The Dictionary of Human Geography

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geographies ‘permitted the birth of social sci-

ence in England’ (p. 276), the implication being

that subsequent academic geographies may also

have drawn on moralistic assumptions concern-

ingenvironmentandsociety. Jackson’s ac-

count of the work of the early-twentieth-

centurychicago schoolof urban sociologists

conversely shows how the identification of

forms of moral order underlying ‘apparent so-

cial disorganization’ (1984, p. 178) may allow a

critique of conventional moralistic assumptions

concerning life in the moderncity.Matless

(1994) develops the theme of moral geograph-

ies of conduct by considering how the geog-

raphy of a particular region, the Norfolk

Broads in eastern England, can be understood

in terms of competing formulations of appropri-

ate behaviour in the landscape. Moral geog-

raphies are here constituted through

assumptions concerningclassandlandscape.

Such work echoes studies ofsocial exclusion

andtransgressionin highlighting the basis on

which people may be labelled as in or out of

place feedback.

Some moral geographical work has sought a

prescriptive role. Sack (1997) argues for the

inherently geographical nature of moral ac-

tions in order to develop a framework through

which we might improve ourselves as moral

geographical subjects: ‘Thinking geographic-

ally heightens our moral concerns; it makes

clear that moral goals must be set and justified

by us in places and as inhabitants of a world’

(p. 24). Sack recognizes the complex vari-

ations of morality between different times

and places, but the aim, in common with the

tenor of muchhumanistic geography,isto

seek a normative framework for being human;

for being, in Sack’s terms, a ‘geographical

self’. For other work noted above, however,

the term ‘moral geographies’ is not prescrip-

tive, its use being informed by a philosophical

and political assumption that senses of moral

order are produced through environmental

and spatial practices that are always bound

up with relations ofpower. Here, the connec-

tion of the moral and the spatial in moral

geographies is bound up with a suspicion

regarding any claim to be able to define mor-

ality, and with a sceptical attitude to the social

power of the moral. dmat

Suggested reading

Driver (1988); Smith, D.M. (2000a).

moral landscapes The association of par-

ticularlandscapes with schemes of moral

value (see alsomoral geographies). Tuan

(1989) reviews the wide-ranging historical

and geographical association of particular

moral values with the landscapes of city, coun-

try and garden. A moral–spatialdialecticmay

also be identified whereby moral landscapes

both reflect and reproduce senses of moral

order. Work has focused on such processes in

the geography of institutions, in the use of

architecture and landscape design to promote

particular moral principles, and in the produc-

tion of consciously ‘alternative’ social spaces.

The institution as moral landscape is con-

sidered in Ploszajska’s (1994) work on the

Victorian reformatory school as an ‘environ-

ment of moral reform’. Such moral landscapes

are one element of a geographical interest in

relations ofspaceandpower, whereby spatial

organization is shown to be not only reflective

of but central to the workings of power.

Daniels’ (1982) study of the ‘morality of land-

scape’ in the work of Georgian landscape gar-

dener Humphry Repton shows how aesthetic

values of landscape design were at the same

time moral values concerning social harmony,

plebeian deference and aristocratic responsi-

bility. The theme of moral landscapes thereby

connects to aesthetic, social, political and

economic issues: indeed, all of those categor-

ies are shown to be mutually constitutive.

Pinder’s (2005c) study of utopianurbanism

in the twentieth century similarly draws out

the strong senses of moral order informing the

modernist urban schemes of architects and

planners such as Le Corbusier (seeutopia).

Studies of moral landscapes may also ad-

dress the ways in which moral value is located

in particular environments. Matless (1997)

considers how moral debates over conduct

in open-air landscape shaped cultures of

landscape,leisureand thebodyin twentieth-

century England, and served to reproduce

versions of English national identity.

Associations of morality andnature, whereby

moral order may be equated with a sense of

natural order, may also serve to enable particu-

lar groups or individuals to claim a moral land-

scape close to nature. Locating the moral in the

natural is a common trope of certain forms of

environmentalism, which cultivate an eco-

logical morality or environmental ethic around

an assumed moral community of the human

and nonhuman. Such work differs from much

of the work discussed above in operating with

a strongly normative sense of morality (see

alsomoral geographies). A normative use

of the term moral landscape is also found in

Ley’s (1993) work on co-operative housing

in Canada, presented as embodying moral

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MORAL LANDSCAPES