The Making of Post-war Manchester symposium and a new presentation on airports and heliports

On the 8th May I co-organised a successful one-day symposium looking at urban change in post-war Manchester, with a focus on infrastructure projects and major government plans in the three decades from 1945. Well over a hundred people attended the event and heard a fascinating sets of presentations from a range of geographers, historians, planners, architects and archaeologists, with well known professors, established scholars and new researchers speaking.

The intellectual objectives and the programme of the symposium are given on the introductory slides and other details for the day were laid out for participants in a nice little printed booklet which Richard Brook and myself put together. You can also look through the slides for many of the talks given on the PostwarMcr blog. The symposium was made possible with financial support from Cities@Manchester initiative and the Campion Fund of the Manchester Statistical Society. We plan to develop a edited book following the themes of the symposium and many speakers have committed to contributing chapters.

I also gave a new paper on the significance of aviation during the post-war period focused on the large scale development of airport infrastructure in Manchester up to the mid 1970s. This was examined in contrast to the failure of the helicopter to become a routine form of transport during this period and the unbuilt schemes for a centrally located heliport for the city. Now I have to write the talk into a formal paper, as well as undertake some more in depth research on the different phases of building at Manchester Airport.

The Making of Post-war Manchester, 1945-74: Plans and Projects symposium

I am convening a small 1-day symposium on the histories of urban change in the post-war period, looking at a range of different plans and projects relating to Manchester. The event is being held on the 8th of May and is being co-organised with Richard Brook in the Manchester School of Architecture. It is free to attend and you can register for a ticket from here.

We think we have put together a strong programme. The presentations will consider events, such as ‘smokeless zones’, the emergence of a computer cluster in the city, and large scale built projects of the era, including Mancunian Way and the University expansion, in relation to civic plans, infrastructural initiatives, local and national government policies, technological innovation and the wider fiscal climate. Speakers include Michael Nevell from Salford University talking on 'From Industrial City to Industrial Archaeology', from Bangor University we have Peter Shapely discussing 'Social Housing in Post-war Manchester' and Professor John Pickstone who will examine 'Health and Hospitals'.

Forgotten Plans for Heliports

Last week I went over to the University of Liverpool to give a seminar in the Department of Geography and Planning. It was a friendly event and I tried out a new talk on the historical geography of the helicopter and unrealised planning for city centre heliports in the 1950s. This is a fairly new strand of research coming out of the broader Mapping Manchester project and more directly from the successful Infra_MANC exhibition that I co-curated last spring.

If you're interested you can browse through the slides on 'Vertical Urbanism and the Forgotten Plans for Heliports'. The image above is an example of the kinds of unrealised plans for rooftop heliports that I am examining. This particular drawing, from the early 1950s, was for a helicopter station in the centre of Liverpool but was not actually built. (Image courtesy of Liverpool City Archives.)

I am giving an amended version of this heliport talk at a one-day workshop in Birmingham next week on Infrastructure and the Rebuilt Post-war City, where I will drop the Liverpool-specific examples and add in a little bit more on London and Birmingham. I plan to write this material up as a full paper in the next few months, but in the meantime you might want to read the 'helicopter dreaming' chapter in the print catalogue from our Infra_MANC exhibition - copies still available for just £10.

Crowdsourced Cartography 

The finalised journal version of a paper on crowdsourced cartography and the relevance of the notion of prosumption to geographical information creation has come out in the latest edition of Environment and Planning A (January 2013, Vol 45(1)). It is co-authored with Rob Kitchin and an earlier draft has been up on SSRN for a while. The abstract is as follows:

"This paper considers the emerging phenomenon of crowdsourced cartography in relation to ideas about the organisation of contemporary knowledge production in capitalist societies. Taking a philosophical perspective that views mapping as a processual, creative, productive act, constructed through citational, embodied, and contextual experiences, we examine how we might profitably analyse collaborative crowdsourced projects like OpenStreetMap to better understand geographic knowledge production in a shifting political economy and sociotechnical landscape. We begin by characterising crowdsourcing practices in the wider context of Web 2.0, which some commentators assert is rapidly becoming a new, dominant mode of knowledge production. We then contextualise Web 2.0 knowledge production, drawing upon the ideas of sociologist George Ritzer, and his notion of ‘prosumption’, geographer Michael Goodchild’s idea of volunteerist ‘citizen scientists’, and economic commentator Nicholas Carr’s critique of the ‘ignorance of crowds’. We then go on to discuss the changing nature of cartography in the Web 2.0 era with respect to authorship, ontology, representation, and temporality."

