Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Relying on the fecund interface of three fields—studies in science, risk geography, and knowledge management—this paper notes first that the lack of understanding of the relationships between maps and territory and risks is an unfortunate consequence of the way the mapping impulse has been interpreted during the modernist period. Then, taking into account the advent of digital navigation, the paper discusses a very different interpretation of the mapping enterprise that allows a mimetic use of maps to be distinguished from a navigational one. Consequently, we suggest maps should be considered as dashboards of a calculation interface that allows one to pinpoint successive signposts while moving through the world, the famous multiverse of William James. This distinction, we argue, might, on the one hand, help geography to grasp the very idea of risks and, on the other, help to free geography from its fascination with the base map by allowing a whole set of new features, such as anticipation, participation, reflexivity, and feedback, now being included in the navigational definition of maps.

Turfgrass yards dominate the residential landscapes of St Petersburg, Florida, and much of the rest of the urban and suburban United States. Increasingly, alternatives to the resource-intensive turfgrass lawn are the focus of interest among environmentalists, state and county governments, and growing numbers of residents in cities in the water-scarce Southeast and Southwest. Drawing on ethnographic and survey field research on everyday yard practices, resource use, and landscape perceptions, we explore the environmental and cultural dilemmas presented by the choice between conventional turfgrass and the more environmentally benign xeriscaping. We engage with Bourdieu's notions of habitus, field, and distinction to explore how local and personal scale yards, as produced and consumed technonatures, mediate the scales of global environmentalism, national and regional cultural identities, classed aesthetics, and personal and collective security. We find that xeriscaping does not increase proportionate to income. We argue that yards are a display of cultural capital and that xeriscapers are invested in an environmentalist field that operates at an imagined global scale as opposed to the neighborhood and national scale values invoked with the traditional turfgrass lawn. Referring to Bourdieu's work on taste and distinction, we argue that xeriscaped landscapes may entail a more environmentally benign set of landscaping practices but that the adoption of xeriscaping is no less implicated in the reproduction of privilege and distinction than is the traditional turfgrass lawn.

This paper investigates the increasingly popular practice of ghost tourism comprising urban ghost tours and organised paranormal investigations. Set in the context of modern forms of enchantment, wherein audiences engage in a knowing and reflexive sense of ‘delight without delusion’, the paper explores the various infrastructures, (discursive, affective, and material) that engender a sense of supernatural possibility. I argue that practices of legend-telling, legend-tripping, ostension, and play produce affective assemblages of supposition and wonder that momentarily transform space into something charged with the strange and anomalous. This infrastructure relies on the engineering of dispositions that are both shaped on and brought to the tourist event itself. As such, those with deeply held beliefs in ghosts and the afterlife, as well as those for whom the infrastructures fail to generate wonder, place limits on the artifice of modern enchantment. The paper uses examples from participant observation on ten ghost tours across the UK, an overnight vigil in a Tudor mansion, and interviews with tour guides.

In recent decades intense territorial transformations in European Mediterranean countries have caused radical changes in their landscapes, with a resulting impact on the territorial identity of local societies. Faced with the risk of irreversible loss of sense of place and of local identity, as a result of nonconsensual processes almost always poorly explained by the administration, civil society has recently reacted in an increasingly indignant and organized manner, demanding a new culture of territory. This article analyzes, in the case of Catalonia, the interaction between landscape, territory, and civil society and demonstrates that this interaction, organized in a large number of associations in defence of territorial identity, has shown itself to be extraordinarily vital and dynamic. In this context, landscape has been revealed as the catalyst and unifying element of growing conflicts of a territorial and environmental nature palpable in Catalan society.

This paper examines the process of designing and testing multiplayer levels for a large, commercially released videogame. In doing so, it argues that videogame designers work to create the potential for positively affective encounters to occur—a complex and elusive outcome that is key to creating critically and commercially successful multiplayer videogames. By unpacking various examples from this process, the paper attends to debates regarding the distribution and transmission of media affects. Instead of acting to deterministically shape action, I suggest that processes of videogame design are predicated on producing contingency, albeit a contingency that designers attempt to manage and control. In this case, positively affective outcomes can only be understood as a relation between the code space of the game and the embodied techniques users generate in response to these environments.

