T H E D I C T I O N A RY O F
Human
Geography
5th Edition
Edited by
Derek Gregory
Ron Johnston
Geraldine Pratt
Michael J.Watts
and SarahWhatmore
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
T H E D I C T I O N A RY O F
Human
Geography
To the memory of
Denis Cosgrove and Leslie Hepple
T H E D I C T I O N A RY O F
Human
Geography
5th Edition
Edited by
Derek Gregory
Ron Johnston
Geraldine Pratt
Michael J.Watts
and SarahWhatmore
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
This 5th edition first published 2009
# 2009 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization
# 2009 Derek Gregory, Ron Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, Michael J. Watts, and Sarah Whatmore
Edition history: Basil Blackwell Ltd (1e, 1981 and 2e, 1986);
Blackwell Publishers Ltd (3e, 1994 and 4e, 2000)
Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program
has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The dictionary of human geography / edited by Derek Gregory . . . [et al.]. – 5th ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-3287-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-3288-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Human geography–Dictionaries. I. Gregory, Derek, 1951–
GF4.D52 2009
304.203–dc22
2008037335
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Set in 9/10pt Plantin by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Singapore
1 2009
Contents
Preface to the Fifth Edition
vi
How to Use This Dictionary
x
Acknowledgements
xi
List of Contributors
xiii
Editorial Advisory Board
xvi
THE DICTIONARY OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
1
Bibliography
818
Index
957
v
Preface to the Fifth Edition
Geographical dictionaries have a long history. A number were published in Europe in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a few – mostly those with greater pretensions to providing
conceptual order – were described as ‘Geographical Grammars’. The majority were compendia of
geographical information, or gazetteers, some of which were truly astonishing in their scope. For
example, Lawrence Echard noted with some asperity in his 1691 Compendium of Geography that
the geographer was by then more or less required to be ‘an Entomologist, an Astronomer, a
Geometrician, a Natural Philosopher, a Husbandman, an Herbalist, a Mechanik, a Physician, a
Merchant, an Architect, a Linguist, a Divine, a Politician, one that understands Laws and Military
Affairs, an Herald [and] an Historian.’ Margarita Bowen, commenting on 1981 on what she took to
be Geography’s isolation from the scientific mainstream in Echard’s time, suggested that ‘the
prospect of adding epistemology and the skills of the philosopher’ to such a list might well have
precipitated its Cambridge author into the River Cam!
It was in large measure the addition of those skills to the necessary accomplishments of a
human geographer that prompted the first edition of The Dictionary of Human Geography. The
original idea was John Davey’s, a publisher with an extraordinarily rich and creative sense of the
field, and he persuaded Ron Johnston, Derek Gregory, Peter Haggett, David Smith and David
Stoddart to edit the first edition (1981). In their Preface they noted that the changes in human
geography since the Second World War had generated a ‘linguistic explosion’ within the discipline. Part of the Dictionary’s purpose – then as now – was to provide students and others with a
series of frameworks for situating, understanding and interrogating the modern lexicon. The
implicit model was something closer to Raymond Williams’ marvellous compilation of Keywords
than to any ‘Geographical Grammar’. Certainly the intention was always to provide something
more than a collection of annotated reading lists. Individual entries were located within a web of
cross-references to other entries, which enabled readers to follow their own paths through the
Dictionary, sometimes to encounter unexpected parallels and convergences, sometimes to encounter creative tensions and contradictions. But the major entries were intended to be comprehensible on their own, and many of them not only provided lucid presentations of key issues
but also made powerful contributions to subsequent debates.
This sense of The Dictionary of Human Geography as both mirror and goad, as both reflecting
and provoking work in our field, has been retained in all subsequent editions. The pace of
change within human geography was such that a second edition (1986) was produced only five
years after the first, incorporating significant revisions and additions. For the third (1994) and
fourth (2000) editions, yet more extensive revisions and additions were made. This fifth edition,
fostered by our publisher Justin Vaughan, continues that restless tradition: it has been comprehensively redesigned and rewritten and is a vastly different book from the original. The first
edition had over 500 entries written by eighteen contributors; this edition has more than 1000
entries written by 111 contributors. Over 300 entries appear for the first time (many of the most
important are noted throughout this Preface), and virtually all the others have been fully revised
and reworked. With this edition, we have thus once again been able to chart the emergence of
new themes, approaches and concerns within human geography, and to anticipate new avenues
of enquiry and new links with other disciplines. The architecture of the Dictionary has also been
changed. We have retained the cross-referencing of headwords within each entry and the
detailed Index, which together provide invaluable alternatives to the alphabetical ordering of
the text, but references are no longer listed at the end of each entry. Instead, they now appear in a
consolidated Bibliography at the end of the volume. We took this decision partly to avoid
duplication and release space for new and extended entries, but also because we believe the
Bibliography represents an important intellectual resource in its own right. It has over 4000
entries, including books, articles and online sources.
Our contributors operated within exacting guidelines, including limits on the length of each
entry and the number of references, and they worked to a demanding schedule. The capstone
entry for previous editions was ‘human geography’, but in this edition that central place is now
vi
PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION
taken by a major entry on ‘geography’, with separate entries on ‘human geography’ and (for the
first time) ‘physical geography’. The inclusion of the latter provides a valuable perspective on the
multiple ways in which human geography has become involved in interrogations of the biophysical world and – one of Williams’s most complicated keywords – ‘nature’. Accordingly, we have
expanded our coverage of environmental geographies and of terms associated with the continued
development of actor-network theory and political ecology, and for the first time we have
included entries on biogeography, biophilosophy, bioprospecting, bioregionalism, biosecurity,
biotechnology, climate, environmental history, environmental racism, environmental security,
genetic geographies, the global commons, oceans, tropicality, urban nature, wetlands and zoos.
The first edition was planned at the height of the critique of spatial science within geography,
and for that reason most of the entries were concerned with either analytical methods and formal
spatial models or with alternative concepts and approaches drawn from the other social sciences.
We have taken new developments in analytical methods into account in subsequent editions, and
this one is no exception. We pay particular attention to the continuing stream of innovations in
Geographic Information Systems and, notably, the rise of Geographic Information Science, and
we have also taken notice of the considerable revival of interest in quantitative methods and
modelling: hence we have included for the first time entries on agent-based modelling, Bayesian
analysis, digital cartography, epidemiology, e-social science, geo-informatics and software for
quantitative analysis, and we have radically revised our coverage of other analytical methods.
The vital importance of qualitative methods in human geography has required renewed attention too, including for the first time entries on discourse analysis and visual methods, together
with enhanced entries on deconstruction, ethnography, iconography, map reading and qualitative methods. In the previous edition we provided detailed coverage of developments in the
social sciences and the humanities, and we have taken this still further in the present edition.
Human geographers have continued to be assiduous in unpicking the seams between the social
sciences and the humanities, and for the first time we have included entries on social theory, on
the humanities, and on philosophy and literature (complementing revised entries on art, film
and music), together with crucial junction-terms such as affect, assemblage, cartographic reason,
contrapuntal geographies, dialectical image, emotional geography, minor theory, posthumanism, representation and trust (complementing enhanced entries on performance, performativity,
non-representational theory and representation). Since the previous edition, the interest in some
theoretical formations has declined, and with it the space we have accorded to them; but human
geography has continued its close engagement with postcolonialism and post-structuralism, and
the new edition incorporates these developments. They involve two continuing and, we think,
crucial moments. The first is a keen interest in close and critical reading (surely vital for any
dictionary!) and, to repeat what we affirmed in the preface to the previous edition, we are keenly
aware of the slipperiness of our geographical ‘keywords’: of the claims they silently make, the
privileges they surreptitiously install, and of the wider webs of meaning and practice within
which they do their work. It still seems to us that human geographers are moving with considerable critical intelligence in a trans-disciplinary, even post-disciplinary space, and we hope that
this edition continues to map and move within this intellectual topography with unprecedented
precision and range. The second implication of postcolonialism and post-structuralism is a
heightened sensitivity to what we might call the politics of specificity. This does not herald the
return of the idiographic under another name, and it certainly does not entail any slackening of
interest in theoretical work (we have in fact included an enhanced entry on theory). But it has
involved a renewed interest in and commitment to that most traditional of geographical concerns, the variable character of the world in which we live. In one sense, perhaps, this makes the
fifth edition more conventionally ‘geographical’ than its predecessors. We have included new
entries on the conceptual formation of major geographical divisions and imaginaries, including
the globe and continents (with separate entries on Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australasia and
Europe), and on Latin America, the Middle East, the global South and the West, and on cognate
fields such as area studies and International Relations. But we also asked our contributors to
recognize that the world of geography is not limited to the global North. In previous editions,
contributors frequently commented on the multiple ways in which modern human geography
had worked to privilege and, indeed, normalize ‘the modern’, and together they traced a
genealogy of geographical knowledge in which the world beyond Europe and North America
was all too often marginalized or produced as a problematic ‘pre-modern’. For this edition, we
asked contributors to go beyond the critique of these assumptions and, wherever possible, to
vii
PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION
incorporate more cosmopolitan geographies (and we have included a new entry on cosmopolitanism).
And yet we must also recognize that this edition, like its predecessors, remains focused on
English-language words, terms and literatures. There are cautionary observations to be made
about the power-laden diffusion of English as a ‘global language’, and we know that there are
severe limitations to working within a single-language tradition (especially in a field like human
geography). The vitality of other geographical traditions should neither be overlooked nor
minimized. We certainly do not believe that human geography conducted in English somehow
constitutes the canonical version of the discipline, though it would be equally foolish to ignore
the powers and privileges it arrogates to itself in the unequal world of the international academy.
Neither should one discount the privileges that can be attached to learning other languages, nor
minimize the perils of translation: linguistic competences exact their price. But to offer some
(limited) protection against an unreflective ethnocentrism, we have been guided by an international Editorial Advisory Board and we have extended our coverage of issues bound up with
Anglocentrism and Eurocentrism, colonialism and imperialism, Empire and Orientalism – all of
these in the past and in the present – and we continue to engage directly with the politics of
‘race’, racism and violence. All of this makes it impossible to present The Dictionary of Human
Geography as an Archimedean overview, a textual performance of what Donna Haraway calls
‘the God-trick’. The entries are all situated knowledges, written by scholars working in Australia,
Canada, Denmark, India, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and
the United States of America. None of them is detached, and all of them are actively involved in
the debates that they write about. More than this, the authors write from a diversity of subjectpositions, so that this edition, like its predecessor, reveals considerable diversity and debate
within the discipline. We make no secret of the differences – in position, in orientation, in
politics – among our contributors. They do not speak with a single voice, and this is not a
work of bland or arbitrary systematization produced by a committee. Even so, we are conscious
of at least some of its partialities and limitations, and we invite our readers to consider how these
other voices might be heard from other positions, other places, and to think about the voices that
are – deliberately or unconsciously – silenced or marginalized.
None of these changes is a purely intellectual matter, of course, for they do not take place in a
vacuum: the world has changed since the previous edition, and this is reflected in a number of
entries that appear here for the first time. Some reach back to recover terms from the recent past
that are active in our present – including Cold War, fascism, Holocaust and Second World – but
all of them are distinguished by a sense of the historical formation of concepts and the webs of
power in which they are implicated. While we do not believe that ‘everything changed’ after the
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, one year after our
last edition, a shortlist of terms that have achieved new salience within the field indicates how far
human geography has been restructured to accommodate a heightened sensitivity to political
violence, including its ethical, economic and ecological dimensions. While many of these terms
(like the four we have just mentioned) should have been in previous editions, for the first time we
now have entries on: American Empire, asylum, bare life, the camp, ethnic cleansing, spaces of
exception, genocide, homo sacer, human rights, intifada, just war, militarism, military geography,
military occupation, resource wars, rogue states, security, terrorism, urbicide and war. Human
geography has made major contributions to the critical study of economic transformation and
globalization too, and our entries continue to recognize major developments in economic
geography and political economy, and the lively exchanges between them that seek to explicate
dramatic changes in contemporary regimes of capital accumulation and circulation. The global
economic crisis broke as this edition was going to press. We had already included new entries on
anti-development and anti-globalization, on the International Monetary Fund and the World
Social Forum, and on narco-capitalism and petrocapitalism, which speak to some of the
ramifications of the crisis, but we also believe that these events have made our expanded
critiques of (in particular) capitalism, markets and neo-liberalism more relevant than ever
before.
A number of other projects have appeared in the wake of previous editions of the Dictionary:
meta-projects such as the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography and several other
encyclopedias, an indispensable Feminist Glossary of Human Geography, and a series devoted to
Key Concepts in the major subdisciplines of human geography. There is, of course, a lively debate
about scale in geography, but we believe that the scale (or perhaps the extent of the conceptual
viii
PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION
network) of The Dictionary of Human Geography continues to be a crucial resource for anyone
who wants to engage with the continued development of the field. It is not the last word – and
neither pretends nor wishes to be – but rather an invitation to recover those words that came
before, to reflect on their practical consequences, and to contribute to future ‘geo-graphings’.
This makes it all the more salutary to return to Echard’s original list and realize that virtually all
of the fields he identified as bearing on geography have their counterparts within the contemporary discipline. The single exception is the figure of the Herald, but if this is taken to imply not
the skill of heraldry but rather a harbinger of what is to come, then human geography’s interest
in prediction and forecasting returns us to the footsteps of our seventeenth-century forebear.
Be that as it may, none of us is prepared to forecast the scope and contents of the next edition of
The Dictionary of Human Geography, which is why working on the project continues to be such a
wonderfully creative process.
Derek Gregory
Ron Johnston
Geraldine Pratt
Michael J. Watts
Sarah Whatmore
ix
How to UseThis Dictionary
Keywords are listed alphabetically and appear on the page in bold type: in most cases, users of
the Dictionary should begin their searches there. Within each entry, cross-references to other
entries are shown in capital letters (these include the plural and adjectival versions of many of
the terms). Readers may trace other connections through the comprehensive index at the back of
the book.
Suggested readings are provided at the end of each entry in abbreviated (Harvard) form; a full
Bibliography is provided between pages 818 and 956, and readers seeking particular references or
the works of particular authors should begin their searches there.
x
Acknowledgements
In the production of this edition, we are again indebted to a large number of people. We are
particularly grateful to Justin Vaughan, our publisher at Wiley-Blackwell, for his enthusiasm,
support and impeccably restrained goading, and to many others at Wiley-Blackwell (especially
Liz Cremona and Tim Beuzeval) who have been involved in the management and implementation of this project. We owe a special debt to Geoffrey Palmer, our copy-editor, who performed
marvels turning multiple electronic files into an accurate and coherent printed volume, and to
WordCo Indexing Services, Inc., who compiled and cross-checked the Index with meticulous
care.
The preparation of a large multi-authored volume such as this is dependent on the cooperation of a large number of colleagues, who accepted our invitation to contribute, our
cajoling to produce the entries, our prompts over deadlines and our editorial interventions: we
are immensely grateful to them for their care, tolerance and patience. It is with the greatest
sadness that we record the deaths of two of them during the preparation of the Dictionary – Denis
Cosgrove and Les Hepple – and we dedicate this edition to their memory.
The authors, editors and publishers thank the following for permission to reproduce the
copyright material indicated:
Martin Cadwallader for the figure reproduced in the entry for Alonso model from Analytical
Urban Geography, 1985.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd with The University of Chicago Press for the figure reproduced in the
entry capitalism from D. Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 1982.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd for the figure reproduced in the entry crisis from D. Gregory,
Geographical Imaginations, 1993.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd for the figure reproduced in the entry critical theory, based on Jürgen
Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Polity Press.
University of California Press for the figure reproduced in the entry cultural landscape from
Carol O. Sauer, The Morphology of Landscape, 1925. # 1925 The Regents of the University of
California.
Peter Haggett for the figure reproduced in the entry for demographic transition from Geography: A Modern Synthesis, 1975.
Ohio State University Press/Macmillan Publishers Ltd for the figure reproduced in the entry
distance decay from Peter J. Taylor, ‘Distance transformation and distance decay functions’,
Geographical Analysis, Vol. 3, 3 July 1971. # Ohio State University Press.
Hodder and Stoughton Publishers Ltd for the figure reproduced in the entry Kondratieff
waves based on Marshall, 1987, from P. Knox and J. Agnew, Geography of the World-Economy,
1989.
Macmillan Publishers Ltd with St. Martin’s Press for the figure reproduced in the entry
Kondratieff waves from Knox and Agnew, adapted from M. Marshall, Long Waves of Regional
Development, 1987.
Peter Haggett for the figure reproduced in the entry for locational analysis, from Locational
Analysis in Human Geography, 1977.
xi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Cambridge University Press and The University of Chicago Press for the figure reproduced in
the entry for multiple nuclei model from Harris and Ullman in H.M. Mayer and C.F. Kohn,
eds, Readings in Urban Geography, 1959.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd for figures 1 and 2 reproduced in the entry production of space from
D. Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, 1993.
The Estate of Conroy Maddox for the figure reproduced in the entry for reflexivity.
xii
Contributors
AA
AB
AGH
AJB
AJS
AL
AV
BA
BY
CB
CF
CK
CP
CW
DCa
DCl
DCo
Ash Amin, Professor of Geography,
University of Durham, UK
Alison Blunt, Professor of
Geography, Queen Mary, University
of London, UK
Tony Hoare, Senior Lecturer in
Geography, University of Bristol,
UK
Adrian Bailey, Professor of
Migration Studies, School of
Geography, University of Leeds, UK
Anna Secor, Associate Professor of
Geography, University of Kentucky,
USA
Andrew Leyshon, Professor of
Economic Geography, University of
Nottingham, UK
Alexander Vasudevan, Lecturer in
Cultural and Historical Geography,
University of Nottingham, UK
Ben Anderson, Lecturer in
Geography, University of Durham,
UK
Brenda Yeoh, Professor of
Geography, National University of
Singapore, Singapore
Clive Barnett, Reader in Human
Geography, The Open University,
UK
Colin Flint, Professor of Geography,
University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign, USA
Cindi Katz, Professor of Geography,
Graduate Center, The City
University of New York, USA
Chris Philo, Professor of Geography,
University of Glasgow, UK
Charles Withers, Professor of
Historical Geography, University of
Edinburgh, UK
David Campbell, Professor of
Cultural and Political Geography,
University of Durham, UK
Dan Clayton, Lecturer in Human
Geography, University of St
Andrews, UK
Denis Cosgrove, formerly Alexander
von Humboldt Professor of
Geography, University of California,
Los Angeles, USA
DG
DH
DL
DMat
DMar
DMS
DNL
DP
EM
EP
ES
ESch
FD
GB
GHa
GHe
GK
Derek Gregory, Professor of
Geography, University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Dan Hiebert, Professor of
Geography, University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
David Ley, Professor of Geography,
University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada
David Matless, Professor of Cultural
Geography, University of
Nottingham, UK
Deborah Martin, Assistant Professor
of Geography, Clark University,
USA
David Smith, Emeritus Professor of
Geography, Queen Mary, University
of London, UK
David Livingstone, Professor of
Geography and Intellectual History,
Queen’s University, Belfast, UK
David Pinder, Reader in Geography,
Queen Mary, University of London,
UK
Eugene McCann, Associate
Professor of Geography, Simon
Fraser University, Canada
Eric Pawson, Professor of
Geography, University of
Canterbury, New Zealand
Eric Sheppard, Regents Professor,
University of Minnesota, USA
Erica Schoenberger, Professor of
Geography, the Johns Hopkins
University, USA
Felix Driver, Professor of Human
Geography, Royal Holloway,
University of London, UK
Gavin Bridge, Reader in Economic
Geography, University of
Manchester, UK
Gillian Hart, Professor of
Geography, University of California,
Berkeley, USA
George Henderson, Associate
Professor of Geography, University
of Minnesota, USA
Gerry Kearns, Professor of
Government and International
Affairs, Virginia Tech, USA
xiii
CONTRIBUTORS
GP
GR
GV
GW
JA
JD
JF
JGl
JGu
JH
JK
JL
JM
JPa
JPe
JPi
JPJ
JSD
JSh
JSt
JSu
xiv
Geraldine Pratt, Professor of
Geography, University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Gillian Rose, Professor of Cultural
Geography, The Open University, UK
Gill Valentine, Professor of
Geography, University of Leeds, UK
Graeme Wynn, Professor of
Geography, University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
John Agnew, Professor of
Geography, University of California,
Los Angeles, USA
Jessica Dubow, Lecturer in
Geography, University of Sheffield,
UK
James Faulconbridge, Lecturer in
Human Geography, Lancaster
University, UK
Jim Glassman, Associate Professor of
Geography, University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Julie Guthman, Associate Professor,
Community Studies, University of
California, Santa Cruz, USA
Jennifer Hyndman, Professor of
Geography, Syracuse University,
USA
Jake Kosek, Assistant Professor,
University of California, Berkeley,
USA
Jo Little, Professor in Gender and
Geography, University of Exeter, UK
James McCarthy, Assistant Professor
of Geography, Pennsylvania State
University, USA
Joe Painter, Professor of Geography,
University of Durham, UK
Jamie Peck, Professor of Geography,
University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada
John Pickles, Earl N. Phillips
Distinguished Professor of
International Studies and
Geography, University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA
John Paul Jones III, Professor of
Geography, University of Arizona,
USA
James Duncan, Reader in Cultural
Geography, University of Cambridge
Jo Sharp, Senior Lecturer in
Geography, University of Glasgow,
UK
Jon Stobart, Professor of History,
Northampton University, UK
Juanita Sundberg, Assistant
Professor of Geography, University
JWi
JWy
KB
KJ
KM
KS
KWa
KWo
LB
LK
LL
LST
LWH
MB
MC
ME
MH
MM
of British Columbia, Vancouver,
Canada
Jane Wills, Professor of Human
Geography, Queen Mary, University
of London, UK
John Wylie, Senior Lecturer in
Human Geography, University of
Exeter, UK
Keith Bassett, Senior Lecturer in
Geography, University of Bristol, UK
Kelvyn Jones, Professor of Human
Quantitative Geography, University
of Bristol, UK
Katharyne Mitchell, Professor of
Geography, University of
Washington, Seattle, USA
Kirsten Simonsen, Professor of
Geography, Roskilde University,
Denmark
Kevin Ward, Professor of
Geography, University of
Manchester, UK
Keith Woodard, Lecturer in Human
Geography, University of Exeter, UK
Liz Bondi, Professor of Social
Geography, University of
Edinburgh, UK
Lily Kong, Vice President
(University and Global Relations)
and Professor of Geography,
National University of Singapore,
Singapore
Loretta Lees, Professor of Human
Geography, King’s College, London,
UK
Leigh Shaw-Taylor, Senior Research
Associate in Geography and Deputy
Director of the Cambridge Group for
the History of Population and Social
Structure, University of Cambridge,
UK
Les Hepple, formerly Professor of
Geography, University of Bristol, UK
Michael Brown, Professor of
Geography, University of
Washington, Seattle, USA
Mike Crang, Reader in Geography,
University of Durham, UK
Matthew Edney, Director of the
History of Cartography Project,
University of Wisconsin, Madison,
USA
Michael Heffernan, Professor of
Historical Geography, University of
Nottingham, UK
Mark Monmonier, Distinguished
Professor of Geography, Syracuse
University, USA
CONTRIBUTORS
MS
MSG
MSR
MT
MW
NB
NC
NJ
NJC
NKB
NS
OY
PG
PH
PM
PR
RH
RJ
RK
RL
Matthew Sparke, Professor of
Geography, University of
Washington, USA
Meric Gertler, Dean of Arts and
Sciences and Professor of
Geography, University of Toronto,
Canada
Matthew Smallman-Raynor,
Professor of Analytical Geography,
Nottingham University, UK
Matt Turner, Professor of
Geography, University of WisconsinMadison, USA
Michael J. Watts, Professor of
Geography, University of California,
Berkeley, USA
Nick Bingham, Lecturer in Human
Geography, The Open University,
UK
Nigel Clark, Senior Lecturer in
Human Geography, The Open
University, UK
Nuala Johnson, Reader in Human
Geography, Queen’s University,
Belfast, UK
Nick Clifford, Professor of River
Science, School of Geography,
University of Nottingham, UK
Nick Blomley, Professor of
Geography, Simon Fraser
University, Canada
Nadine Schuurman, Associate
Professor of Geography, Simon
Fraser University, Canada
Oren Yiftachel, Professor of
Geography, Ben Gurion University
of the Negev, Israel
Paul Glennie, Senior Lecturer in
Geography, University of Bristol, UK
Phil Hubbard, Professor of Urban
Social Geography, Loughborough
University, UK
Phil McManus, Associate Professor
of Geography, School of
Geosciences, University of Sydney,
Australia
Paul Routledge, Reader in Geography,
University of Glasgow, UK
Richard Harris, Senior Lecturer in
Geography, University of Bristol,
UK
Ron Johnston, Professor of
Geography, University of Bristol, UK
Roger Keil, Professor of
Environmental Studies, York
University, Canada
Roger Lee, Professor of Geography,
Queen Mary, University of London
RMS
RN
SC
SCh
SCo
SD
SE
SG
SHa
SHe
SHi
SM
SP
SW
TJB
US
VG
WMA
Richard Smith, Professor of
Historical Geography and
Demography, University of
Cambridge, UK
Richa Nagar, Professor of Gender,
Women and Sexuality Studies,
Department of Geography,
University of Minnesota, USA
Sharad Chari, Lecturer in Human
Geography, London School of
Economics, UK
Sanjay Chaturvedi, Professor of
Political Science and Co-ordinator of
the Centre for the Study of
Geopolitics, Panjab University,
Chandigarh, India
Stuart Corbridge, Professor of
Development Studies, London
School of Economics, UK
Simon Dalby, Professor of Geography,
Carleton University, Canada
Stuart Elden, Professor of
Geography, University of Durham
UK
Stephen Graham, Professor of
Geography, University of Durham,
UK
Susan Hanson, Research Professor of
Geography, Clark University, USA
Steve Herbert, Professor of
Geography, University of
Washington, Seattle, USA
Stephen Hinchliffe, Reader in
Environmental Geography, The
Open University, UK
Sallie Marston, Professor of
Geography, University of Arizona,
USA
Scott Prudham, Associate Professor
of Geography, University of
Toronto, Canada
Sarah Whatmore, Professor of
Environment and Public Policy,
School of Geography and the
Environment, University of Oxford,
UK
Trevor Barnes, Professor of
Geography, University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Ulf Strohmayer, Professor of
Geography, National University of
Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Vinay Gidwani, Associate Professor
of Geography, University of
Minnesota, USA
Bill Adams, Moran Professor of
Conservation and Development,
University of Cambridge, UK
xv
Editorial Advisory Board
Nicholas Blomley
Professor of Geography, Simon Fraser
University, Canada
Don Mitchell
Professor of Geography, Syracuse University,
USA
Sanjay Chaturvedi
Professor of Political Science and Co-ordinator of
the Centre for the Study of Geopolitics, Panjab
University, India
Anna Secor
Associate Professor of Geography, University of
Kentucky, USA
Eric Clark
Professor, Department of Social and Economic
Geography, Lund University, Sweden
Felix Driver
Professor of Human Geography, Royal Holloway,
University of London, UK
Katherine Gibson
Professor, Department of Human Geography,
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies,
Australian National University, Canberra,
Australia
Joanne Sharp
Senior Lecturer in Geography, University of
Glasgow, UK
Eric Sheppard
Regents Professor, Department of Geography,
University of Minnesota, USA
Kirsten Simonsen
Professor of Geography, Roskilde University,
Denmark
David Slater
Loughborough University, UK
Michael Heffernan
Professor of Historical geography, University of
Nottingham, UK
Gearoid Ó Tuathail (Gerard Toal)
Professor, School of Public and International
Affairs, Virginia Tech, USA
Jennifer Hyndman
Professor of Geography, Syracuse University,
USA
Jane Wills
Professor of Human Geography, Queen Mary,
University of London, UK
Kelvyn Jones
Professor of Human Quantitative Geography,
University of Bristol, UK
Brenda Yeoh
Professor of Geography, National University of
Singapore
Paul Longley
Professor of Geographic Information Science,
University College London, UK
Oren Yiftachel
Professor of Geography, Ben-Gurion University of
the Negev, Israel
Peter Meusburger
Senior Professor, Department of Geography,
University of Heidelberg, Germany
Yoka Yoshida
Associate Professor of Human Geography, Nara
Women’s University, Japan
xvi
A
abduction A form of reasoning that takes
accepted knowledge and infers the ‘best available’ explanations for what is observed. Whereas
deduction formally infers the consequences
of a cause-and-effect relationship (if a, then b),
and induction infers a conclusion from a number of observations (of the same patterns, for
example), abductive reasoning infers relationships from observations rather than asserting
them. It thus presents a ‘provisional’ account
for what has been observed (for why a is related
to b), either inviting further empirical investigation that might sustain the ‘explanation’ or
encouraging deductive work that might put the
putative causal chain on a former footing.
rj
abjection A psychoanalytic concept that describes a psychic process through which the
pure, proper and bounded body and identity
emerge by expelling what is deemed impure,
horrific or disgusting. The abject refers to bodily by-products such as urine, saliva, sperm,
blood, vomit, faeces, hair, nails or skin, but
also to impure psychic attachments, such as
same-sex desire (Butler, 1997) and to entire
zones of uninhabitable social life. What and
who is classified as abject is socially and culturally contingent; it is that which ‘upsets or
befuddles order’ (Grosz, 1994, p. 192). The
abject thus signals sites of potential threat to
the psychic and social order. Abjection is a
process that can never be completed, and this
is one factor that creates the intensity of psychic investment in the process. The concept is
of interest because it attests to the materiality
of subjectivity (the constant interplay between the body and subjectivity); the persistent work required to maintain the fragile
boundary between inside and outside, object
and subject; and the intimate ways in which
cultural norms inhabit the body. Geographers
have been drawn in particular to the role that
abjection plays in group-based fears manifest,
for instance, in racism, sexism, homophobia
(see homophobia and heterosexism), ableism and some forms of nationalism (Young,
1990a), particularly in the maintenance of
borders and purification of space, and in the
production of the space of the exception (see
exception, space of). As one example, Jo
Long (2006) interprets the efforts of the
Israeli state to defend its borders from the
‘leakage’ of Palestinian checkpoint births and
female ‘suicide bombers’ through the concept
of abjection; Judith Butler (2004) conceives
the US-operated Guantánamo Bay detention
camp as a domain of abjected beings.
gp
Suggested reading
Sibley (1995).
aboriginality A term derived from the Latin
ab origine, meaning the original founders, or
‘from the beginning’. In the nineteenth century,
‘Aborigines’ denoted the existing inhabitants of
what Europeans called the ‘New World’. Today,
the terms ‘aboriginal peoples’ and ‘aboriginality’
are in official use in Australia and in Canada,
and in Canada it is also common to refer to
‘First Nations’. Elsewhere, it is more usual to
refer to indigenous peoples, and hence indigeneity.
According to the United Nations Working
Group on Indigenous Peoples, the interpretation of such expressions should reflect the
historical and current situations of these colonized peoples (see colonialism), as well as their
manner of self-identification and search for
greater degrees of self-determination. However,
as a construct of European modernity, ‘aboriginality’ was freighted with connotations of
‘savagery’ and lack of culture (Anderson,
2000a) (see also primitivism), and its continued use also obscures the subjectivities of
the heterogeneous groups to which it is applied.
Indigenous peoples often had no single name to
describe themselves before there was
a colonizing Other to make this necessary.
The Maori (meaning ‘ordinary’, or ‘the
people’) of New Zealand did not describe
themselves as such until they were aware of
Pakeha (‘not Maori’ or Europeans). They
knew and named themselves as members of
kin-based groups, as is still the case. Likewise,
amongst the Kwara’ae of Malaita (one of the
Solomon Islands) self-definition is understood
in relation to place, genealogy, right of access
to land and the right to speak (Gegeo, 2001).
Since the 1980s, globalization and the
architecture of neo-liberalism have presented
both problems and opportunities. Marginalization and loss of control of resources continue
(Stewart-Harawira, 2005), but there is also
1
ABSTRACTION
potential for insertion into transnational informational and economic networks. This can
facilitate steps towards indigenous professionalization and self-determination. Participation
in activities such as tourism, oil extraction
and cattle ranching by the Cofan and Secoya
peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon has
opened spaces for questioning fixed notions
of indigenous identities (as ‘natural’ conservationists of remote territories, for example).
These are often articulated in different ways
and contested within communities, particularly along generational lines (Valdivia, 2005).
Despite official recognition of indigenous
peoples in national legislation and constitutional
law, the practical implementation of policy
remains a problem in many parts of the world.
According to the United Nations Working
Group in 2003, this applies in areas ranging
from rights to land and natural resources to the
alleviation of poverty. Institutionalized discrimination is pervasive, not least through superimposed definitions of identity (e.g. for census
purposes or for state entitlements). State education systems have often been structured to facilitate integration or assimilation, denying cultural
and ethnic diversity. Universities may be complicit. Research on, rather than with, indigenous
people is seen as reproducing colonial relations,
advancing the career of the researcher rather than
indigenous interests. (cf. Smith, 1999b).
ep
Suggested reading
Smith (1999); Valdivia (2005).
abstraction Methodologically, abstraction
involves the conceptual isolation of (a partial
aspect of) an object. During the quantitative
revolution, abstraction was seen as the
starting-point for the construction of spatial
models, but few methodological principles
were provided (Chorley, 1964). Some critics
of spatial science were drawn instead to the
construction of what the sociologist Max
Weber called ideal types: ‘one-sided’ idealizations of the world seen from particular points of
view. There was nothing especially ‘scientific’
about them, which is presumably why they
appealed to the critics, and Weber claimed
that this kind of selective structuring is something that we all do all the time. Since it is
possible to construct quite different ideal types
of the same phenomenon, depending on one’s
point of view, the critical moment comes when
the ideal type is compared with ‘empirical
reality’ – but here too few methodological
principles were proposed to conduct or interpret any such comparisons.
2
realism rejected both of these approaches as
arbitrary and substituted what its proponents
saw as a rigorous scientific methodology.
According to Sayer (1992 [1984]), abstractions
should identify essential characteristics of objects and should be concerned with ‘substantial’
relations of connection rather than merely ‘formal’ relations of similarity (which Chorley
(1964) had called ‘analogues’; cf. metaphor).
Realism turns on identifying those internal
relations that necessarily enter into the constitution of specific structures. Hence Sayer distinguished a rational abstraction – that is, ‘one
that isolates a significant element of the world
that has some unity and autonomous force’ –
from a chaotic conception – that is, one whose
definition is more or less arbitrary. It is no less
important to recognize different levels of abstraction, a strategy of considerable importance in
theoretical formations such as historical materialism that claim to move between the general and the (historically or geographically)
specific (Cox and Mair, 1989). But these prescriptions turn out to be far from straightforward in a human geography where ‘context’
cannot be cleanly severed from objects of
analysis, and recent debates over scale have
revealed the importance of revisiting issues of
epistemology and ontology that are focal to
the process of abstraction (Castree, 2005b).
Abstraction is more than a formal method: it
is a profoundly human and thoroughly
indispensable practice, as Weber recognized,
so that what matters are the consequences of
particular modes of abstraction. Seen thus, it
spirals far beyond the spheres of science and
other forms of intellectual enquiry. Many
critics have drawn attention to the role of
abstraction in the heightened rationalization
of everyday life under capitalism – what
Habermas (1987b [1981]) called ‘the colonization of the lifeworld’ – and the attendant
production of an abstract space, ‘one-sided’ and
‘incomplete’, that Lefebvre (1991b [1974])
identified as the dominant spatial thematic of
modernity (see production of space).
dg
Suggested reading
Castree (2005b); Sayer (1982).
accessibility The standard definition is the
ease with which people can reach desired activity sites, such as those offering employment,
shopping, medical care or recreation. Because
many geographers and planners believe that access to essential goods and services is an important indicator of quality of life, measures of
access are used to compare the accessibility
ACCUMULATION
levels of different groups of individuals and
households, or of different places or locations.
Most measures of accessibility entail counting
the number of opportunities or activity sites
available within certain travel times or distances of a specified origin (Handy and
Niemeier, 1997). A simple example is
X
Oi dij b ,
Ai ¼
tance. Gaining access often entails overcoming
barriers constructed by language and culture
(as in the ability to access medical care), by
lack of education or skills (as in access to
certain jobs), or by gender ideologies (which
prohibit women from entering certain places
or place additional space–time constraints on
women’s mobility). In short, lack of access
involves more than spatial mismatch.
sha
where Ai is the accessibility of person i, Oi is
the number of opportunities (say, the number
of job openings of a particular type or the
number of grocery stores) at distance j from
person i’s home, and dij is some measure of
the friction of distance between i and j (this
measure could be distance in kilometres,
travel costs in euros or travel time in minutes).
This equation could also be used to assess the
relative levels of accessibility of different areas,
such as census tracts; in this case, Ai is the
accessibility of place i, Oj is the number of
opportunities in place j, and dij is a measure
of separation between places i and j.
As is evident from the measure above,
accessibility is affected by land-use patterns,
mobility and mobility substitutes in the
form of telecommunications. If many opportunities are located close to someone’s home
or workplace, that person can enjoy a relatively
high level of accessibility with relatively little
mobility, and will be more likely to gain access
to opportunities via walking or biking rather
than via motorized modes (Hanson and
Schwab, 1987). As opportunities are located
at greater distances from each other and from
residential areas, greater mobility is required
to attain access. As the cost of overcoming
spatial separation increases, all else being
equal, accessibility decreases. Electronic communications such as the telephone and the
internet enable access without mobility, although in most cases, such as that of purchasing a book from an online vendor, the cost of
overcoming distance remains in the form of
shipment costs (Scott, 2000b). These relationships among accessibility, mobility and landuse patterns are central to efforts to promote
the urban village as an alternative to sprawl.
The advent of GIS technology has enabled
the development of accessibility measures that
recognize that a person’s access changes as
that person moves about, for example, over
the course of a day (Kwan, 1999). In addition,
there is increasing recognition that the ability
to take advantage of spatially dispersed employment opportunities, medical services and
shops involves more than overcoming dis-
Suggested reading
j
Kwan and Weber (2003); Kwan, Murray, O’Kelly
and Tiefelsdorf (2003).
accumulation The process by which capital
is reproduced on an expanding scale
through the reinvestment of surplus value.
Accumulation of capital is possible within
a variety of social structures, but for Marx
accumulation was uniquely imperative within
capitalist societies and therefore constituted
a definitive condition of the capitalist mode
of production (see capitalism).
In capitalist contexts, accumulation involves
reinvesting the surplus value from past rounds
of production, reconverting it into capital.
Marx discussed different forms of accumulation that applied to different historical and
geographical conditions of production. In
early centuries of European capitalism, a crucial dimension of the accumulation process
was enclosure of common lands and conversion of communal or tied labour into ‘free’
wage labour, through destruction of independent control over means of production. Marx
described this process of primitive (or ‘primary’) accumulation as a historical precondition for the development of capitalism (Marx,
1967 [1867], pp. 713–41), but it has also been
seen in more recent Marxist scholarship as a
continuing dimension of the overall process of
accumulation that Harvey (2003b, pp. 137–82)
calls accumulation by dispossession (cf. Amin,
1974; see also marxian economics).
Within the capitalist mode of production
proper, the major form of accumulation is
what Marx calls ‘expanded reproduction.’ To
remain in business, any given capitalist must
at least preserve the value of the capital originally invested, what Marx calls ‘simple reproduction.’ But, as individual capitalists seek
to more effectively extract surplus from labour,
they employ new means of production (machinery and other technologies), the value of
which can only be fully realized through
expanding their scale of operation. This spurs
competition over markets, and competition in
turn comes to act as the enforcer of expanded
3
ACID RAIN
reproduction. Any capitalist who chooses only
to engage in simple reproduction would soon
lose market share and go out of business. As
Marx put the matter, ‘Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!’ (Marx,
1967 [1867], p. 595).
This competition-enforced dynamic of accumulation shapes the geography of capitalist
development. The search for new markets
drives investors to intensify production and
consumption within given locations, contributing to the development of the built environment and transforming social relations in ways
that facilitate expanded reproduction (Harvey,
1999 [1982]). It also drives investors to seek
opportunities in new locations, thus giving rise
to a geographical expansion of capitalist relations of production and consumption, albeit in
a highly uneven fashion when considered at a
global scale (Amin, 1974; see uneven development). Both intensive and extensive capitalist
accumulation are fraught processes that do not
occur automatically, and are shaped by numerous social struggles (Harvey, 2003b, pp. 183–
211). The reproduction of capitalist social relations may or may not occur in given contexts,
and may depend upon a variety of factors, including the roles played by states.
jgl
Suggested reading
Amin (1974); Harvey (1999 [1982], 2003b);
Marx (1967 [1867]).
acid rain The deposition of sulphuric and
nitric acids on to land or water by rainwater.
Acid rain is one form of acid precipitation,
which also includes acid snow, acid hail, dry
deposition and acid fog condensation. On a
pH scale of 14, a substance with a pH value
of less than 7 is considered acidic, while a pH
value greater than 7 is considered alkaline.
Rainwater is naturally slightly acidic, with a
pH value of about 5.6. Acid rain generally
has an average pH range of 3–5. Acidity is
greatest near the base of clouds, and is diluted
by a factor of 0.5 to 1 pH during rainfall
(Pickering and Owen, 1994).
The English chemist R. A. Smith discovered
a link between industrial pollution and acid
rain in Manchester in 1852, although it was
known in the twelfth century that the burning
of coal caused air pollution (Turco, 1997).
Smith first used the term ‘acid rain’ in 1872,
but his ideas have only been treated seriously
since the late 1950s. The studies of Swedish
soil scientist Svente Oden focused attention on
this international issue. In 1972 the Swedish
Government presented its case at the United
4
Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. The term ‘acid rain’ has
been used extensively in recent decades.
Acid rain is caused primarily by the cumulative release of nitrogen and sulphur from
the burning of fossil fuels. This includes coal
for power, heating and industry, petrol in
automobiles, and uncontrolled fires in coalfields and coal mines, particularly in northern
China (Stracher and Taylor, 2004). While
acid rain may occur through natural processes
such as volcanic activity, it is the cumulative
impact of human activities that has caused a
marked increase in acid rain over the past
century. Since about 1990 various Western
countries have been generally successful in
reducing their generation of acid precipitation,
mostly through the closure of old factories,
improved pollution control measures and the
phasing out of domestic coal burning, but
sulphur and nitrogen oxide emissions have
increased rapidly in countries such as China
(Cutter and Renwick, 2004).
Acid deposition is most severe in western
Europe, the Midwest of North America, in
China and in countries near its eastern
borders. These areas have higher generation
rates. Acid rain may cross national boundaries
and fall several hundred kilometres from the
source, particularly when tall smokestacks
displace pollution from its source area. The
areas most affected by acid rain tend to be
downwind of dense concentrations of power
stations, smelters and cities, are often in
upland areas with high levels of precipitation,
and are often forest areas dissected by rivers
and lakes. Acid rain kills forests when acidic
particles directly damage leaves, and/or when
the soil becomes acidified and the metals
bound in the soil are freed. The nutrients
necessary for plant growth are then leached by
the water. Acid rain lowers the pH value of lakes
and other water bodies, which kills fish and
other aquatic forms of life. Acid rain may also
corrode buildings and other structures.
pm
action research A synthesis between study of
social change and active involvement in processes of change, where critical research, reflexive activism and open-ended pedagogy are
actively combined in an evolving collaborative
methodology.
By its very nature, action research interrogates the conventional idea of the academic
researcher as an isolated expert who is authorized to produce knowledge about the marginalized ‘Other’. It seeks to eliminate the
dichotomy between researcher and researched
ACTIVISM
by involving research subjects as intellectual
collaborators in the entire process of knowledge production: from agenda formation, analysis and decisions about forms that
knowledge should take, to grappling with the
intended and unintended outcomes emanating from the knowledges produced. In this
sense, the relevance of research for social action is not primarily about helping the marginalized to identify their problems by fostering
social awareness or militancy. Rather, relevance comes from deploying analytical
mediation, theory-making and critical selfreflexivity in ways that allow people who are
excluded from dominant systems of knowledge production and dissemination to participate in intellectual self-empowerment by
developing critical frameworks that challenge
the monopolies of the traditionally recognized
experts (Sangtin Writers [and Nagar], 2006;
see also participant observation).
To avoid slipping into a romance of undoing
the dominant norms of knowledge production, however, one must recognize that ‘participation,’ ‘transformation,’ ‘knowledge’ and
‘empowerment’ are also commodities with
exchange values in the academic (and expertise) market. Rather than assuming social
transformation to be the ultimate goal for a
community, it is necessary to examine critically what motivates and legitimizes the production of social knowledge for social change
or empowerment and to ask whether participation is a means or an end. Poetivin (2002,
p. 34) points out that participation as a means
runs the risk of becoming a manipulative device in the hands of urban researchers and
social activists who can operate communication techniques and modern information
systems with a missionary zeal. As an end,
however, participation can become an effective
democratic process, enabling intellectual empowerment and collective social agency.
Until the 1980s, action research was regarded
as a largely unproblematic community-based
and practice-oriented realm that was less
theoretical than other forms of research. But
such neat separation between action and
theory has been successfully muddied
by geographers whose work blends poststructuralism with a commitment to praxis
(see applied geography). Such writing struggles with dilemmas of authority, privilege,
voice and representation in at least three
ways. First, it recognizes the provisional nature of all knowledge, and the inevitably problematic nature of translation, mediation and
representation. Second, it underscores the
importance of being attentive to the existence
of multiple situated knowledges (frequently
rooted in mutually irreconcilable epistemological positions) in any given context. Thus,
negotiating discrepant audiences and making
compromises to coalesce around specific
issues are necessary requirements for academics
who seek to engage with, and speak to, specific
political struggles (Larner, 1995). Third, it
suggests how specifying the limits of dominant
discourses can generate dialogues across difference in ways that disrupt hegemonic modes
of representation (Pratt, 2004).
rn
Suggested reading
Enslin (1994); Friere (1993); Gibson-Graham
(1994).
activism The practice of political action by
individuals or collectives in the form of social
movements, non-government organizations
and so on. Within geography, this is related to
discussions about the political relevance of the
discipline to ‘real-world concerns’ and to practices of resistance. With the advent of radical
and marxist geography in the 1960s came a
concern to facilitate the direct involvement of
geographers in the solving of social problems
(e.g. Harvey, 1972). Early radical geographers
called for the establishment of a people’s geography, in which research was focused on politically charged questions and solutions and
geographers actively involved themselves with
the peoples and communities that they studied
(e.g. William Bunge’s 1969 ‘Geographical
Expeditions’ in Detroit). The development of
feminist geography has emphasized politically
committed research, including promoting
dialogue and collaboration between activistacademics and the people they study, as well as
recognizing and negotiating the differential
power relations within the research process.
Another central concern has been the question
of whom research is produced ‘for’ and whose
needs it meets (Nast, 1994a; Farrow, Moss and
Shaw, 1995).
Since the 1990s, geographers have lamented
anew the separation between critical sectors of
the discipline and activism both inside and outside the academy (e.g. Blomley, 1994a; Castree, 1999a; Wills, 2002: see critical human
geography). Calls have been made for critical
geographers to become politically engaged outside the academy, collaborating with social
movements, community groups and protests,
among others, to interpret and effect social
change (Chouinard, 1994b; Kobayashi, 1994;
Routledge, 1996b; Fuller, 1999). Because
5
ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY (ANT)
activism is gendered, classed, racialized and
infused with cultural meanings depending on
the context of struggle, collaboration requires
theorizing and negotiating the differences in
power between collaborators and the connections that they forge. Hence several authors
have proposed that the differences between
academic and activist collaborators are engaged
in relational and ethical ways, aware of contingency and context (Katz, 1992; Slater, 1997;
Kitchin, 1999; Routledge, 2002). This also demands acknowledgement of what Laura Pulido
(2003) calls the ‘interior life of politics’: the
entanglement of the emotions, psychological
development, souls, passions and minds of activist-academic collaborators.
Activism is discursively produced within a
range of sites, including the media, grassroots
organizations and academia, and this has frequently led to a restrictive view of activism that
emphasizes dramatic, physical and ‘macho’
forms of action. Ian Maxey (1999) has argued
for a more inclusive definition of activism,
as the process of reflecting and acting upon
the social world that is produced through
everyday acts and thoughts in which all
people engage. Through challenging oppressive power relations, activism generates a
continual process of reflection, confrontation
and empowerment. Such an interpretation
opens up the field of activism to everybody
and serves to entangle the worlds of academia
and activism (Routledge, 1996b; see also
third space).
Recent calls for activist research have argued that academics have a social responsibility, given their training, access to information
and freedom of expression, to make a difference ‘on the ground’ (Cumbers and Routledge, 2004; Fuller and Kitchen, 2004a),
although such responsibility is not necessarily
restricted to the immediate or very local (Massey, 2004). Fuller and Kitchen see the role of
the academic as primarily that of an enabler or
facilitator, acting in collaboration with diverse
communities. Radical and critical praxis is
thus committed to exposing the socio-spatial
processes that (re)produce inequalities between people and places; challenging and
changing those inequalities; and bridging the
divide between theorization and praxis. They
bemoan the fact that there is still some scholarly distance between geographers’ activism
and their teaching, as well as between their
research and publishing activities, and that
critical praxis consists of little else beyond
pedagogy and academic writing. They posit
that the structural constraints of the desire to
6
maintain the power of the academy in knowledge production and the desire to shape the
education system for the purposes of the neoliberal status quo work to delimit and limit the
work of radical/critical geographers. Under
such conditions, an activist geography entails
making certain political choices or committing
to certain kinds of action (Pain, 2003), where
commitment is to a moral and political
philosophy of social justice, and research is
directed both towards conforming to that
commitment and towards helping to realize
the values that lie at its root (see also action
research).
pr
actor-network theory (ANT)
An analytical approach that takes the world to be composed of associations of heterogeneous
elements that its task it is to trace. What became known as ANT emerged out of work
being done within Science and Technology
Studies (STS) during the 1980s by a group
of scholars including, most notably, Bruno
Latour, Michael Callon and John Law.
Drawing on a diversity of conceptual influences ranging from the relational thought of
philosopher of science Michel Serres and materialized post-structuralism of philosophers
Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to the
practice-centred ethnomethodology of sociologist Harold Garfinkel and the narrative
semiotics of Algirdas Greimas, these authors
together produced the basis of a thoroughly
empirical philosophy (Mol, 2002) that has
now established itself as a serious alternative
to more established social theories.
Latour (2005) suggests that what ANT
offers as a ‘sociology of association’ is an uncertainty as to ‘what counts’ in a given situation, which stands in marked contrast to the
approach of traditional ‘sociologies of the social’, where the salient factors are more or less
determined in advance. The objective of ANT
is thus to give things some room to express
themselves such that the investigator can ‘follow the actors’ (to quote an oft-quoted ANT
rule of method), letting them define for themselves what is or is not important. In practice,
of course, such aspirations are profoundly difficult to operationalize, meaning that ANT
studies rarely start from a completely blank
slate and instead tend to repeatedly draw attention to a number of features of the world
that are usually downplayed or ignored in classic social science accounts. This has led Law
(1994) to suggest that ANT is perhaps better
thought of as a ‘sensibility’ than a theory per se,
an orientation to the world that brings certain
ADAPTATION
characteristics into view. Most notably, these
include (1) the constitutive role of non-humans in
the fabric of social life. Whether it is as ‘quasiobjects’ around which groups form, ‘matters
of concern’ that animate sociotechnical controversies or ‘immutable mobiles’ through
which knowledge travels in the durable guise
of techniques and technologies, ANT takes
things to be lively, interesting and important.
This move can be seen as restoring agency to
non-humans as long as it is appreciated that
(2) agency is distributed, which is to say that it is
a relational effect that is the outcome of the
assemblage of all sorts of social and material
bits and pieces. It is these actor networks that
get things done, not subjects or objects in
isolation. Actors are thus networks and vice
versa, hence the significance of the always hyphenated ‘actor-network theory’. Making and
maintaining actor-networks takes work and
effort that is often overlooked by social scientists. Callon (1986) terms this mundane but
necessary activity the ‘process of translation’,
within which he elaborates four distinctive
movements. This concern with the work of
the world also helps to explain the ongoing
attraction of sociotechnical controversies to
ANT practitioners as sites not only of political
significance, but also where science and society can be observed in real time.
Advocates of ANT often express modesty
and caution regarding how far the findings of
their specific case studies might be extended.
However, the approach itself offers a radical
challenge to the organizing binaries of modernity, including nature and culture, technology and society, non-human and human and
so on. Viewed from an ANT perspective, these
are, at best, the outcomes of a whole range of
activities (as opposed to the appropriate starting points for action or analysis). At worst,
they are political shortcuts that serve to bypass
the due democratic consideration that our collective ‘matter of concerns’ deserve.
With its combination of a transferable
toolkit of methods and far reaching conceptual
implications, it is perhaps not surprising that
ANT has begun to travel widely, far beyond
the laboratories where it started into fields as
various as art, law and economics. In geography, the particular appeal of ANT has been
that it speaks to two of the discipline’s most
long-standing concerns. On the one hand,
the approach has proved helpful to those seeking to enrich and enliven understanding of
the relationships between humans and nonhumans whether coded ‘technological’ (e.g.
Bingham, 1996) or ‘natural’ (e.g. Whatmore,
2002a; Hinchliffe, 2007). On the other hand,
ANT’s tendency to at once ‘localise the global’
and ‘redistribute the local’ (Latour, 2005) has
been both employed and extended by geographers seeking to understand how action at
a distance is achieved in a variety of contexts
(e.g. Thrift, 2005b; Murdoch, 2005).
Despite internal debates about everything
from the appropriateness of the term (Latour,
2005) to whether we are now ‘after ANT’
(Law and Hassard, 1999), there can be little
doubt that the sensibility, and probably the
term, is here to stay – if still very much a
work in progress. One indication of this is the
fact that there now exist a number of standard
criticisms of ANT. These include the charges
that it ignores the structuring effects of such
classic sociological categories as race, class
and gender and that it underplays the influence of power in society. Whether such dissenting voices represent valid concerns or are
an indication of the challenge that ANT poses
to traditional social science thinking is a matter of judgement. More significant, perhaps,
for the future of ANT is that a number of its
most influential figures have begun to address
such criticisms in more or less direct ways,
armed with a newly identified set of antecedents (including Gabriel Tarde, John Dewey
and Alfred North Whitehead). Prompted in
part by contemporary work around the edges
of ANT, such as the cosmopolitical thinking of
the Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle
Stengers (2000) and the ‘politics of what’ promoted by Dutch philosopher Annemarie Mol,
recent work in the field is concerned not only
with how the world is made, unmade and
remade, but also with the better and worse
ways in which the social is and might
be reassembled. Whether this marks the start
of a ‘normative turn’ for ANT it is too early
to tell, but will be worth following.
nb
Suggested reading
Law and Hetherington (2000); Latour (2005).
adaptation Derived from Darwinian and evolutionary theory (cf. darwinism; lamarckianism), adaptation is an enormously influential
metaphor for thinking about the relations between populations (human and non-human)
and their environment (Sayer, 1979). It is a
concept with a long and robust life in the
biological and social sciences. Adaptation is
rooted in the question of survival, and specifically of populations in relation to the biological
environments that they inhabit (Holling,
1973). Adaptation refers to the changes in
7
AEROTROPOLIS
gene frequencies that confer reproductive
advantage to a population in specific environments, and to physiological and sociocultural
changes that enhance individual fitness and
well-being.
Adaptation has a currency in the social sciences through the organic analogy – the idea
that social systems are forms of living systems
in which processes of adaptation inhere (Slobodkin and Rappaport, 1974). In geography,
cultural and human ecology drew heavily
on biological and adaptive thinking by seeing
social development in terms of human niches,
adaptive radiation and human ecological succession (see Watts, 1983b). Some of the more
sophisticated work in cultural ecology
(Nietschmann, 1973) drew upon the work of
Rappaport (1979), Wilden (1972) and Bateson (1972), who employed systems theory (cf.
systems analysis), cybernetics and ecosystems modelling as a way of describing the
structure of adaptation in peasant and tribal
societies. Here, adaptation refers to
the ‘processes by which living systems maintain homeostasis in the face of short-term
environmental fluctuations and by transforming their own structures through long-term
non-reversing changes in the composition
and structure of their environments as well’
(Rappaport, 1979, p. 145). There is a structure
to adaptive processes by which individuals
and populations respond, in the first instance,
flexibly with limited deployments of resources
and over time deeper more structural (and
less reversible) adaptive responses follow.
Maladapation in this account refers to processes – pathologies – by which an orderly pattern of response is compromised or prevented.
In social systems, these pathologies emerge
from the complex ordering of societies.
Cultural ecology and ecological anthropology
focused especially on rural societies in the
third world to demonstrate that various aspects of their cultural and religious life fulfilled
adaptive functions. Adaptation has also been
employed however by sociologists, geographers
and ethnographers in contemporary urban
settings as a way of describing how individuals,
households and communities respond to and
cope with new experiences (migration, poverty, violence) and settings (the city, the
prison). In the human sciences, the term
‘adaptation’ has, however, always been saddled
with the baggage of structural functionalism on the one hand and biological reductionism on the other (Watts, 1983b). Much of the
new work on risk and vulnerability – whether
to global climate change or the resurgence of
8
infectious diseases – often deploys the language
or intellectual architecture of adaptation. mw
aerotropolis A term introduced by Kasarda
(2000) referring to urban developments focused on major airports, which increasingly
act as major economic centres and urban
development, for both aeronautical- and nonaeronautical-related activities: Kasarda likens
them to traditional central business districts, with important retail, hotel, entertainment and conference facilities, drawing on
wider clienteles than those who fly into the airport at the development’s core. Increasingly,
land-use planning focuses on airports as
major economic development cores.
rjj
Suggested reading
http://www.aerotropolis.com/aerotropolis.html
affect The intensive capacities of a body to
affect (through an affection) and be affected
(as a result of modifications). The concept is
used to describe unformed and unstructured
intensities that, although not necessarily experienced by or possessed by a subject, correspond to the passage from one bodily state
to another and are therefore analysable in
terms of their effects (McCormack, 2003). In
contemporary human geography, there is no
single or stable cultural-theoretical vocabulary
to describe affect. It is possible to identify at
least five attempts to engage with affects as
diffuse intensities that in their ambiguity lie
at the very edge of semantic availability: work
animated by ideas of performance; the psychology of Silvan Tomkins; neo-darwinism; Gilles
Deleuze’s ethological re-workings of Baruch
Spinoza; and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis
(see psychoanalytic theory) (Thrift, 2004a).
Within these five versions, the most
in-depth has been the engagement of nonrepresentational theory with Deleuze’s creative encounter with the term affectus in the
work of the seventeenth-century philosopher
Baruch Spinoza (which had been translated as
‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’). This begins from an
analytic distinction between affect and other
related modalities, including emotion and
feeling (Anderson, 2006b), and is organized
around two claims. First, affects can be described as impersonal or pre-personal, as they
do not necessarily belong to a subject or inhabit a space between an interpretative subject
and an interpreted object. Rather, affects can
be understood as autonomous, in that they are
composed in and circulate through materially
heterogeneous assemblages. This retains the
AFRICA (IDEA OF)
connotation that affects come from elsewhere
to effect a subject or self. Second, affect is
equivalent to intensity in that it does not function like a system of signification, but constitutes a movement of qualitative difference.
The relationship between the circulation and
distribution of affects and signification is not,
therefore, one of conformity or correspondence, but one of resonation or interference.
Unlike other versions of what affect is and
does, non-representational theory’s engagement with the term is based on a distinction
between affect and emotion – where emotion
is understood as the socio-linguistic fixing
of intensity that thereafter comes to be defined
as personal (cf. emotional geography). The
term ‘affect’ has thus been central to nonrepresentational theory’s break with signifying
or structuralizing versions of culture. The
difficulties that affect poses for social analysis –
how to describe the circulation and distribution of intensities – have been engaged
through the creation of new modes of witnessing that learn to pay attention to the inchoate,
processual, life of spaces and places (Dewsbury, 2003). Alongside this development of
new methodological repertories has been a
growing recognition that understanding the
circulation and distribution of affect is central
to engagements with a contemporary political
moment in which affect has emerged as an
object of contemporary forms of biopower
and biopolitics (Thrift, 2004a). In response,
a range of work has begun to articulate and
exemplify the goals and techniques of a spatial
politics and/or ethics that aims to inventively
respond to and intervene in the ongoing composition of spaces of affect (McCormack,
2003).
ba
Suggested reading
McCormack (2003); Thrift (2004a).
Africa (idea of) Geography, as an institutionalized field of knowledge, figures centrally
in both the history of informal and formal
colonial rule in Africa and in the ways in
which Africa came to be represented in the
West – and in turn how the West has represented itself to itself – especially from the
eighteenth century onwards. In his important
and controversial book Orientalism (2003
[1978]), Edward Said reveals how ideas and
knowledge, while complex and unstable, are
always inseparable from systems of subjection.
In his case, orientalism represents a body
of European knowledge, a geography of the
Orient, which not only helped construct an
imperial vision of particular places and subjects but displaced other voices, and indeed
had material consequences as such ideas became the basis for forms of rule. In an almost
identical fashion, the history of geographical
scholarship, and of academic geography,
in particular in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, was closely tied to the
European imperial mission in Africa. The
Royal Geographical Society (RGS) was
formed in 1830 as an outgrowth of the Africa
Association, and Britain’s overseas expansion
in the nineteenth century (in which Africa figured prominently, especially after 1870) was
by and large orchestrated through the RGS.
Similarly, the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1)
directly stimulated an increase in French geographical societies, which helped sustain a coherent political doctrine of colonial expansion,
not least in Africa. At the Second International
Congress of Geographical Sciences held
in 1875, and attended by the president of the
French Republic, knowledge and conquest
of the Earth were seen as an obligation,
and geography provided the philosophical
justification.
Africa was central to, and to a degree constitutive of, the troika of geography, race and
empire. European geography helped create or,
more properly, invent a sort of Africanism,
and relatedly a particular set of tropical imaginaries or visions embodied in the emergent
field of tropical geography (see tropicality).
Equally, Africa played its part in the debates
within geography over environmental determinism, race and civilization, and in what
Livingstone called the moral economy of climate; Africa helped invent geography. The
iconography of light and darkness portrayed
the European penetration of Africa as simultaneously a process of domination, enlightenment and liberation. Geography helped make
Africa ‘dark’ in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, as it simultaneously assisted in the
means (military cartography) by which the darkness was to be lifted by the mission civilisatrice. In
a sense, then, the study of Africa lay at the heart
of academic geography from its inception.
The idea of Africa and its genealogical provenance in the West is far too complex to be
sketched here. Suffice to say that Stanley
Crouch is quite right when he writes that
Africa is ‘one of the centerpieces of fantasy of
our time’ (Crouch, 1990). Africa was after all, in
the words of Joseph Conrad’s Marlow in Heart
of darkness (2007 [1902]), ‘like travelling back to
the earliest beginnings of the world’. It is no
surprise that one of the most important texts
9
AFRICA (IDEA OF)
on contemporary Africa – Achille Mbembe’s
Postcolony (2001) – begins with the statement
that Africa stands as the ‘supreme receptacle’
of the West’s obsession with ‘absence’, ‘non
being’ – in short, ‘nothingness’ (p. 4). The
Hegelian idea that Africa was a space without
history has been elaborated so that Africa’s
special feature is ‘nothing at all’. It is against
this sort of dehistoricization that so much intellectual effort has been put – by African intellectuals in particular – to account for another idea
of Africa, one that approaches what Bayart
(1993) calls ‘the true historicity of African
societies’.
A history of geographers and geographical
practice in the service of colonial rule in Africa
has yet to be written, but it is quite clear that
geographical ideas, most obviously land use
and agrarian change, population growth and
mobility, and environmental conservation, run
through the period from the imperial partitioning of Africa in the 1870s to the first wave of
independence in 1960. Richard Grove (1993)
has traced, for example, early conservation
thinking in the Cape in southern Africa to
the 1811–44 period, which had produced a
conservation structure of government intervention by 1888, driven by a triad of interests:
scientific botany, the white settler community
and government concerns for security. This
tradition of land use and conservation was
inherited by various colonial officials in
Africa, and reappeared across much of western and southern Africa in the 1930s in a
debate over population growth, deforestation
and the threat of soil erosion. In colonial
British West Africa, the rise of a populist
sentiment in agricultural policy singing the
praises of the smallholder and the African
peasant is very much part of the historiography of cultural ecological thinking in geography as a whole (see cultural ecology).
The relevance of geography’s concern with
land use and human ecology for colonial
planning in Africa (and elsewhere) was vastly
enhanced by what one might call the ‘invention
of development’ in the late colonial period.
While the word ‘development’ came into the
English language in the eighteenth century
with its root sense of unfolding, and was subsequently shaped by the Darwinian revolution
a century later, development understood as
a preoccupation of public and international
policy to improve welfare and to produce governable subjects is of much more recent provenance. Development as a set of ideas and
practices was, in short, the product of the
transformation of the colonial world into the
10
independent developing world in the postwar
period. Africa, for example, only became
an object of planned development after the
Depression of the 1930s. The British Colonial
Development and Welfare Act (1940) and the
French Investment Fund for Economic and
Social Development (1946) promoted modernization in Africa through enhanced imperial investment against the backdrop of growing
nationalist sentiments. After 1945, the imperial desire to address development and welfare
had a strong agrarian focus, specifically productivity through mechanization, settlement
schemes and various sorts of state interventions (marketing reform, co-operatives), all of
which attracted a good deal of geographical
attention. Growing commercialization in the
peasant sector and new patterns of population
mobility and demographic growth (expressed
largely in a concern with the disruptive consequences of urbanization and rural–urban
migration) pointed to land use as a central
pivot of geographical study.
Geography was a central practical field in
the mapping of the continent. At the Treaty
of Berlin (1895) when Africa was partitioned,
the maps produced by geographers were for
the most part incomplete and inadequate. But
the harnessing of cartography to the colonial
project was an indispensable component of
colonial rule and the exercise of power. Cadastral surveys were the ground on which Native
Authorities and tax collection were to be
based, but fully cadastral mapping proved either too expensive or too political. New critical
studies in cartography have provided important accounts of the institutionalized role
of mapping in colonial (and post-colonial)
rule and its use as an exercise of power
(see cartographic reason; cartography).
The mapping of Africa is still ongoing and
the delimitation of new territories (whether
states, local government areas or chieftaincies)
remains a complex process, wrapped up with
state power and forms of representation that
are not captured by the purported objective
qualities of scientific map production.
Colonial rule in Africa proved to be relatively short, little more than one lifetime
long, and produced neither mature capitalism
nor a standard grid of imperial rule. Whether
settler colonies (Kenya), peasant-based trade
economies (Senegal) or mine-labour reserves
(Zaire), in the 1960s virtually all the emerging
independent African states shared a common
imperial legacy: the single-commodity economy. African economies were one-horse
towns, hitched to the world market through
AFRICA (IDEA OF)
primary export commodities such as cotton,
copper and cocoa. However distorted or neocolonial their national economies, African
hopes and expectations at independence were
high – indeed, in some sense almost euphoric.
The heady vision of Kwame Nkrumah – of
a black Africa utilizing the central-planning
experience of the Soviet Union to industrialize
rapidly and overcome poverty, ignorance and
disease – captured the popular imagination.
Indeed, among the first generation of African
leaders, irrespective of their political stripe,
there was an infatuation with national plans
and ambitious long-term planning. Health,
education and infrastructure were heavily
funded (typically aided and abetted by technical foreign assistance), and government
activities were centralized and expanded to
facilitate state-led modernization. In spite of
the fact that state agencies extracted surpluses
from the agrarian sector – peasant production
remained the bedrock of most independent
states – to sustain import-substitution and
industrialization (as well as a good deal of
rent-seeking and corruption by elites), African
economies performed quite well in the 1960s,
buoyed by soaring commodity prices (especially after 1967).
Not surprisingly, much of the geographical
scholarship of the 1960s was framed by some
variant of modernization theory, or at the very
least by the presumption that the processes of
modernity (commercialization, urbanization
and transportation) were shaping indigenous
institutions and practices. From the onset of
the 1970s, the complacency and optimism of
the 1960s appeared decidedly on the wane.
Mounting US deficits, the devaluation of the
dollar and the emergence of floating exchange
rates marked the demise of the postwar
Bretton Woods financial order. The restructuring of the financial system coincided with
the crisis of the three F’s (price increases in
fuel, fertilizer and food) in 1972–3, which
marked a serious deterioration in Africa’s
terms of trade. Ironically, the oil crisis also
contained a solution. Between 1974 and
1979, the balance-of-payments problems of
many African states (which faced not only a
quadrupling of oil prices but a general price
inflation for imported goods and a sluggish
demand for primary commodities) was dealt
with through expansionary adjustment: in
other words, through borrowing from banks
eager to recycle petrodollars or from the special facilities established by the international
monetary fund (imf) and the World Bank.
Expansionary adjustment, however, deepened
two already problematic tendencies in African
political economies. The first was to enhance
the politics of public-sector expansion, contributing to waste, inefficiency and the growing privatization of the public purse. The
second was to further lubricate the political
machinery, which produced uneconomic
investments with cheaply borrowed funds.
The crisis of the 1970s helped to precipitate
two major changes in the institutional and theoretical climate of Africanist geography. On the
one hand, the spectre of famine in the Sahel and
the Horn drew increased foreign assistance to
sub-Saharan Africa as a whole and to rural development in particular. To the extent that
this support translated into research and programming activities in the donor countries,
academics and consultants were drawn into development and applied work, in the USA
through USAID, in the UK through the Ministry of Overseas Development, and in France
through the Office de la Recherche Scientifique
et Technique d’Outre-Mer (ORSTOM). In the
USA in particular, USAID-funded projects permitted some campuses to expand their Africanist activities and encouraged some geographers
to systematically explore a number of questions
relating to drought, food security and rural resource use. On the other, the bleak prospects for
Africa in the face of a world recession and
deteriorating terms of trade, prospects that contributed to the call for a new international economic order in the first part of the 1970s, were
not unrelated to the growing critique of marketoriented modernization theory and the early
growth theorists, and to the gradual emergence,
beginning in the late 1960s, of radical dependency theory, and subsequently of Marxistinspired development theory (Watts, 1983a).
The precipitous collapse in the 1980s
brought on by drought, famine, AIDS, bankruptcy, civil strife, corruption, the conflation
of troubles, was matched by an equally
dramatic rise of neo-liberal theory (see neoliberalism) – what John Toye (1987) has
called the counterrevolution in development
theory. Championing the powers of free and
competitive markets – and by extension the
assault on the state-led post-colonial development strategies of most African states – while
popular in the halls and offices of the World
Bank and various development agencies, was
an object of considerable theoretical debate.
Some geographical scholarship had certainly
been critical of state-initiated development
schemes, but the myopic prescriptions for
free markets were properly criticized for their
impact on the poor, for their dismissal of the
11
AGEING
institutional prerequisites for market capitalism and as a basis for sustained accumulation.
At the same time, the adjustment had devastating consequences on university education
in Africa, with the result that research by
African geographers was seriously compromised. African scholarship generally withered
to the point of collapse as faculties faced the
drying up of research monies, compounded by
declining real wages. Many academics were
compelled to engage in second occupations.
The most active African geographers were
those who were based outside of the continent
or who acted as consultants to international
development agencies.
By the new millennium two other issues
had, in a curious way, come back to haunt
Africa, raising difficult and profound questions about the way Africa is, and has been,
inscribed through Western discourse. One is
rooted in debates that stretch back to the
end of the eighteenth century and the other
is relatively new. The Malthusian spectre (see
malthusian model) hangs over the continent
and has pride of place in the major policy
documents of global development agencies.
Some geographers, working largely within a
Boserupian problematic (see boserup thesis),
had explored the relations between demographic pressure and land use during the
1980s, but the new demographic debate is
driven increasingly by the presumption of
persistently high fertility rates (in some cases
over 4 per cent per annum), rapid environmental degradation (the two are seen to be
organically linked) and what is widely held to
be the extraordinarily bleak economic future
in the short term for most African economies.
AIDS, conversely, is of late-twentieth-century
provenance, but its history has been, from
its inception, linked (often falsely) to Africa.
While the statistics are contested on virtually
every front, work by geographers has begun
to draw out the patterns and consequences
of terrifyingly high rural and urban infection
rates in the east and central African arc.
Whether the human geography of Africa has
approached Edward Said’s goal to produce
a geography of African historical experience
remains an open question. What the most compelling geographies of the 1980s and 1990s
accomplished, nonetheless, was the addition
of complexity to our understanding of African
places and spaces (Hart, 2003; Moore, 2005).
Since 2000, there is no question that Africa has
gained a newfound international visibility.
Driven in part by the debt question and the
efforts of the likes of Bono, Gordon Brown in
12
his time at the British Exchequer, the New
Economic Partnership for Africa (NEPAD),
and the so-called anti-globalization movement, Africa is now the focus of substantial
global concern. The conjuncture of a number
of forces have brought the continent to a sort of
impasse: the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the limited
success of the austerity and adjustment reforms, a continuing decline in their share of
world trade and foreign direct investment, the
failure to meet the 2005 Millennium Goals,
and the rise of massive cities (mega-cities)
dominated by slums. The Commission on Africa (‘Blair Report’) and the US Council of
Foreign Relations Task Force on Africa
Report – both released in 2005 – speak in quite
different registers to the challenges that geographical scholarship and practice must speak
to. The growing significance of Africa in US
‘energy security’, in which the Gulf of Guinea
figures so centrally, is one area in which the
long-standing interest of geographers in strategic resources will continue to develop.
mw
Suggested reading
Cooper (2003); Ferguson (2006); Mamdani
(1995).
ageing The process of becoming chronologically older, something affecting all lifeforms,
but which in the social sciences becomes significant to the study of human populations
and their internal differentiation. population
geography reconstructs the age profiles of
populations within areas, noting the relative
sizes of different age cohorts, and examining
the demographic transition ensuing if fertility and mortality rates both decline and prompt
the overall ageing of a population. This latter
phenomenon is an oft-remarked feature of
the more-developed world, with implications
such as the increasing tax burden placed on
the working age cohort, allied to increasing
needs for specialist social, health and personal
services for the growing elderly cohort
(e.g. Andrews and Phillips, 2005).
Other researchers directly tackle the worlds
and experiences of older people. While the
broad field of gerontology (the study of such
people) has prioritized a ‘medical model’, concentrating on the biological facts of ‘senescence’ (reduced mobility, deteriorating sight
etc.), social scientists – looking to social gerontology – increasingly favour a ‘social model’,
emphasizing instead society’s progressive
withdrawal from and even exclusion of its
older members (as in the Western orthodoxy
of ‘retiring’ people at c. 60–70 years). The
AGENT-BASED MODELLING
social model acknowledges ageism as discriminatory ideas and practices directed at people
solely because of their age, specifically when
this is old age, the latter being influenced by
negative portrayals involving ‘impotency, ugliness, mental decline, . . . uselessness, isolation, poverty and depression’ (Vincent,
1999, p. 141). Countering such ageism, it is
argued that many societies historically and beyond the West respond respectfully to their
elders, regarding them as sources of wisdom,
balanced judgement and effective political
leadership. Many older people shatter the
stereotypes, moreover, and are healthy, active
and able to lead lives that are personally fulfilling and socially worthwhile. A tension
nonetheless arises between the relative bleakness of the social model (e.g. Vincent, 1999),
stressing the iniquities pressing on elder life,
and a vision of the ‘freedoms’ now enjoyed by
many older people as consumers buying into
a dizzying variety of cultural practices (e.g.
Gilleard and Higgs, 2000). Much depends
on other dimensions of social being, such as
class, ethnicity and gender, which differentially impact the life experiences of different
elderly population segments, and there is also
an emerging distinction between the ‘younger
old’ and the ‘older old’ (the latter, 85 þ years,
now being seen as the real ‘other’ emblematic of
old age: Gilleard and Higgs, 2000, pp. 198–9).
These issues have all figured in geographical
scholarship on ageing and elderly people. While
children have recently attracted concerted
geographical research attention, parallel work
on elderly people remains fragmented, lodged
in different corners of social, cultural, economic, population and medical geographies
and various studies of disability. Some attempts have been made to delineate an overall
field of ‘gerontological geography’ (Golant,
1979; Warnes, 1990), and to examine the intersections of ageism, other bases of identity and
the socio-spatial worlds of old age (Laws, 1993;
Harper and Laws, 1995; Pain, Mowl and
Talbot, 2000). More specific studies have
considered: the migration patterns traced out
by elderly people, notably to ‘amenity destinations’ in coastal areas, rural ‘idylls’ and even
purpose-built ‘retirement villages’ (Rogers,
1992); the daily activity spaces of elderly
people, including the possible diminishing of
such spaces attendant on both increasing bodily frailty and loss of social roles (Golant,
1984); the everyday environmental experience
of elderly people in residential neighbourhoods, particularly those of the city, including
the meanings and memories attaching to the
quite mundane, peopled, object-filled places
all around them (Rowles, 1978; Golant,
1984); and the growth of ‘nursing homes’
of different kinds, with definite locational and
internal spatial configurations, which can be
critiqued as zones of exclusion, putting boundaries between dependent elderly people and the
rest of the population (Rowles, 1979; Phillips,
Vincent and Blacksell, 1988).
cpp
Suggested reading
Andrews and Phillips (2005); Golant (1984);
Harper and Laws (1995); Rowles (1978).
agent-based modelling An approach to
understanding decision-making and its consequences through simulation models, which
require substantial computing power. Agentbased models recognize the interconnections
and spatial dependencies among people and
places: a large number of agents make decisions that affect others who respond in a
dynamic process, the outcomes of which can
be identified and – in geographical applications – mapped (cf. game theory). The collective outcomes may be unexpected, even
when the individual agents’ decision-making
criteria are fairly simple (cf. rational choice
theory). Complex patterns ‘emerge’ from the
interaction of a large number of simple decisions, which is one of the hallmarks of the
burgeoning science of complexity (Holland,
1995). In this sense, agent-based modelling
conceives of the world as being generated
from the bottom up, in contrast to an earlier
generation of models in the social sciences
which were aggregative, working from the top
down (as in gravity models).
A classic agent-based model of spatial patterns and processes was developed by Schelling’s (1971) work on ethnic residential
segregation. His agents were households
that had preferences for the type of neighbourhood in which they lived – such as for whites
that ‘no more than half of their immediate
neighbours should be black’. Individuals
were randomly distributed across a chequerboard representation of an urban environment, and those whose situation did not
match their preferences sought moves to vacancies where the criteria were met. Schelling
showed that the equilibrium solution would
almost certainly be a greater level of segregation than expressed in the preferences – for
example, although whites would be content if
their neighbourhoods were 50 per cent black,
most of them would live in areas where whites
were in a large majority. With increases in
13
AGGLOMERATION
computing power much more complex models
can be run, which continue to provide the
somewhat counter-intuitive result that segregation is greater than people’s individual preferences suggest (Fossett, 2006).
Agent-based modelling is widely used in the
social sciences – in, for example, modelling the
spread of diseases (cf. epidemiology), trafficgeneration, land use and land cover
change, the diffusion of ideas, migration,
crowding in small spaces and inter-firm competition (see http://www.econ.iastate.edu/
tesfatsi/ace.htm).
rj
Suggested reading
Batty (2005); Testfatsion and Judd (2006).
agglomeration The association of productive activities in close proximity to one another.
Agglomeration typically gives rise to external
economies associated with the collective use of
the infrastructure of transportation, communication facilities and other services.
Historically, there has been a tendency for economic activity to concentrate spatially, the large
markets associated with metropolitan areas adding to the external cost advantages. Agglomeration also facilitates the rapid circulation of
capital, commodities and labour. In some circumstances, decentralization may counter
agglomerative tendencies; for example, if land
costs and those associated with congestion in the
central area are very high. (See also economies
of scale; economies of scope.)
dms
Suggested reading
Malmberg (1996); Scott (2006).
aggregate travel model A statement, often
expressed as an equation, that predicts some
aspect of travel (e.g. the number of trips or
travel mode) for units (e.g. individuals or
households) aggregated to small areas, often
called ‘traffic analysis zones’. The data are
collected and analysed for these zones, obscuring differences that may exist within zones
and, because zones do not make travel decisions, rendering impossible investigation of
decision-making processes underlying travel.
For example, number of trips generated by a
zone may be predicted as a function of the
zone’s average household income and average
number of vehicles per household. Aggregate
travel models have been fundamental to transportation planning since the 1950s.
sha
Suggested reading
Hanson (1995, esp. chs 1,4,5,6).
14
agrarian question The forms in which capitalist relations transform the agrarian sector,
and the political alliances, struggles and compromises that emerge around different trajectories of agrarian change. The founding
theoretical text in studies of the agrarian question is Karl Kautsky’s The agrarian question,
first published 1899 (but not translated into
English until the 1980s). Kautsky’s focus on
the agrarian question in western Europe rested
on a striking paradox: agriculture (and the
rural) came to assume a political gravity precisely at a moment when its weight in the
economy was waning. Agriculture’s curious
political and strategic significance was framed
by two key processes: the first was the growth
and integration of a world market in agricultural commodities (especially staples) and the
international competition that was its handmaiden; and the second was the birth and
extension into the countryside of various forms
of parliamentary democracy. International
competition in grains was driven not only by
the extension of the agricultural frontier in
the USA, in Argentina, in Russia and in eastern Europe (what Kautsky called the ‘colonies’ and the ‘Oriental despotisms’), but
also by improvements in long-distance shipping, by changes in taste (e.g. from rye to
wheat) and by the inability of domestic grain
production to keep up with demand. As a
consequence of massive new supplies, grain
prices (and rents and profits) fell more or less
steadily from the mid-1870s to 1896 (Konig,
1994). It was precisely during the last quarter
of the nineteenth century when a series of
protectionist and tariff policies in France
(1885), Germany (1879) and elsewhere were
implemented to insulate the farming sector.
New World grain exports were but one expression of the headlong integration of world commodity and capital markets on a scale and with
an intensity then without precedent and, some
would suggest, unrivalled since that period.
Kautsky then devoted much time to the
Prussian Junkers and their efforts to protect
their farm interests. But in reality the structure
of protection only biased the composition of
production in favour of grains (and rye in
particular) grown on the East Elbian estates.
Tariffs provided limited insulation in the protectionist countries, while the likes of England,
The Netherlands and Denmark actually
adopted free trade (Konig, 1994). Protection
did not, and could not, save landlordism but
was, rather, a limited buffer for a newly enfranchised peasant agriculture threatened
by the world market. The competition from
AGRARIAN QUESTION
overseas produce ushered in the first wave of
agricultural protectionism, and in so doing
established the foundations of the European
‘farm problem’, whose political economic repercussions continue to resonate in the halls of
the European Commission, the GATT/WTO
and trade ministries around the world
(Fennell, 1997).
The agrarian question was a product of a
particular political economic conjuncture,
but was made to speak to a number of key
theoretical concerns that arose from Kautsky’s
careful analysis of the consequences of the
European farm crisis: falling prices, rents and
profits coupled with global market integration
and international competition. In brief, he
discovered that: (i) there was no tendency for
the size distribution of farms to change over
time (capitalist enterprises were not simply
displacing peasant farms – indeed, German
statistics showed that middle peasants were
increasing their command of the cultivated
area); (ii) technical efficiency is not a precondition for survivorship (but self-exploitation
might be); and (iii) changes driven by competition and market integration did transform
agriculture, but largely by shaping the production mix of different enterprises, and by
deepening debt-burdens and patterns of
out-migration rather than by radically reconfiguring the size distribution of farms. The
crisis of European peasants and landlords
in the late nineteenth century was ‘resolved’
by intensification (cattle and dairying in particular in a new ecological complex) and by
the appropriation of some farming functions
by capital in processing and agro-industry
(see also Goodman, Sorj and Wilkinson,
1987: see also agro-foodsystem).
Kautsky concluded that industry was the
motor of agricultural development – or, more
properly, agro-industrial capital was – but that
the peculiarities of agriculture, its biological
character and rhythms (see Mann, 1990;
Wells, 1996), coupled with the capacity
for family farms to survive through selfexploitation (i.e. working longer and harder
in effect to depress ‘wage levels’), might hinder
some tendencies; namely, the development of
classical agrarian capitalism. Indeed, agroindustry – which Kautsky saw in the increasing
application of science, technology, and capital
to the food processing, farm input and farm
finance systems – might prefer a non-capitalist
farm sector. In all of these respects – whether
his observations on land and part-time farming, of the folly of land redistribution, his commentary on international competition and
its consequences, or on the means by which
industry does or does not take hold of landbased production – Kautsky’s book was
remarkably forward-looking and prescient.
Terry Byres (1996) has suggested that there
are three agrarian questions. The first, posed
by Engels, refers to the politics of the agrarian
transition in which peasants constitute the
dominant class: What, in other words, are the
politics of the development of agrarian capitalism? The second is about production and the
ways in which market competition drives the forces
of production towards increased yields (in short,
surplus creation on the land). And the third
speaks to accumulation and the flows of surplus, and specifically inter-sectoral linkages between agriculture and manufacture. The latter
Byres calls ‘agrarian transition’, a term that
embraces a number of key moments; namely,
growth, terms of trade, demand for agrarian
products, proletarianization, surplus appropriation and surplus transfer. Byres is concerned
to show that agriculture can contribute to industry without the first two senses of the agrarian question being, as it were, activated, and to
assert the multiplicity of agrarian transitions
(the diversity of ways in which agriculture contributes to capitalist industrialization with
or without ‘full’ development of capitalism
in the countryside). While Byres’ approach
has much to offer, it suffers from a peculiar
narrowness. On the one hand, it is focused on
the internal dynamics of change at the expense
of what we now refer to as globalization.
On the other, the agrarian question for Byres
is something that can be ‘resolved’ (see also
Bernstein, 1996). ‘Resolved’ seems to imply
that once capitalism in agriculture has ‘matured’, or if capitalist industrialization can proceed without agrarian capitalism (‘the social
formation is dominated by industry and the
urban bourgeoisie’), then the agrarian question is somehow dead. This seems curious on
a number of counts, not the least of which is
that the three senses of the agrarian question
are constantly renewed by the contradictory
and uneven development of capitalism itself.
It is for this reason that we return to Kautsky,
since his analysis embraces all three dimensions
of the agrarian question (something seemingly
not acknowledged by Byres) and because he
focused so clearly on substantive issues central
to the current landscape of agro-food systems: globalization, vertical integration, the
importance of biology in food provisioning,
the application of science, the shifts of power
off farm, the intensification of land-based
activities and the new dynamisms associated
15
AGRIBUSINESS
with agro-processing (McMichael, 1996;
Goodman and Watts, 1997). Of course,
Kautsky could not have predicted the molecular revolution and its implications for the
role of intellectual property rights and so on.
But it is an engagement with his work that
remains so central to current studies of
modern agriculture.
The role of socialism also stands in some
tension to the agrarian question. After 1917,
Russian theoreticians of rather different stripes –
for example, Chayanov and Preobrazhensky –
posited a type of socialist agrarian question in
which peasants were collectivized into either
state farms or co-operatives (Viola, 1996),
sometimes in practice through extraordinary
violence and compulsion. There were very
different experiences across the socialist
world as regards the means by which socialist
agricultural surpluses were generated and appropriated by the state (here, for example, the
Soviet Union and China are quite different).
In the same way, the fall of actually existing
socialisms after 1989 produced a circumstance
in which a new sort of agrarian question
emerged as agrarian socialism was decollectivized – in the Chinese case, for example, gradually producing, after 1978, several hundred
million peasants (Zweig, 1997).
Kautsky was, of course, writing towards
the close of an era of protracted crisis for
European agriculture, roughly a quarter of a
century after the incorporation of New World
agriculture frontiers into the world grain
market had provoked the great agrarian depressions of the 1870s and 1880s. A century
later, during a period in which farming and
transportation technologies, diet and agricultural commodity markets are all in flux, the
questions of competition, shifting terms of
trade for agriculture and subsidies remain
politically central in the debates over the European Union, GATT and the neo-liberal reforms currently sweeping through the third
world. Like the 1870s and 1880s, the current
phase of agricultural restructuring in the
periphery is also marked (sometimes exaggeratedly so) by a phase of ‘democratization’
(Kohli, 1994; Fox, 1995: cf. core–periphery
model). Agrarian parallels at the ‘centre’ can
be found in agriculture’s reluctant initiation
into the GATT/WTO trade liberalization
agreement, albeit with a welter of safeguards
and, relatedly, the dogged rearguard action
being fought by western European farmers
against further attempts to renegotiate the
postwar agricultural settlement, which reached
its protectionist apotheosis in the Common
16
Agricultural Policy (CAP) during the 1980s.
It is a picture clouded, however, by the strange
bedfellows that the CAP has joined in opposition, including environmentalists, food safety
activists, animal liberationists, bird watchers,
rural preservationists and neo-conservative
free trade marketeers – all of which is to say
that if agrarian restructuring has taken on
global dimensions, it is riddled with unevenness and inequalities (and here claims that the
agrarian question is ‘dead’ appear rather curious). The rules of the game may be changing,
but the WTO playing field is tilted heavily
in favour of the OECD sponsors of this
neo-liberal spectacle.
mw
Suggested reading
Bobrow-Strain (2007).
agribusiness A term coined by economists
Davis and Goldberg (1957, p. 3) at the
Harvard Business School, who defined it as
the sum total of all operations involved in the
manufacture and distribution of farm supplies; production operations on the farm;
storage; processing and distribution of farm
commodities and items made from them.
The term emphasizes the increasingly systemic character of food production, in which
the activities of farming are integrated into a
much larger industrial complex, including the
manufacture and marketing of technological
inputs and of processed food products, under
highly concentrated forms of corporate ownership and management. Agribusiness has
since become used in much looser and more
ideologically loaded ways as shorthand, on the
Left, for the domination of capitalist corporations in the agro-food industry and, on the
Right, for the role of] in the modernization of
food production capacities and practices. In
this looser sense it has become a synonym of
the industrialization of the agro-food system.
The classic model of agribusiness centres
on the vertical integration of all stages in
the food production process, in which the
manufacture and marketing of technological
farm inputs, farming and food processing are
controlled by a single agro-food corporation.
This model was based largely on the US
experience, where corporations such as Cargill
and Tenneco gained control of particular
commodity chains through a combination
of direct investment, subsidiary companies
and contracting relationships. Numerous
studies in the 1970s drew attention to its
AGRICULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
significance for commodities such as fresh
fruit and vegetables, broiler chickens and
sugar cane (e.g. Friedland et al., 1981). It
should be noted that a rival term, ‘la complexe
agro-alimentaire’, coined contemporaneously
in the French research literature, proposed a
much more diffuse model of the industrial
development of the agro-food complex (e.g.
Allaire and Boyer, 1995).
The ‘US school’ of agribusiness research
had considerable influence over the development of agricultural geography in the
English-speaking world, particularly in the
1980s. But it has increasingly attracted criticism both because of a disenchantment with
its theoretical debt to systems theory, and
because vertical integration proved too empirically specific to support the larger claims
of agribusiness as a general model of food
production today (Whatmore, 2002b).
sw
agricultural geography In the second half
of the twentieth century, agricultural geography has undergone profound changes, as
has its subject. Until the 1950s, agricultural
geography was a subset of economic geography, concerned with the spatial distribution
of agricultural activity and focusing on variations and changes in the pattern of agricultural land use and their classification at a
variety of scales (see also farming). As the
economic significance of agriculture declined
in terms of the sector’s contribution to GDP
and employment, particularly in advanced
industrial countries, so interest in the subject
diminished in the geographical research
community. Thus, by the end of the 1980s,
leading practitioners were advocating the end
of agricultural geography and the dawn of a
‘geography of food’ (see also food, geography of).
The importation of new theoretical
concepts from political economy and a
shift in the substantive focus of study to the
agro-food system as a whole, rather than
farming as a self-contained activity, renewed
the field of agricultural geography. Research
agendas framed in terms of the agro-food system (see, e.g., Marsden, Munton, Whatmore
and Little, 1986), set the parameters for a
new phase of geographical interest; the initial
momentum for the shift came from encounters with interdisciplinary networks and ideas,
notably those of rural sociology, as much
as with conversations with the broader geographical community.
By the early 1990s, researchers had taken
the field beyond the farm gate in two direc-
tions. First, it had expanded to the wider
organization of capital accumulation in the
agricultural and food industries, focusing on
the social, economic and technological ties
between three sets of industrial activities:
food raising (i.e. farming), agricultural technology products and services, and food processing and retailing. Second, it now
encompassed the regulatory infrastructure
underpinning these activities, focusing on
the political and policy processes by which
national and supranational state agencies
intervene in agricultural practices and food
markets.
The contemporary agro-food system is a
composite of these various perspectives and
concepts (see Millstone and Lang, 2003), as
depicted in the accompanying figure. The figure illustrates the enlargement of the scope of
agricultural geography from a focus primarily
on activities taking place on the farm itself (B)
to one spanning the diverse sites and activities
of food production and consumption (A–D).
In addition to emulating economic geography’s enduring emphasis on transnational
corporations, this broadening focus of agricultural geography includes particular attention to the regulatory agencies and processes
that are so prominent in the organization of
advanced industrial food production and consumption (see Marsden, Munton, Whatmore
and Little, 2000).
Research within this political economy
tradition has been driven by two contradictory
impulses. On the one hand, it has sought to
treat agriculture and food production as just
another industrial sector, like cars or steel,
thus aligning it much more closely with the
broader community of industrial geography
and its concerns with globalization, corporate capitalism and the so-called transition
from fordism to post-fordism. Indeed,
many concerns associated with the agrarian
question, such as the uneven process of
capitalist development, came to preoccupy
industrial geographers in the past decade.
On the other hand, researchers have sought
to make sense of the distinctive features of
the industrial organization of farming that
persist, particularly the adaptive resilience of
family and peasant forms of production
(e.g. Whatmore, 1991; Watts, 1994a), and
their intimate relationship with rural landscapes and national historiographies, which
magnifies their political significance in the
electoral and policy processes of developed
and developing countries to this day (e.g.
Moore, 2005).
17
18
A
AGRI-TECHNOLOGIES
INDUSTRY
MACHINERY
TECHNOLOGIES
(e.g. harvesters,
dairy equipment)
CHEMICAL
TECHNOLOGIES
(e.g. fertilizers,
pesticides)
BIOLOGICAL
TECHNOLOGIES
(e.g. genetically
engineered
crops and
livestock)
EXTENSION
AGENCIES
– RETAIL
– ADVISORY
– CREDIT
(performed
by
commercial,
state and
cooperative
agencies)
B
C
FARMING
INDUSTRY
FOOD
INDUSTRY
REGULATORY
AGENCIES
LAND/
PROPERTY
INTERESTS
– quality
standard
authorities
FARM
B
U
S
I
N
E
S
S
E
S
MANUFACTURING
FOOD
PROCESSING
FOOD
PACKAGING
REGULATORY
AGENCIES
– intervention
apparatus
FOOD
RETAILING
CATERING
(commercial
food
preparation)
FARM/
PROPERTY
SERVICING
AGENCIES
agricultural geography (reproduced from
Whatmore, 2002a, p. 13)
F
O
O
D
– food quality/
safety standards
– health/nutrition
policy
– marketing
boards
(primarily
state
agencies)
D
– AID/food
security
measures
(primarily
state
agencies)
HOUSEHOLD
LABOUR
(domestic
food
preparation)
C
O
N
S
U
M
P
T
I
O
N
AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION
The tensions between these two impulses
have proved potentially creative, and geographers’ efforts to recognize and work through
them have been a major contribution to the
interdisciplinary field of agro-food studies.
These efforts bring quite different levels of
analysis into common focus to examine the
social and economic connections between,
for example, global and local networks,
corporate and household actors, production
and consumption processes. The influential
collection of essays Globalising food, edited by
David Goodman and Michael Watts (1997),
exemplifies these contributions. But, as this
same volume indicates, the tensions between
the two impulses in agricultural geography
have also generated some significant analytical
disagreements and silences, including a growing divergence between North American
and European agro-food research in terms of
theoretical influences, analytical foci and policy engagement. Crudely put, the divergences
revolve around the extent to which the social,
political and cultural diversity of food production and consumption processes are admitted
into the compass and terms of analysis.
However, there is arguably a more widely
shared sense emerging among geographers
and others about the need to direct attention
to (at least) three critical issues that have
been eclipsed and/or marginalized by the
terms of political economic analysis. First,
there is the question of ‘nature’ and farming’s impact on valued environments, culminating in the reorientation of agricultural
subsidies (notably the European Common
Agricultural Policy) towards the promotion
of environmental rather than productivity
outcomes (Lowe, Clark, Seymour and
Ward, 1998). Second, there is the rise of
consumption as a key focus of analysis, not
least in the political significance of consumer
anxieties around industrial agriculture associated with a series of ‘food scares’ (Friedberg, 2004). Linking these two themes is a
growing interest in so-called ‘alternative food
networks’ or ‘quality foods’ such as fairtrade, organic and animal welfare foods.
Here, attention focuses on the bodily currency of agro-food networks as they connect
the health and well-being of people (both as
food consumers or producers), the animals
and plants that become human foodstuffs,
and the ecologies that they inhabit (Stassart
and Whatmore, 2003).
sw
Suggested reading
Freidberg (2004).
agricultural involution A term coined by the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1963) to refer to
the intensification and elaboration of the agrarian labour process without substantial gains in
per capita output. Based on his studies of rice
paddy production in post-colonial Java and
concerned with prospects for development,
Geertz posited that rice production there hindered the modernization process. Without the
application of new methods, it absorbed
virtually all existing labour, so that productivity
merely kept up with population growth. His
thesis can be contrasted with the boserup thesis
(Boserup, 1965), which sees population growth
as inducing technological change. (See also
intensive agriculture.)
jgu
Suggested reading
Harriss (1982).
Agricultural Revolution A collection of social, technological and productivity changes,
which took place somewhere between the
sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and
which collectively revolutionized English agriculture. These changes are generally associated with the industrial revolution and are
widely thought to have promoted industrialization, both by reducing agriculture’s share
of the workforce and by enabling a much
larger population to be fed. The same term is
also sometimes used to describe similar agricultural changes in Scotland and Wales in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well
as in Continental Europe in the nineteenth
century. Whilst there is general agreement
amongst historians and historical geographers
that an Agricultural Revolution took place in
England, there is profound disagreement both
as to when and where it took place, and as to
what it entailed.
Writers on the Agricultural Revolution have
drawn attention to one or more of three major
areas of change (Overton, 1996):
(1) A change in the social organization of
agriculture, usually described as a shift
from peasant agriculture to agrarian capitalism, a process sometimes termed an
‘agrarian revolution’. This process had
two central features. First, there was a
long-term shift away from production
for use to production for sale; such
commercialization clearly began in the
medieval period and may have been
essentially completed before 1700. Second, there was a shift away from the
19
AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM
dominance of small farms worked mainly
by family labour to a system whereby
most land was owned by large estates, let
as large farms at commercial rents to capitalist tenant farmers and worked by wage
labour. Both the chronology and causes of
this second shift have been the subject of
much debate. There is no agreement over
whether the key period of change was the
sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth century, but the primacy once accorded to
enclosure is now usually displaced by
causes such as population change and
long-term price movements.
(2) Technical changes, particularly in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have
loomed large in accounts of the Agricultural Revolution. In the arable sector, the
key innovation was the introduction of
more complex crop rotations including
clover and turnips, which provided highquality fodder for animals, thus allowing
the area of grassland to be reduced without
decreasing the production of animal products. It now seems clear that these and
associated changes allowed an extension
of the arable area between 1750 and 1850
(Campbell and Overton, 1993; Williamson, 2002). In the pastoral sector, technical
improvements were related largely to selective animal breeding aimed at increasing
carcass weight, decreasing the age at maturity (slaughter) for meat animals or increasing the yields of wool or milk.
(3) Until recently, discussions of agrarian
change were not informed by any direct
accounts of productivity, but measurements of changes in productivity and
their connection with technical change
have since been placed on a more secure
statistical footing (Wrigley, 1985a; Allen,
1992, 1999; Overton, 1996).
In the early twentieth century, the historiographical emphasis was on technical and social
change, and the most important changes were
held to have taken place in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, in parallel with
what was then thought to be the key period
of industrialization. Chambers and Mingay’s
classic (1966) account more or less repeated
this framework, but its restatement coincided
with a series of major revisions: Jones (1965)
identified the century from 1650 to 1750 as
the key period, while Kerridge (1967) argued
that the Agricultural Revolution’s key achievements were between 1570 and 1673. The
debates have multiplied ever since.
20
Although recent work has generally focused
on productivity, different measures of productivity have been emphasized. Wrigley (1985a)
has stressed the growth of labour productivity
between 1550 and 1850, and the way in which
that allowed a wider restructuring of the economy through a shift in occupational structure
away from agriculture towards manufacturing
and services. Grain yields are known to have
doubled between 1500 and 1800. Allen
(1992; cf. Glennie, 1991) put the growth in
wheat yields in the seventeenth century at
centre stage, and in his subsequent (1999)
account emphasized the growth in total food
output between 1600 and 1750 and between
1800 and 1850, as well as the growth of wheat
yields. Overton (1996) has emphasized three
features of the century after 1750: the unprecedented increase in total food production implied by the tripling of population over any
previously achieved level, a rise in overall
grain yields, and the fact that these productivity changes coincided with a period of fundamental technical change. Turner, Beckett and
Afton (2001) have argued that the key
changes took place between 1800 and 1850,
though they pay no attention to the undoubted achievements of the period before
1700.
A series of major and historically unprecedented achievements can be identified in English agriculture for every identified sub-period
between 1550 and 1850, therefore, and it is
probably unhelpful to isolate one particular
element and identify the period of its achievement as ‘the Agricultural Revolution’. Such a
broad perspective sits comfortably alongside
recent views of industrialization as a process
that began well before 1750.
lst
Suggested reading
Allen (1992); Campbell and Overton (1991);
Overton (1996); Wrigley (1988).
agro-food system According to the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), ‘the set of activities and
relationships that interact to determine what,
how much, by what methods and for whom
food is produced and distributed’ (Whatmore,
2002b, pp. 57–8). The most commonly acknowledged sectors/spheres that comprise the
agro-food system are agrarian production itself
(farming); agricultural science and technology
products and services to farming (upstream industries); food processing, marketing, distribution and retail (downstream industries); and
household food purchasing, preparation and
AID
consumption. In addition, those state and, increasingly, private bodies that regulate prices,
terms of trade, food quality and environmental concerns relative to food production play an
integral role in shaping the agro-food system.
Various analytical frameworks have been
employed to specify the ways in which the multiple practices and institutions that organize the
provision of food are interrelated, and even coproduced.
Among different conceptualizations of the
agro-food system, one major axis of difference
is whether the key organizing forces of the
food system exist at horizontal scales or vertical flows. An example of the first is the
concept of food regime. Borrowing from regulation theory, Friedman and McMichael
(1989) first employed this concept to denote
the existence of national patterns of food
production and trade that are periodically stabilized by distinct configurations of private,
sub-national, national and supra-national
regulation. An example of the latter is Fine,
Heasman and Wright’s (1996) ‘system of
provision’. In keeping with the commodity
chain approach, they take the vertical trajectory
of a given commodity as the unit of analysis.
In this approach, the agro-food system is best
understood as a composite of all commodity systems, even though many food stuffs travel
through horizontal organizations and institutions and are eaten as part of a (horizontal) diet.
A second major consideration in these differing approaches is the extent to which the natural conditions of production, the organic
properties of food, and/or specific commodity
characteristics are seen to shape the agrofood system. Goodman, Sorj and Wilkinson
(1987) afford a good deal of explanatory
power to the biological foundations of food
production insofar as they posit that industrialization takes place in ways that are distinct from other key sectors (see agrarian
question).
A third consideration is the ontological status of the food system itself; namely, to what
extent the term reifies a set of relationships
that are then seen to be more determined
and stable than they may be. Drawing on
French convention theory, Allaire and Boyes
(1995) first highlighted the importance of embedded social relations in constructing the
quality of food commodities. Recently, agrofood scholars have borrowed from actornetwork theory as well, not only to recognize that food provision is more contingent,
variable, fragmented and, hence, vulnerable
to political change than the systemic language
implies, but also to theorize the significance of
the non-human in non-binary ways. Whatmore and Thorne’s (1997) discussion of alternative food networks mostly precipitated the
shift from ‘systems’ to ‘networks’ as the dominant analytic in agro-food studies.
jgu
Suggested reading
Fold and Pritchard (2005); Tansey and Worsley
(1995).
aid Targeted and typically conditional flows
of resources aimed at alleviating specific social and economic problems and/or promoting
long-term economic development. Aid may
take a variety of forms, but the predominant
forms, such as world bank loans and Official
Development Assistance (ODA) from government agencies, are usually designed to encourage specific policy choices by recipients and
are conditional upon the recipient importing
specific products or services from firms connected with the donor agency.
Such forms of ‘tied aid’ have a long history,
but have become especially important since
the end of the Second World War. From that
point the World Bank, which was formed
along with the international monetary
fund (imf) in 1945, took on a central role in
providing large-scale international aid for reconstruction and long-term development
(Payer, 1982; Kolko, 1988, pp. 265–77).
While the World Bank was originally focused
upon the reconstruction of advanced industrial economies, it came later to have as one
of its main tasks the provision of aid to developing countries. Since the 1970s, World Bank
loans have been offered on the condition that a
number of political and economic reforms,
often referred to as ‘structural adjustment’,
are implemented (Mosley, Harrigan and Toye,
1991; see also neo-liberalism). This practice
has come under considerable criticism in
recent years, on grounds ranging from distributional and environmental impacts to failure
to involve local communities in development
decisions.
Many forms of ODA have been criticized,
like World Bank projects, for their effects on
local livelihoods and recipient country autonomy (Gibson, Andersson, Ostrom and Shivakumar, 2005). For example, tied aid forces
recipient countries to purchase goods and services from the donor country, thus subsidizing
donor country exporters and forcing recipients
to purchase goods.
For example, in 1990, only one of the world’s
27 Development Assistance Countries (DAC),
21
AIDS
Norway, gave more than 1 per cent of its Gross
National Income (GNI) in aid (1.17 per cent),
with the DAC average being 0.33 per cent of
GNI. In 2003, no DAC members donated as
much as 1 per cent of GNI, and the overall
DAC average declined to a quarter of one per
cent. For the USA, the figures were 0.21 per
cent in 1990 and 0.15 per cent in 2003
(UNDP, 2005, p. 278). Other forms of emergency and short-term relief aid are provided
under the auspices of a wide variety of agencies,
including humanitarian and non-governmental organizations. With an endowment of nearly
$40 billion in 2008, the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation is set to become a major player
among international aid agencies.
jgl
Suggested reading
Gibson, Andersson, Ostrom and Shivakumar
(2005); Kolko (1988); Mosley, Harrigan and
Toye (1991); Payer (1982); United Nations
Development Program (UNDP) (2005).
