Introduction
Confronting emptiness in history

Courtney J. Campbell, Allegra Giovine and Jennifer Keating

‘ There is no such thing as an empty space on a map.’¹

Emptiness is a challenging concept: slippery in definition and elastic in meaning. It implies a total lack of content: people, buildings, objects or markings on a map. In the abstract, emptiness equals nothingness, a perfect void. Yet when one thinks of places on the globe that one might associate with being empty – the Gobi or Sahara deserts, the depths of the Pacific ocean – it is quickly evident that none is truly devoid of everything. The most cursory survey of these two expanses would reveal an array of contents: mineral deposits, complex eco-systems, transitory forms of life, migrants and long-standing patterns of circulation and movement. Even the ultimate vacuum – the cosmos – is full of planets, stars, asteroids, debris and space junk. Yet these contents do not necessarily contradict a palpable identification of emptiness. In this sense, emptiness is inherently relational, defined as much by what does not fill or is expected to fill a space as by what is in fact there.

Emptiness is therefore less the result of site-specific quantitative assessment and more something perceived through comparison with other places. Empty sites appear emptier than elsewhere, containing fewer people, fewer signs of life, fewer traces of human activity. As a state, emptiness necessarily invokes what is not present; it is in some ways a condition of absence. It thus follows that as emptiness is a matter of perception, it is a highly subjective phenomenon, dependent to a large extent on who is doing the observing and what the subject expects to find. What is devoid of objects or meaning to one person or group might very well be ‘full’ to another. Taking this one step further, emptiness is thus deeply rooted in how places are imagined and, as will be shown in this volume, a potent tool in the articulation of power between individuals and collectives. With this in mind, emptiness cannot be accepted at face value; it is by no means an objective state. As Brian Harley suggests in the epigraph above, absences – in his case, literally blank spaces on early modern European maps – must be subject to historical investigation and critical analysis.

This examination of emptiness can be situated within a long trend towards the study of spatial history. While there is a tendency to speak of a twenty-first century ‘spatial turn’ in history, spatial history finds its roots in a much deeper past. Cumulatively, these efforts have radically altered an older, Cartesian conception of space which first placed emphasis on the stability and timelessness of places and landscapes and then in the nineteenth century subordinated space to time in contemporary thought.² The gradual re-evaluation of space as a critical concept in understanding the world around us began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when scholars around the globe contributed to the growing field of human geography, studying the effects of geography and environment on culture. They tied concepts from the hard sciences, like biomes and ecosystems, to cultural phenomena, but still thought of spaces as bounded and stable.³ It was only from the late 1970s and 1980s onwards that historians and geographers, influenced by discourse analysis and studies in postmodernism, began to think of spaces as social constructs in constant transformation.⁴ These spaces gain meaning, in line with Henri Lefebvre’s definition, through ‘spatial practice’ (how we move within and around space), ‘representations of space’ (architectural plans, city plans and maps) and ‘representational space’ (symbolic associations with geographic spaces). In this way, spaces, our use of them, their representations and other symbolic associations change over time. While the meaning of ‘emptiness’ varies in this volume according to chapter and sources, the meaning of ‘space’ and ‘place’ remains fairly established throughout: in line with Lefebvre, this volume also conceives of space as socially produced and consumed. Further, the chapters in this volume tend to recognize a ‘thirdspace’ – that is, space that consists of multiple real and imagined, concrete and abstract facets.⁵ Space, then, is a social construct in constant transformation.⁶

What scholars now call the spatial turn refers to ‘the perception that social change can no longer be satisfactorily explained without a reconceptualization of categories relative to the spatial component of social life’.⁷ While many scholars have limited their discussions of the spatial turn to methodological questions inspired by the use of geographic information system (GIS) technologies for the study of human geography and history, this volume is more concerned with how spatial meaning is constructed, how emptiness is represented and for what purposes and ends. In this way we agree with Karl Schlögel’s assessment that ‘being and time’ are no longer enough to explain human existence and Martina Löw’s urging for scholars to move beyond the idea of space as a container or a priori reality (that is, as absolute space) and towards an understanding of space as a condition that results from social processes.⁸

