Seeing Critically: Four Notes on Power and Place

Seeing Critically: Four Notes on Power and Place as critical theorist John Burger would see it

What Critical Geography Actually Means

Critical geography is not about being negative.
It’s about asking: Who benefits?

When a city builds a new highway, who gets connected—and who gets displaced?
When a map draws a border, whose stories get erased?

Geography, like history, is never neutral.

To study it critically is not to oppose it—
—but to finally see it.

The Shape of Inequality

In every city, you can tell who matters by where the money lives.

The rich live high. Hills, penthouses, elevation.
Their geography is a metaphor—distance from the street, from the poor, from the noise.

The poor live near the water—because they have to.
Not the waterfront condos, but the flood zones.
The reclaimed land. The edge of the industrial park.

The landscape is drawn to serve capital:
Wider sidewalks in the business district,
Surveillance in the housing projects,
A park in one neighborhood, a landfill in the next.

And when protest comes—when someone says, “This is unfair”—the answer is always spatial:
“Move.”

But where to?

When the whole landscape is organized by wealth, movement becomes exile.

Geography is not just where you are.
It is what you are allowed to imagine.

The Colonial Blueprint

A map is not a neutral object.
It is a memory imposed on space.

The colonizer draws borders not to include, but to divide.
The purpose is not governance—it is extraction.
The mine must be reachable.
The people must be sortable.
The land must be named—again, and again—until no one remembers what it was called before.

A road is built. It leads to a port.
It does not connect villages. It connects profits.

The city is designed in two parts:
The part you are meant to see, and the part you are meant to ignore.

Geography becomes architecture.
Architecture becomes memory.
Memory becomes forgetting.

And when the colonizer leaves—
When the flag is lowered, the soldiers gone—
The buildings remain. The roads still divide.
The statues still teach obedience.
The ports still face outward.

This is not the past.
It is the structure in which the present lives.

Reading the Landscape

A building does not need to speak in order to say something.

A courthouse built with neoclassical pillars tells you who the law is modeled after.
A plaza with no benches tells you how long you are welcome to stay.
A statue raised on a pedestal does not ask to be seen—
—it demands to be looked up to.

These choices are not aesthetic.
They are political memory, made solid.

And if you do not belong to the history it glorifies, the message is clear:

You are visiting.
Not remembered.


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