Geomorphology: the mechanics and chemistry of landscapes - By Robert S. Anderson and Suzanne P. Anderson PDF

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New Zealand Geographer (2012) 68, 70–76 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-7939.2012.01222.x Book Reviews Swept up lives? Re-envisioning the response, chapter 3 provides a fascinating alter- homeless city native geography of the city whereby the lives of the homeless are not viewed solely as being Paul Cloke, Jon ...

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New Zealand Geographer (2012) 68, 70–76

doi: 10.1111/j.1745-7939.2012.01222.x

Book Reviews

Swept up lives? Re-envisioning the homeless city Paul Cloke, Jon May and Sarah Johnsen, WileyBlackwell Publications, Chichester, 2010. 292 pp. ISBN 978-1-4051-5387-4. Swept Up Lives? Re-Envisioning the Homeless City offers a timely intervention into existing work on homelessness and neoliberal urban governance. The book puts forward an alternative narrative to the prevalent and often pessimistic accounts of urban homelessness as found in analyses of the ‘revanchist’ city. While not denying the increasingly punitive environment in which welfare services now operate, the authors seek to foreground the agency of both service users and providers in navigating such an environment. The book is based on extensive research conducted as part of a UK ‘Homeless Places Project’ between 2000 and 2004 and has had, by the authors own admission, ‘a long gestation period’. Although they acknowledge that there have been changes to the policy landscape since then (such as the No One Left Out initiative in 2008), their research captures an important juncture in the rescaling of governance for homeless services. Alongside the election of New Labour in the late 1990s, there has been a more concerted attempt to recentralise control over homeless services, in part through new ‘joined-up’ partnership mechanisms, so that the state has a greater say in how non-statutory organisations are delivering front-line welfare services. This, alongside changes in how the urban environment is being policed (the introduction of ASBOS for example), has for many served to create a highly punitive and regulated environment for the urban homeless. However, the authors argue that narratives of control and purification of public space offer an overly simplistic reading of the current situation. Firstly, such a perspective tends to deploy a rationalist reading of the homeless city in which the agency of the homeless is limited. In

response, chapter 3 provides a fascinating alternative geography of the city whereby the lives of the homeless are not viewed solely as being punctuated by encounters with institutional places (day centres or hostels, for example). Rather the chapter focuses on the daily emotional and affective geographies of the homeless as they traverse the city to find ‘places to eat’, ‘places to sleep’, ‘places to earn’ and ‘places to hang out’. Secondly, the authors argue that it is overly reductive to suggest that the spaces of care, such as soup runs, day centres and hostels, are solely doing the work of government in ‘sweeping up’ the homeless from public space. Instead these services are shown to be crucial sites of pause and refuge, ‘in which the humanity of homeless people is respected’ (p. 91). Framed by an earlier discussion of the potential emergence of a ‘postsecular ethics’ in homeless provisioning, chapters 4, 5 and 6 give profound insights into not only the overburdened environment in which these services operate but also the motivations for those (primarily volunteers) who work in such services. A key concern running through these chapters is the difficulty in defining a relationship of care across different services within the changing governance framework. Whereas government targets emphasise getting people off the street in a desire for ‘rehabilitation and change’, many faith-based organisations operate through ‘an ethos of open and noninterventionist acceptance’ (p. 120).This distinction in approach has served to undermine the work of voluntary and faith-based organisations as they are viewed by local government as less effective in meeting policy targets and therefore potentially less deserving of funding. However, the authors argue this need not be the case. Working with the homeless in this way offers an outlet for a particular ‘voluntary attitude’ in society that continues to have a crucial place alongside more ‘professional’ approaches in aiding the most impoverished among us. The final chapters move on to an analysis of the uneven geographies of provision and

© 2012 The Authors New Zealand Geographer © 2012 New Zealand Geographical Society