Nonetheless, within the expanding literature on space and history, little is said of the role that emptiness serves or the processes by which it is produced. An explanation of why this might be can be found in Lefebvre’s own commentary on his work: having introduced the notion that space was actively produced, he admitted that speaking of space in this way ‘sounds bizarre, so great is the sway still held by the idea that empty space is prior to whatever ends up filling it’.⁹ While Lefebvre’s thoughts on the social production of space have since become largely normalized in scholarship, the bulk of research continues to explore the work done in the production and construction of spaces: the act of ‘filling’ space with meaning. Almost implicitly, this has meant that most studies look in the opposite direction to emptiness and, correspondingly, very little research explores the social and cultural practices used to create or maintain conditions of emptiness. Thus while many scholars continue to concentrate on the spatial evolution of borders and populated landscapes in a historical sense, we also consider emptiness or ‘nothingness’ to be equal components in the fabric of real and imagined space, subject to, and created by, very similar sets of physical and discursive activities as other types of space. Just like other spatial realms, emptiness can never be a neutral stage on which human activity plays out: like ‘wilderness’ or ‘wild nature’, it is not a ‘natural’ state; neither is it simply a precursor to being ‘filled’ with objects, people, imagination or value.¹⁰ In short, we argue that spaces which are considered empty and devoid of content are just as important to the social production of space and landscape as those which are remembered, celebrated or memorialized. While some historians have detailed the place of seemingly empty spaces within national narratives (consider, for example, the work of Cynthia Radding on the US–Mexican borderlands, Richard White on the American west and Willard Sunderland on the Russian grasslands)¹¹ and others have historicized emptiness as a concept in natural and religious philosophy (for example, work on early modern experimental vacuums by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer and on the role of emptiness in the creation of ‘oriental philosophy’ by Urs App),¹² this volume engages with the use of empty spaces in the construction of historical narratives writ large, including, but also beyond, the national. Emptiness is not the lack of physical or imaginative content, but rather a condition that grants value to the modern spaces discussed in this volume.

As shown above, with only a little work it is not difficult to uncover that these places – like Harley’s maps – are not empty, but in many ways full of both life and meaning. In this book we aim to excavate the myths and illusions of emptiness. If emptiness is the result of social perceptions, then probing this constructed illusion offers access to a wider set of historical ideas about nation, empire, community and self: the thought processes, self-perceptions and world-views of those who form and sustain the idea. In other words, examining places conceived of as empty allows us to uncover the purpose of these constructions, given that geographical imaginations exist to advance certain political, social and economic agendas.¹³ In the end, these contemplations of emptiness reveal a particularly modern discomfort with unused, unknown or uncontrollable spaces. Empty spaces, then, are not just voids or the contemplation thereof, but are sites that shed light on the anxieties and possibilities of modernity. We do not, therefore, seek to fix a specific meaning to emptiness, but to consider the plurality of meanings attached to the concept and, in turn, what they can reveal about past and contemporary societies and individuals.

