISM AND THE GEOPOLITICAL IMAGINARY Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) drew from his studies of the history of the rivalry between Britain and France over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the lesson that mastery of the seas was essential to global power and national defense. Writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century, he bemoaned the decline in the US Navy in the quarter century following the end of the US Civil War. He proposed that in order to connect domestic production with foreign markets, the United States needed a merchant

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fleet, and to protect that fleet it needed a navy, and so that US shipping might have sanctuary and refueling abroad, the US needed colonies, and he observed that in these enterprises the US would come into conflict with the established and rising powers from Europe. In other words, ‘to retain … the undisturbed enjoyment of the returns of commerce’, it was necessary for the United States to ‘argue upon somewhat equal terms of strength’ with its European adversaries (Mahan 1890: 818). For Mahan, the biological language of national survival was simply a recognition of this economic and military injunction to compete or die: ‘All around us now is strife; “the struggle of life”, “the race of life”, are phrases so familiar that we do not feel their significance till we stop to think about them’ (Mahan 1890: 821). Their significance was that, for Mahan, they expressed both the necessity of imperialism and the unrealistic idealism of international law. Mahan recognized in the British a people who ‘by a kind of natural selection’ had risen to international prominence thanks to their ‘commercial enterprise and political instinct’, but who had also been helped because they had built an empire before international law had any force: ‘The very lawlessness of the period favored the extension of their power and influence; for it removed from the free play of a nation’s innate faculties the fetters which are imposed by our present elaborate framework of precedents, constitutions, and international law’ (Mahan 1893: 462). It is clear, then, that for the United States to take the place in the world commensurate with the scale of its exports, it would have to disregard the treaties and laws that attempted to stabilize the existing global order, build up its navy and acquire strategic colonies. Geopolitics developed as an academic justification for imperialism. Friedrich Ratzel’s (1844–1904) writings on the state were heavier on biology and lighter on strategy than were Mahan’s. Ratzel was a racist and an environmental determinist. He argued that different environments

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had shaped the culture and civilizations of distinct races: ‘Contrasts in the life of races thus possess, in their natural basis, the guarantee of permanence or repetition’ (Ratzel 1898: 149). The main distinction that he drew was between settled and nomadic races, and within the Old World he contrasted the Aryan races, sedentary tillers of the soil, with the Ural-Altaic races who were travelling herdsmen. The nomads, he suggested, exerted a pressure upon the people of the arable lands and showed them the necessity of developing states in order to resist the marauding tribes. Ratzel believed that human groups that remained in isolation would stagnate and herein lay a central contrast between progressive civilizations and the moribund peoples without history: ‘If we look at mankind as a whole, we can see that its northern members lie in a widespread mutually operative connection; its southern in remote separation’ (Ratzel 1896: 6). Ratzel argued that the relations between environment, state and culture were dynamic. Not only must peoples interact but they must also migrate if they were to remain vital. Woodruff Smith (1986: 83) has termed this a ‘migrationist colonialism’ to distinguish it from the search for markets or raw materials to serve the industrial sector. Ratzel’s intention was that German colonists should establish new agricultural settlements abroad and in this relationship with new land reinvigorate the German people (Smith 1980: 54). He described these colonial ambitions as the necessary extension of the living space (Lebensraum) of the state. Ratzel’s geopolitical imaginary, then, served a rather different imperialism than did Mahan’s. German imperialism was also very much on the mind of Halford Mackinder (1861– 1947). Whereas Mahan was impressed by British sea power as the basis for global domination, Mackinder was struck by Ratzel’s account of the relations between states and land. Mackinder warned the British that the development of continental railway systems meant that the mobility advantage previously enjoyed by sea power was now in question. He did not share Ratzel’s exclusive

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focus upon peasant agriculture and his interest in land power included attention to industrial resources. Like Mahan, Mackinder was interested in the geographic dimensions of military strategy. He brought these themes together in a paper on what he termed ‘the geographical pivot of history’ (Mackinder 1904). Mackinder’s starting point was very much like Ratzel’s in stressing the antagonism between sedentary and nomadic peoples. Like Ratzel, he noted the pressure exerted upon Europe by the pressure of raids from Slav, Turkic and Mongol peoples. However, Mackinder claimed that the time was fast approaching when, with new technologies, the thinly settled lands of the nomads would swarm with new economic activity, woods would be cleared, marshes drained, drylands irrigated and deposits of coal and oil mobilized for industry even in the remotest of places. Some of the areas from which nomads had in earlier times launched raids upon Europe bid fair to become the new industrial and agricultural districts of a great new land power. In a study of the geographical realities that, in his view, meant that international law was unlikely to succeed in stabilizing the world order after the First World War, Mackinder called this emerging region the ‘Heartland’. His argument was that there was a concentration of industrial resources running from the Caspian through Western Russia into Eastern Europe and that this oil, coal, and iron ore was in places inaccessible from the sea. It was thus a fortress from which a land power might integrate, organize and cultivate the steppelands that stretched away to the east between the deserts and mountains to the south and the frozen wastes to the north. Mackinder (1919: 104) summed up his warning as follows: ‘Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: | Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: | Who rules the World-Island commands the World.’ Over the course of his long career in British politics, Mackinder alternated between fearing that control of the Heartland would fall to Russia and fearing that it would fall to Germany.

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Much the same question was on the mind of Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922). Kjellén was a close student of Ratzel and, like Mackinder, was concerned with the forms of land power within Europe. Kjellén coined the term ‘geopolitik’ to refer to the management of space by a state. From Ratzel, Kjellén took the observation that only large states could survive the competition that was now afoot. Ratzel viewed the state as ‘the greatest achievement of man on earth’ and as the ‘climax of all phenomena connected to the spread of life’ (quoted in Farinelli 2000: 951). Both Mackinder and Kjellén saw things somewhat differently. Mackinder though that empires were the political units of the future and he imagined the British Empire as a federation of self-governing dominions (the settler colonies) and protectorates (the other colonies). Kjellén also went beyond the state to suggest that the future belonged instead to blocs of states. In this respect, he thought that Central Europe had a choice between German or Russian domination, and he recommended accepting the first (Tunander 2001). These four theorists were all responding to a world where imperialistic competition between the Great Powers seemed to have become both more intense and to have changed in character. This New Imperialism was widely trumpeted and variously defined. Geopolitics was the study of statecraft in the context of imperialism. Each of these authors saw imperialism as a challenge the state could not refuse if it were to survive. None of them saw much scope for international law as a framework for international relations because each saw competition between states as inevitable and that states that expected to prevail would likely use force to get what they needed regardless of existing treaties, conventions, or legal arguments. This association of geopolitics with imperialism was codified in the decades either side of the turn of the twentieth century and it became notorious some 40 years later when the term was taken up with alacrity by Nazi ideologists and fellow travelers in other states.

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GEOPOLITICS AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY In 1924 Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) founded the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, a journal that explored the geographical strategies that a resurgent Germany might make use of in its journey towards world domination. Haushofer argued that ‘[g]eopolitik must become the conscience of the state’ (quoted in Neumann 1943: 281). This included the collection of statistics, particularly population statistics, and their presentation in ways that promoted the case for German expansion. Haushofer also argued that land power might now become dominant in the world and that it might be the basis for unifying the Eurasian landmass under German, or joint German– Russian–Japanese control. For himself, Haushofer pleaded that his perspective was taken from the work of Mackinder, ‘the greatest of all geographic world views’ (quoted in Weigert 1942a: 116). Haushofer was a close friend of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, and indeed visited the pair when they were in prison together in 1923–4, leading them through the study of a number of works in military and geographical theory, including Ratzel’s Political Geography; or the Geography of States, Commerce, and War (Walsh 1948: 15). Haushofer applauded the Nazi–Soviet pact and the alliance with Japan, and he explicitly placed his journal and his scholarship in the service of furthering both the empirical and popular-ideological basis of Nazism, as the exiled German attorney Friedrich Roetter (1945: 550) wrote, Haushofer believed that ‘learned men … must help the Fuehrer in making comprehensible his national and supernational aims’. Certainly, Hitler and the Nazis spoke many a time of Germany’s need for room to grow, for living space (Lebensraum), and Hitler implicitly evoked the Heartland declaring in 1936 that ‘[i]f I had the Ural Mountains with their incalculable store of treasures in raw materials, Siberia with its vast forests, and the Ukraine with its tremendous wheat fields,

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Germany and the National Social leadership would swim in plenty’ (quoted in Fifield and Pearcy 1944: 23). Geopolitics was taught to children and soldiers, and Haushofer popularized it through his own radio program. In a recent memoir Günter Grass recalls his training while a teenager in the Waffen SS, when ‘once a week we yawned our way through a class in Lebensraum und Weltanschauung, in Blut und Boden’ (2007: 115). The law students that Roetter knew were more enthusiastic, evincing ‘tremendous interest’ in Haushofer’s lectures because they ‘seemed to open up new possibilities in a world in which [Woodrow] Wilson’s ideals had become misused tools in the hands of the victors of Versailles’ (Roetter 1945: 550). Geographers in the US were quick to distance respectable political geography from reprehensible geopolitics. Isaiah Bowman (1942: 656) castigated geopolitics as a ‘pseudo-scientific justification’ for ‘territorial expansion’, while Derwent Whittlesey (1944: 58) saw it as emanating from a distinctive ‘national habit of mind which reaches far back into German history’. Similarly, the refugee from fascism, George Kiss (1942: 633), traced geopolitics back to Hegel who, he said, had preached that ‘Germany’s eternal mission was one of conquest and domination’, while another refugee, Jean Gottmann (1942), insisted that whereas political geography had a ‘brilliant past’ (1942: 206), geopolitics was no more that ‘a certain amount of scientific trappings in order to plead and facilitate certain national expansions’ (1942: 205). In truth, there was a continuum between, on one side, explanations of international relations in terms of national will, the balance struck between population and local resources, and colonialism; and on the other, academic justifications for further projects of territorial expansion. The geographer, Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932), was, like Mackinder, Haushofer, and Kjellén, a close student of Ratzel, and her account of the geographic basis to the history of the US resonates with social-Darwinist terminology,

