Spatial Disciplines Research Articles

On Whenua, Landscape and Monumental Interiors

There is an intersection of landscape and interior within pre-contact Maori building practice. Throughout New Zealand the land bears imprints from such interventions as the terracing of pa1 to form defensible, habitable zones; the recessing of rua-kai2 to form storage vessels within the ground; the indenting of umu3; and the imprinting of the interiors of whare puni4. This paper explores the manner in which this excavational practice destabilises the clear distinctions between the Western spatial disciplines of interior design, landscape architecture, and architecture. The paper speculates that this carving practice may offer opportunities for intercultural, interdisciplinary space making. This exploration moves between cultures, between perceptions of landscape and whenua, between landscape, interior and architectural disciplines. These betweens are theorised as a practice, as a mode of making contemporary space which draws from the history and specificity of this land and indigenous culture. This theorised practice has been embodied in a series of buildings developed over the last seven years. Step House, and Continuum House are discussed in relation to notions of landscape interiors and nature-culture continuums. The built works are sited in-between; between bodies in space, and the body of the land; between architecture, landscape and the interior; between indigenous and Western cultures.

Drawings of sections and drawing with sections1

Our era has been described as an age of divided representation, where the instrumental, rationalistic and commodifiable aspects of life have overthrown the ethical, creative and communicative ones that used to give meaning to human existence. This schism has led to the fact that representations have lost their power to re-present things meaningfully and have become mere ghosts of reality – often by rejecting it overall. This paper discusses the role that the drawings of sections can play in the way that we come to know, understand and interpret space. Although the paper uses architecture as its main entry point, it relates to various other design-oriented spatial disciplines (landscape architecture, urbanism, engineering, product design, geography, etc.). Methodologically, the paper cuts the discourse about sections in two distinct parts. The first one has to do with drawings of sections that come to describe an already existing structure (drawings of sections). The second highlights the role that sections play during the designing of new things – things that do not yet exist – in order to bring them into being (drawing with sections). With the proposed distinction the paper calls us to rethink sections, from a mere outcome of the design process, to the design process per se.

KONUT İŞLEM HACİMLERİ ARACILIĞIYLA KONUT PİYASASININ MEKANSAL ANALİZİ: MENTEŞE, MUĞLA

As there is a reciprocal relationship between the patterns of investor decisions, local and central government strategies, household mobility, and housing transactions have repercussions on both macro and micro scales. Housing transactions within a metropolitan region can alter certain neighbourhood dynamics through the cycle of housing sales regarding urban development patterns, socio-economic characteristics of the residents, tenure type, neighbourhood, and housing quality. Even though the connection between neighbourhood dynamics and housing transactions is undeniable for spatial disci-plines, there are very limited studies for that matter. This study aims to explore the housing market dynamics of Menteşe via housing transactions. It employs three different datasets (Open Street Map (i), Household, housing and office data collected by the Turkish Statistical Institute (ii), Title deed transaction statistics by The Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre (iii)). For spatial heterogeneity, Moran’s I, and spatial randomness, a local indicator of spatial association (LISA) has been applied. The findings revealed the role of centrality and the importance of mixed land use in housing markets even though all the neighborhoods on the periphery are very close to the city center in terms of distance.

Technical Land-Sea Spaces: Impacts of the Port Clusterization Phenomenon on Coasts, Cities and Architectures

Land-sea interactions, extending inland and towards the marine spaces, are affected by major management and design transformations. Globalization processes, port expansion projects and extensive energy transition requests have recently led port institutions to demand more land, engaging deeply with logistics platforms and radically restructuring forms of port governance. In this competitive context, the phenomenon of Port Clusterisation, i.e. the administrative aggregation whereby two or more ports are merged to form port clusters, is heavily impacting the institutional sphere. However, not only does this phenomenon have no control over cities, but its spatial component seems to be neglected by the disciplines of space, such as urbanism and architecture. As a result, port and city institutions lack design tools to tackle urgent challenges as coastal utilization, the need for resilient port-city infrastructures and the regeneration of the port-city architectural heritage. In terms of novelty and contribution to academia, an examination of the spatial footprint of port clusters will allow research to move beyond its state-of-the-art by targeting a phenomenon that, though pivotal, is under-researched, especially within the spatial disciplines.