Keywords: cartography, crowdsourcing, ‘prosumers’, Web 2.0, authorship, ontology, representation, temporality

Book Reviews

A couple of recent reviews in academic journals for our book Code/Space, interesting to get positive feedback. My good mate in Kentucky, Matt Zook's provided a review in Regional Studies, (Vol. 46(8)). While Peter Adey's review in the Journal of Transport Geography, (Vol. 26) opens by noting that "Code/Space is a pretty remarkable piece of scholarship. It works in a number of important ways to collate and develop the authors' research on software, the internet and communications over the last 15 years or so."

Also, you might be interested in a book review that I wrote on the The Culture of Diagram by John Bender and Michael Marrinan (Stanford University Press, 2010). The review has just come out in the latest edition of the journal Cartographica. I was rather critical of this particular book, arguing that "... their analysis suffered from drawing on such a narrow range of diagrammatic applications and that it offers a narrowly constrained empirical spatial and temporal sample of evidence. The result is a serious and scholarly book, but one in which genuinely novel insights are few."

Publicity Burst on the Manchester Blitz Maps

We managed to get some good media coverage about the online maps of Manchester, especially regarding the Second World War bomb damage mapping held by the City Archives. Following a good press release from Mike Addelman we were featured in a great double page spread in Manchester Evening News, including a 'lovely' picture of my head (see partial scan of the hardcopy newspaper page below). The story 'Blitz Maps Unearthed' was actually trailed on the front cover of the newspaper. The version on the MEN website has a useful slideshow of images, again including a couple of cheesy images of myself holding big old paper maps in a supposedly scholarly fashion.

The 'blitz maps' story also got a little mention in The Times newspaper last Friday. The following day Donna Sherman (Rylands map librarian) and David Govier (Manchester City archivist) were interviewed about the new online cartographic resources for Manchester, particularly the bomb damage maps, on BBC Northwest Tonight, BBC Radio Manchester and Granada News. And just this morning I noticed that the BBC News Manchester website has a nice annotated slideshow of some of the maps that Rylands Library has digitised, along with a few related historic photographs.

Maps of aerial bombing of the City of Manchester during the Second World War

These maps have long been sought after and generally thought not to exist for Manchester. However, a large folio of annotated Ordnance Survey county series maps showing the location of all bombs dropped and the damaged caused to buildings during the Second World War have been unearthed. The maps contain a lot of detail, including the type of bomb and the date it was dropped. Accompanying the maps are a large set of index cards detailing the properties effected and the damage caused. The maps and index cards were prepared by the City Architects Department in the Manchester Corporation as part of their management of the city during the war.

I first came across the maps as part of ongoing research about 'Mapping Manchester' in December 2009 when they were held (or perhaps 'lost') within working files of the Planning Department in the Town Hall Extension. Now they have been transferred to Manchester Archives and are available for inspection by the public. (Their archive reference number is GB127.MISC/1192.)

I have been working with Kevin Bolton and David Govier, in Manchester Archives, to get the whole folio of bomb damage maps properly digitised and made available online. This digitisation was undertaken recently as a voluntary project by the University of Manchester Library, with the assistance of Donna Sherman in the map library and the experts in the Rylands Deansgate CHICC group doing the photography. You can browse all 47 sheets of the bomb damage maps in exacting detail through the Library's LUNA website. (There are also several hundred of other historic maps of Manchester available now on LUNA, including many nineteenth century street maps and a range of Ship Canal plans.)

Given the original Ordnance Survey base maps rather annoyingly split the city centre of Manchester across four separate sheets it can be hard to get a sense of the overall pattern of bomb damage in the core area. Consequently, I decided to get the four central sheets stitched together to create the synthetic map image shown above (and available as a pdf download). The stitching together of the images of the four map sheets was expertly done by Graham Bowden, who works in the University's Cartography Unit. The edge matching across the sheets is not perfect, however, as the original maps have warped and stretched over the past sixty years and so are no longer exactly rectangular.

The key for the bomb annotations shown on the map is as follows:

• Red circle: fire bomb
• Blue circle: high explosive bomb
• Green circle: land mine
• Solid red shading: building demolished
• Red hatching: structure partially damaged

It is also important to note in looking at the map above that the apparent lack of any bombing or damage over the River Irwell in Salford and Trafford is due to the nature of data collection and not reality on the ground. These maps were produced by the Manchester Corporation and therefore only detailed damage within their jurisdiction. Salford suffered quite significant amount of bombing in the Second Word War.