The chapters in this book approach empty spaces around the world and throughout the modern period through a variety of related disciplines, ranging from national, imperial and local history to cultural studies, art history, architecture and urban design and archaeology. While varied in methodology, the chapters presented here all focus explicitly on the purported emptiness of physical sites: air-, ocean-, rural-, suburban- and city-scapes, in either material or representational form; and, in so doing, explore the identification, construction and use of emptiness by a variety of individual, group and state actors as a specific spatial practice. They examine emptiness as the product of representational practice and of material activity – in other words, as the outcome of both imaginative and physical work. Just as Jacques Lacan’s work on the gaze has had particular impact on the way historians have succeeded in incorporating regimes of sight into research on contemporary understandings of other places, so here almost all of the chapters engage with literal or metaphorical sight as a property that underpins the spatial practice and representation of emptiness.¹⁴ At times this is done in very direct fashion, via visual representations of empty spaces including fine art, film, newspaper cartography and posters. In other instances, the idea of a ‘national’, ‘colonial’, ‘archaeological’ or ‘scientific’ gaze that informs the imaginative processes of envisioning space underpins the commentary. Taken together, the chapters underscore the extent to which emptiness is historically contingent – the product of the interaction of different sets of ideas or gazes which change according to time and place. They contribute to our understanding of national and imperial narratives of territorial and social identity. They also show how notions of emptiness are employed to make statements about social isolation, to critique dominant ideologies of capitalism and neoliberalism and to uncover conflicting ideas of value and appropriation. They reveal how ideas about empty spaces insinuate fear of the unknown and provide an imagined vacuum to be filled with the hope of modern technologies. Emptiness, in this way, becomes a cipher for broader projects of self-, collective-, national- and imperial-fashioning and is, therefore, deeply implicated in our economic, political and social systems.

We also learn through the chapters in this volume that emptiness in the social imagination is connected not simply to an absence of the usual ‘content’ of life – buildings, people, objects and so forth, but also to a lack of, or disruption to, more abstract qualities that we usually observe in our surroundings. A number of the chapters discuss the temporal aspect of emptiness, when the usual passage of time is suspended or distorted (a desert, a post-apocalyptic scene, a megalithic monument on a modern housing estate), thus resulting in places that are seen as being somehow ‘out of time’. Here, emptiness bears some of the characteristics of ‘heterotopias’ or ‘heterotopic spaces’: sites such as a prison or museum that disrupt the surrounding ‘real’ world by virtue of their inversion of the usual mess and jumble of life to produce perfect and meticulous utopian spaces.¹⁵ Just as heterotopias are ‘slices of time’, isolated from the traditional passage of time in reality, so the chapters explore how emptiness produces a similarly disruptive effect on temporal patterns. Both empty and heterotopic sites ‘make difference’ from their surroundings as they appear curiously ‘in place and out of place’, yet the former are most often seen as far from the perfection that the latter embody.¹⁶ These chapters invite us to ruminate on the relationship between time and space in the modern period and the role that emptiness has played in creating the perception of places in past, present and future. These reflections on emptiness remind us that the post-modern, pre-modern and modern are not mutually exclusive, but can connect, combine and contribute to processes of hybridization, exclusion and modernization.¹⁷ The volume therefore contributes to a broader understanding of emptiness as existing not simply on a spatial but also a temporal scale. While the temporality of emptiness is not the focus of this volume, we hope the chapters here lay the foundation for future study.

This collection deals explicitly with the modern age from the nineteenth century onwards. As the chapters here suggest, narratives of the empty have gained additional currency and use in the modern age, allowing emptiness to take on a particular resonance that it may not have had in the past. Such developments are linked more broadly to the changing ways in which time and space were experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, connected, as Stephen Kern and others have demonstrated, to technologies such as the land survey, photography, new forms of travel and communication and the global standardization of time.¹⁸ We suggest that the value of emptiness is heightened in the modern age, not simply by technologies that made empty spaces more readily visible, traversable and controllable, but also by some of the key processes and ideologies that span the modern world. The industrial city emerges as an important site for the identification and negotiation of empty space, both within urban zones and as a contrast to the relative emptiness of more remote locations, as do land-, sea- and air-scapes in the narratives of high imperialism, burgeoning nationalism and twentieth-century capitalism. In turn, this sets up a tension between attempts to ‘overcome’ or ‘make productive’ empty spaces and efforts to preserve or highlight emptiness, themselves very often rooted in the experience of life specific to the modern age (social isolation and the anxiety associated with unknown, abandoned or unused spaces).¹⁹ Empty spaces, then, become a lens, metaphor, foil, or tool for working through the anxieties of modernity – in the words of Anthony Vidler, the ‘[f]ear, anxiety, estrangement, and their psychological counterparts, anxiety[,] neuroses, and phobias … intimately linked to the aesthetics of space throughout the modern period’.²⁰ Just as for Linda Nochlin the anxiety of modernity is expressed through fragmentation (in her case, of representations of the human body), so is it also expressed through representations of emptiness or voids – an anxious metaphor deployed by individuals, communities, societies and states around the world for the desire to understand, control and maintain the unknown, unused, uncontrollable or unimaginable spaces that inconvenience the spread of imperialism, nationalism, capitalism, neoliberalism and multinational corporations.²¹ That said, while the meaning of emptiness is painted with the brush of modernity, we do not propose that emptiness is a uniquely modern phenomenon, but simply that it acquires heightened value in the modern age; quite clearly more work remains to be done on histories of emptiness in the pre-modern period.

