Political Geography 34 (2013) 55e57

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Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

Commentary

Territory, now in 3D!

Gavin Bridge*
School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom

Keywords: about geopolitics. The history of this abstraction e the making of

Territory
territory e is the subject of much of Elden’s previous work. Secure
Resources
Verticality the Volume extends his interest in territory in another dimension e
Political economy the vertical. Verticality is significant because adding height and
depth to the horizontal plane magnifies the possibilities of relative
location, affording additional means of control. The paper’s primary
objective is to show how practices of territory e of securing space
to achieve particular ends e work through more than area alone.
Secure the Volume extends Stuart Elden’s exploration of territory
Elden aims to do rather more, then, than simply remind geogra-
into three-dimensional space. His essay centers on volume’s dis-
phers and other spatial theorists to think in 3D.
tinctive third dimension e the vertical, lending height and depth e
The examples which Elden mobilizes e drawn from aerial
and explores its significance for practices of power. Engaging and
warfare and archeology e suggest that the vertical primarily sig-
richly illustrated, Secure the Volume is an open invitation to consider
nifies distance e up and down e from the lived plane. Height and
how verticality and volume (and practices of their calculation) can
depth provide a degree of remove from the realm of experience;
be critical to strategies of containment and control. This short
with that remove comes the possibility of selective engagement
commentary takes up Elden’s invitation. It considers how territory
between one plane and another. This contingent reciprocity (see
works ‘at depth’ by focusing on the political-legal techniques
below) can be used for political ends. Tunnels and holes exemplify
adopted by states and firms for capturing and controlling sub-
the political possibilities (and terrors) associated with the potential
terranean natural resources such as groundwater, minerals and oil
for (dis)connection. There is a latent power to being ‘underground’:
and gas. The commentary develops two of the essay’s general
the capacity of sappers and social resistance movements to pro-
concerns e that the politics of space should consider the vertical,
liferate horizontally unseen, to under-mine and bring down the
and the related, yet subtly different, concern with volume e by
(infra)structures of authority. At the same time the possibilities of
exploring how these concerns play out in the context of subsurface
this position cannot be separated from the fear of being unable to
resources. The ‘underground’ is a very particular spatial context, yet
return to the surface, of permanent exile from the social realm, of
Elden’s arguments are directly relevant because the territory of the
becoming lost from the world. Shafts, tunnels, mines and other
mineral kingdom has always been both vertical and volumetric.
holes into the ground serve as conduits connecting the plane of
existence (the surface) to a radically different space below. As
The vertical as potential: what lies beneath
conduits, their function is to connect e to enable movement by
bringing two spaces into relation. But holes also mark the point of
Thinking volume rather than area should come easily: as
entry/exit into a different realm: the qualities of space on either
embodied, earthly creatures we inhabit three dimensions and
side e above on the surface, and below underground e are radically
issues of volumetric integrity and security e of containment,
different. The idea of the hole as a portal to another world reflects
exclusion, contamination, and the conditions of passage between
the profoundly disorientating experience of descending into the
interior and exterior e are fundamental to human experience.
earth e an experience that combines loss with liberation as social
Elden has pointed out elsewhere how it is just such a philosophical-
life and its conventions are left behind (see, for example, Williams,
cum-psychological conception of enclosed space that animates
1990). The underground, therefore, is a rich source of cultural
Sloterdijk’s concern with the sphere (Elden & Mendieta, 2009).
imagination, from the descent to the underworld in classical
Indeed, the primacy of volume in the realm of experience e from
mythology to Lewis Carroll’s Alice and numerous contemporary
the body to collective spaces of home, city and beyond e begs the
manifestations (such as on-line games like Minecraft). Because the
question of why and how area and its associated cartographic
qualities of space above and below are so different, there is an
technologies became the primary analytical optic for thinking
umbilical character to many vertical structures: social life can only
be sustained underground via supply routes from and to the sur-
DOI of original article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.12.009.
* Tel.: þ44 (0)1612753638. face. Tunnels and mines, then, become the surface’s colonial out-
E-mail address: [email protected]. posts e a frontier where life is only possible with the aid of

0962-6298/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.01.005
56 G. Bridge / Political Geography 34 (2013) 55e57

