Denis Cosgrove

Geography is Everywhere: Culture and Symbolism in Human Landscapes

On Saturday mornings I am not, consciously, a geographer. I am, like so many other people of my age and lifestyle, to be found shopping with my family in my local town-centre precinct. It is not a very special place, artificially illuminated under the multi-storey car park, containing an entirely predictable collection of chain stores — W.H. Smith, Top Shop, Baxters, Boots, Safeway and others — fairly crowded with well-dressed, comfortable family consumers. The same scene could be found almost anywhere in England. Change the names of the stores and then the scene would be typical of much of western Europe and North America. Geographers might take an interest in the place because it occupies the peak rent location of the town, they might study the frontage widths or goods on offer as part of a retail study, or they might assess its impact on the pre-existing urban morphology. But I’m shopping.

Maps, Mapping, Modernity: Art and Cartography in the Twentieth Century

While the history of cartography has freed itself from debilitating debates over the scientific and artistic status of maps, considerations of the relationship between art and cartography have continued to focus largely on pre‐modern maps, avoiding critical examination of twentieth‐century art and science in cartography and leaving intact the impression that these followed distinct paths in the modern period. In this paper, however, I have drawn on theoretical work in Science Studies and taken account of modern arts separation from aesthetics to suggest that an examination of art and cartography in the twentieth century should focus on mapping practices rather than on maps as such. A summary overview of modern‐art movements and selected works indicates a continued, if critical, engagement of avant‐garde artists with cartography, and the examination of more popular newspaper artwork produced in the context of the intensely modern visual culture of mid‐twentieth century Los Angeles indicates a similarly close connection between modernity, art and cartography.

Fieldwork as theatre: a week's performance in venice and its region

Abstract The conventions of fieldwork are reassessed in the light of teaching a weeks field course on the landscape and culture of Venice and its region. The metaphor of ‘theatre’ helps conceptualise the present post‐structuralist insistence on representation in relations between land and life, as well as the more traditional geographic emphasis on observation. The metaphor of theatre is articulated through the exercises of the fieldwork, including urban trails, coach trips, discussion sessions, group projects and, not least, the experience of living for a week in an Italian city.

Landscape and Identity at Ladybower Reservoir and Rutland Water

Large-scale water control projects have been a major component of environmental engineering and landscape transformation during the twentieth century, creating some of its most characteristic modernist forms. The discourses generated by their design and implementation articulate diverse and often opposing cultural identities. Those surrounding the design and construction of reservoirs at Ladybower (1935-45), in what is now the Peak District National Park, and Rutland Water (1968-76), in Englands smallest shire county, give insights into the role of landscape aesthetics and symbolism in the complex negotiations of local and national identity at different moments in the course of twentieth-century modernism in Britain.

... Then we take Berlin: cultural geography 1989-90

Berlin. The single most powerful geographic event of the past year was the collapse of the last half century’s political order in an act of landscape change: the breaching of a concrete wall. Today indistinguishable lumps of ’the wall’ fetch astronomic prices from New York to Tokyo, solely because of their place of origin: the century’s most symbolic landscape artifact, now an article of consumption, fragmented and scattered across the globe. We may already envision the reconstitution of Berlin as capital city of Germany, political, cultural and symbolic centre of Europe’s superpower. I shall return to the reunification of Germany, but I open with the transformation of Berlin because it captures so many of the issues that have dominated work in cultural geography over the year. I ended last year’s report with comments on the postmodern urban landscape and its fragmentary nature. I shall open here with the same theme for it has been the subject of three major

A terrain of metaphor: cultural geography 1988-89

In last year’s report Lester Rowntree (1988) stressed ’the continuity and evolution of cultural geography’. Here I intend to adopt a different perspective. I shall stress both the reintegration of a human geography within which separately conceived subsets such as economic, historical and cultural geography make decreasing sense (Driver, 1988a); and also some of the discontinuities of cultural geography today, its fragmented and at times incidental nature. Continuities can

Orders and a new world: cultural geography 1990-91

Over the three years during which I have reported for PIHG on cultural geography the world has changed utterly. In 1988, despite the signs of its crumbling, the world order inherited from the Allied victory of 1945 and the postwar process of European decolonization remained substantially in place: first, second and third worlds were still recognizable. Although radically nongeographical, in the sense that these economic and ideological divisions of the globe offered no theoretical place to the physical environment and the ties of people to their native land as constitutive elements of geographical diversity, nonetheless they offered a powerful shorthand for mapping the human world. They were widely employed within geography. Last year I used as my text the removal of the most potent landscape symbol of that world order the destruction of the Berlin wall. The signal political event of the subsequent 12 months has been a war fought, rhetorically at least, over the concept of a ’new world order’. As I write, Europe, the continent most clearly divided between the former first and second worlds and historical creator of the third, struggles simultaneously to bind the nations of its Economic Community into ever closer territorial and political union, and to avoid a blood-letting between Slavic and Balkan cultures, long bound unwillingly together under the dictatorship of a universalist ideology. If the old world order privileged economic differences, the emerging order bids to reinscribe ethnic and cultural difference based in large measure on attachments to land on

