Environment, Space, Place

In the Timaeus, Plato’s creation story, Plato describes an entity he refers to as the chora. The Greek word chora is translated as place, room, or space, but Plato’s descriptions of the chora are so notoriously enigmatic that there is disagreement about what, exactly, he intends to indicate by it. In this paper, I address an interpretation of the chora according to which the chora is a kind of cosmic mirror. I argue that this interpretation results in an uncharitable reading of Plato’s explanation. Alternatively, I contend that Plato conceives of the chora as space, place, and matter all at once. The upshot of my view is that it attributes to Plato a more nuanced understanding of space and place and a more coherent explanatory account.

Th is paper explores the perception of urban landscapes through sound, using two case studies of cities where bells played a significant role in the city, where a particular dramatic event silenced these bells, and where the act of remaking broken or tuneless bells re-creates an engagement with the lived places of the past. At Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, newly cast bells recreate the melodious peal last heard before the French Revolution, and ChristChurch Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, bells damaged by destructive earthquakes of 2011 will eventually ring out their familiar tones in an urban landscape that is physically almost unrecognisable. Both case studies demonstrate the ways that the inadvertent and the deliberate transformation of soundscapes continually interactswith ideas of place and meaning within the constantly changing city.

Th is paper uncovers how demolition has served as a collective way of forgetting violent pasts. It explores several examples in Canada, including the 1992 demolition of the notorious Mount Cashel Orphanage in St. John’s, Newfoundland, a building we claim was purposefully razed to the ground in order to forget egregious crimes of sexual abuse that had taken place on the site. We contend that as with other sites associated with difficult memories, this was a valiant effort to forget by removing all traces of the setting. We note that even when buildings are not demolished following violent events, echoes of their architectural forms are often recast in the forms of memorials, both real and virtual.

Public access to the commons is often restricted, thus leading to implicit regulations (in addition to explicit barriers that exclude who can and who cannot utilize the commons). This is relevant toward spatial systems, as an important geographical issue is access to various sites over space (Heatwole and West 1980), and this paper presents varying degrees of accessibility in different places (i.e., municipal and state jurisdictions in the United States, with a particular emphasis on Connecticut’s coastline). There is a dialectic struggle to enhance access to the commons as a fundamental right of the public, with the need to balance tourism and recreational uses of coastal resources with conservation and preservation eff orts. This paper will aid policy makers and those concerned with beach access in Connecticut (and beyond) better understand the nature and complexity of how citizens and officials within coastal municipalities have come to perceive, in a collective sense, their beaches/ municipal parks as common property resources to be utilized for recreational purposes while balancing environmental conservation efforts simultaneously. Various legal frameworks, as well as federal and state efforts in coastal zones in key states (including Connecticut), in addition to historically recent court cases in Connecticut resulting in legal enhancements toward increasing public access to nonresidents of specific municipalities, have shaped who can and who cannot access the commons.

This article queries the notion of performance as a sustained act of commemoration, and, thus, implicitly, atonement and forgetting. Laying aside potentialconsiderations of guilt and/or victimisation inherent in the spatio-temporal superimposition of a World War II modality of existence on an affluent, and, by comparison, peaceful part of the world, my investigation focuses on three mutually related areas of performance: the body’s hidden somaticity, the co-becoming of the self and time; and walking as a mnemonic mechanism. Aided by the Japanese philosophers’ Shigenori Nagatomo’s concept of the hidden body and Kitaro Nishida’s theorisation of the relationship between the temporalised and the atemporal, the actual and the virtual, the spatial and the non-spatial as the continuity of discontinuity, I argue against the idea of performance as a cumulative, sedimentary and implicitly restorative poiesispraxis. Instead, I seek to articulate the ways in which the actional, interoceptive and psychogeographic schemes generated by eating and walking intertwine to create complex patterns of individual-collectiveremembering-forgetting.

Between 1681-1725, several Quaker writers promoted settlement in Pennsylvania to English and continental readers. This promotional literature attempted to persuade investors to support the venture, and to attract potential emigres to settle in the province. These texts described the landscape as having been improved by Quakers through clearing the land, laying out farms and towns, and refining the built environment. This widely circulated image of an improved landscape joined with other writings to refute the charge that Quaker incivility disqualified Friends for government during a volatile era of English politics. Pennsylvania’s improvement gave weight to the claims of William Penn and others that Friends deserved not only religious toleration in England but political authority as well, in the American provinces and throughout the Atlantic World.

