Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
17-21 April 2007: Association of American Geographers Annual
Meeting, San Francisco, California
Geographies of practice and the urban outdoors
This session will explore the diverse transactional relationships that inhabitants, workers and visitors have with the urban outdoors. Through a particular interest in the mundane practices of different social groups, we are also interested to consider how such a perspective might enrich or challenge current efforts to increase overall wellbeing through outdoor spaces.
Large amounts of resources are spent in cities across the world in endeavouring to provide a positive outdoor environment; policy makers are often keen to encourage city people outdoors where they are understood to derive benefits in terms of improved physical and mental health and a strengthened sense of community. Yet provided spaces, where they exist, may be under-used, or used in ways not intended, whilst other, incidental places can prove more popular. Many may lack the means to get to allocated sites, even locally, whilst others derive similar benefits in more removed locations. Conflicts can also arise when the practices of some may exclude or preclude those of others. Furthermore, professional and policy practices are also crucial as they configure the outdoors in ways that possibly seek to manage and control different social practices. If we move beyond notions of discrete spaces, there are issues of lifestyle as changing work practices, for example, can keep individuals indoors where they may actually be happier. Individuals and groups also manage their own outdoor experience in ways that minimise the negative by avoiding unpleasant places and controlling their sensory experience through clothing and other technologies.
An examination of practice and the urban outdoors has the potential to enrich our understanding of a number of important issues including environmental justice, social inclusion, city sustainability and urban design. More conceptually, it could extend theories of nature experience, everyday materiality, and physical embodiment and also provide an important geographical perspective by considering how outdoor practices can vary between cities.
Possible themes:
- Social cohorts: the old, the young, the rich, the poor, the infirm.
- Different lifestyles: those always indoors, those always outside.
- Communities of practice: cyclists, businessmen, dog walkers, drivers.
- The experience of environmental processes: weather, sunshine, snow, wind.
- City climates: tropical, temperate, seasonal, stable.
- Professional practices that configure and control.
- Exclusionary practices and excluded practices.