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as when she explained the Spanish–American War of 1898 as an inevitable overflowing of US power beyond its national boundaries: ‘The commercial strength of the American Republic was bound sooner or later to find a political expression in that international struggle for existence, which is a struggle for space’ (Semple 1903: 433). In similar fashion, Haushofer determined that ‘[t]he ultimate solution of Japan’s problem of over-population is expansion into spheres of least resistance’ (quoted in Weigert 1942b: 741). Haushofer cited Bowman’s work in support of this particular observation leading Weigert to raise the accusation of intellectual dishonesty in an attempt to distinguish clearly between political geography and geopolitics. Weigert admitted that Bowman had advised that Japan needed to ‘overflow its boundaries’ (Bowman 1928: 578), but Weigert added that ‘Haushofer forgets to say, however, that Bowman added, “if not by people then by exports”. This instance of Haushofer’s utter disregard of all attempts to solve such problems by international economic cooperation is characteristic’ (Weigert 1942b: 742). Bowman (1942: 655) was incensed: ‘The phrase “utter disregard” is much too weak. It is utterly dishonest, unless we believe in constant war, to talk in terms of “population pressure” as a thing to be relieved by theft of territory from a neighbor.’ It was indeed true that Bowman wrote of Japanese commerce but he also noted that as trade grew, ‘this invited both territorial expansion and the stimulation of industry’ (Bowman 1928: 578). His account of the prospects for Japanese imperialism was nowhere near as critical as he later implied, for not only did he mention that Manchuria was close, ‘thinly populated’, and ‘capable of supporting a dense population’, he also recognized that Japanese capital had developed Manchurian industry and exports, and further that only Japan’s ‘possession of Manchuria’ would prevent these assets from coming ‘under Russian control’ and allowing ‘Russian capital [to] guide development’ (Bowman 1928:

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582). The interdependence of economic and political factors acknowledged here treats Japan as able to meet its national needs, yes by exports, but also by emigration to Manchuria, and even by colonial control of that mainland province. There was, in the 1920s and 1930s, a continuum between Anglo-American political geography and German geopolitics. Indeed, from 1940 there had been proposals to establish within the US a Geopolitical Institute and in 1942 ‘a Geopolitical Section of the Military Intelligence Service was created. The section’s objectives were “to study physical, economic, political, and ethnological geography in order to advise on measures of national security and assurance of continued peace in the post-war world, as well as to conduct such studies as may be demanded for the immediate prosecution of the war”’ (Crampton and Ó Tuathail 1996: 539). The political scientist Johannes Mattern (1942: 46) offered a more judicious evaluation and acknowledged that ‘a great deal has been going on in the past and is going on today everywhere in the world that is plain, unadulterated Geopolitik, though it is not called by the name, even when it has been and is being called obeying Manifest Destiny or assuming the White Man’s Burden’. The Soviet intellectual Nikolai Bukharin (1888– 1938) noted that it was in Britain, France, and the US, and not only in Germany, Japan, and Italy, that colonialism was either promoted or defended with reference to the balance between land resources. He insisted that these imperialists were geopoliticians without realizing it. Bukharin criticized geopolitics because it ‘flatly denies all history’, because it explains social, economic, and political change in terms of constant factors of national identity and environmental conditions (1936: 564). It was essentially a normative theory that ‘preaches new conquests and wars of intervention’ (1936: 565), while excusing the need in terms of permanent biological, spiritual, and ecological relations. Bukharin argued that ‘a war of conquest is a function of

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the social order, that it is not a non-historical category connected directly with geographical and biological factors’ (1936: 568). Instead Bukharin understood the drift to war as having an economic basis: ‘[i]s not the hunt for markets, coupled with over-production and under-consumption, a characteristic feature of the special “capitalist mode of production”?’ (1936: 568). After the end of the Second World War, the term geopolitics became an anathema in the English-speaking world, but the strong distinction drawn between good political geography and bad geopolitics meant that the broader relations between geographical arguments and imperialist politics went unexamined.

THE RE-EMERGENCE OF GEOPOLITICS Mackinder’s ideas, at least, continued to be discussed after the defeat of Nazi Germany but with the Soviet Union now figured as the potential continental hegemon that had to be contained. Both Nicholas Spykman (1893– 1943) and George Kennan (1904–2005) wrote about the Soviet containment in terms that echo very strongly the language of Mackinder. Kennan described Soviet containment as fulfilling a key policy aim of the US that ‘no single Continental land power should come to dominate the entire Eurasian land mass … become a great sea power as well as land power … and enter … on an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and supported by the immense resources of the interior of Europe and Asia’ (quoted in Liberman 1993: 128). During the 1970s, there was a trickle of English-language articles and books discussing geopolitics. In the first place, analysts, and particularly military strategists, were drawn increasingly to the description of global competition for access to oil supplies as a version of geopolitics. When, in 1974, Peter Grose wrote of ‘a new geopolitics’, he was asking how the balance between the Great Powers would shift when

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the matter to be contended over was not the relative size of their nuclear arsenals but, rather, their supplies of petroleum. Grose (1974) was optimistic, for ‘[t]he new geopolitics grants the privileges of power to nations that direct their national efforts into the production of energy, a product that can be used, that can help people to live, and just possibly to live better.’ Grose appeared to assume that each Great Power would find domestic oil supplies but others emphasized instead the global and regional competition for access to resources, as with Oil and Geopolitics in the Persian Gulf Area: A Center of Power (Koury 1973), Great Power Rivalry in the Far East: A Geopolitics of Energy (Ebinger 1977), and the inquiry by the US Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Geopolitics of Energy (Conant and Gold 1977). The second way the term was revived was to refer to the regional dimensions of Great Power rivalries, as when Senator James Fulbright (1970) referred to US and Soviet interference in the affairs of Egypt, Jordan, and Israel, as ‘infusing the crisis with the hocus pocus of geopolitics’. In the 1970s the term was used frequently when speaking of Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor from 1969 to 1975 and Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977. An early profile of Kissinger described his ‘generally conservative, 19th-century, balance-of-power approach and his acute sense of the superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union’, and it was this fixation with the superpower implications of any issue in international affairs that was intended when speaking of his ‘understanding of geopolitics [which] makes him the most articulate, and frequently used spokesman for policy’ (Smith 1971: 12). This understanding of international relations as realpolitik ran through Kissinger’s (1979) memoirs and did much to re-establish the currency of the term geopolitics. One reviewer (Hoopes 1979) wrote that his own account identified Kissinger as ‘a doctrinaire high priest of “geopolitics”’, seeing everywhere only a

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conflict with the Soviet Union and aiming on all occasions to have prevail the will of the US so that its credibility be not tarnished by weakness. Geopolitics, then, is being used to describe a world view based on simple polarities and endless contests of force and assertion. Another person who regularly used the language of geopolitics from the mid-1970s was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who acted for Carter in much the way that Kissinger had acted for Nixon. Between them, Kissinger and Brzezinski have advised a series of US presidents, Republican and Democrat respectively. John McCain, the 2008 Republican candidate for President, had the support and advice of Kissinger, while Brzezinski did the same for Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate. The continuity, and common ground, is striking. Both share Mackinder’s concern about the control of the Heartland by Russia and have responded in similar ways to what they saw as the false optimism that accompanied the end of the Cold War around 1990. In 1994 Kissinger (1995: 814) warned that ‘Russia regardless of who governs it, sits astride what Halford Mackinder called the geopolitical heartland, and is the heir to one of the most potent imperial traditions.’ In 1997 Brzezinski (1997a: 52) argued that ‘[i]n a volatile Eurasia, the immediate task is to ensure that no state or combination of states gains the ability to expel the United States or even diminish its decisive role.’ Brzezinski has a strong sense of the continuity between current US and earlier British foreign policy. In explicit homage to Mackinder’s contemporary, the British Foreign Secretary George Curzon, Brzezinski tiled one of his books The Grand Chessboard (1997b); in another he echoed Mackinder explicitly: ‘Whoever controls Eurasia dominates the globe. If the Soviet Union captures the peripheries of this landmass … it would not only win control of vast human, economic and military resources, but also gain access to the geostrategic approaches to the Western Hemisphere – the Atlantic and the Pacific’ (Brzezinski 1986: 22–3). When the Soviet Union invaded

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Afghanistan, Brzezinski, in a memo to President Carter, presented the geopolitical challenge as in a direct line of succession from British practices of a century earlier: ‘If the Soviets succeed in Afghanistan … the age-long dream of Moscow to have direct access to the Indian Ocean will have been fulfilled. Historically, the British provided the barrier to that drive, and Afghanistan was their buffer state. We assumed the role in 1945’ (Brzezinski 1979). The end of the Cold War also saw a revival of geopolitics within Russia. Just as the Nazis had embraced Mackinder’s warnings about land power and converted them into a program, so too did the new generation of Russian nationalists that, rejecting the Western orientation of President Yeltsin, celebrated the anti-Western stance of President Putin (Clover 1999, Smith 1999). Commentators such as Aleksandr Dugin have argued that with the resurgence of Greater Russia, a primary goal should be to expel Atlanticist influence from the Eurasian landmass. Dugin draws explicitly upon Mackinder and, indeed, has translated some of the British geographer’s work and included them in his own geopolitical textbooks (Sedgwick 2004).

GEOPOLITICS AND EMPIRE I have indicated some of the most important revivals of geopolitics, although there have been others (e.g. Hepple 2004 on Latin America), and two questions arise from this: what is exactly that gets revived, and why? A return to geopolitics has come to include at least some reference to Mackinder (and even the Chilean dictator Pinochet (1981) translated sections from Mackinder for his own geopolitics textbook). The revival of geopolitics has also generally included most of five elements: interconnectedness, polarization, impotence of law, contrast between land and sea power, and a justification for intervention.