Any exploration of emptiness could have multiple starting points. In this collection, we have chosen to open the volume with four chapters that examine specific land-, sea- and air-scapes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each of which discusses the ways in which conceptions of emptiness contributed to regional, national and imperial narratives of territorial identity, nation-building and conquest. From this cohesive base, the second half of the collection is more cross-disciplinary in nature, incorporating related disciplines of art history, cultural studies, urban planning and archaeology. While maintaining a continued focus on the use and implications of emptiness, these chapters allow the conversation to broaden out, examining the role of space in acts of self-fashioning, in critiques of tradition and modernity and in using and reimagining the past. Emptiness in these chapters becomes a useful category to cut across traditionally separated disciplines and sub-fields and underscores not simply the ongoing relevance of spatial inquiry to a range of academic scholarship, but the fruitfulness of exploring a historical condition from different methodological perspectives.

Opening the volume, Kevin James explores tropes of barrenness and abundance in the late Victorian Connemara landscape. Centred on a rural hotel that acted as a base both for tourists and for social investigators and rural industrial improvers, the chapter traces the evolution of two competing narratives about the wild landscapes of western Ireland: one which saw the district as characterized by want and privation due to the barrenness, infertile soil and over-population of the local landscape; the other gradually inverting the trope of scarcity to find in the region’s remote and rugged nature a haven for sporting tourists. Here James points to the competing ways in which landscape was framed, with emptiness being a source of despair with attempts at ‘improvement’, and also a cause for celebration and preservation. As tourism lent the region new allure at the beginning of the twentieth century, James demonstrates not only the ways in which notions of emptiness were central to the process by which landscape was recast from unproductive and harsh to stark and alluring, but also that they were central to individual acts of self-fashioning by reform-minded politicians, local inhabitants and visiting tourists.

The obstacles and opportunities of difficult nature are picked up in Jennifer Keating’s contribution on the seemingly empty desert drylands of colonial Central Asia. Here, too, Russian colonists and administrators found in the challenging landscapes a reason to ‘improve’ empty nature through irrigation and settlement. Yet just as James points to multiple attitudes to the wild environment of Ireland, so, too, Keating frames emptiness as having no fixed value. While studies of imperial history most frequently reference the labelling of land as ‘empty’ as a simple precursor to colonial appropriation, here Keating explores the instability of desert landscapes, pointing to the perceived and real threat that they posed to travellers, settlers, communities and infrastructure in the form of aridity, erosion, mirages and disorientation. The desert challenged just as much as it enabled the narratives and actions of Russian imperialists.

Efforts to ‘overcome’ difficult geographies perceived as empty also form the basis of Leonie Schuster’s chapter on aviation in early twentieth-century Brazil. Shifting the focus from landscape to airscape, she suggests that the first distance flights, particularly those of Edu Chaves in 1912, contributed to the physical and symbolic integration of Brazilian national territory, not simply by allowing previously ‘empty’ airspace to be conquered, but by connecting the densely populated coast with the sparsely inhabited interior, seen by urban elites as ‘empty’ and lacking national content. Chaves’s flights, framed in the press as a continuation of the bandeirantes’ conquest of the Brazilian hinterland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, served as a symbolic means of unifying geographically disconnected territory, couched in both national and imperial rhetoric.

