New Books In Geography

More and more of the world is living in cities, yet we rarely stop to examine how our spaces are organised and controlled. In a remarkable new book, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso, 2013), Bradley Garrett tells the story of his urban explorations that attempt to show the space from an entirely new viewpoint. The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork with a community of urban explores that begins in London and takes on global sites in the development of what the book refers to as ‘place hacking’. The explorers unearth the hidden histories of the London Underground, experience sites (and sights) of seemingly closed neo-liberal capital’s constructions and point to ways that the city could be a space for creativity beyond the blandness of coffee and consumer culture. Fundamentally Explore Everything aims to ensure we never look at our city spaces in the same ways again. Unusually for a book informed by critical theory, the text is richly illustrated with photographs taken as

Americans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coastal nation; it’s become one again. According to John R. Gillis‘s provocative new book The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the same may be said of the entire world. Humans, he says, started–or rather quickly became after they evolved in eastern Africa 200,000 ago–a coastal species. We stayed very close to the oceans and seas until the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Thereafter, we moved into various interiors. Now, he says, we are moving back to the shore in force. We are transforming it and, alas, destroying much of it. Gillis calls on us to think of the shore not as a place to settle, but a habitat that is essential to our future prosperity and, one might say, survival. Listen in.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m

The story opens with a closing and closes with an opening. The closing is the sale of the map of Martin Waldseemuller, “America’s birth certificate,” for $10 million to the Library of Congress. The opening is the illumination of a grave as you, the reader, turn on a light to read the sunken stone. In the space between these two moments, each centered on a thing displayed (a map on a wall, a body under your feet), the story of a third object emerges from amid the threads of the people, languages, relationships, wars, and seas with which it has been entangled for more than 400 years. Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer (Bloomsbury, 2013) explores the secrets of a map in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. In a beautifully written historical mystery, Timothy Brook follows the map from its arrival at the Library after the death of a late owner, a scholar who helped found the field of international law and found himself jailed by two kings along

You’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of Exploration (and really it wasn’t even that, because the people who lived in what we now call “Europe” didn’t think of themselves as “Europeans” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but no matter…). There were, however, other Ages of Exploration. Giancarlo Casale‘s wonderful book is about one of them, one you haven’t heard of. It’s called, appropriately enough, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford UP, 2010) and is about–you guessed it–the Ottoman Age of Exploration. Like their “European” counterparts, the Ottoman explorers were pursuing two interests: spices and salvation. The former were found (largely) in Southern Asia and the latter was of course in Mecca. To ensure access to both, the Ottomans built–nearly from scratch–an large,

Why the heck is “America” called “America” and not, say, “Columbia?” You’ll find the answer to that question and many more in Toby Lester‘s fascinating and terrifically readable new book The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name (Free Press, 2009). As Toby points out, medieval Europeans thought the earth had three parts–Europe, Asia and Africa, with Jerusalem at the dead center and water all around. (And no, they didn’t think the earth was flat…). But in 1507 a peculiar item appeared–the Waldseemuller map— that outlined a fourth part of the world called “America,” with the Atlantic Ocean on the one side and an unnamed ocean on the other. Here’s the really curious thing though: at that time no European had ever seen what we now call the “Pacific Ocean.” Balboa was the first to see it, and he didn’t do so until 1513. So

You’ve probably heard of the Hudson River, and you may have even heard of Hudson Bay. But have you ever heard of Henry Hudson? Well you should, and now thanks to Peter Mancall‘s page-turning Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson (Basic Books, 2009) you can. And very pleasurably at that. Hudson was an explorer. He was looking for fame and fortune, both of which happened to be located in what Europeans called the “South Sea,” that is, the Pacific Ocean. For there were found the Spice Islands on which could be found (you guessed it) spices. These spices were incredibly valuable. A boatload of spices was worth a boatload of cash. Hudson knew it, and so did everyone else. The problem was that it was hard to get there, particularly from England. One had to sail around Africa, and that was no easy trick. So Hudson set about looking for a Northeast (above Russia) and Northwest (above Canada) passage. In point of fact the former exists, though only modern icebreakers (often nuclea

This week we have Professor Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa on the show talking about his new book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Professor Gordon is the author of two previous monographs, Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2004) and New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Mapping Decline breaks new ground not only in our understanding of the decay of the American inner-city, but also in its use of quantitative data in combination with GIS mapping technologies. The book is full of beautiful maps that paint a vivid, if somewhat depressing, picture of American urban history. Philip J. Ethington of the University of Southern California calls Mapping Decline “a searing indictment of policymakers, realtors, and mortgage lenders for deliberate decisions that sacrificed their own city of St. Louis on the alt