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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Philip Lowe
According to Bruno Latour, the imposition of crude classificatory schemes onto complex entities has two main effects: firstly, the classifications lead social actors to sift the world into the schemes' simple categories; secondly, underlying relations subvert the schemes' functioning, resulting in the production of transgressive 'hybrids'. Thus, classification and relation interact and this interaction shapes both the practice of classification and the world that is classified. In this paper, we examine the interaction between a scheme of spatial classification and the spaces that are enrolled within the scheme. We show that a division between urban and rural areas was put in place in post-war England in order to protect a 'vulnerable' rural nature from urban advance. However, as soon as it was imposed, this division was transgressed by complex socio-economic processes. We assess the response to this transgression by considering the activities of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), an environmental group that played some considerable part in constructing the urban-rural divide in the first place. We show that the CPRE has responded to the 'paradox of preservationism' by placing urban-rural divisions in the context of 'ecological' relationships. We illustrate this 'ecologization' of the modernist divide using the example of housing and we argue that the CPRE's ecological approach illustrates how a new alignment between 'urban' and 'rural' may herald a new and more sophisticated form of spatial classification.
Author(s): Murdoch J, Lowe P
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
Year: 2003
Volume: 28
Issue: 3
Pages: 318-332
Print publication date: 01/01/2003
Date deposited: 18/04/2012
ISSN (print): 0020-2754
ISSN (electronic): 1475-5661
Publisher: Wiley
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1475-5661.00095
DOI: 10.1111/1475-5661.00095
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