Rescue geography hit the University of Manchester today, with a repeat of last month's seminar for my new (ish now) colleagues. Again I was slightly hesitant presenting something which is very much a 'work in progress', and again there were people in the audience who list GIS amongst their primary research interests (yikes).
But again the response was really positive, with another set of highly thoughtful comments at the end for us to muse upon. I'm going to list them here so that they are recorded somewhere other than my own wetware...
KW suggested that the tension between lived and planned space in the sustainability process was akin to that between use value and exchange value... prompting some interesting thoughts about how the notion of sustainability might be positioned within wider academic debates. This resonated with what Sunand Prashed had said about sustainability needing to be the balance between modernity and tradition last week... Another paper idea to chuck on the back-burner...
He also mentioned Jane Jacobs work on forensic geographies, where she recovers artefacts from a condemned Glaswegian tower block, which really reminded me of the paper I saw a few years ago where a New York artist was trying to capture the sense of place attached to a condemned tenement block. Wish I could remember their name...
CP asked a whole series of questions... luckily for me none of them were technical GIS questions! Must buy him a drink sometime... The one I didn't answer was why we were using Google, an evil multinational company, for something that we want to be public... well I guess the answer is that the public all use Google, so to reach them we must too... there are definitely more issues to go into here though.
NC asked why we didn;t just use maps and draw where we went on them, which made me realise that time is as important as space in terms of this project. We need to know where AND when people say things. Also, despite the teething problems with the equipment, once you get these tracklogged transcripts there are so many things that you can do with them.
MJ pointed out that walking interviews might actually confine or tie the conversation to the surrounding environment, which was something I hadn't considered.
BR and JB (and some others) raised the question about sampling and representativeness, and how this may be a problem if we start feeding 'results' into planning processes.
BR also suggested using the same route for respondents, which would allow for greater comparability. We had considered this, but decided against it, I guess because it would preclude exploration of memories and personal attachments. It did make me think that there are effectively two levels of environmental prompts: there are the purely functional / practical, like noise levels, and then there are the highly subjective, like attachments to place. The project will definitely work on the first level, but how much rigour we can bring to our analysis of the second level is less certain.
The only bad thing was that I seemed to go on for longer this time... Hope I'm not turning into a bore... no really... it keeps me awake at night... perhaps I need help...