Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007) 197e199www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg

Conference report

Geocritica: historical geography and the history of territory*

‘Critical geography’ is a term much used in contemporary geographical writing. It is todayassociated with a form of knowledge which is theoretically rich and politically engaged, aimedat combating all kinds of oppression and exploitation, and dedicated to the construction ofa more equal world. Yet the field is in fact rather older than its current topicality might imply.Indeed, critical geography has a long history, stretching back to the scholarship of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century geographers. Since the 1970s, though, the term has been widely used inthe Iberian and Latin American world, both as a synonym for what was usually called radicalor Marxist geography in the Anglophone world and as a perspective that can provide a criticalstandpoint on prevailing theoretical constructs within the discipline, without necessarily beinginformed by a radical or Marxist perspective.

It was with the latter stance in mind that in 1976 Horacio Capel founded a series of researchpapers entitled Geocritica (Cuadernos crıticos de geografıa humana), published by the Departmentof Human Geography of the University of Barcelona. The series continued until 1994, when it wasdiscontinued after publication of the 100th issue (all of them now available at www.ub.es/geocrit/cienbil.htm), to be replaced by Scripta Nova (Revista Electronica de Geografıa y Ciencias Sociales),an electronic journal (http://www.ub.es/geocrit/nova.htm) that has had an important impact, notonly in Spain, but throughout Latin America. This editorial effort was soon followed by thecreation of two other electronic journals: Biblio 3W (Revista Bibliografica de Geografıa y CienciasSociales), which publishes debates, review articles and book reviews (http://www.ub.es/geocrit/bw-ig.htm), and Ar@cne (Revista Electronica de Recursos en Internet sobre Geografıa y CienciasSociales), dedicated to the dissemination of Internet resources for geography and the socialsciences (http://www.ub.es/geocrit/aracne.htm).

Although Geocritica disappeared as a research paper series more than a decade ago, its com-mitment to ‘the development of another Geography, one that is a product of a collective effortand of rigorous discussion’ is still alive and well in the shape of the Coloquio Internacional de Geo-critica, an annual forum that brings together geographers and other social scientists from a varietyof countries, predominantly from Spain and Latin America, in order to discuss a general theme.The first six Geocritica conferences were held in Barcelona and addressed, respectively, the chal-lenges facing Iberian America in the twenty-first century (1999); the social and spatial dimensions

* Report on the Eighth Geocritica International Colloquium, Mexico City, 22e26 May 2006.

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2006.09.002

198 Conference report / Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007) 197e199

of innovation (2000); migration and social change (2001); labor (2002); housing and the produc-tion of urban social space (2003); and the social and spatial impacts of the new technologies ofinformation and communication (2004). Since then, the conference has become more mobile.In 2005, it took place in Santiago, Chile, where the theme was urban agents and urban policies.In 2006, the meeting moved to Mexico City, where the theme was ‘Historical Geography and theHistory of Territory’. In 2007, the conference will take place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, under theheading of ‘Problems of the contemporary world: solutions from geography and the socialsciences’.

Given the broad scope of these themes, the Geocritica conference programmes tend to be veryelastic and cover a diverse range of topics. The Mexico City meeting on historical geography andthe history of territory was no exception. Fourteen non-simultaneous sessions were planned, ad-dressing issues of change and continuity in rural space; the history of irrigation and of hydraulicworks; historical perspectives on humaneenvironmental relations in risk societies; geopolitics andthe history of the administrative divisions of territories; technical networks and mechanisms ofterritorial control; public health and hygiene from a historical perspective; historical perspectiveson regional organization; urban agents and the historical production of the city; landscape changeand environmental history; historical cartographies of territory; space and territory in the theoryand history of geography and of the social sciences; cultural dimensions of territory; the territorialorganization of pre-Columbian societies and of the polities of the West Indies; and urban history,urban utopias and heritage preservation. The sessions were planned to take place in a variety ofvenues, three of them in historical buildings located near the Aztec ‘Temple of the Sun’. Sincedelegates were obliged to walk through the historical district in order to reach the sites of themeeting, there were multiple opportunities not only to appreciate the architecture of colonialand nineteenth-century Mexico City, but also to observe and perhaps even participate in the dailypolitical rallies that were taking place at the Plaza Mayor (Zocalo).

From a total of 260 abstracts submitted to the local organizing committee, chaired by historicalgeographers Jose Omar Moncada and Hector Mendoza Vargas (of the Universidad NacionalAutonoma de Mexico e UNAM), 160 papers were selected for presentation, their authors comingfrom Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Cuba, Portugal, France andItaly. As in the case of all Geocritica conferences, speakers could present in a variety of differentlanguages, though in Mexico City the vast majority of papers were in Spanish or Portuguese.Most of the participants were geographers, though also represented were historians, architects,anthropologists, educationalists and linguists.

Responding to the general theme of the meeting, all authors incorporated time into their anal-yses even if not all the papers could easily be recognized as historical geographies. Of particularinterest were those that dealt with the production of urban space, such as studies of the dissem-ination of military presidios in colonial Mexico and their subsequent transformation into towns(Luis Arnal); of the role played by the mendicant religious orders in the establishment ofa vast array of mission settlements in Latin America (Antonio Gil Albarracın); of the constructionof public parks in nineteenth-century Mexico and the role they played in social control and in thepromotion of urban civility (Eulalia Ribera Carbo); and of the changing rationales that governedindustrial location in Barcelona (Mercedes Tatjer) and Rio de Janeiro (Marcio Oliveira) over thelast two centuries. Other highlights included papers dealing with mapping, notably those on theancient cartography of Portuguese Macao (Francisco Roque Oliveira) and the role played by

199Conference report / Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007) 197e199

military engineers in the cartographic production of what is today Mexico (Maria del CarmenLeon Garcia; Marcela Davalos), Spain (Francesc Nadal) and Morocco (Luis Urteaga); the diversehistorical geographies of irrigation networks (Pere Sunyer Martın; Jorge Ricardo Ponte); the re-lationship between landscape appreciation, travel writing and political projects for an egalitariansociety in Argentina (Perla Zusman); and how alternative models of political organization were atthe basis of the social struggles that shook the Guatemalan highlands in the nineteenth century(Aaron Pollack).

The final session was dedicated to the discussion and approval of proposals for the protectionof endangered heritage sites in Iberia and Latin America. This was followed by an award cere-mony: the International Geocritica Award is given every year to a prominent critical researcherin geography, the social sciences or the history of ideas. In 2006, homage was paid to RobertHerin, Professor Emeritus of the University of Caen, France, for his outstanding work in the fieldof rural and social geography. The conference ended with a guided field trip to the world heritagesite of Teotihuacan.

Along with the bi-annual Encontro de Geografos da America Latina, the Coloquio Internacionalde Geocritica has become an important event for geographers in Latin America. Under the guid-ance of Horacio Capel, the so-called ‘Geocritica network’ has been responsible for a number ofimportant initiatives that have promoted geography in the countries of Iberia and Latin America,strengthening the bonds among academic communities that, in spite of their similarities oflanguage and history, had relatively little professional contact with each other. Dedicated to ‘His-torical Geography and the History of Territory’, the 2006 Geocritica conference has certainlycontributed to the attainment of these goals, for it provided an important opportunity for histor-ical geographers in Europe and in Latin America to know each other better and to share commonresearch interests and challenges. Most of the papers presented in Mexico City are alreadypublished and can now be accessed at http://www.ub.es/geocrit/sn/sn-218.htm.

Mauricio A. Abreu

Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro