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| J. Douglas Porteous - professor, retired BA, MA (Oxon.), PhD (Hull) No email. Phone, voicemail, write me a letter. |
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| Career Narrative | ||
| ooooo I was born in 1943 in the ancient city of York, England, but spent my early years in a remote rural hamlet without electricity or other modern conveniences. I relish having had the opportunity to experience this pre-modern rural life. I went to local schools and spent a year as a shipyard labourer, building trawlers, before going up to Oxford in 1962 with an Open Exhibition at Jesus College. I took a First Class Honours degree in Geography and was awarded the Herbertson Prize for the best Honours dissertation of 1965, as well as a Dodd Award for Adventurous Travel. Obtaining a Major State Studentship, I looked for a change of academic scene by moving to the University of Hull, Yorkshire, for my Ph. D. in urban, historical and planning geography, completed in 1968. My interests in urban planning and Latin America were furthered by a postdoctoral year at the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Harvard and MIT, 1968-69. During that year I was one of the 12 holders of a John F. Kennedy Memorial Scholarship (said to be "a Rhodes Scholarship in reverse"). In 1969 I was appointed Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Victoria (age 25), and later achieved the ranks of Associate (1974, age 30) and Full Professor (1978, age 34). Victoria is environmentally beautiful, and thus I have stayed in the same university for my whole career. Yet I have travelled widely, visiting over 130 countries on all continents, doing fieldwork research in the Arctic, the Atacama Desert, Polynesia, Greece, Hebridean Scotland, and northern England, and using conveyances as varied as horse, kayak and dugout canoe. At the University of Victoria my teaching was originally concentrated in urban geography and planning. At mid-career, however, I began to move into cultural geography, with innovative courses in the philosophy of geography and environmental aesthetics. My most recently-created course, Landscapes of the Heart, investigates the important intangible relationships (attachment, aesthetics, ethics, and spirituality) between humans and their environment, using both imaginative literature and academic research. Graduate supervision has followed a similar course. Early M.A. and Ph. D. dissertations covered topics such as housing, building evaluation, playground design, streetkid shelters, the politics of planning, the mobility of the elderly, and agricultural land preservation, while more recent theses have investigated the role of islands and coasts in the human imagination, the 'invention' of landscape images through advertising, the emotional losses associated with eviction, Shakespearean landscapes, soundscapes, community development, Candian ex-pats in Saudi Arabia, Easter Island development, and wilderness spirituality. My own research began in historical geography and urban studies, moved through environmental psychology and urban and social planning, incorporated a turn towards literary evidence from novels and poetry, and currently involves four related long-term themes:
The connection between all four themes is a concern with urban, rural and regional planning processes, and an insistence that planning should incorporate a number of elements currently downplayed, notably the non-visual senses, the intangible relationships between people and place, and the active participation of those whose lives may be irrevocably altered by the prevailing process of 'planning-down' from bureaucrat, manager and politician to the impacted citizen. Beyond the often-unassessable effects of teaching, my scholarly work has had practical value in three areas. On Rapanui (Easter Island), my initial work on tourist statistics has been used by local planners. The villagers of Howdendyke, East Yorkshire, have had their history validated and development pressures explained by my book Planned to Death (1989). Indeed, they have used the book effectively in meetings with officials to demand participation in any further change in their already half-destroyed village. Further, local corporate managers have been encouraged by the book's exposé of corporate affairs to upgrade, after many years of neglect, their remaining company housing. Finally, concepts outlined in my book Environment and Behavior (1977) were incorporated by Yugoslav architect R. Karolic into a three hundred unit townhouse complex in New Belgrade, completed in 1990. The residents have expressed satisfaction with the design. I see my career, then, as a complex interplay of learning, research, teaching, and writing, with the hope that some of my ideas and interventions may find positive expression in community planning processes and even in actual design. I feel most strongly, however, that among the above teaching is of the greatest importance, and that to write (especially books) is also to teach. ooooo |
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