The Unsettling Outdoors. Russell Hitchings
But before that, I want to say more about research methods since this book is also about strategies for studying social life. These are my concerns in the next chapter. Within it, I make a case for attending to how people speak of the social practices they are involved in carrying out and how practices can encourage people to speak in certain ways. I will also say some more about where we will go to explore environmental estrangement in the four case study chapters that follow. But, for readers who are less interested in research methods, it is possible at this point to skip forward to the case studies. As we go through those, the book will move from spaces of work, to spaces of exercise, to spaces of leisure, both at home and away. In this respect, it gradually turns to social contexts in which we might imagine there to be increasing amounts of time and inclination to revel in enjoyable and beneficial engagements with outdoor environments. These chapters will consider the extent to which this is the case before the book ends by drawing a series of broader conclusions about how the social future of greenspace benefits is investigated and influenced.
Endnotes
1 1 It should be acknowledged that these studies commonly work with the assumption of all people sharing the same essential response to stimuli. In this way, they downplay the likelihood of responses varying according to the cultural and demographic characteristics of individual groups. Nonetheless, and notwithstanding how there will be variations of this type, when taken as a whole, these studies still provide an impressive weight of evidence.
2 2 Jorgensen (2011) also considers how the whole idea of ‘landscape design’ is fundamentally predicated upon the implicit prioritising of visual experience.
3 3 In this regard, many of my geography colleagues are naturally suspicious of some of the arguments presented earlier in this chapter. In their thinking, the problem with many of the psychological studies that attempt to explore how ‘humans’ experience greenspace is that they don’t properly engage with context, namely with variation between groups and places and change over time. This reticence is understandable in view of the different purposes of these two disciplines (one often hoping to understand what is believed to be an essential human response; the other more interested in exploring how things work out differently in different situations). However, as I see it, it is a shame to ignore the findings of relevant studies because they do not share the same starting assumptions. After all, whilst we may be arguing about the best ways of defining the problem, things could be changing fast in wider society (and finding the most effective responses to these changes will surely come from consulting studies undertaken under a variety of disciplinary banners). An alternative way of characterising the benefits of a geographical approach is about being willing to combine different insights in pursuit of a fuller understanding of the issue at hand. That is a much nicer fit with how I like to think about the approach being taken by this book.
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