Spatiality and visualisation of the everyday: nature-culture in Tallinn’s urban fringe Tiina Peil...

Spatiality and visualisation of the everyday: nature-culture in Tallinn’s urban

fringeTiina PeilCentre for Landscape and CultureEstonian Institute of Humanitiestiina.peil@tlu.ee

• cultural materialism (Denis Cosgrove)• theorisation of nature (Neil Smith)• non-representational theory (Nigel Thrift)• materialist semiotics (Sarah Whatmore)

Hybrid geographies – physical and human geography

Relationship between language and spatial consciousness

Geographers come armed with

Nature ----- Culture

wildnatural

domesticatedartificial

Adding SPACE

countryrural

townurban

Adding TIME

and SCALE ?

Pragmatist suspicion of fixed dualisms separating humans from nature but useful as analytical categories

Individuallocal

collectiveglobal

Result: a complex, formidably polysemic or semantically promiscuous ‘object of inquiry’

Spatiality

...defined as any property relating to or occupying space

...refers to – material spaces – spatial metaphors

...a metonymic bridge between metaphor and personal experience

Space and experience: the everyday affect & emotions

There is great power in being able to see the world as one will and then to have that vision enacted. But if being is seeing for the subject, then being seen is the precise measure of existence for the object.

Williams 1991, 28

Naturalisation of culture & culturalisation of nature

Materiality of representations – substancephysical presence, coded forms, visual/ made visual

Visualisation

...the formation of mental images

...a survey of the world and a tradition of maps / the inherent spatiality of maps

...a tension between showing the data, showing the world that the data represent, and providing abstractions and indicative interpretations (boundedness, convention)

Research focus...

How cultures value nature?How these insights can be institutionalised,

routinised, or embodied in a culture of nature?What is perceived as nature?

perception grades into action

How we organise the spaces in which we live?

...is the process of making our domesticated worlds

Tallinn urban fringe

• Ordering nature– gardens, parks– roads– signs

• Interpreting nature– agricultural landscapes

as nature– the country and the city

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