Geography I

Increasingly I'm interested in various critical theorisations of geography and was reading David Harvey's critique of Foucault's concept of heterotopic space.

Might be worth looking up Harvey further on this because he mentions Kropotkin, and already I can see how the spatialisation and use of multiple sites is central to forthcoming critical strategies and has been on my mind:

Geographers of various stripes struggled towards the century's end to give their geography a more  evolutionary and emancipatory twist. The social anarchists - geographers like Elisee Reclus and Kropotkin - invented a version of the geography of freedom (Fleming, 1988) which has remained influential as a subversive strain of thought to this day, but for obvious reasons it suffered marginalization from the mainstream (except in the refracted versions in the urban and regional planning of Patrick Geddes and Lewis  Mumford). Friedrich Ratzel took the innovative step at the turn of the century of collapsing Kant's inner and outer distinctions into something called "Anthropogeographie" but unfortunately got so lost in organic metaphors (of the state in particular) and social Darwinism as to be later regarded, unfairly as it turns out, as the founder of Nazi geopolitical thought. This kind of Darwinian geopolitical and imperialist geography (which had its Anglo and French counterparts in Mackinder and Demangeon) along with environmental determinism (the other major strain of independent geographical thinking) lost respectability even as it struggled to retain some semblance of Humboldtian synthesis. When the Readers Digest condemned "the hundred geographers behind Hitler" in the midst of World War II, professional geographers suffered all the indignities that Heidegger was later to experience without having any of the deeper intellectual resources needed to defend themselves Geographers for the most part retreated into the safety of mere description of spatial orderings.

One good formalisation to be used in relation to Kropotkin might be through Geddes and Mumford architecture, which i of course know nothing about. 

Anyway more thoughts on geography to follow in the coming weeks.