Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

The report of a ten-day expedition to the Arabian Hijaz by William Robertson Smith forms the fulcrum of an inquiry into the work of this denominated orientalist. A biblical scholar, encyclopedist, cultural anthropologist, and student of comparative religion, whose writings profoundly influenced figures such as Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Bronislaw Malinowski, Smith's experiences in the Arabian peninsula were crucial in his efforts to understand the nature of early Semitic social life, particularly the role played by ritual sacrifice and kinship rules. In this paper I argue that Smith's tour must be read not as an exercise in the Occidental ‘othering’ of the Orient but as a project in self-understanding and as a set of investigations into the genealogy of the Christian West. As such it is used to engage with contemporary debates about orientalism.

Under the political pressure of Turkey's Modernity Project Ankara's urban-planning processes and its monuments have always been utilized as significant tools of architectural displacement in the expedience of utopias, both socially and spatially. Urban-scale operations since the 1950s, a significant conservative breakthrough as a result of global liberalism and populism, however, have overwhelmed the secular state's organized forgetting, and have increasingly demobilized the capital city's modernist collective memory into conservatively schizophrenic experiences. In this paper I aim at discovering the ever-changing qualities of collective memory and its spatiotemporal remainders within the context of Turkey's political history by addressing the forces and trajectories of identity politics.

Cosmopolis is a concept that has a long history in many cultures around the globe. It is a mirroring of the ‘social’ and ‘natural’ worlds, such that in one is seen the order and the structures of the other—a mutual ‘mapping’. In this paper I examine how the presence of cosmopolis—a Christianised cosmopolis of the European Middle Ages—was made evident in the representation and formation of cities at that time. I reveal a dualism between the social and spatial ordering of both city and cosmos which defined and reinforced social and spatial boundaries in urban landscapes, evident for example in the 11th and 12th centuries. Recently, Toulmin (1992) has taken the idea of cosmopolis to argue that it has been a persistent presence in Western-Enlightenment science, philosophy, and religion—a ‘hidden agenda of modernity’. I contend that, as an idea, cosmopolis has a much earlier circulation in European thinking, not least in the Middle Ages. Locating cosmopolis in the medieval and the modern periods then begs a question of what is it that really makes the two distinct and separate? All too often human geographers have emphasised discontinuities between the ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ age, locating the ‘rise of modernity’ some time in the Enlightenment period. However, what ‘mapping’ cosmopolis reveals are continuities, binding time and space together, which when looked at begin to help query the modernity concept itself.

In this paper I focus on a local initiative to produce a hiking map of Valtaleggio (in northern Italy). In the effort of redrawing the valley to attract tourism a group of locals engaged in planning and negotiating visibility, but also got involved in an exercise of memory, remembering the history of their valley through recent changes in the landscape. The ethnographic observation of the ‘map enterprise’ spurs reflections on differing local perceptions of the landscape—and, accordingly, on how practices of locality shape identities.

In this paper I argue that new social geographies of impairment present a conceptually sophisticated, but limiting, view of the impaired body as a container of social disadvantage. They say much less about how people with impairments routinely exercise agency in everyday life vis-à-vis the restrictive sociospatial circumstances in which they find themselves. I address this problem by developing a phenomenology of visually impaired children's everyday body-in-space encounters with their home and urban environments. This illustrates the various and creative ways in which visually impaired children routinely exercise agency within their home and urban environments.

The goal of integrating a broad set of stakeholders and local knowledges in environmental decisionmaking can come into conflict with the aim of effectively regulating environmental change through the establishment of standardised methods. In this paper I explore public perceptions of environmental change as active sense-making with respect to a particular aspect of the environment—sounds and noise. I use a case study of an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process for the planned extension of an airport in Sweden. I focus on how local citizens reacted to the issue of airport noise as discussed in the EIA, as well as on local perceptions of noise. Analysis of local peoples' perceptions of environmental change raises questions concerning the meaning of environmental protection versus individual rights, the population affected by a development, and the issue of financial compensation versus commitment to dialogue. These questions must be raised in order to assess whether EIA fulfils its goal of increasing dialogue and building more participatory structures within the planning process.

In this paper I interrogate the powerful brand of intimate nationalism that has permeated American political discourse since the initiation of the ‘war on terror’. I consider how a strategic collapse of scales in articulations of ‘domestic’ life simultaneously defines public cum national and private cum familial belonging, with material force. This scaled production of domestic intimacy entails a concurrent restructuring of the spatiality of social reproduction and of norms of desirous identification. My analysis draws on the combined insights of scalar theory and sexuality studies, and argues that in order to benefit from both fields of inquiry we need to return to and rethink class. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, I posit class as embodied social-group relations of production, consumption, reproduction, and desire in order to highlight the scaled and strategic hinging of normative sexualities to modes of social reproduction. This approach questions how people become invested in, and desirous of, norms of sociality that constitute militarist imperial capitalism. It suggests that identification with, and desire for, this nation at this moment is fundamentally dependent on actual configurations of private, intimate life. A consideration of these shifting normative desires and geographies of domestic life, as manifest across a range of cultural, political, and economic terrains and at a variety of spatial scales, provides insight into why people continue to consume and be consumed by the American empire.

Heterosexuality is often perceived by geographers to be a dominant social force in the production of space, yet the ways that heterosexuality achieves this domination have not been scrutinized. In this paper I focus on two straight girls' narratives to explore, first, how they sexualize space and thus make space heterosexual; and, second, how space and spatiality imbue their everyday social and sexual practices and thus exist as a central component of subjectivity. I argue that considering the spatiality of their sexual practices presents a theoretical advantage over current feminist conceptualizations that place girls in gendered relationships in which boys maintain control. Instead, I suggest that a close reading of the pleasures and proprieties of sex and sexuality in these two girls' stories illustrates how the girls become invested with and perform social-sexual norms and meanings through spatialized practices.