UTS presentation for 3rd year students in Design, Architecture and Building.

1. The Science and Art
in
Space and Place
Presenter
Hamish Robertson, PhD
Faculty of Health
University of Technology Sydney

2. Contents
• In memoriam
• Quick introduction
• Space and place as deep concepts in geography and more broadly
• Classical and contemporary applications
• From analogue to digital – e.g. cartography as art and science
• Intersectional and humanistic science
• Serious issues but also fun applications
• Carceral geographies – harms can and do persist over time
• Some spatial neuroscience – looking forwards and new modes of inquiry
• Conclusion

3. Humanistic Geography and Yi-Fu Tuan 1930-2022

4. Quick
Introduction
I’m a geographer by training with 25 years experience in
health and aged care work, multicultural health, dementia
research etc.
Ageing geographer and geographer of ageing
I’m a member of the American Association of Geographers
and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (fun stuff)
I’m interested in space and place, health geography and
technology, quant and qual, and various other things – often
connected but not always directly
Nimish and I have been colleagues for almost 4 years around
the intersecting concepts of (1) health and the smart city and
also (2) aged care design and delivery in an ageing world

5. Space and place as deep concepts
• Space and place can be mutually constitutive (less so in astronomy (or maybe I’m wrong!) but in
the human sciences, arts, humanities and professions (e.g. urban planning)
• Cultural affiliations abound e.g. genius loci, Hippocrates, religious iconography, stewardship of
nature versus dominion over nature, medicinal mountains (sacred and profane spaces and places)
and on it goes
• Personal and collective elements – what is uniquely personal and what is shared at some level?
How do we tell? Does technology alter this? How? In what ways?
• Orthodoxy and heterodoxy – often perception and understanding are regulated through systems,
ideologies and power structures i.e. alternatives always exist but we may need to look for them
e.g. post-colonial theory
• No specific end-point to space and place – time, social change, events, experiences,
interpretations e.g. your cohort versus mine

6. Classical and contemporary applications
• Space is often assumed to be quantifiable, objective, replicable, stable and accepted (masculine,
normative etc…?)
• Place is, by way of contrast, is often represented as qualitative, subjective, uniquely individual
(small group?), unstable/ephemeral and contested (feminine, deviant etc…?)
• Consider these (and other) dualisms as problematic e.g. is space singular of multiple? Is place
virtuous or morally contested? Is space instrumental or negotiated? Is place always beneficial or
good and what might a ‘bad place’ look like (and whose interpretation counts)?
• How do these concepts interact with other space/place concepts e.g. nature, the countryside, the
‘wild’, the town or city, territories, the nation state, ‘secure’or carceral spaces/places,
contaminated spaces and so on?
• How do transitions/changes in technology affect these concepts and their contemporary
understanding e.g. the ‘smart’ city as technology or technologically mediated space? Is it art,
science, techne or some mixture?

8. From analogue to digital
• Data collection was originally manual – the computer was the clerk, often male and then subsequently
female (cost, status etc.(
• World War 2 – electro-mechanical computing gains momentum -> cryptography, bombing, early
missiles and the ‘space race’ of the Cold War
• We are in a digital era – long development but very fast upswing e.g. AI applications growing at pace in
many domains including healthcare
• Digital strategies favour (prefer?) more quantification BUT qualitative is viable too – publicly
contributed spatial information i.e. place-based responses and community mapping activities,
Indigenous mapping and so on
• Accessibility of technologies and, thus, inclusion or exclusion from data generating processes and
practices (e.g. people with disabilities of various kinds)
• Data is great but interpretation matters – lying with statistics is as old as statistics e.g. eugenics and
psychology

9. Mapping in the 21st century

10. Intersectional and humanistic science
• Space and place interest philosophers, geographers, architects, surveyors,
psychologists, feminists, mathematicians and others – not singular in their
theorization or application
• Science is pluralistic (Sandra Mitchell’s work, for example) and progressive (mostly
but caution is required) – knowledge base is open to change as all knowledge
should be
• New ways of knowing emerge all the time (history and philosophy of science) and
you may well contribute – applications produce knowledge too!
• A humanistic science doesn’t seek orthodoxies but rather relevance to many
different audiences – space and place offer us tools for that task – teasing out
differences of perception, experience, response

11. Serious issues but also fun/engaging applications
• Many wicked problems for which spatial science applications are potentially useful
but we tend to repeat/reproduce problems over time e.g. ‘slum’ clearances
normalise specific values, space over place
• Many are ethical applications but not all by any means (see previous slides and
upcoming one)
• Fun matters – people live real lives in addition to any quantified selves –
community mapping, mapping by children, young people or vulnerable groups e.g.
people with disabilities, older people (Graz and mapping for the visually impaired)
• Mapping and cartography can be emancipatory or generate new forms of power
production e.g. gunshot reporting in US cities, little practical use but great for
police authority and resourcing – fear in spaces and places versus happiness and
pleasure, or Ros vs Wade repeal and policing state borders

12. Carceral geographies
• Many spaces are highly instrumentalist and aim at the control of individuals and groups e.g.
prisons, mental health institutions, schools, hospitals and even territories (e.g. Israeli geography,
US-Mexico border, CBDs at 2am versus midday) – politics, power and geography are intimately
linked
• Consider the panopticon – from Bentham, Foucault to Guantanamo and beyond e.g. drone
warfare versus ecological management or healthcare delivery in crisis events (implicit or explicit
potential for violence)
• Space and place carry implicit and often explicit power implications e.g. the city at night and safe
spaces for women, the policing of borders, migration practices and refugee camps of almost any
kind have to go by boat because airlines wont’t take you without a visa)
• Design and construction of regulatory spaces e.g. anti-homelessness in architectural design and
town planning (at least since Victorian times), ‘new’ towns and urban ‘renewal’ – but usually not
for the original residents

14. Some spatial neuroscience
• Neuroscience is a broad interdisciplinary undertaking BUT heavily
influenced by medicine and psychology – so a risk to this dominance
• Space and place involve aspects of genetics, biology (place cells),
physiology, psychology and so on (e.g. cognition, senses (sight, sound,
smell, touch, taste, gut), emotions, mood) – Mark M. Smith and the
concept of sensory history
• Human health and wellbeing are a consequence of interactions across
and between these domains – spaces, places and temporality
• Brain development starts early and can be continuous across the
lifespan, but decline is also common as we age –adaptive geographies
are needed to make places for PWDs and an ageing population
• So, space and place experiences have a neuroscientific dimension –
applied neuroscience e.g. green, blue and grey space research is
applied neuroscience – how are we measuring (quant and qual)?

15. • Space and place evolve in conceptual, theoretical and practical ways
and through technologies e.g. virtual geographies, gamification and
the like
• Who you are can matter in what you see and interpret - gender,
ethnicity, culture, health status and disability etc. (racist geographies)
• All measures are invented – so question them – quantification
privileges a certain way of seeing the world and what is in it (ontology
versus epistemology)
• And all measuring systems can be gamed – Jerry Mueller’s work and
others
Conclusion