Jane Jacobs

A geography of big things

This paper sketches some conceptual tools by which cultural geographers might advance geographies of architecture. It does so by thinking specifically about one architectural form: the modernist residential highrise, which is the ‘big thing’ of this paper. The paper draws on recent developments in material semiotics in order to interrogate features often uniquely associated with the highrise, such as its global reach, uniformity, and scale. The paper first rethinks how cultural geography has traditionally explained the movement of built forms, explicitly turning from diffusionist accounts to the notion of translation. It then offers a reconsideration of the way geographers might think about scale in relation to a ‘big’ and ‘global’ thing like the modernist highrise, arguing that scale is produced relationally and in specific contexts. Finally, it offers a template for cultural geographical scholarship which takes seriously the technical work entailed in things, like a highrise, materialising or de-materializing. It does so by way of two illustrative stories: one about the productive social science of highrise suicides in Singapore; the other about the destructive role of the inquiry into collapse of Ronan point in the UK.

Urban geographies I: Still thinking cities relationally

This review essay revisits recent scholarship within urban geography that has been shaped by relational theory, looking specifically at the scholarship on urban policy mobilities and urban assemblages. As will be shown, current urban geographies of relationality operate with irreconcilable grammars.

Too little, too much: Cultural feminist geographies

This paper traces some of the contours of recent critiques of cultural geography and reflects upon the implications they have for the continuing vitality of a feminist geography concerned with the cultural. The paper seeks to work away from this current disenchantment suggesting that in the field of feminist geography there are explicit intellectual and political imperatives that keep central the field of concerns associated with cultural geographical perspectives. Along the way we examine emergent scholarship on the governance of gender through culture concepts, the idea of gender as a form of foundational ordering grammar, the implications of non-representational claims for feminist scholarship, and the nature of performativity. We conclude by encouraging feminist cultural geography to chart the emergent geographies of relational natures and material cultures that reveal gender as both embodied and discursive, given and enacted.

From Urban Aborigines to Aboriginality and the City: One Path Through the History of Australian Cultural Geography

This paper charts one idiosyncratic and rather personalised path through the emergence of cultural geography in the Australian context. It takes as its example the transition from research which examines a category group identified as ‘urban Aborigines’ to more recent research of our own which looks at the theme of how Aboriginality is articulated in and through the space of the city. This transition provides a way of registering some broader changes within the sub-disciplinary field of cultural geography. The paper also reflects on recent criticism that a cultural emphasis detracts from the political edge of geographical research. The influential work of Fay Gale suggests that this claim is somewhat misplaced in the context of the development of the sub-discipline in Australia.

Commentary—Comparing Comparative Urbanisms

I write this commentary as someone who could well be regarded as a serial comparator. I think naturally through the multiple of two, and my research routinely has worked across two “case studies.” My Masters research examined the land rights struggles of so-called “nontraditional” Aborigines in contemporary Australia, and drew upon ethnographies of two tribal groups co-located in a large rural town, but experiencing quite different levels of recognition by official land rights and heritage registration processes. My doctoral research examined two urban planning battles, one in the center of the City of London and one on its eastern edge, both shaped by the intersection of planning deregulation in a new era of neoliberal openness, imperial nostalgia, and postcolonial migration. My subsequent research on postcolonial urbanism set those London cases against comparable city-building events in Australian cities, staging an encounter between the old heart of empire and the cities once at its edge. More recently, I have investigated the afterlives of state-provided, high-rise housing in Singapore and Glasgow in order to better understand the differentiation that accounts for the global replication of the high-rise architectural typology. And my latest challenge has been to co-design and co-deliver an interdisciplinary urban studio based on a systematic analysis of two cities: Edinburgh and Casablanca. My scholarship has always been invested in the larger project of decentering and provincializing dominant or reductive knowledge structures, and I have packaged that project within the framework of postcolonial theory. The project of decentering assumes multiples; even if it is not expressed in terms of empirically realized “cases,” it most certainly is evident in the more abstractly held notion of the center against which one works. When one conducts research through multiple cases is one necessarily doing it in the name of a formal comparative method? Does comparativism somehow better serve the postcolonial imagination? I have never thought of myself as a scholar committed to the comparative mode, per se. For example, although my research project designs are routinely organized around two case studies conducted simultaneously, I rarely report on findings in a formally comparative mode (case a compared to case b). Nor is my 1 + 1 “method” conducted in the name of a unitary, reductive answer (1 + 1 = 2)—comparison, say, in the name of a convergent or unified understanding of urbanization or the urban condition. I have adopted a research preference for 1 + 1 because I believe in the fact and the political potential of a

