Michael Crang | Durham University (original) (raw)

Papers by Michael Crang

Environment and Planning A, Oct 1, 2003

Sustainability

China is facing an important period of rural governance innovation and restructuring of territori... more China is facing an important period of rural governance innovation and restructuring of territorial spatial patterns. This paper selects catchments as the most closely related spatial units for rural industrial development and rural settlement activities, profoundly revealing the characteristics of transformational development and spatial governance in mountainous areas. To date, extensive literature in this area has produced a broad multidisciplinary consensus on catchment water and soil conservation and rural industry development; however, the interactive mechanism of ecological, social, and economic networks, and the characteristics behind small catchments which benefit from spatial governance, have never been analyzed and are relatively new to the sphere of rural governance. Our research argues the relative importance of multi-scale catchment units compared with traditional administrative village units in enhancing the organizational benefits of rural revitalization in terms of ...

There are two categories for the things that are counterfeited. There is everything and there is ... more There are two categories for the things that are counterfeited. There is everything and there is anything…" (interview with Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit Officer). The trade in counterfeit and pirated goods is stated to be one of the fastest growing businesses in the world (Lin, 2011). The World Trade Organisation estimates that 7% of all global commerce is counterfeit (UNODC, 2015). The World Economic Forum goes further, suggesting that in 2015 counterfeiting and piracy equated to 10% of the global trade in merchandise, costing the global economy $1.77 trillion (World Economic Forum, 2015: 3; see also UNODC, 2015). We must acknowledge that, of course, no one knows the scale of brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

A specially commissioned text by Professor Mike Crang, Head of Department of Geography and member... more A specially commissioned text by Professor Mike Crang, Head of Department of Geography and member of CVAC (Centre for Visual Arts and Culture) for the exhibition "The Liveliest of Elements, an Ordinary Extraordinary Material" by Laura Harrington. Laura Harrington is interested in the natural world and how humans understand and interact with it – she works with multiple mediums including film, drawing and installation. A shared interest in upland environments and peat as a lively and dynamic material provided the impetus for a collaboration with physical scientist Dr Jeff Warburton (Department of Geography, Durham University) as part of a Leverhulme Trust Artist Residency. Their collaboration focused on Moss Flats, an upland bare peat flat in the North Pennines. Harrington has evolved this research into an exploration of this dynamic eco-system through moving image, words and sound. The title of the exhibition is inspired by artist Joseph Beuys who once described a European...

Environment and Planning A, 2012

There has been a recent spate of artistic work focusing on (over)consumption using the lens of di... more There has been a recent spate of artistic work focusing on (over)consumption using the lens of disposal and discard. In this brief commentary I will try to sketch out a few common themes across some of this work, showing how it connects with and challenges social science work on consumption and which registers it uses for thinking about the waste our societies create. Much work on consumption has referenced the thought of Michel de Certeau around consuming as appropriation. The artworks highlighted here suggest we might reflect more on his via negativa and concern with opacity, occlusion, and indeed the shadows things castothe negatives of objects. The art here suggests consumption is not just the obverse of production, but a photographic negative or its material imprint in a cast. Part of the force of these of works is the old but powerful and necessary trick of taking something unthought and unseen and rendering it visible in new ways. But moving beyond much work in consumption, t...

This chapter will focus upon the contested practices and imaginations of one island whose tourist... more This chapter will focus upon the contested practices and imaginations of one island whose tourist market is markedly divided between an upmarket north and mass market south. In the midst of this tense clash of tastes, the island was the setting for the book and the film of Captain Corelli’s mandolin. So this chapter moves between the Louis de Bernieres’ book Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1997), the Miramax film of the book (released 2001) and the touristic experience of the island. In the year after the release of the film visitor numbers from the UK to the island, who form some 87% of those arriving by plane, rose by 22% and 10% again the year following, more strongly than growth in visitors from other countries, and growing more rapidly than British tourism to Greece in general (Hudson and Ritchie 2006: 263-4). It was by all accounts a classic case of movie driving up the popularity of a destination. This has set in play competing and complementary imaginaries of the island as lands...

Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 2015

We outline the frameworks that shape and hold apart waste debates in and about the Global North a... more We outline the frameworks that shape and hold apart waste debates in and about the Global North and Global South and that hinder analysis of flows between them. Typically, waste is addressed as municipal waste, resulting in a focus on domestic consumption and urban governance and an emphasis on cities and the national scale. The prevailing ways of addressing the increasingly global flows of wastes between the North and South are those of global environmental justice and are underpinned by the geographical imagination encoded in the Basel Convention. New research on the trades in used goods and recycling in lower income countries challenges these accounts. It shows that arguments about dumping on the South need revision. Wastes are secondary resources for lower income countries, harvesting them is a significant economic activity, and consequent resource recovery is a key part of the global economy. Four areas for future research are identified: (a) changing patterns of global harvest...