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In the first place, the world has generally been seen as having just become dangerously interconnected. Mackinder claimed (1922: 253) that ‘[t]o-day we have almost annihilated space’, and this meant that ‘we now have a closed circuit – a machine complete and balanced in all its parts. Touch one and you influence all’ (Mackinder 1900: 271). This argument against isolation is a constant feature of the geopolitical imaginary as when Brzezinski remarked that ‘John Kennedy caught the essence of America’s novel position in the world when he saw himself as “the first American president for whom the whole world was, in a sense, domestic politics”’ (Brzezinski 1970: 307). Because the world is interconnected, a state with the foreign entanglements of Britain or the United States will find its national interests stretching to all corners of the earth, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair (1999) argued: ‘We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have a reason to exist.’ Since this interconnectedness is (repeatedly) viewed as novel, it becomes a reason why existing policies have to be abandoned in the face of the new situation. Today, this novelty is called globalization but in the past something very like it has been described in other terms including closed space, new imperialism, and Americanization, among others. The second common theme of the geopolitical imaginary is a view of the world as containing essentially hostile elements. It is not enough to argue that the national interest extends overseas, people have to be persuaded that they live in a hostile world if they are to accept foreign military adventures. There are two common strategies here: in economic terms the world may be presented as a zero-sum game so that the economic rise of rivals must mean the decline of one’s own country; in physical terms, rivals are painted as relentless in their attacks so that they must be confronted since they cannot be endured. For Mackinder, Britain had to be strong throughout the world if it was to protect its investments for ‘the great creditor nation cannot afford to be weak’ (1902: 346) and if

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Britain was to stand in the scales and move the power of Germany, Russia or the United States, then, it would have to act as an empire and not rely upon the resources of the home country alone, as ‘[a]ll the Britains are threatened by the recent expansion of Europe and therefore all may be ready to share in the support of the common fleet, as the cheapest method of ensuring peace and freedom to each’ (1902: 351). Mackinder saw nations as expressing broadly racial identities that came from the shaping of civilizations by environments. Montane and nomadic peoples lived in areas that could barely support them so they developed aggressive tendencies. The peoples of the fertile lowlands had to become martial in their organized resistance to the raiders. The only pacific people were the island dwellers and thus it was that they had to be roused by geopolitical agitation if they were to recognize that with the new global interconnectedness they could no longer rely upon their isolation to guarantee their freedom. This style of argument is central also to the modern revival of geopolitics from Samuel Huntington (1997: 57) warning of Islam’s ‘bloody borders’, to Bernard Lewis (1990) suggesting that Islamic countries are consumed by a civilizational jealousy at the success of the Christian West, to David Frum and Richard Perle (2004: 7) warning that the struggle with Islam is war to the death, ‘victory or holocaust’, or Robert Kaplan’s (2000) plea for a ‘pagan ethos’ as the Christian West sets aside the crippling commitment to law and rights that prevents it responding to the challenge from Islam. These are not mavericks, each has been closely connected to the US foreign policy elite. Geopolitics is asserted as the necessary guide to the use of force in a world where law offers no protection. For Mackinder (1911: 83) international relations were never likely to be regulated by treaty or convention but only by ‘universal law of survival through efficiency and effort’. International law would ever be ineffective because ‘war gives the only decision which an injured people with passions roused is willing to accept’

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(Mackinder 1922: 175). Thus, as the title of his best known book (Mackinder 1919) announced, people could pretend to rely upon democratic ideals but they would sooner or later be brought back down to the realities of force, strategy and geography. This same rejection of law, with more or less regret, is widely articulated today and is often presented as a contrast between idealistic Europe and realistic America, as when Kagan (2004: 3) disparages Europe as a ‘selfcontained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation’, a ‘post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity’. Instead, geopoliticians describe the virile US as exemplifying the making of right by might as Philip Bobbitt argues in The Shield of Achilles, and Condoleeza Rice (2000) asserts when she proposes that US foreign policy should be governed by national self-interest and not ‘in the interests of an illusory international community’ (2000: 62), or constrained by ‘every international convention and agreement that someone thinks to propose’ (2000: 49). Geopolitics has also often sustained a view of the exceptionalism of the home country. In a world of violence and shrill contest, it is best that one’s own country prevail not only out of self-interest but because this is best for the world due to the global values that one’s own country expresses. Mackinder (1919: 74), for example, in distinguishing between maritime and continental powers detected a distinction between the aggressive character of land-power and the defensive nature of sea-power, for ‘warships cannot navigate mountains’. This exceptionalism is expressed in very similar terms by John Mearsheimer (2001: 41), who suggests that the US, as a sea power has no capacity for building a global empire since ‘the stopping power of water’ puts limits on the project of force overseas. This view is widely shared and thus Rice (2000: 62) asserts that the United States ‘has had no territorial ambitions for nearly a century’, while Bill Clinton is sure that while people recognize the military force of the US in the world, ‘no one suggests that we ever

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sought territorial advantage’ (quoted in Mearsheimer 2001: 527). Instead, the geopolitical imaginary figures the home country as the source of universal values that are precious gift to, rather than imposition upon, the rest of the world. These universal values, then, ground the claim that intervention overseas is one’s own nation’s present to backward peoples; that spreading these values are the civilized person’s burden. This is a liberal version of the argument for imperialism. Mackinder (1910: 118), for example, believed that British rule in India was all that protected Indian people from ‘oriental despotism and race domination’ from without. British rule brought to India, peace, justice, and food security; at least in Mackinder’s account. In similar terms, Tony Blair (1999) defended NATO intervention in Kosovo as ‘based not on any territorial ambitions but on values’. Indeed, while strictly colonial arguments for imperialism are still made (particularly with regard to securing the raw materials necessary for national economic success), there are many similarly ‘liberal’ arguments for military adventures, so-called humanitarian intervention. Because one’s own values are asserted as universal, then, introducing them, even by force, feels justified, as when Thomas Barnett (2004: 169) urges that the US might enforce ‘connectedness’ upon states denied the benefits of globalization by their rulers, and Bobbitt (2002: 303) argues similarly that the US would be justified in removing the ‘leadership cadres’ in any state refusing to its people the opportunities of involvement in the world economy. Why, then, are there these continuities in geopolitical arguments? I think that the five arguments I have set out above provide some of the best arguments in favor of imperialism, the use of force to reshape the economies and polities of foreign places. There are, thankfully, counter-arguments to imperialism but they are rarely heard within geopolitics. However, there are counter discourses, including critical geopolitics (Ó Tuathail 1996) which elucidates the political choices

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naturalized by dominant geopolitical writings and arrangements. In addition, recent studies in geopolitics have broadened the causes of conflict that they consider, to include environmental change (Dalby 2002; le Billon 2005; Barnett 2007), economic globalization (Cowen and Smith 2009), global pandemics (Whitehall 2009), patriarchy (Giles and Hyndman 2004), the policing of international networks of drugs smuggling (George 2009), and the strategic uses of outer space (MacDonald 2007; Collis 2009). Much of this recent work makes explicit the ways that geopolitical discourses underpin identities and subjectivities, often nationalist, but also more broadly racist. For example, Joanne Sharp (2000) has studied the popular geopolitics found in that staple of the doctor’s waiting room, the Reader’s Digest. The work of Edward Said (1978) on Western attitudes towards the Arab world has had wide influence on later studies such as Derek Gregory’s (2004) powerful study of imperialism in Palestine, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. Geopolitics, then, started as a justification for imperialism. Critical geopolitics developed as the explicit study of these justifications. The challenge today is to move from the moment of critique to the moment of utopia and the elaboration of the norms that would shape a fairer world (Benhabib 1986; Kearns 2008). Agnew and Corbridge identified ‘internationalism multilateralism’, ‘local oppositional imaginations’ and ‘market socialism’ as some of the bases for a new world order, an alternative to hegemonic ‘transnational liberalism’ (1995: 227). Kees van der Pijl (1998) suggested that the regulation of international capitalism creates a cadre with a global agenda and that, under the pressure of class struggle, this group may evolve norms that will serve the cause of global justice, an alternative geopolitical order to the anarchic competition between states (Rosenberg 1994). There is also discussion of the international recognition of secessionist enclaves, and that this might presage the development of a global territorial system based on entities other

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than states (Borgen 2007). By joining a multi-state system, the members of the European Union had to develop norms for respectful international cooperation which, Scheipers and Sicurelli (2007) argue, might carry over into shaping a more progressive foreign policy on the part of the EU that includes the ratification of various international agreements on human rights and environmental standards. A progressive geopolitics could also build upon the history of nonviolent social movements (Gorsevski 2004) and the ways that anti-systemic popular movements both challenge and reform international law (Rajagopal 2003; de Sousa Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito 2005). Finally, then, geopolitics might begin serving global civil society (Falk 1995; Keane 2003; Baker and Chandler 2005) instead of imperialism.

REFERENCES Agnew, John and Corbridge, Stuart (1995) Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory, and International Political Economy. London: Routledge. Baker, Gideon and Chandler, David (eds) (2005) Global Civil Society: Contested Futures. New York: Routledge. Barnett, Jon (2007) ‘The geopolitics of climate change’, Geography Compass, 1: 1361–1375. Barnett, Thomas M.P. (2004) The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century. New York: G.P. Putnam. Benhabib, Seyla (1986) Critique, Norm, Utopia: A Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Blair, Tony (1999) ‘Prime Minister’s speech: Doctrine of the international community’, given at the Economic Club, Chicago IL, 24 April 1999. Available at: http:// number10.gov.uk/output/Page1297.asp, accessed 1 June 2008. Bobbitt, Philip (2002) The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Borgen, Christopher (2007) ‘Imagining sovereignty, managing secession: the legal geography of Eurasia’s frozen conflicts’, Oregon Review of International Law, 9: 477–534.