prosthetic devices. When those devices fail, the connected struc- verticality. The technical question of ‘extra-lateral rights’, for
ture transforms into a closed vessel: tunnel becomes tomb. example, revolves around the way mineral structures (i.e. veins) are
This combination of profoundly different spatial realms with often inclined at an angle (and are sinuous and branching) rather
the possibility for establishing connection between them lends than being truly vertical: at issue is whether outcroppings on the
tunnels, holes and other vertical structures an important creative- surface (i.e. within the boundaries of a mining claim) allow a miner
destructive potential. In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford to follow a vein wherever it leads underground (i.e. outside the
(1934) contrasts the ‘inorganic’ qualities of the underground coal claim’s vertical boundaries). This issue was resolved in different
mine with the lively, fecund properties of agriculture as part of his ways across mining camps in the late 19th century: in the United
critique of modernity. This symbolizes for Mumford the increasing States, the so-called ‘Law of the Apex’ was devised to address this
domination of the inorganic netherworld over the surface via ‘car- problem (Raymond, 1883). Far from a dusty footnote in the annals
boniferous capitalism’. At the heart of this critique is what Mumford of mining history, however, the vertical dimensions of territory are
referred to as the ‘animus of mining’: ‘mine: blast: dump: crush: live issues in the context of groundwater pollution and resource
exhaust,’ he argued, had become ‘the syntax of modernity.’ As an extraction. The controversy over hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) in
economically productive force and as a collective mindset, mining the United States to obtain natural gas from shale, for example, is
and its vertical structures brought the netherworld to the surface linked to the issue of the split estate and the impact of verticality on
and let loose its contents upon it. The shock of modernity, then, is in security of property (for householders and investors, alike). By
part about the radical mixing together of these two different planes. alienating surface and subsurface and vesting private ownership
This sense of vertical rupture and displacement is, I suggest, at the rights in the latter (in many parts of the US, subsurface mineral
heart of the concept of the Anthropocene: the anthropogenic rights are privately held by individuals and companies who do not
eruption of the underground over the last 250 years, and the impact own the land above), split estate means private owners have an
of this raid on the lithosphere on biogeochemical cycles of carbon, incentive to offer up their rights to gas developers. The division of
nitrogen, sulfur and mercury, for example. Although the ‘metabolic surface and subsurface estates can be a cause of significant land use
rift’ associated with the emergence of industrial capitalism is often conflicts as, for example, surface rights frequently include a right to
understood in horizontal spatial terms (the division between town drill water wells. The particularity of these institutional arrange-
and country, for example), it also has a powerful vertical dimension: ments has propelled the gas boom in the US and, at the same time,
nowhere is this vertical displacement clearer than in regard to the provided some of its most striking contradictions (in the form, for
transport of carbon from lithospheric stocks and its re-accumulation example, of the contamination of domestic water supplies with gas
in the atmosphere (Clark & York, 2005). and other flammable materials).
The question of modernity and the vertical may be extended
(literally) to consider the skyward reach of the modern metropolis. Volume as a politics of earth and life
Much of the vertical infrastructure characteristic of the modern city
is derived from technical practices associated with mining. Gray Corporate and state power in the natural resource sector is
Brechin’s (1999) work on San Francisco suggests how, in its mate- commonly constituted through volumetric practices, as those who
rials, techniques of construction, patterns of movement, modes of live alongside resource extraction will know all too well. I mean this
financing and even spatial planning, the modern city can be not in the simple sense that mining is about moving quantities of
understood as the inverted space of the underground mine. The earth, but in the sense implied by Elden: that the exercise of power
techniques for ‘securing volume’ on the Comstock Silver Lode in involves technologies of calculation, visualization and manipu-
Nevada e of creating voids within a solid through which men and lation around volume. Direct examples include the way proposals
machinery could circulate, and building three-dimensional struc- for new resource projects e an irrigation reservoir or gas field, for
tures underground to prevent collapse e became, with very little example e are often couched in technical languages associated
modification, the inhabitable voids of offices and apartments thrust with volume measurement; mandates to inventory the void-spaces
high above the city streets. and absences created by extraction (subsidence, flooding, safety
The notion of ‘vertical reciprocity’ e deployed by Adey (2010) to hazards); and assessments of commercial value (acre-feet of water,
describe the relationship between the conjoined environments of billion cubic meters of gas) that establish whether a ‘bump in a
land and air e is also productive for thinking about the way insti- geologists’ mind’ (as one oil company manager put it) becomes a
tutions of property have evolved in the context of the ‘under- going concern. I suggest, then, that volume is a primary metric of
ground’. The historical evolution of mining law, and the historical anticipation and potential: calculations of what space contains
struggles between landed property and extractive enterprises, (cubic meters of gas, ounces of gold), and what contained materials
provide rich illustrations of the nature of this reciprocity between mean that space could become, are essential to the performance of
surface and subsurface, and of the challenge of depth for those resource landscapes. We can go further, however, to argue that geo-
seeking to secure the mineral kingdom. The complex histories metrics are more than a tool in the service of state and corporate
through which sovereignty has been extended over lands and power: the political rationalities which surround ‘resources’ e
resources (i.e. their appropriation to the state, and the subsequent rationalities of competition, control, conservation and optimiza-
re-allocation of some resources to private owners while reserving tion, for example e are constituted through a way of seeing that has
others) has created in many jurisdictions the ‘split estate.’ ‘Split’ the problem of volume and ‘inner-structure’ at its core. This is
here refers to the alienation of the surface from the subsurface so precisely the point Braun (2000) makes in his account of the role of
that each may be held separately: the effect is that a bundle of earth sciences in the development of governmental power in
ownership and use rights associated with the surface does not Canada: through geological science, he argues e with its interest in
extend all the way down. Not only do surface rights peter out with understanding the attributes of space and its internal structures e
depth, but they are also vulnerable ‘from below’: verticality induces underground space became ‘vertical territory’. Among the various
a problem of access, so that a subsurface right also implies a right of techno-political practices of geological science is the technique of
access to the surface estate (without this, subsurface rights cannot the assay which involves taking a sample, calculating content based
be enjoyed). It is precisely because holes and other geophysical on that sample and then extrapolating total volumes. Such tech-
structures go ‘all the way down’ but property does not that the legal niques invite speculation around content, and play a critical role in
histories of mining and oil and gas are riddled with the problem of transmuting volume into value. Volume, then e in the sense of both
 G. Bridge / Political Geography 34 (2013) 55e57 57

