DISTRIBUTED LANDSCAPES: HISTORIES OF CENTERS AND EDGES IN AMERICAN
PLANNING
CALL FOR PAPERS, INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHERS
(LONDON, 5–10 JULY 2015)
Organizers: Garrett Dash Nelson (Geography, University of
Wisconsin–Madison) and Peter Ekman (Geography, University of California,
Berkeley)
The history of spatial planning in the United States -- since
industrialization if not earlier -- can be told as a series of
contestations over centers and edges. Motifs of "centralization" and
"decentralization" have for generations animated debates over landscape
aesthetics, political and economic scale, the allocation of tangible and
intangible resources, the territorial indices of belonging and
exclusion, the cultures of nature, and the limits of urban life.
Physical centers and edges have routinely been invoked as geographic
forms deemed adequate to express, clarify, mediate, optimize, structure,
or resist these desired distributions of people and things. Some of
American planners' most imaginative and vexing work has taken place at
or just beyond the notional edge of the metropolis. How to configure a
historical geography richly attentive to these tensions, at once
theoretical and inescapably material?
We conceive the sphere of "planning" in a way broad enough to encompass
the orderings and logics articulated (if not always realized) by
architects, landscape architects, realtors, property developers,
industrialists, theorists, critics, reformers and improvers of various
stripes, and state actors at all scales, in addition to the formal
planning profession in place since the late Progressive era. The session
will thrive on case studies of specific landscapes whose edges have
provoked reflection, imitation, or conflict. So, too, will it welcome
heterodox intellectual histories of American planners, their techniques,
and their spatial imaginaries.
Papers might address, for instance:
* The aesthetics and politics of the "middle landscape" (and other
aspirations to rural-urban synthesis)
* Regionalism and regional planning as experiments in radical politics
* Scalar contestations over "comprehensive" planning
* Anxieties over edges, boundaries, and limits in the industrial city
* The variegated politics of decentralization, "decongestion," and
anti-urbanism
* Political centralization employed in the name of spatial
decentralization
* The role of "model" towns as object lessons in urban form and social
order
* Prehistories of the postwar suburb (residential, industrial,
military, corporate, other)
* Defense, evacuation, and the edges of the wartime metropolis
* Methodological sketches for an "edgewise" historical geography
To propose a paper, please submit a 250-word abstract to Garrett Nelson
([log in to unmask]) and Peter Ekman ([log in to unmask]) by 31 AUGUST
2014.
More information about ICHG 2015 may be found at
http://www.ichg2015.org/programme/propose/ and a Web version of this CFP
may be found at
http://people.matinic.us/garrett/ichg-distributed-landscapes/
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