City, Arts and Public Spaces: Gavin Kroeber, Part 2

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by Gavin Kroeber, freelance producer and founder of Experience Economies.

Keyword: Innovation

In an attempt to attend to the particular urban and cultural ecosystem of the Bay Area I'd like to contribute a second term – innovation – and loosely suggest its relevance to the discussion.

As the national discourse around innovation expands, we see hundreds of thousands of square feet of urban space mobilized and repurposed under the term: municipal innovation districts, public and private innovation incubators for entrepreneurial ventures, etc.

Innovation - which stands basically for the hope that we can innovate our way out of what we've innovated our way into, that the ecological and other crises produced by an unparalleled manufacture and marketing of new things is best met with more new things – enlists concepts of art, design, creativity, and social practice in the service of product design and entrepreneurship. It established a myth of self-invention, of remixing, all of which positions the entrepreneur as the apotheosis of the creative spirit.

Innovation is place-based. Even as it operates through and celebrates communication networks that would overthrow space, it advances itself through copresence (TED talks, Davos) and nodes of innovative density (the Bay Area and Boston, both possessed of imbricated educational, military-industrial, and countercultural histories). Municipalities, embracing the term and the idea of an economy based around it, affirm Florida's creative class claims and set about trying to remake themselves with the ingredients that will foment innovation – not only educational and technological infrastructures and financial incentives for incubators to rise up but also a texture of life that is suitable to innovators. 

That texture of life is, as Florida notes, bound up in concepts of "experience" and eschews traditional art genres.

The intertwining of experience (which pays no heed to disciplinarity) and innovation (championing the creative entrepreneur) serves to remove any sense of historic aspect from cultural production within the territories of their greatest ascendance. Innovation seeks to produce a culture that rejects an erases the position of artist and, moreover, the historical lineages and institutional infrastructures of art disciplines in favor of a new figure: the entrepreneur/creator.

Innovation as an ideology, though ubiquitious in the United States, radiates from two particular urban nodes: the Bay Area and Boston. This suggests a "cultural axis" in the country between these two points that is now rising to compete with the assumed one four hours to its south between New York and Los Angeles.

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Gavin Kroeber

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by Gavin Kroeber, freelance producer and co-founder of Experience Economies.

Keyword: Event Landscape

The arts and the city are mutually recomposing one another – conceptually, physically, operationally.

It is often noted that capitalism in the west has turned from the production of goods as a towards more ephemeral products. This turn – a turn in which municipalities have abandoned outdated ‘smokestack chasing’ strategies for economic growth and, spurred on by lobbyists and promotional campaigns, have instead engaged in an inter-urban competition to attract the mobile audiences of both tourism and business – has in forty years produced a corresponding landscape: what we might call the event landscape. At its grandest scale composed of flagship convention centers, festivalist urban developments, theme parks, theaters, large parks (“convention centers with grass”) and eventalized museums, the event landscape also includes a countless periphery of smaller rental facilities, public-private spaces, and non-profit venues, new or re-vamped, all mandated to host rotating programs that can organize a flow of spending attendees through cities. We can read in this physical landscape an ascendant modality of cultural production – “the event”, not in the sense of Badiou but in the sense of the event production industry, which relies on flexible logistics systems to assemble and disassemble its products daily and also serves as a kind of logistics system aggregating and directing bodies. Operating across disciplines and blurring their distinctions, remaking our most renowned institutions and casting up new ones to accommodate its protocols, the event writes itself into the built fabric of our cities.

We should not, however, mistake this landscape for its built forms. Landscape, as the sociologist Sharon Zukin notes, can denote not only “the usual geographic meaning of ‘physical surroundings,’ but… also… an ensemble of social and material practices and their symbolic representation.” The event landscape is cultural, social, and ideological, as much as it is spatial. It is “built” from practices and concepts as much as from bricks and mortar.

As the event landscape grows, producing new glittering venues, cultural institutions have one the one hand made more and more regular ventures into these prestigious sites (witness Storm King’s exibition on Governor’s Island or the BMW Guggenheim Lab) and on the other have remade or repurposed their own architectures to correspond more to this new paradigm (witness the eventalization of MoMA’s atrium). Engaging the protocols of the event, institutions are seeing their organizational DNA rewritten. Facing the impossibility of housing the required knowledge and technology demanded by shifting sites, diverse projects and accelerated rotation, partnerships and subcontractors have become de rigueur. The institution increasingly operates by founding sub-institutions, what might be described as “pop-up institutions” and “distributed institutions” – production teams that are temporally concomitant with each commission (and dissolve with them), assembled (in the former case) by the institution itself and (in the latter) drawing on the teams of multiple partners. New venues are regularly thrown up in service of the event – a proliferating network of landscape destinations and (I should add) biennials – but even as these official foundings multiply, founding itself seems to come uncoupled from incorporation, emerging as an essential institutional practice. As these ephemeral structurations of labor rise and collapse, mirroring the feverish rotation of events, we are reminded that the evental institution oversees not just the flexible assembly of materials but the precarious coordination of labor.