AIDS Geographical perspectives on Acquired
Immune Deficiency Syndrome, its causes and
consequences, have taken three related tacks.
The earliest was from the discipline’s spatial
science tradition (e.g. Shannon, Pyle and
Bashshur, 1991). This approach treated
AIDS as a newcomer in a long line of nonhuman infective agents (bacteria, viruses etc.),
such as cholera, influenza, tuberculosis and
malaria, that medical geographers could model
(see medical geography). Work in this tack
mapped the spatial distribution, and sought to
model the diffusion of the disease (especially
its various strains) predictively.
This approach was quickly outpaced by political and cultural geographers, who exposed
the homophobia and heterosexism often at
work in earlier spatial science approaches, as
well as reflecting a postmodern trend that
challenged the primacy of science to guide
geographers’ approach to studying the
world. (For instance, this work often exposed
spatial science’s embarrassingly awkward encounters with culture.) Rather than reductively
conceptualizing the virus as a non-human/biological entity (as spatial science had), this
scholarship emphasized the virus and its syndrome as a thoroughly social, rather than biological, phenomenon. It therefore explored the
multiple meanings at stake in transmission,
prevention and care. It showed how various
structures such as patriarchy, biomedical hegemony and racism, in places disempower
people living with HIV. It especially reframed
AIDS as a political geography, raising ques22
tions of equity and social justice in particular
places. In this way, HIV-positive people were
reconceptualized not as passive nodes of diffusion (with all the attendant blame), but as
active agents struggling to prevent further infection, and to respond caringly and humanely
to the ‘glocal’ dimensions (see glocalization/
glocality) of the pandemic. In this way,
geographers’ complex response to AIDS was
a synecdoche for the epistemological and
methodological debates within/between medical geography and geographies of health
and health care, but also the growing
interest in feminism and the rise of queer
geography (see queer theory). It thereby accelerated and intensified links between that
sub-discipline and a wide array of others.
This work also broached the nature–society
duality, exemplifying for some the incorporation of the body and disease into the exploding field of political ecology.
Presently, work in geography continues on
the social construction of the syndrome and
the various social identities of sexuality,
race, class and gender (e.g. Raimondo,
2005). In more contemporary work on HIV
and AIDS, there has also been a return to a
more global (or glocal) perspective (Craddock,
2000b). There has also been a much needed
return to a regional focus on AIDS in africa
(e.g. Oppong, 1998; Kesby, 1999), but also
the global South more generally, bringing the
pandemic into development geography, as
well as globalization and geographies of
neo-liberalism (e.g. questions on access to
expensive, life-saving drugs in the context of
free trade and market hegemony; or questions
of safer-sex education in the context of an
ascendant social conservatism and homophobia in social and international aid policy).
In this way, more recent works show a much
greater appreciation of the multiplicity of
social geographies of AIDS than the previous
two strands of research.
mb
Suggested reading
Craddock, Oppong, Ghosh and Kalipeni (2003);
Shannon, Pyle and Bashshur (1991).
algorithm A problem-solving procedure with
set rules. Many algorithms can be represented
as decision-making trees and translated into
computer code, allowing complex tasks to be
tackled efficiently.
rj
alienation A term derived from the Latin
word alienus, meaning ‘of or belonging to another’. Of Judeo-Christian origin, the concept
ALONSO MODEL
became a secularized keyword in nineteenthand twentieth-century philosophy and social
theory via G.W.F. Hegel’s writings, particularly his Phenomenology of the spirit (1808) and
Philosophy of right (1821), and their critical
adaptation by Karl Marx in his early writings
(1843–5). In Phenomenology, Hegel contended
that the object world (nature, religion,
art etc.), which loomed independent of
man’s consciousness, epitomized alienation.
Accordingly, absolute knowledge or freedom
consisted in overcoming alienation by understanding the external world as emanation of
Spirit – a facet of the human subject’s own selfconsciousness or essence. Rejecting the politically conservative implications of Hegel’s
philosophy, which anointed the state and its
order of private property as the culmination of
substantive freedom (i.e. as the essence and
end product of man’s striving for self-consciousness), Karl Marx instead proposed that
capitalist production organized around stateprotected private property rights and that calculative reason was the source of radical disharmony among individuals, who ended up
estranged from their social existence; between
individuals and their creative life activity or
labour; and between individuals and means
of production (see capitalism; class). The
concept of alienation entered geography via
the work of Bertell Ollman (1976) and his
interlocutors.
vg
Suggested reading
Marx (1988 [1844]).
Alonso model A model of the zonal structuring of land use within an urban area. Using
accessibility (measured as transport time
and cost: cf. friction of distance) as the
key variable, it accounts for intra-urban variations in land values, land use and land-use
intensity. Its simplest form assumes that all
journeys are focused on the city centre. Land
users balance transport costs to that point
against those for land and property, with the
highest prices being bid for the most accessible
inner-city land – which only commercial and
industrial enterprises can afford. The result
(shown in the figure) is a distance-decay relationship between location-rent and distance
from the centre, with residential uses (which
have the lowest bid-rent curves) confined to
the outer zone. Alonso’s now largely obsolete
model of a unicentric city can be modified to
accommodate a multi-centred organization of
urban land use (see centrifugal and centripetal forces; decentralization; edge city;
Alonso model Concentric intra-urban land-use zones generated by the bid-rent curves for retailing, industrial
and residential land uses (Cadwallader, 1985)
23
ALTERITY
sprawl) and also gentrification of innercity, formerly non-residential areas, but is less
relevant to spatial structures in which accessibility to a small number of points (usually by
public transport) is a minor influence on many
locational choices.
rj
Suggested reading
Alonso (1964a); Cadwallader (1996).
alterity A philosophical term for other/
otherness. Rather than referring to individual
differences, it more often refers to the systematic construction of classes, groups and categories. Such groups or classes are seen as
‘Other’ to a dominant construction of the Self
(Taussig, 1993). Occupying the position of
outsiders, such groups are often denied the
basic rights and dignities afforded to those
who are included within such cultural units as
community, citizenship or humanity (Isin,
2002). Alterity does not refer merely to a casting out. Instead, the logic of exclusion is such
that the Other is immanent to the constitution
of the dominant group.
as
Suggested reading
Isin (2002).
alternative economies Approaches to trade
that challenge many of the principles of
capitalism. As part of a broader set of critical
commentaries on capitalism (see, e.g., GibsonGraham, 1996), work on alternative economies
has revealed the importance of initiatives
including gift economies, charity banks and
Local Exchange Trading Systems (see Leyshon,
Lee and Williams, 2003). Alternative economies
are often seen as a viable strategy for dealing with
forms of social exclusion caused by groups being
bypassed or exploited by mainstream spaces of
capitalism, such as the retail banking industry
(Leyshon, Burton, Knights, Alferoff and
Signoretta 2004).
jf
Suggested reading
Leyshon, Lee and Williams (2003).
America(s) (idea of) The landmass in the
Western Hemisphere consisting of the continents of North and South America (sometimes
Central America and the Caribbean are identified as separate sub-regions). The plural
form is relatively recent, providing an alternative to a singular that typically refers to either
the entire landmass or the United States
of America on its own. The earliest use of
24
the name America for the continents of the
Americas is on a globe and map created by
the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in
1507. The most popular story about the
naming draws from a book that accompanied
the map in which the name is derived from
the Latin version of the explorer Amerigo
Vespucci’s name, Americus Vespucius, in its
feminine form, America, as all of the continents were given Latin feminine names by
their European namers. From this viewpoint,
Vespucci (directly or indirectly) ‘invented’
America (O’Gorman, 1961).
Most of the inhabitants of the Americas call
themselves Americans, but in the Englishspeaking world use of the word is often
restricted to residents of the USA, a product
both of the difficulty of making ‘the United
States’ into an adjective and the political–
economic weight of the USA. The majority
of the population of the Americas lives in
latin america (542 out of 851 million),
named as such because the south and central
regions were colonized mainly by Spain and
Portugal, in distinction from North America
colonized initially by the British and French.
As the largest and most developed economy,
the USA has long dominated economically
and frequently manipulated politically the
states and peoples in the rest of the landmass.
The discovery of America by Europeans is
usually put down to Christopher Columbus in
1492, though the existence of lands to the west
of Europe was mooted in medieval Europe.
Effectively, however, in terms of political, economic and intellectual consequences, it is the
European encounter after 1492 that is most
significant, even though it was not until the
late eighteenth century that the shape of the
landmass as a whole was finally established.
The appearance of America in the mental
universe of fifteenth-century Europeans represented a crucial early moment in the creation
of the sense of a geopolitical world (see
geopolitics) that was increasingly to match
the physical Earth. The ‘discovery’ was more
than just the discovery of a new race of
non-Europeans. More particularly, it was the
discovery of a previously unknown landmass
and with it the recognition that ancient Greek
cosmology, which had divided the Earth into
three parts, had been mistaken (Kupperman,
1995).
Initially, at least, as John Elliott (1972) has
argued, the discovery of America encouraged
European intellectuals and officials to enlarge
their concept of humanity. Eventually, though,
the new variety of patterns of human
AMERICAN EMPIRE
behaviour made for some difficulty in retaining the natural law belief in an essential and
universal human nature. The increasing
sense of absolute cultural difference from the
natives and the impulse to exploit the newfound lands of America combined, however,
to create propitious circumstances for the expansion of settlement by Europeans. To the
English philosopher John Locke, writing in
1689 and providing an early example of the
backward-modern conception of the stages of
human social development, the Roman law
known as res nullius applied to the ‘empty
lands’ not put to active agricultural use by
the native inhabitants and thus justified their
takeover: ‘America’, he wrote, ‘is still a pattern
of the first Ages in Asia and Europe, whilst
the Inhabitants were too few for the Country,
and want of People and Money gave Men
no temptation to enlarge their Possessions of
Land, or contest for wider extent of Grounds’
(Locke, 1960 [1689], pp. 357–8; see also
terra nullius).
America was europe’s first ‘new world’. As
such, it was regarded as a tabula rasa for European efforts at bringing the whole world into
the European world economy (Armitage,
2004). In this respect, North and South
America parted company over how this was
done. If from 1492 to 1776 the North was
increasingly dominated by an empire in ascendancy, the British, the South was subject
to two empires, those of Spain and Portugal,
in long-term decay. By the late eighteenth
century, local settler elites in both parts were
in revolt against distant rule. As a result
of their relative success, they were able by
the early nineteenth century to imagine an
America autonomous of Europe in which
their ‘political independence was accompanied by a symbolic independence in the geopolitical imagination’ (Mignolo, 2000, p. 135). If
on the US side this led to the Monroe Doctrine of ‘America for the Americans’, on the
southern side it led to a developing sense of a
‘Latin America’ increasingly dominated by its
northern neighbour, particularly as the USA
emerged as a global power towards the century’s end. The struggle to expropriate or
qualify the labels ‘America’ and ‘American’,
therefore, cannot be separated from the
wider political conflict over the geopolitical
consequences for the whole world of the discovery and subsequent rising significance of
the ‘Americas’.
ja
Suggested reading
Agnew (2003); Burke (1995); Pagden (1993).
American empire As an informal form of
imperial rule mediated by market mechanisms
as much as by military might, American empire has traditionally proved to be an elusive
object of analysis and critique (but see
Williams, 1980). In the context of the Iraq
war this elusiveness has declined, afflicted by
the spectacle of US dominance and the protests ranged against it (RETORT, 2005). In
the media, liberal apologists joined conservatives in promoting the Iraq adventure explicitly as a way of expanding American empire
(e.g. Boot, 2003; Ignatieff, 2003), and, in the
streets, amongst the millions marching against
the war in 2003, many held placards that just
as explicitly decried the violence and hubris of
empire. However, as the playwright Harold
Pinter reminded audiences when he received
his Nobel Prize in 2005, the norm has more
generally been silence on the topic. ‘The
crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless,’ he complained, ‘but very few people have actually
talked about them’ (Pinter, 2005). One explanation for this silence is that in political
discourse two kinds of ‘exceptionalism’ continually conspire to make talk of American
empire somehow seem inappropriate. On the
one hand, there is the exceptionalism of imperial denial that developed out of the antiimperial origins of American capitalism and
the Jeffersonian idea of the USA as an ‘empire
of liberty’. Having started with the national
origin stories about independence from imperial rule, this is the popular discourse that extends today to arguments that American
dominance in the middle east is exceptional
in its emphasis on freedom, free enterprise and
liberal rights. On the other hand, there is the
illiberal connotation that makes exceptions in
the name of American ‘leadership’ or ‘sovereignty’: a discourse that argues that unique
global circumstances require the USA to
make exceptions and break global rules (such
as the Geneva Conventions) in order to maintain global order. There is a wealth of scholarship addressing how the contradiction
between these two discourses exposes the exclusions and obscured authoritarian underpinnings of liberal universalism (Cooper, 2004;
Lott, 2006; Singh, 2006). By also mapping
the geographies of dominance that are at
once concealed and enabled by the appeals to
exceptionalism, critical human geography
has simultaneously sought to make American
empire itself less obscure (see El Fisgón, 2004).
Challenging the liberal capitalist dissembling of empire, Neil Smith has underlined
25
ANALOGUE
how the exceptionalist rhetorics of imperial
denial have also been predicated on a form of
flat-world disavowal of geography (Smith,
2003c, 2005b; see also Sparke, 2005). By promoting the US model of liberal-democratic
capitalism in the terms of an ‘American Century’ (as Henry Luce, the publisher of Time
magazine, did in 1941) and by recently
attempting to renew and expand this world
historical dominance with a ‘Project for a
New American Century’ (as neo-conservative
advocates of a pax americana have done in the
past decade), Smith argues that a focus on
making global history has helped to hide the
global geography of American empire. Advanced today with a-geographical appeals to
globalization, Smith suggests that American
dominance abroad is also ironically vulnerable
to nationalist reaction at home (cf. Pieterse,
2004). Focusing further on the capitalist contradictions in the global system on which these
vulnerabilities turn, other geographers have
emphasized that American global hegemony
has been centrally related to the country’s role
as the incubator, exporter and regulator of
free-market neo-liberalism on the world
stage (Harvey, 2004b, 2005; Agnew, 2005a).
Such work suggests that just as this hegemony
was underpinned by America’s centrality to
twentieth-century capitalism, so too will it be
undermined by the changing economic organization of the world, including the USA’s increasing indebtedness in the twenty-first
century.
While the political-economic geography
of globalization exposes forms of American
dominance that lie beneath the flat appeals
of liberal exceptionalism, cultural-political
geographies of American empire have in turn
showed how the illiberal exceptionalism illustrated by America’s contravention of laws protecting liberty has also created spaces of
exception (see exception, space of) on the
ground. Derek Gregory’s account of the ‘colonial present’ thus explores how imaginative
geographies tied to orientalism have helped
to legitimize the US-led re-colonization of the
Middle East, turning the local inhabitants into
outcasts and depriving them of human rights
in the name of spreading freedom (Gregory,
2004b; see also Mitchell, 2002; Vitalis, 2002).
Similarly, recent work by the American intellectual historian Amy Kaplan has provided a
scrupulous legal geography of the Guantánamo military base as another space of exception that is at once inside and outside the
empire of American liberty (Kaplan, 2005;
see also Gregory, 2006).
26
Pinter the playwright argued that the double
standards represented by such spaces are normally hidden backstage: ‘you have to hand it to
America,’ he concluded. ‘It has exercised a
quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly
successful act of hypnosis.’ But what comes
after the wit and hypnosis when the whole
world can see the torture and abuse that go
on backstage? One answer is simply the end
of empire, or, as the RETORT group put it,
‘real strategic failure’ (RETORT, 2005, p. 5).
But before this happens another development,
indicated by the work of Gregory, Kaplan and
a host of other scholars examining American
geopolitics, is an almost religious re-mapping
of American grand strategy as a Manichean
double vision: a world in which core capitalist
countries are seen as deserving of universal
rights while a supposedly dysfunctional set
of exceptional spaces are seen as sites where
freedom must be suspended and people dispossessed in the name of spreading freedom
(see Roberts, Secor and Sparke, 2003; Sparke,
2005; Dalby, 2006; Smith, 2006b). Following
this neo-liberal geopolitical script – which has a
precedent in imperial British liberalism
(Mehta, 1999) – American empire can continue the hypnotic ‘god-trick’ of universalism
in the spaces of the core by masquerading as an
overarching force for good.
ms
analogue The world is too complex to represent in its entirety. Analogue maps or other
devices produce scaled-down models of the
world using lines and areas to represent
selected features. This is different from digital
models (cf. digital cartography), which can
be edited and transformed using GIS and
other computer programs. In analogue maps
or diagrams, for instance, information is fixed.
The data cannot be viewed through a different
map projection, nor can the scale be
changed. Analogue maps literally use analogies (lines for roads, blocks for houses, circles
for towns, etc.) to represent the Earth. By
contrast, digital maps display information on
the screen but the properties, such as scale and
projection, are not fixed and can be displayed
in different formats.
ns
analytical Marxism Scholarship using the
logic and language of mathematics to interrogate Karl Marx’s theory of capitalism (and
other modes of production) for theoretical
and/or empirical analysis (see marxism).
In the three volumes of Capital, Marx drew
ANARCHISM
at times extensively on mathematical examples
to explicate his theory of value, as well as on
quantitative information about poverty and
capital–labour relations in nineteenth-century
Britain. Marx has been criticized by mainstream economists for mathematical incompetence, particularly for errors in his
‘transformation problem’, which sought somewhat unsuccessfully to show that prices
of production (long-run market prices) are
determined by labour values. Sraffa (1960)
demonstrated, however, that neo-classical
macroeconomics had the same mathematical
limitations, being only logically correct if
production technologies are identical in every
sector of the economy. Morishima showed
that Marx’s theory of exploitation can be
deduced mathematically from his theory of
capitalism: capitalists can only make positive
monetary profits if labour is exploited in
labour value terms. This triggered scholarship
in analytical Marxism.
In economics and sociology, analytical
Marxism stressed developing deductive theories consistent with Marx’s theorization of capitalism. Much of this work, pioneered by John
Roemer, John Elster, George Cohen and Erik
Olin Wright, is grounded in rational choice
theory – the belief that macro-features of
society are the consequence of the self-interested actions of informed, rational economic
actors. Taking the same starting point as neoclassical economics, remarkably they show
that under Marxian assumptions a very different view of capitalism emerges. Exploitation
occurs, the opposed economic interests of
workers and capitalists generate class struggle
over the economic surplus, capitalism is unstable, and individuals choose to join exploiting and exploited classes because of initial
wealth and endowment differences. These
scholars have rejected Marx’s labour theory
of value. Empirically, however, observed
long-term market prices are indeed closely
correlated with labour values, suggesting that
such rejection is premature. These rational
choice Marxists are criticized for their grounding in rational choice behaviour, and insistence on deductive reasoning, which are seen
as inconsistent with Marx’s dialectical logic
(see dialectic: see also Roemer, 1982,
1986b; Carver and Thomas, 1995).
Geographers have applied mathematical
reasoning to a Marxian analysis of the capitalist space-economy, without grounding this
in individual rational choice. Like Harvey’s
dialectical analysis, Sheppard and Barnes
(1990) demonstrate that the incorporation of
space complicates some of Marx’s theoretical
propositions. Space further destabilizes the
capitalist dynamics of uneven development,
increases the likelihood that the interests
of individual capitalists are in conflict with
class interests and catalyses conflict between
places that can undermine class dynamics.
Equilibrium analysis is thus of little value,
as equilibria are most unlikely and always
unstable. Unlike Harvey, it is deduced that
space undermines labour value as the foundation of Marxian analysis. Empirically, Webber
and Rigby (1996) show that fordism was not
the golden age of postwar capitalism, contra
regulation theory. Recent advances in complexity theory suggest that mathematical
analysis of complex systems such as capitalism
approximates many aspects of dialectical
reasoning, suggesting that Marx’s own resort
to mathematics was not in tension with his
philosophical approach.
es
Suggested reading
Roemer (1986); Sheppard and Barnes (1990).
anarchism A political philosophy that is
anti-authoritarian, seeking the elimination of
the state and its replacement by a decentralized social and political self-governing social
order. Anarchist social order is not the absence
of government, but a form of self-government
that does not demand obedience. It is a mixture of libertarian, utopian and socialist ideas
that counters power and hierarchy through
voluntary, and usually local, decentralized
communities. Cook (1990) identified five
different forms of anarchism – individualism,
collectivism, anarchist communism, anarchosyndicalism and pacifism. Anarcho-feminism
and situationism are also relevant varieties
of anarchism that have been utilized by
geographers. Geographers Peter Kropotkin
and Elisée Reclus were among the early proponents of anarchist communism. Both were
active members of the academic geography
community in the late 1800s and early 1900s
(Kearns, 2004), though their political leanings
were ignored as ‘baggage’ by the geography
establishment, which was focused upon imperial and national projects (MacLaughlin,
1986). Kropotkin’s belief that ‘the duty of
socially-concerned scientists lay in articulating
the interests of subordinate social classes and
combating poverty, underdevelopment and
social justice’ (quoted in MacLaughlin, 1986,
p. 25) lay at the heart of the radical geography
that emerged in the late 1970s. However,
the initial identification of anarchism as a
27
ANDROCENTRICITY
philosophical basis for radical geography was
short-lived, and in the late 1970s its influence
declined (Peet, 1977b; Peet and Thrift, 1989).
More recently, Blunt and Wills’ (2000) identification of radical geography’s attention to
anarchism as facilitating the ‘breakthrough’ to
marxism echoes Peet’s sentiments, but they
also highlight Emma Goldman’s contribution
to anarcho-feminism and its role in stimulating
feminist geographies.
However, there has been renewed interest in
the philosophy and practice of anarchism in
explaining contemporary human geography.
Sibley (2001) has identified the importance
of anarchist theory in promoting the challenge
to binary thinking that has developed into the
concept of third space. Bonnett’s (1996)
study of situationists (a political force that
was particularly active in the 1960s, seeking a
‘new human geography’ by critiquing contemporary urbanism, planning and architecture)
focuses upon the creation of politicized urban
spaces as a way of challenging authority. Economic geographers interested in contemporary
resistance to neo-liberalist globalization
have identified the creation of autonomous
geographies that are underpinned by anarchist
principles. Chatterton’s (2005) study of workers’
co-operatives in Argentina defines three autonomous geographies: a territorial geography
of networked autonomous neighbourhoods,
a material geography of mutual aid, and a
social geography of daily practice and interaction. Following the tension in anarchism
between individual freedom and social action,
Chatterton shows how the groups try to manage their interaction with the rest of the world
while simultaneously creating a network of
autonomous places. Taylor (2004a) has taken
a more structural approach to anarchism in
identifying global cities as a basis for resisting state power. Blunt and Wills’ claim that
anarchist ideas have ‘spawned only the outlines of a tradition of geographical scholarship
and there is plenty of scope for further elaboration’ (2000, p. 2) is still true, but there are
signs that urban, economic and political geographers find contemporary changes a catalyst
for elaboration.
cf
Suggested reading
Blunt and Wills (2000); Peet (1977).
androcentricity Viewing the world from a
male perspective. Some feminist theorists
view mainstream scholarship or science such
as geography as androcentric, in that what is
presented as a gender-neutral analysis or
28
method, in practice embodies masculine values
and assumptions (e.g. Rose, 1993; see also
feminist geographies). Eichler (1988) outlines six types of androcentricity: male frame
of reference; locating men as agents and
women as objects; female invisibility; maintaining male over female interests; misogyny;
and defending male dominance. She also traces
five manifestations of androcentricity in the
research process (see masculinism).
sw
Suggested reading
Eichler (1988); Rose (1993).
Anglocentrism An attitude that unreflexively assumes the superiority of knowledge
produced in Anglo-American contexts (see
also ethnocentrism; eurocentrism). In contemporary geography it refers to a debate – in
particular, within critical human geography
– addressing the social and epistemological
mechanisms that construct an ‘international’
writing space imbued with Anglo-American
hegemony. The debate mostly has been
performed at International Conferences of
Critical Geography and in commentaries and
editorials in ‘international’ journals (e.g. Berg
and Kearns, 1998; Minca, 2000; Braun,
Vaiou, Yiftachel, Sakho, Chaturvedi, Timar
and Minca, 2003; Geoforum, 2004).
This Anglo-American hegemony does not
work as an intentional domination of debates,
nor is it something to be accepted as inevitable –
it is the outcome of a series of power-constituting practices. One of these is language. To an
increasing extent, English has become the
lingua franca of ‘international’ academic (and
other) discourses, a practice giving precedence
to some while putting ‘others’ in a position
where they have to cope with the burden
of translation and struggle to communicate
thoughts and concepts in an idiom that to
them is a secondary skill. This is not only
about translation in a literal sense, because no
language is a neutral medium; the adoption of
any language has a range of cultural and conceptual consequences. The question of language therefore folds into a much broader
power–knowledge system, which constitutes
geographical writing spaces including Anglophone journals, books, conferences, seminars
and so on. In these writing spaces, power and
knowledge connect, through the media of language, institutional arrangements and social
practices of inclusion/exclusion and through
the political economy of international publishing, to produce a ‘centre–periphery’ imaginary
with regard to the relationship between
ANNALES SCHOOL
Anglo-American and non-Anglo-American
writers. Notwithstanding an increased sensitivity to situated knowledge in contemporary
geography, these practices, connected to an implicitly supposed neutrality of concepts and categories, tend to conceal the partiality and local
character of Anglo-American theoretical production and reproduce it as ‘unlimited’, ‘universal’ or at least ‘transferable’. The ‘mastersubject’ of geographical theory is constructed
as Anglo-American, with more inferior subjectpositions left open to writers from ‘other’
places. Contributions from outside the Anglophone world are at one level welcome, but
the authors tend to be seen, not as theoryproducing subjects, but rather as providers of
‘case-studies-from-another-place’. The nonAnglo-American writer is constructed as a mediator or translator, often in a double sense; on
the one hand ‘translating’ travelling AngloAmerican theory and putting it into use in
‘other’ contexts, and on the other one ‘translating’ the unknown and exotic ‘other’ and making
it accessible to the powerful knower in the
centre.
Geographical writings based in feminism and
post-colonialism have in many ways identified
and challenged this power–knowledge system.
Even they, however, are not immune from
the charges made in the debate. Like any
dominant discourse, they have difficulties
destabilizing their own power position. But
the very existence of the debate can be seen
as a promising opening; in particular, to the
extent that it is based on common recognition
and works against the hegemony from ‘inside’
and ‘outside’ alike.
ks
Suggested reading
Gregson, Simonsen and Vaiou (2003); Paasi
(2005).
animals Once of marginal concern to geography, animals, their places, welfare, relationships and spatialities have recently become
areas of debate and innovation. Attention has
been buoyed by growing social concerns for
animals and the, albeit problematic, growth in
animal rights literature. Moreover, developments in social theory that have (a) deconstructed the human, exposing the indistinct
character of the divides between humans and
animals (Agamben, 2002), and (b) reconstructed animals, affording them active roles
in constituting their environments, bodies and
relationships (see actor-network theory,
non-representational theory), have started
to unsettle the human of human geography.
While antecedents of this new animal geography certainly existed in cultural ecology
and studies of domestication (Tuan, 1984),
the most important shift in the place of animals
in geography occurred in the 1990s, through a
series of innovative papers that aimed to bring
the animals back in (Wolch and Emel, 1995,
1998; Philo and Wilbert, 2000). This work
covered a range of topics focusing on spaces
of exclusion of, and human cohabitation with,
animals. One difficulty in this work was
to devise means of talking about animals themselves, rather than reducing non-human animals to having bit parts in human history (and
thereby inadvertently reproducing the
Cartesian and Kantian notions of non-human
animals as automata, and as means to human
ends). It is here that the work of a whole range
of approaches that share something with poststructuralism has been most productive
in affording animals their own histories and
geographies. The work of anthropologists, particularly that of Tim Ingold, highlighted the
similarities between human and non-human
animals’ dwelling practices (Ingold, 2000). deconstruction of the terms ‘human’ and ‘animal’ afforded insights into the role that the
singular noun ‘the animal’ has played in what
Jacques Derrida has called the sacrificial structure of human supremacy (Derrida, 2003).
Finally, work informed by understandings and
tracings of the material and cultural associations of human and non-human animals has
demonstrated complex histories and geographies of sharing (molecules, viruses, flesh), accommodating, adapting, hostilities and
hospitalities (Haraway, 2003). The resulting
hybrid forms are multiple, leading not to
some undifferentiated human/non-human
amalgam, but to worlds wherein non-human
and human animals differentiate themselves at
the same time as they form close relationships
(Whatmore, 2002a).
sjh
Suggested reading
Wolch and Emel (1998); Wolfe (2003).
Annales School An interdisciplinary school
of French historians established by Lucien
Febvre and Marc Bloch, co-founders in 1929
of the journal Annales d’histoire économique
et sociale (now Annales. Économies. Sociétés.
Civilisations). The Annalistes, originally based
in Strasbourg (a German city from 1871
to 1918) developed an integrative, synthesizing and distinctively French style of ‘total
history’, in opposition to German historical
methods. Drawing ideas from sociology,
29
ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY
anthropology and human geography, the
Annalistes insisted that short-term political
events must be understood in relation to
long-term structural economic, social and environmental change. The writings of Fernand
Braudel (1902–85) exemplify this approach,
which continues to be significant in both
French social science and in the (stylistically
very different) transatlantic development of
world-systems analysis.
mjh
Suggested reading
Baker (1984); Clark (1999b); Friedman (1996).
anthropogeography A school of human
geography closely associated with the
German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–
1904: see Bassin, 1987b). Ratzel had trained
in the natural sciences and, like many of his
contemporaries, was taken by the ideas of darwinism (see also lamarck(ian)ism). Following
an extended visit to the USA, however, it
was clear that his imagination had also been
captured by anthropology. On the marchlands
between the natural sciences and anthropology, he now ‘sought to lay out the conceptual foundations of a new discipline – human
geography’ (Livingstone, 1992, p. 198). Its
central statement was in the two volumes of
his Anthropogeographie, published in 1882 and
1891, the first subtitled ‘Geography’s application to history’ and the second ‘The geographical distribution of mankind’. These volumes
have to be placed in the context of the
contemporary debates within the German
intellectual community over the place of the
cultural sciences and their relation to the natural sciences (Smith, 1991). Ratzel’s achievement was to put ‘the human’ back into
geography: in his view, the discipline could
not be assimilated to the natural sciences but,
on the contrary, had to explore the reciprocal
relations between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’.
It also had to set those relations in motion by
recognizing the dynamics of spatial formations
(notably diffusion and migration).
Ratzel’s project was thus not environmental determinism, as some commentators
have suggested, but it was distinguished by
the attempt to elaborate a series of nominally
scientific
concepts
whose
significance
extended beyond the formalization of an academic discipline. For Ratzel, writing in the
middle of what Bassin (1987c) describes as
an ‘imperialist frenzy’, the development of a
state could not be separated from its spatial
growth. Natter (2005) is thus surely right to
say that Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie ‘bleeds
30
into’ his Politische Geographie, published in
1897. Indeed, Ratzel himself saw Anthropogeographie as only a preliminary stage in the
foundation of ‘the science of political geography’. In his Politische Geographie, Ratzel accordingly described the state as ‘a living body
which has extended itself over a part of the
Earth and has differentiated itself from other
bodies which have similarly expanded’. The
object of these extensions and expansions
was always ‘the conquest of space’, and it
was this that became formalized in the concept
of lebensraum (‘living space’): ‘the geographical area within which living organisms develop’. Ratzel was keenly aware of the
dangers of organicism, but even so insisted
that: ‘Just as the struggle for existence in the
plant and animal world always centres about a
matter of space, so the conflicts of nations are
in great part only struggles for territory’ (see
also geopolitics).
Wanklyn (1961) treats Lebensraum as ‘a fundamental geographical concept’, and in her
eyes Ratzel’s writings were directed primarily
towards ‘thinking out the scope and content
of biogeography’. This is to understand biogeography in a highly particular way, but there
is a more general tradition of biogeographical
reflection within human geography that suggests affinities between Ratzel’s Lebensraum,
Paul Vidal de la Blache’s genre de vie and the
concept of rum (‘room’) developed in Torsten
Hägerstrand’s time-geography. If these affinities are recognized, then Dickinson’s (1969)
view of Ratzel’s original formulation, stripped
of its subsequent distortions by the Third
Reich, as ‘one of the most original and
fruitful of all concepts in modern geography’,
becomes peculiarly prescient. But such a
purely ‘scientific’ reading does scant justice
to the context in which Ratzel was working
and, in particular, ignores the fact that his
vision of human geography not only had
political implications but also rested on – and
indeed was made possible by – a series of political assumptions (Bassin, 1987b). Crucially,
Farinelli (2000, p. 951) insists that through
Ratzel’s reformulations ‘the state takes possession of geography, and becomes its supreme
object’.
dg
Suggested reading
Farinelli (2000); Natter (2005).
anti-development A body of work and
practice that is fundamentally opposed to
mainstream conceptions of development.
Standard accounts of development assume
ANTI-GLOBALIZATION
that people’s lives will be improved to the
extent that they are linked to others by
efficient systems of economic production and
exchange, and by capable systems of government. Development presumes an extension of
scale in social life. With this comes a surrender
of power to experts and more abstract social
forces such as the financial system or the
state. Anti-developmentalists have opposed
these notions for several reasons. As early
as 1908, Mohandas Gandhi raged against
the introduction of manufacturing into India
in his essay Hind Swaraj (Gandhi, 1997
[1908]). It was dehumanizing, he said, and
removed the possibility of living a virtuous
life, which revolved around self-provisioning
and religious contemplation in a village
setting. There are echoes of this complaint
in Tolstoy and Ruskin and other parts of
the Western pastoral tradition.
Modern anti-developmentalism continues
to draw on Gandhi, but it also draws on
more contemporary critiques by Schumacher,
Illich, Berry and others. For the Indian public
intellectual Ashis Nandy (2003), developmentalism is a violent set of social practices
that denies space to other accounts of being
human. The violence that Nandy refers to is
an originary violence that resides in the will to
power that development must embody. By this
yardstick, efforts to promote human development or sustainable development are oxymoronic. Development is opposed to
humanity and to forms of life lived in harmony
with other beings, and hence the call for its
negation. Other versions of anti-development
strike a more populist note. Development is
condemned less for its intrinsic violence – for
creating what Esteva and Prakash (1998) call
the ‘cold calling-card mentality of the modern
West’ – than for its self-satisfied service on
behalf of the global rich. In the words of Gustavo Esteva, ‘If you live in Rio or Mexico City,
you need to be very rich or very stupid not to
notice that development stinks.’
Critics of anti-development believe that it is
all but impossible to opt out of some version
of development, and/or that some versions
of development have empowered poorer
people in countries as diverse as Costa Rica,
Botswana and Taiwan (Kiely, 1999). Life
expectancies in India and China increased
by more than twenty-five years over the
period from 1950 to 2000, the so-called
‘Age of Development’. If there is room for
criticism of ‘the’ development discourse, it
needs to be promoted within the framework
of post-development, or as a series of
alternatives to mainstream conceptions of
development.
sco
Suggested reading
Nandy (2003); Power (2003).
anti-globalization A set of political positions
that articulate resistance and alternatives to
neo-liberal or capitalist globalization. A
range of international initiatives have cohered
since the 1970s, such as the international anticorporate boycott of Nestlé between 1977 and
1984, the riots against international monetary fund (imf) structural adjustment
programmes throughout the global South
during the 1980s and the formation of Via
Campesina – an international farmers’ network
(Starr, 2005). A key moment was the emergence in 1994 of the Zapatista rebellion
in Chiapas, Mexico, which has demanded
indigenous rights and the democratization of
Mexican civil and political society, as well as
articulating both a critique of the globally dominant economic process of neo-liberalism,
and a vision of an alternative politics
(Routledge, 1998).
The emergence of neo-liberal globalization
as the globally hegemonic economic model has
prompted the upscaling of previously local
struggles – between citizens and governments,
international institutions and transnational
corporations – to the international level, as
marginalized groups and social movements
have begun to forge global networks of action
and solidarity. ‘Anti-globalization’ is a misnomer, since such groups struggle for inclusive,
democratic forms of globalization, using the
communicative tools of the global system
such as the internet. What they are expressly
against is the neo-liberal form of globalization.
Hence a more accurate term is ‘grassroots globalization’ (Appadurai, 2000), although other
popular names have included ‘globalizationfrom-below’ (Brecher, Costello and Smith,
2000), ‘movement of movements’ (Mertes,
2004) and the global justice movement (see
www.globaljusticemovement.net).
By taking part in grassroots globalization
networks, activists from participant movements and organizations embody their particular places of political, cultural, economic
and ecological experience with common concerns, which lead to expanded spatiotemporal
horizons of action (Reid and Taylor, 2000).
Such coalitions of different interests are necessarily contingent and context-dependent,
forms of solidarity being diverse, multiple,
productive and contested (Braun and Disch,
31
ANTI-HUMANISM
2002; Featherstone, 2003; Mertes, 2004).
They are dynamic, negotiated ‘convergence
spaces’ of multiplicity and difference, constructed out of a complexity of interrelations
and interactions across all spatial scales
(Routledge, 1998).
Grassroots globalization networks have
been manifested in ‘global days of action’,
which have consisted of demonstrations and
direct actions against targets that symbolize
neo-liberal power, such as the G8 (e.g. protests in Genoa, Italy, in 2001 and Gleneagles,
Scotland, in 2005), the world trade organization (protests in Seattle, USA, in 1999,
Cancun, Mexico, in 2003 and Hong Kong in
2005) and the World Bank and the IMF (e.g.
protests in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2000
and Washington, USA, in 2002 and 2005).
Such protests have been characterized by
a convergence of interests and concerns in
the particular place of protest, and solidarity
protests that have occurred in cities across
the globe at the same time. The symbolic
force generated by protests in such places has
contributed to further mobilizations and the
creation of common ground amongst activists.
Another important manifestation has been
the establishment in 2001 of the world social
forum (wsfm) – an annual convergence of
NGOs, trades unions, social movements and
other resistance networks in Porto Alegre,
Brazil (2001–3), and subsequently in Mumbai,
India (2004). The WSF attempts to engender
a process of dialogue and reflection, and
the transnational exchange of experiences,
ideas, strategies and information concerning
grassroots globalization. The WSF (which
attracted tens of thousands of participants in
2003) has decentralized into regional and thematic forums that are being held in various
parts of the world, such as the European
Social Forum in Florence, Italy (2002), the
Asian Social Forum in Hyderabad, India
(2003), and the Thematic Forum on Drugs,
Human Rights and Democracy in Cartagena,
Colombia (2003) (Sen, Anand, Escobar and
Waterman, 2004).
Mary Kaldor (2003) posits that such developments represent the emergence of a ‘global
civil society’ that includes at least six different types of political actor that are ‘antiglobalization’ in outlook: more traditional
social movements such as trades unions;
more contemporary social movements such
as women’s and environmental movements;
NGOs such as Amnesty International; transnational civic networks such as the International Rivers Network; ‘new’ nationalist
32
and fundamentalist movements such as Al
Qaeda; and the anti-capitalist movement.
Meanwhile, Amory Starr (2000) identifies at
least three different strategic foci within the
‘anti-globalization movement’: (i) Contestation
and Reform, which involves social movements
and organizations that seek to impose regulatory limitations on corporations and or governments, or force them to self-regulate,
mobilizing existing formal democratic channels of protest (e.g. Human Rights Watch
and the Fair Trade network); (ii) Globalization
from Below, whereby various social movements
and organizations form global alliances
around such issues as environmental degradation, the abuse of human rights and labour
standards, to make corporations and governments accountable to people instead of elites
(e.g. the Zapatistas, labour unions or the WSF);
and (iii) De-linking, Relocalization and Sovereignty, whereby varied initiatives articulate the
pleasures, productivities and rights of localities
and attempt to de-link local economies from
corporate-controlled national and international
economies (e.g. permaculture initiatives, community currency, community credit organizations, sovereignty movements – especially those
of indigenous peoples – and various religious
nationalisms; see also Hines, 2000).
Despite such diversity, certain key areas
of agreement have emerged, such as demands
for (i) the cancellation of foreign debt in the
developing world (which amounted to US
$3,000 billion in 1999); (ii) the introduction
of a tax on international currency transactions,
and controls on capital flows; (iii) the reduction
in people’s working hours and an end to child
labour; (iv) the defence of public services; (v)
progressive taxation to finance public services
and redistribute wealth and income; (vi) the
international adoption of enforceable targets
for greenhouse emissions and large-scale investment in renewable energy; (vii) policies
that ensure land, water and food sovereignty
for peasant and indigenous people; and (viii)
the defence of civil liberties (Callinicos, 2003;
Fisher and Ponniah, 2003). At the root of such
demands is the perceived necessity to reclaim
and protect common resources and rights
seen as directly under threat of erasure or appropriation by the processes and agents of neoliberal globalization.
pr
anti-humanism
A critique of humanism
that seeks to displace the human subject as
the centre of philosophical and social enquiry.
Knowledge and understanding, morality and
ethics, and interpretation are all challenged by
APARTHEID
a rethinking of notions of agency, rationality
and subjectivity. While ‘anti-humanism’ is a
term that can encompass a range of different
perspectives, it generally takes its philosophical basis from Friedrich Nietzsche’s thinking
through of the death of God. For Nietzsche, it
was not enough to replace God at the centre
with the human but, rather, the implications
needed to be thought through more fundamentally. Martin Heidegger’s 1947 ‘Letter
on Humanism’ (see Heidegger, 1991[1947])
was a major influence on a generation of
French writers such as Michel Foucault
(1970 [1966]) and Jacques Derrida (1982b),
collectively identified under the sign of poststructuralism, whose reformulations proved
influential in the Anglophone academy. The
white, male, heterosexual adult who is generally a cipher for the ‘human’ of classical humanism has also been criticized from a range
of perspectives. Not all of these take the strong
anti-humanist perspective that denies agency
and responsibility, which is often seen as politically disabling, but the challenge to the universalizing tendencies of classical humanist
reasoning has been pervasive. In human geography, this critique has led to a broadly understood posthumanist tradition.
se
Suggested reading
Soper (1986).
apartheid A political and legal system
of racial classification, spatial separation and
discrimination against black South Africans.
Associated with the white minority National
Party that came to power in 1948, apartheid
policies built on pre-existing forms of racial
segregation and dispossession, but took
them in new directions.
Dismissing presumptions of South African
exceptionalism, Mamdani (1996) maintains
that apartheid was simply a variant of indirect
rule through which colonial power operated in
other parts of africa (see colonialism).
While acknowledging these continuities, Alexander (2002, p. 140) insists that ‘the fact of a
large population of European descent [ . . . ]
does make all the difference’. So, too, do the
interconnections between institutionalized racism and forms of class exploitation that characterized apartheid.
Apartheid officially died in 1994, when the
African National Congress (ANC) received
overwhelming support in South Africa’s first
non-racial election, which marked the transition to liberal democracy. Yet apartheid retains a powerful afterlife in terms of persistent
racial, spatial and economic inequalities in
South Africa, and as emblematic of ongoing
forms of racialized oppression around the
world.
Gross violations of human rights committed during the apartheid era were the focus of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC), which has become a model for countries all over the world seeking to come to
terms with histories of violence. Between
1996 and 1998, the TRC received 20,000
statements from victims and nearly 8,000
applications for amnesty from perpetrators.
In her compelling account of the TRC, Krog
(2000) illuminates its accomplishments, limitations and ambiguities, along with chilling
testimonies of many who bore the brunt of
state-sanctioned violence. The final report of
the TRC, submitted in 2003, recommended
that the government pay some US $375 million in reparations, and that businesses that
had benefited from apartheid policies make
reparations through a special wealth tax. President Thabo Mbeki authorized a one-time payment of R30,000 (approximately US $5,000)
to each of about 22,000 people defined as
victims of apartheid, but refused to impose a
tax on businesses.
The debate over apartheid reparations overlaps with the ANC government’s controversial
embrace of a conservative package of neoliberal macro-economic policies in 1996
(Bond, 2000; see neo-liberalism). The postapartheid era has seen the rapid emergence
of an African middle class and a small but
extremely wealthy corporate black elite. Yet
huge numbers of black South Africans remain
in impoverished conditions in poorly serviced
and densely populated townships, rural
reserves and slum settlements. Persistent
poverty and inequality have prompted some
critics to argue that there has been a shift
from race to class apartheid, while others
contest this formulation. Since 2001 many
oppositional movements have arisen demanding access to resources, and fierce protests
have erupted in many different parts of the
country. Despite these challenges, the ANC
continues to exercise considerable hegemonic
power – a testimony, perhaps, to the ongoing
importance of nationalism, grounded partly in
histories and memories of the struggle against
apartheid.
Global apartheid, some maintain, is a more
adequate description of the current world
order than apparently race-neutral terms
such as globalization or neo-liberalism, and
can also bolster efforts to transform global
33
APPLIED GEOGRAPHY
minority rule. Experience in post-apartheid
South Africa has much to contribute to struggles aimed at deepening democracy and challenging inequality.
gha
Suggested reading
Beinart (2001); Hart (2003); Marais (2001).
applied geography This is a notion that
necessarily operates at a number of different
levels. On the one hand, geographical research
and the production of geographical knowledge
are activities that necessarily relate to the ‘real
world’. Geographers are attempting to understand the physical and human world, and their
knowledge is produced in a dialectic with the
world around them. In addition, their knowledge is disseminated to others – and particularly students – in a way that is likely to shape
people’s beliefs and behaviour. In this regard,
all knowledge is potentially applied.
On the other hand, however, there are particular strands of geographical enquiry that
prioritize the production of knowledge that
can be applied to solving pressing issues or
concerns in society. There are strong strands
of geographical research in the fields of environmental policy, development and urban and
regional planning that have been more applied. It is also important to note that any
field of human geography and physical
geography can potentially be applied to the
development of policy. Geographers might be
contracted to do research about a social concern and highlight the potential policy implications of their findings. They may also be
consulted as experts in order to draw on their
knowledge in the production of public policy.
Yet further, geographers might highlight their
own views about potential policy-making by
the state, corporations or civil society as a
result of their own research or insights. There
is clearly a place for geography to be applied
through policy engagements of various kinds
and there have long been vocal calls to do
more of this work – for the debate in the
1970s, see Coppock (1974) and, more recently, see Martin (2001b) and Ward (2005a).
It is useful to distinguish this focus on policy
from a wider set of engagements and applications that we can call public geographies.
Echoing recent debates in the discipline of
sociology (see Burawoy, 2005), a number of
geographers are beginning to rethink the way
in which academics engage with, and even
create, audiences through their research,
teaching and in their roles and performances
as intellectuals in the wider society (Murphy,
34
2006; Ward, 2006). In this model, the discipline itself comprises different interlocutors
such as students and fellow academics with
whom there is an ongoing dialogue over
the production and dissemination of ideas.
In addition, there are multiple publics with
whom academics might engage with as part
of their own work, exploring new developments, testing out ideas and putting research
into action. The explosion of interest in action research and participant observation
methodologies that seek to empower research
groups and participants is in part a reflection
of this shift towards public collaborative
engagement through our research (see Hale
and Wills, 2005). Furthermore, the practice
of research can itself constitute audiences,
however fleetingly, through activities such as
holding a workshop or conference to disseminate findings, publishing research material
and papers on the Internet, or taking part in
media coverage of events.
Geography and geographers can add significantly to understanding the contemporary
human and physical world at a time when
issues of geography are increasingly pressing.
There is clearly a place for applying such
knowledge on a whole range of fronts, from
the most powerful intellectual interventions
about contemporary neo-liberalism and war
(Gregory, 2004b; RETORT, 2005), to ongoing engagement in the problems of civil society and the development of policy for
particular ‘clients’. Our notion of applied
geography thus needs to be widened far beyond the traditional focus on policy, to incorporate the discipline’s relevance to multiple
audiences and political forces for change. jwi
Suggested reading
Murphy (2006); Ward (2005, 2006).
area studies Academic programmes that cut
across disciplinary boundaries to develop a
relatively comprehensive body of knowledge
about given regions – or areas – of the
world. There is a history of such regionally
based, interdisciplinary studies that pre-dates
the Second World War (Said, 2003 [1978]),
including within geography. Contemporary
area studies, however, and the world regions
that they have taken as objects of study, are
largely
a
post-Second
World
War
phenomenon.
At the end of the Second World War, the US
government took on a leading role in funding
area studies programmes within US universities
in order to develop the academic expertise
AREAL DIFFERENTIATION
necessary for effective management of the
national project of world leadership (Gendzier,
1985). In the cold war era, some of the first
areas of major concern were in europe, but
area studies programmes were also quickly
developed for regions of asia (including the
middle east) and the rest of the so-called
third world (Cumings, 1998). Although the
intention of the US government in funding
such programmes clearly had to do with
the need to develop knowledge useful to the
maintenance of imperial power (see american
empire), the kinds of work done within area
studies came to vary widely, both methodologically and politically (Wallerstein, Juma,
Keller et al., 1996).
Methodologically, area studies programmes
brought together scholars from a range of social sciences – including anthropology, applied
economics, geography, history, political science and sociology – as well as various humanities and physical sciences disciplines. This
spurred a significant amount of interdisciplinary collaboration and is credited by some
scholars with having helped erode disciplinary
boundaries in the post-Second World War
academy (Wallerstein, Juma, Keller et al.,
1996, pp. 36–48).
While many early Cold War studies were
animated by a desire to serve the US government’s overseas projects – even leading
in some cases to considerable controversy
within disciplines over the appropriate role of
scholarship – many area studies programmes
also came to serve as the home base for a range
of critical scholarly endeavours that questioned these same US policies (Anderson,
1998, pp. 11–12). This was the case, for
example, in Asian studies, where a group
called the ‘Concerned Asian Scholars’ came
together during the Vietnam War, challenging
the views of Asianist scholars who supported
the US war effort. Likewise, scholarship
critical of US foreign policy agendas has frequently emanated from fields such as Latin
American and Middle Eastern studies.
jgi
Suggested reading
Anderson (1998); Cumings (1998); Gendzier
(1985); Said (2003 [1978]); Wallerstein, Juma,
Keller et al. (1996).
areal differentiation The study of the
spatial distribution of physical and human
phenomena as they relate to one another in
regions or other spatial units. Also sometimes
referred to as chorology, it is, with landscape and spatial analysis approaches, often
regarded as one of the three main conceptions
of human geography. Of the three, it is the
oldest Western tradition of geographical
enquiry, tracing its beginnings to the Greeks
Hecateus of Miletus and Strabo, although
the term itself only dates from the 1930s.
In Strabo’s words, the geographer is ‘the person who describes the parts of the Earth’.
Description, however, has never been just taking inventory of the features of regions. The
purpose was always to relate the features
to one another to understand how places differ from one another and how this has come
about. As the theoretical justification for studying regions and regional geography, use of
areal differentiation has waxed and waned
down the years, with different proponents
using distinctive concepts and language.
The ‘classic’ epoch of regional geography, to
use Paul Claval’s (1993, p. 15) turn of phrase,
was reached in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, when much of the theoretical debate in geography was devoted to the
concept of the region. The most important
modern statement of geography as areal differentiation was made in Richard Hartshorne’s
The nature of geography (1939). Though often
viewed as an argument for the uniqueness of
regions, the logic of the presentation suggests
that recognizing regions requires investigating
similarities as well as differences over space. In
the 1950s and 1960s, critics of regional geography succeeded in marginalizing the focus
on areal differentiation as they pushed a redefinition of the field in terms of spatial analysis.
In the 1980s, however, the approach made
something of a comeback. But the revival is
neither directly connected to older debates
such as that between Hartshorne and his
critics, nor is it monolithic. Three positions
can be distinguished. One involves a focus on
place-making as an essential human activity.
A second sees regional differences in terms
of processes of uneven development that are
forever rearticulating the global division of
labour under capitalism. A third attempts reconciliation between the first two by seeing
places or regions as settings for the interpellation
of human agency and the conditioning effects
on it of social and environmental context.
Persisting dilemmas limit the possibility of
unifying these positions. For one thing, the
question of whether regions are ‘real’ or exist
solely in the mind of the observer continues to
wrack debate (Agnew, 1999). There are also
important differences over narrative versus
analytic modes of thinking and presentation,
the relevance of regional divisions in an
35
ART
increasingly ‘networked’ world, and the best
terminology (such as that of place versus
region).
ja
Suggested reading
Entrikin and Brunn (1989); Sack (1997).
art Geography has a long-standing and
multifarious relationship with art. geography’s
literal meaning as ‘earth writing’ and its concern with visual representation have often
brought the discipline into close involvement
with artistic practices, with geographical
knowledge frequently being dependent upon
skills of visual survey and graphic recording
such as sketching, drafting and painting,
especially during the period of European
exploration (Cosgrove, 1999). The significance of an aesthetic sensibility continued
through much cultural geography and regional geography in the early twentieth century; for example, in Carl Ortwin Sauer’s
studies of cultural landscapes and in the
pictorial language with which Paul Vidal de
la Blache referred to landscape description.
Geographical interest in visual art has taken
many forms. These include studies of representations of spaces, places and environments
in a range of artistic media, especially in terms
of the politics of representation, ideology,
identity and the construction of imaginative
geographies. Also important is geographical
research on art production (e.g. the formation
of local, regional and national artistic traditions; the role of arts industries in economic
and urban change; the spaces of artistic creativity); on art dissemination and reception
(including through artistic networks, institutions, audiences, and public engagement with
and contestation of works of art); and on art
practices (as embodied creative processes, as
expressions and forms of geographical knowledge, as interventions in and performances of
spaces and places).
Geography’s reconstitution as a spatial science in the 1950s and 1960s sidelined such
artistic considerations, although a concern
with visualization and the aesthetics of order
can be discerned in geometric spatial modelling (Gregory, 1994). humanistic geography
brought an interest in the expressive and emotional engagement of art with places through
its emphasis on subjectivity and human experience. The emergence of a politicized cultural geography in the 1980s, influenced by
marxism as well as social histories of art and
broader currents of cultural theory, turned
critical attention to the social conditions and
36
power relations through which art is produced
as part of a concern with the politics of representation. Significant studies focused on the
constitution of the Western idea of landscape
as a ‘way of seeing’, and on its role in naturalizing class and property relations, in articulating visions of national identity, and in
legitimating colonial interests (e.g. Daniels,
1993; Cosgrove, 1998 [1984]). Feminist
critics also emphasized the importance of gender relations and sexuality in discussions of
visuality and landscape (see also vision and
visuality).
Recent geographical interest in art has become more extensive and diverse. While
much work remains focused on visual and
iconographic readings of artefacts such as
paintings, drawings, maps, photographs, landscapes, architecture, monuments and sculptures, research has also addressed the
spatialities of sound art, land art, street art,
music, video, film, performance and dance,
among other fields. Attention has turned in
particular to artistic practices and to the embodied, processual and performative elements
of art (see performance). Studies have thus
drawn out the bodily practices and sensory
immersion in places involved in visual art production (Crouch and Toogood, 1999), and to a
lesser extent viewing and reception. They have
also explored the ways in which modern and
contemporary artistic practices have directly
engaged with urban and rural geographies,
from attempts by twentieth-century avantgardes such as the dadaists, surrealists and
situationists to break down divisions between
art and everyday spaces, to more recent ‘works’
and interventions by performance artists, conceptual artists, community artists and others.
The latter often take collectivist, collaborative,
ethnographic or dialogical approaches, based
not on the individualized production of aesthetic objects but on practices such as urban
explorations, walks, participatory events, investigations of social spaces and sites, and
interactions with groups and communities.
They are also frequently politicized or activist,
forging public arenas for political discussion
and critical engagement with the processes
through which spaces are produced (Deutsche,
1996b; for examples, see Cant and Morris,
2006; and the ‘Cultural geographies in practice’ section of the journal Cultural Geographies). Alongside researching such art, a number
of geographers are collaborating with artists
(e.g. Driver, Nash, Prendergast and Swenson,
2002). Some are further experimenting themselves with artistic and performative practices
ASIA (IDEA OF)
as a critical and imaginative means of addressing geographical concerns.
dp
Suggested reading
Cosgrove (1999); Deutsche (1996b).
artificial intelligence Computerized decision making that simulates human expert
decision-making. In its simplest form, artificial
intelligence (AI) consists of a body of procedural rules (e.g. the linear IF THEN ELSE rules
that are the mainstay of computer programming). Or it can describe a heuristic type of
intelligence that surpasses simple procedural
instructions. Artificial intelligence can relieve
humans of tedious tasks such as addition of
grocery prices. For such simple tasks, it often
surpasses humans in speed and accuracy but
can fall short when asked to codify knowledge
in a holistic manner. Since the early 1990s,
more sophisticated AI has sought to emulate
human thinking using parallel computing (e.g.
neural nets and genetic algorithms). These
techniques have been more successful than
traditional linear rule-based systems in classifying area types or identifying regional zones.
They have also been used for map generalization – a task that requires processing of
multiple decision-making facets including
context, intention, scale and contiguity. In
each case, neural nets and genetic algorithms
teach themselves based on positive or negative
reinforcement during ‘training’. In the case of
neural nets, a series of images corresponding
to a given classification may be ‘fed’ into the
net. Subsequent training rewards the net for
choosing the right classification. At the present, AI is only able to emulate very simple
human decision-making though the promise
of truly intelligent computing.
ns
Suggested reading
Openshaw and Openshaw (1997); Weibel (1991).
Asia (idea of) Considered the world’s largest
continent but actually part of a single landmass with Europe (the conventional dividing
line being the Ural and Caucasus mountains),
Asia lays claims to being the ‘cradle of human
civilization’ as it is home to important ancient
civilizations – including those of China,
India, Japan and Persia – that generated
major developments in agriculture, urbanism,
religion and other fields of human expression
(Parker, 1994, p. 4).
Derived from Greek and first used to describe the region later known as Asia Minor,
‘Asia’, like other related terms such as the
‘Orient’ or the ‘Far East’, is a cartographic
construct imposed from the outside rather
than a pre-existing geographical reality.
Depicted on eurocentric maps of the world
as the ‘east’, European colonizers tended to
frame Asia in oppositional terms to Europe:
as culturally degenerate, environmentally debilitating and inherently backward, in contrast
to Europe’s civilizational progress and
enlightenment (Weightman, 2006). As a
conceptual category, the term ‘Asia’ has continued to evolve, often in response to external
categorization. The term for the sub-region of
South East Asia, for example, has only gained
currency since the Second World War, when
the region gained visibility in military and
strategic terms under the South East Asia
Command established in 1943, and consequently achieved legitimacy in international
eyes (Savage, Kong and Yeoh, 1993). ‘Asia’
as a construct is also subject to internal pressures. For example, the term ‘Asiatic’ to refer
to the inhabitants of Asia or as an adjective
pertaining to Asia has now been superseded
in common usage by ‘Asian’: the former nomenclature fell out of favour in the postwar
era, as it had become laden with pejorative
implications during European colonialism.
Today, Asia’s 3.6 billion people account for
about three-fifths of the world’s population.
China, the most populous nation in the
world, has a current population of more than
1.2 billion people, followed closely by India,
with a population of slightly over a billion
(United Nations, 2005). Although the world’s
population growth rate is now generally
declining, and in Asia it is likely to fall even
further below the global rate, nonetheless, the
developing countries of Asia will still be major
contributors to world population growth for
many decades to come. More than a third of
Asia’s population live in urban areas, including some of the largest megacities in the world.
Considering Asia as one geographical entity,
however, belies the diversity in cultures and
peoples, as well as a wide range of economic,
political and demographic structures. Migration, trade, war and European colonization in
the past had contributed to contact, exchange
and syncretism in many spheres of life within
the region. Despite the new sense of Asian
solidarity expressed during the Bandung Conference of 1955 to sever ties of dependency on
the West, different approaches to decolonization and nationalism in the mid-twentieth century led the countries in Asia down divergent
pathways (Parker, 1994, p. 10). The more
37
ASIAN MIRACLE/TIGERS
Weightman (2006).
destruction caused by rapid growth. After the
economic crisis hit many of the tigers in 1997,
some analysts also began to question the economic sustainability of the Asian NIC growth
model (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, 1998). In
addition, some authors have noted that the
Asian miracle has much to do with the development of a networked, cold war era, regional
production hierarchy, led by Japan, which is
both geographically and historically specific –
and thus not readily replicated even if it does
present a desirable model (Cumings, 1984;
Bernard and Ravenhill, 1995).
jgl
Asian miracle/tigers A popular description
Suggested reading
of East and South East Asian countries that
had exceptionally high rates of economic
growth from the 1960s until the Asian
economic crisis of 1997. Some lists of the
Asian miracle economies include Japan, but
most early discussions focused on Hong
Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan,
also called the ‘first tier’ Asian newly industrializing countries (NICs). After the economic
boom extended to Southeast Asia in the
1980s and 1990s, authors began to speak of
Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand as part of
the miracle, and some discussions of China’s
rapid growth since the 1990s also place it
on the list of tigers/miracle economies.
The World Bank’s East Asian Miracle report
(1993) put an official seal on the language of
miracles, though the bank’s analysis argued
that the rapid growth of these economies was
not in fact miraculous and could be replicated
by other countries. The report was met with
varied forms of criticism, however, and there
have been analysts who question whether the
performance of the Asian NICs is replicable
or should be celebrated as uncritically as it
often has been.
The East Asian Miracle report generally
credited neo-liberal policies with responsibility
for the boom, including maintenance of
export-oriented trade regimes, though it
acknowledged some benefits from policies of
‘financial repression’, such as state-imposed
below-market interest rates for loans to
specific exporting industries. Various institutionalist analysts criticized the bank for overlooking a range of other state policies that
facilitated growth, but that do not fit the tenets
of neo-liberalism (Wade, 1996).
Other analysts have criticized celebration of
the Asian NICs performance, regardless of the
specific role of states in their growth. Criticisms
have included concerns about the political repressiveness of Asian states and environmental
Bernard and Ravenhill (1995); Cumings (1984);
Hart-Landsberg and Burkett (1998); Wade
(1996); World Bank (1993).
recent pursuit of modernity and global futures
has also been characterized by uneven and different trajectories for countries in Asia.
Optimism about the region based on the
runaway success of some East and South East
Asian ‘miracle’ economies (see asian miracle /
tigers) was suddenly brought up short as the
region floundered in crisis in the closing years of
the twentieth century (Chapman and Baker,
1992; Forbes, 2005).
by
Suggested reading
38
assemblage The process by which a collective asian miracle/tigers entry entity (thing or
meaning) is created from the connection of a
range of heterogeneous components. A translation of the French word agencement, the solidity of the English term tends to make it
sound more static, rational and calculated
than the original term signifies. In fact, it is
precisely the sense of an aggregate with a certain consistency being created from an active,
ad hoc and ongoing entanglement of elements
that has made the notion so attractive to
authors working in a post-structuralist
vein. The concept has been put to work notably in science and technology studies (STS)
(see Law, 2004), the work of Jacques Derrida,
and – most significantly – the combined writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
(1998).
nb
assimilation A particular form of the social
integration of people into a new society, typically after they have migrated from another
country (cf. migration). There are many
forms of integration, which include social exclusion (denying migrants basic social rights),
assimilation, laissez-faire approaches (leaving
migrants alone to choose their own mode of
social engagement with mainstream society)
and pluralism (allowing migrants to retain
their cultural traditions and live separately
from mainstream society). Assimilation is a
process whereby migrants give up their cultural traditions, including attire, language,
cuisines and ways of thinking, and take on
the cultural traditions of the society in their
destination country (Gordon, 1964; Glazer
and Moynihan, 1970). The classic immigration-based countries – the USA, Canada,
AUSTRAL(AS)IA, IDEA OF
Australia and New Zealand – all expected migrants to assimilate for most of their history.
Recently, Canada and Australia have adopted
the policy of multiculturalism as a new
mode of migrant integration, which is a kind
of hybrid between assimilation and pluralism
(Hiebert and Ley, 2003). Several European
countries also adopted multicultural policies
in the latter decades of the twentieth century,
notably the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK.
Other European countries, such as France and
Germany, have been wary of multiculturalism
and continue to expect migrants to assimilate.
In the aftermath of terrorist incidents and several episodes of social unrest, those European
countries that adopted multiculturalism
appear to be reconsidering that decision, and
may be returning to assimilation as a means of
integration (Vasta, 2005). These debates have
been highly politically charged, and critics
of the return to assimilation have argued that
it reflects an Islamophobic agenda.
dh
Suggested reading
Massey and Denton (1993).
asylum Asylum has two distinct meanings in
human geography. One stream of work has
been directed towards the (historical) geography of institutions for mental illnesss (Philo,
2004; and see medical geography). Another
body of work examines asylum as the displacement of refugees from one state to another, in
which they seek sanctuary from violence and
political persecution (Hyndman, 2000). The
two are very different, but both of them raise
searching questions about marginalization and
the production and location of ‘outsiders’. jh
Austral(as)ia, idea of The term ‘Australasia’
is a construct of imperialism. As a means
of delineating and denoting a diversity of
far-flung colonial territories, it had wide currency in the nineteenth century, both in the
metropole and regionally. If it retains some
utility in the former context, it is ‘a repressed
memory’ in the latter (Denoon, 2003). This
is despite continually evolving regional networks of economy, migration and, to a lesser
extent, collective memory.
‘Austral’ means ‘belonging to the south’, so
‘Australasia’ is literally to the south of, but
distinct from, asia. The term was coined in
1756 by the Frenchman Charles de Brosses
for one of his three divisions of the great southern continent. Belief in the existence of this
continent – also known as Terra Australis –
entered the European geographical imagin-
ation from sources in classical cartography.
The search for it was one of the purposes of
James Cook’s voyages to the Pacific; what
eventually emerged were the islands of the
Pacific and continental Australia.
‘Australasia’ came to have flexible meaning,
but usually encompassed the British colonies on
the Australian mainland along with Tasmania,
New Zealand, Fiji, British New Guinea
(Papua), the Solomon Islands, the Cook Islands
and Tonga. The construct reflected the shared
interests of British colonists and capital in the
region, their security dependent on the imperial
navy and their political legitimacy on the imperial parliament. The continuing popularity in
Australia of Blainey’s book The tyranny of distance (1966) indicates that (western) europe
remains for many a cardinal cultural reference
point.
But shared interests were also undercut by
other, conflicting, perspectives. The eventual
outcome of the 1890 Australasian Federation
Conference was the federation, in 1901,
of the Australian colonies alone. The term
‘Australasia’ became tainted, particularly in
New Zealand, one of whose representatives
at the 1890 meeting had underlined its concern about Australian dominance by describing his homeland as a ‘rather remote part of
Australasia’ (in Mein Smith, 2003, p. 312).
There were also anxieties, in New Zealand
and the Pacific islands, that matters of ‘native
administration’ would be silenced in an
Australian-dominated Federal parliament.
This reflected the particularities of relations
with indigenous peoples in the different
territories.
In the 1920s ‘Australia Unlimited’ was promoted by boosters who envisaged population
capacities of 100–500 million and saw a dominant Australia as ‘the future pivot of white
settlement in a secure and revivified empire’
(Powell, 1988, p. 131). The geographer
Griffith Taylor, whose prediction of a population of only 20 million in 2000 was prescient,
challenged this vision cartographically, labelling much of the Australian interior as ‘uninhabited’ and ‘almost useless’. This echoed
another colonial imaginary, that of Australia
as terra nullius, or no one’s land, prior to
European settlement. Not until the Mabo
judgement of 1992 was native (or aboriginal)
title recognized in Australian common
law (Whatmore, 2002c) (cf. aboriginality).
Mabo has ‘unsettled’ Australia, bringing to the
fore contestations over national aspirations
that also characterize the other countries
of what was ‘Australasia’. The past has also
39
AUTHENTICITY
returned to haunt the present in another guise:
whereas Australasia was originally used to
mark a separation from Asia, in recent years
regional geographical imaginaries have been
both dislocated and reoriented by deepening
economic and cultural connections between
the two.
ep
authenticity get played out in the knowledgemaking practices of specific times and places
(Livingstone, 2003c).
nj
Suggested reading
Livingstone (2003c).
azimuth The azimuth is the horizontal (‘on
Suggested reading
Denoon (2003); Whatmore (2002c).
authenticity The genuineness, trustworthiness and accuracy of an object or an account.
Human geographers have addressed the issue
of authenticity in relation to a whole raft
of questions from identity politics (e.g. the
gendered self) to our understanding of and
relationship with nature. In all cases there
has been a shift away from an essentialist
concept of the authentic (cf. essentialism) to
a more partial, constructed and situated notion of what passes as authentic (Whatmore,
2002a). Rather than presenting a foundationalist account of authenticity, human geographers are tracing how particular versions of
40
the ground’) angle between a given direction
and some line of reference (a meridian).
Imagine that you stand looking northwards
along the Grand Meridian (zero degrees longitude) at Greenwich, England – the official
starting point for each new day. A bird flies
nearby and you turn your feet towards its
shadow on the ground. The angle you have
rotated defines the azimuth. Because that angle
usually is measured with a compass, azimuth is
synonymous with bearing. But be warned if
travelling to the North Pole – the azimuth
you should follow is not magnetic north! rh
Suggested reading
Robinson, Morrison, Muehrcke, Guptill and
Kimerling (1993).
B
back-to-the-city movement A term usually
indicating repopulation of cities by former
suburban residents. The perception of a
back-to-the-city movement has, since the
1990s, been influenced by media reports and
some research studies that indicate, advocate,
and/or celebrate the return of mostly affluent
class fractions to some inner-city neighbourhoods (Florida, 2002). The term is, then,
closely associated with discussions of gentrification. Recent research in the USA cautions
that most residential migration still involves
suburbanization or counter-urbanization
and notes that we are far from seeing a widespread back-to-the city movement (Kasarda,
Appold, Sweeney and Sieff, 1997).
em
Suggested reading
Kasarda, Appold, Sweeney and Sieff (1997).
balkanization The fragmentation of a larger
political entity into smaller, mutually hostile
units. The term originates from the geopolitics of national self-determination in a context of continental power rivalries in the
Balkans at the end of the nineteenth century.
The term returned to prominence with the
break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and was
brought to bear upon other states, especially
Russia. Balkanization has been used as a metaphor for immigration patterns into the USA
producing a spatial and social segmentation of
the population (Frey, 1996: see segregation).
Such usage has been contested for its negative
connotations (Ellis and Wright, 1998).
cf
bare life (‘naked life’) Life that is excluded
from political participation, and so can be
abandoned to violence and death without
recrimination or penalty. The emphasis on
exclusion and abandonment is vital: ‘bare
life’ is not a given but is socially produced.
Agamben (1998) claims that classical Greek
philosophy made a vital distinction between
political life (bios) and merely existent, biological life (zoe): and, as he uses the term,
bare life is actively poised between the two.
To show how vulnerable such a position is,
Agamben locates the production of bare life
at the intersection of two distinctive modalities
of power: sovereign power and biopower.
His thesis is a double critique of Michel
Foucault’s theses on biopolitics, disciplinary
power and governmentality.
(1) Agamben refuses Foucault’s historical
trajectory.
Foucault
(1981a[1976],
p. 141) argued that a crucial junction
between modernity and capitalism
was the novel ‘entry of life into history’
that took place in eighteenth-century
Europe, whereas Agamben insists that
‘the inclusion of bare life in the political
realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power’: in
other words, for Agamben this is a process with a much longer history (which is
why he returns to classical philosophy).
What characterizes political modernity
for Agamben is then the ‘coincidence’
of bare life with the political realm, but
a coincidence that is profoundly contradictory: bare life is no longer at the
margins of the political order, in fact
it becomes a central object of political
calculation, but it is also excluded from
its deliberations (Mills, 2004, p. 46). It is
by no means clear that Foucault and
Agamben mean the same thing by ‘life’,
but the bearers of Agamben’s ‘bare life’
are political objects not political subjects:
they are wilfully exposed to violence and
death because they are treated as
though they do not matter so that, collectively, they become so many versions
of homo sacer.
(2) Agamben twists Foucault’s spatial template. His account turns not on strategies
through which the normal order contains
and confines its ‘outside’ – the sick, the
mad, the criminal, the deviant – but on
strategies through which the ‘outside’ is
included ‘by the suspension of the juridical order’s validity – by letting the juridical order withdraw from the exception
and abandon it’. Agamben argues that
this space of exception (see exception,
space of) is typically produced through
martial law and a state of emergency,
which then become the ground through
which sovereign power constitutes and
extends itself.
41
BARRIO
Agamben treats the camp as the exemplary
locus of the production of bare life. He does
not confine the camp to particular locations,
but other writers have seen the production of
bare life in the plight of refugees in Kosovo
(Edkins, 2003), in the contemporary ‘war on
terror’ in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq and
its global war prison (Gregory, 2004b,
2006b), in post-colonial violence in Rwanda
and Zimbabwe (Sylvester, 2006), and in postKatrina New Orleans (Braun and McCarthy,
2005). The disposition to abandon people in
this way, visible in early and late capitalism,
has economic and well as political coordinates,
and these imperatives have been vigorously
reasserted under the sign of neo-liberalism
(cf. Bauman, 2004).
dg
Suggested reading
Sylvester (2006).
barrio A Spanish word meaning ‘neighbourhood’. The term’s various significations in the
Americas are rooted in Spanish colonialism.
Colonial cities were laid out in a grid pattern
radiating out from a central plaza, church
and government buildings (Bakewell, 2004).
Residence near the plaza was reserved for the
city’s principal vecinos, or citizens. Poorer residents, with varying citizenship status, lived
in barrios on the outskirts of the town. Thus,
urban location signified social, political,
economic and racial status. In latin america
today, ‘barrio’ may signify a neighbourhood
or a squatter settlement (see squatting); the
actual cultural signification assigned to the
term varies widely (Clawson, 1997, p. 319).
In the Mexican states annexed by the
USA in 1848 after the Mexican–American
War, the term referred to the neighbourhoods
inhabited by Mexican-Americans. Raúl
Homero Villa (2000, pp. 4, 7) proposes the
terms barrioization to refer to the external legal
and ideological structures that contribute
to the formation of segregated barrios and
barriology to describe the internal processes of
place-making that facilitate the creation
of Mexican-American communities. For
Mexican-Americans, ‘barrio’ is associated
with both the poverty resulting from dispossession and the ‘feeling of being at home’
(Griswold del Castillo, 1979, p. 150).
jsu
Suggested reading
Villa (2000).
base and superstructure The metaphor that
Marx uses to express the idea that the
42
economic structure of society (its ‘base’)
conditions corresponding legal and political
superstructures and forms of consciousness.
As Marx succinctly puts it in the Preface to
his 1859 work A contribution to the critique of
political economy, ‘The mode of production of
material life conditions the social, political
and intellectual life process in general’
(see marxism; mode of production).
The relationship is more complicated than it
appears. Marx and Engels subsequently denied
that this formulation implied a simple economic determinism, and insisted that there
were many forms of reciprocal effect between
base and superstructure. This did not prevent
the hardening of the distinction in the often
mechanical interpretations that were systematized in textbooks by Marx’s immediate followers (such as Plekhanov). The tendency
amongst Marxists in the more recent past has
been to downplay the metaphor as too crude to
capture the complexity of interrelationships
that Marx was trying to encapsulate (interactions between base and superstructure are
more evident in some of his historical analyses,
such as ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Napoleon’). It has also proved difficult to maintain a simple base/superstructure distinction
when many superstructural elements – such as
legal conceptions and scientific knowledges –
clearly enter into the economic base.
Cohen (1978) has provided a sophisticated,
modern restatement in functionalist terms that
tries to clarify these issues (see functionalism).
On his reading, the economic base comprises
relations of production (but not forces of production), and the superstructure is much smaller than is often supposed, comprising only
those non-economic institutions, such as legal
systems and the state, that are functionally necessary to the reproduction of the economic
base (art, for example, is thus largely excluded).
Althusser (see Althusser and Balibar, 1970)
tried to resolve the problem in a different
way by developing a further distinction that
Marx made between ‘determination’ and
‘domination’ in his claim that politics played
the dominant role in the ancient world and
religion in the Middle Ages. Althusser interprets this to mean that the economic structure
is only ‘determinant in the last instance’, and
may not itself play the dominant role in many
social formations, although it determines which
of the other levels assumes that dominant
role. For Althusser, therefore, the social system is thus a complex totality ‘structured in
dominance’. Following Althusser, ‘antiessentialist’ Marxists such as Resnick and
BAYESIAN ANALYSIS
Wolff (1987) and Gibson-Graham (2006b
[1996]) have gone further in dissolving the
very notion of the economy as a separate space
with deterministic effects, replacing base and
superstructure with the notion of a decentred,
over-determined totality with no essential,
determining structure (cf. essentialism).
Harvey (1999 [1982]), on the other hand,
continues to emphasize the classical role of the
economy and the dynamics of capital accumulation in shaping social (and, crucially, class)
structures under capitalism, but avoids simple
base/superstructure distinctions by conceptualizing economic and superstructural elements
as ‘moments’ in the total circulation process of
capital.
In summary, although the base/superstructure
distinction is too crude to provide an answer, it
does point towards the key question of the nature
of ‘the economy’ in capitalist systems and its
influence on, and interaction with, wider social,
cultural and political structures.
kb
Bayesian analysis A type of statistical modelling and estimation deriving from the early
ideas of the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who
developed his ‘doctrine of chances’ in 1763
(Bayes, 1763 [1958]). The Bayesian perspective differs from traditional or ‘orthodox’ statistical inference in giving explicit recognition
to the role of prior ideas and probabilities and
so is sometimes labelled as a ‘subjective’ approach to probability and statistics. Much of
the probability theory was developed by 1939,
when Jeffreys wrote his classic text (Jeffreys,
1998 [1939]), but the implementation of
Bayesian methods as a practical statistical
technique is much more recent, and had to
await modern computer technology and the
invention of some very clever new devices.
Bayes’ central idea is that prior probabilities
are updated by confrontation with data to provide posterior probabilities. For example, suppose we want to make inferences about a
parameter u (which might be a mean or a
regression coefficient). Our prior probability
distribution for u is p(u). The observed data
are represented by the likelihood function p
(yju). Using Bayes’ rule on conditional probabilities gives us the posterior density or distribution p(ujy) as follows:
p(ujy) ¼ p(u)p( yju)=p( y),
P
where p(y) ¼ u p(u)p( yju), the sum over all
possible values of u, which acts as a normalizing
constant. This term may be ignored in many
instances (though not in model comparison)
to give the unnormalized posterior density:
p(uj y) / p(u)p( yju):
This expression defines the core of Bayesian
inference. Note that this method derives a
posterior probability distribution for u, whereas
classical (or standard) inference uses the
sample data to make inferences about the
unknown, but assumed fixed, parameter
value of u. Where there are several parameters
in question, such as u1 and u2, then p(ujy) is a
joint distribution, and the Bayesian statistician
converts this to two marginal posterior distributions by integrating across the range of the
other u :
ð
p(u1 j y) / p(u)p( yju)du2 :
In this framework, inferences about u1 are
made taking account of the full distribution
of u2, whereas classical inference is based just
on the optimal point estimates and local
curvature around that location.
Opinions about the potential of Bayesian
methods have differed sharply. Some have
seen them as a way of broadening the scope
of quantitative analysis, whilst others have
rejected the notion of bringing subjectivity
into statistical inference. In practice, Bayesian
methods were little used except for circumstances under which they were equivalent to
classical results and so there was no computational difference, only one of interpretation.
More direct implementation depended on
the facility to do the numerical integrations
required to get the marginal distributions,
and modern computing provided this. In the
social sciences, the work of the Chicago
econometrician Arnold Zellner was very
important in this process (Zellner, 1971).
Modern Bayesian analysis is usually based on
‘uninformative’ or ‘diffuse’ prior information,
reflecting prior ignorance or a determination
not to introduce subjective prior information into the analysis; Bayesian estimation is
then used very much as a technical device to
estimate posterior distributions.
Bayesian methods have taken a further leap
forward in the past decade with the construction of Markov Chain Monte Carlo, or
‘MCMC’, techniques (Gilks, Richardson and
Spiegelhalter, 1996). It has been shown that
43
BEHAVIOURAL GEOGRAPHY
complete sets of joint and marginal posterior
distributions may be constructed by this simulation method. Starting from the (diffuse)
prior distributions, the conditional distributions of the u-parameters are sampled using
random sampling (hence the ‘Monte Carlo’
part of the name) and these sampled u values
are then brought together with the data to
estimate the likelihood. This information is
then used to update the conditional distributions, and the process is repeated many
hundreds or thousands of times, gradually
building up samples representing the posterior
distribution. The sampling at any stage t is
based on updating from the conditionals at
time t 1, and hence it is a (first-order) markov chain process. This remarkable method
can be developed for very complicated models
with many parameters and difficult structures,
and is being used in many disciplines. Models
in both spatial econometrics and multilevel modelling may now be estimated by
these Bayesian methods.
Bayesian methods have been applied in
several areas of geographical and spatial analysis. The specific version of ‘empirical
Bayes’ estimation is widely used in spatial
interpolation and in disease mapping and spatial epidemiology. Other applications include
population and economic forecasting, crime
‘hotspot’ modelling, and hierarchical Bayes
estimation to lend insight into the problem
of ecological inference. Brunsdon (2001)
provides a case-study using MCMC in a Bayesian model predicting school performance figures for pupil-tests. In spatial econometrics,
Bayesian methods, both numerical integration
and MCMC, have been used to estimate
models with spatial endogeneity and more
complicated forms (Hepple, 1995; LeSage,
1997). The geographer Peter Congdon has
written two major statistical texts on Bayesian
statistical modelling (Congdon, 2001). Opinions still differ about the role of subjective
prior information, but modern Bayesian
methods are one of the fastest developing
areas of quantitative analysis.
lwh
Suggested reading
Withers (2002).
behavioural geography A sub-discipline
emphasizing the psychological underpinnings
of individual spatial behaviour; in particular,
the cognitive and decision-making processes
that intervene between a complex environment
and human action. In its earliest expression this
work was more humanistic, exemplified in the
44
historical musings of J.K. Wright in the 1940s
(Keighren, 2005), and the influential essays of
Lowenthal (1961) and Brookfield (1969) on
environmental experience and perception.
While this tradition led into humanistic
geography, behavioural geography was typically more formal and analytic, drawn into
the positivist paradigm of locational analysis. Its characteristic question was: Given the
assumption of rational behaviour, why did an
actual location or pattern of spatial behaviour
depart from an optimal form? (See location
theory.) The answer was seen to be a product
of decision-making, and notably the human
tendency to have only incomplete information,
to make imperfect choices, and to be satisfied
with sub-optimal options. Applications included Wolpert’s (1964) study of Swedish
farmers and Pred’s (1967) analysis of industrial location. In each instance, behaviour was
seen to be satisficing rather than optimizing
as predicted, for decision-makers were not
only incapable but even unwilling to compromise other values in order to maximize
their utility functions. Similar work examined
the journey to shop, and showed again how,
both in terms of retail location and shopping
behaviour, cognitive variables intervened to
complicate geographically rational behaviour
(see retailing). A particular emphasis was
upon preference structures in spatial behaviour, modelling such topics as place utility
and residential search. The most celebrated
work was conducted by Peter Gould and his
students who examined the mental maps, or
preference surfaces, within different countries
held, usually by students, and which might
permit the prediction of subsequent migration (Gould and White, 1993 [1974]).
One of the most interesting and applied
aspects of behavioural geography was work
examining human perception of environmental hazards. Typically, this research addressed itself to a seemingly anachronistic
location decision. Why did people or industry
locate in unpredictable sites such as floodplains or areas of earthquake or avalanche
hazard? How was such irrational behaviour to
be explained? The pioneering work by Robert
Kates and Gilbert White on floodplain hazards
inspired many subsequent studies, which
included increasing methodological sophistication. For example, Saarinen’s (1966)
innovative study of the perception of drought
hazard by farmers on the Great Plains postulated the existence of a distinctive personality
disposition, which he explored using the
thematic apperception test, a personality
BERKELEY SCHOOL
assessment measure. A range of related personality assessments, such as personal construct theory and the semantic differential,
were employed, and in this work geography
and psychology became close neighbours (Aitken, 1991; Kitchin, Blades and Golledge,
1997). During the 1970s, in particular, this
productive interdisciplinary relationship was
developed through the annual meetings of
the Environmental Design Research Association and in the pages of the new journal,
Environment and Behavior (see environmental psychology).
Since that period, behavioural geography has
continued to diversify, even if its position has
been less elevated than in the 1960s and 1970s
when many disciplinary leaders worked in this
sub-discipline. More recent research has
included analysis of environmental learning,
spatial search, developmental issues in spatial
cognition and cartography and Golledge’s
(1993) important work with the disabled and
sight-impaired (see disability). But some of
the lustre has left the field. In part, this may
be related to the methodological sensibilities of
post-positivist human geography. In part, it is
due to the growing conviction of the inherently
socialized nature of geographical knowledge,
which challenges the individualism of psychological models. In part, it emanates from a
suspicion of the adequacy of an epistemology
of observation and measurement that may
leave unexamined non-observable and nonmeasurable contexts and ideological formations. Nonetheless, behavioural geography has
a continuing legacy, comprehensively itemized
and integrated in the massive compilation of
Golledge and Stimson (1997).
dl
Suggested reading
Gold (1980); Golledge and Stimson (1997);
Walmsley and Lewis (1993).
Berkeley School American cultural geography was dominated until the 1980s by
Carl Sauer, his colleagues at the University of
California at Berkeley and their students.
While this type of cultural geography is no
longer important in Berkeley, it remains a research tradition carried on by former Berkeley
students and their students scattered throughout the world.
Arguably, no geographer had more influence on American geography in the twentieth
century than Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889–1975).
He received his PhD in 1915 from the University of Chicago, where he came under the
influence of the environmental determinism
of Ellen Churchill Semple. In 1923 he moved
to Berkeley, and under the influence of the
anthropologists A.L. Kroeber and R.H.
Lowie was exposed to a concept of culture
that was to replace his earlier environmentalist
ideas. In 1925 Sauer wrote what is perhaps his
best known essay, ‘The morphology of landscape’, which strongly denounced environmental determinism and suggested a method
by which cultural geographers should conduct
their fieldwork (Sauer, 1963b [1925]). Shortly
after arriving at Berkeley, Sauer developed what
was to become a life-long interest in latin
america, and there remains a strong connection
with the region in the work of subsequent
generations of his students. Cultural geography,
for Sauer, was the study of the relationship
between humans and the land (see also
cultural landscape). During the latter part of
his career, he pursued two broad, rather speculative historical themes. The first focused on
such questions as early humans’ use of fire and
the seashore as a primeval habitat, while the
second explored the condition of America when
Europeans first encountered it.
While giving Sauer his due, it must be
remembered that most of the ideas that he
introduced into the field – historical reconstruction, cultural hearth and diffusion
amongst them – were current at the time in
German geography (see anthropogeography)
and American cultural anthropology. His
intellectual debt to Friedrich Ratzel, Otto
Schluter, Eduard Hahn and A.L. Kroeber
was immense. Sauer and his students placed
a greater emphasis upon human relationships
with the physical environment than did the
anthropologists, whose interests not only
included human–environment relations but
whose focus was on human behaviour more
generally. Wagner and Mikesell (1962) identify three principal themes that define the work
of the Berkeley School. The first is the diffusion of culture traits, such as plants, animals
and house types. The second is the identification and evolution of culture regions through
material and non-material traits (cf. sequent
occupance). The third is cultural ecology,
usually also studied in historical perspective.
Sauer’s persistent insistence on the importance of an historical perspective ensured that
many American geographers referred to a distinctively hybrid cultural–historical geography.
It has been argued that the Berkeley School
adopted a reified ‘superorganic’ conception of
culture from the anthropologist A.L. Kroeber
(Duncan, 1980). After the 1980s, the Berkeley
School served as a counterpoint for New
45
BID-RENT CURVE
Cultural Geographers of a more theoretical
bent. In the past decade, however, some cultural geographers who feel that New Cultural
Geography had been too discursive and
human in its focus, paying insufficient attention to nature, have come to a new appreciation of some of the more environmentally
focused contributions of the Berkeley School
(Price and Lewis, 1993).
jsd
Suggested reading
Leighly (1963); Wagner and Mikesell (1962).
bid-rent curve A plot of the rent that
people are prepared to pay against distance
from some point, usually the city centre.
Rent bids generally decrease with increasing
distance from a city or its centre where land
values are highest, so a bid-rent curve slopes
down in a diagram with rent on the vertical
axis and distance displayed horizontally (see
alonso model; distance decay). The curve is
sometimes shown as convex to the graph’s
origin, to reflect sharp decreases in rent with
short distances from the city (centre), levelling
off with increasing distance. Bid-rent curves
are an important element in models of both
..
urban and agricultural land use (cf. von thu
nen model).
dms
biodiversity A term defined in the United
Nations Convention on Biological Diversity
(CBD) as ‘the variability among living organisms from all sources including inter alia terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems
and the ecological complexes of which
they are part; this includes diversity within
species, between species and of ecosystems’
(Article 2). The stated objectives of the
Convention are ‘the conservation of biological
diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the
benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic
resources’ (Article 1).
As Jeffries (1997) points out in his account
of the rise of biodiversity as a matter of scientific and policy concern, the term was barely
used in scientific or policy communities before
the 1980s. He tracks its rise to the development of a scientific infrastructure associated
with the new field of conservation biology,
including a learned society (the Society for
Conservation Biology), a scientific journal
(Conservation Biology) and an undergraduate
teaching programme (at the University of
California, Berkeley), all established in 1985.
This body of work focused on recording and
accounting for the observed and hypothesized
46
decline in the variety of living organisms in any
number of contexts – a decline represented as
a human-driven process of extinction. Defined
by its sense of urgency, biodiversity conservation readily took on the mantle of a global
environmental crisis in both scientific and
popular imaginations through such totemic
(and telegenic) spaces as the Amazonian rainforest. The rapid uptake of this new scientific
agenda in the world of international environmental policy-making, centred on the United
Nations, is attributed by Takacs (1996) to the
influential efforts of some of its leading scientific sponsors – whom he collectively labels the
‘rainforest mafia’, notably the eminent US
biologist E.O. Wilson.
Efforts to reduce the rate of decline in biological diversity associated with global and
local management practices fostered under
the CBD, such as Biodiversity Action Plans,
are bound up with the rather different agendas
of those concerned with exploiting biodiversity
as a new form of natural resource (Bowker,
2000; see also genetic geographies). Among a
number of problematic tensions inherent in
these management regimes, two have drawn
significant and persistent political fire. First,
the CBD regime sets biological diversity apart
from, and at odds with, human society and
activity. This is contradicted by the historical
record of co-evolution between humans,
plants and animals, which has left its mark,
through processes such as domestication, on
the genetic and phenotypic diversity of our
biological heritage today. Second, the CBD
regime has generated some highly contested
management arrangements, such as those
permitting the slaughter of animals belonging
to mammal species threatened with extinction
in order to generate income to invest in
the protection of the remaining species
population.
sw
Suggested reading
Bowker (2000); Jeffries (1997); Takacs (1996);
United Nations Environment Programme (1992).
biogeography One of the oldest sub-fields
of the discipline, concerned with describing
and explaining the spatial patterns of the distribution of living organisms: where they are,
where they are not and why. While this field of
concern has now become tightly bound up
with the rise of scientific and policy effort to
manage species extinctions and conserve biological diversity (see biodiversity), the study
of biogeography represents an important and
generative common ground between human
BIOPHILOSOPHY
and physical geographers, both historically
and today (see Spencer and Whatmore,
2001).
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, biogeography was a focus of analysis across disciplines such as geography, anthropology and archaeology, both for those
concerned with the development of human
societies and for those concerned with the
distribution and viability of animal or plant
populations. Cultural geographers such as
Carl Sauer, for example, framed their accounts of societal development in terms of
the ecological fabric of a region or landscape
in which it was situated (see berkeley
school). While these concerns fell from favour in cultural geography as divisions between natural and social science perspectives
and practices became more entrenched (see
environmental determinism), they have
gained new impetus from the popular science
writing of sociobiologists such as Jared Diamond, in his account of the connections between the social and ecological collapse in the
historical demise of any number of civilizations (Diamond and LeCroy, 1979). As a
result, for much of the late twentieth century
biogeography became, in effect, a subspecialty within physical geography, as
represented by the leading academic publication, the Journal of Biogeography. This subdiscipline has fared unevenly in the research
agendas and teaching curricula of the discipline in different parts of the world.
In its twenty-first century incarnation,
biogeography has regained its status as a generative common ground that takes life as its
central concern, inspired by two currents (see
Thrift, 2005a). The first of these is the rise of
the life sciences and their potency in reworking
the genetic fabric of living kinds, including
humankind. The second is a renewed interest
in the resources of biophilosophy that informs academic and popular concerns about
the social and ecological implications of the
biotechnologies that are proliferating at the
interface between life and computer sciences
(see Greenhough and Roe, 2006). Between
the policy investment in biodiversity and the
intellectual re-investment in the question of
life, biogeography has become an important
focus of transdisciplinary work between social
and natural scientists.
sw
biophilosophy A term associated with a
Suggested reading
Suggested reading
Diamond (1979); Greenhough and Roe (2006);
Quamen (1996); Spencer and Whatmore (2001);
Thrift (2005).
Ansell-Pearson (1999); Bergson (1983 [1907]);
Doyle (1997); Margulis and Sagan (2000);
Whitehead (1929).
long history of deliberations in Western
thought from Aristotle, through natural history and evolutionary theory to post-genomic
biology, on the question ‘What is life?’
(Margulis and Sagan, 2000). Two aspects of
these deliberations are particularly influential
today in academic – and, to some extent,
popular – debates about the always urgent
business of living. The first is the philosophy
of biology (or the philosophy of organism), in
which theoretical biologists and philosophers
since the nineteenth century have been concerned with elucidating the principles of
organization that characterize life informed
by the changing practices and paradigms of
biological knowledge (see Doyle, 1997).
These principles primarily concern the processes of growth, decay, reproduction, development and adaptation. Here, the question
‘What is life?’ is frequently articulated as an
epistemological question about how and
why the study of biology (living things) differs
from other fields of study.
Biophilosophy, on the other hand, represents a critique of the philosophy of biology
in the sense that it is more interested in posing the same question in ontological terms
that interrogate the precarious register of ‘life’
as a means of thinking past human/animal/
machine categorical divisions. In this, it is
less concerned with describing the universal
essence of life than with tracing through
its ceaseless multiplicity. Here, the focus
is on the network of relations that always
take the living organism outside itself and
the morphogenic impulses of replication and
differentiation, multiplicity and singularity
through which the flux of worldly becomings
takes, holds and changes shape. It is now
most closely associated with a ‘vitalist’ current that runs through Leibniz and Spinoza,
Bergson and Whitehead to Deleuze (see
Ansell-Pearson, 1999), and is concerned
with the life force that ‘insinuates itself
into the habits and repetitions of matter without becoming contained by materiality’
(Bergson, 1983 [1907], p. 126). This is one
of a number of important threads weaving
through non-representational theory that
has become so influential in geography and
other social sciences over the past five
years or so.
sw
47
BIOPOLITICS, BIOPOWER
biopolitics, biopower Terms coined by
French philosopher Michel Foucault in his
writings on medicine, discipline and sexuality
(see Foucault, 1978 [1976], 2003 [1997],
2008 [2004]), which refer to power over life.
Foucault traces the emergence of this particular practice to Europe in the seventeenth century, where instead of political rule being
primarily over territories (see territory) and
only secondarily over the people within them,
it moved to being over individuals and the
populations of which they were part, particularly in terms of their biological and physical
characteristics. Power is exercised over the individual body and the collective body of the
population. Instead of the sovereign power
to take life, this new biopower is the power to
make, sustain or remove life. Foucault was
particularly interested in how, as political rule
becomes increasingly medicalized, it is simultaneously mathematicized, with the development of measures and statistical techniques.
Biopower is the tool by which the group of
living beings understood as a population is
measured in order to be governed, which is
in turn closely connected to the political rationality of liberalism (see governmentality). Under the broad term of biopower,
Foucault examined a range of institutional
practices and knowledges, including public
health, housing campaigns, mechanisms for
control of disease and famine, sexual behaviour, work patterns, and the treatment and
organization of social, sexual and physical abnormality. His writings on this topic are part
of a wider project understanding rationalities
of government and the birth of the modern
subject, and are interested in how power
produces and shapes individuals as subjects
of knowledge.
Since his death, there have been several
significant extensions of Foucault’s theses.
Although most of his work concentrated on
europe, his lectures on race (2003) have
proved influential in thinking about colonial
and post-colonial modalities of power and political violence, including war (see Stoler,
1995; Agamben, 1998; Mbembe, 2003). Several scholars have focused on the bio-political
implications of contemporary biomedical and
genomic research for the intensifying medicalization of society (see Rabinow and Rose,
2006b; Rose, 2006b: cf. medical geography). As their work shows, developments
in the life sciences now spiral far beyond questions of health to address species-being, and
this has prompted several scholars to argue
that security practices are being driven by
48
a ‘toxic combination’ of geopolitics and
biopolitics (Dillon, 2007; Dillon and LoboGuerrero, 2008).
An important stream of work on contemporary biopolitics seeks to show how the advance
of particular techniques, notably biometrics,
has profound political and politico-geographical
consequences. Biometrics – literally the measurement of life – takes unique physical or
behavioural traits such as DNA, fingerprints,
iris scans or gait (the manner of walking) in
order to build up a profile of an individual to
enhance the workings of security systems.
Much work has been done to extend these
insights in analyses of the ‘war on terror’ and
its derivatives (see terrorism) (Amoore,
2006; Reid, 2006; Dauphinee and Masters,
2007; Gregory, 2008a).
se
Suggested reading
Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2008); Esposito
(2006); Gregory (2008a); Rabinow and Rose
(2006b).
bioprospecting The exploration, collection
and testing of biological materials in search
of genetic, biochemical, morphological or
physiological features that may be of value
for commercial development. In certain senses
it is an extension of age-old practices by which
people have learned to benefit from their biophysical (and especially plant) environments.
However, the ‘social and spatial dynamics’
(Parry, 2004) that underlie such activity have
changed so dramatically in the past 30 years
that bioprospecting can today be most usefully
regarded as a significantly new articulation of
that entanglement.
Specifically, three related but distinguishable developments have provided new opportunities for business and science to come
together to detach biological materials and
associated knowledges from their contexts, so
as better to exploit them elsewhere. First, a
series of economic developments has served
to make bioprospecting profitable. With the
emergence of biodiversity as an organizing
trope and its framing as a valuable resource
through the rhetoric of ‘green developmentalism’, the notion of ‘selling nature to save it’
has become legitimized. Second, a series of
technical developments has served to make
bioprospecting practical. In particular, the
transformation of biology associated with the
emergence of information technologies has
made the manipulation of the genetic code of
organisms the basis of its value. Finally, a series of developments in international property
BIOTECHNOLOGY
law has served to make bioprospecting legal. In
two major multilateral agreements – the 1992
Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) and
the 1994 Agreement on Trade-related Aspects
of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) –
much of the world’s biological material has
been designated as ownable in various senses,
and thus a legitimate object for transaction
and exchange.
The situation that has emerged from these
three developments is profoundly politicized
(Dutfield, 2004). For advocates, bioprospecting can deliver assistance ranging from the
financial to the educational to those communities in which it takes place, as well
as contributing to the production of new
pharmaceutical and other products. For critics,
bioprospecting is biopiracy (Shiva, 1998
[1997]), in that it fails to adequately recognize
or reward the traditional knowledge of the
peoples who have cultivated of modified the
properties that make a given organism valuable. Questions of what should be ownable
(even in a temporary form) are another matter.
Only by tracing the sorts of benefit-sharing
agreements in a particular case is one likely
to get beyond the terms of this increasingly
polarized debate (Castree, 2003a).
nb
bioregionalism An ecological philosophy
and movement advocating the new ecological
politics of place, born in San Francisco in the
1970s. Bioregions are defined by two kinds of
mapping. First, the tools of climatology, geomorphology and natural history are used to
map ‘geographic terrains’ with distinctive ecological characteristics. Second, descriptions of
sense of place or ‘terrains of consciousness’
by those who live within them refine the
boundaries of these bioregions. Both the
approach and practice of bioregionalism
have been widely criticized as analytically and
politically misconceived in the context of
global social and environmental problems
and processes.
sw
Suggested reading
List (1993); Sale (1991).
biosecurity Biosecurity is a state and intrastate response to the cross-boundary movements of non-human living things, particularly
those organisms that are considered a threat to
human, ecological and economic welfare. It
has at least three elements. First, there is the
attempt to manage the movements of pests
and diseases (cf. disease, diffusion of).
Attention is focused on nation-states and
their disease statuses. These regional disease
zones sometimes map on to other distinctions
between North and South or Rich and Poor,
mappings that are far from accidental and not
without consequence (Davis, 2005). Within
the state, specific sites are earmarked for biosecurity measures: these include airports,
seaports and increasingly farms (Donaldson
and Wood, 2004). Second, there are the
attempts to reduce the effects of invasive
species on so-called indigenous flora and
fauna (Bright, 1999). Third, there are the attempts to reduce the risks of microbiological
materials being used as weapons. All three
practices link together geopolitics and biogeography, throwing up real tensions between movement and stasis, nations and
natures (Clark, 2002).
sjh
biotechnology The term is perhaps most
usefully defined by a phrase as simple as ‘the
uses of life’ (to quote the title of one history
of the concept: see Bud, 1993). Those searching for more technically precise versions
should refer to Bains’ (2003) A–Z on the subject. Although vague, this formulation has the
virtue of getting across two of the more important things about biotechnology; namely,
that it is both a very broad term and one
that is confused and contested. Starting with
the latter point, when one reviews the literature on the subject, it swiftly becomes apparent that there is nothing like an agreed
definition of biotechnology. For some the
notion covers everything from the ancient art
of brewing through plant breeding and chemical engineering all the way to modern techniques of genetic manipulation, because all of
these activities result from a coming together
of human ingenuity, technical intervention
and biological materials. For others, biotechnology is a frontier technology that should
restrict the term to only the most recent
elements of this long history; namely the
proliferation of technical possibilities in
the late twentieth/early twenty-first century
around the convergence of an informational
biology, a neo-liberal economic context and
extensive legal protections on intellectual
property. What is perhaps most significant
about these competing positions is how they
are mobilized during the many debates pertaining to biotechnology. One hears more of
the former if the aim is reassurance and when
long track records of safety are involved and
more of the latter if the aim is to boost
or debunk the technology by invoking its
49
BLOCKBUSTING
revolutionary novelty. Both accounts can be
heard at the same time (as in some discussions
of GM crops in the USA) when the aim is to
make products appear at once ‘substantially
equivalent’ to what has gone before and radically new and worthy of patents and payment.
Even if one sticks with the restricted take on
biotechnology, the term is used to cover a
diverse range of activities. The colour-coded
categorization of biotechnology in common
use gives some sense of this:
(1) Red signifies biotechnology as applied to
medical processes. This can include the
genetic modification of bacteria and
yeast in the development of drugs or the
direct manipulation of a person’s genome in an attempt to prevent or cure
disease.
(2) Green signifies biotechnology as applied
to agricultural processes. Most notably
(and controversially), this includes the
development of transgenic plants specifically designed (for example) to express
or be resistant to a certain pesticide.
(3) White (sometimes) grey signifies biotechnology as applied to industrial processes. Examples here include growing
organisms engineered to produce a useful chemical, or bacteria that help break
down certain chemicals (as used to clear
up oil spills).
(4) Blue, finally, signifies biotechnology as
applied to aquatic, coastal or marine
processes. Little used as yet but a rapidly expanding field, applications here
focus on extracting useful substances
from water-dwelling bacteria and other
organisms.
Biotechnology in all its hues has long been
identified as an area that provides both challenges and opportunities for geography (Katz
and Kirby, 1991). Following a series of more
recent provocations (e.g. Castree, 1999c; Whatmore, 1999a; Spencer and Whatmore, 2001),
a body of literature is now finally emerging
within the discipline that is taking these opportunities and challenges seriously – see, for example, the articles collected in special issues
edited by Bridge, Marsden and McManus
(2003) and Greenhough and Roe (2006).
Even more encouragingly, the best of this work
is eschewing the familiar temptations
of economic reductionism or technological
determinism in favour of developing conceptually informed, empirically rich accounts of what
happens when something new (an object or a
50
technique) is added to an already full world.
Thus attention is paid at once to the new spaces
of transformation and circulation involving biotechnology and also the questions of coexistence
of existing and novel ways of life that such new
spaces raise.
nb
Suggested reading
Bingham (2006); Parry (2004).
blockbusting A tactic engaged by American
land speculators to buy housing units and
then rent or sell them at inflated prices. In
cities such as Chicago, industrialization,
African-American migration to northern cities and racial segregation resulted in a growing, but spatially contained, African-American
population (Philpott, 1991 [1978]). In White
neighbourhoods adjacent to this AfricanAmerican ghetto, real estate agents would
sell or rent a vacant unit to an AfricanAmerican household, then use fear tactics
about lower home values and racial change to
persuade white homeowners to sell. Units
would then be sold or rented to AfricanAmerican households at grossly inflated
prices. The result spatially expanded the
ghetto (Hirsch, 1983).
dgm
Suggested reading
Hirsch (1983).
body A rapidly growing field within geography deals with social and spatial conceptions of the human body – often located in
the tension between the body as a social and
a biological phenomenon. This upsurge of
interest in the body does not confine itself to
geography, but occurs all over the social sciences and humanities. The background might
be found in a mixture of circumstances. Some
authors refer it to changes in the cultural landscape of late modernity, involving a rise of
consumer culture and self-expression. Others
regard it primarily as a theoretical intervention, rectifying a former deficiency in social
theory. And for still others, feminism is held
responsible for putting the body on the intellectual map. Initially, there is a division in the
social theory of the body, one that is often
attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Michel Foucault, respectively. On the one
side stand analyses of the body as lived, active
and generative, and on the other side studies
of the body as acted upon, as historically
inscribed from without. Still other approaches
are informed by psychoanalytic theory.
