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The Anarchist Roots of

Geography: Towards
Spatial Emancipation

Book September 2016

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Simon Springer
University of Victoria
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 THE

ANARCHIST
ROOTS
OF

GEOGRAPHY
TOWARD SPATIAL
EMANCIPATION

SIMON SPRINGER
The Anarchist Roots of Geography
Toward Spatial Emancipation
Simon Springer

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Description:

The Anarchist Roots of Geography sets the stage for a radical politics of possibility
and freedom through a discussion of the insurrectionary geographies that suffuse
our daily experiences. By embracing anarchist geographies as kaleidoscopic
spatialities that allow for non-hierarchical connections between autonomous
entities, Simon Springer configures a new political imagination.

Experimentation in and through space is the story of humanitys place on the planet,
and the stasis and control that now supersede ongoing organizing experiments are
an affront to our survival. Singular ontological modes that favor one particular way
of doing things disavow geography by failing to understand the spatial as a mutable
assemblage intimately bound to temporality. Even worse, such stagnant ideas often
align to the parochial interests of an elite minority and thereby threaten to be our
collective undoing. What is needed is the development of new relationships with our
world and, crucially, with each other.

By infusing our geographies with anarchism we unleash a spirit of rebellion that
foregoes a politics of waiting for change to come at the behest of elected leaders and
instead engages new possibilities of mutual aid through direct action now. We can
no longer accept the decaying, archaic geographies of hierarchy that chain us to
statism, capitalism, gender domination, racial oppression, and imperialism. We must
reorient geographical thinking towards anarchist horizons of possibility. Geography
must become beautiful, wherein the entirety of its embrace is aligned to
emancipation.

Endorsements:

Highly persuasive, robust, and original, The Anarchist Roots of Geography is impossible
to ignore. It will provoke and agitate those who need provoking and agitating because
it fundamentally changes the underlying assumptions about what it is to be truly
radical in a time of crisis.
Dr. Richard J. White, Sheffield Hallam University

Simon Springers guide to what an anarchist geography might mean is spirited, lucid,
original, and historically deep. It is also, to his great credit, insistent on the creative
role of strife and conflict. James C. Scott, Yale University

Simon Springers brilliant vision of an emancipatory spatiality invites us to reflect
upon the largely ignored tradition of anarchism in human geography and on the ways
in which it can assist us not only to do a better job of being geographers but also to do
a better job of changing the world. This is a thoughtful retort to the orthodoxies of
radical geography, a welcome challenge to the territorial imperatives of the Neoliberal
state, and a thrilling invitation to consider how another world may be possible.
Audrey Kobayashi, PhD, Queens University

Direct Link:

http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-anarchist-roots-of-
geography

The Anarchist Roots
of Geography
TOWARD SPATIAL EMANCIPATION

Simon Springer

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS

Minneapolis London
The old order, supported by the police, the magistrates, the
gendarmes and the soldiers, appeared unshakable, like the old
fortress of the Bastille, which also appeared impregnable to the
eyes of the unarmed people gathered beneath its high walls
equipped with loaded cannon. But soon it became apparent
that the established order has not the force one had supposed.
One courageous act has suced to upset in a few days the
entire governmental machinery, to make the colossus tremble.
Peter Kropotkin, The Spirit of Revolt
 Contents
Introduction. Becoming Beautiful: To Make
the Colossus Tremble 1
1. A Brief Genealogy of Anarchist Geographies 25
2. What Geography Still Ought to Be 43
3. Returning to Geographys Radical Roots 65
4. Emancipatory Space 97
5. Integral Anarchism 131
6. The Anarchist Horizon 155
Acknowledgments 179
Notes 181
Bibliography 185
Index 219
 Simon Springer is an associate professor in the Department of Geog-
raphy at the University of Victoria, Canada. Prior to this, he worked at
the University of Otago and at the National University of Singapore.
Simon is the author of Violent Neoliberalism: Development, Discourse, and
Dispossession in Cambodia (2015) andCambodias Neoliberal Order: Violence,
Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space(2010) and is the
coeditor ofThe Handbook of Neoliberalism(2016),The Handbook of Con-
temporary Cambodia(2016), and The Radicalization of Pedagogy: Anarchism,
Geography, and the Spirit of Revolt (2016).

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