The sites, ways of doing, and discourses of the event landscape aggregate cultural works across disciplines, accommodating them to a dominant cultural logic. The event has become a meta-discipline, a meta-institution pulling more and more of the differentiated fields of cultural production into its sphere of influence. To apply this frame across genres and institutions of course risks the loss of valuable disciplinarily-specific art histories. To do so likewise flirts troublingly with economic determinism, the event being a historically specific cultural formation emerging within post-Fordist capitalism, a modality of cultural production that maps directly onto flexible accumulation. But to discuss cultural production within an event landscape also challenges the institutional and disciplinary tendency to segregate resonant practices behind the firewalls of genre and medium, and moreover challenges the ideological capacity of disciplinary and institutional fields to isolate practices from their preconditions and effects in wider contexts. At the same time flattening and liberating, the delineation of the event landscape serves not only to position us, as cultural producers, within it, but it lets us attend to the urgent question of which positions we wish to take up.

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Irene Chien

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by Irene Chien, PhD candidate in the Department of Film & Media and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Urban

In mainstream US media, “urban” is a pervasive euphemism for black, a way to register but not directly point at African-American culture within the post-racial political paradigm of colorblindness. “Urban music,” “urban fiction,” “urban comedy,” and “urban entertainment” are all ways to identify media made by, featuring, and marketed primarily to African-Americans without directly naming them.  “Urban” in this sense gives value to at the same time it disavows the authenticity of black bodies, voices, and “street” experiences that now circulate globally in the form of hip-hop identity and aesthetics.  At the same time, in contemporary cultural discourse, “urban” continues to function as a code word for the crime and poverty associated with blackness that is less inflammatory than “inner-city,” “ghetto,” or “the ‘hood.”  Is the conflation of “black” with “urban” a way to erase black people from the scene so as to better commodify their cultural expressions for a global market?  Is it a way to be more inclusive of other races and ethnicities when considering life in the city and its cultural expressions?  What are exactly are the effects of this semantic slippage from black to urban?

Urban became linked with blackness in the context of the 20^th-century Great Migration in which 6 million African-Americans moved from the rural south into cities in the northern, midwestern, and western United States.  The fact that this migration pattern is now being reversed as African-Americans move back to the south and (perhaps pushed by the gentrifying effects of the New Urbanism) out of cities into poor suburbs, puts even more pressure on the dodges and slippages between race and space manifested in substituting “black” with “urban.”  These uses of the term urban points to a more general conflation of race with environment--black with urban, white with suburban, and Latino with rural. As we examine the urban in its many contexts and meanings, I hope to interrogate this racialization of space and spatialization of race.

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Mélanie Perrier and Barbara Formis

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by choreographer Mélanie Perrier and art philosopher Barbara Formis.

Keyword: PARIS versus SAN FRANCISCO : SDF versus Homeless

The homeless people are very present in the public spaces of the city of San Francisco. Mélanie and myself have been noticing this presence as a certain way to occupying the public space by way of performance art and methods of exhibition. Above all, we have been noticing a split between the American homeless and the French S.DF. A certain number of differences can be drawn. Above all, the terminology. In French, we name those people without a home S.D.F which is the acronym for “Sans Domicile Fixe”, which literally means: “without a fixed residency”. In English, they are called home-less, people without a home. We can see straight away that the French terminology gives a certain mobility to the homeless person and opens up to the possibility of having access to a house, a shelter. The S.D.F does potentially have a home, but this home is not one, but multiple, is not here but everywhere. On the opposite the homeless is deprived of the possibility of having a home, he or she is in a state of wandering, lost, without a place to go to. But, we can also notice that, opposite to what the terminology suggests, the S.D.F. is far less mobile than the homeless person in San Francisco. The American homeless has a chariot, several bags, big plastic bin bags: the home moves with his or her body. The homeless is like a snail. The chariot is part of his or her identity. The SDF is not a nomad, even if the terminology would suggest a certain geography, a certain appropriation of the space by the fact of moving. But the SDF makes possession of the public space as if it was a private space, he or she makes physical separations (walls made of paper, limits), the home becomes a shelter, usually fabricated with daily objects and shared with others. The SDF considers the public space as a domestic space. On the opposite, the homeless has a stronger sense of the public space, because walking and moving is the habitual way of using the public space, the homeless will excel the possession of the public space (by walking into a red light without noticing the cars forced to stop to make the homeless person pass). In comparison, the SDF is less visible, his or her existence is separated from the public space, by the usage of physical limits. Once that he or she stops asking for money, the appearance of his or her body diminishes. The homeless seems to be constantly in a situation of exhibition and performance, the SDF seems to be more aware of the limits between the scene and the stage, between what is made to be visible and what is not, between the private and the public space.

