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This paper reflects on the search for a lost, obscure piece of experimental architecture that appeared on the west coast of Scotland in the late 1960s. Encouraged by cultural geography’s efforts to recuperate storytelling as a valid mode of inquiry and to adopt a more enchanted, affirmative disposition to our endeavors, we develop a geographical story intended to draw out how enchanted experiences gained through curiosity and an openness to contingencies can serve as a vital force for sustaining geographical ways of being, doing and knowing with the world. This account focuses on our encounters with various research sites that we identify as ‘dreamlands’ to express the idiosyncratic, unregulated, unexpected sensations of wonder and delight that such places evoked, the excessive materialities they revealed and the imaginative processes they elicited. We argue that such dreamlands are not as superfluous as might be assumed by their uncanny absence from the polished end-products of scholarship, and instead, allude to the latent forces of enchantment to which geographers might become better attuned when conducting and crafting their research.

Risk tends to be conceptualized at the individual scale, with global risk communication and governance efforts fixated on an individual's knowledge and behavior. While individuals are undoubtedly influenced by those who surround them, such human–human interactions tend to be excluded from empirical and field-based analyses of risk taking. This study diverges from prevailing analyses of risk as an individualized phenomenon, exploring the collective and relational practices that influence risk while fishing from hazardous rocky coasts. The aim is to counter the near-universal tendency to individualize risk in empirical analyses by instead using a mixed-methodology that can quantify and enable consideration of collective responses to risk, in real-time. We demonstrate that both rock fishing practice and many of the high-risk events that emerge while rock fishing are managed collectively. Compared to the tendency to individualize risk, we demonstrate that collective responses to risk are more representative of how risk is experienced and acted upon, with implications for risk management in countless contexts.

This article explores community responses to ‘Golden Head’, a guerrilla artwork that was installed covertly in a Melbourne park in early 2020 by unknown persons. Focusing on local residents’ reactions to this mysterious, unsanctioned statue, we document an ongoing array of playful speculations, creative responses and imaginative interactions that unfolded both in situ and via social media. We argue that in eliciting an outpouring of jokes, memes, stories, photographs and other creative rejoinders, this enigmatic object has strengthened and renewed a collective sense of place. We also consider Golden Head’s reception in light of recent challenges to the legitimacy of many traditional memorial statues, and as a response to the increasingly over-regulated city. We conclude that this outpouring of imaginative local reactions to Golden Head constitutes a playful form of collective place-making that implicitly critiques the grandiose ambitions of official statues and affirms the oft-neglected ludic potential of urban space.

In this paper, we elaborate on the Fifth Dimension, an extraordinary, largely overlooked architectural example of 1960s psychedelia that was installed in a small Scottish resort town. Made up of 17 domed chambers, each designed to stimulate psychedelic sensory experiences for its intrepid visitors, the Fifth Dimension was the creation of London-based environmental artist Keith Albarn using his experimental “Ekistikit” modular building system. We argue that the qualities and impacts of this highly inventive, utopian “fun palace” interrogate stereotypical depictions of countercultural, psychedelic creativities. We discuss how they also intersect with current geographical scholarship concerned with sensation, play, and the built environment. Two key elements of the Fifth Dimension are examined. First, building on critical geographies of architecture, we focus on Albarn's innovative system to exemplify how pioneers of environmental design used advanced modular technologies to radically re-configure the possibilities of dwelling and working in flexible building structures. Second, drawing on aesthetic theories of the sensory, we demonstrate how the structure was designed to stimulate transformative psychedelic sensibilities as a novel form of disruptive politics to induce critical dispositions towards the built environment. Our argument is underpinned by the call for a recuperation of sensational and affective experience in the design and inhabitation of built environments. We contend that this bears particular significance for an emergent geography of play and enchantment.

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2020 The Authors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers). This paper is concerned with the affective power of light, darkness, and illumination and their role in exposing and obscuring processes of rapid urban change. Little academic attention has focused on how lighting informs multiple, overlapping, and intersecting urban temporalities and mediates our experience of an ever-changing city. This paper foregrounds a walk through the illuminated city at night as an epistemic opportunity to develop an embodied account of material and temporal change in ways that disrupt the aesthetic organisation of the sensible world at night. By detailing the discontinuous experience of walking through differently lit spaces, the paper develops novel ways of conceptualising the experience of urban change that unsettle common understandings of subjectivity, temporality, and the city. The paper draws on a single night's walk from Canning Town to Canary Wharf in east London – an area that has recently undergone rapid change, including the erection of enclaves of high-rise development. By accentuating the shared experiences of walking with light, we reveal the affective capacities of light and dark to conceal and expose wider material, embodied, and temporal urban changes but also how we might challenge the organisation of the nocturnal field of the sensible.

