J M Jacobs
Biographic Data
| ID | 51850 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J M Jacobs |
| GIVEN NAMES | J M |
| FAMILY NAME | Jacobs |
| SIGNATURE | JACOBS J M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9967-1274 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1345 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1960 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Monarchy and urban change: The post-independence development of the Pesanggrahan Ambarrukmo, Yogyakarta
This article explores the role of Indonesia’s royal house of Yogyakarta in the development of a site called Ambarrukmo. Originally a royal garden retreat, Ambarrukmo has undergone two significant phases of urbanization: the construction of an international hotel during Indonesia’s immediate post-independence period, and the more recent construction of a large-scale mall. These commercial development projects have been used by the Sultan to defend…
Chee, Lilian 2023 Architecture and Affect: Precarious Spaces. Oxford and New York: Routledge
Making do: Young People and Mobilities at Home
This paper investigates young people’s mobile practices of ‘making do’ as they negotiate work, study and play in the home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on Singapore, and drawing on original empirical data derived from online journaling by twenty participants, the paper elaborates on their practices of ‘making do’ when working from home. Using an interdisciplinary approach spanning youth, cultural and architectural studies, the paper cons…
Urban custodians and hospitable citizens: Citizenship and social actions at two liberal arts universities in Hong Kong and Shanghai
Drawing upon fieldwork conducted at two liberal arts universities in Hong Kong and Shanghai in 2018, this article explores how liberal arts educational institutions are promulgating citizenship ideas about moral and character development, as well as the ways in which young people’s social actions are informed by these citizenship narratives alongside wider socio-economic and political norms governing the urban subject. We discuss two emergent pol…
Earth Honoring: Western Desires and Indigenous Knowledges 1
This chapter begins with a critical examination of the colonial and patriarchal potentials of recent radical environmentalisms and feminisms. It examines the recent history of political alliances between environmentalists and women&s;s groups and Aborigines. The chapter focuses on a specific example of one such political alliance, which formed around the struggle by the Arrernte people of central Australia to stop the flooding of women&s;s sacred…
Postcolonial Geography
Planetary postcolonialism
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.…
Houses of Experiment: Modern Housing and the Will to Laboratorization
This article adds historical and geographical specificity to the link between city building and laboratorization processes. It does so by way of the example of housing in mid-twentieth-centuryBritain. Housing provision at this time saw an intensification of the relationship between architectural design and science by way of the emergent field of building science as well as new social-science studies of householder satisfaction. The article focuse…
Defensible Space on the Move: Revisiting the Urban Geography ofAliceColeman
This article traces the movement of the concept of 'defensible space' fromNewYork City in the 1970s, where it was developed by theCanadian architect/plannerOscarNewman, toLondon in the 1980s and into design interventions inBritish public housing in the 1990s, throughBritish geographerAliceColeman, who acted as an especially powerful transfer agent. In focusing on this urban design 'concept' on the move we contribute to existing scholarship on pol…
Urban geographies I: Still thinking cities relationally
This review essay revisits recent scholarship within urban geography that has been shaped by relational theory, looking specifically at the scholarship on urban policy mobilities and urban assemblages. As will be shown, current urban geographies of relationality operate with irreconcilable grammars
Commentary—Comparing Comparative Urbanisms
10.2747/0272-3638.33.6.904
Commentary: Property and propriety: (re)making the space of indigeneity in Australian cities
This commentary reflects on the ways in which identity-bound studies reflecting on indigeneity and the city rarely connect with the theories that drive world systems and post-world systems accounts of urbanization. It ponders how we might begin to make links between a default ‘local’ episteme of Australian indigenous studies and a ‘more worldly’ episteme that operates as the infrastructure for understanding (global) urbanization. First, it points…
Doing Building Work: Methods at the Interface of Geography and Architecture
This paper summarises the methodological approach taken in an interdisciplinary project involving geographers and architects. The project charted the diverse afterlives of the modernist-inspired, state-sponsored, residential high-rise, and did so drawing on two cases: Red Road Estate in Glasgow and Bukit Ho Swee Estate in Singapore. In offering a specific account of, and reflection upon, the methodologies used in the High-rise Project, we hope to…
Update from the Editors
Practising architectures
Living Room: Rematerialising Home
The Modern Touch: Interior Design and Modernisation in Post-Independence Singapore
The authors take as their focus the advice on interior design and decoration that Singapore's Housing Development Board (HDB) distributed to residents as part of its programme of universal housing provision. Through a series of regular articles appearing in the HDB publication Our Home (1972-1989), readers were presented with stories that showed how selected HDB residents decorated their newly acquired highrise flats. The authors detail the relat…
'A Tall Storey … but, a Fact Just the Same': The Red Road High-rise as a Black Box
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 pape…
A geography of big things
