Progressive Geographies

Interactive visualization of Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (1656)

The painting is in the Prado in Madrid – I was there just last week. The Prado website has some more information.

Thanks to Melissa Pawelski for the link.

Chris Barrett, Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety – now published by Oxford University Press in their Early Modern Literary Geographies series.

The Cartographic Revolution in the Renaissance made maps newly precise, newly affordable, and newly ubiquitous. In sixteenth-century Britain, cartographic materials went from rarity to household décor within a single lifetime, and they delighted, inspired, and fascinated people across the socioeconomic spectrum. At the same time, they also unsettled, upset, disturbed, and sometimes angered their early modern readers. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety is the first monograph dedicated to recovering the shadow history of the many anxieties provoked by early modern maps and mapping in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A product of a military arms race, often deployed for security and surveillance purposes, and fundamentally distortive of their subjects, maps provoked suspicion, unease, and even hostility in early modern Britain (in ways not dissimilar from the anxieties provoked by global positioning-enabled digital mapping in the twenty-first century). At the same time, writers saw in the resistance to cartographic logics and strategies the opportunity to rethink the way literature represents space—and everything else. This volume explores three major poems of the period—Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674)—in terms of their vexed and vexing relationships with cartographic materials, and shows how the productive protest staged by these texts redefined concepts of allegory, description, personification, bibliographic materiality, narrative, temporality, analogy, and other elemental components of literary representations.

David Bissell, Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities – now out with MIT Press

We spend much of our lives in transit to and from work. Although we might dismiss our daily commute as a wearying slog, we rarely stop to think about the significance of these daily journeys. In Transit Life, David Bissell explores how everyday life in cities is increasingly defined by commuting. Examining the overlooked events and encounters of the commute, Bissell shows that the material experiences of our daily journeys are transforming life in our cities. The commute is a time where some of the most pressing tensions of contemporary life play out, striking at the heart of such issues as our work-life balance; our relationships with others; our sense of place; and our understanding of who we are.

Drawing on in-depth fieldwork with commuters, journalists, transit advocates, policymakers, and others in Sydney, Australia, Transit Life takes a holistic perspective to change how we think about commuting. Rather than arguing that transport infrastructure investment alone can solve our commuting problems, Bissell explores the more subtle but powerful forms of social change that commuting creates. He examines the complex politics of urban mobility through multiple dimensions, including the competencies that commuters develop over time; commuting dispositions and the social life of the commute; the multiple temporalities of commuting; the experience of commuting spaces, from footpath to on-ramp, both physical and digital; the voices of commuting, from private rants to drive-time radio; and the interplay of materialities, ideas, advocates, and organizations in commuting infrastructures.

“I read Transit Life, fittingly, while commuting in and out of a new city for the first time. The book is a guide to these taken-for-granted journeys, the infrastructures that make them possible, and the people that live them. It crackles and pops with insights of stories and encounters that will help us see commuting anew. It places practical reflection on the brushes, glances, gestures, and skills we experience and develop in our routes and routines in and out of cities. Accessible, perceptive, passionate, and often revelatory; it is a book about life on the move like no other.”
—Peter Adey, Professor of Human Geography, Royal Holloway University of London; author of Mobility, 2nd edition

“Like John Urry’s Mobilities a decade ago, Transit Life convinces the reader that transport is fascinating and at the core of debates in the social sciences and humanities.”
—Robyn Dowling, Professor of Urbanism, The University of Sydney

“David Bissell’s Transit Life offers a deep dive into the experiences of daily commuters and the rhythmic patterns of movement that make up our cities. Immersing himself in the troubled traffic that courses through Sydney, Australia, Bissell finds vibrant, diverse, intense human feelings about the commute, far richer and more surprising than statistics can provide. Despite its endless frustrations and disappointments, commuting emerges as a skilled practice that also brings moments of connection, camaraderie, and occasional enjoyment. He shows how commuting subtly transforms us and how we transform the places through which we pass. Transit Life exemplifies a new kind of mobility thinking, commuting us toward more rewarding forms of social inquiry.”
—Mimi Sheller, Director, Center for Mobilities Research and Policy; Professor of Sociology, Drexel University; author of Aluminum Dreams

Sami Moisio, Geopolitics of the Knowledge-Based Economy – now out with Routledge. Only a very expensive hardback or e-book at this stage, unfortunately. If you buy via Routledge, code FLR40 will give a 20% discount (Flyer – Geopolitics of the Knowledge-Based Economy).

We live in the era of the knowledge-based economy, and this has major implications for the ways in which states, cities and even supranational political units are spatially planned, governed and developed. In this book, Sami Moisio delves deeply into the links between the knowledge-based economy and geopolitics, examining a wide range of themes, including city geopolitics and the university as a geopolitical site. Overall, this work shows that knowledge-based “economization” can be understood as a geopolitical process that produces territories of wealth, security, power and belonging.

This book will prove enlightening to students, researchers and policymakers in the fields of human geography, urban studies, spatial planning, political science and international relations.