12.05.08 PH [all these from the Glossary to Casey, Representing Place]

geomorphology [n]: the scientific study of the form of the earth, especially by attending to the configuration of particular landmasses; by extension, a sense of the earth's multifarious shapes.

landscape [n]: literally, "shape of the land"; a word deriving from the Dutch landschap that signifies (a) a vista or "cut" (hence the -scape) of the perceived world, construed as "country" or "land" of "field" set within a horizon; (b) the circumambience provided by a particular place; (c) by extension, seascape, cityscape, and so on; (d) a genre of painting that, in contrast with landskip [q.v.], is concerned with the material essence of a place or region rather than with its precise topography, and with transplacement rather than with transposition.

landskip [n]: an early form of "landscape" and, more particularly, a conception of painting as well as decoration that emphasizes topographic exactitude; also applied to maps and verbal descriptions in late seventeenth-century English.

region [n]: a portion of the earth's surface that has become a significant cartographic or painterly unit; it is constituted by a group of closely concatenated places that are spatially continuous with each other as well as temporarily coexistent and thus cohistorical.

topomnesia [n[: remembrance of place, especially the remembering that informs a painter's rendition of a place or region he or she has once experienced in first person.

9.04.08 PH

land-system [n]: "an area of land, distinct from surrounding terrain, having a recurring pattern of landform, soils and vegetation, such that the variations in these parameters are predictable" (quoted in Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007), p. 139).

4.04.2008 JP

heterotopia(s) / heterotopology [n] heterotopic [adj] heterochronies [n]

Foucault identifies heterotopias as "real places" existing in "every culture, in every civilization" that are "counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted."

He lists six principles of a heterotopia: i. all cultures contain examples of it; ii. its function can change over time; iii. it is capable of juxtaposing several contradictory or incompatible sites within one space; iv. heterotopias are linked to specific chunks/slices of time, often distinct from traditional sections of time, (Foucault also suggests heterochronies) v. heterotopias always "presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable"; vi. heterotopias function in relation to all the non-heterotopic space that remains.

"their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space… as still more illusory…. [or else create] another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not somewhat in this manner" (Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces", Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986)).

03.04.2008 JP

slum and squatter settlements [n]

Though slum is often conflated with the term squatter, indeed so much so that they are wedded in the same phrase, i.e. "slum and squatter settlements", there are some important geohistorical/etymological distinctions between the two. Squatter settlements are "unauthorized, unregulated patches of urban growth" deemed "permanent settlements alive to the pride of ownership and the ambition of self-improvement." Slums, by contrast, are the "decayed shells of once superior housing" (Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped, p. 64; see also Caldwell, Roy Chandler, "For a Theory of the Creole City" in Ici~Là: Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French, ed. Mary Gallagher, p. 31)

To slum, or slum it [v], connotes a certain debauchery – things going to seed. To squat [v], however, denotes a crouching or sitting position, a person on their haunches with heels close to or pressing buttocks and thighs; it also denotes an unlawful occupation of a land area or building.

Slum [n]: etymologically from "back room" or back street, alley, court; often used in the phrase "back slum(s)"; also "rarely, a house materially unfit for human habitation." OED: e.g.1825 Westmacott Eng. Spy II. 32: "The back slums lying in the rear of Broad St."; also 1851 Dickens Lett. (1880) I. 251: "When the back slums are going to be invaded."

