What is the Spatial Turn? Jo Guldi What is a turn?

Humanities scholars speak of a quantitative turn in history in the 1960s, a linguistic and cultural turn of the 1980s in history and literature, and even more recently an animal turn. Beyond the academy, to turn implies retrospection, a process of stopping in the road and glancing backwards at the way by which one has come. May the weary traveler turn from lifes dusty road and in the wayside shade, out of this clear, cool fountain drink, and restR. E. Speer, Robert Burns, Nassau Literary Magazine 43 (1888): 469. Landscape turns and spatial turns are referred to throughout the academic disciplines, often with reference to GIS and the neogeography revolution that puts mapping within the grasp of every high-school student. By turning we propose a backwards glance at the reasons why travelers from so many disciplines came to be here, fixated upon landscape, together. For the broader questions of landscape worldview, palimpsest, the commons and community, panopticism and territoriality are older than GIS, their stories rooted in the foundations of the modern disciplines. These terms have their origin in a historic conversation about land use and agency. This essay documents the contributions of the university disciplines in the period from 1880 to 1960, a moment supremely fertile for academic discourse, when scholars in history, religion, and psychology reflected on our nature as beings situated in space. This spatial moment represented the flowering of social commitment on the part of public intellectuals who addressed the struggles over space that surrounded them. From the 1840s forward, much of western Europe was engaged in a conversation about land reform that pitted the new stewards of expert-led bureaucracy civil engineers, urban planners, and foresters against traditional communities and their intellectual spokespeople: Chartists Marxists, Fabians, and legal reformers. From the 1880s forward, legal scholars, archaeologists and historians fixed on the history of the commons as a source of records about community where records about spatial practice disclosed notions of collective ownership rarely documented in the textual tradition. Public intellectuals like legal scholar Henry Maine, philosopher Ernst Cassirer, urban historian Lewis Mumford, journalist Walter Lippmann, and religious scholar Mircea Eliade combed through historical records, proposed theories of spatial experience, and promoted the terminology of commons, palimpsest, and pseudoenvironment, attempting to coin a universal language for describing spatial experience and its artificial manipulation. In the decades that followed, literary scholars, art historians, and social historians drew on ethnographic methods to document the worldview by which collective societies brokered their relationship to land. Only after 1970 did these languages begin the process of convergence, encouraged by the importation of French theory, in particular the work of Foucault, Lefebvre, de Certeau, and Virilio, which newly emphasized the power relations implicit in landscape under general headings like abstract space, place, and symbolic place, interpreted through new spatial metaphors like panopticism. The resultant spatial turn in literature and art history of the 1970s and 80s did not so much rewrite the old concerns as treat them with an attention to capitalism, surveillance, and power hitherto practiced

only within the realm of social history. In departments of Geography, this vocabulary was elaborated into theories of the relationship between power and space territoriality, Masseys power geometry, and Harveys space-time compression. In the social sciences and humanities, scholars returned to urban history and environmental studies with a renewed interest in the microcosms of everyday life and the macrocosms of global flows. These spatial impulses took a deeper hold with the influx of digital tools. Developed in the 1960s by the Canada Land Inventory, GIS was adapted for use in the social scientists and humanities Beginning in the 1990s with the GIS survey of ancient Corinth, the uses of GIS began to tempt scholars in archaeology and economic history with a vision of rigorously measurable, infinitely sharable information. By enhancing the clarity with which scholars could speak of spatial problems, GIS encouraged the reopening of spatial questions in the disciplines. Beyond the academy, GIS opened questions of vertigo-inspiring scale. By scraping spatial data from archives of unprecedented vastness, researchers stood a better chance than ever before of addressing problems of tremendous size. Cartographic projects like Saul Griffiths maps of land use helped researchers to ask whether in the future we would indeed be able to depend entirely on renewable energy or would be necessarily forced into reckoning with nuclear options. The spatial turn represents the impulse to position these new tools against old questions. In the pages of contemporary journals, sociologists turn back to Simmel, historians of technology to Mumford, and literary historians to Benjamin. We remember that every discipline in the humanities and social sciences has been stamped with the imprint of spatial questions about nations and their boundaries, states and surveillance, private property, and the perception of landscape, all of which fell into contestation during the nineteenth century. Reviewing the period of spatial emergence from 1880 to 1960 can help us understand the imprint of these questions and the direction that interdisciplinary collaboration may take in the spatial era of GIS. ART AND GEOGRAPHY

The contemporary art world has gravitated toward notions of space and place with terms such as in situ, outdoor and alternative space becoming ubiquitous in its terminology. Further examples of art-geography hybridization include use of geolocation, georeferencing, fieldwork methodologies, and other geographical input in the creative process and in the appearance or significance of resulting works. Consequently, art critics and scholars increasingly view issues pertaining to public space, environment, and virtual space as prime topics of concern. Yet if art practice is engaged with a spatial turn then geography too is adopting and adapting art practice to the geographical imagination. Indeed, maps may be viewed as artworks; map-making as a creative process; and fieldwork methodologies as essentially artistic practices. A further aspect of the art-geography nexus concerns arts engagement with contemporary spatial development planning and practice. From the branding of artist districts to festivalisation and local policies based on cultivating, promoting and clustering creative industries, artists are now seen as key players in the urban development

game. This poses a new set of opportunities and challenges for artists to engage with revitalization processes, and also opens up new areas for critical research.

With such developments in how space and place are experienced in contemporary art, and how art is conceptualised and utilised in geography and allied disciplines, we believe now is a good time to take stock and cast a critical eye over the various art and geography interrelationships. Consequently, this conference brings together artists and geographers, as well as representation from throughout and beyond the academy, for discussion, exchange, and mutual learning. Guiding topics for include but are not limited to: the emergence of contemporary art in geographical knowledge; its various theoretical underpinnings and methodological foundations. When and how conversations between geography and other better-established art disciplines started. How geographers claim, complement or challenge extant approaches. the forms of the spatial turn in contemporary art and the ways in which geography (and its theories of space, place and spatiality) contributes to define arts relational or contextual nature. The use of the tools and modalities of geographical knowledge in contemporary art, including maps and map-making, fieldwork, and documentary practices. relationship(s) between art and geography in the making of knowledge of/about space and place, their relation to space, place and to regimes of geographical knowledge production. the strategies used by artists to address social concerns and engage with spatial development and engineering. How do artists, art scholars, and geographers, with their diverse approaches, register and critically reflect on these new developments?