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Bowman, Isaiah (1928) The New World: Problems in Political Geography. New York: World Book Company. Bowman, Isaiah (1942) ‘Geography vs. geopolitics’, Geographical Review, 32: 646–658. Brzezinski, Zbigniew (1970) Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technocratic Era. New York: Viking Press. Brzezinski, Zbigniew (1979) ‘Memo to President, December 26, 1979’. Available at: http://edition. cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/20/documents/ brez.carter/, accessed 20 June 2008. Brzezinski, Zbigniew (1986) Game Plan: The Geostrategic Framework for the Conduct of the U.S.Soviet Contest. Boston MA: Atlantic Monthly Press. Brzezinski, Zbigniew (1997a) ‘Geostrategy for Eurasia’, Foreign Affairs, 76: 50–64. Brzezinski, Zbigniew (1997b) The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Perseus Book Group. Bukharin, Nikolai (1936) ‘Imperialism and communism’, Foreign Affairs, 14: 563–577. Campbell, David (1998) Writing Security: United States’ Foreign Policy and the Politics of Security. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Clover, Charles (1999) ‘Dreams of the Eurasian heartland: The reemergence of Geopolitics’, Foreign Affairs, 78: 9–13. Coleman, Mathew and Agnew, John (2007) ‘The problem with empire’ in Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden (eds) Space, Knowledge, and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 317–40. Conant, Melvin A., and Fern Racine Gold (eds) (1977) Geopolitics of Energy. Washington DC: US Government Printing Office. Collis, Christy (2009) ‘The geostationary orbit: a critical legal geography of space’s most valuable real estate’, Sociological Review, 57: 47–65. Cowen, Deborah, and Smith, Neil (2009) ‘After geopolitics? From the geopolitical social to geoeconomics’, Antipode, 41: 22–48. Crampton, Andrew, and Ó Tuathail, Gearóid (1996) ‘Intellectuals, institutions and ideology: The case of Robert Strausz-Hupé and “American Geopolitics”’, Political Geography, 15: 533–555. Dalby, Simon (1990) Creating the Second Cold War. London: Pinter. Dalby, Simon (1991) ‘Critical geopolitics: discourse, difference, and dissent’, Environment and Planning D. Society and Space, 9: 261–283. Dalby, Simon (2002) Environmental Security. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, and Rodriguez-Garavito, César A. (eds) (2005) Law and Globalization from

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GEOPOLITICS

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Index

Figures in bold; Tables in italics Aboriginal peoples, 256, 449 academic geographers, 167, 272, 274–6, 280, 313, 433 academic geography. See geography: academic actor-network theory (ANT), 102, 158, 325, 559 aerial surveillance, 172 Africa development in, 598 diaspora, 422 East, 202, 207, 212, 421, 423, 449, 533 exploration of, 117, 120, 164, 202–3, 207, 210 missionaries in, 202, 212 (see also mission(s)) North, 106, 113, 140 perceptions of, 421, 423 politics in, 419, 422 slavery and, 423 (see also slavery and slaves) weather and, 153, 212 West, 215, 423 See also specific country African-Americans, 426 African Association, 117–19, 422 Agassiz, Louis, 443, 449, 466–7, 478, 494, 495, 541 Age of agriculture, 100, 116, 127, 179, 182, 206, 219, 264, 359, 363, 377, 447, 457, 459, 529, 565–6, 569, 588, 599, 603 Age of Enlightenment. See Europe: Enlightenment albedo, 532 Alps, 55, 466–7, 495, 529, 541, 584 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 111 American Geographical Society (AGS), 121, 166, 221–2, 388, 494 American Museum of Natural History (New York), 69. See also museum(s) American Philosophical Society, 117 American Society for Geographic Research, 222 American Society for Photogrammetry (ASP), 172–3 Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 146, 167, 168, 381, 577. See also Netherlands, the analytical cartography, 223, 388. See also cartography Analytical Hierarchy Process, 129 ancient Greece and Greeks, 21–6, 28, 30, 33, 35, 149, 390

Index.indd 623

Antarctica, 495 Anthropocene, 503, 534 anthropology, 43, 213, 291–2, 303, 309, 311, 372–4, 385, 411, 448, 549, 606 applied geography, 276. See also geography Arabs, 13, 422 archaeologists, 145, 303, 446 archaeology, 69, 74, 138, 303, 305, 311, 424, 446 archival histories, 95–6 archives construction of, 88–9 definition of, 88 function of, 93 future of, 97 historical geography of, 89 knowledge production and, 88 purpose of, 88 retrieval from, 89 reworking of, 96–7 working in, 91–3 writing from, 93 archivists, 91–2, 95, 97. See also archives Arctic, 54, 56–7, 84, 119, 180–1, 360, 534, 544 Arctic warming, 180–1. See also climate change areal differentiation, 346–7, 349–50, 354 aridification, 533. See also desertification aridity, 534, 544, 546 Aristotle, 25, 102, 316, 322, 369–70, 384 art studios. See studio(s) Association of American Geographers (AAG), 122, 221–2, 279, 281, 350, 386, 389, 427, 482, 565 astronauts, 83, 590 astronomical geography, 360. See also geography astronomy, 79–80, 115–17, 131, 499 atmospheric carbon dioxide, 543–4. See also greenhouse gasses atmospheric pollution, 532 Australia, 108–9, 164, 180, 426, 448–9, 482, 582, 591 automatic weather stations (AWS), 155 Banks, Joseph, 72, 117, 163, 166 Barthes, Roland, 2

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624

battle space geography and geographic intelligence in, 220–2 GIS and, 226 (see also geographical information systems) visualization technologies, 225 Berlin Academy of Sciences, 117 Big Science, 76, 79–80, 349, 385 biodiversity, 520, 589 biogeographers, 452, 456, 459–62 biogeography, 72, 290–1, 296, 305, 372, 442, 444–5, 453, 457–62, 499, 585 botanical and zoological gardens, 100–1, 103–6, 105 botany, economic, 103–4 Bourdieu, Pierre, 409, 414–15 Boyle, Robert, 78, 115 Brazil, 589, 591–2, 601, 606 Britain. See United Kingdom British Empire, 72, 94, 119, 163–5, 218, 220, 423–4 British Guiana, 43 British Museum, 65–7, 72, 73. See also museum(s) Burt, Cyril, 4, 465 Burton, Richard, 120, 420 Canada, 8–9, 56, 95, 127, 278, 294–5, 396, 415, 444, 568 Canada Geographic Information System, 127. See also geographic information systems Canada Land Inventory, 127 capital, 194–7. See also finance capitalism, 100, 109, 158, 163–4, 168–9, 192–4, 198, 246, 254–5, 262, 278, 309, 318, 323–4, 334, 351, 377, 406–7, 412–16, 434, 458, 555–8, 565, 577, 600–1, 604–5, 619 carbon footprint, 591 offsetting, 592 trading, 592 carbon dioxide, 532, 543–4 cartography analytical, 223, 388 computing and, 224 cyber-, 358 development of, 357 geography, geodesy and, 83 military, 223 spatial analysis and, 387 warfare and, 218 case-study research, 230 Catholicism, 102 Central Intelligence Agency (US), 222–3 centres of calculation, 161–8 change through time, 449, 452, 476–7, 480 unidirectional, 476, 485 chaos calculating, 399–402 change and, 476 complexity and, 398–9

Index.indd 624

INDEX

confidence in, 401 in environment, 401 turbulence and, 398–9 chaotic Rössler system, 401 chaotic systems, 399–400 Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM), 239 Chicago, USA, 82, 386–7, 423, 426, 550–3, 557–8, 563 Chicago School, 553–5, 557, 563, 604. See also LA School Chile, 274, 445, 448, 591, 600–1 China, 4–5, 13, 46, 106, 130, 140, 164, 204, 208, 446, 503, 577, 589, 591–2, 606 chorography, 22, 30, 40–2, 346, 383 chorology, 345–6, 348 circuits of capital, 193, 195 circuits of value, 188–9, 188, 192–3, 196–8 cities centre, 66, 435, 554 characteristics of, 551 Chicago as model, 553–5 (see also Chicago, USA) concept of, 549 decentring of, 555–8 finding, 550–3 genealogy of, 550 rediscovery of, 558–60 See also specific city Civil War (US), 73, 371 class. See social class climate change biogeography and, 444–6 disease and, 208–9 geomorphology, 470 ice and, 499–500 knowledge, 209, 212 modeling, 499, 543, 546 oscillations, 209, 534 patterns, 445, 467, 499, 531, 540–2, 591–3 remote sensing of, 180 (see also remote sensing) See also weather climatology, 290, 296, 377, 452, 459 coal, 79, 264, 293, 592, 612 cognitive science, 12 Cold War, 5, 11, 57, 82, 84, 218, 222–6, 349, 382, 385, 389, 600, 610, 616 colonial geography, 95, 598 colonialism, 8–9, 56, 164, 246, 249, 251–2, 254–6, 308, 362, 407, 415, 419–20, 422, 425, 433, 597, 600, 611, 613–14 complexity, 395–9 computer science, 129, 390 computer simulation, 555 conservation aesthetic imperative of, 583–4 climate change and, 591 environmentalism and, 588–9 movement, 583, 588

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INDEX

significance of, 584 utilitarian imperative for, 582–3 See also environment conservationists, 295, 583, 585 consumers, 71, 294, 591 control systems, 223, 457–9, 458 Cook, James, 72, 95, 164 cosmogenic radionuclide (CRN) dating, 498 cosmography, 40 cultural studies, 294–5, 424 culture geography and (see geography: cultural) masculinist, 432 norms for, 432 relativism and, 5, 7, 256, 371 Cuvier, Georges, 45, 68–9, 118, 466, 477, 487 cycle(s) of change, 476 of erosion model, 481 in nineteenth century, 477–80 in time, 338, 475–7 (see also time) Darwin, Charles, 11, 27, 54, 119, 288–9, 441–5, 448–9, 477, 585 Darwinian evolution and natural selection, 373–4, 378, 444, 553 Davis, W.M. 441–3, 468 Davisian cycle model for erosion, 443, 449, 475, 480–3, 485–7 decolonisation, 90, 255 Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence Agency (UK), 277 Defense Mapping Agency, 224 deforestation, 287, 376, 529, 587, 589–90, 591 denudation chronology, 444, 447, 480, 482 de Saussure, Horace-Benedict, 55, 466, 529 descriptive geography, 34, 40–2, 362. See also geography desertification, 376, 530, 533, 589 development approaches to, 601–3 colonial mission and, 597 (see also mission(s)) economists, 596, 599–600 geneaology of, 595 geography, 596, 598–9, 602–3, 605 global, 605–7 history of, 596–8 rural, 603 study of, 598–9 digital divide, 126, 135 digital elevation models (DEMs), 134–5, 134, 182 digitisation, 97 discrimination, 523, 564. See also racism; segregation Domesday Book, 94, 332, 446 drainage basins and systems analysis and stream flow, 509–10 characteristics of, 396–7, 502 development of, 507

