Cover of Environment, Space, Place
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Displaying: 1-12 of 12 documents


1. Environment, Space, Place: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Troy R. E. Paddock Bridges: Technology and the Social
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Central to Martin Heidegger’s critique of modern technology is the transformation of “things” into “objects.” This article will apply some of the insights gained by Actor-Network-Theory to the several bridges in Budapest, with a special focus on the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, in order to argue that modern technology and the creations of that technology can also be “things” in the Heideggerian sense of the term. The result is a view of bridges that is firmly grounded in the physical and geographic impact that bridges can have on space and place. The use of ANT also reveals that Heidegger and one of his main critics, Bruno Latour, arenot as far apart in their thought as the latter might contend.
2. Environment, Space, Place: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Phillip Roberts The Wall: Control and Space in the Byker Redevelopment
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This article is concerned with the political implications of Ralph Erskine’s redevelopment of the Byker estate in Newcastle Upon Tyne in the United Kingdom. In it I attempt to provide a theoretical analysis of the architectures and environmental planning procedures operating in Byker, using the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to consider the impact of the re-development on the spaces within Newcastle and upon the bodies of the residents of the area. Ralph Erskine hadbeen concerned with using the redevelopment to improve the quality of life on the estate and to introduce a positive political relation to the spaces and buildings on the development, however, as this paper will show, the upheavals in the social organisation of city life in Britain at large have negated the positive effects of his redevelopment philosophy and led to the reterritorialisation of a regressive and isolating politics of social organisation across the city spaces of Newcastle Upon Tyne.
3. Environment, Space, Place: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Roger Paden The Technological Production of a Space for Art and Environmental Aesthetics
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This paper argues against evolutionary accounts of aesthetics by defending the idea that our fundamental aesthetic categories have undergone great changes in the last two millennia, in particular, during an “artistic revolution” that lasted from 1680 to 1830. This revolution was made possible by the development of a number of technologies of art that created a separate cultural space for this new invention. The attempt to extend this revolution to include the aesthetic appreciation of the natural environment is aided by a new set of technologies that help make an aesthetic object out of natural environments. This even morerecent development is further evidence against an evolutionary explanation of art.
4. Environment, Space, Place: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Robert Rosenberger The Spatial Experience of Telephone Use
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Ideas developed within the philosophical tradition of phenomenology can be used to describe the experience of talking on the phone. In particular, I build on a contemporary brand of phenomenology called “postphenomenology,” a school of thought which specializes in the analysis of the relationships that form between users and technologies. Three central concepts are reviewed and developed: transparency, sedimentation, and what I call “field composition.” These concepts can be used for the description of the way that the content of a telephone conversation can come to stand forward and capture a user’s overall field of awareness. I suggest that this account of the experience of the telephone can be useful for analyzing issues in scientific research and public policy regarding the topic of using the phone while driving.
5. Environment, Space, Place: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Charlie Hailey Treillage’d Space: Tuning Person and Place in the Porches of Alison and Peter Smithson
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Late in their architectural career, Alison and Peter Smithson designed an eighty-square-foot, indoor-outdoor space for a man and his cat. The Smithsons described this modest space in methodological and phenomenal terms, noting that the addition to Axel Bruchhäuser’s Hexenhaus could be read “as an exemplar of a method by which a small physical change—a layering-over of air adhered to an existing fabric—can bring about a delicate tuning of persons with place.” The Hexenhaus’ tuning elements—second skin, tree screen, and double-acting mesh—create a “treillage’d space” that supplants mediation, reframes attunement, and elicits an active weaving of person, place, and phenomena. This paper seeks to understand what the architects meant by “tuning” and in the process to outline operations for spatial weaving.
6. Environment, Space, Place: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Wolfgang W. Fuchs Remote Control
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This article investigates three technological developments that are related to spatial determinations and that influence behavior in both the public and the private spheres of life. Examined are the changing relative size of movie screens and their venues, the seeming conflicting dynamic of entertainment and communication screens in the private sphere both increasing and decreasing in size, and the influence of action-at-a-distance technology.
7. Environment, Space, Place: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Tracey Nicholls Crossing into Lawlessness: Thoughts on Airplane Travel and State Power
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This article examines the post-9/11 policing of points of entry and transfer at US airports and the ways these points become “forbidden places” to those deemed undesirable, in order to expose the ambiguity of forbiddenness with respect to place. It uses Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics to argue that the War on Terror has created a class of expendable non-persons whose legal identities (citizenships) are not acknowledged and Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of “the camp” as a metaphor for the spaces in airports that are neither entirely inside nor outside a national jurisdiction. This discussion takes place, in part, through the case study of suspected terrorist Maher Arar, arguing that his case shows the displacement of our sense of prohibition, away from spaces and onto persons.
