Architecture and Geography: Between Spaces

by Jane Jacobs (Editor), Stephen Cairns (Editor)

Architecture and Geography are disciplines that share an interest in space, place and conventionally with architecture as creators, geographers as analysts. These disciplines seem to belong together, perhaps should belong together, but there has been seemingly insurmountable distance and differences between them. Architecture And Geography is dedicated to surmounting this distance and these difference. The collection offers a series of engaging essays on the relationship between these two across time, in different cultural and national contexts, through different practices of designing and describing the world, and through different theoretical registers. The collection brings together a prestigious group of international scholars, drawn from both architecture and geography. In an era of globalization, mass urbanization, intensified inequities and environmental duress the need for geography and architecture to speak to each other is pressing. Never before has there been such a sustained meditation on the possibilities that occupy the space between the architectural and geographical imaginations.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2015

About the author

Jane Jacobs, OC, O.Ont (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was an American-born Canadian writer and activist with primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. The book has been credited with reaching beyond planning issues to influence the spirit of the times.
Along with her well-known printed works, Jacobs is equally well-known for organizing grassroots efforts to block urban-renewal projects that would have destroyed local neighborhoods. She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and after moving to Canada in 1968, equally influential in canceling the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of highways under construction.