Reviewed by Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Department of Sociology, University of Trento (IT)

After the catastrophic events that hit Japan, and particularly in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, a large scale debate about the sustainability of our energetic, economic and even civilizational model is badly needed. Such a huge task which is before us, and which calls for a general rethinking of our ecological approaches and aspirations, could perhaps start from some spatial and environmental insights that Japanese thought itself has transmitted to us.

The collection of short essays reviewed here provides an excellent introduction to the work of the French geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque (born in 1942), who has devoted most of his life to an exploration of Japanese thought and culture, with particular reference to its peculiar spatial and environmental attitudes. Not much of Berque’s oeuvre is available to English readers, yet his major theoretical works (Berque 2000a, 2000b) can be said to engage a dialogue with Japanese philosophical tradition in order to develop reflections that are more widely applicable to the contemporary world, rather than a merely philological reconstruction of certain sources – an intellectual project that somehow recalls what François Jullien has done with Chinese thought.

[CC image credit: Traditional houses in Ogimachi by Guillaume Brialon]

In a larger work that appeared nearly at the same time as the collection on milieu and human identity, Berque (2010) has explored the notion of the ‘ideal habitat’ and has questioned the contemporary transformation and sustainability of that ideal. In these shorter essays, written during the last ten years, the focus is rather on the notions of landscape, milieu, common heritage and identity. Starting from the acknowledgement that western modernity has produced a grave disequilibrium in the relation between the human species and the world – as landscape devastation, waste of natural resources and the many aberrations in the design of the urban built environment testify – the author advances a distinction between a western conception of landscape, pivoted around the subject, and an eastern conception, which instead focuses on the predicate–the latter logic being best represented by Nishida Kitarô’s basho no ronri, or logic of place, a text from 1966.

On the one hand, the author observes, an analysis of the Chinese Zong Bing’s (375-443) classic treaty on landscape painting (Shan Shui) shows a rising awareness of the spiritual dimensions of landscape many centuries before the western notion we employ was conceived during the Italian Renaissance period; on the other hand, in Japanese haiku poetry not only is the subject implicit, but there are verbal forms without a veritable subject. This latter fact should not be taken as a sign of abstraction of space from place; quite the contrary, Japanese sensibility remains extremely grounded in the ‘emplaced’ presences that ‘people a place’. For one of the most important Japanese philosophers of the twentieth century, Watsuji Tetsurô (who was born in 1889, the same year as Heidegger and Wittgenstein), the crucial notion of fûdo, or human milieu, can be found. To stress the fact that, contrary to a superficial impression, Watsuji’s notion does not entail a deterministic approach (i.e., the idea that the climate determines the mores and ethos of a people), Berque proposes to translate fûdo as médiance, meaning something that simultaneously mediates and is in the middle of the relation between a society and its environment. To be true, Berque also rejects the notion of environment as too objectivist, and prefers to speak of milieu, a concept which inherently entails a point of view from within on such a relationship.

The major argument running through the various essays of the book is that it is all the more urgent today to retrieve our perception of the horizon that surrounds us in order to give meaning to the scale of our actions. From this perspective, Berque speaks of ecoumène to address the phenomenon of the birth of a plurality of life-worlds through progressive unfolding and development of milieus. Hence, if the médiance is an always local and ‘emplaced’ relation between humans and their milieu, a reciprocal ‘absorption’ between a place and its inhabitants, the ecoumène is the human relation to the geographic extension of the planet at large. The ecoumène can be contrasted to the ‘cyborg landscape’, which the author criticises as landscape based on a mechanistic view which determines a detachment (débrayage) of people from their household (foyer), their horizon, and ultimately from the earth. Some further important insights ‘for a surpassing of modernity’ might also come from a comparative examination of the notion of heritage (patrimoine) in the East and in the West: in this respect, the author reflects, the traditional Japanese approach might help us to escape from the false alternative between mummification versus demolition of landscape which has characterised the Western approach to common heritage.

Perhaps Berque’s approach remains in many senses stuck to certain overall dichotomies, which might ultimately undermine his arguments. However, as suggested at the outset, a serious discussion on the human ecological relationship to the environment is so necessary today that all contributions attempting to open new perspectives – for instance, as in this case, through cross-cultural analysis of spatial concepts – should be greeted as most welcome.