This article explores the shifting uses and meanings of Manchester civic plate, a huge silver dining service purchased in 1877 to coincide with the opening of the city’s neo-Gothic Town Hall. The authors explore how the silver collection has successively forged relations with a host of different people, places and objects, exemplifying the changing processes through which objects are understood, utilized, valued, maintained, stored and curated. Three key processes are deployed to illuminate these shifting entanglements: the use of the silver to express municipal prestige and advance particular cultural values, the maintenance procedures that have responded to the silver’s vital material constituency and practices of display, storage and curation. In accounting for these diverse and volatile processes, the article argues for the virtues of theoretical breadth in exploring the multiplicities of material culture.

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. In addressing geography’s neglect of shade and shadow, this paper explores how the dynamic play of shadow and light constitutes an integral part of everyday affective and sensory attunement to place and guides pedestrian movement. First, we identify how particular shadows are shaped by distinctive kinds of solar radiance, material forms, human visual perception and cultural representations. We then consider the different cultural ways in which shade and shadow have been interpreted across space and time and identify diverse shadowy effects in different geographical contexts. Thereafter, we focus on particular key elements of central Melbourne’s shadow aesthetics, discuss how patterns of shade guide urban choreographies, and explore how architects have imaginatively manipulated shadow.

© 2019 Institute of Australian Geographers This article presents a series of commentaries on Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities, published by MIT Press in 2018. Centring on an in—depth case study of Sydney, the book argues the need to attend carefully to the fine—grained detail of the commuting experience. In all sorts of ways, Transit Life presents a way of thinking about urban transportation radically different from that used by mainstream transport planners and geographers. Geographical Research asked six researchers—Tim Edensor, Michele Lobo, Debbie Hopkins, Helen Fitt, Juliana Mansvelt, and Donald McNeill—to reflect on what kind of research vistas might be opened up bring the tools of cultural geography and mobility research to the world of commuting. Here are their responses, rounded out by a reply by David Bissell, Transit Life's author.

The aim of this chapter is to explore the connections between place and participation in the context of the devolution of statutory governance to local neighbourhoods. The chapter tests the key assumption underpinning the state rationality of localism that the smallest geographical unit of governance – the local neighbourhood or place – provides the greatest opportunities for citizens to participate in decisions. Examining the role of place within an international division of labour between private and public, the chapter maintains that localism provides the statutory framework in which a domestic economy of reciprocity can be practiced as democratic governance. It advances the innovative concept of community identity frames to explain how neighbourly relations can be transformed into more formal processes of participative democracy. In this way, the chapter argues, places can be more democratic simply because they are more local.

The premise of this chapter is that the darkness of night in Shakespeare’s plays is both a stage and a state of mind, a phenomenological experience and a psychic condition. Not only is darkness what helps lovers escape, what allows visions to arise, what brings both wonder and terror. It is also the signifier for that state of adventure and recognition upon which a return to the ordinary is predicated. To bring light implies that any form of self-discovery requires darkness, not only as its backdrop but also as a creative entity. The question thus also to be explored is what closures those plays that make particular use of darkness find. Is darkness ultimately dispelled or are elements of darkness – and one might think of the sober morning at the end of Romeo and Juliet – carried into the day? Or does everything, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, end in night?

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. In addressing geography’s neglect of shade and shadow, this paper explores how the dynamic play of shadow and light constitutes an integral part of everyday affective and sensory attunement to place and guides pedestrian movement. First, we identify how particular shadows are shaped by distinctive kinds of solar radiance, material forms, human visual perception and cultural representations. We then consider the different cultural ways in which shade and shadow have been interpreted across space and time and identify diverse shadowy effects in different geographical contexts. Thereafter, we focus on particular key elements of central Melbourne’s shadow aesthetics, discuss how patterns of shade guide urban choreographies, and explore how architects have imaginatively manipulated shadow.