These different approaches are mostly
BODY
translated into geography by means of feminist
writings. A major source is Judith Butler’s
Foucauldian theory of performativity, understood as ‘the reiterative and citational practice
by which discourse produces the effect that
it names’ (1993a, p. 2). For Butler, the body
is socially constructed, embodying possibilities
both conditioned and circumscribed by
historical convention. Moi (1999), following
Simone de Beauvoir, forwards a concept of
the body as a ‘situation’ – a situation amongst
many other social ones, but fundamental in
the sense that it will always be a part of our
lived experience and our coping with the
environment. Grosz (1994) argues for a
sexed corporeality in which alterity is constitutive of (material, psychological and cultural)
bodies and emphasizes the volatile boundaries
of the bodies, permeated by bodily flows
and fluids (see also abjection).
Within geography, the degree to which
time-geography dealt with the body is a contested matter, but two approaches to human
geography in the 1970s and 1980s did contain
traces of the body. In humanistic geography,
lived and sentient body-subjects appeared,
and in marxist geography the body was implicitly present in notions of the material reproduction of labour power. The real upsurge
of interest in the body, however, occurred in
the 1990s, not surprisingly led by feminist
geographies. This work can be summarized
around three themes.
The first one is the body as the geography
closest in. It includes the spatiality of the
body, drawing on phenomenology or on
Lefebvre’s theory of the production of
space, including both the generative spatializing body and the historical confinement of the
body in abstract space (Simonsen, 2005).
Mostly, however, the literature has dealt with
the inscription of power and resistance on
the body, concurrently involving issues of
performativity, body politics and the body as
a site of struggle. Due to her processual, nonfoundational approach to identity, many
have incorporated Butler’s notion of performativity into their work on the intersections
between gender, sexuality, space and place
– for example, the performance of gay skinheads and lipstick lesbians in sexualized spaces
(Bell, Binnie, Cream and Valentine, 1994), or
gendered performances of work identities
within the finance industry (McDowell and
Court, 1994). The notion is, however, contested. For example, Nelson (1999) criticizes
the translations of the language of performativity into geography for not being aware of
what she sees as its radical representational
notion of body and subjectivity, in this way
initiating a lively discussion of the limits of
performativity.
The second, related, theme is other bodies.
Taking off from the insights of feminism,
post-structuralism and post-colonialism,
it tackles the necessity of acknowledging
differences and power in embodiment. The
body is central in the process where dominant
cultures designate certain groups (disabled,
elderly, homosexual, fat, female, people of
colour, people of other nations and so on: see
ageism; disability; ethnicity; homophobia
and heterosexism; racism; sexuality) as
Other. Subordinate groups are defined by their
bodies and according to norms that diminish
and degrade them as ugly, loathsome, impure,
deviant and so on, while privileged groups, by
imprisoning the Other in her/his body, are able
to take on the position as disembodied subjects.
This ‘scaling of bodies’ has provoked analyses
that on the one hand expose processes of domination and socio-spatial exclusion (Sibley,
1995) and on the other explore struggles
for recognition and appropriation of space.
A well-developed area within this group is
queer theory, which explores negotiations
and conflicts over symbolic and material
spaces marked by exclusionary imperatives
and politics.
Third, philosophies on the body have
inspired theorists to dismantle dualisms that
have long troubled Western thought and
culture. Primarily, the mind/body dualism is
addressed, subsequently leading to the ones of
subject/object, culture/nature, sex/gender
and essentialism/constructionism. Feminists
have shown how such dualisms have been
strongly gendered, connecting the female body
to nature, emotionality, non-consciousness
and irrationality. Substantially, the dismantling of dualisms has worked as a means to
expose the instability and fluidity of bodilyascribed identities. Epistemologically, it has
enforced the acknowledgment that not only
the objects of analysis but also the geographer
her-/himself are embodied. Many geographers
have, at least in principle, adopted the notion
of embodied or situated knowledge as a
substitute for decontextualized, disembodied,
‘objective’ knowledge.
As pointed out by several authors (e.g. Callard, 1998), the first wave of body-literature
within geography favoured particular ways of
understanding the body. A wealth of studies
was devoted to body-inscriptions, body regimes
and discourses on bodies, while practices of
51
BORDER
material and fleshy bodies attracted less
attention. This gap has, however, started to
be filled: Longhurst (2001) implements
Grosz’s theory of the volatile materiality of
the body through ideas of body boundaries,
body fluids, abjection and (im)pure spaces;
studies on illness, impairment and disability
explore ‘body troubles’ in everyday coping
with the environment; and theories of
practice and non-representational theory
focus on moving bodies and the performative
and material nature of embodiment. The
latter also dissolves the distinction between
the human and non-human, the organic and
non-organic (see also cyborg).
ks
Suggested reading
Bell and Valentine (1995); Butler and Parr
(1999); Longhurst (2001); Nast and Pile (1998).
border A form of boundary associated with
the rise of the modern nation-state and the
establishment of an inter-state geopolitical
order, founded – most famously with the
foundational myths of the 1648 Treaty of
Westphalia (Teschke, 2003) – on the political
norms of national states claiming and using
terror to control territory (as the etymology
is also sometimes interpreted: see Hindess,
2006). Both on maps and on the ground,
borders make spaces of national sovereignty,
and are thus key sites where the ‘inside versus
outside’ distinctions of territoriality and
modern international relations are at
once reproduced, reinforced, contested and
transcended (Walker, 1993; Agnew, 2003a).
Thus, as the French philosopher Etienne
Balibar suggests, borders are ‘overdetermined,
and in that sense, sanctioned, reduplicated
and relativized by other geopolitical divisions’
(Balibar, 2002, p. 79). It is for this same reason that political geographers have increasingly focused on what many call ‘re-(b)
ordering’ (Newman, 2002; Kolossov, 2005;
Van Houtum, 2005; Van Houtum, Kramsch
and Zierhofer, 2005).
Borders appear in geopolitical discourses
that at once reproduce and reinforce the
nation-state. In media ranging from the legal
and pedagogic to the prosaic and banal – from
court-case cartography, school maps and museums, to murals, cartoons and even weather
forecasts – imaginative geographies script
and thereby sanction the divisions of national
borders (Paasi, 2005a; Sparke, 2005; Anderson, 2006a; Painter, 2006). These cultural
geographies of border construction in turn
inform the actual enforcement of borders on
52
the ground through both social practices
and state practices of border control (Nevins,
2002; Coleman, 2005). Many border-buttressing social practices are xenophobic, and
remain animated today in many parts of the
world by provincial, racist and/or masculinist
fantasies about foreign ‘floods’ overwhelming
homeland defenses (see Theweleit, 1987;
Darian-Smith, 1999; Wright, 1999b; Price,
2004). However, while such social reinforcement continues to reduplicate twentiethcentury divisions produced by liberal regimes
of ethno-racial and sexual governmentality,
contemporary state practices of border
control are simultaneously being shaped by
the new class divisions and related but context-contingent recombination of neo-liberal
governmentality with neo-liberal governance.
It is in this way that the borders inside and
around various free trade regions are being
both softened and hardened simultaneously.
Within the EU (Sparke, 2000a; Walters,
2002), the NAFTA region (Bhandar, 2004;
Coleman, 2005; Gilbert, 2007), and diverse,
smaller scale cross-border free market
development zones (for which the Malaysia–
Indonesia–Singapore growth triangle is the
prototype; see Sparke, Sidaway, Bunnell
and Grundy-Warr, 2004), governments are
attempting to bifurcate border management:
facilitating fast crossing for business travellers
and increasing punitive policing of working
class ‘others’ deemed dangerous to the neoliberal free market order.
The neo-liberal class-divided relativization
of borders is not happening in the same way
everywhere. Within the NAFTA zone there
remain all sorts of informal cross-border
economies (see Staudt, 1998), and in Europe,
while the old Cold War East German/West
German border has turned into an Ossie/
Wessie social class divide (Berdhal, 1999),
the Iron Curtain border of the cold war
past has not been bifurcated but, rather, subsumed into an EU growth and integration
zone (Scott, 2002; Smith, 2002a). And these
kinds of complexities seem minor in contrast
to the ways in which the new border between
Israeli-occupied enclaves and Palestiniancontrolled parts of the West Bank reduplicates
the geopolitics of religious and ethnic divisions with a vengeance, all the while relativizing the old Green Line and hopes of a ‘good
border’ by imposing a monumental and militarized class divide with the new concrete
curtain of the colonial present (Gregory,
2004b; Newman, 2005; see also Falah and
Newman, 1995).
BOSERUP THESIS
Contextual contingencies noted, the emergence of a transnational business class with
increasingly global rights to own property,
make contracts and move freely has clearly
been marked at and on borders the world
over. State border management is becoming
increasingly transnationalized in its global coordination, with border-relativizing reliance
being placed on individualized biometric
codes rather than traditional national passports (Adey, 2004; Salter, 2007). Meanwhile,
as the US continues to wage its so-called war
on terror, the soft-cosmopolitanism of the
border-crossing kinetic elites seems set to be
accompanied by the creation of a carceral
cosmopolitanism for those border-crossers
deemed a threat to the free world (Sparke,
2006). Within these developments we can
see – to return to a term of Balibar’s – the
‘other scene’ of borders today: a scene in
which the sovereignty system supposedly
established at Westphalia is superseded by a
new kind of global ‘terrortory’, delinked from
the nation-state and its geographical borders
(cf. Kelly, 2005; Hindess, 2006).
ms
borderlands A key term in two contemporary literatures, the concept-metaphor of borderlands is employed alternatively as either a
research re-focusing concept for scholars who
study cross-border regional development (e.g.
Pratt and Brown, 2000), or as a meaning remaking metaphor designed to disrupt normalizing notions of nation and the nation-state
(e.g. Anzaldúa, 1999). Both uses of the term
refer back to the geographical regions surrounding international borders, and both
also frequently involve attempts to describe
the lives and imaginative geographies of
people whose daily practices, economic activities and cultural connections cross the borders that define nation-states. But whereas
research on cross-border regional development tries to draw analytical comparisons
between different models of borderlands
governance, work on the multiple meanings
of borderlands seeks to find antidotes to
nationalist chauvinism and attendant forms
of ethnic absolutism in the cross-cultural
intermixing of everyday borderland life. This
does not mean that the disruptive uses of
the term are always focused on just cultural
hybridity. There are some brilliant borderlands studies that underline how everyday economic, social and political ties across border
regions are just as disruptive of normative
assumptions about nation-states and related
forms of gendered, racialized and/or
ethnicized identity (Staudt, 1998; Berdahl,
1999; Darian-Smith, 1999, Price, 2004).
Likewise, there are also many usefully sobering studies that show how, in all too many
cases, such disruptions still continue to be
exploited, controlled and/or destroyed
through various combinations of state- and
market-mediated violence (Wright, 1999b;
Nevins, 2002; Lindquist, 2004; Coleman,
2005).
Inspired in part by the studies that highlight
how power relations become particularly evident in borderlands, and catalysed by an
emerging governmental interest in crossborder regional planning, there has been a
recent explosion of articles and edited volumes
on border-region development that are increasingly attuned to the ways in which such
regions make manifest diverse political geographies of reterritorialization (Eskelinen, Liikanen and Oksa, 1999; Perkmann and Sum,
2002; Nicol and Townsend-Gault, 2005; van
Houtum, Kramsch and Ziefhofer, 2005).
While a few contributions to this literature
seek to emulate a corporate transnationalism and promote branded borderlands for
capitalist development (e.g. Artibise, 2005),
other works critically chart the ways in which
such place promotionalism feeds into and out
of the cross-border regional entrenchment of
neo-liberalism (Perkmann, 2002; Nicol and
Townsend-Gault, 2005; Sparke, 2005).
But borderlands continue to be shaped by a
multitude of other forms of reterritorialization
too, and whether these take geographical shape
as geopolitics (see Scott, J.W., 2002, 2005b;
Brunn, Watkins, Fargo and Lepawsky, 2005;
Edwards, 2005), hybrid natures (Sletto, 2002;
Fall, 2005) or post-colonial sovereignties
(Mbembe, 2000; Kramsch, 2002; Sidaway,
2002; Sparke, Sidaway, Bunnell and GrundyWarr, 2004), borderlands provide usefully
prismatic lenses on to the changing geography
of power in the context of globalization. ms
Boserup thesis Classical political economists, and Malthus and Ricardo in particular,
developed in the early stages of demographic
transition in Europe a macroeconomic theory of the relations between population growth
and agriculture. Ricardo (1817) distinguished
between intensive and extensive agricultural
expansion: extensive expansion presumed the
extension of cultivation into new lands that
were marginal and therefore subject to diminishing returns to labour and capital, whereas
intensive expansion enhanced the output of
existing lands through the application of better
53
BOSERUP THESIS
weeding, fertilizer, drainage and so on, which
was also subject to diminishing returns to
labour and capital. Ricardo, like Malthus
(1803), assumed that population growth increases would be arrested by a decline in real
wages, by increases in rents and by per capita
food decline.
There is a third form of intensification that
rests upon the deployment of the increasing
labour force to crop farmland more frequently
(i.e. to increase the cropping intensity or to
reduce the fallow). The reduction of the period
of fallow (the period of non-cultivation or recovery in which the land is allowed to regenerate its fertility and soil capacities) was
a major way in which European agriculture
increased its output during periods of population growth, as observed at the time when
Ricardo and Malthus were writing. Fallowing
does not imply poorer or more distant land,
but as the fallow length is reduced greater
capital and labour inputs are required to prevent the gradual decline of crop yields and the
loss of fodder for animals.
Esther Boserup (1965, 1981) made fallow
reduction a central plank of her important
work on agrarian intensification. While fallow
reduction is also likely to yield diminishing
returns, these are more than compensated for
by the additions to total output conferred by
increased cropping frequency.
In the eighth century the two-field system
predominated in Western Europe, but by the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries the three-field
system had come to displace its two-field
counterpart in high-density regions (see field
system). By the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the fallow had begun to disappear
entirely. Boserup (1965) saw this fallowing
reduction as the central theme in agrarian history and the centrepiece around which the
Malthusian debates over overpopulation and
famine ultimately turned (cf. malthusian
model). In her view, output per person–hour
is highest in the long-fallow systems – for example, the shifting or swiddening systems of
the humid tropical forest zone, in which diverse polycropping of plots for one or two
seasons is then followed by a fallow of 15–25
years (depending on local ecological circumstances: cf. shifting cultivation) – and
population growth is the stimulus both for
reduction in fallow and the innovations associated with intensified land use.
Boserup envisaged a progressive series of fallow reductions driven by the pressure of population (and the threat of exceeding the
carrying capacity). Long-fallow systems
54
that are technologically simple (associated
only with the digging stick and the axe) are
displaced by bush fallow (6–10 year fallow)
and short fallowing (2–3 year fallow) in which
the plough is a prerequisite. Annual, and finally
multiple, cropping appear as responses to continued population pressure. Across this progression of intensification is a reduction in
output per person–hour, but a vast increase in
total output. The shift to annual and multiple
cropping also requires substantially new forms
of skill and investment, however, which typically demand state-organized forms of investment and surplus mobilization. Boserup saw
much of Africa and Latin America as occupying an early position in a linear model of intensification in which output could be
expanded by fallow reduction. The ‘Boserup
thesis’ refers to the relationship between population growth and agrarian intensification,
measured through fallow reduction and a decreasing output per person–hour.
Implicit in the Boserup thesis, although
she did not develop these implications, is the
changing role of land tenure, the increasing
capitalization of the land and more complex
forms of state–society interaction. Indeed,
Boserup’s work has been taken up by a number of archaeologists and anthropologists, who
have charted patterns of state formation
and social development in terms of agrarian
intensification.
Boserup’s anti-Malthusian theory lays itself
open to all manner of charges, including a
non-linear form of techno-demographic determinism and a general lack of attention to the
ecological limits of intensification (Grigg,
1980; cf. teleology). It is not at all clear
how or whether Boserup’s thesis can be applied to market economies. Indeed, her thesis
does not seem to be much help, for example,
in the English case: in its essentials, the agricultural technology of the eighteenth century
(the Norfolk four-course rotation) had been
available since the Middle Ages, and although
the eighteenth century was a period of population growth, the previous period of sustained
demographic growth from the mid-sixteenth
century had witnessed no intensification as
such (Overton, 1996: see agricultural revolution). Processes of intensification are naturally on the historical record and the
reduction of fallowing in the third world –
whether driven by demographic growth or
not – has been and continues to be documented (see Guyer, 1997). But intensification is
a socially, culturally and politically complex
process. To the extent that fallow reduction
BRENNER THESIS
involves someone working harder and differently, the question of who works, when and for
what return (a question played out in terms of
age, gender and class in the peasant household) is not posed by Boserup. Here, newer
work on household dynamics has more to offer
(Carney and Watts, 1990).
mw
boundary At once a geographical marker
and a geographical maker of regulative authority in social relations. As markers of authority,
boundaries range considerably in scale, significance and social stability. From international
boundaries that mark the borders between
nation-states to the barbed-wire boundaries
that mark the perimeters of export-processing
zones, to the racially, religiously and/or sexually exclusive boundaries that still mark the
privileged places of decision-making occupied
by straight, white, Christian, men of property
in America, boundaries take many different
forms. But whether boundaries are the product of international conventions, economic
expedience or cultural conservativism, a key
point highlighted in the work of geographers
is that boundaries are also geographically
constitutive makers as well as markers of regulative power relations. In other words, international boundary lines actively operate to
create and consolidate the global norms of
nation-state territoriality and the national
identities forged under the resulting aegis of
state sovereignty (Paasi, 1996). Barbed-wire
fences around export-processing zones serve
directly to carve off such spaces from wider
political geographies of civil interaction,
labour organization and democratic oversight,
thereby depriving workers inside of numerous
citizenship rights (Klein, 2002). And the invisible but often impenetrable boundaries
referred to by terms such as the ‘glass ceiling’
also clearly help enable and enforce spaces of
privileged authority (Berg, 2002).
Nevertheless, not all boundaries create their
regulative effects through binary ‘us–them’
partitions. In many cases of state boundary
drawing inside modern nation-states – including the boundaries drawn to delineate electoral districts, schools districts, police districts,
public health districts and so on – the act of
inscribing a boundary on a map and enforcing
it with routinized bureaucratic state actions on
the ground helps create the larger singular
effect we call ‘the state’. As Timothy Mitchell
(1991) has argued, following Foucault, state
effects can thereby be said to emerge through
the everyday acts of spatial organization
created by government. This is also no doubt
why the publishers of a book such as Seeing like
a state (Scott, J.C., 1998b) saw fit to put an
everyday image of a distinctly right-angled
turn in a road on the cover, an apparently
arbitrary turn, presumably produced by some
jurisdictional boundary marked on a state map.
But since a scholar such as Mitchell argues visà-vis traditional state theories (including the
highly anthropomorphized and sovereigntist
kind advanced by Scott), the lesson of such
geographical boundary making is not that
there is a king-like state whose boundarydrawing is a sign of top-down state dominance.
Rather, the point is that along with all the state
practices that the boundaries enable, the process of boundary drawing is itself a disciplinary
dynamic that helps consolidate the authority of
the state. Mitchell applies this argument most
directly to theorizing the emergence of nationstate power, but it can equally be argued to
apply to sub-national and transnational forms
of state-making too (Sparke, 2005). Once
examined in such venues as courtrooms and
free trade tribunals, boundary drawing can
also be seen as a highly contested mediation
process through which the power relations of
everyday social life, and the power relations of
government themselves begin to reappear as
if divided by a stark state/society boundary.
However, as work by geographers on everything from electoral gerrymandering (Forest,
2005) to community policing (Herbert, 2006)
shows, the concept of such a clear-cut state/
society boundary is better reinterpreted as a
site of fraught political–geographical struggles,
struggles which in the very process of blurring
the abstract state–society distinction often
end up creating new jurisdictional boundary
lines on the ground.
ms
Brenner thesis A thesis proposed by historian Robert Brenner (1976) as a contribution
to a running debate within primarily Marxist
scholarship about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Brenner emphasized the
ways in which class, and more specifically
property relations, served as a ‘prime mover’
of economic change. His basic premise is that
the relationship between landlord and tenant
was exploitative and depended on ‘noneconomic compulsion’. Thus relations of production in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
England were dominated by the institution
of serfdom, which was buttressed by the
manorial system and the common law that
excluded serfs from access to royal courts
(which were reserved for those who were
legally free). Hence lords could act arbitrarily
55
BRENNER THESIS
in their dealings with their unfree tenants. The
power of this exploitative relationship provided
a ready explanation for low and declining productivity within the peasant sector before the
Black Death, which in this analysis has little if
anything to do with a population-resource imbalance as proposed in the postan thesis. Not
only was this relationship inimical to the maintenance of effective husbandry within the peasantry, but it also led to a build-up of tenants on
the land, since it curtailed the migration of
serfs to areas where their labour could be
more effectively deployed.
The struggle between lords and peasants
had different outcomes in different regions,
which Brenner argues accounts for macrogeographical variations in the move towards
agrarian capitalism in europe: in England
lords were the victors, since tenants never
gained absolute property rights, whereas in
France peasants were far more successful.
Brenner contends that landlord capacity was
diminished in the period of demographic depression after the Black Death, but that when
population growth resumed in the sixteenth
century, lords who still retained their power
were able to evict peasant producers and
install entrepreneurial tenants who farmed
larger holdings with the increasing use of
wage labourers. In this way, Brenner explains
how agrarian capitalism emerged earlier in
England than in the rest of Europe.
The thesis has been subject to considerable
debate in history and historical geography
(Aston and Philpin, 1985). Many now claim
that serfdom did not operate in the manner
proposed by Brenner, since custom gave unfree tenants much protection from market
forces – and, indeed, benefited this group in
56
the period of price and rent inflation in the
thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries
(Hatcher, 1981; Kanzaka, 2002; Campbell,
2005). Furthermore, English customary law
may have been greatly influenced by the common law to the extent that lords were in no
position to operate their courts arbitrarily to
their advantage (Razi and Smith, 1996b).
While Brenner purports to treat the landlord–
tenant relationship as an endogenous component, he is reluctant to admit the impact of
exogenous forces associated with demographic
change driven by epidemiological movements
that have little to do with human agency
(Hatcher and Bailey, 2001). Others have argued that changes in the distribution of land
and the stimulus of land markets came as
much from within the tenantry as it did from
landlord initiatives (Glennie, 1988; Hoyle,
1990; Smith, 1998b). Likewise, it has been
claimed that middling sized owner-occupied
farms were the principal source of an early
modern agricultural revolution (Allen,
1992). Even within Marxist circles, there are
those who would stress the emergence of a
world system in which international trade
and colonial expansion served to advantage
England and its near neighbour Holland, leading to the emergence of large urban centres,
which in turn stimulated demand for foodstuffs and the move towards capitalist farming. Such arguments have loomed large in the
writings of Pomeranz (2001), who also
stresses the importance of access to the
‘ghost acres’ of the americas as fundamental
to English economic success.
rms
Suggested reading
Aston and Philpin (1985); Brenner (1976).
C
cadastral mapping A system of surveying
and recording the boundaries, structures
and salient features of land parcels in order
to confirm ownership, support the buying
and selling of land, promote the assessment
and taxation of landed property, and delineate the territorial privileges of tenants and
others assigned limited rights. In addition to
its traditional role in the commodification
of land, a modern multi-purpose cadastre
provides an efficient framework for urban
and regional planning, land-use regulation,
and the management of publicly and privately
owned infrastructure such as sewers and
distribution pipelines for water and natural
gas (National Research Council Panel on a
Multipurpose Cadastre, 1983). Where datasharing arrangements and a common planecoordinate system permit, a geographic
information system can readily integrate
land-record data with street-address information, terrain data, census results, and environmental and natural-hazards data, including
flood-zone boundaries.
Allied with notions of private property,
cadastral maps are among the oldest cartographic forms (see cartography, history of),
in use at least as early as 2300 bce, when the
Babylonians described land boundaries and
structures on clay tablets (Kain and Baigent,
1992, p. 1). The Egyptians and the Greeks were
less inclined to map property surveys than the
Romans, who used maps to tax private holdings
and differentiate them from state lands. The
collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century ad temporarily ended property mapping in
Europe, but Renaissance capitalism revived
the map as a management tool for private estates
and precipitated the development of intricate
state cadastres during the enlightenment.
Cadastral mapping was essential to European
colonization of the New World, where land
grants and orderly settlement depended on
map-based land registration (see colonialism).
Cadastral mapping has an important role
in the third world, where comprehensive
land-record systems can promote land reform
by validating traditional holdings, minimizing
boundary disputes, promoting conservation
of natural resources, and reducing land fragmentation, which can undermine agricultural
productivity. However promising, cadastral
reform easily fails if poorly planned or not
fully implemented (Ballantyne, Bristow et al.,
2000).
In the more developed world, online cadastres have heightened the innate conflict between
personal privacy and open access to public
records (Monmonier, 2003). Public access to
cadastral information is a fundamental right
in the USA and other countries in which local
officials base evaluations of taxable real property on the parcel descriptions and sale prices
of nearby or similar properties. Without
access, citizens cannot judge the fairness of
their assessments and present an informed
challenge to an inequitable evaluation. By
making transaction data far more readily
available, the internet has undermined the
expectation of privacy among buyers reluctant
to disclose their purchase price. Even so, benefits clearly trump injuries insofar as ready
disclosure promotes a more knowledgeable
real-property market and arguably fairer tax
assessments.
mm
Suggested reading
Jeffres (2003); Kain and Baigent (1992).
camp ‘The hidden matrix . . . of the political
space in which we are living’ (Agamben, 1998,
p. 166). Agamben’s controversial thesis
focuses on the juridico-political structure (or
nomos) that produced the concentration
camp. These camps were introduced by
European colonial regimes in Cuba and South
Africa at the close of the nineteenth century,
but Agamben is most interested in those established by the Nazis during the Second World
War. Unlike many writers, Agamben does not
see these as aberrations from the project of
modernity – paroxysmal spaces – but, rather,
as paradigmatic spaces. What took place in
them was made possible, so Agamben claims,
because the camps were materializations of
the space of exception (see exception, space
of) in which the state withdrew legal protections from particular groups of people (Jews,
gays and Romanies among them). By this
means, millions of victims of fascism could be
reduced to bare life (cf. Agamben, 1999).
But the camp is neither peculiar to fascism
57
CAPITAL
nor limited to an enclosed space. For
Agamben, ‘the camp is the space that is
opened when the state of exception begins
to become the rule’, and he insists that ‘we
find ourselves virtually in the presence of a
camp every time such a structure is created’
(Agamben, 1988, p. 174). Seen thus, it is by
no means absent from liberal-democratic
societies. Hence Agamben draws formal parallels between concentration camps and the
sites where states now hold illegal immigrants
or refugees (cf. Perera, 2002), and he claims
that the juridico-political structure through
which prisoners taken during the ‘war on
terror’ are held confirms that the global
generalization of the state of exception is
intensifying (cf. Gregory, 2006b, 2007).
‘The normative aspect of law can be thus
be obliterated and contradicted with impunity,’ he continues, through a constellation of
sovereign power and state violence that
‘nevertheless still claims to be applying the
law.’ In such a circumstance, he concludes,
the camp has become ‘the new biopolitical
nomos of the planet’ (see biopolitics) and
‘the juridico-political system [has transformed] itself into a killing machine’
(Agamben, 1988).
That Agamben’s thesis is concerned with
the metaphysics of power and the logic of
juridico-political structures needs emphasis.
Bernstein (2004) objects that what then
becomes lost from view is the complex of institutions, practices and people through which
these reductions to bare life are attempted: in
the case of Auschwitz, for example, the gas
chambers, the guards, the huts, the watchtowers, the railways, the police, the roundups – in short, the whole apparatus of
violence that produced the holocaust. But
this is precisely Agamben’s point: ‘Instead of
deducing the definition of the camp from
the events that took place there, we will ask:
What is a camp, what is its juridico-political
structure, that such events could take place
there?’ In his view, the urgent political task is
to disclose ‘the juridical procedures and
deployments of power by which human beings
could be so completely deprived of their rights
and prerogatives that no act committed against
them could appear any longer as a crime’
(1998, pp. 166, 171). Even so, it is not at all
clear that Agamben is much interested in the
details of those other ‘deployments of power’
or the spaces that are produced through them,
and nor does he register the ways in which
resistance to the production and proliferation
of camps is mobilized.
dg
58
Suggested reading
Agamben (1998, pp. 166–76); Minca (2004).
capital In everyday parlance, capital is an
asset to be mobilized by a group, individual
or institution as wealth. This economic sense
of capital has, according to Raymond Williams
(1983 [1976], p. 51), been present in English
since the seventeenth century and in a fully
developed form since the eighteenth – derived
from its general sense of ‘head’ or ‘chief’.
Capital in this sense might be a stock of money
(invested to secure a rate of return), a pension
fund or a piece of property. In the broadest
sense – often deployed as such by conventional
forms of economics – capital is an asset of
whatever kind capable of yielding a source of
income for its owner (which is typically,
depending on the asset and the legal rights to
it, a claim on interest, on rent or on profits).
In classical economics, capital was assumed to
be one of a trio of factors of production (land
and labour being the others), distinguished by
the fact that it was produced (contra land),
could not be used up in the course of production as might a resource and could be used in
the production of other goods. Both Adam
Smith and David Ricardo referred to a distinction between fixed and circulating forms of
capital. Capital goods are already produced
durable goods, available for use as a factor of
production. In this classical (and indeed
neo-classical) sense, capital was a stock, in
contradistinction to investment over time (a
flow). Implicit in all of these definitions is a
twofold sense of capital being trans-historical
(it applies to every society) and it posits the
fact of inanimate objects (land) being generative (of income). Over the past half-century
there have been many efforts to classify capital
beyond its narrow economic meaning. The
list is now very long (see Putnam, 2001;
Bourdieu, 2002): human capital (skills, competences, education), cultural capital (the
symbolic and hermeneutic class powers
deployed in the political and economic realm),
social capital (the social networks and social
agencies deployed in economic development),
political capital (political resources deployed
within different domains of politics – for
example, the state, the family) and finance
capital (originally developed a century ago by
Hilferding to address the increasing integration of industrial and banking enterprises).
The Marxist conception of capital stands in
sharp contradistinction to these sorts of claims
and to all conventional definitions. Capital is
first a social form that pre-dates capitalism
CAPITALISM
but dominates in, and is generic to, capitalism
as a system of generalized commodity production. Capital is not a thing, but is a ‘social
relation’ that appears in the form of things
(money, means of production). Capital does
indeed entail making money or creating wealth
but, as Marx (1967) pointed out, what matters
are the relations by which some have money
and others do not, how money is put to work,
and how the property relations that engender
such a social world are reproduced. Capital,
said Marx, ‘is a definite social production relation belonging to a definite historical formation of society which is manifested in a thing
and lends this thing a specific social character’
(Marx, 1967, vol. III, p. 48). Under capitalism, capital is ‘value in motion’; that is to say,
it is an expansionary social value that drives,
and arises from, the production process. The
process – multifaceted and unstable – by
which money is converted into labour, raw
materials, capital goods, commodities and
back into money again is what Marx called
‘the general formula of capital’. Capital arises
from the social labour organized for generalized commodity production – that is to say, a
competitive system in which commodities produce commodities. The enormous complexity
of the category is bound up with the ways in
which the meaning of the word ‘capital’ shifts
and transforms itself in Marx’s work, leading
some to note that a word such as capital is
bat-like: one can see in it both birds and mice.
Capital comes to dominate in a capitalist
mode of production. Capitalist societies are
marked by the fact that capital is socially
owned and organized in particular ways – by
a capitalist class. Contemporary forms of capitalism have, however, vastly complicated this
class map, not least by the ways in which
shareholder capital (pension funds, individual
shareholders and government ownership of
stock) has refigured the cartography of the
ownership of capital. Geographers have largely
focused on the ways in which capital as a
social relation has spatial and ecological
expressions – for example, the geography of
accumulation or industrial districts, and
the relations between value in motion and
global climate change – and on the prismatic
ways in which capital attaches natural characteristics to things that are socially produced
(see Harvey, 1999 [1982]; Smith, 1982;
RETORT, 2005).
mw
capitalism
As a word denoting a distinctive economic system, ‘capitalism’ began to
appear, according to Raymond Williams
(1983 [1976], p. 50) in English, French and
German from the early nineteenth century
(although the Oxford English Dictionary cites its
first use by Thackeray in 1854). ‘Capitalist’ – as
a key actor in a capitalist system – has a longer
semantic history, dating back a half-century
earlier, but this term too was clearly being used
to describe an economic system – sketched by
Adam Smith and the Scottish political economists among others – for which the word capitalism had not yet been invented. Capital and
capitalist, says Williams, were technical terms
in any economic system but gradually became
deployed to account for a particular stage
of historical development, and out of this shift
in meaning crystallized the term capitalism.
Marx, who did not use the term until the
1870s, was the central figure in distinguishing
capital as an economic category from capitalism as a specific social form in which ownership
of the means of production was centralized
(through a capitalist class), and that depended
upon a system of wage-labour in which a class
had been ‘freed’ from property. Capitalism in
this sense, again as Williams observed, was ‘‘a
product of a developing bourgeois society’
(1976, p. 51). The term gained some traction
in the 1880s in the German socialist movement
and was then extended to non-socialist writing,
though its first extensive English and French
usages seem to not have been until the early
twentieth century. In the wake of 1917, and
most especially after the Second World War,
capitalism was rarely used as a descriptor by
its promoters, and was deliberately replaced by
such terms as free or private enterprise and,
more recently still, the market or free market
system (as part of the neo-liberal discourse of
the 1980s and 1990s).
What, then, are the defining qualities of
capitalism, understood as a distinctive mode
of production? It is a historically specific
form of economic and social organization and
in its industrial variant can be roughly dated to
mid-eighteenth century Britain, but the theorization of its conditions of possibility and its
internal dynamics have necessarily been an
object of intense debate. Classical political
economy – Adam Smith and David Ricardo –
and its Marxian critique both accepted that
capitalism was a class system, that labour and
capital were central to its operations, and that
capitalism as a system was expansive, dynamic
and unstable. These accounts fasten upon
the economy – or, more properly, the political
economy – and the centrality of property
relations, the market–commodity nexus, the
separation of the workers from the means of
59
CAPITALISM
production and the centralization of capitalist
control under the figure of the capitalistentrepreneur. These claims – to the extent that
they reflect some common ground – are subsequently elaborated in radically different
ways. Some cling to a narrow definition of
economy (theorized in different ways) as
central to the intellectual enterprise; others
seek to link economy, culture, politics and
society into a more elaborated sense – what
Max Weber called a ‘cosmos’ – of a capitalist
system. In general, the development and
institutionalization of the critical social sciences has seen a massive proliferation of
opinion – and of conceptual apparatuses – for
the examination of actually existing capitalist
systems.
Some of this diversity of opinion can be
appreciated by a consideration of a quartet of
theorists. Adam Smith, like other classical
political economists, was concerned with the
distribution and accumulation of economic
surplus and the problems of wage, price and
employment determination. Writing at the
birth of industrial manufacture, the key to
the Wealth of nations (see Smith, 2003) is the
concept of an autonomous self-regulating
market economy described as civil society.
Smith’s genius was to have seen the possibility
of an autonomous civil society, its capacity for
self-regulation if left unhindered and its capacity for maximizing welfare independent of
state action. Smith located capitalism at the
intersection of the division of labour and
the growth of markets. Furthermore, in this
system self-interested individuals indirectly
and inadvertently promoted collective interest
through the functions of self-regulating markets. The growth of commerce and the growth
of liberty reinforce one another under capitalism. In its neo-classical variant, labour markets are seen as no different than any
commodity market and capitalist markets are
assumed, if unimpeded by the state or other
distortions, to function to produce a general
equilibrium. Friedrich von Hayek’s (1944)
account of liberal capitalism took this reasoning to its limit. Capitalism was conceived of as
a unity of liberty, science and the spontaneous
orders that co-evolved to form modern society
(the ‘Great Society’, as he termed it). It is a
defence of the liberal (unplanned) market
order from which the preconditions of civilization – competition and experimentation – had
emerged. Hayek, like Weber, saw this modern
world as an iron cage constituted by impersonality, a loss of community, individualism and
personal responsibility. But, contra Weber,
60
these structures, properly understood, were
the very expressions of liberty. From the
vantage point of the 1940s this (classical) liberal project was, as Hayek saw it, under threat.
Indeed, what passed for liberal capitalism was
a travesty, a distorted body of ideas warped by
constructivist rationalism, as opposed to what
he called ‘evolutionary rationalism’. Milton
Friedman (2002 [1962]), in the realm of economic theory, waged this battle from the
1960s onwards.
For Max Weber, the capitalist cosmos was
guided by systems of calculability and rationality – this is what gave Western capitalism its
specificity – which grew in part as an unintended consequence of Protestantism (see
Weber, 2001 [1904–5]). Formal rationality
produced a capitalist society characterized by
large-scale industrial production, centralized
bureaucratic administration and the ‘iron
cage’ of capitalism that shapes individuals’
lives with ‘irresistible force’. Contra Smith’s
roseate vision of capitalism – though always
wary of the costs of class oppression, in his
view dished out by corrupt government –
Weber’s vision of capitalism was ultimately
bleak, always operating in the shadow of the
‘totally administered society’.
Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian economic
historian and socialist, who believed that the
nineteenth-century liberal capitalist order had
died, never to be revived (see Polanyi, 2001
[1944]). By 1940, every vestige of the international liberal order had disappeared, the
product of the necessary adoption of measures
designed to hold off the ravages of the selfregulating market; that is, ‘market despotism’.
It was the conflict between the market and the
elementary requirements of an organized
social life that made some form of collectivism
or planning inevitable. The liberal market
order was, contra Hayek, not ‘spontaneous’
but a planned development, and its demise
was the product of the market order itself. A
market order could just as well produce the
freedom to exploit as the freedom to associate.
The grave danger, in Polanyi’s view, was that
liberal utopianism might return in the idea of
freedom as nothing more than the advocacy of
free enterprise, in which planning is ‘the denial
of freedom’, and the justice and liberty offered
by regulation or control just ‘a camouflage of
slavery’. liberalism on this account will
always degenerate, ultimately compromised
by an authoritarianism that will be invoked as
a counterweight to the threat of mass democracy. Modern capitalism, he said, contained
the famous ‘double-movement’ in which
CAPITALISM
markets were serially and coextensively disembedded from, and re-embedded in, social
institutions and relations. In particular, the
possibility of a counter-hegemony to the selfregulating market resided in the resistance to
(and reaction against) the commodification of
the three fictitious commodities – land, labour
and money – that represented the spontaneous
defence of society.
Marx’s account identifies a fundamental
contradiction at the heart of capitalism – a
contradiction between two great classes
(workers and owners of capital) that is fundamentally an exploitative relation shaped by the
appropriation of surplus. Unlike feudalism, in
which surplus appropriation is transparent (in
the forms of taxes and levies made by landowners and lords, backed by the power of the
church and Crown), surplus value is obscured
in the capitalist labour process. Marx (1967)
argues that labour is the only source of value
and value is the embodiment of a quantum of
socially necessary labour. It is the difference
between the sale of a worker’s labour power
and the amount of labour necessary to reproduce it that is the source of surplus value. The
means by which capital extracts this surplus
value under capitalism – through the working
day, labour intensification and enhancing
labour productivity – coupled to the changing
relations between variable and constant capital
determine, in Marx’s view, the extent, degree
and forms of exploitation. In the first volume
of Capital, Marx identifies the origins of surplus value in the organization of production
(the social relations of production so-called).
In volume II, Marx explains how exploitation
affects the circulation of capital, and in
volume III he traces the division of the total
product of exploitation among its beneficiaries
and the contradiction so created. In Marxist
theory two kinds of material interests – interests securing material welfare and interests
enhancing economic power – are linked
through exploitation (exploiters simultaneously obtain greater economic welfare and
greater economic power by retaining control
over the social allocation of surplus through
investments). Members of a class, in short,
hold a common set of interests and therefore
have common interests with respect to the
process of exploitation (see also marxism).
In the wake of Marx’s work, the central
debates over capitalist exploitation have turned
on (i) whether the labour theory of value is a
necessary condition for any truth claim about
exploitation, (ii) whether exploitation can be
made congruent with the complex forms of
class differentiation associated with modern
industrial society, and (iii) whether there are
non-Marxist accounts of exploitation. In neoclassical economics, for example, exploitation under capitalism is seen as ‘the failure
to pay labour its marginal product’ (Brewer,
1987, p. 86). Exploitation in this view is
micro-level and organizational. That is to say,
using micro-economic theory exploitation is a
type of market failure due to the existence of
monopoly or monopsony. In more developed
versions of this organizational view, exploitation can be rooted in extra-market forces;
for example, free-riding or asymmetric
information (the so-called principal–agent
problem). A more structural account of
exploitation from a liberal vantage point
would be the ideas of Henry George or John
Maynard Keynes, for whom land owners or
rentier classes (non-working owners of financial wealth) produce not exploitation in the
Marxist sense, but exploitation as waste and
inefficiency due to ‘special interests’.
In the Marxian tradition, there has been in
general an abandonment of the labour theory
of value – away from the view of Elster (1986)
that ‘workers are exploited if they work longer
hours than the number of hours employed in
the goods they consume’ (1986, p. 121) –
towards John Roemer’s notion that a group is
exploited if it has ‘‘some conditionally feasible
alternative under which its members would be
better off’ (Roemer, 1986a, p. 136). Perhaps
the central figure in developing these arguments is Erik Olin Wright (1985), who sought
to account for the contradictory class location
of the ‘middle classes’ (in that they are simultaneously exploiters and exploited). Building
on the work of Roemer, Wright distinguishes
four types of assets, the unequal control or
ownership of which constitute four distinct
forms of exploitation under capitalism: labour
power assets (feudal exploitation), capital
assets (capitalist exploitation), organization
assets (statist exploitation) and skill assets
(socialist exploitation). While pure modes of
production can be identified with single forms
of exploitation, ‘actually existing capitalism’
consists of all four, opening up the possibility
of the simultaneous operation of exploiter/
exploitee relations (e.g. managers are capitalistically exploited but are organizational
exploiters).
A long line of Marx-inspired theorizing
has attempted to grasp the relations between
(European or transatlantic) capitalism, empire
and the non-capitalist (or developing) world.
This is the heart of theories of imperialism
61
CAPITALISM
(Lenin, 1916), whether as the coercive extraction of surplus through colonial states (Fanon,
1967 [1961]), through unequal exchange
(Arrighi and Pearce, 1972), or through the
imperial operation of transnational banks and
multilateral development institutions (the
World Bank and the international monetary
fund). The so-called ‘anti-globalization’
movement (especially focusing on institutions
such as the World Trade Organization) and
the ‘sweatshop movements’ (focusing on
transnational firms such as Nike) are contemporary exemplars of a politics of exploitation
linking advanced capitalist state and transnational corporations with the poverty and
immiseration of the global south against a
backdrop of neo-liberalism and free trade
(Harvey, 2005; Starr, 2005).
It is axiomatic that there has been enormous
controversy over the operations, the merits
and the costs of the capitalist system since
the nineteenth century. Much ink has also
been spilled attempting to provide periodization or classifications of actually existing
capitalisms and the origins of capitalism in
the transformation from feudalism. The pluralization of the word capitalism – capitalisms –
highlights enormous geographical, temporal,
institutional and cultural diversity of what
is now a global and integral form of political
economy. The originary question hinges in
large measure on engaging with Marx’s
account of primitive accumulations and the
British enclosures, and the extent to which
the feudal system was transformed by the corrosive effects of the markets and/or urbanbased merchants, by demography or by
internal contradictions within the feudal system (reflections in class and other struggles
between tenants, lords, the Church and merchants). The periodization of capitalism turns
on similar theoretical tensions: Was ‘early’
capitalism characterized by expansionary
trade and the dominance of merchants’ capital? Was this early mercantile capitalism actually in the business of inventing new systems of
capitalism production (e.g. the plantation)?
What was – or is – the relation between forms
of unfree labour (some of which still exist,
although not as organized mass slavery) and
the development of industrial capitalism? To
what extent were the accumulations associated
with differing phases of the development of the
world system – slavery, informal empire, and
the first age of empire – integral to the rise of
industrial capitalism in Britain or elsewhere in
Europe? These questions have produced a vast
body of scholarship and theorizing. What can
62
be said, with some trepidation, is that while
the trajectories of capitalism in europe and
elsewhere have some substantive diversity,
there is some agreement that the rise of industrial manufacture in Britain in the eighteenth
century, the growing concentration of capitals
(and the linking of industrial and bank capital)
at the end of the nineteenth century, the institutionalization of a sort of Keynesian capitalism in the wake of the First World War, and
the genesis of a resurrected ‘liberal capitalism’
(dubbed neo-liberalism, echoing the late nineteenth century) as a force driving the post1945 globalization of transnational capitalism
are key moments – or watersheds – in the long
march of modern capitalism. The national and
local forms in which the great arch of capitalist
development has been institutionalized –
sometimes theorized as systems of regulation
or social accumulation (see regulation
theory), sometimes as national capitalisms,
sometimes as models or cultures of capitalism
– has generated a very substantial and sophisticated body of work over the past three to four
decades, including an important dialogue over
the differences between the first and ‘late’
developers (e.g. the so-called asian tigers).
Geographers, particularly since the 1970s,
have been especially concerned to address the
relations between space, environment and the
reproduction of the capitalist system. The
most elaborated account in the English language is the body of work of David Harvey
(1999 [1982]) – but one might easily point to
an equally expansive and synoptic account in
the work of Henri Lefebvre (2003 [1970]).
Harvey’s work began as a critical account of
the city in the advanced capitalist states, but
quickly developed into a magisterial re-reading
of capital in which the friction of space – and
what he termed the ‘spatial fix’ – provided a
key theoretical ground on which to understand
the circuits of capital (see figure) and the built
environment, the changing geography of
capitalist accumulation and the environmental
costs of – and, more recently, the relations
between – american empire and primitive
accumulation (what he calls accumulation by
dispossession). Other geographers have naturally contributed to the space–nature–capitalism triumvirate: Doreen Massey on spatial
divisions of labour, Neil Smith on uneven
development, Richard Walker on regional
and agrarian capitalism, Ash Amin on industrial districts, Gillian Hart on trajectories
of capitalism, Stuart Corbridge and Richard
Peet on neo-liberalism and development,
and so on.
CAPITALISM
capitalism Circuits of capital (Harvey, 1999 [1982])
Since the 1990s, the spectacular rise of
neo-liberalism as a specific form of capitalist
development and its relation to questions of
empire, development and environment has
drawn much critical attention. David Harvey’s
A brief history of neoliberalism (2005) attempts to
map the dismantling of the social democratic
world, with a special focus on the British
form of national Keynesianism, inflected by
the command economy of the Second World
War, but whose roots lay earlier in the response
of the managers of North Atlantic capitalism to
the Depression, and which came in the form of
welfare safety nets, income redistribution,
domestic industry protection, state-financed
public works and capital controls – ‘embedded
liberalism’ of the Polanyian sort.
The rise of neo-liberal capitalism was in a
sense the victory of Friedrich von Hayek’s
The road to serfdom. It was Margaret Thatcher,
after all, who pronounced, at a Tory Cabinet
meeting, ‘This is what we believe’, slamming a
copy of Hayek’s The constitution of liberty onto
the table at 10 Downing Street. His critique of
collectivism – that it destroys morals, personal
freedom and responsibility, impedes the production of wealth, and sooner or later leads
to totalitarianism – is the ur-text for market
utopians. Collectivism was by definition
a made rather than a grown order; that is,
a ‘taxis’ rather than a ‘cosmos’. Collectivism
was, Hayek said, constructivist rather than evolutionary, organized not spontaneous,
an economy rather than a ‘catallaxy’, coerced
and concrete rather than free and abstract.
As Antonio Gramsci might have put it, there
has been a Hayekian ‘passive revolution’ from
above, in which we have witnessed what Perry
Anderson has dubbed a ‘neoliberal grand
slam’ (2000c). The vision of the Right has no
equivalent on the Left; it rules undivided
across the globe and is the most successful
ideology in world history.
The process by which neo-liberal capitalist
hegemony was established, and its relation
to forms and modes and sites of resistance,
remains a story for which, even with Harvey’s
synoptic survey at hand, we still have no full
genealogy. Neo-liberalism was a class reaction
to the crisis of the 1970s (Harvey talks of a
‘restoration of class power’); on that much,
Milton Friedman and David Harvey are
agreed. But we are still left with many paradoxes and puzzles. Why, for example, did the
LSE and Chicago – once the respective
centres of Fabianism and a certain version of
(American) liberalism under Robert Hutchins
– become the forcing houses of neo-liberalism?
What were the facilitating conditions that
fostered the arrival of the maverick Ronald
Coase in Chicago, marking a neo-liberal turning point? How did the World Bank – a bastion
63
CAPTURE–RECAPTURE METHODS
of post-war development economics and, it
must be said, of statism – become the voice
of laissez faire? How can we grasp the fact that
‘shock therapy’ in eastern Europe was more
the product of the enthusiastic Hungarian
reformers than of the more reticent American
neo-liberal apparatchiks? It is sometimes
noted that the 1991 World Development
Report (shaped by former US Secretary of
the Treasury Lawrence Summers) marked a
neo-liberal watershed in its refiguring of the
role of the state. But it was africa (not latin
america or eastern Europe) that proved to
be the first testing ground of neo-liberalism’s
assault on the over-extended public sector,
on physical capital formation and on the proliferation of market distortions by government.
There is much that remains unclear in the rise
of neo-liberal hegemony as a particular force
of capitalism.
As Polanyi might have anticipated, three decades of radical neo-liberalism culminated in the
autumn of 2008 with a spectacular and massive
implosion of the US financial sector, turning
quickly into a deeper and systemic crisis of capitalism itself. The catastrophic collapse of US
investment banks – which ramified globally
producing de facto bank nationalizations in
much of western Europe – was triggered by a
classic housing bubble. During the 1990s, however, this bubble was, unlike the past, driven by
new and dubious financial and mortgage instruments, and by the utter failure of the financial
regulatory institutions (the credit rating
agencies and the Securities and Exchange
Commission in particular). By late 2008, in
spite of a massive $700 billion bailout by the
US Treasury, credit and the banking sector
remained in effect frozen and the prospect of a
massive global recession loomed. The great
experiment in free market utopianism - the socalled ‘neo-liberal grand slam’ - had put
Keynesianism back on the political agenda.
In the US and much of Europe, a Polanyian
counter-revolution - in the US there is talk of a
new New Deal – is now in the offing.
mw
capture^recapture methods A sampling
technique that was developed in ecology to
estimate population size and vital rates
(including survival, movement and growth).
A search is made in a defined area and identified animals are captured and marked or
recorded in some way. Visits are made on
subsequent occasions and the proportion
of unmarked animals is recorded; this
allows, given assumptions, the estimation of
the total population. Model-based approaches
64
(Cormack, 1989) have been developed that
use categorical data analysis to provide
confidence intervals for the estimates. With
human populations, the method uses the
extent to which the same individuals are to
be found in different data sources; thus
Hickman, Higgins, Hope et al. (2004) estimated the total number of drug users by using
five data sources – community recruited
survey, specialist drug treatment, arrest referral, syringe exchange, and accident and
emergency
kj
carceral geographies Spaces in which individuals are confined, subjected to surveillance or otherwise deprived of essential
freedoms can be termed ‘carceral’. The most
obvious examples of these are jails and
prisons, which are state-sponsored spaces of
detention, typically used to punish criminal
offenders. Prisons are relatively young, in historical terms, first appearing in Western
Europe in the eighteenth century. These
spaces were designed to maximize surveillance, and to encourage self-monitoring and
possible rehabilitation.
In geography, much interest in carceral
institutions flows from Michel Foucault’s
influential study, Discipline and punish: the birth
of the prison (1995 [1975]). There, Foucault
traced the logics that underlay early prison
designs, and sought to illustrate how these
logics were deployed by other social institutions, such as schools and military organizations. Foucault’s description of power as
diffuse and capillary has influenced considerable work across human geography, much of
which demonstrates how social control is
mobilized through the construction and regulation of space.
Such geographies of control are widespread.
From its birth in europe, the use of incarceration as a punishment practice diffused widely
and quickly. Indeed, in some former colonial
states, prisons built decades ago by the colonial powers are still in use (Stern, 1998).
Today, there is evidence that the harsh punishment practices common in the USA
are diffusing through much of the rest of the
world. Although prisons and their operative
conditions vary across the globe, certain characteristics are common: their populations are
dominated by members of lower economic
classes and ostracized social groups; their
environments are commonly overcrowded,
dirty, disease-ridden and violent; and their
everyday realities make elusive personal security, privacy and dignity.
CARTESIANISM
Just as prisons restrict the mobility of individuals inside their walls, they are central to the
regulation of movement of people across
boundaries, particularly given concerns about
security in this age of panic about terrorism.
The most obvious example here is the USA,
which operates a separate set of prisons for
those accused of immigration violations.
These detention centres are run by the executive branch of the federal government, and thus
lie largely outside judicial review. Detentions
can be indefinite, and detainees left bereft of
legal representation. Such detention centres
reportedly house many suspected of plotting
terrorist acts (Dow, 2004). Beyond its own territory, the USA operates camps and so-called
‘black sites’, part of a global war prison where
practices of torture and otherwise inhumane
detention take place outside the constraints of
international law (Gregory, 2007).
Incarceration thus becomes implicated in
wider processes of citizenship, migration
and national security. Borders become heavily policed (Nevins, 2002) and those arrested
crossing illicitly are subject to indefinite detention and possible deportation. Those who
do manage to cross illegally come to inhabit
‘spaces of non-existence’ (Coutin, 2003),
invisible to legal and other authorities, and
thus deprived of the benefits of formal recognition. Full citizenship, however, hardly leaves
one outside of places that are heavily monitored and tightly controlled: in a world
of increasing surveillance and security consciousness, the scope of carceral geographies
promises to widen.
skh
Suggested reading
Foucault (1995 [1975]); Nevins (2002).
carrying capacity A concept developed
mainly in population biology and ecology that
commonly refers to the maximum number of a
given species that a given environment can
support indefinitely. Developed with respect
to animal populations that grow quickly and
then crash precipitously when they exceed their
environment’s carrying capacity, it has been
widely but controversially applied to human–
environment relations (e.g. efforts to quantify
the maximum number of park visitors compatible with conservation, or the maximum
human population that the Earth can support).
Such applications frequently neglect more relevant questions regarding the complex social
dynamics of resource use, particularly issues
of distributive justice and technological change.
jm
Suggested reading
Harvey (1974a); Meadows, Meadows and Randers (1992).
Cartesianism In order to provide a firm and
permanent structure for the sciences, the
philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) outlined a method of enquiry based on certain and
indubitable knowledge. The kind of knowing
learned from hearsay, teachers and parents
was seen to be suspect, marked by the uncertainties of opinion (doxa). Only knowledge
derived from reason and method (episteme)
provided adequate foundations for scientific
knowledge, and clear and explicit criteria for
demarcating scientific from non-scientific
claims (Bernstein, 1983, p. 23). For logical
empiricism and logical positivism, such
methods were seen to offer the possibility of
developing a universal science that would
share common foundations and principles.
Such Cartesian science was to be disinterested,
objective, value-free, universal and abstract,
and it was based on a firm belief that science
represented nature in a direct manner, serving
– as Rorty (1979) suggested – as ‘the mirror of
nature’ (cf. mimesis). Bernstein (1983) referred
to this history of scientific efforts to found basic
statements in direct observation of an external
reality as the Cartesian Anxiety, a term that
Gregory (1994, pp. 71–3) extended to the
cartographical and geographical project (see
cartographic reason).
In the 1960s, the growing power and reach of
universal science, hypothetico-deductive methodologies and mathematical abstraction in
the natural and social sciences led to a
series of disciplinary methodenstreiten (‘struggles
over method’). The ‘Positivist dispute in
German sociology’ (see Adorno, 1976) was
particularly influential in this struggle, bringing
together the views of a broad group of philosophers of science, including Thomas Kuhn,
Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend,
Jürgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno, on the
limits of disinterested, value-free and universalist understandings of science. In human geography, a critique of Cartesianism, and the
clearest reflection of this broader methodenstreit,
was provided by Gregory (1978a), who argued
against positivism and spatial analytic claims to
a privileged form of knowledge production.
Instead, geographical science was never
disinterested or innocent, but always a social
activity framed by determinate interests.
Habermas (1987a [1968]) had argued that
knowledge claims must be understood in terms
of such interests (see also phenomenology),
65
CARTOGRAM
and Gregory elaborated these claims for geography. In the place of a single privileged scientific method, Gregory outlined a plurality of
scientific epistemologies, each one determined
by the specific knowledge-constitutive interests
that give rise to them (he identified three:
technical, interpretative and emancipatory).
Corresponding to each knowledge-constitutive
interest was a particular form of science: empirical, hermeneutic and critical (see critical
theory). Since then, it has become commonplace to treat geographical enquiry, like all
forms of intellectual enquiry, as an irredeemably social practice, although this has been
understood in ways that often differ significantly from Habermas’ original theses, and the
rise of a critical human geography has been
accompanied by a series of searching enquiries
into the effects produced through representation and other modes of apprehending the
world (see non-representational theory). jpi
cartogram A customized map projection
that adjusts area or distance to reveal patterns
not apparent on a conventional base map.
For area cartograms this adjustment might be
specific, as when the areas of countries or
provinces are made proportional to their
populations (Dorling, 1993), or expedient, as
when small places such as Luxembourg or
Rhode Island are rendered sufficiently large
so that their symbols on a choropleth map
are readily visible. Similarly, distance cartograms
might adjust distances to reflect transport
cost relative to a particular place (Monmonier,
1993, pp. 198–200) or rearrange transport
routes to promote clarity, as on the widely
imitated London Underground map.
mm
Suggested reading
Gastner and Newman (2004).
cartographic reason The belief that cartographic and geographical representations
are direct representations of an external and
independent world or, as the philosopher
Richard Rorty (1979) put it more generally,
they are the ‘mirror of nature’ (see also cartesianism; objectivity). In this view, the task of
cartography and geography is to represent
the external world faithfully, and the criterion
for success and hence ‘truth’ is the degree
to which this correspondence is achieved.
This view of representation depends upon
a cartographic theory of correspondence in
which, to take the metaphor at its most literal,
information about the world is accurately
66
transmitted (primary sense data) through a
medium (the map) to a receiver (the map
reader) (for a critical reading, see Pickles,
1992). The accuracy of the transmission of
the information from the real world to the
reader is a measure of the accuracy and hence
effectiveness of the mapping process. This
representational notion of science presumed
that the world was external and independent
of the observer and that the nominally scientific
observer could describe the world in ways that
corresponded directly to the reality of
the world. Such foundational and objectivist
epistemologies have variously been referred
to as observer epistemologies or, in an acknowledgement of the effects that they produce, the
‘god-trick’ (Haraway, 1991d) and the ‘Cartesian
Anxiety’ (Bernstein, 1983). It was this latter
term that Gregory (1994) adapted as the cartographic anxiety to characterize a particular mode
of geographical imagination.
Some commentators have associated such
critiques of cartographic reason with the
influence of postmodernism on human geography, but some of the most telling interventions have been inspired by modernism and its
sustained interrogation of representational
practices. Thus for Olsson (2007, p. 4), the
thought of such a tabula rasa, a pristine ‘world’
uncontaminated by the act of knowing, is
literally unimaginable, and theories of human
knowledge that presume such a beginning point
or possibility are deeply flawed. Instead, for
Olsson, the drawing and interpreting of a line
is the cartographic act exemplified. It is always
an act that creates meaning; every drawing of a
line is the creation of a distinction, the delimiting of an identity, and the creation of a boundary. As Pickles (2004) shows, by inscribing
lines, creating distinctions, and drawing borders, cartography and, by extension, geography, can be seen as a part of a diverse array
of cultural practices and politics that are constantly producing and reproducing worlds (see
also Farinelli, Olsson and Reichert, 1994). jpi
cartography (1) The design and production
of maps by individuals or organizations; (2) the
scientific study of the technology of mapmaking
and the effectiveness of maps as communication devices; and (3) the scholarly examination
of the societal role and impact of maps. The
term’s association with mapmaking reflects lexical roots in carte (French for map) and graphie
(Greek for writing). Although mapmaking is an
ancient art, cartography is a nineteenth-century
word, introduced in 1839 by Portuguese
CARTOGRAPHY
scholar Manuel Francisco de Barros e Sousa,
Viscount of Santarém, who used it to describe
map study in the same way that historiography
refers to the history of historical writing (Wolter,
1975). Although Santarém referred only to
early maps, the word evolved to include contemporary maps and mapping as well as ancient
artefacts (Harley, 1987, p. 12).
As a synonym for mapmaking, cartography
is often construed to include the collection of
geographical information through systematic
surveys, formal or otherwise, of the physical
landscape or its human occupants. In an institutional context, cartography might refer
narrowly to the production of artwork for
printed maps (also called ‘map finishing’) or
more broadly to the overall mission of a commercial firm such as Rand McNally or a government agency such as the Ordnance Survey.
Although individuals working as freelance
mapmakers or non-faculty staff members of
an academic geography department are still
content to call their work cartography and
themselves cartographers, the term’s other
institutional connotations declined markedly
in the final years of the twentieth century,
when new technologies (see digital cartography; geographic information systems;
remote sensing) and new business models
undermined the paper map’s traditional role
in storing and distributing geographical information, and organizations at different levels
replaced ‘cartography’ as a descriptor with
more fashionable labels based on ‘geospatial’
or ‘geographical information’.
As a scientific endeavour focused on the
increasing efficiency in mapmaking, improving
the reliability of map communication, or
enhancing the understanding of cognitive
processes involved in decoding and using
maps, cartography remains an active if somewhat retrenched sub-discipline of geography.
Moreover, its boundary with geographic
information science is blurred insofar as
many (perhaps most) academics trained as
cartographers not only understand the power
and limitations of geospatial technology but
know how to use GI software. Similarly, many
(but probably not most) academics trained as
GI scientists not only appreciate the map as
an interface and display device but also recognize the inadequacy of current GI software
as a design tool. Labelling became especially
important in the 1990s, as older faculty
retooled and academic departments converted
course titles and job descriptions from cartography to GIS. The American Cartographer
became Cartography and Geographic Information
Systems in 1990, only to reposition itself as
Cartography and Geographic Information Science
nine years later. Despite this blatant but
apparently successful attempt to retain market
share through re-branding, the journal
remains committed to improving the practice
and understanding of map communication,
albeit with a clear emphasis on electronic and
digital cartography.
Map-design research has theoretical, technical and more ostensibly scientific–empirical
themes, with the latter often relying on subjecttesting to improve pedagogical approaches
to map reading, enhance understanding of
how the human eye-brain system processes
map information (MacEachren, 1995), and
evaluate the effectiveness of competing solutions to design problems (Montello, 2002). In
the latter three empirical realms, academic
cartographers constitute a numerical and philosophical majority only in design-related cartographic research, which also includes work on
dynamic and interactive maps, multi-sensory
cartographic interfaces (see visualization),
and tactile maps for persons with impaired
vision (Perkins, 2002). Not surprisingly, educational psychologists and cognitive psychologists
dominate explorations of map-reading and cognitive mapping, respectively.
Arthur Robinson’s The look of maps (1952)
was the seminal work in empirical map-design
research, a topic taken up in various guises by
Robinson’s graduate students and their intellectual offspring. Robinson held that effective
map design required an appreciation of the
design’s impact on map viewers, whose ability
to decode cartographic symbols was understandably impaired if they could not read
labels or detect crucial differences in line
thickness, greytones or colour. Aligned philosophically with the logical positivism of
the quantitative revolution, map-design
researchers uncritically adopted psychophysics, a paradigm in experimental psychology
that treats the magnitude of a response as a
power function of the magnitude of the activating stimulus (Montello, 2002, pp. 288–9).
A succession of empirical studies attempted to
‘rescale’ graduated circles, line weights and
greytones to the perceptual prowess of a hypothetical average map reader, an attractive concept undermined by variations in cognitive
style, training and prior knowledge as well as
by the unavoidable distractions of nearby symbols in the ‘map environment’. Although less
ambitious studies of ‘just noticeable differences’ among lines, greytones and colours
provided reliable guidance for mapmakers,
67
CARTOGRAPHY
map-design research lost momentum in the
1980s, when the shortcomings of psychophysical rescaling became apparent. Despite this
disappointment, subject-testing remains a
useful strategy for evaluating solutions to
problems in map design, and empirical studies
experienced a revival in the 1990s, when the
computer proved a valuable tool for testing
subjects and qualitative methods such as
focus-group interviews offered further
insights (Suchan and Brewer, 2000).
Computers fostered numerous technical
advances as well, including automated strategies
for placing labels in non-overlapping locations,
generalizing linear features, classifying data for
choropleth maps, interpolating isolines, generating oblique views of three-dimensional
surfaces, and creating visually effective animated and interactive maps (Monmonier and
McMaster, 2004). Although the computer was
ostensibly an instrument of mapmaking, these
techniques clearly functioned as tools for map
design insofar as the map author could readily
experiment with thresholds, parameters and
methods of symbolization. Although the limitations of psychophysics were readily apparent
in the 1980s, interactive maps that the user
could query with a cursor further undermined
the need to improve value estimation by rescaling map symbols.
Two other theories prominent in cartography
in the 1970s were the communication model
and a conceptual framework called visual variables. Derived from feedback-loop models in
information theory, the cartographic communication model in its simplest form treated
the map as a channel connecting a map author
(source) with a percipient (destination). A
more elaborate version treated the map author
as a filter that helped form the percipient’s view
of the world and added a reverse flow (feedback), which encouraged a modification of the
map’s design or content to promote a more
accurate transmission of the map author’s
intended message. Particularly noteworthy
was a comparatively sophisticated modification
by Antonı́n Koláčný (1969), whose model
described the cartographer’s reality and the
map user’s reality as overlapping but not completely coincident subsets of a larger reality.
Although the communication paradigm
received considerable attention in the academic
press and no doubt heightened awareness of
communication among academic cartographers, the notion that all maps, or even most maps,
contained a specific message was largely viewed
as naı̈ve or trivial by the 1980s, when computerassisted cartography began to command
68
increased attention (Antle and Klinkenberg,
1999). By contrast, French semiologist
Jacques Bertin’s (1983) notion of visual variables, especially the six retinal variables (size,
shape, hue, value, pattern and orientation)
under the map author’s control, proved more
relevant to map design, and remains a significant theory in cartography.
The third definition of cartography, focused
on the societal impact of maps, recognizes that
the map is not only a descriptive medium and a
problem-solving tool but also a text, as that
term is used in textual studies, cultural studies
and critical theory, and that map reading is
thus a situated cultural practice. Although academic cartographers had at least a vague awareness of the map’s rhetorical clout, especially in
geopolitics (Tyner, 1982), the 1980s
witnessed a renewed interest in cartographic
propaganda. Particularly influential were the
writings of J.B. Harley, a map historian acutely
aware of the map’s role in asserting hegemony
and justifying exploitation and also its vulnerability to manipulation as an instrument of
warfare, colonization and diplomacy. Harley’s
most important contribution was the notion of
cartographic silences, whereby the deliberate
omission of features or place names might
advance a government’s territorial claims
or promote an illusion of benevolence or efficiency (Harley, 2001a). These ploys succeeded
largely because the public understands the
need for selective generalization – the map
works as a communication device only when
the mapmaker consciously avoids graphic clutter – and widely accepts the map as an ostensibly objective, factual representation of reality.
And because most maps work, or appear to, the
public generally accepts the map author’s view
of reality, however flawed or one-sided. That
many maps in the media and the political arena
contain discernible biases made the label
‘social construction’ particularly appropriate
(Vujakovic, 1999; Schulten, 2005).
Harley challenged scholars to question the
motives of mapmakers by ‘deconstructing’
contemporary as well as historic maps (cf.
deconstruction). Although the studies that
followed sometimes bordered on mild paranoia in their disdain for evidence of intent or
impact – Pickles’ (2004, pp. 60–71) critique of
exaggerated claims for the ‘power of maps’
includes some good examples – other scholars
combined an insightful examination of the
map author’s mindset with a careful appraisal
of the institutional context in which maps were
produced. For example, Herb (1997) tied the
development of strident late-1930s German
CARTOGRAPHY, HISTORY OF
propaganda maps, which probably convinced
few people who were not already Nazi sympathizers, to a post-First World War collaboration
between scholars and activist politicians eager
for a ‘Greater Germany’. Similarly, Cosgrove
and della Dora (2005) offer a perceptive interpretation of the vivid pictorial Second World
War maps of Los Angeles Times cartographer
Charles Owens, a self-trained newspaper artist
fascinated with aviation, cinema and photojournalism. Cloud (2002), whose work is
similarly grounded in archives and interviews,
studied the ‘military–industrial–academic complex’ during the Cold War and provides
numerous insights on the intelligence community’s contributions to private-sector GIS
and remote sensing, including the use of
classified satellite imagery to update domestic
topographic maps and the paradox of conceptual details of top-secret research and
development efforts ‘hidden in plain sight’
in readily available cartographic and photogrammetric journals.
Research on the societal impacts of mapping is also concerned with public access to
geographical information, including the role of
government and other institutions in producing and distributing maps, influencing their
content, and restraining or promoting their
use. In this context, the map becomes not
only an artefact or tool, but also a piece of
intellectual property or an opportunity for
international collaboration (Rhind, 2000).
Moreover, growing use of the internet as a
medium for delivering and integrating geographical information has not only altered the
appearance and usability of maps but substantially altered relationships between public and
private sectors as well as between map author
and map viewer (Taylor, 2006a). The increasingly eclectic nature of maps and mapping
promises to make map study a fascinating
and challenging geographical endeavour,
whatever one calls it.
mm
Suggested reading
Harley (2001a); MacEachren (1995); Monmonier
(2004); Montello (2002); Pickles (2004); Taylor
(2006).
cartography, history of The study of the
processes whereby people in all cultures and
in all periods have variously made and used
maps to comprehend, organize and act in
space and place, together with their motives
for and effects of doing so. A primary element
of human geography and the history of
geography, the history of cartography is
also widely recognized across the humanities
and social sciences as an intellectually vibrant
and exemplary interdisciplinary field of study
that draws on and makes significant contributions to many historical fields. Note that ‘historical cartography’ per se is the practice of
representing past distributions or events in
maps; as such, it constitutes a particular topic
for historians of cartography (Skelton, 1972).
Librarians, professors, lawyers and lay
scholars (notably collectors and their dealers)
have studied maps as historical phenomena
since the 1700s. Traditionally, such studies
have elucidated the content of old maps in
order to generate locational and morphological data for use by other historians, notably
those of geography, exploration and colonialism, but also historical geographers, geomorphologists, lawyers, archaeologists and
students of cities and landscapes. Even so,
there was little disciplinary identity for such
‘map history’ before the twentieth century:
map historians were few in number, widely
dispersed and they were constrained within
national schools by differential physical and
linguistic access to primary sources. The
viscount de Santarém’s 1839 neologism of
‘cartography’, to mean the study of old maps,
accordingly could not take root; it was instead
quickly appropriated by professional mapmakers. A more coherent scholarly community coalesced around Imago Mundi, founded
in 1935 by Leo Bagrow; this is still the leading
journal in the field and has since 1967 given
rise to biennial international conferences
(Skelton, 1972; Harley, 1986, 1987; Edney,
2005a).
The successful promotion after 1945 of
cartography as an academic subject entailed
the expansion and consolidation of a previously minor, sporadic and internalist history
of cartographic techniques. The new concern
for such a ‘history of cartography’ was truly
innovative in that it focused on map form
rather than on map content, and on archival
and contextual research rather than on cartobibliography and map analysis. It generated
significant studies, for example of the histories
of map printing and thematic mapping. From
this perspective, academic cartography provided historians of cartography – however
briefly – with both an intellectual framework
(Woodward, 1974) and an institutional home
(Harley and Woodward, 1989; Edney, 2005b).
Both ‘map history’ and the ‘history of cartography’ were thoroughly intertwined with
the modern ideology of cartography. Indeed,
that ideology has in large part depended upon
69
CARTOGRAPHY, HISTORY OF
cartographic history for legitimation: the
historians’ narratives of past cartographic
progress, whether in content or in form, validate the modern convictions that maps are
unproblematic replications of geographical
data (see cartographic reason) and that
cartography is an inherently moral practice
aimed at improving the human condition.
Map history has thus served as a surrogate
for the triumphs of modern Western science
and civilization generally. These empiricist
and positivist ideals were further perpetuated
by the historical narratives constructed in
order to justify an academic status for cartography (Edney, 2005b), and they further
underpin a rapidly growing popular literature
that allies the powerful myth of cartographic
progress to the equally powerful myth of the
lone scientific genius.
Paradoxically, the ‘history of cartography’
ended up establishing the broader intellectual
potential of map studies and led to the proliferation of a ‘history of cartography’ that has
taken map studies far beyond the confines of
academic cartography and geography (Edney,
2005a,b). Several factors contributed to the
shift: attention to the larger historical record
revealed many more cartographic activities
than were encompassed by the established
canon; detailed archival studies increasingly
suggested that maps must be considered as
humanistic as well as technological/scientific
documents; academic cartography’s adherence to models of communication made some
historians aware of the need to study how
maps were used as well as made; and academic
cartography’s claims to intellectual autonomy
were matched by arguments that the history of
cartography should no longer be subservient
to other fields (esp. Blakemore and Harley,
1980). A triumphal, empiricist history of
cartographic progress was increasingly recognized as intellectually bankrupt. In 1977,
Denis Wood could accordingly present a
structuralist reinterpretation of the history of
cartography as part of a larger critique of
academic cartography (see structuralism).
For Wood, the history of cartography replicated the development of spatial cognition
in the individual; he has subsequently clung
to this argument, even as he has made truly
significant distinctions between the necessarily
social processes of ‘map making’ and individual processes of cognitive ‘mapping’ (Wood
and Fels, 1992).
By the late 1970s, Brian Harley and David
Woodward had set out to create a new,
autonomous discipline of the history of
70
cartography by unifying the widely dispersed
literature within a multi-volume History of cartography. Even with only three of six volumes
published to date, the series has already
proven enormously influential in promoting
the catholic and humanistic study of cartographic history. The extensive consideration
given to non-Western and pre-modern cartographies has loosened the west’s putative
stranglehold on ‘proper’ cartography and has
seriously undermined the conviction that
maps must be geometrically consistent, measured and graphic in nature. The series has
demonstrated unequivocally not only that the
history of cartography is a valid field of study
in its own right but also that it cannot hope to
make significant contributions as long as it
adheres to modern cartographic ideology
(Harley and Woodward, 1987–continues; see
Woodward, Delano Smith and Yee, 2001, esp.
pp. 23–9; Edney, 2005b).
Harley also set out to create a new intellectual identity for the field. His initial foray, with
Michael Blakemore, drew on the art-historical
principles of iconography to demonstrate
the manner in which maps necessarily bear
cultural and social significance in addition
to factual and locational data (Blakemore
and Harley, 1980). Subsequently, and largely
influenced by the work of philosopher–
historian Michel Foucault, Harley advanced
a series of essays on the inherently political
nature of all maps (Harley, 2001b). Harley’s
essays from the 1980s were crucial in that
they crystallized the intellectual concerns
with modern cartographic ideology already
expressed by many scholars across several disciplines, waved the flag for more critical map
studies and served as prominent vehicles for
human geography’s adoption of approaches
informed by post-structuralism. His essays
were nonetheless incomplete. Harley succeeded brilliantly in exposing modern cartographic ideology by wrenching off its mask
of objectivity, but he was ultimately unable
to theorize a new, critical paradigm (Edney,
2005a).
Parallel to, drawing on, and at the same
time motivating Harley’s theoretical exposés
were studies by scholars in other fields who,
unburdened with any disciplinary baggage,
recognized (or simply ignored) the traditional
shortcomings of map history. These scholars
included sociologists and political scientists
as well as historians (e.g. Winichakul, 1994;
see geo-body), but most were literary scholars
who began to consider maps as simply one
more strategy of representation within
CARTOGRAPHY, HISTORY OF
spatial discourses. For example, Carter (1987)
exposed the ‘spatial history’ of the shifting
configuration of Australia in texts, graphics
and cartographics, and Helgerson (1992)
explored the early modern construction of
‘England’’ as a site of national desire.
Today, the history of cartography features
several potentially conflicting elements. Its
practitioners are distributed across several disciplines and its institutional situation suffers
accordingly. But it has a strong intellectual
core in the rejection of traditional map history
and the concomitant recognition that maps
are cultural documents: maps are not the territory, in that they do not represent the land
and its essential characteristics in an unproblematic manner, yet maps emphatically are the
territory, in that they are intellectual constructions through which humans have organized,
comprehended and manipulated spaces and
places. Critical histories of cartography have
tended to examine the functioning of maps
as texts within specific spatial discourses,
especially those of nationalism and Western
rationalism, to elucidate how cartographic
expression has contributed, often crucially, to
associating particular meanings and configurations of identity with certain territorial
entities (especially state and empire) and
peoples (especially nations). Such studies feature a renewed emphasis on map reading,
now with the goal of elucidating the discursive
meanings that would likely have been read
into maps by their readers; particular success
in this respect has attended the study of map
forms previously deemed marginal or ephemeral, such as maps in art, modern road maps
or maps in educational texts. These studies
have approached, inter alia, British and modern India, early modern Europe and Japan, the
modern USA and Turkey, and nineteenthcentury Mexico and Thailand; classical historians currently debate the extent to which
Greek and Roman conceptions of territory
were cartographically constructed. Critical
histories of cartography have also addressed:
the instrumental deployment of maps to create
and maintain states and empires, overtly
underpinning the application of juridical
power, with recent explorations of thematic
cartography’s contributions to modern governmentality in Europe and North
America; the articulations of spatial discourses
with cartographic practices, whereby distinctive cartographic modes can be discerned; the
intersections of Western and indigenous
peoples, which tend to break down the neat
boundaries with which ‘text’ and ‘graphic’
have been habitually circumscribed; and the
patterns of map consumption, particularly
in terms of ‘print culture’, in order to delimit
the social limits of specific discourses in
which maps figured and to explore the interconnections between maps and other representational strategies (Edney, 2006). All told,
critical histories of cartography have promoted
cartographic studies into a significant component of research in the humanities and
social sciences.
Yet there is need for caution. Modern cartographic ideologies continue to infect much
supposedly critical work. Whereas the very
concept of ‘map’ is itself culturally determined
(Jacob, 2006) and the making of maps is
distributed across several modes that are not
necessarily connected (Edney, 1993), there
remains a tendency to treat ‘map’ as a selfevident category that is constant across
cultures and to understand ‘cartography’ as a
singular endeavour; discourse analysis based
on such misconceptions inevitably fails.
Again, a reading of Harley’s essays without
consideration of the larger stream of poststructuralist thought has led many scholars to
continue to understand map meaning as being
determined solely by mapmakers working for
socially privileged patrons: in this arrangement, a map’s meaning is bifurcated into
a culturally insensitive ‘factual’ layer and a
‘symbolic’ layer that is manipulated by the
map’s maker to achieve some kind of effect
on its readers. Such an approach denies the
agency of the map-reader and so fails to realize
fully the conventions of cartographic discourses and their constructions of spatial
meaning. In this respect, the transition to a
coherent critical paradigm of cartographic
history remains incomplete.
Furthermore, critical theory does not provide by itself a sufficient basis for the history of
cartography. Rigorous analysis of a spatial discourse requires a clear grasp of the forms of
maps involved in the discourse, of the social
and geographical patterns of that discourse,
and of the relevant political and economic
contexts. That is, critical studies must be
competently grounded in an empirical archive.
Much scope accordingly remains for cartobibliographies to elucidate the patterns of
map availability (e.g. Krogt, 1997– ), although
the carto-bibliographies need to be carefully
designed and implemented.
The history of cartography might thus at
present be described as a three-layer intellectual palimpsest. Traditional approaches have
not been completely erased: they are still quite
71
CASE STUDY
visible, especially within popular writing,
and it is hard to escape the restrictions of
the progressivist canon and its underlying presumptions. Academic cartographers continue
to pursue an internalist history, now reconfiguring it to account for the new directions
being taken by digital technologies (Slocum,
McMaster, Kessler and Howard, 2008).
Intellectually, the future clearly lies with the
new catholic and critical history of cartography; its challenge is to turn the older strains
of cartographic historiography to its own
ends, remaining empirically strong but consolidating a coherent and interdisciplinary
intellectual presence.
mhe
Suggested reading
Edney (2005a); Harley (1987, 2001b); Jacob
(2006). See also http://maphistory.info/
case study The case study epitomizes a process or complex set of processes in context,
thereby demonstrating how theoretical tools
can be applied to the social world. The idea
of the case study emerged in the 1930s
through attempts to make the human sciences
a parallel enterprise to the biophysical sciences, specifically in trying to see instantiations of sociological theory in the manner of
medical case histories. Urban sociologists,
mainly from the chicago school, saw the
case study as the ideal method to produce
hypotheses. For instance, Whyte’s Street corner
society (1943) is a classic case study of life,
gangs, work and politics in a working-class
Italian neighbourhood in Boston. By the late
1960s, the sociological approach of Grounded
Theory advocated building theory through
case studies, as a kind of stylized empiricism.
However, sociological thought has paid
much longer attention to what Max Weber
called ‘configurations’ of seemingly objective
regularities or hypothetical laws, which only
become intelligible in specific, concrete situations (Weber, 1949). Considered as a
Weberian configuration, the case study separates contingent from necessary causes and
context from structuring process, to show
how both elements come together in concrete
conjunctures. The Weberian approach,
it would seem, provides more durable analytical tools than some of its successors in urban
sociology.
Contemporary critiques from scholars such
as Dipesh Chakrabarty of the Subaltern
Studies Collective question the underlying presumption to objectify lived histories in cases
that conceal the translation of local into expert
72
knowledge (see subaltern studies). This
insight would suggest that as long as disciplinary authority is itself part of the object of analysis, case studies can remain efficacious in
engaging concrete interactions between expert
knowledges and forms of belonging. Such an
interactive conception of the case study is particularly useful from the perspective of a
human geography that strives to show how
broader processes work through specific constellations of social space. Through Massey’s
notion of an extroverted sense of place
(Massey, 1994b), one can conceive of ‘case
geographies’ as intersections of dynamic,
mobile, constructed and contested spatial processes. Another constructive critique of case
studies emerges from Mary Poovey’s (1998)
interrogation of the boundaries between
descriptive and interpretive evidence in the
making of the modern fact. Poovey’s analysis
contrasts the kind of evidence that makes
for case studies against the seemingly nonevaluative numerical and statistical indices that
surround such objects of evidence. The useful
insight in thinking of particular geographical
cases is to ask what work the division of nomothetic and idiographic forms of knowledge
accomplishes in maintaining or undermining
the coherence of actual cases.
sc
caste An endogamous social hierarchy of
enduring political significance, believed to
have emerged some 3500 years ago around
highly questionable categories of Aryans and
non-Aryans in the Indian subcontinent. The
former – comprising brahman, kshatriya and
vaishya – emerged as dominant occupational
castes of so-called dvija (twice-born). The
shudra caste(s) – regarded as non-Aryan and
‘mixed’ – were occupationally marginalized
and racialized, as was also the case later with
the ‘outcastes’ (Dalit), whose touch was
deemed polluting (Thapar, 1966). This order
was challenged from the sixth century bce,
but all major religions in India came to bear
the social imprint of caste. Brahman social
dominance was bolstered by a British neoBrahmanical ruling ideology, and provoked
a backlash (Bose and Jalal, 1997).
Significantly, leaders such as Lohia analytically separated the high castes from women,
shudra, Dalit, Muslim and adivasi (‘indigenous’) and underscored the political necessity
of marriages between shudra and dvija, while
disrupting the rift between manual and brain
work, which contributed to the formation,
rigidification and violence of caste.
rn
CATEGORICAL DATA ANALYSIS
Suggested reading
Lohia (1964).
catastrophe theory A branch of ‘bifurcation
theory’, which is itself a branch of non-linear
dynamic systems theory. Bifurcation theory
studies how, in certain non-linear systems,
there may be paths and shifts in behaviour
dependent on small changes in circumstances
or the current position of the system. One type
is the sudden jump or catastrophe, where a
dramatic change results from a small change
in the parameters. Other forms of bifurcation
include ‘hysteresis’, where the reverse path to
some point is not the same as the original path,
and ‘divergence’, where a small change leads
the system towards a very different state (but
not in a ‘jump’).
Bifurcation and catastrophe theory were
developed by the French mathematician
René Thom in the early 1970s (Thom,
1975). In human geography, several studies
suggested that it could be used to understand
settlement pattern changes, both in terms of
the sudden emergence and growth of cities
and the sudden collapse of layers in a central
place system (for a review of these and other
studies, see Wilson, 1981). The difficulty with
these, and with many other suggested applications in the social sciences, is that they were
speculative and one had to assume particular
non-linear relationships and parameters to
generate a system subject to catastrophes,
and the perspective has not been as productive
as many originally hoped. The most detailed
and analytical developments in human geography have been those by Wilson, which add
dynamics in the classic retail, gravity and
urban structure models and explore potential
bifurcations. Like its relative chaos theory,
catastrophe theory is now treated as part of the
wider complexity theory.
lwh
Suggested reading
Wilson (1981).
categorical data analysis A family of quantitative methods in which the variables are
gauged at a low scale of measurement. Such
variables may be binary categories (male/
female; rich/poor), ordered multiple categories
(as in a Likert scale such as, unhappy, neutral,
happy), unordered multiple categories (travel
to work by car, foot, train, cycle), or a count
(the number of crimes in an area). Such data
often arise through survey analysis in which
answers to questions are limited to a number of
categories. Until the 1970s, analysis of such
data was limited to simple description in a
cross-tabulation, testing for independence of
variables through such procedures as chisquare, and assessing association with a range
of measures of correlation such as Cramer’s
V and Yule’s Q. More recently, a full-scale
modelling approach has been developed for
such data in a regression-like framework.
All regression models consist of three components: the response or outcome variable; a
function of the predictor or explanatory variables; and a random term that represents the
stochastic variation in the outcome variable
that is not accounted for by the predictors. In a
standard regression model the response is a
continuous variable that is related to the predictors in a linear (straight-line) fashion (the
so-called ‘identity link’). With such a continuous outcome, the random term is usually
assumed to follow a normal distribution and
is summarized by an estimate of the unexplained variation, such as the variance. In categorical data analysis, in what are known as
generalized linear models, the response is
not continuous but discrete, the link between
outcome and predictors is non-linear, and
the random distribution is not normal but
takes an appropriate distribution, depending
on the scale of measurement of the dependent
variable.
A number of key members of the family are
defined by different types of measurement for
the response variable. One that is binary or a
proportion with a relatively small absolute
denominator (e.g. the unemployment rate for
small areas) requires a logit link and a binomial distribution; this is known as the logit
regression model. Multiple categories are usually analysed with logit link and a multinomial
distribution. Responses which are counts are
usually analysed with a logarithmic link and a
Poisson distribution: this is known as the poisson regression model. Such models also
offer a very flexible approach to longitudinal
data analysis, called discrete time analysis, in
which the response is whether or not an event
(e.g. marriage/separation/divorce) occurred in
a specified time-period.
This model-based approach allows assessment of the relationship between an outcome
and a predictor variable (which may be continuous or categorical), taking account of
other predictor variables. It is possible to test
for relationships, derive overall goodness-of-fit
measures and use diagnostic tools as part of
exploratory data analysis for assessing
whether the model’s assumptions have been
met. There is now a wide range of software
73
CELLULAR AUTOMATA
for quantitative analysis. This is vital, as the
procedures used to calibrate models do not
permit exact analytical solutions as in standard
regression, but require an iterative approach,
which can be computationally expensive. kj
Suggested reading
Agresti (2002); Power and Xie (2000); Wrigley
(1985b).
cellular automata Models of spatial phenomena, usually comprising a raster grid of
cells, each of which has a value representing
its present ‘state’ on a variable of interest.
algorithms with theoretically derived rules
are applied to the initial system configuration
to simulate changes. Run many times (each
run is termed a ‘generation’), the algorithm
produces an evolving pattern. A classic
example is the well-known ‘game of life’, in
which all cells are initially identified as either
alive or dead (Conway, 1970); its algorithm’s
rules specify that, for example, if any cell has
fewer than two live neighbours, it too will die.
Cellular automata have been used for several decades in human geography to simulate
spatial patterns and change – as in Torsten
Hägerstrand’s original work on the diffusion
of innovations (see Morrill, 2005).
Developments in computer technology, especially geographic information systems and
geocomputation, have enabled large-scale
use of cellular automata models to simulate
a wide range of environmental and other
geographies (cf. agent-based modelling). rj
census
An enumeration, usually undertaken within the state apparatus, to provide
needed data for state purposes. The Latin
word census translates as ‘tax’, giving a clear
indication of the purpose of such enumerations, the first of which are believed to take
been taken in Egypt some 3,000 years ago.
Many ad hoc censuses were taken before the
nineteenth century – as with the 1086
Domesday book in England. Since then, an
increasing number of countries have conducted regular (usually decennial) censuses
as part of the development of statistics to
inform the ever-widening range of government
decision-making (Cullen, 1975). Censuses of
population and housing are the most common,
but separate censuses of, for example, agriculture, construction, (local) governments, manufacturing, mining and retailing have been held.
A few countries – mainly in Scandinavia – have
replaced censuses by continuously updated,
geocoded population registers.
74
Censuses are constitutionally mandated in
some countries. In the USA, for example,
Section Two of the First Article states that
‘Representatives and direct taxes shall be
apportioned among the several states . . .
according to their respective numbers’: the
first census was to be conducted within three
years of the constitution’s acceptance, and
‘within every subsequent term of ten years’.
They have been conducted decennially since
1790, and their findings have sometimes been
hotly disputed because of their implications –
as with the allocation of seats to the US House
of Representatives after the 2000 census
(Johnston, 2002: on the history of the US
Census, see Eckler, 1972).
Although the primary role of a census is to
collect factual information to inform public
policy – both current and future (such as
population projections) – nevertheless they
cannot be considered ‘neutral’ tools. The data
that they collect all refer to categories (occupational class, ethnicity etc.) that are social
constructions, whose nature is determined by
some theory of what should be measured, and
how – as with the main ethnicity categories now
used in the US Census (White; Black
or African-American; American Indian and
Alaskan Native; Asian; Native Hawaiian and
Other Pacific Islander; Hispanic or Latino
Origin) which dominate discourse about race
and ethnicity there (Robbin, 2000; Yanow,
2002). Early US censuses generated considerable conflict between northern and southern
states over counting slaves: southerners wanted
to count them, because they would boost their
entitlements to federal revenues and representation; northerners opposed to slavery were
against. Eventually a compromise was reached,
and slaves were counted as three-fifths only of
‘all other persons’ until after the Civil War.
‘Indians not taxed’ were excluded entirely until
1936. A similar situation obtained in Australia,
whose original constitution – passed in 1900 –
included ‘In reckoning the numbers of the
people . . . aboriginal natives shall not be
counted’. This remained the case until 1967,
when voters overwhelmingly approved (91 per
cent in favour: voting is compulsory in
Australia) a referendum including the requirement that Aboriginals ‘be counted in reckoning
the population’.
Just as there is a politics and a sociology of
official statistics, including censuses (on which
see several chapters in Alonso and Starr,
1987), so there is also a politics and sociology
of their use. Data can be deployed in a variety
of ways to sustain particular cases, including
CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT (CBD)
partisan political projects – as illustrated by
the use of 2001 census data in the UK to
portray the country’s changing ethnic geography in ways that, while not wrong, emphasize findings that sustain a particular case
(Dorling, 2005; Johnston and Poulsen, 2006).
The conduct of censuses is a major administrative task involving the distribution to and
collection of forms from every address in the
country, followed by the collation of large volumes of data. That administration is in almost
every case geographical in nature: the country
is divided into small areas (variously termed
‘collectors’ districts’, ‘enumeration districts’,
etc.) in each of which data collection is overseen by a trained administrator (a role partly
eliminated in some cases by use of postal and/
or on-line questionnaires). Those small areas
may also be deployed as reporting units, with
data made available to users at very fine spatial
scales. (The average collection district at
the 2001 New Zealand census contained 106
persons, for example.) Elsewhere, the smallest
reporting units are specially designed to provide information about neighbourhoods in
urban and separate settlements in rural areas,
as with census tracts in the USA. For the
2001 UK census, geographers were involved
in designing a three-level hierarchy of output
areas which are relatively homogeneous on two
criteria – dwelling type and tenure – as well as
meeting size and shape constraints and fitting
within local authority boundaries: their average populations were 297, 1,513 and 7,234
persons, respectively (Rees, Martin and
Williamson, 2002).
Although an increasing number of census
authorities release data at such small spatial
scales, thereby facilitating detailed geographical analyses (cf. factorial ecology; segregation; social area analysis) – some of value to
policy-makers, as in the identification of areas
of social exclusion within cities towards
which programme money may be directed – a
major purpose of a census is to provide information about and for sub-national governmental and administrative units. These then form
the context of much geographical analysis
although geographers have been employed to
define other spatial architectures for data dissemination that are commensurate with the
contemporary spatial structure of economy
and society, which may not be the case with
administrative areas: examples are the use of
commuting data to define metropolitan
areas in several countries.
Although the nature of the data collected
and the spatial units for which they are
released are important constraints to spatial
analysis, nevertheless censuses provide a
wealth of information that has been deployed
by geographers and others to portray many
aspects of society – not least through the
production of atlases (e.g. Dorling and
Thomas, 2004) notably, though not only, in
population, social and urban geography.
In addition, census authorities are increasingly
providing a wider range of material: public-use
micro-samples of entirely anonymized individual records are released in some countries, for
example, which may be linked across censuses
to facilitate longitudinal data analyses. In
some countries, too, the original manuscript
census returns are made available (including
on the internet), perhaps 100 years after they
were collected, allowing detailed analyses
in historical geography not previously
feasible.
rj
Suggested reading
Alonso and Starr (1987); Eckler (1972); Openshaw (1995); Rees, Martin and Williamson
(2002).
census tract A small areal unit, containing a
few thousand residents, used to collect and
report census data. The first tracts were
defined by the US Bureau of the Census in
1920 to approximate natural areas or neighbourhoods, providing useful data for analysing urban social geography (cf. social area
analysis). Many censuses now use a similar
spatial architecture – with varying terminology; some report data for areas with only
a few hundred residents. Most tracts and comparable areas are designed for logistical convenience, although those for the 2001 England
and Wales census were defined by geographers
to produce areas with different housing
characteristics (Martin, 2002).
rj
Suggested reading
US Bureau of the Census, Census Bureau Geography: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/GARM/
central business district (CBD) The nucleus
of an urban area around its most accessible
point, containing an internally differentiated
concentration of retail and office establishments. In cities where most workers and shoppers travel by public transport, the CBD has
the highest density land uses, most valuable
land and is the focus for most intra-urban journeys. With greater reliance on private transport,
decentralization and deconcentration trends
are eroding the CBD’s role: most are now
75
CENTRAL PLACE THEORY
declining both absolutely and relatively as
shops and offices move to more accessible
suburban locations (cf. edge city; retailing;
sprawl).
rj
Suggested reading
Carter (1995); Murphy (1972).
central place theory A theoretical statement
of the size and distribution of settlements
within an urban system in which marketing –
especially retailing of goods and services – is
the predominant urban function. The theory
assumes that both customers and retailers are
utility-maximizers, making it a normative
statement against which actual patterns can
be compared.
Of the two separate central place theories
developed, Christaller’s (1933) has been most
influential. It was based on two concepts: the
range of a good – the maximum distance that
people will travel to buy it; and the threshold for
a good – the minimum volume of sales necessary for a viable establishment selling that
good (or a bundle of linked goods, such as
groceries). In order to maximize their utilities,
retailers locate establishments to be as near
their customers as possible and customers visit
the nearest available centre: in this way, expenditure on transport costs is minimized and
spending on goods and services maximized.
On a uniform plane with a uniformly distributed population, Christaller showed that
application of these two concepts produced a
hexagonal network of central places housing
the establishments, organized in a hierarchy
whose number of levels reflected the number
of goods/services with similar range and
threshold values (he identified seven). Each
was centrally located within its hinterland,
with those at the hierarchy’s lowest level having the smallest number of establishments and
serving the smallest hinterlands, and thus
most widely distributed. The ways in which
smaller settlements nested within the hinterlands of larger ones depended on a further set
of principles. Christaller identified three (as
shown in the figure). The marketing principle
(k ¼ 3: a in the figure) minimizes the number
of settlements so that each is at the meetingpoint of three hexagonal hinterlands for
centres at the next hierarchical level up: the
number of centres in each order is 1, 2, 6, 18,
54, 162 and 486. According to the transport
principle (k ¼ 4: b in the figure) the goal is to
minimize the length of roads joining adjacent
places. Each settlement is located centrally
on the boundary line between the hexagonal
76
hinterlands of two places in the next highest
order hierarchy, and the number of centres is
in the ratio 1, 2, 8, 32, 128, 512 and 2,048.
Finally, the administrative principle (k ¼ 7: c in
the diagram) has each lower-order settlement
and its hinterland nested exclusively within the
hinterland of a single settlement in the next
highest order, producing a much larger number of places in the ratio 1, 6, 42, 294, 2,058,
14,406 and 100,842.
Lösch’s (1940) model was much less restrictive than Christaller’s. Rather than bunch all
functions into seven ‘orders’ he treated each as
having a separate range, threshold and hexagonal hinterland. Where feasible, functions
were clustered into settlements but all central
places with certain functions in them need not –
as in Christaller’s scheme – also contain all of the
functions with smaller ranges and thresholds.
This produced a much wider range of settlements in terms of size and complexity of business profiles: whereas Christaller’s theory
produced a stepped hierarchical urban system,
Lösch’s was consistent with a more continuous
distribution of urban sizes.
Central place theory was a major stimulus to
work in the early years of geography’s quantitative revolution: it was described by Bunge
(1968, p. 133) as ‘geography’s finest intellectual product’. Christaller’s work, in particular,
was the basis of much research into the size
and spacing of settlements and into consumer
behaviour (both inter- and intra-urban), and
also as the basis for planning settlement patterns – not only in the anodyne cases of new
settlements in the Dutch polders and the distribution of new shopping centres in cities, but
also in the violent resettlement of Eastern
Europe as part of the Nazi holocaust.
With greater mobility and customer choice
available in many, more developed, societies,
the underlying assumptions are increasingly
irrelevant and the theory remains more as an
exemplar of modelling during that period
of geography’s history than as a paradigm for
understanding contemporary settlement patterns, although it is one of the theories ‘rediscovered’ in the new economic geography.
(See also periodic market systems.)
rj
Suggested reading
Beavon (1977); Berry and Parr (1988); Fujita,
Krugman and Venables (1999).
centrifugal and centripetal forces Terms
adapted from physics by C.C. Colby (1932)
to describe two counteracting forces generating intra-urban land-use changes. Centrifugal
central place theory The size and spacing of central places, plus their hinterlands (left) and routes (right),
according to three variants of Christaller’s model: (a) the market principle, which minimizes the numbers of centres:
(b) the transport principle, which minimizes the road length: and (c) the administrative principle, in which
hinterlands are nested hierarchically
CHAIN MIGRATION
forces push residential, business and other
users away from the congested, polluted,
high-density and expensive inner-city areas
towards the suburbs and beyond (cf. deconcentration:
see
counter-urbanization;
decentralization; sprawl), whereas centripetal forces attract them towards the centre
for the benefits of accessibility and agglomeration (cf. gentrification). The balance of
these two forces at any time determines the
changing urban morphology.
rj
chain migration A term used to describe
migration that occurs in a sequence, when
the movement of one person causes others to
follow. It is a major component of networkbased theories of migration. Chain migration
typically begins at the family scale, with a single person moving to a new place in search of
better opportunities. Once settled, that person
facilitates the migration of other members of
the nuclear or extended family (Hugo, 1994).
In time, the migration network extends to
friends and acquaintances as well. As this
occurs, migration becomes self-perpetuating.
New arrivals are assisted by those who have
already learned to cope in the receiving society
(Castles and Miller, 2003). This is particularly
effective in the process of finding shelter and
work, and newcomers generally live in close
proximity, and take similar jobs to those who
help them. This process leads to the development of immigrant enclaves in housing and
labour markets, as Banerjee (1983) has shown
in the case of internal migration in India (cf.
segregation and segmented labour market).
Chain migration also fosters financial transfers, or remittances, between immigrants and
family members who are still residents of the
source country, as well as other forms of transnationalism (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004).
From the point of view of receiving countries, the chain migration process can be
thought of as an ‘immigration multiplier’, in
the sense that each individual immigrant is
likely to generate the entry of several others
over time (Jasso and Rosenzweig, 1986). Once
established, these networks develop routinized
systems of movement that can even circumvent state authority (Bocker, 1994). It is
widely believed, for example, that chain
migration has been an essential ingredient in
the entry of the approximately 12 million
undocumented immigrants residing in the
USA. This insight has often been used by
critics of immigration, who argue that the
combination of the self-perpetuating nature
of chain migration and the multiplier effect
78
will cause a geometric increase in immigration
(cf. Goering, 1989). However, it is worth
remembering that social networks are just
one contributing factor in migration, and that
other factors, notably economic differentials
between countries and various forms of violence, are structural causes of migration. dh
Suggested reading
Castles and Miller (2003); Hugo (1994).
chaos theory A branch of non-linear mathematical theory dealing with dynamic systems
which exhibit aperiodic behaviour that is sensitive to initial conditions and is unpredictable
in detail. Such sensitivity to initial conditions
is often referred to as the ‘butterfly effect’, with
the illustration that the flapping of a butterfly’s
wings in one part of the world might, through
tiny impacts on the atmosphere, have major
impacts elsewhere in the world. The behaviour
of systems that exhibit chaos may appear to
be random, even though the system is deterministic in the sense that it is well defined and
contains no random parameters. This technical use of the word ‘chaos’ is at odds with
everyday language, which suggests complete
disorder. Chaotic systems are ‘orderly’ in
being deterministic, and also usually have
well-defined system structure and statistics.
A very simple example of such a system is
provided by May (1973) in his standard logistic model of population growth:
X tþ1 ¼ aXt [1
bXt =a],
where next year’s population Xtþ1 is dependent on the current population Xt and parameters a and b. The system exhibits very
different behaviours depending on the values
of a: if 1 < a < 3, then Xt tends towards a
stable equilibrium population. If a > 4, then
there is a divergence to minus infinity (a total
collapse of the system), but for values of a
between 3 and 4, there are interesting dynamics: if 3 < a < 3.8495, then Xt oscillates with
a regular, periodic frequency, but if 3.8495 <
a < 4, then the oscillations are chaotic, with
no regular frequency.
Chaos theory was a popular and muchvaunted term for a time, but, like the related
mathematical systems of catastrophe theory,
it is usually now treated as part of the wider
arena of complexity theory, and further reading will be found under this term.
lwh
Chicago School The first sociology department in the USA (founded in 1892), located
CHICAGO SCHOOL
at the University of Chicago, where scholars
including Robert Park, Louis Wirth and
Ernest Burgess established an agenda, approach
(human ecology) and methodology for
the study of urban areas. From the 1910s
through to the 1930s, the scholars at the
Chicago School set out to study the city as
‘a product . . . of human nature’ (Park, 1967
[1925], p. 1). Indeed, the Chicago School
sociologists saw the city as ‘the natural habitat
of civilized man [sic]’ (Park, 1967 [1925],
p. 2). Fundamental to their theories about
urban life was an expectation of social organization and control. They anticipated that
land use patterns in a city would reflect
‘an orderly and typical grouping of its
population and institutions’ (Park, 1967
[1925], p. 1), and sought to study these
systematically. Chicago School sociologists
developed detailed descriptions of urban life
based on field observations of Chicago. In
doing so, they advocated that ethnographic
methods drawn from anthropology be applied
to urban cultures (Park, 1967 [1925]). Their
in-depth observations were hindered by a tendency to generalize from the single Chicago
case, but their emphasis on observation
remains influential in community research.
The Chicago sociologists drew upon
Darwin’s theories of order and ‘cooperative
competition’ among species in a shared territory and applied them to humans in urban
environments (Park, 1936). The concept of
community articulated the biotic level of social
organization, which correlated for the Chicago
School scholars with race and ethnicity
(Theodorson, 1961; Knox, 1994). Social
communities as defined by ethnicity formed
‘natural areas’ that were segregated from one
another (Park, 1967 [1925]). By applying biological metaphors to sociology, Park and his
colleagues were creating a scientific justification and legitimation for the study of social
phenomena (Entrikin, 1980). At the same
time, however, their naturalizing of racialized
social communities fostered and reinforced
notions of a ghetto that was both voluntary
and temporary: ‘they never saw the difference
between the ethnic enclave and the black
ghetto’ (Philpott, 1991 [1978], p. 141).
Further, Philpott argues that with the exception of the ‘Black belt’ African-American
ghetto, the natural areas (social communities)
about which the Chicago sociologists wrote
were never as homogeneous as some of their
writings suggested.
Well-known and influential studies of ‘natural areas’ that were developed by the Chicago
School faculty and their students include
Zorbaugh’s The gold coast and the slum (1929)
and Frazier’s ‘Negro Harlem: an ecological
study’ (1937). Perhaps the most famous
among the writings of the Chicago School,
however, is that of Ernest Burgess on ‘The
growth of the city’ (1967 [1925]). In it, he
offered a descriptive model of urban structure
to explain land use, urban growth and neighbourhood change. He posited urban expansion based on differentiation of land uses and
competition among those uses..(a basic premise
also articulated in the von thunen model and
also other land-use models by Hoyt (1939) and
Alonso (1960), among others). His zonal
model represented the city as a series of ‘concentric circles’, or zones. The central zone at
the core of the city was the central business
district (cbd), called the ‘loop’ in his model
due to the influence of Chicago as the empirical
case study. Successive zones were described as
residential areas, differentiated from one
another based on categories of ethnicity, social
class and housing type.
The process of urban expansion was
explained by Burgess (1967 [1925]) in terms
of the invasion and succession of one zone
(predominant land use) into the next outer
zone adjacent to it, with physical expansion
of the city the result. The mobility assumed
in the model to be inherent to urban expansion was seen by Burgess to be both a stimulus
to urban growth and the source of instability,
especially in lower-income and immigrant
communities. Thus, crime, poverty, homelessness and social and psychological instability were seen as naturally occurring phenomena
in the zone of transition just outside of the
expanding CBD (Burgess, 1967 [1925], p. 54).
Burgess’ model, and the overall goals of
the Chicago School to study urban life, community and organization, have been extremely
influential in urban studies generally, including urban geography. The inherent (and
explicit) spatiality of Burgess’ model of
urban growth is appealing to geographers.