The modern touch: interior design and modernisation in post-independence Singapore

The authors take as their focus the advice on interior design and decoration that Singapores Housing Development Board (HDB) distributed to residents as part of its programme of universal housing provision. Through a series of regular articles appearing in the HDB publication Our Home (1972–1989), readers were presented with stories that showed how selected HDB residents decorated their newly acquired highrise flats. The authors detail the relationship between this design advice and the commitment to modernist design principles, the self-conscious pragmatism of the HDB, and the reliance on a limited market logic (‘homeownership’). The HDBs vision of the benefit of its highrise housing programme was, from the outset, complexly entangled with cultivating individual investments in the home by way of interior design and decoration practices. The paper contributes not only to the specific story of Singaporean housing, but also to wider scholarship on modernism, the everyday practices of interior design, and housing consumption.

Windows: Re-viewing Red Road

Abstract This paper examines the notion of a building event by exploring the interaction between residents, interviewers, a video-camera and the building technology of the window. The effect of that interaction is ‘a view’. The windows and views in this paper belong to a high-rise multi-storey residential estate: Red Road, Glasgow. The paper argues that the view is not simply a framing of a scene, but a socio-technical achievement.

Aboriginal art: Australia's neglected inheritance

Australias rich heritage of aboriginal rock art is threatened by a rapid growth in tourism. The authors studied visitor behaviour at rock art sites in order to assess the merits of various kinds of protective mechanisms: fences, grilles, guides, and boardwalks. Site protection requires scientific research and planning, as security mechanisms applicable to one site do not necessarily work in another. Photographs, references.

Houses of Experiment: Modern Housing and the Will to Laboratorization

This article adds historical and geographical specificity to the link between city building and laboratorization processes. It does so by way of the example of housing in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Housing provision at this time saw an intensification of the relationship between architectural design and science by way of the emergent field of building science as well as new social-science studies of householder satisfaction. The article focuses on two examples of these housing sciences, tracing their role in the production of British modern housing. The first example focuses on a set of experiments conducted on ventilation and heating at Britains Building Research Station. The second example examines the social science of a post-occupancy study of multi-storey flats in Glasgow. The article argues that mid-twentieth-century housing construction and provision was structured in and through a laboratory logic that had a complex geography and temporality. In the sciences of housing conducted during this period there is a conflation and hybridization of the space of the laboratory, the site of the house and the action of the experiment.

The Postcolonial Ghost Story

Let us begin by noting that Australia’s postcolonial condition is for the most part a consequence of claims made upon it — land claims, compensation claims, and so on — by its Aboriginal people.* It would be possible to describe Aboriginal people at this point in Australia’s modern history as charismatic, in their capacity to mobilize forces much larger than their ‘minority’ status would suggest. When a claim is made on a sacred site, this feature is especially apparent: a government can look forward to losing millions of dollars through legal procedures that invariably bring together a ‘smorgasbord’ (as one newspaper described it) of interest groups over a protracted period of time. In this climate, Aborigines certainly continue to receive sympathy for what they do not have — good health, adequate housing, and so on — and yet at the same time they draw resentment from white Australians because they seem to be claiming more than their ‘fair share’. We have elsewhere described this double-headed view of Aborigines as ‘postcolonial racism’ — a form of racism which sees Aborigines as lacking on the one hand, and yet appearing on the other hand to have too much: too much land, too much national attention, too much ‘effect’.1 It is surely a strange irony to hear white Australians these days — including some maverick Federal politicians — describing Aborigines as more franchised, more favoured, than they are.