ZINTEGROWANY PLAN INWESTYCYJNY – SPRZĘŻENIE PROJEKTOWANIA ARCHITEKTONICZNEGO I PLANOWANIA PRZESTRZENNEGO

The integrated investment plan is to be, after the amendment of the Act on Spatial Planning and Development, a new tool allowing for the development of urbanization opportunities initiated by private and institutional entities. This paper traces the background of design theory in terms of interdisciplinary integration mechanisms within spatial disciplines, and examines how ZPI can use these mechanisms. An initial attempt at a critical assessment and perspectives that emerge in connection with the expected introduction of this legal regulation was made, thus commenting on one of the first ways of legally sanctioned initiation of planning regulations by organized urban or architectural design.

‘It was quiet’: the radical architectures of understatement in feminist science fiction

“Poisonless:a bare city, bright, the colours light and hard, the air pure. It was quiet.” The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974) This is how Ursula K. Le Guin describes the city of Abbenay in The Dispossessed. It is modest and unassuming. It is quiet. This architectural restraint is jarringly at odds with predominant portrayals of the science fiction city. As noted by Graham (2016) and Hurley (2008) the future city has become synonymous with rapid vertical urbanisation, closing off alternative urban visions and the possible futures they contain. While there is a growing call for the study of sf by scholars in the spatial disciplines such as Abbott (2016), Collie (2011), Hewitt and Graham (2015) and Kitchin and Kneale (2002), the unassuming, everyday spaces of feminist sf are often lost in the shadows cast by the dystopian high rise. As Le Guin argues, these passive and participatory utopias become visible only when we ‘adjust to a dimmer light’ (1989). In response, this paper lingers in shared spaces of sf which are possible examples of what Washida Imarisha terms ‘visionary fiction’ which is sf that ‘has a relevance towards building new, freer worlds’ (2015: 4) including; N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–2017), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1979) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). By imaginatively inhabiting the utopian enclaves within these feminist texts it is possible to explore geographies of alterity – to adjust to the dim light and learn to cherish the quiet.

Disaster management takes to the skies: How new technologies are reconfiguring spatialities of power in desert locust management

This article explores how new technologies – such as drones and satellites – are incorporated into disaster management and questions the implications for power relations between disaster authorities and subjects. This is a critical area of research, as the proliferation of aerial and networked technologies has made their use in disaster management and response more common. Although concerns have been raised about the potential use of aerial and networked technologies in the surveillance and spatial discipline of populations by commercial and government actors, few have considered the implications for disaster management. In response, this article turns to geographical literature on necropower, verticality, and planetary spatialities to analyse technological innovations in responses to desert locust upsurges in Kenya. Drawing from qualitative research carried out between February 2020 and January 2021, we explain how desert locust control operations have shifted from horizontal to vertical to networked and planetary in nature through experimentation with new technologies over the past century. We argue that aerial and networked technologies have led to a volumetric shift in desert locust management and response, giving remote and increasingly automated actors who operate ‘above’ greater power over the life and death of populations ‘below’. In making this argument, we adopt a more-than-human perspective to account for how nonhuman entities and lifeforms shape and are subjected to necropolitical disaster management and responses. We conclude by reflecting on what this analytical approach has to offer the study of vertical and volumetric geographies.

Hybrid and Performative Spaces: Towards a New Analytical Lens

The exhibition space is a territory where architects and designers have experimented with hybrid and performative spatial qualities. However, such spatial mechanisms have expanded into other spatial practices. As we live in a constantly changing world, these practices allow spatial systems that adjust to continual changes in modes of living. Newer approaches to spatial transformation try to respond to the need for transience and flexibility. Hybrid and performative interventions are elaborated to transform existing spaces with strategic non-architectural rearrangements. As a result, our inhabited spaces, such as exhibitions, are becoming hybrid and performative. However, hybrid and performative may be perceived as tools, or as resulting qualities. The literature review analysis shows many intersections between hybrid and performative. Both terms indicate a flexible built environment that is designed and organised to be multifunctional. Hybrid mostly refers to the various modes of accessing, using and being present in the space, while performative refers to the concept of flexible mechanisms, the openness towards changes and the unpredictable characterisation of a space. Performative is also linked to the ability of the space to multitask and perform different roles, including communicative tasks. This study investigates the repertoire of hybrid and performative through an analysis of a literature review conducted through the lens of exhibition design. We seek to explore and promote applications in spatial interventions and the potential to define a set of analytical tools. Seeing the emergence of a constantly changing world, spatial disciplines are trying to respond with flexible mechanisms. Therefore, newer critical lenses, scholarships, and analytical tools must be investigated, explored, and proposed to cope with such continuous shifts.