References
Berque, Augustin (2000a) Écoumène. Introduction à l’étude des milieux humains. Paris: Belin.
Berque, Augustin (2000b) Médiance. De milieux en paysages. Paris: Belin.
Berque, Augustin (2010) Histoire de l’habitat idéal. De l’Orient vers l’Occident. Paris: Félin.

More information about Augustin Berque
Augustin Berque, Directeur d’études, EHESS
Augustin Berque – Wikipédia
Ecoumene

There is no doubt that most Canadian Arctic settlements will be affected because they are predominantly in exposed locations on the shoreline. Iqaluit, a quickly sprawling capital of Nunavut with a population of about 7500 is the focus of my research on Inuit urbanization and Arctic cultural capitals. Iqaluit is mostly under 10m above high tide, rising to a ridge about 30m above sea level. The most dramatic case is Tuktoyaktuk, at the mouth of the the Mackenzie Delta on the Beaufort Sea where many parts of the town have been undermined by tidal action. However other settlements such as Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island, have already suffered from major storms; flooding washed out a key bridge.

Yesterday, Forum on the Future released its report ‘Megacities on the Move‘ that argues for planning to ensure more sustainable access to goods and services in cities.  They present four scenarios as videos – one solution, ‘Planopolis’ is here. But urban access to goods such as food depends on long supply chains back to rural locations.  We need solutions for the far corners of the world as well as cities.

- Rob

Reviewed by Paul Crosthwaite, English Literature Research Group, Cardiff University (UK)

This outstanding study explores the engagement of Anglo-American women writers of the modernist period with a global capitalist system increasingly orientated towards the consumption of desirable commodities. Situating the authors she analyzes against a meticulously sketched backdrop of early twentieth-century socio-economic history in Britain and the United States, Alissa Karl shows how long-prevailing theorizations of modernist culture as high-mindedly antagonistic towards the vulgar machinations of the marketplace (such as those associated with Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School) misrepresent the ambiguous blend of attraction and repulsion that characterizes many modernist encounters with the seductions of consumer capitalism.

Window shopping at Marshall Fields, Chicago, 1910

One of the chief strengths of Karl’s book is its insistence on approaching commodity consumption not as an autonomous activity contained by the four walls of the grocer’s shop or department store, but as an economic phenomenon inextricably woven into the global capitalist network and determined by an array of power structures. In the introduction, Karl describes how her thinking on these issues evolved over the course of her research:

When I began this project, I set out to examine the conceptualization, function, and impact of consumer capitalism in women-authored modernist texts …. I soon discovered that it was not possible to discuss adequately the ideologies and operations of consumerism without considering the ways that consumerism and modernism alike interfaced with procedures of capitalist economies more broadly, with the classed hierarchies that organize capitalist cultures, with shifting but still active nation- and empire-building, and with racial and ethnic dynamics of societies in demographic flux.” (4)

The four chapters that follow make good on the ambitious terms of the project’s remit. The first chapter considers how the fiction of Jean Rhys registers the ways in which “consumerism links the evolving strategies of actual colonization (economic, military, political) with those of the metaphorical (but no less material or real) colonization of women’s bodies through commodification, fetishization, and visual appropriation” (17). Karl shows how Rhys’ heroines – émigrés to London or Paris from colonized territories or other exotic locales – attempt to utilize consumption and display in order to fashion what they imagine to be metropolitan identities; the effect, however, is to turn themselves into commodities to be possessed and exchanged by domineering, paternalistic men. The book then turns to Virginia Woolf, to examine the co-construction of consumerism and imperialism in The Voyage Out (1915) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Here, Karl argues that Woolf sees the practices of British imperial domination as not merely confined to the upper social echelons – in the exercise of state and corporate power – but as continually replicated and intensified ‘on the ground’ in the everyday consumption of goods that bear the imprint of distant exploitation. Woolf’s response, however, is a complex – and symptomatic – combination of complicity and critique.

