The 90S Show

Culture Leaves the Farm and Hits the Streets 1

Bibliographic Data

ID11670328
AuthorsTrevor J Barnes (0000-0003-4396-5470, University of British Columbia, corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume24
Issue6
Pages479-492
Publication date2003-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueUrban Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0272-3638 • E-ISSN: 1938-2847
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.2747/0272-3638.24.6.479
OpenAlexW1987855153
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited45

The tradition of American cultural geography was defined by studies of the rural, and in its more prosaic form focused on cataloging and mapping artifacts such as fence posts, barn types, and gravestones in order to delimit culture areas. In contrast, the city was all but ignored, treated as a cultural vacuum, and conceived only as a site of work, production, and economic relations. Hence, the importance of urban spatial science that from the late 1950s formalized that economism as central place theory, or Alonso's map of bid-rent curves, or models of retail location. Even when urban geography began eschewing formal models and theory, turning toward some kind of Marxist approach during the 1970s, the focus on things economic remained, but couched now in a different vocabulary such as rent gap, urban gatekeepers, and uneven development. The economism of spatial science and Marxism could not be sustained, however. Culture had to be let in. From 1990 pressured by outside theoretical developments such as cultural studies, and postmodernism, and changes from inside the discipline such as the rise of the new cultural geography, urban geography finally cracked, explicitly allowing culture in first as a trickle, but by the end of that decade as a flood. Culture had finally left the farm and hit the streets

Civil engineering · Cultural geography · Economic geography · Epistemology · Geography · Human geography · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Postmodernism · Social science · Sociology · Urban geography · Urban planning · Urban theory · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Law · Philosophy · Urban Planning and Governance · Urbanization and City Planning