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 p…
Too little, too much: Cultural feminist geographies
This paper traces some of the contours of recent critiques of cultural geography and reflects upon the implications they have for the continuing vitality of a feminist geography concerned with the cultural. The paper seeks to work away from this current disenchantment suggesting that in the field of feminist geography there are explicit intellectual and political imperatives that keep central the field of concerns associated with cultural geograp…
Edge of Empire
Edge of Empire examines struggles over urban space in three contemporary first world cities in an attempt to map the real geographies of colonialism and postcolonialism as manifest in modern society. From London, the one-time heart of the empire, to Perth and Brisbane, scenes of Aboriginal claims for the sacred in the space of the modern city, Jacobs emphasises the global geography of the local and unravels the spatialised cultural politics of po…
Touching Pasts
On The Border Of The Unsayable: The Apology in Postcolonizing Australia
This essay examines the rewired circuits of desire, will and subjectivity that occur in postcolonizing settler nations such as Australia. Its explicit concern lies with an examination of the Australian process of reconciliation and with the call for, and giving of, apologies for past wrongs to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. The essay argues that postcolonizing trends in Australia work to restructure the settler sense of national subjecti…
Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation
Aboriginal claims for sacredness in modern Australia may seem like minor events, but they have radically disturbed the nation's image of itself. Minorities appear to have too much influence; majorities suddenly feel embattled. What once seemed familiar can now seem disconcertingly unfamiliar, a condition Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs diagnose as 'uncanny'. In Uncanny Australia Gelder and Jacobs show how Aboriginal claims for sacredness radiate ou…
Geographies of Publicity and Privacy: Residential Activism in Sydney in the 1970s
In Australian cities in the early 1970s certain sections of the trade union movement banned work on inner-city construction projects considered detrimental to the urban environment: trade union 'black bans' were transformed into so-called 'Green Bans'. Associated with the union action was a ground swell of resident opposition to demolition and redevelopment. There has been much documentation of this important moment in Australian history: Green B…
Living Room: Rematerialising Home
Edge of Empire
Edge of Empire examines struggles over urban space in three contemporary first world cities in an attempt to map the real geographies of colonialism and postcolonialism as manifest in modern society. From London, the one-time heart of the empire, to Perth and Brisbane, scenes of Aboriginal claims for the sacred in the space of the modern city, Jacobs emphasises the global geography of the local and unravels the spatialised cultural politics of po…
A geography of big things
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 p…
Practising architectures
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
On The Border Of The Unsayable: The Apology in Postcolonizing Australia
This essay examines the rewired circuits of desire, will and subjectivity that occur in postcolonizing settler nations such as Australia. Its explicit concern lies with an examination of the Australian process of reconciliation and with the call for, and giving of, apologies for past wrongs to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. The essay argues that postcolonizing trends in Australia work to restructure the settler sense of national subjecti…
Too little, too much: Cultural feminist geographies
This paper traces some of the contours of recent critiques of cultural geography and reflects upon the implications they have for the continuing vitality of a feminist geography concerned with the cultural. The paper seeks to work away from this current disenchantment suggesting that in the field of feminist geography there are explicit intellectual and political imperatives that keep central the field of concerns associated with cultural geograp…
Planetary postcolonialism
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.…
Commentary—Comparing Comparative Urbanisms
10.2747/0272-3638.33.6.904
The City Unbound: Qualitative Approaches to the City
Doing Building Work: Methods at the Interface of Geography and Architecture
This paper summarises the methodological approach taken in an interdisciplinary project involving geographers and architects. The project charted the diverse afterlives of the modernist-inspired, state-sponsored, residential high-rise, and did so drawing on two cases: Red Road Estate in Glasgow and Bukit Ho Swee Estate in Singapore. In offering a specific account of, and reflection upon, the methodologies used in the High-rise Project, we hope to…
From Urban Aborigines to Aboriginality and the City: One Path Through the History of Australian Cultural Geography
This paper charts one idiosyncratic and rather personalised path through the emergence of cultural geography in the Australian context. It takes as its example the transition from research which examines a category group identified as 'urban Aborigines' to more recent research of our own which looks at the theme of how Aboriginality is articulated in and through the space of the city. This transition provides a way of registering some broader cha…
Defensible Space on the Move: Revisiting the Urban Geography ofAliceColeman
This article traces the movement of the concept of 'defensible space' fromNewYork City in the 1970s, where it was developed by theCanadian architect/plannerOscarNewman, toLondon in the 1980s and into design interventions inBritish public housing in the 1990s, throughBritish geographerAliceColeman, who acted as an especially powerful transfer agent. In focusing on this urban design 'concept' on the move we contribute to existing scholarship on pol…