These maps are a fascinating historical artefact and potentially a useful source for understanding the immediate physical  impact of the war on Manchester and the longer-term influence this had on post-war urban development in the city centre.

My new edited book is now in print and is available to purchase from booksellers. Touching Space, Placing Touch has taken quite a while to complete but the result is, I think, a worthwhile volume. Full credit to my co-editor Mark Paterson who was really responsible for guiding the intellectual development of the book and took real charge in getting it into print.

We are both pleased with the end result. Its got a range of good chapters and some real thematic coherence. Thanks to all our contributors for their efforts. Credit to Ashgate as well for doing an effective and professional job with the editing, design and physical production - its a nice hardback volume. It looks good on my office shelf!

While its quite expensive (£65; $120), this is very much the norm for this type of volume. We hope it will find an audience, get some good reviews and sell some copies. This promo flyer gives more details on the content of the book along with a copy of the cover blurb.

The Map Reader awarded a book prize

We were pleased to learn a few months ago that our recent edited book The Maps Reader (Wiley, 2011) had been selected by the Berendel Foundation for the award of the Cantemir Prize 2012.

My co-editor Rob Kitchin attended a conference, Mapping Humans, at Oxford University last week where the award was officially made. Shown left is the certificate recording the award to The Map Reader and below is a photograph of Rob with HRH Prince Radu of Romania, who formally gave the prize to us.

I was invited to give a talk down in London at a seminar on the Shape of Knowledge put together by David Penfold for the International Society for Knowledge Organization. My talk on 'Mapping Software' was a blend of ideas about cybergeography and code/space. The slides from my talk at available here.

New journal paper in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

A further theoretical argument around cartography as practice and the best way to research mapping has been published in TIBGs as an early view article. It is entitled, Unfolding mapping practices: a new epistemology for cartography, and is co-authored with Rob Kitchin and Justin Gleeson. There is a local version available here. The abstract for the paper is as follows:

"In recent years there has been a turn within cartographic theory from a representational to a processual understanding of mapping. Maps have been re-conceptualised as mappings that ceaselessly unfold through contingent, citational, habitual, negotiated, reflexive and playful practices, embedded within relational contexts. In this paper, we explore what this rethinking means for cartographic epistemology, contending that attention needs to be focused on understanding cartography through the lens of practices – how mappings are (re)made in diverse ways (technically, socially, bodily, aesthetically and politically) by people within particular contexts and cultures as solutions to everyday tasks. We detail how these practices can be profitably examined using a suite of methods – genealogies, ethnographies, ethnomethodology, participant observation, observant participation and deconstruction – that are sensitive to capturing and distilling the unfolding and contextual nature of mapping. To illustrate our argument we narrate the unfolding production and consumption of a set of mappings of so-called ‘ghost estates’ in Ireland, a public geography project that has been covered over 300 times in local, national and international media and that has contributed to Irish public discourse and policy debates."

Key words: cartography; epistemology; ontogenesis; practice; ghost estates; public geography

Quoted in the papers

I was interviewed about the politics behind mapping technologies by Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman a few weeks ago. His article, How Google and Apple's digital mapping is mapping us appeared in the paper yesterday. The article made the front cover of the G2 section and generated a good number of online comments. I got a small quote:

"The map is mapping us," says Martin Dodge, a senior lecturer in human geography at Manchester University. "I'm not paranoid, but I am quite suspicious and cynical about products that appear to be innocent and neutral, but that are actually vacuuming up all kinds of behavioural and attitudinal data."

The fact that I claimed not to be paranoid has raised a couple of comments from my colleagues.

Also, my recent book gets a nice name check in an interesting comment piece about the growing power of software algorithms in academia. The article is entitled Leave the thinking to us, in the Times Higher Education. It is by sociologist David Beer and he notes:

"In Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge's book Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life (2011), the authors demonstrate the importance of software for the functioning of the social world everywhere from the home to air travel. It would be remiss to think that higher education somehow sits outside these broader social developments. Kitchin and Dodge point out that even mundane technologies such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop come "loaded" with "algorithmic normalities" that "subtly ... direct users to certain solutions". Without thinking too hard, we can immediately see that PowerPoint's algorithmic normalities are likely to be providing us with subtle directions in how to lecture."

