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This paper brings together geographic literature on homelessness and theories of aesthetics to analyse how city beautification projects in contemporary American cities promote the displacement of homelessness. Based on research conducted in Fresno, California, I argue that the seemingly innocuous realm of aesthetics often undergirds anti-homeless politics. In Fresno, officials sought to create a visual landscape that was conducive to middle-class consumption and leisure, such that the project of building a desirable city was deeply influenced by market pressures. In turn, homeless encampments were framed as unpleasant objects that must be removed to make way for economic opportunities. Efforts to reinforce this 'live play work' aesthetic resulted in a politics of displacement and criminalisation. Yet people who resided in encampments championed an alternative aesthetic practice grounded in reuse, survival and collective appropriation of urban space. Thus, the example of Fresno shows that aesthetic norms not only reinforce revanchist politics, but simultaneously present the possibility of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on 'Landscape, Mobility and Practice' which was held at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference in September 2006. In the paper the panel engage with the work of geographers and others who have been drawing upon theories of practice to explore issues of mobility and how we encounter, apprehend, inhabit and move through landscapes. The contributors discuss the usefulness of conceptions of landscape vis-à-vis place and space, and different traditions of apprehending, practising and articulating the more-than-representational dimensions of landscapes. The panel discuss the entwining of issues of power and politics with different representations, practices and understandings of landscape/landscaping, and a number of the panellists position their thinking on the politics of landscape in relation to recent work on the politics of affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public monuments traditionally appear in high contrast to their landscapes, an effect that sets aesthetic, ideological and social distances. However, Manmale, counter-monuments, and counter-hegemonic monuments (eg the AIDS quilt, Rachael Whiteread's House, Melbourne's Another View Walking Trail, Tiananmen's Goddess of Democracy, or Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial), challenge the norms of monuments in visuality, fixedness, and permanence, and suggest intricacies which mediate the interactivity of art, site and passers-by. In this paper, I consider three counter-hegemonic monuments in Vancouver, British Columbia - all installed in 1997/98 and all dealing with the issue of violence - sited within one neighbourhood. Via archival research, interviews, and extensive participant observations investigating how the monuments actually function in social memory rituals, I discovered that the characteristics of publicness in the landscapes that lay 'beneath and before' the monuments deeply affected their origins, designs, and current uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a small-scale, qualitative research project, which used in-depth, semi-structured interviews to explore what a particular group of middle-class, white mothers with young children were doing with their family photographs. It was evident from the interviews that this group of women felt ambivalent about their photos. On the one hand, photos were seen as precious objects which evoked intense emotional reaction; on the other, they were seen as banal and trivial. The paper explores this emotional paradox, and suggests that it is part of the spatial proximity so central to these family snaps, which the mothers described as 'togetherness'. This togetherness was also enacted, corporeally, in a number of ways in relation to the photos. The paper therefore also argues, more generally, that studies of visual imagery need to pay more careful attention to how particular images are engaged with in specific, diverse and multi-sensory ways when they are 'seen'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]