Book Reviews

consumption of homeless services within and across urban and rural spaces, peeling back the different contextual layers (historical, political and organisational) that combine to shape the care infrastructure in place. The authors illustrate that unevenness of provision is more than the sum of the number of homeless present or services available, but this also relates to the feel of a place for a homeless person. In making this distinction, they draw attention to the importance of different homeless scenes in making a place ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in which to be homeless. Overall, Swept up Lives? is a ‘hopeful’ re-reading of homeless services in the UK and would be of great interest to those in both academic and policy fields working in the area of homelessness and welfare provisioning in a neoliberal context. Aisling Gallagher School of People, Environment and Planning College of Humanities and Social Sciences Massey University

The settler’s plot: how stories take place in New Zealand Alex Calder, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2011. 299 pp. ISBN 978-1-86940-488-8. Alex Calder’s new book The Settler’s Plot examines the relationship between literature, place and Pa¯keha¯ settlement in New Zealand. An analysis that is overtly framed by a cartographic impulse tries to connect stories from the corpus of New Zealand literature with the actuality of Pa¯keha¯ settlement. The stories in the book occur in a range of stylised and suggestive settings, and the book represents an attempt to write a cultural history of those settings in which Pa¯keha¯ New Zealanders have invested significant tacit cultural knowledge. Calder’s task is approached through the deep reading of a small selection of classic works in New Zealand literature. In selecting these works, the author has reached both into the orthodox canon of New Zealand literature, for example, Mansfield, Sargeson, Frame and Curnow, but also into a larger group of authors that include: Augustus Earle, F.E Manning, William Satchell, Herbert Guthrie-Smith,

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Robyn Hyde and John Mulgan. Interestingly, Calder mixes together works of fiction and non-fiction. The rationale for this being that adding the work of people such as GuthrieSmith and F.E. Manning expands and shifts the character of the canon of New Zealand literature (and in particular nineteenth century literature), and in the process opens up new groups of work for literary examination. The book is organised into four sections, each of which deals with a different group of settings. The organisation and tenor of the book’s narrative is neatly summed up by the author when he argues that while the book is chronological, ‘this is not sequential history so such as a sorting through of communal memories’ (p. 5). Part I reflects on what the author terms the ‘Paheka turangawaewae’ and the complex relationship it suggests between a sense of Pa¯keha¯ belonging constituted through reference to a relationship to nature and the continuing challenge offered to this identity by the prior presence of Ma¯ori in those narratives of belonging. Part II examines those places of early engagement between Ma¯ori and Pa¯keha¯ via the work of Earle and Manning. Here Calder is critical of analyses that tend to lock works such as those written by Earle and Manning into ideological straitjackets and to efface the hesitancies and silences of their narrators. Part III focuses our attention on what the author argues are the two key places of Pa¯keha¯ place making, the farm and suburb. For geographers, the inclusion of Guthrie-Smith’s classic environmental history Tutira is a reminder that such works were not simply bald chronicles of change but often selfconsciously literary in their aspirations. Moreover, often lost in the grand narratives of environmental change associated with Tutira, and indeed a theme running throughout the book, is the idea that such stories are built from a myriad of small details filled with hesitancies not necessarily enslaved to any master narrative. Part IV is concerned with the absent other of Pa¯keha¯ identity – overseas – set against the near places of the farm, etc. Examined through the work of Robin Hyde, John Mulgan, Allan Curnow and Janet Frame, the author argues that the metaphor of looming, the sense of place oscillating between near and far, offers a productive way of thinking beyond the nationalist of ‘here’ or post-national alternatives.

© 2012 The Authors New Zealand Geographer © 2012 New Zealand Geographical Society

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Many of us will be broadly familiar with the works interrogated in the book, but I suspect not deeply enough to be comfortable with the level and style of analysis. Furthermore, the conventions of literary criticism represent an alien way of knowing in a human geography increasingly framed by the analysis of the rhythms of material practice. Here the author’s notion of a ‘sorting’ through can read as a potential jumping from idea to example and back again. Consequently, The Settler’s Plot offers a challenging read for geographers schooled in different ways of knowing and writing.Yet there is worth in the way in which Calder consistently calls us to reflect on the memories of place embedded in those works that make up Jim Traue’s ‘Ancestors of the Mind’ (2005). There also is worth in his call to trust in the hesitancies of authors such as Manning and Guthrie-Smith and to avoid the easy positioning of their stories in the grand narratives of place that Pa¯keha¯ have told themselves, a concern with the openness of the text that we would do well to reflect on in our own reading and work. Matt Henry School of People, Environment and Planning College of Humanities and Social Sciences Massey University

Reference Traue JE (2005). Ancestors of the mind: a Pakeha Whakapapa. In: Brown R, ed. Great New Zealand Argument: Ideas about Ourselves. Activity Press, Auckland, pp. 139–47.

