In this chapter, I seek to disassemble the persistently held presumption that film and music, amongst other overarching cultural forms, through their dramatic deployment of commercially projected powerful imagination, can determine the expectations of individuals as to their desires and preferences of how to behave, most directly in terms of choosing venues for holidays and how to experience them (Beeton, 2005). These near-dominant understandings are not merely in the populist tabloid press or even broadsheets and their online equivalent voices but amongst academics and other thinkers who intend to investigate, reflect, and inform. Yet is it at all sensible to emphasize meta-cultural forms in the determination of imagination? In other words, where does the multiplicity of difference amongst media themselves "fit" in the embroilment of our lives? Or, maybe, the myriad fragments of our imagination might have other, humbler, more important, resonant, and continuing as well as sudden effects on imagination. A memory from visiting a place or somebody in our individual past might even be jolted into our present by a passing sound or a visual image that appears in that wider media. This is not about inducing certain images but about making a fragment of our own imagination come to mind again, shining light on a corner that had been left in the dark for some time. Simply put, the connection between a film, a dance, a song, and our imagination is far from linear. This chapter grows from insights and evidence across the humanities and social sciences. In these threads, this chapter understands the others it shares space with in this collection but does so with a care to acknowledge the inter-weaving that inhabits life and our relations with whatever may be around us: in dreams, desires and disappointments, memories, or events.

As readers will soon be aware, I admit that I find nothing positive from Brexit for people, civil society, economy, cultural lives, environmental survival, and social relations. It may be that othe...

Geography has contributed significantly to our understanding of art and creativity, notably in how art happens: in different media, often in projects developed collaboratively. Our interests as geo...

In this chapter the context in social history is set out, with a particular consideration of the value of the insights of Pierre Bourdieu and how they might be applied to change in medieval society. The historiographical context of the emergence of the idea of Chivalry as a social change within an existing habitus follows from this, and the way the idea colonized the national historiographies of Europe after its first articulation in the Enlightenment. The chapter explains how it is that the Enlightenment and the present day are able to approach the contemporary medieval social mind because its aristocracy as much as its clerical elite was an educated and literate one, and quite how pervasive its use and appreciation of literate forms was.

Abstract This is a book about the medieval obsession with defining and practising superior conduct and the social consequences that followed from it. It is also a book about how historians since the seventeenth century have understood medieval conduct, because in many ways we still see it through the eyes of the writers of the Enlightenment. This is nowhere more so in its defining of superior conduct on the figure of the knight, and categorizing it as Chivalry. Using for the first time the full range of the considerable twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature on conduct in the European vernaculars and in Latin, the book describes and defines what superior lay conduct was in European society before Chivalry, and maps how Chivalry emerged and redefined superior conduct in the last generation of the twelfth century, and suggests how and why it did. The emergence of Chivalry was, however, only one part of a major social change, because it also made necessary a new and narrower definition and understanding of what Nobility was, which had consequences for the medieval understanding of gender, social class, violence, and the limits of law. The book tackles social change on a European scale and in the emerging understanding that twelfth- and thirteenth-century elite society was a predominantly literate one. Indeed, the majority of the many male and female writers on conduct used here (mostly for the first time in a social history book) were not churchmen, but lay people giving their opinion on their own society and its problems.

Contemporary concern for bricolage both transcends and supersedes de Certeau’s important intervention that resituated the term as actions undertaken in everyday life. In particular, he engaged the notion of bricolage in ways that presented tactics, evasions, resistances, ruses and even tricks in his consideration of everyday life as practiced. Whilst these considerations may be read, as indeed he asserted, as ‘making do’, there are further possibilities of this term. For example, bricolage may be considered to ‘occur’. In this we may take the anthropologist Hallam and Ingold’s grasp of creativity as something in our bodily and mental response to situations, calm, anxious and otherwise; responding to the detail of a situation, a required or desired action.

The late Colin Ward was a major figure in British anarchist thinking and action, and was also influential in Italian anarchist circles. This chapter seeks to connect Ward's ideas and their origins with the very pragmatic, practical approach to spaces of people's lives. Ward's attachment to the idea of mutual aid was directly influenced by his enthusiasm for P. Kropotkin's elucidation of the idea, in his book of the same name. Geographies of leisure are rarely thought of in relation to notions of anarchy. Colin's anarchy championed human life, supported the post-war development of new towns; he wrote two classics The Child in the City, and The Child in the Country. Leisure geographies generally have a connection to state intervention and, more recently, commercialisation. In the posthumous collection of a number of Colin's essays and talks, Talking Green, in which he drew threads that had grown through his life, his concern for pollution and green leisure space emerges.

In this short commentary I consider the development of conversations between human geography and tourist studies: ‘tourist’, because my own work is motivated by an interest – and concern – for the ...