Introduction: Project Plowshare

of the nineteenth century to the mega-dams and basin transfer schemes of the mid-twentieth, the progress of modernity may be calibrated through the planetary scale of its geographical engineering. Nowhere are the scale, hubris and environmental recklessness – in more sympathetic words, the sublimity – of the Modernist engineering imagination more apparent than in Project Plowshare, the 16-year programme funded by the United States Federal Government to use near-surface nuclear explosions ‘peacefully,’ for vast construction and engineering projects. Inspired by the fiercely anti-communist Hungarian émigré physicist Edward Teller, plans were developed for a series of spectacular events in locations stretched across the globe: in Alaska, Central America, Australia and the continental United States, whose purpose was at once both demonstrative and experimental. In the context of the Cold War, Americans would be reassured that nuclear swords could safely be beaten into plowshares, while the Soviets would witness the progressive achievements of a superior Western science. Of course, the Soviets were themselves conducting similar activities – and with fewer constraints on the geography and sociology of their ‘science,’ dramatic evidence that the culture of high modernism produced as many similarities between the superpowers as their ideologies emphasized differences. The papers collected here under the editorship of Scott Kirsch pursue aspects of Project Plowshare through four of the projects it generated: Project Sedan, a vast nuclear crater punched into the Nevada desert and the largest explosion actually realized by Teller’s team; Project Chariot, the scheme to excavate a harbour on the Alaskan shores of the Bering Sea; the plan to construct a second, sea-level Panama Canal by means of the near-simultaneous explosion of some 250 nuclear charges; and Project Ketch, a commercial scheme to create an underground gas storage chamber in Appalachian Pennsylvania. In itself, each project offers material for a dramatic, if hair-raising, narrative. In telling them in Ecumene, the four authors have used them as vehicles for addressing larger questions of interest within the scope of this journal. Scott Kirsch’s account of Teller’s struggle to produce a convincing demonstration of the capabilities of nuclear engineering is a case study of the arguments developed by historians of science, notably Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer

Cultural Geographies in Practice Anti-Ecumene

the Moon. The mile is both geodetic and experiential, registering a thousand human paces taken along a straight line over earthly terrain. On the Moon, gravity, horizon, atmosphere and light – fundamental presuppositions of terrestrial existence – are variously disrupted or absent. Geography is not a lunar practice, and on the lunar surface earthly spatiality meets significant resistances. We know this because men have walked and driven earthly miles across the Moon’s surface. The visual record of their locomotion and of the landscapes it produced is complete, defined and strangely disturbing. The artist Michael Light, with a photograhic eye formed in the desiccated landscapes of the American south-west, has selected and curated Full moon from over 32 000 hand-held and automatic photographs produced by the Apollo space programme between 1968 and 1972.1 His exhibition moves away from those images of the blue Earth that have become Apollo’s iconic legacy, to the ignored archive of images generated by the 9 missions, twenty-seven astronauts and twelve moon walkers who constituted Apollo’s encounter with lunar landscape. More than a record of unique technical achievement, Light’s selection of these images, his arrangement and juxtaposition of them, the scale at which he has reproduced them, and the lighted spaces in which he has chosen to display them, have turned them into an uncannily familiar yet unsettling gallery of landscape art: familiar through the presence of so many of the formal conventions and associations of landscape (including its sustained links with cartography suggested by the réseau of hairline crosses that mathematize their representational space), uncanny and unsettling because so many of landscape’s conventions and associations are either stripped away or unaccountably absent. Light’s book treatment of the images sequences them in three stages, according to the narrative of an Apollo lunar mission: launch and outward journey with the Moon’s surface clarifying into a photographic map of increasing scale,

Special Issue: Colonialism and postcolonialism in the former British Empire

tudents of colonialism and postcolonialism increasingly recognize that these terms Sshould not refer to monolithic totalities, explicated by global theories based on such concepts as Others, Orientalism, Imperialism. Rather, as Thomas points out, the complexity of these global processes needs to be unravelled through localized and historically specific accounts of colonial and postcolonial representations and practices.’ The terms ’colonialism’ and ’postcolonialism’ refer to a great variety of projects. British, French, German, Russian and other European colonialisms varied significantly and have left different traces in the postcolonial period. Within each, colonialism was articulated through local resources, climate, settlement policies, degrees of local resistance and, finally and crucially, the various, often contradictory, projects of Europeans themselves: settlers, administrators, capitalists, missionaries and scholars.