10.13023/ETD.2020.206
Huntley, Eric Robsky
Eric Robsky
Huntley
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8497-0589
University of Kentucky
Reserved for the Whole Earth
Forms of Evidence, Ought Anxiety, and the Futures of Geographic Inquiry
University of Kentucky Libraries
2020
Dissertation
Social and economic geography
This dissertation examines geographic forms of evidence in the practices of landscape architects and geographers. I analyze evidence not only as an epistemic phenomenon, but as an aesthetic one, as well. Convincing an audience that the world is (or should be) one way and not another requires that knowledges be stacked, extended, and stitched together in a manner admissable to an audience. In the first two chapters, I use the case of the landscape architect Ian McHarg to examine how his approach to integrating scientific knowledge---a aesthetic response to what I theorize as 'ought anxiety'---grew alongside the environmental bureaucracy in the 1960s, but fractured and collapsed in the 1980s. I examine his approach using two generative figures: the layer and the globe. In the first chapter, I examine McHarg's attempt to expand the knowledges considered salient to planning practice, represented as vertically arrayed layers. I argue that this form of holism draws a surprising line through the history of GIS that ties geospatial technology---its aspirations if not its actuality---to mid-century conservationism and the early stirrings of bureaucratic environmentalism. In the second chapter, I narrate McHarg's horizontal upscaling of ecological planning's unit areas: from physiographic regions to the globe. In the final empirical chapter, I return to the discipline of geography to argue that a particular epistemic aesthetic---the bridge---and its impracticability played central roles in the elimination of the department of geography at the University of Michigan.
© 2020 Eric M. Robsky Huntley
University of Kentucky
https://doi.org/10.13039/100007472
Department of Geography Barnhart-Withington Grant