Welcome
Welcome to my new blog. I’m new to Substack but I hope to make this place a home for my serious writing. This blog will be utilized as a platform where I discuss issues through a geographic lens - with a focus on urbanism, transportation, environmentalism, history, and politics. My doing this is a long time coming and I’m excited to start publishing some of my ideas. Please bear with me while I finesse my understanding of the Substack platform, though!
The first law of geography is that everything is related, and this blog is looking specifically at the relationship between places and ideas. The name I chose for this blog — All Geographies are Memories — is a direct reference to that. Geographers often discuss the difference between space and place. Space is the house, an absolute, objective site, whereas place is the home, a site, yes, but also somewhere that has meaning for people. I’d argue that every geography has meaning for at least someone. A park that you’ve passed by may just be a space that exists, but it surely has meaning for those that frequent it. With regards to memory, I think that memories are mostly ideas we have — they’re unreliable and not an objective account of everything. They’re stories we tell ourselves. Even the sharpest memories have biases, exclude things, embellish, and ultimately decay as time goes on. To me, geography is a lot like this. The spaces we inhabit are places with ideas that give it meaning, and those notions shift as time goes on and new mechanisms lay themselves over geographies, changing them.
Or maybe I’m just sentimental and nostalgic about places because we can’t really go places right now and I miss doing that a lot. However, I have used the extra spare time that the pandemic has afforded me to learn more about the places I live in and frequent which has given me greater understanding and I hope to share some of that here.
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