Mapping worlds, moving cities 255exercises
- Create three texts:
a) one based on an explicit sense of place
b) one based on an implicit sense of place
c) one which is a mixture. - Create a text which has an oblique relationship with place.
- Create a text which constructs the city as a site of contradiction
and difference. - Create a series of texts which engage imaginatively with each of
the following: the diasporic city, the consumerist city, the under-
privileged city, the gendered and sexualised city, the sensory city,
the virtual city and the unreal city. Or think of other types of
cities and also write about them. - Create a walk poem.
- Create a text which engages the interface between body and
city, but breaks down the unity of both. - Create a text which pivots on time–space compression (that is,
shifts rapidly between different times and spaces).
MAPPING WORLDS
Postmodern geography
The area of cultural studies in which space and place are most discussed is
postmodern geography. A very important and influential idea in post-
modern geography is that a place is never circumscribed, unidirectional or
apolitical. Doreen Massey, for example, argues that a place does not have a
single identity, and is not contained within physical boundaries. Rather, it
always links and merges with other places beyond its apparent limits. Any
place consists of constantly shifting social and economic interrelationships
between people and institutions, both within that place and with other
places (Massey 1994). Place is therefore heavily involved in issues of power
and symbolism, and charged by social relations. Places are always hybrids,
constantly intersecting, aligned with, or superimposed upon each other.
Maps are essential for establishing the position of a place and its relation-
ship with other places. But maps give a very limited impression of the
geographical, social and political complexity of places, because they mark
them out in a fixed and bounded way.