Full Description
Since the early 1960s, the internationally acclaimed and highly distinguished Swedish geographer Gunnar Olsson has made substantial contributions to his own discipline. In addition, because of the transgressive nature of his work and writing, which often borders to art and philosophy, his ideas and approaches have reached a wider audience of those interested in the history and geography of ideas, culture and human reasoning. Olsson's recent masterpiece, Abysmal, is a minimalist guide to the territory of Western culture. In it, he investigates how cartographical reason enables people to think about and navigate the abstract world of invisible human relations, in much the same way as they are able to study and traverse the physical Earth by using maps and mapping. This book presents a comprehensive introduction to, and overview of, the entire range of Olsson's geography from the early days of spatial science to his contemporary engagement with, and critique of, cartographical reasoning. It includes selected samples of Olsson's own writings, including rarities, together with a consolidated bibliography of his publications. It also contains critical engagements from leading scholars such as Michael Dear, Michael Watts, Chris Philo and Marcus Doel, with Olsson's geography, from a variety of perspectives, which are particularly valuable to those readers who already know his work. It is structured and written in a way that makes Olsson's geography accessible to a wide readership, including those who are not already familiar with Olsson's work.
Contents
A: Introduction; 1: Preamble; 2: Gunnar Olsson and Humans as Geo-Graphical Beings; B: Equal Signs; 3: Geography 1984; 4: Emerging from the "Egg" 1; 5: Inference Problems In Locational Analysis; 6: Gunnar Olsson: A Very Short Introduction; 7: Servitude and Inequality in Spatial Planning: Ideology and Methodology in Conflict; 8: Between the Castle and the Trial: The Spaceless Spaces of Planning; C: Chiasms; 9: GO: On the Geographies of Gunnar Olsson; 10: Of Bats, Birds and Mice 1; 11: The social space of silence; 12: Crazy Wisdom and Recovering the Human in Olsson's Method of Cartographic Critique; 13: Chiasm of thought-and-action †; 14: Chiasm/Rubric; D: Maps; 15: Projection of Desire / Desire of Projection 1; 16: Gunnar Olsson and Me; 17: Mapping the forbidden; 18: The Minimalist: Three Variations on Homo Pontefix; 19: Gunnar Olsson, Figures of 'Madness' and a Form of 'Schizologie'; E: Cartographic(al) Reason; 20: Mappa Mundi Universalis; 21: De Ludo Globi or The Reason of the Sphere; 22: To be human (the Secret of the Pyramid); 23: Double Crossed; 24: De Nobis Ipsis Silemus