Deep Adaptation - The Spatial Dimension

The future, which we thought we had maybe another decade to prepare for, is now suddenly here. In all likelihood, we can expect further crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic or of similar severity, especially in the context of climate change. They will render the 21st century radically different from the 20th: conventions, techniques, and social practices we are familiar with will disappear. Our responsibilities and roles as architects and urban planners will also change fundamentally in this process. We will work in increasingly volatile and vulnerable contexts and constellations.
 Until now, many actors in politics, but also in academia and research, have played down or denied the vulnerability of our urban structures to the risks that are the direct effects of our current way of life. In the search for alternative and, in a sense, more realistic perspectives, Jem Bendell’s concept of “Deep Adaptation”, which has been widely and controversially discussed since its first publication in 2018, calls for a shift: he urges us to prepare for the collapse of certain systems that currently govern our lives – and to see this as an opportunity for positive change.
 This change and the resulting challenges we are facing are primarily not technological, but above all social, economic, and organisational in nature. Moreover, they are highly interdependent and all-encompassing; they require systemic change, profound transformations, and adaptations of action. It is therefore not a question of developing technical solutions in isolation, but rather of fundamentally rethinking the way we live, operate, work, travel, and interact.
 This issue of SPOOL seeks to explore the spatial dimension of the Deep Adaptation concept and how it can be put to use in the spatial disciplines such as urban planning, landscape planning, urban design, and architecture.

Walking and telling the territory: reclaiming Mapuche planning through storytelling and land-based methodologies

ABSTRACT The spatial disciplines have slowly started to acknowledge their complicity with Indigenous dispossession in settler colonial contexts. Since early contact, instruments of land appropriation like surveying, mapping, town building, zoning, and place-naming have helped legitimise settler presence and imposed Western spatial relations over Indigenous territories. Indigenous planning – understood as planning by, for, and with Indigenous peoples grounded in their worldviews, values, and priorities – pre-dates and stands in stark contrast to dominant planning discourses. This paper offers methodological reflections on a participatory action research project that seeks to rebuild a Mapuche spatial planning knowledge base that still exists despite state-led attempts to disarticulate Mapuche socio-spatial relations. Within the logic of Indigenous resurgence, we consider the power of land-based walking and storytelling methodologies as tools to rebuild Mapuche spatial planning. By deepening embodied community knowledge of the land, renaming places, and (re)producing community-owned knowledge that refuses to be shared outwardly such methodologies not only contest the legitimacy of Western planning systems, but reassert the principles that have long guided Mapuche spatial planning and support the reconstruction of Mapuche territory. We also explore the limits of such approaches and whether they can reorient the ethics of Western planning towards Indigenous priorities.

Drinking the Winds: Monsoon as Atmospheric Spring

This paper explores monsoons as a set of atmospheric-orographic dynamics productive of water resources and as a site of actionable concern for landscape practice. From study to representation to design, the term “landscape practice” is used to describe a way of positioning environments as both subject and object of concern. While monsoons are constituents of many geographies, dynamics, materials and experiences, this paper focuses on the South Asian monsoon and its relationship with the Tibetan Plateau. In this region, freshwater resources are dependent on the monsoon; however, as rising global temperatures and rapid urban development significantly impact the behavior of the monsoon and the Plateau’s ability to store freshwater, the monsoon—as a kinetic body of freshwater—becomes the focal point of visual media productions and extractive technologies that require a shifting of perspective from one that privileges land to one that centers the atmosphere. The inclusion of meteorological and atmospheric material and dynamics within the space of landscape practice, constructively challenges the spatial discipline’s engagement with exploitable resources; and the monsoon provides a tangible site and set of conditions that is in urgent need of this exploration.

XR-Immersive Labs Improve Student Motivation to Learn Kinesiology

Kinesiology is an inherently spatial discipline, both physically and visually. The use of extended reality-immersive lab activities may enhance students’ motivation to learn by enabling students to interact with visual content and illustrate and demonstrate kinesiology content and concepts. Using an instrumental case study method, this article assesses the use of extended reality immersion across three semesters of an upper division kinesiology course focused on motor control. This is a unique approach because it blends established physical motor control and biomechanical data collection techniques with emerging virtual reality technology to enhance—rather than replace—the lab experience. The effectiveness is measured via an experimental design to contribute to the small, but growing, body of knowledge on the efficacy of immersive learning.

