This paper describes a research project that aimed to translate complex spatial and scientific data about coastal change into accessible digital formats for general audiences. The project used fine-scale remote sensing techniques including airborne and terrestrial laser scanning to produce spatially accurate and realistic 3D digital visualisations of projected sea level rise at Cotehele Quay, a site on the River Tamar in Cornwall owned and managed by the National Trust. Area residents and stakeholders were involved in a series of focus groups which provided guidance on the integration of the spatial models into a short film. The paper focuses on how the participatory, iterative process adopted in the project shaped the content and design of the film. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this process enhanced the viability of the film as a communication tool for use in wider engagement activities.

Keywords: : Terrestrial laser scanning , heritage , sea-level rise , community engagement , multi-media

In 1999 English China Clays (the then principal china clay producer in Cornwall and west Devon) was acquired by the multinational industrial minerals company Imerys. Shortly after, a group of concerned clay workers and local historians came together in a salvage mission to recover historical documents which had been deemed expendable during the business takeover. Together they ransacked offices and emptied filing cabinets collecting historic documentation about the industry. In the eighteen years that have followed, the china clay industry and its associated landscape have undergone immense change and transformation. Meanwhile, that small band of individuals has grown into the China Clay History Society (CCHS). CCHS is now in the process of formalising their salvaged collection, with curatorial expertise from the Wheal Martyn Museum (of which the CCHS is a component part). In this thesis, the CCHS archive and its associated community relationships are examined in relation to experiences of past loss, present instability, and the hope of future renewal.

Over an extended period of participant observation working alongside the caretakers of the archive, I explored the different practices of collecting, sorting, and valuing which are making and remaking china clay heritage in mid-Cornwall. Drawing on heritage studies and past studies of collecting, as well as professional museum and archival scholarship, this thesis emphasises the role that practice and material relationships play in the assembling of heritage (Macdonald 2009). Two distinct modes of ordering (Law 1994; 2004) – ‘Passion’ and ‘Purpose’ – are identified as central to this research, which aims to show how different practices of collecting and valuing have profound implications for the ways china clay heritage may be performed in the future.

This illustrated essay presents a series of photographic images documenting the contents of an abandoned cobbler’s workshop in Cornwall, UK. A reflection on the process of encountering and documenting this place accompanies the photographs, and problematizes the impulse to conduct ‘salvage archaeology’ through means of visual representation. The process of photographic mediation is traced through four distinct stages: invitation, intercession, intrusion, and invention. The essay draws on the work of Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig to explore how the act of representation can be seen to be implicated in both the destruction and production of an object’s aura, particularly in relation to transient and ephemeral material cultures.

Mapping the spatial distribution of ecosystem goods and services represents a burgeoning field of research, although how different services covary with one another remains poorly understood. This is particularly true for the covariation of supporting, provisioning and regulating services with cultural services (the non-material benefits people gain from nature). This is largely because of challenges associated with the spatially specific quantification of cultural ecosystem services. We propose an innovative approach for evaluating a cultural service, the perceived aesthetic value of ecosystems, by quantifying geo-tagged digital photographs uploaded to social media resources. Our analysis proceeds from the premise that images will be captured by greater numbers of people in areas that are more highly valued for their aesthetic attributes. This approach was applied in Cornwall, UK, to carry out a spatial analysis of the covariation between ecosystem services: soil carbon stocks, agricultural production, and aesthetic value. Our findings suggest that online geo-tagged images provide an effective metric for mapping a key component of cultural ecosystem services. They also highlight the non-stationarity in the spatial relationships between patterns of ecosystem services.

This paper describes a research project that aimed to translate complex spatial and scientific data about coastal change into accessible digital formats for general audiences. The project used fine-scale remote sensing techniques including airborne and terrestrial laser scanning to produce spatially accurate and realistic 3D digital visualisations of projected sea level rise at Cotehele Quay, a site on the River Tamar in Cornwall owned and managed by the National Trust. Area residents and stakeholders were involved in a series of focus groups which provided guidance on the integration of the spatial models into a short film. The paper focuses on how the participatory, iterative process adopted in the project shaped the content and design of the film. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this process enhanced the viability of the film as a communication tool for use in wider engagement activities.

Keywords: : Terrestrial laser scanning , heritage , sea-level rise , community engagement , multi-media

Geographers have begun to investigate the link between creative production and cultural memory-work, exploring how art interventions frame and facilitate engagements with the past in place. This paper builds on this emerging area of enquiry to examine the transformation of an industrial river landscape in Western Montana, and the production of a sound artwork which attempted to respond to the landscape’s unmaking with an interactive installation at a local museum. An interest in how cultural remembrance is practiced and performed in relation to processes of material disarticulation guides the analysis. In conclusion, the paper proposes that a form of kinetic memory characterises engagement with ephemeral sites and the cultural productions they catalyse. The researcher’s involvement in the installation process opens up an adjacent discussion about geographical research conducted on, and through, contemporary art practice.

In many discussions of how cities in the global North are changing, the growing importance of urban design is emphasised: that is, the production of visually and spatially coherent urban buildings and spaces seems to be increasingly central to urban change. To date, most attention has focused on exploring the reasons for this shift. Much less attention has been paid to the experiences of the people inhabiting and using such designed spaces. Although many authors acknowledge that, in theory, such encounters between human subjects and designed urban environments are richly various and unpredictable, few studies have examined this empirically and learnt theoretically from these encounters. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in the British city of Milton Keynes-the centre of which is a shopping mall, a designed environment par excellence-the authors argue that understanding experiences of contemporary urban change requires a relational and performative understanding of environmental encounters, and they suggest three intertwined implications for rethinking research on urban aesthetics: first, a multimodal and sensuously embedded understanding of vision; second, a practice-centred understanding of the environment; and third, a need for self-reflexive understanding of the researchers' position in the fieldwork.

The historical development of Scottish allotment gardens has invested these urban agricultural landscapes with an ambiguous diversity that persists today in both plot-level practice and in political representations. This paper examines how the ambiguity that pervades allotment practice surfaces as a liability in strategic appeals. I juxtapose a pair of narratives - the story of my involvement in a Scottish Parliament Allotments Inquiry and a history of a single Edinburgh allotment site - to draw out the survival of historical forms in contemporary political negotiations. Although a theory of `tactics' and ` strategies', adopted from Michel de Certeau, frames my discussion, I locate my analysis in the gap between these categories.