This article examines how narratives mediate human interactions with environments to create a sense of place and identity. We begin with a review of the Greek poem Phaenomena to see how constellations brought a human dimension to the cosmos as well as a sense of predictability. A review of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea illustrates the conception of indifferent space that erases the human presence, and how the imagination comes into play to fill the void. We examine how narratives work to model aspects of environments and draw out meaning where before there was raw substance. Two seminal poems of Baudelaire then present a more subjective modeling of the environment. Pablo Neruda let his poetic vision be reflected in his three homes as protective playgrounds for his imagination. The article concludes that the models we examined are sheltering niches that help us feel at home in the world. As environments turn out to be more interactive, fragile, and complex than previously thought, our narratives also have to reflect on their impact on the sense of home they propose.

This article attempts to explain how the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 was uniquely different from previous exhibitions and sought to resolve a longstanding tension between a vision of the future and longing for the past. In particular, it addresses how ideas of the everyday were redirected towards functionalism in a joyful festive context through the agency of consumer desire. It also explains how the exhibition attempted to relate to Skansen, a nearby museum of the Swedishvernacular and how Gunnar Asplund’s concepts of functionalism reflect Heidegger’s principles of dwelling. Finally, using Foucault’s concepts of ‘other’ spaces, it shows how the Stockholm Exhibition served as a heterotopia of the future that collaborated actively with a heterotopia of the past to make a more convincing case to a mass audience about the appropriateness of functionalism in Sweden.

Cities around the globe are immersed in transnational projects of place reconfiguration and attraction. Urban places, intent on competing in the globalized experience-based economy, undertake identity projects—on-going, dynamic processes through which places are produced and reproduced by conscious strategies of place making and identity building (see, for example, Nyseth and Viken 2009). In this article, I employ Henri Lefebvre’s conceptions of a “right to the city” in order to explore the right to full participation in imagining and shaping urban futures. Spatial practices, such as those I term civic tinkering, may offer one way to help enable such imagining.My discussion draws from scholarship on imaginaries and place identity, as well as on my own qualitative field studies conducted in Roanoke, Virginia, in the United States, and Belfast, Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. While my precise research questions differed in these two sites, I explored, in each instance, the processes of place identification and development centered on arts and culture, and the extent to which marginal groups and their concerns were engaged or considered in such processes. I also explore “tinkering” as a set of activities that hold potential for residents to more fully participate in the urban project byconstructing, altering, and disrupting spatial meanings. Tinkering may be any impermanent, unsanctioned, and informal activity endeavoring to positively alter a city’s identity. Henri Lefebvre described the relevance of such practices in his vision of the city as oeuvre, or ongoing project.

Mountain peaks, like all uninhabitable and barely accessible environments, stand in the way of a clear-cut distinction between “place” and “space.” Building on the environmental thought of Aldo Leopold, as well as the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and twentieth-century phenomenology, I draw attention to this obscure in-between region and argue that the conceptual distinction must be subject to careful adumbration, depending on the concrete place where it is employed. Subsequently, mountains are theorized as the sites of friction between earth and world, where sovereign authority and objectivizing thinking are equally suspended.

Central to several current philosophical projects is determining which conversational conventions will best locate and accommodate all the required participants. This article follows Troy Paddock’s lead in exploring a number of conventions currently on offer, particularly Heidegger’s aesthetic nearness-to-hand and Latour’s scientific Actor-Network-Theory. This article also introduces Donald Davidson’s social triangulation as a complementary model of approach: one thatimplicates propositional agents in potentially revealing relations. It concludes that a close study of implicational, as distinct from inferential, argument and judgment may prove profitable in establishing a secure and productive environment, and may foster the emergence of modeling techniques and metrics that could help in designing such conversations.

This article argues that sustainability is essentially a contested concept that not only cannot be sufficiently defined in a one-forall blueprint, but requires a new mode of self-actualization of human potential in dialogical, cooperative learning processes. Inherent aporias and their ethical implications are illustrated by an analysis of the mainstream interpretation of the sustainability concept in the context of the relationship between the logic of accumulation and improvement and insatiable human desires as off-springs of a deeper ontological transformation of modernity. A philosophical account of technology and modern sciencewill be introduced in order to investigate overconsumption driven by mimetic desires and the transformative and dialectic dynamics of desire. A contemplative learning model is suggested as a useful basis for a reasonable interpretation of the sustainability concept.

