Questions from Vivien:

1. how does Johnstown flood relate to hurricane sandy?

2. What lessons can we learn from disasters?

3. what does the author try to implement with this quote "labor creates a specific commodity, or something so generalized as a landscape" ?

Mitchell Ch. 4: The Work of Landscape

“Landscapes are both systems of meaning and systems of social reproduction”

(p.100)

The Work of Landscape

“The landscape is an active agent…serving both as a symbol for the needs and desires of the people who live in it, and as a solid, dead weight channeling change in this way and not that.

‘Landscape’ is best seen as both a work (it is the product of human labor and thus encapsulates the dreams, desires, and all the injustices of the people and social systems that make it) and as something that does work (it acts as a social agent in the further development of the place).” (p. 93-94)

Johnstown, Chinatown, Sacre Coeur

• “Examining just what a landscape is, and just how a landscape goes about doing its work in society. What are the functions of landscapes? How do landscapes form? And what do they mean” p. 99

• How does Mitchell try to answer these questions in analyzing the landscapes he presents?

Defining Landscape

• W.J.T. Mitchell- Landscape as “natural scene mediated by culture”

• Landscape as a form of ideology: “a way of selecting and representing the world so as to give it a particular meaning- an important ingredient in consent and identity” (p. 100)

• Ch. 4- Landscape in relation to class, race, and nationality.

Defining Landscape

• “Landscape is a (peculiar) work of human labor. It is much like a commodity: it actively hides (or fetishizes) the labor that goes into its making. (p.103)

• Landscape is an instrument of cultural power…it naturalizes a cultural and social construction representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable.

Doing Critical Cultural Geography

• “Searching below the surface of material (and representational) landscapes, [working] tp uncover the conditions under which landscape is made…exploring class and gender relations, the role of race and nationality in landscape production…[analyzing] particular events that are determinate in making a landscape” (p.114)