Does this differentiation between the SDF and the homeless has something to do with cultural identities, differences between the usage of public space between the US and France? This is the question that we would like to ask to the group.

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Jennifer Wolch

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by Jennifer Wolch, Dean of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Carbon Hoofprint

Cities are centers of consumption, and especially in the west, their ecological footprints however measured are enormous. Buildings energy use and the fuel use of transportation systems are typically the focus of urban sustainability studies, along with urban form and the conservation of habitat within and beyond urban limits. Far less attention is paid to 'stuff' and the cultural detritus of modern life, and even less attention is paid to the role of food in the carbon economy. By any measure, animal products are the most carbon intensive forms of food and yet are rarely seriously addressed as such. When the issue is raised (as when, for example, a former IPCC scientist urged vegetarianism due to the carbon consequences of meat), controversy ensues, but questions of diet, culture, and supply chain impacts - not only on carbon emissions but worker welfare, other forms of environmental damage, and animal welfare - are quickly dropped like a hot potato. Moreover, amid the rising popularity of urban agriculture as hip and cool, there is no mention of animals and how their welfare can possibly be protected in the backyards of inexperienced 'farmers'. Apart from large questions of animals and political economy, both locally and globally. I am interested in the cultural and subjective bases that allow urban residents who 'know' things about the impacts of their consumption behavior, to essentially 'unknow' them and resist changes to habitual behavior, however damaging such behavior may be to health, environment, and other sentient creatures with whom we share the planet.. I'm also interested in how urban sustainability policies and plans can surface the 'stuff' problem, including food products, and encourage a sharing economy committed to transspecies justice. 

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Dominic Willsdon

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by Dominic Willsdon, Curator of Education and Public Programs at SFMOMA.

Keyword: Biennial

Recently, I have become involved in devising contemporary art biennials, at a time when the debate about these events has slowed.  Like so many of the dozens of biennials around the world, the two I am now working on – the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre and the Liverpool Biennial – date from the 1990s.  Istanbul (1987) and Havana (1984) are among the older contemporary biennials (excluding Venice and São Paulo, which belong to a different time).  Before it is anything else, a biennial is an ongoing series of temporary exhibitions supported by a city.  (‘Support’ might turn out to be the keyword inside my keyword, unless it is ‘ongoing’.)  Much of the biennial debate has been about how a city informs, limits, accommodates etc. such a series of exhibitions, and how the exhibitions supplement and illuminate the city as a location of culture.  The debate has slowed, but it could be taking a new turn.

From time to time, over this same period, art museums have deployed the city as a category of visual culture.  In my everyday, ongoing museum life, the first exhibition I ever worked with was Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (Tate Modern, 2001); and the most recent was Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art (SFMOMA, 2012-13).  Both shows addressed cities, as places of art making and cultural exchange, in the absence of biennials.  (As it happens, I am now working on a museum exhibition that is partly about a city that lost a biennial.  The Johannesburg Biennial – which was discontinued after its 2nd edition in 1997 – haunts contemporary art in that city.)  But while the city can be a theme for a museum, for a biennial it is the organizing idea.  A museum is not a biennial (museum biennials, like the Whitney, are a wholly different species).  A biennial is not a museum.  The work of the biennial might even begin where that of the museum ends.  Biennials often find their value in the absence of museums, or other abiding cultural institutions – from the absence of cultural infrastructure.     

