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Rematerializing geography: The 'new' urban geography

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DOI: 10.1191/0309132502ph358pr

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Progress in Human Geography 26,1 (2002) pp. 101–112

Rematerializing geography: the

‘new’ urban geography
Loretta Lees
Department of Geography, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK

I Introduction

In the face of several recent proposals for rematerializing social and cultural geography
this paper argues that we should look to the ‘new’ urban geography for inspiration.
Because of its subdisciplinary history – its relatively greater attachment to quantitative
and applied work, the strong influence of political economy, and the long tradition of
empirical and practical research – urban geography was relatively late to embrace the
cultural turn. Partly as a result, it has done so in ways that avoid many of the excesses
that Jackson (2000) and Philo (2000) seek to remedy by ‘rematerializing’ social and
cultural geography. In urban geography, engagement with the cultural turn has not
replaced studies more firmly grounded in material culture or concern with socially
significant differences. These are issues that Jackson (2000: 9) outlines in his call to
revive a ‘ “material culture” perspective’. Philo’s (2000) treatise is more nuanced; he
traces the progression of [social and cultural] geography’s move away from sometimes
avowedly materialist work to a wholehearted engagement with the immaterial, while
recognizing that not all early work shied away from the immaterial nor does all con-
temporary work shy away from the material. However, Philo (2000: 33) is concerned
with geography’s current:
preoccupation with immaterial cultural processes, with the constitution of intersubjective meaning systems,
with the play of identity politics through the less-than-tangible, often-fleeting spaces of texts, signs, symbols,
psyches, desires, fears, and imaginings. I am concerned that, in the rush to elevate such spaces in our human
geographical studies, we have ended up becoming less attentive to the more ‘thingy’, bump-into-able,
stubbornly there-in-the-world kinds of ‘matter’ (the material) with which earlier geographers tended to be more
familiar.

We can see here, and this is reflected in much of the discipline, that the terms material
and immaterial are used loosely and differently. The ‘material’ that Philo wants to rema-
terialize geography with is associated with matter, it is concrete. The ‘material culture’

© Arnold 2002 10.1191/0309132502ph358pr

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102 Urban geography

that Jackson touts is the relationship between people and things, a relationship that
actor network theory and non-representational theory focus on. One of the problems
with the recent call to rematerialize geography is that geographers tend to use the
material and immaterial as a shorthand for tensions between empirical and theoretical,
applied and academic, concrete and abstract, reality and representation, quantitative
and qualitative, objective and subjective, political economy and cultural studies, and so
on. In part this is because there has not been one ‘turn’ but several – cultural, linguistic,
interpretative, postmodern. Yet, for the most part, geographers use these terms inter-
changeably, as I am guilty of in this paper. Defining what we actually mean by material
and immaterial ought to be the first step in rematerializing geography. It means
answering complex questions such as: ‘Does the immaterial have no objective
existence?’ and ‘Are consciousness and will due to material agency?’. Despite the fact
that this report will reveal the myriad ways that (urban) geographers use the terms
material and immaterial, unfortunately it is not the place to deconstruct and indeed
reconstruct these distinctions.
Philo (2000: 31) wants geographers to take seriously both the immaterial and the
material. In this paper, I want to highlight the fact that this is something that contem-
porary urban geography in particular has done as it has taken on board ideas from the
cultural turn. First, however, I want to set the scene by outlining the state of play of
urban geography as we enter the twenty-first century.