Geomorphology of upland peat: erosion, form and landscape change Martin Evans and Jeff Warburton. RGS-IBG Book Series. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2010. 262 pp. ISBN 978-1-4443-3741-9. This short but very informative book provides a detailed account of the geomorphology of England’s upland peat ecosystems, focusing in particular on the erosion of these landscapes through abiotic forces. Although the research presented is predominantly for peat ecosystems in England, the authors have incorporated, where possible, data from around the globe.

Research into the erosion of upland peat ecosystems, according to Evans and Warburton, has been almost entirely undertaken in the UK, and in that sense this book provides a synthesis of processes and data that could be used as a starting point for undertaking comparative research into peat ecosystems around the globe. ‘Upland’, in the context of UK research, refers to ‘wildlands or areas where agriculture is extensive’ (p. 7). Evans and Warburton consider the ‘low altitude peatlands of Newfoundland, Tasmania, the Shetlands and the Falkland Islands’ (p. 7) to also fit their definition of upland peat. Like all good texts on quite specific topics, Evans and Warburton first define the relevant terminology; in doing this, the basic functional (hydrological) and structural (geomorphic) aspects of peat ecosystems and also the key focus of peat erosion are presented for those less versed in these types of ecosystems. The land system model presented at the end of chapter one further adds to our basic understanding as it provides a good depiction of the features typically found in these upland peat systems, which ties into the discussions presented in the following chapters. Chapters two through six focus on the geomorphology and hydrology of these globally rare ecosystems and their erosion. The hydrological processes and sediment production of these systems are discussed, incorporating details specific to different peat ecosystems, such as ombrotrophic mires and blanket bogs. The focus then changes to the erosion of these ecosystems and the geomorphic aspects of these systems that facilitate erosion such as slope, sediment yield, surface hydrology and morphology, and the influence of wind. These are presented through a robust overview of processes, methods of data collection and relevant theory drawn from a range of literary sources. The text is supported and enriched throughout the book by numerous photographs,diagrams,graphs and tables. With every different theme, Evans and Warburton acknowledge the gaps in the research, highlighting that even though this book provides a synthesis of peat geomorphology, more research is still required. Chapter seven presents a framework that considers the geomorphic forms of the landscape, from the macroscale to the microscale, and how they influence the construction and

© 2012 The Authors New Zealand Geographer © 2012 New Zealand Geographical Society

Book Reviews

erosion of these peat ecosystems. Evans and Warburton are trying to emphasise, through this relatively short chapter, the importance of spatial scale on the relationships between geomorphic processes, hydrology and the ecology of the landscape, and the need for research to recognise that there is variation in all of these features that gives rise to characteristic peat ecosystems. The following chapter focuses on the revegetation of these eroding peat ecosystems, giving consideration to long term influences such as climate change and pollution. Figure 8.3 presents an interesting, but simplified, model of the abiotic and biotic factors controlling the successful revegetation of the system with Sphagnum. The inclusion of abiotic factors in the model acknowledges the importance of the structural (geomorphic) and functional (hydrological) components of these ecosystems on revegetation and long-term stability. The final chapter briefly touches on the implications of peat erosion, making mention of carbon budgets and stored contaminants. The briefness of the issues in this chapter is perhaps a reflection on the fact that the impacts of erosion are still being determined, and research into this area needs to be developed. Overall, the material presented by Evans and Warburton assumes that the reader will have at least a basic level of understanding in the fields of geomorphology, hydrology and climatology. The robust synthesis of literature relating to the construction and erosion of upland peat ecosystems in England has inspired a spark of intrigue into the nature of New Zealand’s peat ecosystems. A book that is well worth reading. Jillian Hetherington Department of Geography University of Otago