Index.indd 625

625

geomorphology, 504–13 human influences on, 526 humid-temperate, 516 hybrid landscapes and, 503–4 hydrology and, 508–9 landform analysis and, 505–7 management of, 502–3 modeling, 507–8 morphometric analysis of, 508–9 network characteristics, 509 study of, 503 zonation, 515 See also river(s) drainage patterns, 134, 495, 505, 507–8 Dual Image Stellar Index Camera (DISIC) camera, 223 Durkheim, Emile, 359, 405, 408–9, 551 dust, 74, 96, 374, 532 dynamics, 394–6. See also chaos; time Earth age of, 480 components of, 584 cycles, 475–7 early beliefs about, 581–2 humanities, 471–2 as laboratory, 81–6 observation, 77, 83, 146 earthquakes, 182, 582 earth system science, 296, 462 Earthviewer software, 132 East Africa, 202, 207, 212, 421, 449, 533. See also specific country East India Company, 117, 119, 163 eco-hydraulics, 520 ecology balance with, 585 Clementsian, 444 cultural, 82, 291–2 fieldwork and, 57 modelling, 554 political, 292 population, 452, 454 roots of, 453–6 systems, 452, 454–6, 458–62 economic growth, 278, 318, 368, 599, 602–3 ecosystem definition of, 452 energy flow through, 455 geography and, 456–8, 461 Egypt, 32, 106, 162, 422–3, 534, 589, 591, 598, 615 El Niño, 179–80, 401, 497, 534 England. See United Kingdom Enlightenment, Age of. See Europe: Enlightenment, Age of enlightenment-thinking, 597 enslavement, 419, 421. See also slavery and slaves

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626

environment conventions on, 588 debate on, 589–91 global issues of, 590 influences on humans, 376, 533–5 international agreements on, 588 milestones of, 531 modelling, 155 racial politics and, 371–3 See also environmentalism environmental causation, 370–1, 373 environmental determinism, 15, 290, 292, 294, 304, 344, 368–9, 371–8, 419–20, 533, 541–2, 582, 586, 611 environmentalism, 373, 375, 589 environmentalists, 122, 294–5, 532, 585 Eratosthenes, 24–5, 27, 31–2, 563 erosion Davisian cycle model for, 443, 449, 475, 480–7 fluvial, 498 glacial, 498 hillslope, 525 isostasy in, 488 Penckian model of, 483–4 ethnicity, 418. See also race ethnic separatism, 607 etymology, 22, 28, 30, 31, 33 Eurocentrism, 246, 255, 377, 378 Europe central, 163, 483, 612 city system in, 195 (see also cities) colonialism and, 9, 46, 415, 419, 448–9 (see also colonialism) Eastern, 5, 612 (see also specific country) Enlightenment, Age of, 6, 12, 26, 30, 42, 54, 60, 66, 95, 113, 116, 150, 156, 218–19, 252, 255, 359, 371, 381, 390, 431, 466, 541, 595, 597, 600, 605 exploration from, 72, 106, 308 gardens in, 103–5 (see also botanical and zoological gardens) geographical societies in, 120 geographical study and practice in, 27, 350, 381, 565, 598 (see also geography) geostationary satellites of, 155 hegemony and, 107, 195 historical geography and, 447 history of, 318 imperialism and, 159–60, 208, 586 juridical models of, 253 knowledge and, 9, 13 (see also knowledge) landscapes, 446 (see also landscape) learned associations in, 113–14, 119 mobility in, 578 modernity and, 9, 252 missionaries from, 204 (see also mission(s)) museums in, 64, 66 (see also museum(s); specific museum) science in, 163, 169,

Index.indd 626

INDEX

slavery and, 419 (see also slavery and slaves) weather and, 153, 534, 541 (see also weather) Western, 103, 196, 371, 433 (see also specific country) zoos in, 106 evolution biogeography and, 444–6, 460 (see also biogeography) definition of, 442 of landforms, 442–4 theory, 69, 289 evolutionary–developmental biology (“evo-devo”), 378 evolutionary ecology, 452, 460 exceptionalism, 24 expeditions, 61. See also fieldwork experimental design, 59, 60, 60 experimental laboratory sciences, 80 face-to-face (F2F) communication, 191 Falkland islands, 445 feminism, 431–2 feminist theory, 102, 108, 437 feudalism, 12, 255, 262, 407 field, the cities as, 53–5, 82, 467, 549 difference from laboratory, 62 experimentalism in, 82 as laboratories, 82 locations as case studies, 62 training in, 56 transformations in, 60, 61 scientific spaces of, 82 See also fieldwork fieldwork critiques of, 44 epistemological procedures of, 44 landscape and, 304 my-tribe syndrome in, 54 observation in, 60 practices of, 45, 60 regulatory practices in, 44 social nature of, 56 as a teaching practice, 44 time limitations of, 45 transferability of, 58 vs. expedition, 61 finance capital, 194–7 centres of, 195 contemporary, 185 geography and, 185–7, 192 hegemony in, 192–9 (see also hegemony) male predominance in, 186 markets, 192, 194–6 Finland, 337 floods, 179, 476, 509–10, 582 flow diagram, 396, 397 fluvial erosion, 508. See also erosion

1/19/2011 2:05:41 PM

INDEX

Foucault, Michel, 2, 12, 138, 160, 308, 319, 321–2, 436–7, 610 Fourier, Jean Baptiste Joseph, 543 France geography in, 220, 279 (see also geography) imperialism of, 220 learned societies and, 112 (see also learned societies) social issues in, 264–7 (see also Musée social (Paris)) trigonometry and, 42 See also Europe French Revolution, 348, 477 gaia hypothesis, 593 Galapagos, 443, 445 Gemeinschaft concept, 323, 551, 564, 566–7 gender definition of, 431–3 identities, 431–7 sex and, 435–7 (see also sex) genealogy, 3, 15, 23, 27–9, 30–7, 41, 99, 117, 255, 595–6 General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 595 general systems theory, 452, 454, 456–7, 470 geodesists, 358, 488 geodesy, 40, 83, 130, 219–20, 223–4, 381 Geodetic Reference System (GRS80), 223 geodetic satellites, 223 geodiversity, 471–2 geographers in civil service, 275–7 definition of, 271 in government, 274–7 influence of, 278 maps and, 358–66 (see also map-making; maps) in media, 279, 282 as politicians, 274 society–nature relationship and, 297 subaltern space and, 251 Geographical Association (GA), 121 geographical education, 40, 74, 280. See also museum(s) geographical information systems (GIS) accessibility of, 135 census and, 133 climate change and, 545 development of, 126, 223 function of, 126 history of, 126–8 lab, 85 land analysis by, 133 limitations of, 130–2 maps and, 363–5 (see also maps) public-participation, 129 remote sensing and, 43, 130, 178 research community, 364 services, 131 as social construction, 129 software, 128

Index.indd 627

627

spatial analysis and, 389–90 (see also spatial analysis) thematic mapping and, 364 tools, 134, 509 uncertainty and, 129 geographical societies, 117–22, 166, 220, 272. See also learned societies geographical writing, 21, 23, 31, 41–2, 275, 277, 419 geographic complexity, 395–9 geographic information science, 84, 130, 321, 388, 390, 498, 606 geographic information systems. See geographical information systems geographic intelligence, 217–18, 220–4, 226 geographic knowledge. See knowledge: geographical geographic knowledge production. See knowledge production geographies of economic and public life, 186 of financial production, 197 of geographical knowledge, 4–7 post-natural, post-social, 295–6 of women, 433–4 geography academic, 83, 217, 276, 278, 287–90, 295, 297, 299, 344, 381, 386, 540–1 activism and, 40 actors in, 55 ancient Greek origins of, 21–6, 28, 30, 33, 35, 382 applied, 276 areal differentiation in, 346–7, 349–50, 354 art studios and, 147 (see also studio(s)) astronomical, 360 behavioural, 602 bio-, 72, 290–1, 296, 305, 372, 442, 444–5, 453, 457–62, 499, 585 cartography, geodesy and, 83 (see also cartography) characteristics of, 1, 11, 21–3, 296, 349 (see also geography: scope of) classical (see geography: ancient Greek origins of) class in, 410–16 climate change and, 545–7 cold war, 222–6 (see also Cold War) colonial, 95, 598 complexity in, 395–9 concepts and controversies, 12–16 control and capital in, 56–7 cultural, 140, 203, 291, 305–7, 309, 312, 352, 603–4 (see also culture) definition of, 39, 317 descriptive, 34, 40–2, 362 of development, 596, 598–607 earth systems and, 585–7 ecosystem and, 456–8 (see also ecosystem) environmental determinism and, 373–6 environmental subdisciplines of, 280 evolution and, 441 (see also evolution) expedition in, 54–5

