126: Groth & Bressi's Understanding Ordinary Landscapes

The essays in Paul Groth and Todd Bressi's collection Understanding Ordinary Landscapes are compiled from a two-day symposium at Berkeley in 1990 called "Vision, Culture, and Landscape" that was intended to both celebrate and critique JB Jackson's version of cultural landscape studies.  In general, while the essays underscore Jackson's reliance on and use of visual and spatial information as a way to understand past and present cultures, they grapple with ways to deal with the realities of social and cultural pluralism and their effects on the landscape.  While in many ways Jackson's work was radically subjective and Postmodern before its time, in others it is distinctly Modern, particularly in its emphasis on underlying universals, empirical research, and continuity.

According to Groth, cultural landscape studies defines landscape as the combination of people and place, with an emphasis on the history of how people have used everyday or vernacular space - buildings, rooms, streets, fields, yards - to establish and articulate identities, social relations, and cultural meanings.  When JB Jackson started publishing Landscape in 1951, he also emphasized the activist mission of cultural landscape studies: the more people know about ordinary environments, the more they will become attached to them and the less likely they will be to wantonly destroy them.  Groth and Bressi build on cultural landscape studies via a 6-part framework updated for the 1990s:

1. focus on ordinary landscapes to get at cultural meaning and environmental experience
2. shift from a rural emphasis to both rural and urban landscapes, as well as landscapes of production and landscapes of consumption
3. continue to study diversity and uniformity, but emphasize difference, fragmentation, intertextuality and hybridity instead of a single, unifying narrative
4. continue to write for the intelligent lay reader
5. support a broad notion of interdisciplinarity that includes cultural, human, social, critical, landscape architecture, art history and other approaches
6. engage with visual and spatial information, either in support of or in direct opposition to it; the landscape must remain the primary object of study.  Respect JB Jackson's argument that "landscape... must be regarded first of all in terms of living rather than looking."

This collection includes many heavyweights: David Lowenthal, Peirce Lewis, Dolores Hayden, Wilbur Zelinsky, and more - all folks who are contributing to and thinking about what a new cultural geography might mean and how it might be updated to include social difference and PoMo cultural theory.  It also holds up JB Jackson as the methodological exemplar of cultural landscape studies - which makes sense, because as far as I know, he invented it.

120: Yi-Fu Tuan's Topophilia

Yi-Fu Tuan's Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values argues that because humans are the "ecological dominant," understanding the environment requires first understanding human behavior in depth, so that we can see how our attitudes, beliefs, passions and values shape and are shaped by the environment.  This claim that human perception and experience is an important component of the environment and a valid geographical topic is in direct response to the scientific reductionism of post-WWII geography; it seeks to bring human culture back into the "practical" study of the environment by putting "topophilia," or "the affective bond between people and place or setting," at the center of geographic research.

Although Topophilia intentionally does not have a stated method, it does have a theoretical framework.  Tuan sets out to examine environmental perception and values at the levels of the species, group, and individual; to hold culture (or topophilia) distinct from the environment to show how

115: Lucy Lippard's The Lure of the Local

Lucy Lippard's The Lure of the Local is a swan song to the hybridity of place - temporal and spatial, personal and political, geographical and psychological, lived and imagined, insiders and outsiders - and to the ways in which art, particularly public art, can mediate place's connections between land, history, and culture.  For Lippard, lived experience is central to the construction of place, as are the accumulated sedimentations of experience, memories, and connections in a place.  If space is a memoryless landscape, place is a landscape mediated by human experience.

In an increasingly globalized world, for Lucy Lippard, the "lure of the local" is

the pull of place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies.  It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation.  The lure of the local is that undertone to modern life that connects it to the past we know so little and the future we are aimlessly concocting.

102: Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space

Lefebvre was one of the very first orals books I read.  My notes from a year ago: 

Henri Lefebvre’s vast, multifaceted The Production of Space could probably be said to advance any number of arguments, but I think his most compelling argument is the one that brings space and knowledge into a classical Marxist framework: capitalist Western society is moving from the production of things in space to the production of space itself, which means that capitalist powers are increasing their hold and surveillance on ordinary people (aka space is now shaping the working class).  However, all is not lost: no matter how much they try, the people who build and shape “dominant” space and employ the working class can’t squeeze the working class out of existence or keep them from “appropriating” and shaping space to suit their own needs, nor can they make the world a completely visual, timeless, ideological construct.  Regular people have bodies, and we live in specific places at specific historical moments, and we shape those places (yeah, I said places, not spaces) into unique, historical “works of art” that contrast with the partially commodified built environment constructed by the ruling class.  To say that capitalism has moved beyond the product to space itself is to argue for both an increasing attempt at totalizing control of society through space AND increased resistance from the people who live in, experience, and shape that space – with the potential for a socialist revolution where appropriated spaces based on the human body/lived experience and use-value take precedence over dominant, visual spaces and exchange-value.