Ulf Strohmayer

• PhD
• Ollscoil na Gaillimhe – University of Galway

This paper engages with a key trope of landscapes as representation: their mirroring capacity. Contextualising the concept of ‘landscape’ within art history, the paper invokes several technologies that have been functional in the recognition of landscapes while themselves remaining invisible. One such technology is a 17th century technology known a...

This article presents the case for a reconceptualised form of engagement around development at a local scale within a medium-sized city. Deploying ideas gleaned from literature on emergence, the article explores how a non-teleological form of development might engage with stakeholders in an urban regeneration area. Focusing on three distinct social...

This essay analyses a key motif in geographical scholarship: the most basic form of mobility achieved by an abled-bodied person engaging in acts of walking. By embedding “walking” firmly within a phenomenological tradition, the essay places “being mobile” qua walking within a field of enquiry that conceptualises an embodied form of mobility as both...

This paper details the contextual and conceptual elements involved in setting up an Urban Lab in the city of Galway, Ireland. The paper specifies the set-up of a lab in the post-industrial area of Nuns' Island, through a detailed reading of pertinent ‘lab-centred’ literatures. It contributes to this literature by (1) analysing a lab in the explicit...

In this paper, we map the evolution of approaches to development in Ireland since the formation of the state. With reference to the current national and international context, we make the case for the adoption of a transformational approach to development in one of Europe’s most centralized countries. We highlight the growing literature on socio-ec...

Für die Verortung der deutschen akademischen Humangeographie im Geflecht zwischen wissenschaftlicher Praxis, theoretischen Propositionen und Lehralltag war der Geographentag in Kiel im Jahre 1969 ein Meilenstein. Anlässlich der Erinnerung an den Ort und die Debatten vor 50 Jahren wurde wiederum Kiel im Jahre 2019 zu einem Ort der Reflektion. Der hi...

Structuration theory played a key role in the formation of geographical theories during the 1980s. Characterized by the adaption of social‐scientific arguments and concepts within human geography, structuration theory arguably changed, especially, the manner in which the notions of “structure” and “agency” were discussed and incorporated into empir...

This commentary traces key issues attaching to the use of the word ‘public’ within planning practices and theories. It argues for an alternative, non-binary engagement with public practices that may profit from being cast in a Foucauldian language and epistemology.

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The coexistence of language and space involves more than matters of approximation and equivalence. Beyond simple binaries expressed perhaps most vividly in Saussurean terms, beyond, in fact, any simple invocation of structure, language in a quite fundamental sense is space: without the spatiality embedded within and practiced across the Saussurean...

In search of transnational scholarship and languages within human geography, the so-called ''Quantitative Revolution'' of the 1960s arguably holds considerable pride of place. More than previous innovations within geography, which were largely bounded within (and by) national intellectual traditions, the innovate practices associated with the 1960s...

This paper examines three failed bids by the French Olympic Committee and the City of Paris to host the summer Olympic Games of 1992, 2008 and 2012 in an attempt better to understand the role of heritage designations in the context of urban change. Introducing the various sites earmarked for the Games, the paper explores the relationship between pl...

This essay addresses one of the defining characteristics of debates within human geography and across the social sciences during the last ten years: the encounter between traditional and postmodern discourses. It is argued that at least one issue has been unduly neglected: the material fact of groundless arguments. Alternatively portrayed as the fa...

Rezensiertes Werk: Wehrheim, Jan: Die überwachte Stadt : Sicherheit, Segretion und Ausgrenzung / Jan Wehrheim. - Opladen : Leske und Budrich, 2002. - 238 S. : Ill., graph. Darst. - (Stadt, Raum und Gesellschaft ; Bd. 17) Zugl. Oldenburg, Univ., Diss. ISBN 3-8100-3383-9

Transcending the dualism between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ has been one of the central aims of geographical knowledge during the last decade or so. The present paper adds to this growing body of literature by focusing on the construction of a key space of the French Second Empire (1852-1870), the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in the newly created 19th arro...

This paper proceeds in three steps. First, it gives more focus and rigor to the geographic reception of “postmodernism,” through an investigation of the problem of representation as it has evolved from Kant through de Saussure and Wittgenstein to Derrida. Second, it arranges historical materialist encounters with the problem of representation along...

The following essay attempts to illuminate the production of “presences” in the course of European modernity. It argues that the disintegration of a stable and local presence is one of the defining, albeit largely ignored, characteristics of modernity. The consequences of what could rightly be called an “exploded” presence are then examined with th...

Cet essai trace l’histoire des grandes idées théoriques de la géographie humaine du siècle dernier. Les auteurs montrent les développements majeurs des théories qui ont déterminé les pratiques des géographies européennes et américaines depuis Ratzel, Reclus et Semple. C’est aussi la dernière publication de P. Gould, décédé en 2000, que Géographie,...

This paper traces the involvement of theoretical ideas in the history of human geography during the last century. The authors address major theoretical advances and the practices they begot both in Europe and in the US since the days of Ratzel, Reclus and Semple. The paper is also one of the last publications by Peter Gould, who died in 2000. Since...

As in other fields, advances in geographic knowledge rely as much on debate and disagreement as on cumulative, consensus based research. While debates have often been discussed by geographers, the focus has been on positions more than on the dynamics of debate itself. A scattering of explicit discussions of debating practices began to appear in the...

This report synthesizes the main strands of regional planning in France since the end of the Second World War. lt highlights the principally political reasons behind the creation an subsequent recreation of instruments used for and in the process of 'planning spaces'. The region long since held to be a staple of geographic enquiry, here emerges as...

In this essay I analyse the role of space in key texts belonging to the tradition of phenomenology. Starting from the assumption that phenomenology is uniquely positioned to answer the epistemological challenges posed by today's theoretical discourses, works by Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer are examined in light of their respective treatments of...

Few are those to deny that the current state of the social sciences is one of crisis. Brought about by a widespread recognition of the instability inherent to social scientific concepts, the very idea of a crisis appears to have turned ubiquitous — so ubiquitous indeed as to constitute a new and commonly accepted status quo. In the wake of postmode...

The question of National Socialism, then, here and today: what does it mean to speak of it in the singular? Indeed, what does it mean to speak of it at all? Almost fifty years after the liberation of Germany, in fact Europe, from a most ruthlessly effective totalitarian political system, the problems posed by the historical emergence of something l...

Georges Benko «Societies are much messier than our theories of them» Michael Mann The Sources of Social Power 1 Towards a unified social theory Why are there communication problems between the different disciplines of the social sciences? And why should there be so much misunderstanding? Most probably because the encounter of several disciplines is...

Current developments within the human sciences in general and social geography in particular have challenged the paradigm of representation that has prevailed here as elsewhere for the longest time since the Enlightenment. The paper at hand seeks to explore some of the wider ramifications of this so-called “postmodern challenge” for those forms of...

We all practice it, use its presumed power of explanation, and never seem to get tired of it: theory, only recently introduced to geography at large, appears to be indispensable for any truly rigorous analysis of the social world. But is it really? In this paper it is argued that even the most sophisticated of attempts at 'theorizing the social' ca...

In an effort to respond to the so-called ‘postmodern challenge’ in a way that continues to allow for an understanding of social interaction in time and space, geographers have increasingly turned to the theory of structuration put forward by Anthony Giddens. This theory paints a picture of the human agent as being constrained by sociohistorical cir...

Ever since the "crisis of representation" erupted within the human sciences some twenty years ago, thinking about language, concepts and modes of communication more generally has become a central feature of academic research. Geography is no exception: communication within the discipline, as well as between academics and the lay public, has been su...