$Research paper thumbnail of Making material memories: Kinmen’s bridging objects and fractured places between China and Taiwan$

cultural geographies, 2016

The post-war material culture of Kinmen, a former military outpost in Taiwan, reveals a biography... more The post-war material culture of Kinmen, a former military outpost in Taiwan, reveals a biography moving from conflict to hope for rapprochement, from matériel to militaria to souvenir. By experimenting with the concept of sensuous materialism, this article looks at touristic things from and of the battlefield past and explores how, through their materialities, things interact with people’s senses and shape their understandings of cross-strait relations. Far from being inert, these things are full of life and energy in their ability to animate the object–human relationship. Social memories are enacted through specific material affordances with the senses. Those memories are sensuous, emotional and affective as well as political and historic. Examining the making, staging and consumption of touristic things and how their commemorative materialities interact with and shape people’s consciousness of past histories, present happenings and future dreams helps us gain a more nuanced under...

cultural geographies, 2015

Geoforum, 2015

A variety of ethical tourism initiatives have arisen which look at the distribution of benefits a... more A variety of ethical tourism initiatives have arisen which look at the distribution of benefits and costs arising from the movement of western tourists who are consuming places in the Global South. This paper troubles those positions. Taking the case of the rise of domestic tourism in China, the paper examines the linked patterns of ethnic and nature based tourism. Theories of how natural and cultural heritage are valued by tourists are typically derived from Western historical precedents. Notions of individualised, romantic modes of consumption of pristine nature may well be inadequate in other contexts. The paper examines the double edged role of Chinese notions of harmony of people and nature in offering new opportunities for development for poor minority groups whilst also enrolling them in 4 modes of governance that turn them into bio-cultural resources. Looking across examples drawn from Yunnan in South Western China, the paper identifies how environmental ethics are mobilised and script minority identities in 4 ways: the valorisation of geopiety, blurring nature and culture in geotourism, in quests for rural simplicity, and celebrations of place based folk culture that simultaneously render it mobile. The rise of domestic environmentally concerned tourism is shown to fit the emergence of an ecological but market led mode of governance over minority groups.

European Urban and Regional Studies, 2016

Europe has set out its plans to foster a ‘green economy’, focused around recycling, by 2020. This... more Europe has set out its plans to foster a ‘green economy’, focused around recycling, by 2020. This pan-European recycling economy, it is argued, will have the triple virtues of: first, stopping wastes being ‘dumped’ on poor countries; second, reusing them and thus decoupling economic prosperity from demands on global resources; and third, creating a wave of employment in recycling industries. European resource recovery is represented in academic and practitioner literatures as ‘clean and green’. Underpinned by a technical and physical materialism, it highlights the clean-up of Europe’s waste management and the high-tech character of resource recovery. Analysis shows this representation to mask the cultural and physical associations between recycling work and waste work, and thus to obscure that resource recovery is mostly ‘dirty’ work. Through an empirical analysis of three sectors of resource recovery (‘dry recyclables’, textiles and ships) in Northern member states, we show that re...

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2012

The dominant political-economic approaches to global trade flows known as global value chains and... more The dominant political-economic approaches to global trade flows known as global value chains and global production networks offer powerful insights into the coordination and location of globally stretched supply chains, in particular from global South to North. By way of both conceptual and empirical challenge, this paper highlights flows of end-of-life goods from the global North towards the global South. This involves the disassembly and destruction of goods to recover secondary resources for further rounds of commodity production. Global recycling networks take things of rubbish value (often spent or 'end-oflife' goods) and turn them back into resources in other places and production networks. They operate not through adding value, but by connecting different regimes of value. The paper does not set out a new conceptual framework, but asks what challenges the rekindling of value in used goods creates for global commodity chain analysis and what insights those approaches bring to looking at 'waste' flows. The examples of used clothing and end-of-life merchant ships are mobilised to illustrate the dynamics of global recycling networks and to challenge prevailing commodity chain approaches in three key areassupply logics and crosscutting networks, value and materiality, and inter-firm governance. We argue that resource recovery engenders highly complex and brokered forms of governance that relate to practices of valuing heterogeneous materials and which contrast markedly with the modes of co-ordination dominated by 'big capital typical of global production networks for consumer goods.

Time & Society, 1994

This paper takes one institution, the museum, and suggests how this institution organizes underst... more This paper takes one institution, the museum, and suggests how this institution organizes understandings of time. Museums are seen as actively organizing practices that sustain certain views of the world. The paper takes a single case study to illustrate how such practices may be currently organized. It suggests that while analysis of cultural grammar may be illuminating, a narratological perspective is required in order to analyse practices in modern museums. Thus it is suggested that studies of narrativity may shed some light on contemporary understandings of temporality.

Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 2013

Moving up the waste hierarchy is a key priority for UK waste policy. Waste prevention requires po... more Moving up the waste hierarchy is a key priority for UK waste policy. Waste prevention requires policy interventions to promote reuse. The term 'reuse exchange' has been adopted by UK policy makers to describe a variety of second-hand trading outlets including car boot sales, charity shops and online exchange sites. As waste policy is based on tonnage diverted from disposal (or landfill), policy interventions to promote reuse exchange will be based on the weight of goods estimated to be flowing through these sites. This paper uses a combination of field survey data and scale-up estimation to quantify and characterise the weight of goods exchanged at car boot sales in England in 2012. This is estimated at 50 -60 000 tonnes per annum. The paper emphasises that movement up the waste hierarchy brings waste policy into closer contact with household consumption practices. It draws on qualitative research to show that, for participants, car boot sales are not associated with waste prevention. Instead, car boot sales rely on stocks of surplus household goods and exemplify the culture of thrift, which enables more, not less, consumption. The paper shows the collision between the social values that inform thrift and the environmental values that underpin reuse; and it argues that the policy goal of enhanced recovery for reuse might best be achieved by working with consumer culture. Two ways of achieving this are suggested: interventions that make it easier for consumers to do the right thing, through promoting opportunities for the circulation of stocks of surplus goods, for example, through increasing the frequency of car boot sales; and interventions which recognise that car boot sales also generate waste, which could be recovered for reuse.