II Urban geography as we enter the twenty-first century

Unlike cultural and economic geography, urban geography has, to date at least,
remained free of the prefix ‘new’. Indeed, if anything, since Thrift (1993) proclaimed an
urban impasse – the loss of the urban as both a subject and object of study – urban
geography has almost seemed to be treading water. Thrift’s impasse is still evident as
we enter the twenty-first century, for urban geographers now identify themselves as
cultural geographers, feminist geographers, population geographers, economic
geographers, social scientists, and so on. Although urban geography remains one of the
largest study/research groups in both the IBG and the AAG it is also one of the most
diffuse. The intellectual developments that have swept over and transformed the
discipline over the last decade are usually associated with cultural, economic or
feminist geography, even if many of them have been urban in text and context. Sexual
geographies, for example, are not thought of as situated centrally within urban
geography. Sexy and powerful topics have been produced, yet urban geography is not
associated with them, despite the fact that the city is central to so much of them. As
Johnston (2000: 877) puts it, ‘. . . many of the concerns formerly encapsulated within
urban geography are now studied under different banners’. ‘Urban geography’ is
seemingly not seen to be at the forefront of innovative work in the discipline any more.
In contrast to the apparent decline of urban geography the urban and urbanity have
gone from strength to strength – we have seen the emergence of a ‘new’ urbanism (Katz,
1994), the new city (Sorkin, 1992), the new urban frontier (Smith, 1996a); the popular-
ization of urban living, the promotion of urban livability and urban sustainability
(Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 1999; 2000). Despite the
fact that more and more rural areas of the world are becoming urbanized, that more and

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 Loretta Lees 103

more people are living in cities, and that urban geography is potentially the most
important and fertile research area in geography, urban geography is apparently
suffering as a subdiscipline.
As we enter the twenty-first century two main concerns are being voiced about urban
geography. First, there is the question of identity. Urban geographers do not agree about
what constitutes ‘urban geography’ (RGS-IBG Urban Geography Research Group, 1998;
2000). The sheer size of the Anglo-American urban geography community has meant
that, in contrast to, say, the social and cultural geography community, there remains a
much more disparate theoretical, philosophical, epistemological, ontological,
conceptual and methodological apparatus out there. Urban geography is hard to tie
down. The fissiparous nature of urban geography was nowhere more apparent than at
the 2000 Institute of British Geographer’s Conference in Brighton where the RGS-IBG
Urban Geography Research Group (UGRG) organized a session titled ‘Urban
geography at the millennium’. In the discussions that took place, the legacy of the
group’s baggage became apparent – some of us are running on the culture treadmill,
others the political-economic treadmill, and others a policy treadmill. The literatures we
read, theories and methodologies we use, are for the most part different; we seldom
come together to learn from each other.
Second, it is a subdiscipline supposedly suffering from a ‘crippling historical legacy’
of outmoded approaches (Johnston, 2000: 877). In the USA, there remains a significant
cohort of ‘traditional’ urban geographers who are educating still more ‘traditional’
urban geographers. In the UK, this is less evident at university level but quite evident
in A level and GCSE work. The legacy at university level is more that ‘straight’ urban
geography courses are now seldom taught.
These concerns may be somewhat particular to the UK, where they reflect the
paranoia that cultural geography is taking over the discipline; that the concept of
culture has become somewhat cannibalizing (Barnett, 1998); that theory only really
happens in cultural studies and in feminism; that urban studies are either not
theoretical enough (Massey, 2001) or alternatively so much so as not to be policy
relevant (Peck, 1999).
American urban geographers, by contrast, seem more confident about their position
at least from the outside. Staeheli et al. (2002) maintain ‘that [urban] geographers are at
the forefront not only of understanding contemporary urban space, but also of
imagining and mapping its futures’. They isolate what they consider to be the major
contributions that American urban geographers have made over the past decade –
spatiality and difference, spatiality and privatization, spatiality and technology,
spatiality and representation, and the glocal city. Each of these is framed by the ‘spatial
turn’ which they argue suggests a new way of looking at cities. They conclude that a
new city is emerging out of the transformations of the public and private spheres, and
an important frontier for urban theory and practice in the twenty-first century will be
understanding the relationship between electronic and technological spaces in relation
to reconstituted and mutated urban space (Staeheli et al., 2002).
The (British) concerns outlined above, I would suggest, mask the continued
importance of urban geography within the discipline as a whole, for a ‘new’ urban
geography has emerged that already deals with many of the issues outlined in recent
calls for the rematerialization of geography.