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atopical [n]: "This is a place that is everywhere and nowhere, a place you cannot get to from here. Sooner or later, in a different way in each case, the effort of mapping is interrupted by an encounter with the unmappable.  The topography and the toponymy in each example, in a different way in each case, hide an unplaceable place.  It was the locus of an event that never "took place" as a phenomenal happening located in some identifiable spot and therefore open to knowledge.  This strange event that took place cannot be the object of a cognition because it was a unique performative event.  This strange locus is another name for the ground of things, the preoriginal ground of the grouns, something open to any activity of mapping.  The atopical inhabits the individual psyche.  Why can desire not be satisfied in a happy coincidence of consciousness with the hidden other within the self?  It haunts language.  Why cannot language ever be wholly clear?  It interferes with interpersonal relations, relations with the "other."  Why can they never be wholly satisfactory or fulfill desire?  It underlies society and history.  Why are they so often a panorama of violence and injustice?  It generates the opacities of storytelling.  Why can no story ever bring the things it narrates wholly into the open?  The encrypted place generates stories that play themselves out within a topography" (J. Hillis Miller, Topographies, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995, pp. 7-8).

biochore [n]:

biotope [n]:

bush [n]: land beyond the plantation.  "The bush came to embody all the anxieties of a slaveholdijng elite: a free, vengeful, miscegenating populatiojn bent on blood, invisible, atavistic" (Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, p. 19).

chorology [n]: the detailed study of regions and their differentiations.

chorophilia [n]: love of place

chronotope (of culture) [n]: “a setting or scene organizing time and space in representable whole form” (James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 25).

dwelling [n]:

encompass [v]
"The word 'compass' and with it encompass is one of those words in the Oxford English Dictionary with a small discursive introduction puzzling at the word"s origins.  To 'measure, 'walk in pace,' 'stride across' belong to the oldest meanings of compass and encompass. But surprisingly, so do 'contrivance,' 'artifice,' 'designing skill,' 'strategem.' So power is in encompass. Something of Colossus astride the globe. There's trickster in the word, too. A touch of fraud and gullibility. There is comfort in it. Reassurance. A sense of completeness, enfolding." (Greg Dening, "Deep Times, Deep Spaces," in Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, New York, Routledge, 2004, p. 17).

gathering [n] and midst [n]
"The power of place consists in its nontendentious ability to reflect the most diverse items that constitute its "midst". In many regards, a place is its midst, being in the midst of its own detailed contents; it is what lies most deeply amid its own constituents, gathering them together in the expressive landscape of that place. No mind could effect such gathering, and the body, though necessary to its attainment, requires the holding and keeping actions native to the place it is in." (Casey, "How to Get from", p. 29)

genius loci [n]: the spirit of the place.  Cf. Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, p. 143.

geobody [n]: the "body" of a national territory, often anachronistically back-projected.  Cf. Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, p. 207.

habitus [n]:

idiolocality [n]:

landmark [n]: Cf. Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, p. 15

landscape [n]: “Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum, both a package and the commodity inside the package” (My emphases, see W.J.T. Mitchell"s "Imperial Landscape" in Landscape and Power, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 5)

life-spaces [n]

loco selvaggio [n]: (from Dante"s Inferno)

midst [n]: see gathering

pathecture [n]: the process of building feelings and meanings by the arrangement of material obejcts, especially through construction, dilapidation, and excavation.

paths out of town [n]: Only by walking those paths can we reconnect the individual place with the rest of the world (see William Cronon, “Kennecot Journey: The Paths out of Town”, in William Cronon, et al., eds., Under an Open Sky, NY: Norton, 1992, pp. 28-51).

periegete / periegesis [n]: a (human / written) guide to a place.

region [n]: "'The region is a place in itself', writes Ian Duncan, 'the source of its own terms of meaning and identity ... while the province is defined by its difference from [the capital].' Exactly: village and region are alternative homelands of sorts, whereas the provinces embody the capitulation of local reality to the national centre" (Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, p. 52; with the Duncan quote coming from his "The Provincial or Regional Novel", in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William Thesing, Oxford: OUP, 1992).

ruins [n]: physical remains shaping a location of experience that is past but not completed.

therapeutae [n]: people who give close attendance.

threshold [n]:

topistics [n]: a holistic mode of inquiry designed to make the identity, character, and experience of a place intelligible.

topoclasm [n]: destruction of a place.

topotherapy [n]: the responsive dwelling, close attendance, cultivation, and care of a place.

wilderness [n]: a location of unsettled experience.