Concept Caching: Washington Heights, New York

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

Another concept in cultural geography is that of the cultural landscape.  Images, of which this one is also located in the same urban area as the site of cultural struggle in Lower Manhattan mentioned in the post The “Ground Zero Mosque” and Cultural Geography, provide essential visual texts to the investigation of cultural landscapes.  The image’s caption offers a sensory description of this cultural landscape; of its sights, sounds, and smells.  These traces provide clues for understanding the spatial context of cultural activities and communities that inhabit the landscape.

The “Ground Zero Mosque” and Cultural Geography

There has been plenty of, well, talk about the proposed building of a Muslim community center two blocks away from Ground Zero.  The chatter has manifest around political arguments, religious liberties, urban development strategies, community-building, and mostly, impalpable feelings.  With no attempt to take sides or to analyze such points of view, this topic can be investigated from a cultural geographic approach that may offer insight into the contradictions, controversies and commotion.

In cultural geography, we investigate the context of a place.  In this case, we would interrogate the perspectives, activities, histories and futures that all overlap in the place we know as Lower Manhattan.  By interrogating the spatial context of a site, we find traces of culture imbued with change, power, and struggle.  These traces can be material acts, messages, and presences in place from yesterday, today and tomorrow; these traces can be non-material, emanating from peoples’ memories, emotions and psyches of place.  Cultural geography, and its approach, is particularly apt for considering the competing claims over the place of Lower Manhattan.  It is the simultaneous site for competing claims made by New Yorkers, Muslim-Americans, 9/11 victims and survivors, and all Americans.  These traces are what make the proposed placement of an Islamic community center such a contentious prospect.

At the heart of this debate is the intersection of national memory and place.  Lower Manhattan is the site of one of the most emotionally-stricken events in the American memory: the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers.  This national memory is itself composed of millions of individual acts of remembering.  Each colored by individual experiences, knowledges, prejudices, and perspectives.  That memory has a clear visual impression that does not require a precise knowledge of the actual geographies that contextualize that landscape.  It is the tensions within this national memory that draw the battle lines in this culture war over the site.

There are several themes that emerge from this controversy.  One of the first themes that occurs over and over is location.  Distance and proximity are paramount among the arguments over the location of the Muslim community center.  To some the simple math of counting city blocks settles the dispute.  To others, it is the traces of the event that call for more relative notions of adjacency and nearness.  This is perhaps the most obvious cultural act of bordering a place in order to underscore its meaning.

Another theme relates to the establishment of presence in the place: in particular, the presence of Muslims in Lower Manhattan.  By some, this presence has been continuously claimed from the past and into the present.  That existence has preceded and persisted with the main event at the heart of this debate: 9/11.  This is another act in claiming: by asserting belonging to the place, then rights to the place are substantiated.

Another theme relates to various the scales of the debate.  Ultimately the unease or struggle is sited not only in Lower Manhattan, but at the national scale of America.  Some of the ways this has become discernable is through the discursive focus on the planned cultural activity (Islam) and on the associated cultural identity (Muslim).  First, cultural activity is focused on at the site, but also can be seen being fought over at the national scale.  The space within the community center in the place of Lower Manhattan is not defined broadly as an interfaith space of worship or prayer, but narrowly as a space of Muslim worship or prayer.  It is respected that in America, religious freedom is to be tolerated.  However, as a result of national memory, many of the individual acts of remembering now associate that certain religion as inappropriate or out of place at this site.  Some have argued this distinction stems from the conflation of Islam with terrorism, and of Muslim with foreign.  And they would see this as resulting in the discomfort, fear, xenophobia that is heard among the chatter.  Second, cultural identity is also seen to be conflict-ridden at all scales.  Perhaps as a response to the conflation of Islam with terrorism or foreign, there have emerged discursive efforts to open up Muslim cultural identities to include not only religion, but to include coexisting roles as citizens, neighbors, stakeholders, and insiders.  This can be heard as claims to identities as New Yorkers, as Americans, and as families.