Paper analysing the content of the City of Manchester Plan, published in 1945

I've just received the pageproofs for a paper, coauthored with Chris Perkins. Its due to be published in the autunm hopefully.

Mapping the Imagined Future: The Roles of Visual Representation in the 1945 City of Manchester Plan
by Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge

Abstract
Visual representations have often played a crucial role in imagining future urban forms. In the aftermath of the Second World War, a noteworthy new genre of urban plan was published in Britain, most deploying seductively optimistic illustrations of ways forward not only for the reconstruction of bomb-damaged towns and cities but also for places left largely undamaged. This paper assesses the contribution of visual elements in this process with a detailed case study of the maps, statistical charts, architectural drawings and photographs enrolled into the 1945 City of Manchester Plan. The cultural production of these visual representations is evaluated. Our analysis interprets the form, symbology and active work of different imagery in the process of reimagining Manchester, but also assesses the role of these images as markers of a particular moment in the cultural economy of the city. This analysis is carried out in relation to the ethos of the Plan as a whole.

Keywords: City of Manchester Plan; planning; visual practices; mapping; Manchester; architectural drawings; photographs; futurity

Our chapter on Manchester as a 'hydraulic city' read through original maps and plans of water supplies and sewage systems has been published in a new edited book Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance (Palgrave). The book is a useful collection of pieces relating to spatial representation and aspects of urbanity, expertly pulled together by Les Roberts.

You can read an uncorrected pageproof version of the chapter, 'Maps, Memories and Manchester: The Cartographic Imagination of the Hidden Networks of the Hydraulic City'. Below is an example of the kinds of historical mapping we analyse, in this case a simple segmented chart of the Thirlmere aqueduct, a triumph of Victorian engineering that brings fresh water from the Lake District  down to Manchester.

  (Source: The Engineer, 19th October 1894, page 340. 

A scanned copy of this issue is available from Grace's Guide.)

Touching Space, Placing Touch

A new edited book I have been working on with Mark Paterson is coming close to completation. We are just checking the pageproofs at the moment. The title is Touching Space, Placing Touch and it will be published by Ashgate in the the autumn. The draft cover design is shown in the thumbnail image.

You can read the substantive introduction written by Mark Paterson, Sara MacKian and myself from here (this is a near final pageproof version). The book also contains a chapter by Rob Kitchin and myself entitled 'Towards touch-free spaces: sensors, software and the automatic production of shared public toilets' (this is a pageproof version).

The book contains an interesting range of contributions looking at different social aspects of the spaces of touch. The list of twelve chapters in Touching Space, Placing Touch is as follows:

• Negotiating therapeutic touch: encountering massage through the 'mixed bodies' of Michel Serres, by Jennifer Lea
• Touching the beach, by Pau Obrador
• Touching space in hurt and healing: exploring experiences of illness and recovery through tactile art, by Amanda Bingley
• Facing touch in the beauty salon: corporeal anxiety, by Elizabeth R. Straughan
•  Fieldwork: how to get in(to) touch. Towards a haptic regime of knowledge in geography, by Anne Volvey
• Guiding visually impaired walking groups: intercorporeal experience and ethical sensibilities, by Hannah Macpherson
• Touch, skin cultures and the space of medicine: the birth of biosubjective care, by Bernard Andrieu, Anne Flore Laloë and Alexander Klein
• Touching environmentalisms: the place of touch in the fraught biogeographies of elephant captivity, by Jamie Lorimer
• Towards touch-free spaces: sensors, software and the automatic production of shared public toilets, by Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin
• In close embrace: the space between two dancers, by Sarah G. Cant
• Intra-body touching and the over-life sized paintings of Jenny Savile, by Rachel Colls
• Touched by spirit: sensing the material impacts of intangible encounters, by Sara MacKian

Book Reviews

A couple of reviews for our Code/Space book have appeared recently in academic journals.

Francis Harvey, from the Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, says Code/Space "is an important contribution; I only wish it had been written more with GIScience in mind. Still, it is a very worthwhile read." Read the rest of his review from the International Journal of GIS here.

A second review is published in Cultural Geographies in which Matthew Wilson notes perceptively that "it is somewhat surprising that Kitchin and Dodge do not explicitly advocate coding itself as a technique for critical studies of software (alongside ethnography and genealogy) – which would be in alignment with the thrust of much contemporary digital humanities and critical GIS literatures. In what ways can code ‘speak back’ and resist discursive regimes? How might the discourse break down under the weight of code? How are we to code differently?"

