The Swiss-French geographer Claude Raffestin died earlier this year.
Juliet Fall has a tribute to him here, and Sage have made some articles by or about him available open access until the end of 2025.
These articles are mainly from a special section of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space from 2012, put together by Francisco Klauser from a workshop we organised at the University of Durham. That section included pieces by Klauser, Fall, Alexander B. Murphy, Claudio Minca, and a piece commissioned by Raffestin, translated by Samuel Butler.
Francisco R Klauser, Thinking through Territoriality: Introducing Claude Raffestin to Anglophone Sociospatial Theory
Claude Raffestin, Space, Territory, and Territoriality trans. Samuel A Butler
Alexander B. Murphy, Entente Territorial: Sack and Raffestin on Territoriality
Claudio Minca, Claude Raffestin’s Italian Travels
Juliet J. Fall, Reading Claude Raffestin: Pathways for a Critical Biography
In addition, an earlier piece by Fall and another piece by Raffestin from other Sage journals are included in this virtual theme issue, also made open access.
Juliet J. Fall, Lost geographers: power games and the circulation of ideas within Francophone political geographies
Claude Raffestin, Territoriality: A Reflection of the Discrepancies Between the Organization of Space and Individual Liberty
Juliet and her Geneva colleagues have a tribute in French here. Not much else of Raffestin’s important work has been translated into English, but I know these other pieces – they require subscription, unfortunately:
Elements for a Theory of the Frontier, trans. Jeanne Ferguson, Diogenes 34 (134), 1986.
From Text to Image, Geopolitics 5 (2), 2000, 7-34; also available in Jacques Lévy ed. From Geopolitics to Global Politics: A French Connection, Routledge, 2001.
Could Foucault have Revolutionised Geography? trans. Gerald Moore, in Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden eds., Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, London: Ashgate, 2007.
It would be great if his book Pour une géographie du pouvoir was translated one day…
Update: more of his work in French is here, much open access. Thanks to Ed Draper at Sage, Kate Derickson at Environment and Planning D: Society and Space for agreeing to do this virtual theme issue and Juliet for the tribute.
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I am saddened to hear of his passing away. I discovered his work only a few years ago and found it truly grand…. My semi-core lecture for final year undergraduate students in Sociology and Political Science, titled ‘Care Power Information’, has been dedicated this year to the question of the rural-urban divide. While Henri Lefebvre and Thomas Gieryn were my two main methodological reference points, I gave the students some materials (mostly the one’s cited in this post) by and on Raffestin (and, of course, Stuart Elden). A few of the students cited Raffestin in their mid-term assessment (a recorded 5-minute presentation based on analyzing two photos they had to take themselves on a rural and an urban setting or thing, and tracing the genealogy of the relation, conflict, or transition process between the two). Students made excellent use of the Raffestin readings in even such a small presentation… I will mention him in my final lecture next week.