New Books in Geography

Kate McDonald‘s Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, 2017) is a thoughtful and provocative study of the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism. McDonald’s work on Japanese travel and tourism to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan traces the changing political valences of space and the spatial order of the Japanese empire from the late nineteenth century into the postwar occupation years. Beginning with the insight that the spatialization of empire was integral to its social imaginary, McDonald explores space as a mechanism for the naturalization and reproduction of uneven structures of rule. McDonald is attentive to the changing meanings of space as the context of empire shifted after World War I, identifying the spatial politics of pre-1918 Japan as a “geography of civilization” (à la the high imperialist project of the mission civilisatrice) and of post-1918 Japan as a more ethnographic “geography of pluralism.” This shift paralleled and reflected the transition of empires worldwide from a context of territorial acquisition to territorial maintenance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Several recent guests on New Books in Political Science have talked about the path to political polarization in the US, including Lilliana Mason, Dan and Dave Hopkins, and Sam Rosenfeld. The deep divides between the parties have an obvious geographic dimension, but what is the cause? What has allowed people to sort themselves into cities, suburbs, and rural areas of the country? Clayton Nall has an answer to these questions: highways. Nall has written  The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermine Cities (Cambridge University Press, 2018). In the book, Nall connects the federal programs to expand highway construction through the country to differences in political attitudes. In short, highways have contributed to sorting and polarization, allowing people to live and work much farther away than in the past. Using a variety of interesting sources of data, Nall also shows how this sorting has had different impacts on attitudes about transportation spending, with Republicans and Democrats holding distinct views on how federal money should support the physical connections between communities.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The First World War ended over four centuries of Middle East rule by the expansive, multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual Ottoman Empire. In its wake, Britain, France, and some groups within the region and its diaspora aspired to create ethnically, religiously, and nationally homogenous nation-states that would be kept separate from Arab Muslims majorities. In States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (University of California Press, 2017), Laura Robson traces the origins and nature of such campaigns, which sought to demographically engineer the Middle East through ethnic removal, population transfers, and partition. Drawing on a broad range of communities and newly-formed states in the Middle East, Robson shows that such schemes were often designed to bolster colonial control of the region and impose neo-imperial modes of governance on its people. In addition to shedding new light on the transformation of identity and communal subjectivity in the post-war Middle East, Robson also provides crucial historical context to several issues facing the region today, including the refugee crisis, increased migration, and intercommunal conflict. In doing so, Robson’s account serves as an important reminder that the kinds of demographic engineering frequently presented as contemporary solutions often create more problems than they solve. Joshua Donovan is a PhD candidate at Columbia University’s Department of History. His dissertation examines national and sectarian identity formation within the Greek Orthodox Christian community in Syria, Lebanon, and the diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space (I. B. Tauris, 2018), Cynthia Ruder explores how the building of the Moscow canal reflected the values of Stalinism and how it was used to create distinctly Soviet space, both real and imagined.  She discusses the canal as a physical construct: an massive and important infrastructure project that would allow Moscow to have a steady supply of drinking water and create enough water pressure to allow for the construction of high rises, as well as a shipping channel that connected Moscow to the Volga and the Russian heartland and the rest of the world via the Baltic, White and Caspian seas, as well as the imagined spaces created, such as Moscow becoming “a port of five seas.” Ruder examines the Stalinist political system’s ability to tame and control water, bending it in service of socialism, and how these achievements were memorialized in art, song and literature. But she also explores the darker side of canal construction, the use of Gulag labor, the human cost it exacted and how this too was reflective of a Stalinist world-view. Building Stalinism provides an excellent look into the pervasive nature of Stalinism and its complex modern legacy. Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Is modern capitalism too far advanced in the U.S. to create common property regimes? Are there models for what an Urban Commons might look like? Join us as we speak with Amanda Huron, author of Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C. (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). She’ll help us understand the theory and practice of Limited Equity Housing Cooperatives and the affordability, control, stability, and community they can provide to low-income communities and the people who live in them. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

