The lecture begins by considering Plymouth’s worldly entanglements and wartime destruction to reflect on how empires, death and war are folded into the textures of an everyday urban fabric. Such reflections follow the tracks of Mark Blacksell's (1968) pioneering doctoral thesis about the effects of bombing on the urban geography of the Ruhr.
It then moves on to reflect on cities as centres of economic, political and symbolic power, drawing on scholarly debates about imperial cities, geopolitics and planetary urbanization. It interrogates how and when urbanization becomes entangled with imperialism. It moves beyond the typology of the ‘imperial city’ and, instead, considers how the idea of the imperial urban can be used to understand geopolitics. The lecture explores these ideas across a diverse range of places, notably Makkah (Mecca), the Pearl River Delta, Silicon Valley, Yangon (Rangoon) and Singapore’s cross-border hinterlands in Johor and Riau.
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The Mark Blacksell Lecture
The purpose of the Mark Blacksell lecture series is to bring scholars working at the forefront of geography to University of Plymouth to present their research to a public audience. The lecture series is named after Professor Mark Blacksell, a human geographer with unusually widespread interests and expertise. He was appointed Professor of Geography at University of Plymouth in 1994, and served as both Head of the Geography Department and Dean of the Faculty of Science before he retired in 2003.