week 11 17 november 2011 geog 3300 | space, place & scale copyright © amy lavender harris 1...

Week 1117 November 2011

GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & ScaleCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris

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GEOG 3300Space, Place & Scale

Week 11Landscapes of Fear / Moral Geographies

Department of GeographyFaculty of Liberal Arts & Professional

StudiesYork University

Fall Term 2011-2012



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[Image by Yasuharu via Flickr.com and used under a Creative Commons license.]



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The most dangerous place?



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[Evil gnome image by Spleenboy via Flickr.com and used under a Creative Commons license.]



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[Image by Carst via Flickr.com and used under a Creative Commons license.]



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[Image by Gizmo Gun via Flickr.com and used under a Creative Commons license.]



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Landscapes of Fear: Three Perspectives

• Descriptive: places that are objectively dangerous or that cause fear reasonably. Cliff edges, airplanes, prisons, war zones.

• Phenomenological: landscapes and the experience of fear. Yi-Fu Tuan’s :Landscapes of Fear (1979). Childhood fears of the dark, imaginative landscapes, natural disasters, cities (disorientation, disorder, fire, crowding, strangers), regulation and control.

• Social Constructionism: discourse and power (Foucault, Derrida), ‘difference’ (Bhabha, Said, Young), exclusion (Harvey.



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How are landscapes of fear socially produced?

• Gold and Revill argue that landscapes of fear are socially produced through marginality, spectacle, and surveillance.

• “Processes of marginalisation sustained by social exclusion produce landscapes of urban decay and suburban change. Landscapes of spectacle organised around displays of conspicuous consumption and counter-hegemonic rituals of macho behaviour and community solidarity charge the landscape with deeply ingrained senses of belonging and alienation. At the same time, processes of surveillance simultaneously create highly regulated socially exclusive spaces in commercial districts and exclusive suburbs at the expense of abandoning others.”



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Socially Produced Landscapes of Fear

• We shape and reshape landscapes to alleviate fear (e.g., video cameras, opening spaces for visibility, restricting entry)

• But it is important to explore where fear comes from and how it is associated with landscape.

• Fear is not just a thing but a process. Fear manifests itself in social practice.

• Landscape, too, is not just a thing: it is also a manifestation of lived social practice. We frame the world.

• Fear and place: ethnic conflict, territoriality and history, regulated spaces, fear of crime, fear of ‘Others’, fear of ‘difference’, power and control (fear seeded by the state?), contested spaces/places



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Marginalisation: Exclusionary Spaces

• Gold & Revill argue that exclusionary spaces like ‘ghettos’ “naturalise” in material form the values of the powerful (36-37) and mark out “moral geographies that exclude and exile feared social groups.”

• Other exclusionary spaces: suburbs? Gated communities?

• What about homeless people? • Examples in Toronto? [Regent Park, Jane & Finch,

Parkdale, Malvern, Woodbridge?]



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Spectacle: Symbolic Spaces

• Landscapes manipulated to produce emotional responses, often tied to displays of power and control

• “bread and circuses”• Public spectacles: capital punishment• War memorials, battlefield sites, locations of

massacres• “the cultural and historical resources bound up in

mythic sistes and poetic spaces can form an important resopurce for nations that perceive themselves under threat.”

• Sports arenas? • Mental hospitals? Insane asylums? Portals of entry

and departure?



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Surveillance: Regulated Spaces

• Ordering and regulation: the “social management of fear” (40)

• Mapping as an act of regulation and control• Data gathering (medicine, courts) used to assert

moral control over populations and places• Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon; surveillance in

Orwell’s 1984. Scenes in Modern Times (film)• “fortress cities” (Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear) –

Davis shows how populations in Los Angeles have ‘naturalised’ fear as a “biological determinant of social relations”



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Significance

• Fear as material social practice expressed in the landscape

• Spaces can be manipulated to valorize and legitimate fear



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Moral Geographies

• At the very beginning of this course we acknowledged the need to move beyond merely descriptive encounters with place

• We considered Cresswell’s observation that a place is more than just a thing; it is also a meaningful location and a way of looking.

• As a result, we have developed an understanding of some of the ways place and culture are mutually constitutive.

• Geography is the moral terrain of our activities. As Robert Sack points out, almost everything we do as humans has a spatial dimension: space has a way of making our activities visible. As such, place becomes a moral record.



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Geography as Moral Terrain

• Think of the ways we create place, and the kinds of places we make: prisons, gardens, concentration camps, war zones, deserts, great libraries, homes

• Think also of the kinds of spaces we produce: spaces of production and consumption, or of play, or spaces for understanding.