Often the term “Roman frontiers” is used to refer to the outer borders of the empire and, in some instances, the physical limes systems that demarcated the extent of Roman rule. However, it is also possible to discuss the frontiers of the internal provinces, some of which offered important strategic and political advantages to the Romans. Certainly, this is true of Gallia Narbonensis, an internal province that is modern-day Southern France and the Rhone Valley. Here, early Augustan urbanization schemes and imperial policy underlined the beneficial relationship between indigenous populations and the Roman military and aristocracy, resulting in urban and provincial landscapes that defined borders relevant to not only local urban populations, but also foreigners – Roman subjects and “barbarians” alike. One way to identify these ideological frontiers is through the examination of Narbonensian triumphal architecture, particularly arches.Triumphal arches are more prevalent in Gallia Narbonensis than in any other province in the Western Empire. During the early stages of imperial expansion, Augustus began new phase of triumphal iconography that took into account the differing secular ideologies of the frontier and interior. Where the aggressive and militaristic traditions of border tribes were used as a means to defend the Empire, the populations of the interior were demilitarized – an act which was called peace by the imperial government. The non-military virtue, in addition to urbanization, set those identified as Roman apart from those seen as barbarian.

Socio-spatial conditions for women in Dhaka are very specific and highly contradictory. This article traces some of these contradictions by looking at the multilayered presence of women in public space—where public space is defined as both the space of politics and public discourse, and the physical space of streets, parks and squares. By analyzing the presence of women in public space, it is argued that one can observe a continuous tension within these spaces between ‘official’ discourses and often repeated ideas that stress equal rights for women on the one hand and a whole series of everyday practices on the other that rather tend to make women’s presence in public space marginal.

This essay theorizes a spatial-affective strategy from the discursive silence between Alexander Kluge and Peter Sloterdijk. Using as a springboard their discussion of a film that Sergei Eisenstein never made, I identify two possibilities of agency in an age of late globalization: Kluge’s faith in the possibility of liberating processes and spaces and Sloterdijk’s mistrust in the hegemonic structures of contemporary society. The difference between those agentive-affective possibilities gives rise to distinct strategies for a subjective geography capable of countering the violent and virtual spaces of late globalization. Rather than declaring one philosopher’s strategy the path to luck, this essay tests how each can be mobilized. Thereby, the crucial location of humans in spaces normallyconstrained by capitalism’s rhetoric of terror and safety can instead become—though hope or suspicion—spaces engendering more plural subjects.

Drawing on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, key ideas in the writings of the poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a phenomenological conception of affects, and poems that address the seasons, this article outlines a poetic phenomenology of the temperate seasons. It aims to unite a poetic sensibility for seasonal phenomena with a structured phenomenological approach. In doing so, it presents the seasons as a meaningful polyphony in which human beings also participate. It gives a non-reductive account of how the human experience of the seasons is deeply connected to natural seasonal phenomena and indicates ways in which we can deepen our understanding of, and participation in, the seasons.

A summer spent in the Scandinavian Arctic changes the sense of seasons: the Sámi know eight seasons; the visitor finds summer in the valleys, winter above, in the mountains, and winter below, in the permafrost underfoot. The summer spent in movement makes one understand the force of movement and initiative in human life, the sedentary and the nomadic instincts. The seasonal migrations of reindeer and the periodicity of lemming years make one explore movements of humans that are not launched by initiatives, periodic and rhythmic movements. Exploring rock paintings in Alta and the space station in Kiruna extends the space of human history from humans assembled at the foot of the retreating glacier, 7000 years ago, to human tourists in outer space.

The cave at Lascaux, France provides one of the earliest examples of human artwork: bulls, horses, and other creatures painted on rough rock walls, iconic examples of the emergence of human culture. After being closed to the public due to damage from the large influx of visitors, the cave was recreated in a near exact replica at Lascaux II, a museum site close to the original cave. This paper explores the reconstruction of the site and the constant stream of tourists to the location, arguing that the site functions as a pseudo-religious place of pilgrimage in which human beings imagine themselves as descendants of their primevalancestors and re-affirm their own humanity. The representations of Lascaux, including Bataille’s text, express longing for an absent origin, in keeping with discourses of play between presence and absence in philosophy and theology.

The “universally affective power of home” is such, that in the light of an increasingly mobile world this very concept articulates a great part of the contemporary debate around place, identity and belonging. An overview of such debate will be provided in this article. It begins with a problematization of the concept of home that allows us to understand it beyond notions of fixity and stability. The core of the article is a discussion about the ways in which contending definitions ofplace determine the understanding of attachments to place, and this will be grounded through the discussion of a particular way of experiencing such attachments: the feelings of home.