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104 Urban geography

III The ‘new’ urban geography: straddling a move towards and away from the
interpretative turn

With its feet planted, for the most part at least, in the political-economic tradition, the
subdiscipline of urban geography has struggled with the cultural turn of the late 1980s.
The cultural turn was particularly disturbing for urban geography because it
highlighted the unstable nature of the city as both a thing in itself and as an object of
thought and action, (see Pile, 1999, on defining the city). Some urban geographers stood
firm in a position that refused to leave the material world for the immaterial world
(Badcock, 1996). Yet others came to engage with the hermeneutic tradition and
immaterial urban world(s) (see, for example, Beauregard, 1993; Keith and Pile, 1996;
Ruddick, 1996; Wilson, 1998).
Heated debates in urban geography over the process of gentrification mirrored this
state of affairs. Two names headed the gentrification debates of the time: Neil Smith
focused on the material dimensions of the gentrification process, as exemplified in, for
instance, his rent gap thesis; while David Ley focused on the immaterial dimensions of
the process such as ‘new’ middle class attitudes towards the central city (Redfern, 1997:
1275–78; Lees, 2000). Goss (1997: 184) revealed the difficulties that urban geographers
were having with their turn to representation: ‘The more important and difficult task,
however, is to deconstruct the dualistic discourse [of gentrification]: to expose it as a
“representational response” to the much broader social problem of uneven
development and racial inequality . . .’.
Several years on, urban geography and its sister, urban studies, are distinctive in their
simultaneous embracing of, yet withdrawal from, this cultural turn. Perhaps because
the interpretative tradition was taken up more cautiously in urban geography than, for
example, in social and cultural geography, this time lapse has prompted an interesting
state of affairs whereby urban geographers are both increasingly attracted and repelled
by the interpretative tradition. This straddling act mirrors the fact that although urban
geographers have overcome their fear of the subjective and immaterial, that is things
without obvious material expression in the urban world, they remain for the most part
sceptical of totally dematerialized geographies. Most urban theorists now bow to the
representational, but are conscious of the dilemmas of representation. Moreover, they
see the material within the immaterial, and vice versa, as the following thematic look at
contemporary urban geography reveals.

1 The linguistic turn: urban political economy

The linguistic turn was slow to diffuse into political-economic geographers’ analyses of
power, inequality and urban governance. They struggled with the cultural turn.
However, the two were/are not as alien to each other as some may have thought. As
Philo (2000: 32) argues:
. . . the whole architecture of Marxist [and political economic] thought – conducting theoretical work to unpack
the hidden structures of social relations as bound up with control over the means of production – is all about
bringing into the consciousness of the academic (and maybe too of the downtrodden) the reality of structures
which are themselves immaterial (in the sense of not being immediately available to human sensory apprehen-
sion) but which nonetheless have dramatic material effects in the well-being or otherwise of everyday people.