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2010

The iconic images heralding an age of connectivity are the plane and the trace of digital flows b... more The iconic images heralding an age of connectivity are the plane and the trace of digital flows bearing information. However, not far behind has been the cumbrous yet essential ‘big box’ of containerization, shipping all manner of goods across the planet on great vessels remorselessly circling the globe. Critiques of global trade have latched upon the counterimage of these mighty ships' ruinous carcasses beached and being broken in South Asia. Here then is the antipode of globalization—ships, once carrying cargoes, now themselves sold around the globe for scrap and ending up broken up according to the very logics of cheap locations that their routes made possible. This paper interrogates these counterimages of global capitalism. Looking at the works of various photographers it examines how waste ships are made to work aesthetically. It examines the photo-documentary and traditions of the industrial sublime to find ‘time-images’ that speak to the material and labour worlds of glo...

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2010

At a first level, the papers in this theme issue provide a contribution to the diversity and vita... more At a first level, the papers in this theme issue provide a contribution to the diversity and vitality of current waste scholarship. At another level they are a means to moving waste scholarship to a fuller engagement with materiality. i Our starting point here is a paradox. Waste is intrinsically, profoundly, a matter of materiality and yet -notwithstanding a sustained engagement with materiality in certain areas of the social sciences of late -much of what is most readily identified as waste research remains staunchly immaterial. Just as much as societies have sought to distance

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2010

This paper picks up from extensive literatures that have addressed the relationship of heritage t... more This paper picks up from extensive literatures that have addressed the relationship of heritage to national identity. Much work focuses upon the symbolic construction of the past through heritage institutions, but in so doing it tends to underplay the affective experience of heritage sites. In this paper we argue that it is the felt experience and the organisation of sensibilities towards heritage which are often as important, and that these have racialised modalities. We thus look at attempts to foster civic inclusion and argue that they need to work through not just civic openness but felt exclusions and fears. We take two canonical heritage sites to exemplify these issues. First, the British Museum was chosen as an urban national institution that is conventionally seen speaking in an unemotive, pedagogical register. The history of the museum as collecting artefacts from around the world and bringing them to London is related to diasporic communities' feelings about the collec...

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2010

Environment and Planning A, Oct 1, 2003

Sustainability

Environment and Planning A, 2012

Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 2015

$Research paper thumbnail of Making material memories: Kinmen’s bridging objects and fractured places between China and Taiwan$

cultural geographies, 2016

cultural geographies, 2015

Geoforum, 2015

European Urban and Regional Studies, 2016

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2012

Time & Society, 1994

Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 2013

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2010

This essay is concerned with the intersection of lived time, time as represented and urban space ... more This essay is concerned with the intersection of lived time, time as represented and urban space - especially around everyday practice. As such it follows in a long pedigree of works addressing time and space in the city. However, what I want to try and rethink some approaches to offer a less stable version of the everyday, and through this a sense of practice as an activity creating time-space not time space as some matrix within which activity occurs. The essay thus addresses the paradox that Stewart identifies where the ‘temporality of everyday life is marked by an irony which is its own creation, for this temporality is held to be ongoing and non-reversible and, at the same time characterized by repetition and predictability’ (1984, p14). I want to thus look both at stability but also the emergence of new possibilities through everyday temporality. To do this I want to proceed through four circuits, each picking up and expanding upon the previous, developing and transforming it. The first circuit serves to locate the everyday through the study of temporality. The study of the chronopolitics and regulation of daily life serves as an entree into why ‘the everyday’ matters. The multiple rhythms and temporalities of urban life this form the back-cloth for this essay; what Lefebvre evoked, but hardly explained, as a rhythmanalysis. The second circuit picks up on this but to adds the insights of time-geography in the paths and trajectories that individuals and groups make through the city. Introducing a sense of human action and motility into the experience of time offers a new step while the combination of time-space routines serves to link the everyday to the reproduction of social regularities (Pred 1982). However, the sense of time-space created through time geography is rather rarefied, so the third circuit seeks to develop a critique and step sidewise through a concern with the differences between lived and represented times - a focus on experiential time-space that will lead to considering phenomenological accounts. Time and space cease to be simply containers of action. These it will be suggested begin to offer a sense of space-time as Becoming, a sense of temporality as action, as performance and practice; indeed the difference as well as repetition. The possibility as Grosz (1999) argues for not merely the novel, but the unforeseen. However, the fourth circuit suggests that these still share an idea of the self-presence of everyday experience, and will open up ideas of events as problematising the everyday. This attempts to both keep a sense of fecundity in the everyday without it becoming a recourse to ground thinking in an ‘ultimate non-negotiable reality’ (Felski 2000:15). The essay then argues for a sense of greater instability - or perhaps better, fragility - within the everyday. This essay thus focuses on the flow of experience for the social subject. It is also important to think through the topology and texture of temporality in the urban fabric, the city as well as its people, but that is a task for a different occasion (see Crang & Travlou, 2001).

