Association of American Geographers (AAG)

Annual Conference 2004
Philadelphia, PA., March 14 - 19.

Session 1
Stuart Elden (Intro)
Matthew Hannah
Margo Huxley
Jeremy Crampton
Philip Steinburg
Stuart Elden (Discussant)

Session 2
Richard Heyman
Stuart Elden
Karen Morin
Steven Legg
Jeremy Crampton (Discussant)

21st century social control within (post)industrial societies revolves increasingly around calculative technologies embedded within regimes of biopower. Theorizations of biopower, however, problematize the notion of 'resistance' to control. Using the concept of 'informational self-determination' first developed by the West German Constitutional Court in 1983 and subsequently taken up in the EU's privacy policy, I sketch the outlines of an incipient form of 'calculated citizenship' that renders intelligible emerging forms of resistance more appropriate to a world governed through biopower. Special attention is given to implications of calculated citizenship for the spatial (re)organization of (post)industrial societies.

Keywords: Biopower, statistics, informational self-determination.

Nineteenth century urban reform involved practices that rested on (at least) two operational rationales of spatial causality: dispositional and vital. Dispositional rationales rely on notions of 'eutaxic' (well-ordered) space, translated from classical orderings of knowledge, to bring about proper relations between 'men and things', whether in buildings, cities, regions or territories. Dispositional rationalities aim at producing visible, calculable spaces - cellular structures, grid layouts, division and repetition - that constrain 'uncivil/non-normal' behaviours or enable appropriate comportments by autonomous liberal subjects, according to governmental purpose or strategy. Vital rationales operate through teleological, biological and anthropological conceptions of the relations between bodies and environments, seeing the nature and quality of environments as capable of producing immoral, abnormal, non-autonomous subjects or maintaining moral, normal autonomous individuals: environments are improved in order to generate appropriate subjects. Each rationale of spatial causality involves different kinds of calculation, measurement and assessment of individual-population-environment problems and their solutions, but both can be seen to inform spatial technologies of government by the state in the first half of the twentieth century.

Jeremy Crampton, Anthropology and Geography, Georgia State University, 33 Gilmer St., Atlanta, GA., USA. Email: jcrampton [at] gsu.edu. Geographic Governance and Mapping at the Paris Peace Talks, 1919.

In December 1918, the American liner the George Washington sailed from New York City to France, carrying the American president, tons of documents and maps in crates, the President of the American Geographical Society, and assorted cartographers and draftsmen, including Armin Lobeck and Mark Jefferson. This group of scholars and politicians were united in the task of redrawing the political map of Europe, East Asia, Africa and the former German colonies around the world, following the defeat of Germany and her allies in World War I. This paper discusses the cartographic calculation involved in delineating territorial boundaries, based as they were on population assessments, linguistic boundaries and natural ethnic regions. I examine how this calculation was implemented for reasons of geographic governance.

Keywords: World War I, geographic governance, political cartography.

John Seller, hydrographer to the King of England from 1671 to his death
in 1697, is best known for his nautical atlases and navigation manuals
which provided technical guides for English sailors. In addition to
these specialized publications, however, Seller also published a popular
geography book in 1690 called “A New Systeme of Geography, Designed in a
Most Plain and Easie Method, for the better Understanding of that
Science.” For the most part, this book bears a striking resemblance to
the modern world regional geography textbook, with an introductory
section on key categories that characterize the world (climates,
landforms, etc.) followed by in-depth descriptions (and maps) of each
world region. Seller, however, betrays his professional roots as the
book gives surprising prominence to calculation as a means by which the
reader can both recognize her or his own position as an English subject
and recognize her or his connections (and differences) with others around
the world. Thus, Seller uses calculation as a popular and, in his words,
“diverting and pleasant” activity to support emergent views of English
nationhood and England’s place in the world.

Keywords: Calculation, English identity, Geographic education, Textbooks,
Navigation.

Recent research into the quantification of geography looks towards
disciplinary developments in the 1950s and '60s and, secondarily, towards
the late-nineteenth-century intellectual origins of mathematical
statistics. The period between the turn of the century and World War II,
however, has been largely ignored. In fact, it was during this period,
especially in the U.S., that social science emerged as part of a general
bureaucratic order that relied on professional expertise for its
technocratic legitimacy. The development of social science during the
social upheavals of the early twentieth century helped legitimate state
intervention in the social process through the invention of the
quasi-public sphere of policymaking.