Developing the visual depiction of emptiness discussed by Schuster in relation to cartography, Tricia Cusack explores the visual qualities of seascapes in Empire Marketing Board (EMB) posters of the 1920s and 1930s. Serving the EMB’s mission to increase trade between Britain and its overseas empire, Cusack argues that these posters also sought to foster imperial ideology and did so through their presentation of the ocean as a benign passageway. While reminders of the dangers of the empty sea remained in their imagery, EMB posters simultaneously sought to minimize these fearful elements by reducing the vastness of the ocean, emphasizing the impregnability of the ocean liner and placing the viewer securely behind the ship’s railing. Through these visual representations EMB posters effectively connected the empire’s territorial bounties and invited viewers to take part in the imperial voyage.

Explored across land, sea and air in these opening four chapters, emptiness thus emerges as a critical component in thinking about region, nation and empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Described and discussed in the media, written reports, travel accounts, maps, posters and so forth, emptiness rooted in difficult-to-traverse or inhospitable nature served the agenda of a variety of imperial and national projects: a spatial device used to rationalize attempts to ‘improve’ or ‘unify’ territory. At the same time, irrespective of the relative success of these socio-political projects, the deployment of notions of emptiness provides intriguing insight into the subjectivities of those framing the land as empty, casting imperial, local and national actors as improvers, reformers and controllers of difficult nature.

The remainder of the volume draws on a wider range of disciplinary methodologies to expand our understanding of emptiness, especially its temporal and affective dimensions. The practice of visually depicting, and thus creating, emptiness runs through chapters 5 and 6, with empty urban and suburban landscapes as a cipher for dislocation, both in a personal sense from a wider group, from society or social norms; and in a temporal sense from the ‘normal’ run of time. In her chapter on Edward Hopper’s paintings of Paris in the early twentieth century, Emily Burns turns our attention to the fine arts and the ‘great American vacuist’s’ early experimentation with the portrayal of empty, alienated urban spaces. Guiding us deftly through technical aspects of Hopper’s paintings, Burns exposes the tension between figure and place that denies a harmonious whole to the foreign capital. The removal of human figures, for example in Hopper’s repeated paintings of the Louvre, disrupts the temporality of naturalistic scenes, giving them a modernist effect. Burns suggests that the seeming emptiness of Hopper’s Paris is, in fact, carefully constructed and acts as both a claim to cultural and artistic solitude and as a symbol of anxieties about the then fraught practice of artistic study abroad and of French artistic hegemony. In this sense, emptiness is a form of artistic argument through which Hopper is able to make certain claims about himself and the wider art world.

Aesthetic uses of emptiness to project latent anxieties and convey altered temporalities are shown in a different medium in the following chapter by Martin Walter. Taking two contemporary TV series, The Walking Dead and Survivors, as his primary objects of inquiry out of a much wider landscape of post-apocalyptic fiction, Walter shows how the recent revival of this genre relies on the appropriation of empty and fragmented spaces which feature in discourses of security and bodily integrity and promote the ideology of neoliberal late capitalism in Western societies. In contrast to Burns’s focus on the relationship between the individual and the perception of emptiness, here Walter explores the ways in which collectives conceive of the rural and urban environments of the post-apocalypse, where previously familiar sites such as a family home, a supermarket or a farm unnerve by their emptiness. He suggests that the visual representation of abandoned spaces is used as a means to comment on anxieties surrounding consumerism, late capitalism and neoliberalism. As in Burns’s exploration of Hopper’s Paris paintings, here estrangement forms a critical component of the visual depiction of emptiness, with empty spaces indicative of both an alienation from social norms that have been shattered by the apocalypse and a temporal disconnection between the ‘old’ world and that of the post-apocalypse.

