What Has Happened to Territory?

TSEG - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History

This article explores the architectural and intellectual history of géographie volontaire, a series of experiments in inserting design volition into the study of territory. From the 1940s until the 1970s, an important group of geographers, engineers, state administrators, urban planners, and architects in France used the novel term géographie volontaire, or 'volitional geography,' to convey their ambitions for a comprehensive organization of space, from the modernization of housing and industry to the shaping of the national territory at large. It was therefore less a subdiscipline of geography than a particular logic for intervention, originating in wartime national planning and carried by the ambitions of postwar reconstruction and development. Focusing on the relationship between knowledge and design, the article reveals how géographie volontaire circulated in the institutions of government and the hallways of academia and how it shaped state-led architecture and planning projects. Corresponding to postwar revisions of international modernism, géographie volontaire extended the conventional scales of architecture and urbanism to the territorial. Yet more than just a change in scale, it implied both a particular political economy and a particular organization of knowledge. Shaped by the intersection of architectural and geographical knowledge, territory became a central logic for the state-led management of postwar capitalism.

The paper deals with the construction of landscape and its relationships with art works, architecture and a broader concept of territory with special focus on the role of sculpture.

Ingold has used Marx’s distinction between exchange value and use value to distinguish between land and landscape. Land, Ingold suggests, is abstracted, quantitative and interchangeable. Landscape, by contrast, is qualitative and emerges as habitation’s embodiment of the history of inhabitants’ activities, projects and livelihoods. We use this distinction to argue that the 1913 Land Act effectively created a white monopoly on the production of landscape. By closely considering some of the resulting landscapes, we argue that a significant consequence of this monopoly has been the emergence of what we call the territorial ontology. We characterize this ontology as a world in which land and landscape are collapsed into territory – a bounded, possessed collection of qualities value can be extracted from. This is the world of colonial modernity’s racialized relations of production. In the second part of our article, we examine the North-West University’s landscape art collection and using Ingold to illuminate the relationship between landscapes and representations of landscapes, we argue that these representations draw attention to the world and as such form a part of the complex holding the territorial ontology in place. After demonstrating that the territorial ontology has been central to the racialization of the relations of production in South Africa’s colonial modernity, we call for landscape restitution and suggest that universities are the spaces from which to lead this initiative. Keywords: landscape, territory, belonging, sovereignty

City, Territory and Architecture, 2018

Architectural Design, 2013

If the city is as much about culture as nature, then a cultural understanding of the shaping of the urban is as essential as a scientific one. Here, architect and critic Marina Lathouri, who directs the graduate programme in History and Critical Thinking at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, describes how the concept of planning in the 19th century became intrinsically linked to notions of territory, borders and spatial organisation. She questions whether this might now be tested, and new design technologies used, to expose underlying emerging patterns of disruptive flows beckoning the possibility of the logic of a new social disposition.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2015

These four books all, in different ways, rely upon and contribute to understandings of territory. They move from the very historical to the resolutely contemporary, and in two cases combine the political-historical in important and insightful ways. The most fully historical is Tom Scott's The City-state in Europe, which takes a broad comparative approach to the formation and transformation of polities in Western Europe from the high Middle Ages to the beginning of the early Modern period. One of its key contributions is to offer analysis of city-states outside of the Italian peninsula. While it does discuss this area at some length, it also has insightful analysis of other parts of Europe, including the geographical region of Germany and some especially helpful discussion of Switzerland. The reading of Cologne, for example, notes how the extent of the city's power extended unevenly from its urban centre. The region must not, we are told, "be seen as uniform or integrated, a clearly delineated market area functioning as a contado by other means". Instead, different trade markets extend in uneven ways, creating what Scott calls a "variable geometry" which distinguishes the economic region of Cologne from a "territorial city-state" (page 147). This outlining of the multiple political-spatial forms which cities could take in relation to surrounding areas is one of the best aspects of the book. In this respect, the subtitle is revealing (see page 236). The analysis does indeed provide some valuable insights into the shifting interrelation between hinterland, territory, and region. One of the key developments in this period was from cities that had territories, in the classical Latin sense of surrounding lands, to territories within which there were cities-a more modern understanding that has become the dominant meaning. The older idea of a territory was indeed much closer to that of a hinterland, of areas outside an urban core. If the book lacks an explicit analysis of this transition in theoretical terms, it provides a great deal of historical-geographical detail that is very helpful in tracing those larger processes. The book as a whole tends to shy away from broad generalisations, but provides the kind of specificity that those kinds of analyses are often forced to neglect (see Elden, 2013). The book's strength, then, is in the historical evidence provided, in the documentary resources mobilized and the ability to work with sources in multiple languages. It is less secure conceptually, with occasional frustrating ambiguity. At one point Scott notes that "we are only tangentially concerned" with political theory (page 51), and this shows in the imprecision with which key terms are used. Unfortunately, one of these is the very idea of territory, which is often used to translate quite disparate terms. For example, with respect † A review of The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty by

Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales

Based on Florian Mazel’s book L’évêque et le territoire. L’invention médiévale de l’espace (ve–xiiie siècle), this article seeks to revisit the spatial turn that has marked medieval studies in France over the last thirty years. Historians of dominium in the feudal period draw on the phenomena of incastellamento or inecclesiamento to suggest a territorial anchoring of populations around the “poles” or “cells” of domination represented by the castle, the church, the cemetery, and the parish. Mazel, however, offers a reflection on another scale. He sees territory as a space for the expression of political sovereignty, with the Church and its establishment of a new form of spatiality—the diocese—preceding the state as an institution realized via a territorial construction. Through its focus on the diocese, this analysis concentrates on a scale which makes sense within a general hierarchical dynamic of ecclesial spatialization, from top to bottom, from local to universal. But it also and...

Croatian International Relations Review, 2014