The Dictionary of Human Geography (130 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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monuments
Built icons of identity usually in the form of public statues or symbolic build ings that are designed and executed to evoke a sense of national and regional identity, and to induce in the collective imagination remem brance of specific events or people. Although the study of monuments has increased in human geography over the past 20 years, a result of a heightened interest in the symbolic, ritualistic and performative dimensions of identity formation, historians were the first to explore the relationships between public monuments and nationalism. Mosse?s (NEW PARAGRAPH) study of the role of the public statue in the development of German nationalism is still an exemplary analysis, while Schorske?s (NEW PARAGRAPH) discussion of the redevelopment of Vienna?s Ringstrasse in the nineteenth century provides a brilliant interpretation of the role of Austria?s rising middle class in impressing their political vision on the architecture of the city. (NEW PARAGRAPH) There are several reasons for studying the links between monuments and political cultural identities. First, the erection of public monuments in public space has proliferated since the nineteenth century, and this expan sion of public statuary corresponds with the heyday of nation building projects. Second, unlike other arts such as painting or litera ture, monument making is usually a collect ive process ?more democratic than painting because it is simpler and more solemn, more appropriate to the public square, to huge di mensions, and to emblematic figures that are both a product of, and stimulus to the imagin ation? (Agulhon, 1981, p. 4). Third, the rituals surrounding the unveiling of monuments and the dynamics of their reception and consump tion help us to identify their role in the public consciousness. Icons in bronze or stone are made meaningful by the ways in which they visually and verbally invoke particular versions of identity. Finally, the spatiality of public statu ary is important in the constitution of meaning and it is here that geography has a particular contribution to make (see also memory). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A seminal geographical study of a monu ment is Harvey?s (1979) analysis of the Basil ica de Sacre Coeur in Paris and its role in the development of class politics in the capital. Subsequent studies have pursued several different themes. Studies of the role of war (NEW PARAGRAPH) monuments in articulating national and sec tional commemoration range from extensive surveys of memorials to the two world wars (Heffernan, 1995; Johnson, 2003b) to in depth studies of individual statues (Till, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . These analyses pay close attention to the iconographic debates surrounding the use of particular motifs (see iconography) and to the conflicts over identity engendered by them. The spatiality of commemorative sites has been another focus: Leib?s (2002) analysis of the Arthur Ashe statue in Richmond, Virginia, for example, highlights the role of place and race in the public discussion of the location of the monument, while Benton Short (2006) recovers the politics of location that animated recent discussions of monume nts and memorials on the Mall in Washington, DC. All of these studies focus on the visual and verbal languages surrounding public monuments, but more recently human geog raphers have started to address the PERfORMA tive dimension by examining the textual and non textual, bodily and non bodily practices involved in the making of public icons (e.g. Howe, 2008). Nj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Leib (2002); Till (1999). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
moral geographies
The study of the inter relationship of moral and geographical argu ments. Work has considered the way in which assumptions about the relationship between people and their environments may reflect and produce moral judgements, and how the conduct of particular groups or individuals in particular spaces may be judged appropriate or inappropriate. D.M. Smith (1998a) sees moral geographies as one of six research areas linking geography and moral philoso phy, alongside the historical geography of moralities, inclusion and exclusion in bounded spaces, the moral significance of distance and proximity, questions of social jUSTlCE and en vironmental ethics. Smith extends his discus sion in Moral geographies (2000a), a wide ranging treatment of geography, morality, ethics and justice (see also moral (NEW PARAGRAPH) landscapes). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The term ?moral geographies? achieved pro minen within human geography through Driver?s study of allied ?environmentalism? and ?moralism? in nineteenth century social sci entific urban studies: ? ??Moral science?? was ... a science of conduct and its relationship to en vironment, both moral and physical? (Driver, 1988, p. 279). Driver argues that such moral 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 ing environment and sociETy. Jackson?s ac count of the work of the early twentieth century CHICAGO school of 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 modern ciTy. 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 concerning class and landscape. Such work echoes studies of social exclusion and transgression in highlighting the basis on which people may be labelled as in or out of PLACE FEEDBACk. (NEW PARAGRAPH) 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 much humanistic GEOGRAPHy, is to 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 of power. 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 (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Driver (1988); Smith, D.M. (2000a). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
moral landscapes
