Progressive Geographies

It’s been a long time since I read a novel with maps… and I don’t think I’ve ever read one that ends with an essay explaining its geopolitics.  I’ve just finished C.J. Sansom‘s Dominion (Pan/Macmillan, 2012), which is set in an alternative Britain in 1952.  The premiss is that Churchill never became Prime Minister in May 1940; instead, the British government under Lord Halifax sued for peace with Hitler.  In Sansom’s chillingly plausible vision, Britain became a German satellite state  but retained its nominal independence; it was not placed under military occupation but its government (and especially its police apparatus) became overwhelmingly fascist.  Germany was given carte blanche in Europe, and continued a relentless, remorseless but ultimately unwinnable war against what was left of the Soviet Union; Britain retained its Empire – which, apart from South Africa, became increasingly restive at the absolutist politics that festered at its heart…

Noticing, rather belatedly I now realise, that the last book by Iris Marion Young had been published got me reflecting on the different encounters I have had with her work over the years, making me feel old, and slow, but also making me realise that sometimes thinkers act as helpful companions. I have always found, on reading Young, that she had got somewhere I wanted to be well before I arrived there, but I have also found this kind of affirming – she is one of the thinkers who always reassured me that I wasn’t completely on the wrong track. So I have been reconstructing ‘my life with Iris’, which does, oddly, include one occasion when I met her in person.

I think my first encounter was in late 1989 – I was in my first term as a graduate student, and this was the moment of postmodernism in geography: Ed Soja’s Postmodern…

I apologize to those of my readers who would reasonably see this article as a form of self-promotion, this will be the first and only post about this book. Following the research I undertook in 2010 and the architectural project that emerged from it in 2011, My good friends Ethel and Cesar from  DPR-Barcelona and I have worked together to come out with a book, Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence that would be available for all. This is now the case and you can find the book on any national franchise of amazon and (preferably!) in some bookstores in various countries. For a presentation of this work, you can see the small lecture I was lucky to be able to do at the school of architecture of Lund (Sweden) in September 2012. One particularity of the book that is also worth noting, was developed by dpr-barcelona is the introduction…