Current debate on the biennial centers on the question of how it dwells in a city, on its identity and value, for a city, beyond the recurring exhibitions.   The Mercosul Biennial is evolving, perhaps in name too, into the Porto Alegre Biennial.  More than most biennials, throughout its history, it has addressed a primarily local public.  Its distinctiveness lies in the breadth and depth of its commitment to education in Rio Grande do Sul.  If Mercosul inherits a certain multi-year continuity (of expectations, of services, of employment…), some other biennials are now projecting ahead a multi-year continuity.  SITE Santa Fe recently announced a six-year program under the title SITElines.  The Liverpool Biennial is planning to become a year-round, every year platform in the city.  Biennials are adopting something of the temporality of museums.   A realignment of museum and biennial functions is emerging.

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Anthony Cascardi

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by Anthony Cascardi, Dean of Arts and Humanities at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Dwelling and Beyond

In the early stages of thought about what we have come to call “global urban humanities,” the term mega-city was suggested to us as the type of site where an exploration of the potential connections between the humanities and fields including environmental design, architecture, and urban planning might be especially fruitful.  The suggestion, implicit or explicit, was that the mega-city was especially representative of contemporary conditions and that it presented a unique set of problems, ones that had yet to be thoroughly explored by any of the fields in question.  While the term no longer plays a key role in the GUH project, we should not let the questions it might raise fall entirely by the wayside.

Urban expansions so large in scale and scope and so thoroughly built raise the question: has nature been entirely eclipsed?  (Jameson once characterized postmodernism as the era when nature is “gone for good.”)  Is this true?  And if it is, then what avenues can/must we pursue in order to think about a humane urbanism?  The writings I know best about the ethics of architecture (e.g. Karsten Harries’ book of that title) think about the building (typically singular).  They say little or nothing about an environment that is totally built.

Harries work draws on Heidegger, for whom the key question is the relationship between building and dwelling.  My questions are these:  what is the nature of dwelling in cities as vast as Los Angeles, Tokyo, Mexico City, and Hong Kong? And what is the nature of dwelling in the (mega)city—i.e. (mega)city dwelling, which may involve something quite different from the dwelling that a building makes possible.  Beyond dwelling, what is the place of expression in these environments?  Of what kind of humanity are they themselves the expression?  What relationship do they have to the activities of planning and production?

These questions present opportunities to think about what a humane urbanism might mean for us. 

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Nick Kaye

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by Nick Kaye, Dean of the College of Humanities and Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Exeter.

Keyword: Site

Contemporary notions of site and place emphasize experiences of instability, displacement and multiplicity. In the context of anthropological and performance theory addressing the performance of place and site, including Marc Auge’s influential Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), Miwon Kwon’s One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (2004), and linked concepts of “theatre/archaeology,” the stability and continuity of site is called into question. In this work, a site is approached firstly as a construct that is a function of multiple aspects: sites are palimpsestual and simultaneous, embracing diverse material, historical, cultural, spatial, and personal aspects, for different visitors or occupants at different times. The temporal dimension of site is also complex: a “site” does not exist simply in the “now” of its present-tense occupation by any individual or group, but is a function of memory and anticipation; and of disjunctions and differences between experiences of being in a place and knowing or reading “its” signs and texts. Art and performance, like any other cultural activity, are also implicated in the formation of the sites they occupy and gain meaning from. Like any located object, too, the specific occasion of a media or performance artwork also defines of the place or places it occupies, so performing and changing the contingencies that influence its meaning. 

My current web-based project, SiteWorks: 288 events/sites, San Francisco 1969-84, is the first iteration of an ongoing site-specific curation of archival remains of past performance and conceptual art across the present city of San Francisco. The first version of this project is available as a praxis session for Performance Studies International at http://siteworks.exeter.ac.uk. 

SiteWorks presents memories, traces and archival remains of events that occurred between 1969 and 1984, encompassing the period in which Tom Marioni established and curated the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) at locations on 3rd Street in the SoMa area of the city. SiteWorks is designed to operate in the temporal and spatial interstices in which place is defined for the individual in their enactment of a site or sites.

Delivered from an OMEKA database through Google Maps such that a walker may encounter and respond to a haunting of the present city through past acts - and ephemeral places – Siteworks invites its participants to become agents of performance, art and site. By animating a fragmentary archive of performance through real places, SiteWorks creates spaces for recollection, imagination, and intervention, provoking present enactments of the city’s spaces in response to fragmentary remains of ephemeral events.

SiteWorks comprises three interlinked ‘collections’: individual ‘events,’ selected exhibitions, and Eleanor Coppola’s “Windows,” a work articulated across 54 different locations. These collections can be treated as discrete groups of works or as a totality of 288 event/sites. The content of the SiteWorks database may be explored in relation to specific places and routes, searched by artist and work, by themed tags, and in free search.