This chapter will focus upon the contested practices and imaginations of one island whose tourist... more This chapter will focus upon the contested practices and imaginations of one island whose tourist market is markedly divided between an upmarket north and mass market south. In the midst of this tense clash of tastes, the island was the setting for the book and the film of Captain Corelli’s mandolin. So this chapter moves between the Louis de Bernières’ book Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1997), the Miramax film of the book (released 2001) and the touristic experience of the island. In the year after the release of the film visitor numbers from the UK to the island, who form some 87% of those arriving by plane, rose by 22% and 10% again the year following, more strongly than growth in visitors from other countries, and growing more rapidly than British tourism to Greece in general (Hudson and Ritchie 2006: 263-4). It was by all accounts a classic case of movie driving up the popularity of a destination. This has set in play competing and complementary imaginaries of the island as landscape and beach resort – and what such beaches should be used for. Hosting the (so-called) most photographed beach in Greece, alongside beaches, or always ‘coves’, labelled as ‘romantic’ via the movie, alongside mass tourism infrastructure the chapter unpacks the production of the beach and scenery for tourists. Not least here we want to highlight the different Kefalonias imagined and those lost and found, those unobtainable and those haunting the Ionian.

Obrador, P. and Crang, M . and Travlou, P. (2009) 'Taking Mediterranean tourists seriously.', in Cultures of mass tourism : doing the Mediterranean in the age of banal mobilities. Farnham : Ashgate, pp. 1-20. New directions in tourism analysis.

Crang, M. A. (2006) 'Circulation and emplacement : the hollowed out performance of tourism.', in Travels in paradox : remapping tourism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 47-64

There is a story of tourism geography that begins with measuring flows of people as they go throu... more There is a story of tourism geography that begins with measuring flows of people as they go through points. In practice then this means charting of the movement of people as they pass through specific places – a story of “bums on seats”, of number of overnight stays, durations of visits and distance travelled. This was then a geography of events - an event ontology of the measurable and visible. Emerging as a critique of this, so the story goes, is a geography of the construction of places through representations, a shaping of imagined landscapes. We should though quickly admit that this was not just a critique but also a reflexive recognition that the tourist industry was about precisely making and selling images. Perhaps the apotheosis of this is the “literary landscape” where, say, Britain is divided into Brontë country (west Yorkshire around Haworth), Austen Country (literary Hampshire as the local council has it), Lorna Doone Country (Exmoor), Hardy Country (Dorset) or more declassée Herriot Country (Yorkshire Dales around Thirsk), Heartbeat (North York Moors) or Catherine Cookson Country (South Tyneside), or to go further afield we might look at Anne of Green Gables (Prince Edward Island) or lately Captain Corelli’s Island (the Ionian Island of Kefalonia). Even this quick selection starts to indicate ambiguities where say films or TV series overcode books, which as we shall see themselves may lean on other sources. This chapter asks a little more about the instability of producing destinations. Firstly, in terms of deconstructing tourism as a signifying system. That is to see tourism as precisely a form of geography – literally earth writing – or to put it another way as inscribing meaning on to the earth. However, this vision of tourism inscribing meaning on the world, making the world as text, has limits. Both the semiological approach and the managerialist mapping of flows to destinations we might argue see tourism as being about structures and orders imposed upon the world. What both these approaches share is quite a strong sense that tourism makes places and those places are delimitable and definable – and that tourism occurs out there. They produce oddly fixed versions of the world for a mobile and fluid process. As Oakes and Minca note in this volume, the tendency is to see places defined by immobility and travel as something that happens in a sort of non-place between them. The chapter asks whether a refashioned sense of the eventfulness of tourism might enable us to tell stories that see places as more unstable, as themselves involving movement, and track circulation as a constitutive activity of representations. In other words, it is going to suggest that at issue are not just the representational strategies and structures that code places, but the ontological construction of places. That is it is not about the image of places as beheld by tourists, but rather the processes and practices of signification – where tourism takes up discourses and representations and uses them in ordering places, making meanings, making distinctions and thus making places through actions. It is not about what representations show so much as what they do. This picks up on accounts of the worldliness of texts and the textuality of world, but tries to find away around some of the static or synchronic structures of textual models. It addresses the ‘bleed through’ of ‘back here’ to ‘over there’ in overlaying and discordant geographies of social memory, personal memory and social structure.

This essay looks at three interwoven mobilisations around travel and tourism. Perhaps the most ob... more This essay looks at three interwoven mobilisations around travel and tourism. Perhaps the most obvious is the mobilisation of the destination, where it suggests that while tourism is often defined as travelling to somewhere – that sense of "where" is visited is actually rather less firmly placed on the earth’s surface than is often assumed. Second, it tracks the mobilisation entailed in becoming a tourist, looking at the construction of tourism as a specific practice of mobility. And to tell those stories it uses the third register of academic mobility – to speak of being a researcher chasing the two previous mobilised topics. The story is told in the context of the Greek Ionian Island of Kefalonia, or to locate the destination in not entirely the same space, Captain Corelli’s Island. The use of the ethnographic confessional is used to avoid treating tourists as dupes, through the scandalous suggestion that ethnographer and tourist are, if not the same creature then the same species – that homo academicus might be uncomfortably closely related to that embarrassing relative turistas vulgaris.

