Category: Human Geography
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Fossilised politics
What I’ve found over the last few years, particularly as I’ve engaged with the lives of environmental activists through the now concluding OHEM project is that the continuing arch of the twenty-first century’s history will be inseparable from the politics of energy; in the broadest sense of the word. How…
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Architecture and Power: Trump 2.0 and what it means for the city
Anyone who has sat through one of my lectures on cities will be sick of hearing that the built environment is never a politically neutral plane. Architecture and urban planning have always served as tools for political ideologies, shaping not only skylines but also the societies that inhabit them; and…
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The Bear: Gentrification & its discontents
The opening shot of the highly acclaimed TV show ‘The Bear’ sees the main character Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto staring down a caged brown bear in the heart of Chicago’s downtown. The motif, evidently a dream, nightmare or general vision rather than actual events, serves a telling mark not only of…
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Exploring Blackness of the Inner City: A Review of Netflix’s “The Kitchen”
As an urban geography professor, there are some films that are so on the nose with regard the themes that pervade my teaching and research encounters that they demand a closer inspection: and Netflix’s The Kitchen by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya is one such film. Set in a near…
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Pixel 8’s ‘best take’ and the Digital Dystopia
By now, you will have no doubt seen adverts for the new Pixel 8 mobile phone. One of it’s key new innovative features is it’s AI-infused camera technology, notably ‘best take’ (advertised above, if you can stomach it). This feature, which the adverts are keen to show in a fun,…
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Juxtaposition in the Capitalocene
One of the fundamental epistemological tenants of the Capitalocene can be analysed via a rather old-fashioned motif: a geographical, specifically, a scalar narrative. That is because our current conjuncture compels us to confront a stark and often discordant juxtaposition: one that chaotically zooms from the cosmological, the planetary, the national,…
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In Praise of the Pub Crawl
Monopoly Pub Crawl Route: Taken from https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/8mjd27/we_did_the_monopoly_pub_crawl_for_my_stag_do/ In the emotionally-draining, exploitative and burn-out fuelling drudgery of modern urban capitalist life, there are decreasingly few means of escape in which new spaces of the city are explored unintentionally, and new social connections can be forged. Within this urban hellscape though, a…
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Walking the Edge: The interstitiality of the Blackwater Valley Path
I’ve lived in the Blackwater Valley area for nearly a decade now, and as a keen runner and walker, I have frequently come across the wayfinding infrastructure of the Blackwater Valley Path. It became one of those ritualistic things whereby I would mentally log that I needed to research the…
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CfP RGS-IBG 2022 – Food for thought: The political potentiality of mutual aid food provision networks
August 30th – September 2nd 2022, Newcastle University Sponsored by the Social Cultural Geography Research Group (SCGRG) and Food Geographies Research Group (FGRG). Organisers: Oli Mould, Jenni Cole and Adam Badger (Royal Holloway, University of London) Of the many horrific outcomes of the coronavirus disaster, the wellspring of mutual aid…
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A line of flight? A Psychogeographic venture on Newcastle’s Skywalks
Newcastle was once touted as the ‘Brasilia of the North‘ by an ambitious town planner, T. Dan Smith. That was back in the 1960s when cities were seen as plastic crucibles to mould into concrete utopias, but half a century (and a corruption conviction again the Labour City Councillor that…
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