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This review essay revisits recent scholarship within urban geography that has been shaped by relational theory, looking specifically at the scholarship on urban policy mobilities and urban assemblages. As will be shown, current urban geographies of relationality operate with irreconcilable grammars.

This paper sketches some conceptual tools by which cultural geographers might advance geographies of architecture. It does so by thinking specifically about one architectural form: the modernist residential highrise, which is the 'big thing' of this paper. The paper draws on recent developments in material semiotics in order to interrogate features often uniquely associated with the highrise, such as its global reach, uniformity, and scale. The paper first rethinks how cultural geography has traditionally explained the movement of built forms, explicitly turning from diffusionist accounts to the notion of translation. It then offers a reconsideration of the way geographers might think about scale in relation to a 'big' and 'global' thing like the modernist highrise, arguing that scale is produced relationally and in specific contexts. Finally, it offers a template for cultural geographical scholarship which takes seriously the technical work entailed in things, like a highrise, materialising or de-materializing. It does so by way of two illustrative stories: one about the productive social science of highrise suicides in Singapore; the other about the destructive role of the inquiry into collapse of Ronan point in the UK.

The advent of state-sponsored mass high-rise housing in post-war Britain brought into view a range of issues about the role of technology in everyday life. This paper draws on approaches in the study of science and technology in order to deepen our understanding of the socio-technical aspects of such high-rise housing, past and present. This thinking is elaborated empirically by examining a 1960s high-rise development, Red Road, Glasgow. The paper examines the inaugural phase of development and the most recent phase of 'redevelopment', the first stage of which is demolition. The paper extends existing accounts of residential high-rises generally and Red Road specifically, as well as elaborating an alternate analytical framework for understanding high-rise and supertall dwellings.

Edge of Empire examines struggles over urban space in three contemporary first world cities in an attempt to map the real geographies of colonialism and postcolonialism as manifest in modern society. From London, the one-time heart of the empire, to Perth and Brisbane, scenes of Aboriginal claims for the sacred in the space of the modern city, Jacobs emphasises the global geography of the local and unravels the spatialised cultural politics of postcolonial processes. Edge of Empire forms the basis for understanding imperialism over space and time, and is a recognition of the unruly spatial politics of race and nation, nature and culture, past and present.

This article is intended to serve both a provocation for future scholarship on traditional built environments and an outline of a lineage for that scholarship. It is inspired by Bruno Latour’s late-career calls for scholars to respond to “climate mutation.” This aspect of Latour’s thinking may be particularly relevant to the field of traditional built forms because it offers an ecological and moral imagination distinct from current preoccupations with questions of identity and authenticity. Furthermore, his ideas offer new legitimacy to older lineages of scholarship on traditional built forms. The article experiments with some examples of how inquiry into traditional built environments might be reshaped by what Latour defined as “Terrestrial” imperatives.

A review of qualitative approaches to the city is presented to cut a path through the theoretical and empirical development that have led to the growing reliance on qualitative methods in studies of the city. Two spatial extremes of recent urban work are examined.

Edge of Empireexamines struggles over urban space in three contemporary first world cities in an attempt to map the real geographies of colonialism and postcolonialism as manifest in modern society. From London, the one-time heart of the empire, to Perth and Brisbane, scenes of Aboriginal claims for the sacred in the space of the modern city, Jacobs emphasises the global geography of the local and unravels the spatialised cultural politics of postcolonial processes.Edge of Empireforms the basis for understanding imperialism over space and time, and is a recognition of the unruly spatial politics of race and nation, nature and culture, past and present.

The advent of state-sponsored mass high-rise housing in post-war Britain brought into view a range of issues about the role of technology in everyday life. This paper draws on approaches in the study of science and technology in order to deepen our understanding of the socio-technical aspects of such high-rise housing, past and present. This thinking is elaborated empirically by examining a 1960s high-rise development, Red Road, Glasgow. The paper examines the inaugural phase of development and the most recent phase of 'redevelopment', the first stage of which is demolition. The paper extends existing accounts of residential high-rises generally and Red Road specifically, as well as elaborating an alternate analytical framework for understanding high-rise and supertall dwellings. Adapted from the source document.