Such a controversy provides a rich opportunity for the application of the cultural geographic approach.  This approach is also often the least recognized or understood by non- and lay- geographers.  And yet, the processes that it investigates are the subconscious, intuitive and most human which we employ as we shape and engage with our world.  Introducing undergraduate geographers to the cultural geographic approach is a way of introducing them to human society, and to themselves.

Cultural Geography References:

Anderson (2010) Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces, Routeledge.

Mitchell (2000) Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction, Wiley-Blackwell.

Discussion Questions:

1. Recall your experience on the day of September 11, 2001.  Attempt to describe what might be the overall national memory of that day.  Where would your memory and the national memory converge and diverge?
2. Review the two ways that location is approached (i.e. the rigid distance approach or the affective adjacency approach) in this controversy along with the accompanying validation for their claim over the site.  Evaluate each argument separately.
3. Assess the importance of establishing presence and belonging.  What are some of the strategies that cultural presence or belonging is seen to be validated or negated?

A Pond-to-Pond Journey

Some geographers love to learn about places by following transects. When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), I would sometimes go start at the Inner Harbor and follow any major street,  a couple dozen of which radiate from that central location, through the city, to the suburbs, and beyond. It was the start of a habit that I have continued, most recently by eschewing the high speed of the New York State Thruway in favor of the U.S. 20 on a drive from Bridgewater to Albany, a brief transect that I would love to extend in both directions. When we followed this short transect in July, Newport, Oregon was a couple thousand miles to our backs. When we got off Route 20 in Albany in favor of a faster route home, Boston was still a couple hundred miles ahead.

Author William Least Heat-Moon describes an unusual transect from New York City to Astoria, Washington in his book River Horse: The Logbook of a Boat Across America. In it, he describes what seems at first an impossible transect — crossing the United States on fresh water in a 22-foot boat. Better known for his book Blue Highways, in River Horse he finds a way of crossing the country that avoids not only the major highways, but the minor ones as well. Most houses and businesses face a road, with a “front” maintained for visitors and passersby to see. By crossing the country on rivers and canals, Heat-Moon experiences the cultural landscape from behind the usual lines.

It is, of course, not physically possible to cross the United States entirely on fresh water, as several drainage divides must be crossed. Heat-Moon minimized the inevitable portages  by carefully mapping his route, by having friends occasionally swap a canoe for the main expedition craft, and by pushing each boat to the limits of its hull draft.

My wife Pamela (librarian, blogger, and honorary geographer) and I are planning a major transect of our own, assuming that the passenger automobile is still in use when we near retirement. To celebrate our 66th year, we are going to make a transect “from Chicago to L.A., more than two thousand miles all the way. ” That is, we are planning a transect along the old Route 66, which predates the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System by a generation. In many places, the original roadbed has been obliterated by the new system, but in others, it runs parallel — or it runs into the trees and fields. In many cases, travel facilities or entire small towns that served the original highway passengers have been abandoned.

I was put in mind of these various transects when I heard recently about a most unusual transect that geologist Robert Thorson and his wife Kristine followed in the summer of 2009. The transect is unusual in that they proceeded in an orderly fashion from east to west, but rather than following lines or curves, they followed a discontinuous collection of points on the landscape: the kettle ponds left by the receding ice of the Pleistocene glaciations. Their journey is documented in his book Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds and on his blog, Walden to Wobegon. The blog title refers to two kettle ponds made famous by literature: Thoreua’s very real Walden Pond and Garrison Keilor’s fictional Lake Wobegon. I learned about both the book and the blog from Robin Young’s delightful interview with Professor Thorson on WBUR’s Here and Now radio program.

Thorson provides insights regarding limnology, the ponds and lakes themselves, and the history of recreation on fresh water. In moving across the inverted archipelago at  the southern fringes of continental glaciation, however, he also tells tales of the land and the people in the vast spaces between those most intriguing bodies of water.