Terms such as CBD are ubiquitous in the
field. Yet the assumptions underlying the
model and its theory of growth, particularly
the naturalization of race, ethnicity and
social problems such as crime and homelessness, limit its use and applicability.
The Chicago School is clearly situated in
and thus limited by its time and place –
because of its reliance on human ecology and
Darwinian metaphors, and upon the city of
Chicago as the main case study. Yet Park’s
(1967 [1925]) original description of an
79
CHILDREN
agenda for research included population and
demography, land use, patterns of home
ownership and migration, community development and character, neighbourhood history,
occupational and class mobility, social unrest
and social control (including policing and
urban policies). Many of these topics remain
of vital interest to urban geographers, and
draw upon ideas from the Chicago School
about pattern, process and community,
although our contemporary approaches to
and theories of these topics are necessarily
different.
dgm
Suggested reading
Dear (2002); Entrikin (1980); Jackson and Smith
(1984); Park, Burgess and McKenzie (1925).
children A burgeoning area of scholarship
in human geography that encompasses
notions of children as active producers of
space, as geographical subjects and as environmental agents, at the same time as it recognizes children’s limited mobility, the
peculiarities of their exposure to various environmental degradations and hazards, and the
mediated nature of their spatial engagements.
The earliest work in the field, pioneered by
James Blaut and the psychologist David Stea,
addressed the ‘ontogeny of environmental
behavior’ by looking at children’s geographical
learning, especially their understandings of
spatial relationships, mapping skills and place
knowledge (Blaut and Stea, 1971, p. 387).
Their Place Perception Project (1968–71)
spurred much generative work in the field,
including Roger Hart’s (1979) landmark study
of children’s place experience, Denis Wood’s
fascinating research on the relationship
between young people’s spatial behaviour
and their cognitive maps, and research on such
issues as children’s differentiated access to the
outdoor environment or ‘home range,’ their
understanding of environmental processes
and human–environment interactions, and
their ability to negotiate aerial photographs.
At about the same time as Blaut, Stea and
their colleagues at Clark University were
researching children’s acquisition of environmental knowledge, William Bunge (see Bunge
et al., 1971) was launching the Detroit
Geographical Expedition, which examined
the effects of noxious and deteriorated environments on children’s well-being, and developed projects of environmental activism
around the uneven geographies of people’s
everyday lives and children’s exposure to
problems rooted in these geographies. These
80
two streams of work – not, coincidentally,
by radical geographers – set the stage for
much subsequent scholarship on children’s
geographies and the geographies of children,
even as some of their key practitioners were
marginalized from the field.
As geographers have continued to address
the development of spatial cognition, mapping
skills and environmental learning, there has
been an ongoing debate about whether mapping represents a cultural universal that children share from earliest childhood, as Blaut
and Stea and their colleagues have argued,
or is dependent on cognitive development,
as Roger Downs, Lynn Liben and their
colleagues have argued. While much of this
debate has concerned children’s relative preparedness for acquiring spatial concepts and
mapping skills (and thus was an argument
about the role of geographical education at
different ages), it was animated by the principals’ understandings of the nature of Piagetian
developmental psychology and what Blaut
considered its idealist underpinnings. Both
sides recognized children’s embrace of geographical concepts, and advocated their being
taught mapping and spatial skills in all phases
of their education, agreeing that it would not
only be a cornerstone of enhanced geographic
literacy but contribute to cognitive development and learning in other arenas (Blaut,
1997; Liben and Downs, 1997; cf. Matthews,
1992). Despite this conclusion and the decades of scholarship that support it, there
remains a surprising disconnection between
the work of scholars interested in geographical
or environmental education and those who
look at children’s place experience and their
acquisition of environmental knowledge and
spatial skills.
Work on children’s geographies has been
developmental, ecological, milieu focused,
comparative and concerned mostly with
the global North. As the field evolved, its
concerns expanded to include children’s
understanding and experience of place (Hart,
1979; Matthews, 1992; Wood and Beck,
1994), their knowledge of environmental processes and human–environment relations
(Kates and Katz, 1977; Hart, 1997; Katz,
2004), the social ecologies of their environmental interactions (Ruddick, 1996; Valentine,
1997; Aitken, 2001) and studies of particular
children’s environments, such as playgrounds,
schools, parks and neighbourhoods (e.g.
Skelton and Valentine, 1998; McKendrick,
1999). In tandem with broader disciplinary
concerns, research focused on children and
CHINATOWN
geography has shifted to address new arenas of
experience and has recognized the socially
constructed nature of childhood. Recent work
has examined children and the electronic
environment (Holloway and Valentine, 2000);
children as environmentalists (Hart, 1997;
Holloway and Valentine, 2000); aspects of
place experience, such as fear, constriction
and surveillance, which have peculiar ramifications for young people (Valentine, 1997;
Katz, 2005; Pain, Grundy, Gill et al., 2005);
the emotional geographies of youth and
childhood; identity formation and issues of
difference; landscapes of consumption; and
questions of youth participation and rights
(Hart, 1997). A growing number of geographers are attending to children’s geographies in
the global south and addressing the questions
of difference that they raise (Holloway and
Valentine, 2000; Katz, 2004).
In geography as in other disciplines associated with the ‘new social studies of childhood,’
children are recognized as subjects and social
actors in their own right at the same time as
they are both becoming something else and
subject to structural forces beyond their control. Children and young people are seen to
shape their own and others’ lives, the social
formations in which they live and the social
construction of childhood itself. While children’s experiences are often cast in relation
to adults, geographers and others are clear that
age and life course are not the only differences that structure young people’s experiences. Geographers examine how differences
of gender, class, nation, race, embodiedness and sexuality separately and in conjuncture affect young people’s experiences and
understandings of the world (Skelton and
Valentine, 1998; Holloway and Valentine,
2000). Childhood is now recognized as a
social construction that varies historically
and geographically, and scholars seek to
understand it for itself rather than as a stage
on the road to adulthood. If research only
recently moved away from the latter perspective and its focus on the practices and processes of socialization, it has long been the
case that scholarship on children’s geographies
has treated children methodologically as social
actors rather than as objects of learning or
vessels for knowledge. This perspective can
be readily seen in the methodologies adopted
– and invented – for studying children’s geographies. Beginning with the early work of
Blaut and Stea and their students and colleagues, children have been asked to navigate
actual and representational geographies, make
maps, engage in landscape modelling, enact
‘geodramas’, take photographs and make
films, keep journals, write narratives, lead
walks and – more recently – shape the research
itself. These strategies have long complemented research methods such as surveys, interviews, participant observation and the like
in children’s geographies.
In the past decade, children’s geographies
has been recognized as a vibrant sub-field of
the discipline. This achievement was marked
by the inauguration of an international journal, Children’s Geographies, the online revival
of the Children’s Environments Quarterly as
CYE (Children, Youth, and Environments), the
establishment of an IBG/RGS Working Group
on the geographies of children, youth and families; the publication of a number of edited
collections (e.g. Skelton and Valentine, 1998;
Holloway and Valentine, 2000) and monographs (e.g. Matthews, 1992; Ruddick, 1996;
Aitken, 2001; Katz, 2004); and the proliferation of specialized international workshops,
conferences and special sessions at geography
meetings. Perhaps the significance of this
sub-field to the broader discipline, as much
as its own ‘coming of age’, can best be seen
in how a growing number of geographers
have refracted issues such as globalization,
gentrification, migration or homelessness,
and theoretical constructs such as scale,
social reproduction or the production of
space through the lens of childhood and youth
(e.g. Ruddick, 1996, 2003; Katz, 2004). ck
Suggested reading
Holloway and Valentine (2000); McKendrick
(2000, 2004); Skelton and Valentine (1998).
Chinatown Chinese peoples living in cities
beyond China have formed compact and
comparatively exclusive settlements known
as Chinatowns, in which they have resided,
worked and traded (Benton and Gomez,
2003). Following the classic ideal-type
Chinatown
formulated
by
Lawrence
Crissman (1967) based on studies of Chinese
societies in South East Asia and North
America, scholars of the overseas Chinese
such as William Skinner and Wang Gungwu
have portrayed Chinatown as an extension of
homeland practices, where principles of
social organization based on descent, locality
and occupation that had ordered rural life in
China were transplanted to overseas urban settings. In many countries, Chinatown demography was fuelled by an initial phase – taking
place during the nineteenth and the first half
81
CHOROLOGY/CHOROGRAPHY
of the twentieth centuries – characterized by
either indentured labour systems or kinshipbased chain migration (predominantly of
men), followed by a post-Second World War
phase during which a ‘bachelor society’ was
gradually transformed by the presence of more
female migrants and family immigration (Chen,
1992; Benton and Gomez, 2003). Largely selforganizing entities, socio-political life and the
provision of cradle-to-grave services in these
transplanted communities were anchored, to
different extents in different communities, by
Chinese associations based on clan, surname,
dialect or provenance. Portrayed as an immigrant neighbourhood or an ethnic enclave,
Chinatown is identified as a reception area for
newcomers, an agglomeration of ethnic businesses (including ‘illegal’ or ‘immoral’ practices such as drug trafficking, gambling and
prostitution) serving its ‘own kind’, and the
focal point of a well-knit community in a
foreign land. The Chinatown depicted in this
vein is essentially an outpost of a foreign country, comprising a diaspora of unassimilable
foreigners.
Recent scholarship has challenged our
understanding of Chinatown in at least three
ways. First, Chinatown is not just an exported
structure, but the product of host society reception, including colonial labour policies in some
instances and racial discriminatory and discursive practices more generally. In colonial cities
of South East Asia, Chinatown as a racial categorization and spatial container to accommodate the Chinese emerged as part of colonial
urban planning, and often featured in colonial
discourses as a landscape of filth, pestilence
and moray decay (Yeoh and Kong, 1994). In
Western contexts, by placing the idea of
Chinatown at the centre of race-definition
processes, Anderson (1987, p. 581) argues that
‘Chinatown is a social construction with a cultural history and a tradition of imagery and
institutional practice that has given it a cognitive and material reality in and for the West.’
More than a place-name or a social community, Chinatown is also part of the imaginative
geographies underpinning white European
cultural hegemony (see chinatown).
Second, using Chinatown as a spatial reference for an essentialized Chinese identity or
‘chopsticks culture’ fails to recognize differences of class, sub-ethnic affiliation and cultural history among members of Chinese
communities. Social and economic mobility,
generational change and the influx of later
arrivals from different parts of mainland
China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other
82
Chinese communities have transformed closed
social structures and introduced diversity in
terms of class, occupations, educational
backgrounds, political affiliations and even
ethnic consciousness among those identified
with Chinatown (Chen, 1992; Kwong, 2001;
Christiansen, 2003).
Third, against portrayals of Chinatown as
an enclave economy that defies integration
into the mainstream, Zhou (1992) argues that
immigrant Chinese in Chinatowns in the US
context are able to draw upon social capital
and networks to surmount structural barriers
and facilitate socio-economic mobility. From
this perspective, Chinatown as an ethnic
enclave provides a mechanism for eventual
immigrant incorporation into mainstream
society.
Chinatown landscapes are also increasingly
revitalized for the purposes of heritage tourism or promoted as gentrified, conservation
settings to enhance urban aesthetics in globalizing cities. Along with other ethnic neighbourhoods ranging from Koreatown to Little
India, Chinatown as the inscription of race in
place has continued to evolve in tandem not
only with immigration dynamics but with the
politics of place.
by
Suggested reading
Anderson (1992); Yeoh and Kong (1994); Zhou
(1992).
chorology/chorography The study of the
variation in the Earth’s surface from place
to place (see also areal differentiation).
Chorology represents the oldest tradition of
Western geographical enquiry. It was first
codified by Hecataeus of Miletus in the sixth
century bce and systematized by Strabo in the
seventeen books of his Geography, probably
written between ad 18 and 24. The geographer, he wrote, is ‘the person who attempts
to describe the parts of the earth’ (in Greek,
chorographein). The two key words were
‘describe’ and ‘parts’: in effect, Strabo was
recommending what would now be called
regional geography as the core of geographical reflection. He was not interested in chorography for its own sake, but intended it to
serve a higher purpose. The production of
geographical knowledge was an indispensable
complement to political and moral philosophy, because it provided a material ground for
understanding truth, nobility and virtue. For
this reason, Strabo’s geography was fundamentally concerned with human activities. It
was also directed towards political and social
CHRONOTOPE
ends, and paid considerable attention to the
interests of the political ruler and the military
commander. Although Strabo was born in
Greece, he enjoyed the patronage of
Augustus and did most of his work in Rome,
so that his Geography can be read as an
attempt to explain the post-Republican world
(the inhabited world, or ecumene) to the citizens
of the new Roman Empire (Dueck, 2000).
Chorography was not supposed to provide a
comprehensive gazeteer or regional inventory:
it was partial and purposive, and Strabo focused
on Rome and began with europe because ‘it is
admirably adapted by nature for the development of excellence in men and governments’
(van Paassen, 1957, pp. 1–32).
Strabo’s conception of geography was challenged by Claudius Ptolemaeus (or Ptolemy)
round about ad 150. In his view, the purpose
of geography was to provide ‘a view of the
whole head’ and this meant that he separated
geography from chorography, which had the
purpose ‘of describing the parts, as if one were
to draw only an ear or an eye’. As this passage
implies, for Ptolemy, graphein did not mean
describing but drawing and, specifically, mapping. Ptolemy’s ‘geography’ was geodesy and
cartography, and he preferred to leave out
everything that had no direct connection with
that aim: ‘We shall expand our ‘‘guide’’ for so
far as this is useful for the knowledge of the
location of places and their setting upon the
map, but we shall leave out of consideration all
the many details about the peculiarities of the
peoples’ (van Paassen, 1957, p. 2).
The distance between Strabo and Ptolemy
could not be plainer, and it is indelibly present
in the modern constitution of geography too.
As late as the seventeenth century, Strabo
and Ptolemy continued to provide the main
models for European geography. The usual
distinction was between a Special Geography,
devoted to a description of particular regions,
and a General Geography, mathematically
oriented and concerned with the globe as a
whole. The premier illustration is the work
of Bernhard Varenius, who published both
studies in Special Geography and his famous
Geographia generalis, in which, for the first time,
geography sought to engage with the ideas of
Bacon, Descartes and Galileo (Bowen, 1981).
The modern case for geography as chorology
was argued most forcefully by Hartshorne
(1939), and following the subsequent debate
over exceptionalism in geography – and
despite the nuances and qualifications that
Hartshorne had registered – chorology was
often used in polemical opposition to spatial
science (cf. Sack, 1974a). But the temper of
the original version, with its acknowledgement
of the importance of power and philosophical
reflection (cf. Casey, 2001, p. 683), is a forceful reminder of the continuing need to attend
to the politics of geographical enquiry, while
Koelsch (2004) has insisted that contemporary attempts to understand the heterogeneous
geography of the world still have much to learn
from ‘the place-based, cultural–historical
model’ of Strabo.
dg
Suggested reading
Koelsch (2004).
choropleth A map that portrays a single
distribution for census tracts, counties or
similar areal units; portrays each areal unit as
homogeneous; divides the data into discrete
categories; and typically describes spatial
variation of intensity data with a darkermeans-more sequence of greytones. Readily
rendered by mapping software, choropleth
maps can present misleading patterns when
based on count data, highly heterogeneous
areal units, inappropriate class intervals or
illogical sequences of colours (Brewer and
Pickle, 2002; Monmonier, 2005). Although
most choropleth maps depict quantitative
distributions such as median income or the
percentage rate of population growth, qualitative choropleth maps are useful for showing
distributions such as dominant religion or
form of government.
mm
Suggested reading
Monmonier (1993).
chronotope Translated as ‘time–space’ from
its origins in Greek, the term is used to designate the spatio-temporal contexts and categories embedded within a text or other cultural
artefact. The term was devised by Russian
literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail
Bakhtin (1895–1975) in the 1920s, partly
influenced by the revolutionary transformation of physics by Einstein, Planck and
others, and it was subsequently imported into
literary history and cultural studies. In the
most general terms, the idea of a chronotope
acknowledges the inseparability of time and
space while deploying their unity to materialize concrete cultural formations. It is perhaps
best to think of a chronotope as a kind
of matrix that allows cultural analysts to situate a work within its historico-geographical
setting in order to facilitate its interpretation.
83
CITIZENSHIP
Bakhtin (1984, p. 246) offered the concrete
example of the French literary salon as a key
nineteenth-century chronotope, ‘where the
major spatial and temporal sequences of the
novel intersect’ in the works of Balzac and
Stendhal. Not surprisingly, the term has been
influential in theatre studies, with the stage
providing an intuitive location for the observation of chronotopes in action, and theories of
performance have developed these immanently geographical tropes still further by
insisting on the contextual boundedness of
human actions. In human geography,
Folch-Serra (1990) proposed a dialogical conception of landscape that derived directly
from Bakhtin and promised to reconstruct
the power-laden interactions ‘that alternately
‘‘anchor’’ and destabilize the ‘‘natural harmony’’ of a region’. This focus on the narration
of landscape resurfaces in interdisciplinary
studies of landscape and identity (Lehman,
1998), but the sense of diversity, dialogue and
disputation that is crucial for any Bakhtinian
approach is best exemplified by O’Reilly’s
(2007) study of the unfolding micropolitical
relations between competing voices and the
co-production of gendered time–spaces of participation in development projects in North
India. As she shows, and as the concept of a
chronotope strongly suggests, struggles over
meaning are also and reciprocally struggles
over the production of distinctive time–spaces.
us
Suggested reading
Holloway and Kneale (1999); O’Reilly (2007).
citizenship The rights and duties relating
to an individual’s membership in a political
community. In the past several centuries, the
boundary of this community has been the
nation-state and membership has implied
some degree of integration into a common
national heritage. In its early formulations,
however, citizenship was understood as a set
of rights and freedoms located primarily at
the local scale. The expansion of individual
freedoms (such as the right to work and habeas
corpus) into a national institution was one of
the key components of the growth of modern
citizenship. It reflected a shift from local, communal relations and social rights rooted in
village membership into a sense of a national
community and of individual rights guaranteed by a state. This shift in scale from the
local to the national and from communally
sanctioned rights to those protected by the
state is an absolutely fundamental aspect
84
of modern citizenship, and one that is
profoundly intertwined with the growth of
industrial capitalism, liberalism and modernity in the West (Weber, 1978 [1922];
Turner, 1993; Marston and Mitchell, 2004).
As it has developed in British and North
American societies, citizenship owes its modern legacy to a succession of legal and political
rights and responsibilities originating in
Britain mainly in the seventeenth century and
continuing through to the present. According
to T.H. Marshall, citizenship can be usefully
periodized in terms of: (a) the eighteenthcentury development of civil citizenship,
which encompasses civil and legal rights,
especially property rights; (b) the nineteenth-century expansion of political citizenship, which involves the rights to vote, to
associate and to participate in government;
and (c) the rise of twentieth-century social citizenship, which involves entitlements such as
provisions for health, housing and education
(see Mann, 1987, p. 339; Marshall and
Bottomore, 1992). Marshall envisioned a continuous positive trajectory for citizenship in
terms of the ongoing inclusiveness and expansion of universal rights, as well as the evolution
of those forms of state welfarism (social citizenship) that guaranteed all members the
chance to access those rights and participate
in the politics of the community. Although his
framework remains influential, Marshall
has been criticized for his lack of attention to
the experiences of women (Vogel, 1994;
Walby, 1994), for the linear and evolutionary
qualities of his model (Giddens, 1982),
and for his unquestioned liberal assumptions
relating to the positive integrative capacity of
citizenship itself (see liberalism).
Like many mid-twentieth-century liberals,
Marshall was a strong nationalist who conceptualized citizenship as corresponding with a
specific state territory and as fundamentally
linked with its economic development and
cultural narratives. For him and many others,
citizenship necessarily assumed both a sense of
belonging and identity rooted in a shared
national past and a commitment to the production and defence of its territorial borders.
Over the past few decades, however, these
types of assumptions have been overturned.
As a result of the powerful new forces of globalization and transnationalism, both the
national narratives of heritage and community
and the state’s discrete and autonomous jurisdiction over territory and population have
been called into question. One of the many
new kinds of tensions that have erupted in this
CITY
period involves the meaning and practices of
contemporary citizenship.
With the ever-increasing volume and speed
of the flows characteristic of globalization,
including those of trade, finance, commodities, information, ideas, culture and human
beings, the ability of state actors to control
and regulate border-crossings and their
increasingly mobile populations has greatly
diminished. At the same time, most states
have maintained various kinds of power
through new types of geopolitical alliances,
new forms of disciplining and regulation of
people across borders, and the development
of new transnational or supranational institutions and practices of rule. In all of these
assemblages of power, the meaning, status
and practice of citizenship has remained a crucial and much sought-after prize, and it has
been at the centre of multiple hegemonic
struggles worldwide over the past two decades.
The scholarship on citizenship has burgeoned over the same time period, with hundreds of titles on different forms of citizenship,
such as post-national, transnational, dual and
multicultural. Those with an empirical bent
have tracked the transformations in citizenship
law in different national sites over this period
and/or the numbers of immigrants or denizens
who have become citizens, or whose status or
benefits or rights have changed. Those leaning
towards post-structuralism have written
about the cultural qualities of contemporary
citizenship, emphasizing in particular its
multi-layered nature and/or the ways in which
belonging and identity are morphing into
something quite different from earlier nationbased understandings and assumptions. Many
have also remarked on the different scales of
citizenship, from supra-national (e.g. the EU)
to sub-national (e.g. Basque) citizenship possibilities. Soysal (1994) argues that the development of both of these forms manifests the
declining importance of national citizenship
and the rise of new forms of post-national
membership in europe.
Almost all current scholarship engages with
citizenship as a constantly evolving, non-linear
formation that is tied to the development of
modern nation-states as well as to the evolution of contemporary economic systems.
In the west, it is inevitably interrelated with
the form and logic of capitalist development.
This said, it should be noted that the ways in
which citizenship takes shape at different historical periods and in different places always
reflect the actions of those to whom its
transformation matters. State and economic
restructuring responding to civic or popular
action – whether it is of resistance or accommodation – shifts the terrain of rights, responsibilities and belonging on which citizenship
is based, leading inexorably to new formations
through time.
km
Suggested reading
Castles and Davidson (2000); Hall and Held
(1989); Turner (1986).
city The etymological roots of the term lie
in the Latin civitas; it is related to the Greek
polis, the Latin urbs, the French la cite, la ville,
the Italian la città and the German die Stadt.
Today, a more generic usage of the term refers
to an urban demographic, economic and
above all political and jurisdictional unit,
usually bigger than a town. In the USA, cities
are considered to have self-government granted by the states. In Canada, where municipal
autonomy is more restricted, cities are under
the constitutional jurisdiction of provinces. In
the UK, reference is to a large town that has
received title from the Crown.
Cities are usually trading centres and marketplaces. Their emergence is linked to the
historical separation of non-agricultural work
from the land (see urban origins). Ancient
cities in the Indus valley, in Mesopotamia,
Egypt and China were based on a hydrological
agricultural economy, and were the seats of
religious and military power, and the state.
The built environment developed around a
temple or ziggurat, and was walled for defence
and internal control of the population. In
ancient Greece and Rome, city-states
(Athens, Rome) were cores of larger empires
(Mumford, 1961; Benevolo, 1980). Medieval
cities in Europe are often seen as the Western
archetype of urban socio-spatial organization
and the core of an urban-based network of
trade systems (e.g. the German Hansa).
During that period, cities were municipal corporations of free citizens embedded in – usually feudal – larger territorial units. Cities were
seats of church power and of the emerging
bourgeoisie, as well as the tightly organized
artisan trades. Many cities became the location of the first universities.
Today’s most common image of cities
is influenced by the industrial age. The
industrial revolution led to the large-scale
demographic concentration of working-class
populations around manufacturing plants
or industrial complexes, and housed in the
typical tenement and rowhouse settlements
of the nineteenth-century city. Industrial core
85
CIVIL SOCIETY
regions such as the British Midlands or the
German Ruhr area became sites of rapid
urbanization, creating regional agglomerations of industrial cities. In the USA,
Chicago stands in as the prototypical industrial city that grew explosively around the turn
of the twentieth century.
Improved transportation allowed longer
commuter distances and suburbanization at
the beginning of the twentieth century. The
planned suburbanization and automobilization, as well as functional separation of land
uses in particular, were ultimately considered a
major contributor to the ‘fall’ of the modern
city (Jacobs, 1992 [1961]; see suburb). The
twentieth century saw metropolitanization and
the rise of the megalopolis, a supercity
stretching across several urban areas. City life
now encompasses most areas of society as
‘urbanism as a way of life’ (see urbanism)
becomes pervasive. post-industrial cities
now characterize most Western nations,
as industries first moved to suburban locations
and then to developing countries where – as in
Korea, Brazil or China – renewed waves of
urbanization and industrialization seem to
repeat the history of the industrial city in
Europe and North America.
In the global south, cities have often grown
from colonial outposts into global trading
centres (Hong Kong and Singapore). In
Africa, Asia and Latin America today, cities
grow dramatically, often largely on the basis
of large-scale squatter settlements (see squatting) and informal urbanization. Cities have
recently enjoyed renewed attention as a postWestphalian system of global governance has
restructured the role of nation-states, and
as new types of global cities and megacities
have begun to exert territorial, economic and
political power at a global scale.
The city has been the object of much
scholarly debate in geography and the social
sciences. As David Harvey (1973, p. 196) has
noted: ‘Urbanism may be regarded as a particular form or patterning of the social process.
This process unfolds in a spatially structured
environment created by man [sic]. The city
can therefore be regarded as a tangible, built
environment – an environment which is a
social product.’ Urban theory of the twentieth
century, strongly influenced by the work
of German sociologist Max Weber (1958
[1921]) and the chicago school of sociology
(Park, Burgess and McKenzie, 1925; Wirth,
1938), tended to fetishize the city spatially as
something that appeared distinct from
society. Neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian
86
critiques led to a new phase of studying the
city in the 1960s and 1970s (Castells, 1972;
Harvey, 1973; Smith, 1979b; Saunders, 1986;
Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]), pointing to the notion
that the modern city is an economic or administrative part of capitalist society and cannot
be studied in separation from it. Castells influentially defined the city as the site of collective consumption and a site for social
movement mobilization (Castells, 1972,
1983). A related strand of thought redefined
the city as a product of urban growth machines
and governing regimes interested in the
increase in property values (Logan and
Molotch, 1987). Whereas in the 1970s and
1980s ‘the city’ often became synonymous
with the site of social crisis, pathology and
delinquency, the postmodern turn in geography and urban studies reinvigorated the discussion on the city in the 1990s, as Los
Angeles was temporarily viewed as the new
‘Chicago’: a distinct and pervasive model of
urbanization in a globalized capitalist system
(Scott and Soja, 1996; Dear, 2002; see postmodernism). As China’s cities grow in size
and significance as global players, they have
become the focus of increased attention at the
beginning of the twenty-first century, while the
sprawling megacities of the global South are
considered to be on a trajectory different from
the ones in the West and in the North.
Although the death of the city had been
predicted as a consequence of the development of transportation and information technologies that allegedly make agglomeration
less necessary and less likely, the opposite has
occurred in the past decade: economic power
has been re-concentrated in cities as a new
wave of re-centralization of people and economic activities has led to a ‘fifth migration’
to urban centres (Fishman, 2005). Much of
this had to do with a distinct process of
‘metropolitanization’, a state growth strategy
that concentrates specifically on cities. As a
consequence, cities have been rediscovered
as the site of ‘creative industries’, but also
as the contested space of social struggles,
gentrification and displacement.
rk
Suggested reading
Amin and Thrift (2002); Harvey (1989c);
LeGales (2002); Parker (2004).
civil society Understood as a domain of
associations autonomous from the state, this
concept has been critical to the history of
Western political thought. Originally posited
in europe in the eighteenth century to denote
CIVILIZATION
a realm of social mutuality, the idea of civil
society increasingly came to signify aspects of
social existence that occur beyond the state. In
its different uptakes, the concept of civil society has been central to the development of
both the liberal-parliamentary tradition and
the socialist-Marxist one. Although demarcated differently by theorists of the French,
German and Scottish enlightenments, all
attempts to articulate a notion of civil society
shared the perceived tensions between the
public and the private, the social and the
individual, collective responsibility and selfinterest, and state prerogatives and individual
freedoms. But Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci offered an alternative perspective. In
his Prison Notebooks (1971 [1929–35]), he
explored aspects of the state and civil society
that liberal theory ignores – namely, the relations of power and influence between political
society (what liberal theorists call ‘state’ or
‘government’) and civil society (the ‘private
sector’ in liberal vocabulary), which mutually
reinforce each other to the advantage of certain strata and groups. Contra liberalism,
Gramsci recognized civil society as the terrain
of hegemony rather than freedom.
The contemporary revival of the idea of
civil society within academia and policy circles
is a curious event. It appears to be correlated
to the demise of the Soviet Union and
the market triumphalism that followed (see
neo-liberalism). For advocates of economic
globalization – an institutionalized project of
market deregulation – the term ‘civil society’
functions as placeholder for an array of signifiers that are used almost interchangeably:
private sphere, free market, free society, democracy, social capital and so on. In short, civil
society denotes that desirable zone of activities
and associations that is putatively free from
state intervention.
Contrast this usage with that by communitarians and left liberals, who worry about
the expansion of administrative and economic
mechanisms into virtually all spheres of life
under late capitalism. For them, the concept
of ‘civil society’ represents a fading terrain
of democracy that must be preserved and
resuscitated. Thus, civil society appears in
their writings as the sphere of social interaction
composed of ‘the intimate sphere (especially
the family), the sphere of associations (especially voluntary associations), social movements, and forms of public communication’
(Cohen and Arato, 1992, p. ix). It is differentiated from both a political society of ‘parties,
political organizations and political publics
(in particular, parliaments)’ and an economic
society ‘composed of organizations of production and distribution, usually firms, cooperatives, partnerships, and so on’ (ibid.).
vg
Suggested reading
Buttigieg (1995); Cohen and Arato (1992);
Edwards (2004); Ferguson (1995 [1767]);
Seligman (1992).
civilization (1) A complex sociocultural
formation. (2) An evolutionary process of
cultural development, most often associated
with the German sociologist Norbert Elias
(1897–1990), who traced a ‘civilizing process’
in post-medieval Europe. The two have often
been connected through the distortions of
a colonialist imaginary that treats the ‘west’
as coterminous with ‘civilization’, divides the
world into superiors and subalterns (often
described as ‘barbarians’ or ‘savages’), and
advances its own ‘civilizing mission’ to
‘enlighten’ or ‘develop’ them (cf. primitivism).
It is scarcely surprising to find that the term
‘civilization’ originated in Europe in the middle
of the eighteenth century, when europe was so
busily encountering its ‘others’ (Mazlish,
2005). In the course of the twentieth century,
anthropologists, archaeologists, ancient historians and other scholars recognized multiple
civilizations, however, and increasingly treated
civilizations as complex, adaptive systems
(Butzer, 1980). These more technical concepts
were put to work in comparative historical
geography: for example, in studies of urban
origins it is common to distinguish
the Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley
or the Mayan civilization in Meso-America.
But the older colonial distortions have also
resurfaced through polemical arguments
about a contemporary ‘clash of civilizations’.
The most detailed version of this thesis was
proposed by American political scientist
Samuel Huntington (1993, 1997; see also
Kreutzmann, 1998). Huntington argued that
questions of collective identity – ‘Who are
we?’ and ‘Who are they?’ (cf. imaginative
geography) – assumed a special force under
the pressures of globalization. He saw these
as intrinsically cultural questions, whose
answers were almost invariably provided
by religion. Far from the secular world of
modernity carrying all before it Huntington
believed that the world was witnessing a global
religious revival. For this reason he used religion to identify seven or eight major civilizations and to explain the conflicts emerging on
the ‘fault-lines’ between them. His thesis was a
87
CLASS
generalization of a polemic by British
Orientalist Bernard Lewis on ‘The roots of
Muslim rage’ and had the same destination
(see orientalism). ‘The overwhelming majority of fault-line conflicts,’ Huntington concluded, ‘have taken place along the boundary
looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims’. Huntington
attributed this to what he called, with offensive
disregard, ‘the Muslim propensity toward violent conflict’, and argued that since the Iranian
revolution that toppled the Shah in 1979, a
‘quasi-war’ had been in progress between
Islam and the West. Huntington’s ideas gained
a new lease of life following 9/11 (Salter,
2002), but they have been sharply criticized
both for their conceptual crudity – in particular, Huntington’s unsophisticated rendition of
cultural interaction and identity formation
(Said, 2000; Sen, 2006) – and for their unreflective
demonization
of
Islam,
or
Islamophobia.
dg
Suggested reading
Kreutzmann (1998); Robertson (2006).
class In The communist manifesto (2002
[1848]), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
asserted that ‘[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’.
This declaration marks the foundations of
class analysis. Although the concept of class
has since come into wide usage, it remains
contested. There is disagreement on how best
to define it, on its general role in social theory and on whether it remains relevant to the
analysis of contemporary societies. For some,
classes have become largely redundant in
today’s societies; for others, class persists as
one of the fundamental forms of social
inequality and power. Some view class as a
narrow economic phenomenon, while others
embrace a more elastic conception that spans
cultural dimensions and economic conditions.
In its most persistent popular sense, class
refers to a social division or system of rank
order, evident in the phrase ‘upper, middle
and lower classes’, that is associated with
position, privilege and hereditary advantage
(or the lack thereof). Class is also construed
as distinctive bodily practices, such as attire,
carriage, speech, diet, habitation and forms
of lifestyle consumption – all linked to underlying unequal structures of material resources.
Uses of the term ‘class’ are always
evaluative, whether positive or pejorative.
Hence, the upper classes are sometimes
the ‘aristocracy’ – endowed with a natural
88
authority and disposition to rule – or else the
‘leisured class’ – parasitic on society’s surpluses and given to ostentatious consumption.
Correspondingly, the middle classes are
sometimes the ‘enterprising’ classes, who
embody individual initiative, toil and prudence, and form the mainstay of civil society.
Alternatively, they are the bourgeoisie –
merchants, traders, entrepreneurs and professionals, committed to defending the inequalities and privileges of private property and to
organizing the exploitation of the working
classes. The lower classes are sometimes the
‘working classes’ or the ‘working poor’ – simple, hard-working and law-abiding people,
who can claim no inherited privileges – or,
alternatively, the ‘lower orders’ – uncivilized
and unruly (and in some renderings, criminal
and sexually promiscuous), who court idleness
and are a drag on economic progress.
The eventful ‘discovery’ of an underclass by
US-based conservative academics and commentators in the 1980s added a gendered
and racial twist to these negative portraits.
In this ‘culture of poverty’ discourse, which
significantly influenced the 1990s policy shift
in the US from welfare to workfare, the underclass came to signify a disaffected layer of
work-shy, feckless, criminal, undeserving and
semi-detached poor people, typically black
and from disorganized households headed by
single mothers, who had grown accustomed to
surviving on excessively generous handouts
from government-run welfare programmes.
From an academic standpoint, the analysis
of class has taken two dominant forms, sorted
by historical lineage. The first set of approaches,
deriving from Karl Marx, pivots around the
concepts of class relations and class structure
(see marxist economics). Other adjectival
uses of the term class – class location, class
conflict, class interests, class formation and
class-consciousness – obtain their meanings
from their link to class relations and class
structure. Sociologist Erik Olin Wright contends that class relations should be viewed,
sensu stricto, as a specific form of prevailing
social relations of production (Wright, 2005).
These, he says, designate the different kinds
of rights and powers of persons in society who
participate in production. When the rights and
powers of people over productive resources
are unequally distributed – when some people
in a society have greater rights and powers
with respect to certain productive resources
than do others – these relations can be
described as class relations (see capitalism).
It is important to note that the rights and
CLASS INTERVAL
powers in question do not pertain to the ownership or control of things in general, but specifically to resources or assets as they are deployed
in production. The fundamental contrast in capitalist societies, for example, is between owners
of means of production (machines, inputs,
space etc.) and owners of labour power, where
each category of owner – the capitalist and the
labourer – deploys the resource that they own
in production. That said, it is worth emphasizing that class relations as defined are elastic
enough to recognize patriarchy within
the household and beyond and racial discrimination within society (see racism) as concurrent
class processes. Meanwhile, work in radical
geography has convincingly shown that
exploitative class relations are fundamentally
spatial and that this spatial organization is critical to understanding the nature of uneven
development.
The ambiguity of class location – or location
within social relations of production – is forcefully illustrated by managers within corporations, who exhibit the rights and powers of
both capital (they can hire and fire workers,
make decisions about new technologies and
changes in the labour process, etc.) and labour
(they cannot sell a factory, they have limited
discretion in the use of surplus or profit, they
can be fired from their jobs if the owners are
unhappy, etc.). Workers as corporate shareholders (via an employee stock ownership
plan, for example) provide another vivid illustration of ambiguity, since they simultaneously
occupy two class locations. Other instances
that complicate the empirical exercise of class
location include persons who work at two jobs,
one as a worker in a firm and the other
as a self-employed tradesman; professional
women, who employ a full-time housemaid;
or historically, working-class sepoys stationed
in colonies who, by virtue of racial difference,
found themselves in positions of class superiority vis-à-vis natives (one imagines a similar
phenomenon at work in today’s imperial outposts). In short, class relations, class structure
and class location in societies are complex – as
such, we should presuppose neither unity of
purpose (class interest) nor consciousness
(class agency) within a given class category
(see Marx, 1963 [1852]).
The German sociologist Max Weber’s
analysis of class is the primary alternative to
Marxist class analysis. In Weber’s scheme,
classes are distinguished by positions of relative advantage and disadvantage in terms of
wealth and income. He writes: ‘We may speak
of a ‘‘class’’ when (1) a number of people have
in common a specific causal component of
their life chances, in so far as (2) this component is represented exclusively by economic
interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income, and (3) is represented
under the conditions of the commodity or
labor markets’ (Weber 1968 [1946], p. 181).
While there are overlaps here with Marx’s
understanding of class, there are also clear
differences. Weber, for instance, emphasizes
‘personal life experiences’ and ‘life chances’
as critical aspects of ‘class situation’, and takes
class to be ‘any group of people that is found
in the same class situation’ (ibid.). Thus,
whereas for Marx class is an objective set of
social relations, for Weber subjective elements
become key. Also in contrast to the Marxist
view of class as relational, the Weberian view
emphasizes class as market position. Classes are
hierarchical arrangements, but potentially
dynamic ones because market position may
be changed by collective strategies in the
labour market (e.g. through professional associations or trades unions). In underscoring the
‘life chances’ that accompany ‘class situation’,
Weber draws attention to individuals’ prospective ‘personal life experiences’: ‘the probabilities of social and occupational mobility; of
educational access and achievement; of illness
and mortality’ (Clarke 2005, p. 40). While
classes, in Weber’s view, derive unambiguously from economic interest, they are linked
to political organization (party) and social position (status), both of which may be shaped by
non-economic processes and may influence
‘class-consciousness’. The French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu is a prominent example of a
scholar who has creatively fused the Marxist
and Weberian perspectives of class in his
analysis of various forms of capital.
vg
Suggested reading
Bourdieu (1984); Massey (1995); Weber (1968
[1946]); Wright (2005).
class interval A key element in the design of
a quantitative map that partitions the range
of data values into discrete categories, each
assigned a unique symbol. Common on choropleth maps, class intervals are also used
for maps of linear and point phenomena
and embedded in maps on which isolines
divide the data into categories or layers.
Typically, a map key links the class intervals
to their respective symbols, which may vary
in size, greytone value or colour. Because
different class intervals can yield radically
different depictions of the same data, viewers
89
CLASSIFICATION AND REGIONALIZATION
should be wary of ill-informed, careless or
biased map authors (Evans, 1977; Monmonier,
2005).
mm
Suggested reading
Monmonier (1993).
classification and regionalization Procedures
– most of them quantitative – for grouping individuals into categories. Classification involves
splitting a population into mutually exclusive
categories on pre-determined criteria, either
deductively (using a previously determined
set of classes, such as town size-groups) or
inductively (finding the best set of classes, on
predetermined criteria, for the data set being
analysed: cf. deduction; induction). Some
procedures start with the entire population and
divide it; others start with individuals and group
them into classes. Most proceed hierarchically,
generating classes that nest within each other at
various scales. The goal is to produce classes
whose members are more like other members
of their class than they are members of other
classes: classes are internally homogeneous and
externally heterogeneous. A range of classification algorithms is available in standard statistical packages.
Regionalization (cf. region; regional geography) is a special case of classification in
which the individuals classified are spatially
defined units (usually areas) and the resulting
classes (regions) must form contiguous spatial
units. Because of this constraint, regions may
not be as internally homogeneous as would be
classes generated for the same set of areas but
without the insistence on contiguity. These
latter form regional types, areal units grouped
without a contiguity constraint, so that similar
areas may be spatially discontinuous (e.g.
areas with Mediterranean climates).
Recent work has argued that classifications
should not impose firm boundaries, and suggested instead the use of fuzzy sets to indicate
the probability that an individual belongs to
any particular class. (See also districting
algorithm; geodemographics; modifiable
areal unit problem; redistricting.)
rj
Suggested reading
Johnston (2005c); Heckman, King and Tracy
(2005); Openshaw and Openshaw (1997).
climate Conventionally understood to comprise the meteorological elements – rainfall,
wind, temperature, insolation, humidity and
so on – which characterize the general atmosphere over a zone of the Earth’s surface for
90
a period of time. The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2003) thus
identifies climate, in its Glossary of terms, as
‘average weather’ or ‘more rigorously as the
statistical description of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time
ranging from months to thousands or millions
of years’. To this, the IPCC glossary adds that
the World Meteorological Organization specifies 30 years as the ‘classical’ temporal period
for determining average conditions. The crisp
clarity of this definition, however, masks the
concept’s contested historical lineage. During
the period of the European enlightenment,
for example, Diderot and d’Alembert’s celebrated Encyclopédie identified as one of its definitions of climate a region with characteristic
seasons, soils and cultural mores (Feldman,
1990). The Victorian geologist Samuel
Haughton (1880, p. 74) similarly typified climate as the ‘complex effect of external relations
of heat and moisture upon the life of plants and
animals’, including the human species. Given
these associations, it is not surprising that
the study of climate has routinely embraced
matters of social, moral and political concern.
human geography’s engagements with climate have thus been manifold. Among the
most conspicuous have been a noticeable
inclination amongst its advocates to reduce
environmental determinism to climatic
determinism; the incorporation of climatic
conditions into studies of the perception of
environmental hazard and risk; discussion
about the role of human agents in inducing
climate change and global warming; medical
geography’s earlier interest in the role of
climate-correlated pathologies; and imperial
debates about human capacities to adapt to
different climatic regimes. Each of these
domains has witnessed controversy. Amongst
early-twentieth-century environmental determinists, for example, climate was often called
upon to justify various racial ideologies that
attributed excellence to the temperate zones
and explained the historical trajectory of civilization in the vocabulary of climatic circumstance (Livingstone, 1994: see also race).
Controversy has also attended proposals over
the steps that need to be taken to curb the
influence that human society has had in
climate change and over the degree to which
the Earth’s planetary atmosphere can be
understood as a self-regulating system: this
has immediate political implications, since
individual states have been reluctant to bear
the political consequences of prioritizing
environmental restraint over economic growth
CLUSTERS
(Fleming, 1998). Amongst early medical
geographers, debates about climate revolved
around whether disease should be understood
in miasmic–ecological terms or in the language
of the new germ theory (Rupke, 2000: see
also medical geography). Debate raged too
amongst colonists over whether human acclimatization was possible and, if so, under what
conditions it could be effected.
Other human dimensions of climatic discourse and practice have also recently been
the subject of geographical investigation. The
realization that climate has often been conceived of in moral categories has established
it as a significant component in a range of
moral geographies. Thus historians of science, for example, have demonstrated how
the study of meteorological conditions was
rooted in a suite of discourses about the prediction of ominous social and political happenings (Jankovic, 2000). The ways in which
climate was used to pathologize whole zones of
the globe by resorting to it as the explanation
for debility as well as parasitic fecundity have
also been exposed (Naraindas, 1996). At the
same time, enquiries within historical geography have revealed how climate was culturally constructed to serve various, often racial,
interests among philosophers, geographers,
medical practitioners, travel writers and artists
(Livingstone, 2002a). These pronouncements
contributed directly to the production of the
idea of tropicality by castigating the tropical
world as medically and morally degraded, and
by providing a naturalistic justification for
various labour practices in the colonial world
and immigration policies in the West. Read in
this register, climate has persistently surfaced
as a cultural category that has been deployed
as a hermeneutic resource to advance moral,
political and social interests.
The practices of meteorological instrumentation have also raised significant geographical
questions. Weather conditions are derived
from a variety of instrumental devices, such
as anemometers, hygroscopes, thermoscopes,
barometers and pluviometers (see scientific
instrumentation). At centres of calculation,
such as the Meteorological Office, the aggregate mensural yield of widespread meteorological networks is assembled as affiliated
observation stations return standardized records
to weather information centres. As Anderson
(2005a, p. 290) puts it: ‘Philosophically, the
science of meteorology was global; in practice,
global science developed in distinctively different political and geographical landscapes, and
contemporaries insisted on the importance of
the differences.’ The inherently geographical
nature of this process of knowledge production as information moves from specific sites
into general circulation has been the subject of
interrogation by both historians and geographers, who have examined this scientific impulse
to escape the bounds of the local (Jankovic,
2000; Naylor, 2006). The significance of missionaries in the gathering of climatological
data has also attracted scrutiny, as their
records provide information on the weather
history of locations in which they worked
(Endfield and Nash, 2002). Such work has
drawn attention to issues congregating around
the standardization of measurement practices,
the social geography of who can be trusted to
deliver reliable climatic information, the regulation and management of distant observers,
and the cultural politics of shifting boundary
lines between amateur and professional.
Matters of climate are thus profoundly
implicated in a range of discourses. The racial
politics of climatic determinists, the apocalyptic tincture of certain strands of climatic prophecy, the economic geography of weatherrelated insurance, and the social constitution
of climatological knowledge are just a few of the
ways in which climate is clearly disclosed as a
cultural construct.
dnl
Suggested reading
Jankovic (2000); Livingstone (2002a).
clusters A concept usually associated with
the work of Michael Porter, from Harvard
Business School’s Institute for Strategy and
Competitiveness. Porter defines clusters as
‘ . . . geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized suppliers, firms
in related industries, and associated institutions (for example universities, standards
agencies, and trade associations) in particular
fields that compete but also cooperate’
(Porter, 1998c, pp. 197–8). According to
Porter’s work, within a cluster: (1) information flows increase between related and supporting industries; (2) market awareness of
firms improves thanks to the concentration in
the cluster of demanding clients; (3) peer pressure/competition drives innovation as rivals
seek to out-compete one another; and (4) local
‘factor conditions’, such as the availability
of skilled labour in a particular area, are
exploited to make firms globally competitive.
These four forces form part of Porter’s
‘diamond model’ for successful clusters. In
addition, as Porter also points out, the social
foundations of a cluster are vital because
91
CO-EVOLUTION
success is reliant on ‘ . . . social glue that binds
clusters together, contributing to the value
creation process. Many of the competitive
advantages of clusters depend on the free flow
of information, the discovery of value-adding
exchanges or transactions, the willingness to
align agendas and to work across organizations, the strong motivation for improvement.
Relationships, networks, and a sense of common interest undergird these circumstances’
(Porter, 1998c, p. 225).
The concept of the cluster mirrors in many
ways ideas contained in a wider set of literatures.
Dating back to Marshall’s (1890) work on
industrial districts and, more recently,
through studies of what have been called learning regions and innovative milieux (Asheim,
1996; Malmberg and Maskell, 2002), emphasis
has been placed on the importance of geographically distinctive arrangements of firms in one
industry for knowledge production and circulation. This has become especially important in
light of recent debates about the knowledge
economy and the need for cities and regions to
be globally competitive centres of innovation. It
is Porter’s cluster concept that has gained most
traction in policy circles, with regional authorities throughout the world employing Porter and
his followers to develop a cluster strategy for
their local industries. Many are, however, critical
of this approach. For geographers, the main
concern with the cluster concept has been its
apparent geographical fuzziness and the way in
which the boundaries of a cluster are never defined in existing work. In addition, the way in
which iconic spaces such as Silicon Valley are
used to produce ‘elastic’ theoretical models that
can be turned into fashionable development
concepts has also caused concern, particularly
because of the questionable levels of success of
such models (see Martin and Sunley, 2003). jrf
has been used loosely to understand the complex relationships between, for example, technology and place (Graham, 1998), economy
and environment (Costanza, 2003) and
humans and companion species (Haraway,
2003). The shared aim is to avoid reductionism and determinism, and point to the relational character of change.
sjh
co-fabrication
An orientation towards
research and intervention emphasizing the
ontological and political requirement of ‘working together’ (Whatmore, 2003). Derived
from the work of the philosopher Isabelle
Stengers (1997), the implications and practices involved in co-fabrication have best
been exemplified in science and technology
studies and actor-network theory, where
the production of reality is demonstrated to
be something other than a zero-sum game.
Rejecting discourses of either pure human
invention or discovery of already existing reality, co-fabrication enacts a relational understanding of ontology, suggesting that the
more activity there is from a researcher, the
more – if they are to be successful – activity
there is from the researched (Latour, 1999c).
This maxim applies as much to human–
microbe assemblages in the laboratory as it
does to studies of, or with, social groups.
In terms of the latter, co-fabrication leads to
something akin to action research, though
with the added implication that all participants
in the research process are treated less as
informants and more as colleagues (Stengers,
1997). For social science, this requires a
change of stance, away from distanced,
expert critique and towards the crafting of
co-operative ventures.
sjh
Suggested reading
Whatmore (2003).
Suggested reading
Martin and Sunley (2003); Porter (1998b).
co-evolution In biology and ecology, coevolution refers to the reciprocal changes that
occur between populations of species as they
interact. In one sense all evolution is coevolution, as all species are considered to
affect and be affected by changes to other
species and their environments. In more specific terms, co-evolution is understood to
apply to those interactions where there has
been mutual, symbiotic or parasitic changes
that have affected both parties that are temporally and spatially proximate. In human
geography and the social sciences, the term
92
cohort A group of people with a common
demographic vintage. Cohorts are most often
defined on the basis of being born in the same
year or years (i.e. birth cohorts, such as the US
‘baby boom’ born in the US between 1946
and 1964), although marriage, divorce, migration and graduation events also define groups
whose life experiences and biographies can be
analysed over time. Adopting a cohort approach
has deepened understanding of very low levels
of fertilty (Lestheage and Willems, 1999)
and spatial variations in migration (Plane,
1992), and supplements period approaches that
analyse changes occurring between two points
in time.
ajb
COLLECTIVE CONSUMPTION
Suggested reading
Weeks (1999, Chs 5 and 8).
Cold War The period of international diplomatic, political and military rivalry between
the United States of America (USA) and the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR),
conventionally understood as lasting from the
end of the Second World War in 1945 to the
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As with other
periods of international transformation, the
Cold War is subject to a variety of different interpretations, each highlighting different causes.
The conventional historiography of the
Cold War understands the period as one of
realist geopolitics, in which the balance of
power and spheres of influence were historical
necessities (Halle, 1991). Although allies during the defeat of Nazi Germany, the USA
and the USSR approached the postwar order
with different visions, the USA backing a
market-oriented liberal order (see capitalism;
democracy), while the USSR sought friendly
regimes on its borders and the spread of
communism internationally. At the 1945
Yalta summit, President Roosevelt, General
Secretary Stalin and Prime Minister
Churchill outlined plans for zones of military
occupation in defeated Germany, with the
liberated territories to be democratic. But with
Soviet forces occupying the east and the allies
dominant in the west, europe was divided by
what Churchill called an ‘Iron Curtain’. This
produced two competing military alliances –
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO, est. 1949) organized by the USA in
the west, and the Warsaw Pact (est. 1955),
dominated by the Soviets in the east, with
the former seeking to contain or roll back
the latter.
These ‘ideological blocs’ (see ideology)
became the basis for the organization of international politics for more than 40 years, with
their enmity symbolized by the nuclear arms
race and materialized in a number of global
events, including the building of the Berlin
Wall in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of
1962, amongst many others. Although many
flashpoints were in Europe, the Cold War was
a global geopolitical formation that produced
the ‘third world’ as a non-aligned group of
states that declined to side with either the
‘First World’ (the USA and its allies) or the
‘Second World’ (the USSR and its allies).
Although the Cold War did not erupt into
direct ‘hot’ war between the two superpowers,
there were numerous proxy conflicts between
their allies, largely in africa and asia, often
piggybacking on indigenous struggles, in
which millions perished. The enmity between
the blocs was eased by diplomacy, especially
the period of ‘détente’ in the 1970s, and ended
by the early 1990s when a variety of forces
intersected to remove the Soviet hold over
eastern Europe and the eventual demise of
the USSR as a superpower.
Revisionist accounts of the Cold War have
detailed the economic forces driving American
expansionism, with the conflictual imaginative geographies of capitalism and communism having existed prior to the geopolitics of
the post-Second World War era. Perspectives
from critical geopolitics (e.g. Campbell,
1998; Glassman, 2005) argue that the Cold
War was a discursive formation as much as a
geopolitical condition. This ‘architecture of
enmity’ (Shapiro, 1997) materialized political
identities that have survived the demise of the
Soviet Union and helped constitute new
enemies.
dca
Suggested reading
Gaddis (2006); Gregory (2004b).
collective consumption Basic public services such as schools, health services and utilities, usually provided by the state, which
facilitate or enable the reproduction of labour
power (Castells, 1977) (see social reproduction). The notion of collective consumption
developed within Marxist urban theory, with
the spheres of production (of goods and services) and labour reproduction as defining
elements (Pinch, 1989). It is an effort, therefore, to theorize social relations in capitalist
space; specifically, the means by which labour
is reproduced ‘on a daily and intergenerational
basis’ (Pinch, 1989, p. 47). Castells (1977)
identified collective consumption as the basis
for a framework for the analysis of labour
reproduction in a specific sphere of social
and spatial life, that of the urban (Saunders,
1986, p. 172). According to Castells’ (1977)
framework, since housing, recreational and
health facilities, for example, are provided to
people in specific locations on the basis of
their collective use, investigation of collective
consumption constitutes a fixed territorial setting for empirical analysis (Saunders, 1986).
Thus, Castells (1977) argued that he had
identified a specifically urban space with the
specification of the labour reproductive and
collective consumption processes. However,
these processes do not occur exclusively in
urban places, and the challenges of reproduction and collective consumption are also evident
93
COLLINEARITY
in rural areas or small towns (Saunders,
1986).
Castells refined his approach to collective
consumption in his influential The city and
the grassroots (1983). In it, he argued that the
increasing role of the state in collective consumption, as part of efforts to resolve the contradictions of capitalism, did not solve those
contradictions but, instead, led to an increasingly contentious and political consumptive
sphere (Castells, 1983; Saunders, 1986). The
result is collective activism: urban social
movements organized against or as a challenge to the state over its management of and
provisions for collective consumption.
Pinch (1989) argued that, with the state
posited as the provider of goods and services
for collective consumption, the concept is too
narrow, since many collective goods can be
privately provided. Indeed, with increasingly
neo-liberal states, collective consumption
seems an outdated concept. The problem and
question of the reproduction of labour – such
as how to provide for childcare or health services – however, remains salient (Pinch, 1989).
Contemporary scholars concerned with these
issues focus less on the state and more on its
role as one element in public__private partnerships, and the responses in and effects on various communities (see community).
dgm
Suggested reading
Castells (1983); Herbert (2005).
collinearity A statistical problem associated
with the general linear model, especially
multiple regression analysis. If two or more
of the independent variables are substantially
correlated, the resulting regression coefficients
will provide unreliable statements of the true
relationships and be difficult to interpret.
Statistical tests can identify the extent and
impact of collinearity in an analysis.
rj
colonialism An enduring relationship of
domination and mode of dispossession, usually (or at least initially) between an indigenous (or enslaved) majority and a minority of
interlopers (colonizers), who are convinced of
their own superiority, pursue their own interests, and exercise power through a mixture of
coercion, persuasion, conflict and collaboration (cf. Osterhammel, 1997, pp. 14–20).
The term both denotes this relationship and
serves as an interpretation of it – customarily
one in which the experiences of colonizers
and the colonized are at odds. Derived from
the Latin word ‘colonia’ (estate, distant
94
settlement), and typically promulgated within
the framework of an empire, ‘colonialism’ was
first used as a term of disapprobation in
eighteenth-century debates about the morality
of slavery, and has since been conceptualized
as a distinctly Western modality of power that
has been closely connected to the evolution of
capitalism, modernity and eurocentrism.
(1) Concept and imagery. Colonialism is commonly viewed as the chief variant and consequence of imperialism: the tangible means by
which disparate parts of the world became
subordinated to the drives and dictates of
a separate and distant imperial centre (metropole or mother country), and struggles over
territory, resources, markets and national
prestige
became
displaced
overseas
(cf. world-systems theory). The term ‘colonization’ denotes the array of expansionist projects – exploration, war, geopolitical rivalry,
military conquest and occupation, commerce, migration, settlement, state formation
and cultural representation – from which particular colonialisms arise.
A common – and not inaccurate – image of
colonialism is of a state-centred system of
power characterized by brute exploitation, astonishing cultural arrogance and racism,
which reached its heyday in the early twentieth
century, when European colonial empires
spanned the globe (the British Empire covering 20 per cent of the world’s land surface),
and colonial rule (then justified as a ‘civilizing
mission’) seemed secure to its protagonists, in
spite of widespread anti-colonial resistance.
Colonialism has also been viewed as symptomatic of an epistemological malaise at the
heart of Western modernity – a propensity to
monopolize and dictate understanding of what
counts as right, normal and true, and denigrate and quash other ways of knowing and
living. Yet it is more than just a will to exercise
dominant control, or a proprietary project that
constructs the world as the west’s bequest –
although it is surely both of these things. Nor
has it simply been a hierarchical and diffusionist process, solidified in a core–periphery
relationship, which spawned what Frantz
Fanon (1963 [1961], pp. 37–8) described as
‘a world cut in two’ and a colonial world ‘divided into compartments’ – with the colonized
enjoined to emulate the West. Colonialism has
also been characterized by subversion and,
some argue, by inherent flux and contradiction, ambivalence and hybridity. Not feeling
at home in empire was a visceral experience
for the colonizer the world over.
COLONIALISM
It has become commonplace to observe that
colonialism involves a mutual interdependence
of forms, at root because colonial identities are
constructed in relation to both a metropolitan
core and indigenous/colonized lands and
peoples. Identities are formed and stretched
across both metropolitan/colonial and colonizer/colonized divides, creating what Edward
Said (1993, pp. 3–61) – a key thinker and
influence on geographers – dubs ‘overlapping
territories’ and ‘intertwined histories’. The
interdisciplinary critical project of postcolonialism, which is inspired, in part, by a
‘desire to speak to the Western paradigm of
knowledge in the voice of otherness’, has sought
to show that Western/metropolitan subjectivity
has not been constituted in a self-contained
box, but through this long, stretched and often
violent process of colonial exchange, and tries
to expose and destabilize the way in which
Western and non-Western, and colonial and
post-colonial, identities have been shaped by
potent binaries – of ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’, ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ and so on
(Goldberg and Quayson, 2002, p. xiii).
This critical reconfiguration of Western history and culture is intrinsically linked to what
many see as the cornerstone of colonialism’s
spatiality: the importance of displacement
for both colonizer and colonized (and for both
their knowledge systems and ways of life),
and the subsequent difficulty of ever going
back to some pristine or authentic connection
between place and identity that is uncontaminated by the experience of colonization.
‘Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography,’ Said (1993, p. 7) writes in an influential passage, ‘none of is completely free from
the struggle over geography. That struggle
is complex and interesting because it is not
only about soldiers and cannons but also
about forms, about images and imaginings’.
Colonialism can be distinguished from
imperialism in terms of the local intensity
and materiality of this geographical struggle,
centrally over home and territory. Said
spurred interest in how colonialism works as
a cultural discourse of domination animated by
images, narratives and representations – and
mediated by class, race, gender, sexuality,
nation and religion – as well as a material
project and feat of power. Over the past twenty
years, colonialism has been studied as a ‘cultural technology of rule’ imperilled by various
‘investigative modalities’ (Cohn, 1996).
Said (1978, pp. 49–73, 327) deploys the
term imaginative geography to capture the
connective imperative between geography and
discourse within the unequal framework
of empire: the ‘dramatisation’ of difference
between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and ‘here’ and
‘there’, with texts ‘creat[ing] not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to
describe’. In famously showing how the Orient
was produced, its meaning regulated and
Western dominance over it shaped, by
Western knowledge, institutions and scholarship (by a discourse of Orientalism), Said does
not collapse the distinction between representation and reality. Rather, he underscores how
orientalism and other colonial discourses
exert authority by creating asymmetrical relationships between Western and ‘other’ knowledge systems. It is through this process of
‘knowledgeable manipulation’ that distorted
images and stereotypes of foreign lands and
peoples become taken-for-granted, traits of
difference become ascribed to particular
spaces, places, environments and natures,
and ‘other’ peoples are deemed unable to represent or govern themselves. This is what Said
(1978, p. 63) means when he describes ‘the
Orient’ as ‘an enclosed space’ and ‘a stage
affixed to Europe’, and David Arnold (2005,
p. 225) when he describes how British observers ‘affixed’ India to alien European ideas
of landscape and nature – as part of the
Tropics (see tropicality). While Said has
been criticized for obscuring how nonWestern peoples responded to this epistemological onslaught, he revealed how colonialism
revolves around grammars of difference,
othering and exclusion that are acutely spatial
– that function as ‘trait geographies’ (Gregory,
2001b).
(2) History and interpretation. As much of the
above implies, there is more than one model
of colonialism. Indeed, it is important to recognize how different meanings and models
of colonialism have evolved and operate a
posteriori. Important distinctions have been
drawn between different types of colonies: exploitation colonies (e.g. British India, French
Indochina; slave colonies, ‘protectorates’ and
‘dependencies’), which were established primarily for the purpose of capitalist economic
extraction, where tiny expatriate colonial elites
often governed large subject populations, and
ideologies of race and paternalism played
a pivotal role in colonial rule; settler colonies
(e.g. North America and australasia), whose
political economies were premised on the
availability of extensive tracts of cultivable
and resource-rich land, and where indigenous
peoples were systematically displaced by
95
COLONIALISM
colonists and native populations plummeted
due to disease; and maritime enclaves (e.g.
Aden, Hong Kong, Jakarta and Malacca),
which served as commercial and military
nodes in encompassing imperial networks.
While these are ideal types – for instance,
French Algeria and Spanish Peru were both
extraction and settler colonies – a large literature identifies the distinct power relations pertaining to these different colonial formations.
The close association of colonialism with
European/white minority rule has meant that
the term has been deemed inapplicable to
some situations – until recently, the colonial
period of US history, where colonists along the
Atlantic seaboard soon outnumbered native
people. And the ‘salt water’ association
between colonialism and distant overseas possession explains why expressions such as ‘internal colonialism’ have been used to describe
situations in which colonialist relationships
exist within the borders of, or contiguous to,
an imperial state or kingdom (e.g. between
England and its ‘Celtic fringe’, especially
Ireland).
The history of colonialism has also been
divided into distinct periods: Spain and Portugal’s initial sixteenth-century conquest of
the New World; the seventeenth-century creation of an ‘Atlantic world’ revolving around
the circulation of people and commodities,
and centred on slavery and the racialized
plantation economies of the Caribbean; the
eighteenth-century extension of European (especially British and Dutch) trade and dominion in Asia; the nineteenth-century building of
European land empires in Africa and Asia and
the emergence of the USA as a significant
empire-builder; the maturation of colonial export economies between 1900 and 1945; and a
postwar welfare-minded colonialism that became entangled with independence struggles
and decolonization.
Since the 1980s work on colonialism –
much of which is either aligned with, or sees
itself as a response to, post-colonialism –
stems from the recognition that the postwar
break-up of Europe’s colonial empires did not
quickly or necessarily put once colonized
regions on a par with the West – at any level.
In 1965, Kwame Nkrumah coined the term
neo-colonialism to describe how the West
(and especially the USA) was perpetuating
colonialism while upholding ideals of independence and liberty, the contradiction being
as apparent in development models, which
were the vehicles of a new cultural imperialism,
as it was blatant in new international
96
investment and trade relations (Young, 2001,
pp. 44–56; cf. development geography;
third world; transnational corporation).
Some remarkable theoretical treatments of
colonialism from this era – for example, the
work of Fanon and Aimé Césaire – alight on
the enduring and nefarious psychological
influence of colonial categories of thought
and social pathologies on post-independence
politics and nationalism. And if, as this suggests, the colonial past was not over, then
Derek Gregory (2004b, pp. 6, 117), adds what
now seems an obvious rider: that the colonial
past ‘is not even past’. empire is being revived
through the creation of new ‘colonizing geographies’ of division, partition and enmity (the
war-torn middle east currently bearing
the brunt of them) that displays many affinities
with past colonial ideas and practices. The
United Nations has declared the period
2001–10 the ‘Second International Decade
for the Eradication of Colonialism’.
Indeed, there is now arguably a greater range
of opinion about colonialism than there has
been for 50 years, including burly affirmations
of its supposed benefits that feed on imperial
nostalgia. On the other hand, there has been a
radical re-reading of the West’s conception of
its cultural evolution, and much academic soul
searching, not least within European and
North American geography, which has strong
ties with empire, blasting apart disciplinary
allegories of objectivity, progress and selfcontained development (cf. geography, history of). Many discourses and practices that
have been deemed central to geography’s
make-up and heritage – exploration, mapping, surveying, environmental determinism, geopolitical model-building and latterly
GIS – have been pressed into (and are still
designed for) imperial service.
cartography has been a colonizing tool par
excellence. Maps brought ‘undiscovered’ lands
into spatial existence, emptying them of prior
(indigenous) meanings and refilling them with
Western place-names and borders, priming
‘virgin’ (putatively empty land, ‘wilderness’)
for colonization (thus sexualizing colonial
landscapes as domains of male penetration),
reconfiguring alien space as absolute, quantifiable and separable (as property), drawing
mapped space into the unifying framework of
Western knowledge and reason, and, along
with the clock and calendar, effecting a fundamental reorganization (standardization) of the
relations between time and space (Edney,
1997; cf. time__space distanciation). Little
wonder, then, that concepts and metaphors
COLONIALISM
of mapping and location have a seminal place
in post-colonial theory.
(3) Critical problematics. While recent work on
colonialism eludes simple characterization, it
can usefully be located within a series of interrelated spatial poles of interpretation, which
grapple with whether colonialism, in extremis,
can and should be treated as uniform or
diverse, coherent or fragmentary, centred
or decentred, and whether it put in train a
cultural history of affinity or difference, connection or separation, inclusion or exclusion.
These analytics can be traced through two pairs
of watchwords that infuse work in the field of
colonial studies and the wider project of postcolonialism.
With regard to diversity and specificity,
recognition of the historical–geographical diversity of colonialism is often registered as a
warning about the perils of generalizing about
‘it’ from particular locations (Algeria, India
and the Caribbean being the crucibles of
much theorizing). Colonialism is conceived as
less amenable to abstraction than imperialism, as more localized and differentiated than
models suggest, and in need of more comparative research. This critical impulse to extend
what Fanon (1963 [1961], p. 239) called ‘the
will to particularity’ – to expose the duplicity of
Western universals and absolutes – has
been manifested in calls to bring metropole
and colony into ‘a unitary analytical field’
(Cooper and Stoler, 1997a, p. 1), to conceptualize colonialism as a ‘forged concept’ involving
both similitude and difference (Lloyd, 1999,
p. 7), and to re-examine those processes (both
violent and intimate) that colonizers and the
colonized shared, as well as those that set
them apart.
A range of recent scholarship on struggles
over ‘who was inside and who was outside the
nation or colony, who were subjects and who
were citizens’, demonstrates the importance of
escaping older scholarly containers and ‘mapping . . . difference across nation and empire’
(Hall, 2002a, p. 20; Lambert and Lester,
2006). Starting from an analytical standpoint
of liminality (how colonialism operates in
terms of what it excludes and places outside
its domain of comprehension and action), and
from the premise that significant gaps existed
between metropolitan/imperial prescriptions
of power and the daily realities and pressures
of colonial rule, a feminist-inspired literature
examines how colonialism involves incessant
struggles over the making and protection of
cultural boundaries and frontiers – struggles
that are gendered, sexualized and racialized,
and that work to demarcate the foreign from
the domestic, the civilized from the wild or
savage and home from away (Stoler, 2002;
Blunt, 2005).
Emphasis is now routinely placed on the
spatiality of such struggles and dynamics,
and geographers have been particularly concerned with how colonialism operates through:
(i) particular sites and contact zones, such as
ships, forts, plantations, trade posts, ports and
cities, native reserves, mission stations,
museums and exhibitions; (ii) the networks
and institutions – such as the London-based
Royal Geographical Society and Seville-based
Council of the Indies – that coordinated the
flows of people, goods, orders and information
connecting this array of places and spaces; and
(iii) the inscription devices and systems of
representation – forms of recording, writing,
and calculating distance and measuring difference, such as maps, journals, ledgers, paintings
and despatches; practices of exploration,
observation, fieldwork, classification and
synthesis; and discourses justifying colonialism
– that both shaped and were shaped by such
sites, domains and networks (Driver, 2001a; cf.
centre of calculation; climate; tropicality). This body of work emphasizes that
Europeans’ ability to know, physically reach
and govern distant and far-flung lands was
something made, practiced and performed
(and thus amenable to criticism and re-invention) rather than given (and was not some
innate and distinguishing European quality
and mark of its superiority).
However, such site-specific and de-centred
readings can arguably lose sight of colonialism’s trans-historical traits and general effects
– such as (for some) its propensity to racialize
difference the world over, and (for others) the
way in which the state is deemed to be
the bearer of the most rational and civilized
practices of rule – and thus undermine an
anti-colonial politics that is responsive to the
commonalities of experience among the colonized. Anti-essentialist and non-teleological
approaches to colonial history that refuse to
generalize and conceptualize colonialism
in extremis, or as a totality, can trivialize its
impact, and can serve divisive ethnic and
nationalist agendas in the post-colonial world
that ‘repeat . . . colonialism’s own strategy . . .
to regionalize, split up, divide and rule’
(Young, 2001, p. 18). Conceptual and ethical
tensions also arise when critical affiliation with
the colonized (and other so-called ‘injured
identities’) is derived from a critical stance that
97
COMMAND ECONOMY
underscores colonialism’s inherently fragmentary character, and sees both colonialism’s
civilizing mission and ‘third world’ nationalisms and revolutionary movements as
doomed to failure and self-interest. One the
other hand, geographers operating at the former margins of empire complain about the
metro-centric focus of both older imperial histories, and newer critical accounts of the colonizing impact that metropolitan-based
initiatives (such as cartography and travel)
had on outlying regions. Viewing the colonized world from the (former) imperial centre –
which is where a good deal of critical work on
geography and empire emanates from – can
blunt understanding of the specific and changing composition of colonial power in particular localities (Harris, 2004).
With regard to discursivity and dislocation,
geographers have considered how a wide range
of spatial practices and representations of
space work as colonizing discourses – as textual and visual ‘scriptings’ and ‘spaces of constructed visibility’ that have shaped what
Europeans understood to be ‘out there’ and
framed how interaction was to proceed and be
recorded (Duncan and Gregory, 1999). In
prosecuting such ideas – travel writing being
a prime focus – geographers have been critical
of the reduction of colonialism to issues of
discourse and representation, and a concomitant erasure of historical–geographical specificity, which has characterized much (especially
literary) work in this area, and have coined
expressions such as ‘spaces of knowledge’
and ‘geographies of truth and trust’ to underscore the materiality of discourse and the situated and embodied nature of colonial knowledge
and power (Gregory, 2001b). Nevertheless,
much of this literature has been preoccupied
with the agency and texts of European/
Western/colonizing projects and actors, and
either overlooks native agency or subordinates
indigenous knowledge to the gaze of the
Western/metropolitan/post-colonial critic by
representing it as the background noise against
which the colonizing West stakes its claims to
truth and power. While the difficulties involved
in bringing native agendas and ‘other’ voices
back into the colonial spotlight should not be
underestimated, work that aims – laudably –
to expose and question previously undisclosed
connections between discourse and domination runs the risk of reinforcing the ideas,
images and categories (of, for example, exoticism, primitivism and race) that it sets out
to challenge. It does so, in part, Nicholas
Thomas (1993) has pointed out, by
98
obfuscating how colonial encounters operate
as two-way and intersubjective (albeit still
unequal) processes rather than as a oneway projection of desire and fear, or as a
unitary imposition of power (see also
transculturation).
All of this helps to dispel the illusion of a
seamless or ineluctable process of Western
expansion, and makes the current promulgation of a ‘post-colonial geography’ that seeks
to assess what about geography (as a discipline, discourse and practice of power) might
need decolonizing more than a belated or
ironic gesture, as some have suggested.
dcl
Suggested reading
Blunt and McEwan (2002); Cooper (2005);
Gregory (2004); Said (1993, 2003 [1978]).
command economy An economy in which
the means of production are owned and controlled by the state and in which central planning prevails. The term is used to distinguish
economies, such as those in Eastern Europe
until the early 1990s, from either capitalism
or a mixed economy. The dismantling of command economies in Eastern Europe reflected
an inability to produce goods in the quantities
that people had come to expect, as a result of
difficulties of coordination and the lack of efficiency incentives. However, the economies
that replaced them have their own imperfections, including large-scale criminalization,
reflecting the difficulty of creating marketregulated economies in former socialist states
(cf. socialism).
dms
commercial geography A forerunner of
economic geography concerned with
describing, tabulating and cartographically
representing the geographical facts of commerce for practical, business ends. Coined by
the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
in the late eighteenth century as one of his six
divisions of geography, commercial geography was systematically taken up by German
geographers from the middle of the nineteenth
century. In Britain, the Scottish geographer
George Chisholm (1850–1930) provided the
first English-language version of the project
in his 1889 tome, A handbook of commercial
geography, and identified three sections: how
commodities are produced, what commodities
are produced and where commodities are
produced. Chisholm provided no indication
of the complexity of the concept of commodity, however, and seven years before his book
was published the German geographer Götz
COMMODITY
had already recognised a new sub-discipline,
economic geography, that was to be a science
rather than an encyclopaedia of facts for
improving the bottom line (Sapper, 1931,
p. 627).
tjb
commodity With its price tag, said the great
German critic Walter Benjamin, the commodity enters the market. The Oxford English
Dictionary defines a commodity as something
useful that can be turned to commercial advantage (significantly, its Middle English origins
invoke profit, property and income); it is an
article of trade or commerce, a thing that is
expedient or convenient. A commodity, in
other words, is self-evident, ubiquitous and
everyday; it is something that we take for
granted. Marx (1967 [1867]) said that commodities were trivial things but also bewildering, ‘full of metaphysical subtleties and
theological capers’.
Commodities are everywhere, and in part
define who and what we are. It is as if our
entire cosmos, the way we experience and
understand our realities and lived existence
in the world, is mediated through the base
realities of sale and purchase. Virtually everything in modern society is a commodity: books,
babies (is not adoption now a form of negotiated purchase?), debt, sperm, ideas (intellectual property), pollution, a visit to a national
park and human organs are all commodities.
Even things that do not exist as such appear
as commodities. For example, I can buy a
‘future’ on a basket of major European
currencies, which reflects the average price
(the exchange rate) of those national monies
at some distant point in time. Other commodities do not exist in another sense; they are
illegal or ‘black’ (heroin, stolen organs).
Others are fictional (e.g. money scams and
fraud). Visible or invisible, legal or illegal, real
or fictive, commodities saturate our universe.
Commodity-producing societies – in which
the dominating principle is commodities producing commodities – are a quite recent
invention, and many parts of the world, while
they may produce for the market, are not commodity societies. Socialist societies (and perhaps parts of China and Cuba today) stood in
a quite different relationship to the commodity
than so-called advanced capitalist states (cf.
socialism). Low-income countries, or the
third world so-called, are ‘less developed’
precisely because they are not mature commodity-producing economies (their markets
are undeveloped or incomplete, as economists
might put it) – they are not fully commoditized.
So the full commodity form as a way of
organizing social life has little historical depth:
it appeared in the West within the past 200
years. And over large parts of the Earth’s surface the process of commodification – of ever
greater realms of social and economic life being
mediated through the market as a commodity –
is far from complete. Perhaps there are parts of
our existence, even in the heart of modernity,
that never will take a commodity form.
A peculiarity of a commodity economy is
that some items are traded as commodities
but are not intentionally produced as commodities. Cars and shoes are produced to be
sold on the market. But labour – or, more
properly, labour power – is also sold and yet
it (which is to say me as a person) was not
conceived with the intention of being sold.
This curious aspect of labour as a commodity
under capitalism is as much the case for land
or Nature. These sorts of curiosities are what
Karl Polanyi, in his book The great transformation (2001 [1944]), called ‘fictitious commodities’. Polanyi was of the opinion that market
societies that do not regulate the processes by
which these fictitious commodities become
commodities will assuredly tear themselves
apart. The unregulated, free-market, commodity society would eat into the very fabric
that sustains it by destroying nature and
by tearing asunder the most basic social relationships (see capitalism).
The commodity raises the tricky matter of
price, which after all is the meaning of the
commodity in the capitalist marketplace: how
it is fixed, and what stems from this price
fixing. For example, the running shoes that a
poor inner-city kid in the USA yearns for are
Air Nike, which cost slightly more than the
Ethiopian GNP per capita and perhaps more
than his mother’s weekly income. Or consider
the fact that a great work of art, Van Gogh’s
Wheat field, is purchased for the astonishing
sum of $57 million as an investment. The
problem of the determination of prices and
their relations to value lay at the heart of nineteenth-century classical political economy,
but it is an enormously complex problem that
really has not gone away or in any sense been
solved. The ‘metaphysical subtleties’ that Karl
Marx refers to are very much about the misunderstandings that arise from the way we
think about prices, and what we might call
the sociology or social life of commodities.
But if there is more to commodities than their
physical properties and their prices, which are
derived from costs of production or supply
and demand curves, then there is a suggestion
99
COMMODITY
that commodities are not what they seem.
Commodities have strange, perhaps ‘metaphysical’, effects. For example, the fact that a
beautiful Caravaggio painting is a commodity –
and correlatively, that it is private property
and only within the means of the extravagantly
rich – fundamentally shapes my experience
of the work, and of my ability to enjoy its
magnificent beauty in some unalloyed way.
Its commodity status has tainted and coloured
my appreciation of it.
A commodity, then, appears to be a trivial
thing but it is in fact bewildering, even theological. The commodity, said Walter Benjamin,
has a phantom-like objectivity, and it leads its
own life after it leaves the hands of its maker.
What on earth might this mean?
One way to think about the commodity
is derived from Karl Marx, who begins his
massive treatise on capitalism (Volume 1 of
Capital) with a seemingly bizarre and arcane
examination of the commodity, with what he
calls the ‘minutiae’ of bourgeois society. The
commodity, he says, is the ‘economic cell
form’ of capitalism. It is as if he is saying that
in the same way that the DNA sequence holds
the secret to life, so the commodity is the
economic DNA, and hence the secret of modern capitalism. For Marx, the commodity is
the general form of the product – what he calls
the generally necessary form of the product
and the general elementary form of wealth –
only in capitalism. A society in which the commodity is the general form of wealth – the cell
form – is characterized by what Postone
(1993, p. 148) calls ‘a unique form of social
interdependence’: people do not consume
what they produce and produce and exchange
commodities to acquire other commodities.
But the commodity itself is a queer thing.
because while it has physical qualities and uses,
and is the product of physical processes that are
perceptible to the senses, its social qualities –
what Marx calls the social or value form – are
obscured and hidden. ‘Use value’ is self-evident (this is a chair that I can use as a seat and
that has many fine attributes for the comfort of
my ageing body) but value form – the social
construction of the commodity – is not.
Indeed, this value relation – the ways in which
commodities are constituted, now and in the
past, by social relations between people – is not
perceptible to the senses. Sometimes, says
Marx, the social properties that things acquire
under particular circumstances are seen as
inherent in their natural forms (i.e. in the obvious physical properties of the commodity). The
commodity is not what it appears. There is,
100
then, a hidden life to commodities and understanding something of this secret life might
reveal profound insights into the entire edifice
– the society, the culture, the political economy
– of commodity-producing systems. It is possible to construct a diagrammatic ‘biography’
of the broiler from production to consumption,
which depicts many of the actors involved in
the commodity’s complex movements and
valuations. This is a commodity circuit or a commodity chain (in French, it is referred to as a
filière). Commodity circuits can depict different
types of commodity chains and contrasting
commodity dynamics.
Marx invoked commodity fetishism to
describe the ways in which commodities have
a phantom objectivity. The social character of
their making is presented in a ‘perverted’
form. By this, he meant a number of complex
things: first, that the social character of a commodity is somehow seen as a natural attribute
intrinsic to the thing itself; second, that the
commodities appear as an independent and
uncontrolled reality, apart from the producers
who fashioned them; and, third, in confusing
relations between people and between things,
events and processes are represented as timeless or without history, they are naturalized.
Another way to think about this is that commodity production – the unfathomable swirl of
commodity life – produces particular forms of
alienation and reification. In his book Society
of the spectacle (1977), Guy Debord argues that
in a world of total commodification, life presents itself an as immense accumulation of
spectacles. The spectacle, says Debord, is
when the commodity has reached the total
occupation of social life and appears as a set
of relations mediated by images. The great
world exhibitions and arcades of the nineteenth century were forerunners of the spectacle, celebrating the world as a commodity.
But in the contemporary epoch, in which the
representation of the commodity is so inextricably wrapped up with the thing itself, the commodity form appears as spectacle, or as a
spectacular event, whether four men trying to
play chicken or a chef playing football with a
frozen broiler. Whatever else it may be, the
terrifying events of 11 September 2001 and
the collapse of the twin towers of the World
Trade Center represented an enormous spectacle in the Debordian sense; and a spectacle
for which there could be no spectacular
response of equal measure. Necessarily, this
spectacle of spectacles was a product of commodification and necessarily it has become a
commodity itself. Within weeks of the attacks,
‘
COMMODITY CHAIN/FILI ERE
Ground Zero in New York City had become a
small marketplace for 9/11 T-shirts and other
mementos, just as shirts bearing the image of
Osama Bin Laden and the falling towers were
selling like hot cakes in Bangkok, Jakarta and
the West Bank as icons of anti-imperialism.
We began with the commodity as a trivial
thing and have ended with a world of commodities that ‘actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour,
and the social relations between the individual
producers’ (Marx, 1976 [1867], pp. 75–6).
But this hidden history of the commodity
allows us to expose something unimaginably
vast; namely, the dynamics and history of capitalism itself. The commodity as its ‘cellular
form’ is surely one of the keys to unlocking the
secrets of what Max Weber (2001 [1904–5])
called the ‘capitalist cosmos’.
mw
Suggested reading
Taussig (1978).
‘
commodity chain/filiere A collection of
interrelated economic activities and industries
that produce a particular kind of product or
service. While commodity chains connote
‘vertical’ coordination among firms, from
design to assembly to final distribution, the
term seems to have first been used by
Hopkins and Wallerstein in 1977 in a programmatic call to de-centre the nation-state
in international political economy. Coming
from the perspective of world systems theory
(see core–periphery model), they argued for
attention to be paid to ‘the widespread commodification of processes’ by ‘tak[ing] an
ultimate consumable item and trac[ing] it
back to the set of inputs that culminated in
this item – the prior transformations, the raw
materials, the transportation mechanisms, the
labor input into each of the material processes,
the food inputs into the labor’ (p. 128). The
alternative – and more common – usage of
this concept seems to have independent origins in French industrial economics. Montfort
and Dutailly (1983) used the term filière to
refer to a set of firms linked vertically in the
creation of a single product. The organizational structure of an economy is then best
understood and described as a collection of
constituent filières, or commodity chains.
This approach has been used in economic
geography to discuss technological and economic interdependencies between spatially
proximate buyers and suppliers, as well as
firms linked horizontally in relations of cooperation. The approach also appears to have
independent origins in agro-food studies (see
agro-food system), representing a rare case
in which agricultural geography led the
way in economic geography. Friedland,
Barton and Thomas (1981) first use of the
term ‘commodity systems analysis’ to focus
on the mutual interaction of agricultural production practices, grower organization,
labour, science and extension, and marketing
and distribution systems, which was quickly
followed by the actor-oriented variant associated with Wageningen University to emphasize how the specificity of farm labour
processes can give rise to different styles of
farming (van der Ploeg, 1985).
For some scholars, the utility of commodity
chains is largely descriptive, a lens through
which to examine industrial organization and/
or economic geography. For instance, the
global commodity chain approach, most associated with Gary Gereffi and his colleagues,
focuses on the transnational reach of interfirm networks of manufacturers, suppliers
and subcontractors to each other, and to markets. In respect to the strong coordination role
that apparel design firms started to play in the
1980s, they also suggested an epochal shift
from producer-driven to buyer-driven chains.
Recently, they have posited the existence of
regulation- or consumer-driven commodity
chains, in light of the increased salience of
ethical products and the increasing power of
private systems of regulation to construct and
ensure quality in certain spheres of commodity
production (see Gereffi, Humphrey and
Sturgeon, 2005).
One variation on this approach is value
chain analysis, which draws attention to how
surplus distribution along a given chain is a
function of rent-generating barriers to entry,
which are in turn a function of chain governance (Kaplinsky, 2004). Kaplinsky and
others have argued that that national development prospects can be improved by industrial ‘upgrading’ to higher value-added
processes.
For another set of scholars, the commodity
chain approach is a tool of radical scholarship,
in that it has the potential to make the workings of capitalism more transparent, particularly because globalization seems to make
most commodities inscrutable as to how they
are made and distributed (Hartwick, 1998).
Other geographers, notably Leslie and
Reimer (1999), are critical of the notion that
commodities can be ‘unveiled’. Leslie and
Reimer have also remarked that commodity
chains privilege flows relative to scale. jgu
101
COMMON POOL RESOURCES
Suggested reading
Gereffi and Korzeniewicz (1994); Hughes and
Reimer (2004).
common pool resources resources, usually
natural, from which it is difficult to exclude
users, and whose use reduces resource availability for others (Ostrom, Dietz, Dolsak,
Stern, Stonich and Weber, 1999). Contra the
tragedy of the commons thesis and its calls
for privatization or centralized state control,
common pool resources have often been governed sustainably by common property
regimes, whose rules are structured around
the resource’s size, mobility, renewability and
other characteristics. Common pool resources
thus differ from true open access resources.
It is unclear, though, whether and how these
lessons can be ‘scaled up’ to address contemporary problems at larger scales, with more
users and greater rates of change.
jm
Suggested reading
Dietz, Ostrom and Stern (2003); Ostrom, Dietz,
Dolsak, Stern, Stonich and Weber (2002).
common property regimes Forms of ownership and access whereby all or parts of a local
environment are owned and managed by a community. This differs from private ownership,
state ownership and open access regimes, where
nobody owns the environment.
Common property regimes have existed
for thousands of years. They have become
more popular as indigenous practices are recognized and validated, and the limitations of
state ownership, top-down management and
private property become increasingly apparent. Common property regimes may be particularly suited to ‘resources’ where it is
possible to restrict access, but private ownership, while possible, is a very costly way to
manage the resource.
pm
communication(s) The geography of communication treats the sending, receiving and
exchange of information and messages faceto-face or via other means (letters, media,
telephone, Internet). Because communication
is essential to social relations, it is central to
many of the processes of interest to human
geographers, such as the construction of difference, the definition of community, the
causes and consequences of segregation and
the conduct of social movements. At issue
is who has access to what information, and
how space, place and networks shape this
access.
102
Despite the power of information technology
to enable communication at a distance (see
time–space compression; time–space convergence; time–space distanciation), faceto-face communication is still prized in many
theories in human geography. In economic
geography, for instance, the spatial agglomeration of certain types of industry (such as
software development, the film industry or
watchmaking) in industrial districts is seen
as a prime facilitator of innovation: the key
motivation for such agglomerations is believed
to be the ease of face-to-face communication,
which many see as necessary to the development of trust in social interactions (Murphy,
2006). In urban geography, the desire for relatively easy face-to-face communication is seen
as the main rationale for the clustering (see
clusters) of producer services in dense urban
areas. Information exchanged face-to-face in
social networks is also important to the functioning of labour and housing markets, because
large numbers of people learn about and evaluate employment and housing options via such
channels. Because the nature of the information
exchanged, including its locational dimensions,
depends in part on the characteristics of the
people in a social network, the social identity
of network constituents is important. In sum,
the process of face-to-face communication plays
an important role in concentrating certain types
of human activity in certain places and in certain
groups of people.
Because telecommunications permit communicating over great distances, questions
arise as to the power of such technologies to
support the dispersal of human activity. Will
information technologies such as the internet
and video conferencing undermine the raison
d’être for urban agglomerations and industrial
districts (i.e. the need for face-to-face contact)? In addressing this question, geographers
have examined the extent to which communication via technology is a substitute for face-toface interaction (in which case one might
expect greater dispersal of human activity),
a stimulus to face-to-face interaction (in
which case one would expect information
technologies to lead to a greater demand for
face-to-face contact and therefore increased
agglomeration effects) or a complement to personal contact (in which case one might expect
information technologies to have little impact
on the concentration or dispersal of human
activity) (Janelle, 2004).
sha
Suggested reading
Wheeler, Aoyama and Warf (2000).
COMMUNITY
communism A tradition of thought based on
the principle of the communal ownership of
property (primitive communism) and common ownership of the means of production (full
communism). Although traceable back to
ancient Greece, in its modern form it is most
widely associated with the writings of Karl
Marx, especially The communist manifesto
(Marx and Engels, 2002 [1848]). Writing at
the height of the industrial revolution,
Marx observed the increasing exploitation of
newly urbanized wage labourers (the proletariat), and the widening gulf between the rich and
the poor. He argued that the socio-economic
system known as capitalism was responsible
for the exploitation and alienation of these
labourers, and that only by transcending it
through revolutionary struggle could society
advance to a better system, that of communism.
In communism, all private property is abolished, there are no discernible classes and the
people are self-governing. In pure communism
the state is unnecessary, but according to Marx
and most of his followers, communism will be
preceded by a transitional stage called socialism, in which the state plays a major role.
Although pure communism has never been
implemented, Marxist theories were central in
galvanizing workers’ movements in Europe in
the late nineteenth century, and socialist governments became important players on the
world stage following the Russian Revolution
of 1917. After the Second World War, many
more communist parties came to power and
established regimes in Eastern Europe under
the aegis of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union. The victory of Mao Zedong and the
establishment of the People’s Republic of
China in 1949 was another major turning
point in the growth and spread of communist
ideology. Other countries in Asia and Africa,
including Vietnam, North Korea, Laos,
Mozambique and Angola, adopted some form
of communist principles of government over
the following years.
With the expansion of new forms of
neo-liberal governance and the introduction
of glasnost (openness) by the Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, communist
ideology began to wane. Over the past decade
numerous geographers have explored the
social and spatial repercussions of the transition to a post-communist world, especially
in the former satellite countries of the USSR
(see especially Pickles and Smith, 1998;
Rainnie, Smith and Swain, 2002: see postsocialism). Others have interrogated the
implications of communism’s disintegration
for theory and intellectual movements (see
Burawoy, 2000). In both cases, the break-up
of state planned and regulated societies has
had enormous ripple effects, with ongoing
ramifications in the context of increasing
American dominance on the global stage. km
Suggested reading
Marx and Engels (1972 [1845]).
communitarianism Both a political and an
intellectual programme, communitarianism
affirms the values and procedures of community, and rejects the political and analytical
premises of individualism, while worrying at
the effects of industrialization and urbanization on community life (Smith, D.M.J
1999a). Under the direction of writers such
as Amitai Etzioni (1994), as well as critics of
liberalism, such as Michael Sandel, communitarianism has enjoyed a resurgence in the
past decade. However, one can find precedent
in the work of those such as Emile Durkheim,
who also traced the disorganizing effects of
modernity. Contemporary communitarians
argue for a new moral and social order based
on shared values that bridge tradition, such as
moral ties of family, with modern norms of
tolerance and inclusion.
nkb
community
A group of people who share
common culture, values and/or interests,
based on social identity and/or territory,
and who have some means of recognizing,
and (inter)acting upon, these commonalities.
The definition is contentious, however, and
Joseph (2002) has suggested that community is less about social identity and more
related to practices of production and consumption under capitalism. Community is
frequently used to connote a scale at which
people can easily interact and recognize one
another, although as Anderson (1991a [1983])
argued in relation to nations, community
can be ‘imagined’ and actualized through
media and culture rather than interpersonal
interaction.
The chicago school of sociologists saw
community as the basis for social organization,
and their usage fostered a connotation with
neighbourhood. The use and propagation of
community as related to urbanism by the
Chicago School drew upon, but also reinterpreted, notions of community from German
sociologists such as Ferdinand Tönnies
(1855–1936). Tönnies envisioned community
(Gemeinschaft) as one’s family and intimate life,
while society (Gesellschaft) was an ‘imaginary
103
COMMUTING
and mechanical structure’ (Tönnies, 1955
[1887], p. 37). For Tönnies and the Chicago
School, urban neighbourhoods could provide
the kind of mutual support required for a community such as that found in a ‘rural village’
(Tönnies, 1955 [1887], p. 49; Park, 1967
[1925]). Nonetheless, in Tönnies’ formulation, community was being replaced by society
through urbanization and industrialization.
Although Tönnies acknowledged a possibility
of community in urban neighbourhoods, his
formulation situated community primarily in
pre-industrial rural settings. Equating community with the intimacies of village life, however,
fails to acknowledge the political and economic
inequalities inherent to such a setting – Joseph
(2002, pp. 4–5) cites Williams (1973) on this
point.
Tönnies’ (2001 [1887]) conceptualization
of community as a traditional ‘rural’ phenomenon sets it in opposition to or pre-dating
industrial capitalism (Bender, 1978; Joseph,
2002). This conceptualization fosters and supports claims such as that of communitarians –
exemplified by Etzioni (1993) and Bellah,
Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton
(1985). These scholars see community as
missing from, or left behind by, modernity.
They seek a return to mutual support and
responsibility, which, they argue, form the
basis of community and social values (Bellah,
Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton, 1985).
Such notions of community have been important to the governance strategies of the neoliberal state (Herbert, 2005: see also neoliberalism). These strategies – such as welfare
reform and community policing – transfer to
individuals or groups of citizens’ activities
and roles that were formerly assumed by the
state. But Herbert (2005) argued that many
communities – often conflated with neighbourhood from Chicago School formulations
in these state devolutions – are unable and
unwilling to assume these tasks, thus fostering
a disconnect between ideals of community
and actual experiences of them in neoliberalism.
The failure of community to act in lieu of
the state highlights its status under capitalism.
Seeking to challenge the notion of community
as antecedent of and potentially in opposition
to the individualization of capitalism, Joseph
(2002) argued that capitalism actually produces community. In her view, community is
not merely or primarily a set of shared social
identities, although it is often depicted as such
in identity politics (for an example, see Young,
1990a). Instead, community is performed
104
(see performativity) and practiced through
relations and practices of production and consumption: ‘Marx articulates the necessary role
that historically particular and differentiated
social formations play as the bearers of capital,
as the medium within which capital circulates
. . . ’ (Joseph, 2002, p. 13). Community is a
way that people articulate use values within
the circulation of production and consumption, thereby supplementing and particularizing the abstractness of capital. Joseph’s
(2002) formulation of community as operating in and through capitalism forces reconceptualization of it as a positive reaction or
antidote to capitalism. It may support or disrupt capital, but neither outcome is evident
a priori (Joseph, 2002). Instead, scholars need
to attend to the particularities of community;
how it is produced and performed discursively
and in practices, and to what end.
dgm
Suggested reading
Herbert (2005); Joseph (2002); Williams (1973);
Young (1990a).
commuting The daily journey to work,
implying a repetitive daily trip from a fixed
home location to a fixed work location. The
term dates to the mid-nineteenth century,
when wealthy businessmen began travelling
from their suburban dwellings to their
urban worksites via railroad: the ‘commutation’ of their daily tickets to lower-priced
monthly fares led to the term ‘commuter’
(Muller, 2004). The peaking of journeys to
and from work during the morning and evening rush hours and associated road congestion
have been a prime focus of transportation
planning since the 1950s. Telecommuting
involves using information technology to work
while the worker is not physically in the workplace.
sha
compact city A policy goal associated with
advocates of sustainability in Western-world
urban planning. Proponents seek to mitigate
automobile-related energy use, urban air pollution, and sprawl-related farmland and habitat loss by promoting the re-use of urban
brownfield sites, high-density and mixed-use
development, and public transit. The compact
city ideal permeates discussions of urban
sprawl, smart growth, quality of life and
questions of urban housing availability and
affordability. A range of opinions exist on the
veracity, feasibility and acceptability of the
compact city as a model for achieving urban
sustainability, from outright advocacy, to
COMPLEXITY THEORY
considered evaluation (Breheny, 1995), to
strong scepticism (Neuman, 2005).
em
Suggested reading
Breheny (1997).
comparative advantage The principle
whereby individuals (or territories) produce
those goods or services for which they have
the greatest cost or efficiency advantage over
others, or for which they have the least disadvantage. The outcome tends to be specialization across places. A gifted individual or
resource-rich region may be able to produce
everything more efficiently than others that are
less well endowed, but as long as some comparative advantage exists, specialization may
benefit all. An example is that of the best
lawyer in town who is also the best typist: it
pays the lawyer to concentrate on the lucrative
practice of the law and hire a typist (who has a
comparative advantage in typing relative to
knowledge of the law). One region may be able
to produce two goods more efficiently than
another region, but it pays to concentrate on
the good for which there is greatest comparative advantage and buy the other from the
second region.
The notion of comparative advantage is
important in understanding regional specialization, whereby all regions gain from the
interchange of products even if they could satisfy their own needs (cf. complementarity). A
condition for realizing the benefits of comparative advantage is free trade. At the international scale, market imperfections such as
tariff barriers can impede specialization based
on comparative advantage, protecting domestic production of goods that could not withstand open competition. The objective may
be to ensure more ‘balanced’ economic development and to avoid problems associated with
narrow product specialization.
dms
competitive advantage
The relative ability of firms in the same market to win aboveaverage profit levels, through either cost or
product differentiation advantages. These
may result from either a superior resource
base (e.g. better facilities, superior quality of
workforce), greater capability to utilize its
available resources (capability advantages)
and/or a better-quality product. That competitive advantage may be only transient; it is sustainable if it cannot be challenged by other
firms.
Competitive advantage is also used to
account for the emerging division of labour,
rather than the theory of comparative advantage. Places may compete for employment –
as, for example, in many service industries,
including leisure and tourism – on the basis
that what they have to offer is superior to that
available in other places, so that spatial differentiation results from competitive success
rather than differential resource availability or
efficiency.
rj
Suggested reading
Ancien (2005); Porter (1998).
complementarity The existence of complementarity between two regions implies that
one produces (or has the potential to produce)
goods or services for which the other suffers
from a deficit (or potential deficit). Ullman
(1956) used the term to describe one of the
bases of spatial interaction, arguing that
complementarity may arise either from areal
differentiation (in resource endowment, or
in social, economic and cultural conditions)
or as a result of economies of scale (cf. comparative advantage).
rj
complexity theory A term for the study of
‘complex systems’ that is used in both mathematical systems modelling and in qualitative
and discursive work. Complex systems are
non-linear, interdependent and strongly
coupled systems with feedback loops, and
may exhibit scale-effects, together with sensitivity to initial conditions and path-dependence.
The original use of the term is for the mathematical properties and analysis of such nonlinear interdependent systems, and embraces
both chaos theory and catastrophe theory
as sub-branches. Many studies identify three
divisions of mathematical complexity theory:
algorithmic or computational complexity;
deterministic complexity; and ‘aggregate
complexity’.
Algorithmic complexity deals with the relative
computational difficulty of computable functions. This may appear the least relevant division for human geography, but is important
in understanding the difficulties of solving
large-scale spatial optimization problems and
other aspects of geographic information
systems and spatial analysis. Deterministic
complexity examines the properties of non-linear systems and subsumes both chaos theory
and catastrophe theory as particular subsets.
The third division of aggregate complexity considers systems of linked components or subsystems and examines the ways in which order
and structure may emerge at higher levels
105
CONFIRMATORY DATA ANALYSIS
from the interactions. A classic example is the
highly organized termite hill that emerges out
of the interaction of countless highly specialized individual termite activities. Such properties of ‘self-organization’ and ‘emergence’ are
central to aggregate complexity.
Several different attempts have been made
to develop and apply the mathematical theory
to urban and regional systems, such as Allen
(1997) and Portugali (2000). One difficulty is
defining the objects within the system and its
boundaries. Reviews of these issues and their
relevance for human geography may be found
in Manson (2001) and O’Sullivan (2004).
Wilson (2000) takes a pragmatic approach,
using complexity theory as a framework within
which to link various urban sub-models, arguing that such linkage is vital to understand
urban structure; however, this cannot be done
in analytical terms, but only through computer
simulation and sensitivity analysis.
Complexity theory has also been adopted
by cultural geographers (see cultural geography) as an analogical and metaphorical
tool: as the ‘cultural turn’ emphasized the
importance of difference, contingency and
context, so the various concepts, models and
terms within mathematical complexity theory
provided useful language and metaphors with
which to examine space and society. Within
human geography, this use of complexity
theory outnumbers the mathematical applications. A well-developed example is provided
by Urry’s study of ‘global complexity’ (Urry,
2003), in which complexity is used to link
together local and global, the emergence of
global ‘order’ from regional ‘disorder’, the role
of feedbacks and path dependence in how
regions engage with global society, and the
challenge for how social theory is constructed.
Thrift (1999b) gives a wide-ranging survey of
the take-up of the complexity metaphor in
both business and the social sciences.
lwh
Suggested reading
Manson (2001); O’Sullivan (2004); Thrift(1999b).
confirmatory data analysis Quantitative
statistical procedures used to evaluate hypotheses, usually involving the use of significance
tests (cf. exploratory data analysis).
rjj
conflict
At its most general, ‘conflict’ can
mean anything from a personal disagreement
between two people to a world war. It is now
widely understood that conflict is part of the
human condition, although only some of it
results in overt violence or combat. Conflict
106
theory in sociology emphasizes struggles over
resources and the formation of groups and
social cleavages that may lead to organized
conflict. Coercion, resistance, revolt and
political violence within states, and warfare
between states, are dynamic processes in
which escalation, violence, conflict resolution
and peace-making are all vitally important.
In political science and economics, conflict
is sometimes discussed in terms of game
theory and strategic calculation, an approach
that has not been frequently invoked by
geographers.
Themes of conflict run through numerous
facets of contemporary enquiry in human
geography, even though they are often not
theorized as such. Marxist approaches emphasize the importance of structural conflict
between classes and especially in cities under
capitalism, where the geography of class
struggle is literally built into the urban structure (see marxism). More recently, feminist
analyses
have
investigated
numerous
conflicts generated by patriarchal structures
and the strategies of resistance used by
women (Staeheli, Kofman and Peake, 2004:
see also feminism; patriarchy). migration
brings peoples and cultures into conflict as
newcomers and established populations
negotiate coexistence, frequently in situations
of considerable economic change and against
a backdrop of class and gender struggles.
Identity conflicts are part of the urban
mosaic in most metropolitan centres, where
diasporic populations (see diaspora) are
now the subject of numerous geographical
analyses inspired by post-colonialism
(Jacobs, 1996).
Classic geopolitics focused on the geography of war and international rivalry, a topic
that has undergone a revival of interest since
the 1980s. Most recently, conflict is at the
heart of a series of geographical analyses of
matters of war and peace, where territory,
identity, national independence, empire and
violence have all come under scrutiny in the
aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001
and the launch of the ‘global war on terror’
by the Bush administration in the USA (see
terrorism). Here, conflict is discussed at the
largest scales as matters of clashes between
civilizations and cultures, but critical geopolitics also reveals the multiple ways in
which these struggles are socially constructed
and reach into the lives of ordinary people
(Gregory, 2004b). These terms are heavily
laden with both implicit and explicit geographical thinking, a matter that has gained
CONSERVATION
considerable attention by geographers (Flint,
2005).
sd
Global Witness, The Kimberly process (http://
www.globalwitness.org/pages/en/the_kimberley_
process.html).
Suggested reading
Flint (2005).
conflict commodities Across the global
South, the dependence upon a strategic natural resource (oil, diamonds, copper) has
been associated with a cluster of poor
human, economic and political development
indices, an association that has been called
the ‘resource curse’. These pathologies appear
especially robust in extractive economies;
for example, the petro-states of the Gulf of
Guinea, which are classic rentier economies
marked by deplorable corruption, poor economic performance, authoritarian politics,
miserable social achievement and civil conflict (including civil war), against a backdrop
of enormous oil wealth. Paul Collier and his
colleagues at the World Bank (2003) developed a model of what they called the ‘economics of civil war’ in which resource-dependent
economies (especially minerals) could be
sought out and looted by rebel groups. The
ease with which resources such as diamonds
and oil could be extorted, stolen or tracked
down by groups were driven, in their view, by
greed and criminality rather than grievance.
Civil conflict always surrounded resourcedependent economies in which the character
of the resource – point or diffuse, proximate or
remote (see Le Billon, 2005) – determined
the particular forms of violent politics (coup
d’état versus secessionist movements).
Conflict commodities refer to the association
between state dependence upon particular
commodities and the ease with which rebels
could plunder the resource in order to fund
their war (organized crime in the World Bank’s
account) against the state. The case of ‘blood
diamonds’ gained international attention
because of the ways in which alluvial diamonds and their trade could be easily
controlled by rebel groups in the extraordinarily violent civil conflict in Sierra Leone. As a
result of the pressure by activist groups such
as Global Witness, the Kimberly Process
Certification Scheme was set up in January
2003 as an international governmental certification system to prevent the trade in diamonds
that funded or sustained civil conflict (see
Global Witness, n.d.).
mw
Suggested reading
Collier, Elliott, Hegre, Hoeffler, Reynal-Querol
and Sambanis (2003); Le Billon (2005). See also
conservation A term that implies the keeping or preservation of something for future
use and human benefit. The word can be
applied to buildings or to food, but it is mostly
used to refer to the natural environment,
natural resources, and particularly species
and habitats. Concern for non-human nature
has a long history; for example, in classical
Mediterranean societies, and in the early
European tropical colonial empire (Grove,
1995). In its modern form, conservation
became established as a body of thought and
social action towards the end of the nineteenth
century.