Global perspectives in the geography curriculum: reviewing the moral case for geography Alex Standish, Routledge, Oxon, 2009. 209 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-47549-5. With its interesting title concerning the moral case for geography, this book presents a critical look at the discipline’s journey within educa-

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tion, arguing that a certain derailment has occurred. The main concern is that the postmodern turn has resulted in a more reflexive and individualised geography that is open to ‘contamination’. Standish does not actually use that word, but he implies it. This book is a result of his research into the secondary curricula for geography both in the United States and the UK, and there is value for New Zealand geography educators to learn from his observations and to reflect further on our situation. The central thesis is that the intrinsic qualities of the discipline of geography taught at secondary school have been lost, or at least marginalised, in the political move to use the curricula to improve citizenship ideals, and in the case of geography, global citizenship (he uses the environment, population and development causes as examples). By utilising geography as a vehicle, the pedagogy becomes focused on student-centred learning that links personal actions to global issues with the effect of relocating the focus of geography from the wider world of facts to a more personal response.Thus, intrinsic knowledge (how you feel about something) and personal accountability (what you are going to do about it) are prioritised above the outside world of facts. Standish gives this reprioritisation a name: ‘The ethical turn’ (p. 4). Standish is not saying that we should not teach issues in geography (he is not calling for a complete return to the days of regional geography), but he is arguing that teaching geography today has meant a reconfiguration of the subject into a verb: one does geography – it is an action, not just a process of learning (p. 120). You do not learn for the sake of learning, you learn so you can become active in some (predefined) way, and that this is not agenda-free. He points out that when the ‘focus has moved from knowledge and understanding about issues to making a connection and empathising with the people involved’ (p. 127), that this is showing a contempt for the subject and underestimates the capacity of young people to learn content and from thence to make their own decisions for connection, if any. At its worst, this results in the neglect of critical questioning and deeper learning in exchange for empathy and personal involvement, the emotive over the rational. To some extent, I did agree with him in that we should

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be asking questions about this, as studentcentred pedagogy does have risks. I felt that he was arguing for a more rational knowledge base, for a deeper, more objective approach to learning. But is this possible? Surely no discipline is politically neutral. Some might argue that Standish is swinging the pendulum too far, at the risk of dismissing the many offerings, a more constructivist perspective has to offer geography. This is in terms of engaging young people through place-based learning, innovative fieldwork that explores values and emotions as well as more action-orientated geography projects, in other words, real geography. I found this book interesting and challenging and was left thinking that Standish makes some valid points and there is much to digest and reflect upon in his book (for a useful comparison, see Graham Butt’s edition ‘Geography, Education and the Future’, Continuum, London 2011). It is imperative to have these conversations about what constitutes knowledge, education and pedagogy in all disciplines, not just geography. Standish is certainly furthering the debate in geography, and this book would be a valuable asset to those involved in thinking about how we teach geography in this country. Being aware of how the subject is positioned, how it is taught and how it can be used as a vehicle for political projects alerts educators to the possible erosion of a liberal education, if that is one’s aim. No subject is politically neutral nor ideologically idle and this book is testimony to that. Rachel Tallon School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences Victoria University of Wellington

Geomorphology: the mechanics and chemistry of landscapes Robert S. Anderson and Suzanne P. Anderson, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010. 637 pp. ISBN 978-521-51978-6. There has been an increasing shift in recent years towards a process-based understanding of landscapes and their functions, and the

linking or scaling-up of processes from the microscopic scale to a catchment scale. Geomorphology: The Mechanics and Chemistry of Landscapes fills this niche nicely as a textbook that provides a quantitative approach to earth surface processes for upper level undergraduate or graduate students. The 18 chapters are comprehensive in their coverage of topics that are relevant to the discipline. The earlier chapters of the book cover the processes related to the formation of the Earth and the fundamentals of earth surface processes, progressing t...