A final example of a transect comes from WBUR, one of  several public radio stations in Boston, Massachusetts. Traveling west from Boston along Route 9, WBUR produced programs in each of five cities and towns over the course of a week. On topics ranging from immigration to higher-education funding and arts-centered economic development, the series — aired as Finding a Way Along Route 9 — provides an excellent sampling of the current state of the economy and society in Massachusetts. Although the series does not cover the entire state, it makes a conscious effort to overcome a pervasive tendency to associate Boston — the primate city of Massachusetts — with the state as a whole.

Discussion / Activity

1. What are some examples of transects you have read about or encountered in radio, film, or other media? What did the traveler or travelers involved learn from their experience?

2. What is a transect that you could take in a single day, close to home, in order to learn something about your region? What mode of transportation would you choose, and what are its advantages and limitations? How would you record your learning along this transect? (This question can be treated either as a thought experiment or as an actual class assignment, in which each student plans a transect, follows it, and reports back. A group of students could be sent on transects that cover different “slices” of the same region.)

3. What is a transect that you would like to follow elsewhere in the world, if time and money were unlimited? What would you expect to learn?

Concept Caching: Informal Activities–India

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

Currently, about 70 percent of India's GDP derives from informal economic activities. Those individuals, who indulge in marginal livlihoods and survival activities outside government regulations, comprise 65-75 percent of workers in urban areas and make up the bulk of the urban poor. Nearly two-thirds of these people are women. Most people who work in the informal sector are low-skilled, rural or small town migrants or those who, for any number of reasons, have fallen out of the formal sector. Barbering and ear cleaning are ancient professions, handed down from father to son through generations. The introduction of cotton buds or Q-tips has hurt the ear cleaning trade. The Federal Government is using barbers to disseminate information about HIV and AIDS because they believe that men are more likely to discuss intimate details of their sex-life with their hair cutter as opposed to family members or colleagues. The barbers keep a supply of governmment-issued condoms on hand. BA Weightman

In thinking about the possible connections that can be made to the post Geography Directions: Haptic Technologies and the Geographies of Touch, this image provides a bit of humor and perspective about haptic scales, technology, and the geographies of touch.  From the American viewpoint, where personal space is prized, the close contact shown in this image is a little astounding.  It exhibits a cultural difference in the way that bodies are managed and interact through touch.  Geographers that study the space of the body are in the vanguard of geographic research.

Geography Directions: Haptic Technologies and the Geographies of Touch

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

Touch-screen mobile phones and other electronic devices are increasingly part of our everyday business and leisure engagements.  However, the BBC recently reported on the commercial race to launch ‘new’ haptic technologies, where “for the first time, people will be actually be able to have a virtual feel of some of the images that are placed before them.”  This article reports on research at the Disney Laboratories in the US where technologies are being developed to let people ‘feel’ objects on screen by stroking them with their fingers.  A senior researcher states: “We do this by applying a high voltage to a transparent electrode on the glass plate – in this case people will feel a texture on the glass. By varying the frequency and amplitude of the signal we can create different sensations.”  Other examples of this type of technology include developments in localised tactile feedback – aimed to enhance haptic phones where “people feel them, stretch them, bend them and have them react to these interactions”.

In a recent issue of Geography Compass, Deborah Dixon and Elizabeth Straughan chart “recent efforts to place touch, touching and being touched within non-essentialist, human geographic analyses”.  They highlight how “Considerable attention within geography has been paid to the physiologies, knowledges and practices that give substance and import to the senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch – and the manner in which these work alone, or in concert, to facilitate particular forms of relations between and amongst people, other life forms and objects.”  Dixon and Straughan draw on examples of work that explores the “inter-play between the ‘interior’ psychologies of intimacy and indifference, acceptance and alienation (i.e. feelings of being in/losing/being out of touch) and the ‘exterior,’ corporeal work of texture and friction, push and feel.” In conclusion, they call for more critical attention to the work of touch.  The advent of haptic technologies reported in this BBC article demonstrates new ways in which various senses – in this case touch - frame our experiences and understandings of the world around us.