Two aspects of the conservation of the
environment have been important since the
late nineteenth century. The first concerns
the rate at which resources, particularly
renewable resources (such as living species),
are consumed. The second concerns the desire
to ensure the survival of species and habitats.
The distinction between these two is commonly exemplified by the sharp debate in the
USA in the early years of the twentieth century
between the utilitarian view of conservation
of Theodore Roosevelt’s adviser, the forester
Gifford Pinchot, and the more romantic preservationist arguments of the Sierra Club and
John Muir (Hays, 1959). However, these two
aspects of conservation are still in tension
today; for example, between those who argue
that safari hunting and a legal trade in ivory
are an appropriate and effective way of conserving species such as elephants in africa,
and those who feel that such hunting and
trade can never be controlled in a way that
guarantees sustainable harvests and that does
not promote illegal killing.
The technical basis of ideas about conservation of renewable resources draws on a number of areas of natural science, particularly
the science of fisheries management. In the
late nineteenth century, fish catches began to
decline systematically in Europe and the USA
as fishing became industrialized with the
advent of steam-driven boats and other innovations. The International Conference for
the Exploration of the Sea in 1899 proposed
scientific enquiries to promote rational
exploitation. By the 1930s the idea of a maximum sustainable yield was established, and
through the first half of the twentieth century
a series of international institutions were
established to try to regulate fishing, including
107
CONSUMPTION
the Overfishing Convention agreed in London
in 1946, and the International Whaling
Commission established in Washington in
1946. Neither these, nor their successors,
achieved the sustained exploitation of any significant open-water stock of fish or marine
mammals. The boom–crash cycle of sealing
in the nineteenth century, and of the herring
fishery in the North Sea, ocean whaling and
Atlantic cod fishing in the twentieth century,
provide ample evidence of both the desirability
of conservation and the political and economic
difficulty of making conservation strategies
work (Cushing, 1988).
The language of fisheries science suggests
the considerable influence of economics:
stocks were renewed or depleted, and calculations included estimates of catch per unit
effort. In turn, economics reflected evolving
understanding of the dynamics of resources,
particularly in the distinction between
renewable (flow) and non-renewable (stock)
resources (Ciriacy-Wantrup, 1952). Such
ideas have been widely applied; for example,
in soil erosion and forestry. The US Dust
Bowl stimulated concern about the management of soil resources in a way that could
sustain production around the world; for
example, in tropical Africa, where it provided
the legitimization for widespread and unpopular compulsory terracing (Beinart and Coates,
1995). The concept of sustained yield forestry
is long established, although its application to
old-growth temperate forests (where ‘tree
farming’ is regarded as environmentally highly
destructive), and the failure to apply its principles to tropical regions forests remain highly
controversial.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the
extinction of species such as the quagga (a
barely striped plains zebra from the African
Cape) and the North American passenger
pigeon, and the near-extinction of others such
as the American bison, became the rallying
points for a species conservation movement
in the USA, Europe and the colonial world
(Sheail, 1976; Adams, 2004). This movement
drew in particular on zoos (notably the New
York Zoological Society, founded in 1895),
and on the support of hunters turned conservationists; for example, in the Society for the
Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire
(founded in London in 1903). It campaigned
for the establishment of game reserves, nature
reserves and eventually national parks,
and on the establishment of national legislation for protected species (e.g. designating
closed hunting seasons and protected species),
108
and for international treaties for conservation; for example, the 1918 Anglo-American
Convention for the Protection of Migratory
Birds and the 1973 Convention on Trade in
Endangered Species (CITES).
Wildlife conservation expanded rapidly after
the Second World War, with the establishment
of organizations such as the Conservation
Foundation (1948) and the Nature
Conservancy (1951) in the USA, and the
IUCN – the World Conservation Union
(1956) – and the Worldwide Fund for Nature
(1961). The membership, capacity and number of conservation organizations grew with
the wider environmental movement, developing from a series of small patrician interest
groups in a few industrialized countries into a
global movement.
By the 1990s, the power and sophistication
of conservation had grown, with the establishment of new and strongly corporate organizations, such as Conservation International
(Brosius, 1999). The development of conservation biology as a science lent growing confidence to conservation planning; for example,
in the definition of biodiversity ‘hotspots’
and protected area selection. The social
impacts of conservation came under increasingly close scrutiny (Brechin, Wilhusen,
Fortwangler and West, 2003; Neumann,
2004a). However, the erosion of living diversity
through the operation of global capitalism and
patterns of consumption continued unchecked
(Jenkins, 2003). The factors that created conservation in the nineteenth century remain
strong.
wma
consumption
Conventionally, the act of
purchasing and using commodities, although
some commentators insist that the term
should also refer to their transformation,
resale and exchange (Gregson and Crewe,
2003). Although economic geography has
traditionally focused on spaces of production, there has been a significant rise of interest
in consumption since the 1980s, accompanied
by increased dialogue between economic and
social geography. One reason for this is the
putative shift to a post-industrial society,
where retailing, leisure and tourism are
widely identified as major engines of growth
(in the west, at least). Another is the theorized
importance of consumerism as a locus for
identity: in the consumer society, what we
buy has seemingly become more important in
defining our sense of self than what we produce. Finally, the rise of interest in consumption appears to be related to important trends
CONSUMPTION
in globalization, with place-related consumer cultures (such as national cuisines or
musics) having been largely replaced by a
landscape of hybrid commodity flows (see
food, hybridity, music, transculturation).
Some of the features taken to be characteristic of contemporary consumption are likely
facets of modernity (Glennie and Thrift,
1992). Indeed, some argue that the consumer
revolution actually preceded the industrial
revolution, with innovation in production
being fuelled by changes in consumer tastes
and mores. Historical geographies of retailing
thus reveal a remarkable series of innovations
in the design, advertising and selling of goods
through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a succession of carefully orchestrated
spaces – including market halls, arcades and
department stores – playing a major role in
imbuing products with an aura of desirability
(Wrigley and Lowe, 2002). In the era of high
modernism, cultures of consumption were
also very much associated with the attainment
of security and comfort, with the idealization
of the suburbs reflected in a plethora of
products that no home could possibly be
without. The domestication and suburbanization of consumption was mirrored in the decentring of consumption, with retailing and
leisure following the middle classes into the
suburbs; simultaneously, however, mass transportation allowed the city centre to enhance
its role as a space of consumption, with cinema-going, nightclubbing and eating out
becoming key urban rituals, maintaining the
myth that city centres provided a vibrant
public sphere.
The mid-twentieth century has thus often
been characterized as an era of ‘high mass
consumption’. Nonetheless, Bauman (2001a)
suggests that consumption remained subordinate to work throughout this period. As he
describes, work served as the link holding
together individual motivation, social integration and systemic reproduction, with consumer goods primarily regarded as rewards
for work. Furthermore, in industrial producer
societies, the state provided some of these
rewards to workers through collective provision, so even the unemployed could participate in rituals of consumption. However, in
postmodern, deindustrialized societies, the
state has little interest in tending to this
‘reserve army of labour’. Hence, the welfare
state ‘safety net’ has gradually eroded, with
individuals forced to search for security in the
marketplace. (see neo-liberalism. Luckily (at
least for some), contemporary consumerism
implies that for every human problem there
is a solution that can be purchased: even problems of over-consumption (e.g. obesity) fuel
the marketing of new commodities (e.g. diet
products, health club subscriptions, plastic
surgery).
The second consumer revolution has thus
heralded an era in which consumption, not
work, is the hub around which identity
revolves. Yet, as Appadurai (1996, p. 38)
insists, ‘consumption has now become serious
work’, and it is wrong to imply that consumerled societies are any less disciplined than
industrial ones. Indeed, consumerism has
arguably bequeathed a new mode of social
control, where the fundamental social divide
is not between bourgeois and proletariat, but
between the creditworthy seduced – those
whose appetite for consumption fuels a huge
leisure, recreation and service sector – and the
repressed – those ‘flawed consumers’ who are
unable to enjoy a life of conspicuous consumption (Clarke, 2003). While the former are
drawn into purchases through a panoply of
subtle (and not so subtle) marketing, it also
requires surveillance to exclude the repressed
from spaces of leisured consumption. CCTV,
security guards, credit-rating mechanisms and
consumer profiling are all significant in this
process, maintaining the order of consumer
spaces designed for the affluent.
The way in which shopping malls combine
such mechanisms of social control with a carefully orchestrated ambience has led many
geographers to proclaim them as paradigmatic
consumer settings:
Developers have sought to dissociate malls
from the act of shopping. That is, in recognition of the emptiness of the activity for
which they provide the main social space,
designers manufacture the illusion that
something else other than mere shopping is
going on. The product is effectively a
pseudo-space that works through spatial
strategies of dissemblance and duplicity.
(Shields, 1989)
Given that the acquisition of commodities has
become so central to developing a sense of self,
exclusion from such spaces must be regarded
as a significant dimension of social exclusion
(Williams and Hubbard, 2001). However,
accounts focusing on seductive spaces of
consumption perhaps ignore the more routine
spaces where the majority of consumption
occurs (e.g. supermarkets, corner shops, takeaways). Likewise, the emergence of new spaces
of ‘second-hand’ consumption (e.g. eBay) also
109
CONTEXTUAL EFFECT
raises important questions about the relationship between repressed and seduced.
Alongside the attention devoted to the socialities of consumption, there is significant
work by geographers on the subjectivities
created through acts of consumption. For
instance, the centrality of consumption in constructions of the body is of growing interest
(Valentine, 1999), as is the emotional connection forged between people and the things that
they consume. Some are even beginning
to explore the emotional labour required to
dispose of old goods, noting they may be
incorporated into our personal biographies in
profound ways (Gregson and Crewe, 2003).
The fact that consumer goods may have long
and complex lives is also something that geographers have explored through attempts to
chart global commodity chains and the ‘traffic in things’ (Jackson, 1999). Transcending
simple distinctions between production and
consumption, tracing webs or networks of
commodity circulation not only offers an
important perspective on transnationalism;
it also draws attention to the range of technologies, spaces and bodies involved in practices of consumption.
Although consumption was once regarded
as marginal to geographical enquiry, the sheer
variety of recent studies suggests that it is now
impossible to ignore the spatiality of consumption. Indeed, perhaps the main impediment to the development of geographical
theories of consumption is the current ubiquity of consumer studies. Having quickly
reached a point at which a bewildering range
of activities are understood to involve consumption, a key challenge facing human geographers is to decide whether consumption
remains a useful concept around which to
orient a vast and complex literature.
ph
Suggested reading
Clarke, Doel and Housiaux (2003); Mansvelt
(2005).
contextual effect The impact of local
environments on individuals’ attitudes and
behaviour. Much social science is based on
compositional effects, whereby attitudes and
behaviour are influenced by individuals’ nongeographical position within society, such as
their social class: within any society, people
from similar backgrounds are assumed to
behave in similar ways, wherever they live.
According to arguments regarding contextual
effects, however, because attitudes and behaviour patterns are to a considerable extent
110
learned through social interaction in places
(such as households and neighbourhoods),
similar people living in different sorts of
places may think and act differently as a
result of interactions with their neighbours.
Furthermore, many patterns associated with
compositional effects may themselves be the
results of aggregating contextual effects.
If behavioural norms are learned from local
models, national patterns are simply summations of those local practices over all places:
the national is an aggregation of the local.
The terminology regarding contextual
effects varies across disciplines. In economics,
for example, Brock and Durlauf (2000) distinguished among: endogenous effects, whereby
one individual’s behaviour is causally influenced by that of other group members
(cf. endogeneity); exogenous effects, according
to which individual behaviour varies with the
observed attributes that define group membership; and correlated effects, on the argument
that individuals in an area tend to behave in
similar ways because they either have similar
characteristics or face similar opportunities
and constraints.
The contrast between compositional and contextual effects strongly influenced thinking
within human geography in the 1980s, as characterized by Thrift’s (1983) seminal paper
in which he deployed the structuration
approach to appreciate various forms of behaviour (such as the ‘life path’) as compositional
orderings within contextual fields. Citing
Therborn, he argues that ‘being in the world’
involves both inclusive (being a member of a
meaningful world) and positional (having
a particular place in the world as defined by
characteristics such as gender, ethnicity etc.)
characteristics and that the processes of becoming – learning about one’s positional situations –
are structured contextually in locales.
Contextual effects underpinned much of the
early work on diffusion, notably through
Torsten Hägerstrand’s operationalization of
social contact and influence through the concept of the mean information field, and
their production was central to his conception
of time-geography. More recently they have
been widely explored within electoral geography, with studies showing that people are
very likely to share political attitudes with and
to vote in the same way as (the majority of)
their neighbours, irrespective of their social
positions (cf. neighbourhood effect). They
have also been identified in other fields, as
in studies of morbidity and mortality in
medical geography and of school effects
CONTEXTUALITY
on student development (cf. education).
Although empirical studies have identified
behaviours consistent with contextual effects,
however, the processes assumed to produce
them – for example, the role of social interaction in the spread of attitudes and behavioural norms – is less well understood. Indeed,
in some situations it may be impossible to
identify the causal impact of a local context
because of an endogeneity effect whereby
(some at least) individuals select their interaction contexts (as with working-class people
who aspire to middle-class status and so
choose to live in middle-class areas and send
their children to local schools).
Jencks and Mayer (1990) suggested five
mechanisms which can generate outcomes
consistent with contextual effects:
(1) epidemic effects, whereby peer influences
within an area spread to neighbours;
(2) collective socialization, whereby local role
models are important ingredients in attitude development;
(3) institutional models, in which local institutions rather than people provide the
influences;
(4) competition models, whereby neighbours
compete for scarce resources; and
(5) relative deprivation models, which involve
individuals comparing their situations
relative to their neighbours’ and act
accordingly.
Two or more of these may be relevant in any
particular situation.
rj
Suggested reading
Agnew (1987); Johnston and Pattie (2006).
contextuality The situated character of
social life, involving coexistence, connections
and ‘togetherness’ as a series of associations
and entanglements in time–space. The concept of context has deep historical roots. It
is initiated in relations of language, and it
has always contained some double sense of
‘circumstances’ and ‘connections’. Like text,
context is a metaphor derived from the Latin
texere, ‘to weave’, and in traditions of interpretation, context came to refer to the coherence of the text, the connections between
the parts and the whole.
The term was translated into geography by
the Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand as
part of the ontological and epistemological basis
of time-geography. Hägerstrand (1974) distinguished between compositional approaches,
which proceed by splitting up their objects into
structural categories derived via formal–logical
method, and contextual ones, in which objects
and events are treated in their immediate
spatial and temporal setting and attributed a
property of ‘togetherness’ that must not be split
asunder. In time-geography, trajectories of individual entities are represented in time–space,
not as movements in an empty Cartesian time–
space, but as bundles of activities together constituting a web of trajectories. Hägerstrand saw
the idea of such a web as a basic postulate of
the contextual approach. It should ensure an
understanding of time and space as resources
‘drawn upon’ in the conduct of life. It does,
however, remain debateable whether his reduction of human action to moving entities and his
graphical illustrations still retained a sense of
time and space as external frameworks.
Stripped of their connotations of ‘physicalism’, Hägerstrand’s ideas eventually intersected with threads in modern social theory
and social philosophy pursuing ontologies of
practice and understandings of the ‘situation’
for social action. In structuration theory,
introduced by the British sociologist Anthony
Giddens (1984), for example, contextuality
does not denote boundaries of social life but,
rather, features that are inherently involved in
its construction. ‘All social activity’, it says, ‘is
formed in three conjoined moments of difference: temporally, structurally and spatially;
the conjunction of these express the situated
character of social practices’ (Giddens, 1981,
p. 30). Giddens provides a set of concepts that
describe contextuality as inherently involved
in the connection of social integration and
system integration; of face-to-face interaction
and more extensive relations of mediated
interactions. One of them is the concept of
locale, describing ‘settings’ of interaction
connected to different social activities. Many
geographers have worked in critical dialogue
with these formulations. Pred (1984), for
instance, pursues a ‘theory of place as historically contingent process that emphasizes
institutional and individual practices as well
as the structural features with which those
practices are interwoven’. Simonsen (1991)
adds a more phenomenological aspect by
emphasizing the ‘situated life story’ in an
approach to the constitution of social life
involving the interaction between different
modes of temporality and spatiality. In these,
and other, contributions, a central point is that
contexts are not passive backdrops. They are
‘performative social situations, plural events
which are more or less spatially extensive and
111
CONTIGUOUS ZONE
more or less temporally specific’, and they
are ‘productive time–spaces which have to be
produced’ (Thrift, 1996).
Another thematic corresponds to epistemology. Several philosophical sources inform
these discussions. Central are Martin
Heidegger’s phenomenology and Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s ideas of language games, somehow intertwining with Michel Foucault’s ideas
of historically constituted and spatially formed
‘power–knowledge’. But also important is
Karl Mannheim, a pioneer of the sociology
of knowledge, who was one of the first to treat
ideas as socially situated (Situationsgebunden).
Part of these ideas, often mediated through
Donna Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge, has induced a new understanding of
the production of geographical knowledge.
Knowledge production is seen as a practical
activity that literally takes place and intervenes
within specific contexts. Different versions of
contextual knowledge circulate, but what generally connects them is a rather modest attitude towards the powers of theory (cf. Thrift,
1996). Theories are of course vital and indispensable accounts, but at the same time they
are always limited and partial: they are marked
by the contexts from which they emerge and
the circumstances that they are intended to
meet.
Common to contextual approaches is their
reference to dynamic, connected time–spaces.
More recent contributions both accentuate
and develop this point. Schatzski (2002), for
example, in what he calls a ‘site ontology’,
connects to practice and human coexistence.
Social sites, in this account, are contexts where
‘practices and orders form an immense, shifting, and transmogrifying mesh in which they
overlap, interweave, cohere, conflict, diverge,
scatter and enable as well as constrain each
other’. In another way, Massey (2005), without using the term, opens to a radically
dynamic vision of contextuality. She discusses
space in terms of interrelations, heterogeneity
and process, and connects it to time through a
double determination as ‘discrete multiplicity’
and ‘dynamic simultaneity’. This allows for
a conception of different time–spaces (or contexts) as relational; as ever-shifting constellations of trajectories, constructed out of their
interrelations and ‘throwntogetherness’.
ks
Suggested reading
Massey (2005); Simonsen (1991); Thrift (1996).
contiguous zone A zone of special jurisdictional purposes contiguous to the territorial
112
sea, which a coastal state may claim up to
24 nautical miles from the baseline for measuring the territorial sea. The coastal state may,
in such a zone, exercise the control necessary
to: (1) prevent infringement of its customs,
fiscal, immigration or sanitary laws and regulations within its territory or territorial sea;
and (2) punish infringement of such laws and
regulations committed within its territory and
territorial sea (United Nations, 1983, Art. 33).
This enables foreign nationals to exercise
numerous prerogatives, including rights of
navigation, overflying, fishing, conducting
research and laying submarine cables.
sch
Suggested reading
Valega (2001).
continental shelf The Third United Nations
Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS
III) defines the continental shelf as ‘the natural
prolongation of the land territory to the outer
edge of the continental margin, or to a distance
of 200 nautical miles from the baselines from
which the breadth of the territorial sea is
measured’ (United Nations, 1983, Art. 76).
Where the continental margin extends beyond
200 nautical miles from the baseline, the coastal
state must establish its outer edge with the
highly technical methods stipulated in Article
76 of the Convention. The coastal state exercises
over the continental shelf ‘sovereign rights for
the purpose of exploring it and exploiting its
natural resources’ (United Nations, 1983,
Art. 77).
sch
Suggested reading
Valega (1992).
continents Usually defined as ‘large, continuous, discrete masses of land’, the identification of continents is both conventional and
contingent, because it is closely bound up with
the histories of exploration, geography and
geopolitics. Contemporaries divided the
Graeco-Roman world into three continents –
europe, asia and ‘Libya’ (see africa) – but
as early as the fifth century bce Herodotus
was puzzled ‘why three distinct women’s
names should be given to what is really a single
landmass’ (Lewis and Wigen, 1997, p. 22). In
medieval Europe, cosmographers and cartographers retained this tripartite division but
saw the three as parts of a single ‘world island’,
or Orbis Terrarum. The European ‘discovery’
of the americas from the late fifteenth century
followed by ‘the Great Southern Continent’ of
australia in the early seventeenth century
CONTRAPUNTAL GEOGRAPHIES
Modern continental systems
Antarctica
Australia
Antarctica
Australia
Antarctica
Australia
South
America
South
America
America
displaced these ethnocentrisms and allowed
for a heightened sense of global division and
distinction.
In English, the word ‘continent’ was not
used to denote major divisions of the globe
until the early seventeenth century. In the
course of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, those differences were calcified by
doctrines of environmental determinism:
the continents were distinguished by the
supposedly intimate, and even causal, connections between their physical and human geographies. The categories of the emergent
‘continental system’ were thus naturalized,
‘coming to be regarded not as products of
a fallible human imagination but as real entities
that had been ‘‘discovered’’ through empirical
inquiry’ (Lewis and Wigen, 1977, p. 30).
The arbitrary nature of the continental schema
is revealed by the different systems
in contemporary use (see table), but while
these have little or no scientific merit they
nonetheless often retain considerable popular
and geopolitical significance. (See also metageography.)
dg
contrapuntal geographies The networks
through which people and events in different
places around the world are connected in
a complex, dynamic and uneven web that
both maintains their specificity and mobilizes
their interactions. Contrapuntal geographies
thus reject two conventional prejudices: the
uniqueness of place and the universality of
space. Places are not closed and self-sufficient,
but neither is (global) space open and increasingly self-similar. The term derives from the
work of Edward Said (1935–2003), a literary
critic with a lively geographical imagination.
He regarded ‘contrapuntal reading’ as an
indispensable part of cultural critique, and
particularly of the critique of colonialism.
Said argued that europe – and the ‘west’ more
generally – relied on a myth of auto-genesis
(self-production) that represented modernity
as the unique product of the actions of
Europeans, who then had both the right and
the responsibility to reach out to bring to
others the fruits of progress that would otherwise be beyond their grasp. He objected to this
North
America
North
America
Europe
Asia
Africa
Eurasia
Africa
Eurasia
Africa
not only for its narcissism but also for its
essentialism: in his view, all cultures are
hybrids, ‘contrapuntal ensembles’. This was
partly a matter of material fact – networks of
commodity exchange, of migration and the
like – and partly a matter of cultural construction: ‘No identity can ever exist by itself and
without an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions’ (Said, 1993, p. 58: see also imaginative geographies). It was therefore essential
to bring these ‘overlapping territories [and]
intertwined histories’ together.
Said was an accomplished musician and
his root metaphor was a musical one: ‘In the
counterpoint of Western classical music, various themes play off one another, with only
a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony
there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a
rigorous melodic or formal principle outside
the work. In the same way, I believe, we
can read and interpret English novels . . . ’
(Said, 1993, p. 51). There are three crucial
points about such a project as it spirals beyond
literary criticism:
(1) Contrapuntal geographies are rarely transparent and their disclosure requires both
theoretical and analytical acuity. Another
literary critic, Frederic Jameson, regarded
contrapuntal reading as vital to the interpretation of the colonial world by virtue of
‘the systematic occultation of colony from
metropolis’ but argued that globalization
has produced an ‘epistemological transparency’. This is precisely the universality
rejected by Said’s conception (cf. Gregory,
2004b, pp. 11–12).
(2) Contrapuntal geographies may disclose
‘concert and order’, but this must not
be mistaken for harmony or equilibrium:
their movements are orchestrated
through differential relations of power
(see also transculturation). Said’s
(1993, p. 279) own account focused on
a particular modality of power, by seeing
‘Western and non-Western experiences
as belonging together because they are
connected by imperialism’.
113
CONURBATION
(3) Third, contrapuntal geographies require
reading from multiple sites and points of
view: not only from the point of view of
the dominant discourse but also from
the perspective of subaltern knowledges
(cf. Featherstone, 2005a: see also subaltern studies).
Contrapuntal geographies have been invoked
to wire the discourse of terrorism and security mobilized by the USA in its ‘war on terror’
in Afghanistan and Iraq to heightened Israeli
military action in occupied Palestine (Gregory,
2004) and to campaigns by the Hindu Right
against Muslims in India (Oza, 2007): like
Said’s original proposal, both studies revealed
the reactivation of colonial tropes to characterize ‘the common enemy’.
Other projects have been directed towards
similar ends without invoking Said: Gilroy’s
(1993) ‘Black Atlantic’ is one, particularly
prominent example of a transnational spatial
formation composed through an intricate interplay of connection and difference. Said himself preferred demonstration to theoretical
elaboration, but in human geography there
have been several attempts to develop a more
insistently materialist theorization of these
ideas. Thus Katz (2001a) substituted a cartographic metaphor – a countertopography – for
Said’s musical one:
I want to imagine a politics that maintains
the distinctiveness of a place while recognizing that it is connected analytically to other
places along contour lines that represent
not elevation but particular relations to a
process (e.g. globalizing capitalist relations
of production). This offers a multifaceted
way of theorizing the connectedness of
vastly different places made artifactually discrete by virtue of history and geography but
which also reproduce themselves differently
amidst the common political-economic and
socio-cultural processes they experience.
This notion of topography involves a particular precision and specificity that connects
distant places and in so doing enables
the inference of connection in uncharted
places in between . . . Such connections
are precise analytical relationships not
homogenizations. Not all places affected
by capital’s global ambition are affected
the same way . . . The larger intent is to
produce countertopographies that link
different places analytically and thereby
enhance struggles in the name of common
interests. (Katz, 2001a, pp. 1229–30)
114
These geographies are in constant and often
disjunctive motion, and Sheppard (2002)
borrowed the concept of a wormhole from
relativity theory to accentuate the complex
topologies involved:
The positionality of two places should
be measured not by the physical distance
separating them, but by the intensity and
nature of their interconnectedness . . . Like
networks, wormholes leapfrog across space,
creating topological connections that reduce
the separation between distant places and
reshape their positionality . . . Wormholes
are a structural effect of the long historical
geography of globalization, reflective of how
globalization processes reshape space/time.
The existence of such wormholes may
also have highly asymmetric consequences
for the places that are connected . . . ’
(Sheppard, 2002, pp. 323–4)
Whatever vocabulary is preferred, however,
mapping these volatile geographies involves
more than a cartography of connections:
the implication of differentials and differences
in time–space is vital (cf. power-geometry).
And Said’s original metaphor conveys an
equally crucial sense of dynamics: of movement, variation and change.
dg
conurbation A term coined by Patrick
Geddes (1854–1932) to describe a built-up
area created through the coalescence of two
or more once-separate settlements, probably
initiated through ribbon development along
the main inter-urban routes. With greater
urban sprawl the term has largely been
replaced by terms such as megalopolis, metropolitan area and metropolitan labour
area, in which the built-up area may be discontinuous.
rj
convergence, regional The tendency for
regional incomes or levels of living within a
country to become more equal over time.
That this should be the case is a prediction
derived from neo-classical economics,
which portrays labour, capital and other factors of production moving from one region
to another seeking the best possible returns
(in the form of wages or profits), until there
is nothing to gain from further movement
because returns are the same in all regions.
Thus a competitive free-market economy
under capitalism should tend towards regional
equality, subject to constraints on the spatial
mobility of factors of production.
CORE–PERIPHERY MODEL
Evidence for individual nations shows that
this prediction does not necessarily hold true.
For example, regional incomes in the USA
show steady convergence from the latter part
of the nineteenth century up to the 1970s.
However, individual regions had their own
trajectory, reflecting their historical experience
of greater or lesser movement towards the
national average income, which complicates a
simple picture of regular convergence. In addition, the convergence thesis depends on the
geographical scale adopted: the trend towards
reduced inequality at a broad regional scale
can be contradicted more locally; for example,
between core and periphery and within the
city. Thus in the USA convergence at a broad
regional scale has been accompanied by local
divergence between city and countryside and
among neighbourhoods.
Regional convergence is not confined to
capitalist economies and, indeed, may be
more marked under a socialist system that
has the equalization of regional living standards as an explicit objective. For example, a
strong convergence tendency could be
observed among the republics of the former
Soviet Union, although this may have been
reversed during the so-called ‘era of stagnation’ that preceded perestroika and the eventual
collapse of communism.
There is evidence also of reversals of convergence in the capitalist world, including the
USA, with inter-regional inequality increasing
since the 1970s. In the UK, divergence can be
observed among regions since the early 1980s,
in GDP per capita and other measures of
income. The fact that this has ocurred during
an era of dedication to the free market suggests
limits to the extent of regional convergence
towards perfect equality under capitalism,
in practice if not in theory. Indeed, the earlier
era of more positive regional planning may
have taken the country further in the direction
of equality than would have been the case
under less restrained market forces. This suggests that, after a certain level in the convergence process has been reached, state
intervention in the form of regional policy is
a necessary if not sufficient condition for further convergence.
dms
Suggested reading
Caselli and Coleman (2001); Martin (2001a);
Sokol (2001); Williamson (1966).
co-operative An enterprise formed by an
association of members with the aim of promoting their common economic interests.
Historically, co-operatives have formed to
enhance the selling power of independent,
family-based producers; thus they have been
most prevalent in the farming sector (Moran,
Blundern and Bradley, 1996). Sellers’ cooperatives share market and pricing information, and may act as a single seller to secure
better prices. The co-operative form has also
been used to enhance purchasing power
(bulk purchases) and to share the costs of
food processing. In recent years, producer cooperatives have formed hand in glove with fair
trade initiatives to improve the working conditions and income of peasant producers.
jgu
Suggested reading
Cobia (1989).
core^periphery model A model of systematic patterns of uneven development in
the geography of human activity, based on
uneven distribution of power within and
between societies. Cores and peripheries can
be analysed at a variety of geographic scales,
including uneven regional development within
national economies and uneven development
at a global scale.
The development of cores and peripheries
within national economies was a topic of considerable concern to national development
planners and urban and regional geographers
in the early post-Second World War period.
Particularly in developing countries, unbalanced growth between dominant, typically
highly primate, urban centres and agrarian
regions of the country led to a variety of exercises in promoting regional and secondary city
development (see dual economy). However,
the strength of existing economic cores and
the failure of many decentralization projects
has led in recent decades to less enthusiasm
for state policies that attempt to overcome
core–periphery structures at a national level,
while uneven development is increasingly seen
as central to the dynamics of capitalism
(Smith, 2008 [1984]).
The notion of cores and peripheries at a
global scale is associated with the work of a
variety of development economists, but has
been an especially pronounced feature of
approaches such as dependency theory
(Frank, 1967) and world-systems analysis
(Wallerstein, 1979). Assessments of core–
periphery dynamics at a global scale have typically taken national states and economies as
important constituents of the global system,
and have thus identified some states as being
part of the global core and others as part of the
115
CORPORATIZATION
global periphery. Core states are those with
the highest value-added industrial manufacturing and service sectors, while peripheral
states are more dependent on agricultural
and raw materials exports – and, more
recently, on lower value-added manufactured
goods. world-systems theorists identify states
that are semi-peripheral in that their exports
comprise a mix of higher and lower valueadded goods (Wallerstein, 1979, pp. 66–94).
Many core–periphery models, such as
that of Andre Gunder Frank, connect core–
periphery structures at a national scale with the
global core–periphery structure (Frank, 1967,
pp. 8220). In particular, such models have seen
primate cities in developing countries as nodal
points connecting national economies to the
global system, and as ‘suction pumps’ from
which surplus is siphoned out of peripheral
societies and into global circuits of capital
(Armstrong and McGee, 1985). Recent processes of globalization have called into question the degree of coherence of national
political economies, making the variants of
core–periphery theory that hinge on a hierarchy
of states more problematic. But the models that
emphasize crucial roles for cities in the developing world retain considerable relevance. jgl
Suggested reading
Armstrong and McGee (1985); Frank (1967);
Smith (2008 [1984]); Wallerstein (1979).
corporatization The spread of business
objectives, methods and discourses into the
non-profit and state sectors of society.
Schools and universities, hospitals, welfare
offices and so on are increasingly held to the
operating standards of private enterprise,
despite differing reasons for their existence,
resources and relationship to society. Talk of
‘cost centres’, ‘customers’, ‘products’, ‘markets’ and even ‘profitability’ (in relation, for
example, to university spin-offs of private
companies) grows more common. Nonbusiness organizations should strive for efficiency and respond to changing social needs.
But the meaning of efficiency and responsiveness in these organizations ought perhaps to
be evaluated on different grounds than we
would apply to a corporation.
esch
Suggested reading
Steck (2003).
correlation The
degree of association
between two or more variables. In statistical
analyses, correlation coefficients varying
116
between þ/ 1.0 are measures of the goodness-of-fit of a relationship: a value of 1.0
indicates a perfect relationship. If values less
than 1.0 are squared, they indicate the proportion of the variation in one variable than can
be accounted for statistically by the other(s): a
correlation of 0.8 indicates that 0.64 of
the variation can be accounted for. Positive
correlations indicate that as one variable
increases in value, so does the other: negative
correlations that as one increases in value,
the other decreases. In several variants of the
general linear model, notably regression
analysis, the correlation between two variables
is denoted by r and the (multiple) correlation
among three or more variables by R. A correlation coefficient is merely an indicator of
covariation among two or more variables
and is not a measure of causality, although a
high correlation may have important theoretical implications.
rj
cosmography The unified study of the
Earth in relation to the heavens, cosmography
arises from geocentric assumptions and a
belief in homologies between the spatial order
of terrestrial and celestial spheres. The spherical geometry of celestial poles, great circles,
hemispheres and ecliptic can be projected on
to both Earth and sky and illustrated by the
armillary sphere, whose spherical lattice of the
five great circles, poles, axis and colures makes
it the symbol of cosmographic science (still to
be found on the flag of Portugal). Mathematical
cosmography had practical significance for
oceanic navigation, and early in modern europe
cosmographers were often influential court
appointees (Fiorani, 2005). Cosmographic order
has given rise in many belief systems to ideas of
divinely ordered, cosmic harmony, reproduced
at varying scales, including the human microcosm, and to attempts to steer influences
believed to flow through the cosmos, often by
manipulating cosmographic diagrams and
images. Descriptive cosmography was the classification and description of the contents
of the created cosmos, assumed to have an
order that reflected mathematical relations.
Incorporating both the mathematics of order
and description of contents, cosmography
eludes easy definition and courts intellectual
incoherence.
Cosmographic science peaked in early modern Europe, where cosmographies took the
form of illustrated books and maps that may
be regarded as precursors of the modern atlas.
Cosmographies became increasingly encyclopaedic in seeking to systematize spatially and
COSMOPOLITANISM
illustrate the whole of universal knowledge.
The dazzling ‘marvels’ of the worlds newly
encountered by Renaissance Europeans meant
that cosmography often failed to distinguish
reality from fable, and the cosmographic project’s grand synthetic goals became increasingly unwieldy (Grafton, 1992; Lestringant,
1994). Cosmography’s assumption of a closed
universe
meant
that
acceptance
of
Copernicus’ world system, especially after
Galileo and Newton, led to its decline as an
active field of knowledge, being replaced by
astronomy and geography as distinct enquiries
(see also geography, history of), although
mathematical cosmography remained a critical science during the eighteenth-century
establishment of accurate meridians on an
oblate globe and the development of geodetic
survey (Edney, 1993). Non-Western and premodern cosmologies find graphic expression
in diverse cosmographic maps and diagrams
(see cartography, history of).
dco
Suggested reading
Besse (2003); Cosgrove (2006a).
cosmopolitanism Across the centuries, political philosophers and social commentators
have argued over the desirability and possibility of social organization and affiliation on a
cosmopolitan scale. Cosmopolitans, blaming
nationalism for many of the ills of the world,
have argued that universal attachments and
rights offered at transnational scale are
desirable for human progress and emancipation. For example, the ancient Greeks emphasized the global responsibility of the citizen,
while during much of modernity the cosmopolitan ideal has been driven by Kant’s desire
for governments to have obligations beyond
their own territories (Delanty, 2005b). In
contrast, Adam Smith stressed the role of sympathy as a bridge between individuals and
among nations in a world differentiated by
market laws, and the French revolution
sought to extend the principles of liberty,
equality and fraternity as universal values,
while Marx insisted on the necessity of a
socialist commons under the guidance of the
international workers’ movement.
In recent years, the cosmopolitan ideal has
evolved in new directions, to include proposals
such as global government, binding international charters, corporate social responsibility, enhanced human rights, global
environmental stewardship and various international commitments to poor countries, as a
response to growing international inequality
and planetary damage (Held and KoenigArchibugi, 2003). Global citizenship and
political action in general has come to be
placed at the heart of the cosmopolitan ideal
as a necessary adjunct to the process of globalization in economic, social, institutional
and cultural life, involving the rise of planetary
organization, transnational flows and crossnational interdependencies. Global citizenship
and global government are seen to be required
by the rise of global society.
The critics of cosmopolitanism have long
argued, however, that collective affect and
affiliation have always depended on strong territorial loyalty and identification, as have the
processes and institutions of political expression
and action, most commonly around ethnonational communities. Thus, cosmopolitan
ideals have been judged to be elitist, as reflections of only the values and cultural practices of
intellectuals, the itinerant upper echelons and
territorially disaffected minorities, with mass or
majority affiliation held to be gathered around
enduring national and local communities. The
critics – past and present – have also dismissed
the cosmopolitan ideal as utopian, naı̈ve or
unworkable, on the grounds that it is a fictive
aspiration that fails to excite affect and loyalty
on the ground, that in a world ordered around
local, national and regional sovereignty its
institutional proposals have little chance of
uptake and survival, and that as a symbol of
progress it is undermined by a human condition
that is increasingly wary of universalistic or
teleological aspirations (Bauman, 2003).
Undercutting these normative disputes, lies
the claim that contemporary social reality is
becoming thoroughly cosmopolitan, regardless of questions of consciousness. Ulrich
Beck (2004), for example, stresses the need
to distinguish cosmopolitanism as a credo
from cosmopolitanization as a multidimensional
process of trans-territorial transformation that
demands more than national or state-centred
response. Beck provides four examples. The
first is ‘risk cosmopolitanism’, a fear shared by
all around the world of heightened risk – military, climatic, epidemiological, environmental,
sociobiological – viewed as a global threat that
requires new commonalities and interconnected action. Consequently, the second is a
‘postnational politics’ driven by a global sense
of unlimited threats and uncertainties that are
much harder to identify and calculate on the
basis of traditional state measures, forcing new
approaches to inter-state regulation and the
rise of many non-state policy networks.
The third example he gives is the globalization
117
COST STRUCTURE
of inequality as a consequence of entangled
national and transnational processes (from state
welfare decisions to global neo-liberalism and
the acts of transnational corporations and
financial institutions); a phenomenon requiring
transnational interventions, but all too frequently treated by national elites as a domestic
issue (see also transnationalism). Finally,
Beck refers to ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ based
around the everyday consumption of products
and images from around the world, and the
increasing formation of cultural practices and
affiliations through world engagement.
The sum of these few examples of a multidimensional process is the claim that ‘the
experiential space of separate national societies, each with its own uniform language,
identity and politics, is becoming more and
more of a myth’, as what counts as national
becomes ‘in its essence increasingly transnational or cosmopolitan’ (Beck, 2004,
p. 153). This does not in any way mean that
we are all becoming cosmopolitans, but it does
question how far accounts of what goes on
within nations can afford to ignore the world
at large. These considerations have prompted
some geographers to revisit the history of
geography (see geography, history of), not
to condemn its contributions tout court but
to offer nuanced readings of its engagement
with cosmopolitan ideals (Cosgrove, 2003;
cf. Harvey 2000a), while others have sought
to energize the contemporary project of a critical human geography by reflecting on the
implications of cosmopolitanism for ethics
(e.g. Popke, 2007) and for political action
(e.g. Gidwani, 2006).
aa
cost structure The division of the total cost
of production into its constituent parts, or the
cost of individual inputs. For example, the
cost structure of the iron and steel industry
would indicate absolute (or relative) amounts
of expenditure on iron ore, coking coal, limestone, labour, capital equipment and so on.
The cost structure thus reveals whether a particular activity is material intensive, capital
intensive, labour intensive and so on, with
respect to expenditure on inputs. This information can provide an initial clue to the inputs
likely to have the greatest bearing on the location of the activity in question.
dms
cost^benefit analysis An analytical procedure for the comprehensive, frequently ex ante,
economic evaluation of major public-sector
projects, embracing their full positive and
negative societal consequences, sometimes
118
over the range of project options and geographical scales (e.g. Turner, Adger and
Doktor, 1995). As such, cost–benefit analysis
(commonly ‘CBA’) covers a wider range of considerations than the profit-and-loss accounting
of private-sector decision-making. Originally
applied to public river and harbour projects
in the USA, CBA’s contemporary uses extend
to such diverse issues as urban air quality,
dam and irrigation schemes, refuse recycling,
medical and veterinary procedures, transport
deregulation, roadway maintenance, disposal
of hazardous waste, energy generating and
conservation and job creation schemes
(Armstrong and Taylor, 2000; see also
Mishan and Quah, 2007).
Cost–benefit analysis involves three stages.
First, costs and benefits associated with
public projects have to be identified, including
intangible externalities such as noise, habitat loss, pollution and raising human
health and lifespans. Second, these must be
quantified, including their discounting to a
common base date, since the various costs
and benefits can arise over very different time
periods. Finally, the resulting cost–benefit
ratios are incorporated into the decision-making, or project-evaluation, stage, alongside
political and other judgmental inputs
(Turner, 2007).
Economists differ as to the best application
of these general principles in particular cases,
and over the validity of the exercise as a whole.
Defining all costs and benefits is one such:
how to be comprehensive without doublecounting. Not all variables have an obvious
market value, and some ‘estimates’ may be
little more than guesses. The discount
rate can also be crucial to the outcome, and
endangers undervaluing the welfare of future
generations. Finally, distributional issues are
important – a $1 million benefit to poor
residents from one freeway route should outweigh the same gain to rich citizens from an
alternative.
Recent extensions of cost–benefit analysis to
large-scale environmental issues, such as
global warming, are now at the forefront of
international debate (Stern, 2007) but have
proved particularly controversial. Not only
are such potential environmental changes
irreversible, but the cost and benefits vary
internationally, raise sharp ethical valuation
judgements (e.g. over landscape, wildlife
and human life) and questions of inter- and
intra-generational fairness – the already poor
are likely to suffer most, while the future
generations who feel the sharp end of global
CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
changes may also have the technology to
combat them.
agh
Suggested reading
Elins (2000).
counterfactuals Literally contrary to the
facts: determining what might have been had
the facts been different. What if the Rhine
River never existed? What if in Florida in
November 2000, fewer chads were left hanging? And, perish the thought, what if The dictionary of human geography had never been
written? Posed as subjunctive conditional,
counterfactuals focus attention on comparing
the known case, the historical geographical
record, with what might have been the case
in a different possible world. Discussions of
counterfactuals are found in philosophy,
social psychology, political science, some
branches of economics and perhaps most
prominently in history (and through it, historical geography). Also termed virtual history, historians use counterfactuals to facilitate
clearer explanation of past events. For
example, to understand the rise of German
Nazism, Ferguson (1998) imagines twentieth-century Europe without the First World
War. On that basis, he cannot conceive of the
emergence of the Third Reich, and so concludes that the First World War must be its
cause. For a number of historians, however,
this is not history, but a form of fiction. The
economic historian M.M. Postan declared
that ‘the might-have-beens of history are not
a profitable subject for discussion’ (quoted in
Gould, 1969, p. 195). With postmodern and
post-structural scepticism about the separation of fact and fiction, this kind of objection
is less convincing, and virtual histories burgeon both in academia and in literature
(Ferguson, 1999).
tjb
Suggested reading
Ferguson (1999).
counter-urbanization Population deconcentration away from large urban areas and
their suburbs, first identified in the USA in
the 1970s, where many metropolitan areas
were losing population through net migration
to non-metropolitan areas. The growing areas
were generally relatively small settlements,
which were either increasingly accessible
for commuting or offered attractive environments for retirees and home-based workers.
This changing population distribution was
paralleled by employment deconcentration
to smaller towns that offered cheaper, more
extensive tracts of land, more pliant (usually
non-unionized) labour forces, plus pleasanter
and less-congested environments and were
more accessible as transport costs were
reduced both absolutely and relatively (cf.
footloose industry). Similar patterns of
counter-urbanization were identified in many
other countries in the late twentieth century,
though there has been some ‘back-to-the
city’ recently, which has made the patterns
of change less clear-cut. (See also edge city;
sprawl.)
rj
Suggested reading
Champion (1991); Champion and Hugo (2004).
creative destruction The general notion that
only through the demise of existing entities can
new ones be brought into the world. While
associated with thinkers such as Nietzsche and
Hegel, creative destruction as a distinct phrase
is best known to geographical audiences
through the work of the economist Joseph
Schumpeter. In his hands, it is both a description of capitalism’s disequilibrium dynamics
and a historical argument regarding the passage
to social democratic welfare states. Against
the marginalist concerns of twentieth-century
neo-classical
economics,
Schumpeter
(1942) took up macro-economic questions in
the classical tradition (see political economy). He argued that capitalist competition
induces entrepreneurs to innovate (and to
maintain a stable of scientists for the purpose),
resulting in qualitative changes to production
technologies that are fundamentally disruptive
to the existing economic landscape. As opposed
to the smooth unfolding of technological
innovation, the equilibrium provided by the
market’s ‘hidden hand’, and theories of disruption caused by exogenous forces (e.g. weather,
war), Schumpeter saw capitalism as inherently
unstable, a condition that its citizens would
ultimately find intolerable. Schumpeter’s ideas
are often likened to those of Marx, important
differences being that the latter desired capitalism’s demise and located its chronic instability
less in competition than in accumulation as
such (class-based extraction and investment
of surplus value: see Storper and Walker,
1989). It is, of course, in the spirit of the latter
that Harvey so often invokes ‘creative destruction’ in his construction of an explicitly
historico-geographical materialism and his
critical analyses of landscapes of capital accumulation (see, e.g., Harvey, 1989b: see also
marxist geography).
ghe
119
CRIME
crime The geographical study of crime seeks
to: explain the spatial clustering of criminal
behaviour; consider how the construction
and monitoring of spaces might reduce the
incidence of criminality; and explain how
wider social and political dynamics shape the
fear of crime and societal responses to it.
Like many other social phenomena, criminal behaviour is unevenly distributed. Much
work in geography attempts to account for
this variation, typically by elaborating the
demographic characteristics and common
social patterns in places where crime is concentrated. Often taking inspiration from the
‘social disorganization’ theory developed by
chicago school sociologists, these accounts
take aim at several factors arguably common
to places characterized by concentrated disadvantage: the comparative lack of economic
opportunity, the likelihood of high residential
mobility, the high percentage of single-parent
households, and the general cultural acceptance of crime (Smith, S.J., 1986a; Sampson,
Raudenbush and Earl, 1997). Some geographical work focuses more on the common
practices of criminal offenders, and how their
time–space patterns make opportunities for
crime more or less available to them
(Rengert, 1997). A related, and highly popular, criminology of place concentrates on the
alleged effects of so-called ‘broken windows’
as incubators of crime. Places where broken
windows are not fixed signify a lack of informal social control that invites the criminally
minded into their midst (Wilson and Kelling,
1982; for a critique, see Harcourt, 2001). In
recent years, the geographical clustering of
crime has been mapped by police departments
using geographic information systems (gis)
technologies: these help isolate ‘hot spots’ of
criminality for targeted enforcement.
For some, this clustering of ‘hot spots’ is
connected to the built environment. Various
related approaches – ‘situational crime prevention’, ‘defensible space’, ‘environmental
criminology’ – suggest that crime’s geographies are significantly a consequence of whether
spaces deter crime through effective defensibility and surveillance. Places can thus be
constructed to repel crime if they make entry
difficult or monitoring easy. Such monitoring
takes conspicuous form in the UK, and
increasingly in other places, through closedcircuit television (CCTV) units that monitor
much of public space (Fyfe and Bannister,
1998). These surveillance practices ostensibly
reduce criminality by increasing the threat
of capture.
120
Other work in the geography of crime
focuses on how crime is commonly constructed, socially and politically. There is
now, for instance, an extensive literature on
the fear of crime, and its variation across social
groups and across space (see Koskela and
Pain, 2000). Such fear is more prevalent
amongst the elderly and amongst females,
especially when they are in unfamiliar public
places. Fear of crime is also a political
construct, used as a means to legitimate ‘get
tough’ policies for reducing crime. These
political processes are sometimes tied to the
wider practices of neo-liberalism, through
which welfarist approaches to social problems
are delegitimized, in favour of policies that
emphasize social control.
skh
Suggested reading
Smith, S.J. (1986a).
crisis A potentially complete failure in the
reproduction of systemic relations. The term
appears in multiple discourses, being used to
describe threatened failures in the reproduction of socio-economic structures, political
institutions, representational conventions, ecological systems and more. Its connotations are
largely negative: describing the failure to reproduce relations as a crisis carries some implication that continuity in those relations is
desirable or necessary. Crises of social relations
are often viewed as having positive aspects
as well, though, inasmuch as they present windows of opportunity for progressive change.
Relevant work in human geography has
focused mainly on crises of capitalism.
Human geographers influenced by historical
materialism have viewed capitalism as a
socio-economic system whose internal contradictions make it inherently unstable and prone
to periodic crises that lead to the reconfiguration and greater socialization of relations of
production and reproduction. Such a trajectory ultimately calls into question the reproduction of capitalism itself, making this
perspective fundamentally different from more
mainstream accounts of the ‘business cycle’.
Briefly, capitalism is prone to crisis because
its endogenous dynamics frequently and characteristically produce situations in which:
(i) workers, collectively, cannot afford to buy
the commodities they produce (a crisis of
underconsumption); (ii) more commodities
are produced than can be absorbed by all
available purchasing power (a crisis of overproduction); (iii) capitalists accumulate
more capital than they can invest in profitable
CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS
crisis
enterprises (a crisis of over-accumulation);
or (iv) a large portion of the total labour
force cannot be profitably employed in the
production of commodities (a crisis of
unemployment or underemployment). These
various manifestations of crisis are closely
related, with one often leading to or accompanying another.
Human geographers, most prominently
David Harvey, have built upon and refined
Marx’s original work to develop a more coherent and geographical theory of the dynamics of
capitalist crises. In work central to marxist
geography, Harvey (1999 [1982]) has proposed a threefold theory of capitalist crises.
His ‘first cut’ explains how the crisis tendencies above are inherent to capitalism. His ‘second cut’ focuses on their temporal
displacement via fiscal and monetary arrangements that stave off crises by laying the seeds
of larger problems in the future (e.g. increased
household reliance on credit cards, or ballooning national deficits). His ‘third cut’ explores
the ways in which geography can be used to
combat crisis tendencies (see also Harvey,
2001); for example, by massive investments
in new locations or the opening of new markets, and suggests that crises of capital accumulation are culturally mirrored in crises of
representation that materially affect the ways
in which time and space are constructed and
construed (Harvey, 1989b) (see figure: see also
time__space compression). The state plays
critical roles in the above processes.
Collectively, these theoretical refinements help
to explain how capitalism has survived and
expanded despite regular crises, contrary to
the predictions of classical Marxism. Similar
questions have been taken up in regulation
theory, which explores the role of minimally
necessary fits between narrowly ‘economic’
activities (regimes of accumulation) and broader
social and political conventions and institutions
(modes of regulation) in producing and overcoming periodic crises (Walker, 1995). Meanwhile,
ecological Marxism has sought to bring nature
into crisis theory, pointing out that severe environmental degradation and other failures of
environmental regulation may both precipitate
a crisis, and be important objects of political
struggle during one (O’Connor, 1998).
jm
Suggested reading
Harvey (1999 [1982], 2001).
critical geopolitics The emergence of critical geopolitics within political geography
situates power not in the hands of a sovereign
state or individual, but in more relational ways
that traverse a spectrum of scales of social life.
Influenced by post-structuralism and
responding to the realist approaches of international relations in conventional geopolitical
discourse, critical geopolitics has not simply
contested the claims of international relations (IR) theory and international political
economy (IPE), but taken them apart by
exposing the assumptions of each and challenging the taken-for-granted categories of analysis within IR in particular. Drawing inspiration
from the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques
Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, critical geopolitics is a less a theory of how space and politics
intersect than a taking apart – a deconstruction – of the normalized categories and narratives of conventional geopolitics. Such an
approach challenges seemingly commonsense
understandings and practices of ‘peace’, ‘violence’ and ‘war’ within the state system
(Dalby, 1991).
Critical geopolitics is defined by its deconstructive impulse (see deconstruction),
121
CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS
questioning assumptions in a taken-forgranted world and examining the institutional
modes of producing such a world vis-à-vis writing about the world, its geography and politics.
Such an approach does not subscribe to any
one mode of apprehending the geopolitical
world; it eschews the idea that any geography
can be fully finalized or authoritative (Sparke,
2005). Rather, it seeks to reveal and examine
the assumptions, constructions and power
relations that are foundational to such apprehension (Shapiro, 1997).
A central project for critical geopolitics is
analysis of the discursive practices by which
scholars spatialize international politics: it asks
why and how a particular geopolitical narrative is normalized and accepted (Ó Tuathail,
1996b) (see discourse; cf. Müller, 2008).
Critical geopolitics thus seeks to politicize
knowledge production through discourse
analysis of dominant geopolitical practices,
such as foreign policy and techniques of representing war (Shapiro, 1997; Gregory, 2004b).
Within geography, ‘[c]ritical geopolitics is one
of many cultures of resistance to Geography as
imperial truth, state-capitalized knowledge,
and military weapon. It is a small part of a
much larger rainbow struggle to decolonize
our inherited geographical imagination so
that other geo-graphings and other worlds
might be possible’ (Ó Tuathail, 1996b,
p. 256). Sparke (2005, p. xiv) adds that ‘any
assumption about geography either as a result
of or as a basis or container for other social
relations always risks fetishizing a particular
spatial arrangement and ignoring ongoing processes of spatial production, negotiation, and
contestation’.
Ó Tuathail’s (1996b) agenda-setting call for
critical geopolitics was a central text in the
unravelling of dominant geopolitical discourse. It provided compelling critiques of
geopolitics, but through its distance from
alternative epistemological ways of knowing
how to ‘geo-graph’ the world (see epistemology) or from ontological commitments to it
(see ontology), critical geopolitics risked
becoming disembodied critical practice and
suffered from ‘a dearth of commentary on the
prospects for resistance’ (Sparke, 2000b,
p. 378; cf. Routledge, 1996a). Even as he
argued against positions that are unmarked,
unmediated and transcendent, then, Ó
Tuathail unwittingly became part of this category. How dominant geopolitical scripts can
be destabilized and recast to take account of
people and places represented as the orientalized Other (see orientalism), for example, or
122
excluded from understandings of security and
political economy altogether, represents a
major challenge for critical geopolitics. To
expose the subjects effaced by realist geopolitics
and international relations is a laudable goal,
but how might political change be effected once
power relations have been exposed?
Sparke (2005) seeks to bridge this gap in his
analysis of the ways in which a Canadian
organization – the National Action Committee
on the Status of Women (NAC) – displaced the
masculinist and state-sponsored ‘big picture’
politics through the formation of a counterpublic. Sparke’s analysis of the material, political and gendered dimensions of geopolitics
employs a feminist politics of location that
goes beyond a purely discursive exegesis.
Dalby (1994) noted the lack of attention to
gender at the intersection of IR theory and
critical geopolitics, reiterating important
issues that had long been raised by feminists.
He examined the ways in which geopolitical
categories of security are gendered and the
gender-blind analysis of much IR theory.
His overview of gender and feminism in IR
underscored the broader absence of feminist
voices in geopolitics during the 1990s, with
notable exceptions (Kofman and Peake,
1990; Kofman, 1996). Since then, conversations between feminist geography and geopolitics have considerably increased, and much of
the work that fills these silences is directed
towards an explicitly feminist geopolitics
(Staeheli, Kofman and Peake, 2004; Hyndman,
2004, 2007).
Critical geopolitics is not limited to the
orthodox trinity of gender, race and class.
Sharp (2000a) took critical geopolitics in new
directions in exploring the underdeveloped
connections between politics, popular culture
and sexuality, and studies like hers have also
extended the engagement of critical geopolitics with the visual rather than narrowly textual
(cf. Hughes, 2007; Strüver, 2007). The
agenda of critical geopolitics has been further
enlarged through explorations of discourses of
danger and security (Megoran, 2005), generosity and nationalist identity (Carter, 2006)
and affect, fear and emotion (Pain and
Smith, 2008). None of these studies is limited
to the analysis of discursive effects. These
extensions, and others like them, have opened
up the field of critical geopolitics and forged a
series of connections that involve far more
than political geography; critical geopolitical
perspectives now reach deep into human
geography at large and, as befits their interdisciplinary orientations, across a still wider
CRITICAL HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
interdisciplinary space. It is now difficult to
imagine critical analysis of, say, american
empire, colonialism, imperialism or terrorism that does not touch on critical geopolitics
at some point. These are vital developments,
at once political and intellectual, because they
disclose a series of intersections between biopolitics (see biopower), geopolitics and geoeconomics that lie at the heart of the contemporary political moment and that urgently
require critical analysis (cf. Sparke, 2007). jh
critical human geography
Theoretically
informed geographical scholarship, committed to Leftist politics, social justice and liberation through scholarly enquiry. Critical
geography is one variant of the rich tradition
of critical enquiry in social science and the
humanities that embraces Marx’s call not only
to interpret the world, but to change it. Fay
defines contemporary critical science as the
‘attempt to understand in a rationally responsible manner the oppressive features of a society such that this understanding stimulates
its audience to transform their society and
thereby liberate themselves’ (1987, p. 4). Agger
(1998) identifies several features of critical social
theory, as practiced in fields such as geography.
These include: a rejection of positivist enquiry
(see positivism); an endorsement of the possibility of progress; a model of society characterized by structural domination produced, in
part, through myth and ideology; and a rejection of revolutionary expediency with a concomitant faith in the agency of everyday change
and self-transformation.
Critical human geography emerged from a
long tradition of dissent. Although its predecessors include the anarchist geography of scholars
such as Reclus and Kroptkin (see anarchism),
Anglo-American critical geography’s roots are to
be found in the radical geography that
emerged in the 1970s (see Peet, 2000). A selfidentified field of critical geography began to
emerge in the late 1980s. Important departures
included a rejection of some of the structural
excesses of marxism (in line with a general postmodern turn), and a sharpening interest in questions of culture and representation, as
opposed to the economic focus of radical geography. Radical and critical geography, while
closely related, are not interchangeable. Some
observers (Castree, 2000) worry at the eclipse
of the former by the latter.
One important consequence of the postmodern turn has been that critical geography
is remarkably varied in its commitments.
For Hubbard, Kitchin, Bartley and Fuller
(2002), critical geography is diverse in its
epistemology, ontology and methodology, and lacks a ‘distinctive theoretical
identity’ (p. 62). That said, certain common
themes can be discerned (Blomley, 2006).
These include:
(1) A commitment to social theory and a
rejection of empiricism: critical geographers draw from a number of theoretical wells, including political economy,
queer theory, post-colonialism and
feminism.
(2) Self-consciously oppositional enquiry:
scholarship that seeks to unmask power,
demonstrate inequality, uncover resistance and foster emancipatory politics
and social change.
(3) An emphasis on representation as a site
for domination and resistance: given a
general interest in discourse and meaning, one common focus is the ways in
which representations of space serve to
sustain power (or conversely, can be used
to challenge power).
(4) An optimistic faith in the power of critical
scholarship: critical geography can both
undo oppressive forms of social power,
and provide transformative insights. In
speaking truth to power, in other words,
the scholar can undo domination, and
free the oppressed: ‘Dissentient thoughts
and norm-challenging information can,
as history shows, be as potent as armies
given the right conditions’, Castree and
Wright (2005, p. 2) argue.
(5) A commitment to progressive praxis:
critical geographers claim common-cause
with movements committed to social
justice. The precise nature of the relation, and the appropriate focus for, and
locus of, activism has been much debated
(Fuller and Kitchin, 2004b).
(6) space as a critical tool: a particular attention to the ways in which spatial arrangements and representations can serve to
produce inequality and oppression and
opposition. To varying degrees, critical
geographers note the ways in which
space can serve as both a tool and veil
of power.
Some important and unresolved questions
remain. For example, relatively limited discussion has occurred over the shared commitments, if any, of critical geographers (though
cf. Harvey, 2000b). What are geographers critical of? Why? And to what end? To borrow
123
CRITICAL RATIONALISM
from Barnes (2002), critical geographers are
better at the ‘explanatory-diagnostic’ than the
‘anticipatory-utopian’. Critical geography, for
Barnes, needs ‘an imaginative capacity to
reconfigure the world and our place within it’
(p. 12). This should not entail enforced political conformity, of course. However, too often,
the politics that informs critical geography
remains implicit and inchoate. More generally,
what are the assumptions implicit to critical
scholarship? Agger (1998), in a supportive
critique of critical social science, raises concerns that it posits a view of human capacity
that is predicated on ‘an inflated conception of
the powers of human reason and will’ (p. 9).
Another important question concerns the
institutionalization of critical geography. While
critical geographers like to think of themselves
as rebels and outsiders (and were certainly treated as such by the disciplinary establishment
fifteen years ago), critical enquiry has become
pervasive in geography (Byles, 2001). Critical
geography, Castree (2000, p. 958) notes ‘has
insinuated itself into the very heart of the discipline’. While this may reflect its analytical
strengths and insights, others worry that institutionalization has entailed co-optation. Has
critical enquiry lost not only its verve, but also
its commitment to political change?
Such charges have come, in part, from critical geographers outside the Anglophone
world. For it should be noted that critical geography is practiced (often in distinct ways)
across the globe. The particular insights of, for
example, Hungarian (Timar, 2003) or Japanese
(Mizuoka, Mizuuchi, Hisatake, Tsutsumi and
Fujita, 2005) critical geography needs to be
better acknowledged (Bialasiewicz, 2003).
Better linkages should also be forged with
critical scholars in other disciplines.
On this point, the formation of the
International Critical Geography group should
be noted. This is a loose network of likeminded geographers from Europe, Asia and
North America who embrace internationalism
and critical enquiry (Desbiens and Smith,
1999). A series of innovative workshops and
conferences have been held, beginning with a
gathering in Vancouver in 1998.
nkb
Suggested reading
Blunt and Wills (2000); Castree and Gregory
(2006).
criticalrationalism A philosophy of science
developed by Karl Popper (1902–94), asserting
the progressive growth in knowledge through
continued rational criticism. Nothing should be
124
sacrosanct; everything should be open to scrutiny. While Popper believed that knowledge in
the traditional sense of certainty, or justified
true belief, was unobtainable, sustained rational
criticism would allow us to get ‘nearer to the
truth’ (Popper, 1945, vol. 2, p. 237).
Popper ranged enormously in his philosophical interests over a long life, but two are
particularly germane for critical rationalism.
First, his thesis of falsification was developed in opposition to the verifiability principle
of logical positivism. Verification, Popper
argued, required that the truthfulness of a scientific statement be unambiguously proven for
every conceivable instance: past, present and
future. This could never happen, said Popper
(1959). Instead, he proposed that scientific
statements are defined by their potential to
be falsified. Science advances not by knowing
what is true, but by knowing what is false.
Second, we have Popper’s ideas about the
growth of human knowledge: he claimed that
scientists begin work not with bare facts (again
logical positivism’s contention), but with
problems to be solved. The starting points
are hypotheses, hunches, conjectures about
potential solutions and then comparisons with
existing theory (Popper, 1963). Should the
new conjecture remain unfalsified and possess
greater ‘empirical content’ than the old theory,
the new should replace the old. By greater
empirical content Popper meant the ability
of the hypothesis to account for hitherto
anomalous results, solve as yet unsolvable
problems or make (correct) predictions about
phenomena not so far predicted. When
Einstein’s theory of relativity was conjectured,
for example, it could not be falsified and
made correct predictions that went beyond
Newton’s old theory. Consequently, the cosmos became Einsteinian, science progressed
and human knowledge grew. Behind the latter
lay the strategy of critical rationalism: critical
in that any theory demonstrably false was
eliminated; and rational in that the best theory,
the one with the most explanatory force and
predictive power, was chosen among those
that remained. There was qualified progress,
but progress nonetheless.
It is odd that critical rationalism, and
Popper’s writings more generally, were only
barely taken up in geography. Popper’s belief
in realism, rationality and progress, as well as
in the importance of critique, conjecture and
scepticism about ultimate truth, were made
for the discipline at least in its guise as science
during the quantitative revolution. Instead,
geographers clung to various forms of
CRITICAL THEORY
positivism, the very philosophy that Popper
thought he had demolished in 1935.
Programmatic statements were made on the
behalf of critical rationalism by some geographers including Wilson (1972), one of the
key proponents of a scientific approach to
geography during the 1960s, and by Bird
(1975, 1989), and Chouinard, Fincher and
Webber (1984) used Lakatos’ critique and
reformulation of Popper’s proposals to outline
the conduct of research programmes in a nominally scientific human geography. But critical
rationalism was never realized in practice
within geography. Indeed, the very idea of
such a normative philosophical scheme set
out in advance to generate scientific progress
became increasingly unattractive, especially in
the social sciences, after Kuhn’s (1970 [1962])
writings on paradigms, which stressed the
messiness of scientific practice and the role of
ruptures and revolutions in scientific advance.
Further, as human geography moved towards
postmodernism and post-structuralism and
their various commitments to anti-realism,
relativism and incommensurability, the prospects of Popper’s critical rationalism gaining
hold in the discipline became ever more
remote.
tjb
Suggested reading
Bird (1975). See also Critical rationalism study
page: http://www.geocities.com/criticalrationalist/
critical theory A primarily European tradition of social and political thought centrally
concerned with critical reflection on capitalism and modernity. It is closely associated
with the work of the so-called Frankfurt
School, which emerged in Germany in the
1920s. The School formed amidst the defeat
of left-wing parties in western Europe, the
degeneration of the Russian revolution into
Soviet Stalinism and the rise of fascism. The
members of the School expanded classical
marxism, drawing upon ideas from Freud,
Weber and others outside the Marxist tradition, and in particular sought to supplement
the orthodox focus on political economy
with concepts drawn from the spheres of aesthetics, culture and philosophy. Its key members were Theodor Adorno (1903–69), Max
Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Herbert
Marcuse (1898–1979); another scholar associated with the School, Walter Benjamin
(1892–1940), committed suicide fleeing
Nazi-occupied France. By then, most members of the School had already moved to the
USA, returning to Germany in the 1950s. The
key postwar representative of critical theory is
Jürgen Habermas (1929– ).
Horkheimer (1975) defined critical theory
in contrast to traditional theory (the neutral,
objective stance claimed in the natural sciences). Unlike traditional theory, critical social
theory had to be reflexive and account for its
own social origins and purposes. Its attitude
was one of distrust towards the social rules
and conventions encountered by individuals
in their daily lives. The critical theorists
identified new trends in capitalism with the
emergence of monopolies, the closer association of state and capital, the growth of
bureaucracy, and the rationalization of social
life linked to the dominance of instrumental
reason. They explored issues of identity,
authoritarianism, the spread of commodity
production, reification and alienation. They
were concerned with the way in which culture had become an industry, with popular
cultural forms serving to distract workers
from the increasingly repetitive nature of
their daily work, thus promoting a sense of
fatalism and blocking the potential for resistance. Their conclusions on the ideological
barriers to revolution in an increasingly onedimensional society tended to confirm a logic
of domination that led to a pessimistic political
immobility that they found it difficult to break
out of.
Jürgen Habermas has carried on the tradition of critical theory in the postwar period,
but has also modified it in important ways. His
early work presents a theory of knowledgeconstitutive interests (technical, practical and
emancipatory) that guide different types of
science – empirical–analytical, hermeneutic
and critical (Habermas, 1987). Here, critical
theory takes on the role of a therapeutic critique, modelled on Freudian psychoanalytic
theory and directed towards freeing society
from ideologically distorted perceptions.
Problems with this formulation led
Habermas to take an important ‘communicative turn’ in the formulation of critical theory
in the 1970s (Habermas, 1984, 1987). Social
life requires co-operative, communicative
interaction and Habermas undertakes the
‘rational reconstruction’ of the underlying system of rules that speakers must master in order
to communicate. Speakers uttering a sentence
necessarily (though usually implicitly) make
certain validity claims (to truth, rightness,
sincerity, intelligibility). A genuine rational
consensus on the basis of these validity claims
can emerge only under conditions of free
and unconstrained debate that Habermas
125
CRITICAL THEORY
critical theory Lifeworld and system
summarizes as ‘the ideal speech situation’.
This serves as a basis for the critique of ideology as distorted communication and false
consensus. Critical theory can thus be shown
to be grounded on normative standards
that are not arbitrary, but that are inherent
in the very structure of language and
communication.
Habermas links these ideas to an evolutionary, developmental model of social evolution
as a learning process. As societies evolve, ‘system’ (which is to say those areas of social life
coordinated through the steering mechanisms
of money and power) becomes differentiated
and uncoupled from ‘lifeworld’ (the storehouse of background convictions and world
views against which individuals come to a
mutual understanding) (see figure). Capitalist
modernization can then be criticized as a
process of one-sided rationalization, involving
the ‘colonizing’ of the lifeworld through
the over-extension of steering mechanisms
of markets, bureaucracy and technological
rationality.
Habermas sees his work as an attempt to
continue the enlightenment tradition in the
face of the irrational challenges of postmodernism (Habermas, 1990 [1985]). However,
his own views have been criticized for presenting an ethnocentric view of evolution and
rationality, and many have found his foundationalist arguments for an ‘inherent telos of
speech’
oriented
towards
consensus
unconvincing.
Others have taken up the challenge posed in
his writings in new ways. Thomas McCarthy,
for example, is a leading figure in attempts
to build links between Habermas’ critical
126
theory and elements of American pragmatism. McCarthy’s book-length exchange with
David Hoy over the relative merits of a critical
theory based on the work of Habermas and the
genealogical approach of Foucault brings out
superbly the relative strengths and weaknesses
of the critical theory tradition (Hoy and
McCarthy, 1994). Hoy argues that Foucault
actually provides an alternative way of continuing the tradition of critical theory by developing an internal, genealogical critique that
brings to light the historicity of our reason
and self-understanding. In response, McCarthy
continues to defend Habermas’ aim of constructing a systematic theory of reason and
context-transcending truth claims as a necessary basis for critique. This aim also serves
to differentiate Habermas’ engagement with
pragmatism from the more extreme constructivist and ethnocentrist views of Richard
Rorty (see Habermas’ exchange with Rorty in
Brandom, 2000).
Two further caveats are necessary. First, it is
obviously the case that this particular tradition
of critical theory does not have a monopoly
on the concept of ‘critical’. Habermas and
Popper famously tussled over the critical
claims of critical rationalism, for example,
while realism asserts its critical potential on
the basis of a distinction between surface
appearances and underlying, causal mechanisms in a stratified view of reality. Similarly,
although the project of a critical human
geography has invoked critical theory in the
sense discussed here (see Gregory, 1978a,
1994), it is a much more heterodox tradition.
In part – and the second caveat – this is
because neither Habermas nor his critics have
CULTURAL ECOLOGY
paid much attention to the spatialities implicit
in his formulations. Yet his work is, inevitably,
a situated knowledge: his writings have
been a response to the dilemmas of postwar
Germany seeking to come to terms with
the ghosts of its fascist past, and many of his
arguments are centred on a particular, even
privileged, view of europe. More than this,
however, the colonization of the lifeworld that
Habermas claims to identify mirrors, in a radically different register, Lefebvre’s account of
the superimposition of abstract space over
concrete space (Gregory, 1994: see also production of space), and may be glimpsed in an
earlier form in the spatial impress of European
colonial systems on the lifeworlds of native
peoples (Harris, 1991). Of all those who have
been associated with critical theory, however,
it has probably been the tragic figure of
Benjamin who has left the most enduring
mark on human geography: his experimental
renderings of the city, in text and as montage,
are powerful reminders that modernism was
a critique of modernity and not merely a celebration of it, and have inspired conceptual
elaborations (e.g. Latham, 1999) and eloquent
investigations (e.g. Pred, 1995).
kb
Suggested reading
Bernstein (1995b); Rush (2004).
cultural capital A concept coined by the
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, cultural
capital is one among many forms of capital
that figure prominently in his intellectual project; namely, to elaborate ‘a general science of
the economy of practices’ that would explain
the ‘economic logic’ behind apparently noneconomic and therefore disinterested practices
such as gift exchange or cultural consumption.
Cultural capital is closely linked to and functions in conjunction with economic capital (the
conventional and most crudely material form
of capital that inhabits economic theory)
and social capital. The inter-convertibility
of various forms of capital is a critical rather
than incidental element in Bourdieu’s theory
of practice; but Bourdieu is careful to note that
the fungibility of cultural and social capital
into economic capital is conditional rather
than guaranteed, and frequently partial (in
short, not without risk). Two additional concepts, symbolic capital and academic capital,
which have close affinities with the concept
of cultural capital, also appear in Bourdieu’s
writings. That said, academic capital may be
regarded as a subset of cultural capital and
symbolic capital as a superset.
In his instructive treatise, Distinction: a social
critique of the judgment of taste (1984), Bourdieu
deploys the concept of cultural capital to great
effect to show how bourgeois practices of
cultural consumption – via the arts, education, cuisine, attire and so on – consolidate
an aesthetic that ‘consciously and deliberately
or not . . . fulfill[s] a social function of legitimating social differences’. But his clearest
discussion of the concept is in a short, oftenoverlooked essay called ‘The forms of capital’,
where Bourdieu identifies three states in which
cultural capital can exist: ‘in the embodied
state, i.e. in the form of long-lasting dispositions of mind and body; in the objectified
state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures,
books, dictionaries, instruments, machines,
etc.) which are the trace or realization of theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state [as educational qualifications] . . . ’
(1985, p. 243).
Key aspects of cultural capital differentiate
it from economic capital: principal among
these are its necessarily embodied form, which
makes it both less fungible and less easily
acquired than economic capital; and the more
overtly social and disguised conditions of its
transmission. Economic logic dictates the efficacy of cultural capital: hence, the symbolic
profits of distinction (e.g. the ability to read
in a society of illiterates) that accrue from
cultural capital depend on the scarcity value
of that capital, which in turn depends on its
distribution within society. The more illdistributed a particular form of capital, the
greater is its value. In a circular argument,
Bourdieu maintains that inequalities in the
distribution of capital – in short, class divisions – are reproduced intergenerationally by
those very forms of capital that demarcate
class status in the first instance: ultimately,
he writes, ‘the means of appropriating the
product of accumulated labor in the objectified state which is held by a given agent [i.e.
various forms of capital], depends for its real
efficacy on the form of distribution of the
means of appropriating the accumulated and
objectively available resources . . . ’ (1985,
pp. 245–6).
vg
Suggested reading
Guillory (1993); Lane (2000).
cultural ecology An important, if somewhat
under-appreciated, precursor to contemporary
political ecology. Cultural ecology has been
primarily concerned with the relationships
among the transformation of nature, social
127
CULTURAL ECONOMY
reproduction and cultural processes within particular social formations. Emerging from North
American anthropology in the mid-twentieth
century, cultural ecology has mostly concerned
itself with non-industrial societies, typically
pastoralists, hunter–gathers, fishing cultures
and small-scale cultivators, with an emphasis
on ethnographic field methods. Cultural ecology in this sense is most closely associated with
the work of Julian Steward and the Chicago
school, particularly after the publication of
Steward’s Theory of culture change (1955).
Work done or influenced by Steward in this
tradition emphasized a close relationship
between symbolic culture (values, religious
beliefs and traditions) on the one hand, and
the material, ecological basis of a society on
the other. Steward in particular developed the
notion of a ‘cultural core’ shaped in a possibilist
sense by the ways in which critical environmental resources (crops, animals, energy sources
etc.) were used by a culture. It would be fair to
say that Steward’s primary interest was cultural
formation and change, but cultural ecology
more generally was at the forefront of scholarly
attention to questions about the social bases of
environmental change, how cultures respond
or adapt to environmental change and also
how cultures influence the management of critical environmental resources. Moreover, considerable theoretical and methodological
diversity characterizes self-described cultural
ecologists (Netting, 1986).
As the name would suggest, cultural ecology
was heavily influenced by the rise of ecology.
This is true not only in terms of a focus on the
relationship between environmental conditions and cultural processes, but also in some
of the conceptual emphasis on systems, adaptation, homeostasis, resilience, stability and
so on, all hallmarks of an earlier phase of
ecology (see ecology). It would be unfair to
attribute the kind of telos so evident in
Clementsian ecology to cultural ecology. But
some work in cultural ecology took on
a cybernetic character, conveying a sense that
all the pieces of a culture meshed into a coherent, smooth-running, well-adapted and stable
machine-like whole, with culture functionally linked to environmental conditions and
resource availability. This is apparent, for
example, in Roy Rappaport’s (1968) work on
wild pigs, and the spiritual beliefs and rituals
surrounding these resources in New Guinea.
At the same time, strict adherence to traditional ethnography in cultural ecology at
times meant that particular social formations were conceptualized rigidly as such,
128
independent and isolated from the rest of the
world, with little or no consideration of or
facility for the ways in which these ostensibly
remote cultures articulate with social processes at broader scales of analysis. This, in
turn, meant that cultural ecology provided little capacity for understanding power, the
appropriation of surplus and valuation in the
context of a global political economy, even
when important linkages along these lines
were recognized by cultural ecologists themselves (Robbins, 2004). This is a theme articulated well by one of Steward’s students, Eric
Wolf (1982), in his argument for the relevance
of political economy, and of the need for
attention to the articulation of local social formations with broader social processes.
Cultural ecology’s influence goes far beyond
localized studies of non-industrial societies,
however. As among the first fields to reverse
academic specialization, and to seriously consider environmental change within a social
science framework, and with an emphasis on
careful, empirical observation and analysis,
cultural ecology had an important influence in
translating and reinforcing environmentalism
in the Anglo-American academy. Cultural
ecologists in numerous instances have documented the high levels of sophistication and
sustainability in many ‘traditional’ settings,
questioning the apparent ‘advancement’ of
market-guided and/or state-managed resource
appropriation (e.g. Geertz, 1963). And some
cultural ecologists, before even talk of a first
world political ecology, began to apply their
approaches in more industrialized settings,
with important results (see, e.g., BaylissSmith, 1982).
sp
cultural economy In mainstream economics, culture and economy are kept largely
apart, in the belief that economic activity
follows its own rules and rationality. In contrast, heterodox approaches, tapping deep into
the history of classical economics, have long
argued that the economy draws on cultural
inputs or is culturally embedded. Thus, attention has been drawn, inter alia, to such
phenomena as the rise of the cultural industries, the role of spectacle, advertising and
desire in sustaining consumption, the lubrication of economic relationships by trust and
reciprocity, varieties of capitalism explained
by differences in national institutional and
business cultures, and the role of culturally
inflected routines and habits in influencing
economic evolution. These various approaches
acknowledge the existence of a tight link
CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
between culture and economy, but still continue to treat the two domains as separate
entities, arguing that logics governing the two
should not be conflated (Ray and Sayer,
1997). Indeed, many writers sympathetic
to these approaches insist on the continued
primacy of political economy over cultural
economy.
More recently, however, a second generation of cultural economy theorization has
emerged, one that sees only a singular plane
holding together hybrid inputs including
abstract rules, historical legacies, symbolic
and discursive narratives, social and cultural
habits, material arrangements, emotions and
aspirations (Callon, 1999; Du Gay and Pryke,
1999; Hetherington and Law, 1999). Still
struggling for an exact vocabulary and dispersed across the social sciences, this
approach sees economy as a cultural act and
culture as an economic act, so that meeting
material needs and making a profit or earning
a living can be seen as part and parcel of
seeking symbolic satisfaction, pleasure and
power. Accordingly, in explaining the economics of production, for example, corporate
values, workplace cultures, conventions of
welfare and rituals of creativity can be shown
to shape competitive potential, along with
various rules of technological, organizational
and market ordering. Similarly, in the economics of markets, rules of value based on
price and other forms of rating can be shown
to weave in with consumer tastes, the seductions of organized spectacle and the market
power of some economic actors.
This variant of the cultural economy
approach is marked by a number of conceptual orientations with long histories in classical
economic thought (for a synthesis, see Amin
and Thrift, 2004). One concerns the absolute
centrality of passions in the economy, from the
libidinal energies and spectacle of consumption and possession that drive ‘fast capitalism’,
through to the love of objects that now so
powers wants and needs. A second orientation, which can be traced back to Adam
Smith’s emphasis on the role of empathy in
making the market economy work, highlights
the pivotal significance of moral values, as
manifest in the market ethic itself and in the
social conventions that justify particular mores
of economic behaviour (hedonism, individualism, fast food as bad/good food, trade versus
aid). Third, there is new work on the economics of knowledge that recognizes the centrality
of creativity based on unconscious neural
mobilizations, material cultures and
learning-by-doing in small communities of
practice. A fourth orientation is to explain
generalized trust in ways that supersede the
emphasis on interpersonal dynamics found in
earlier variants of cultural economy. For
example, Seabright (2004) has argued that
the option of intimacy among strangers in the
market economy, in which multitudes of economic actors who do not know each other
constantly jostle, is lubricated by many cultural institutions that have evolved over time,
including the facility of laughter. A fifth orientation is to explain economic power less as a
force possessed or wielded by some actors and
institutions than as a diffuse and subtle form of
cultural enrolment, scripted in the standards,
rules and accounting measures that daily
produce disciplined subjects and regulate
economic life, or through particular narratives
of what counts as significant in business
journals, advertising scripts and stories of corporate prowess. Finally, the cultural-economy
approach, following a long lineage of projection from particular situations (e.g. Marx’s
projections on capitalist futures based on the
British experience) explores the integrative
work done by readings of the economy (e.g.
Daniel Bell on the service economy or Manuel
Castells on the information economy).
This new body of thought, in summary,
rethinks the economy as a culturally infused
entity, based on the potentialities of passion,
moral sentiments, soft knowledge, instituted
trust, symptoms of normality and discursive
forms of power. These are considered to drive
economic life at all levels and manifestations. aa
Suggested reading
Amin and Thrift (2007).
cultural geography One of the most rapidly
growing and energetic sub-fields in Anglophone
geography over the past 20 years. Many have
written of a cultural turn in geography
paralleling those in other social sciences.
Often the subject of controversy over its
approaches, claims and methods cultural
geography has seen the reinvigoration of some
topics and the development of whole new
topics of geographic enquiry. Indeed, it may
be that we can identify a recent ‘culturalization’ of many branches of geography, rather
than simply a field of ‘cultural geography’ –
thus, it is not always clear if the field is defined
by culture as the content of study, and what
its limits might be, or the approach used.
There is also a long history of the study of
the geography of cultures that has had an
129
CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
often-troubled relationship with the recent
surge in interest in the field. So, for the sake
of clarity, we shall start with these legacies,
then move to the explosion of work in the
1990s and finally point to current fragmentations in the field.
Throughout most of the twentieth century,
cultural geography existed as a sub-field in
different traditions of geography that addressed
‘the existence of a variegated landscape
of differentially adapted human groups to
their immediate environment’ (Archer, 1993,
p. 500). To draw out three approaches to
this topic:
. In North American geography, the dominant tradition was the berkeley school,
built around the work of Carl Ortwin
Sauer (1889–1975). So powerful was this
tradition that around the middle of the
twentieth century cultural geography was
often used to label all human geography
in US universities. Drawing on the work
especially of emerging anthropological perspectives on material culture, from the
likes of Franz Boas (1858–1942), Sauer
added a geographical focus on landscape,
drawn from German geography’s work on
landschaft. His most famous formulation
on the morphology of landscape (in his
essay of that name in 1925) described the
cultural landscape, where culture was
the agent and landscape the medium.
Work in this tradition charted the origins
and diffusion of cultures around the globe
from cultural hearths. In this, it tracked
the movement mostly via material artefacts, taken as metonyms of cultures in
which they were embedded. Some work
developed a notion of cultural areas dominated by one cultural group occupying an
area. The focus on culture as an agent led
to accusations that it was inventing
a ‘superorganic’ entity rather than focusing
on the mixed, changeable and contested
experience of people (Duncan, 1980).
Despite its empirical attention to processes
of diffusion and change in cultures contacting different environments, it tended
to a singular view of culture held by and
defining a group.
. The focus on the mutual shaping of people
and place was echoed in European traditions in cultural geography. The annales
school that developed in France from the
work of Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–
1918) is claimed by cultural, and by social
and historical geography. It paid close
130
attention to linkage of people and place
through ‘genres de vie’; that is, the ways
of everyday life. Exemplary works such as
Le Roy Ladurie’s (1966) Les Paysans de
Languedoc charted the intimate connections of the rhythms of daily life and the
environment over the long durée, creating
a ‘seamless robe’ of people and place. Vidal
de la Blache (1903) summarized this
process as follows:
It is man who reveals a country’s individuality by moulding it to his own use. He
establishes a connection between unrelated
features, substituting for the random effects
of local circumstances a systematic cooperation of forces. Only then does a country
acquire a specific character, differentiating
it from others, till at length it becomes, as
it were, a medal struck in the likeness of a
people.
The focus was on ordinary folk and everyday
cultures rather than high culture. Perhaps the
greatest studies building from these traditions,
that are still causing controversy, were those of
Fernand Braudel (1902–85), whose magisterial works of the shared development of a
Mediterranean culture (see Braudel and
Reynolds, 1975 [original French 1949]) –
based around olives, wine and grain, and the
long-term patterns of trade – remain scholarly
landmarks. These works echoed the studies of
Frédéric le Play (1806–82), who developed a
geographical account of France around the
categories of Place–Work–Folk. His work was
picked up by the British planner and biologist
Patrick Geddes, and led to the foundation
of the Le Play Society that sponsored a range
of geographical expeditions during the midtwentieth century. They share the vision of
groups creating a cultural homeland as ‘an
area carved out by axe and plough, which
belongs to the people who have carved it out’
(Olwig, 1993, p. 311).
. In British geography, a regional approach
was inspired by Hettner’s Länderkunde
schema (see Hettner, 1907) of natural
base up to social and finally cultural superstructure – starting from geology, then
topography, climate, natural resources
and finally leading to settlement and
human culture adapted to those circumstances (Heimatkunde). A similarly chorological approach in Swedish geography
focused on hembydsforskning (home area
studies), and drew upon ethnological studies of material culture and language to
CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
define cultural regions (Crang, 2000). In
Britain, Geddes’ influence produced a regional survey approach that emphasized a
visual integration of the landscape as a
method of finding unity (Matless, 1992),
while the local history work on landscapes
of W.G. Hoskins focused on studies that
sought to capture the identity and spirit of
specific regions through their landscapes.
These classic traditions focused upon the
commonalities in the landscape and rural, historical or traditional forms. Criticism of this
tendency mounted through the last quarter
of the twentieth century. First, humanistic
geography challenged the lack of concern
with, and scope for, individual interpretation
and actions. Authors looked at the meaning of
places for specific people, and the emotional
geographies of cultures found in the bond
with specific places and their genius loci
(e.g. Pocock, 1982). Second, radical, feminist and marxist geography criticized the
assumptions of organic wholeness given to
cultures, and pointed to the internal divisions,
contradictions and conflicts while, moreover,
pointing to more contemporary and urban
formations. Third, the political context and
implications of European traditions has been
examined. Thus the work of a German geographer such as Franz Petri, writing between
the world wars, examined the spread of
Germanic culture from a supposed ancestral
cultural hearth around post-Roman Frankish
peoples. Based upon an examination of field
and place names, taken as indicators of
Germanic culture, he could label ‘[t]he character of Frankish settlement in Walloon and
Northern France [as] utterly Germanic’ (Ditt,
2001, p. 245) – a highly charged verdict, given
the territorial disputes around Germany. This
highlights the problematic relationship of artefact to cultures – choosing certain things as
indicators of a culture, but leaving other things
as analytically insignificant, reveals political
dimensions and choices in the analysis.
To these issues was added engagement with
other sub-disciplines and fields outside geography, which – in the last two decades of the
twentieth century – were also undergoing their
own cultural turns. We might, for the sake of
argument, characterize the work that followed
in two strands, the first tending to respond
to developments in social geography and sociology, and the second as drawing from the
radical ends of the arts and humanities.
Together, they have often been labelled the
‘New Cultural Geography’, which began as
something of a rebellion to the above traditions but rapidly swept on to transform other
sub-disciplines as well.
The first strand drew on work from behavioural geography, to which it added the long
tradition of ethnography from the chicago
school of urban sociology, and arguments
over the sociology of culture emerging in the
1970s and through the 1980s. This inspired a
rich vein of work on urban cultures and subcultures in modern everyday life. The latter
were seen as resistance or transgression, contesting the categories of the majority culture.
Culture was no longer seen as somehow
a ‘natural’ property of a group but, rather,
the medium of power, oppression, contestation and resistance. Much of this work grew
from an engagement with the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
and worked to look at the role of culture in
securing and maintaining the hegemony of
dominant groups. It began to push at the cultural construction of social categories (such as
age, race, class, sexuality or gender) and
the ways in which these came to signify
particular meanings and be connected with
specific ways of life (e.g. Bell and Valentine,
1995; Kofman, 1998; Skelton and Valentine,
1998; Pred, 2000).
The second strand of work was differentiated not so much by topic as by method,
drawing from the arts and humanities. Work
here drew on critical studies of often high
cultural artefacts such as art and literature,
but moved these techniques to include more
popular cultural forms such as film or other
media. Rather than using these cultural forms
as sources of ‘data’ about what occurred in
places, or as rich evocations of emotional resonance (which had been the tendency in
humanistic geography; e.g. Pocock, 1981),
it unpacked the spatialities of the materials to
examine what work they did in representing
and shaping cultures. Thus landscape paintings were examined not just for content, but
the way in which they framed the landscape –
indeed, created ‘landscape’ as a visual category. Often using a linguistic approach,
studies treated cultural artefacts as texts that
could be read and interpreted to uncover hidden meanings and the imprints of the power
that shaped them and which they embodied.
In this, it drew from the techniques of deconstruction and post-structuralism, which
focused on how texts shape meaning through
processes of exclusion or repression, whereby
they downplay or negate some possible interpretations while foregrounding others. The
131
CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
recovery of these hidden meanings was thus
linked to recovering the voices and views
of silenced and oppressed groups, especially
in studies informed by post-colonialism
(Blunt and McEwan, 2002). This latter work
also inspired studies of cultural definition and
difference (e.g. Anderson, 2007), especially
the creation of otherness. Here, the focus
became how cultural artefacts were not simply
indicators of cultural belonging, waiting to be
analysed by academics, but were actively
used to signal and create identities by ordinary
people.
These two approaches often fused and
cross-pollinated. For instance, work on urban
ethnicity moved from segregation analyses,
of distributions of peoples, to studies of the
lived experience of those cultures, how they
signified belonging and how they signified
exclusion. Rather than now examining the distribution of cultures seen as discrete entities
occupying more or less exclusive territories,
cultural geography engaged with the study of
connections, movements and circulations of
meanings in transnationalism and diasporic
cultures created in the modern global world.
These often form examples of cultural
hybridity and hybridization, which confound
the exclusions and repressions of hegemonic
cultures that sought to maintain a link of
people (singular) and territory. Studies saw
the multiple categories of identity connected
and inflected by people’s local milieu (e.g., on
youth, class and race, Nayak, 2003), or looked
at the fluidities and fixities of labelling and
categorization in transforming urban milieux
(Pred, 2000).
Beyond issues of ethnicity, cultural geography moved to explore many other aspects
of identity politics (Keith and Pile 1993;
Pile and Keith, 1997), such as sexuality and
disability, which became ever more salient
in the closing years of the twentieth century.
The main focus was on practices of inclusion
or exclusion, belonging, resistance and identity. A major strand of work emerged around
the different forms and modalities of consumption and how this related to people’s
identities.
The focus on identity and the meaning
of social activities was transplanted into other
formerly discrete sub-disciplines. Thus it
became increasingly common to see studies
of rural cultural geographies, concerning
issues of Otherness and identity (e.g. Cloke
and Little, 1997), and urban geographies of
cultures, political geographies about identity
or using similar methods in deconstructing
132
key texts in a critical geopolitics. In economic geography there was a double focus,
both on cultural forms in the cultural economy (e.g. Amin and Thrift, 2003) and on
‘enculturing’ approaches – focusing upon processes of meaning and belonging within both
firms and markets. In some cases this blurring
into other fields has been controversial and has
met with hostility from those who regard with
suspicion the topical focus (as not being of
great importance) or the methods as lacking
in either rigour or the appearance of rigour
sufficient to persuade policy-makers. There
have thus been arguments about the cultural
turn going ‘too far’ and undermining former
assumptions and unities (Martin and Sunley,
2001). The incorporation of cultural issues has
had an energizing effect on other sub-fields, but
has also meant that cultural geography’s own
distinctiveness has become less clear. As a subdiscipline it has been relatively unconcerned,
if not antipathetic, to policing the boundaries
of enquiry, especially given how it has shown
that definitions enact power relations and
often work to exclude groups. Likewise, it has
continued to draw catholically from other disciplines, blurring the edges of geography.
Within the sub-discipline, a recent series of
debates have begun to challenge some of the
sureties that have emerged over the past
20 years. First, while criticisms of idealism
have long been levelled at cultural geography,
often in the name of re-prioritizing other categories of analysis in the name of historical
materialism, a new set of theorizations of
materialism have emerged within the subfield itself. These often refuse the cartesian
divide into subject and object, and look at
thinking as a material process embedded in
the world. They also attempt to provide
renewed senses of agency for the material
world, rather than just focusing on human
agency. Some work challenges the anthropocentric basis of human geography, and culture
as a human artefact, drawing on posthumanism and driving renewed studies into animal
geographies. Second, debates have contested
the focus upon signification and meaning
within cultural geography. Instead, recent work
flags up the role of habit and routine focusing
on the unconscious and preconscious shaping
of identities and actions. Third, the focus
on the textual mode of interpretation has
been argued to privilege representation as a
social process. Instead, non-representational
theory focuses upon the performance and
enactment of identities. This rematerialization
and rethinking of cultural geography often
CULTURAL LANDSCAPE
returns to issues of dwelling and the relationship of people, but not peoples, to places
drawing inspiration from post-Heideggerian
and Deleuzian philosophy. It challenges a
preoccupation with representational forms
and meaning leading to the social construction
of identities. Instead, it focuses upon the
connection of material and social process in
forging identities in practices and actions.
These current debates promise to be as unruly
as previous developments, drawing widely
from outside the discipline and speaking to
topics across sub-disciplines.
mc
Suggested reading
Anderson, Domosh, Pile and Thrift (2002);
Atkinson, Jackson, Sibley and Washbourne
(2007); Blunt, Gruffudd, May. and Ogborn
(2003); Crang (1998); Mitchell (2000); ShurmerSmith (2002).
cultural hearth The place of origin of a cultural system. This concept was introduced into
American cultural geography by Carl Ortwin
Sauer (1952; see also 1969) and was important
in the early work of the berkeley school. Sauer
borrowed it from late-nineteenth-century
German anthropogeography, along with the
related notions of culture area, cultural landscape and cultural diffusion. For many in the
Berkeley School, the term was used primarily
to refer to the originary point of agricultural
systems that had subsequently diffused outwards. For others, it represented the heart
of cultural regions more broadly defined
(Wagner and Mikesell, 1962).
jsd
Suggested reading
Leighly (1969).
cultural landscape Conventionally, a principal object of study in cultural geography.
The classic definition is Carl Ortwin Sauer’s
(1963b [1925] – see figure):
The cultural landscape is fashioned from
a natural landscape by a cultural group.
Culture is the agent, the natural area the
medium, the cultural landscape is the result.
Under the influence of a given culture, itself
changing through time, the landscape
undergoes development, passing through
phases, and probably reaching ultimately
the end of its cycle of development.
This definition reflects not only Sauer’s
personal context and scholarly concerns
(see berkeley school), but also theoretical
issues that remain critical to discussions of
cultural landscape. His description of cultural
landscape as subject to evolutionary change
echoes W.M. Davis’ cycle of natural landscape
evolution, but Sauer was explicitly concerned
to counter environmental determinism and
drew upon German studies of Kulturlandschaft
that stressed the mutual shaping of people
(Volk) and land in the creation of dwelling
(Heimat) (Olwig, 2002). Sauer thus stressed
culture as a geographical agent, although
the physical environment retained a central
significance as the medium with and through
which human cultures act (see culture area).
Hence such elements as topography, soils,
watercourses, plants and animals were
incorporated into studies of the cultural landscape insofar as they evoked human responses
and adaptations, or had been altered by
human activity.
Today, Sauer’s neat distinction between
nature and culture has been largely abandoned in favour of a ‘social nature’ (see also
production of nature): the tabula rasa of a
‘natural landscape’ upon which ‘culture’
inscribes itself ignores the constancy of environmental change, and the dialectic of ‘nature’
and ‘culture’ is historically constructed. All
landscapes are at once natural and cultural
(Cosgrove, 1998 [1984]). Furthermore, contemporary cultural ecology has deepened
our understanding of the complexities of cultural landscape change, and post-colonialism has reworked perspectives on the
landscape impacts of colonialism (Sluyter,
2001, 2002; Mitchell, 2002e [1994]). In consequence, greater attention is now given to
grids of power, to cultural contestation and
to the active role played by the diverse
‘insiders’ of landscape, so that Sauer’s idea of
a climax cultural landscape swept away by a
rejuvenated one has been replaced by notions
of a more mediated, hybrid and transcultural
landscape (see also transculturation).
The emphasis on landscape’s representational and semiotic qualities, particularly in
studies informed by art history and iconography, has led to calls for renewed attention
to its substantive aspects: its materialities
and continued significance for lifeworlds.
While cultural landscape remains closely identified with the tangible, visible scene, landscapes are increasingly read by geographers
as moments in a networked process of social
relations that stretch across time and space
(see also sense of place). Closely connected
to these developments, a nuanced use of
phenomenology is apparent in some recent
studies of landscape in which narrative
133
CULTURAL POLITICS
cultural landscape
Natural landscape and cultural landscape (after Sauer, 1963 [1925])
strategies are used to explore and express the
co-constitution of material and experiential
space (Wylie, 2002b). Attention to myth, memory and ‘haunting’ embodied in the material
landscape is another expression of the retreat
from an exclusive focus on representation in
cultural landscape studies, but this is also
another insistent restatement of the importance
of historical apprehension that was the hallmark of Sauer’s original prospectus: but now
understood in radically different terms.
dec
Suggested reading
Béguin (1995); Duncan, Johnson and Schein
(2004).
cultural politics The processes through
which ‘meanings are negotiated and relations
of dominance and subordination are defined
and contested’ (Jackson, 1989, p. 2). An insistence that the cultural is political, involving relations of power and conflicting interests
between different groups, has been central
to much work in cultural studies and, more
recently, cultural geography. It depends
upon a view of culture as plural, as socially
produced and struggled over. Attention has
focused in particular on the role of space
and place in the construction of meanings and
identities as well as processes of resistance
and transgression, in recognition that ‘[c]
ulture wars are real wars’ (Mitchell, 2000,
p. 287).
dp
Suggested reading
Mitchell (2000).
134
cultural turn A set of intellectual developments that led to issues of culture becoming
central in human geography since the late
1980s. The renewed interest in questions of
culture is not confined to human geography,
but within the discipline the cultural turn
usually refers a number of related trends:
(1) the emergence of a ‘new’ cultural
geography;
(2) the increasing attention to culture in
sub-fields such as economic, environmental, historical and social geographies;
(3) claims that culture has become a more
important factor in the world itself – for
example, in economic processes or in
driving political conflict.
Theoretically, the cultural turn has promoted a
greater degree of pluralism in human geography, drawing on concepts from other disciplines and focusing attention on multiple
dimensions of difference (including gender,
race and sexuality). Methodologically,
the cultural turn has encouraged the use of a
wider range of interpretative and qualitative
methods. Epistemologically, the cultural turn
has underwritten a commitment to investigating the contingent and constructed qualities of
phenomena. It has also gone hand in hand with
a ‘geographical turn’ across the humanities
and social sciences more generally.
But the cultural turn has also been criticized
for distracting geographers from undertaking
research that is useful for policy-makers,
and for retreating from the ‘materialist’
CULTURE
analysis of power under capitalism. As these
objections show, the cultural turn is embedded in wider disputes about the relevance of
human geography research and teaching
(Barnett, 2004a), but both these criticisms
underestimate the ways in which cultural turns
have been pursued far beyond the academy
and in the very two spheres that the (different)
critics identify. Thus cultural economy has
demonstrated multiple ways in which ‘fast capitalism’ has taken a cultural turn that involves
not only the commodification of culture but
also the enrolment of cultural knowledges in
economic activities, and still more recently
the US military has pursued a ‘cultural turn’
in its search for a new counter-insurgency
strategy in its continued military operations
in Afghanistan and Iraq (Gregory, 2008b). cb
Suggested reading
Barnett (2004c).
culture Famously described by Raymond
Williams (1981) as one of the most complex
words in the English language, culture is also
one of the most influential, yet elusive, concepts in the humanities and social sciences.
Williams’ methodology, almost philological
in its attention to the historical accretion of
meaning around words, is indicative of a distinctive style of conceptualization that any
account of culture could do well to respect.
Rather than look for a single, essential meaning behind the complexity of usages of ‘culture’, Williams (ibid., p. 92) held that the
complexity ‘is not finally in the word but in
the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate’. These problems include
the relationship between the general and the
particular, individual and society, structure
and agency, autonomy and authority. What
emerges from the history of ‘culture’ is not a
word that designates an ontological entity,
but a complex noun of process, whose simplest derivation is related to the idea of cultivation. In short, culture best thought of as a
process, not a thing. Accordingly, Williams
identified three broad usages of culture: (i) a
general process of intellectual, spiritual development; (ii) culture as ‘a way of life’ characteristic of particular groups, whether nations,
classes or subcultures; and (iii) works and
practices of intellectual and artistic activity,
such as music, opera, television and film, and
literature (ibid., p. 90). This final sense is
derived from the first, since these works and
practices are the means of sustaining the process of development designated in (i).
In human geography, the concept of culture has had a variable history. In the tradition
of American cultural geography associated
with Carl Ortwin Sauer, culture was rarely an
object of explicit conceptual reflection. This
approach concentrated upon the empirical
scrutiny of material culture, understood as
expressions of unified cultural systems. Such a
view was criticized by Duncan (1980) for holding a ‘superorganic’ understanding that reified
culture as an independent entity with explanatory force (see berkeley school). This critique helped inaugurate the development of a
so-called new cultural geography, and a broader
cultural turn in human geography that drew
on concepts of culture from a range of disciplines such as anthropology, semiotics, cultural
studies, art history and literary theory. There
have been two broad stages in this centring of
culture as an object of conceptual debate in
human geography. The first stage involved the
assertion of the relevance of cultural or broadly
interpretative approaches in the discipline.
This stage ushered in a number of approaches
that emphasized the representational dimensions of cultural processes, and which also
tended to be strongly holistic, even functionalist, in their understandings of the relationships
between culture and other processes. The second stage of theorizing culture in human geography has concentrated on overcoming the
closures inadvertently set in place by the relative success of the first stage.
The new cultural geography that emerged
in the 1980s, and the cultural turn that followed in the wake of this and debates around
postmodernism, saw the concept of culture
subjected to explicit conceptual reflection
by geographers. In one strand of research,
landscape was re-conceptualized as a ‘way of
seeing’, or a ‘text’, or a ‘symbolic form’ or in
terms of iconography (see Cosgrove and
Daniels, 1988). These moves were often
inflected by traditions of marxism, but specifically by Marxist cultural theory that extended
beyond the confines of the Marxist political
economy that predominated in human geography (cf. critical theory). This relationship
has become increasingly strained, however, as
the difficulties of theorizing relationships of
agency, determination and meaning from
within the Marxist tradition have become
more acutely obvious. One outcome of this
reconceptualization of landscape has been an
anchoring of the concept of culture around a
notion of representation understood by analogy with seeing, imagination and vision. This
visual account of landscape and culture has
135
CULTURE
been the occasion for sustained critical
thought (Rose, 1993), but this debate about
culture and visuality has done little to contest
the narrowly visual construal of representation
bequeathed by this strand of the new cultural
geography (see also vision and visuality).
A second strand of research, emerging from
social geography, drew on concepts of culture from the new field of cultural studies.
Jackson (2003 [1989]) explicitly drew on
Williams’ cultural materialism to outline a programme for a revivified cultural geography.
Cultural materialism derives from Williams’s
argument that ‘culture is ordinary’, and builds
on the notion that culture should be understood as a ‘whole way of life’; that is, an active,
lived tradition of meanings or ‘structure of
feeling’. Williams drew on diverse sources (e.
g. conservative philosopher Edmund Burke
and liberal critic F.R. Leavis), but gave them
a populist twist. Cultural materialism was
intended as a contribution to, but also a move
beyond, Marxist understandings of the determinate relationships between economy and
culture. Rather than formulating the differing
degrees of relative autonomy of levels of a
social formation, Williams simply collapsed
the base/superstructure distinction of classical Marxism altogether. He did so by extending the notion of ‘materialism’, understood
by analogy as any process of active making, to
cultural life as well, arguing that culture was
the practical activity of producing meanings.
This move effectively brackets rather than
resolves the key problem referred to by
Marxist accounts of materialism, which is not
the problem of the ontological status of culture
or economy at all, but the problem of theorizing complex causal relations between different
practices. Cultural materialism also informs
the idea of a ‘circuit of culture’, which has also
been influential in human geography. This
model integrates different aspects of cultural
processes – production and distribution, the
‘text’, consumption and everyday life – into
a series of discrete but related ‘moments’ in an
ongoing circulation of meaning-making (du
Gay, Hall, Janes, McKay and Negus, 1997).
Theoretically, the ‘circuit of culture’ privileges
meaning as the essential quality of cultural
processes. Methodologically, it provides a practical means of undertaking empirical work on
specific cultural practices while remaining true
to the axiom of cultural practices that need to
be understood in relation to the totality of
other practices of which they are a part.
These two strands of thought on culture (in
terms of visual representation and in terms of
136
meaning-making) have served as an important
route towards a widespread engagement with
post-structuralism in human geography,
with its emphasis on exposing the contingency
of supposedly natural forms through the
deployment of interpretive methodologies.