Building with landscape

The multi-dimensionality of BwN calls for the incorporation of ‘designerly ways of knowing and doing’ from other fields involved in this new trans-disciplinary approach. The transition out of a focus on rational design paradigms towards reflective design paradigms such as those employed in the spatial design disciplines may be a first step in this process. By extension, the knowledge base and design methodologies of BwN may be critically expanded by drawing on ways of knowing and doing in spatial design disciplines such as landscape architecture, which elaborates the agency of the term ‘landscape’ as counterpart to the term ‘nature’. Operative perspectives and related methodologies in this discipline such as perception, anamnesis, multi-scalar thinking, and process design resonate with specific themes in the BwN approach such as design of/with natural processes, integration of functions or layers in the territory and the connection of engineering works to human-social contexts. A series of installations realised for the Oerol festival on the island of Terschelling between 2011 and 2018 serve as case studies to elaborate potential transfers and thematic elaborations towards BwN. In these projects inter-disciplinary teams of students, researchers and lecturers developed temporary landscape installations in a coastal landscape setting. Themes emerging from these project include ‘mapping coastal landscapes as complex natures’, ‘mapping as design-generative device’, ‘crowd-mapping’, ‘people-place relationships’, ‘co-creation’, ‘narrating coastal landscapes’, ‘public interaction’ and ‘aesthetic experience’. Specific aspects of these themes relevant to the knowledge base and methodologies of BwN, include integration of sites and their contexts through descriptive and projective mappings, understanding the various spatial and temporal scales of a territory as complex natures, and the integration of collective narratives and aesthetic experiences of coastal infrastructures in the design process, via reflective dialogues.

Sulla centralità di spazio e territorio nel progetto di rigenerazione delle montagne e delle aree interne

The crisis brought on by Covid-19 has dramatically highlighted how the territorial dimension has long been excluded from national policies to be reduced to a mere diagrammatic and abstract space to be reduced in a mere diagrammatic and abstract space. An unphysicality of things that also goes through philosophies of smart or replicable best practices, in the idea that it is enough to follow a procedure to solve the complexities of contemporary life. The crisis has also brought to light the theme of internal, mountain and marginal areas, which have already received strong and growing attention in recent years. All the researches of the last few years demonstrate how the frontier of innovation is placed along the margin lines, in territories such as the Alpine and Apennine ones: regeneration projects based on culture, community cooperatives, resettlement that arises on the recovery of legacy and on the new technologies. These are experiments as fragile as the places they insist on, but where the territorial and spatial dimension plays an active and new role, which should be carefully observed thanks to the new openings it can offer. The essay identifies some nodes that arise from a long process of analysis and field experiences, and which intertwine two strategic issues: on the one hand, the need for policies capable of actively addressing the issue of territories – overcoming the contrast between socio-economic and spatial disciplines –, and on the other hand the project of reactivation and regeneration of mountain and marginal spaces.

Other rural livings: Contemporary rural dwelling phenomena in Colombia

This paper identifies and analyses three phenomena in the current situation of design of rural housing in Colombia, approached as cultural spatial situation, reviewing its causes and main characteristics. The phenomena are product of a search of new types of rural dwelling generated since 1990, that were classified in three groups based on the type of spatiality produced and their relation to rural territories. The types of housing include formal and informal design processes. The groups relate to the overlook of the rural context, the stereotyped rurality and the dwelling derived from political situations. The causes of these phenomena are also reviewed with focus on the role of the spatial disciplines such as architecture, design, planning and urbanism, on the development of rurality and on the role played by the State on the configuration of rural areas through policy, normative and institutional presence. The goal is to be able to understand what is happening in rural housing in the colombian situation and how the current facts can inform spatial disciplines, as architecture and design, in rural contexts in the near future.

Sanctuaries along Streets: Security, Social Intimacy and Identity in the Space of the Storefront Church

While storefront churches are pervasive in central city neighborhoods throughout the United States, the spatial disciplines have been slow to incorporate them as a subject of research. The current paper examines the emergence of storefront churches and the ways in which their interior spaces are adapted and experienced by their congregants and clergy. This paper brings to light how disenfranchised groups became associated with the storefront churches and contested a history of marginalization to create unique spaces of religious, social, and cultural importance for themselves. Observations of the arrangement of interior space, the use of everyday objects to shape religious and social gatherings, and in–depth interviews were conducted in seven storefront churches. The study found that clergy and congregants shared a history of migration from the rural South and that the churches generally adhered to southern forms of worship of the sanctified church. Storefront church space was adapted to support aspects of sanctified worship, along with particularistic forms of expressivity of each church's view of the world. The study provides insight into the ways in which storefront churches have emerged as an important space where marginalized groups shape their own designs for modes of worship, communion, and expressivity, disassociated from the dominant society.