The association of par ticular landscapes with schemes of moral value (see also moral 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 spatial dialectic may 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. (NEW PARAGRAPH) 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 of space and power, 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 utopian urbanism 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 (see utopia). (NEW PARAGRAPH) 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, leisure and the BODy in twentieth century England, and served to reproduce versions of English national iDENTlTy. Associations of morality and nature, 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 also moral 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 (NEW PARAGRAPH) principles of coMMUNlTy and individuality through an oppositional POSTMOdERN archi tectural style. Other forms of ?oppositional? moral landscape might be traced in studies of the geographies of transgression, where land scapes labelled by others as immoral are up held as pointers towards the production of alternative social space. dMat (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Matless (1997); Tuan (1989). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
morphogenesis
(The study of) change in form over time. The term derives from develop mental biology, and is sometimes used as a syno nym for positive feedback in systems analysis (see also coMPLExiTy ThEORy). Its most devel oped use in hUMAN GEOGRAPhy to date has been in studies of landscape change in hlSTORlCAL GEOGRAPhy. (See also MORPhOLOGy.) dg (NEW PARAGRAPH)
morphology
Form or the study of form. Morphology became a contested term in the struggle between the hUMAN GEOGRAPhy of Paul Vidal de la Blache and the emerging soci ology of Emile Durkheim at the turn of the twentieth century. Durkheim argued that the systematicity of the social and thus what made its scientific study possible was the result of its morphology, by which he meant the spatial forms through which individuals were held together as a social structure. For this reason, any account of the constitution of social life would have to include many of the propositions of human geography, which Durkheim regarded as one of the ?fragmentary sciences? that had to be drawn out of their isolation to contribute to the plenary social science of sociology (Andrews, 1993). This sense of social morphology can be traced through twentieth century sociology in the writings of Maurice Halbwachs, Georg Simmel and others, but Vidal complained that Durkheim?s view ignored the physical ecological dimension and left society sus pended in the air. (NEW PARAGRAPH) It was exactly this conjunction between ?the social? and ?the natural? that prompted Carl Sauer to insist that the morphology of land scape was the central object of geographical enquiry. For Sauer (1963b [1925]), geog RAPhy was ?a science that finds its entire field in the landscape on the basis of the significant reality of chorological relation?. Sauer?s con ception did not neglect spatial arrangements, in his terms ?the connections of phenomena? (as these differed from place to place: see (NEW PARAGRAPH) ChOROLOGy), but his emphasis on morphology derived from J.W. Goethe?s eighteenth cen tury interest in ?the science of forms? and regis tered two other claims of equal importance: (NEW PARAGRAPH) ?nature? and ?culture? had to be seen as interdependent in the co production of landscapes; and (NEW PARAGRAPH) the same basic forms recurred across the whole field of transformations. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The first of these was focal to Sauer?s sense of hlSTORlCAL GEOGRAPhy, so that his enquiry was not confined to the morphology of land scape but was directed towards its MORPhO genesis; that is, the development of its forms over time. It was in this sense that Sauer described ?all geography [a]s physical geog raphy?: in its focus on physical form, on the material inscriptions of culture on the surface of the Earth. This intersected with his second claim, because he insisted that ?a definition of landscape as singular, unorganized or unre lated has no scientific value? and he was con cerned to develop a conception of landscape as ?a generalization derived from the observation of individual scenes?. Much later, others devel oped this in directions that Sauer refused to take. In particular, some early work in spatial science involved a search for geometrical and mathematical regularities in the evolution of spatial patterns of settlement (see Harvey, 1967). This too can be seen as a revivification of the science of morphology, but it usually acknowledged a debt neither to Goethe nor Sauer but to D?Arcy Thompson?s On growth and form (1992 [1917]) and his pioneering search for ?essential similarities? between ?ani mate and inanimate things?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The interest in MORPhOGENESis has con tinued in both European and American geography. There has been a long standing interest in the historical evolution of rural landscapes (e.g. Helmfrid, 1961) and urban landscapes (e.g. Conzen, 1960: see White hand, 2001). Much of the early work was qualitative and descriptive, but in recent years, and in conjunction with parallel studies in archaeology, there have been considerable advances in the quantitative measurement of landscape forms (metrological analysis), includ ing the integration of space syntax with GIS (Bin Jiang and Claramunt, 2002; Lilley, Lloyd, Trick and Graham, 2005). Urban mor phogenesis remains a vital area of geographical enquiry (Vance, 1990). The International Sem inar on Urban Form (http://odur.let.rug.nl/ ekoster/isuf2/index.html) was established in (NEW PARAGRAPH) 1996 and publishes a journal devoted to Urban Morphology. There has been a particular interest in the political economy of urban morpho genesis (Whitehand, 1987), and more recently in the cultural and symbolic dimensions of urban morphology (Lilley, 2004a,b). dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Lilley (2004a); Whitehand (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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