Book Reviews
A couple of reviews of my recent books have appeared in the journal Cartographica over the last couple of months. 

Firstly, Kenneth Field wrote a thoughtful and generally positive review of the edited book Classics in Cartography. As he noted:

"Classics in Cartography is not only a supremely constructed book in its own right but does a fine job of representing the high calibre of papers published in Cartographica over the past 48 years. It provides an insightful read and should also be a staple for students of cartography and GIS. Given the wealth of classics that didn’t make the cut, maybe there is opportunity for a second volume? As Pink Floyd did: The Final Cut?" (Source: Cartographica, Vol. 47, No. 1)

A second review, this time for Code/Space, co-written with Rob Kitchin. Here Gwilym Eades is rather more critical of the framing of our analysis of software in his review. As he says:

"Code/space represents a valiant attempt to usher the field of software studies into being. Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s co-written book succeeds in this self-proclaimed mission in many ways. My main hesitations about this book, however, revolve around limitations to the mission of software studies as a newly emerging field and not around the soundness of the methodology Kitchin and Dodge use in their comprehensive survey of the manifold effects of code on everyday lives in the modern world. While that methodology is indeed rigorous, its rigour exists within a flawed theoretical framework." (Source: Cartographica, Vol. 47, No. 2)

Other recent mentions of Code/Space include a complementary post by David Beer on his Thinking Culture blog. While our underlying concept of 'code space' also seems to be picking up traction, in part, following a LIFT Conference talk given by James Bridle entitled "We fell in love in a coded space".

Infra_MANC Exhibition Catalogue

We've had a printing done of a 2nd edition of the catalgoue from our recent Infra_MANC exhibition. One hundred copies are available for £10 each. Twenty-five are on sale at the RIBA Hub in Manchester and a further 75 will be available from the Manchester Modernist Society's online shop (http://themodernist.bigcartel.com). The catalogue is 200+ pages full colour, professionally printed with spiral binding. It contains 4 x 7500 word fully referenced and illustrated essays looking at the following four infrastructures of post-war Manchester.

One of the chapters in the Infra_MANC catalogue was partially based on the diligent research regarding the Mancunian Way conducted by James K. Thorp for his architecture degree. He has now put the full text of his 2010 thesis Highway in the Sky: A Socio-Technical Analysis of the Urban Motorway online. Its a really effective description and interpretation of this iconic piece of Manchester's infrastructure. 

Another smaller but intriguing aspect of researching the exhibition was the possibilities of relic spaces under Manchester from the unbuilt Picc-Vic rail tunnel in the 1970s. One of these, that we exposed in the exhibition, was a void under the Arndale shopping Centre. This has now been covered in a short article in the latest issue of Subterranea (April 2012, page 54-55). To find out more about what the Picc-Vic tunnel would have been like if it had been built you'll need to buy a copy of the catalogue!

I recently contributed a short essay to the Land Diagrams web project at the invitation of Amy Cutler. In partnership with another commentator we were set to think about the meaning of map of linguistic data for Cornwall suggested by Amy.

The goal of Amy's project to produce ‘twinned study’ that can "offer two simultaneous gestures of thought in response to one geographical image". I hope the Land Diagrams project develops and I'll be keeping an eye on it. 

Infra_MANC - another mini-burst of publicity

We got some more useful press coverage for our Infra_MANC exhibition this week, focused on the unbuilt 1970s Picc-Vic railway tunnel under central Manchester and the possibility of a void under the Arndale shopping for a station. The press release and images were picked up by the Manchester Evening News as a page 3 article in the newspaper and also a nice blog post by Martin Wainwright in the Guardian. Both pieces also attracted an interesting, and sometimes amusing, range of comments from readers.

Hello, just a quick (shameless) promotional and (self)congratulatory note to say that our book Code/Space has recently been awarded a significant academic prize by the Association of American Geographers. Rob and myself were both very surprised and pleased to won the Meridian Book Award for the Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography for 2011.

The AAG awards committee wrote: "We feel it pushed the envelope as it explained the linkages between software and human behavior in a spatial context. This book articulates how space and software have
become so intertwined that they constitute one another in our lives. It
is one of the rare books that link critical social theories with technology and philosophy. Using everyday spaces, it demonstrates how such spaces are transformed by code and how new spaces of interactions are recreated. It is the type of book that can interface with many different disciplines. It is one of the few geography books taking the technology and the potential in reconstituting space seriously."