Continuing the exploration of the ways in which the passage of time is implicated in the physical practice and representation of emptiness, the final two chapters explore spaces within urban or suburban landscapes that are initially conceived of as unused or vacant and thus empty of activity. The authors examine conflicting values of use, uncovering the temporary and transient activities that fill these spaces with new meaning and thus have the capacity to affect the way in which such sites are conceived in the longer term. The process of the partial appropriation of these sites points again to the unstable qualities of emptiness: simultaneously empty and not empty, depending on perspective. These contestations of the meaning of emptiness are explored first by Krystallia Kamvasinou and Sarah Ann Milne in their study of the temporary use of vacant urban spaces in post-war London. Today’s temporary-use initiatives have rich historical precedent, and despite the transience of earlier projects, Kamvasinou and Milne offer a historical lens through which to connect contemporary efforts to those of the 1960s countercultural movement, 1970s community gardening and urban ecology and more recent environmentalism. They show the means by which vacant urban land has been reimagined from a landscape of decline to a ‘landscape of potential’ in which value is assessed beyond the narrow economic terms of private developers. This creative act of reimagining was first taken up largely by individual artists and through a series of case studies the authors reveal how efforts to reimagine emptiness gradually became sanctioned through official processes and institutions. Kamvasinou and Milne argue that although temporariness is a feature characteristic of vacant urban lands, this does not inhibit (and, indeed, may encourage) their influence on longer-term processes that shape the urban landscape.

Kenneth Brophy’s contribution on prehistoric enclosures embedded in urban landscapes and edgelands draws the volume to a close and, in so doing, brings the perspective of archaeology to the exploration of emptiness. Even more than historians, archaeologists deal with emptiness as a key challenge of their discipline: both the gaps within a historical record that relate to a period thousands of years ago; and the very physical empty spaces of prehistoric monuments, henges and enclosures, often vast in size and revealing very little trace of past life or activity under survey or excavation. Brophy’s interest in this chapter is not in prehistory per se, but in the modern uses of these prehistoric ‘empty’ enclosures. Taking three sites in Scotland with Neolithic associations – places where ‘the ancient past intrudes into the contemporary’ – he explores the curious positioning of these sites ‘out of time’, either invisible at ground level or subject to traumatic relocation and reconstruction to serve urban regeneration. Crucially, although these places appear to be empty, due to a lack of activity or found objects from the past, this is far from the case and, just as in the preceding chapter, Brophy tracks the use of these seemingly vacant places for a variety of social and anti-social activities. Observation reveals patterns of social gathering, ceremonies, sport and memorialization, all of which leave little long-standing tangible evidence, just as in prehistory. Examining how these sites are used now also illuminates the challenges that archaeologists face in understanding how these places were used in deep time; and Brophy suggests, in fact, that the enduring idea of Neolithic sites as empty is largely the product of the archaeological gaze and the methods of fieldwork that are used to explore large, ancient sites. As he summarizes, emptiness is ‘often simply an illusion caused by the processes we use to look at the past’ – thus implicating not only historical actors in the production and maintenance of emptiness, but also present-day investigators of that history.

In drawing together this volume, and as a basis from which our explorations have proceeded, we find common ground with Harley and Lefebvre’s suggestions that objective emptiness does not exist. Harley’s caution that ‘there is no such thing as an empty space on a map’ and Lefebvre’s urging that ‘space is never empty’ have underpinned our conceptualization of emptiness as being the very opposite of neutral space.²² Moreover, rather than dismissing emptiness as an empirical fallacy, confronting the subjective, perceived existence of emptiness in history reveals sites as compelling as those spaces that have been interrogated as ‘filled in’ with content, value, activities and things. The work put into constructing and maintaining emptiness, both physical and figurative, points to the fact that emptiness is a condition that results from a complex mix of socio-historical processes. In turn, emptiness is a critical component not simply in spatial histories, but also in broader studies of imperialism, nationhood, self-fashioning and economic development across the modern era. Thus while the slipperiness of definition may make empty spaces methodologically challenging to explore, it is precisely the malleability of emptiness that has lent it such value to a range of actors in the recent past. Absences should not cause us to look elsewhere, but to look closer.

Figure 1.1. Map of Galway, with map of Ireland inset. Created by Marie Puddister, University of Guelph.

¹ J. B. Harley, ‘Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe’, Imago Mundi, xl (1988), 57–76, at p. 71.

