Author ORCID Identifier
Date Available
4-20-2020
Year of Publication
2020
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
Geography
First Advisor
Dr. Matthew W. Wilson
Abstract
This dissertation examines geographic forms of evidence in the practices of landscape architects and geographers. I analyze evidence not only as an epistemic phenomenon, but as an aesthetic one, as well. Convincing an audience that the world is (or should be) one way and not another requires that knowledges be stacked, extended, and stitched together in a manner admissable to an audience. In the first two chapters, I use the case of the landscape architect Ian McHarg to examine how his approach to integrating scientific knowledge---a aesthetic response to what I theorize as 'ought anxiety'---grew alongside the environmental bureaucracy in the 1960s, but fractured and collapsed in the 1980s. I examine his approach using two generative figures: the layer and the globe. In the first chapter, I examine McHarg's attempt to expand the knowledges considered salient to planning practice, represented as vertically arrayed layers. I argue that this form of holism draws a surprising line through the history of GIS that ties geospatial technology---its aspirations if not its actuality---to mid-century conservationism and the early stirrings of bureaucratic environmentalism. In the second chapter, I narrate McHarg's horizontal upscaling of ecological planning's unit areas: from physiographic regions to the globe. In the final empirical chapter, I return to the discipline of geography to argue that a particular epistemic aesthetic---the bridge---and its impracticability played central roles in the elimination of the department of geography at the University of Michigan.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2020.206
Funding Information
- University of Kentucky Department of Geography Barnhart-Withington Grant, 2017
- University of Kentucky Department of Geography Barnhart-Withington Grant, 2015
Recommended Citation
Huntley, Eric M. Robsky, "Reserved for the Whole Earth: Forms of Evidence, Ought Anxiety, and the Futures of Geographic Inquiry" (2020). Theses and Dissertations--Geography. 65.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/65
Included in
Geographic Information Sciences Commons, Human Geography Commons, Landscape Architecture Commons, Science and Technology Studies Commons, Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons, Urban Studies and Planning Commons
