History, Space, and Place

2013

Mihailo St. Popovic, Veronika Polloczek, Bernhard Koschicek, Stefan Eichert (eds.): Power in Landscape – Geographic and Digital Approaches on Historical Research, 2019

This article is an introduction to my virtual issue of Past & Present on Space, Place, and Scale in Past & Present. The entire issue is available, without subscription, until August 2016. You can access it here: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/past/space_place_and_scale.html

Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe, 2016

Recently social and cultural studies have experienced a 'spatial turn'. Space-related research seems ever expanding: some historians relate macroeconomics and human agency to regional contexts; others focus on micro-spaces like houses, taverns and parish churches; even virtual or imaginary spaces (such as Purgatory) attract increasing attention. In all of these works, space emerges as a social construct rather than a mere physical unit. This collection examines the potential and limitations of spatial approaches for the political history of preindustrial Europe. Adopting a broad denition of 'political', the volume concentrates on two key questions: Where did political exchange take place? And how did spatial dimensions aect political life in dierent periods and contexts? Taken together, the essays demonstrate that premodern Europeans made use of a much wider range of political sites than is usually assumed-not just princely courts, town halls and representative assemblies, but common elds as well as back rooms of provincial inns-and that spatial dimensions provided key variables in political life, both in terms of the embedding of practical governance and in the more abstract sense of patronage networks, conceptualizations of power and territorial ambitions. As such, this book oers a timely and critical engagement with the 'spatial turn' from a political perspective. Focusing on the distinct constitutional environments of England and the Holy Roman Empire-one associated with early centralization and strong parliamentary powers, the other with political fragmentation and absolutist tendencies, it bridges the usual gaps between late medievalists and early modernists and those between historians and scholars from other disciplines. Preface, commentary and a sketch of research perspectives discuss the wider implications of the papers' ndings and reect upon the potential and limits of spatial approaches for political history as a whole.

2021

This guide provides an overview of the thematic areas, analytical aspects, and avenues of research which, together, form a broader conversation around doing spatial history. Spatial history is not a field with clearly delineated boundaries. For the most part, it lacks a distinct, unambiguous scholarly identity. It can only be thought of in relation to other, typically more established fields. Indeed, one of the most valuable utilities of spatial history is its capacity to facilitate conversations across those fields. Consequently, it must be discussed in relation to a variety of historiographical contexts. Each of these have their own intellectual genealogies, institutional settings, and conceptual path dependencies. With this in mind, this bibliographical essay surveys the following areas: territoriality, infrastructure, and borders; nature, environment, and landscape; city and home; social space and political protest; spaces of knowledge; spatial imaginaries; cartographic representations; and historical GIS research.

The question of space and place in geographical knowledge is ultimately not just about whether the question of "where" matters in the way that "when" does in explaining "how" and even "why" something happens. It is also about how it matters. Given that both space and place are about the "where" of things and their relative invocation has usually signaled different understandings of what "where" means, it is best to examine them together rather than separately. That is the purpose of this chapter.

2007

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A well-established scholarly paradigm capable of explaining the interaction between spatial and social constellations doesn't really exist. Several attempts have been formulated from different disciplinary perspectives, such as anthropology, sociology, social and cultural geography, architectural history and theory, but no consensus has been reached. The only chance to develop a convincing theoretical apparatus nevertheless lies in an interdisciplinary approach that would build upon the insights and methods developed within these different disciplines. In order to do that, it might be helpful to point towards divergent models of thought that underlie the existing attempts to make sense of the relation between spatial configurations on the one hand and social/cultural patterns on the other. This paper presents a model which identifies three important ways to conceptualise this interaction: space seen as receptor, as instrument or as stage. The paper reviews the relevant literature from architectural history and theory, positioning it within a broader framework that also addresses material from anthropology, sociology and cultural geography. It points to similarities and parallels, but also to divergent sensibilities and contrasting understandings, which together make up a rich matrix of theoretical positions.

Belgeo, 2021

Many thanks to Chris Kesteloot for his careful reading and for helping me see where clarification of the argument was necessary. Context 1 Human and physical geography are both evidently 'geographic'. They are both concerned with differentiation over the earth's surface. A concern with spatial arrangement is fundamental to both, even while the more concrete concepts vary: so continentality and storm tracks in climatology, drainage basins and outliers in geomorphology, and central places and hinterlands in human geography. In physical geography, we can also note a stronger vertical component in concepts of space: air rising over mountains, water flowing downhill and so on; but that is not significant for what follows. For regardless, even while space relations are central to what physical geographers do and what they regard as significant, they do not obsess about it in the way that human geographers do and write books about it (Gregory, Urry, 1985; Harvey, 1982; Massey, 2005). It is by no means sidelined. A comparison of the two Blackwell Dictionaries, The Dictionary of Human Geography and The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Physical Geography is fascinating in this regard: a multitude of maps in the latter and very few in its human geography counterpart. And then in addition, to complement its concern with the vertical aspects of space, lots of block diagrams. Space relations are simply assumed and not found worth examining for their own sake. Exploring why this is the case, will contribute to an understanding why the two sub-fields have diverged to the degree that they have. 2 To anticipate what follows, I am going to argue that in the first place, it is a matter of different conceptions of space; and in the second, why such different conceptions have Human and physical geography and the question of space Belgeo, 4 | 2021

Geographical concerns with space and place have escaped the confines of the discipline of geography. Many humanities scholars now invoke such conceptions as a means to integrate diverse sources of information and to understand how broad social processes play out unevenly in different locations. The social production of spatiality thus offers a rich opportunity to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues between different schools of critical theory. Following a brief assessment of the spatial turn in history, history of science, and political philosophy, this paper explores its implications for literary and cultural studies. It invokes a detailed case study of late 18th century Lima, Peru to explicate the dynamics of colonialism, the construction of racial identities, and different power/knowledge configurations within a particular locale. Space in this example appears as both matter and meaning, i.e., as simultaneously tangible and intangible, as a set of social circumstances and physical landscapes and as a constellation of discourses that simultaneously reflected, constituted, and at times undermined, the hegemonic social order. The intent is to demonstrate how multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship can be facilitated by paying attention to the unique of circumstances that define places within given historical moments. As seen in this example from literary colonial studies, other disciplines, therefore, can both draw from and contribute to poststructuralist interpretations of space as a negotiated set of situated practices.