Anne Buttimer

In this chapter, I examine directions for lifeworld research today, giving particular attention to recent phenomenological studies on place. I identify four important assumptions that underlie a phenomenological understanding of lifeworld and then draw on the concept of place to clarify some of the lifeworld’s social, environmental, spatial, and geographical aspects. As a means to concretize my discussion, I draw on descriptive evidence from British writer Penelope Lively’s Spiderweb, a 1990s novel describing one outsider’s efforts to come to inhabit a place—a fictitious present-day village in the southwestern British county of Somerset (Lively 1998).

In this paper, I reflect on the theme of Neo-Lamarckian possibilism, which was grafted from the school of regional geography. I examine the proposed bilateral relationship between human societies and their natural environments that were theorized by Western academics from the 19th to early 20th centuries. Focusing on three early proponents of this line of thinking, Friederich Ratzel, Paul Vidal de la Blache, and Carl Sauer, I argue that they pioneered and have since captured Western imaginations on geography, development and expansion, though today we engage similar discussions in a post-colonial veil. In treating the region as an object of study, early modern geographers like Ratzel, Vidal de la Blache, and Sauer managed to marry an inherent legitimizing clause for the consolidation of peoples and places, that is, the region was permitted to be an objective. This differs from the geography familiar to Strabo and Varenius, as they used knowledge of regions to serve military intelligence or commercial intrigues, to give an advantage for conquest or trade, in order to obtain more resources, power or even glory, whereas Neo-Lamarckian possibilist theories of regional geography legitimized conquest. Instead of aiding conquest, expansionist conquest was made to be part of the course of history, and thus, permitted. The "laws" that these academics described and discovered from the realm of regional geography were natural, as they were inspired by the natural sciences, from a stream of biology called Lamarckism, hence the name, Neo-Lamarckism; these laws dictated a projection or destiny for humankind, and more importantly, the West's role in that destiny. Expansion and consolidation were phenomenon, that is, tendencies that are unavoidable, inevitable, natural, and therefore political yet amoral.

In this chapter, I examine how the ideas of three current researchers—architect Christopher Alexander, architectural theorist Bill Hillier, and political philosopher Daniel Kemmis—provide important new insights for understanding the urban lifeworld and for making more vibrant places. I argue that these thinkers’ conceptions of place, though considerably different in some ways, can be drawn together to offer a powerful understanding of how physical-spatial and human worlds might mutually sustain each other by bringing human beings together informally and thereby generating a sense of togetherness, particularly in cities. In turn, this possibility of spontaneous geographical gathering can support a liveliness of place and one kind of implicit environmental belonging.

Description

This piece of literary geography examines the relationship between landscape and identity in the works of nine Irish writers who published English language novels between 1929-1946. Focusing upon the distinct lebenswelt experiences and depictions by these Irish writers, an engagement with Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘Historical Poetics’ sets the periodicity of early post- independent and partioned Ireland in rhythm with the distinct senses of place and spaces of culture to which each writer’s works give birth. This book contains four color photographs.

Reviews

“This book offers a highly evocative read for scholars in the entire spectrum of the human sciences. Among its most eager readers in twenty-first century Europe may be those twentieth century emigrants who returned ‘home,’ after many years of longing, to discover dramatically transformed - and often unwelcoming — ‘chronotopes.’ This book could yield an important on lesson potential connections between liminality and creativity.” – Professor Emeritus Anne Buttimer, University College Dublin

Anne Buttimer (1938-2017) was doubtlessly one of the most prestigious international and transnational figures of humanistic and critical geographies in the last fifty years. Yet, her intellectual legacy seems to be still neglected or poorly understood. Drawing upon recent literature in cultural and historical geographies on the use of archives and primary sources for performing archaeologies of knowledge to better understand the construction of ideas, this paper presents the study of Buttimer's archives as a way for rediscovering this outstanding scholarly figure and for allowing international geographical scholarship to reengage with her ideas. An exceptional and multilingual collection including books, correspondence and work materials, Buttimer's archives are held at UCD School of Geography and will be the object of both inventory and research projects in the next few years. In presenting this collection, our argument is twofold. First, Anne Buttimer was a cosmopolite, transnational and socially engaged figure, whose networking with international exponents of radical geography in the 1970s and 1980s needs reappraisal to reflect on what she called 'accountability', i.e. the social role of the researcher. Second, her legacy still nourishes critical discourses challenging what she called the danse macabre of 'inhuman geographies'. As Anne refused all labels, including that of a 'humanistic geographer', we define her work as a drive towards 'humane geographies', drawing upon the definition of 'humane sciences' already developed in critical scholarly traditions such as humanitarianism and anarchism.

An underdeveloped focus regarding nostalgia is ‘the urban’ realm. A greying society, societal upheaval, lack of empirical (Dutch) research on urban nostalgia, the need for a theory-inclined approach and a stimulus for new academic exploration make this study relevant. The primary objective is to gain new insights regarding the elderly people’s experience of place, while using these to give direction to the development of a theory on urban nostalgia. Methodologically, a re-photography, semi-structured interviews with residents of Tilburg aged 63 years and older, and archive research have been conducted. The analysis was done via Atlas.TI and has been structured along (1) the ‘what’ and (2) the ‘how’ of urban nostalgia. The ‘what’ exposed the presence of personal, inter-relational and ‘everyday’ (‘social’) objects as well as architectural, urbanistic and ecological (‘spatial’) objects of nostalgia. The ‘how’ showed a variety of expressions, such as critical, forward-looking, reflective, restorative, meliorative, conservative, ambiguous, comparative, adaptive, contrasted and integrative nostalgia. The findings indicate the need to consider elderly resident’s experience to space and place in the perspective of attractiveness and place-making. Future research on gender, age, education and ethnicity differences as well as on other cities could enhance in-depth understanding of the topic.