Negotiating the Heart; Heritage, Development and Identity in Postimperial London
The empirical focus of this paper is a long-running planning controversy associated with attempts to redevelop a site on Bank Junction in the centre of the City of London. These plans faced fierce opposition from those who sought to have the local character of the area, its 'heritage', preserved and enhanced. The controversy culminated in the 1980s, a period during which the City and its surrounds were under massive redevelopment pressure in resp…
Politics and the Cultural Landscape: The Case of Aboriginal Land Rights
In this paper Aboriginal land rights are analysed from the perspective of a disadvantaged group seeking access to a scarce resource controlled by external agents. The Aboriginal participants in land rights politics are found to be actively seeking ways in which their interest in the land can most effectively be communicated to external groups which have constructed well‐formed, but often distorted images of what constitutes a genuine Aboriginal i…
The Modern Touch: Interior Design and Modernisation in Post-Independence Singapore
The authors take as their focus the advice on interior design and decoration that Singapore's Housing Development Board (HDB) distributed to residents as part of its programme of universal housing provision. Through a series of regular articles appearing in the HDB publication Our Home (1972-1989), readers were presented with stories that showed how selected HDB residents decorated their newly acquired highrise flats. The authors detail the relat…
Geographies of Publicity and Privacy: Residential Activism in Sydney in the 1970s
In Australian cities in the early 1970s certain sections of the trade union movement banned work on inner-city construction projects considered detrimental to the urban environment: trade union 'black bans' were transformed into so-called 'Green Bans'. Associated with the union action was a ground swell of resident opposition to demolition and redevelopment. There has been much documentation of this important moment in Australian history: Green B…
Aboriginal art - Australia's neglected inheritance
Australia's rich inheritance of Aboriginal rock art is now under threat from a rapid growth in tourism. Tourists seek out remote areas of the country where they can experience the 'real' Australia and Aboriginal rock art sites are promoted as integral to that 'outback' experience. Various management techniques have been used at rock art sites to protect them from tourists but not all have been successful. Research has been concerned with studying…
Speaking Always as Geographers
Kooramindanjie: Place and the Postcolonial
Kooramindanjie is 600 kilometres North West of Brisbane in the sandstone tablelands of the Great Dividing Range of Australia. It is an oasis in the desert plains and Aboriginal people would travel many hundreds of miles to visit this place for water, food, shelter and ceremonies. The caves were cool places in summer and warm places in winter, and offered shelter when the days were windy or when there was rain. They offered a safe place for the wo…
Urban custodians and hospitable citizens: Citizenship and social actions at two liberal arts universities in Hong Kong and Shanghai
Drawing upon fieldwork conducted at two liberal arts universities in Hong Kong and Shanghai in 2018, this article explores how liberal arts educational institutions are promulgating citizenship ideas about moral and character development, as well as the ways in which young people’s social actions are informed by these citizenship narratives alongside wider socio-economic and political norms governing the urban subject. We discuss two emergent pol…
Houses of Experiment: Modern Housing and the Will to Laboratorization
This article adds historical and geographical specificity to the link between city building and laboratorization processes. It does so by way of the example of housing in mid-twentieth-centuryBritain. Housing provision at this time saw an intensification of the relationship between architectural design and science by way of the emergent field of building science as well as new social-science studies of householder satisfaction. The article focuse…
The Consequences of Ruins: Contemplations on Social Memory and Loss of Place in Australia
Commentary: Property and propriety: (re)making the space of indigeneity in Australian cities
This commentary reflects on the ways in which identity-bound studies reflecting on indigeneity and the city rarely connect with the theories that drive world systems and post-world systems accounts of urbanization. It ponders how we might begin to make links between a default ‘local’ episteme of Australian indigenous studies and a ‘more worldly’ episteme that operates as the infrastructure for understanding (global) urbanization. First, it points…
Uncanny Australia
The Structure of the Word in old Khmer
Since the publication in 1954 of M. Cœdes' sixth and last volume of edited and translated Cambodian inscriptions, almost every legible text of Old Khmer which has so far come to light has been readily available in transcribed form to the student of the Khmer language. It is a humble and restricted literature which has come down to us, as the praises of gods and kings and most of the important edicts were written in Sanskrit while the native tongu…
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Aboriginal art - Australia's neglected inheritance
Australia's rich inheritance of Aboriginal rock art is now under threat from a rapid growth in tourism. Tourists seek out remote areas of the country where they can experience the 'real' Australia and Aboriginal rock art sites are promoted as integral to that 'outback' experience. Various management techniques have been used at rock art sites to protect them from tourists but not all have been successful. Research has been concerned with studying…
Politics and the Cultural Landscape: The Case of Aboriginal Land Rights