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628

geography (Cont.) experimentation in, 45–6, 54–5 feminist, 430, 434–5, 439, 574 as fieldwork, 43–5 finance and, 192 flood and ice and, 466–7 function of, 281, 288 future of, 281–2 gesturing and conversing in, 46–7 global, 197, 605–7 government and, 280–1 of hazards, 291–3 hegemony and, 197–8 (see also hegemony) historical, 3, 77, 89–91, 94–5, 116, 190, 251, 331–2, 334, 446–7, 530, 603 history of, 3, 21–7, 29–30, 36, 39, 45, 82, 220, 249, 344, 419, 438, 563 home, 347 human–environment relations and, 290, 585–7 humanist approaches in, 602–3 knowledge (see knowledge: geographical) landscape and, 302–3 (see also landscape) language of, 359 lay understanding of, 272 maps and, 357–8, 361 (see also map-making; maps) market dynamics and, 277 masculine nature of, 430 mathematical, 40–2, 381 military intelligence and, 217–18, 220–4, 226 mineralogical, 43 mobility and, 578 (see mobility) modern, 2, 22–7, 30–1, 42, 44, 116, 492, 572 modernization of, 27 moral, 43 myths in, 23–7 narrative forms of, 40–2 nature concept and, 100–2 new ethnicities and, 424 (see also ethnicity) new natural resource, 293 patterns in, 338 (see also cycles(s)) physical (see physical geography) policy and, 273–4, 280–1 political, 224, 289, 412, 613–15 post-modernism in, 604–5 practices, 47 quantitative revolution of, 384–90, 601–2 race/ethnicity and, 419–24, 426–7 of reading, 8, 11–12, 89 regional, 39, 344–6, 348–9, 353, 458, 571–2, 599–600, 602 relationship between nature and society in, 100 relevancy of, 595 rural, 565–8 scale and, 319, 382 scholarship in, 1, 3, 16, 416, 430 scientific societies and, 114–17 (see also learned societies) scope of, 40, 288–90

Index.indd 628

INDEX

social, 410 (see also Weber, Max) social class in, 410–16 (see also social class) societies for, 117–22, 166, 220, 272 (see also learned societies) society–nature studies and, 291–3 spatial science and, 224, 599–601 statistics in, 41 subaltern themes in, 249 (see also subaltern space) systems approach in, 457 teaching, 121, 220 territorialism in, 54 time and, 332, 335–9, 341, 347, 476–7 (see also time) transport, 206, 572–5, 577–8 tropical, 599, 606 urban, 147, 387, 550, 553–60, 563–5 U.S. radical, 411–14 World War II and, 290 (see also World War II) geometric scaling, 395 geometry, 115, 161–2, 176, 230, 306, 383–4, 469, 512, 519, 521 geomorphologist, 44, 54, 57, 59, 60, 387, 466, 470 geomorphology, 512 alternative traditions of, 470 characteristics of, 512 cultural, 472 definition of, 289, 465 drainage basins and, 502, 504, 508 (see also drainage basins and systems) geography and, 452 (see also geography) history of, 443–4, 447, 468, 478, 486, 489 landforms and, 470 physical geography and, 290 (see also physical geography) planetary, 40 quantitative revolution in, 469–70, 487 regional, 470 geophysicists, 488 geopolitics definition of, 612 and empire, 616–19 exceptionalism and, 618 history of, 610, 613 knowledge, 9, 219 (see also knowledge) political geography and, 613–15 re-emergence of, 615–16 georeferencing, 135 geospatial intelligence (GEOINT), 224–6 Geospatial One-Stop, 131 geostationary satellite imagery, 171. See also satellites geotheory, 466 Germany, 22, 79, 158, 202, 220–2, 265, 288, 337, 374, 448, 484, 488, 611–15, 617. See also Nazi Germany Gesellschaft concept, 323, 551, 564, 566 Gilbert, Grove Karl, 55, 467, 478 glacial epochs, 494–5, 498, 534. See also glaciation and glaciers

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INDEX

glaciation and glaciers, 396, 467, 477, 480, 493–5 characteristics of, 493 climate system implications of, 497–9 computer simulations of, 497 Earth-systems approach to, 492 history of study of, 493 landscape pattern of, 495 mountain, 497 processes, 497, 499, 500 theories of, 466, 478, 492, 494–6, 541 glasshouses, 105 global development, 605–7 global ice volume, 496 globalisation, 6, 11, 113, 198, 274, 279, 282, 323, 328, 344, 351–2, 409, 458, 555, 558, 567–8, 571, 596, 607, 617–19 global land-cover/land-use, 180 global positioning system (GPS), 130, 281 global trade deficits, 196 Google Earth, 83, 83, 85, 132–4, 135, 183, 218, 272, 358, 365 Google Maps, 135 graphosphere, 334–5 Greeks, 13, 26, 106, 155, 156, 163, 316 (see also geography: ancient Greek origins of) greenhouse gasses, 540, 542–5 greenhouse warming, 544 Greenland, 495 guerilla war, 217 habitus, 409, 414 Haeckle, Ernst, 585 Hartshorne, Richard, 21–2, 24, 222, 345, 347, 386 hegemony, 11, 107, 112, 122, 167, 1187, 191, 192–9, 248, 254, 256, 351, 382 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 10, 311, 319 high spatial-resolution imagery, 173, 181 Hippocrates, 370, 371 Hippocratic humours, 369, 371 history of climate change study, 542–5 of geographical education, 40 of geographical inquiry, 22 of geographical knowledge, 12 (see also knowledge: geographical) of geography (see geography: history of) of science, 30, 85, 101, 104 Hitler, Adolf, 221, 613. See also Nazi Germany home geography, 347 homeostasis, 292, 456 Hong Kong, China, 550, 557–8 Hooke, Robert, 115, 150, 476 human(s) ecology, 82, 553 influences on environment, 287, 528–34, 530 population growth of, 262, 544, 590, 592 human geography characteristics of, 288, 345, 549, 605, 607

Index.indd 629

629

cities and, 549 (see also cities) cultural, 447 (see also geography: cultural) fieldwork in, 43 (see also fieldwork) history of, 276, 290, 388–9 landscape and, 303–4, 306 nature and, 293–6 physical geography and, 1, 344, 457 (see also physical geography) region and, 344, 352 significance in, 345 humanism, 14, 43, 345, 597, 602, 605 Human Rights Watch, 91 humoral theory, 370, 371 hydraulic geometry, 521–2 hydroelectric power, 503 hydrography, 128, 134 hydrology, 84, 134, 152, 290, 296, 376, 394, 454, 502, 504–5, 507, 520, 586 hygrothermometers, 151 hypsometric curve, 506, 510 ice age, theories of, 492–7 ice and climate change, 499–500. See also climate change ice-core measurements, 544 imperialism, 9, 32, 41, 72, 113, 158, 160, 162–3, 169, 219–20, 224, 308, 362, 378, 587, 610–12, 614, 617–19 India, 9, 43, 90, 94–5, 103, 130, 135, 164–6, 208, 247, 250–5, 414, 424, 589, 591–2, 598, 606 Indonesia, 180, 592 industrialisation, 264, 551, 563 inequality, 188, 224, 307, 411, 426, 432, 556–7, 596, 601, 607. See also discrimination; racism information and communication technologies, 340 instantaneous field of view (IFOV), 176 Institute of British Geographers (IBG), 122, 599 Integrated Earth Observation, 180 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 218, 223, 226 International Geographical Union, 111 international law, 611–12, 617, 619 International Meteorological Committee (IMC), 152 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 198, 595 International Society for Photogrammetry (ISP), 172–3 Ionic school, 162–3 Iraq, 91, 225 Ireland, 90 iron ore, 612 irrigation, 181–2, 206, 213, 503, 529, 589 isolines, 362 isostasy, 470, 487–8 Israel, 225, 615, 619 Japan, 8–9, 46, 204, 384, 591 joint-bounded blocks, 59 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 23–4, 255, 319, 373, 419–20 Kew gardens, U.K., 104, 109

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630

knowledge amateur, 212 circuits of value and, 189 circulation of, 190–1 climate, 209, 212 definition of, 189 economic, 187 finance and, 187 gendering of, 437–9 (see also gender) as geographical product, 188 geographical, 4, 9–10, 13, 76, 82–3, 85, 160, 185–7, 189–91, 204–6, 211–12, 221, 271–3, 277–80, 360 geographically ‘situated’, 58 geography of, 7–13, 187–9 geopolitical, 9, 219 hegemonic, 10–11 hierarchies, 250–1 historically ‘situated’, 58 idiographic, 127 indigenous, 8 insurgent, 248 localisation, 88 masculinist, 430, 438 museums and, 68 (see also museum(s)) nomothetic, 127 normalization of, 5 power and, 94–5 as process, 190 production (see knowledge production) relational formulation of, 190 relational geographies and, 189 rurality, 566 scientific, 10–11, 14, 80, 101, 107, 130, 162–3, 212, 232, 298 sites of, 8–9 situated, 246, 248, 256, 430 spaces of, 186–7, 190–1, 195–8, 250 from subaltern, 248 urban, 564 knowledge production archives and, 88 centre of calculation and, 158 (see also centres of calculation) cities and, 549 credit system and, 194 geographies of, 7, 191 industrialization of, 80 mobilization and stabilization in, 161 modelling, 235 networks, 162 non-Western forms of, 165 place and, 328 plurality of, 9 scientific, 80 sources of, 6, 298 laboratory characteristics of, 77–81

Index.indd 630

INDEX

definition of, 78–9 Earth as, 81–6 in ecology and field biology, 81 functions of, 76 geography and, 45–6 history of, 78 isolation of, 77–8 physiology, 79 processes, 78 sciences, 77, 79–81, 83 vs. field, 62 labor–capital relations, 413 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 68, 289, 441, 443–4, 477 landforms complexity science and, 471 cycle of erosion in, 13, 14, 441–4, 468–9, 475–6, 478–9, 482–3, 485–6 (see also erosion) earth surface dynamics and, 471 as ‘immutable mobile’, 468–9 kinds, 470–1 quantitative revolution in, 486–7 studies, 465–6 systems and, 470–1 See also landscape Landsat satellites, 128, 173–4, 177–8, 181, 225 landscape architects, 101, 128 cultural, 289, 304, 446–8, 530 definition of, 300–2, 304, 309–10, 313 dwelling and, 309–12 English, 101, 333 etymology of, 302 fieldwork and, 304 geographical understandings of, 312 geography and, 302–3 glaciation and, 498 human geography and, 303 interpretation, 278 linear perspective and, 306 as material record, 303–5 natural kinds and, 471 phenomenological approaches to, 310 as representation, 309 study, 22, 307, 310, 505 temporality and, 311 as way of seeing, 306–9 See also landforms LA School, 555, 557, 559. See also Chicago School Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), 497 Las Vegas, U.S.A., 550, 558 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 78 learned societies, 111–14 liberal democracy, 600 Library of Alexandria, 162–3, 168 Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) sensors, 130, 182 Linnaeus, Carl, 164 lithography, 361