Culture has been consistently construed in
representational terms by geographers (and
according to an impoverished understanding
of representation at that); or in terms of the
intangible or ideational aspects of processes
that are somehow realized or materialized in
some concrete form. This first stage of theorizing culture in geography has therefore been
supplanted by a second, more critical stage
in which the limitations of these concepts of
culture have been challenged. One feature of
this second stage has been the ascendancy of
an ontological register of theory, involving the
abstract delimitation of the ‘the cultural’ from
‘the economic’, ‘the representational’ from
‘materiality’, or ‘the human’ from ‘the nonhuman’, followed by the assertion of their
inevitable entanglement.
The starkest example of this ontologization
of theory is Mitchell’s (2000) argument that
‘there is no such thing as culture’. This claim
selectively invokes an essentialist criterion of
definition to assess the validity of the concept
of culture, which – it is supposed – must refer
to an ontologically independent thing-like
entity in order to have any salience. On these
grounds, Mitchell concluded that ‘ ‘‘culture’’
has no ontological basis’ (ibid., 12), and that
culture ‘represents no identifiable process’
(ibid., 74). Mitchell also argues that the
concept of culture is used as an explanatory
category in both cultural studies and in human
geography. This claim wilfully overlooks the
processual, action-oriented and practicefocused conceptualizations of culture in both
fields. In place of these, Mitchell recommends
an explicitly reductionist model of culture
understood as merely a medium for symbolizing more fundamental economic, political and
social processes. There is really just ‘a very
powerful ideology of culture’ (ibid., 12), developed and deployed to control, order and
define ‘others’ ‘in the name of power and
profit’ (ibid., 75). Despite its ostensibly
Marxist credentials, this approach to culture
negates a long-tradition of Western Marxism,
one in which ideology and culture are explicitly defined against this sort of explanatory
reductionism (see also critical theory).
The idea that culture is merely a medium
through which the prevailing order of things
is naturalized (i.e. a mode of reification) is
CULTURE
a throwback to the nineteenth century, and
does not stand up after the reorientation of
questions of culture and ideology away from
‘consciousness’ towards ‘subjectivity’ that
the twentieth-century tradition of Western
Marxism did much to inaugurate.
Mitchell’s materialist correction of what he
claims are politically quiescent concepts of
culture is just one example of the vocabulary
of ‘materiality’ coming to the fore in recent
theorizations of culture in human geography.
Calls for the ‘rematerializing’ of cultural geography (Jackson, 2000) now abound. This usually means looking more closely at material
cultures of artefacts and objects; at issues of
embodiment; and at the entanglement of ‘the
cultural’ and ‘the economic’. The ascendancy
of this ontological register goes along with
attempts to supersede the narrow understandings of representation, vision, meaning and
textuality that geographers constructed
through their initial engagements with poststructuralism. But the ‘materialist’ turn compounds the limitations of that construal,
reinstalling dualisms between ideal and material, subject and object, and the representational and the non-representational. Calls for
the rematerialization of culture, or indeed of
human geography in general, give the impression that the value of a concept lies in its ability
to disclose some level of ontological existence.
But culture is not really an ontological category
at all; it is a functional category of attribution,
in the sense that to call something cultural is
to ascribe a particular set of purposes and
qualities to it, not to attribute a finite set of
characteristics that define its essence.
The challenge to concepts of culture in
human geography is not a matter of getting
the correct ontology. It lies, rather, in loosening the hold exerted by holistic conceptions of
culture that allow various sorts of exorbitant
claims of political relevance to be ascribed to
cultural analysis. Culture is often ascribed a
particular sense (as one aspect of meaning of
human affairs), and a very general and even
totalizing (in which it is assumed that whole
ways of life are unified and integrated through
norms, meanings and values). The idea of
‘cultural politics’ often rests on claims that
social totalities are in some way integrated,
refracted or mediated through culture. There
is a paradox here: holistic concepts of culture
as meaning and symbolization help to acknowledge the political salience of cultural processes, but only at the cost of invoking
undifferentiated concepts of power. By conflating politics with culture, this leads to the
failure to think about the consequences of
what it might mean if politics needs to be
supplemented (cf. deconstruction) by cultural
processes of symbolization, representation or
mediation in the first place. What is left aside
as a result is the question of what sorts of
powers are intrinsic to cultural processes themselves – powers such as authority, charisma,
desire, feeling or seduction.
Three overlapping trends are likely to inflect
the conceptualization of culture in human
geography in the near future. In each case, it
is by returning to a sense of culture as practice
that progress is likely to be made. First, there is
interest in concepts of culture that draw on
Foucault’s ideas of governmentality. In this
approach, culture is defined as a set of aesthetic practices for cultivating the capacities
for self-regulation (Bennett, 1998). This
approach explicitly builds upon a genealogical
analysis of the accretion of meanings of ‘culture’ as an independent and autonomous
field. It reads this as an index of the practical
deployment of culture as a medium for ‘acting
on the social’. This line of thought is open to
an instrumentalist interpretation in which culture is understood as a medium for legitimizing
or resisting the power of the state or capital
(see instrumentalism). But its real potential
lies in disclosing some of the powers that are
specific to cultural processes. One feature of
the modern concept of culture that this
approach focuses upon is the antithetical and
self-divided structure of modern definitions of
the term: not only is culture defined against
society, anarchy or nature; but it is also
internally divided against itself, into high and
low, elite and popular or mass. This ‘splitting
of culture’ (Bennett, 1998, p. 82) is crucial to
understanding the powers of culture: it defines a
range of resources that can be deployed to
transform conduct and behaviour (e.g. a canon
of great works, or various repertoires of cultural judgement); and it also defines a range of
domains that can be transformed through the
application of these resources (e.g. ‘cultures of
poverty’, ‘institutional cultures’, ‘the culture of
schooling’). This analysis of culture as both a
medium and object of transformation owes a
great deal to a tradition of anti-colonial and
post-colonial cultural theory (see post-colonialism: see also Said, 1993). However, the
strong Foucauldian inflection of the concept
of culture implies a less holistic imagination of
the relationship between culture and power
than is implied by concepts such as cultural
imperialism, hegemony and ideology
(Barnett, 2001).
137
CULTURE AREA
A second area in which the powers of culture are foregrounded follows from and
develops Stuart Hall’s seminal analysis of the
concept of articulation. Grossberg (1993, p. 4)
develops an explicitly ‘spatial materialism’ that
also builds on Deleuzian thought to argue that
the concept of culture needs to be changed
from that of ‘the field in which power is symbolized to a set of practices which apply
power’. This is related to a shift from the
interpretative apprehension of meanings to a
consideration of the production of relations,
and recasts cultural studies as ‘a theory of
contexts’. There is considerable potential
here for geographical research, as there is in
the closely related reorientation of cultural
analysis away from narrowly construed issues
of meaning towards embodied practices of
feeling, shame and compassion (e.g. Berlant,
2004). The third area of growing interest lies
in moves to rethink culture as a field of performance and action (e.g. Hastrup, 2004).
Here, again, there is a move away from holistic
accounts of how culture symbolizes and integrates other social relations, towards an
emphasis on the specific powers of cultural
practices, and suggesting new models of relations and agency in the process (Strathern,
1995).
The odyssey of the concept of culture in
human geography is likely to continue awhile
yet, but do not expect anyone to arrive at
a singular, ontologically robust definition.
Duncan and Duncan (2004a) recommend
the self-consciously eclectic combination of
theories of culture backed up by empirical
analysis, and this seems more in the spirit of
the traditions of cultural studies and anthropology from which human geographers have
drawn so much inspiration. Flexibility is one
of the reasons why ‘culture’ can serve as a
useful lingua franca between otherwise disparate and disconnected fields. But the
continuing influence of cultural analysis in
the discipline depends on the acknowledgement that there is more to culture than meaning and representation; and more to culture
than the reproduction of or resistance to
power relations constituted by more fundamental processes. Above all, it requires a
greater degree of concern with what cultural
studies can teach us about how to do theory
itself – that theory is not about arriving at
essentialist criteria or the vain search for ontological clarity, but is about appreciating the
essentially contested qualities of concepts, and
analysing what is most at stake in these disagreements.
cb
138
Suggested reading
Frow (1997); Johnson, Chambers, Raghuram
and Tincknell (2004); Mulhern (2000); Robbins
(1993); Williams (1981); Yudice (2003).
culture area A geographical region over
which homogeneity in measurable cultural
traits may be identified. Contiguous zones
identified within a culture area are core, over
which the culture in question has exclusive or
quasi-exclusive influence, domain, over which
the identifying traits are dominant but not
exclusive, and realm, over which the traits
are visible but subordinate to those of other culture groups. The classic study is Meinig’s (1965)
identification of a Mormon culture area centred
on the Great Basin of Utah. Today, the concept
is little used in geography, as culture is identified more closely with process, connection and
network than with the areal boundedness of
mappable cultural markers.
dco
cybernetics Derived from the Greek ‘kybernetes’, meaning ‘steersman’, it sees systems as
learning and self-regulating. The term ‘cybernetics’ was first used by the information theory pioneer Norbert Wiener in his 1948 book
Cybernetics: or control and communication in the
animal and the machine. The term has often
impacted on geography through compound
forms such as ‘cybernetic organism’, abbreviated to cyborg, and ‘cybernetic space’, abbreviated to cyberspace. However, two specific
inflections of the term in geography are worth
noting in themselves.
First, the term has literal and metaphoric
resonance with work that has used models
and algorithmic programming to simulate geographical phenomena. The weaker version of
this is an epistemological inclusion of feedback in models. algorithms as series of calculations or procedures can be sequences where
each step depends upon the previous ones.
Sophisticated agent-based modelling thus
has co-dependent multiple calculations. The
stronger version is an ontological statement
that sees the world as operating as, or analogous to, a neural network. Thus the world
can be seen as operating like information passing through a system. Cybernetics focuses
upon the relationships of these parts to see
how the whole system is controlled or governed. This has the virtue of moving away from
a cartesian division of thought and the world,
by insisting on seeing the world as a thinking,
reflexive entity. However, it also risks reducing thought to a communication system and
providing a mechanistic view of the world.
CYBERSPACE
Second, cybernetic space has been used in
distinction to the abridged cyberspace to
emphasize the way in which electronic communication and information processing capacities
interact with the real world (Mitra and Schwarz,
2001). Far from creating a separate virtual
realm, information processing capacities are
regularly embedded in everyday devices so that
they are able to respond and either be programmed or learn about patterns of use – offering the prospect of a world of ‘ubiquitous
computing’ (sometimes abbreviated to ‘ubicomp’). Increasingly, life in the urbanized west
depends on these embedded processors, which
regulate temperatures, elevators, traffic and an
array of taken-for-granted processes. With the
variety of wireless technologies, devices can
communicate with each other without the user
necessarily being aware that an automated electronic conversation is occurring. They use ‘soft’
adaptive computational processing that creates
‘a technical substrate of unconscious meaning
and activity’ embedded in the environment
(Thrift and French, 2002, pp. 312, 322). These
devices would create ‘smart’ environments or
‘ambient intelligence’ that can keep track
of users and will tailor interactions to suit
the users. Thus they will communicate and
remember past purchases, preferences, previous visits and past actions. This, the designers
believe, will be used to provide customized
menus or facilities. Cybernetics points out that
this builds adaptive, reflexive capacity into the
very environment, rather than vesting it solely
in human agents.
mc
Suggested reading
Andrejevic (2003, 2005); Cuff
McCullough (2004); Thrift (2004).
(2003);
cyberspace A term that has followed a rapid
arc from subcultural obscurity to media ubiquity, and is now often seen as academically
misleading. It was famously coined in the
novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, first
published in 1984 (see Gibson, 1986). In his
novel, he offered a futuristic vision:
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination
experienced daily by billions of legitimate
operators, in every nation, by children being
taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic
representation of data abstracted from banks
of every computer in the human system.
Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light
ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters
and constellations of data. Like city lights,
receding into the distance . . .
Gibson was writing (on a Remington typewriter,
before the first widely available Graphical
User Interfaces even appeared on desktop computers) about the emergence of a networked
and immersive environment. Gibson’s vision is
replete with spatial metaphors and imaginaries
for interactive fora created out of data and
information. In other novels, he models online
worlds on the walled city of Kowloon (Idoru)
or a variety of urban dystopias.
The use of cyberspace in this phase was
connected to dystopian cyberpunk science
fiction that broke from conventions of seeing
technology as promising an ever-brighter
and cleaner modernity (Burrows, 1997;
Featherstone and Burrows, 1997; Kitchin
and Kneale, 2002), to one that saw it as connected to or enabling social and personal fragmentation, woven amidst landscapes striated
by effects of power and innovation, but also
decay and dispossession.
This gave impetus to seeing flows and
exchanges of data and information not merely
through space but as creating online worlds
where data were manipulated as virtual artefacts (see also virtual reality). The representations and maps of cyberspace created by
programmers and writers did indeed precede
the territory in Baudrillard’s sense (see also
simulacra) – they were vital in its creation, in
giving information specific forms and idioms
for use. The mapping of cyberspace spawned
new technologies to locate and understand
data, and set up an intriguing dialogue with
cartographic concepts now applied to
imagined objects (see Crampton, 2003;
Dodge and Kitchin, 2001a).
From this beginning, cyberspace entered
wider academic and popular parlance, along
with a string of other spatial metaphors for information networks. Thus the 1990s saw the rise
of discourses imagining what Kitchin (1998)
called the ‘world in the wires’ through spatial
metaphors such as ‘chat rooms’, informational
highways, ‘electronic frontiers’ and ‘cybersalons’ (see virtual geographies). Indeed, new
virtual worlds were designed where ‘avatars’ or
online representations of users could interact in
virtual realms (see, e.g., Anders, 1998). The
possibilities for new realms of interaction
attracted a great deal of attention in the mid1990s. The possibilities of playing with identities such as gender ascriptions were pursued
alongside questions of the formation of online
communities without spatial proximity in the
real world. Far from the cyberpunk chaos of early
accounts, many online worlds developed in the
new millennia became mainstream, and quite
139
CYBORG
suburban and conventional (with popular online
environments such as Second Life having more
than seven and half million users in 2007, and a
slogan ‘Your world. Your imagination’ suggesting that most users had fairly conventional
imaginations), while others retained a focus on
gaming. Meanwhile, online sources of information have become as usual and familiar as traditional media – with online versions of
conventional media and alternative media
rescaling audiences, while the ‘blogosphere’ provides alternative fora (see, e.g., Chang, 2005).
Other new media are woven into our everyday
lives as part and parcel of our normal, material
lives (see, e.g., Morley, 2003; Yoon, 2003):
The 1990s were about the virtual. We were
fascinated by the new virtual spaces made
possible by computer technologies. Images
of an escape into a virtual space that leaves
physical space useless, and of cyberspace – a
virtual world that exists in parallel to our
world – dominated the decade. . . . By the
end of the decade, the daily dose of cyberspace (using the internet to make plane
reservations, check email using a Hotmail
account, or download MP3 files) became
so much the norm that the original wonder
of cyberspace – so present in the early
cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s and still
evident in the original manifestos of
VRML evangelists of the early 1990s – was
almost completely lost. The virtual became
domesticated. (Manovich, 2006, p. 220)
By the millennium, even as these online
worlds expanded their users, the notion of an
immaterial or ethereal set of worlds as a
model for informational landscapes seemed
to miss many dynamics. Most especially, it
missed the increasing mixture of the virtual
into both everyday life and also everyday
spaces. Far from entering a world online, the
informational world began to permeate our
lived environment. Increasingly, processing
power was located in the environment around
us, not just in discrete artefacts called computers. As mobile telephones, ‘smart’ devices
and electronic sensors led automated
responses, the separation of an online and offline world seemed anachronistic.
mc
Suggested reading
Adams (1997); Crampton (2003); Dodge and
Kitchin (2001a); Kitchin (1998); Nunes (1997).
cyborg The shackling together of ‘cybernetic’ and ‘organism’ in the term ‘cyborg’ is
140
designed to convey the combination of animal
(usually humans) and technology. Initially
drawn from science fiction, it has been taken
on to critique technological futures based on
a cartesian division of mind and body. It
was popularized and developed by Donna
Haraway (1991a) to criticize what she called
a masculinist fantasy of second birthing in
technological utopian writing. This technological fantasy suggested an ideal of a transcendent union of human and machine, with
people uploading their consciousness into
machines. The aim would be eternal life in a
disembodied state in the realm of cyberspace.
In cyberpunk writing, this was often depicted as
fusion of hardware and software escaping the
limits of the ‘meatware’ (aka the human body).
This imaginary builds on deep-seated divides of mind and body. Cartesian philosophy
had powerfully divided thought and world
(res cogitans and res extensa, respectively).
This compounded medieval Christian tradition, which had developed the model of the
Manichean divide of the spirit and the flesh,
the former being divine and the latter earthly,
sins being located with the body and virtue
with the mind. Feminist critics (see feminism)
have long pointed out that these divisions
become gendered to associate women with
the body and the material, while men were
associated with logic and thought. The technological fantasies of escaping the body simply
restaged these debates.
The concept of the cyborg linked flesh and
body to emphasize the materiality of lives and
technological transformations, and to show
that humans are always part of the world and
entangled in technologies. The perspective
links with posthumanism in challenging
an autonomous and foundational humanity.
It implies that human intelligence and consciousness shape, but also are shaped by, technologies. While ‘such feedback loops may
be reaching new levels of intensity as our
environments become smarter and more information rich, . . . the basic dynamic is as old
as humans’ (Hayles, 2002, p. 303).
The term is also used to point to accelerating vectors of technological development
in technoscience and biotechnology that
are directly fusing technical implants with
animals, often to restore lost capacities.
In benign ways, this is seen as augmenting
the capacities of bodies. Rather than transcending the body, it is about prostheses that
expand our reach or capacities. More critical
accounts point out that work on ‘human augmentation’ has been most enthusiastically
CYCLE OF POVERTY
supported by the military–industrial complex,
in efforts to create advanced soldiers (Gray,
1995, 2003). The figure of the cyborg is
thus often used to highlight the powerful
myths of technology and humanity, and the
investments in them by medical and military
discourse.
mc
Suggested reading
Gray (1995, 2003); Haraway (1997).
cycle of poverty The idea that poverty and
deprivation are transmitted from one generation to the next. The work of Oscar Lewis
in the 1960s (see Lewis, 1969b) presented the
victims of poverty as the authors of their own
misfortune. Members of poor families were
said to place little value on education, hard
work or sexual responsibility. The empirical
evidence for this behavioural view of poverty
is slight, although it feeds into talk of an
underclass. Other poverty cycle models pay
more attention to neighbourhood effects
(bad schools, lack of jobs, danger), or the
determining effects of social divisions structured around class, gender and race.
sco
Suggested reading
Wilson (1990).
141
D
Darwinism Narrowly construed, Darwinism
refers to the theory of evolution developed by
Charles Darwin (1809–82) and initially published in The origin of species (1859). The term
itself was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in
his 1860 review of The origin to identify the
central component of the theory; namely, the
mechanism of natural selection, according to
which organisms born with any advantageous
feature have selective advantage over rivals
in the struggle for life. Yet Darwinism, more
broadly understood, conveys numerous associated ideas including common organic descent, gradualism and the multiplication of
species, and such additional mechanisms
of evolutionary transformation as sexual selection, group selection and correlative variation
(Bowler, 1989).
At the same time, Darwinism is also associated with at least two further suites of ideas –
social Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. Social
Darwinism is usually taken to refer to the application of Darwinian principles and mechanisms to human society, and often is thought
to have justified anti-interventionist, laissezfaire economic policies on the basis of a survival of the fittest ideology. Trading on organic
analogies, the idea is that human societies and
institutions are subject to the laws of evolution
by selection and struggle, and that human
intrusion constitutes unwarranted interference
in the processes of natural development. Such
perceptions need modifying in at least two
respects. First, there are good grounds for
supposing that social thinking, notably in the
form of Malthusian demography (see malthusian model), was integral to Darwin’s theory
from the beginning and it is thus not simply
a case of extending its application from the
natural to the social world (Young, 1969).
Darwinism, in this reading, always was social
(Greene, 1977). Second, revisionist social
evolutionists could equally mobilize the theory, sometimes drawing on its Lamarckian
counterpart, to justify interventionism and
political reform (Jones, 1980). Neo-Darwinism
(or the neo-Darwinian synthesis as it is usually
known), refers to the classical theory of evolution that emerged during the 1930s when R.A.
Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and Sewall Wright –
building on T.H. Morgan’s earlier chromosomal
142
theory of inheritance – combined Darwinian
natural selection with a quantitative approach
to population genetics that served to show the
compatibility between Mendelian genetics and
Darwin’s mechanism (Smocovitis, 1996).
This synthesis rescued Darwinism from the
attacks to which it had been subject in the
decades around 1900 from figures such as
William Bateson and Hugo DeVries, who had
argued that evolution took place by saltation;
that is, by discontinuous variation (Bowler,
1983).
Within geography, Darwinian thinking in
its various guises – sometimes in association
with lamarck(ian)ism – has exerted considerable influence. Stoddart (1966) identified ideas
of change through time, organization and
ecology, selection and struggle, randomness
and chance, as key Darwinian influences on
geography, though some of these were already
established in the tradition prior to Darwin’s
intervention and were, in any case, compatible
with Lamarckism. Whatever the precise
genealogy, evolutionary thinking in one form
or another found expression in almost every
sub-disciplinary specialism of geography.
W.M. Davis’ cycle of erosion gave an evolutionary reading of landscape development –
though hardly in any specifically Darwinian
sense, given the absence of sexual reproduction
and inheritance as the drivers of change, as
Darwin envisaged it (see also physical geography). Frederick Clements’ plant geography
displayed his fascination with organic modes of
thought, and the Russian geographer and ichthyologist Lev Semyonovich Berg developed a
Darwinian theory of ‘nomogenesis’ that, by
emphasizing mutations, allowed for evolutionary ‘jumps’ (see also biogeography). Friedrich
Ratzel’s anthropogeography disclosed an
organismic conception of the state and translated into human geography Moritz Wagner’s
Lamarckian-inspired
migration
theory.
Derwent Whittlesey’s scheme of sequent
occupance and H.J. Fleure’s geographical
anthropology and anthropometric cartography were also evidently imbued with evolutionary thinking. In the latter case, the interplay
of racial type, evolutionary mechanisms,
anthropometric localization and psycho-social
factors were of central importance.
DECENTRALIZATION
Besides these individuals, a variety of key
issues within the geographical tradition drew
heavily on evolutionary motifs. Statements
of environmental determinism by figures
such as Ellen Semple, Elsworth Huntington
and Griffith Taylor were invariably couched
in evolutionary categories, with climate,
migration and natural selection routinely playing the leading roles. From a more radical perspective, Peter Kropotkin found in a modified
Darwinism the grounds for championing collectivism, opposing Spencerian individualism
and connecting up the philosophy of natural
science with anarchism. This essentially
Russian reading of evolution drew inspiration
from the St Petersburg naturalists, all of whom
had conducted fieldwork in Siberia, in conditions markedly different from the tightly
packed-in niches of the tropical world – in particular, from the work of Karl Kessler, who set
out the law of mutual aid. The transference of
ideas about community between sociology and
ecology, couched within an evolutionary political economy, also found expression in
geography in the tradition of human ecology
(Mitman, 1992). Debates about acclimatization were likewise connected up to questions
about heredity and adaptation (Livingstone,
1987a; Anderson, 1992). And early theoretical
statements about regional geography, such
as those of Herbertson and Geddes, were supported by appeals to the need for elucidating
evolutionary mechanisms in specific contexts
(Livingstone, 1992).
Within contemporary human geography,
issues raised by Darwinism continue to surface. The legitimacy of transferring biological
categories to the social order, for example,
continues to be the subject of debate (cf. biopower), as are matters rotating around the
understanding of how nature and culture –
to employ two abstractions – are to be conceptualized. Recently too, enquiries have been
undertaken into the geography of Darwinism,
with the aim of ascertaining the ways in which
evolutionary theory circulated around the
world and was differently embraced, mobilized and resisted in the light of local cultural
politics (Livingstone, 2006).
dl
data analyses. Many countries now have
such archives (usually sponsored by research
funding agencies that encourage – in some
cases require – researchers to deposit data
sets to encourage social scientific advances
through the re-analysis of existing data sets
alongside the creation of new sources). These
archives are increasingly used to store and
disseminate not only original data sets collected by academic researchers but also
those collected by public-sector bodies (such
as censuses). Although most of those archives
focus on quantitative data, other types are now
stored in formats that allow them to be made
readily available to other researchers – as in
Qualidata, part of the UK Data Archive
housed at the University of Essex (see software for qualitative research) – and
archives that store maps in digital form, and
the internet has facilitated linking archives
to enable international data-sharing. As well
as storing data, most archives offer training
and other forms of user support to facilitate
analyses of the data sets held.
rj
Suggested reading
See the Guide to primary social science data and
related resources available on the Internet (http://
www.chass.utoronto.ca/datalib/other/) and the
Social science data archives (http://www2.fmg.
uva.nl/sociosite/databases.html)
data mining Computer-based automated
procedures for searching large and complex
data sets in order to identify spatial patterns
and relationships, either to confirm existing
or to generate new hypotheses. In spatial
analysis, Openshaw’s geographical analysis machine and geographical explanation
machine exemplify data mining algorithms, as
do some aspects of geodemographics. Some
term these practices ‘data dredging’, since
they are based on little prior knowledge and
exemplify inductive thinking (see induction)
whereby explanations are sought after patterns
are identified (cf. exploratory data analysis): however, they can also be abductive (cf.
abduction; geocomputation). Many of the
structured algorithms for data mining use
artificial intelligence approaches.
rj
Suggested reading
Bowler (1989); Livingstone (2006); Stoddart
(1966).
Suggested reading
data archive A central repository of access-
decentralization A process of spatial change
generated by centrifugal forces (cf. centrifugal and centripetal forces). Within urban
areas (see urbanization), demands for space
ible data sets. Researchers are encouraged to
deposit original data sets (e.g. survey data)
there to enable others to conduct secondary
Berry and Linoff (1997).
143
DECISION-MAKING
and to avoid the congestion, pollution and
land costs of high-density areas stimulate
decentralization into suburbs and beyond,
whereas at larger scales the negative externalities of large cities encourage movement to
smaller settlements (cf. counter-urbanization).
Decentralization is facilitated by reliance
on roads for the movement of goods and
individuals.
rj
decision-making The
process whereby
alternative courses of action are evaluated
and a decision taken. The decision-making
perspective attracted great interest after it
was introduced to geography during the
1960s as part of the behavioural movement
(see behavioural geography). It broadened
traditional perspectives, making them more
realistic with respect to human practice.
The crux of the decision-making perspective is the recognition that real-world location
decisions are seldom if ever optimal in the
sense of maximizing profits or minimizing
resources used. Similarly, consumer behaviour hardly ever accords with the rational calculus of utilities assumed in conventional
economic formulations. The all-knowing and
perfectly able economic actor of neo-classical
economics bears only slight resemblance to
actual human beings.
Sub-optimal location decision-making may
be incorporated into conventional location
theory by the use of spatial margins to profitability within which some profit is possible
anywhere and the business is free to locate
away from the optimal (profit-maximizing)
location at some pecuniary cost. However, this
tells us nothing about how actual choice of
location is arrived at within the economically
determined constraints.
A step further was taken by Allen Pred
(1967, 1969) in his concept of the behavioural
matrix. According to this, decision-makers
have a position in a matrix with the information available on one axis and the ability to use
it on the other. The more information and the
greater the ability, the higher is the probability
of a ‘good’ location within the spatial margin;
that is, near the optimal location on cost/revenue grounds. Decision-makers with very limited ability and information are more likely to
locate beyond the margins and fail, but a good
location could still be chosen by chance.
Pred was greatly influenced by H.A. Simon’s
(1957) concept of satisficing behaviour, as
an alternative to the unrealistic optimizing
capacity attributed to ‘economic man’ (sic).
Decision-makers were viewed by Simon as
144
considering only a limited number of
alternatives, choosing one that is broadly satisfactory rather than optimal. The introduction
of a more realistic perspective on location
decision-making corresponded with a similar
move in the study of business behaviour in
general, within a broad context of industrial
organization.
The decision-making perspective in locational analysis followed two routes: theoretical and empirical. The search for a theoretical
framework for studies of location behaviour
under conditions of risk and uncertainty
led geographers and regional scientists into
such fields as game theory and organization
theory, and more recently to use large-scale
simulation models, as in agent-based modelling (cf. artificial intelligence). The
light shed on actual decision-making was very
limited, however.
An empirical approach promised more, in
a field where the emphasis is so much on
individual practice. There was a tradition of
survey analysis in industrial location studies
well before the behavioural movements
penetrated the subject. Such research often
revealed the importance of ‘purely personal’
factors. Later empirical research preferred
to take sets of firms and examine the actual
process of decision-making. Some perceived
problem (such as undercapacity) sets in
motion a sequence of decisions beginning with
whether to expand in situ, to set up a branch
or to acquire an existing plant; the sequence
continues with the process of searching for a
site, the evaluation of alternatives, the final
decision and the feedback of the learning
experience into some subsequent decision of
a similar nature. This empirical approach held
out the prospect of generalizations that relate
the process of location decision-making to
the nature of the organization concerned
(cf. search behaviour).
After many years of behavioural studies of
industrial location decision-making, the findings seemed to promise more than it was able
to deliver. A critique was mounted by Doreen
Massey (1979), who pointed to objections on
epistemological grounds (see epistemology)
to the practice of adopting ideal type constructs (whether ‘economic man’ or some
‘satisficing man’) and of making a distinction
between behaviour that accords with the
ideal type and that which must be attributed
to other factors. Massey argued that the
focus on individual decision-making distracts
attention from the structural features of the
economy to which firms react, and that what
DECOLONIZATION
firms actually do with respect to the setting up
or closure of plants is best understood in this
broader context of political economy. There
has recently been a revival of interest in
aspects of location decision-making, however,
including the learning process and corporate
strategy with respect to restructuring. The
work of Schoenberger (1997) emphasizes recognition of the significance of cultural factors
to the operation of the firm.
Other aspects of human geography in
which the decision-making perspective
assumed importance include response to
environmental hazards (e.g. Kates, 1962),
residential choice (e.g. Brown and Moore,
1970), shopping behaviour (e.g. Rushton,
1969: see also revealed preference analysis) and the decision to migrate (e.g. Wolpert
1965). Again, neo-classical economics was
originally influential, the concept of place utility being an obvious geographical extension of
the theory of consumer behaviour. While qualities of place as people evaluate them do influence decisions including locational choice or
movement, there are many other considerations of a fortuitous and seemingly irrational
nature. Indeed, geographers can easily exaggerate the spatial element in decision-making.
Research involving qualitative methods
has sought a more sensitive understanding of
how people assign meaning to various aspects
of life and how decisions follow from this. For
example, the decision to seek health care,
involving the coverage of distance, is influenced by culturally specific conceptions of
the meaning of illness, personal and shared
experience of being ill, assessment of the benefit likely to be derived from the doctor’s advice
based on past contacts, the felt need for treatment or reassurance, and so on. Such work
helps to set the spatial aspects of decisionmaking and taking in a broader context,
getting away from crude notions of human
behaviour as some stimulus–response mechanism and allowing greater scope for the way
meaning is interpreted and translated into
action. Work in the earlier tradition is now
part of the discipline’s history rather than
important to contemporary practice.
dms
Suggested reading
Chapman and Walker (1991); Hayter (1997);
Malmberg (1997); Smith (1981 [1971], Ch. 5);
Wolpert (1964).
decolonization The process, often long,
tortuous and violent, by which colonies
achieve their national aspirations for political
independence from the colonial metropolitan
power (cf. nationalism). Decolonization
can be understood as the period of later colonialism (Chamberlain, 1985). Modern colonialism covers the period from the fifteenth to
the twentieth centuries, and hence decolonization is uneven in its geography and history. In
the New World, which had been subjected
to Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch
colonial rule in the First Age of Colonialism,
the first wave of decolonization occurred in
the eighteenth century. In this regard, the socalled Classical Age of Imperialism in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century was short,
the first decolonizations of the second wave
being achieved after the end of the Second
World War. The two cycles of imperialism
both concluded with a limited phase of decolonization, followed by the rapid collapse of
empires and an irresistible push to political
independence (Taylor, 1994b).
The first challenge to the first wave of
imperialism came in 1776, as British North
American colonies declared independence.
While Britain maintained its Caribbean and
Canadian colonies, the Napoleonic upheavals
in Europe so weakened Spain and Portugal
that European settlers from Mexico to Chile
expelled their imperial masters. By 1825, the
Spanish and Portuguese empires were dead
(cf. latin america). In the subsequent 115
years up to the Second World War, decolonization was limited to Cuba in 1898 and two
groups of British colonies: the white settler
colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand
and South Africa) granted internal autonomy
and finally full sovereignty in 1931, and Egypt
and Iraq after the First World War. The
Second World War marked the death knell
for european colonization: India’s separation
from the British, Indonesia from the Dutch,
and the remaining Arab mandated territories
and Indo-China from the French. The independence of Ghana in 1957 marked an
avalanche of liberations in africa, though
the process was not complete until 1990
(Namibia). Between 1945 and 1989, over one
hundred new independent states were created.
Decolonization is a process marked by the
achievement of political independence, but
the duration, depth and character of decolonization movements vary substantially. In some
African colonies, colonization was barely
accomplished, and resistance movements of
varying degrees of organization and institutionalization attended the entire colonial project.
In other cases, an organized anti-colonial and
nationalist movement came late, accompanied
145
DECOLONIZATION
by a rapid and hastily assembled set of political
negotiations in which it is clear that the
metropolitan power wished to hand over
the reins of power with utmost expedience
(Nigeria). In others, it took a war of liberation, a bloody armed struggle by leftist guerillas or nationalist agitators pitted against
white settlers or intransigent colonial states
(as in Laos, Vietnam and Zimbabwe).
One of the problems with analysing decolonization, as Fred Cooper notes (1997, p. 6),
is that the story ‘lends itself to be read backwards and to privilege the process of ending
colonial rule over anything else that was happening in those years’. It should also be said
that any account of decolonization presumes
an account, or a theory, of colonialism itself:
top-down interpretations take colonial projects at face value, whereas the nationalist
account denies any reality to the goal of
modernization that the colonial state purported to bring. In general, decolonization is
seen as either (i) self-government as an outcome
of negotiated preparation and vision from above
by a colonial state apparatus, or (ii) as a
nationalist triumph from below, in which power
is wrested (violently or otherwise) from recalcitrant colonizers. In practice, decolonization
was an enormously complex process involving
something of each, and shaped both by
the peculiarities of colonialism itself and the
particular setting in world time in which the
nationalist drive began.
There are two forms of decolonization that
rest on what one might call nationalist triumph. The first is built upon social mobilization in which a patchwork of anti-colonial
resistances and movements (many of which
are synonymous with colonial conquest itself )
are sown together into a unified nationalist
movement by a Western-educated elite
(Malaysia, Ghana or Aden). Mobilization
occurred across a wide and eclectic range of
organizations – trades unions, professional
groups, ethnic associations – bringing them
into political parties and propelled by a leadership focused on racism, on liberation and
the sense of national identity of the colony,
given its own history and culture. The second is revolutionary – Franz Fanon (1967
[1952]) is its most powerful and articulate
spokesman – in which the vanguard is not
Western-educated elites or indeed workers, by
the peasants and lumpenproletariat. It rested
upon violence and rejection of any semblance
of neo-colonialism. Decolonization rejected
bourgeois nationalism (of the first sort);
rather, as Fanon put it, ‘the last shall be first
146
and the first last. Decolonization is the putting
into practice of this sentence’ (1967, p. 30).
Both views depict nationalism as subsuming
all other struggles and hence obscures and
misses much history; both posit a True
Cause, as Cooper (1997, p. 7) puts it, in which
there is little truck with opposition. Mamdani’s
(1996) enormously influential book on Africa
makes the important point that decolonization
posed the possibility of breaking with the
traditional of European colonial indirect rule
(what he called ‘decentralized despotism’) in
which African custom granted enormous
powers to local systems of traditional (and
therefore cultural) authority, and developing
instead a sort of civic nationalism in which
cultural politics did not play a key role. Most
African states continued the colonial model in
which African colonial subjects were granted
racial equality and citizenship rights, but in
which ‘indigenes’ were simultaneously a sort
of bonus. In the historiography of the period,
the nationalist road to self-government tends
to take for granted the depth and appeal of a
national identity (cf. identity politics). It is
precisely the shallowness of these nationalisms
in the post-colonial period that reveals how
limited is the simple nationalist account of
decolonization itself. In practice, decolonization occurred in the context of all manner
of contradictions and tensions between the
national question and other social questions.
There is also a narrative of decolonization
that has a singular vision, but from the side of
the colonial state. It was the colonial bureaucracy, long before nationalist parties arose,
that shaped self-government on a calculus
of interest and power derived from an older
conception of colonial rule (New Zealand and
Canada) as a stepping stone to Independence.
In this view, Africa by 1947 had already been
set on the road to decolonization – this is a
classic instant of Whig history – in spite of the
fact that the Colonial Offices typically saw
early African leaders as schoolboys or demagogues (Cooper, 1997). Another version of
the dirigiste theory is rendered through the
cold calculation of money and cost. It was
the decision-making rationale of accountants
estimating costs and gains – and who in particular gained – against the backdrop of imperial power’s economic performance after the
Second World War that sealed the fate of the
colonies.
In all of these accounts – for India as much
as Indonesia or Iraq – colonialism is as monolithic as the explanations themselves. There
is a reduction involved in seeing Indians or
DECONSTRUCTION
Kenyans as colonial subjects or as national
or proto-nationalist actors. An alternative
approach pursued by the so-called Subaltern
School (Guha and Spivak, 1988; see subaltern studies) sees colonialism as a contra metropolitan project, moving against trends to
exercise power under universal social practices
and norms. It was ‘dominance without hegemony’. In other words, the hegemonic project
of colonialism fragmented as colonial rule
attached itself to local idioms of power. From
this experience characterized by hybrid forms
of identity, blurred boundaries and contradictory practices, the process of decolonization
must necessarily look more complex than
simply self-rule managed from above by the
colonial state or mobilized from below by
nationalist forces (cf. hybridity).
mw
deconstruction A tradition of philosophical
analysis and textual criticism begun by the
French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–
2004). Derrida engages the canon of Western
philosophy from Plato through G.W.F.
Hegel to Martin Heidegger, modern literature and art, and key social and political
thinkers including Karl Marx, Sigmund
Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure.
The general significance of Derrida’s work
cannot be detached from the distinctive style
of his writing: deconstruction works through
the elaboration of particular texts, rather than
creating concepts or general systems. The
concepts associated with deconstruction –
dissemination, parasites, pharmakon, trace and
others – are like found objects, terms that turn
out to have ambivalent meanings in particular
textual traditions. As a ‘method’ of analysis,
or a way of reading, deconstruction exposes
unacknowledged implications in existing traditions. This systematically parasitical dependence of deconstruction on other texts makes
the application of any particular deconstructive
motif a hazardous affair of partial validity.
Derrida’s own work can be divided into an
early phase of ‘critical’ deconstruction and a
later phase of ‘affirmative’ deconstruction.
Deconstruction first came to prominence
in the 1960s and 1970s. Although Derrida
is often thought of as the quintessentially
‘French’ theorist, deconstruction has been
most influential in the English-speaking academy. In Of grammatology (Derrida, 1976), the
basic lineaments of deconstructive ‘method’
are established. Derrida’s notorious claim that
‘there is nothing outside the text’ is really an
interpretative rule, according to which reading
is meant to follow the immanent patterns of
texts rather than impose external criteria of
interpretation (Barnett, 1999). In readings
of Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss and JeanJacques Rousseau, Derrida identified a recurrent tendency to render writing as a secondary,
contingent medium for the expression of pure
thoughts properly expressed in direct speech.
Derrida calls this privileging of expressive
speech over the risks of mediated communication logocentrism. He claims that it embodies a
deep prejudice in Western thought in favour of
the ideal of a disembodied, isolated subject
hooked up to the external world by the fragile
and untrustworthy medium of referential language. In ‘classical’ deconstruction, this
inherently normative evaluation of the relationship between speech and writing, orality
and literacy, is subjected to critical analysis
that leads to apparently perverse conclusions.
If writing is able to act as a supplement to the
pure form of expressive speech, then this logically implies that something essential must be
absent from the pure form; it turns out that far
from being a mere supplement, writing is a necessary supplement to the supposedly pure form of
speech. The analysis of speech and writing in
Of grammatology exemplifies a general theme
in deconstruction, whereby what is secondary,
accidental or contingent is shown to be fundamental to the working of identities, meanings
and systems. The point of this demonstration
is not meant to be disobliging but, rather, to
encourage a reordering of the terms of normative evaluation through which concepts are
developed and deployed.
Derrida calls the assumption that phenomena such as meaning or identity must have
singular essentialist forms the metaphysics
of presence. This term indicates the relevance
of deconstruction to geography’s concern with
spatiality and temporality. Deconstruction
is indebted to Heidegger’s argument that
Western thought has consistently privileged
the present tense when trying to apprehend
the nature of being, or ontology. By affirming the irreducible role of writing in the
expression of thought, Derrida is arguing that
all those aspects for which writing or textuality stands – spatial and temporal extension,
and the dimension of difference that these
imply – are constitutive components of apparently free-standing entities such as the unified,
self-identical subject of philosophical reason.
This is articulated by one of Derrida’s most
important neologisms, the notion of différance
(Derrida, 1982a), which refers to the movement of spatial differentiation and temporal
deferral that Derrida holds is the condition
147
DECONSTRUCTION
of possibility for any and all identity, punctuality or unity.
Although Derrida’s work is most often
thought of as a post-structuralist radicalization
of structuralist accounts of signification (see
post-structuralism), the concern with issues
of presence, time and space indicates the
degree to which deconstruction engages critically with phenomenology as well, including
the works of Edmund Husserl, Heidegger and
Emmanuel Levinas. Deconstruction points up
the limitations of internalist, monological
accounts of the self typical of phenomenology
that privilege ‘experience’ as the primary
modality of subjectivity. Moreover, rather than
thinking of deconstruction as merely concerned with the instabilities of meaning and
signification, it is better to think of it as part
of a broader revival of interest in rhetoric.
For example, one of Derrida’s most influential
contributions has been to popularize the
writings of J.L. Austin on the performativity
of language-in-use across social sciences and
humanities.
Deconstruction reached its institutional
zenith in the 1980s, having become an orthodoxy in literary studies in the USA especially,
although it was less well received in mainstream English-language philosophy. There
is an identifiable shift in Derrida’s work from
the late 1980s onwards towards a more
‘affirmative’, although no less arcane, register
of deconstruction. Less concerned with calling
Western philosophy to task for its blindnesses,
Derrida turned to the task of mining this same
tradition for the traces of an alternative
vocabulary of ethical concern and political
responsibility (see also ethics). This shift
coincided with a series of public scandals concerning Heidegger’s Nazi affiliations and the
anti-Semitic wartime writings of Paul de Man,
Derrida’s close friend and leading deconstructionist critic in the USA. In the wake of these
controversies, Derrida’s writing undergoes
an explicit ethical and political turn, focusing
on a set of topics such as the gift, animality,
hospitality, ghosts, friendship and forgiveness;
as well as political topics such as sovereignty,
democracy and cosmopolitanism. There has
also recently been a degree of rapprochement
between deconstruction and ‘analytical’ traditions of philosophy.
In geography, deconstruction has had a
variable reception-history. Derrida is rarely
cited as a ‘key thinker’ on issues of space and
place, yet he is a background presence in a
number of intellectual developments in the
discipline in the past decade and a half.
148
Deconstruction first came to prominence as
part of debates about postmodernism, when
it was invoked as an authoritative reference
point for critiques of essentialism and foundationalism in epistemology. This epistemological
reading saw deconstruction externally applied
to support arguments about the contingency
of knowledge-claims and the constructedness
of phenomena. This construal of deconstruction owed a great deal to Richard Rorty’s
pragmatism. In a number of fields, such as
economic geography or critical geopolitics, deconstruction is appealed to as a variant
of ideology-critique to help in debunking
claims of objectivity and naturalness (see also
cartography, history of).
The predominant anti-essentialist, epistemological framing of deconstruction has
been supplanted by the more sophisticated
focus on ontological issues. Doel (1999) provides the most systematic engagement with the
spatial and temporal metaphysics of deconstruction, laying out an alternative spatial grammar of mobility, relations and foldings. postcolonialism in geography has also been heavily inflected by deconstruction. Derrida’s concern with issues of reading, interpretation and
context are intimately related to a wider critique
of Western historicism (Young, 1990b). And,
most recently, geographers have begun to
engage seriously with the ethical and political
aspects of deconstruction’s treatment of themes
such as hospitality, responsibility, radical
democracy, cosmopolitanism and sovereignty
(Popke, 2003; Barnett, 2004b, 2005).
The ethical and political turn in deconstruction indicates that what is most at stake in
deconstruction is neither epistemology nor
ontology per se but, rather, a challenge to
rethink the inherent normativity of theoretical
reasoning. Certainly, any temptation to deploy
deconstructive ideas as if they were socialtheoretical concepts is best avoided, not least
because Derrida’s engagement with various
traditions of metaphysical reflection is almost
completely devoid of any mediation by sociological or historical conceptualization that any
such usage would require. In short, deconstruction might be much less new, original or disruptive than is often supposed. Deconstruction
is not best thought of as either postmodernist
nor post-structuralist; rather, it lays is a practice of reasoning governed by the imperative
of working through inherited traditions in
critical, inventive and responsible ways.
Deconstruction therefore continues a tradition
of enlightenment critique, but with a distinctive flourish.
cb
DEFENSIBLE SPACE
Suggested reading
Critchley (1999); Derrida (1976, 2002); Royle
(2000).
deduction A form of reasoning which – as
the reverse of the sequence deployed in
induction – moves from the general to the
particular. It takes what is known (or
assumed) as given, and deduces possible consequences from those axioms. In an empirical
situation – which is the normal context for the
application of deductive reasoning in human
geography – the deductions are normally
expressed as hypotheses, statements of
expectations on the basis of prior knowledge.
Formal procedures are then deployed to test
the validity/falsifiability of those statements
(cf. falsification), most of which involve the
‘scientific methods’ normally associated with
positivism. (See also abduction.)
rj
Suggested reading
Harvey (1969).
deep ecology A radical form of environmentalism that argues that nature has an
inherent right to exist, that humans are part
of nature and that our ecological awareness
comes from experiencing ourselves within
nature (Devall and Sessions, 1985). Deep
ecology is both a philosophy and a practice
associated with the Western environmental
movement. Although it draws on earlier
ideas, the term emerged when the Danish
philosopher Arne Naess (1973) distinguished
between ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ ecology. The
former approach was seen as technocentric,
anthropocentric and reformist. In contrast,
deep ecology has emerged and developed
as a philosophy that is ecocentric; advocates
dismantling the dominant socio-economic
systems through which humans appropriate
nature; and argues for biocentric equality, so
that the desire by humans to dominate nature
is eliminated in favour of humans, as one
species, living in nature. Humans, like other
species, must respect nature’s limits and
thresholds in order for all forms of life to live
on a sustainable basis.
There is diversity in both the thought and
practice of deep ecology. The practice includes
very radical, single-issue, deep ecology organizations such as the Animal Liberation Front,
which is dedicated to animal welfare, through
violence and other means if necessary, and
groups such as Earth First!, which was promoted as the activist version of deep ecology.
In addition to local site-defence groups, the
philosophy has also influenced formally organized activist organizations and Green political
parties in many developed countries (Luke,
2002). Within geography, while there has been
more engagement with deep ecology by
human geographers, Haigh (2002) advocates
that deep ecology guide the teaching, research
and practice of physical geography.
Deep ecology has been critiqued as romanticism, fundamentally flawed in its conception
of non-human parts of nature having intrinsic
value, and anti-humanist in its approach (this
was a major debate in the 1980s with social
ecologists led by Murray Bookchin). Deep
ecology has also been critiqued for its inability
to distinguish between different parts of
humanity (men and women, rich and poor,
different cultural beliefs and practices) and
its celebration of outdoor experiences in
nature, which Luke (2002) labelled ‘sportspersonism’ and claimed was a potentially
dangerous form of ‘utopian ecologism’. The
danger partly arises from the lack of a transition
strategy in deep ecology, other than individual
action, to move from the present situation to a
future deep ecology state of ‘harmony’ with
nature (Luke, 2002). Despite the critiques,
deep ecology has been influential and cannot
be ignored. It has encouraged a wider appreciation of nature and modern humanity’s often
destructive relations with it.
pm
defensible space A concept associated with
Oscar Newman (1972, 1996), who identified
modernist design of high-rise buildings in
‘park-like’ settings as a key factor increasing
residents’ vulnerability to crime. Studying
crime statistics for public housing in New
York City, he argued that crimes such as rape
increased dramatically in anonymous interior
public spaces. He argued that high-density
housing can be safe if designed according to
principles of defensible space, which allow
residents to claim territory, provide
opportunities for resident self-surveillance,
reduce the stigma and isolation of public housing, and connect public housing to other safe
spaces by orienting buildings to public streets
rather than interior pathways. These ideas
were taken up and tested more rigorously in
the UK by Coleman (1985), and have been
extended into situational crime prevention programs such as Crime Prevention Through
Environmental Design (CPTED) and Safe
Cities Programs (Wekerle and Whitzman,
1995). These more recent programmes focus
on public space (rather than the semi-public
149
DEINDUSTRIALIZATION
spaces of public housing) and address perceptions and fear of crime as well as actual crime.
The Safe Cities Program in particular emphasizes a broad community-oriented approach to
problem-solving. Recent efforts to control crime
through surveillance, such as security cameras, are distinct from the concept of defensible
space, which emphasizes the need to create the
architectural framework to enable residents
to control their own environment.
gp
Suggested reading
Wekerle and Whitzman (1995).
deindustrialization A sustained decline in
industrial (especially manufacturing) activity
and capacity (cf. industrialization). It may
involve the absolute and/or relative decline
of industrial output, employment and other
means of production. Such changes are quite
normal in the course of economic development. However, when they are linked to the
declining competitiveness of industrial production to meet extra-regional, domestic and
international demand within reasonable levels
of employment and a sustainable balance
of payments, deindustrialization represents a
process of underdevelopment. The causes
of deindustrialization are complex. In the
contemporary global economy, they lie in a
combination of local circumstances and locational adjustment to global conditions. In a
capitalist economy, the rate of profit and
its determination must lie at the centre of
any explanation of these changing spatial
configurations of industrial activity. (See also
rustbelt.)
rl
Suggested reading
Bluestone and Harrison (1982); Martin and
Rowthorne (1986).
deliberative mapping The collaborative
creation of maps by multiple authors who share
a common interest or complementary expertise. Also known as ‘collaborative mapping’,
‘participatory mapping’ or ‘geocollaboration’,
deliberative mapping is a form of distributed
mapping supported by geographic information systems and online software designed for
group decision-making in map design, environmental planning, political redistricting
or emergency response (MacGillavry, 2003).
Collaboration can be in real time or asynchronous, over a period of days, weeks or
even years (Schafer, Ganoe, Xiao, Coch and
Carroll, 2005). The dialogue is both verbal
and graphic, as participants at adjoining
150
workstations or continents apart suggest
applications as well as modifications.
mm
Suggested reading
MacEachren and Brewer (2004).
democracy The term ‘democracy’ has a
simple meaning: ‘Rule by the people’. But
the meaning of ‘people’ and ‘rule’ are far from
straightforward. The historical geography
of democracy is therefore the ongoing process
of finding answers to various practical problems: who should rule, how rule should be
organized, and over what scope of activities.
But these practical issues are internally related
to questions of justification, which means that
democracy is a highly contested concept in both
theory and practice. As a result, the empirical
analysis of democratic politics cannot avoid
issues of normative democratic theory.
Modern democratic theory depends on
a distinctive geographical imagination. It
assumes that democracy is framed by bounded
territories, involving a nested hierarchy of
scales contained within the nation-state
(see also boundary). Key thinkers of this tradition have focused considerable attention on
the geographical organization of democratic
politics in complex, spatially extensive territories (Dahl, 1989). The limitations of this territorial framing of democracy are increasingly
subjected to critical investigation in political
science (Shapiro and Hacker-Cordón, 1999).
Until very recently, there has been little
explicit focus in human geography on the normative questions that are at the core of debates
about the relationship between democracy and
spatiality. This is the result of political geography’s avoidance of reflection on the normative basis of political issues. However, the
1990s saw a shift in various sub-disciplines
towards investigating the entwinement of practical issues with normative issues central to
democratic theory; for example, issues of participation in development geography, issues of
deliberation in urban planning, and issues of
citizenship in environmental studies. Aspects
of democratic theory are now present across
human geography (Barnett and Low, 2004).
electoral geography is the sub-field in
which the geographies of democracy have
always been a concern. Much of this has
focused on mapping distributions of votes, but
recent attention has focused on developing
more sophisticated, spatially sensitive explanations for voting behaviour (Agnew, 1996). The
spatial organization of electoral systems effects
how votes are translated into representative
DEMOCRACY
majorities in liberal democracies (see liberalism). The spatial organization of formal
democracy therefore has consequences for democratic outcomes in terms of basic criteria of
equality and representativeness. Research on
this process has broadened out to include the
geographies of campaigning, party-formation
and political communication. This has also
involved more explicit considerations of
the normative issues at stake in the traditional
issues such as gerrymandering, re-districting
and representation (Johnston, 1999; Hannah,
2001).
The past two decades have seen the global
‘diffusion of democracy’, in the wake of the
collapse of communism in Eastern Europe,
political transitions away from authoritarianism in latin america, africa and asia, and the
application of norms of ‘Good Governance’
in the geopolitics of Western international
engagements. Geographers have investigated
the degree to which the adoption of democratic forms of governance can be accounted
for by specifically geographical factors
(O’Loughlin, Ward, Lofdahl et al., 1998),
contributing to renewed debates concerning
whether democracy can only be established
and sustained after various socio-economic
and cultural prerequisites have been met
(Przeworski, 1995). The theoretical assumptions and the practical devices through which
liberal forms of electoral democracy have
been circulated as the global norm have also
been critically interrogated (Bell and Staeheli,
2001). Debates about democratization raise
fundamental questions regarding the degree
to which the norms of Western, liberal, representative democracy can and should be practically applied in non-Western contexts and
deployed as normative benchmarks of critical
analysis (see ethnocentrism; eurocentrism:
see also Slater, 2002). The geographical mobility of democratic practices suggests that the
devices through which different imperatives
of democratic rule are enacted can be combined, adapted and reordered in different
geographical contexts (Saward, 2003). This
points to the importance of issues of temporal
sequencing and spatial organization to the
successful institutionalization of the complex,
competing imperatives of democratic deliberation, decision-making, accountability, participation and revision (Dryzek, 2005).
Criticisms of liberal, representative democracy that assume the nation-state as the
natural container of democratic politics have
encouraged geographers to pay increasing
attention to various alternative models of
democracy. In contrast to the focus of electoral
geography on the formal democratic procedures of elections, voting and parties, geographers have turned to notions of participatory
democracy and radical democracy to consider the diverse practices and sites where questions of accountability, citizenship, justice and
participation are contested (Young, 2000).
One feature of these explorations is a commitment to thinking of democracy as more than
simply a procedure for legitimizing the
decisions of centralized bureaucracies.
Models of deliberative democracy are now in
the ascendant in democratic theory, implying
a much more active role for citizens in all facets
of decision-making, as well as the extension
of democratic norms to a far wider array of
activities. These sorts of arguments are often
associated with calls for the decentralization of
decision-making and political participation to
sub-national scales of regions and cities. At the
same time, there is increasing attention given to
emergent forms of transnational democracy
(Anderson, 2002a), focusing on the degree
to which systems of globalized economic and
political governance can be subordinated to
democratic oversight (Held, 1996). In this
work in particular, there is increasing attention
given to the diverse ‘agents of justice’ through
which democratic justice can be pursued and
secured (O’Neill, 2001), moving beyond an
exclusive focus on states as the privileged containers of democratic politics (cf. Low, 2003).
This emphasis on the global dimensions
of democratic politics has two important implications for geographical research in these areas.
First, it indicates that rather than opposing
representative to participatory forms of democracy, any viable form of democratic polity is
likely to combine aspects of these practices in
different ways. For both practical and normative reasons, representation seems an irreducible aspect of any viable, pluralistic model of
democracy. Not only do representative procedures enable the time__space distanciation of
democratic politics, but they also embody
important principles of difference and nonidentity within the demos (Barnett, 2003, Ch.
1). Representation is also an unavoidable
mechanism for the integration of so-called
‘mute interests’ – for example, future generations or non-human actors – which concerns
with environmental futures has made a much
more imperative consideration for democratic
theory (Goodin, 2003). The second reason
why the globalization of democracy is significant is that it suggests a move beyond the predominant territorial framing of the spatiality
151
DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION
of democracy. Rather than thinking simply in
terms of the need to articulate sub-national and
national scales with global scales, discussions
of these topics increasingly focus on the diverse
spatialities of democracy, ones which articulate
territorial and non-territorial practices, scalar
and non-scalar conceptualizations of space
(Low, 1997).
cb
Suggested reading
Barnett and Low (2004); Dunn (2005); Held
(1996); Mann (2005).
demographic transition A framework that
explores the historical sequence of changes in
fertility, mortality, migration and age
structure. This cornerstone of research in demography (see also historical demography)
uses widely accessible data (typically, time series
records of vital rates), proposes that stages of
economic development have particular demographic signatures and suggests that population
policies encourage zero population growth.
Its foundational concepts drew on French
and western european experience in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and
described a linked reduction in mortality rates
that helped to trigger sustained declines in
birth rates. According to the ‘classic’ transition
model (see figure), (national) populations
began at a high stationary phase, with both
death rates and birth rates high, and overall
population growth rates low. Improvements
in fresh water supply and sanitation, public
health and nutrition (characteristics of the
epidemiological transition) begin to support a
downward trend in death rates. As this
occurred at the same time as birth rates
remained high, population growth accelerated
during the next ‘early expanding’ phase.
During the third ‘late expanding’ phase, population growth continued but annual rates of
increase slowed down as the linked ‘fertility
transition’ kicked in and birth rates fell in
response to diverse factors including urbanization, decreased infant mortality, the changing
roles of children and women in society, contraception, and new patterns of nuptuality
(Sanderson and Dubrow, 2000). Finally,
populations entered a ‘low stationary’ phase,
where both birth and death rates are low, and
natural increase is again close to zero.
Considerable research has examined the
degree to which, given time, all regions of
the world will exhibit vital signs and demographic mechanisms that ‘converge’ on this
ideal type (Coleman, 2002). For example,
across contemporary sub-Saharan africa, there
is evidence to both support the diffusion of
the transition and question the transition’s
assumption of universalism (see Gould and
Brown, 1996). Indeed, sensitivity to both
historical and spatial variations in linked
demographic transitions has led to calls for a
reformulation of the classic framework.
Noting very high levels of ageing and belowreplacement fertility across a number of
more developed nations, advocates of a new
and distinctive second demographic transition
discuss how new links between demographic
drivers are being shaped by the changing relationships between parents and children in
society, new living arrangements (including
increased rates of cohabitation, mixed marriages and divorce) and sexual behaviours
(including later parenting and high fertility
outside marriage) (see, e.g., Ogden and Hall,
2004). In turn, the rise of immigration
demographic transition (Haggett, 1975)
152
DEMOGRAPHY
(e.g. in response to below replacement fertility)
may promote new modes of belonging and
family strategies, and create the conditions
for another distinctive transition.
ajb
Suggested reading
Kirk (1996); Van de Kaa (1987).
demography The science of human populations. For much of the preceding 400 years,
the field has concerned itself with the size,
distribution and composition of populations,
and how changes in these are connected with
the three population processes of mortality,
fertility and migration (Greenhalgh, 1996).
While formal demography has developed mathematical and actuarial techniques to model
and project changes in population (see life
table; population projection), the interdisciplinary field of population studies examines
demographic change within its broader societal setting and makes use of a wide range of
approaches (see, e.g., historical demography; life course). Despite its keen interest
in population distribution, its interdisciplinary
niche and its strong connections with sociology and economics, demography has had
a relatively limited engagement with geography. Although the development of population geography between the 1960s and the
1980s and the growth of spatial demography
drew attention to the study of mortality, fertility and particularly migration, many geographical analyses of issues including poverty,
gender roles, social exclusion, urbanization
and environmental degradation underplay
population factors (but for a recent exception,
see Gould, 2005).
Descriptions of changes in population size
and distribution make use of empirical data on
deaths, births, moves and the ages at which
these events occur, mostly obtained from
population censuses, social surveys or registers of population. Population growth within
an area is most simply expressed through the
balancing equation as follows:
Pt2 ¼ Pt1 þ (B t1
þ (I t1
t2
Dt1
t2 )
t2
E t1
t2 ),
where P is the population size, B is births, D is
deaths, I is in-migrants to an area, E is outmigrants from an area, t2 is time 2, t1 is time
1 in the past, and t1 – t2 is the time interval
between time 1 and time 2. Knowledge of the
ages at which vital events occur allows agespecific rates to be used to create synthetic or
model populations that approximate actual age
compositions of populations, and may be
used to project future population scenarios
(see population projection). Such stable
population theory is at the basis of life tables
that are used to calculate life expectancy by
age, the number of survivors by age, and thus
the impact of the three population processes
upon the age structure, and vice versa. Armed
with such data, research on changes in population growth and distribution has centred
on efforts to build, critique and extend the
demographic transition model; for example,
through work on differentials in mortality,
the onset of fertility decline and, more
recently, its recovery (Bongaarts, 2002; Case
and Paxson, 2005).
The field has long enjoyed an extremely
close – some have argued, too close – relationship
with social policy, whether at the international
scale such as the League of Nations’ commissioning of the Office of Population Research’s
work on transition theory in the 1940s, or in
informing the US administration’s laissez-faire
position on family planning at the 1984
International Conference on Population and
Development, or more recently in assessing
the impact of immigration policy or welfare
reform measures upon the life chances of
low-income family members (Büche and
Frick, 2005). A good deal of research effort
continues to debate new dimensions of the
population–resource–well-being nexus in
light of the likely global diffusion of low fertility and ageing, and the short-termism of
replacement migration policies (Meyerson,
2001). Connected to this, studies in family
demography describe factors behind changes
in the timing and nature of decisions about
marriage and partnering, divorce and household dissolution, leaving and rejoining the parental home, cohabitation, and transitioning
from full-time to part-time and unpaid work
(Holdsworth and Elliot, 2001). The diversification and plurality of households is a theme
in work on, for example, mixed marriages,
and variations in intergenerational relations
and resource flows by class, gender, race
and ethnicity (Gershuny, 2000). Many analyses link family demography to well-being,
with an increasing emphasis upon children
(Eloundou-Enyegue, 2004). Applied research
includes the development of geographical
informational systems and geodemographic techniques; both are used by marketing firms to target launch new products and
design sales areas, and by local authorities to
deliver services more efficiently.
ajb
153
DENSITY GRADIENT
Suggested reading
Greenhalgh (1995); Kent and Haub (2005);
Lutz, Sanderson and Scherbov (2004).
density gradient The rate of falling-off in
some value with distance from a central point,
as with the distance-decay relationships
showing land values and population densities
declining away from
a city centre (cf. alonso
..
model; von thunen model). Such relationships are often associated with patterns of social
contact, diffusion and spatial spread.
rj
dependency ratio The number of persons
aged 0–14 and 65 and over, divided by the
number of persons aged 15–64. This total
dependency ratio assesses the dependency
or reliance of one group upon another, and is
one of a suite of measures summarizing age
composition in a population (see also the
child dependency ratio, or the number of
persons aged 0–14 divided by the number of
persons aged 15–64, and the aged dependency
ratio, or the number of persons aged 65 and
older divided by the number of persons aged
15–64). The assumptions that all persons
under 15 and over 65 are (equally) dependent,
and that all persons within the working ages of
15–64 are (equally) independent are problematic, and are partly based on particular ideas of
work and production in capitalist societies.
Other measures reflect broader interest in the
links between generations. For example, the
caretaker ratio divides the number of females
aged 50–64 by the number of persons aged
80 and older, and informs analyses of changing care relations (Teo, 1996). Overall, these
measures do help expose differences in population composition that have profound social
and economic implications, including the
future provision of pensions and social support, patterns of economic demand and labour
supply, and gender relations. (See also ageing; population pyramid.)
ajb
Suggested reading
Shryock and Siegel (1973).
dependency theory A complex body of
theory with somewhat varied political orientations, presenting versions of core–periphery models that purport to explain the
underdevelopment of countries in the global
south as a consequence of their relationships
with the countries of the global north.
Central to these relationships have been forms
of economic, political and cultural dependence on the products of the global North,
154
including advanced manufactured goods, political models and sociocultural norms.
The earliest major variants of dependency
theory developed in latin america and are
especially associated with the Argentinean
structuralist economist Raúl Prebisch, for years
the head of the United Nations (UN) Economic
Commission on Latin America (ECLAC) and a
founder of the UN Commission on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD). Prebisch presented
evidence for declining long-term terms of
trade for global South exporters of agricultural products and raw materials, resulting in
their having to pay relatively more over time
for manufactured imports from the global
North (Kay, 1989, pp. 31–5). This line of
argument, institutionally supported by
ECLAC and UNCTAD, contradicted certain
features of Ricardian, neo-classical trade theory
that argued for the benefits to all countries of
trade based on comparative advantage (see
neo-classical economics). Structuralists thus
legitimized state policies of import-substitution
industrialization (ISI) that had been attempted
in Latin America since the 1930s. The goal of
these ISI policies was to reduce the import of
expensive manufactured goods by producing
such goods domestically under high protective
tariffs.
While Prebisch and other structuralists
quickly recognized the limits of ISI strategies
(Kay, 1989, pp. 36–41), they nonetheless
came under sustained attack from economists
who favoured export-oriented industrialization based on comparative advantage and
the maintenance of minimal tariff barriers.
At the same time, more politically radical versions of dependency theory came to the fore
by the 1960s, including the widely read works
of Andre Gunder Frank (1967). Gunder
Frank, influenced in part by the Cuban revolution, argued that only a world-wide socialist revolution – not mere shifts in state trade
policies – could undercut dependency in the
global South and eliminate underdevelopment, which he saw as an inevitable result
of core–periphery relationships under global
capitalism.
Radical dependency theories gained currency beyond Latin America in the 1970s,
especially in africa, but this decade also saw
the formulation of less radical versions of the
dependency thesis, including ‘dependent development’ (Evans, 1979) and world-systems
analysis (Wallerstein, 1979), that more readily allowed for the possibility of some movement upwards from the global periphery.
By the 1980s, however, many development
DEVELOPMENT
theorists claimed to see considerable problems
with any sort of dependency approach
(Corbridge, 1986). Nonetheless, central arguments put forward by dependency theorists
continue to haunt many development debates
today (Gwynne, Klak and Shaw, 2003). jgl
Suggested reading
Corbridge (1986); Evans (1979); Frank (1967);
Gwynne, Klak and Shaw (2003); Kay (1989);
Wallerstein (1979).
desertification A term coined in 1949 to
refer to an extreme form of ‘savannization’,
the conversion of forest into savanna, involving severe soil erosion and the invasion of
dryland plants. The Sahel drought and famine
of the early 1970s triggered concern about
advance of the Sahara, and extensive scientific
debate about bio-geo-physical feedback (the
effect of land-use changes on atmospheric
processes because of dust, surface reflectance
or other factors). This environmental narrative
had great power with policy-makers (Swift,
1996). Current understanding (e.g. in the
UN Convention to Combat Desertification,
1994) distinguishes between long-term largescale climatic processes that create desert
conditions, and local causes of ecological degradation and poverty (Mortimore, 1998). wma
development A central keyword of twentiethcentury political economy and social policy,
which can broadly refer to processes of social
change or to class and state projects to transform national economies, particularly in formerly colonized or third world geographies.
Cowen and Shenton (1996) provide a genealogy of these conceptions of intentional and
immanent development emerging from an
eighteenth-century European intellectual history concerned with secularized progress in
the wake of social disorder. Such a genealogy
must be pluralized and grounded in intertwined spatial, natural and cultural histories
of improvement, colonization, commodification, discipline, predation, government, transformation, destruction and renovation. A
category that carries such enormous and
variable analytical weight is inevitably contentious, and the idea of ‘development’ has
always been subject to critique (Cooper and
Packard, 1997), long before the efficacy of
the idea itself was called into question at the
end of the twentieth century, whether for its
allegedly inevitable eurocentrism (Escobar,
1995) or for its scepticism of the invisible hand
of the market (Lal, 1985). One way to frame
the long history of development before the
concept’s use is through four key intellectual
traditions: (1) political and economic liberalism and the defence of ‘free markets’; (2)
Marxist critique of class, class struggle and
imperialism; (3) social Darwinist notions of
evolution through racially hierarchized environments; and (4) anti-colonial defence of cultural difference and the possibility of national
self-determination. These four currents have
provided content, and contention, to what
would be thought of as ‘development’, as well
as to the technocratic and statist enterprise that
came together in the wake of mid-twentiethcentury decolonization.
The narrower conception of international or
intentional development came to its own after
the Second World War, in an ensemble of institutions, policies, disciplinary formations and,
most importantly, practices of intervention in
the alleviation of poverty in the Third World
recently decolonized nations, as they sought to
steer a tenuous path through the geopolitics
of the cold war. Development now signified
intervention by governments, rich and poor,
and by an array of international institutions
and organizations in civil society (Cooper
and Packard, 1997). Intentional development
was shaped by proximal legacies: ideas of ‘late
development’ in Bismarck’s Germany and the
nascent Soviet Union, inter-war arguments
for state intervention either to manage capitalism, as envisioned by Keynes, or to resist
the destructive aspects of commodification
through some form of democratic socialism
(as in Polanyi, 2001 [1944]). US political scientists were crucial to the emerging doctrine of
modernization theory as a disciplinary formation in the US academy (Gilman, 2003) tied to
the conceit that the right kinds of social and
economic planning would bring Third World
countries in line with Western capitalist norms
of social transformation. Development economics and new state capacities fueled the
Promethean visions of Third World states,
many of whom used modernization theory to
navigate through the Cold War, controlling
diverse and often undemocratic polities, while
forging shifting economies from reliance on primary-product exports to import-substitution
industrialization.
This orthodoxy of modernization, statism
and developmentalism was soon called into
question through oppositional forces of the
1960s and early 1970s, which sought to
redefine ‘development’ in more radical terms.
These forces were sometimes inspired by
radical anti-colonial thinkers such as Fanon
155
DEVOLUTION
(1963 [1961]), or they were spontaneous guerrilla or squatter movements critical of the failures of anti-colonial nationalists in power.
Latin American structuralists and dependency
theorists saw ‘peripheries’ revert to underdevelopment and forced stagnation through
trade relations with ‘metropoles’ (see core–
periphery model and dependency theory).
Others turned to peasants neglected by the systematic and global dumping of US grain surpluses. A series of ‘Third Worldist’ schools of
development studies, along with journals such
as Monthly Review and the Journal of Peasant
Studies, represented this wider climate of what
Emannuel Wallerstein calls the ‘anti-systemic
movements’ of the 1960s (see Watts, 2001).
The 1970s saw the response from states and
multilateral institutions to the oppositional
movements of the 1960s, manifest in neopopulist discourses of incorporation and participation within the development establishment.
The world bank spoke of ‘basic needs’.
green revolution transformations reshaped
agrarian geographies and associated livelihoods and expectations. Research and policy
interest in the informal sector intensified,
while development institutions sought to integrate women in development in areas of food
production and fertility. The 1970s was also a
period of deepening global crisis and transformation in the US’s hegemonic role in relation to the geopolitics of finance, currencies
and energy. The OPEC oil-price hike and the
subsequent flood of Eurodollars into offshore
US banks led to reckless lending and borrowing by increasingly indebted Third World
countries, and the Debt Crisis of the early
1980s was ‘resolved’ through geopolitical
realignments, allowing new forms of intervention in sovereign states to ensure repayment
to metropolitan banks. Development theory
and practice shifted abruptly into a period of
forced austerity and structural adjustment,
justified through a reinvention of liberal economic doctrine, in what John Toye dubbed
‘the neo-liberal counterrevolution’. The onset
of neo-liberalism coincided with the demise
of the USSR – the massive experiment in state
socialism – whose birth and death marked
hopes and laments of many Leftist development thinkers and Third Worldist nationalisms,
while making space to rethink anti-imperialist,
democratic socialist alternatives to Cold War
verities (Nove, 2005 [1983]).
By the 1990s, the focus of development had
shifted to East Asia, to economies that had
come through years of crisis, and to remarkable
transformations in China: a kind of capitalism
156
with Maoist characteristics, combining fast
growth with piling social and environmental
costs (see asian miracles / tigers). The
twenty-first century has in several senses borne
the continuing importance of development
questions after the highpoint of neo-liberal
and post-development critiques, as well
as the continued salience of its four longterm themes of liberalism, marxism, social
darwinism and anti-colonial radicalism.
Neo-liberalisms are now seen in relation to
state interventions, imperial militarism and
class projects of regional elites as well as their
adversaries. A revival of interest in Polanyi
(2001 [1944]) comes at a time when the social
costs of market fundamentalism are clearer,
and a key task of development geography is
to track its local articulations, as Hart (2001)
demonstrates in South Africa. Hart’s work
exemplifies the importance of continuing to
trace development processes in their spatial
diversity, and in relation to development
models abstracted from elsewhere. Taking
the South African government’s arguments
about East Asia as exemplar, Hart argues that
Chinese capitalism has relied on histories of
land reform and state investment in a social
wage, precisely that which has been eroded
in the decade following apartheid. This is a
powerful call to a development geography
engaged with concrete policy problems and
popular aspirations that is also careful about
tactics.
sc
devolution The transfer of power or authority from one person or body to another, and
specifically the transfer of governmental powers
from the central or federal government to
lower tiers. Devolution may involve the transfer of functions to unelected regional or local
administrative bodies, but the term is more
commonly used to refer to the transfer of some
legislative powers to provincial elected assemblies, which are often established for the
purpose.
Devolution thus involves a division of powers
(administrative, judicial or legislative) between
the central government and sub-national institutions. Devolution is sometimes distinguished
from federalism in which the division of
powers is determined by the constitution,
whereas under devolution the powers are conferred by the centre, which retains the capacity
to revoke them. However, the practical operations of federal and devolved systems are
often similar.
The extent of devolution varies between
countries, but sub-national institutions typically
DIALECTIC(S)
have responsibility for policy fields such as planning, economic development, health care
and environmental protection, while defence
and foreign affairs remain the responsibility of
the central state. Devolved institutions may also
have revenue-raising powers. Devolution may
also be ‘asymmetrical’ with some territories
having more autonomy and greater power than
others within the same nation-state.
Devolution has been an important state
strategy for the management of territorial political and cultural differences and the political
claims associated with them (Keating, 1998:
cf. territory; territoriality). It has also
been an important demand of territorial (especially regionalist) political movements, whether
as an end in its own right or as a step towards
either independence or political separation
(see regionalism).
Regional devolution has been a notable feature of the political geography of the European
Union since the 1970s. For example, of the
six largest EU countries, different forms of
regional autonomy were introduced in Spain
in 1978, in France after 1982, in Italy during
the 1990s and in Poland after 1999. In the UK
in 1999, a devolved parliament with some taxraising powers was established in Scotland,
along with elected assemblies of more limited
scope in Wales and Northern Ireland (Germany
had adopted a federal constitution in 1949: see
EU Committee of the Regions, 2003).
jpa
Suggested reading
Jones, Goodwin and Jones (2005); Swenden
(2006).
dialectic(s) The perpetual resolution of binary oppositions, a metaphysics most closely
associated in European philosophy and social
thought with G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1813) and
Karl Marx (1818–83). In human geography,
a simple example would be the following,
essentially Hegelian reading of August
Lösch’s location theory. There:
a perfectly homogeneous landscape with
identical customers, working inside the
framework of perfect competition, would
necessarily develop, from its inner rules of
change, into a heterogeneous landscape,
with both rich, active sectors and poor, depressed regions. The homogeneous regional
system negates itself and generates dialectically its contradiction as regional inequalities appear. (Marchand, 1978)
This is a helpful first approximation, but
the dialectic is usually deployed outside the
framework of neo-classical economics that
contains traditional location theory. In fact,
it is a characteristic of the Löschian system
that once the heterogeneous landscape has
emerged, it is maintained in equilibrium rather
than convulsed through transformation. As
such, it is really an example of a categorical
paradigm – one in which change is simply the
kaleidoscopic recombination of the same,
ever-present and fixed elements – rather than
a fully dialectical paradigm.
The most developed dialectical paradigms
in human geography have been derived from
Marx’s historical materialism. A formal
statement of principles has been provided by
Harvey (1996, pp. 48–57; cf. 1973, pp. 286–
302). Its key propositions include the following:
. Dialectical thinking emphasizes processes,
flows and relations.
. The formation and duration of systems
and structures is not the point of departure
(these ‘things’ are not treated as givens)
but, rather, the problem for analysis: processes, flows and relations constitute –
form, shape, give rise to – systems and
structures.
. The operation of these processes, flows
and relations is contradictory, and it is the
temporary resolution of these contradictions that feeds into the perpetual transformation of systems and structures. All
systems and structures thus contain possibilities for change.
. Spaces and times (or, rather, ‘space–
times’) are not external coordinates but
are contained within – or ‘implicated in’ –
different processes that effectively produce
their own forms of space and time.
Particular importance is attached to the
identification of contradictions. Formally, a
contradiction is a principle that both (i) enters
into the constitution of a system or structure,
and also (ii) negates or opposes (‘contradicts’)
the stability or integrity of that system or
structure.
These principles seem abstract when set out
in this form, but they have been used to considerable analytical effect by Harvey in his
explorations of the contradictory constitution
and restless transformation of capitalism as a
system of commodity production: hence his
insistence on the crucial, dialectical concept of
‘creative destruction’. Harvey wires this to the
dialectical production of space itself (see
Barnes 2006a; Sheppard, 2006a). Indeed, space
has occupied centre-stage in many dialectical
geographies, but several of these owe as much
157
DIALECTICAL IMAGE
to Lefebvre’s reading of Marx as they do
Harvey’s: hence Soja (1980, 1989) proposed
a ‘socio-spatial dialectic’ (see also trialectics)
and Shields (1999) described Lefebvre’s work
as a ‘spatial dialectics’. Other writers, indebted
in different ways to different historical materialisms, have shown how other geographical
concepts may also be approached dialectically:
thus Pred (1984) emphasized the dialectics of
place and practice; Mitchell (2002a) traced a
series of ways in which landscape may be
interrogated as a dialectical formation; and
Castree (2003b) examined the prospects (and
problems) of treating what he called ‘nature in
the making’ dialectically.
In Harvey’s own writings, as elsewhere, dialectics functions as both a mode of explanation
and a mode of representation (Castree, 1996).
representation is not confined to writing, of
course, and there has been considerable interest in combining the textual and the visual
in the tense constellations of what Marxist
cultural critic Walter Benjamin called the dialectical image. Historical materialism is rich
with close readings of Marx’s canon – attending not only to what he said but how he said
it – and it was famously claimed that Marx’s
words are ‘like bats: one can see in them both
birds and mice’. In human geography, however, this attentiveness to the slippery subtleties of language and to the powers released by
words has occasioned a series of reflections
that have taken many critics a considerable
distance from Harvey’s own base in historical
materialism. Thus Olsson (1974) argued that
the categorical paradigm fails to recognize the
interpenetrations of form and process, subject
and object, so that its propositions reveal more
about the language we are talking in, whereas
‘statements in dialectics will say more about
the worlds we are talking about’. Olsson’s subsequent work has taken him far from Marx
and into a sustained interrogation of Western
philosophical thought (Olsson, 1980, 1991,
2007). To be sure, ‘words’ and ‘worlds’ are
connected, as Olsson (and for that matter
Harvey) constantly accentuate, and in order
to explore the ways in which they are folded
into one another, a number of human geographers have made two further moves. One
has been to follow the linguistic turn in the
humanities and social sciences, and so challenge the metaphysics of binary oppositions
on which classical dialectics depends
(Doel, 1992, 2006: see also deconstruction).
Another has been to take seriously Harvey’s
emphases on materiality, practice and transformation, but to develop these through
158
an avowedly non-representational theory.
Here too, the accent is on practices, and on
the provisional and the incomplete, but
Whatmore (1999b, p. 25; see also 2002a) insists
that dialectical reasoning is ‘insufficiently
radical’ to convey the sensuous openness of
‘world-making’: there is thus a studied refusal
to render processes through binary oppositions or to convene them within a plenary
totality. But some perceptive critics have wondered whether, in practice, this agenda (its
‘relational ontology’) really is so different from
the approach practiced by Harvey and others
(Demeritt, 2005).
dg
Suggested reading
Demeritt (2005); Harvey (1996, pp. 48–57);
Sheppard (2006).
dialectical image A leitmotif in the work of
Walter Benjamin, the dialectical image is best
described as an aesthetics of historical montage, or as a method for disrupting a linear or
progressivist logic of history and historical
understanding. Opposed to all forms of teleology and totality, the dialectical image rests
on a spatio-temporal paradox. On the one
hand, all images must be torn from their immediate contexts and their chronological movement ‘frozen’ in order to become legible.
On the other, dialectics, in both the ancient
sense of continuous disputation and the
Marxian theoretic of contradiction, works to
ensure constant mobility and mutation. So
understood, the dialectical image reconfigures
the relationship of the past to the present.
Refusing all temporal continuity in which the
present illuminates the past or the past casts
its light on the present, the dialectical image
constitutes the scene in which time and space
are out of joint; in which the ‘then’ and now’,
like the ‘here’ and ‘there’, combine in an
explosive flash or ‘constellation’. From this
emerges a cognitive shock, without which
rigorous conceptual thinking cannot occur. jd
Suggested reading
Benjamin (1973, 1999); Buck-Morss (1989);
Dubow (2007).
diaspora A scattering of people over space
and transnational connections between people
and places. The term was first used to describe
the forced dispersal of the Jews from Palestine
in the sixth century bce, and often continues
to refer to forced migration and exile. More
recently, and particularly since the 1990s,
diaspora studies have come to encompass
DIFFERENCE
wider notions of transnational migration,
resettlement, connection and attachment,
often closely associated with post-colonial
and ‘new ethnicities’ research (see transnationalism). For Kalra, Kaur and Hutnyk
(2005), there is a broad distinction between
the use of diaspora as a descriptive tool and
mode of categorization (including lists of various criteria that characterize diasporas) and
more critical understandings of diaspora as a
contested process. Whilst some accounts identify different types of diaspora, including victim, labour, trade, imperial and cultural
diasporas on a global scale (Cohen, 1997),
other studies theorize diaspora and its implications for understanding space, identity, culture and the politics of hybridity (including
Hall, 1990; Kalra, Kaur and Hutnyk, 2005).
Rather than analyse diaspora solely in terms of
‘race’ and ethnicity, geographers and others
working across the humanities and social
sciences have explored the gender, class and
sexual spaces of diaspora. Geographers have
also stressed the importance of studying the
grounded politics of diaspora (including
Mitchell, 1997b). Both the conceptual study
of diaspora and the substantive study of different diasporas develop critical perspectives
on globalization, neo-liberalism, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.
Both ideas about diaspora and studies
of particular diasporas are inherently geographical, revolving around space and place,
mobility and locatedness, the nation and
transnationality. The diasporic lives of transnational migrants, for example, are often interpreted in terms of ‘roots’ and ‘routes’
(Clifford, 1997). Whilst ‘roots’ might imply
an original homeland from which people have
scattered, and to which they might seek to
return, a focus on ‘routes’ complicates such
ideas by tracing more mobile, transcultural
and deterritorialized geographies of migration
and resettlement. As Paul Gilroy explains, the
spatialities of diaspora represent ‘a historical
and experiential rift between the locations of
residence and the locations of belonging’
(2000b, p. 124). A wide range of research
explores diasporic attachments to homelands
that might be remembered, imagined, lost
or are yet to be achieved, and the political,
economic and cultural materialization of such
attachments through political activism, the
transfer of remittances and diverse cultural
practices. Other research unsettles the idea
that people living in diaspora are bound to a
homeland or nation of origin and identification. Avtar Brah, for example, proposes the
notion of ‘diaspora space’ to encompass the
‘intersectionality of diaspora, border, and dis/
location as a point of confluence of economic,
political, cultural and psychic processes’ (1996,
p. 181). As Brah explains, ‘diaspora space as a
conceptual category is ‘‘inhabited’’ not only by
those who have migrated and their descendants
but equally by those who are constructed and
represented as indigenous. In other words, the
concept of diaspora space (as opposed to that of
diaspora) includes the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘‘staying put’’ ’
(p. 181).
ab
Suggested reading
Brah (1996); Clifford (1997).
difference The concept of ‘difference’ has
become an increasingly prominent concern
in geography over the past two decades.
Geographers have looked at how socio-spatial
boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are produced on the basis of categories such as race,
class, gender, sexuality or disability. Most
agree that these and other such categories are
socially constructed. This is not to say that
differences do not exist or are illusory but,
rather, to point out that the ways in which we
categorize ourselves and others are the result
of social practices. Further, these socially constructed differences have very real political
effects. As Audrey Kobayashi (1997, p. 3)
writes, ‘The concept of difference allows the
social creation of categories of people subordinate to a dominant norm, and allows the
continuation of cultural practices that reinscribe difference as differential values placed
upon human life.’
In that difference arises from social practice,
it is also spatial. David Harvey (1996) argues
that space and time work to individuate and
identify people through the production of differences along multiple axes. In other words,
geographically inscribed inequalities position
people and groups differently in relation to political, cultural, ecological and economic
resources. Spatial practices such as segregation and the policing of borders work to
enforce and consolidate difference. As David
Delaney (1998) shows in his work on race, landscape and law, the complex legal geographies of
property and public/private distinctions are
inseparable from the relations of power and
domination that are associated with difference.
This means that some people have more access
to rights in certain spaces than others.
While ideas about difference often work to
delimit hierarchies and inequalities, difference
159
DIFFUSION
is also a powerful element of identity politics. Race, class, gender, sexuality and other
differences can provide the basis for solidarities and resistance. Arguments that point
out the constructed nature of such categories
and that highlight the divisions within groups
(such as racial differences within feminist
movements, or class differences within racial
politics) can seem to threaten the basis of
political struggles forged around identities
such as ‘Black’ or ‘Woman’. In response, some
feminists have adopted ‘strategic essentialism’, choosing to emphasize the commonalities across women’s experiences in order to
unite women for political purposes.
Difference poses political problems for
those who wish both to value diversity and
to dismantle the structures of discrimination
and oppression that scaffold ideas about difference. The question of how to recognize and
make space for the very real effects of difference, or positionality, and at the same time
to dismantle hierarchies based on difference is
of ongoing concern to political theorists and
geographers. Iris Marion Young (1990a), for
example, has advocated for the celebration of
diversity within an overarching political unity.
Such a project is not, however, without its
difficulties in the context of ever shifting axes
of difference and alliance.
ajs
Suggested reading
Fincher and Jacobs (1998); Women and Geography Study Group (1997).
diffusion The spread of a phenomenon
(including ideas, objects and living beings)
over space and through time. There is a long
tradition of diffusion studies in American
cultural geography, most closely associated
with the work of Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889–
1975) and Fred B. Kniffen (1900–93).
According to Sauer (1941), it was Friedrich
Ratzel (1844–1904) who ‘founded the study
of the diffusion of cultural traits, presented
in the nearly forgotten second volume of his
Anthropogeographie’ published in 1891 (see
anthropogeography). In Sauer’s view, diffusion – ‘the filling of the space of the earth’ –
was a ‘general problem of social science’:
‘A new crop, craft or technique is introduced
to a culture area. Does it spread, or diffuse
vigorously or does its acceptance meet resistance?’ The specific contribution of geography
was to reconstruct diffusion pathways and to
evaluate the influence of physical barriers
(Sauer, 1952; Wagner and Mikesell, 1962).
Both tasks were pursued by various members
160
of the berkeley school, but they reappeared
in a starkly different guise in the much more
formal study of innovation diffusion inaugurated by Torsten Hägerstrand (1916–2004).
One of Sauer’s closest associates introduced
Hägerstrand’s Swedish monograph to AngloAmerican geography: ‘No one who essays
in the future to interpret the distribution of
culture elements in the process of diffusion
can afford to ignore Hägerstrand’s methods
and conclusions’ (Leighly, 1954). Even so, it
was some fourteen years before an English
translation of Hägerstrand’s Innovation diffusion as a spatial process appeared (Hägerstrand,
1967; see Duncan, 1974). Hágerstrand’s work
had two catalytic consequences: it set in
motion the frozen worlds of spatial science,
and it opened the door to sophisticated
computer modelling of spatial processes. The
theoretical structure of his original model is
shown in the figure. An interaction matrix
provides the contours of a generalized or mean
information field, which structures the way
in which information circulates through the
population in a regional system. These flows
are modulated by physical barriers and individual resistances, which together check the
transformation of information into innovation
and so shape the successive diffusion waves
that break on to the final adoption surface.
Most immediate discussion focused on the
operationalization of the model – on the use
of simulation methods, the comparison of
‘observed’ and ‘predicted’ patterns of adoption, and the detection of a localized neighbourhood effect. Within this modelling
tradition, the most important developments
included the following:
. A formalization of the mathematical relationships between the structure of the
mean information field and the form and
velocity of diffusion waves, revealing the
connections between different distancedecay curves and the classic neighbourhood effect (although it is scarcely surprising that a distance-bound interaction
matrix should generate a contagious pattern
of adoptions).
. A demonstration that the Hägerstrand
model is only a special instance of the
simple epidemic model, and the subsequent
derivation of more complex epidemic
models, particularly through the remarkable contributions of Cliff, Haggett, Ord
and Versey (1981), whose replication of a
range of ‘spatial processes’ (see process)
confirmed:
DIFFUSION
– the recognition of hierarchical diffusion,
typically through central place systems, and frequently operating alongside
the distance-bound, contagious diffusion
of the classical model (Hudson, 1969;
Pedersen, 1970);
– the incorporation of rejection and removal processes and the modelling of
competitive diffusions (Webber, 1972).
These changes entailed a move away from
simulation techniques towards more analytical
methods, which have been of immense
importance in the increased traffic between
epidemiology and medical geography (see
disease, modelling of). This is now the
major focus of diffusion theory in human
geography, although spatial models of information circulation and innovation diffusion
are important in marketing research too.
Haggett (1992) claimed to see parallels
between Sauer’s original prospectus and the
contemporary modelling of disease, particularly
his use of ‘controlled speculation’ and his focus
on ‘hearths and pathways’. Ironically, however,
it was precisely these features that caused
diffusion theory to fall from grace in most other
areas of human geography. There were several brilliant studies that wired diffusion into
larger social transformations (e.g. Pred, 1973;
Blaikie, 1975), but these were the exception to
a cascade of studies using available data sets
merely to ‘fit’ or ‘test’ diffusion models. Just ten
years after the translation of Hágerstrand’s
magnum opus, Blaikie (1978) could speak of a
‘crisis’ in diffusion research, which he said
arose from its preoccupation with spatial form
and space–time sequence, while Gregory
(1985) attributed the ‘stasis’ of diffusion theory
to a pervasive unwillingness to engage with
social theory and social history to explore
the conditions and the consequences of diffusion
processes. Critics argued that the spatial circulation of information remained the strategic element in most applications of the
Hägerstrand model and its derivatives, and
while flows of information through different
propagation structures and contact networks
were exposed in more detail, the primacy
accorded to the reconstruction of these spatial
pathways obscured a crucial limitation of the
Hägerstrand model: it operated within what
Blaut (1977) called a ‘granular region’, ‘a sort
of Adam Smithian landscape, totally without
macrostructure’. In particular:
(1) The Hägerstrand model begins with a
pool of ‘potential adopters’ and does
not explain the selective process through
which they are constituted in the first
place. This suggests the need for a
model of biased innovation, where (for
example) class or gender circumscribes
access to innovations. ‘Non-diffusion’ is
then not a passive but an active state
arising directly from the structures of a
particular society (Yapa and Mayfield,
1978). Critiques of this sort required diffusion theory to be integrated with fields
such as political economy and feminist geography that pay attention to
the social as well as the spatial.
(2) The Hägerstrand model assumes a
‘uniform cognitive region’ and does not
explain the selective process through
which information flows are interpreted.
This matters because ‘resistance’ to innovation is not invariably a product of
ignorance or insufficient information: it
may signal a political struggle by people
whose evaluation of the information is
strikingly different to that of the ‘potential adopters’. Critiques of this sort required diffusion theory to be reconnected to a more general cultural
geography (Blaut, 1977).
These critiques served largely to divert
attention to other projects, however, and there
has been little advance in the architecture of
diffusion theory in recent years. Interest in the
detailed reconstruction of specific diffusion
sequences as key moments in processes of
economic and cultural transformation has
continued in cultural–historical geography
and environmental history (e.g. Jordan,
1993; Overton, 1996), and there is also a
growing interest in the circulation of information, including the transmission of scientific
knowledge and the formation of creative economies (Kong, Gibson, Khoo and Semple,
2006). But these enquiries rarely refer to,
let alone rely on, classical diffusion theory. The
tension between diffusion modelling on the
one side and cultural-historical and politicoeconomic studies of diffusion on the other
(and the versions of human geography that
each represents) is exemplified by the study
of aids. Mapping and modelling the spread
of the disease has been a major focus of geographical enquiry, but this has been undertaken largely in isolation from studies of its
social and cultural geography (cf. Brown,
1995). It is in the space between these two
intellectual traditions that diffusion theory
currently languishes, but some small steps
161
DIGITAL CARTOGRAPHY
diffusion The structure of Hägerstrand’s diffusion model
towards bridging the gap have been made in
studies of disease diffusion and war (e.g.
Smallman-Raynor and Cliff, 2004).
dg
Suggested reading
Blaikie (1978); Blaut (1977); Haggett (1992).
digital cartography The use of numerical
coding, electronic media and digital computers to collect, manipulate, manage and display geographical data. Coined in the 1970s,
the term has largely replaced the older rubric
‘computer-assisted
cartography’,
because
almost all production cartography is now
computer-assisted. ‘Digital cartography’ seems
destined for obsolescence insofar as most
geospatial data are now ‘born digital’; that is,
originally captured as numbers using a global
positioning system (gps) receiver, aerial
photogrammetry or remote sensing, rather
than converted from an existing map image
by scanning or a process of electronic tracing
known as digitizing. In this sense, geographical data acquired by updating, transforming
or otherwise enhancing the attributes (descriptions) of cartographic objects such as street
segments and land parcels are also born
digital. Because hard-copy, analogue maps
have become more the exception than the
rule, ‘digital cartography’ seems likely to survive only when writers need an opposite for
‘analogue cartography’. Even so, born-digital
materials, especially useful because they
are readily searchable and easily updated,
challenge conventional practices of map
preservation and copyright (Varian, 2005).
As an endeavour, digital cartography is
closely related to geographic information
162
systems (gis). In general, the former focuses
on data acquisition, data management and the
generation of reproducible images, while the
latter emphasizes data retrieval and specialized
analysis. These overlapping disciplines share
a common interest in automated map generalization and the display of terrain data.
In addition, digital cartography has a dynamic,
interactive component linked to scientific visualization and computer animation. Other
shared concerns include standardized terms
and definitions, flexible exchange formats,
efficient methods for ensuring reliability, and
the development of metadata describing a file’s
origin, contents and fitness for use (NoguerasIso, Zarazaga-Soria, Lacasta, Béjar and MuroMedrano, 2004).
As with GIS, digital cartography recognizes
two principal types of data, raster and
vector. Examples of raster data include landcover data acquired from space with a multispectral scanner, digital elevation models
(DEMs) consisting of surface elevations sampled for a grid with rows and columns spaced
30 m apart, and images scanned from historical topographic maps and nautical charts.
The spatial quality of a raster data set is
described by the spatial resolution of the sensor or scanner. By contrast, vector data rely on
lists of point coordinates to describe the shape
and position of boundary lines, streets and
other linear features, as well as lists of linkages
or adjacencies to specify the boundaries of
polygons representing, for example, counties
or census tracts. In addition, attribute data
describe the type of feature, its name or identifying number, and specialized characteristics
such as the population of a census tract or
DIGITIZING
the width and left- and right-hand address
ranges of a street segment.
Each format has particular advantages.
Maps in raster format, for instance, are well
suited for print-on-demand distribution as
well as dissemination over the internet
(Evans and Vickers, 1995). By contrast, vector
data are especially useful for creating map displays at different scales on diverse projections
(see map projection). Mathematical formulae
afford ready conversion between spherical and
plane coordinates or from one projection to
another. Indeed, tailored map projections that
control distortion for a region of interest or
provide insightful views, including dynamic
oblique views or flyovers, are a prime asset of
digital cartography.
Digital cartographic research has also produced algorithms for map generalization and
map labelling, both of which support the
dynamic, interactive change of scale for street
maps, topographic maps and electronic
atlases. Generalization is especially relevant
for maps displayed at scales smaller than that
for which the data were originally acquired
(McMaster and Shea, 1992). Because map
symbols are more likely to overlap as scale
decreases, a generalization algorithm must
first identify areas where overlap will occur
and then avoid aesthetically awkward (and
sometime confusing) graphic conflict by suppressing less important features or shifting
them apart – one of several ethically responsible trade-offs that human mapmakers
call ‘cartographic license’ (Li and Su, 1995).
Generalization must also smooth out intricate
coastlines and streams with tight meander
loops, both of which can yield ambiguous
and unappealing blobs at substantially reduced
scales. Automated map labeling is similar to
map generalization insofar as the algorithm
must determine potential conflict between
the allegedly ideal positions of map labels
(Zoraster, 1997). If the conflict cannot be
resolved by moving one or more labels to a
less desirable location, the algorithm might
need to leave a feature unlabeled or use a thin
leader line to link a symbol with a label that
cannot be adjacent. More straightforward is
the attachment of text to curved features such
as roads and streams.
Another common display task in digital
cartography is the realistic viewing of digital
elevation models. Typical strategies include
low-angle oblique views, which require a geometric transformation as well as the identification and suppression of symbols where the
surface is hidden from view (De Floriani and
Magillo, 2003) and the addition of shadows,
or hill shading, in areas not illuminated by
a hypothetical light source located in the upper
left or upper right (Tuhkanen, 1987). More
intriguing are maps formed by draping satellite
imagery, land-cover classifications or topographic symbols over obliquely viewed digital
elevation models (Banerjee and Mitra, 2004).
Although digital cartography has largely
displaced its non-electronic counterpart as
the principal means of acquiring and storing
geospatial data, paper maps thrive in diverse
ways: in newspapers, magazines, atlases and
geography textbooks; as mass-marketed wayfinding and recreation maps; and as customized, one-off artefacts downloaded over the
Internet (Peterson, 2003) or created using
commercial, off-the-shelf mapping software
(Longley, Goodchild, Maguire and Rhind,
2005, pp. 157–75). Everyday experience suggests, not without irony, that the majority of
paper maps nowadays are specially tailored
renderings based on digital data and produced
on a laser or ink-jet printer.
mm
Suggested reading
DeMers (2002); Longley, Goodchild, Maguire
and Rhind (2005); McMaster and Shea (1992);
Peterson (2003).
digitizing The process of converting images,
texts, models, maps, sounds and data into
digital and computer readable forms, with an
expectation of ‘value added’ but a risk of information loss. A paper map is easily digitized
into bitmap or JPEG format using a conventional, desktop scanner. However, the user
may be disappointed by the result. First, the
original image will be converted into a series of
discrete (raster) pixels. The blocky nature of
these will be evident in words or labels copied
from the original document; the severity
will depend on the resolution of the scanner
(its dpi – dots per inch). Second, loading
the image into a geographic information
system will not leave it positioned correctly
with other maps and data on screen. The reason is that although the digital image may
show a map, no information has been encoded
such that the computer can interpret it geographically. Providing a ‘world file’ assigns
geocodes to the corners of the image and
therefore locates it. Yet, if the user’s goal is to
select all schools within a certain distance of a
major road, for example, then s/he will still
be left wanting: the original map has been
digitized ‘en masse’ without encoding the
two specific features of schools and roads.
163
DISABILITY
The general point is that digitizing may
appear straightforward, but producing an outcome that is fit for purpose requires more
careful thought. For example, it is easy to scan
a manuscript and therefore archive it in an
online depository. But unless some metadata
about the document are also provided (year of
publication, title, abstract etc.), then it will be
hard for potential users to search the depository and extract what they are looking for.
It may also be beneficial to convert the
scanned image using text recognition software, permitting all documents to be searched
for key words. However, this all takes time and
money, as well as the development of standards and protocols to ensure consistency in
how information is stored, catalogued and
updated – such as those developed for the
JSTOR scholarly journal archive (www.jstor.
org) that allow searching of the author, title,
abstract and/or full text for all or a subset of
the journals archived, for all or particular
dates, and for all or specific types of journal
content (e.g. article, review or opinion piece)
(Schonfeld, 2003).
There is also the issue of error management.
Using manual digitizing tables and software to
capture the geographies of schools and roads
from a paper map assumes that the map is
of reasonable quality, having not shrunk or
stretched, and requires concentration from
the person digitizing who may easily make
mistakes (from a slight hand shake or from
fatigue or boredom!). A lack of attention could
lead to road sections that do not meet (an
undershoot) or the creation of a new spur
when the road is drawn past the intended
intersection (an overshoot). If not detected,
the errors could propagate and lead to misleading analyses of the data concerned.
Digitization is always a change to the
original. Whether it matters depends on the
nature of the change and how the digital version is applied. It could be argued that MP3s
are inferior to vinyl records because they
have a lower frequency range. But then have
you ever tried to carry a thousand seven-inch
singles?
rh
Suggested reading
Clarke (2003); Schonfeld (2003).
disability Conventionally understood as the
state of being physically and/or mentally different from some assumed ‘norm’ of human
corporeal and/or psychological functioning,
the term applies to people with an impairment
that supposedly limits their ability to perform
164
activities in the manner taken as ‘normal’ for
a human being. Disability is often framed
negatively, couched as ‘loss’ (e.g. of a limb or
vision) or ‘lack’ (e.g. of mobility or reasoning
skills), with scant attention paid to the experiences and aspirations of the people affected.
Proponents of the medical model of disability
stress the apparently ‘damaged’ body or mind
of an individual, and invite a personal narrative of ‘tragedy’ followed by ‘heroic’ efforts
at self-adjustment (Golledge, 1997). Those
of the social model stress not the individual
but, rather, a wider society that fails
to accommodate impairment, thus embracing
a critical stance on the underlying ableism
of a non-disabled society (Chouinard, 1997).
The latter model, casting light on ‘disabling
social and environmental barriers’ (Barnes
and Mercer, 2004, p. 2; emphasis added)
and advocating a critical ‘politics of access’,
is inherently geographical in its alertness
to the social and physical placing of disabled
people within non-disabled settings. This
model also examines both the political–
economic forces impacting upon disability, as
in the discriminatory dynamics of labour
and housing markets, and the deeper roots
of oppression occasioned by the stigmatization
of ‘imperfect’ bodies (Hahn, 1989). It has
itself been criticized for remaining too distanced from embodied realities, and thereby
neglecting subjective experience as revealed in
personal stories of pain, fatigue, rejection and
simply ‘getting by’. Some theorists hence call
for a third way, a biosocial model, allowing bodies and experiences into the picture while still
retaining the critical sharpness of the social
model (Watson, 2004).
These debates have played out within geographical research on disability (Hall, 2000b),
which has become a recognizable sub-field
exemplified in review articles and edited book
collections (Park, Radford and Vickers, 1998;
Butler and Parr, 1999). Early work considered
the wheelchair-user or visually impaired person negotiating the environmental obstacle
course of streets, curbs and buildings fronted
by steps (Golledge, 1993; Vujakovic and
Matthews, 1994). The focus upon ‘stairs’ was
then supplemented by a concern for ‘stares’
(Pain, Burke, Fuller and Gough, 2001,
p. 177), so that the issue becomes not just
physical accessibility but also the extent to
which disabled people are marked as different,
fundamentally unwanted and ‘out of place’ in
public space (Butler and Bowlby, 1997). The
broader context of ‘disabling environments’
here attracts critique, implicating architects,
DISCIPLINARY POWER
planners and building control officers (designers and ‘the state’) for producing spaces that
effectively ‘lock out’ disabled people (Imrie,
1996). The longer-term historical perspective
reveals how modern capitalism has initiated
an ongoing process of spatially marginalizing
disabled people from meaningful economic
roles and the normal rounds of social reproduction (Gleeson, 1999). Other geographical
enquiries now use qualitative methods such
as in-depth interviewing to excavate the experiential dimensions of being ‘out of place’,
detecting how the axes of disability, class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality meld together
in (the enduring of ) exclusionary spaces.
Disability geography deals with both physical and mental impairments, where the latter
entail both people with mental health problems (the ‘mentally ill’ in a medicalized
vocabulary, including the ‘depressed’, ‘schizophrenic’ etc.) and people with learning or
intellectual disabilities (the ‘mentally handicapped’ or ‘mentally retarded’ of now disfavoured vocabularies). There is a vibrant tradition
of mental health geography (Smith and Giggs,
1988), exploring spatial–epidemiological
subjects as well as looking at both the emergence of the ‘lunatic asylum’ and, more
recently, processes of ‘deinstitutionalization’,
‘community care’ and the sites of everyday
survival today for people with mental health
problems (see contributions to Philo, 2000c).
Less extensive is work on geographies of
intellectual disability, although historical and
contemporary studies can be identified (see
contributions to Metzel and Philo, 2005).
There is potential for building theoretical, substantive and ethico-political bridges between
the different strains of disability geography
tackling physical and mental difference, and
perhaps too with parts of health geography
exploring the circumstances of people with
long-term chronic illness (Moss and Dyck,
2002).
cpp
Suggested reading
Butler and Parr (1999); Gleeson (1999); Imrie
(1996); Philo (2000c).
disciplinary power A form of power analysed in the work of Michel Foucault (1926–
84) that in his analysis follows from classical
sovereignty. Foucault claims that power is dispersed throughout society rather than coming from a centralized source, and that is
therefore important to analyse it within institutional and social practices. Disciplinary
power emerged in Foucault’s published works
with Discipline and Punish (1976), but was also
analysed in his earlier lectures at the Collège de
France that are now being published (see, e.g.,
Foucault, 2003 [1999], 2006 [2003]).