By Sarah Mills

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Concept Caching: Luxor, Egypt

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

In our Concept Caching site, there are countless examples of the human-environment connection.  Despite its subdued appearance, this image of Luxor, Egypt offers an extraordinary representation of this interaction.  On the banks of the Nile River, surrounded by the vast Egyptian desert, Luxor is one of the world’s oldest continuously settled and cultivated areas on Earth.  In the post Biomes to Anthromes, the inclusion of human influence on ecological communities puts this Egyptian riverine landscape in true perspective.

Biomes to Anthromes

Many have debated the semantic tags of “natural” or “pristine” when discussing the physical environment or landscape.  At the heart of this is the reality that humans have long been shaping and outright changing the physical landscape; that there is no true pristine or natural environment in our history or today.  In ecology, discussions and research often do not account for human activities in an inclusive way.  Ecosystems and biomes are often seen as disturbed, disrupted, or destroyed by humans.

Two ecologists set about to change the paradigm from which biomes are viewed as natural systems.  Re-orienting the existing theoretical approach of biogeography, ecology, biology, and more, this new paradigm incorporates the long present human influence in nature.  Using the established ecological tool of the biome, these scientists added the various patterns of human alterations.  Presented in Frontier in Ecology and the Environment, the paper titled, “Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world” is a fascinating read for geographers of every stripe.  It includes an intriguing map of these new regions, along with some other interesting graphics for further investigation.

Following up their 2008 paper, came a 2010 Global Ecology and Biogeography paper titled, “Anthropogenic transformation of the biomes, 1700 to 2000.” As the title declares, this paper is interested in the temporal trends of human alteration.  The results are presented in a series of maps that illustrate the changes to anthromes across the Earth’s surface.  This paper offers striking visuals for the global-scale developments that have been associated with the history of human-environment transformation.

Not only are these papers enthralling reads with provocative visuals, but this new paradigm provides an excellent discussion or lecture topic for any geography class, from the pre-undergrad, to undergrad, to graduate levels.  Among the patterns of anthropogenic biomes are correlations to a myriad of environmental, demographic, economic, urban, and social issues.  Some of the issues that have emerged from discussion are: deforestation; sprawl; changing land-use; technological advancement; environmental limits on settlement or agriculture; regional comparisons; and so on.   By viewing the series of maps, students can interpret patterns, investigate historical and contemporary issues, and draw correlations to many related topics in environmental science and geography.  For the most part, they can do so without much pre-instruction.  The relationships they reveal are often intuitive and amount to a very fulfilling classroom dialogue.  Even the classification of the anthrome regions themselves is an interesting topic for consideration.  Interrogating the legend that accompanies these maps uncovers relationships among changing population patterns and densities, agricultural land-use practices, and the significance of various environments to human practices.  A fun activity is to bring up the serious of maps in power point or Google Earth, to view them sequentially, moving forward and backward, and seeing the change in the patterns on the surface.  Students always gasp at the changes they see in “real-time” and remark at the accelerating pace and spread of some of the world’s anthromes.

Both of these papers are provided and expanded on in the website for the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology at UMBC.  This website is a great companion for instructors, students, and all other interested parties.  Some of the great downloadable extras are Google Earth maps and educator resources, like power points and educational guides.