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INDEX

London Missionary Society (LMS), 203–6, 209–10, 212–13 Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network, 84–5 Los Angeles, USA, 132, 140, 550, 557–8, 577 lumber, 583 Lyell, Charles, 466, 467, 468, 477–8, 480, 529 macroinvertebrates, 519 Manchester, UK, 68, 71, 114, 120, 328, 550–1 Manifest Destiny, 614 map-making of climate-change, 545 development of, 42 environmental mapping, 180 geology and, 361 GPS and, 130 imaging and, 277–80 locational and discursive expression in, 43 as practice, 42 thematic, 358, 360–4 Mapping. See map-making Mapquest, 131 maps access to, 135, 364 digital mapping systems, 225 evolution of, 357, 359 as geographic writing, 42 geography and, 357–8 (see also geography) GIS and, 363–5 history of, 42 missionaries and, 206 requirements of, 127 role of, 127 as social constructions, 128 technological change and, 361 thematic, 360–3 types of, 42 See also map-making Marinos of Tyre, 32 Marx, Karl, 405–6, 587 Marxian social class theory, 411, 412, 414. See also social class Marxism, 14, 375–6, 407, 409, 411, 415, 457, 556 Marxist urbanism, 556 masculinism, 432, 437–8 Mead, Margaret, 4 media, growth of, 262 Mercator, Gerardus, 359 meteorology agricultural functions of, 151 instruments, standards and measurement in, 150–2, 545 offices, 151, 153, 155 satellite, 154, 173, 181 vernacular observational, 149–50 Mexico, 72, 120, 181–2, 256, 362, 601 Microsoft Virtual Earth, 135 Middle Ages, 99, 106, 163, 606

Index.indd 631

631

migration studies, 572, 575 mission(s) British Victorian movement, 204 cultural exchange and, 211 diplomatic relationships and, 211 exploration and, 203 gardens, 206–8 history of, 204 local agency and, 211–12 map construction by, 206 medicine and, 208–11 meteorological data from, 208–11 scientific reports, 202–6 mobility axioms for study of, 576–9 European, 164, 578 forms of, 574 new paradigm for, 575–6 place and, 576–7 power and, 577–8 social and cultural contexts of, 577 models and modeling academic, 239 assemblage, 239 assessment, 233 of climate, 155 coherence within, 236 commercial, 239 computational fluid dynamics (CFD), 230, 236–7 criticism of, 238–9 establishing trust in, 232 functions of, 228 futures, 231 in interdisciplinary settings, 236 limitations of, 233 local knowledge and, 241 performance, 233 rationale for, 229, 242 river channel formation, 508 scientific knowledge and, 232 statistical power of, 232 trust in, 234–8 underdetermination, 233 of urban ecology, 564 urban flood inundation, 231 visualisation and, 236 of weather, 152 money, 92–3, 119, 185–6, 194–7, 297, 338, 385, 389–90, 435, 552 moraines, 466, 495, 497. See also glaciation and glaciers Moran, Thomas, 468 multiculturalism, 419, 425–6, 603 Musée social (Paris), 261, 263–9 museum(s) architecture, 66 characteristics of, 64 collections in, 65

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632

INDEX

museum(s) (Cont.) construction, 66–8 definition of, 64 disciplinary belief systems and, 68 displays, 68–71 exhibition policies of, 70 functions of, 71–2, 74 geographies of, 65 multiple access criteria for, 68 organisation of, 73 private collections of, 65 provincial, 72, 74 public display areas in, 67 and visitors, 65, 71 See also specific museum Muséum Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle (Paris), 68, 107 Museum of Natural History (Oxford History), 67, 96. See also museum(s) Napoleon, 113, 120, 218–19, 220–1 National Geographic Society, 483. See also learned societies National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), 224–5 nationalism, 6, 109, 219, 253–4, 323, 406–8 national security, 135–6, 172, 222, 224–5 Natural History Museum (London), 67. See also museum(s) Nazi Germany, 218, 221–2, 319, 374, 610, 612, 615 neo-classical economics, 599–601 neo-liberalism, 603–4, 607 neo-Marxism, 345 Nepal, 43 Netherlands, the, 102, 139, 150, 278, 337. See also Amsterdam, the Netherlands networks -building, 159 knowledge production, 162 Long Term Ecological Research (LTER), 84–5 place and, 327 river, 504, 508, 509, 512 theory, 102, 158, 325, 559 Newton, Isaac, 25–6, 115, 127, 319, 320, 360, 381, 384–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 15, 23, 27–30, 33, 36 non-representational theory, 312, 345, 559 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 350 North Pole, 164. See also Arctic nuclear weapons laboratories, 83 observatories, 76 ocean –atmosphere system, 153 level change, 180, 478, 534, 544, 590 sediments, 496 Odum, E.P., 454, 456 Odum, H.T., 454, 455, 457 oil, 153, 287, 293–4, 371, 587, 592, 612, 615 orientalism, 9, 423

Index.indd 632

Ortelius, Abraham, 359 outer space visualizations, 77 ozone layer depletion, 179, 532, 589–90 palaeoecologists, 446 palaeohydrology, 447 palaeolimnology, 447 paleoclimate, 492, 494, 497. See also climate change palynologists, 447 Paris Geographical Society, 202, 220. See also learned societies Penck, Walther, 483–5, 488 peneplanation, 480, 482, 485, 487, 488 pesticides, 588–90 phenomenology, 8, 217, 310–12, 411 Philippines, 79, 204 photogrammetry, 130, 172–4, 223, 470 photographs and photography aerial, 130, 172–3, 175, 224, 506 landscape, 301, 307 by missionaries, 205 national security and, 225 space, 173 physical geographers, 447, 545 physical geography characteristics of, 296, 387 dynamics within, 394, 402 history of, 288–90, 397, 442, 457, 480 human geography and, 1, 290, 344 (see also human geography) region and, 344 sub-fields, 296 systems analysis in, 458 place definition of, 316, 317, 318, 326 devaluing, 322–3 financial knowledge and, 191–2 geographical scale and, 319 idiographic, 324 modernity and, 323 multiple times in, 338–40 narrative of words and, 383 networks and, 327 as past, 319 placelessness and, 319 practice of, 326–8 sense of, 327 space and, 318–22, 324–6 spatial–temporal relations and, 341 territorialities and relationalities of, 192 Plato, 316, 370, 384 Pliny the Elder, 33, 541 polar regions. See Antarctica; Arctic policy makers, 85, 190, 273, 275, 279–2, 293, 540 political economy, 192 Polybius, 31–3 population ecology, 452, 454 population growth, 262, 544, 590, 592

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INDEX

postcolonial studies, 247–8, 251 postcolonialism, 248, 345 post-modernism, 604, 605 post-structuralism, 575, 605 poverty, 264–5, 279, 282, 293, 377, 426–7, 532, 566, 569, 592, 595–7, 603, 605, 607 Powell, John Wesley, 55, 467–8, 478, 483–4 power balance among nations, 120 impacts of, 578 global, 610 knowledge and, 94–5 relations, 90, 220, 432–3, 574, 578 in statistics, 232 subaltern space and, 250 (see also subaltern space) prejudice, 36, 226, 418, 420, 423–4, 467. See also discrimination; ethnicity; racism primatology, 8–9 printing press, 163, 334, 357, 361 Ptolemy, Claudiua, 25–6, 31–5, 40, 346, 357, 382–4, 563 public sphere bourgeois, 261–3 characteristics of, 262 creating, 268–9 emergence of the, 262 Musée social and, 264–6 quaternary environmental change, 296 race definition of, 418 geography and, 419–20 legacies of, 418–19 social evolution and, 448–9 terrorism and, 425–6 whiteness and, 425 See also ethnicity; racism racial stereotyping, 375, 422 racism, 420–2, 425, 541–2, 611, 619 radar interferometry, 182 rain gauges, 209 rainfall radar image, 154 reconnaissance aircraft, 225 refugees, 118, 248 region areal differentiation and, 346–52 atheoretical character of, 345 chorology and, 346 concept, 345 geography of (see geography: regional) place and, 347 use of, 345 as way of knowing, 350 See also space regionalism, 344–5, 350–4, 607. See also region remote sensing advantages of, 171 algorithms, 176

Index.indd 633

633

applications, 178–9 civilian, 173–4 comprehensive sensors in, 177 computing and, 224 data, 174–6, 179 definition of, 171 digital, 174 environmental, 179–84 GIS and, 130 (see also geographical information systems) history of, 130, 171–5, 183 instruments, 173 large area, 177 long-term, 178 modeling and, 84 (see also models and modeling) multi-disciplinary approaches to, 174 multi-scale, 178 passive, 177 processes in, 175 programs, 130 publication growth, 172 public data from, 218, 225 (see also Google Earth; Microsoft Virtual Earth) satellite, 42, 173, 179–80, 470 (see also satellites) single vs. multiple, 177–8 uses of, 179 vs. in situ observations, 176–7 Renaissance, 31, 33, 64, 66–7, 102–3, 111–12, 163, 252, 255, 359–60, 370, 465–6, 503 Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO), 592 research funding, 57, 84, 387 risk analysis, 546 river(s) basin characteristics, 504, 510 bed, 515, 517, 518, 521, 523, 524 behaviour, 513, 515, 517, 518, 521 channels, 508, 511, 510–26, 514, 524 continuum concept, 517–21 discharge, 522 drainage basin coupling, 513–18 ecological aspects of, 513 engineering analysis of, 522 equilibrium relations, 522 as hydro-ecological system, 517–22 invertebrates in, 519 as lowland system, 515 networks, 504, 508, 512 ordering system, 511 precipitation regime and, 525 systems, 513 Romans and Roman Empire. 13, 106, 163 Royal Academy (UK), 140, 143 Royal Geographical Society, 44, 119–22, 166, 202, 220, 272, 278–9, 281, 288, 420–1, 423, 437–8 Royal Society of London, 41, 72, 112, 114–15, 117, 150, 163–4, 211 rural development, 603 ruralisation of the urban, 568