While sovereignty may showcase its power
through individual events of spectacular violence, such as the fighting of battles or the
torture of attempted regicides – like the gruesome description of the measures meted out
to Damiens at the beginning of Discipline
and punish – discipline works in an entirely
other way. Power is constantly exercised, over
the smallest transgression, with repetition,
certainty and consistency, key elements in
establishing control. Its model is the modern
army, with the training of individual bodies
into collective ones, a process that Foucault
describes as ‘dressage’. The mechanisms can
be found in schools, hospitals, factories and
prisons. The model of spatial organization in
a town affected by the plague is another of
Foucault’s recurrent examples, which he finds
taken to its ideal form in Jeremy Bentham’s
plan for the panopticon.
A number of key themes emerge in
Foucault’s analyses: the control of the body
and its ritualized training and conditioning;
the continuous nature of the exercise of disciplinary power; the control and partitioning of
time – particularly illustrated by the modern
mechanized factory – and spatial organization
and distribution. Spatial control works both on
the level of architectural or urban planning, and
on the ordering of individual bodies. Discipline
is a distribution of bodies, of their actions, of
their behaviour: a spatial strategy and analysis.
These spatial strategies can be understood as
enclosure or confinement; subdivision or partitioning of this space; designation of a purpose
or coding to these sites; and classification or
ranking of them. These spaces of power have
their concomitant knowledges, which Foucault
designates by the power–knowledge relation in
a series of pairings: ‘tactics, the spatial ordering
of men; taxonomy, the disciplinary space of
natural beings; the economic table, the regulated movement of wealth’ (1976a [1975],
pp. 148–9).
In Foucault’s early work on sexuality (1978
[1976], 2003 [1999]), he utilized and developed these ideas about disciplinary power, and
analysed how power over life itself could be
understood as biopower. In his later writings
on governmentality, Foucault developed an
understanding of how liberal governments
tried to govern as little as possible and to open
up spaces for the circulation of goods, people
and wealth (see liberalism). Although many
165
DISCOURSE
have found Foucault’s work on power generally unremittingly bleak, the critique of individual agency and the analysis of the process
by which subjects are formed – a process that
Foucault calls assujettissement, meaning both
subject-formation and subjectification – have
been extremely influential.
se
Suggested reading
Crampton and Elden (2007); Driver (1992a).
discourse A specific series of representations and practices through which meanings
are produced, identities constituted, social
relations established, and political and ethical
outcomes made more or less possible.
Although different fields in the humanities
and social sciences have worked with varying
accounts of discourse, all grow out of the decades of debates about language, interpretation and understanding in the natural and
social sciences (Howarth, 2000). As such, discourse is a concept that departs from the traditional philosophy of language’s relationship
to the world. Instead of seeing the world as
independent of ideas about it, with language
transparently reflecting a pre-existing reality,
theories of discourse understand reality as produced via practices of interpretation deploying
different modes of representation.
Although philosophically well established,
especially in post-structuralism, discourse
remains controversial in the social sciences.
Those employing the concept are often said to
be claiming that ‘everything is language’, that
‘there is no reality’ and that, consequentially,
a general inability to take a political position
and defend an ethical stance abounds. These
objections demonstrate how understandings
of discourse are bedevilled by the view that
interpretation involves only language, in contrast to the external, the real and the material.
These dichotomies of idealism/materialism
and realism/idealism remain powerful conceptions of understanding the world. In practice, however, a concern with discourse does
not involve a denial of the world’s existence or
the significance of materiality. This is well
articulated by Laclau and Mouffe (1985,
p. 108): ‘the fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse has nothing to
do with whether there is a world external to
thought, or with the realism/idealism opposition . . . What is denied is not that . . . objects
exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute
themselves as objects outside of any discursive
condition of emergence.’ This means that
166
while nothing exists outside of discourse, there
are important distinctions between linguistic
and non-linguistic phenomena. There are also
modes of representation that are ideational
though strictly non-linguistic, such as the
aesthetic and pictorial. It is just that there is
no way of comprehending non-linguistic and
extra-discursive phenomena except through
discursive practices.
These philosophical debates are implied
by different uses of discourse even when they
are not overtly discussed. They lead to an
appreciation of the fact that discourses are performative. This means that although discourses
have variable meaning, force and effect, they
constitute the ‘objects’ of which they speak
and produce notions of ‘the social’ and ‘the
self’ (see performativity). The meanings,
identities, social relations and political assemblages that are enacted in these performances
combine the ideal and the material. As a consequence, appreciating that discourses are
performative moves us away from a reliance
on the idea of (social) construction towards
materialization, whereby discourse ‘stabilizes
over time to produce the effect of boundary,
fixity and surface’ (Butler, 1993a, pp. 9, 12).
The performativity of discourse calls attention to the discursive formations that are
produced over time by the stabilization of some
interpretations at the expense of others.
Discursive formations – such as neo-liberal
notions of ‘competitiveness’ (Schoenberger,
1998), gentrification and the racialization
of Puerto Rican youth in Chicago (Wilson and
Grammenos, 2005) or cold war-derived geopolitical discourses of ‘danger’ in Central
Asia (Megoran, 2005) – are the culmination
of discursive economies at work. In a discursive
economy, investments have historically been
made in certain interpretations; dividends can
be drawn by those interests that have made the
investments; representations are taxed when
they confront new and ambiguous circumstances; and participation in the discursive economy is through social relations that embody an
unequal distribution of power.
Within human geography, the use of the concept of discourse can be characterized by a number of dimensions, though by no means would all
scholars would accept every one of them:
. Discourses are heterogeneous: discourses are
not the product of a single author or institution, and neither are they confined to
literary texts, archives, scientific statements
or political speeches. They come to have a
dominant form over time, but they never
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
eradicate alternatives or end resistance,
and are thus constantly having to be
reproduced.
. Discourses are regulated: discourses have
coherence and systematicity, though they
often contain contradictions, and are
marked by their own ‘regimes of truth’
that police the boundaries that legislate
inclusions and exclusions and establish
criteria of acceptability.
. Discourses are embedded: discourses are
not free-floating constructions produced
by thought alone, but are performances
that materialize social life; they are embedded in institutions, practices and subjectpositions, but typically cut across and
circulate through multiple institutions and
subject positions.
. Discourses are situated: discourses, their
formations and economies are the product
of historical practices and geographical
location. As such, they provide situated
knowledges, characterized by particular
constellations of power and knowledge always open to contestation and negotiation,
even as they seek to obscure their historicity and specificity.
Discourses thereby shape the contours of
the taken-for-granted world, naturalizing
and universalizing a particular subject formation and view of the world. Theories of
discourse have thus greatly enlarged the
interpretive horizon of human geography.
Insofar as critical human geography is concerned with the connections between power,
knowledge and spatiality, discourse will be a
vital concept.
Discourse has also altered the selfunderstanding of the field. It has revivified the
history of geography in which ‘great men’ or
‘paradigmatic schools’ have given way to a concern with the discursive production of geographical knowledge. It has made obvious the
complicity of human geography in colonialism and imperialism (see post-colonialism)
and the way in which traditional geographical
knowledge effaced the contribution of nonWestern subjects (Barnett, 1998). Theories
of discourse have also played an important part
in exposing the asymmetries of power that are
inscribed within contemporary geographical
discourses (notably ethnocentrism and phallocentrism), elucidating the role of rhetoric –
and of poetics more generally – in legitimizing
intellectual practice (Crush, 1991) and in
allowing ideology to congeal as ‘unexamined
discourse’ (Gregory, 1978a).
dca
Suggested reading
Foucault (1984); Howarth (2000).
discourse analysis The analysis of discourse; methodologies for studying the production and meaning of discourses. Discourse
analysis involves a wide array of approaches to
the construction and interpretation of meaning. These approaches understand language
as a social practice, and are concerned with
language use beyond the semantic units that
are the domain of linguistics. The differences
between the approaches to discourse analysis
depend on the extent to which they (a) understand themselves to be a formal methodology (hence the sometimes capitalized term
‘Discourse Analysis’) as opposed to a critical
interpretative approach; and (b) the extent to
which the formal components and properties
of linguistic representations, as opposed to
the social practices made possible by language,
are the primary concern
The more formal, methodological approaches
that comprise Discourse Analysis focus on the
structure of spoken or written texts, and
confine their study to those texts – often in
terms of content analysis – leaving questions
of context and how much can be inferred from
the linguistic data to others (see van Dijk,
1997). One prominent approach deals with
the role that metaphors play in social life, and
highlights the frames of reference through
which problems are understood; for example,
‘war’ versus ‘crime’ in the struggle against
terrorism, or ‘choice’ in the debates about
public services and reproductive rights
(Lakoff and Johnson, 2003 [1980]).
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), exemplified in the work of Fairclough (2001),
extends the range of interpretive concern
beyond the structures of language to the social
and political context. While beginning with an
analysis of language texts, CDA also includes
the processes of text production, distribution
and consumption in its approach. Finally,
CDA is concerned with the way in which
sociocultural practice is comprised of discursive events. As such, CDA argues that linguistic and social resources are controlled
institutionally and access to them is unequal.
While CDA extends the concern with
language to the social, it perhaps does not go
as far as more interpretive and less formal
approaches to discourse analysis. Allied with
the conception of discourse as performative,
these approaches largely shun the idea of
discourse analysis as a specific methodology, because they argue that all analysis
167
DISEASE, DIFFUSION OF
necessitates an encounter with the discursive
given the impossibility of apprehending an
extra-discursive realm beyond language and
other modes of representation (see
Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis, 2000).
Here, although few of these authors would present their thought in these terms, Roland
Barthes’ examination of mythologies, Jacques
Derrida’s notion of deconstruction and
Michel Foucault’s account of genealogy
would all count as critical analyses of discourse,
even if they could not be understood as
Discourse Analysis. Nor is this broadly defined
critical approach to discourse limited to questions of language or text (even if they are understood as social practices). As Rose (2007
[2001]) makes clear, discourse analysis is an
important methodology for the study of visual
culture (see visual methods).
dca
Suggested reading
Fairclough (2003). See also the journal Discourse
and Society.
disease, diffusion of An area of medical
geography that is concerned with mapping
and modelling the spread of infectious diseases and their causative agents (e.g. viruses,
bacteria and protozoa) over space and through
time. The approach is characterized by the
application of quantitative techniques to
decipher the spatial and temporal properties
of epidemic waves in terms of their timing,
intensity, rate and geographical corridors of
spread (descriptive models), and to apply this
understanding to the prediction of future disease distributions ( predictive models). Particular
concern with the topic stems from a need to
intervene in the spread of epidemic waves (e.g.
through the implementation of quarantine or
vaccination) as part of public health policy
Geographical interest in the spread of infectious diseases was stimulated by a broader
disciplinary concern with spatial diffusion
that followed from the influential studies of
Torsten Hägerstrand in the 1950s (see
Haggett, 2000). Within the tradition of diffusion modelling initiated by Hägerstrand, geographers have sought to identify the nature of
the diffusion processes by which infectious diseases are propagated spatially, and to incorporate elements of these processes into formal
mathematical models of epidemic transmission. Two basic types of spatial diffusion
process have received particular attention in
the literature. A contagious process describes
the wave-like spread of a disease from its point
of introduction to geographically proximal
168
centres. Alternatively, a hierarchical process
describes the spread of a disease through an
ordered sequence of classes or places (e.g. an
urban settlement hierarchy). Spatial diffusion
processes of the contagious, hierarchical
and related forms have been modelled for a
wide variety of diseases in different historical
and geographical settings; the classic studies
of Pyle (1969) on cholera in the nineteenthcentury USA and Cliff, Haggett, Ord and
Versey (1981) on measles in twentieth-century
Iceland are illustrative of the work undertaken.
Mathematical models of epidemic diffusion
processes can be divided into two broad types.
In time series models the past record of a disease
in a regional system is used to model its future
behaviour. In process-based models the personto-person transmission of an infectious agent
is simulated according to the parameters
of the disease and the population at risk.
Cliff, Haggett and Smallman-Raynor (1993,
pp. 359–410) provide a review of the principal
categories of model, along with a summary of
their relative merits as tools for epidemic forecasting. The insights offered by such modelling approaches are increasingly being used
in the monitoring and control of vaccinepreventable diseases, with the prospect of the
construction of global early warning systems
for the transmission of pandemic events. msr
Suggested reading
Cliff, Haggett, Ord and Versey (1981); Pyle
(1979).
Disneyfication A process through which a
place becomes marketed primarily as a tourist
destination, through standardized landscape
symbolization. The term derives from the
Walt Disney theme parks that originated in
California in 1955. Disneyland offered highly
organized space with themed areas, united
by the central ‘Main Street’ (Avila, 2004). It
celebrates order, cleanliness and predictability
as part of the tourist-in-playground experience
(Sorkin, 1992a; Avila, 2004). Sorkin (1992a,
pp. 216–17) argues that Disney spaces celebrate travel and consumerism in a simulated
experience and landscape that mimics reality,
but is never quite real. The term ‘Disneyfication’
suggests a critique of this commodification
of place.
dgm
Suggested reading
Warren (1994).
distance decay The attenuation of a pattern
or process with distance from a central point.
DIVISION OF LABOUR
distance decay Distance-decay curves and transformations (Taylor, 1971)
Its importance in the evolution of spatial patterns was enshrined in Tobler’s (1970) famous
‘first law of geography’: ‘everything is related
to everything else but near things are more
related than distant things’. Distance-decay
relationships underpin much of the work on
spatial structures undertaken within spatial analysis and spatial science, because
the costs of spatial interaction are related
to the distance travelled (cf. gravity model).
Empirical studies have identified a range of
distance-decay relationships in which the
degree of attenuation with distance is much
greater in some situations than others (see
figure), in part because of the characteristics
of the geometric configurations of the spatial
structures within which they are set (Cliff,
Martin and Ord, 1975–6).
rj
Suggested reading
Sheppard (1984); Taylor (1971).
districting algorithm A computer procedure
for defining the boundaries of electoral constituencies. Such procedures became widely
used in the USA after the outlawing of malapportionment in Congressional Districts and
other constituencies in the 1960s: they are
deployed to explore the number of ways in
which constituencies can be defined which
meet ‘equal population’ and other criteria
(cf. gerrymandering; redistricting).
rj
Suggested reading
Altman, MacDonald and McDonald (2005).
division of labour The separation of tasks
within the labour process and their allocation
to different groups of workers. Two forms
are commonly identified:
(1)
Social division of labour – the division of
workers between product sectors (e.g.
‘car workers’ or ‘textile workers’).
(2) Technical division of labour – the division
of the production process into tasks, and
the specialization of workers in one or a
small number of these (e.g. managers,
supervisors and assembly workers).
The division of labour tends to be greater in
more complex and industrialized societies and
is a central component of the production systems of fordism. On the other hand, the putative emergence of post-fordism has been
associated with more flexible forms of work
organization and the limited re-integration of
previously separated tasks (cf. flexible
accumulation).
169
DOMESTIC LABOUR
Other applications of the concept of the
division of labour include:
(3) Gender division of labour – in which specific jobs are assigned to men or women:
in Western societies nurses tend to be
women, and coalminers men. This extends beyond paid employment, so that
unwaged domestic labour is largely
performed by women (see gender;
patriarchy).
(4) Cultural division of labour – according to
the theory of internal colonialism (Hechter, 1975), regional minorities bear the
same relationship to the majority as a
colony does to the metropolitan power
under colonialism. The periphery supplies the core with raw materials and labour, forming a division of labour
between the minority and majority cultures (see core-periphery model).
The cultural division of labour may be seen as
a special instance of:
(5) Ethnic division of labour – in colonized
and other ethnically divided societies,
employment is frequently stratified
according to ethnicity.
(6) International division of labour – characteristically, less-developed countries produce raw materials and developed
countries produce manufactured goods.
More recently, a new international division of labour has involved the development by transnational corporations
of production facilities in less-developed
countries. Initially, such facilities concentrated on routine and lower-skill
manufacturing tasks. Subsequently, technological advances and the availability of
large numbers of higher-skill (but still
relatively low paid) workers in poorer
countries have seen a major growth in
the outsourcing of business and professional services to countries such as India.
The international division of labour is a special
case of:
(7) Spatial division of labour – a concept
developed by Massey (1984) involving
the concentration of particular sectors
and/or production tasks in specific geographical areas.
According to Sayer (1995), the significance
of the division of labour in the organization of
170
economic activity has been systematically
underestimated. He argues that the complexities of modern industrial economies are such
that they cannot feasibly be centrally planned,
and nor can the social division of labour
be abolished. For Sayer, this means that traditional Marxist approaches to geographical
change (see marxism) must be rethought to
recognize that the political challenges posed
by the division of labour would not disappear
with the transition to a post-capitalist society
(see also Sayer and Walker, 1992).
jpa
Suggested reading
Massey (1995a).
domestic labour Work that is done in and
around the home: activities such as housework, food preparation, childcare and the care
of disabled, sick and ageing household and
family members. Domestic labour is the focus
of much feminist scholarship because women
tend to do this work, regardless of whether or
not they have part- or full-time paid employment. This has implications for the location,
type and hours of many women’s paid employment, and is an important factor contributing
to the persistence of women’s ghettoization in
‘female-dominated occupations’, and the disparity between men’s and women’s wages
(Hanson and Pratt, 1995: see feminism; feminist geographies). Whilst many women in
industrialized countries do this ‘double shift’
of domestic labour and paid employment,
some middle-class women hire other women –
typically racialized, working-class women or
migrants from the global South – to do this
work for them (Momsen, 1999; Pratt, 2004).
gender oppression is thus layered on to other
forms of social and geopolitical domination.
In some cases, domestic labour is then
stretched over very great distances, as women
caring for middle-class children in the global
north strive to mother their own children still
residing in the global south, through daily
or weekly emails and telephone calls
Domestic labour is ambivalently valued
in feminist analyses, viewed simultaneously
as a burden and constraint, and as invaluable
practices of care and social co-operation.
Feminists have developed different strategies
to remedy the unequal gender division of
domestic labour. One strategy is to un-gender
domestic labour, by striving towards equal
contributions by men and women, as well as
more collective options such as socialized
childcare. A second, complementary, approach
is to revalue domestic labour by demonstrating
DOMESTICITY
its importance to the economy. Within marxism, domestic labour is seen as necessary to the
social reproduction that supports and sustains economic production; periodically, marxist geographers have had to be reminded of
this importance (Mitchell, Marston and Katz,
2004). Other attempts to bring domestic
labour within the economy – to make it more
visible and highlight its value – have included
‘wages for housework’ campaigns, and efforts
to include questions about domestic labour on
questionnaires related to national censuses.
The latter allow the extent and worth of such
labour to be measured and potentially figured
into calculations of national economic activity,
such as gross national product (Domosh
and Seager, 2001, p. 45). Cameron and
Gibson-Graham (2003) argue that the second
set of strategies (which they characterize as
‘adding on’ and ‘counting in’) ‘fall short of
generating a feminist politics of transformation’ (p. 151), because they seek to include
domestic labour within existing ways of thinking about the economy, rather than using
domestic labour as a vehicle for thinking
about the economy differently. Rather than
incorporating domestic labour into a broader
conception of the capitalist economy, these
authors urge that domestic labour be
rethought within a diverse economy of
market/non-market, paid/unpaid, capitalist/
non-capitalist relations. England and Lawson
(2005) caution that the category itself maintains troubling conceptual borders by reinforcing a distinction between domestic and other
kinds of work.
gp
crops and livestock – and would have difficulty
surviving outside of that domesticated context.
Domestication is strongly bound up with the
centrality of cultivation to Western ideas of
civilization and the advancement of human
societies from the state of nature. Here, the
process of domestication is understood as consequential not only in terms of altering the
physiognomy of plants and animals, but also
the sociocultural practices of what is taken
to define human beings (Anderson, 1997).
The historical realization of these ideas in the
political and legal practices of colonialism
finds echoes in those of the post-colonial
present through the persistent imperatives of
the scientific management and technological
improvement in the efficiency and productivity
of natural resources. In an era of biotechnology, this historical legacy informs new
geopolitical investments in the meaning and
practice of domestication. In forums such as
the Food and Agriculture Organization and
the world trade organization, for example,
Western countries have asserted claims to
intellectual property rights in biological
resources on the basis of scientific interventions in what are presented as previously ‘natural’ materials (see patenting). By contrast,
countries in the global south have sought to
assert the claims of farmers and indigenous
peoples to equivalent rights in recognition of
their transformative ecological relations with
plants and animals time-out-of-mind.
sw
Suggested reading
domesticity Home life and home-making
Domosh and Seager (2001).
practices within and beyond the household
and/or family. Closely tied to understandings
of home, house and household, domesticity
encompasses paid and unpaid domestic work
(including cooking, cleaning and caring; see
domestic labour), the home life of people
who live alone or with others, and a wider
sense of what is familiar and homely rather
than ‘foreign’ and unhomely. The study of
domesticity dates back to attempts to formalize, rationalize and teach its principles from
the mid-nineteenth century. Within geography, the work of feminist geographers has
been particularly influential in studying
domesticity since the 1970s (see feminist
geographies). In their analysis of social
reproduction within the domestic sphere,
socialist feminists have explored the ways in
which domesticity, as a site of contested and
unequal gender relations, is inseparably bound
domestication The process by which plant
or animal species are reshaped through the
social and economic uses to which they are
put by human societies in particular cultural
and historical contexts. As this implies, human
societies have altered the genetic composition
of plants and animals by influencing their
reproduction and life histories so as to make
them better fitted to human needs and designs
(see Clutton-Brock, 1999). In his theory of
evolution, Darwin (1998 [1868]) called this
process ‘artificial’ (as opposed to ‘natural’)
selection and illustrated it with the example
of pigeon-fanciers (see darwinism). Some
domesticated species and organisms can
become adapted to the point of dependency
on human relations – for example, garden
plants and companion animals or agricultural
Suggested reading
Harlan (1995).
171
DOMINATION
up with capitalism and patriarchy (Gregson
and Lowe, 1994). Feminist geographers have
studied the gender, class and racialized power
relations of paid and unpaid domestic work,
and the ways in which the transnational migration of domestic workers, particularly women,
binds household to global economies and
inequalities (including Pratt, 2004). A wide
range of other geographical research has
explored domestic technologies and rationalities, domestic interiors, embodied domestic
practices and domestic material cultures
(for an overview, see Blunt and Dowling,
2006). Important themes include the ways in
which domestic practices reproduce, recast and
resist ideas about the home and/or family and
the ways in which domesticity is closely bound
up with modernity, power and identity.
Geographies of domesticity also extend far
beyond the household. As Amy Kaplan (2002)
observes, the term ‘domestic’ has a double
meaning, referring both to the space of the
nation and to the space of the household.
Both of these meanings are closely bound up
with shifting ideas about the ‘foreign,’ and are
imagined and materialized through a range of
domestic politics and practices. Rather than
view domesticity as confined to a private
sphere of influence, it is a crucial site of reproduction and resistance that is intimately
bound up with the world beyond, as well as
within, the household. Historical studies
reveal the ways in which domesticity was
explicitly and intimately tied to wider national
and imperial politics through, for example,
discourses and practices concerning maternity, consumption and child-rearing (including Stoler, 2002). Other research has shown
the importance of domesticity in anti-imperial
nationalist politics, often focusing on the
politicization of women within and beyond
the home (including Legg, 2003).
Studies of domesticity in both historical and
contemporary contexts usually focus on the
material and symbolic importance of women.
Whilst a wide range of research documents the
oppression of women through domestic work
and domestic violence, other research
explores domesticity as a site of potential creativity, power and resistance. Other researchers
have begun to investigate the domestic lives of
men and the relationships between domesticity
and masculinity (see, e.g., Tosh, 1999).
ab
domination The physical or cultural assertion of power over an individual, social group
or territory. The term refers to the practice
and manifestation of power relationships,
172
especially in terms of the construction of territory and spaces as a means of control
Domination was originally perceived in
a classical geopolitical sense of territorial
control. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, geopolitical theories advocating the expansion of state borders at the
expense of ‘inferior’ cultures were the basis
for the frontier expansion of the USA and
Russia, Germany’s desire for territory in
eastern Europe, and the establishment of
European empires. In this period, domination
was viewed as the ability of a state to control
territory – and hence its residents – on the
basis of cultural superiority. In the cold war
period, domination was also seen as a matter
of the power of states to define and attain their
own self-interests.
However, critical scholarship began to define
other forms of domination. The Marxist
Antonio Gramsci (1971 [1929–35]) noted that
the ideas of the ruling class are mainly accepted
by the whole of society, producing acquiescence in national projects of capital accumulation that benefit a few (cf. hegemony). Edward
Said’s (2003 [1978]) exposition of orientalism illustrated the cultural practices by which
colonial powers created a sense of superiority
over their subjects through literature and the
arts. The practices of cultural domination
have been addressed by geographers at a number of scales, from the construction of empire
to the normative understanding of places that
exclude particular people, groups and behaviours (Cresswell, 1996).
Feminist and queer studies (see feminist
geographies; queer theory) have emphasized the heteronormative and patriarchal
character of spaces ranging from the household
to the nation-state (Staeheli, Kofman and Peake,
2004). In addition, the racial domination of
whites is gaining increasing attention (see whiteness). However, criticism remains that many
human geography studies tend to ignore questions of race, gender and sexuality (Staeheli,
Kofman and Peake, 2004). Still, the emphasis
placed upon cultural domination has been
connected to the creation of material spaces
of racial segregation in the city, hate crime
activity in gay neighbourhoods and patriarchal practices. In a separate vein of work,
the role of the USA as hegemonic power has
attracted the attention of geographers, especially its role in dominating the global political
agenda and its massive military power.
cf
Suggested reading
Flint (2004); Staeheli, Kofman and Peake (2004).
DUAL ECONOMY
domino theory A theory of geopolitics originally proposed by the USA in the 1950s, claiming that if one country joined or was forced
to join the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence,
then its neighbours would inevitably follow.
The theory rested upon an analogy of toppling
dominoes and was used to justify the military
and political involvement of the USA in other
countries, especially in South East Asia, in the
1950s and 1960s, but also in Central America
in the 1990s (see also cold war). O’Sullivan
(1982) critiques the theory for ignoring the
unique history and internal politics of different
countries (the dominoes).
cf
dry farming
A set of farming techniques for
crop cultivation without irrigation, used in
areas with variable or little rainfall (Heathcote,
1983). Dry farming requires both water and
soil conservation measures, such as mulching,
frequent weeding and summer fallowing in
alternate years. A long-established practice in
the Near East, North Africa and north-west
India, dry farming can only produce a narrow
range of crops and low yields. These methods
were instrumental in the extension of crop
cultivation into the semi-arid areas of the
americas and australia by European settlers
in the nineteenth century. Dry farming is seeing a minor resurgence among followers of
sustainable agriculture.
jgu
Suggested reading
Hargreaves (1992).
dual economy An economy made up of two
supposedly distinct parts: the modern economy and the pre-modern economy. The term
was probably first used by Dutch economist
J.H. Boeke, in his account of Indonesia as a
dual society (Boeke, 1953). Boeke maintained
that parts of Indonesian society had already
become modern: some urban enterprises were
organized according to recognizably scientific
and capitalist principles, and were situated
in neighbourhoods that seemed ‘Western’ to
Boeke. Most of Indonesia, however, was
‘Eastern’ or pre-modern: life and work here
were loosely organized and geared to the production of things for household consumption
or local exchange.
Boeke’s work on Indonesia was meant to
contribute to public policy debates. The
question he raised was the classic mid-twentieth-century question of how to get from A to
B, or from a traditional society to a modern
society (see modernization). As in many of
these models, cultural change was thought to
be driven by economic development. This
was certainly the case in W. Arthur Lewis’
(1954) account of ‘economic development
with unlimited supplies of labour’. Lewis
argued that vast pools of unproductive rural
labour could be decanted to the urban–industrial sector without affecting levels of food
production. Scarce resources could then be
channelled into the ‘commanding heights of
the economy’, much as the Indian government
tried to do in its Second and Third Five Year
Plan periods (1956–66). Even better, urban
real wage rates would not rise in the short
run. Rural–urban migration served an equilibrating function, and helped to ensure that the
modern economy would slowly take the place
of the pre-modern economy.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the logic of this
version of the dual economy model was turned
upside down. Michael Lipton (1977) famously
argued that most of the poverty of the third
world was in the countryside, along with most
of the low-cost sources of economic advance.
To neglect the rural sector in the name of an
abstract model of economic modernity was
inequitable and inefficient. It installed urban
bias as public policy and stalled the process
of human development. Other critics sympathized with some parts of Lipton’s critique –
noting also the growth of urban slums and
shanties – while challenging the dual economy
model to which he still subscribed. Recent
thinking has focused on the complicated ways
in which ‘rur-urban households’ put together
livelihood strategies across the town/country
divide. Such thinking is focused on the economic costs of barriers to mobility, rather than
on the presumed integrity of the urban or rural
sectors (Ellis and Harris, 2004). Still other
critics have gone further. Radical development
theorists argued that the production of precapitalist spaces in an economy was a legacy
of colonialism, rather than a state of original
sin (see dependency theory). In any case, the
two sectors were linked to the advantage of
the ‘modern’ sector. Finally, and perhaps most
pertinently, recent work has emphasized that
modernity is not a singular condition. There
are many forms of modernity, all of which
are structured by a high degree of path dependence. It is a fantasy to suppose that ‘Eastern’
parts of a dual economy can be made ‘Western’
in the sense of the mid-twentieth-century
USA, and a fantastical abuse of public policy
to push for this.
sco
Suggested reading
Ellis and Harris (2004); Hart (2001).
173
E
ecofeminism An umbrella term for a wide
variety of environmental concerns and approaches that integrate diverse feminist and
environmentalist perspectives. Ecofeminism is
both theory and praxis, building on the intellectual foundations of ecological and feminist
political movements where these intersect
as, for example, in popular mobilizations in
the name of peace and nuclear disarmament
(Seagar, 1993), animal welfare (Gaard,
1993) or environmental justice (Shiva,
1988). There are different accounts of the origin of the term itself, but it is most frequently
attributed to the 1980 work of the French
author François D’Eaubonne.
The thematic connection linking diverse ecofeminist currents is the notion that women are
closer to nature. This putative connection is
woven into the mainstream intellectual, religious
and social fabric of many cultures, and has been
an important focus of feminist critique (see feminism). For several decades, feminists sought
to distance the analysis of women’s position in
society from any bodily or biological referent,
labelling any such reference ‘essentialist’ and,
thereby, unspeakable (see Fuss, 1989). As a
consequence, ecofeminist concerns and arguments were cold-shouldered by the feminist
academy for some years when they found
their most powerful expression in works of the
imagination as, for example, in the science fiction writing of Ursula le Guin or Marge Piercy.
While ecofeminism’s conservative tendencies to reduce the heterogeneity of women’s
experience to the singular figure of Woman
and the mutability of nature to an unchanging
primordial Nature remain, since the late 1980s
ecofeminist work has found new consonance
with developments in feminist philosophy
and social theory (see, e.g., Plumwood,
1993). These developments centre on concerns with (i) the materialism of social life
and its connectedness beyond the human
(see also biophilosophy) and (ii) the situatedness of knowledge production associated with
the rise of feminist science studies. As Donna
Haraway, one of the leading proponents of
this latter project, has argued, ‘Ecofeminists
have perhaps been the most insistent on
some version of the world (nature/body) as
active subjects, not as resources to be mapped
174
or appropriated in bourgeois, marxist or
masculinist projects’ (1991, p. 199).
sw
Suggested reading
Fuss (1989); Gaard (1993); Haraway (1991c);
Plumwood (1993); Seagar (1993); Shiva (1988).
ecological fallacy A problem that may arise
when inferring characteristics of individuals
from aggregate data referring to a population of
which they are part. It was first highlighted
by Robinson (1950), who found correlations
of 0.773 in a regression of the percentage of
African-Americans in a state’s population against its percentage illiterate, but only 0.203 when
using data on individuals from the same source.
The fact that African-Americans were concentrated in states with high illiteracy rates did not
necessarily mean that African-Americans had
high illiteracy rates (hence the necessity not to
confuse correlation with causality).
Alker (1969) identified six related fallacies:
. the ecological fallacy – assuming that relationships identified using aggregate data
apply to the individuals concerned;
. the individualistic fallacy – assuming that
the whole is no more than the sum of its
parts (the inverse of the ecological fallacy);
. the cross-level fallacy – assuming that a relationship identified in one aggregation of a
population applies to other aggregations
(cf. modifiable areal unit problem);
. the universal fallacy – assuming that relationships identified among some individuals
applies to all members of the population
from which they have been selected, but
not as a random sample;
. the selective fallacy – in which data from
carefully chosen cases are used to ‘prove’
a general point; and
. the cross-sectional fallacy – assuming that
what is observed at one data applies to
others as well.
All are problems of ecological inference, as is
the more recently identified cross-time fallacy,
whereby relationships that hold at one time are
fallaciously assumed to hold at others as well. rj
ecological imperialism
In his seminal
account of ‘the biological expansion of
ECOLOGY
europe’ Crosby (1986) described ecological
imperialism as the environmental destruction
of large tracts of the Earth by European colonization. Crosby chose to emphasize the imperial
project largely in biological terms (rather than,
say, military or economic) and the ‘encounters’
between hitherto largely separated regions of
the earth now linked together by new systems
of trade, production and forms of cultural
interchange and settlement. As he put it, ‘the
success of European imperialism has a biological and an ecological component’ (p. 7)
(see ecology). Crosby traced the European
settlement in the ‘Neo-Europes’ (North and
South america and australasia), a process in
which their temperate agricultures thrived and
local indigenous systems and ecosystems collapsed. The introduction of Old World pathogens decimated native populations (e.g. the
Spanish devastated the indigenous populations
of the Canaries by introducing pneumonia and
dysentery). Smallpox decimated the Americas.
In addition, Crosby charts the impact the
introduction and dispersion of European
‘weeds’ and the transformative effects of, for
example, the proliferation of new domesticated
animals (see domestification).
The term has been deployed in other more
critical and expansive ways. In the activist
world – and the so-called ‘movement of movements’ (see world social forum) – ecological
imperialism is sometimes held to be ‘the
imposition of a set of ecological values held
by one individual or group onto another individual or group without their consent’
(Okonski, 2003). In this account the causes
of eco-imperialism are multilateral agreements, foreign aid and the romanticization of
the poor. A different, and more theorized and
rigorous, account draws from Marxian theory,
in which ecological imperialism is the product
of the intersection of an expansionary capitalism on the one side and what Karl Marx
called a ‘metabolic rift’ (Foster, 2000). The
dispossession of peasants from the land, the
creation of a pool of landless labourers and the
concentration of the means of production (see
primitive accumulation) historically left a
deep ecological footprint. Land was reduced
to a level of being ‘a venal object’ and this
whole process operated on a global (imperial)
scale. Marx’s notion of a ‘metabolic rift’ was
derived from his analysis of Liebig and other
German chemists of the soil, and the fact that
an expansionary capitalism shipped nutrients
far away, to cities and the imperial centre. A
body of work has attempted to draw connections between an expansionary world system,
the transition from feudalism to capitalism,
the differing forms of empire (and rule) and
the distribution of ecological costs (Grove,
2003). Ecological imperialism in this sense is
quite different from Crosby’s interpretation,
and turns on the recursive aspect of primitive
accumulation as it takes hold of and transforms different natural systems. In the current
moment, the global search for germ plasm by
private pharmaceutical companies – and relatedly the commodification of plant breeding
rights – would be an example of ecological
imperialism in action (cf. bioprospecting).
None of this is to suggest, however, that the
‘older’ forms of primitive accumulation –
peasant dispossession and the ecological
destruction that stems from it (e.g. the Three
Gorges dam project in China) – are not still
proceeding apace.
mw
ecological inference Drawing conclusions
about individuals from data about the populations to which they belong, in the absence of
any information about the individuals themselves. The data deployed almost invariably
refer to population aggregates defined by
territorially bounded areas, such as those used
in the production of census data. In a classic
case, analysts have wanted to know election
turnout rates by different ethnic groups in
the USA, but the only available information
indicates the total turnout in each area and
its population’s ethnic composition. Various
quantitative methods have been used to estimate separate turnout rates for each group
from that information, but technical problems
cast doubt on their validity. Recent developments offer possible solutions in certain circumstances, with the potential of providing
more reliable estimates of unknown values.
(See also ecological fallacy; entropymaximizing models; microsimulation.) rj
Suggested reading
King, Rosen and Tanner (2004); Sui et al. (2000).
ecology A science primarily concerned
with the non-human world and, more specifically, with the complex relations between
organisms and their environment. As such,
ecology is considered something of a holistic
and synthetic science, drawing on population
and evolutionary biology, soil science, hydrology, earth systems, oceanography, chemistry,
conservation biology and other sciences in
attempting to understand how individual
organisms and populations interact with other
species and, more generally, how organisms
175
ECOLOGY
are linked to their biotic and abiotic environments. Some view ecology as the science
of environment, although ecology may be distinguished from environmental science in its
primary emphasis on understanding living
organisms, not only at the individual, population and species levels, but in terms of identifiable communities of plant and animal
species in relatively proximate interactions.
The term ‘oecologie’ is most often seen as a
neologism coined by German biologist Ernst
Haeckel, who first used it in 1866, in part
inspired by Darwin’s Origin of Species. But
the word draws directly on an older notion of
‘oeconomy’, which refers to management of
the ‘household’ in a broad sense (Worster,
1994: see economy). This links the etymology
of ecology and economics in intriguing ways,
but also conveys something of the broad scope
of ecological enquiry, encompassing the world
of living things. In this sense, the lineage of
ecology is much older and more diverse, drawing on the natural history of figures such as
Gilbert White (1720–93) and Linnaeus
(1707–78) (Worster, 1994), and linked by some
to Aristotle’s writings on environmental changes
in Greece. Significantly, modern ecology and
geography have been closely linked, not least
in drawing on the early biogeography of
Alexander von Humboldt. More generally, ties
between ecology and geography have been
forged and renewed based on shared concerns
and perspectives, including the spatial organization and foundation(s) of biodiversity and
how it is affected by human action, the implications of human action on the non-human
world more generally, and the use of synthetic,
relational and holistic reasoning to understand
how ostensibly discrete entities are connected
(not least in spatial terms).
Since the late nineteenth century, ecology in
the Anglo-American world has been closely
linked to environmental politics. During a first
generation of ecology, exemplified by Stephen
Forbes’s (1887) singular publication ‘The lake
as a microcosm’, ecology was animated by
concern with the implications of forestry, fisheries and agriculture (Schnieder, 2000). In the
post-Second World War period, this link
between environmental politics and environmentalism on the one hand and ecology on
the other was consolidated through scientific
enquiry into such matters as the ecological
effects of radiation from nuclear technologies
and the persistence of synthetic organic
compounds in the environment (the latter is
most famously associated with Rachel Carson
and her signature work, Silent spring). Close
176
association between environmentalism and
ecology has continued, as was clearly evident
in the way ecological enquiry was used to
mediate the northern spotted owl controversy
of the 1990s (Prudham, 2005). Not surprisingly, the close association of ecology and
environmentalism has had a major impact on
intellectual and scholarly work inside and
around geography, helping to inspire the
emergence of a distinct interwoven field
of environmental history and historical
geography preoccupied with the human
origins and implications of environmental
change, and drawing upon such changes as the
basis of critique (see, e.g., Cronon, 1991; for a
discussion linking environmental history and
historical geography, see Williams, M., 1994a).
political ecology, as the name would
suggest, has been similarly concerned with
mobilizing ecological theories and methods in
exploring the local and regional origins and
implications of environmental degradation
(however defined) in the context of uneven
power relations.
During the middle of the twentieth century,
particularly after the work of Frederic E.
Clements, ecological research and theory
generally emphasized predictability, stability,
homeostasis and climax communities in the
development of self-contained ecosystems
whose development, when unimpeded by
human action, would tend towards increasing
biological diversity. Clementsian ecology in
particular stressed the recovery of ‘disturbed’
ecosystems from less to more diverse communities, culminating in highly stable climax
ecosystems characteristic of particular regions
(Clements, 1936). Later, this was augmented
by the development of an increasingly formal,
abstract and often highly mathematical systems ecology, emphasizing the modelling of
populations, energy and material flows within
ecosystems, and predicated on the assumption
that discrete populations of organisms compete
to fill exclusive ecological niches. Stability
and homeostasis remained core principles of
systems ecology.
Key concepts from Clementsian as well as
systems ecology informed modernist resource
management paradigms. This includes the
Lotka–Volterra equations used to model interconnected and predictable oscillations of
predator and prey species in closed systems
of mutual dependence, and the characteristic
logistic growth curve underpinning maximum
sustained yield management prescriptions in
fisheries and forestry. In each case, populations are seen to converge on stable carrying
ECONOMIC BASE THEORY
capacities defined by limits on key resources
(e.g. food) in closed systems. These are generalizations, in some sense crude, but they
generally point to an ecology dominated by
generalizable ideas about discrete, ontologically real ecosystems whose behaviour is predictable, and whose tendencies are towards
increasing biological diversity and stability if
left undisturbed by human action.
Yet if twentieth-century environmentalism
and ecology have shared an affinity, ecology’s
attempt to define and speak for a strictly nonhuman nature has raised some difficult issues
that ecology has been, as yet, unable to resolve.
These issues are in part invoked by the transition from Clementsian and systems ecology to
the so-called ‘new ecology’ achieved by degree
over approximately the past two decades. New
ecology has numerous facets, but is generally
characterized by an embrace of complexity,
history and path dependence (see complexity
theory); an appreciation of interconnected
geographical scales in ecological relationships;
a retreat from the broad law-like generalizations of systems ecology; and, critically, an
embrace of change, not constancy, as the new
normal (Botkin, 1990). Ecosystems in this
paradigm are increasingly seen as open to the
point at which defining them robustly becomes
increasingly problematic. Moreover, disturbances from volcanic eruptions, fires, storms,
pest outbreaks and the like are seen as endemic.
Empirical studies of ecological succession
following disturbance – for example, in the
aftermath of the Mount St Helens eruption
in Washington State, USA – also demonstrate
that ‘recovery’’ does not necessarily tend
towards pre-disturbance communities, nor does
the strict lineage of succession posited by
Clementsian ecology strictly apply (Swanson,
1987). Rather, ‘recovery’ depends somewhat
on initial conditions, including the legacy of
pre-disturbance communities.
For these and other reasons, the new
ecology is typically more agnostic about what
communities of organisms may be characterized as ‘normal’ in any given location. Many
implications follow from this, including a significantly diminished capacity for ecology to
provide the baseline against which environmental degradation is defined. And with this,
more overtly political ecologies become necessary, based for instance, on the increase or
decrease in landscape functions of various
kinds (e.g. fuelwood production, hydrological
recharge). At the same time, new ecology is
much less able to sharply and categorically
delineate between natural dynamics and
those influenced by anthropogenic processes
because of the acceptance that change is just
as endemic in nature as is stability (for discussion, see Demeritt, 1994a; Worster, 1994).
This in turn has made ecology a much less
reliable foundation for environmental policies
that would strictly delineate nature and culture; for example, conventional wildernessoriented parks and protected areas, aimed at
biodiversity conservation (Zimmerer, 1994a).
The new ecology has also more generally
prompted considerable ontological soul
searching among ecologists. And yet, as ecology has struggled to come to terms with complexity, context, path dependence, scale and
the basis of inter-subjective knowledge claims
about the non-human world, there remain
strong parallels and linkages between ecology
and geography, not least in embrace of the
pervasiveness of hybrids that transgress formerly stable categories, be they ecosystem
boundaries or nature–society dualisms
(Zimmerer, 2000; Whatmore, 2002a).
sp
ecometrics A term coined by Stephen
Raudenbush (see Raudenbush and Sampson,
1999) to assess the nature of ecological settings,
using the quantitative methods of multi-level
(see multi-level modelling) and spatial
models to exploit spatial dependence in order
to improve the reliability and validity of measures of neighborhood social processes (cf. contextual effect; neighbourhood effect).
Unlike traditional factorial ecology (see factor
analysis), which uses aggregate, usually
census, data to characterize places, ecometrics
uses data on individuals plus systematic social
observation as repeated measures of place
characteristics. It is also concerned with how
places change over time.
kj
Suggested reading
Raudenbush and Sampson (1999); Raudenbush
(2003).
economic base theory
A theory that
explains urban and regional growth in terms of
a division of employment into basic and nonbasic sectors. The basic sector (B) comprises
those industries that meet external or export
demand, and the location and growth of this
sector is viewed as a function of national
and international forces. The non-basic sector
(S) is locally oriented employment, servicing
the total local population (P). The total population is a function of total employment (E)
and the economic base relationships are as
follows:
177
ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY
E ¼ S þ B,
P ¼ aE,
S ¼ bP:
The coefficients a and b can be obtained by
regression using observations for a sample of
cities or for one city or region over time.
Growth (or decline) in local population and
employment is controlled by changes in the
basic sector, and the impacts (multipliers)
of such changes can be calculated from the
economic base equations:
E ¼ (1
ab) 1 B,
P ¼ a(1
S ¼ ab(1
ab) 1 B,
ab) 1 B:
A unit increase in B generates a/(1 ab) units
of additional local population.
Economic base theory is very simplistic in
its assumptions, but because its data demands
are simple it has been widely employed in
regional economic analysis. It is used, for
example, in activity allocation models and
Lowry models. Correct identification of the
basic sector is crucial, and location quotients are frequently used for this purpose.
Either industries with high indices of specialization are defined as basic industries, or the
quotient is used to define a proportion of
employment in an industry as basic; so that,
for example, one-third of employment in
an industry with a quotient of 1.5 is designated
as basic employment. A more sophisticated
approach is to use input–output analysis to
trace actual inter-industrial linkages, but this
is very data-demanding and expensive.
The major limitations of economic base
theory spring from its aggregative nature: the
difficulties of sector definition; the dubious
assumption that the aggregate multipliers
will remain constant; and an inability to trace
the impact of particular basic sector shifts,
such as a rise in oil exports, on specific sectors
of the local economy.
lwh
Suggested reading
Glickman (1997).
economic geography A sub-field of human
geography concerned with describing and
explaining the varied places and spaces where
economic activities are carried out and circulate. The discipline was institutionalized in
the late nineteenth century in both Western
Europe and the USA, and remains one of the
core sub-fields of Anglo-American geography. There have been repeated attempts to
forge links with its seeming intellectual soul
178
mate, economics, but none have held.
Economic geography from the beginning was
more empirically grounded, concerned with
context and conceptually open-minded, and
at the same time less abstract and less formally
theoretical than economics. There were
moments when the two became close, but
mostly they held themselves apart at a distance
(as they do now; cf. new economic geography). Further, unlike economists, economic
geographers never settled on a single methodology, set of techniques, list of venerated
luminaries, disciplinary problematic or definitive definition. Change has been incessant,
the field continually reinventing itself. It
makes for an exciting, dynamic, open subject,
one that never looks back, and a frequent
conduit for new ideas into the rest of human
geography, but there is a nagging sense that
before old promises are realized, new ones are
made. Economic geography sometimes seems
like Penelope’s shroud: spun during the day,
and unravelled the same night.
Existing in embryonic form as commercial
geography, the discipline was formally
defined in Germany in 1882 by Götz. While
commercial geography ‘chiefly served practical ends’, the purpose of economic geography was ‘the scientific task of dealing with
the nature of world areas in their direct influence upon the production of commodities and
the movement of goods’ (Götz, quoted in
Sapper, 1931, p. 627). By the 1890s, economic geography courses appeared for the first
time in US university calendars (Fellmann,
1986). The first Professor of Economic
Geography in Britain was Lionel Lyde,
appointed in 1903 at University College
London. Five years later, the University of
Edinburgh created a lectureship for George
Chisholm, who was author of the first
English-language economic geography text,
Handbook of commercial geography (1889).
Economic geography was up and running.
Chisholm’s book (published in 20 editions),
and J. Russell Smith’s later American version,
Industrial and commercial geography (1913),
set out an initial disciplinary agenda and intellectual style that still resonates. The original
colonial context of the two books no longer
applies, but continuing to remain germane
were their concern with empirical detail, their
celebration of numbers, their predilection
for geographical categorization made visible
by the map, their tracing of relations among
places through economic flows especially of the
commodity, their emphasis on the geographical
effects of technological change and their
ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY
suspicion of theory (although presumably
no contemporary economic geographer would
go as far as Chisholm ‘to wish . . . th[e] love of
pure theory to the devil’; quoted in Wise,
1975, p. 2).
Chisholm’s and Smith’s emphasis was on
the commodity, though neither appreciated
the conceptual richness of the concept, with
geography coming second. The American
geographer R.H. Whitbeck (1915–16,
p. 197) argued that it should be the other
way around: ‘the unit should be the country
and not the commodity’. The consequence
was an increasingly regional focus, at least
in economic geography in the USA, where
the region was defined as unique, and represented by using one typological scheme or
another. Clarence Fielden Jones’ (1935) textbook Economic geography, for example, used
an eight-fold typology.
Hartshorne’s (1939) The nature of geography
later provided at least a splash of scholarly
respectability to an ideographic regionalism.
But it did nothing to connect the discipline to
the fundamental changes that were about to
transform a number of social sciences, and
even some humanities, especially in the
USA, turning on the widespread use of scientific methods and philosophy (and propelled
by the Second World War and later the cold
war). Economic geography initially resisted
that impulse, but by the mid-1950s it too
joined in. The resulting quantitative revolution profoundly altered the discipline, bringing
the systematic application of scientific forms of
theorizing and rigorous statistical techniques of
description and analysis (Barnes, 2001).
The discipline over the period 1955–75,
sometimes labelled spatial science, was
defined by:
(1) Formal theory and models, many
begged, borrowed and stolen from neoclassical economics (rational choice
theory, general and partial equilibrium,
location theory), and physics (spatial
interaction theory and later entropymaximizing models) (Pooler, 1977).
(2) quantitative methods, which were initially taken off-the-peg from inferential
statistics, but later designed in-house to
meet the peculiar features of economic
geographical data (cf. spatial autocorrelation; Gould, 1969a).
(3) The use of computers, at first very crude
and limited, but within a decade performing hitherto unimaginable calculations for instrumental purposes.
(4) A philosophical justification based on
some form of positivism, the idea that
only scientific knowledge is authentic
knowledge (see science).
(5) A focus on abstract spatialities and
geometrically defined location (cf. locational analysis, space-economy). Consequently, the economy was conceived
as an independent spatial object, with
its own causative powers, morphological
form and internal generative processes.
Regions remained part of the economic
geographical lexicon, but conceived utterly
differently: as explanatory, theoretical and
instrumental, a spatial unit to achieve functional objectives (cf. regional science). The
consequence was that people like Clarence
Fielden Jones (and his book) were no longer
recognisable as part of the discipline. They were
not in the same field, not on the same planet.
This often abstract, closed and narrowly
conceived discipline did not last. It was out
of synch with its own disciplinary history,
and increasingly out of synch with its own
historical moment (see relevance). radical
geography emerged during the 1970s, propelling economic geography in a different direction. Harvey’s (1999 [1982]) classical Marxist
theorizing of capitalist accumulation and
crisis was important (see marxism), but even
more so was Massey’s (1984) work on industrial restructuring, which was philosophically underpinned by realism and culminated
in the locality project that dominated British
economic geography during the late 1980s
(Cooke, 1989) (although disavowed by both
Massey and Harvey). Across the Atlantic, a
group of radical economic geographers in
California carried out important empirical
and theoretical work – not on cases of capitalism’s decline (as in studies of deindustrialization in the UK), but on its successes,
such as high-tech industries (Scott, 1988b;
Saxenian, 1994). Merging British and
American interests from the late 1980s produced discussions around the transformation
of an old, disintegrating fordism into a new,
emerging post-fordism (Tickell and Peck,
1992). Heavily influenced theoretically by
French regulation theory, which was more
open-ended, and less abstract and deterministic than classical Marxism, the economy
remained central, but it was softened by recognition of the social institutions, and even the
culture, in which it was embedded.
culture and ‘embeddedness’ became
keywords of the ‘cultural turn’ entering
179
ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY
economic geography from the mid-1990s
(Thrift and Olds, 1996). Often drawing
upon post-structuralism, there was an
attempt to rethink both the larger nature of
the discipline – its empiricist epistemology,
its entrenched masculinism, its economistic
logic (Barnes, 1996; Gibson-Graham, 2006b
[1996]) – as well as particular substantive
topics that could benefit from the new conceptual armature, such as labour and work
(McDowell, 1997a: see labour geography),
financial and business services (Thrift, 2005b:
see money and finance), consumption
and retailing (Miller, Jackson, Holbrook,
Rowlands and Thrift, 1998) and the firm
(Schoenberger, 1997). Such a turn, its proponents argued, also allowed economic geographers
to denaturalize the object of investigation, the
economy. Rather than treating the economy as
‘out there’, as a single inviolable object, it had to
be conceived as a cultural product, fragile, performed and capable of realization in a variety of
forms. In this conception, the line between culture and economy is not just hard to see, but is
no longer there (see also cultural economy).
The ‘cultural turn’ is far from dominant,
however, and already criticisms have
mounted, and new alternatives or versions of
old alternatives proposed. In truth, there is still
no received view, orthodoxy or standard paradigm within economic geography. The current
discipline is like a palimpsest, with past versions of the discipline still partially visible, not
completely erased and continuing to contribute to the discipline’s present form. While
there is no single leading approach, several
areas of the discipline are marked by energetic
research and debate:
(1) Discussion of methods is one (Tickell,
Sheppard, Peck and Barnes, 2007). In the
beginning economic geography was heavily indebted to empiricism (and still is), assiduously
collecting numbers and statistics. Even during
economic geography’s least numerate period,
regionalism, Hartshorne (1959, p. 161) could
claim that ‘objectivity . . . can best be accomplished . . . by quantitative measurements’.
That was taken to an extreme during the quantitative revolution, but as that movement broke
up during the 1970s it facilitated the proliferation of new qualitative methods and techniques, including intensive case-study
research (Sayer and Morgan, 1985), in-depth
interviews, oral histories (Schoenberger, 1996),
ethnographies, participant observation,
discourse analysis (Barnes, 1996) and action
research (Gibson-Graham, 2006b [1996]). It is
180
an approach to methods in which nothing is
proscribed and everything is permitted. The
upside is diversity and rapid change – most of
the methodological techniques listed would
have been viewed as beyond the pale, or at
best, suspiciously avant-garde, even in the
mid-1980s. The downside, though, is a preoccupation with the instant of disclosure rather
than the slower processes of substantiation and
extension (Martin and Sunley, 2001).
(2) Hand-in-hand with permissive methodology has gone permissive theory. Thrift and
Olds (1996, p. 313) speak of a ‘polycentric’
economic geography consisting of a ‘set of narrative communities’ that ‘celebrate a qualitative multiplicity of ‘‘economic’’ times and
spaces’. Those communities include an older
mathematical modelling tradition, sometimes
refurbished for the new economic times and
spaces (e.g., Webber and Rigby, 1996) (but
often not); varieties of political economy,
loosely grouped around marxism, and frequently focused on the state (most recently,
its role in neo-liberalism: Peck, 2008); various stripes of feminism that sometimes intersect with political economy, and often turning
on bodies of both men and women (McDowell,
1997a); a range of institutional approaches
linked to economic anthropology and sociology
(Polyanyi’s and Granovetter’s works are especially important) emphasizing embeddedness,
networks and social capital (Saxenian,
1994); and selective theories drawn from science studies (particularly the work of Bruno
Latour and Donna Haraway), used to understand the brute materialities of economic geographical activities, from the use of machines to
the lurching movement of primary resources
along the commodity chain (Cook, 2004).
The absence of a single approach is liberating
(no authority to which to kow-tow), but slightly
disconcerting (the discipline continually starts
anew with a clean slate).
(3) Both permissive theory and methods have
been used to understand an issue increasingly
preoccupying economic geography from the
late 1980s, globalization, and forming a
body of research as energetic as its focus of
study. Globalization was made for economic
geographical study. And in the beginning it was
economic geography. Although they did not use
the term, Chisholm and Smith were students of
globalization. That focus was lost, however, as
economic geography became the study of only
western industrial economies, and the rest of
the world was parcelled up and given over to
either regional geography or development
ECONOMIC GROWTH
geography. Processes beginning from the
1970s, such as the emergence of a new international division of labour, the increasing
hegemony of multinational corporations,
the growth of international financial capital,
and new forms of communication and longdistance transportation, showed economic
geographers that they needed to deal with
whole world. Further, under globalization the
old intellectual division of labour in geography
was not just redundant but obstructive.
Dicken’s (1988) work on the geography of
multinational corporations (now in its fourth
edition) was one of the first to make this point.
But he made another, just as important – that
globalization was no seamless process, eradicating geographical difference. Globalization
represented not ‘the end of geography’, as
economists portrayed it (O’Brien, 1992b, p. 3),
but another form of its continuing importance.
Geographical differentiations were the very
preconditions for globalization’s possibility
and achievement. Dicken and a former student, Yeung (2002), sharpened the point for
firms, but similar conclusions were reached
for the study of global commodity chains
(Hughes and Reimer, 2004), international
finance, world-wide mega-project property development (Olds, 2001), and the international
migratory circuit of professional elites looking
for elite jobs.
(4) Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, primary
resources and nature have become the focus
of an animated disciplinary discussion. For a
long period the topic was a backwater, and was
almost lost altogether under spatial science.
The simplifying assumptions required for spatial modelling meant that the uneven and lumpy
nature of resources were treated as complicating factors, the analysis of which was promised
but indefinitely postponed. Harvey (1974a)
made a powerful case for considering nature
along with the economy, but this was not nature
‘red-in-claw’ but social-nature, ‘the production
of nature’, as Smith (2008 [1984]) put it. The
production of nature did not mean creating
something where before there was nothing. Nature pre-existed, but how it was exploited, used,
thought about and represented once market
capitalism arrived was utterly altered. The
original Marxist approach emphasized the
centrality of social relations in constituting the
economic resource, and in doing so joined discussions with political ecology. In a classic
paper, Watts (1994b) brilliantly showed how
social relations in Nigeria made the natural
resource of oil neither natural nor a resource;
instead, it created mal-development, social discord and political mayhem (see also petrocapitalism). Since then, discussions of nature
and resources have centred around two axes.
One turns on hybridity, a notion drawn from
science studies and extending what counts
as social relations, and connoting the inseparability, their mixing and blending, of nature and
the social – for example, Swyngedouw’s (1999)
work on the political economy of water in
Spain, and Morgan, Marsden and Murdoch’s
(2006) on food. The other turns on the influence of discursive and regulatory regimes, particularly neo-liberalism, in defining nature and
resources – for example, Bakker’s (2003) work
on water, and the edited collection by Heynen,
McCarthy, Prudham and Robbins (2007).
Economic geography is a discipline that is
intellectually open, eclectic, pluralist, possibly
chaotic and anarchic, and subject to temporary whims and fancies. Inconstancy is the only
constant, inconsistency the only consistency.
Over the past two decades the boundaries
between economic geography and other subfields have become increasingly muddied and
indistinct, as the very idea of a separate discipline, and a separate empirical object of study,
has been contested (as reflected in the new
textbooks for the discipline; e.g., Coe, Kelly
and Yeung, 2007). Almost anything can now
be fodder for its enquiry. Critics from outside
have complained of a hopeless ‘fuzziness’ and
slapdash approach (Markusen, 1999), while
even inside there have been grumblings of a
lack of rigour, focus and policy relevance
(Martin, 2001b). The unusual challenge for
the discipline will be less breaking new
ground, which it seems to do on a daily basis,
than holding its existing ground.
tb
Suggested reading
Amin and Thrift (2000); Barnes (2001); Coe,
Kelly and Young (2007); Scott (2000a);
Sheppard and Barnes (2000).
economic growth A sustained increase in
the production of goods and services, usually
measured at the national level as the change in
the gross domestic product (gdp) of a country’s economy. Economic growth is, at the
same time, one of the most fundamental and
perplexing issues in economic theory. There
are still no conclusive answers to the questions
of what causes economic growth and to what
extent it can be sustained, which have been
hotly debated since the time of Adam Smith
and Thomas Malthus. Smith believed that the
181
ECONOMIC INTEGRATION
ultimate engine of growth was the division of
labour, the increasing elaboration of which
drives productivity, which in turn determines
growth (or the ‘size of the market’). Larger
markets would sustain higher rates of growth,
and therefore growth would continue indefinitely. Malthus, for his part, was much more
pessimistic. He argued that the human population would expand geometrically, while the
supply of land (and therefore food) could only
grow slowly, resulting not only in a slowing
rate of growth, but in catastrophic vulnerability to poverty and famine (see malthusian
model). Karl Marx also identified limits to the
long-run rate of growth, caused in his analysis
by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and
rising class conflict (see marxian economics).
For Marx, economic growth would also be
inherently unstable, following boom and bust
cycles, along with periodic (and gradually
increasing) bouts of unemployment (his
‘reserve army’ of labour). While Marx may
have over-estimated capitalism’s inherent
tendency to system failure, his forecast of significant fluctuation in rates of growth, combined with spatially uneven development, has
been borne out by the historical record (see
Bluestone and Harrison, 2001; Duménil and
Lévy, 2004).
‘Growth is the pivot on which industrial
geography turns’, Storper and Walker (1989,
p. 36) have argued, ‘and change is the only
constant in a world of persistent disequilibrium generated by the very nature of capitalist
development’. There is no evidence of sustained convergence towards an equilibrium
or natural rate of growth; indeed, there is a
growing awareness that there are incipient, if
not urgent, social and environmental limits to
growth. But the search for the ultimate economic causes of growth continues. Often, it
appears that the simple fact of growth is taken
as a sign of causality. So, during the 1980s, the
relatively strong performance of the German
and Japanese economies prompted widespread debate around the essence of these
apparently superior models of capitalism (see
Albert, 1993). During the 1990s, when economic growth in both these economies faltered and American growth surged, this was
held up as a validation of the brand of marketdriven, technology-intensive growth found
in the USA (Friedman, 2000 [1999]), the
generic form of which is often described as
neo-liberalism.
The late 1990s also witnessed the emergence of ‘new growth theory’, developed by
economists Robert Lucas and Paul Romer,
182
which posits that the ultimate causes of growth
are endogenous (i.e. internal), the rate of
growth being a function of the aggregate stock
of capital (both human and physical),
together with the degree of technological
sophistication of the economy (e.g. the rate
of investment in research and development).
The policy implications of this model, which
include accelerating the long-term rate of
investment in technology and skills, have been
explored by Bluestone and Harrison (2001).
Here, they draw unfavourable contrasts with
the prevailing ideology of neo-liberal growth,
which favours short-term measures of market
performance and an ethos of governmental
deregulation.
Evidently, the search for the ultimate causes
of growth continues, and with some urgency.
Since the 1970s, growth rates across many of
the advanced industrial nations have declined
markedly, compared to the so-called ‘Golden
Age’ of fordism, while the experience of lessdeveloped countries (with the notable exceptions of India and China) has been decidedly
uneven. This has led some to conclude that
the ‘Golden Age’ of high growth has given way
to a ‘Leaden Age’ of generally slower, and less
sustainable, economic growth.
jpe
Suggested reading
Dicken (2003, see especially ‘The changing
global economic map’, pp. 32–81); Scott and
Storper (2003); Storper and Walker (1989).
economic integration A term often coupled
with globalization, and typically associated
with claims about the virtues of free trade and
unregulated capital markets. If one searches
for ‘economic integration’ on the website of
the international monetary fund (imf),
for example, some 3,350 documents appear –
the bulk of which are concerned with defining
the enabling conditions for expanding trade
and capital flows, and documenting their
beneficial effects. Such claims have been subject to intense contestation, exemplified most
dramatically by the protests that erupted in
Seattle in November 1999 at the time of the
world trade organization (wto) ministerial
meeting (see anti-globalization).
Some scholars question the extent and
novelty of contemporary global economic
integration, thereby casting doubt on efforts
to portray it as an inexorable linear process.
In the mid-1990s, for example, Hirst and
Thompson (1996) observed that the international economy was actually less open and
integrated than in the early years of the
ECONOMIES OF SCALE
twentieth century under the Gold Standard
regime. They also pointed to the concentration of trade, investment and capital flows
among Europe, Japan and North America.
Since then, China has emerged as a major site
of trade and investment flows, as well as the
single largest holder of US debt.
Burgeoning US debt underscores the structural asymmetries that have propelled the liberalization of financial markets since the
1970s. A widely held view is that the collapse
of the Bretton Woods system of international
monetary and financial arrangements in 1971
represented a defeat for a weakened US capitalism, unleashing market forces that quickly
gained ascendance over nation-state power
(see money and finance). New information
technologies and a ‘space of flows’ also figure
prominently in this account of intensified economic integration (e.g. Castells, 1996a).
In a revisionist analysis of the shift to
what he calls the Dollar–Wall Street regime,
Peter Gowan maintains that the liberation of
international financial markets was part of a
deliberate strategy by the Nixon administration, ‘based on the idea that doing so would
liberate the American state from succumbing to its
economic weaknesses and would strengthen the
power of the American state’ (Gowan, 1999,
p. 23; italics in original). Cutting the link
between the dollar and gold in 1971 meant
that the USA could force revaluation on other
states through its own policy for the dollar. In
a second key set of moves, closely linked to
the OPEC oil-price rise, the USA insisted
that petrodollars be recycled through the private banking system and devised a set of
incentives for commercial banks to lend to
governments in the South. These included
the abolition of capital controls, scrapping
the ceiling on bank loans to a single borrower
and repositioning the IMF to structure bailout arrangements that shifted the risk of
such loans to the populations of borrowing
countries. While ensuring the banks would
not lose, these arrangements have also meant
that financial crises in the south provoked
capital flight of private wealth-holders that
ended up strengthening Wall Street (see neoliberalism). While the banks and Wall Street
benefited in the period after 1973, the continual liberalization of the financial markets came
screeching to a halt in 2008 with the collapse
of over-extended US investment banks and
insurance houses, and the crippling of a global
financial system made excessively vulnerable
by a massive housing bubble driven by excessively leveraged banks deploying risky financial
instruments (credit default swaps, for
example) in a fiscal environment characterized
by corruption, fraud and virtually non-existent
regulation and oversight.
Neo-liberal forms of economic integration
emerge from this analysis not as a set of inexorable technological and market forces
increasingly divorced from state-political controls, but as integrally linked with what Harvey
(2003b) calls ‘the new imperialism’. Such
understandings are crucial in a post-9/11 world
in which economic integration and military
force are becoming closely intertwined.
gha
Suggested reading
Barnett (2004); RETORT (2005).
economies of scale The cost advantages
gained by large-scale production, as the average cost of production falls with increasing
output. Total production costs usually
increase less than proportionately with output,
up to a point where diseconomies of scale (cost
disadvantages) set in.
Economies of scale generally arise from conditions internal to the operation of the plant in
question. Some important internal sources of
scale economies are: (a) indivisibilities, where
plant is built to a certain capacity below which
the average cost of production will be higher
than at full capacity, and the plant cannot be
divided up into smaller units working with the
same efficiency as the larger one; (b) specialization and division of labour associated with
expansion of scale, which can increase efficiency and hence lower costs; and (c) overhead
processes, such as the design of a product,
which must be undertaken and paid for irrespective of scale, so that the larger the output,
the lower is the overhead cost per unit. Certain
external economies may also be associated
with expansion of scale of output; for example,
if the growth of an entire industry reduces
costs in each individual firm.
The existence of economies of scale encourages the expansion of productive capacity up to
the point at which diseconomies eventually pull
the cost of the additional (marginal) unit above
the price that it will fetch. In some modern
industry, it may be that this point is reached
only at a very high volume of output, so that
average cost continues to fall with rising output
well beyond the level at which diseconomies
might be expected to arise. However, in other
activities a trend towards more flexible and
differentiated production may lead to diseconomies at relatively small scale of output. (See
also economies of scope.)
dms
183
ECONOMIES OF SCOPE
economies of scope
The cost advantages
that may arise when performing two or more
activities together within a single firm rather
than performing them separately. When economies of scope exist, firms have an incentive to
internalize (i.e. perform in-house) the production of goods or services that otherwise would
be acquired through transactions with external
suppliers (see transactional analysis). This
incentive is normally expressed in terms of
reductions in production costs as result of
internalization (see transaction costs).
Hence, economies of scope may arise where
the goods or services in question share inputs
to their production (e.g. by using excess
capacity in power generation or indivisible
machinery), are related to one another
through input–output relations (one good
being an input to the production of the other
good), draw upon common technical or manual skills for their production, or can be most
efficiently produced at roughly the same scale
of output. This concept, when combined with
the idea of economies of scale, provides an
understanding of the forces that determine
firm size and the nature of inter-firm relations
in localized clusters of producers (Scott,
1988c). (See also production complex.) msg
economy
Economy is practice and object.
As human practice, Aristotle defined oikos as
operating the household (on patriarchal principles) to meet daily needs. Over time, as the
meaning of economy migrated from the
domestic to the public sphere within political
economy, it came to mean ‘seeking a desired
end with the least possible expenditure of
means’. As object, it refers to the hypothesis
that practices of economy, now in the public
domain, can be separated from the remainder
of societal endeavour: as the economy.
Economy has become central to social discourse as a result of this separation: human
practices are thought of as reducible to means/
ends rationality, and the (capitalist) economy is
thought of as central to human well-being.
The genealogy of this separation of economy from related societal and biophysical processes is not yet clear. The question of how to
organize society on secular principles, as a
substitute for (Christian) religious mores,
was a preoccupation of the enlightenment
in France and Scotland. French Physiocrats
constructed the first model of an economy as
a self-sustaining entity. In 1758, François
Quesnay built a tableau économique, forerunner
of Marx’s theory of the circulation of capital
and of post-1945 input–output models,
184
depicting the flow of net product from its presumed agricultural source, via landlords,
‘unproductive’ industrialists, and back to agriculture. British political economists concerned
themselves with the benefits of organizing society around economy. It was held that the state
could not rein in human passions, implying
that the key was harnessing self-interest for this
purpose. Avarice became constructed as a
beneficial and mild interest rather than a passion, capable of taming other passions deleterious to society. Adam Smith solved the puzzle of
how self-interest could create a society beneficial to all. He reduced self-interest to economic
calculation, and articulated the principle of the
invisible hand, whereby market competition
would translate individual self-interested practices of economy into mutual benefit. Smith’s
argument was geographical: the invisible hand
and free trade would benefit Britain. These
justifications gradually transformed into the
abstract argument that self-interested practices
of economy were universal, and generally
socially beneficial.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political economy focused on the relationship
between economic processes and the national
polity. Karl Polanyi (1944) argues that the
economy was disembedded from society during
Britain’s ‘Great Transformation’ to liberal
capitalism in the early nineteenth century,
and increasingly, the economy was placed in
a national frame. By 1841 Friedrich List,
influenced by American economic policy, was
proposing protectionist policies for the German
national economy, facing the debilitating
consequences of free trade with Britain.
After the 1890s, European and then
American economists completed a marginalist,
subsequently neo-classical, revolution reinforcing the principle of the invisible hand.
Assuming a world of autonomous selfinterested individuals of equal political power
engaged in perfect competition, neo-classical
economics created a level playing field, on
which equilibrium market prices would track
the marginal utility of each commodity; ensure
that capitalists, landlords and workers are fairly
paid (reflecting their marginal contribution to
production); and maximize social utility, in a
self-regulating market. It was also extended as a
normative principle to broad areas of social life.
rational choice theory, the broadly influential idea that social structures and dynamics are
the result of the rational economic choices of
autonomous self-interested individuals, essentially grounds all social processes in practices of
economy – and equates such actions with
ECOSYSTEM
capitalist markets. This vision of a harmonious
self-regulating capitalist economy, grounded in
self-interested practices of economy, and governed by rules of perfect competition, came
to dominate social thought.
After 1945, as the formal end of colonialism created a world largely divided up into
autonomous nation-states, each with
acknowledged sovereignty over their economies (controlling borders, managing economic activities within the border), the idea
of the national economy became commonplace. Indeed, much of the statistical knowledge produced about the economic aspects
of society appears in reams of national statistics, produced using universally agreed practices of measurement (such as the Gross
National Product; grounded in mainstream
Anglophone economic theory), and collected
and published by supra-national agencies.
Timothy Mitchell (2002d) dates ‘the making
of the economy’ to this post-colonial era;
this is certainly when the discourse globalized.
economic geography has at times aligned
itself with such arguments – for example, during the 1960s – but even then serious reservations were expressed about the adequacy of
this discourse. Earlier eras of commercial
geography and regional geography created
an awareness of different, non-capitalist and
non-individualist practices of economy in different places, that are perfectly adequate to the
social and biophysical context in which they
operate. For example, slash and burn and
shifting cultivation remain highly functional for subsistence-based societies in delicate ecological environments (see subsistence
agriculture), now being destroyed by the
clear-cutting of forest ecosystems to undertake
cash-crop monoculture.
spatial science offered a nascent critique of
capitalism’s self-sufficiency and social optimality, even under the extreme assumptions presupposed by neo-classical economics. It was
shown that while neo-classical theory works
well on the head of a pin, it breaks down in
the real world of a geographically extensive
space economy. Perfect competition turns
into monopolistic competition, the level playing field disappears and prices no longer
approximate marginal utilities.
Marxian political economy, gaining popularity in economic geography during the
1970s and 1980s, offered much deeper criticisms: that capitalism entails exploitation of
labour and nature, generates social and political conflict and uneven development, and is
incapable of resolving these problems
internally (see marxism). The space economy
poses difficulties and complexities for Marxist
theory too, but these only exacerbate capitalism’s internal contradictions. Capitalism thus
cannot be disembedded from its non-economic
context, as it depends on state intervention,
biophysical processes with their own logic, social
and legal norms, and civil society for its own
reproduction (see also cultural ecology).
post-structuralism has pushed economic
geography away from analyses that begin with
even political economic processes, towards a
view in which these are co-implicated with
cultural, gendered and biophysical processes,
and non-capitalist economic practices.
Geographical economy is inseparable from
and constituted through societal and biophysical processes, and is variegated rather than
simply capitalist. There is no single economy
applicable to all places, with advanced capitalism constituting a ubiquitous best practice
for all, but room for geographically differentiated possibilities and imaginaries.
es
Suggested reading
Dumont (1977); Gibson-Graham (1996);
Hirschman (1977); Sheppard and Barnes (2000).
ecosystem The concept of the ecosystem
was proposed by the British ecologist A.G.
Tansley in 1935, to describe the interaction
of living things and their non-living surroundings, with which they interact. Tansley’s paper
attacked the notion that the plant community
was an ‘organic unity’, and vegetation succession a process of development to a ‘climax’
state (Sheail, 1987). Tansley suggested that
climate, soils, plants and animals interacted
together as parts of a system, nested within a
host of other physical systems (Sheail, 1995).
The ecosystem concept allowed a reductionist approach to the analysis of forests,
fields, wetlands and other environments in
terms of flows of energy and matter. It allowed
metaphors from engineering, cybernetics and
control theory to be applied to such environments, such as system, feedback, equilibrium,
balance and control. Ecosystems are not
dimensionally defined: they can be defined at
any scale from pond, to ocean or biosphere.
Classic studies, such as those of Odum on
the energetics of Silver Springs in Florida
(in 1956), involved small naturally bounded
systems. Much of the claim of ecology as an
experimental science can be traced back to
the power of the ecosystem approach.
The ecosystem, and the wider science of
ecology, provided a framework for the analysis
185
ECUMENE
and management of human impacts on nonhuman nature. In the mid-twentieth century,
ecological ‘managerialism’ underpinned the
expansion global policy ideas about issues
such as overgrazing, desertification, deforestation and the problem of ‘fragile environments’. Ecologists sought to apply the
‘lessons’ of their interdisciplinary science to
development; for example, in Ecological principles for economic development (Dasmann,
Milton and Freeman, 1973). The ecosystem
as a frame for understanding human impacts
on the biosphere was fundamental to the
environmental movement of the 1970s and
1980s (at that time, often called the ‘ecology
movement’) and to the expansion of
conservation.
The ecosystem concept has had a significant
impact on geography, first in describing vegetation patterns on global (biome) or local
scales, and second as a framework for analysing the interaction of society and nature.
Organism and ecosystem were discussed by
David Stoddart (1967) in Chorley and
Haggett’s Models in geography, both for their
utility in explaining how the world worked and
also as indicators of the value of the systems
approach and general systems theory as a
‘unifying methodology’ for geography.
Despite the explosion of interest by human
geographers in all aspects of the social construction of nature, the ecosystem continues
to be central to natural scientific explanations
of processes and patterns in the living environment, and human interactions with them.
Moreover, recent ecological work on ecosystem disturbance and resilience has maintained
interest in the ecosystem as a holistic frame
for understanding human impacts on nonhuman nature.
wma
ecumene
A term used to mean ‘inhabited
world’ or ‘dwelling place’. It generally refers to
the historical process and cultural forms of
human settlement, and to those parts of the
Earth where people have made their permanent home, and to the economic activities that
support that permanent occupation and use of
land. It derives from the Greek oecumene,
which referred specifically to the civilized
world as it was known to the ancient Greeks
(and, later, Romans) and centred on the
Mediterranean (see civilization). In some
historiographies of geography, ‘ecumene’ is
presented as the unifying concept and distinctive concern of the discipline (James, 1972; see
also geography, history of). In practice, it
was in most active use by cultural geographers
186
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with the allied scholars in anthropology and archaeology, who were then
concerned with the imperatives and distribution of human settlement (see cultural
geography).
Ecumene was adopted as the title of a new
journal launched in 1991 that sought to showcase the work of the ‘new cultural geography’
and the fields of study with which it was in
conversation. That this journal was re-launched
in 2005 under the more straightforward title
Cultural Geography is perhaps indicative of a
declining intellectual purchase and resonance
of ‘ecumene’ at the start of the twenty-first
century.
sw
Suggested reading
Ecumene; James (1972).
edge city An urban form in the USA, identified by Garreau (1991) and addressed by
others (e.g. Beauregard, 1995). An edge city
contains the industry, commerce and residences of traditional cities, but in less compact
form (see exopolis; sprawl). Edge cities are
new (largely emerging post-1970) and contain
high levels of office and retail space. They have
also become generally perceived as places in
themselves, or ‘new downtowns’, on the edge
of urban areas (e.g. Tyson’s Corner, Virginia).
According to Garreau, these are not only ‘edge
cities’ because of their peripheral location,
but also because they are major centres of
innovation.
em
Suggested reading
Garreau, 1991.
education Studies of the geography of
education focus on spatial variations in the
provision, take-up, quality of and outputs
from educational resources. Many of those
resources are provided in facilities at fixed
locations, so the provision of, for example,
play-centres for pre-school children may
involve differential accessibility, with implications for social justice. The majority of
facilities are public goods in most countries,
so their spatial allocation is a political process,
as is public expenditure on education (cf.
positive discrimination).
Spatial variations in educational outputs are
related not only to the quality of the facilities
and institutions’ learning systems, but also
their social milieux. Students’ aspirations and
performance reflect not only their innate abilities and home situations and the quality of
ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY
the school they attend, but also the characteristics of their school and neighbourhood
peers. Strong neighbourhood effects operate (Wöllmann, 2001: see also contextual
effect; multi-level modelling). Their
existence was the basis for challenges to the
‘separate but equal’ schooling systems once
operated in many US states, whereby
African-Americans and whites were allocated
to separate schools: after the classic Brown v
Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court
decision in 1954, many school districts were
required to integrate their schools to remove
the unequal treatment suffered by the former
group (Johnston, 1984). A commonly deployed
strategy to achieve this was ‘bussing’, whereby
students were transported from segregated
neighbourhoods to mixed schools: this was
increasingly countered by whites who either
sent their children to private schools or moved
to suburban school districts where housing
was too expensive for most AfricanAmericans (‘white flight’). Similar patterns
have been observed regarding school choice
in English cities (Johnston, Burgess, Wilson
and Harris, 2006).
With the adoption of neo-liberalism in
many countries, although education remains
a public good, parental and student choice
is promoted – as against the territorially structured school catchment areas that characterized earlier eras, when the composition of
a school, and thus the contextual effects operating therein, reflected the neighbourhoods
that it served. To facilitate this choice, information on schools – such as the performance
of their students in public examinations and
their truancy rates – are published, leading to
the creation of school ‘league tables’.
Studies of geographical education focus on
the provision and nature of instruction in the
discipline in schools and universities. Special
interest groups – including geographical
societies such as the Geographical Association
in the UK – lobby relevant authorities to ensure,
for example, that geography is in the school
curriculum and that departments offer degrees
in the discipline at universities, with varying
success across countries. Leading geographical
societies – such as the Association of American
Geographers and the Royal Geographical
Society/Institute of British Geographers –
include specialty groups whose purpose is
to promote pedagogy, as do journals such as
the Journal of Geography in Higher Education.
Within universities, there is a growing
trend of regularly assessing their performance
– notably at research (as with the UK’s
Research Assessment Exercise, which grades
every university department every five years on
average: Johnston, 1994, 2006) – and then
allocating funds according to the results,
which has the consequence of concentrating
research in selected institutions only.
rj
Suggested reading
Bednarz, Downs and Vender (2003); Kong
(2007); Walford (2001).
egalitarianism The view that all people are
of equal fundamental moral or social worth,
and should be treated as such. Egalitarianism
can take a number of forms related to different
types of equality: equality of opportunity,
equality of outcome, equality of wealth or
power, equality of respect, equality before the
law or equality before God. Egalitarianism
implicitly informs much research on the geographies of inequality, including those associated with differences of gender, class,
ethnicity, sexuality, age, corporeality and
nationality (cf. nationalism). The mitigation
of spatial inequality has been an important
normative concern for geographical scholarship since the early 1970s (Harvey, 1973). jpa
Suggested reading
Lee and Smith (2004).
electoral geography The study of geographical aspects of the organization, conduct and
results of elections. Pioneering studies were
conducted early in the twentieth century, but
most of the literature – produced by a small
number of specialists – dates from the 1960s on.
Because voting in national and local elections is almost invariably place-bound (i.e.
people have to cast their vote in a specified
area, usually that containing their home) and
the results are published for those places, a
great deal of data that can be subject to geographical (i.e. spatial) analysis is created.
Merely mapping election outcomes suggests
that geography is ‘epiphenomenal’, however:
that there is nothing inherently geographical
about the processes producing the outcome,
which just happens to be produced and displayable in spatial form. For geographers such
as Agnew (1987a) and Cox (1969), however,
the decision-making processes underpinning
those mapped patterns are inherently geographical. The socialization of voters is a contextual process (cf. contextual effect) and
much of the social interaction that precedes
a voting decision is locally based, in the
household and neighbourhood – hence the
187
EMIGRATION
considerable emphasis in electoral geography
on the neighbourhood effect. In addition,
the mobilization of voters is also at least partly
a spatially specific activity, with political parties focusing their electioneering on those
places where they expect to get the best
returns.
Much analysis in electoral geography uses
ecological data – often combining electoral
returns for places with census data on the characteristics of their inhabitants – and thus faces
problems associated with ecological inference (cf. ecological fallacy; modifiable
areal unit problem). Geographers have also
added spatial information to survey data,
facilitating analyses that at least partially circumvent those problems, although in the USA
studies of patterns of voting by state and
Congressional District have produced substantial insights into the political economy of
elections there (Archer and Taylor, 1991).
In many electoral systems – especially those
based on single-member constituencies (the
so-called first-past-the-post system, deployed
in both the UK and the USA) – the translation
of votes into seats in the relevant legislature
is an inherently geographical process, with the
membership of such bodies determined by
who wins most votes in each of a set of territorial constituencies. Constituency-delimitation
(cf. redistricting) can thus be highly politicized in some countries, with district boundaries defined to promote the interests of one
party over those of another, although similar
outcomes may result without any such activity
when redistricting is undertaken by independent, non-partisan, bodies (Gudgin and Taylor,
1979: cf. districting algorithm; gerrymandering; malapportionment).
As part of their continued mobilization of
support in places, parties and/or candidates
may influence the allocation of public goods
towards favoured areas, both to reward those
who have supported them at past contests and
to solicit support from others there (cf. pork
barrel). The geography of election results is
thus a potential foundation for a geography
of political power. (See also democracy.) rj
Suggested reading
Johnston (2005a); Johnston and Pattie (2006);
Johnston, Pattie, Dorling and Rossiter (2006).
emigration A particular form of migration:
the term is usually reserved for migration that
occurs between countries. To emigrate is to
leave a place, the opposite of immigration,
to enter a new place. Emigration was defined
188
as a basic human right in Article 12 of the
1966 UN International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights (which came into force in
1976): ‘Everyone shall be free to leave any
country, including his [or her] own’ (United
Nations, n.d.). Note that the right to emigrate
is not matched by the right to immigrate, or to
enter the country of one’s choice. The value of
this right is therefore debatable. Furthermore,
countries vary widely in their observance of
this right. During the cold war period, states
within the Warsaw Pact typically prohibited
their citizens from leaving, especially after
walls were built to separate the capitalist
and state socialist countries of Europe. The
number of countries that currently prohibit
emigration is limited, but all nation-states
regulate exit to a degree through the granting,
or withholding, of passports (Torpey, 2000).
Countries also differ in their practices of monitoring emigration: some track their citizens
abroad through registration systems, and
collect detailed statistics on all entries and
departures, while others are only interested in
citizens who are actually resident in the
nation-state (see also citizenship).
dh
Suggested reading
Castles and Miller (2003).
emotional geography The study of the
dynamic, recursive relation between emotions
and place or space. Emotional geography
includes diverse ways of understanding the
differential topologies and topographies of
emotion. As a body of work it responds, on the
one hand, to the claim that emotions are an
intractable aspect of life and thus potentially a
constitutive part of all geographies (Anderson
and Smith, 2001) and, on the other, to the
recognition that emotions have long been
manipulated and modulated as a constitutive
part of various forms of power (Thrift, 2004a).
As such, work on emotional geographies elicits
the multiple ways in which different emotions
emerge from, and re-produce, specific sociospatial orders and engages with how emotions
become part of the different relations that make
up the lived geographies of place (Davidson,
Bondi and Smith, 2005). Consequently, the
term ‘emotional geography’ does not designate
a sub-discipline limited to the study of a set of
emotions (such as fear, boredom or anxiety).
Rather, it is composed of ways of considering
how emotions, along with linked modalities
such as feeling, mood or affect, are constitutive elements within the ongoing composition
of space–time, and exploring how learning to
EMPIRE
respond to and intervene in such modalities
could or perhaps should disrupt human geography’s methodological and theoretical
practices.
Attention to emotions, or at least calls to
attend to emotions, have a long history in
human geography, being central, for example,
to the expansive version of what a human is
and does that was articulated by humanistic
geographies in the 1970s and, in particular,
to feminist interventions in social geography
(e.g., on fear, Pain, 2000). Current work on
emotional geographies is animated by two
intertwined sources – both of which resonate
with the attention in humanistic geography
to the lifeworld and the taken-for-granted
world, and perform a sensibility that attends
to the ebb and flow of everyday life. First, and
most prominently, there is the careful attention in feminist geographies to the silencing
or repressing of differential, often gendered,
emotional experience and the subsequent
attempts to reclaim and give voice to emotional experiences. Second, attention is paid
in non-representational theories to the
emergence, or individuation, of emotions from
within more or less unwilled assemblages that
gather together human and non-human bodies in broad fields of affect. These are by no
means mutually exclusive or internally coherent perspectives – indeed, what is shared
between them is a commitment to the relationality of emotions and thus an assumption
that emotions are not contained by, or properties of, an individual mind. Yet the resulting
theoretical and methodological pluralism
raises questions about how to understand the
role of the subject in what an emotion is and
does, as well as broader questions of how to
develop conceptual vocabularies attentive to
differential emotional geographies. Both questions have been responded to through the
recent experimentations with techniques such
as practical psychotherapies (cf. psychoanalytic theory) and performative methods
(see performativity) that aim to witness
different emotional or affectual geographies
(cf. Tolia-Kelly, 2006). The importance and
interest of this new body of work is reflected in
the publication of a new interdisciplinary journal, Emotion, Space and Society (2008–).
ba
Suggested reading
Anderson and Smith, (2001); Bondi (2005);
Davidson, Bondi, and Smith (2005).
empire An extensive territory and polity,
encompassing diverse lands and peoples, that
is ruled, more or less directly and effectively,
by a single person (emperor/empress), sovereign state or centralized elite, and without the
formal consent of all its peoples (cf. Lieven,
2005). The term is also used colloquially to
denote great power and transcendent influence (as in ‘corporate empire’ and ‘reason’s
empire’), and the adjectives ‘imperial’ and
‘colonial’ are commonly used to characterize
actions and processes befitting empire.
Empire has taken diverse forms and eludes a
single meaning or explanation. Parallels have
been drawn between the evolution of europe’s
modern colonial empires, which reached their
heyday in the early twentieth century, and
since Roman times the ability to stretch power
over space has figured centrally in debates
about empire (see time-space distanciation).
There have been over 70 empires in history –
including those created by the Romans, Incas,
Habsburgs and Ottomans, and by Britain,
Japan and the Soviet Union – and Niall
Ferguson (2004, p. 11) typologizes them in
terms in their metropolitan foundations,
declared aims, economic and political systems,
social character, and perceived benefits and
drawbacks. Important distinctions have been
drawn between ancient and modern, Western
and non-Western, maritime and land, and formal and informal empires. And histories and
theories of empire have long varied in accordance with: (a) the relative importance given to
six sources of power (economic, military, political, geopolitical, demographic and ideological); (b) the ways and extent to which
sovereignty is seen as unified or divided,
and power as centralized and totalizing or limited and localized; and (c) the impact that
empire has on the identity of colonizing and
colonized peoples (Pomper, 2005).
The term derives from the Latin word
imperium, meaning ‘sovereign authority’, and
since the nineteenth century has been closely
associated with imperialism and treated as
pivotal to the globally uneven development
of capitalism. Empire has long been used as a
term of abuse – as quintessentially exploitative, and the duplicitous means by which
the west has sought to impose its values and
institutions (of reason, civilization, progress,
democracy and so forth) on others. But over
time, and still today, empire has also been
viewed in a more affirmative light – as tolerant
of difference, as a civilizing and modernizing
influence, and as the harbinger of global order
and a higher (perpetual) peace.
In recent years there has been a major revival
of interest in empire, which is tied to three sets
189
EMPIRICISM
of (interrelated) factors. First, there has been a
resurgence of scholarly interest in the history
and legacies of colonialism – one marked by a
comparative turn in the study of world history
that questions both eurocentric and nationcentred histories of empire, and a heightened
concern with the ‘culture of empire’ (Hall,
2000). Second, there has been vigorous debate,
particularly since 9/11, about whether the USA
should be regarded as an empire – ‘empire lite’
and ‘empire in denial’ being important slogans
in the debate (Dædalus, 2005: (see american
empire)). Third, this debate feeds into a wider
discussion of whether globalization is better
characterized as what Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri (2000, pp. xii–xiii) see as a
new age of empire that ‘establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed
boundaries and barriers . . . a decentred and
deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm
within its open, expanding frontiers’ (cf.
biopolitics).
Since the late 1980s, an increasingly diverse
geographical literature has critically examined
the historical links between geography (as
both a discipline and discourse) and empire,
sensitizing geographers to the Westernimperial-white-male biases and assumptions
embedded in their disciplinary fabric. Close
critical attention has been paid to how ‘geography’s empire’ (Driver, 2001a) was fashioned
at the level of knowledge and representation –
as a form of epistemological violence –
through practices of exploration, mapping
and landscape representation, and deterministic and divisive discourses on climate and
race (Clayton, 2004; cf. geography, history
of). But geographers have also taken on board
a wider interdisciplinary attempt to complicate
understanding of empire’s rigid geography of
core and periphery by recovering a community of struggles over who was included and
excluded in definitions of empire and nation,
how lines and boundaries of difference were
drawn between citizen and subject (see citizenship), and the specific – and class-, raceand gender-inflected – imperial and colonial
locations (from museums to plantations) in
which such dynamics were enacted and settled
(Proudfoot and Roche, 2005).
Recent geographical research bears witness
to the contemporary liaison between geography and empire in two further – if contrary –
ways: first, through geohazards research and
an emboldened military geography, which
are fired by GIS technologies and government
contracts, and which serve the perceived
190
security and surveillance needs of Western
states; and, second, through geographers’
oppositional engagement with America’s socalled ‘war on terror’ (see terrorism). In
two important studies of the historical and
contemporary geography of American imperialism, Neil Smith (2003c) uses the political
influence of Isaiah Bowman – ‘Roosevelt’s
geographer’ – to question teleological
accounts of the passage from empire to
nation-state to globality, and recover the
imperial spatiality of American visions of
global development; and Derek Gregory
(2004b) explores the spatial strategies and
tactics – ‘colonising geographies’ – created
and deployed by the USA and its allies in the
middle east, showing how the USA now
bestrides a ‘colonial present’ in which it
exempts itself from international laws, institutions and limits on behaviour, creating
‘spaces of exception’ (of confinement, banishment and punishment) that strip people of
their dignity and most basic human rights
(cf. biopolitics; exception, space of).
Three important insights that can be
gleaned from this range of recent work are
that: (a) past empires were less state-centred
than was previously thought, and current US
imperialism is more centred on the projection
of nation-state power than contemporary theorists such as Hardt and Negri have proposed;
(b) it is possible to analyse empires as both
unitary and fragmentary, and as potent yet
vulnerable apparatuses of power; and (c) historical work on empire, and the recognition it
brings of the diverse ways in which power has
and can be exercised, is key to understanding
the nature and limits of empire today.
dcl
Suggested reading
Howe (2002); Kirsch (2003); Lester (2006);
Lieven (2005).
empiricism A philosophy originating with
the Greeks, and later formally codified by the
English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704),
that privileges experience of the outside world
above all else as the basis of knowledge, truth
and method. The contrast is with philosophies
that favour intuition, or self-revelation, or
rationalism; that is, philosophies underpinned
by internal mental processes independent
of external senses. Empiricism most overtly
entered human geography through the discipline’s use of the standard scientific method,
which was most self-conscious during the
1960s, but which existed both before and
after in less explicit forms. This method
ENCLOSURE
is unabashedly empiricist, averring that
scientific theories and hypotheses are
verifiable only against the gold standard
of empirical data; that is, data observed
though the senses. Nothing else counts.
During the 1960s, this version of the scientific
method and its concomitant empiricist
philosophy was explicitly introduced into
geography as part of the quantitative
revolution (Harvey, 1969). Ironically,
though, what was so novel about ‘the revolution’ was the introduction of rationally derived
theory, exactly the kind of pursuit most
anathema to empiricism. This eventually
clarified a crucial distinction between empiricist
enquiry, which assumes that ‘the facts’ (observations) somehow speak for themselves and
are independent of theory, and empirical
enquiry, a substantive study that may be (and
usually is) sensitive to the interdependence of
theory and observation.
tb
empowerment
Defined by alternative
development thinkers (Friedmann, 1992) as
a process by which households and their
members wield greater socio-political and psychological power (e.g. knowledge, skills,
voice, collective action, self-confidence) to
reshape the actions affecting their own lives,
empowerment has come to mean different
things for different players. While mainstream
development agencies regard empowerment
as a tool to improve efficiency, more alternative agencies claim it as a metaphor for fundamental
social
transformation.
Still,
‘empowerment as praxis’ retains its localized,
personal emphasis as a phenomenon that
necessitates individuals and collectives to
struggle towards new consciousness and
actions (Parpart, 2002) (see also post-development and anti-development).
rn
enclave A small piece of territory that is
culturally distinct and politically separate from
another territory within which it is located.
‘Enclave’ originally referred to a territory situated within a state but outside its political
jurisdiction, such as the Vatican City in Italy.
The term is also used to denote areas in which
a minority population that identifies with one
state is located in the territory of a neighbouring state, such as Ngorno Kharabach, which is
an enclave within Azerbaijan but has an
Armenian population. The term is increasingly used to refer to a city neighbourhood
displaying distinctive economic, social and
cultural attributes from its surroundings. (See
also exclave.)
cf
Suggested reading
Aalto (2002); Parks (2004).
enclosure In
historical
geography,
enclosure refers to the extinction of ‘common
rights’ and the replacement of open or common fields, pastures and meadows with
‘enclosed’ fields free of such rights. Across
large swathes of medieval and early modern
europe, much agricultural land was common
land that was subject to various forms of use by
all individuals holding ‘common-rights’ (De
Moor, Shaw-Taylor and Ward, 2002). These
included rights to graze animals on common
pasture and sometimes the right to gather fuel;
rights over common fields, where individual
cultivators might own a large number of
scattered strips of arable land that alternated
seasonally between private cultivation of the
strips and communal grazing by those with
common rights; and rights over common
woodlands. Such common rights were not
available to everyone, and were regulated by
institutions such as manor or village courts.
Enclosure replaced common land with fully
private land that in some regions was physically
‘enclosed’ by a hedge, wall or ditch – within its
boundaries, the owner or tenant normally has
exclusive rights to use that land.
In England, the parliamentary enclosures of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are
the best known, but enclosure began in the
Middle Ages. It become an important process
during the fifteenth century and probably
peaked during the seventeenth century.
Elsewhere in Europe, enclosure tended to
come much later, principally during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (as in the
Soviet Union), though some common land
still survives. In England, much medieval
enclosure may have taken place by seigniorial
edict, and is often associated with the conversion of arable to pasture and the destruction
of villages (there are over 3,000 deserted
medieval village sites known to archaeologists), but certainly by the early seventeenth
century, and probably by the early sixteenth
century, tenurial security had improved to
the point at which it was legally necessary to
secure the written consent of all proprietors,
giving even the smallest owner an effective
veto. Such enclosures by agreement became
increasingly difficult to secure and during
the eighteenth century, particularly after
1750, enclosure by agreement generally gave
way to parliamentary enclosure. This required
an Act of Parliament that allowed the larger
landowners to override the vetoes of small
191
ENDOGENEITY
owners, though not to appropriate their
property. By 1500, around half of England’s
surface area was either already enclosed or had
never been common. Perhaps 20–25 per cent
was enclosed during the seventeenth century
and a similar amount between 1750 and 1830
(Wordie, 1983).
The importance of enclosure in England has
been stressed in three major historical processes.
First, enclosure reshaped the landscape.
Second, enclosure was entangled with the
destruction of the English peasantry (see peasant) and the rise of agrarian capitalism, though
its importance remains a matter of debate
(Humphries, 1992; Neeson, 1993; ShawTaylor, 2001). Third, enclosure played an
important role in raising agricultural productivity during the agricultural revolution
(Overton, 1996). By allowing farmers to specialize in the most profitable crops, enclosure
facilitated regional specialization and thus
higher overall productivity, and enclosure
was also a precondition for certain technological changes in agriculture; for example,
installing under-drainage or the selective
breeding of animals.
While enclosure has been subject to longstanding historical scrutiny, more recent work
has also begun to reinterpret the concept of
enclosure as a means of exploring the contemporary forms and processes of neo-liberalism
(see RETORT, 2005). Human geographers
have seized upon enclosure as an ongoing
feature of capital accumulation. Whereas
traditional historical accounts of enclosure
emphasized its relationship to ‘the commons’,
recent work has proposed a more complex
spatial formation operating across a number
of scales, sites and practices, from special
economic zones to genetic modification
and biometrics (see biopower). Three major
axes of investigation have been identified
(Vasudevan, McFarlane and Jeffrey, 2008).
The first focuses on the role of enclosure as
a technology of contemporary neo-liberalism.
Narratives of enclosure help illuminate the
reconfiguration of political sovereignties,
modes of subjectification and neo-liberal economic norms through a variety of territories
and networks. The second explores the role
of law as a key instrument through which both
old and new forms of enclosure are legitimized, regulated and policed. The third
addresses the significance of enclosure as a
key dimension of our colonial present. While
studies of colonialism underline the importance of land tenure as a precondition for particular forms of displacement, dispossession
192
and discipline, contemporary instances of
imperial enclosure have also mutated into
new forms of the enclave capitalism that
has accompanied the securitization of global
mineral extraction (see Ferguson, 2006). Such
an expansive re-conceptualization of enclosure
has highlighted not only a complex set of
logics of spatial inclusion and exclusion, but
increasingly urgent forms of resistance that
centre on a messy and highly conflicted
reclaiming of the ‘commons’.
lst/av
Suggested reading
De Moor, Shaw-Taylor and Warde (2002);
Mingay (1997); Vasudevan, McFarlane and
Jeffrey (2008).
endogeneity The property that a variable is
determined within a model or geographical
system, rather than being ‘exogenous’ or
determined outside the model and so taken
as fixed. In statistical models such as regression and the generalized linear model, the
right-hand side or independent variables are
assumed to be exogenous, but situations arise
where they are in fact endogenous, creating
problems for model estimation. One widely
applied example is in fiscal competition and
‘tax-mimicking’ between neighbouring local
or regional governments (such as states within
the USA): a state or local government’s
expenditure (or tax-rate) is determined by several (exogenous) characteristics of the state
but also by the expenditure (or tax-rate)
behaviour of neighbouring states, so that there
is spatial endogeneity; such models are an
important topic in spatial econometrics.
A second example is where school pupil performance levels are influenced by the average
income levels of families within the school
catchments: the family income levels are
assumed to be exogenous, but affluent families
may have moved to the catchments of highperformance schools, and so not be exogenous
after all, the so-called ‘selection problem’ in
estimation. There are several methods for taking endogeneity into account in the estimation
process, including instrumental variables,
maximum likelihood and bayesian analysis,
all of which are employed in spatial econometrics. For studies employing individual-level
data (as in some pupil performance analyses),
there is a technique of ‘matching’ the characteristics of individuals between areas to eliminate endogeneity bias.
lwh
Suggested reading
Manski (1995).
ENLIGHTENMENT
energy The capacity of a physical system
for doing work. All species harness energy.
Human beings harness, convert, release and
(re)deploy energy to do work and yield goods
and services. This is the basis for the material
evolution of human societies. While all life
forms ultimately depend on solar energy, since
the industrial revolution developed countries have increasingly relied on non-renewable resources for energy.
Worldwide energy consumption is increasing. This is partly due to increases in global
population, high levels of energy consumption
in developed countries, and rising energy use
in rapidly developing economies such as
China and India. Per capita energy consumption varies significantly throughout the world.
It is also important to recognize patterns of
economic activity; for example, energy is consumed in developing countries to make cheap
products for export to wealthier countries.
Despite increased efficiencies in energy consumption in most developed countries, redistribution in energy consumption has occurred.
Reducing material consumption, reusing
existing materials and recycling may achieve
reductions in energy demand. Human geographers have studied cultural and urban
aspects of energy use, including transitions to
more sustainable cities (Pacione, 2001a).
Reduction in the use of energy through
improved design, greater insulation and
changes in use patterns can lower economic
costs to an organization. Businesses have
worked with parts of the environmental
movement on energy efficiency since the oil
crises of 1973 and 1979. These crises signalled
the end of cheap, abundant oil and highlighted
the dependency of industrialized countries on
the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC), and the vulnerability of
economies in some developing countries (see
von Weizsacker, Lovins and Lovins, 1997).
Major concerns about energy include the
continued supply of oil and the cumulative
impacts of fossil-fuel consumption (see
global warming). Predictions of ‘peak oil’
at the scale of individual oilfields, countries
and the globe highlight the finite nature of this
natural resource (Deffeyes, 2001). Every
year, the world consumes billions of barrels
of oil more than are discovered. Estimates of
known reserves in various countries are not
always reliable. Therefore, regardless of the
environmental impacts of oil consumption,
other sources of energy are required to continue present levels of economic activity.
Natural gas (the cleanest-burning fossil fuel)
is gaining importance, wind power is increasing rapidly from a low base and ‘hybrid’ cars
are gaining popularity. The nuclear industry is
advocating nuclear energy as an alternative to
fossil fuels to combat global warming.
The dependence on fossil fuels inhibits the
transition to renewable forms of energy such
as solar, wind, biomass, hydrogen fuel cells
and wave power. While fossil fuels are subsidized (Riedy and Diesendorf, 2003), the cost
of renewable energy forms is not reduced significantly, due to inadequate research funding
and difficulties in achieving economies of
scale in production processes. Total world
energy demand is anticipated to grow, despite
efforts at reduction through greater efficiency.
sustainability is crucial, including the use
of appropriate technologies and energy sources
in developing countries, transitions to benign
energy sources throughout the world and reductions in energy use in developed countries. pm
Enlightenment
In traditional interpretations, the Enlightenment is held to be that
period of intellectual enquiry, broadly synonymous with the ‘long’ eighteenth century
in europe (c.1680–1820), in which ‘modern’
ideas of rationality, public criticism and the
emancipation of civil society through reasoned reform took shape. Thus considered,
the Enlightenment was distinguished by challenges to established ideas of ‘ancient authority’ and by the rejection of Classical and
Renaissance conceptions of the world and
of ‘traditional’ scholarship. philosophy and
science were widely believed to be the basis
to universal social betterment. Secular tolerance would overcome religious intolerance.
In sum, humankind would free itself from
ignorance and error.
Other interpretations are current. Indeed,
even during its development and certainly since,
the Enlightenment has been the subject of
detailed scrutiny as to what it was, why it happened and what its consequences have been.
Conventional views of the Enlightenment as
a largely philosophical and uniform phenomenon evident in urban Europe especially
in the lives and writings of great men, have
been decisively challenged (Schmidt, 1996;
Kors et al., 2003). Conceptions of the
Enlightenment as a ‘moment’ of philosophical
critique for a European elite (which still
endure: see Darnton, 2003) have been supplemented by views of it as a social movement.
Ideas of the Enlightenment as a uniform intellectual movement with particular national
expression have been challenged by work that
193
ENLIGHTENMENT
stresses Enlightenment, even enlightenments,
as a social process or processes. As study of
the Enlightenment has become more diverse –
embracing, for instance, medical knowledge,
questions of gender, exoticism, race and
sexuality – so studies of the Enlightenment
have diversified (Outram, 2005). Questions of
geography are central to these revised and
revitalized conceptions of the Enlightenment
(Livingstone and Withers, 1999).
In traditional interpretation, little attention was
paid to the geography of the Enlightenment.
Where it was, emphasis was given to its distinctive features and differences at the level of
the nation-state, chiefly within Europe.
Attention concentrated upon the idea of the
Enlightenment’s originating cultural hearth
or its ‘core’ nations – France, England,
Scotland, Holland, Germany – and to a ‘periphery’ where the Enlightenment was evident later or
in different form: in Russia, for example, or in the
Scandinavian countries. Relatively limited attention was given to the Enlightenment in the americas and to its presence and making in Portugal,
Spain or the Greek-speaking countries of Eastern
Europe (Porter and Teich, 1981). More recent
work has moved beyond these concerns and
scales of analysis. Three distinct but interrelated
themes may be noted.
The first is geographical knowledge and the
Enlightenment.
