Value and diminishment: Listing state park closures, the 2011 attempt to meet general fund reductions in California

This chapter explores value’s Other, diminishment, through a study of locating value in California’s state park system. The practice of listing and de-listing for purposes of preservation relies on a general acceptance of the premise that some places are superior and more worthy of public esteem than others and that such distinctions are detectable and, indeed, measurable in gradations. In this chapter, I aim to undermine our confidence in these kinds of geographical valuations and the designations that they proliferate, by scrutinising two occasions where value is initially located and then subsequently relocated. I use Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park in Nevada County, California, one of the parks on the 2011 closure list, to explain how value is relational and becomes subject to efforts of fixing. The chapter works through my conceptualisation of a geographical axiology or spatial theory of value, first to ask that we more fully acknowledge the radical contingency of value in formal decisions about what parts of the earth are praised and protected and second to illustrate how the practice of valuation functions to redefine “public” as a category in a context of fiscal crisis.