We submitted the book to the AAG awards committee last autumn. Thanks to the publisher MIT Press for their support with this and, most especially, we are very grateful to the following people who wrote greater letters of support and commendations for us:

• Prof. Paul Adams, Department of Geography and the Environment, University of Texas at Austin
• Prof. Mike Batty, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College
• Prof. Mark Boyle, Department of Geography, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
• Prof. Paul Dourish, Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine
• Dr Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
• Prof. Mei-Po Kwan, Department of Geography, The Ohio State University
• Prof. Barney Warf, Department of Geography, University of Kansas
• Dr Matthew W. Wilson, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky

Infra_MANC Exhibition

[Image of the Infra_MANC exhibition: Guardian Underground. Courtesy of Michael England.]

Our exhibition seems to be going well. After a stressful time installing the materials in the CUBE gallery (much praise is due to my co-curator Richard Brook for his design ideas and sterling work), the exhibition officially opened last Monday.

Here are a couple super photographs, kindly taken by Michael England, of parts of the Infra_MANC exhibition and some of the key materials being displayed.

According to the gallery staff we are getting lots of visitors and positive feedback. The exhibition has also been blogged about, including a good posting by Aidan O'Rourke from the 'private view', a lengthy piece on Paul Capewell's blog, and also a mention on the Look Up Manchester blog.

With the help of Mike Addelman, our enthusiastic university media officer, we've managed to get some good press coverage, including good story in the Manchester Evening News and an image slideshow on the BBC News website. Richard and myself were also interviewed about the exhibition for NorthWest Tonight, BBC's flagship regional television new programme.

[Image of the Infra_MANC exhibition: Picc-Vic and Mancunian Way. Courtesy of Michael England.]

Infra_MANC exhibition is only on for a few weeks and is due to close on 17th March. It is open on Monday to Saturday, 12.00-530pm. If you make it along, please let me know what you think.

Infra_MANC: Post-war infrastructure of Manchester

Here is the banner designed by co-curator Richard Brook to promote our new exhibition, Infra_MANC. The banner will hang outside the CUBE Gallery in Portland Street, Manchester that is hosting the exhibition.

We are just the hectic phase of installing the materials in the exhibition itself. We have a lot of interesting plans, maps and artefacts to display. As well as four videos, and hopefully the Futuroute machine on loan from the Transport Museum of Greater Manchester. The exhibition opens officially next Monday, 27th February. I am really looking forward to seeing it finished and the reactions of visitors.

There is also a substantive catalogue, running to over two hundred pages, to support the exhibition. This is being printed and will be available in a week or two. We'll need to sell the catalogue to cover the print costs but might well release it free online as a pdf.

I also wrote a entry for the Cities@Manchester blog, entitled 'Contemporary cities and infrastructural imaginaries' that tries to delineate some of the ideas behind the exhibition.

Here is the uncorrected page proof version of a book chapter I co-wrote a while back. Maps, Memories and Mancheste: The Cartographic Imagination of the Hidden Networks of the Hydraulic City looks at the mapping process of water system and historial geography of infrastructure in Manchester. The chapter will be part of a forthcoming book, Mapping Culture: Place, Practice Performance, being edited by Les Roberts.

Infra_MANC exhibition

I have been planning a new exhibition, with an architect colleague Richard Brook from MMU, for the last few months and doing some low-level archival research to find key material to display. The exhibition is called Infra_MANC - for 'Infrastructure Manchester' - and it will examine four key infrastructural projects from the post-war period. There is the iconic Mancunian Way elevated motorway and the 'secret' Guardian underground telephone exchange. We will also present plans, maps and artefacts relating to two other unrealised infrastructural projects in Manchester: schemes in the 1950s for a city centre heliport and then the underground railway route from Piccadilly station to Victoria (the 'Picc-Vic tunnel') which was planned and nearly built in the early 1970s.

We are just in the final push to complete the text for the large exhibition catalogue. Then there will be the panic in a few weeks to get the exhibition material itself installed and ready for the public opening on the 27th February.

Infra_MANC // Post-war infrastructure of Manchester will be on display in the RIBA hub on Portland Street, Manchester, from 27th February to 23rd March. The exhibition flyer gives a bit more detail. (The great design on the exhibition logo and flyer was done by my co-curator Richard Brook.)