It has been argued by philosophers and cultural historians that the notion of wilderness as it has been developed in the West problematically separates—conceptually and practically—humans from wild nature. The human/wilderness dichotomy, it is said, potentially leads even well-intentioned, environmentally minded people to work for wilderness preservation at the expense of paying attention to our local, lived environment. Although Henry David Thoreau and John Muir are often taken to be key architects of the inherited notion of wilderness, I draw from their differing descriptions of spending time in wild areas in orderto argue that Thoreau provides a view of the human-nature relationship that is not susceptible to this particular worry. Thoreau, much more than Muir, provides us with reasons to not ignore our local lived space in favor of protecting only more wild (i.e., less humanized) places. The contrast between the two does not diminish the value of Muir’s work, but it does remind us that key figures—Thoreau in this case—in the development of the dominant wilderness paradigm should not be set aside as unhelpful in our own efforts to better understand our relationship with local place.

Since European settlement, the Western calendar has insufficiently accounted for the seasonal nuances and multiple temporalities of Australia. Beginning with Tim Entwistle’s recent proposal to revise the four-season Australian norm, this article traces the emergence of the Western calendar in Europe and its institutionalization ‘Down Under.’ With its emphasis on land-based calendars, the Indigenous Weather Knowledge Project (IWKP) is a partnership between Aboriginal communities and the Bureau of Meteorology aimed at preserving and promoting knowledge of the endemic seasons of Australian regions. As themost recent addition to the IWKP, the six-season Nyoongar calendar of the South-West of Western Australia is based on meteorological conditions (ecological time), such as wind directions and temperatures, but also on the procurement of food, maintenance of cultural knowledge, and performance of ceremonies (structural time). Through the fusion of phenomenological (experiential, sensory, place-based, actual) and phenological (cognitive, visual, enumerative, digital) approaches, the endemic seasons of Australia can be appreciated in their depth and extent.

John Kinsella’s twentieth volume of poetry is laden with a poetics of attention to time, water and heat. Climate inheres in simplified topographical sketches, surveys and encounters with animals; water is ambiguous: a solid presence that is also fluid, subject to evaporation and often modelled as multi-dimensional motion; universalised western seasons are used rhetorically and symbolically to bring into relief little seasons within seasons, the more spatially and temporally localised markers of change. All these speak directly to the function of the image and terrestrial matter (“Matter is dreamed and not perceived”: Bachelard),and how poetry is alert to such conditions. Kinsella has conceived of this as a “clash between linguistic anomaly and environmental exactness.”

This article seeks to introduce the topics of green schools and sustainability education to the reader as the first article in a series of pieces on such subject matters. With respect to the first essay, the modern historical development of sustainability related education is assessed through the lens of its roots in both the U.S. educational system and the environmental movement. Furthermore, many of the purported benefits of green school construction practices are examined subsequently given their relative importance and popularity with respect to the topic. Finally, a brief but important examination is proffered per several of the philosophical ramifications of these efforts in an effort to further develop the understanding and discussion of such topics and the related series of articles.

This article takes a look back at the historical and philosophical context of the International Map of the World, humans’ first attempt at mapping the entire surface of the earth in detail on a uniform scale. Albrect Penck’s initial idea for a thoroughly detailed topographic map of the world, proposed at Fifth International Geographical Conference in 1891 and securing the support, both symbolic and financial, of many of the world’s governments by the first decades of the twentiethcentury, consisted of a uniform series of hypsometrically-colored topographical maps overlaid with human data (urbanized areas, railroads, and other infrastructure, primarily) and dividing the world into consistently-scaled quadrangles. Envisioned by some geographers and cartographers as a component of the peace, both following both the First and then the Second World War, the project would come to be administered by international and non-governmental organizations by midcentury, as primary governmental support for cartography at that time increasingly reflected territorial interests and claims over and above those in favor of employing concepts of geographical knowledge that were not explicitly political or territorial. The slow demise of the project can be understood to signify the ultimate difficulty of a project that disacknowledged the fundamentality of politically constructed boundaries by employing another scale, in this case, a geometric scale with systematically geographical content, in order to frame its maps.