To end with a quote:

“In this century we need to change the way we educate our children about the biosphere, about the ecology of the world.  We need to think of it as a human ecology.  Ecology in which people interact with nature and that we’re responsible for the way that nature behaves now and we’ll be responsible for the way it behaves in the future.  And if we want to live in an environment that is desirable for all of us, it’s up to all of us to make that happen.  It’s not going to happen out there somewhere; it’s really the nature around us that matters now.”  -  Earl Ellis

Great articles/resources for students:

Keim, Brandon (2010) “Maps: How Mankind Remade Nature” Wired Magazine

Madrigal, Alexis (2008) “Mapping the Humanized World” Wired Magazine

The Encyclopedia of Earth “anthropogenic biomes” Last updated 2010.

Discovery Channel News (2009) “Earth: Human Influence on Ecology Mapped” (video).

Discussion Questions:

1. Examine the legend associated with the Anthromes map.  Reflect on the organization, order, and naming of each legend item.  What patterns can you see with respect to varying population density, type of agricultural activities, scale of land-use, and utility of diverse environments?
2. Upon viewing the maps of Anthromes, what can you infer about the relationship between population growth/density and agricultural activity?  Compare and contrast the Europe, East Asia, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa world regions.
3. Analyze Figure 2(a) from “Anthropogenic transformation of the biomes, 1700 to 2000.”  Describe the trends in the changing proportions of Used, Seminatural and Wild global lands.  Provide some explanations for the scale and pace of these trends.

Garden Tales

This year, my family has been recognizing the anniversary of each state’s admission to the United States in a project known as Celebrating the States.  For each state, our celebration includes watching one film that relates to the state. Of course, thousands of films have been produced in California, so we chose a title that tells a particular story about California. Given our great interest in the geography of food, we selected an independent, documentary film called The Garden.

The film describes a community garden that was located on 14 acres occupying two city blocks to the north of 41st Street, between Long Beach Avenue and Alameda Street, in an area of South Los Angeles known as South Central LA. The farm was funded by the city of Los Angeles as part of  a multi-faceted approach to healing the city after the deadly 1992 Los Angeles Riots. The garden became the largest community garden in the United States — part of a continent-wide movement that encourages members of a community to grow some of their food on shared land. Connecting people to the land helped connect them to each other.

The film describes how the garden came to be destroyed, despite its many benefits to to the South Central community. The land on which the garden was created had been purchased by the city using imminent domain, which is a legal method of forcing the sale of property at a current fair-market price to a government for a public purpose. In this case, the man who originally sold the land to the City of Los Angeles was able to purchase it back, years later, for the same price. Once he did that, he exerted his private property rights over the land, including the right to evict the gardeners.

In the end, the garden was defeated, but not the gardeners. The landowner demanded millions of dollars to avoid the eviction, but demolished the garden even after they raised the full amount from foundations and other donors. The South Central Farmers continue to farm, on a more extensive piece of land in California’s Central Valley, and to truck the produce into the city. The new location is a better fit with the neoclassic  von Thünen model, which posits that vegetable crops will be found at a modest distance from an urban place, rather than in the city itself.

This film relates in several ways to No Impact Man, a film about which I blogged in connection with our New York commemoration. As Colin Beavin and his family showed in that film, growing food close to urban populations can greatly reduce the human impact on  environmental systems, as the distance food has to travel can be greatly reduced.

Another story of a garden in peril is that of the historic research garden of the Valivov Institute of Plant Industry, however, where the ultimate fate of the garden is not yet known. As with the South Central Farmers garden, this very special garden is threatened by real estate development, in this case residential development associated with suburban sprawl in its suburban location south of St. Petersburg.

As with South Central, the Valivov garden has became a cause célèbre, drawing supporters from throughout the  world. The garden is considered a critical reserve of the internal biodiversity of several crop and botanical plants.  The site itself is of interest for historic reasons as well, because of the extremes to which scientists at the time went to protect rare food strains during the siege of Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was then known) during World War II. Then as now, scientists protecting this garden understood the importance of genetic diversity within food crops as a necessary component of food security. Modern agriculture has dramatically reduced genetic variability within crops; ironically, perhaps, modern crop science requires access to genetic stocks that offer a great deal of variety. The scientists in St. Petersburg also understand that subtle differences in soil chemistry and soil organisms are important, so that transplanting the cultivars to another location would not fully preserve the biodiversity that has been developed at the site.

