ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s and 1990s, there was much talk of a ‘cultural turn’ in human geography.Though subsequent evaluation suggests there was not one turn, but many (see Philo 2000), the key notion underpinning the cultural turn – that culture needed to be taken seriously – was one that was widely embraced by geographers. In particular, geographers studying the built environment began to acknowledge the need for an interpretative approach that would disclose the intersubjective meanings and symbolism of the urban landscape. Indeed, the identification of urban landscapes as legitimate objects of study was crucial to moves within the ‘new’ cultural geography intended to shake off the rural and historical predelictions inherited from the Berkeley School of cultural geography in the United States (P. Jackson 1989; Crang 1998).