Crang, M. (2003) 'Placing Jane Austen, displacing England : touring between book, history and nation.', in Jane Austen and Co. : remaking the past in contemporary culture. New York: SUNY Press, pp. 111-132

In this essay I want to think through the popularity of Austen by linking her work to two sets of... more In this essay I want to think through the popularity of Austen by linking her work to two sets of places. The first is the imagined geographies produced through the text, or perhaps more accurately through its reading, which speak of a vanished English society. The second is the present geographies of tourists who visit Austen-themed places in contemporary England. The juxtaposition of these imagined cartographies raises three issues that this essay tries to unpack. First, a nostalgic geography of a lost English society which has a specific appeal and specific political implications. Second, the effect of this imagined landscape on the reshaping and marketing of the current landscape as a tourist product. Third, the need to then interpret that tourism as part of a disseminated practice of reading--where the action of reading is to connect disparate worlds from the text to home, to tourism and so forth. To coin a phrase, this essay discusses the worldliness of the text and the textuality of the world. It considers the geo-graphy of reading Austen as literally writing the world. I want though to suggest that doing so reframes both the conception of the world used in tourism and of writing in literary studies. This essay is less concerned with interpreting Austen’s works than engaging in what we might call reading at a distance. That is, I am more interested in what others actively make of her writings than in the writings themselves. It is not a matter of assessing how well Austen depicts a place, nor how accurately her fictive places are mapped onto supposed inspirational sites, nor for that matter of how well readers and visitors can recall and understand her work. It is not about the accuracy of any of these representations. Rather, it is about interpreting reading and visiting as doing, as shaping real and imagined landscapes--creating what J. Hillis Miller has called “atopical space” or, as James Donald glosses that, space which is “less the already existing setting for such stories, than the production of space through that taking place, through the act of narration.” The production of space in this manner involves two issues: first, it avoids creating an assumed reading, where the interpretations and actions of readers are drawn from immanent patterns in the text; second, it means that judgements about what is “authentic” do not stand above the practices of reading but are part of the currency within them. What it focuses upon is how Austen’s work is appropriated and circulated to produce senses of “hereness,” which inscribe identities into places. To illustrate this I begin with critiques of Austen-mania as part of a “heritage industry” in the UK, that suggest her work is used to sustain a reactionary and deeply conservative vision of Englishness. I then want to examine literary tourism as a practice by which key texts are mapped onto what becomes or is transformed into a mythical landscape. However, I suggest we move from metaphors of textualised landscapes to ideas of reading practices which open up a pluralised version of the geographies created. I thus try to suggest a disseminated landscape comprising different, multiple places and times of reading, and multiple stories told by the linking between times and places.

Crang, M. (2003) 'Telling materials.', in Using social theory, thinking through research. London: Sage, pp. 127-144.

This chapter asks us to think carefully about what we do with material we have created out in the... more This chapter asks us to think carefully about what we do with material we have created out in the field. The way it is going to approach this is by thinking about the actions involved in analysis making sense out of the material you have so painstakingly gathered. However, I am not going to present a discussion of the criteria of a ‘good’ or ‘valid’ analysis, since there are many types of epistemological theories that underlie different sorts of analysis. That is, there are theories about how we know what we can claim to know, about how we judge truth claims and assess the reliability or validity of our work. The sort of claims you can then make and the type of analysis needed are thus going to vary according to your approach, your questions and hence the data, and the sort of answers, you need. So rather than work through a list of philosophies and their assumptions about validity, this chapter will focus on the actual activity of analysis, as a material process, an idea we will come back to shortly in the next section. When we write research proposals and timetables we often pencil some period for ‘analysis of data’. This chapter is going to unpack this process, first by suggesting analysis is a messier business than this suggests and second, by highlighting the tangible processes of interpretation.

Crang, M. (2005) 'Time : space.', in Spaces of geographical thought : deconstructing human geography's binaries. London: Sage, pp. 199-217

The idea of cultural regions and regional cultures has a long pedigree in several disciplines and... more The idea of cultural regions and regional cultures has a long pedigree in several disciplines and traditions, and in different national contexts. Indeed the variation of customs and habits across the face of the world seems one of the most basic elements experiencing the world. It is an impulse to curiosity, to travel, a source of misunderstanding and translation and sometimes conflict and hostility. Here I want to explore three consequences or issues thrown up by thinking of cultures as
spatially patterning the world. The first is that of defining which culture occupies which territory. Typically we think of place and culture as bound together – each shaping the other, but I want to
argue that our notion of these ‘regions’ and territories is at least as inflected by how the specific ways that have been used to interpret the world as by cultural patterns. In other words how do we define the ‘region’ or territory, and, relatedly, how do we define the culture. Second, this spatial patterning raises issues of scale. Thus we might at one level talk of ‘Latin American’ culture to refer to the shared histories of conquest, resistance and mixed Indian and Iberian heritage. At another level strong political claims are made by states to claim to legitimacy through the notion that one people form one state. In a problematic relationship to this then are accounts that see regional cultures within – and especially problematically – across nationstate borders. These we might say are thus respectively epistemological and ontological issues with thinking about regions and cultures. The third point I want to make is more of a consequence of how we think about regional cultures. It is to think then about how these ideas are represented, popularised and instantiated in society. So here I am going to chart particular preservation efforts through especially open air
museums. How they move from the realm of academic studies of folklore, ethnology, cultural geography into popular culture, political institutions and so forth. Of course it is not quite as simple as this since I will try and show that academic interest often derives from precisely popular sentiment and the cultural zeitgeist as much as intellectual curiosity.

In thinking through inclusive cities, it is increasingly important to think of the role of the no... more In thinking through inclusive cities, it is increasingly important to think of the role of the non-tangible realm of digital media in the city. Immediately one might be justified in asking – what possibilities for inclusion, and threats of exclusion, are created specifically for cities? This chapter suggests the answer to that is three fold. First, increasingly information and communication technologies (ICTs) are part of a competitive interurban
order. Increasingly the economic order and relationships between cities are mediated through flows of information. Cities are located in this digital terrain as much as a physical one – one where flows of data and information have their own specific
geographies produced through key cities and which in turn positions some (parts of) cities differentially in a global environment. Second, leading from this we have to challenge our habitual, definition of cities in terms of a spatial location and extent. Instead, we need to think of cities as simultaneously containers for, facilitators of, constraints upon and products of interactions. Looked at in this way, the mediation of such interactions by ICTs may have profound effects. This then switches the emphasis of urbanity from physical built form to the quality of interaction in cultural life through the exchange of information‘ (Little 2000: 1814). If we see cities as originally creating a densification of activities in space (thus increasing the number of actions possible in a given time), then disembodied media for interactions seem to offer the inverse tendency(to intensify what can be done in a given time irrespective of distance) (Graham 1998, 1997). Together these two issues suggest a rescaling – or multiscaling -- of urban interaction that challenges conventional planning and governance via territorial units. However, the third strand is a resurgence of the urban as a means of coalescing multiple digital environs. The city still operates as both a formal template for understanding the
conditions of openness, free circulation and multiplicity that might be argued to characterise informational realms, but also acts as the location where such digital terrains are produced.

Crang, M. (2009) 'Spaces in theory, spaces in history and spatial historiographies.', in Political space in pre-industrial Europe. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 249-265

In this essay I want to sketch out a set of spaces, spatial relations and spatial scales as ways ... more In this essay I want to sketch out a set of spaces, spatial relations and spatial scales as ways of framing some of the issues about premodern political space. This I do in large part to resist the temptation so often evident in the geographic literature to end up privileging one space, scale or relation as the arena of the political. Be that classic political geography and its fixation on the territorial scale of the state or urban historical geography with a focus upon, and indeed conflation of, the public sphere of politics and the public space of the city. Through this essay my aim is to move from the simple, though crucial recognition that everything, bar angels dancing, occupies space – that is political events are in space and happen over space -- to a view that asks how space shapes those events and finally one that looks to see a history of political space where the space itself is produced and shaped through evolving and competing political activities.

Crang, M. (2008) 'Zeit:Raum.', in Spatial Turn : Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 409-438

Crang, M. (2009) 'home@Singapore.world : spatial imaginaries of a mediated world.', in Mediengeographie : Theorie - Analyse - Diskussion. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 539-564

That the world is globalizing has become a shibboleth and that the flows of information and media... more That the world is globalizing has become a shibboleth and that the flows of information and media increasingly render the world into a global village has been a commonplace of commentary and punditry. In this essay, I seek to probe a little bit more how we see spaces inflected by globalised media – specifically what shape global space might be said to be. To do this I want to review some of the ways that media and information have been imagined relating to spaces – through notions of substitution, derealisation, transcendence and thence to consequence of dispersal, distanciation and social disintegration. From here I turn to examine the production of spatial relations through media, specifically notions of proximity and distance, centrality and peripherality. The analysis here will then turn to the case of Singapore which has sought to envision itself, and be seen by others, as a central hub in a new space of mediated global flows. In and through this account what I want to suggest is that very different spatial imaginaries are mobilized – indeed that these mediated spaces enact and produce different notions of spatiality. Initially I outline how conventional, even critical, accounts produces pit ‘place’ against ‘space’, where a virtualization is seen as transcending or eroding experiential place. Thence I shall try to suggest instead a more relational space is produced. This then is in distinction to imaginaries that see either a scalar shift where globalised and mediated processes start to operate at a global scale, becoming disembedded from previously sedimented territorial scales, or one where a global exterior erodes or overwhelms a local interior. Thus we might look at the effects of global information as disrupting the Russian doll like spatial imaginary of nested scales of belonging and priority, with the local as most immediate through to the distant and attenuated world scale. Accounts here might look at a rescaling of key processes, where global process now outweighs local and produce a hierarchy of (conflicting) scales of processes. Instead the approach here sees places as always having been constituted out of relations between practices, as being produced through a variety of processes occurring between places. Places are the sites of entanglement of practices, and are produced by their relations. In this sense then relational space has a Leibnizean caste, that sees space created through the relations of objects rather than being a substantive matrix into which objects are inserted. This does not allow some notion of an Aristotelian inhabited place opposed to Cartesian, abstract space – an imaginary I shall show haunts much media commentary. That is where we can see in globalization that ‘chaos and complexity have switched polarities from negative to positive, so too are all the expressions of disjunction and discontinuity being revisited as forms of a higher order… [But] Unlike the disjunction of collage that has characterized much of this century, the new disjunction is one of morphing’ (Novak 1995) and to make the distinction clearer the latter involves ‘warpage, not mechanics, not even alchemy, but the curving of the underlying spatial matrix itself’ (Novak 1997). Thus what I am trying to suggest here is not simply the combination or coming together of new elements but the formulation of spatial orientation brought upon by global flows on information. It is then a Deleuzian vision, informed by theorizing multiplicity and hybridity, which sees the city as an abstract machine combining different kinds of spaces in a folded, pleated topology (Crang 2000b, page 314) .To do this I will focus upon the case of Singapore, as a city which has ridden the dragon of informational technology for 30 years and try to explore how it has formed a point where different relations and spaces recombine disrupting scalar notions of belonging and engagement, where the state is actively attempting to produce a sense of centrality but also one where borders are being reinscribed in informational space.

