Paper short abstract:

The urban ground is a socio-material production, earth territorialised by asphalt. Retracing Jerningham Road examines the materiality, landscape and politics of a site of sensory conflict between public movement and private residence.

Paper long abstract:

"The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes."

Marcel Proust

Retracing Jerningham Road repeats a journey made with a distinct purpose for a different one. As a regional government officer, I had walked the length of the street in the wake of complaints about vibrations caused by buses passing, a problem attributed to the worn and weathered asphalt of the street surface. As an urban geographer, armed with this privileged, silent knowledge, Retracing Jerningham Road as a photographer reveals the asphalt as a micro-landscape, the site of social production, direction, tension and the political mediation of conflict between the public and sensory expectations of the private realm. Asphalt is equally material object and technology, the social, administrated material of urban territory, reducing friction, mediating traffic and risk, ultimately an economic infrastructure. Yet it records movement, rhythms and the weather in its material erosion, a memory tape revealing the social forces acting upon the urban realm's synthetic ground and its vulnerability to the degrading forces of nature, time and repetition. As such, Retracing Jerningham Road is multi-purposed; questioning the boundaries of subject between landscape and object, the natural/social and the idea of the street scene found in urban geography, urban photography and visual anthropology.