Chapter 3 analyses two prominent memoirs of modernist literary culture: Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company (1956). Karl skilfully articulates the ways in which Stein, the avant-garde poet, and Beach, the pioneering bookseller and publisher who first brought James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) into print, did not simply reject the consumer marketplace, but rather challenged a standardized mass culture from within the market itself, positioning their wares as radical, daring commodities for a discerning, niche audience. The final chapter focuses on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand, the loosely autobiographical tale of an American woman of white European and black West Indian parentage. Karl argues compellingly that Larsen’s protagonist, Helga, uses consumerism as a strategy through which “to negotiate the discrepancies of racial identification and class positioning in order to forge a unique position for herself” (120). Commodities and consumerism “appear to offer the latitude of choice against the economic formations of race” (120), but, proving in fact to be inseparable from rigidly hierarchical social structures, they turn out to merely embed Helga’s predetermined place on the social scale.

Drawing on the detailed readings of modernist texts offered in her four chapters, Karl’s concluding Coda makes persuasive and intriguing connections to contemporary culture, indicating how many of today’s anxieties and debates about consumption, commodification, branding, and corporate power were rehearsed during the modernist period, and asserting a strong case for the relevance of modernist texts in understanding the intoxicating and troubling consumer landscape of the twenty-first century.

As Karl notes in her introduction, there has been a recent turn in modernist studies towards “geography and transnationalism,” a turn which troubles “the national and temporal parameters of modernism” (3). Modernism and the Marketplace, with its deftly rendered panorama of globalized economic relations and spatially expansive modernist texts, makes a brilliant contribution to this vibrant field of study. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel write influentially of modernism’s “geocultural consciousness” (qtd. in Karl 4); Karl’s book provides one of the best analyses yet of this mode of writing, thought, and experience.

Works Cited
Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Eds.) 2005. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana UP.

Datamasher maps US state-level statistics from the US census and other sources.  An example is their map of fast-food restaurants versus obesity rates (above).  Sometimes these are revealing, sometimes not, and sometimes their statistical reliability may not be good due to sample sizes.  Makes a nice map, however.

Rhizalabs’ FluTracker also does a global mapping of H1N1 influenza using Google:

In its 11th hour, the Bush Administration has authorized a new US Arctic Policy (National Security Presidential Directive 66), which will serve as a continuing, broad policy guideline to government agencies until replaced. That is, it has effect until the next Arctic policy (which can take years to produce). It governs seven broad areas of the American approach to the Arctic: national security and homeland security, international governance, extended continental shelf and boundary issues, promotion of international scientific cooperation, maritime transportation, economic issues, including energy resources, and environmental protection and conservation of natural resources.

Although there is sceptical acceptance of ‘the effects of climate change and increasing human activity in the Arctic region’ the main focus is access to oil and gas reserves on the extended continental shelf, beyond current territorial waters north of Alaska. These reserves are technically recoverable and would be easier to control.

One intended audience is the US Senate, where as the Guardian summarizes: ‘One of the main obstacles to staking a [American] claim on the Arctic seafloor [ie. the extended continental shelf] has been opposition in the Senate to ratification of the United Nations’ 1982 Law of the Sea Convention’

In concert with this policy, US News and World Report mentions that in one ‘midnight regulation‘ by which the outgoing President is attempting to tie the hands of incoming US President Barack Obama,, the Administration recently eliminated an important provision in the US Endangered Species Act requiring “independent scientific reviews” before construction or drilling can occur in an endangered species’ habitat – such as polar bears.

Another major focus is on the right to over-fly and also to freely navigate the Arctic – which will be contested by Canada should the Northwest Passage routes across its Arctic Archipelago become ice-free enough to transit. China’s Xinghua News Agency quotes Bush saying:

Preserving the rights and duties relating to navigation and over flight in the Arctic region supports our ability to exercise these rights throughout the world, including through strategic straits.

The document ignores the signing of the Ilulisat Declaration by all Arctic coastal states, claiming ‘aggressive moves by other countries’. This raises fear without providing facts, as Gunnar Sander notes in a comment to a Wall Street Journal article. Although commentators do not appreciate it, one key audience of this policy is likely to be China, which plans its own voyage to the pole in 2010 and anticipates that a shortcut route over the pole to Europe will become its main shipping route for goods if the polar cap melts.

Ironically, anticipating that melting ice will make access to hydrocarbon and other resources easier is rather ghoulish: give the extra absorption of solar energy by dark-coloured ocean compared to the white ice (the albedo effect) this implies that the planet will have been heating up at a faster than anticipated rate with sea-level rise affecting major capitals: New York, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Mumbai, all of Bangladesh, the Yucatan, the San Francisco Bay Area and so on. Perhaps the extra fuel will be needed for the lifeboats or for constructing dikes.