amount and internal structure e provides a rich register for “a techno-political practices through which these flows are secured.
dramatic exposition of the possibilities” associated with territory This opens up a number of interesting questions. With volume
(Tsing, 2005: 57). framed as a question of anticipating and securing flow, for example,
Secure the Volume points to the politico-technical practices one may consider how bio-politics e the politics of sustaining life e
associated with territory-as-volume, and the cartographic chal- centers around securing the integrity of individual and collective
lenges associated with a third dimension. These challenges of bodies through the maintenance of essential flows, such as water,
delimiting boundaries and calculating content in three dimensions energy and waste exchange, and the prevention of other, potentially
can be extreme for underground resources as they cannot be catastrophic flows (floods, breaches of containment etc). Volumetric
measured directly and there are major uncertainties to do with imaginaries, I contend, are at the heart of contemporary concerns
depth and internal homogeneity. Much might be said here about the with eco-scarcity, from hoary concerns with ‘running out’ to those of
‘optics of the underground’ and the systematization of geological over-accumulation and contamination through excess (Yusoff,
knowledge during the 18th and 19th centuries that went hand in 2009). I do not mean to suggest here the rather obvious point e
hand with commercial extractive development (Braun, 2000; the earth-as-sphere floating in a void: rather, that environmental
Frederiksen, 2013; Scott, 2008). Allow me, however, to highlight politics is, in an important way, about more than the transformation
briefly how contemporary technical exploration practices within of space imagined horizontally (as ‘land use/land cover change’, for
the oil sector illustrate very well the revisioning of cartographic example, or as the footprint of pollution). Instead, I suggest, envi-
techniques to which Elden refers. For many years oil exploration has ronmental politics increasingly centers on the calculative and
been based on the use of 2-D seismography, which involves map- technical-legal practices for inventorying, securing and anticipating
ping ‘bright spots’ within a defined area (bright spots occur where volumes in space. The politics of peak oil, for example, revolve
the acoustic waves used in seismography are abnormally impeded, around projections of global flow rates, set against assessments of
and indicate structural features likely to contain hydrocarbons). The current reserves and ultimately recoverable resources; similarly the
emergence of 3-D seismography, however, now allows companies to politics of climate change are intimately bound up with the mech-
build up three-dimensional models of subterranean structures. The anisms for assessing, projecting and visualizing various volumetric
‘data cubes’ generated through 3-D seismic are processed and pro- bodies, such as the immensity of the ‘global atmosphere’ as well as
jected inside purpose-built structures known as 3-D caves. These more specific three-dimensional spaces such as glaciers and sea-ice
remarkable virtual reality environments provide analysts with the (Yusoff, 2009). More generally, it is through the registers of flow,
capacity to roam within, around and through subterranean for- volume and containment that efforts to secure environmental
mations. Projection ‘caves’ preserve the dimensionality of the futures are being negotiated, from the interests of city and national
underground but key qualities of subterranean space are trans- governments in ‘resource security,’ to the concerns of toxicologists
formed: earthly properties of resistance to movement and opacity and environmental health workers with the micro-geographies of
dissolve, so that one may see and move at will through the earth to bioaccumulation within animal bodies. These suggest some of the
calculate physical and commercial content. ways in which ‘geo-metrics’ are constitutive of contemporary
Elden, then, is clearly onto something in highlighting the sig- political rationalities, and how both geometrics and geo-politics, as
nificance of verticality, and the more general problem of territory discussed by Elden, may be folded within the biopolitical.
as volume. I suggest, however, that ‘volume’ as an organizational I greatly appreciate the invitation by Political Geography to
problematic may be more generative yet: here I briefly consider respond to Stuart Elden’s imaginative paper and his call to think
volume as a spatial form of property through which the circulation of broadly about the ways in which space ‘goes all the way up and
resources and commodities is controlled. Research on the political down.’ It is something of a treat e not an indulgence, I hope e to
economy of natural resources often centers on the relationship have the opportunity to think about how the issues he raises play
between two contrasting spatial forms in which ownership of out in the context of the political economy of natural resources and
resources is asserted. The first is an areal expression where resources the territories of the mineral kingdom. Secure the Volume is not
are imagined as fixed territory: natural resource sovereignty takes intended to be a programmatic ‘agenda’ for a volumetric account of
this form, with resources owned by the government across the area territory: it is, rather, a provocation to take up the challenge of
of national territory. The second spatial form is quanta-based (typ- ‘thinking volume’ and to explore where it might lead.
ically volume, sometimes weight) and refers to ownership rights
asserted over commodities in motion or in storage (e.g. barrels of oil,
References
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