In this chapter my aim is to suggest that an engagement with visuality is worthwhile, may be even... more In this chapter my aim is to suggest that an engagement with visuality is worthwhile, may be even necessary, for qualitative methods in geography. In doing this I want to push the case for these methods when despite sometimes warm words there are relatively few examples of their use. Indeed if one were to look at the methods in qualitative textbooks in geography, then the overwhelming dominance is of linguistic sources – be they written and/or spoken. I will focus upon methods connected to the production of what we might call visual ethnographies. In doing this I want to highlight not a set of techniques, as though they were some items on an a la carte menu, but also paradoxes in the ways visual material is treated in geographical work. That is I want to highlight an ambivalence around visuality and its treatment in geography, and point to some theoretical critiques and slippages. I shall effectively focus upon photographic and video work. Partly my aim is to focus on visual media at a time when they are proliferating in society, and thus may form either (and I would argue both) a topic for study and a means for studies. It is also a time when visual ways of knowing have come under intense and refined critique within the discipline.

My starting point is a sense that ‘visual methods’ may almost have been killed off before they were born in qualitative geography by powerful arguments about the problematic elements of visual knowledge – and in geography especially. A variety of visual methods, and especially the long reliance on modes of observational practice in landscape work and visual tropes for truth and knowledge across the discipline, have been criticised for assumptions of detachment and objectivity of knower leading to objectification of the known. Recently the issue of representational knowledge has been challenged tout court – and the visual seems perhaps inescapably bound to the representational. Vision is positioned as the problem both in how geographers know and a powerful locus of practice within the discipline. And yet, as I browse through geographical journals, I am not exactly overwhelmed by the deployment of visual media. My contention is that we have allowed one sense of visuality, with a troubling past, to rather dominate our critical understanding of what visual methods might comprise or what they might do.

This chapter will begin with a review of some of the classic heritages of visual knowledge in geography, and their politics and legacies. It will develop an account of some of the deployments of visual methods, and different modes of visuality therein. The chapter will examine visual ethnographies that seek to offer an engaged, participatory form of seeing and set it against a more ironic and perhaps even alienated, critical forms of seeing. It will conclude by trying to refigure how we think of seeing as representing rather than a medium of connecting and making present. It will thus ask about the how we might show what is not seen, when it cannot be pictured and how we might think about vision not as the antithesis of touch but through a haptic register

Crang, M. (2012). Tristes Entropique: steel, ships and time images for late modernity Visuality/Materiality: Images, Objects and Practices. G. Rose and D. Tolia-Kelly. Farnham, Ashgate: 59-74.

"There is a long history of thinking about materiality and temporality through flux and flow. The... more "There is a long history of thinking about materiality and temporality through flux and flow. The question then is how do we envision such incessant movement? Michel Serres derives this sort of materiality from the physics of Lucretius that sees the apparent stability of the world as an illusion caused by the turbidity of incessant flows, as the flow becomes turbulent it leads to 'vortices in which the atoms combine to form a quasi-stable order’ forming a world out of the myriad combinations of atoms arising from chance encounters so we need to set ‘aside the principles and habits of thinking in terms of solids and treats atoms as the condition for a theory of flow’ (Webb, 2006: 127).

The world is constantly in flow, just some of it at a very slow rate, and full then of nonorganic life as De Landa (1992) argued. Such an approach highlights not things moving through empty space, but the world as becoming-things.

The focus of this essay is though a negative becoming, or a sense of productivity that includes failure, disassembly and destruction. Following the acknowledgement of the crystalline internal irregularities of steel sees them leading to failures as well as strengths, where imperfections in crystalline structures produce both sharpness and brittleness (de Landa, 2008). Rust, breakdown and destruction are immanent propensities of, not exceptions to, the normal state.