8. Environment, Space, Place: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Christine M. Petto Mapping Forbidden Places and Places of the Forbidden in Early Modern London and Paris
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In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London and Paris, growing numbers of poor alarmed notables and city officials who would come to view a policy of confinement as an appropriate social, economic, religious, and political solution. This work examines the motivations of patrons to support these institutions (called hospitals). In particular, this study looks at their support for the construction (or renovations) of chapels (e.g. chapel at La Salpêtrière and the chapel at the Lock Hospital) and their visitations to these hospitals. Vagrants, beggars, prostitutes, and idlers of other sorts healthy or not were confined not necessarily for theirhealth but for their souls and for the social order of the city. The locations of these hospitals indicate a geographical isolation not only in their “placement” outside the city walls but even in the Christian charitable rhetoric or visitations by benefactors that emphasized their separateness. “Unclean livers” or destitute beggars were put on view so that the morally upright who patronized these institutions could view for instructional purposes and could be viewed for purposes of salvation, but remained as separate nonetheless. Great masses and grand sermons were heard in the chapels that adorned these institutions, but a clear policy of segregation existed that kept the godly patrons separate from the “polluted.”
9. Environment, Space, Place: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Tom Conroy Culturally “Doped” or Not?: On Ethnomethodology, Critical Theory and the Exegesis of Everyday Life Practices
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Everyday life as a sociological/philosophical concept is widely considered to be both a familiar and yet taken-for-granted subject matter for analytic investigation. In considering the works of three leading scholars, Michel de Certeau, Harold Garfinkel, and John Fiske, one can look toward possible referents to this term. Starting with Certeau’s critical semiotics of the everyday, with its emphasis on such distinctions as place and space as well as strategies and tactics, the everyday can be theorized in terms of contrasts between discourse and practice. Similarly, with Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological emphasis on the practical actor and Fiske’s ethnographic and cultural studies emphasis on local meaning, the everyday can be conceptualized in terms of distinctions between lived order and a theorized version of the everyday. By examining the approaches of these three scholars as well as drawing upon a visual examination of everyday urban scenes, the article concludes with an affirmation of a multi-conceptual and methodological approach to the everyday and with recognition of the everyday as a signifier loaded with a multitude of possibly overlapping meanings.
10. Environment, Space, Place: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Wendelin Küpers ‘Inter~Place’—Phenomenology of Embodied Space and Place as Basis for a Relational Understanding of Leader- and Followship in Organisations
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Based on insights of phenomenology, this article aims to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of embodied space and place of and for leader- and followership in organisations. From an interrelational perspective, the “spacing” and implacement of leadership and followership will be interpreted as local-historical and as local-cultural processes. Linked to questions of distance of leadership, embodied face-to-face interaction will be critically compared with distant, non-localised, displaced relationships and tele-presence mediated by information and communication technology. In addition to outlining some links to “potential space” and place-responsiveness by concluding some implications, problems and perspectives on research of embodied space and place forleadership in organisation are discussed.
11. Environment, Space, Place: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Eliot Tretter The Internality of Scale
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Recently, a shadow has been cast over how geographical scale has been theorized. Neil Brenner has argued that scale risks becoming a empty concept because it has been conflated with other terms in geography such as place, region, and space; Marston, Jones, and Woodward have proposed doing away with scale altogether; while Wood has accused geographers of having a “scale fetish.” The following article defends the theory of scale against these various detractors and attempts to become a bulwark to support the many contributions that geographers have made to effectively characterizing the socio-spatial world. I outline four ways of understanding geographical scale: measurement, size, hierarchy, and relation. I then argue for an understanding of scale that is relational because I believe it provides the most adequate language to characterize how geographers have come to understand the social ontology of the spatialworld. Moreover, I set out to show how the relational description of scale, complements other research on scale, which has shown the importance of scale in the production of geographical difference and uneven social relations. Hence, the understanding of scales relationally, allows for people to have relative positions in the world. Finally, I speculate on two implications that the understanding of scale relatively has for characterizing the effects of globalization: 1) the possibilities that this understanding has for confronting a dominant tenant in the ideology of neoliberalism; 2) the promise that it offers for forms of political resistance.
12. Environment, Space, Place: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
David Macauley Head in the Clouds: On the Beauty of the Aerial World
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The sky proclaimed Emerson is “the daily bread of the eyes.” Despite the apparent truth of this observation, we often fail to appreciate the complex canopy of air above and around us in considerations of environmental aesthetics and ecological awareness. I examine the sky and aerial phenomena that are bound to, closely allied with, or materially emergent from, this ocean of blue. In the process, I develop a perspective for thinking about some of the aesthetic characteristics and dimensions of this realm. I show that understanding and appreciating the sky must attend to features related to ephemerality, protean colors, the lack of aclear and definite frame, and other non-anthropogenic qualities. I pay particular attention to explorations of horizontally-mobile clouds and, for the sake of contrast, vertically-originating snow by painters, poets, and philosophers who are able to express imaginative components of these phenomena and to reveal or vivify aspects that complement or complete the more realistic descriptions provided by natural scientists. The always-accessible and ever-fluctuating beauty of the sky offers the potential for deepening our daily experiences of and encounters with the elemental world in which we are sensually immersed and physicallyembedded. It also helps to offer an indirect rationale for respecting and protecting this vital other-than-human sphere.