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 Loretta Lees 105

As such, there is now a receptiveness to ‘the ways in which immaterial cultural

processes become implicated in political-economic spaces’ (Philo, 2000: 32) such as
cities.
Despite some scepticism, urban geographers of a political economic bent have nev-
ertheless sought to link language and difference to critical political economy. They
remain critical of cultural approaches which, they argue, have often disengaged from a
world which today is ‘more unequal’, in which ‘poverty and disease are still
widespread’ and in which ‘powerful elites continue to dominate’ (Imrie et al., 1996:
1258). However, they do not reject the study of culture and language altogether. Rather
they seek to integrate these concerns into a wider political economic approach focused
on ‘issues connected to poverty, inequality and the systemic structural conditions of
people’s existence’ (Imrie et al., 1996: 1258). Indeed, the impact of the linguistic turn on
urban policy studies is increasing (Hastings, 1999b) and seeks to focus on ‘substantive
concerns and empirical questions such as the nature of citizenship and citizen partici-
pation, urban governance and planning, policy processes and power’ (Hastings, 1999a:
7). Amin et al. (2000) testify to such a focus.
Geographers like David Harvey are now quite comfortable emphasizing the role of
discourse as part of urban processes and change. Harvey (1996) took on board critiques
of historical materialism and addressed the treatment of difference and otherness,
recognizing the significance of discourses and images. More recently, Harvey (2000)
reveals the complexity of unpacking the material from the immaterial, and vice versa.
For example, considering Baltimore, Harvey (2000: 133–56) states: ‘It is hard to untangle
the grubby day-to-day practices and discourses that affect urban living from the
grandiose metaphorical meanings that so freely intermingle with emotions and beliefs
about the good life and urban form’ (p. 157).
Neil Smith too has clearly turned more to culture, language and discourse while
keeping one foot still firmly placed in a Marxist political economic camp. Quite early on
Smith (1986) was interested in the role of language, in this case on the gentrification
frontier where images such as wilderness and urban cowboys served to rationalize and
legitimate a process of urban conquest. In his recent work on the revanchism that
motivates New York City’s (Giuliani) administration and steers social and economic
change in the city, Smith (1999a; 1999) focuses on discourse. He argues that ‘In many
ways the vengefulness of the fin-de-siecle revanchist city has overtaken gentrification
as a script for the future’ (1996a: 45). The revanchist city, Smith (1999: 202) states, is ‘the
alter ego to the new urbanism, its Frankenstein (the monster of its own making), the
Marx to its very own Derrida’.
Zukin et al. (1998) argue that urban researchers should join cultural analysis to
political economy and thereby regard images of cities ‘not only as the manipulated
products of growth elites, or as simulacra, but also as implicit texts about terrains of
inequality’ (p. 650). In this vein, Mele (2000a; 2000b) identifies the ways ‘symbolic rep-
resentations and characterizations of the inner city ghetto are employed by stakehold-
ers either engaged in restructuring or committed to resisting it’ (Mele, 2000a: 629).
Contra Badcock’s (1996) criticism that those attracted to the cultural turn in urban
studies have been indifferent to spatial practices, Mele demonstrates the significance of
urban discourse to processes of spatial restructuring. As he explains, ‘consideration of
the significance of urban discourses about the city does not require an abandonment of
the analytical focus on urban form and spatial practices’ (Mele, 2000a: 629–30). Mele’s

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106 Urban geography

approach is not a simple cultural framing of a political economy of neighbourhood

change; rather it specifies ‘the possibilities and limitations for cultural forms to
influence urban spatial practices’ (Mele, 2000a: 646).
In recent years, there has also been a plethora of critical work examining the role of
difference in the constitution of urban life and the structuring of urban space. This work
has offered a cultural politics of the city that has unsettled previous urban analyses.
Fincher and Jacobs (1998), for example, marry a cultural framework with a political
economic framework providing a deeper understanding of the city and urban space.
For recent work in this vein, see Shaw’s (2000) research into inner Sydney’s aboriginal
neighbourhood – ‘The Block’ – swimming in a sea of ‘whiteness’ in which racist
discourses of decline sustain an argument for a revanchist gentrification process.
Writing about social justice in the city, urban geographers in the political economic
tradition tend now to start with the discursive (perhaps because it is easier to engage
with than the reality) but then they move away from this (because talking about it is not
enough, one needs to create it) (see Merrifield and Swyngedouw, 1996; Amin et al.,
2000). ‘By shaping meaning and disclosing new frames of understanding, their intent is
to change minds and hearts. These changes enable people to connect with the city, or
not, and are the basis for democracy and justice’ (Body-Gendrot and Beauregard, 1999:
4). This is an active, politically persuasive urban geography that works at the intersec-
tion of the material and the immaterial.