In this paper I engage with the ideas and practice of Colin Ward, a significant figure in both anarchist and planning circles, especially in the 1980s in the UK, but also with wider reach. With influences from Kropotkin and Mary Wollstonecraft, alongside Martin Buber, planner Patrick Geddes and architect Walter Segal, Ward enlivened popular participation in making spaces more liveable, through cooperative, progressive action. Through his essays, books, talks and articles he communicated a unique approach to what planning can be to a wide audience. I include a number of aspects germane to planning that were pursued and enacted by Colin Ward, with whom I worked closely for two years of research, writing and broadcasting. His linking of activism and theory has made his work widely known and effective in giving potentiality to creativity that can change lived spaces. Planning and anarchy certainly do not discover themselves to be easily aligned or indeed combined. Yet planning has an uneasy combination of making better futures, or intending to, with an effort to secure order through controls, especially and perhaps unintentionally over what seem to be regarded as errant everyday individuals seeking some modest intervention in their immediate, intimate worlds. Such controls are the way in which most individuals come into contact with professional planning, and often seem to work by ensuring things are ‘in keeping’ with what is already there, an often elusive, ambiguous, and possibly evasive term and aesthetic. For example, where housing density is higher, other development may follow suit. Similarly where it is lower, where ironically there may be more room for further development, only similar low density development is allowed. It often seems that planners prefer to negotiate with big business in the form of large-scale developers, on big corporation projects than with hundreds of individuals who may not be familiar with planning’s rules. Yet, it is often in what individuals seek to do that surprising interventions, for example in building style and positioning, that new inspiration can arise. Planners welcome integrated development in midwifing ‘free economy zones’ and so-called ‘creative quarters’ but often seem to miss the cultural creativity than can emerge amongst a thousand scattered individuals. They make deals over so-called ‘affordable housing’ and ‘open space’ as though provision can be ‘better’ co-ordinated through big market players, even if they remain undelivered or are unwelcomingly delayed. On the other hand, families’ costs can often be kept down through selfbuild. It would seem that there is a lack of confidence within the planning profession, a lack of trust in their relationship with people at large, and a lack of open interplay with human beings that ultimately ties planning to the familiarly dull mainstream.

This chapter explores the occurrence of feelings of spirituality and the sacred, not through the popular and academic understandings of sacred journeys, including the often exemplar pilgrimage, but through a reasoning that is open in terms of immanence beyond or outside of that founded in institutions and ritual practices of formal religion. It explains emphasis upon practice and process, the doing of journeys. Discussion of the relation between performance and space draws fresh considerations into meanings surrounding 'sacred' and of 'journeying' and journeys. Journeys are coloured by their commingling relationality with space. Flirting with space implies openness, uncertainty, fluidity and contingency, following Doreen Massey in close-up individual and shared practice and feeling. In journeys our feelings about ourselves in the world are negotiated but also happen to us. Immanence can emerge from this creativity. The chapter explains theoretical reflections in an examination of a repositioning of conceptual reasoning around sacred journeys relationally with ideas of space and its making-significance.

This chapter considers leisure identities through the occurrence of landscape. Prevailing notions of landscape are questioned and critiqued, from the notion of what landscape is, so as to work towards a discussing of the relationships between ourselves, landscape and 'place' in the doing of leisure. Landscape, as with place, is neither simply fixed or prefigured settings of leisure, but unstable, contingent and fluid, alongside our own experience and identities in leisure. A participative, creative character of doing leisure is presented. In this more engaged role in both leisure and landscape it becomes possible to examine the lively and fluid process through which our identity can be negotiated.KeywordsGeographical KnowledgeCultural GeographySport GroundBritish GeographerLeisure StudyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In this article I articulate the cultural geographies of performing potential spaces of a gallery exhibition. I offer my participative, affective relations with the artwork, exploring the fluidity and openness of the spaces in which I found objects that were mutual, commingling and dissonant. In doing so, it is necessary to let the work speak, but not to leave it there. Nor is it to appraise, close-up the arrangement or individual elements of the show in an objective aesthetic. Rather it is to acknowledge circling atmospheres emerging in my cultural geography of practice. New spaces emerge in the practice, through my play with the spaces of the objects as set out, and through my own responses in an affective and productive relational engagement with them, singly and severally.

A core concern of this chapter is the ways through which heritage is given meaning. Of course, heritage in terms of institutionalized sites, for example, is rendered with particular meaning or character, significance or importance, embedded in a particular narrative, through inscription, illustration, and increasingly also with staged performance, sound and orderly accompaniment. Yet, arguably, these forms of heritage are merely fragments in a wider and deeper mixture of prompts, memories, other sites, relations and feelings in our own lives, as ‘ordinary’ individuals going about our living. As Crang and Tolia-Kelly (2010) have carefully argued and evidenced, there is a significant influence across cultures of iconographies of heritage: matters of colonialism, post-colonialism, race, gender and, I would add, class. Through this piece, the emphasis is less on the iconographic or culturally overarching and more on the energies, feelings, affects and emotions wrapped up or available in our encounters with heritage.