As the drone flies: Configuring a vertical politics of contestation within forest conservation

This paper explores how the use of new monitoring technologies, including drones, are being incorporated into forest conservation, with emphasis on what is at stake politically for forest-based communities. This is a critical area to consider, as the cheapness and easy availability of drones has fostered their rapid proliferation in conservation practices, for activities as diverse as wildlife counting and fire prevention. Many have raised political concerns about these technological developments, and their potential to be used for the surveillance and spatial discipline of minority groups. For example, recent scholarship within political ecology, human geography and conflict studies makes clear that the regulatory frameworks of international conservation are being appropriated by states to pursue racialised agendas of social exclusion in former conflict zones – often with the support of international environmental actors. By justifying increased military presence; surveillance technologies; and stop-and-searches, conservation frameworks have facilitated the containment of “risky” populations and the production of new kinds of borders. However, few have yet explored what it will mean to incorporate drones into the production of territorial claims that can protect commons-based livelihoods and resist new forms of spatial enclosure. By examining the introduction of drones in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR) in the Petén region of Guatemala, I reveal how satellite technologies and drones are also being used as part of community-led resistance to dispossession. Here, drones are used as part of everyday conservation practices, as part of a socio-legal process that I describe as the configuration of a vertical politics of contestation. Following the history of technological innovation in the MBR leads me to show how, despite their associations with military containment, such technologies can be used to rework spatial orders imposed by states, international actors, the army and the national elite.

Cartography and the others – aspects of a complicated relationship

ABSTRACTCartographic visualizations have been known for thousands of years and have brought forth a wealth of different map projections and cartographic products. Yet, cartography as an independent science has been established only about 100 years ago and sometimes its position among the spatial disciplines is challenged by the scientific community. In this respect it is a young science based on a very long tradition of map making, globe production, and the development of map projections. Maps and map related visualizations play an important and indispensable role in many other spatial disciplines such as geography and geodesy. Cartography has many overlaps with these traditional disciplines as well as with the more recent ones of photogrammetry and remote sensing. This paper reviews fundamental aspects of the conception of space and time throughout human history, the historic development of cartography from a technique of map making to a spatial science, highlighting major milestones in the history of the discipline. As a young science and confronted with major technological developments in the late 20th century cartography underwent several crises as to what exactly is cartography and how it relates to other spatial sciences, in particular to geographic information systems. Major pitfalls and misconceptions are discussed and the three major scientific pillars of cartography are identified. The relationships of cartography with neighboring disciplines are discussed and the position of cartography vis a vis the others is delineated. Finally, desirable future developments of scientific cartography are discussed.

Urban secrets? Affinities and anthropologies of South African cities

This paper reflects on the discussions of a collective of academics in and around Johannesburg, Africa’s iconic city built on the extractive capital of gold mining. Captured aptly in William Kentridge’s art film Johannesburg: Second Greatest City after Paris (1989), the city is brought into an imaginary relationship with a romanticised Parisian experience. This comparison is taken up through an endeavour to read, re-read, imagine and re-imagine Johannesburg in relation to visions of the French capital contained in the writings in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project with its “convolutes” of the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century. The authors locate these discussions within debates addressed to urban anthropology in South Africa now, delving into the theories, methods and insights presented in a scholarly meeting and associated city tour held in 2017, and through the papers submitted for this special issue. This essay considers how an authorial collaboration comprising an anthropologist, historian and an architect might contribute differently to debates current in the spatial disciplines and anthropology, and how such a multi-disciplinary reading of a seminal text about a European city might resonate with our location in Southern Africa.

Scale matters: a survey of the concepts of scale used in spatial disciplines

ABSTRACT Scale is a critical factor when studying patterns and the processes that cause them. A variety of approaches have been used to define the concept of scale, but confusion and ambiguities remain regarding scale types and their definitions. The objectives of this study were, therefore: (1) to review existing types and definitions of scale, and (2) to systematically investigate the ambiguities in scale definitions and to determine the applicability of the various scale types and definitions. Through a comprehensive literature review, we identified seven types of scales and designed a survey for the seven definitions of scale and interviewed 150 scientists. The results show that the more cartography-related types of scale are relatively well known while the more abstract dimensions are less known and are most ambiguous. Based on graphical examples, participants were asked which spatial scales are most relevant for their work. Surprisingly, composite objects such as a forest stand were most relevant followed by individual objects such as single trees and, lastly, more generalized categorizes or meta-objects such as “forested area”. We have drawn some conclusions that help to clarify the different types of scale regarding their practical use.