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634

INDEX

ruralism, 551 rural life, 551, 565–7 rural policy-making, 569 Russia, 10, 46, 113, 220, 375, 606, 612, 616–17 Russian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 117 Russian Bolshevism, 10 satellite imagery, 60, 154, 173, 175, 358, 365, 506 satellites, 77, 84, 128, 130, 132, 154, 160, 173–4, 178–80, 182, 223 Sauer, Carl, 21, 289, 304, 327, 351, 375, 410, 446, 586 Scholarly Societies Project (SSP), 111–12 science ‘Big’, 76, 79–80, 349, 385 centre/periphery model of, 164 characteristics of, 8 cognitive, 12 geography and, 385 geography of, 369 knowledge and (see knowledge: scientific) post-war paradigm of, 385 system as basis for, 457 work practices in, 158 Scotland, 56, 312. See also Europe sea-level change, 180, 478, 534, 544, 590. See also ocean secularism, 7, 597 sediment accumulation, 515 budget, 516 concentration, 522 deposition, 515, 525 production, 515, 516, 517 supply, 513, 515, 517, 523 transport, 229, 469–70, 508, 512–13, 515, 517, 522–3 yield of basin, 516 segregation, 224, 251, 411–12, 418, 424–6, 553–4, 556, 560, 564. See also racism Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) control system, 223 sensors active, 130 characteristics of, 176 improvement of, 178 passive, 130 remote (see remote sensing) satellite, 173, 179, 180 uses of, 181 validation of, 178 sex, 71, 141, 431–2, 435–7, 577. See also gender Siam, 43, 384 Singapore, 550, 598 slavery and slaves, 248, 377, 420, 421, 449, 529 Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC), 69, 72–3, 221 social class anti-essentialism and, 414–15 geographic differentiation and, 415–16

Index.indd 634

in geography, 410–15 membership, 411 neo-Durkheimian approaches to, 408 neo-Marxist approaches to, 406 neo-Weberian approaches to, 408, 411 (see also Weber, Max) Pierre Bourdieu and, 409 post-class approaches, 410 relations, 406 rent-based approaches to, 405 sociological theories of, 405–11 theories of, 410–12, 414 theorizations of, 405 social-Darwinist ideology, 610, 613 social evolution, 448–9 social inequality, 411, 602 social theory, 405–6, 409, 412, 586, 601 Société de Géographie de Paris (SGP), 118–19, 121, 166 software developers, 241 Soil Conservation Service (SCS), 56, 530 solar activity, 542–3, 546 solar irradiance, 542–4, 546 South Africa, 214, 448, 498 sovereignty, 57, 166, 218, 253 space battle (see battle space) characterisation of, 6 class formation and, 413 closed, 202, 617 definition of, 316 global, 5, 195, 318 history of concept of, 13 neo-Marxist place and, 324–6 perspective on, 324 social theory and, 412 subjectivity and, 568–9 subaltern (see subaltern space) -time coupling, 336, 469–70 urban, 261, 269, 556, 568 world connection and, 617 space exploration, 173 space performative perspective, 325 spatial analysis criticism of, 388 definition of, 381 GIS and, 389–90 history of, 381–2 mainstream science and, 386–8 Newton and, 383–4 Ptolemy and, 382–4 (see also Ptolemy, Claudiua) Varenius and, 383–4 spatial science geography, 224. See also geography Sputnik, 173 spy satellites, 223 stereotyping, 420, 422 Strabo, 22–3, 26–7, 29–35, 273, 346, 357, 563 stream. See river(s)

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INDEX

studio(s) characteristics of, 137 construction of, 145 functions of, 137 heritage, 145–7 London art world and, 140, 143 as place, 142, 144 preservation, restoration and reconstruction of, 145 research on, 147 as subject, 138–40 subaltern space definition of, 246, 248, 249 as differential space, 247–51 genealogy of, 246 paradoxes in, 255–6 as paradoxical space, 255–6 as a space of diversality, 251–6 studies of, 9, 247, 250–1, 253–5 subjects of, 248 subaltern theory, 247, 255 subsidence, 182, 443, 482, 488 suburbanisation, 435, 556, 566–7 sunspots, 541–2 Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT), 182 surveying, 130 Sweden, 278, 446. See also Europe symbology, 213, 359 synthetic-aperture-radar (SAR), 173 systems ecology, 452, 454–6, 458–2 systems theory, 291–2, 296, 457–8, 460–1, 487 Tansley, A.G., 453–4, 456, 460–2, 585 taxation, 57, 94–5, 151, 219, 263 technology digital, 135, 358 environmental mitigation by, 532 mobilization, 231 reach of, 10 research, 82 sensors and, 178 (see also sensors) of warfare, 218 See also specific technology terrorism, 217, 225, 351, 427, 557, 581, 607 Thales, 22, 26, 162 thermometers, 151, 209 Tibet, 43 timber, 583 time commodification of, 332, 337 -consciousness, 332, 334 cycles in, 338, 475–7 daily lives and, 338 as epochal change and tradition, 332–5 geography, 332, 335–9, 341, 347, 476–7 as history, 333 identitiary, 336 measurement, 336

Index.indd 635

635

nature of, 340 place and, 338–40 social organisation and, 334 space and, 336, 339, 469–70 temporalities and, 339 tolerance, forms of, 46 topologically distinct channel network (TDCN), 508, 510 Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS), 180. See also ozone layer depletion transnationalism, 249, 607 transport. See geography: transport trigonometry, 42, 361, 384 troposphere, 149, 153–4, 398, 495 Truman, Harry, 595–9 Turkey, 91 Uganda, 207–8, 211–12, 422 UK National Environment Research Council (NERC), 236 UK Meteorological Office, 151, 154, 155 underdevelopment, 321, 352, 377, 598–601, 607 unionized labour, 412–13 United Kingdom academic geography in, 560, 604 (see also geography: academic) art identity, 140 colonial geography in, 598 environmental controls in, 587 geographical associations in, 120–2 (see also geographical societies; learned societies) geographical education and, 281 landscape in, 305 (see also landscape) meteorology and, 151, 154–5 policy formation and, 272, 275 Weberian social geography in, 414 See also British Empire United States Civil War, 73, 371 finance and, 196–8 (see also finance) geography, 21, 224, 292, 347, 350, 374, 411–15 (see also geography) geography education in, 280–1 geopolitics, 10, 615–16 hegemony, 11 liberalism, 10 military, 223, 385, 387 Navy, 583, 611 neo-colonial role for, 597 remote sensing in, 174, 223, 225 (see also remote sensing; satellites) research funding, 84 scholarly societies in, 114 (see also learned societies; specific society) United States Bureau of the Census, 128, 275 United States Central Intelligence Agency, 222–3 United States Geological Survey (USGS), 56, 134, 174, 178, 183, 467

1/19/2011 2:05:42 PM

636

INDEX

United States National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), 83–4, 130, 132, 174–5, 178, 180, 182–3, 225 United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 180, 183, 225 United States National Science Foundation, 84, 499 United States National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), 131 United States Office of Naval Research (ONR), 84, 172, 173, 385, 387–8 United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 222 universalism, 3, 190, 218–19, 254, 437 university-based scientific research, 84 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), 225 urban centres. See cities urban ethnographies, 564 urban geographies, 411, 557, 559–60, 563–64 urban geography. See geography: urban urbanisation. 246, 262, 264–6, 334, 528, 550–2, 558, 563, 567–8 urbanism, 261, 263–4, 266–9, 552, 555–8, 602. See also cities urban life, 552. See also cities urban planning, 179, 265–9, 277–8, 600 urban–rural living, 567 urban sociologists, 82, 411, 560 urban studies, 550, 553–4, 556, 558, 560, 563 user-generated content (UGC), 134 Vancouver, Canada, 95, 550, 558 Varenius, Bernhard, 24, 26–7, 31, 381–4, 386 Venezuela, 529, 600 Venice, Italy, 90, 102, 117 vernacular observational meteorology, 149–50 videosphere, 334 virtual environments, 132 vitalism, 326 von Humboldt, Alexander, 1, 27, 30, 45, 54, 60, 118, 202, 288, 362, 363, 492, 529, 542, 585, 590, 593 war. See battle space; Civil War (US); Cold War; guerilla war; World War I; World War II watersheds, 502–3. See also river(s)

Index.indd 636

weather democratization of data collection, 155 forecasting, 153–5, 179 international nature of, 152–3 lore, 150 patterns, 149, 151–2 records, 150–1 satellite images of, 155 stations, 15, 150–6, 156 Weber, Max, 405, 408–11, 414, 551–3 Wellcome, Henry, 65, 69, 71, 211 Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, 70, 71–2. See also museum(s) Wikimapia, 135–6 Wikipedia, 134 wild fires and vegetation burning, 179, 183, 532 Wilson, Woodrow, 167, 221 women art and, 141, 145 careers and labour of, 337–9 gender and, 430–2 (see also gender) geographies of, 433–5, 437–8 labour market and, 337–8 learned societies and, 119 (see also learned societies) missionaries and, 204, 210 mobility of, 574, 577–8 World Bank, 595, 604 World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 152–3 World Trade Organization (WTO), 595, 607 World War I, 220 World War II, 80, 82, 172, 218, 221–3, 273, 289–91, 305 zoo(s) applied research on, 101–2, as cultural institution, 108 design of, 107, 108 management, 102 menageries in, 106 national prestige and, 108 public, 107 as recreational activity, 109 See also botanical and zoological gardens

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Index.indd 637

1/19/2011 2:05:43 PM

Index.indd 638

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Index.indd 639

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Index.indd 640

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