This paper traces the way that social science grew out of the urban reform
movements of the Progressive Era to become an integral part of an emergent
bureaucratic social order. It secured that position through a professional
expertise founded on quantification and directed towards the quasi-public
sphere of public policy. I argue that in the 1950s and '60s quantification
was a means for geographers to reposition geographical knowledge
production to gain access to that professional authority. "Theoretical"
developments in the discipline cannot be separated from the structure of
knowledge production they were attempting to build, one that sought to
make geographers a vital part of public policy formation and to move
geography firmly into the institutional constellation established by other
social sciences in the '20s and '30s. To a great extent, that goal
determined the shape geography took in the '50s and '60s--as well as the
contours of debates around relevancy and political engagement in the
post-positivist era.

Stuart Elden, Department of Geography, University of Durham, DH1 3LE, UK. Email: Stuart.Elden [at] durham.ac.uk. National Socialism and the Calculation of the Political.

This paper examines the way in which mathematics and politics intertwined in National Socialist Germany, particularly in relation to the period between 1933 and 1940. As Heidegger's critical writings on the regime showed, one of the particular issues was the way in which what he calls machination and later technology depended upon a particular notion of metaphysics, a particular casting of being, that is, to be is to be calculable. Nazism seeks control of the earth in a way that both makes possible and exceeds its quest for world domination. To take a few examples, the Nuremburg laws had been promulgated in 1935, which depended upon the calculation of race; September 1936 saw the Four Year Plan which turned Germany's economy to a war-footing; the mechanism of Gleichschaltung, of unification, synchronisation, political coordination, bringing into line was underway throughout German life; and the map-making of the Versailles treaty condemned as excluding German Volk from the borders of the country. In an important book (Friedrich Kopp & Eduard Schulte, Der Westfdlische Frieden) two Nazi scholars provided a rereading of the Peace of Westphalia that trades upon this critique, to which Alfred Baeumler contributed a "Geleitwort". This last issue demonstrates the importance of the notion of calculation to Nazi concepts of Lebensraum. Although this paper takes its point of departure from Heidegger, it focuses on the historical period at hand in order to illuminate both a particular instance of the politics of calculation, and a calculative understanding of the political.

Keywords: National Socialism, Calculation, Politics, Heidegger.

Archives of the American Geographical Society (AGS) serve as case material
to consider the nature and extent of geo-statistical thinking in the 19th
century United States. As a geographical society that adopted (ca. 1851)
and then dropped (in 1871) the word statistical from its organization's
title, the AGS provides a rich context for examining relationships among
the rise (and entrenchment) of the calculation sciences, American
commercial expansion, and exploratory knowledge that came to be associated
with "the geographical." The AGS's emphasis on the gathering and
publication of statistics centered on a wide range of subjects, from soils
and agriculture to the postal services. With approximately one-fifth of the
papers read before the society labeled as 'statistical' in the latter 19th
century, questions arise about the role such information played in the
activities of commercial developers who attended AGS meetings to expand
their knowledge of potential markets. Feminist scholarship that has pointed
to the masculinist nature of 'colonial science', including geography's
historiography, serve as further context for this research. I consider the
'manliness' of calculation and its wider gender politics, and make
connections between it and the commercial/imperial interests that AGS
statistical information might have served ca. 1870.

Keywords: GeoStatistics, history of geography, gender, American
Geographical Society.

Steve Legg, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, CB2 3EN UK. Email: sil21 [at] cam.ac.uk. From places of disease to spaces of congestion: the Delhi Improvement Trust and colonial urban planning.

The attempts by the Government of British India to extend the techniques of rule into their territories ranged across a variety of scales and a variety of tactics, from disciplinary segregation to biopolitical regulation. This paper will analyse an example of the latter, within the urban framework of "Old Delhi". With the construction of the new capital between 1911-31 the neighbouring city had to be made sanitary under the weight of increased population and prestige. The Delhi Improvement Trust was established in the 1930s to bring this about.

Surpassing previous schemes that had focused on places of disease, the Trust undertook a statistical re-mapping of the city. Population density was plotted, using a prefixed living space measurement as a norm, thus allowing areas of abnormal congestion to be plotted and targeted. This "intensity map", however, bore little resemblance to the "improvements" that took place due to the reluctance of occupants to give up their cramped but "lived" places in favour of replacement housing designed upon European ideals. This is a pattern that was repeated in policing plans in which abstract reconfigurations of the city failed to produce a lived replica of colonial order. This presentation will focus on the nature of calculation that allowed the city to be reconceived, the planning norms which were enforced on pre-existing markets and communities, and the nature of the local response to these efforts.