China's urban geography

"In this paper I seek to review recent work on Chinese urban geography and to appraise the development of China's urban geography as a field of study both inside and outside China. The temporal scope will span scholarship finished and published mainly during the 1980s." The focus is on works published in English. The author examines the primary topics of interest, methodologies and theories, and available sources of data.     

Travels with feminist historical geography

We explore in this essay the relatively uneven "travels" of feminist historical geography within the academy in order to highlight the realized and potential intellectual productivity that can result from bringing together a feminist and historical approach to understanding place and space. We outline in what ways much of feminist geography is already historical and in what ways much of historical geography is already feminist, and then turn to a discussion of the unevenness of these intellectual journeys. We conclude by suggesting challenges for future research in feminist historical geography.     

Becoming‐urban,becoming‐forest: a historical geography of urban forest projects in Australia

In recent times, local governments in Australia's major cities have embraced the idea that the trees in their streets, parks, and private gardens are parts of a collective urban forest that can be managed to address complex policy problems and create more liveable and sustainable cities. In light of this proposition, applied and critical urban forest researchers have typically focused on questions of quantity with regard to some of the factors that influence the density and distribution of urban tree cover. In a few cases, however, researchers have documented qualitative changes to the urban trees and woodlands that ostensibly constitute the urban forest, suggesting that it might be apprehended in a more mutable and dynamic way. Building on these accounts, we turn to Deleuze and Guattari's theory of becoming to read the urban forest in an active and malleable light, developing a historical geography of urban forestry in Australia that discerns three urban forest projects we call the ‘forest in a city’, the ‘city forest’, and a new but not yet realised, ‘city in a forest’. This finding renders the urban forest in more contingent, multiple, and mutable terms, leading us to finish the paper with a consideration of what seeing the urban forest as becoming means for future research. There, we suggest that Deleuze and Guattari's becoming directs us to different kinds of empirical, political, and ethical concerns that haven't received significant interest in the current literature. These include asking how, why, and with what consequences do particular styles of urban forestry emerge at particular space‐times. How is qualitative difference and urban forest multiplicity dealt with in practice, as well as focusing on affect and everyday embodied encounters between people and trees in different urban places.     

Teaching historical geography in the field

This paper examines the pedagogical and practical challenges associated with teaching historical geography, and archival research specifically, in the context of the undergraduate field trip. In so doing, it draws upon students' own reflections on the experience of conducting archival research during a field trip to New York City and presents the results of an international survey of academics' views as to the current problems and future possibilities associated with the teaching of historical geography and the implications of these perspectives for future curriculum design.     

The historical dimension of French geography

In France, the study of history behind regional geography has suffered a long decline since the late nineteenth century, but a new historical dimension is beginning to emerge. In the nineteenth century, historians showed how much regional character owed to remains from antiquity while historical geographers traced the history of exploration and discovery from ancient to modern times. Vidal de la Blache integrated historical reconstruction with social analysis in the study of regions. Vidal's followers not only characterized the distinctiveness of regional features but also demonstrated that differences in regional ways of life were more pronounced before industrialization and urbanization than later. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, historical investigations by geographers were neither sufficiently comprehensive nor sufficiently rigorous to explain spatial patterns. Historians of the Annales school obtained deeper understandings of social and economic changes and took a broader view of long-term psychological, cultural and geographical changes. Their interpretations of agrarian structures illuminated problems fundamental to the development of European civilization. In the 1970s, reacting against mechanistic analyses of spatial organization, young scholars again turned to historical geography to examine problems of social evolution. At the moment, this revival of historical interest among geographers has not attracted much attention from historians.     

eBay and research in historical geography

The electronic trading forum eBay presents fascinating but under-examined possibilities for research in historical geography. With literally millions of items for sale and millions of users participating in on-line auctions there seems little limit to what one might find. In this essay, three authors briefly trace the history of auctions and of eBay, before explaining how eBay works, and then describing some of the ways that buying (or not buying) research materials on eBay has changed the ways that we think about our work. We further explore some of the implications—empirical, theoretical, methodological and ethical—that the availability of such items to the highest bidder presents, address some of the consequences for the socially constructed and place-specific nature of value that on-line auctioning reveals, and ponder some of the implications of this for contemporary consumption.     

Counterfactual reasoning and method in historical geography

This paper connects philosophical debate concerning the metaphysics and epistemology of counterfactuals to the methodological concerns of historical geography. It argues that counterfactual claims are implied by a wide range of common epistemic judgements, specifically those regarding evidential support and explanatory connection. In addition it argues against those who have sought to restrict the use of counterfactuals to, in particular, rational action, or systems that are inherently chancy. Rather it argues in favour of an expanded role for counterfactual method in history and geography, in the forms of imaginary experiments and the questioning of ‘what might have been’.