2 The interpretative turn: the iconography of urban landscapes

In the late 1980s, geographers studying the built environment began to acknowledge
the need for an interpretative turn to disclose the intersubjective meanings and
iconography of urban landscape. Indeed the validation of contemporary urban
landscapes as legitimate objects of study was crucial to moves within the ‘new’ cultural
geography to shake off the legacies of the largely rural and historical predelictions of
the Berkeley School (Jackson, 1989). Yet the very success of these moves has meant that
the semiotic analysis of urban landscapes has often been associated more with cultural
than urban geography. Whatever its subdisciplinary affiliations, this kind of work has
been concerned with interpreting the semiology of urban spatial practices and
analysing how the built form of cities embodies power relations (see for example, Goss’
[1988] interpretive framework for studying the built environment that combined
Marxism with semiotics and structuration theory). As Hastings (1999a: 8) points out,
‘cities have been examined for the ways in which their spaces act symbolically (as well
as materially) to include or exclude the disadvantaged . . . and for ways in which the
organisation of space can contribute to the construction of different kinds of identities
and forms of behaviour . . .’.
One recent focus of this kind of work has been the landscapes of shopping (Miller et
al., 1998). Related to this, Goss (1999) offers a critical dialectical ‘reading’ of Minnesota’s
Mall of America, the largest themed retail and entertainment complex in the US. Goss
studies both the visual and verbal rhetoric deployed in the narration of the Mall using
semiotic reading and participant observation techniques. His reading of the Mall is
influenced by the ‘psychic turn’ (see section iv): ‘. . . I approach the shopping mall, like
the city, as an “unconscious”, its spatial forms objectifying collective values and dreams

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 Loretta Lees 107

of fulfillment’ (p. 49). Goss mixes the material and the immaterial – he does not seek the
real below the fantasy, rather he seeks to take pleasure ‘in the play of reality and fantasy,
while critically examining how things actually seem . . .’ (p. 49).
Thrift (1996) has voiced concern at the limits of representation encapsulated in the
hermeneutic tradition, charging that the interpretative tradition seems to have paid
scant attention to action, practice and performativity. In moving away from this
tradition, Thrift (2000: 274) seeks to broaden his analysis of space(s) by emphasizing
everyday practices in/of those spaces: ‘These are unreflective, lived, culturally specific,
bodily reactions to events which cannot be explained by causal theories (accurate rep-
resentations) or by hermeneutical means (interpretations).’
Urban geographers have begun to take up this challenge. Unlike Goss (1999), I direct
urban geographers studying the iconography of city landscapes back to an ethno-
graphic approach, arguing that it enables researchers to move away from an emphasis
on representation and interpretation towards theories of practice (Lees, 2001). Adopting
an ethnographic approach to understanding cityscapes does not mean, as Goss (1999)
suggests, abandoning questions about the meaning of built environments. Rather it
means approaching them differently, as an active and engaged process of understand-
ing, rather than as a product to be read off retrospectively from its social and historical
context.

3 The postmodern turn: urban geography as a representation in flux

Unlike in, say, social and cultural geography, the turn to ‘representation’ in urban
geography has centred on (the material) urban form. This focus on urban spatiality is
not surprising given the city’s stark physicality, the obvious layering of economic,
cultural, political and social relations. A representation of the city’s form is an important
first step in achieving a useful representation of its dynamics. The recent work of the
‘LA School’ attests to urban geography as a representation in flux (Body-Gendrot and
Beauregard, 1999: 3). For Dear and Flusty (1998; see also Dear, 2000) the city has become
so unpredictable that they represent it as a centreless urban form, a keno gameboard in
place of the Chicago School’s concentric rings of industry and settlement. Yet this new
representation is still subject to the forces of capitalism. They represent the landscape of
Los Angeles, a city without a common narrative, as multinucleated, disarticulated and
polarized, arguing that urbanism has now gone postmodern and Los Angeles is the
leading example.
Yet however much Dear and Flusty appear to jump on board the postmodern turn,
surprisingly they fall back into a modernist trap. As Lake (1999: 393) notes, ‘the episte-
mology of the detached analytical observer, anathema to post-modernists, nonetheless
pervades Dear and Flusty’s account of Los Angeles’s postmodern urbanism. This is all
the more surprising given their own critique of other writers on Los Angeles for their
“studied detachment from the city, as though a voyeuristic, top-down perspective is
needed to discover the rationality inherent in the cityscape” ’. This reveals the problem
of representation for urban geographers. The representations of the city posited by
the Chicago School ooze with materiality. Los Angeles, on the other hand, ‘eludes
such a representational move’ in its ‘hyper-mobile residents, man-made “natural”
catastrophes, aerospace cyber-possibilities . . .’ (Beauregard, 1999: 396). Dear and