(Followup: Google this)

-Rob

Mónica Montserrat Degen’s recent book Sensing Cities: Regenerating Public Life in Barcelona and Manchester provides an illuminating discussion of the sensuous dimension of the urban everyday, particularly in the context of ‘regenerated’ neighbourhoods. In the book’s first section, Degen lays the theoretical groundwork for her analysis. Following Lefebvre’s notion of space as experienced “first and foremost through the sensuous body” (Degen, 2008, p. 18), and drawing upon his trialectic of space (spaces of representation [lived], spatial practices [perceived], and representations of space [conceived]), Degen outlines her notion of a “socially embedded aesthetics,” which conceives of “aesthetics” in its broadest (ancient Greek) sense as “the perception of the external world by the senses” (p. 38). This conception seeks to emphasize the situated and social nature of the senses, as well as the importance of corporeal perception in structuring urban space both mentally and physically. In the second section, Degen applies her theoretical framework within an extensive discussion of two ‘regenerated’ neighbourhoods: Castlefield in Manchester and El Raval in Barcelona.

Play Urban Sound Ecology by Amy MacDonald.

This recording was taken just outside the Alberta Legislature building in Edmonton on July 1, 2008 (Canada Day). Behind the domed Beaux Arts building is a large public space that includes a fountain and wading pool, and provides a popular recreational spot on hot summer days. This sound clip could be interpreted a number of ways in light of Degen’s book; one of these involves her discussion of the tension between individual agency and imposed order in urban sensescapes. The sound clip without visual imagery might bring to mind a place of play, independence, and individual whim, but the somewhat imposing and ’serious’ visual presence of the legislative building, with its potential connotations of abstract representations of space, certainly influences one’s perception of this particular sensory experience.

Degen’s work covers much ground, tying urban sensory geography to broader processes of globalization and, in turn, bringing these processes to bear on the everyday lived patterns and practices of the residents of (and visitors to) El Raval (famed for its narrow streets) and Castlefield. Accordingly, her book offers many fruitful paths of thought to follow. One of these, which particularly struck me, involves the paradoxical nature of sensuous experience. In her analysis, Degen recognizes and maneuvers within several tensions that are inherent in sensuous experiences—for instance, the interplay between the private, or personal, and public ‘senses’ of sense, and between reception and manipulation of stimuli and sensescapes, to name just two. In terms of the former, we perceive sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches (although, as Degen notes, “at the same time we touch we are touched”; 42) often on a very personal level; certain preferred sensuous experiences—favourite colours, music, and foods, for instance—become markers of identity and individuality, and are not expected to be shared by everyone we meet. Yet a “sensuous mapping” (p. 173) of Castlefield and El Raval residents’ perceptions of the sensescapes of their ‘regenerated’ surroundings suggests not only the senses’ vital role in shaping personal “attachments to places” (p. 175) but also the presence of a “common sensuous imaginary” (p. 175), revealing a commonality among private sensuous interpretations. Further, Degen’s discussion shows that what we might at first consider personal sensuous experiences are in fact inextricably tied to the publicness of a particular space, as access to, and engagement and representation within, public space are deeply affected by the “organization of the sensescapes” of those places in the processes of regeneration that is often effected by private forces (p. 195).

Tenement House Yard, New York from Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890
(Thanks to The Authentic History Centre).

Degen’s discussion also treats the interplay of reception and manipulation of sensuous experience and sensescapes, a “constant negotiation between an imposed order and individual agency” (p. 54). Dominant ideologies found in the conceived visions (representations of space) of planners and politicians provide controlled directives for activities and associated sensory experiences within ‘regenerated’ public spaces. These directives are based on the increasing need to market the experience of (regenerated) public space as a commodity, and often include the predominance of the visual; a drive towards ‘cleanliness’ and the removal of supposed sensuous pollution; and a bland, heavily edited sense of history couched within a ‘designer heritage aesthetic.’ Although these characteristics impose sensescapes upon residents and visitors that sometimes have upsetting results (such as the dissolution of El Raval residents’ strong social bonds), sensuous reorganization is not simply passively received in lived experience. Rather, individuals intervene, appropriating, personalizing, and subverting the sensescapes imposed by new housing and public squares. Degen reveals senses and sensescapes as active sites of struggle, in which individuals enter into dialogue with common conceptions of “good” urban planning and design.

