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Spatiality and visualisation of the everyday: nature-culture in Tallinn’s urban
fringeTiina PeilCentre for Landscape and CultureEstonian Institute of [email protected]
• cultural materialism (Denis Cosgrove)• theorisation of nature (Neil Smith)• non-representational theory (Nigel Thrift)• materialist semiotics (Sarah Whatmore)
Hybrid geographies – physical and human geography
Relationship between language and spatial consciousness
Geographers come armed with
Nature ----- Culture
wildnatural
domesticatedartificial
Adding SPACE
countryrural
townurban
Adding TIME
and SCALE ?
Pragmatist suspicion of fixed dualisms separating humans from nature but useful as analytical categories
Individuallocal
collectiveglobal
Result: a complex, formidably polysemic or semantically promiscuous ‘object of inquiry’
Spatiality
...defined as any property relating to or occupying space
...refers to – material spaces – spatial metaphors
...a metonymic bridge between metaphor and personal experience
Space and experience: the everyday affect & emotions
There is great power in being able to see the world as one will and then to have that vision enacted. But if being is seeing for the subject, then being seen is the precise measure of existence for the object.
Williams 1991, 28
Naturalisation of culture & culturalisation of nature
Materiality of representations – substancephysical presence, coded forms, visual/ made visual
Visualisation
...the formation of mental images
...a survey of the world and a tradition of maps / the inherent spatiality of maps
...a tension between showing the data, showing the world that the data represent, and providing abstractions and indicative interpretations (boundedness, convention)
Research focus...
How cultures value nature?How these insights can be institutionalised,
routinised, or embodied in a culture of nature?What is perceived as nature?
perception grades into action
How we organise the spaces in which we live?
...is the process of making our domesticated worlds
Tallinn urban fringe
• Ordering nature– gardens, parks– roads– signs
• Interpreting nature– agricultural landscapes
as nature– the country and the city
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