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108 Urban geography

Flusty’s thesis unknowingly highlights the problematic connection between reality (the
material) and representation (the immaterial). Beauregard (1999: 393) outlines the
problem: ‘If Los Angeles demands its own language, then the connection between
reality and representation is determinative and the ‘turn to representation’ in urban
theory is rejected. Is this what Dear and Flusty intended?’.
Alongside Beauregard (1999: 393), I would argue that in time to come ‘Postmodern
Urbanism’ will be seen as one of the definitive statements of the Los Angeles School,
‘notable more for its intellectual bravery than theoretical displacement’. In the mean
time, other texts from the LA School are appearing, texts which still seek to connect the
immaterial to the material. For example, Soja’s (2000) survey of urban sociospatial
relations in postmetropolis LA documents the emergence of six different discourses.
The theme of each discourse is illustrated through a series of representative texts, but
once their production and articulation are outlined Soja connects the discourses to
material spaces in the city.

4 The psychic turn: psychoanalysis and the city

Those geographers connected to the ‘psychic turn’ began to turn away from the
hermeneutic tradition just as urban geography began to take it up more generally. In
The body and the city, Pile, (1996) took on board post-structuralist interpretations which
challenged the idea that language and representation were transparent vehicles for the
communication of prior, original meaning and intention. Analysing how we think and
live spatially in the contemporary city, Pile turned to psychoanalysis to reformulate
ideas of human subjectivity and unconsciousness. This work could be viewed as a
thoroughly updated and reworked version of Kevin Lynch’s (1960) The image of the city,
and other works on mental maps, that draws attention to the unconscious influences on
how people behave. The unconscious that Pile (1996) identifies is not simply the
opposite of our conscious but rather a parallel process that has its own language. It is
not fully accessible to ourselves or to researchers. This means that we cannot fully
interpret human actions as we cannot understand the unconscious dimension of these
actions. Here Pile takes urban geographers right down the slippery path of immaterial-
ity and challenges works that place material spaces of the city (e.g., urban public
spaces) as sites of political action/contestation: ‘Maybe political positions are not to be
discovered in the passive, fixed, undialectical space of absolute certainty, but in the
place of psychodynamics’ (p. 256). But Pile does not entirely leave the immaterial
behind: ‘Through fantasy, whether conscious or unconscious, the urbanised subject
creates an imaginary urban landscape, which is constructed partly by the material of
the city, partly by the modalities of identification, partly by defensive processes and
partly by the ‘‘contents’’ of the unconscious’ (p. 236). His more recent writings straddle
material reality and immaterial worlds too (Pile, 2000: 85):
It still feels like musing, all this talk of dreams. The alarm bells are ringing loud and clear: cities are wrecked by
earthquakes, riots, (not so smart) bombs, pervasive disease, abject poverty . . . Collapsing neither into the
waking world of rationalizations and instrumental logics, nor into the dreamworld of barbaric desires and
satisfying fears, the transformation of urban space would necessitate an understanding of the vicissitudes of the
dreamcity.

