Built Environment

Humans are builders, and people surround themselves with the built environment—the landscapes, structures, and other artifacts that reflect their culture. Geographers studying the built environment often use it as a marker, a means of tracing the diffusion of the values, attitudes, beliefs, and traditions of the builders. Geographers such as Carl Sauer contributed early to understanding the built environment, although he used the term cultural landscape. His thesis was that if one knew the landscape, one would know the builder and then could proceed to an understanding of human– environment relationships.

Many contend that philosopher Michel Foucault set the stage for contemporary urban postmodern critical inquiry by opening a dialogue on space, power, and knowledge. Others point to Jean-François Lyotard's incredulity toward metanarratives and his rejection of metatheory while advocating multiplicity. Jean Baudrillard continued the conversation by proposing that image or style (simulacra) has supplanted reality in our highly commodified world and that everything may best be understood as a complex of self-referential signs; it is the map that engenders the territory. These theorists accentuated new relationships between the city observer and the city observed, igniting a reexamination of the social aspects of spatiality. Cities such as Los Angeles, and even individual buildings such as the Bonaventure Hotel in that city, took privileged positions in this inquiry. Fredric Jameson's comments on the Bonaventure Hotel are especially pertinent because they challenged geographers to think of this structure as a marker for theoretical critical discourse rather than as a referent to the past.

Jameson's challenge was accepted by geographers such as David Harvey, who asserted that the era of postmodernism is characterized by massive space– time compression. In the postmodern period, space and time have virtually disappeared, losing their meaning and the structure of control they represented. The loss of the previous referents, particularly time, meant that geography was poised to contribute materially to the discourse on the built environment in the context of critical social theory.

Edward Soja responded directly to this challenge by drawing, in part, on the works of Michel Foucault to expose the connections between knowledge and power in the context of Los Angeles, the quintessential postmodern place, and the works of Henri Lefebvre, who claimed that social power derives from and is expressed in space. Soja employed Los Angeles as a test case of his contention that geography not only contributes to but also shapes the discourse on critical social theory. Thus, the built environment emerges as the marker for a new critical geography.