1. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 GEOG 3300 Space, Place & Scale Week 11 Landscapes of Fear / Moral Geographies Department of Geography Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies York University Fall Term 2011-2012

2. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 2

3. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 3

4. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 4 [Image by Yasuharu via Flickr.com and used under a Creative Commons license.]

5. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 5

6. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 6

7. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 7 [Image by imjustabill via Flickr.com and used under a Creative Commons license.]

8. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 8 [Image by Myradphotos via Flickr.com and used under a Creative Commons license.]

9. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 9 The most dangerous place?

10. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 10 [Evil gnome image by Spleenboy via Flickr.com and used under a Creative Commons license.]

11. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 11 [Image by Carst via Flickr.com and used under a Creative Commons license.]

12. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 12 [Image by Gizmo Gun via Flickr.com and used under a Creative Commons license.]

13. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 13 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.

14. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 14 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.”

15. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 15 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

16. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 16 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?]

17. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 17 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?

18. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 18 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”

19. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 19 Significance Fear as material social practice expressed in the landscape Spaces can be manipulated to valorize and legitimate fear

20. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 20 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.

21. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 21 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.

22. 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. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 22

23. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 23 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?)

24. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 24 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.

25. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 25 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.

26. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 26 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)

27. 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 Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 27

28. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 28 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 …”

29. Week 11 17 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 29 Two ways of evaluating Baycrest as a place InstrumentalIntrinsic