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 Loretta Lees 109

IV The lessons to be learned from this ‘new’ urban geography

[Empirically urban geography is] a set of events, meanings, experiences, institutions, and artifacts as they are
understood socially and spatially [and theoretically it examines] . . . the social fragmentation that accompanies
differential access to power and the control of space, and highlights urban processes as they relate to lived
experiences and the production of cultural forms. (defined by the AAG-UGSG in Staeheli et al., 2002)

I want to close this report by outlining what we can learn from the ‘new’ urban
geography, in the face of those concerns over the subdiscipline outlined in section II
and, more specifically, in the face of recent calls for the rematerialization of geography
as outlined in section I. A quick glance at the ‘new’ urban geography (see section III)
tells us that, contrary to popular opinion, the subdiscipline is thriving empirically and
theoretically. Indeed, it is more than thriving; it is located at the cutting edge of geo-
graphical research that seeks to link the material and the immaterial. It is in large
measure the diffuse nature of urban geography that has made this possible, as urban
geographers of different persuasions have become increasingly open-minded to ‘other’
work in the subdiscipline and beyond. This mixing, matching and critical displacement
of ideas has enabled the emergence of a ‘new’ urban geography. Contra Badcock (1996)
urban geographers attracted to the cultural turn are not indifferent to spatial practices.
Moreover, unlike in most other geography subdisciplines, urban geographers
continually have to deal with material space(s) – the city and urban spaces – and their
representation. Thus the connection between the material and the immaterial is perhaps
more immediate. ‘New’ urban geographers are making great strides in deconstructing
the crippling historical legacies seen to be holding us back (for example, the recent
deconstructions of the Chicago School; Sibley, 1995; Dear and Flusty, 1998; Dear, 2000).
Yet, sensibly, unlike in perhaps social and cultural geography, they have not thrown the
baby out with the bathwater.
Jackson (2000) and Philo (2000) are not new in voicing concern over the dematerial-
izing of human geography (see Mitchell, 1995; Sayer, 1993, 1994; Thrift, 1996; Smith,
1996b; 1997). What is new is that geographers might now be prepared to listen. If so,
there are many lessons to be learned from a closer look at contemporary urban
geography. Take my own work in urban geography, which has long sought to straddle
the material and immaterial worlds. This is rooted for me in a refusal to throw out the
baby (materiality) with the bathwater (Marxist political economy). Mirroring my
discussion above, I have moved both to work within the interpretative turn (Lees, 1996)
and more recently to be much more critical of the interpretative turn (Lees, 2001). As I
hope I have illustrated above, such an attitude is typical of recent work in urban
geography. Urban geographers are now quite comfortable with the cultural turn and
are, for the most part, working astride material and immaterial urban worlds.
Interestingly, at the same time as urban geography has taken on board the interpre-
tative turn engaging with language, discourse, culture, the immaterial and so on, it is
also facing moves in another direction towards what Batty (2000) calls ‘the new urban
geography of the third dimension’. Here, the approach is quantitative rather than
qualitative (‘more a geometry than a geography’; p. 484) and studies are focused on
data sets that supposedly allow for ‘a new kind of fine-scale urban geography . . . [from]
data which are sufficiently intensive to detect detailed patterns and morphologies but
also sufficiently extensive to enable these patterns to be generalized to entire metropoli-
tan areas’ (p. 484). Here modelling and GIS are the central techniques, not textual or

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110 Urban geography

semiotic or discourse analysis. This should remind us that the sheer size of the urban
geography community means that it will no doubt mutate in different directions. The
approaches of those urban geographers who work within this ‘new urban geography of
the third dimension’ will no doubt be quite different to the more cultural approaches of,
for example, Light (1999) on city space to cyberspace, Graham and Aurigi (1997) on
urbanizing cyberspace, and Boyer’s (1996; 1999) work on urban regions and the
cyberspace matrix. Over time, however, I hope that these different approaches will
learn from one another, as has happened with other research clusters in urban
geography. The difficult challenge for urban geography is to keep lines of communica-
tion open and not to allow one approach to cannibalize this exciting subdiscipline. For,
as Bridge and Watson (2000: 1) state:
. . . cities need to be understood from a variety of perspectives in the recognition that the cultural/social
constructs, and is constructed by, the political/economic and vice versa. It is only when we adopt such a
complex and textured reading of cities that we will begin to be able to address the pressing social, economic and
environmental questions faced by cities across the world . . .

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