Employing the rabbinical practice of midrashic reading in order to unfold a passage from The Song of Songs, the manner in which a European/colonial affirmation of the seasons, particularly the season of spring, might become a mode of injustice in a non-temperate climate is explored. The wilding of seasons imposed by colonial usurpation of country finds a particular case study in the invasion of Arrente lands in Australia by buffel grass even as the effects of climate change are being felt. In conclusion, an argument is made for recasting the practice of midrashic reading in order to render the seasons as they are found in TheSong of Songs vulnerable to unanticipated intonations of the seasons as they emerge in Arrente country.

This article explores one of the iconic spaces of the Western Front of the Great War: ‘No Man’s Land.’ It offers an explanation of why one of the most extraordinary events of the First World War, the Christmas Truce of 1914, was only possible in that space. The paper suggests that the subversive nature of the truce required undermined the legitimacy of the state and thus forced state authorities to suppress further similar occurrences.One of the enduring images of World War I is that of trench warfare, featuring two dug-in-sides firing at each other across a space than spanned anywhere from sixty to two hundred yards. The space that was fired across, dubbed ‘No Man’s Land,’ became an iconic symbol representing the destructive nature of the Great War. This article explores why one of the most extraordinary events of the First World War was only possible in that space and why the event could never be duplicated.

Theoria originally implied a kind of active observation, combining perception with asking questions and listening to local stories and myths. This is travel treated not as a metaphor in discourse, but as both source and goal of discourse, or movement as a format for conveying information seen and heard. This would be travel as paraphor or travel and discourse carried one alongside the other as a context for intellection. This article articulates travel as paraphor using Greg Ulmer’s concept of the ‘popcycle’ to analyze the architect Le Corbusier’s ecstatic moment in the monastery at Val d’Ema, outside Florence, revealing thespatial practice of theoria within the architect’s travel tour.

This article explores the contrast of pilgrimage and tourism as sacred and profane journeys using Disney World and the Camino de Santiago as exemplars of such destinations. An entanglement of place structures reveals Disney World as a quasi-religious journey site for some whose tourist actions implicate a ritual centered on capitalist mythology. Disentangling sacred encounters and profane experiences demonstrates the role such places play in elevating community versus self-indulgence.

Literary histories are narratives, just like the literatures they describe. They construct not only a temporal framework but also a spatial arena for literary events, movements and authors—frequently following extra-literary agendas. Using the example of Hindi, the official language of the Republic of India, the article analyzes the conceptualisation of space within literary history by comparatively mapping the space of a sixteenth-century Hindi poet, Tulsi Das, as presented in three histories of Hindi literature (by two Western and one Indian historiographer) from the periods of high colonialism, the struggle for independence andthe post-colonial era. The highly divergent spaces that emerge show that space can never be an objective ‘given’ and also testify to the significance of visualising verbally produced spaces cartographically, so that underlying socio-political dimensions can be perceived.

Despite westernized reports to the contrary, occupation occurred in the Adirondacks before and after European contact. Seasonal encampments scattered throughout the region were part of Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples labour for resource gathering that occurred year-round and for extended periods. The area also became a haven from colonial warfare for some Indigenous peoples; these communities dispersed by the mid-nineteenth century. Land pressures around the reservations of Akwesasne and Odanak forced some peoples to go elsewhere. A few who chose the Adirondacks settled there until White homesteaders moved nearby chasing away game. By the mid-nineteenth century especially Abenaki families settled around established tourist towns. I argue these are all examples of Indigenous occupation and we need to acknowledge this and how their occupation adapted over time.

As the second installment in a three- part series, this essay seeks further understanding relevant to the growing green schools movement in the United States. Specifically, the article examines two overarching threats that have the ability to significantly hinder the future growth and success of such a movement. First, the alarming rise of rampant media use by youth is examined as a potential deterrent to increased environmental understanding, exposure, and actions. Second, a general lack of inclusivity and related programming specific to diverse audiences is analyzed for its potential to erode the movement’s current and future base. Finally, the two threats are examined together through the lens of sustainable education and its potential to ameliorate such grave concerns in the near and long term.