Landscape managers increasingly draw on indigenous practices of controlled burning to develop vegetation heterogeneity and reduce fuel loads, thereby avoiding extensive and destructive fires. However, anthropogenic fire is also commonly represented as a primary driver of environmental change, which in some places has led to an emphasis on heavy-handed fire suppression rather than fire management. These contradictions in global fire management are an example of the complex articulations between the social production of tropical landscapes and the processes of environmental knowledge production. This article draws on constructivist approaches in political ecology and Lacanian psychoanalysis to analyze a conflict between state agencies and indigenous people surrounding fire management in the Gran Sabana, Venezuela. Iconic features of this cultural landscape operate as signifiers in institutional discourse, informing the ways in which environmental knowledge is appropriated and produced and in turn shaping the subjectivities and practices of state fire managers.

This paper provides an analysis of the interaction order in a unique nonexperimental and enduring location-aware community (ie the players of the Mogi game) and of the ways it is particularly oriented towards location and proximity concerns. It shows how one of its features is the public character of positional data, so that players routinely orient towards the fact that their location might be remarked and commented on at all times. Location awareness also provides users with resources to recognize their coproximity when they happen to be close but not copresent. We will discuss how such a situation generally projects an encounter as a relevant future course of action in this environment as well as in other mediated settings. The management of mediated proximities appears to be a crucial feature of the organization of encounters between players in the Mogi community, and as we argue, this must also be the case in any kind of location-aware community that supports occasions for recognizing coproximity ‘at-a-distance’. We describe various practices that have evolved in the Mogi location-aware community to recognize and acknowledge coproximity at a distance, manage its consequences, and even play at fabricating situations that have the appearance of mediated proximity events. This set of practices has gradually evolved to form a rich and peculiar ‘culture of proximity’. Beyond its apparent singularity the kinds of concerns with location and proximity that such a culture addresses are very general and could play a central part in our understanding of future uses of locative media.

This paper analyzes the practices of calculation needed to create carbon forestry offsets in Costa Rica, paying special attention to the spaces that are produced through such practices. I argue that the calculations needed to bring a carbon offset into being as a commodity is a process that results in the coconstitution of relational space, absolute Cartesian spaces, and the bounded territory of the nation-state. I develop my argument by drawing on Martin Heidegger's writings on calculation, technology, and the question of being and examine the spaces that result from carbon offset calculations performed by the Costa Rican state. Central to my argument is the idea that the practices of calculation are productive of a technological metaphysics, where the world becomes disclosed to us as an object of orderability. This ontological orientation allows for the objects and subjects of the world, in this case carbon commodities as well as producers and consumers of carbon offsets, to become relationally embedded in the world through the production of bounded Cartesian space. The production of such ‘graspable’ spaces simultaneously reinforces and undermines the territoriality of the Costa Rican state.

The role of ecotourism as a means of influencing the path of local development or encouraging conservation activities is not unproblematic. Indeed, an increasing body of literature not only challenges the assumed benevolence of ecotourism but critically questions the role of ecotourism in contributing to the greater social and economic justice so often assumed under these programs. This paper seeks to contribute to this growing body of critical literature through an analysis of the impact of ecotourism on the everyday lives of rural villagers adjacent to Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda, paying particular attention to the social forms of access to and control over the process through which decisions about ecotourism take place. Drawing on a year of ethnographic-based fieldwork, this paper focuses on how the commodification of Bwindi as a product of wilderness, a wild and unspoilt destination marketed to foreign visitors, promotes the external control of conservation spaces by international organizations that ultimately contribute to, rather than alleviate, poverty and dependency in local communities. Beyond providing just another case study, however, this analysis argues that the ‘new’ relations between people and parks created under ecotourism in Bwindi have in actuality created new forms of control and vulnerabilities.