Participants may record and share their memories, corrections, additions, and emotional or creative responses to events and places to generate new and diverse engagements, so creating differing communities of interest. Responses may be textual and include media uploads.

SiteWorks provokes enactments, inhabitations and realizations of sites as layered in time, space and imagination, as places personalized in confrontations with the remains and traces of partially known events and remains.

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Andrew Weiner

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by Andrew Weiner, Adjunct Professor of Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts.

Keyword: Public Spaces

I’d like to start by echoing the questions that Shannon and others have already begun framing in prior posts. Part of the excitement in joining a cross-disciplinary group like this lies in seeing the precision and inventiveness with which scholars from other fields are able to engage concepts that sometimes seem to lose their edge through overuse. I wonder though about the ways in which the concept of public space might be overdetermined; the same goes for related ideas like publicity, the public sector, and the public sphere (and this is only considering one of our keywords!). I worry a bit that the extreme generativity of these concepts could also prove to be disabling, allowing people from different fields to unwittingly talk past each other even while using the same language.

With such concerns in mind, I’m thinking about some references that the term “public space” might fail to capture. The first of these is temporality. The metaphors we use to think about publicity are most often spatial in nature (space, square, sphere, arena, etc), making it easy for us to lose track of the particular tempos within which publicity is designated, contested, mediated, and so forth. In what ways might it help to think about publicity as a type of event, one that conjoins subjective perception with collective reception and technical mediation?

A second line of questions concerns the tension between global, regional, and local modes of publicity. I’m currently researching different modes of recent performance in the Middle East and North Africa, and I find myself increasingly aware of the ways in which many of our operative concepts fail to map cleanly onto the events of the Arab Spring (beginning with this term, which is incompatible with uprisings in non-Arab nations like Iran or Turkey). While the idea of public space is essential for understanding the aesthetic and political importance of these events, we obviously need to account for its predominantly European, secular origins. I’ve found it useful to rely on the work of scholars like Nasser Rabbat, who have charted the historical importance of the mosque and the public square in ways that help us connect the complex legacies of colonialism with more recent developments like neoliberal Islam.

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Michael Dear

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by Michael Dear, Professor of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Geohumanities

Framing

The ‘geohumanities’ is a transdisciplinary and multi-methodological inquiry that begins with the human meanings of place and proceeds to reconstruct those meanings in ways that produce new knowledge as well as the promise of a better-informed scholarly and political practice. The term is meant to encompass (but not supersede or replace) related but more specific constructs such as the ‘digital humanities.’ 

Place

A common analytical object in the geohumanities is place. It is an analytical ‘primitive,’ one of our principal ‘key words.’ Place may not be the only relevant primitive, and the term has many meanings. Researchers commonly distinguish between space as an abstraction, and place as a social construct – that is, what humans create out of space. Another meaning is landscape which encompasses natural and cultural dimensions. The production of place refers to both material and cognitive processes and outcomes, and representations of place may include textual, visual, sculptural, quantitative, performative, qualitative, perceptual, and oral dimensions.

Embracing complexity: a non-exclusionary ontology

Theory and practice involve degrees of simplification and abstraction in which some loss of information and complexity is inevitable. In order to minimize such losses, a non-exclusionary ontology is preferred that avoids reductionism or commitment to a single world view, and is able to shift among analytical registers flexibly and nimbly.

Transdisciplinarity: epistemological openness

The fullest knowledge is possible only when every epistemological alternative is included the geohumanities toolkit. This is a heavy burden since no single discipline or individual can absorb all ways of knowing with equal facility. Hence transdisciplinarity, comparative analysis, and a critical self-reflexivity become prerequisites for successful theory and practice in the geohumanities, as does confronting the thorny issue of incommensurablity among epistemological alternatives.

Knowledge and action

Instead of practice dominated by a single hegemonic discipline or approach, the geohumanities offer a radically different practice in which all disciplines adopt contingent and supportive roles. The potential consequence of such self-awareness is a democratic intelligence that invigorates and extends knowledge and action. However, it also risks an untidy accumulation (or bricolage) of viewpoints beyond the point of coherence, where vision becomes blurred and action is stifled. Physical proximity and textual propinquity are not sufficient to forge a community of inquiry. Those who would create a geohumanities are charged with inventing new vocabularies and attaining heightened levels of fluency across disciplinary boundaries, including the capacity to distinguish among competing knowledge claims, in both theoretical and applied contexts.