Richard H. Schein

The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene

This paper presents a conceptual framework for interpreting cultural landscapes in the U.S. through the example of a residential suburb. The particular landscape is presented as the tangible, visible articulation of numerous discourses. Several examples of a “discourse materialized” in the landscape—landscape architecture, historic preservation, neighborhood associations, insurance mapping, zoning, consumption—are employed to demonstrate how the landscape at once constricts and is constructed by individuals who live in a particular place. U.S. cultural landscapes ultimately are viewed as material phenomena, reflective and symbolic of individual activity and cultural ideals, as they simultaneously are central to the constitution and reinforcement of those activities and ideals.

Belonging through land/scape

This paper addresses racialized practices of belonging through two examples which span the period after the Civil War in central Kentucky, and which might stand for questions of race, belonging, land, and landscape in the United States more broadly. It is focused empirically upon people who often have been written out of ‘belonging’, precisely through land and landscape. The examples presented are not intended simply to unmask the ideological undergirdings of land and landscape but, rather, to raise the possibilities for an oppositional politics of belonging in which land and landscape figure as the practical stage upon and through which citizenship and community can be practiced. The conclusions are directed toward grounding concerns for belonging-as-social-justice, which, in these cases, is an incremental achievement, eked out of daily existence, and largely-but not always-in response to dominant social, political, economic, and cultural practice.

Urban Form and Racial Order

This study focuses on the developing urban morphology of Lexington, Kentucky since about 1790, in order to demonstrate how inherited urban geographies help shape racial patterns in the American city. The empirical component begins with a contemporary (potential) racial flashpoint as a catalyst for unpacking the citys urban morphological transformations since the late 18th century. The Lexington case illustrates the importance of particular understandings of urban sociospatial form as key in shaping racialized landscapes in general. It also contributes to a richer understanding of Southern city form and development, and ultimately holds forth the possibilities for intervening in urban sociospatial processes through the cultural landscape to challenge the always-reformulating processes of racial formation.

Race and Diversity: What Have We Learned?

This article briefly examines geographic scholarship on race and diversity to enumerate how such work can contribute to the Addressing Locally-tailored Information Infrastructure and Geoscience Needs for Enhancing Diversity (ALIGNED) projects goal of creating a more diverse discipline and more diverse departments. Our review presents two arguments. First, diversity, as an object of analysis and desired institutional characteristic, is dynamic, unstable, and, above all, historically and geographically contingent. Studies of diversity, and efforts to create it, must begin from this observation. Second, we argue for diverse methodological and epistemological approaches but ones that are linked through a shared commitment to examining race and racism, diversity and inequalities, simultaneously.

Unofficial proprietors in post-revolutionary central New York

Post-Revolutionary land speculators on central New Yorks New Military Tract, operating individually and uncoordinated in their efforts, found themselves trying to sell land while surrounded on all sides by the more alluring, centralized, coordinated land development schemes of the “developers frontier”. In the face of such competition, several New Military Tract land jobbers became more than just speculators, interested only in quick profits. They found it advantageous to take a relatively long-term view of their scattered holdings, and invested time and money not just in promoting settlement of their own land, but also in promoting and planning settlement of the entire region. By their actions they became “unofficial proprietors” of the New Military Tract. Although they were never as powerful as their neighbors in the developers frontier, they acted in ways that distinguish them from traditional accounts of the ubiquitous frontier speculator. The activities of two unofficial proprietors in central New York are presented here to suggest complexities of land speculation and development practices on the frontier in general; and to illuminate an important component of colonization in a particular place that is important to the place itself as well as constitutive of general frontier processes. America, from its inception, was a speculation (and) land speculation in the United States has been a national business The land developer has created a distinctive chapter in American settlement history … Development of the frontier necessitated careful planning.