How to theorize what goes without saying? In The Geography of the Everyday: Toward an Understanding of the Given (University of Georgia Press, 2017), Rob Sullivan develops a general theory of everydayness as the necessary, if elusive, starting point for social and spatial theorists across disciplines. Proceeding in stepwise fashion, Sullivan builds an account of this concept that scopes over space, place, history, time itself, social and biological reproduction, embodiment, the object world, and the neural and perceptual dimensions of experience, folding high-level theorizing together with an eclectic range of empirical engagements. The book generously synthesizes insights from Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karl Marx, Torsten Hägerstrand, Jane Bennett, and other thinkers on or just off the map of critical geography today. It is an ambitious but conversational text, a committed work of exposition that might dovetail with many a seminar in geographic thought. As Sullivan sees it, materializing our own entwinement with the environment — accepting the complexity of “The TimeSpacePlace Thing” — just might incline future geographers to a richer, more affirmative sense of ethics and politics beyond the hermetic models of selfhood that, on his reading, still have wide appeal, even in an age when the costs of anthropocentrism seem all the more immediate. Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at psrekman@berkeley.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), geographer Caitlin DeSilvey offers a set of alternatives to those who would assign a misplaced solidity to historic buildings and landscapes in order then to “preserve” or “conserve” them. DeSilvey reimagines processes of material decay, which always intermingle natural and cultural landscapes, as more animate, eventful, productive, and worthy of affirmation than prevailing practice would have it. Her narrative wends through Montana, Vermont, Germany’s Ruhr Valley, and numerous English sites, each of them rendered at close range, in lithe, sometimes experimental prose. Through these encounters, and with a remarkably light touch, she thinks in a key recognizable alongside, but never subservient to, many strands of recent geographic thought on the force or vitality of nonhuman matter. Curated Decay is an ethical intervention, too, posing difficult questions about vulnerability, rights, care, repair, maintenance, and how we might better respond to environments as they weather and fragment. Just this week, happily, the book was just awarded the Historic Preservation Book Prize by the Center for Historic Preservation at the University of Mary Washington. It will satisfy a wide and curious readership across diverse domains of theory and practice, and because the lines of questioning it opens are not easily closed down, it will stoke debate for some time to come. Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at psrekman@berkeley.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What does it mean to say that a city can “die”? As Brian Tochterman shows in this compelling intellectual and cultural history, motifs of imminent death—of a “Necropolis” haunting the country’s great “Cosmopolis”—have been a persistent feature of discourse on the probable fate of New York City since the Second World War. The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) traces this “spatial narrative” across many domains of thought and cultural production: fiction and essays, planning theory and practice, humanistic and social-scientific criticism in the public square, and film in the age of Charles Bronson’s Death Wish. Throughout, Tochterman shows that New York intellectuals of diverse political inflections have made specters of urban “ungovernability” central to how America and the world look at New York—whether to compel remedies, to render the city’s very chaos alluring, or, especially, to argue for the futility of intervention. Tochterman sheds new light on such figures as E. B. White, Mickey Spillane, Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Lionel Abel, Michael Harrington, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and John Lindsay, among other compass points in the urbanism and intellectual life of postwar New York. Between “Fun City” and “Fear City,” a new image of the metropolitan past, present, and future comes into focus. Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at psrekman@berkeley.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Lawrence Halprin, one of the central figures in twentieth-century American landscape architecture, is well known to city-watchers for his work on San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, Seattle’s Freeway Park, downtown Portland’s open-space sequence, the FDR Memorial on the National Mall, and the California planned community of Sea Ranch. Less well known is his distinctive, process-based approach to design—his theoretical commitment, on the one hand, to a dynamic “choreography” of bodies moving through space, and, on the other, the visually arresting notational techniques of “scoring” he devised to represent such movement and carry out his projects in consultation with the public. In City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Alison Bick Hirsch addresses Halprin’s built work and community workshops in equal measure, pointing up important tensions that his participatory “Take Part Process” never quite extinguished: between manipulation and facilitation, universality and difference, conscious choice and emergent chance. Through Lawrence Halprin and his wife, the modern dancer Anna Halprin, Hirsch opens onto a broader history of postwar landscape and urban design, and onto some of the complicated politics in which proponents and critics of Urban Renewal alike found themselves immersed. Hirsch has written a decisive work that joins the intellectual, social, political, and aesthetic histories of urbanism. Geographers, historians, and urbanists of many stripes will learn from her able analysis. Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at psrekman@berkeley.edu.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), Tim Neale examines the controversy over the 2005 Wild Rivers Act in the Cape York Peninsula of Northern Australia. Through detailed analysis of the role of traditional owners, prime ministers, politicians, the media, environmentalists, mining companies, the late Steve Irwin, crocodiles, and river systems, Neale reveals the ways in which the future of the north was contested. In the process, Wild Articulations reveals the overlapping, contesting, and sometimes surprising relationships between environmentalism, indigeneity, and development in Northern Australia. The book shows how the Act both revealed and fundamentally altered the politics of environmentalism and indigeneity. With implications stretching far beyond Australia, Wild Articulations asks questions such as ‘Who is or should—ethically or legally—be recognized as rightfully interested in indigenous country? What attachments to wild spaces are we willing to recognize as legitimate? What futures do those living in “wild” places want, and what can they expect?’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography