Materialities

This chapter focuses on the debates on materiality and material culture in geography and, using the example of urban infrastructure, offers an overview of the importance of material agency in the construction of meanings and embodied experiences. In order to understand "materialities" as a movement within human geography, it helps to trace how the relationship between the physical world and human experience has been theorised over time in geographical scholarship. Human geographers study individual experiences, shared narratives and myths, social and political institutions, and material embodiment to understand how people give meaning to places and landscapes as they make them together. Though it had effects well beyond the study of culture, the theoretical project of materialities in geography grew as a response to what was called "the cultural turn" in the 1980s and 1990s, when some human geographers worked to assert the importance of affect and experience. This chapter traces a number of reactions to these efforts, culminating in contemporary theory about materialities.