• Think of how deeply all these spaces are contested.

Robert Sack’s Geographical Conception of the Good

• We encounter others in geographical and social space, and in doing so we can contract or expand such spaces as we become more (or less) aware of others and the world as a whole.

• Sack suggests we can apply “geographical principles of judgment” as the basis for a geographical conception of morality.

• But difficulties arise almost immediately: what do we mean by ‘good’ (what makes a place ‘good’?), and how can we know whether and how it is shared?

• Moral theories are also rife with tensions: are we speaking about equality? Justice? Merit? Need? Rights? Responsibilities? Care? Altruism? Game theory? Objectivist self-interest?

• Sack suggests that geography can – perhaps uniquely – expose these contradictions and tensions, thus ‘making room’ for us to move between them and (perhaps) resolve (or at least discuss) what is moral, just, or good.



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Sack’s Geographic Theory of Morality

• Sack suggests there are two forms of geographic judgment: (1) practical or instrumental geographic judgments (goal-focused statement about place); and (2) pure or intrinsic geographic judgments (awareness; process-based).

• Ends and means? Means are the ultimate judge of ends.• What do we judge

– acts of place-making (transforming space into place)– The kinds of social spaces (and social relations) we

produce– The costs of transforming nature into culture– Whether we destroy or enhance the integrity of the

structure and dynamics of place– The kinds of meanings and understandings we produce

(inclusivity? Bigotry?)



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Place, Virtue, and Value

• Instrumental judgments based on virtue: truth (meaning) and justice (merit, equality)

• Instrumental judgments are (arguably) measurable in terms of their effectiveness and their results and ends.

• A problem with instrumental judgments is that they are also relative, debatable, and contested.

• How do we work our way through these challenges? Sack suggests that intrinsic geographic judgments can be helpful.



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Intrinsic Qualities of Place

• Sack suggests we may get around some of the difficulties of competing moral claims by making room for intrinsic geographic judgments that operate in two ways:– (1) an expanded awareness of reality (he calls this

“seeing through to the real”) – an openness to seeing and encountering, a commitment to learning, curiosity, discovery, experience

– (2) acknowledging the value of variety and complexity (the idea that “it is better to have a more varied, diverse, rich, plentitudinous, and complex reality and world, with more different and interesting places.” (37)

• Sack argues that we must be committed to seeking to understand the world as a complex network of places and spaces that shift and change around us. The idea of place itself as something alive.



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Evil Places …

• Narrow and obscure our vision (Sack, 38). Sack suggests we can see this is places dominated by secrecy, that cut themselves off from the rest of the world; he lists the former Soviet Union as an example, but other examples might arguably include Taliban-dominated Afghanistan or the American CIA.

• Diminish the variety and complexity of place (think of Debord and Lefebvre’s commentaries on the appalling emptiness of mass-produced places)

• Assert control over other places (e.g., imperialism, colonialism, urban over rural places, institutions that turn students or patients into customers and doctors, nurses, and teachers into assembly-line workers, homogenous places without character)

• Transgress both instrumental and intrinsic criteria of place (they fail in a test of both ends and means)

Levinas on Scale and the Other

• Levias: “scale as relation.”• Rethinking ‘space’ as interval, separation,

something that may (and must) be bridged. • Space, distance and alterity• Rethinking scale: (1) scale as size (descriptive);

(2) scale as a level (hierarchies but also complexity, diversity, levels; (3) scale as relation (interfaces, dialectical linkages, multiple localities)

• Scale as ... Movement? • Plurality, proximity and engagement• The elsewhere and the other



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Consider a medical facility as a moral world… Turner on the Ethos

of Place• Think of a hospital as a place: its architecture, the design

of its rooms and buildings, and the social habitats and relations that occur therein.

• Turner (reading): “the focus upon rules and quandaries fails to attend sufficiently to the prosaic character of moral experience in particular social settings. Furthermore, the emphasis upon rules and quandaries means that little attention is given to the contribution of instutional design, the practical arrangement of rooms and hallways, gardens, works of art, and everyday human interaction to the creation of meaningful, decent, inhabitable places.” (19)

• Turner adds, “the more time I spent at Baycrest, the more I came to realise that it was the mundane, background features of the place that mattered to the lives of its clients and staff …”



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Two ways of evaluating Baycrest as a place

Instrumental Intrinsic

week 11 17 november 2011 geog 3300 | space, place & scale copyright © amy lavender harris 1...

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