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Lecture notes An Introduction To Environmental History (K400)
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Understanding Place and Human Geography first year planning study notes.
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How have Human Geographers thought about the concept of ‘place’?Lisa Law (2014) 'Urban Senses' chapter 47
‘Geography is conventionally understood as a visual discipline, with an
emphasis on optic methods and techniques such as observation and
mapping’.
‘Our cartographic roots encouraged our reliance on sight’.
‘Seeing, in other words, is equated with believing; we assume vision is clear
and transparent’.
‘Until recently Geographers have unwittingly associated this visual world with
reliable knowledge, without considering how the other senses might shape our
everyday lives and geographies.
‘Some geographers have suggested that looking and seeing - although
dominant in the discipline - are only one of several possible pathways to
knowledge and understanding’.
‘Cultural and feminsit geographers first brought questions of the reliability of
vision to the fore, querying how vision helps produce geographic knowledge’.
‘Denis Cosgrove, a cultural geographer, has examined how ‘perspective’
shapes our seemingly innocent depictions of landscape. He explains how
landscape descriptions whether in written texts, paintings or photographs have
evolved through time, and how they are more akin to a ‘way of seeing’ than a
‘true’ depiction of what is actually seen’.
‘Landscape descriptions are thus not clear or transparent’. ‘No one view is
omniscient, and there are multiple perspectives on any one phenomenon’.
‘Gillian rose a feminist geographer, suggests that the dominant ‘way of
looking’ in geography has been normalized as white, male and heterosexual.
That is, the way geographers look at landscapes has been informed by the
vantage point of a group that has considerable economic, political and social
power’.
, ‘Urban planners imagine our cities from above - with the aid of zoning, land
use and other maps - building into designs an idealised city. This might include
a tree-lined boulevard to introduce nature and aesthetic beauty to your
neighbourhood, but the feelings this evokes for a range of people would likely
be quite different’.
‘As Gill Valentine discusses, women can find tree-lined boulevards
frightening at night as they increase shadows and reduce the possibility of
being seen’.
‘We might intuitively know how the feel of the subway, the smell of food
cooking, the sound of music, and so on is crucial to the making of place, but
how do we include these experiences in our research?’.
‘Geographers had not developed a vocabulary to describe sensory
experiences until recently, partly because of our reliance on sight but also
because they are difficult to record in fieldwork’.
Massey,D (1994) ‘A global sense of place’ p 146 - 156
‘This view of the current age is one now frequently found in a wide range of
books and journals. Much of what is written about space, place and
postmodern times emphasises a new phase in what Marx once called 'the
annihilation of space by time'.
‘It is a phenomenon which has been called 'time-space compression'. And the
general acceptance that something of the sort is going on is marked by the
almost obligatory use in the literature of terms and phrases such as speed-up,
global village, overcoming spatial barriers, the disruption of horizons, and so
forth’.
‘One of the results of this is an increasing uncertainty about what we mean by
'places' and how we relate to them. How, in the face of all this movement and
intermixing, can we retain any sense of a local place and its particularity?’.
‘But the occasional longing for such coherence is none the less a sign of the
geographical fragmentation, the spatial disruption, of our times. And
occasionally, too, it has been part of what has given rise to defensive and
reactionary responses - certain forms of nationalism, senti mentalized
recovering of sanitized 'heritages', and outright antagonism to newcomers and
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