Here then we come to the link of the flow and event of things and the moment of visualization – how does that event in its brief happening and lingering image link to the slow happening of inorganic life? It may be worth connecting that slow happening to the notions of entropy – that matter heads towards increasing levels of disorganization – that is, it is things are generally unbecoming."

Gregson, N., and M. Crang. 2015. Waste, Resource Recovery and Labour: Recycling Economies in the EU. In Why the Social Sciences Matter, eds. J. Michie and C. Cooper, 60-76. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Waste and its connections to a profligate consumerism have become a core concern for public polic... more Waste and its connections to a profligate consumerism have become a core concern for public policy in the developed nations in the twenty-first century. Whether the focus is food or mobile phones, computers or electrical goods, waste – and particularly post-consumer waste-is never far from view and moral concern. Reports have shown how at least a third of the food produced by the planet ends up not on the plate but as food waste (Wrap, 2008; Stuart, 2009; IME, 2013). Trends to faster manufacturer product cycles, cheaper products undermining the economics of repair, and technology and fashion-induced pressures to upgrade goods are seen to be critical to the emergence of 'a). In the EU it is accepted that this has to change. A wave of policy initiatives has identified minimising and preventing waste as central to sustainable futures. In waste policy a first priority is minimising waste generation; the second is to reduce waste by diverting unwanted materials from the waste stream. Diversion is achieved via recovery, be that for re-use, recycling or as energy-from-waste. Recovering wastes via recycling means that wastes become potential feedstock for other industries: they have become resources. This is a major transformation – not just in how we think about waste, but also in what happens to it. Disposal through 'controlled tipping' (or landfill) has gone from being the default option for waste in many EU-member states to become the least desired option for managing wastes. This is not only because of the contribution of landfill gases (principally methane) to greenhouse gas emissions and hence to climate change, but also because materials disposed of as wastes are no longer circulating and so are lost to economies whilst their replacement depletes natural resources. Since the late 1990s the imperatives to minimise and reduce waste have been enacted through the principles of the EU-wide Waste Hierarchy. 1 As a result, national level waste policies have implored millions of European households and consumers to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, promoting these actions as part of a transition to sustainable consumption. In the UK, long stereotyped as the 'dirty man of Europe', this has necessitated the development of an infrastructure to divert waste materials from landfill. This is the biggest change to have occurred in domestic waste management in the UK since the end of the Second World War (c.f. Cooper, 2010). Rather than one bin for 'the rubbish', UK households now have multiple bins for multiple materials: dry recyclables (paper, card, tins and plastic containers), glass, green waste, food waste and residual waste. Increasingly too, the principles of the Waste Hierarchy are being extended to producer responsibility. Manufacturer and retailer responsibilities with respect to waste minimisation and recovery are being ratcheted up, whilst 'end-of-life' is a core principle in sustainable product design.

This chapter asks us to think carefully about what we do with material we have created out in the... more This chapter asks us to think carefully about what we do with material we have created out in the field. The way it is going to approach this is by thinking about the actions involved in analysis making sense out of the material you have so painstakingly gathered. However, I am not going to present a discussion of the criteria of a „good‟ or „valid‟ analysis, since there are many types of epistemological theories that underlie different sorts of analysis. That is, there are theories about how we know what we can claim to know, about how we judge truth claims and assess the reliability or validity of our work. The sort of claims you can then make and the type of analysis needed are thus going to vary according to your approach, your questions and hence the data, and the sort of answers, you need. So rather than work through a list of philosophies and their assumptions about validity, this chapter will focus on the actual activity of analysis, as a material process, an idea we will come back to shortly in the next section. When we write research proposals and timetables we often pencil some period for „analysis of data‟. This chapter is going to unpack this process, first by suggesting analysis is a messier business than this suggests and second, by highlighting the tangible processes of interpretation.

'Time is not a thing' Heidegger (1972, page 3) This chapter addresses how time has been treated i... more 'Time is not a thing' Heidegger (1972, page 3) This chapter addresses how time has been treated in geography and argues the summary answer is too often 'over-simply'. That is, an overstatement, but this essay will suggest that geography has often used an unsophisticated treatment of time. This may be predictable if one thinks of geography as a 'spatial' discipline, with rich debates over the nature of space, place, and landscape instead of over time. And yet that seems an inadequate explanation for why: ''different sorts of time'' have not troubled too many geographers much. There is a wealth of work offering sophisticated analyses of space and spatiality, but to see time and temporality given equal treatment is unusual. In Anglophone contexts, this tendency is poorly explained by reference to the 'nature' of geography, just as it would be mistaken to look to the discipline of history for an abundance of theorizations of social time or studies of different temporalities. (Kurtz 2009, page 259) Although I shall show there is discussion around temporal issues in historical geography this has been limited and revealing in its preoccupations. This essay takes as a starting point the idea that time is not invariant dimension through which things evolve but a socially constructed medium. That is time is not a self-evident category against which the world can be measured, nor is it reducible to its forms of measurement. Indeed thinking for a moment of those forms opens out one avenue of enquiry which is the development and construction of measurements of, and devices for measuring time. Thus there is a history to tell of the rise of standardised time, and indeed histories and geographies of a variety of temporal categories. Thus different cultures around the world have had and still have different relationship to time and different modes of measuring and experiencing it.