Concert, Castelfield, 2004 (Thanks to BBC)

Degen’s work reminds us of the important role of the senses in mediating our experience with our local surroundings and the global forces that shape them, negotiating the public and the private, the social and the personal. As planners, developers, and designers hunt for the key to the ever-elusive ‘sense of place,’ Degen cautions that the role of embodied sensuous experience in making that sense, and in making sense of the world around us, should not be underestimated.

Reviewed by Amy Macdonald, University of Alberta, Canada.

- Rob 

The Chinese Dream Neville Mars, Adrian Hornsby, and Saskia Vendel (project management) 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 2008 .  704pp+79pp magazine.  ISBN 97864506529 [Amazon.ca]

The Chinese Dream surveys scenarios of possible Chinese urban development over the dozen years to 2020. Using graphics and text, the book explores the urban implications of current plans, population migration and the consumerist aspirations of Chinese society. The title is reminiscent of Victor Quinaz‘ 2004 award-winning  film of the same name about a dishwasher in China who longs for the glamour of New York.  The format is the image-rich architecture book, in the style of Koolhas and Mau’s S M L XL. The architects’ approach to books is as a built object, not an extended argument, nor a visual communication design. While it is innovative in its provision of endnotes and authorities in the form of urls, free layout of blocks of text, mixing of Chinese characters and roman text, and in its provison of visual glossaries of urban design ideas, as a whole it hard to read as a linear narrative.   Take a look .  An ironic magazine from 2020 is even bound into the closing sections of book to explain the culture that the authors expect to emerge. 17 chapters consider changing urban design and architecture in China, including the imported idea of ‘creative neighbourhoods’, green suburbs, and new retail and consumer environments.

The book contributes to, but otherwise sits outside of the academic literature on framented urban form and suburbanization. A scale from actual to dream bleeds off the lower right corner of the pages grounding each of 17 chapter-scenarios. Mapping these regional development trents onto urban and rural China, the book presents a stark picture of the implications of the hyper-urban development of China. Shanghai with its central highrise Pudong district, is one well known form in which China’s cities are developing. However, at a broader scale of whole cities and urban regions, this book shows the significance of Chinese growing cities. Where one sees most often the idea of 400 one-million population cities, the book argues that China is headed in the direction of a single Northeastern megalopolis of 400 million.

What if you built the whole mass of Western Europe in 20 years? What if 400 Million Farmers then moved in? What if it happened between now and 2020?What woudl it look like? How whould it work?…. Would there be jobs? Would it be dense? Green? Would you be able to go to sleep at night? And if you did, would you dream of somewhere else?

If one accepts the premise that China is a society under construction, this book attempts to map aspirations and dreams into urban landscapes. While the book attempts to alert all to the challenges and risks of a future megalopolitan China, it glosses the human rights history of China’s development to date as ‘the most successful humanitarian project ever to have taken place’, and in a non sequitur, advances economic evidence to support this claim (these are very different categories). However it does provide critical nuance elsewhere such as the details of the lack of popular benefit from current growth.  This is a symptom of the global neglect of critical and cultural discipline to architects’ and urbanists’ education. Reflecting the small business status of the architect and developer, economics is privileged, politics gets in the way, while culture is reduced to the history of architecture with scant attention to beliefs, social interaction, ritual and memory, or to issues such as cross-cultural communication. Hence there are few countertendencies to the ability of authoritarian planners to resculpt entire cities whenever thought necessary.  Other art and architectural reviewers also mention this but lack the critical insight to see that this is a pivotal issue.  In general my impression is that ‘desire’ is rendered as consumeristic in this text, but the harder to quantify desire for community seems not to figure in any way. Surely Chinese citizens are not so one-dimensional? In short, there are many more aspects of the emotional repertoire which guarantee that Chinese society will evolve less deterministically than this books suggests.

Super Brand Mall, Pudong, Shanghai.  Photo: Rob Shields

While the creators conclude by offering an offshore website www.BURB.tv ’seeded’ with ideas from the book but welcoming communal contributions within its pre-set information architecture.  My sense is that rather than computer-mediated expression, sociology can predict that authorities will not be able to forestall such large masses in high density cities will repeat the political awakening (although not necessarily the outcomes) of nineteenth century British industrial cities, as documented by Simmel, Weber and Engels.