This study invites readers to experience risk on Australia’s hazardous rocky coasts with the rock fishing community. In the paper, we offer an understanding of risk that is relational, a process that emerges within human–environment interactions in a dynamic coastal space that is constantly changing. Exploring the in situ and ongoing sensory attunement of the fishers, we contend, expands upon the quantitative understandings that tend to be deployed by risk managers, offering an innovative approach to conceptualising risk. In identifying how fishers perceive and experience a rocky coastal location in Sydney, Australia, we track rock fishers’ movements using global positioning systems (GPS), undertake participant observation, and draw on video footage, semi‐structured interviews and participatory sketch maps. In doing so, fishers’ perceptions of socio‐environmental stimuli were spatially represented in a GIS, with sketch mapping being the proxy and/or the window into perception–environment relations that produce risk. We contend that the findings show that experienced fishers are more capable of anticipating and reacting to hazardous situations “safely” because they are more attuned to how changing coastal conditions affect risk. This study draws attention to the spatial and temporal phenomena that drive risk perceptions as well as the implications for future perception‐oriented research that adopt a relational understanding.

In this paper, we explore how a light projection sought to convey a range of qualities: conviviality, a sense of place, playfulness, defamiliarisation, and the affective and sensory capacities that were experienced through walking in the distinctive, liminal realm of Bendigo Creek in Victoria, Australia. The projection aspired to solicit a sensory and affective empathy that chimed with the experiences of an earlier event in which dozens of pedestrians were filmed walking in the creek. The projection contributed to a local campaign to reappraise the much‐maligned creek as a local public amenity. We discuss the productive potential of solitary and collective walking and, subsequently, the attributes of the projection in its static and mobile manifestation. In so doing, we suggest that publicly engaged, inclusive, creative practice can offer potent place‐making possibilities.

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Drawing on a detailed analysis of the historical and current development of lighting in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, this article addresses how this site of extraordinarily diverse illumination exemplifies a carefully orchestrated balance between (1) muted and more vivid forms of lighting, (2) curation of historical styles and promotion of contemporary innovations in illumination and (3) artistic luminaires and those more aligned with popular tastes. Through these themes, we argue that the current strategies towards urban lighting that predominantly promote energy conservation, security, commercial imperatives and place-branding may be supplemented by place-specific design strategies that implement multiplicity, connect past and present, and accommodate diverse desires, dreams and realities. These attributes contribute to the ongoing emergence of what we call a ‘lumitopia’, a space in which an intensified attention to illumination is integral to the particularity of a place or landscape. In the case of Tivoli, this offers a lens to manage nocturnal space so that it becomes more aesthetically complex, inclusive and convivial.

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2018 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). This study invites readers to experience risk on Australia’s hazardous rocky coasts with the rock fishing community. In the paper, we offer an understanding of risk that is relational, a process that emerges within human–environment interactions in a dynamic coastal space that is constantly changing. Exploring the in situ and ongoing sensory attunement of the fishers, we contend, expands upon the quantitative understandings that tend to be deployed by risk managers, offering an innovative approach to conceptualising risk. In identifying how fishers perceive and experience a rocky coastal location in Sydney, Australia, we track rock fishers’ movements using global positioning systems (GPS), undertake participant observation, and draw on video footage, semi-structured interviews and participatory sketch maps. In doing so, fishers’ perceptions of socio-environmental stimuli were spatially represented in a GIS, with sketch mapping being the proxy and/or the window into perception–environment relations that produce risk. We contend that the findings show that experienced fishers are more capable of anticipating and reacting to hazardous situations “safely” because they are more attuned to how changing coastal conditions affect risk. This study draws attention to the spatial and temporal phenomena that drive risk perceptions as well as the implications for future perception-oriented research that adopt a relational understanding.

Drawing on an extended road trip from England to India undertaken by two Indian travellers in the 1950s, this paper challenges the dominant travel stories and Eurocentric academic accounts that persistently privilege western tourists. Focusing upon the literary desires that shaped their British itinerary and a dramatic encounter in Egypt, we highlight two distinctly different experiences that emerged during their journey. We demonstrate how a swirl of larger historical events and processes marked the time in which they travelled, with the encounters, places and incidents they experienced informed by the dissipation of colonial alliances and the emergence of postcolonial connections.

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. This paper draws on Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis to investigate the multiple rhythms of the Berlin Marathon, exemplifying and expanding understandings about the rhythms of places and mobilities. First, we discuss how isorhythmic order is imposed on the city and event by race organizers. Secondly, we show that a marathon depends upon the preparatory training or ‘dressage’ performed by the thousands who have made themselves ‘race-ready’. Thirdly, we explore the changing individual and collective rhythms that continuously emerge according to contingencies and stages of the race to compose an unfolding drama of rhythms that includes both arrhythmic and eurhythmic experiences.

