Cultural References

• Cambridge is essentially a market town with grand historic buildings set in narrow streets, the historic core is its defining character

• Trade and commerce dominate the centre with the market square at the heart with colourful stalls selling a variety of goods

• Town buildings reflect the original market town economy

Cambridge City Council, 2003

• The media age in Cambridge is around 31 years, lower than England average 

• 2.7% of people were born in India and 2.4% in China

• 14.8% identify as Asian with one of the largest increases overtime seen in this ethnic group

ONS, 2023

• Culture began as a noun of process before beginning to develop into a new social and intellectual movement

• It now describes intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of ways of life as well as artistic or intellectual works as cultural artefacts

• Hostility has been connected to claims of superior knowledge and creating distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture

Williams, 1985

• Geographers do not simply take photos but they make them by taking an active role in creating framings for analysis 

• The photo form is ambiguous as it preserves singular moments, in sites of constant activity and change such as cities this is problematic

Arnold, 2021

• Cambridge is a world-renowned centre of science and innovation that blends historical wonder, natural beauty and academic prestige

• It is one of the UK’s top innovation centres but faces problems with housing affordability, water supplies, congestion and lack of laboratory space

• The university makes a total net economic impact of nearly £30 billion to support wider Cambridge ecosystems and economic health

• Population growth in Cambridge has been historically higher than other UK cities which causes challenges for house prices and congestion levels

GOV.UK, 2024

• Landscapes are organic and constantly developing, every landscape is unorganised and singular

• Geography is based on the union between physical and cultural elements of landscape by blending physical ecology and cultural expression

• ‘Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result’

• The natural landscape is important for supplying materials for the formation of the cultural landscape but the shaping force is culture

Sauer, 1925

• Reconceptualising culture is important for turning attention to processes and relationships with other spheres of life, the reification of culture is a fallacy and we should instead focus on the development of the idea of culture

• Super-organicism is denied to see culture as socially constructed and actively constrained by social actors

• It is a powerful idea and within it there are systems of race and gender struggles created by language, discourse, class and ideology

• By understanding culture as an idea we can better understand how it functions as well as understanding systems of power that impose meaning on the everyday

Mitchell, 1995

• Culture is a lens of knowing in a meaningful way of life through spatialities of care, ethics and justice

• The idea of the encounter is key to cultural landscapes of care as well as the built environment shaping such social encounters

• Changing cultural landscapes impact spatialities of care, who we care for and what we care about; togetherness and solidarity are conditioned through cultural expectations

• Landscapes serve as a framework to make sense of how power is culturally manifested through everyday encounters

Lin et al., 2022

• Places are where cultures, communities and people root and define themselves; they are produced from an ongoing composition of traces over the local and global that combine to allow past traces to define a current place

• The cultural world is produced through the acts in which individuals engage with everyday which demonstrate power, power has the ability to make places and cultural systems

• Power can be used by dominating groups to create cultural control, these can also be disobeyed in transgressions to transform embedded cultural orthodoxies

Anderson, 2021

• Postcolonial theory is a tool for critical undoing of knowledge and reveals colonial origins of space, it recognises the continued and troubling presence of colonialism after the colonial period

• It has roots in Said’s ‘Orientalism’ as it considers how we think about distant places in a geographical and postcolonial enquiry

• This Is seen in the example of India’s colonisation and how this was aided by mapping as well as the legacy that continues in the containing idea of exoticism

Jazeel, 2012