In this paper Aboriginal land rights are analysed from the perspective of a disadvantaged group seeking access to a scarce resource controlled by external agents. The Aboriginal participants in land rights politics are found to be actively seeking ways in which their interest in the land can most effectively be communicated to external groups which have constructed well‐formed, but often distorted images of what constitutes a genuine Aboriginal i…
The City Unbound: Qualitative Approaches to the City
Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics
Negotiating the Heart; Heritage, Development and Identity in Postimperial London
The empirical focus of this paper is a long-running planning controversy associated with attempts to redevelop a site on Bank Junction in the centre of the City of London. These plans faced fierce opposition from those who sought to have the local character of the area, its 'heritage', preserved and enhanced. The controversy culminated in the 1980s, a period during which the City and its surrounds were under massive redevelopment pressure in resp…
That Dangerous Fantasy of Authenticity: A Review of the J. C. Slaughter Falls Community Arts Project, Brisbane
Uncanny Australia
Kooramindanjie: Place and the Postcolonial
Kooramindanjie is 600 kilometres North West of Brisbane in the sandstone tablelands of the Great Dividing Range of Australia. It is an oasis in the desert plains and Aboriginal people would travel many hundreds of miles to visit this place for water, food, shelter and ceremonies. The caves were cool places in summer and warm places in winter, and offered shelter when the days were windy or when there was rain. They offered a safe place for the wo…
Speaking Always as Geographers
The Consequences of Ruins: Contemplations on Social Memory and Loss of Place in Australia
From Urban Aborigines to Aboriginality and the City: One Path Through the History of Australian Cultural Geography
This paper charts one idiosyncratic and rather personalised path through the emergence of cultural geography in the Australian context. It takes as its example the transition from research which examines a category group identified as 'urban Aborigines' to more recent research of our own which looks at the theme of how Aboriginality is articulated in and through the space of the city. This transition provides a way of registering some broader cha…
Geographies of Publicity and Privacy: Residential Activism in Sydney in the 1970s
In Australian cities in the early 1970s certain sections of the trade union movement banned work on inner-city construction projects considered detrimental to the urban environment: trade union 'black bans' were transformed into so-called 'Green Bans'. Associated with the union action was a ground swell of resident opposition to demolition and redevelopment. There has been much documentation of this important moment in Australian history: Green B…
On The Border Of The Unsayable: The Apology in Postcolonizing Australia
This essay examines the rewired circuits of desire, will and subjectivity that occur in postcolonizing settler nations such as Australia. Its explicit concern lies with an examination of the Australian process of reconciliation and with the call for, and giving of, apologies for past wrongs to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. The essay argues that postcolonizing trends in Australia work to restructure the settler sense of national subjecti…
Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation
Aboriginal claims for sacredness in modern Australia may seem like minor events, but they have radically disturbed the nation's image of itself. Minorities appear to have too much influence; majorities suddenly feel embattled. What once seemed familiar can now seem disconcertingly unfamiliar, a condition Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs diagnose as 'uncanny'. In Uncanny Australia Gelder and Jacobs show how Aboriginal claims for sacredness radiate ou…
Touching Pasts
Edge of Empire
Edge of Empire examines struggles over urban space in three contemporary first world cities in an attempt to map the real geographies of colonialism and postcolonialism as manifest in modern society. From London, the one-time heart of the empire, to Perth and Brisbane, scenes of Aboriginal claims for the sacred in the space of the modern city, Jacobs emphasises the global geography of the local and unravels the spatialised cultural politics of po…
Too little, too much: Cultural feminist geographies
This paper traces some of the contours of recent critiques of cultural geography and reflects upon the implications they have for the continuing vitality of a feminist geography concerned with the cultural. The paper seeks to work away from this current disenchantment suggesting that in the field of feminist geography there are explicit intellectual and political imperatives that keep central the field of concerns associated with cultural geograp…
A geography of big things
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 p…
'A Tall Storey … but, a Fact Just the Same': The Red Road High-rise as a Black Box
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 pape…
Living Room: Rematerialising Home
The Modern Touch: Interior Design and Modernisation in Post-Independence Singapore
The authors take as their focus the advice on interior design and decoration that Singapore's Housing Development Board (HDB) distributed to residents as part of its programme of universal housing provision. Through a series of regular articles appearing in the HDB publication Our Home (1972-1989), readers were presented with stories that showed how selected HDB residents decorated their newly acquired highrise flats. The authors detail the relat…
Update from the Editors
Practising architectures
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (21 works) · Geography (11 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (11 works) · Archaeology (10 works) · History (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Social science (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Politics (9 works)