In both the Los Angeles and St. Petersburg cases, the gardens were under threat because proximity to urban places resulted in land values  that are quite high, relative to the value ascribed to their use as gardens. The tendency of land values to increase with greater proximity to urban areas is known as a rent cone. The conversion of farmland to commercial, industrial, or residential use is — to a great degree — influenced by the expansion of rent cones, which set price expectations (otherwise known as land rent) that are difficult to meet with agricultural land uses. And as von Thünen would have predicted, even with government or charitable subsidies, only the highest-value, intensive agricultural activities are likely to persist close to cities. Extensive uses such as grain or grazing would simply be out of the question, as they yield very low land rents per unit of land.

Discussion questions for viewers of The Garden:

Aside from the provision of food, what benefits were provided by the South Central community garden?

How do the relationships between public and private spaces change over the course of this film?

Are you aware of any community gardens in your city or region? If so, how do they compare with the community garden in the film?

Concept Caching: European Imprints on the Streets of Mumbai, India

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

This image submitted by Harm de Blij offers a visual complement to the descriptions of Indian economic, political, and socio-cultural landscapes that have been shaped by the period of British rule.  As discussed in the post Geography Directions: The British Impact on Indian Geography the impact of the British Raj was tremendous and persists in many of the urban landscapes of modern India.

Geography Directions: The British Impact on Indian Geography

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

This past week, the Prime Minister completed an official visit to India, leading a large entourage of government, business, sport, academic, artistic, and cultural leaders. The visit to India was intended to strengthen long-standing bilateral ties between the two nations. By opening a new chapter in an intimate, if often tense relationship, Mr Cameron stressed the economic and cultural benefits that India and the United Kingdom share – a common language, government organization, social priorities, and investment in key industries. In an editorial for The Hindu, Mr Cameron summarized his position by stating that, “I know that Britain cannot rely on sentiment and shared history for a place in India’s future. Your country has the whole world beating a path to its door. But I believe Britain should be India’s partner of choice in the years ahead”.

Indeed, India of the twenty-first century is prime real-estate for global investment. With well over one billion constituents, a burgeoning economy, and a fledgling middle class, India is poised to become a global player. Why might Britain enjoy an advantage over other global powers in competing for Indian business? The answer may lie in geography.

From a human geographical perspective, the contemporary Indian Diaspora in Britain is tremendously important, providing lucrative commercial, social and creative models that have permanently altered the British cultural landscape. This immigration influx was reactionary in nature, a post-colonial response to eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century British rule of the Indian subcontinent. The geographical impact of the British Raj was immense. In a century, India was transformed from a vast agricultural region, separated by dozens of feuding kingdoms, into a prized economic asset – ‘the Jewel of the British Crown’. As early as the 1770s the East India Company commenced cartographic surveys of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Reorganized under the Ordnance Survey Office, the Survey of India created a distinctive urban infrastructure, facilitated the development of the world’s most extensive railway network, and led to more efficient agricultural production and output. The developments of the India Survey were closely followed by the British public; an 1898 issue of The Geographical Journal complained that the annual issue of the Survey of India Report (12[6]: 606-607) had been inexplicably delayed, angering investors and observers alike. In 2007 The Geographical Journal reviewed an excellent treatise on the subject. Entitled Colonial and Post-Colonial Geographies of India (Saraswati Raju, M Satish Kumar and Stuart Corbridge, eds.), this text successfully analysed changing Indian geography through Western and Indian eyes. Owing to the Royal Geographical Society’s long association with Indian exploration and cartography, the Society’s journals provide ample discourse of Indian-British narratives, including Miles Ogborn’s “Writing Travels,” and Alison Blunt’s “Imperial Geographies of Home”.

By Benjamin Sacks

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Next Page »