Place/Culture/Representation

Discussing authorial power, landscape metaphor and the notions of community and sense of place, this explores the ways in which spatial and cultural analysis have found much common ground in making sense of ourselves and the landscape we inhabit.

Spatial and cultural analysis have recently found much common ground, focusing in particular on the nature of the city. Place/Culture/Representation brings together new and established voices involved in the reshaping of cultural geography. The authors argue that as we write our geographies we are not just representing some reality, we are creating meaning. Writing becomes as much about the author as it is about purported geographical reality. The issue becomes not scientific truth as the end but the interpretation of cultural constructions as the means. Discussing authorial power, discourses of the other, texts and textuality, landscape metaphor, the sites of power-knowledge relations and notions of community and the sense of place, the authors explore the ways in which a more fluid and sensitive geographer's art can help us make sense of ourselves and the landscapes and places we inhabit and think about.

1. Introduction: Representing the Place of Culture Part 1. On Representation in Cultural Geography 2. Author and Authority: Writing the New Cultural Geography 3. Sites of Representation: Place, Time and the Discourse of the Other 4. Spectacle and Text: Landscape Metaphors in Cultural Geography 5. The Lie that Blinds: Destabilizing the Text of Landscape Part 2. On Representing Residential Landscapes 6. Re-Valuing the House 7. Public Housing in Single-Industry Towns: Changing Landscapes of Paternalism 8. Co-Operative Housing as a Moral Landscape: Re-examining the Postmodern City 9. Myths and Meanings of Gentrification Part 3. On Representing Institutional Cultures 10. This Heaven Gives Me Migraines: The Problems and Promise of Landscapes of Leisure 11. The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development: the Culture Building Process within an Institution 12. Multiculturalism: Representing a Canadian Institution 13. Representing Power: The Politics and Poetics of Urban Form in the Kandyan Kingdom Part 4. On Representing Cultural Geography 14. Representing Space: Space, Scale and Culture in Social Science 15. Interventions in the Historical Geography of Modernity: Social Theory, Spatiality and the Politics of Representation 16. Reading, Community and a Sense of Place 17. Epilogue

James S. Duncan, David Ley