Shanghai neighbourhood.  Photo: Rob Shields

At the same time, from where I sit in the wheat, potash and oil rich northern Canadian prairie, I read this book as a warning. It surmises that as wealth increases and families demand more commodious apartments, the per capita footprint of Chinese cities expands. Laid out on page after page of maps and graphs, it presents a design to preserve arable land by creating more compact city forms that will still be able to accommodate the projected 930 million Chinese living in cities by 2030. To paraphrase, this means:

1 new Beijing every year for 35 years… = 2 X the total built volume of China… driven by population growth… rural-to-urban migration… China becomes an urban society.

…Movement into the cities is mostly temporary ‘Leaving the Land not the Village’ (1980s slogan). Rollover migration leads to sprawl clusters and city form becomes scattered and discontinuous.

…There is a specific region in the East where this development is in all forms taking place…PUC People’s Urbanity of China: 96% of China’s population…GDP…migration flows…arable land. Area 3,302,997 Km sq. Population 2004: 1.263 Billion, urban population 2004: 530 million, density 2005: 382 persons/km sq. Population 2020: 1.488 Billion, urban population 2020: 893 million, density 2020: 451 persons/km sq.

About one third the size of the USA, only India will be comparable in its population density. This will put extreme pressure on arable land, requiring China to outsource much of its food supply, with enormous impacts on global markets and the global ecology. This urban-region, stretching from Beijing in the north to Shanghai in the south. Zhangzhou in the west and the eastern coast, will define the future of China itself. An S-shaped metropolis stretching across the region is proposed to preserve at least some land near in Qingdao and Zhangzhou.

Reviewed by Rob Shields, University of Alberta, Canada.

- Rob

Mark Jackson (U of Bristol) has alerted me to a terrific-sounding session on the theme of air and materialities to be held at the 2009 meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in Las Vegas.

CFP: ‘Aerographies’: re-thinking unthought elemental and metaphysical assumptions in recent human geographies
AAG 2009, Las Vegas, March 22nd-27th.

“…our concepts have been formed on the model of solids.” (H. Bergson)

“Metaphysics always supposes, in some manner, a solid crust from which to raise a construction.” (L. Irigaray)

The most vital of geography’s concerns are those that materiality opens in thinking the connections between earth and life (Whatmore 2006). The return to materialist concerns in recent cultural, social and political geographies reflects this vitality. Geographies of affect, emotion, performance and performativity, mobilities, non-representation, science and technology, corporeality, everyday life, representation and vision, memory, networks and assemblages, complexity, etc… all premise their engagements through specificities of the material, whose complex, relational dynamics “en-world” us in multiple ways. Yet, while engaged material practices are said to open relational thinking in dynamic ways, “matter”, and what we mean by the term itself, remains under considered. This has implications, for the objects we think with shape our metaphysical and ontological presumptions. As such, how we engage what we mean by matter is shaped by the objects we mobilize and the empirical sites we refract.

As Irigaray and Bergson argue, we moderns privilege “the solid crust” to give our thought shape. But what if Being and thought are not of the same matter? What if we began with the non-solid? What if we began, /in medias res/, as Irigaray insists we must, with air? Is air the forgotten material mediation of our geographical logos?

We are interested to deepen and extend recent efforts to re-think the geographies of material relation (ex. Ingold, 2008; Olwig, 2008), by interrogating the elemental assumptions behind how we engage the conceptual and practical spaces of matter and relation. In particular, we are interested to engage air as an evocative “object” for thinking relational and experiential space. Would beginning with the most ephemeral, and yet the constitutively most important element for life, enable us to reflect relational interaction in exciting and ever more relevant ways? Can ‘thinking with air’ respond with rigor, innovation, and responsibility to contemporary geographical imperatives ? Can it do so within registers perhaps under recognized in our present earth-writing? Can air be an evocative object for extending geographical engagements with relational materiality and space?

Deadline for abstracts: Oct. 10th, 2008
Reply via email with abstract to: <m.jackson@bristol.ac.uk>
Organisers: Mark Jackson, Maria Fannin, J-D Dewsbury – U of Bristol.

~ Matthew

And let’s not forget the worsening situation in Haiti.

-Rob