Geographical fieldwork

This article introduces the special issue 'Field as Archive / Archive as Field': a set of critical reflections on archival research and fieldwork in academic studies focused on space. The special issue asks, how might the experience of carrying out research in the archive and the field, with all its contingencies and errancies, be taken seriously as empirical material in its own right? In other words, rather than reducing the research process to an empirically insignificant instrument through which to access useable data, how could scholars and practitioners of architecture treat this work as the very stuff of the histories, theories, criticisms, and/or practices they produce? In raising these questions that remain relatively underexplored, especially in architectural research, this special issue works from the contemporary historical juncture that is marked by an increasing visibility of rhetorical and physical hostility throughout social and political affairs. Probing how this historical juncture might impact and be impacted by spatial research, contributors to the special issue explore these impacts through the markedly urban and architectural registers in which they take place, including heritage, infrastructure, displacement, housing, and protest. They, moreover, do so through a variety of contexts relevant to the journal's scope: Egypt, Zanzibar, Turkey, Greece, Iran, and Israel/Palestine.

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Gdańsk lies at the mouth of the Vistula River, which has highly contributed to the development of Gdańsk. With no doubt, the city would not have reached such a high level of advancement without the Vistula River, which has dictated the level of prosperity of the city for many centuries. There comes up the question: to what extent is the Vistula River responsible for the development of Gdańsk, as there are also other assets that could have impact on many aspects of the changes? To answer this question, the project " The role of the Vistula River in development of Gdańsk " was prepared in November 2014.
This article shows the main ideas of this project made by 28 bilingual students of High School No. 3 in Gdańsk. Their individual research and group work in the field are a good occasion to observe cognitive activities of the students. Some reflections of the supervisor of this project related to these activities are included in this work.