Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In the late 1990s, use of either of the words ‘childhood’ or ‘internet’ is enough to signify at a stroke many of society's contemporary hopes and fears about what it means to be modern. By providing a critical review of the burgeoning (popular, policy, and academic) literature that is emerging as debates about ‘childhood’ and ‘the Internet’ take centre stage in the ongoing struggle to define the future of our ‘virtual geographies’, what we seek to do in this paper is to unpack some of the assumptions that underpin both terms. Specifically, we argue that there is now a dominant story in circulation concerning what has been called the rise of a ‘digital generation’, albeit one, as we show, that can be read in two diametrically opposed ways. In the central part of the paper, by characterising the Internet as the latest in a long line of ‘frontier’ technologies, we identify three senses (in terms of time, in terms of space, and in terms of competence) in which this dominant story acts to construct discursively the cyberspace opened up by computer-mediated communication as distinct from the ‘here and now’ . For all its seductiveness, however, we propose that this discourse is not adequate to describe the complexities of what particular children might actually do with particular Internet-based tools in particular settings. By drawing on a variety of work (from both within and outside of the discipline) which has begun to open up the undifferentiated categories ‘children’ and ‘technology’ on which simplistic notions of a cohort of ‘cyberkids’ are based, we conclude the paper with some preliminary ideas about how we might be able to offer more nuanced accounts of being connected.

In this paper I contribute to recent writings concerning geographies of health, geographies of the therapeutic, and geographies of the self. By paying attention to the ‘delusional’ experiences of people named as having mental health problems, the spatial implications of a disruptive mesh between consciousness and unconsciousness are investigated. This empirical investigation explores individual accounts of delusional experience and the changed relationships with the body, home, and city. The ‘unboundedness’ of delusional experience is discussed, and the unpredictable therapeutic properties of nonmedical material spaces are addressed. It is argued that academic geography has neglected the voices of people who experience delusion and the many spaces which they inhabit.

Societies in the Middle Ages underwent a fundamental change in their mode of organisation as they moved from being organised around concepts of kin rule to being ordered around the power exercised by kings over defined territories. Even though this state-making process led to the creation of a landscape that was inherently impersonal in nature, kings strove to legitimise and justify the existence of the new state to their subjects. Their principal method of engendering a sense of loyalty towards their kingdom or early state was through the promotion of certain group ideologies. A variety of these legitimising ideologies were utilised by societal leaders, including foundation legends of kingdoms, origin legends of people, and the promotion of senses of ethnic identity. By drawing on evidence from two Celtic societies in the British Isles, namely Wales and Ireland, it is argued that legitimising ideologies experienced a general increase in their geographical scale throughout the Middle Ages. It is suggested that the main reason for this general trend was the increasing use, and subsequent increasing maturity, of state institutions within medieval society. Such institutions enabled medieval rulers to govern larger territories in a more efficient manner and, as a consequence, legitimising ideologies of an ever-increasing geographical scale were needed in order to justify the rule of those particular political units. It is concluded that these legitimising ideologies were principally political constructs, which were manipulated by medieval rulers in order to justify their rule of an evolving state landscape.

The adoption of Celtic themes in the presentation of heritage sites in Wales builds upon identifiable features of British history and the belief that ‘Celtic-ness’ has some basic appeal to modern visitors. Whereas such presentations have significant economic impacts, particularly through tourism, they rest more firmly on the bases of myth and nostalgia rather than upon any dynamic vision of a Welsh heritage. Visitors, who are often not Welsh, are drawn to such places as a means of knowing the past and encounter an experience that engenders interest and may help them relate to their own identity, Visiting heritage places is a meaningful act of consumption which asserts the importance of roots and the attractions of a representable past.

In this paper I seek to examine the relationships between fiction, violence, and the geographical imagination through an analysis of Eoin McNamee's debut novel Resurrection Man. In dealing with a universal theme—the will to kill—but set in 1970s Belfast and narrating the existential journey of a gang of Loyalist killers in their campaign of violence across the city, I suggest that this novel presents the modern city and the characters who inhabit its streets as individuals journeying through familiar and alien territories in search of a stable set of identities. Through an examination of the narrative style employed by McNamee–the structural devices, the metaphorical engagements, the linguistic tropes—I suggest that the novel reads the city beyond the scientific or social-scientific imagination. For geographers interested in the connections between cities, violence, and modernity, the novel invites us to establish a dialogic relationship with the literary text not to advance our own theories but to take seriously those which in structure, form, and content are radically different to our own.

This paper represents a series of speculations concerning the imagination of the city as a space of government, authority, and ‘the conduct of conduct’ . The authors argue that it is possible to understand the myriad ways in which various authorities have sought to govern the city through an interrogation of the series of means through which the city has been ‘diagrammed’ as a space of power, regulation, ethics, and citizenship. These speculations take a historical but not a historically ‘periodised’ form; the authors consider in turn the diagramming of the city in the ancient Greek world, the nineteenth-century liberal diagramming of the city, eugenic models of the city, and latter-day neoliberal modes of visualising, programming, and governing urban spaces. The aim is neither to found yet another theory of spatialisation nor to advance a Foucauldian urban sociology but to gauge the parameters which have bequeathed us the contemporary city as a governed and ethically saturated space.

In this paper I explore the symbolism of nature and city as two opposing domains in the worldview of Italian Fascism. Nature was construed as a disordered and hostile realm destined to be conquered by man. Farmwork and projects of land reclamation were represented by means of metaphors of violent attack and war; agriculture came to symbolise the Fascist struggle for a radical transformation of Italian society. The city, understood as the epitome for civilisation, constituted an already domesticated and therefore ambiguous realm. As an ideal city, Rome represented the glorious era of the Ancient Roman Empire, which the Fascists wished to resurrect in a futuristic form. Rome of that time was, however, understood as corrupted by centuries of cultural decadence. Extensive modifications of the urban landscape were therefore made so as to represent in city space the Fascist claim to be a continuation of the antique past into a glorious new millenarian era. A comparison between Italian Fascism and German Nazism reveals that these movements had antithetic views on nature and cities.