In this article we discuss the development of urbanized running culture by exploring how the embodied rhythms of running interact with other urban rhythms in a park. The analysis focuses on the timings, sensations and materialities produced through running, and how the rhythms of running intersect with the materialities and rhythms of others. The investigation draws on interviews, observations and a running diary undertaken at Pildammsparken in central Malmö. Our research shows that while the runner, in endeavouring to align with the rhythms of others, may becoming a more disciplined figure, running in the park is more concerned with practising a sharing of space than moving on auto-pilot. Consequently, running is largely a mobile rhythmic practice that negotiates and adapts to co-produce eurhythmic choreographies in this particular urban location.

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Drawing on a detailed analysis of the historical and current development of lighting in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, this article addresses how this site of extraordinarily diverse illumination exemplifies a carefully orchestrated balance between (1) muted and more vivid forms of lighting, (2) curation of historical styles and promotion of contemporary innovations in illumination and (3) artistic luminaires and those more aligned with popular tastes. Through these themes, we argue that the current strategies towards urban lighting that predominantly promote energy conservation, security, commercial imperatives and place-branding may be supplemented by place-specific design strategies that implement multiplicity, connect past and present, and accommodate diverse desires, dreams and realities. These attributes contribute to the ongoing emergence of what we call a ‘lumitopia’, a space in which an intensified attention to illumination is integral to the particularity of a place or landscape. In the case of Tivoli, this offers a lens to manage nocturnal space so that it becomes more aesthetically complex, inclusive and convivial.

© 2017 Landscape Research Group Ltd. This paper focuses on the much-neglected contribution of light to the conceptualisation of landscape. I discuss how light circulates through our visual system and around the spaces we see, refuting notions that we can be detached from the landscapes that we view and characterise. Though we see with the vital light and the landscape, I emphasise that our experiences are invariably entangled with prevalent cultural values, meanings and representations. By drawing upon the experience of walking around an area of raised moorland in the Peak District, I suggest that the experience of particular landscapes can be distinguished by the changing light that radiates upon them and to which we continuously become attuned. By composing an autoethnographic account that highlights key moments when its effects seemed particularly acute, I exemplify the distinctive ways in which the shifting light interacts with elements within this particular landscape.

In this article, I focus on how four artists working with light can reveal the different capacities of illumination and darkness in shaping human apprehension of the world. These artists, I contend, foreground the very particular human ways in which the visual system operates in making sense of the world, for their work explores the different ways in which we sense space at various scales, from the body to the landscape. In Kielder Forest, Northumberland, a Skyspace, created by James Turrell isolates the qualities of daylight and focuses attention on the impact of the sky’s light on the landscape. Carlos Cruz-Diez’sChromosaturation highlights the ocular perception and emotional experience of colour, while Olafur Eliasson’s Model for a Timeless Garden highlights the temporality of visual perception as well as the persistence of notions about the sublime to appreciation of landscape. Both works underscore the partialities of specifically human ways of perception. Finally, Tino Seghal’s This Variation investigates the impact of darkness on the perception of space and its potential for fostering conviviality and sociality.

This paper investigates the effects and affects of darkness, a condition that is progressively becoming less familiar for those of us in the over-illuminated West. In countering the prevailing cultural understanding that darkness is a negative condition, I draw attention to other historical and cultural ways of positively valuing darkness. Subsequently, in drawing on two sites, a gloomy landscape at a dark sky park in South Scotland, and a tourist attraction in which a simulation of New York is experienced in a completely dark environment, I explore the multivalent qualities of darkness. In foregrounding the becoming of sensory experience in gloomy space, I highlight the mobilisation of alternative modes of visual perception in as well as the emergence of non-visual apprehensions, and suggest that the potentialities of darkness might foster progressive forms of conviviality, communication and imagination. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Read through a focus on the remediation of personal photography in the Flickr photosharing website, in this essay I treat vernacular creativity as a field of cultural practice; one that that does not operate inside the institutions or cultural value systems of high culture or the commercial popular media, and yet draws on and is periodically appropriated by these other systems in dynamic and productive ways. Because of its porosity to commercial culture and art practice, this conceptual model of ‘vernacular creativity’ implies a historicised account of ‘ordinary’ or everyday creative practice that accounts for both continuity and change and avoids creating a nostalgic desire for the recuperation of an authentic folk culture. Moving beyond individual creative practice, the essay concludes by considering the unintended consequences of vernacular creativity practiced in online social networks: in particular, the idea of cultural citizenship.