Hiking by James Walker Tucker, 1936.

I recently came across this lovely 1930s painting called Hiking while reading Rachel Hewitt's history of the Ordnance Survey, Map of a Nation. I thought this painting would have made for a cracking cover image for our edited The Map Reader volume. It really captures the essence of using maps that we wanted to convey in the cover design. The question of the gendered nature of cartography is also raised, a point that is made problematic by our actual cover photograph showing the apparently active male role, holding map and pointing, and the more passive female.
We are getting some good feedback on The Map Reader, although its only sold about 400 copies so far. The electronic version is also very well indexed by Google Scholar, so if you search for many of the key articles the first source listed is The Map Reader version on the Wiley onlinelibrary website. Hopefully some reviews in journals should start appearing soon.

The first proper academic reviews of our MIT Press book Code/Space are beginning to appear in journals. There is comprehensive review by Mike Batty in new journal Computational Culture, where he concludes that "Code/space presents an ambitious road map for the way we should begin to understand spatialities – spaces which are being continually transformed by functions based on software processing information. This is one of the first statements of a new approach to understanding space in terms of a world where information is accessible anywhere, any time, and Kitchin and Dodge provide critical structures for understanding how such space can be as differentiated and variegated as the spaces of the past."

Next is an insightful review by Taylor Shelton in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, in which he says:

"As the first book-length treatment of these issues, Code/Space is an important contribution not only to human geography but also to software studies and the social study of technology more broadly. In reorienting the geographic study of technology away from the potentially deterministic ascriptions of agency to technology and toward the various elements and processes that are constitutive of the technologies under scrutiny, Code/Space opens up new avenues for investigating the contingency of the relationship among society, space, and technology."

However, Shelton is rather more critical about our often 'negative' reading of the power of software and also out tendency to (re)invent terminology that confuses rather than clarifies the arguments.

I've also heard from the editorial staff at MIT Press that the first printing of the book is selling out and they want to order a reprint.

Lastly, I noticed that Code/Space gets a mention in the (newish?) Wikipedia entry on 'Software Studies'.

Hello, here is a draft of newish book chapter that I've been working on for a while. It is related, in part, to the ongoing code/space research activity, with Rob Kitchin.

Towards touch-free spaces: sensors, software and the automatic production of shared public toilets

Abstract: New software-enabled technologies are changing the social and material production of everyday landscapes, and re-figuring the embodied relationships between people and the environment through touch. Touching with hands is integral to so much technologic activity and control - the pressing of buttons, pulling of handles, flicking switches, twisting selector dials, and so on. And yet touch is an overlooked spatial sense and practice in human geography. It perhaps then somewhat ironic that in this paper we are concerned with the reverse situation, as we interrogate the nature of mundane technologies that are designed to work without direct human touch. As such, we consider how tools and appliances are being designed and engineered to interact and respond appropriately to people by remotely sensing the presence of human bodies, and offering modes of control that are proximate rather than using physical touch. We focus on electronic/digital technologies, being applied in everyday contexts, that use sensors and software to automatically produce spaces that can react to people (or at a minimum bodily shaped objects) in meaningful ways without direct contact. To begin to explain the nature of this automatic production of touch-free spatiality we concentrate our analysis on shared public toilets, vital but somewhat disregarded spaces of modern life.

Keywords: toilets, automation, software, sensors, code/space

I've made this draft is available as a working paper on the Social Science Research Network, SSRN-id1966248. Another version of the chapter is due to come out in a new book I've been co-editing, Touching Space, Placing Touch (to be published by Ashgate at some point in 2012).

Just noticed that two of my articles have recently passed the 100 citation 'milestone' according to Google Scholar. It is also pleasing that my co-authored book, Mapping Cyberspace, from 2000, is still picking up cites and now has surpassed the 500 mark.

• "The potential of web-based mapping and virtual reality technologies for modelling urban environments", Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (1998) has 108 citations.
  
• "Flying through code/space: the real virtuality of air travel", Environment and Planning A (2004) has some 105 citations.

Obviously you have to take Google Scholar's citation counts with a serious pinch of salt as they are often significantly inflated with double-counting, self-citations and random cites from draft documents and working papers. The much stricter (and more narrowly measured) citations from the ISI Web of Science database gives "Flying through code/space" a less impressive 59 citations (as 'mapped' below) and only a measly 140 odd cites for Mapping Cyberspace.