² For a useful overview, see B. Warf and S. Arias, The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London, 2008). Historicism, for instance, with its focus on stages of development, gave little to no importance to space as a category of analysis.

³ See C. J. Campbell, ‘Space, place, and scale: human geography and spatial history in Past and Present’, Past & Present, ccxxxix (2018), 23–45, at p. 3.

⁴ This body of literature is immense. Some well-known starting points include J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1994); M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Calif., 1984); M. Foucault, ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics, xvi (1986), 22–7; H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991); Y. Tuan, Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience (London, 1977). For additional historiographical information on the spatial turn and spatial history, see P. Hubbard, ‘Space/ place’, in Cultural Geography: a Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts, ed. D. Atkinson et al. (London, 2005), pp. 41–8; N. Thrift, ‘Space: the fundamental stuff of geography’, in Key Concepts in Geography, ed. S. L. Holloway, S. P. Rice and G. Valentine (London, 2003), pp. 95–107; A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography, ed. L. McDowell and J. P. Sharp (London, 2014); R. White, ‘What is spatial history?’ (Stanford, Calif., 2010) <https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29> [accessed 25 June 2018].

⁵ E. W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford, 1996), pp. 56–7.

⁶ Lefebvre, Production of Space.

⁷ M. Löw, ‘O spatial turn: para uma sociologia do espaço’, Tempo Social, xxv (2013), 17–34, at p. 17. Translations are by the editors.

⁸ K. Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich, 2003).

⁹ Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 15.

¹⁰ W. Cronon, ‘The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature’, Environmental History, i (1996), 7–28.

¹¹ C. Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, N.C. and London, 2005); R. White, ‘It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own’: a History of the American West (London, 1991); W. Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004). D. Davis’s recent study on arid lands does move beyond a national perspective: D. K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass., 2016).

¹² S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J., 1985); U. App, The Cult of Emptiness: the Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy (Kyoto, 2012).

¹³ See, e.g., D. Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London, 2008); D. Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford, 1994); D. Harvey, ‘Between space and time: reflections on the geographical imagination’, in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxxx (1990), 418–34; The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, ed. E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (Oxford, 1995); K. G. Morrissey, Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire (Ithaca, 1997); E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993).

¹⁴ J. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. A. Sheridan (London, 1977).

¹⁵ In his 1967 lecture ‘Des espaces autres’, Foucault characterized heterotopias as ‘something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be formed within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’. Parts of the lecture were later reprinted as M. Foucault, ‘Of other spaces’ (see fn 4). Principle four of the ‘principles of heterotopia’ outlines that heterotopic sites are often linked with ‘slices in time’, acting as a break from ‘traditional time’ (p. 26). For a recent discussion of the concept and a detailed bibliography, see P. Johnson, ‘The geographies of heterotopia’, Geography Compass, vii (2013), 790–803.

¹⁶ Johnson, ‘Geographies of heterotopia’, p. 797.

¹⁷ See N. García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. C. L. Chiappari and S. L. López (Minneapolis, Minn., 2005).

¹⁸ S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). See also D. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969); V. Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 2015); J. C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998); R. Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: the Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge, 2013).

¹⁹ See M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity (London, 1982).

²⁰ A. Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), p. 1. For an analysis of the link between empty urban commons and anxiety, particularly in the form of agoraphobia, see K. Milun, Pathologies of Modern Space: Empty Space, Urban Anxiety, and the Recovery of the Public Self (London, 2007).

²¹ L. Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: the Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (New York, 1995). On the multinational corporation as the new motor that drives the pursuit of capital, replacing the nation, see M. Santos, Por otra globalización: del pensamiento único a la cociencia universal (Bogotá, 2004). Canclini suggests that the ‘evasive and unmanageable’ (along with imagined) nature of globalization inspires those who deal in it to do so ‘through narrations and metaphors’ (N. Garcia Canclini, La globalización imaginada (Mexico City, 2001 [1999]), p. II).

²² Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 154.