This paper sketches some conceptual tools by which cultural geographers might advance geographies of architecture. It does so by thinking specifically about one architectural form: the modernist residential highrise, which is the ‘big thing’ of this paper. The paper draws on recent developments in material semiotics in order to interrogate features often uniquely associated with the highrise, such as its global reach, uniformity, and scale. The paper first rethinks how cultural geography has traditionally explained the movement of built forms, explicitly turning from diffusionist accounts to the notion of translation. It then offers a reconsideration of the way geographers might think about scale in relation to a ‘big’ and ‘global’ thing like the modernist highrise, arguing that scale is produced relationally and in specific contexts. Finally, it offers a template for cultural geographical scholarship which takes seriously the technical work entailed in things, like a highrise, materialising or de-materializing. It does so by way of two illustrative stories: one about the productive social science of highrise suicides in Singapore; the other about the destructive role of the inquiry into collapse of Ronan point in the UK.

Jacobs, J. M., Merriman, P. (2011). Practising architectures. Social and Cultural Geography, 12 (3), 211-222, Article Number: PII 936332143, (Special Issue).The papers contained in this special issue contribute to a recently revitalised scholarship on architecture within social and cultural geography. New direction was given to established geographies of architecture by Lees's (2001) call for geographers to move beyond an emphasis on symbolic meaning (representationalism) and towards a consideration of ?the practical and effective or ?non-representational? import of architecture? (2001: 51). In the past decade social and cultural geographers have responded to this call and, in the process, reshaped the geography of architecture. The papers collected here make further contributions to that scholarship. The starting point for our own thinking, and the initial call for papers that generated the content herein, was the concept of ?practising architectures?.Peer reviewe

The advent of state-sponsored mass high-rise housing in post-war Britain brought into view a range of issues about the role of technology in everyday life. This paper draws on approaches in the study of science and technology in order to deepen our understanding of the socio-technical aspects of such high-rise housing, past and present. This thinking is elaborated empirically by examining a 1960s high-rise development, Red Road, Glasgow. The paper examines the inaugural phase of development and the most recent phase of 'redevelopment', the first stage of which is demolition. The paper extends existing accounts of residential high-rises generally and Red Road specifically, as well as elaborating an alternate analytical framework for understanding high-rise and supertall dwellings.

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This article traces the movement of the concept of ‘defensible space’ from New York City in the 1970s, where it was developed by the Canadian architect/planner Oscar Newman, to London in the 1980s and into design interventions in British public housing in the 1990s, through British geographer Alice Coleman, who acted as an especially powerful transfer agent. In focusing on this urban design ‘concept’ on the move we contribute to existing scholarship on policy mobility and city building in a number of ways. First, we explore an instance of the movement/mobility of a planning concept in a historical period (the recent past) largely overlooked to date. Secondly, we demonstrate that this movement was the result of a disaggregated series of expert knowledge transfers and localized translations of pre‐policy expert knowledge, generated through university‐based research work and networks. We theorize this instance of urban planning mobility by way of the interlinked insights offered by the sociology of science and policy‐mobilities literatures. As this is an instance of university research shaping public policy it also offers an opportunity to reflect upon the meaning of ‘evidence‐based policy’ and the impact agenda in contemporary higher education.

Putting the words`history' and`materiality' together serves as a reminder that materialism is always (whatever else it conveys) about money; and of course about the power relations and emotional energies that vie for it. So our first point is that the project of rematerialising home has an inescapably financial bottom line. As Georg Simmel recognised, money itself is formless; it flowsöas Gordon Clark (2005) so aptly puts itölike mercury. But it also settles out into`things', like bricks and mortar, that give it presence; that quite literally lend it form and value. The only real attempt to grapple with this in relation to housing and home is located in the all-but-forgotton notion of`housing classes' developed by John Rex Guest editorial

This position paper aims to frame and supplement other papers in this special issue on advancing postcolonial geographies. We offer five pathways for postcolonial geography: (i) narrating the planetary (which then configures the other paths), (ii) acknowledging other postcolonialisms, (iii) planetary indigeneity, (iv) seeing like an empire and (v) problematizing translations. These intersect and none are exhaustive. Nor are they completed routes. Instead the five paths that follow are offered as invitations to scholarly reflection and empirically informed research.

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