Q & A with Harold Perkins

GI: Paper or digital map?

HP: Paper map- it won’t run out of batteries. Paper maps are what I took hiking in the mountains as a young person so there is more than a bit of nostalgia in my response.

 

GI: GPS or mental map?

HP: Mental map. It won’t lose signal though its just as likely to lead me in the wrong direction as my GPS. I’m concerned technologies like GPS lead to a structured, expertized, capitalized geography (think GPS will show me where the next McDonald’s is on the freeway) while creating a spatially illiterate society that turns on its navigation devices to get to the mall without thinking. Its like what spell checker on Word has done to my ability to spell on my own.

 

GI: Rural, suburban or urban?

HP: I don’t care for suburban development for all the usual reasons. I am equally at home in environments called urban or rural. However, I increasingly feel like these terms are a false trichotomy in part used as mechanisms to discipline and confine us to certain societal roles and identities. Of course as rational beings we need our ‘compartments’ to comprehend and order the world around us. But I’m tired of the cultural, political, and economic baggage that we accept as hand in hand with where we live. We should all question the constructs (and their motivations) that make up where we live and in part determine who we are and how we act in the production of these spaces.

 

GI: Mountain, river, desert, island? In order of preference.

HP: River, mountain, island, desert. I’m happiest when my feet are standing in free flowing cold water. The river could be on a mountain, island, or desert- or perhaps all three at once- as long as it is cold water that supports a healthy trout population. Preferably river in a mountain, I think though.

 

GI: If pre-colonial was ‘0’, colonial ‘5’, and post-colonial ’10’ what number would you give your geographical imagination?

HO: 10 I guess as I certainly identify with post-colonial thinking. We are never going back to a world in a pre-colonized state, but we can work to undermine the myriad ways in which much of the world is still thinking like a 5 and operating according to neocolonial principles.

 

GI: By train, by foot, by bicycle or by car?

HP: I have enormously enjoyed traveling North America and Europe by train. Very fond memories with little physical energy exerted so that I can explore localities by foot once I get there.

 

GI: What is less important: Gross National Product or Gross National Happiness?

HP: GNP

 

GI: Favorite country name?

HP: Somalia. Favorite region within a country name: Andalusia.

 

GI: Paper notebook or laptop?

HP: Paper notebook- its lighter and easier to carry. Plus it doesn’t run out of batteries. See above.

 

GI: What is the capital of Paraguay?

HP: Is this a trick question? My paper map tells me its Asuncion. Perhaps more interestingly, what is the capital of Bolivia?

 

GI: Do Africanized honeybees have a geography? Explain.

HP: Absolutely they do- in more than one sense. Strictly ecologically speaking from a Cartesian standpoint, they are a species from another part of the world considered invasive elsewhere and therefore out of place. Their geography is said to be expanded beyond what is considered their ‘natural’ realm.  Perhaps more interesting is the constructed nature of their spatiality. The term African or Africanized is a loaded term used to ‘other’ the insect and the places they come from.  What does it really mean to be ‘invasive’? Could we not say that the migration of all sorts of species around the globe is a form of hyper-mobilized evolution? All of the creatures that are moving around the planet now with help from humans are after all moving about because of the physical energy/laws bound up in the planet. I don’t believe supernatural forces are causing this. Thus can’t we imagine that humans are merely one more kind of ecological disturbance creating a qualitatively and quantitatively new biosphere? Of course a confounding difference, it can be argued, is that the introduction of bees from another continent to a different one is a social, political, and economic process. In the sense that nature is socially produced for certain ends (much of it has to do with wealth and power). ‘Invasive’ bees are likely to be construed from this perspective as an unwelcome byproduct of capitalism’s dependence on connectivity and flows of goods and people. In other words, what kind of biosphere do we want to construct? Perhaps one without angry bees buzzing everywhere.

 

GI: Favorite geographical concept?

HP: Production of nature thesis. See above.

 

GI: Lastly, what does it mean for someone, some object, some place, some process to “have a geography”? Please explain through an example of your research or creative work.

HP: It depends on how you want to look at it. In geography 100 I remember learning that everything has a geography. In other words, everything takes up space/a certain position in three dimensional, Cartesian space conceived as a container. You, a building, rivers, trout, all have coordinates relative to some concrete notion of space.  Far more interesting and perplexing is the notion that we produce spaces through the relationships between people, objects and the processes that define their dynamics, fluxes, flows, etc. It’s a much more mobile conception of space as something that we as agents have the ability to produce/consume/contest in our day-to-day lives. For example in my own work on urban green spaces in post-industrial settings: parks, under the first liberal era in the US and Western Europe, were conceived of and designed as spaces where working class people could effectively become more like middle and upper classes through contact with nature and ‘more refined’ people strolling the greenways.  The idea is that the urban green space started out as a social engineering project to pacify the politically restive proletariat in the late 1800s/early 1900s.  Parks during the Keynsian era became collectively produced spaces where factory workers and their families could find respite from the vagaries of industrial life. The idea was that the creation of greenspace would create healthy, rested, happy workers who would be more productive for capital. With the demise of Keynesian urbanism and the ascent of neoliberalism in the post-industrial city, nobody works in factories anymore.  The tax base that collectively supported parks is diminished. So these relict green spaces are re-created in a way that makes it so parks patrons have to work on them through volunteering and fundraisers in order to keep them in decent shape. Good citizenship in the neoliberal city is predicated now on working on the parks yourself in what amounts to responsibilized citizenship. The lesson from all of this: in a Cartesian sense, the spatiality of parks changes little through time as they persist in roughly the same locations; but in a production of space sense, the kinds of green spaces produced in the city change radically over time.

 

 

Dr. Harold Perkins is Associate Professor of Geography at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.  His research focuses on urban political ecology and environmental (in)justice.  More specifically he studies urban environments including forest, parks, and waterways to examine underlying processes that create uneven and deeply disempowering relations to nature within neoliberal forms of capitalism.  He employs a political economy perspective to delve more thoroughly into the complex issues of urban environmental governance in the wake of state retrenchment, where multiple actors assume responsibility for environmental service provision.  He is also interested in the political status of nonhuman organisms within capitalist urbanism.  For more information on his work click here.