Dictionaries, disciplines and the future of geography

This essay contributes to the discussions initiated by Setten [Setten, 2008. Encyclopaedic vision: speculating on The Dictionary of Human Geography. Geoforum 39 (3), 1097–1104], about The Dictionary ofHuman Geography. Rather than focusing on the identity and relative exclusiveness of the contributors, I emphasize how successive editions of the Dictionary have helped reshape the discipline in two ways. First, the proliferation of texts, like the Dictionary, aimed squarely at a student market has gone hand in hand with a variety of changes to the political economy of publishing in geography. Second, human geography has increasingly come to be defined in terms of its concepts and theories. The paper ends by considering the implications of these changes for disciplinary unity and the future of geography given the increasing prominence of both of integrated environmental science and of GIS.     

It's a long way to the other geographers and geographic knowledges

Geographic knowledge is usually understood as the knowledge produced by geographers. Yet, it is also produced by people outside of the academia. But as Western science claimed for its exclusive self the status of ‘knowledge’, others have long been denied the production and possession of a true knowledge, and recognised merely the mastering of practical skills. The binary opposition between scientific and other forms of knowledge has been central to the construction of academic geography until the late 1980s, when postmodern thought cast some doubt on the universality of scientific knowledge. This led to critical analyses of academic geography, revealing its situatedness, as well as to a new interest for the geographies of the ‘Others’. Examining how geographers have dealt with other knowledge sets so far, and how they have labelled them, this paper argues that other geographies should be given more attention. This means focusing on the knowledges themselves, and considering implementing a true dialogue between these and academic geography. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Landscape governance: The “politics of scale” and the “natural” conditions of places

Governance has become an iridescent concept in recent years. The term is widely used in almost all social-science disciplines as well as in the political process. The intention of this paper is not so much to clarify these sometimes vague meanings but to highlight some characteristics of environmental governance connected with the restructuring of the spatial dimensions of politics. It starts from the assumption that the quest for multi-level decision making is particularly pressing for environmental governance. However, multi-level governance raises concern about the constitution of various spatial levels and their relationships with each other, as discussed under the term of “politics of scale”. Moreover, it is argued that for environmental governance the spatial reference is strongly connected with another challenge, which concerns the question of how to deal with the biophysical conditions of particular places. The term landscape governance is introduced to tackle this question without referring to an ontologically given space. Thus, landscape governance deals with the interconnections between socially constructed spaces (the politics of scale) and “natural” conditions of places. For this task, the concept of societal relationships with nature is introduced and applied to the term “landscape” as a bridging concept between social and natural sciences. The paper illustrates the approach of landscape governance with examples of problem-oriented interdisciplinary research at the UFZ-Centre for Environmental research in Leipzig, Germany.