Geographical
knowledge,
gleaned through oceanic navigation, terrestrial
exploration, mapping and natural history
survey, was crucial in the Enlightenment to
new ideas about the shape and size of the
Earth, terrestrial diversity and the nature of
human cultures. In this first sense, the
Enlightenment depended upon new geographical knowledge about the extent of what
European contemporaries understood as
terra incognita and then called the ‘fourth
world’, the Americas, and, crucially, about the
‘fifth division’ of the world, the Pacific world
or, in modern terms, australasia. For
example, one distinctively Enlightenment idea
(and ideal), that of society’s development
through a series of stages, was profoundly
shaped by the ‘discovery’ of new peoples on
the islands of the Southern Oceans, and by the
extent of human cultural difference.
Contemporaries referred to these geographies
of human difference as ‘The Great Map of
Mankind’ and devoted considerable time to
theories explaining the development of human
society in relation to factors such as climate,
the role of custom and commercial capacity.
In such ways, Enlightenment was closely connected with empire (see also travel writing).
194
We may secondly think in terms of geography
in the Enlightenment. Geography as one form of
modern intellectual endeavour was itself
shaped by the evolving encounter with new
peoples and lands during the Enlightenment.
This was apparent in terms of emphases upon
realism in description, systematic classification
in collection and comparative method in
explanation. Geography in the Enlightenment
was a discourse, a set of practices by which the
world was revealed and ordered, and it was a
discipline and a scale of study, the whole Earth,
in which formal education was possible, in
schools and universities. It was also a popular
subject, taught in academies and in public
lectures alongside history, astronomy and
mathematics, in order to educate citizens
about the extent and content of the globe
(Mayhew, 2000). In these ways, geography in
the Enlightenment was part of what thinkers
then called ‘The Science of Man’, that concern to understand the human world through
the same observational and methodological
principles as the natural world (see also geography, history of).
Finally, it is now commonplace to refer to
the different geographies of the Enlightenment.
These different geographies are distinguished
by attention to the intrinsic diversity of the
Enlightenment, to the social processes and
contradictions underlying its intellectual
and practical claims and, above all, by sensitivity to the importance of geographical scale
in locating and explaining the Enlightenment
and its constituent practices. Although the
Enlightenment continues to be much studied
in national context, greater attention than
before is now paid to its global expression
and consequences, to the local institutional
sites and social settings in which the
Enlightenment’s defining ideas were produced
and debated, to the uneven transmission of
those ideas across geographical space and to
the variant nature of their reception (Clark,
Golinski and Schaffer, 1999; Livingstone and
Withers, 1999; Cañizares-Esguerra, 2001).
Questions to do with the ‘where’ of the
Enlightenment are thus as important as those
of its ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘who’. Many of the
architects of postmodernism have speculated
on the end of what, ignoring its diversity,
they have sometimes clumsily termed the
‘Enlightenment Project’ (Geras and Wokler,
2000). Whilst initially critical of Enlightenment
writers’ emphases upon rationality, reform
and the power of critical argument, many such
theorists would now confirm the enduring
significance of the Enlightenment as a set
ENTROPY
of critical political issues and as an object of
historical and geographical study.
cw
Suggested reading
Clark, Golinski and Schaffer (1999); Kors et al.
(2003); Livingstone and Withers (1999); Outram
(2005).
enterprise zone An area in which special
policies apply to encourage economic development. Enterprise zones typically offer tax
concessions and reduced planning and other
regulations to private companies. Critics argue
that their effect is often to move existing jobs
rather than to create new ones, and that they
produce a concentration of power in the central state and a loss of control by the local
state over development strategies. Enterprise
zones are common in the USA and the UK,
but similar arrangements are found in many
countries, including export-processing zones,
special economic zones (notably in China and
India) and tax- and duty-free zones.
jpa
Suggested reading
Ong (2000).
entrepreneurship The geography of entrepreneurship explores the relationship of entrepreneurship to space and place; to date,
interest has focused mainly on identifying
the characteristics of places that foster the
formation of businesses in high-technology
industries. This kind of entrepreneurship
has interested economic geographers
because of its presumed importance to innovation and to regional economic growth and
development. In his review of the literature on
entrepreneurs, networks and economic
development, Malecki (1997) points to the
importance of regional industrial mix, skilled
labour, the spatial concentration or agglomeration of similar industries, and networks
that provide access to technology and capital.
He concludes, however, by noting how relatively little is known about the relationship
between entrepreneurship and territory. (For
the entrepreneurial behaviour of places, see
urban entrepreneurialism.)
The culture of entrepreneurship is another
place-based characteristic that affects economic development trajectories. In her comparison of the high-technology clusters of
Route 128 outside Boston, Massachusetts
and Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay
Area of California, Saxenian (1994) underlines the importance of cultural difference (in
patterns of networking, in degrees of hierarchy
in organizations, and in the amount of formality expected in the organization of work, for
example) in shaping economic outcomes
(growth versus stagnation).
In view of the degree to which social structures are gendered and racialized, characteristics
of the entrepreneur affect the relationship of
entrepreneurship to place. Feminist geographers
have pointed to the importance of the gender
of the entrepreneur and the ways in which
gender shapes the meaning of innovation
(what is considered innovative in a place) as
well as an entrepreneur’s access to resources;
female-owned businesses often contribute to
the development of places differently from
male-owned businesses, and women entrepreneurs have greater difficulty obtaining bank
loans, although this difficulty varies significantly from place to place even within a metropolitan area (Blake and Hanson, 2005).
Entrepreneurship among members of ethnic
groups is facilitated by ethnic ties, some of
which may stretch to other countries, which
enhance access to resources (Zhou, 1998; see
ethnicity).
Much remains unknown about the relationship of entrepreneurship to place and space.
For example, how does local context relate to
the formation and nurturing of firms in nonhigh-technology industries? How do different
kinds of businesses and business owners
contribute to local economic and social wellbeing? How does local context enable and
constrain the process of business ownership
for different kinds of people?
sha
Suggested reading
Blake and Hanson (2005); Malecki (1997).
entropy A measure of the amount of uncertainty in a probability distribution or a system
subject to constraints. The term originated
in thermodynamics, but has been used in a
wide variety of contexts, notably in information theory and as the basis for entropymaximizing models of spatial interaction.
The concepts of macrostate and microstate
are central to entropy analysis. Consider the
distribution of 100 people into 10 regions:
individual B to region six, individual K to
region four and so on. A macrostate is an aggregate frequency distribution of people across
regions. Several different microstates may correspond to or give rise to the same macrostate:
different individuals go to different regions,
but the frequency distributions are the same.
Entropy measures the relationship between a
macrostate and the possible microstates that
195
ENTROPY-MAXIMIZING MODELS
correspond to it. At one extreme, one macrostate (all 100 people in one region) has only
one associated microstate, whereas the macrostate with 10 people in each region corresponds to a large number of different
microstates. The number of microstates corresponding to a macrostate is denoted here by
W, and finding the entropy measure is a combinatorial calculation, given by
W ¼ N!=
Y
ni !,
i
the factorial of the total number of individuals
N, divided by the product of the factorials for
each ni (the number in each region). An alternative, but equivalent, measure is that used in
information theory.
lwh
Suggested reading
Wilson (1970).
entropy-maximizing models Statistical models for identifying the ‘most likely’ spatial
allocation pattern in a system subject to constraints. The approach was introduced into geographical modelling by A.G. Wilson (1967) as
the basis for a more rigorous interpretation of the
gravity model, and has been extensively used
since for spatial interaction modelling in
urban regions and for modelling inter-regional
flows of traffic and commodities. It is based on
the concept of entropy, a measure of the uncertainty or ‘likelihood’ in a probability distribution. A journey-to-work model illustrates the
method. For a city divided into k zones, we wish
to calculate the best estimate of interzonal commuting flows Tij, without knowing the detailed
information of each individual movement.
Assume that there are N total commuters. Any
specific trip distribution pattern Tij, known as a
‘macrostate’ (see entropy), can arise from many
different sets of individual commuting movements, or ‘microstates’, and entropy measures
the number of different microstates that can give
rise to a particular macrostate. In the absence
of detailed microstate data, we assume that
each microstate is equally probable, and that
the macrostate with the maximum entropy value
is the most probable or most likely overall pattern. Additional information is also normally
available, notably the number of commuters originating from each zone, the total number of jobs
available in each zone, and estimates of the average or total travel expenditure for the city, C
(usually based on survey data). The entropymaximizing method then consists of maximizing
the entropy measure subject to these constraints.
196
This maximization is a non-linear optimization
problem, and must be solved by iterative search
methods. These models not only fit empirical
trip-distributions well, but also facilitate easy
calculation of the effects of new housing or jobs
(by altering the constraints), and so have been
widely used in more general urban models.
Wilson and his Leeds colleagues have extended
the model in many ways, making it dynamic,
linking it to industrial and urban location theory, and including several types of disaggregation (e.g. by mode of travel).
lwh
Suggested reading
Gould (1972); Thomas and Huggett (1980);
Wilson (1970).
environmental audit Environmental auditing originated in the 1970s as a management
tool to evaluate how well a corporation was
complying with the complex array of environmental legislation that was emerging as a
result of the environmental movement. It is
an important part of environmental management systems (EMS).
Environmental audits are an ‘official examination and verification of accounts and records
to assess how close the situation comes to meeting a set requirement’ (Thomas, 2005, p. 236).
They are a one-off collection of data, and therefore differ from ongoing monitoring activities.
Environmental audits may be internal to a corporation, produced externally, undertaken voluntarily or to fulfil legal requirements, and may
check compliance with regulations or focus on a
company’s systems to achieve and maintain
compliance (de Moor and de Beelde, 2005).
Environmental audits may be undertaken for
governments, aid agencies, financial institutions and community groups. Internal environmental auditing helps companies meet
regulations and their own environmental goals
in a cost-effective manner. Mandatory, external
auditing verifies and encourages compliance
with environmental regulations. Who undertakes the environmental audit and who has
access to the resulting document are questions
about the regulation of industry and commerce.
Environmental auditing is situated within
larger debates about how to achieve and maintain high environmental quality.
pm
environmental determinism
A type of
reasoning that holds that the character and
form of a society, culture or body can be
explained by the physical conditions within
which it has developed. Determinism is a form
of explanation that finds no place for other
ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS
factors, outside forces or random features. All
creativity and productivity is assigned to first
causes, in this case to environmental conditions. Social and human diversity is explainable, this doctrine would hold, solely in
terms of the environments within which they
develop. In this sense there is a strong assumption that nature and culture exist as a dualism, and that cultures are shaped by Nature.
While it is accepted that cultures interact with
environments, and may alter them, it is nevertheless argued that the conditions for doing so
are shaped by the larger environment. There
are two major forms of critique of environmental determinism. The first is a form of
humanism, arguing that far from being
reduced to their physical conditions, human
beings can transcend those conditions
through, variously, ingenuity, spirit, technology and social organization. However, such
arguments tend to reproduce rather than overcome the Nature/Culture dualism, and can
result in forms of voluntarism and idealism.
The second is a more materialist argument,
suggesting that people and environments continuously evolve in relation to one another,
and in doing so necessarily co-produce one
another. In these versions, determinism is
debunked not because of any transcendent
human capacity, or any mysterious element,
but through the sheer randomness of matters
in relation.
Environmental determinism has a long
and varied history, from the ancient Greeks
(notably Aristotle’s climatic zones), the
Renaissance (notably Montesquieu’s Heaven
and Earth), to post-Darwinian writers
(Glacken, 1967). From the late nineteenth to
the mid-twentieth century, it is often argued
that geography was complicit, through its
environmental determinism, with a north
European supremacism that linked human
‘achievement’ and development to environmental conditions (Livingstone, 1992).
Friedrich Ratzel in Germany and Ellen C.
Semple in the United States perhaps best
captured this geographical tradition. Yet even
here, and certainly in later writings of other
environmental determinists, the arguments
were rarely as clear cut as might be supposed.
Ó Tuathail (1992) demonstrates Halford
Mackinder’s partial foundationalism, wherein he ceded to humans the power to transcend
formative environmental conditions. Twentiethcentury schools sought to blur the lines of
explanation, giving rise to such terms as
possibilism and probabilism. The latter terms
are most often associated with the French
school of geography, most famously Paul
Vidal de la Blache. Yet, rather like the
berkeley school and later forms of Marxist
and Russian geography, the notion that nature
conditioned subsequent actions remained.
Despite this recurrent naturalism and its
essentialist and foundational tones, many
of these works repay close scrutiny in a discipline that has been all too keen to leave nonhuman matters aside. The task is now to avoid
any lurch to the cultural in an attempt to leave
environmental determinism behind once and
for all, and instead to return to the indeterminate question of how it is that human and
non-human histories and geographies are
intertwined. Finally, how to account for the
longevity of this form of explanation is itself
a complex question, one that would require
attention to processes as varied as scientific
authority and forms of reasoning (see
science), colonialism and academic discipline building.
sjh
Suggested reading
Livingstone (1992).
environmental economics A branch of
market-based economics that advocates
applying economic instruments to solve environmental problems. Although environmental
economics can be traced to earlier work in the
1920s, it emerged at the same time as the
environmental movement in the 1960s.
At that time most academic, government and
corporate economists were insensitive to the
environmental impacts of economic growth.
Environmental economists claim that the economic system, when the wrong price signals
are given, is a major cause of environmental
problems. The main solution pursued by
environmental economists is to send the right
price signals via market mechanisms. This
approach is now among the most dominant
approaches to diagnosing and managing environmental problems in developed countries. It
is increasingly popular given the pro-market
orientation of neo-liberalism that exists globally and dominates in particular countries.
Environmental economics is closely associated with neo-classical economics and
resource management. It expands the reach
of the market to factor in what environmental
economists label an ‘externality’, thereby
changing the pricing signals for existing market transactions or creating new commodities
and markets. water trading, carbon credits
(see global warming) and pollution credits
are all examples of environmental economics
197
ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARD
applied to environmental issues. Bosetti and
Pearce (2003) demonstrate the application of
environmental economics to conflicts between
fishing and seal conservation interests in
south-west England.
Geographers have been concerned about
the pricing of the environment, and particularly about how monetary values are attached
to environmental ‘goods’ and ‘services’
through contingent valuation. Pricing
approaches include willingness to pay (WTP)
and willingness to accept compensation
(either WTA or WAC). Clark, Burgess and
Harrison (2000) highlight the weaknesses in
contingent valuation, particularly a lack of
understanding by many respondents of what
they were valuing and how this information
would be used. This is crucial because environmental economists rely on approaches that
translate ‘human preferences’ into monetary
values in order to create pricing signals and
operate a market (see Thampapillai, 2002).
Environmental economics has been subject
to considerable criticism. Some critics believe
that pollution taxes are licences to pollute, and
do not relate to the absorptive capacities of the
environment or ethical questions about perpetuating pollution. It is seen as reformist,
or tinkering, with markets. At best, it reduces
the worst excesses of market forces, but it also
justifies some environmental damage and it
perpetuates market expansion through the
commodification process. It does not call for
an economic overhaul, as in the tradition of
the more radical ecological economics
approach, and it does not treat the environment as having existence in its own right.
However, the approach is increasingly influential, and so it cannot be ignored.
pm
environmental hazard Sometimes known
as a ‘natural hazard’, or popularly as a ‘natural
disaster’, this item generally refers to geophysical events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, bushfires, drought, flooding, lightning
and high winds that can potentially cause
major economic damage and physical injury
or death. Such events, for example earthquakes, will have differing impacts depending
on their magnitude and the character of the
affected area (e.g. a heavily populated area
versus a sparsely settled area). Given the
long-term involvement of humans as part of
nature, a detailed analysis of so-called ‘environmental hazards’ often reveals significant
human input (see hazard). The characteristics
of an environmental hazard are that it was not
directly caused by humans, it directly affects
198
humans (unlike an extreme natural event in
nature that does not directly affect humans)
and it is often accompanied by a violent
release of energy. The United Nations
declared the 1990s the ‘International Decade
for Natural Disaster Reduction’ (Mauro,
1995). The use of the terminology ‘natural’
perpetuates the false perception that humans
play no part in these disasters. Geographical
research in the 1990s increasingly stressed
‘disaster’ rather than ‘hazard’, thereby emphasizing the social and cultural issues and the
humanitarian response needed when disaster
occurs (White, Kates and Burton, 2001).
The distinction between environmental
hazard and a human-made hazard has blurred.
It can only be maintained if humans are seen
as being separate from nature, rather than a
species that has been part of nature for thousands of years. Today we experience physical
events, the impacts of which are influenced by
the actions of humans and other species,
which in turn influence the character of future
physical events.
Work in the United States on hazards and
disasters emerged in the context of the nuclear
threat and the cold war. Geographical
research found that despite heavy spending
on dams, losses due to floods were increasing.
This environmental hazard research was critiqued from marxist geography. Smith and
O’Keefe (1980) claimed that geographers in
the tradition of positivism displayed three
major ways of dealing with nature, and demonstrated this through ‘natural hazards’
research. The three major approaches are
nature being seen as separate from human
activity; where nature is seen as neutral but
becomes hazardous when it intersects with
human activity; or where humans are dissolved into nature. The first approach focuses
attention on ‘natural causes’ of disasters,
rather than human vulnerability. The second
approach is seen as a technocratic agenda to
control nature. The third approach is seen as
Malthusian (see malthusian model), because
it blames the victims.
Today, many geographers question a ‘natural hazard’ and highlight the difference
between a natural event (e.g. drought, which
may be partly caused by human activity) and
the consequences (famine). These differences
are usually attributed to the structure and performance of social systems. Recent Deleuzianinspired work by Nigel Clark (2005b) expands
the notion of systems by considering the Earth
as an open system when exploring conceptions
of nature, risk society, and the construction
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
of catastrophic events and their counterpoint,
the notion of order in nature.
pm
environmental history Environmental histories reflect a basic desire to understand the
relations between people and nature through
time. Over the years, scholars have approached
this broad and important topic from several
disciplines. Anthropologists conducted ethnographic studies of the ways in which particular
peoples conceived of, utilized and interacted
with the natural (and supernatural) world.
Archaeologists seeking the origins of domestication explored the earliest relations among
people, plants and animals. Ecologists and other
scientists sought to understand how human
actions affected natural systems. Students of
mythology, religion, and law traced expressions of human attitudes towards and concern
for nature in medieval and Mesopotamian times.
And after generations of philosophers had
pondered the ways in which individuals living in
different epochs conceived of the natural world,
some among them came, late in the twentieth
century, to argue against the very idea that
‘nature’ and ‘society’ are separate, distinct
entities. In general, however, historians and
geographers have led scholarship in this area.
In a manner reflected epigrammatically in the
title of Marjorie Nicolson’s book, Mountain
gloom and mountain glory (1959), historians
such as Keith Thomas (1996 [1983]) and
Roderick Nash (1967) traced changes in the
ways that individuals and societies regarded
nature or wilderness through the centuries.
Others, including William Cronon (1983),
Timothy Silver (1990) and Richard White
(1980), considered what landscapes reflected
of human endeavours, or found, with Mart
Stewart (1996) and Harold Innis (1927), fruitful topics for enquiry in the ways in which economic development rested, in considerable
degree, upon the natural endowments (that
people thought of as resources) of particular
territories. Geographers long held the study
of human–environment relations to be one of
the central ‘traditions’’ of their field, and many
of those with ecological and historical inclinations wrote at some length about the
mutual shaping of lands and lives over time. In
France, Paul Vidal de la Blache (1926), Albert
Demangeon (1942) and Jean Brunhes (1952)
all pursued investigations along these lines,
and were among the giants of human geography early in the twentieth century. In the
UK, some of the leading exponents of the developing subject, including Emrys Jones (1951–2,
1956), Estyn Evans (1960) and Harold
J. Fleure (1951), were primarily interested in
the relations between human societies and the
natural environment (see also Langton, 1988).
And in the USA, Clarence Glacken produced a
classic work, Traces on the Rhodian shore: nature
and culture in Western thought from ancient times to
the end of the eighteenth century (1967), while
Carl Ortwin Sauer, one of the convenors of the
1955 symposium on ‘Man’s Role in Changing
the Face of the Earth’, led the study of humaninduced landscape changes (Sauer, 1963a
[1925]; Thomas, 1996 [1983]; Kenzer, 1986:
see berkeley school).
Still, the characterization of a particular field of
enquiry as ‘environmental history’ is relatively
new. By common North American assessments,
it dates back to the rise of the environmental
movement in the 1960s. There is merit in this
view. As popular interest in environmental questions climbed, the spate of historical scholarship
on the relations between people and nature
through time – particularly in the USA – reached
new heights. In addition, the parallelismbetween
the coinage ‘environmental history’ and public
anxieties about ‘environmental issues’ – which
waxed and waned, but often seemed to be rooted
in past practices (even if these were relatively
recent) – served, brilliantly, to draw attention to
the field. Quickly, the phrase ‘environmental history’ was adopted as a euphonious and readily
understood label for a widely diverse and rapidly
expanding body of work, even as it served to veil
regional, national and disciplinary differences in
emphases, origins and approaches to the study of
human–environment relations. The field is now
too large and varied to be encompassed in any
single assessment, although a number of
scholars have attempted to limn its developing
dimensions (see, e.g., White, 1985; McNeill,
2003; Evenden and Wynn, 2009).
From the mid-1970s onwards, there were
challenges to the dominant (American-centred)
construction of the field. Three among these
warrant brief notice. English-educated Richard
Grove took issue with the common tendency,
given particular substance by David Lowenthal,
to identify the ‘Versatile Vermonter’ George
Perkins Marsh as the fountainhead of the
conservation movement, arguing in Green
imperialism (1995) that awareness of humaninduced environmental changes long predated
Marsh’s work and was sharpened by observation
of the effects of colonial expansion on ‘tropical
island Edens’ (Lowenthal, 1958, 2000; Marsh,
1965 [1864]; Grove, 1995). In 1989, the Indian
scholar Ramachandra Guha offered an important ‘Third world critique’ of American environmentalists’ fascination with wilderness
199
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT
preservation and their embrace of deep ecology. Arguing against the anthropocentric/ biocentric distinction that marked current thinking
on these matters, Guha (1989) insisted that
efforts to extend wilderness protection worldwide had many harmful consequences for indigenous peoples, and urged environmentalists to
place ‘a far greater emphasis on equity and the
integration of ecological concerns with livelihood and work’. Meanwhile, anthropologists
and geographers working on questions of
development and underdevelopment in the
global south coined the term political ecology to describe their interest in the linkages
between political economy and cultural
ecology (broadly, the relations between
human societies and their natural environments). Political ecology is a broad church that
has attracted many geographers – including,
for example, Karl Zimmerer (Zimmerer
and Bassett, 2003), Paul Robbins (2004),
Roderick Neumann (2005) and Philip Stott
(Stott and Sullivan, 2000), amongst others –
for whom contemporary issues were more
pressing than historical enquiry, sensu strictu,
but many reached into the past to understand
current circumstances, and the Journal of
Political Ecology, established in 1994, promised
‘Case Studies in History and Society’ in its
subtitle.
All of this made for something of an identity
crisis in environmental history. A decade after
Australian historical geographer Joe Powell
suggested that the field reflected its practitioners’ collective will to believe in the field,
American historian of science Harriet Ritvo
described it as ‘an unevenly spreading blob’
(Powell, 1996; Ritvo, 2005). Responding to
such challenges and seeking to define their
enterprise, several environmental historians
found order in diversity. According to one
prominent American authority, environmental
history proceeds on three levels. The first
documents ‘the structure and distribution of
natural environments of the past’. The second
‘focuses on productive technology as it interacts with the environment’. The third is
concerned with the ‘patterns of human perception, ideology and value’ and the ways in
which they have worked in ‘reorganizing and
recreating the surface of the planet’ (Worster,
1990b). Another specialist claims that environmental historians ‘study how people have
lived in the natural systems of the planet . . .
how they have perceived nature [and how]
they have reshaped it to suit their own idea
of good living’ (Warren, 2003). A third
American scholar differentiates environmental
200
histories by the extent of their concern with
material, cultural/intellectual or political matters (McNeill, 2003). Studies of the first type
focus upon ‘changes in biological and physical
environments, and how these changes have
affected human societies’. Cultural/intellectual environmental history is concerned with
‘representations and images of nature in arts
and letters’, and political environmental history examines ‘law and state policy as it relates
to the natural world’. In a rather different vein,
the English geographer Ian Simmons has given
shape to his own form of environmental history
in a number of sweeping book-length essays
(Simmons, 1993, 1997, 2001).
chaos theory and post-structuralism
have also contributed to the (re)definition of
environmental history. Thanks in part to the
contributions of geographers such as David
Demeritt (1994b, 1998, 2001a), Bruce Braun
(2003), Noel Castree (1995) and Braun and
Castree together (Braun and Castree, 1998;
Castree and Braun, 2001), a field that rested,
at its inception, upon a particular conception
of scientific ecology (predicated on notions
of stability and climax vegetation complexes),
and upon a dichotomized view of nature and
culture, has been forced, in recent years, to
grapple with the question of ‘which nature
and which conceptions of science should be
brought in’ (Asdal, 2003: but see also, and
more importantly, Worster, 1990a; Cronon,
1995). At the same time, a new awareness of
the relations between knowledge and power
(and an associated concern with questions of
ethics and social justice) has rendered less
satisfying the once-common declensionist narratives of environmental despoilation attributed to capitalist greed or human hubris.
All of this has greatly complicated the stories
that environmental historians tell. The field is
broad and diffuse. It is also inherently interdisciplinary, and many of its practitioners are
interested in providing perspective upon and
contributing understanding to contemporary
debates about human use of the Earth. Thus
the field forms ‘a locus for exploration and
intellectual adventure’, offering humans a
spirited, reflexive understanding of themselves
and their world (Weiner, 2005).
gw
Suggested reading
Cronon (1991); Evenden and Wynn (2009);
Langton (1988); McNeill (2003); Worster
(1983); Wynn (2007).
Environmental Impact Assessment A process of systematically identifying and assessing
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
anticipated environmental impacts prior to a
proposed project, policy, programme or plan
being implemented. The identification of
significant negative impacts may prevent the
proposal (which is usually a project) from
going ahead. This is very unusual. More likely,
it results in the modification of the original proposal, or the introduction of measures to ameliorate the anticipated negative environmental
impacts. A proposal may generate positive
environmental impacts, particularly if the site
is already severely degraded, and these must
be considered in the process.
Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)
was introduced in the USA in 1969 under
the National Environmental Policy Act
(NEPA). It is now a legal requirement in many
countries, provinces/states and in some cities.
International institutions such as the World
Bank and international aid agencies also
require an EIA process on particular development proposals. Initially, assessments were
limited to federal departments in the USA,
but EIA has expanded to include provincial/
state and private development proposals, and
developed from environmental protection to
include sustainable development, a concept
that emerged after EIA began.
There are numerous definitions of EIA.
One succinct definition is ‘an assessment of
the impact of a planned activity on the environment’ (in Glasson, Therivel and Chadwick,
2005, p. 4). The terminology varies between
countries, and often causes confusion.
For example, in some places EIA is simply
known as ‘Impact Assessment’, because it is
broader than a narrow definition of the physical environment. Elsewhere it is known as
Environmental Assessment (EA) because of
the perceived negative connotations of
‘impact’. In the USA, an EA is a preliminary
study undertaken within the EIA process to
identify the likelihood of significant impacts,
which then require the preparation of a full
EIS (Burris and Canter, 1997).
The process of EIA has become standardized and incorporated into planning and
development processes in many countries.
Under some legislative frameworks, the EIA
document may be required to address issues
such as sustainable development, biodiversity,
social impacts and economic considerations.
There are also legal requirements for public
participation. Some jurisdictions include Social
Impact Assessment (SIA) within EIA, while
in other places it is a separate activity (see
Glasson, Therivel and Chadwick, 2005;
Thomas and Elliot, 2005).
Environmental Impact Assessment is sometimes seen as an important process that prevents the worst aspects of proposals from
being implemented. It does not necessarily
guarantee high-quality development. In contrast, other people perceive the process to be a
way of legitimizing controversial development
proposals. In their view, it does very little to
maintain environmental quality. They argue
that many of the key decisions have already
been taken at the policy level, and that
the individual character of EIA often fails
to consider the cumulative impacts of each
development. In some locations these concerns are partly being addressed by Strategic
Environmental Assessment (SEA) at the policy
and programme level (see Caratti, Dalkmann
and Jiliberto, 2004) and Cumulative Impact
Assessment (CIA). Glasson, Therivel and
Chadwick (2005) and others advocate that an
Integrated Environmental Assessment (IEA)
addresses all of these considerations.
pm
environmental justice The right of everyone
to enjoy and benefit from a safe and healthy
environment, regardless of race, class, gender
or ethnicity. More specifically, environmental
justice is a social movement that takes social
justice and environmental politics as fundamentally inseparable. The movement has many
divergent roots, such as the labour struggles of
Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta, and their
crusade against the use of pesticides, in the
1960s; the community-based struggles of Lois
Gibbs and others that arose from the dumping
of toxic chemicals in lower-middle-class neighbourhoods at Love Canal, New York, in the
1970s; and in the responses of various offshoots
of the civil rights movement to placing of
toxic waste dumps, most famously in Warren
County, North Carolina, in the early 1980s.
Others contend that the most accurate date for
the founding of the North American environmental justice movement is 1492. Whenever its
origins, the movement currently stresses three
major tenets. First, it gives attention to unequal
exposure to hazards through specific policies
and practices that intentionally or unintentionally discriminate against individuals, groups or
communities based on race, ethnicity, class or
gender (Bullard, 1994). Second, it has become
more broadly attentive nationally and internationally to the ways in which these same
communities are differentially denied access to
and control over both resources and decisionmaking processes by institutions, corporations and individuals both in the USA and
abroad (Neumann, 1998). Third, it has
201
ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
become engaged in cultural politics involving the very framing of the key terms of the
debate (acceptable risk, waste, race and environmental health) that conditions the political
possibilities of the struggle for environmental
justice (Fortun, 2001). The movement is
known for its creative, engaged activism, its
deep commitment to grassroots approaches to
social change and its irreverence towards
bureaucracy in-action.
jk
Suggested reading
Cole and Foster (2001); Peet and Watts (2003);
Pulido and Peña (1998); United Church of
Christ (1987).
environmental movement A term that has
been used to describe any social or political
movement directed towards the preservation of
natural resources, the prevention of pollution
or the control of land use with the goal of conservation, restoration or improvement of the
material environment. Though practices of
environmental protection have been conducted
in many places around the world for centuries,
the movement as a modern phenomenon has its
sources in different currents and critiques of
modernity. Some of the main currents have
their sources in critiques of industrial capitalism’s treatment of land and labour as commodities, others in transcendental, religious and
aesthetic thought, still others in the practices of
modern rationalist scientific knowledge, and yet
others in a troubling search for nature’s ‘purity’.
These and other tributaries have led to a deeply
heterogeneous movement that has proven to be,
in the best of times, a broad coalition of caring
engaged critics and thoughtful visionaries of
alternative futures and, in the worst, a deeply
divided, exclusionary and even reactionary force
for the reproduction of elitist and racist fears.
Given this diverse history, it is no surprise that
the movement has many current expressions,
including political parties such as the Green
Party, community non-profit organizations,
international lending organizations, radical
affinity groups, mainstream environmental
organizations, legal advocacy firms, green
corporations, and consumers, who operate
through just as many diverse political techniques, including lobbying, scientific research,
legislation, education, organizing and direct
action. Regardless of its exact origins, members
and strategies, the movement’s most powerful
contemporary expressions seem to be found in
international grassroots communities and
organizations that challenge the violent effects
of early twenty-first-century globalization. jk
202
Suggested reading
Gelobter, Dorsey, Fields et al. (2005); Gottlieb
(2001); Kosek (2003); Guha and Martinez-Alier
(1998); Shellenberger and Nordhaus (2004);
Shutkin (2000).
environmental perception A general term
referring to the myriad ways in which actors
(usually human) perceive, engage with and symbolically represent environments. environment
in this sense encompasses both the ‘natural’
and the ‘built’, and includes other people and
animals as key elements. Equally, perception
should be understood in the widest sense, referring to both the bio-psychological idiosyncrasies
of individual sensing, information-processing
and cognition, and the issue of collective cultural beliefs, values and aesthetic judgements
concerning natural and built environments.
Although the study of environmental
perception has never been a sustained core
element of human geographical research, the
topic has been investigated by writers from
often quite different intellectual traditions.
Early work on perception in geography, in
the 1940s and 1950s, was concerned to highlight the importance of human perceptions,
attitudes and values in shaping beliefs, understandings and decisions concerning the environment. Here, an acknowledgement of the
nuance and complexity of human perception
(and consequent behaviour) was intended
as a corrective to human geographies that
either ignored the human, or sought to understand human behaviour in solely rational or
objectivist terms. The notion that human
geographers should delve into the realms of
human perception, meaning and value was
further clarified in Kevin Lynch’s (1960)
The image of the city, which sought to programmatically investigate the relationship between
an urban built environment and the mental
perceptions of its inhabitants. Lynch’s work
was seminal for behavioural geographies
through the 1970s and 1980s, especially insofar as these elaborated the notion of the
mental map (Gould and White, 1993
[1974]) as a key element of environmental
perception. For the most part scientific, quantitative and empirical in approach, these
behavioural
geographies
connect with
broader, interdisciplinary enquiries regarding
the role of environmental perception and
‘value’ vis-à-vis the design and planning of
urban and rural landscapes.
In contrast to the instrumental and objective
approach to environmental perception characteristic of much work in the planning and
ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM
design fields, Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974) Topophilia:
a study of environmental perceptions, attitudes
and values articulated a humanistic (see
humanistic geography), interpretative and
mythopoetic approach to the topic. Tuan was
mostly concerned with environmental perception at the collective cultural level and, in
particular, with illustrating how symbolically
meaningful and keenly felt relationships with
the environment resonated deeply in both
Western and non-Western cultures.
The humanistic approach advocated by
Tuan and others fell from favour with the
advent of critical and radical approaches
emphasizing the study of socio-economic
structures, and the salience and viability of
subjective and emotional geographies of environmental perception was at risk through much
of the 1980s and 1990s. However, over the
past ten years, with the emergence of new,
non-representational approaches to embodiment, practice and performance, and with
the development of vitalist geographies of
nature and environment, environmental perception has re-emerged as a substantive issue
(see non-representational theory). A key
text here has been the anthropologist Tim
Ingold’s (2000) The perception of the environment. Ingold queries what he terms the ‘building perspective’ commonly adopted by
academics examining questions of environmental perception and cognition, and imputed
to those being studied. This perspective is,
he argues, structured around the mistaken
assumption of ‘an imagined separation
between the human perceiver and the world,
such that the perceiver has to reconstruct the
world, in consciousness, prior to any meaningful engagement with it’ (2000, p.191).
According to Ingold, both cognitivist accounts
of mental mapping and the humanistic interpretations of writers such as Tuan equally fall
into this epistemological trap.
Ingold’s alternative approach to environmental perception – which he terms ‘the
dwelling perspective’ – draws heavily upon
the phenomenological philosophy of Martin
Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see
phenomenology). Here, environmental perception is pictured as an ongoing, reciprocal,
bodily process of engagement and involvement, a process in which ‘perceiver’ and
‘world’ are enrolled, and from which they
are continuously emergent. This approach
to environmental perception, and to self–
landscape and culture-nature relations
more generally, has begun to exert considerable influence upon cultural geographers
attending to questions of perception and
embodied practice.
jwy
environmental psychology
An interdisciplinary and disparate field of study, enrolling
researchers from psychology, geography,
anthropology, sociology, planning and design,
environmental psychology examines perceptual, cognitive and embodied relationships
between humans and the environment, both
‘natural’ and ‘built’. Environmental psychology is most closely and commonly associated
with forms of behavioural geography, prominent in the 1970s and 1980s (though recently
renascent; see Kitchin and Blades, 2001). In
contrast to the cognitivist and representational
approach to human–environment relations
usually adopted in this area, phenomenologically inspired forms of ecological psychology
(e.g. Gibson, 1979) emphasize human(and
animal)–environment relations in terms of a
rolling nexus of conjoined embodied action,
perception and affordance.
jwy
environmental
racism
Environmental
racism includes differential exposure to harm
and limiting of access to resources that are
reliant on, or that reproduce forms of, racial
differentiation. The term is commonly attributed to the Reverend Ben Chavis, who in 1982
was the director of the United Church of
Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice when
toxic chemicals were sited in Warren County,
Virginia, because it was predominantly poor
and black. Chavis understood this action as
part of a broader institutional history of racism
in America, and coined the term environmental
racism to call attention to the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons
and pollutants in communities of colour,
including those of African-Americans, Native
Americans,
Asian-Americans,
Chicanos/
Latinos and others (Chavis, 1991). This definition has been amended to include not just the
actions of institutions, industries and governments, but also their failure to act, as in the case
of the federal government’s lack of response to
Hurricane Katrina (Sze, 2005). In addition,
the current definitions hold institutions and
individuals accountable whether their acts are
intentional or not (Bullard, 1994). Examples
include the military–industrial complex’s disproportionate exposure of Native Americans
to nuclear fallout and waste dumps, creating
large ‘national sacrifice zones’ in the Southwest
(Kuletz, 2001). This, for example, may not be
an intentional act, but is still widely considered
an example of environmental racism because of
203
ENVIRONMENTAL REFUGEES
the notions of race inherent in decisions that
make dumping in some sites – rural reservations, poor urban areas, immigrant communities – more ‘logical’ than dumping in upperclass white communities. Finally, still rare but
growing trends in the definitions of environmental racism are both attention to environmental justice beyond the USA and attention
to the ways in which racism is culturally formed
or reproduced through the efforts and exclusions of the environmental movement itself
(Gelobter et al., 2005).
jk
Suggested reading
LaDuke (1999); Pulido (1996); Romm (2002).
environmental
refugees A term that
became used in environmental debates, starting in the 1980s, to refer to people displaced as
a result of immediate environmental change,
but also including those forced to move as a
result of floods and the other indirect effects of
global change. The category carries the rhetorical force of the word ‘refugee’, but not the
international legal status of a person forced to
cross a state boundary. ‘Ecological refugee’ is a
synonym, but has also been used in the narrower sense of people displaced by the expansion of commercial farming and forestry
operations to feed the expanding metropolitan
economy of India and elsewhere.
sd
Suggested reading
Gadgil and Guha (1995); Jacobsen (1988).
environmental security As the cold war
ended in the late 1980s, policy-makers and
scholars argued that environmental change
was now a major threat to international security: advocates of this ‘environmental security’
perspective argued that it required top priority
from states because of the potential for serious disruptions caused by environmental
refugees and likely future resource wars.
Policy advocacy on these themes was part of
the rationale for holding the Rio de Janeiro
Earth Summit in 1992.
Sceptical scholars were unconvinced that the
causal mechanisms between environmental
change, disruption and conflict were proven,
however frequently they were asserted as fact.
Some suggested that, given the broad generality of both terms, scholarly research should be
focused more narrowly on acute conflict and
resources. In the 1990s, scholarly research
established that there were some plausible possible links between environmental scarcities
and conflict, but suggested that simple causal
204
mechanisms were lacking (Homer-Dixon,
1999). It was also concluded that the likelihood
of wars between states as a result of environmental change was small, despite numerous
public pronouncements that water wars in
particular were an imminent danger in many
parts of the world. More generally, the literature on the causes of war also suggests that
environment has rarely been a direct cause of
inter-state conflict – and, indeed, might present
considerable opportunities for cross-border
co-operation and peace-building.
Subsequent critical work has pointed out that
many of the more alarmist public discussions
lack necessary analyses of either the history of
resource appropriations in rural areas, or of the
disruptions caused by the processes of development, and fail to adequately take these important contextual factors into account (Dalby,
2002). Critics have also argued that linking military understandings of security to environmental
matters is confusing, both because military solutions are not the appropriate measures to deal
with environmental difficulties and because military activities are themselves especially damaging to environments.
Geographical scholarship has recently connected insecurity with hazard vulnerability
assessments and the literature on political
ecology has engaged the discussion linking
the global economy directly to social change.
This shows that insecurity, environment and
their interconnections are much more complex social phenonema than was initially
assumed in the 1980s (Peluso and Watts,
2001). Despite these conceptual ambiguities,
and the difficulties of establishing links
between environmental change and conflict,
the discussion of environmental security continues apace in policy and academic circles
(Dodds and Pippard, 2005).
sd
Suggested reading
Dalby (2002); Dodds and Pippard (2005).
environmentalism The ways in which the
relationships between people and their surroundings are understood and acted upon.
These have varied greatly through time and
within and across cultures. One, undoubtedly
Western, typology for understanding some of
these shifts is provided by Glacken (1967).
Three environmentalisms are developed from
an exhaustive history of understandings of
human–environment relations. First, there is
the notion that the Earth exists by design,
one fitted in particular for human purposes.
Such an environmentalism is evident in
EPIDEMIC
Graeco-Christian and Hebraic theologies,
wherein creation for human purpose can lead
to a legitimization of human domination over
the non-human world. There are strong echoes
of this form of environmentalism in contemporary thoughts and practices, which tend to be
human centred (anthropocentric). The second
environmentalism is underpinned by the notion
that environments act as the major influence on
human affairs (environmental determinism).
The reductionism and sometime racist inflections of this mode of thinking have been discredited in regional geography (Livingstone,
1992), yet it is a form of environmentalism that
has enjoyed a new life at a global scale and as a
normative discourse. The physical resource
limits of a finite planet and the capacities of
global systems to adapt to human activities
became major environmentalist debates and
causes in the 1960s and 1980s, respectively.
The third environmentalism that Glacken
traces is the attempt to understand human–
environment relations in more dynamic and
co-evolutionary ways. It involves an understanding of the Earth and its inhabitants –
including humans – as unfinished matters.
Furthermore, any human change involves
changes to environments and vice versa. The
three environmentalisms are complex and
overlap historically and culturally, but can be
summarized as human mastery over nature,
environmental determinism and co-evolution.
In turn, these can be roughly mapped on to
contemporary inflections, including (1)
anthropocentrism and technocentrism, (2)
ecocentrism and (3) mutualism. O’Riordan
(1976) gave particular attention to the contrast
between technocentrism, which posited faith in
the ability of human technical ingenuity to transcend earthly limits, and ecocentrism, which
cautioned people to live within their environmentally determined conditions (see also deep
ecology; population geography). The utility
of the distinction can instantly be recognized in
debates over food and energy technologies
(genetic modifications versus organics, renewables versus nuclear energies and so on). The
third stream is perhaps where most energies
have been invested in geography in recent years.
This is in part a reflection of the proliferation of
humans and non-humans in recent centuries,
making firm human–environment distinctions
more difficult. Transgenic animals, genetically
modified foodstuffs, holes in stratospheric
ozone layers and climate change all undermine
any firm distinction between people and environment, culture and nature, politics and science. Human–environment dialectics (Harvey,
1996) and feminist and post-structuralist
informed reformulations of human–environment relations (Haraway, 1991c; Ingold,
2000) have produced a range of writing that
attempts to pair together humans and environments through such varied endeavours as
political ecology (Robbins, 2004), ecofeminism and cosmopolitics (Latour, 2004;
Hinchliffe, Kearnes, Degen and Whatmore,
2005). There is a good deal of variety in these
literatures, but to varying degrees they all
move away from a firmly fixed or foundational view of environment and towards
accounts where the mattering of environments
(which include humans), their contribution to
human and non-human vulnerabilities and to
life chances, become central concerns. There
is recognition in all these non-foundational
accounts of uneven environments, of the need
for environmental justice, of shifts in local
and global patterns of development and consumption. Finally, in this gradual move
towards a non-foundational environmentalism
there are huge dangers and debates. The reliability of science as an ally to environmentalism comes under scrutiny once the fixity of
environments has been unsettled, and once
uncertainties and indeterminacies of scientific
ways of knowing become more widely understood. The ability of science to mediate nature
and act as an authority on environmental concerns has become a matter for heated debate
(see risk society). Environmentalism is therefore currently in a crucial political moment as
it negotiates between the uncertainties of
socio-ecological dynamics and the calculations
and arguments required for a shift in the ways
in which humans dwell in the world.
sjh
Suggested reading
O’Riordan (1976).
epidemic A term (derived from the Greek
epi-, upon þ demos, people) used in the health
sciences to describe the unusually high incidence of a specified illness, health behaviour
or other health-related event in a given community or region; ‘unusually high’ is defined
relative to the usual frequency, or expectancy,
of the health event in the population under
examination (Benenson, 1995). The term is
often used to describe the rapid spread of
an infectious disease (e.g. ‘an epidemic
of measles’) and may be applied to a range of
geographical scales, from small and highly
localized outbreaks to global pandemic episodes. Epic events, such as the Black Death
(ad 1346–53) or the Spanish influenza
205
EPIDEMIOLOGY
pandemic (ad 1918–19), are extreme
examples from the many tens of thousands of
historically recorded disease outbreaks to
which the term ‘epidemic’ can properly be
applied (Kohn, 1998).
msr
discourses, institutions, architectural forms,
regulatory decisions, laws, administrative
measures, scientific statements, philosophical,
moral and philanthropic propositions’. The
notion of the episteme is now seen as ‘a specifically discursive dispositif’ (cf. discourse). se
Suggested reading
Haggett (2000).
Suggested reading
Gutting (1989); Han (2002).
epidemiology The branch of medical science that is concerned with the study of the
causes, distribution and control of healthrelated events in a specified population. geography and epidemiology have a long association that can be traced back to the nineteenth
century and the use of disease maps to analyse
the causes of epidemic events (Gould, 1985).
Today, the association between geography and
epidemiology finds expression in a cross-disciplinary branch of medical geography
known as spatial epidemiology (Elliott and
Wartenberg, 2004). Spatial epidemiologists
map, analyse and model the distribution and
spread of health-related conditions and their
biological, environmental, behavioural and
socio-economic determinants over space and
through time. (See also disease, diffusion
of.)
msr
Suggested reading
Cliff and Haggett (1988).
episteme A term introduced into modern
thought by the French thinker Michel
Foucault (1926–84) in his book Les mots et les
choses, translated as The order of things (1970
[1966]). The term is based on the Greek
word for knowledge or science, and for
Foucault an episteme is a system of thought
that conditions the particular sciences or knowledges (savoirs) that emerge at a particular time.
He identifies three main epistemes: the
Renaissance, the classical age and the modern.
It is within an episteme that we find the criteria
not just of individual pieces of knowledge, but
the rules that govern the production of truth
and reality as such. Foucault discounts an
understanding of absolute, atemporal, aspatial
knowledge, and instead analyses historically
specific forms of understanding that are the
conditions of possibility of knowledge (see
Foucault, 1972b [1969]). In this sense, he can
be understood as historicizing Kant’s work (see
genealogy). Foucault rarely used the term in
his later work, but introduced the notion of a
dispositif (1980c), which he described as ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of
206
epistemology Concerned with defining
knowledge and explaining how it works.
While ontology attempts to account for what
is in the world, epistemology asks how it is
possible to know the world. Although often
considered in tandem, particularly in describing the constituent elements of a body of
thought, ontology and epistemology more
properly should be thought of as overlapping,
as there may be elements of ‘what is’ that are
not knowable, and knowledge may contain
ideas that do not correspond to existing things
in the world. Their conceptual complications
were made most explicit during the epistemological ‘turn’ in the humanities and social
sciences, which was inspired by the linguistic
‘turn’ developed under the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and
Judith Butler, among others. These connected
movements rejected Platonic epistemology,
which took knowledge to be innate and
discoverable by profound illumination, and
made it the product of circulating discourses
and dispersed power relations, which were
naturalized over time through their popular
uptake and transformation into common
notions (see hegemony). Among the political
consequences of this take on knowledge was a
dethroning of the notion of Truth, particularly
in its a priori, universal articulation, as the lofty
goal of all acts of knowing. With the new, rising
wave of feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonialist
perspectives and activism in and beyond the
academy, the classical notion that there are
absolute, knowable Truths that correspond to
things in the world was increasingly critiqued
as an enlightenment invention that reflected
the privileged position of white, Western masculinity, the historical subjectivity holding scientific, social and political knowledge-power
(Haraway, 1988; Rose, 1993). Rooted in
feminism, standpoint epistemology recognizes
the partiality of knowledge, but goes further
by arguing that the ‘worked-for’ or ‘struggledfor’ knowledge generated by members of
oppressed genders, races and classes is more
likely to capture truths than the uncritical and
comfortable epistemologies that evolve out of
EPISTEMOLOGY
privileged experience (Hartsock, 1983;
Harding, 2004; see also situated knowledge).
Such concerns have made for lively debate
within human geography, but epistemology
is also implicit within much historical theorizing in the discipline. One of the most important threads throughout the long history of
geography (see geography, history of) and
its attendant philosophy has been an argument over the relative merits of generality
and particularity. This seemingly abstract binary relates to concrete knowledge production
insofar as ‘general geography’ is distinct from
‘specific geography’ (as Bernhardus Varenius,
1622–50, termed it: see chorology), and on
that distinction rests the question of how
much emphasis should be given over to the
search for trans-contextual scientific laws.
The answer hinges to some extent on whether
geography can claim to be a mature science,
one whose knowledge is objective, explanatory, rational and orderly. In the 1950s and
1960s, adherents to spatial science and
regional geography fought over various
aspects of these qualities (see nomothetic
and idiographic), but that debate was
eclipsed by humanistic geography’s outright
reversal of the polarities fastened on to the
objectivity–subjectivity opposition. Through
its attention to hermeneutics, the interpretation of subjective experience and concepts such
as sense of place, humanistic geographers
reversed direction on decades of ‘scientism’ in
geography, and paved the way for geographical
critiques informed by feminism and poststructuralism.
key epistemological binaries
Objectivity
Explanation
Order
General
Rational
Subjectivity
Interpretation
Complexity
Particular
Emotional
Most recently, post-structuralist geography
has seen a shift in epistemological emphases,
from (1) a trenchant critique of knowledge
claims that puts all matter into question
through a constructivist epistemology to (2) a
materialization of epistemology through an
anti-essentialist assertion of ontology (cf.
essentialism):
(1) Through the exploration of foreign continents, the naming of their spaces after Westerners and other Western spaces, and the
mapping of those spaces in such a way that
Western prejudices and power relations became
inscribed upon their landscapes (see also
orientalism), attention has long focused on
the role that cartography, exploration and
geography played in processes of Western
colonialism during Enlightenment and postEnlightenment modernity (Mitchell, 1988;
Gregory, 1994). Pervasive within the latter,
mapping practice (Pickles, 2004) came to be
based on a detached or ‘bird’s eye’ (Schein,
1993) perspectivalism that Dixon and Jones
(1998) summarize as follows:
. Cartesian perspectivalism, ‘which lineates the
world with respect to a central point’ (see
also cartesianism);
. ocularcentrism, ‘which privileges vision from
an elevated vantage point from which the
world may be surveilled in its totality’ (see
also surveillance; vision and visuality);
and
. the epistemology of the grid, ‘a procedure for
locating and segmenting social life so that it
may be captured, measured, and interrogated’ (see cartographic reason).
Epistemologically, this view lent itself to a
conceit of representation and to what
Mitchell (1988) and Gregory (1994) call the
world as exhibition: the power to know and
control space rests in the capacity to visualize,
demarcate and survey, all parts of a grid epistemology that colonizes spaces just as it dominates
mainstream geography. These epistemological
inquiries led many in the 1990s to debate
the relative importance of materialism and
discourse in the production of social space.
In many cases, post-structuralism’s representational instabilities and uncertainties trumped the apparently self-evident bedrock
ontologies found in materialist theories such
as marxism.
(2) Recently, some thinkers have begun
to investigate how knowledge works beyond
representation. In many ways, this work harkens back to the studies of emotional and
sensational connections to places highlighted
under humanistic geography, though these
tended to connect interiorized and subjectivized feelings to the representational idea of
place. Instead, the current work draws heavily
upon Gilles Deleuze’s critique of representation as a hindrance to understanding the
world, which, ontologically, articulates processes of ‘pure difference’ beyond, prior
or even contrary to the orders or similitude
and resemblance at work in representation.
207
EQUALITY
Human geography’s exemplars here are affect
and non-representational theory, two areas
concerned with the possibilities of ‘presubjective knowledge’ derived from differential bodily
capacities, functions and experiences that, if
only fleetingly, occur beyond the knowledgeas-representational-idea framework. The challenges to this body of theory are: (1) that it must
invariably bring us, as researchers, back to
representation through the presentation of results; and (2) that it is still largely unclear
what practical political value lies within the
domain of the politically unrepresentable.
At present, responses to these challenges are
still in the early stages (Anderson, 2006b;
Thrift, 2008).
kwo / jpj
Suggested reading
Cloke and Johnston (2005); Dixon and Jones
(1998); Gregory (1994); Pickles (2004); Rose
(1993).
equality A political ideal promoting the
equal treatment, standing or status of people
in certain respects. Equality has a close, though
complex, connection to justice. While equality
is a central ideal within liberal democracies (see
liberalism), often enshrined as a formal right,
its precise meaning and scope remain controversial. Different and often competing contexts
for equality exist that variously answer the
question: What is the relevant respect in which
people are to be compared?
(1) Administrative equality. The requirement
that existing laws (see law) be administered equally to everyone. This minimal
view of equality concerns the application
of law, not the content. As Bakan (1997,
p. 46) notes, it would be met even in a
system that made explicit distinctions between people, such as apartheid, so long
as laws were equally applied to all members of an oppressed group.
(2) Political equality. Equality in respect to formal political rights (such as voting
or running for office). This issue, of course,
has proved controversial, as in the case of
the struggle for the extension of the franchise to women, for example. The disenfranchisement of convicts in many US
states, or the scalar politics of non-citizen
voting (Varsanyi, 2005), attests to the continued relevance of this issue.
(3) Formal equality. The Aristotlean principle
to treat like cases as like: when two persons
have equal status in relation to one relevant
aspect, they must be treated equally with
208
regard to this aspect. Thus the content of
law, rather than its implementation, must
not draw distinctions between people on
inappropriate grounds. This, of course,
begs the question: Which distinctions are
legitimate? Modern liberal sensibilities forbid distinctions on the basis of gender, or
race, for example. However, children
and the insane are treated differently from
adults of sound mind. For a law to meet the
requirements of formal equality, however,
requires only that it not draw illegitimate
formal distinctions between people: its effects may still be unequal between people.
A law that forbids all citizens from begging
in public space treats all equally: however,
given that only the poor beg, its effects are
invidious. Moreover, interventions that
seek to redress inequality through redistribution (such as social welfare or progressive taxation) compromise formal
equality.
(4) Substantive or social equality. The absence
of ‘major disparities in people’s resources,
political and social power, well-being and
of exploitation and oppression’ (Bakan,
1997, p. 47). Attaining social equality is
fundamental to some movements for social justice. Advocates for social equality
note that people may attain formal, political and administrative equality, yet any
resultant benefits are cancelled out by
their manifest social inequality. In 1929,
upon learning that women could, for the
first time, be appointed to the Senate, the
Canadian feminist Nellie McLung asked:
‘Now that we are persons [in law], I wonder if we will notice any difference?’
(http://www.abheritage.ca/famous5/
leadership/legal_social_equality.html).
In other words, political equality was of
limited utility while women faced the inequalities of patriarchy. Feminists have
also struggled with the tension between
equality and difference. For some, feminist struggle should seek to erase differences between men and women, as it is a
basis for discrimination. Others argue
that the differences between men and
women should be acknowledged in any
adjudication of rights.
As noted, the promulgation of social equality
can also conflict with formal equality (as in the
case of positive discrimination, for example).
For some, social equality can be attained
through equality of opportunity: that is, all
should be allowed the same chance to compete
E-SOCIAL SCIENCE
for social goods and resources. Others insist on
the need to attain equality of outcome or
results. The parameters of social equality are,
however, uncertain: Are people to attain equality in resources, material goods, well-being or
capabilities, for example (Gosepath, 2005)?
Equality, particularly social equality, is an
important though rarely articulated principle
that underlies some geographical scholarship,
particularly of a critical orientation (see Smith,
2000a: see also critical geography).
nkb
equilibrium A state in which the forces making for change are in balance. This concept is
central to neo-classical economics, where a
free market working perfectly is supposed to
tend towards a state of equilibrium. If the
forces of supply and demand for all goods
and services and all factors of production
are balanced in such a way that all supply
is consumed and all demand is met, and no
participant(s) in the economy can derive any
further income or satisfaction from doing anything other than what is presently done, this
would constitute a state of equilibrium which
would be maintained until a change took
place, response to which would eventually
restore equilibrium.
Suppose that, in a perfectly competitive
economy in equilibrium, either the extraction
of coal becomes more difficult or resources are
depleted, and that the coal owners put up the
price of coal so as to meet the rising cost of
mining. As the consumption of coal is to some
extent sensitive to its price, demand for coal is
reduced. The mine owners may then find that
they have coal unsold and reduce its price a
little to get rid of it. Eventually, the balance of
forces of supply and demand will be regained
by these market adjustments, at a point at
which the prevailing price just clears the stocks
of coal supplied. Equilibrium will have been
restored. This process may, of course, involve
bringing back into balance other elements of
the economy disturbed by change in the coal
market; for example, if there is less coal produced than before, under the new state of
equilibrium this may affect employment in
mining, coal delivery and so on – while if the
new market price is higher, some customers
may substitute other sources of fuel for coal.
In reality, an economy will be in a process
of perpetual adjustment to change.
Equilibrium is an ideal state that is never
achieved in practice but is helpful as a concept
in the understanding of a market-regulated
economy (on which, see Plummer and
Sheppard, 2006; Fowler, 2007). A distinction
is sometimes made between general equilibrium, which relates to the entire economy,
and partial equilibrium, which refers to a single
market or limited set of related activities.
Spatial equilibrium refers to balance in a spatially disaggregated economy. Change in such a
system can be spatially selective; the rise in the
price of coal may be confined to a specific
region, and restoration of equilibrium involves
change and its repercussions working their way
from place to place as well as from one market to
another. The spatial version of neo-classical
economics suggests the equalization of income
as a feature of spatial equilibrium, since regional
disparities in wages should encourage labour to
move to regions where wages are highest and/or
capital to move to regions where wages are
lowest until equality is achieved and no advantage is to be obtained from further movement
(see convergence, regional). Just as imperfection in market mechanisms can frustrate the
achievement of equilibrium in general so, in
geographical space, obstacles to the free mobility of labour, capital and so on impede adjustment to wage and price differentials.
The concept of spatial equilibrium has been
partly responsible for some misconceptions in
regional development theory and planning
practice. The terms ‘equilibrium’ and ‘balance’ have desirable connotations, and the
idea of a self-regulating space-economy tending towards equalization of incomes encourages a view that market mechanisms are
capable of promoting more even development
if planners somehow harness them to a public
purpose. However, the tendency of market
economies under capitalism in reality is more
one of concentration and centralization, characterized by uneven development and
inequality of living standards, especially in
the undeveloped world.
dms
e-social science
An approach to social science research that takes advantage of powerful
networks of computers sharing resources and
processing power. These are often compared
to electricity grid systems: people generally do
not mind where electricity is being generated;
they just want to use its power. The same
could be true of accessing a computational
grid, be it for quantitative modelling and simulation, or for more qualitative methods
(such as running online discussion groups).
Origins of grid computing include the Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence@Home project, whereby signals from outer space are distributed to PC users to be analysed using spare
209
ESSENTIALISM
resources on their machines. A similar project,
supported by the BBC, was used in 2006 to
model climate change. Other developments
of e-social science in the UK have been stimulated by a major research initiative in e-science,
with the Economic and Social Research
Council establishing a National Centre for
E-Social Science at the University of
Manchester (http://www.ncess.ac.uk/). There
are links between e-social science and geocomputation. Geographers are involved
in this work through the development of
large-scale
simulation
models
(as
in microsimulation), by ‘grid-enabling’
spatial statistics (specifically geographically
weighted regression) and the development
of two- and three-dimensional virtual environments (cf. visualization).
rj
above. However, the argument that social phenomena have relatively stable,
durable features, and that these might
be ascribed some degree of causal
power, is not necessarily essentialist or
determinist at all. Social science methodologies and explanation tend to be
fallibilistic, rather than claiming to establish absolute truth about facts or absolute
foundations to knowledge.
(3) A third sense of essentialism is derived
from critiques of the idea that racial, ethnic, sexual or gender identities are
premised on unifying, shared dimensions
of experience, embodiment or social position. Criticism of essentialism is here
associated with the claim that identities
and norms are relational, socially constructed and historically contingent.
Suggested reading
See www.ncess.ac.uk and http://www.bbc.co.uk/
sn/climateexperiment/
essentialism The doctrine that holds that
it is possible to distinguish between the essential and non-essential aspects of objects or
phenomena. Fuss (1989, p. xi) defines it as
‘a belief in the real, true essences of things,
the invariable and fixed properties which
define the ‘‘whatness’’ of a given entity’.
Essentialism is usually used as a pejorative
term, but it is important to distinguish at least
three different senses:
(1) Epistemological essentialism is related to
foundationalism, and proposes that the
aim of investigation is to discover the true
nature or essence of things, and to
describe these by way of categorical definitions (see also epistemology). Essentialism in this sense assumes that essences are
unchanging, that objects have single essences and that it is possible to gain certain
knowledge of these essences. Rorty (1979)
repudiates this sense of essentialism, arguing that it depends on a correspondence
theory of truth that offsets reality and
representation. In contrast to a picture of
objects with intrinsic qualities, he affirms
an ontology of contingent relations that
go ‘all the way down’ (see pragmatism).
(2) Philosophical critiques of essentialism
have been invoked to question the validity of explanatory social theories and
methodologies (see also philosophy).
The argument here is that any claim that
X is a cause of Y is equivalent to, or
founded on, essentialism in sense (1)
210
Anti-essentialist perspectives often run
together these three senses, claiming that various harms or risks of essentialism in sense (3)
are legitimized by epistemological essentialism
(1) and notions of explanatory causality (2).
In human geography, essentialism became
an explicit focus of debates alongside debates
about postmodernism. An influential reference point was the anti-essentialist marxism
of Resnick and Wolff (1987), according to
whom any causal account of social processes
is inherently suspect. They propose instead a
notion of overdetermination, derived from
Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, which
they define as the mutual constitution of each
process by all others. This anti-essentialist
view of causality seems to imply that in order
to be able to say anything meaningful about
the relationships between processes, one must
be able to provide a complete account of all
existing relationships relevant to the case at
hand. The anti-essentialist response to this
problem is to select arbitrary entry-points, such
as class or gender, into the totality of social
processes, claiming a pragmatist justification
for this theoretical strategy. What is being confused here is the reasonable claim that one
might not want to presume in advance the
existence of a necessary causal relationship
with the idea that one can legitimately proffer
tentative, partial, empirically grounded, and
theoretically justified claims about causal relationships in the course of ongoing, fallibilistic
enquiry.
If the grand philosophical claims made on
behalf of anti-essentialism in geography do
not stand up to serious scrutiny, then antiessentialist perspectives have nonetheless
ETHICS
been a boon to forms of social constructionist
and relational theorizing in the discipline.
The strong political impulse behind antiessentialism has factored in issues of gender,
race, culture and the like alongside the predominant focus on economic processes and class
(Gibson-Graham, 2006b [1996]). However,
there has not been much explicit geographical
conceptualization from this anti-essentialist
perspective, despite the fact that Althusser’s
original critique of essentialism in Marxism
was oriented by an innovative attempt to think
through the non-coincident temporalities of
different processes (Althusser and Balibar,
1970, pp. 94–118). The potential herein for
theorizing spatiality in a fully conjunctural and
relational fashion has, however, been pursued
by Massey (2005).
Discussions of essentialism in geography
have become stuck in easy juxtapositions of
‘bad’ essentialism and ‘good’ social constructionism. There is a tendency to conflate
cultural essentialism with biological reductionism, causal explanation with epistemological foundationalism; and to affirm
simplistic notions of constructed realities and
contingent knowledge-claims (Sedgwick,
2003). Anti-essentialism presents a false
choice between knowledge with certain guarantees and knowledge with nothing to back it
up other than arbitrary persuasive force. In
contrast, recent treatments of theories of practice suggest a reorientation of theoretical
energy away from essentialist definitions of
fundamental, ontological qualities, towards a
greater appreciation of the ways in which concepts accrete overlapping degrees of family
resemblance without ever converging around a
finite number of criteria.
cb
Suggested reading
Hacking (1999); Sayer (1997).
ethics That part of philosophy concerned
with the worthiness of human actions and of
systems of belief regarding what people ought
or ought not to do. Questions regarding our
duties, obligations and responsibilities fall
within the purview of ethics. While there is
no universal agreement regarding which of
our acts are subject to moral evaluation and
argument, the actions that affect the well-being
of other human beings, ourselves and/or nonhuman beings, within our midst or distant
from us, are most pertinent. Ethics concerns
not only the actions of individual people but
social, economic and political structures and
arrangements that also affect human and non-
human beings. In this sense, ethics and social
justice are intrinsically related to each other, if
they are separable at all.
The study of ethics may be descriptive or
normative, or may fall into the category of
meta-ethics (see Smith, D.M., 1994a). The
purpose of descriptive ethics is to understand
what people actually do, and what they actually believe, with regard to rights, wrongs,
duties and so on; it is not necessarily concerned with evaluating those actions and
beliefs. Within normative ethics, the goal is to
develop arguments or justifications for acting
in particular ways and not others; normative
ethics wishes to settle moral dilemmas by
applying some theoretical argument to a particular case; for example, whether the US war
in Iraq meets the criteria for a ‘just war’ (cf.
normative theory). Meta-ethics has a broader
provenance than either of these; it is the field
that takes on questions pertaining to the ethical as such; that is, it takes up the issue of
what sort of territory ethics should cover.
Examples of meta-ethical questions include
the following: What actions call for ethical
judgement? (I should exercise more frequently, but it is probably not an ethical matter if I do not.) What entities should be given
moral consideration at all? (It would not be
ethical to kick a dog for the fun of it, but I need
not worry about kicking a soccer ball.) Can
there be any moral universals? (Some people
would argue that every society gives special
consideration to the needy, but what counts
specifically as a need may differ from one society to another.) Can moral views be objective
or only subjective? (There are some philosophers who have argued there are verifiable
moral facts in more or less the same way there
are objective, scientific facts.)
Moral philosophers, in asking why a
particular act, decision or belief is ethical, typically distinguish between consequentialist
and deontological notions of ethics (Smith,
D.M., 1994a). Consequentialism argues that
an act (or decision or belief) must be judged
against its consequences. The process is one of
weighing the probable effects of one course of
action as opposed to others. One makes the
choice on the basis of the morally best effects.
A best effect, for example, might be that
the greatest good is brought to the greatest
number of people: utilitarianism, in other
words, is a consequentialist theory of ethics.
Deontological theories of ethics evaluate actions
on their own merits, independent of their consequences. They see duties and obligations as
inherently good; even if a different course of
211
ETHICS
action would bring pleasure to a great many
people. Thus, a deontological theorist might
encourage me to give preference to the care of
my own sick child over the care of other children elsewhere, even if those resources might
go further in another part of the world.
Geographers’ concern with ethics and values is long-standing (Kropotkin, 1885; Sauer,
1956). To a degree, the fit between geography and ethics is an intuitive one, without
necessarily saying anything about what kind of
norms have emerged or in whose favour they
work. The field’s attention to cultural differences between places and peoples attunes it to
the fact of differing systems of values in those
places, but also to the prospects for cosmopolitanism (see Popke, 2007). Likewise,
geographers’ interest in interactions and flows
(of people, commodities, ideas, capital)
between places has made the issue of fair interactions and distributions a natural one to think
about. The same could be said regarding the
discipline’s focus on nature–society relationships: debates over the proper stance towards
the environment, towards access to land,
water and other natural resources, and
towards the distribution of environmental
risks and hazards are central to contemporary environmentalism. Also, the propensity
of places, regions, states and other territorial
arenas to be marked off from one another by
boundaries – material, symbolic or both – has
led to questions of who is included and who is
excluded, and to what extent these determinations are ethically justifiable (Sibley, 1995;
Creswell, 1996). Geography, as Sack (1997)
has argued, would seem to be intrinsically
morally significant and so one need not
look far to see that geographers have thought
so, for better and worse, for centuries (e.g.
Livingstone, 1992).
What makes recent work in human geography significant is the willingness to tap moral
and political thought more directly and extensively than in the past. This willingness is of a
piece with the emergence of alternative – radical, feminist, queer and critical human –
geographies in the past 30 years. Two reasons
for greater attention to moral and political
thought may be ventured. First, the social
revolutions of the post-Second World War
period (e.g. movements for political independence, civil rights, gender parity, peace and
security, sexual liberation) came to have an
enormous impact on geography, eventually
leading to disciplinary moves against a geography in service to the status quo. One could
say, as Harvey (1972) did, that real-world
212
social revolutions extended into the academy,
where the struggle for disciplinary space
ensued (cf. Blunt and Wills, 2000). The struggle for new disciplinary spaces within geography involved delving into literatures on
politics and ethics (e.g. Harvey, 1973).
Second, debates among these alternative geographies have been fuelled by a similar sort of
exploration, as proponents of various persuasions (say marxism or feminism) have sought
to make their cases to each other, or despite
each other (cf. Harvey, 1992). In any event,
the past thirty years has seen something of a
‘moral turn’ in the geographical literature. A
particularly strong indication of this turn is the
publication of surveys of moral philosophy
written specifically for geographical audiences
(e.g. Smith, D.M., 1994a; cf. Low and
Gleeson, 1998). Smith’s efforts in particular
may be viewed as a search for common ground
in the struggle for greater equality globally
and locally. Although his contributions are to
all three fields of ethics (descriptive, normative
and meta-ethics), the main thrust of his work
is to see through the many differences in moral
theory towards an argument (deontological)
for ‘the more equal the better’ at every geographical scale. Another indication of the
moral turn is the elaboration of moral arguments and concepts for purposes of advancing
specific issues of concern to geographers.
Examples include arguments for why the welfare of distant strangers should matter
(Corbridge, 1993b; but cf. Barnett and Land,
2007); ‘care’ as a ethical–political practice,
and the notion of ‘responsibility’ within a
globalizing world (Brown, 2004; Massey
2004; Lawson, 2007; Popke, 2007); the application of theories of ethics to a wide range of
geographical topics from place and self, to
development practice and climate change
(Whatmore, 1997; Proctor and Smith, 1999a;
Smith, 2000a); and a burgeoning interest in
the ethics of activism and research practices
(Lynn and Pulido, 2003).
The moral turn in geography has been
strengthened by a continuing effort to reach
into new literatures. The adoption of feminist
ethics and geographical reworkings of the
ethical positions taken by a number of poststructuralist thinkers are good examples.
Although hardly new, feminist ethics shapes
the uptake of ethics in geography in important
ways. Standpoint epistemologies, which are
embraced by a number of strands of feminism, emphasize the embodied and therefore
partial quality of knowledge (as against disembodied universal ‘truths’), including partiality
ETHNIC CLEANSING
of moral convictions – meaning that moral
systems are always systems that come from
somewhere, that somewhere often being a
privileged, masculine sphere (e.g. the state,
the church) (see also situated knowledge).
At the same time, a feminist geographical perspective, because of its concern for social justice and the righting of wrongs, may argue
explicitly in favour of partial, as opposed to
impartial, decisions regarding distribution
of scarce resources – thus the enormous influence in the geography of the 1990s of philosopher Iris Marion Young’s work on group rights
(as opposed to individual rights) (Young,
1990a).
Feminist-standpoint epistemologies share
with post-structuralism a scepticism
towards, or even wholesale rejection of, the
notion of universal truths, including the idea
of universally applicable moral principles (see
universalism). For this reason, the ethical
and the moral are sometimes distinguished
from each other, as when Cornell (1995,
p. 78) states: ‘The ethical as I define it is not
a system of behavioral rules, nor a system of
positive standards [morality] by which to justify disapproval of others. It is, rather, an attitude towards what is other to oneself.’ This
shying away from the enunciation of rules
and opting instead to cultivate a considered
refelexivity (although the difference between
the two can be overdrawn) is what has drawn
some geographers towards thinkers such as
Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean
Luc Nancy. The aim is to develop an ethics
that is responsible to the need for openness
and difference, as against an ethics built upon
foundational, universal certainties (see Popke,
2003; see also Gibson-Graham, 2003).
Whether an ethics can properly be built upon
the notion of human rights, for example, is a
case in point. Extending from the philosophies
of Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Donna
Haraway, Baruch Spinoza and others, a concept of ‘posthumanism’ has emerged in recent
years in human geography and elsewhere that
challenges the boundaries and the identity of
the human subject upon which the idea of
human rights relies (see Braun, 2004a). The
specific interest in post-structuralism as a
resource for ethics and geography should not
necessarily be construed as a radical break: it
is, instead, a tool or tools for grappling with
what it means to think and act in terms of
relationality and in alliance with struggles for
a better world. At the same time, it should be
noted that there are streams of ethical thought
relatively untapped by human geographers.
These would include ethical systems beyond
the Judeo-Christian legacy (see Esteva and
Prakash, 1998), as well as the thought of
‘Western’ thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche
and Alain Badiou, for whom responsibility to
the ‘other’ is not the objective of ethics (cf.
Dewsbury, 2007).
ghe
Suggested reading
Badiou (2001); Smith, D.M. (1994a); Whatmore
(1997).
ethnic cleansing The forced removal of an
ethnic group from a particular territory or political space by deportation, forced emigration
or genocide. Examples of ethnic cleansing
include the holocaust (in which six million
Jews and millions more Roma and other
groups were killed), the German resettlement
of western Poland during the Second World
War and the attempts of the South African
state to relocate blacks during apartheid.
While the practice is anything but new, the
term itself gained widespread use in the
1990s, when it was used to refer to Serbian
attacks on Muslims in Bosnia and Albanians
in Kosovo. Political geographers have shown
how the idea of ethnic cleansing is an outgrowth of the ideology of nationalism, which
promotes a unity between the boundaries of
the state and the identity of the population
(Flint and Taylor, 2007 [1985]). Ethnic
cleansing thus attempts to create a territorial
order based on ‘an idealized convergence of
identity and space’ (Dahlman and Ó Tuathail,
2005a, p. 273). Kevin Cox (2002, p. 188)
writes that ethnic cleansing ‘is a solution that
arises in particular geographic situations’, such
as when a minority population is dispersed
within the dominant national population of
the state and so cannot easily secede from the
larger political unit.
Ethnic cleansing involves not only the
removal of populations, but also the destruction of place and community through ‘the
erasure of ‘‘other’’ cultural landscapes, the
renaming of locales and the repopulation of
the land by a new group’ (Dahlman and Ó
Tuathail, 2005a, p. 273). Marcus Doel and
David Clarke (1998, p. 57), in their discussion
of the Holocaust, show how ethnic cleansing
seeks to configure ‘social, physical, moral, and
aesthetic space’ through desires for ‘purity’.
Ethnic cleansing can thus be seen as a violent
policing of the boundaries between the Self
and the Other (see other/otherness). In their
work on Bosnia-Herzegovina, Carl Dahlman
and Gearoid Ó Tuathail (2005a) show how
213
ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
ethnic cleansing, with its emphasis on borders
and separation, becomes a means to consolidate a political geography of security.
They raise important questions about the legacy of ethnic cleansing, and what happens
when the displaced attempt to return to the
territories from which they were removed. ajs
Suggested reading
Dahlman and Ó Tuathail (2005a); Naimark
(2001).
ethnic democracy An ethnically differentiated form of democracy articulated by sociologist Sammy Smooha during the early 1990s
(see ethnicity). ‘Ethnic democracy’ (ED)
is characterized by the allocation of equal
political and civil rights on an individual level
to all citizens (see citizenship) and the parallel
preservation of collective political rights of the
dominant majority only. Ethnic democracy
underscores the structural inequality that
characterizes some formally democratic but
ethnically dominated nation-states (see democracy). The ED model maintains that the
allocation of equal individual rights qualifies
this regime as a democracy – even in the
absence of minority collective rights – and
claims that this explains its relative political
stability. The ED model has sparked a lively
debate both theoretically and substantively in
relation to Israel/Palestine (Ghanem, 1998;
Shafir and Peled, 1998; Smooha, 2002). oy
ethnicity
Ethnicity is one of the most difficult concepts in the social sciences to define:
researchers disagree on the meaning of the
term; social groups differ in their expressions
of ethnicity; and some theorists challenge the
credibility of the concept in the first place (see
Banks, 1996). The etymology of this term
dates back to ancient Greece, where the word
ethnos was used to refer to a distinct ‘people’.
The word ethnic originally entered the English
language as an adjective applied to non-JudeoChristian peoples. The first instance of the
word ethnicity used as a noun occurred in the
early 1940s, when researchers sought to find a
replacement for the word ‘race’ once it had
become associated with the genocidal policies
of the Nazi party (see genocide). In contemporary usage, ethnicity is seen as both a way in
which individuals define their personal identity and a type of social stratification that
emerges when people form groups based on
their real or perceived origins. Members of
ethnic groups believe that their specific ancestry
and culture mark them as different from
214
others. As such, ethnic group formation
always
entails
both
inclusionary
and exclusionary behaviour, and ethnicity is a
classic example of the distinction people make
between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (cf. difference;
other/otherness; subject).
While much attention was given to theories of
ethnicity and the nature of ethnic groups in the
early twentieth century, especially in the USA
(see chicago school), interest waned in the
postwar period. The liberalism that came to
dominate the intellectual climate by mid-century was predicated on a belief in the autonomy
of individuals. Within the discourse of liberal
individualism, the notion that people modify
their actions because of their ethnic loyalties is
suspect, and generally considered a fading remnant of pre-modern times. The version of marxism that challenged liberalism in the late 1960s
was equally dismissive of ethnicity, claiming
that ethnic attachments were fostered by capitalists and the state in order to divide the working
class (e.g. Bonacich, 1972). By the 1970s, many
leading social theorists had abandoned the
study of ethnicity, associating it with antiquated
views of society and conservative politics. This
dismissive attitude began to change in the
1980s, however, when it became clear that ethnicity was not losing its salience; on the contrary, identity politics were on the rise, and
ethnic nationalism had become a primary
force in the most violent struggles around the
world, especially in the post-cold war era – a
turn of events unanticipated by liberal and
Marxist scholars alike (Berking, 2003). The
fact that over 90 per cent of the world’s nationstates are poly-ethnic suggests that this type of
conflict is likely to continue (see also
multiculturalism).
It is worth reflecting upon this point.
Historically, the idea of a nation-state was
founded on the principle of ethnic homogeneity in the form of a people or nation, which
held control over a bounded territory, or
state. It is debatable whether this simple correspondence between people and territory
ever existed, but it is certainly clear that contemporary nation-states are characterized by
multiplicity rather than mono-ethnic singularity. This has led to much discussion of
the relationship between ethnicity, the nation
and nationalism (e.g. Banton, 2004). As
Dunn (2003b) and Amin (2004a) point out,
national cultures continue to reflect outmoded
assumptions of ethnic homogeneity, to the
detriment of minority groups (cf. Chow,
2002). This leads to one of two prominent
confusions surrounding the concept of
ETHNICITY
ethnicity. Many use the term only to refer to
minority groups, assuming that people in the
majority are ‘normal’ while everyone else is
‘ethnic’. While this usage of the term was considered acceptable in the nineteenth century, it
is no longer correct. In fact, everyone has an
ethnic background, whether or not it is
acknowledged. In most situations, people can
only afford to be unaware of their ethnicity
when they are in a privileged position (see
whiteness).
A second ambiguity arises when the terms
ethnicity and race are used interchangeably, or
when they are seen as variants of the same
classification system. For example, it is often
thought that people can be divided into three
or four broad racial groups and that each has a
number of ethnic subdivisions (e.g. race ¼
Caucasian, ethnicity ¼ Italian). However, it
is exceedingly difficult – many believe impossible – to discern discrete ‘races’: the genetic
mixing of human populations defies such a
simplistic classification system (see race).
While there are obvious phenotypical and
genetic differences between people, there is
only one human race, a point emphatically
made by the United Nations. Throughout
history, though, people have been racialized
by others for particular reasons. Most commentators agree that racialization is necessarily a negative process, where one group
chooses to define another as morally and/or
genetically inferior in order to dominate and
oppress it: racialization is always an imposed
category. Phenotypical features, such as skin
colour or facial structure, are then interpreted
as evidence that the two groups are indeed
separate ‘types’ of people and are used strategically to demark the boundaries between
groups (cf. apartheid). Once defined, such
boundaries are extremely difficult to cross.
Racialized minorities become ethnic groups
when they achieve social solidarity on the basis
of their distinct culture and background.
Racialization therefore facilitates the development of ethnic consciousness, which may be
harnessed by minorities in their struggle
against discrimination (e.g. the Black Power
movement of the 1960s in the USA or the
Palestinian intifada), but does not necessarily
lead to ethnic group formation. While external
forces are important in the generation of
ethnic consciousness, the most basic difference between race and ethnicity is that ethnic
affiliation arises from inside a group; ethnicity
is a process of self-definition.
However, ethnicity is not uniformly important to all people: the degree of ethnic identity
and attachment varies strongly between and
within societies. Many of the most cohesive
ethnic groups have emerged after the conquest
of a territory by an external power. In these
cases, ethnic attachment and nationalism are
powerfully fused as people affiliate to ensure
the survival of their culture, religious practices
and access to employment opportunities. The
goal in these struggles is usually political independence. Occasionally, tensions in polyethnic states become so extreme that ethnic
loyalty becomes the overriding social force
shaping the polity. The genocide of Jews in
Nazi Germany is a repugnant example of this
tendency, as are the recent attempts at ‘ethnic
cleansing’ (the forced removal of all minorities from an area) in parts of the former
Yugoslavia and elsewhere. migration is
another impetus for the development of heightened ethnic consciousness. Immigrants often
face hostility within the societies they enter,
and form ethnic bonds and associations to
increase their political credibility, economic
viability and sense of social belonging.
Whereas conquered groups tend to fight for
independence, diasporic groups fight for the
right to be included in their new societies as
equal participants.
Acknowledging the variability of ethnic
affiliation, theorists have long debated the
causes of ethnic identity and division. Two
distinct views dominate the literature: ethnicity as primordial, or absolute, versus ethnicity
as constructed, as the outcome of other social
processes (Jenkins, 1996; Hale, 2004). Those
advocating the former see ethnicity as a basic
form of affiliation that naturally emerges as
people are socialized into cultures with long
histories; children are born into ethnic
groups and develop deep-seated attachments
to them. The most extreme primordial position is taken by sociobiologists, who believe
that ethnicity is a legacy of the struggle for
food and shelter (Van den Berghe, 1981). In
this controversial perspective, ethnic solidarity
is seen as an extension of the biologically
driven feelings that link individuals to their
nuclear family and kin. These researchers find
it difficult to explain why some people place
little value on their ethnic origin and culture
while others choose to express their ethnicity
even when it is disadvantageous to do so.
Researchers advocating constructionist views,
conversely, assert that ethnic attachments arise
in specific contexts, for specific reasons.
Marxists, as mentioned, often minimize the
importance of ethnicity by arguing that it is a
displaced form of class consciousness. In its
215
ETHNICITY
crudest form, this argument implies a rigid
instrumentalism wherein the state, viewed
as a tool of the capitalist class, enacts colonial
and immigration policies designed to create
differences within the working class in order
to fragment its solidarity (Bonacich, 1994; cf.
colonialism). More sophisticated Marxist
treatments of ethnicity have emerged in light
of growing ethnic and nationalist movements
in the late twentieth century: even these, however, tend to portray ethnicity as a regressive
force deflecting people from their ‘real’ material interests (Williams, R.M., 1994b).
Another variant of the constructionist view
emphasizes the relational causes of ethnic
identification – that is, ethnic groups acquire
their identity not alone, but in relation to one
another. For example, early-twentieth-century
immigrants from the southern Italian peninsula to North America brought the parochial
loyalties of their village origins (see chain
migration); in their new, displaced context,
however, these local affiliations were united
into a broad consciousness of being ‘Italian’.
This emergent ethnicity was the product of a
host of factors, including similar religious
expressions, common languages, geopolitical
events, occupational segmentation, residential
segregation and the way in which these
immigrants were perceived and categorized
as Italians by others around them (Yancey,
Ericksen and Juliani, 1976). The constructionist view is also best suited to explain the
ways that identity shifts as circumstances
change. For example, a person can legitimately identify her/himself as English in the
UK, British in other European countries,
European in Asia and ‘white’ in Africa.
However, while constructionist theories help
us understand the variability of ethnic attachments and identities, their very flexibility
makes it impossible to develop a systematic
account of ethnicity. In fact, the very factors
that cause ethnic consciousness to emerge in
some contexts impede it in others, which tends
to make theorization inherently difficult and
incomplete.
Over time, ethnic solidarity may be perpetuated or may dissipate. The processes governing the dynamic between cultural retention
versus assimilation are exceedingly complex,
but researchers generally agree that the nature
of the social boundaries between ethnic
groups is critical. Boundaries are maintained
when individuals maximize their interactions
with those within their ethnic group while
minimizing their interactions with others.
This occurs when separate social, political
216
and educational institutions are established
within different groups. According to Fredrik
Barth (1969), boundaries created between
groups can be resilient even when the cultural
practices of the groups are no longer distinctive. In many cases, ethnic boundaries become
entrenched in space, such as in the formation
of ethnic neighbourhoods in cities.
Geographers have shown a long-standing
interest in documenting the causes and consequences of urban ethnic segregation. Much of
this work stems from the conceptualization of
human ecology articulated by Robert Park
and other members of the chicago school
in the early twentieth century. During the
1960s, attention focused on plotting ethnic
‘ghettos’, devising ways to measure the
degree of ethnic segregation (see indices of
segregation), and formulating public policy
to integrate ethnic and racialized groups across
the city. By the end of the decade, a concern
for ethnic residential patterns entered the
mainstream of urban theory and increasingly
sophisticated models of urban land use were
devised. This type of work came under intense
criticism after the 1970s. On the one hand,
the relationship between the degree of social
tolerance and residential patterns is not
entirely clear; that is, a high level of segregation is not necessarily the result of discrimination, just as residential mixing does not
necessarily indicate the absence of discrimination (see Peach, 1996b). On the other hand,
studies of segregation have relied almost
exclusively on census data. Ethnicity is defined
in most censuses by respondents’ national or
‘racial’ origin, and is therefore a poor indicator
of ethnic affiliation (e.g. all those of Polish
descent are lumped into the same category,
whether or not they identify with that cultural
heritage; see Petersen, 1997). Furthermore,
such classification of people perpetuates
the idea that there are distinct races, and the
census itself may be implicated in the racialization of minorities. Given these criticisms,
the number and significance of data-intensive,
quantitative studies of ethnicity declined in the
1980s. However, this type of work has been
revived subsequently as the number of immigrants in European and North American cities
has increased and as immigration policy has
become more intensely debated.
Geographers have also devoted considerable
energy studying the racialization process, especially as it impinges on people’s access
to housing and the labour market (e.g.
Anderson, 1991b; Jacobs, 1996). The regulatory practices of government are highlighted in
ETHNOGRAPHY
this work because immigration, housing,
employment equity and other policies directly
affect the way in which individuals experience
discrimination and ethnic or racial difference.
While this research has led to important
insights, it has tended to ignore social processes
operating within groups; that is, discrimination
and racialization are emphasized without a corresponding interest in the agency of individuals
to create ethnic consciousness and use this to
struggle against domination (Leitner, 1992 –
for examples of geographical work that explores
the relationship between racialization and
agency, see Ley, 1995; Mitchell, 1998; Gibson,
Law and McKay, 2001; Kelly, 2002; also see
identity politics).
Geographers and other social scientists have
also begun to examine the intersections
between ethnicity and other forms of personal
identity and stratification, notably class and
gender (e.g. Anthias, 2001). Here, emphasis
is placed in which each dimension of identity
affects all others; for example, masculinity
and femininity may well be defined and
lived differently in different ethnic groups (cf.
feminist geographies). This type of investigation is both conceptually difficult, since
researchers must study many facets of experience and social structure simultaneously, and
controversial, since it destabilizes traditional
definitions of class and gender.
dh
century – alongside continued streams of
low-status immigrants (such as Hispanics to
the USA and Pacific Islanders to New
Zealand). These new – predominantly Asian
– groups tend to cluster in suburban areas, but
rarely dominate the local population, although
perhaps being more visible in the landscape
(because of their housing and retail businesses) than their numbers suggest. And, Li
argues, such concentrations may be much
more permanent elements of the residential
matrix than the enclaves associated with earlier
migrant streams.
rj
Suggested reading
Li (2006).
ethnocentrism Most cultures and peoples
have historically inscribed themselves at the
centre of the world. ‘Ethnocentrism’ refers
to the practice of taking one’s own subject position as the central reference point in relation to
which all others can be arrayed with regard to
their difference (see also others/othering).
Like anthropologists and sociologists, geographers have worked to uncover and counter
the ethnocentric universalism implicit within
much geographical practice and analysis
(Godlewska and Smith, 1994; Agnew, 1998)
(cf. anglocentrism; eurocentrism).
as
Suggested reading
Suggested reading
Amin (2004a); Banton (1983); Mason (1995);
Pincus and Ehrlich (1994); Smaje (1997);
Smith (1989); Sollors (1996).
ethnoburb A term popularized by Li (1998)
to describe the residential patterns of Asian
migrants to Australian, Canadian, New
Zealand and US cities in recent decades.
Traditional models of ethnic residential patterns (following the chicago school) link
them to processes of economic, social and
cultural assimilation, whereby over time ethnic groups lose their separate identity and
merge into the wider population, at the same
time becoming dispersed through the urban
fabric away from their original concentrations
in ghetto-like areas. Contemporary multiculturalism policies, on the other hand, promote economic integration alongside cultural
difference, so that ethnic group members
retain their separateness.
Ethnoburbs reflect this changed situation,
involving migrant groups comprising more
skilled and wealthier populations than was
the case in the first half of the twentieth
Robinson (2003).
ethnocracy A type of regime conceptualized
by geographer Oren Yiftachel during the mid1990s, in which a dominant ethno-national
group appropriates the state apparatus to
expand and deepen its control over contested
territory and power structures (Yiftachel and
Ghanem, 2004). Ethnocracies typically represent themselves as democracies (see ethnic
democracy), but are characterized by high
levels of unequal segregation between rival ethnic nations and by structural inequalities
between ethno-classes within each nation.
Driven by a hegemonic project of ethnicization
and internal colonization, ethnocracies are neither democratic nor authoritarian. They can be
found in states such as Sri Lanka, Latvia, Israel
and Sudan. Ethnocracies typically lack equal
citizenship, separation of religion and state,
or proportional minority representation and
rights, and have suffered chronic political
instability (Kedar, 2003).
oy
ethnography From the Greek ethnos (the
nation) and graphē (writing), ethnography is
217
ETHNOGRAPHY
most closely associated with the discipline
of sociocultural anthropology, and with participant observation and long-term, indepth engagement with specific communities
or societies. It refers to both a set of research
methods and to the written product.
Ethnography has often come under attack
for its role in British colonial efforts to produce
detailed knowledges about native populations
in order to govern and control them. Yet
the meanings, practices and uses of ethnography are multiple and contentious, and
have shifted radically over time. In recent
years, sociologists, historians and geographers
have joined with anthropologists to focus on
how ethnography can be used to forge politically enabling understandings of processes
glossed by the term ‘globalization’ and to
illuminate the possibilities for social change.
Relational conceptions of the production
of space and scale associated with Henri
Lefebvre (1991b) are becoming increasingly
important in efforts to construct a project of
critical ethnography.
During the 1980s, ethnography came under
sharp attack from within anthropology.
In Writing culture (1986), Clifford, Marcus
and others challenged presumptions of ‘ethnographic authority’, and propelled what has
been termed the reflexive turn (see reflexivity). Instead of simply discovering or reflecting culture, they argued, ethnographers
actually write or produce it. Since the 1980s
there have also been a number of feminist
critiques of ethnography, some of them simultaneously critical of the sort of experimental
writing and textual strategies promoted by
authors of the reflexive turn (e.g. Behar and
Gordon, 1995). In another set of anthropological critiques, Appadurai (1988) and others
condemned traditional ethnographies through
which mobile anthropologists produce knowledge that incarcerates ‘natives’ in bounded
localities, and map essentialized cultures on
to bounded territories. He insisted on ethnography that is not so resolutely localizing,
while others proposed the metaphor of travel
as a means of escape for the ethnographer
from the ‘incarceration of the local’ and the
supposed stasis of space.
By the 1990s, growing numbers of anthropologists were calling for critical understandings of space, place and culture that went
beyond metaphors of travel, flows and deterritorialization. In Culture, power, place: explorations in critical anthropology, Gupta and
Ferguson pointed to the necessity of ‘exploring the processes of production of difference
218
in a world of culturally, socially and economically
interconnected and interdependent spaces’
(1997, p. 43), and the ethnographic essays in
their volume exemplify that argument. In
Ethnography through thick and thin (1998),
Marcus sought to update his earlier critique
of cultural anthropology with a call for multisited ethnography. The bringing together of
ethnography and history by the Comaroffs
(1992), Cooper and Stoler (1997b) and others
was also an important development in the
1990s. Relational understandings of space and
place are implicit in some of this work.
From within sociology, a significant strand
of scholarship that is moving towards critical
understandings of spatiality is the project of
global ethnography spearheaded by Michael
Burawoy and his students (2000). While ethnography has generally occupied a marginal
position in sociology, it formed the basis of
the chicago school of urban sociology that
goes back to the 1920s. A partial descendant
of the Chicago School, Burawoy has shifted
sociological deployments of ethnography in
radically new directions. In their ‘Manifesto’
that launched the journal Ethnography, Willis
and Trondman (2000) echo Burawoy’s
emphasis on theory as a ‘precursor, medium
and outcome of ethnographic study and
writing’. They propose time (theoretically
informed methodology for ethnography) as
an appropriate acronym, as well as being
relevant in a non-acronym sense.
These moves to redefine ethnography are
further enriched by more explicit attention to
a conception of space (or space–time) and
scale as actively produced through situated,
embodied material practices and their associated discourses and power relations
(Lefebvre, 1991b). For example, there remains
a widespread tendency to conceive of ‘place’
as concrete, and ‘space’ as abstract – in other
words, a notion of place as space made meaningful. A Lefebvrian understanding of the production of space decisively rejects this
distinction. Instead, space and place are both
conceived in terms of embodied practices and
processes of production that are simultaneously material and discursive. From this perspective, place is most usefully understood as
nodal points of connection in wider networks
of socially produced space – what Massey
(1994b) calls an extroverted sense of place. If
spatiality is conceived in terms of space–time
and formed through social relations and interactions at all scales, then place can be seen as
neither a bounded enclosure nor the site of
meaning-making, but rather as ‘a subset of
ETHNOMETHODOLOGY
the interactions which constitute [social]
space, a local articulation within a wider
whole’ (Massey, 1994b, p. 4). Places are
always formed through relations with wider
arenas and other places; boundaries are
always socially constructed and contested;
and the specificity of a place – however defined
– arises from the particularity of interrelations
with what lies beyond it, that come into conjuncture in specific ways.
A conception of place as nodal points of
connection in socially produced space enables
a non-positivist (see positivism) understanding
of generality. In this conception, particularities
or specificities arise through interrelations
between objects, events, places and identities;
and it is through clarifying how these relations
are produced and changed in practice that
close study of a particular part can generate
broader claims and understandings. Such an
approach underscores the fallacies inherent in
notions that concrete studies deal with what is
local and particular, whereas abstract theory
encompasses general (or global) processes that
transcend particular places. This conflation of
‘the local’ with ‘the concrete’ and ‘the global’
with ‘the abstract’ (see local-global relations) confuses geographical scale with processes of abstraction in thought (Sayer, 1991).
Critical conceptions of spatiality are central
to relational comparison – a strategy that
differs fundamentally from one that deploys
ideal types, or that posits different ‘cases’ as
local variants of a more general phenomenon
(Hart, 2006). Instead of comparing preexisting objects, events, places or identities,
the focus is on how they are constituted in
relation to one another through power-laden
practices in the multiple, interconnected
arenas of everyday life. Ethnographic studies
that clarify these connections and mutual processes of constitution – as well as slippages,
openings and contradictions – help to generate
new understandings of the possibilities for
social change.
gha
Suggested reading
Chari (2004); Katz (2004); Mitchell (2004).
ethnomethodology An approach to studying social order and practical reason that
discloses how people or ‘members’ produce
everyday situations, deploying concepts that
neither ironicize nor stipulate those found
in situ. The concern is the routine practices
through which situations ‘occasion’ said
members, and vice versa, thus catching the
self-rendering and self-describing of these
situations as exactly what they are in the immediate flow of their conduct. Attention alights on
the ‘how’ of this conduct – just how the people
involved do what they do – and on recovering
both the ‘skills’ exhibited by members and the
situated, local, changeable ‘orders’ whose ‘rules’
they knowingly follow. Ethnomethodologists
resist importing theoretical constructs that
derive from ‘elsewhere’ or are specified at a level
of abstraction removed from the situation in
question. They retain a sustained commitment
to the empirical, but reject the taken-for-grantedness of ‘social facts’ typifying empiricist or
positivist social science, preferring instead to
ascertain how a supposed ‘social fact’ has come
about, become recognized and then entered the
situated practical knowledge of people in the
grain of their everyday lives. Central here is the
reflexivity of the researcher, not so much
through continually interrogating their own
positionality, but through gauging the ‘how’
of their own conduct; that is, how they do what
they do themselves when researching as a practical activity.
Ethnomethodology has intellectual roots in
Alfred Schutz’s constitutive phenomenology
and Erving Goffman’s micro-sociology of the
everyday, both of which have figured in versions of human geography post-1970. The
key figures here, though, are: Harold
Garfinkel (e.g. 1967), who declared that the
researcher must learn from members ‘what
their affairs consist of as locally produced,
locally occasioned, and locally ordered, locally
described, locally questionable, counted,
recorded, observable phenomena of order’
(Garfinkel and Weider, 1992, p. 186); and
Harvey Sacks (e.g. 1992), who developed conversation analysis (CA), taking seriously the
‘analysis’ that we all do while conversing as
well as the timing, spacing and ‘indexicality’
(the significance of immediate contexts to the
progress) of any conversation. There has been
no concerted attempt to create an ethnomethodological geography, although ethnomethodological ‘policies’ have filtered into the discipline
through ethnography and also brushes with
the likes of symbolic interactionism, actornetwork theory (ant) and non-representational theory (nrt).
In various studies – on mobile phone use in
cars, everyday life in coffee-houses, practices
with pets – Laurier (1998, 2004) has worked
between geography and ethnomethodology,
highlighting how such a position differs from
‘the requirements of the performance of
‘‘doing competent cultural geography’’ ’
(Laurier, 2001, p. 486). Unlike NRT’s
219
EUCLIDEAN SPACE
wariness of spoken communication, he follows
the impetus of CA in foregrounding ‘talk’ as
social action, within which members undertake ‘representational work’ as it occurs in
the immediacy of the here-and-now. He recognizes the objection that ethnomethodology
appears not to tackle what theorists take as
larger, more enduring ‘social structures’,
responding on the one hand (with ANT) that
such structures cannot just be the fragile
accomplishment of countless interlinking
peoples, conducts and situations, and on
the other by seeking commonalities with the
‘archaeological’ method pioneered by Michel
Foucault when dealing with the (seemingly
grander) operations of discourse and power
(Laurier and Philo, 2004).
cp
political utility. This utility emerges first as
‘nature’s space’ and later as all of social life
is reduced to Euclidean space. The result is a
double reduction of complex three-dimensional realities to a two-dimensional space,
and to the space of two-dimensional objects
that can be ‘naively’ mapped or represented.
At this point, the spaces of lived experience are
normalized and seen as reducible to abstract
and transparent spaces: the god-trick has rendered the world as something to be looked
at from a distance, as a world-as-picture or
world as exhibition, where complex social and
natural worlds have become intelligible to the
eye, to be read and represented (Heidegger,
1962 [1927]: see also epistemology; production of space).
jpi
Suggested reading
Eurocentrism A world-view that places
‘Europe’ at the centre of human history, social
analysis and political practice. These three
spheres are closely connected, and revolve
around the constitution of ‘Europe’ as subject
and object of enquiry, as architect and arbiter
of method, and as exemplar and engineer of
progress. Thus:
Laurier (2001, 2004).
Euclidean space The metric space defined
by the geometric system devised by the
Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria.
Euclidean space (sometimes called Cartesian
space: see cartesianism) is the space typically
presumed in everyday discussion and in more
formal accounts of distance, interaction or
spatial distribution in human geography.
Euclidean space is based on five axioms:
. Any two points can be joined by a straight line.
. Any straight-line segment can be extended
indefinitely in a straight line.
. Given any straight-line segment, a circle
can be drawn having the segment as radius
and one endpoint as centre.
. All right angles are congruent.
. The parallel postulate. If two lines intersect
a third in such a way that the sum of the
inner angles on one side is less than two
right angles, then the two lines inevitably
must intersect each other on that side if
extended far enough.
From the 1970s, geographers explored both
the power and the limits of Euclidean space for
mapping the Earth (see cartography), recognizing that the surface of the globe is not
Euclidean but a two-dimensional surface of
constant positive curvature. Spatial analytical
modelling often presupposes Euclidean space,
although there have been some experiments with
non-Euclidean spaces, such as Riemannian
and Lobachevskian geometries and multidimensional spaces (see also spatial science).
Euclidean space has long been treated as
absolute and homogeneous, properties that
for Lefebvre (1991b) guarantee its social and
220
(1) ‘Europe’ is placed at the centre of human
history through the assumption that it
provides the model and master-narrative
of world history: that its histories (and
geographies) are the norm and the rule,
from which others learn or deviate.
(2) ‘Europe’ is placed at the centre of social
analysis through the assumption that its
theoretical formulations and methods
of analysis provide the most powerful resources for all explanation and
interpretation.
(3) ‘Europe’ is placed at the centre of political practice through the assumption
that its cultural and political systems act
as the bearers of a universal Reason that
maps out the ideal course of all human
history (see enlightenment).
europe appears in scare-quotes throughout
the preceding paragraph to draw attention
to its cultural construction. The very idea of
‘Europe’ has a long and far from unitary
history. Eurocentrism has a long history (or
rather historical geography) too, through
which it has been so closely entwined with
the projects of colonialism and imperialism
(Blaut, 1993) that it cannot sensibly be confined to the continent of Europe. In the course
of those discursive expansions, ‘Europe’ has
turned into ‘the west’ (cf. orientalism), which
EUROCENTRISM
has more recently been turned into the global
‘north’ (cf. south). Each one of these transitions has been freighted with its own cultural
and political baggage, but their general burden
is clear. ‘Eurocentrism is not merely the
ethnocentrism of people located in the
West’, Dhareshwar (1990, p. 235) notes, but
rather ‘permeates the cultural apparatus in
which we participate’: it is a global ideology.
It follows from these characterizations that it is
possible to study Europe without being
Eurocentric, and that it is equally possible to
study non-European societies in thoroughly
Eurocentric ways.
Geography has a particular and a general
interest in Eurocentrism. Historians of the
modern discipline have argued that it is a constitutively ‘European science’ (Stoddart, 1986).
Critics have objected that this erases the contributions of other geographical traditions
(Arab, Chinese and Indian among them) and
that geography in its modern, transnational
and hegemonic forms (see hegemony) is more
accurately described as a ‘Eurocentric science’
(Gregory, 1994; see also Sidaway, 1997).
Work in the history of geography (see geography, history of) has drawn attention
to these issues through an interrogation of
geography’s complicity in the adventures of
colonialism and imperialism and, in particular,
of the reciprocities between the intellectual
formation of the discipline and the political
trajectory of European expansion, exploitation
and dispossession (Driver, 1992b). During
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
the discipline invested heavily in activities that
had considerable instrumental value (some
historians have suggested that it was precisely
these practical contributions that helped
secure the formal incorporation of the modern
discipline within the Western academy). Its
strategic contributions included mapping and
surveying other territories, compiling resource
inventories, and producing imaginative geographies of other peoples and places. These
investments contributed to the formation of
the modern discipline as a ‘white mythology’
that: (a) postulated a racially unmarked subject-position as the condition of objective truth
and scientific discourse; (b) effaced alternative
subject-positions; and (c) appropriated other
forms of knowledge – all three gestures are
diagnostics of Eurocentrism (Barnett, 1998;
see also whiteness).
In the course of the twentieth century,
Eurocentrism bled into what Peet (2005)
describes as the ‘even more virulent geocultural form’ of Americentrism. There are
crucial differences as well as affinities between
the two (Slater, 2004, pp. 13–16), but both
cultural formations have underwritten and
been propelled by military force and capitalist
globalization. Their conjunction was registered within the modern discipline by the
designation of a singular ‘Anglo-American
geography’ in the 1960s and 1970s, but this
was a double exclusion: apart from some
key contributions from German and Swedish
writers, non-Anglophone European geographers were marginalized (Eurocentrism had contracted to an anglocentrism), and classical
spatial science offered a series of supposedly
general models that were in fact predicated on
specifically European and American cases
(Christaller’s Germany, Burgess’s Chicago)
(cf. McGee, 1995). Since then, however, while
the intellectual corpus of ‘Anglo-American
geography’ has become increasingly fractured –
here too there are differences as well as
affinities – Slater (1992) could still argue that
much of it continued to rely on a EuroAmericanism that projected its own situations
as ‘lineages of universalism’. Slater claimed
that the dependence of an ostensibly critical
human geography on European and
American traditions of critical theory, historical materialism and postmodernism
(the list could now be extended: feminist
geography and post-structuralism have
been exercised by the same questions) tacitly
licensed assumptions of ‘universal applicability’ that concealed ‘a particularity based to a
large extent on the specific experiences of
the USA and the UK’. Geographies written
under the sign of post-colonialism have been
directly interested in these issues – in the need
to ‘provincialize’ the assumptions of EuroAmerican geography, to attend to other voices
and to ‘learn from other regions’ – but they also
often draw directly on European high theory, and
Slater (2004) has demonstrated that they have
much to learn from other politico-intellectual
traditions too (cf. tricontinentalism).
Geography is scarcely alone in these predicaments, and in the sense of discourse
rather than discipline it has a more general
involvement in Eurocentrism. Gregory (1998)
has drawn attention to four conceptual strategies – ‘geo-graphs’ – that entered directly into
the formation of a colonial modernity:
(1) Absolutizing time and space: the construction of concepts through which European metrics and meanings of history
and geography were taken to be natural
and inviolable, as marking the centre
221
EUROPE, IDEA OF
around which other histories and other
geographies were to be organized (cf.
Young, 1990b).
(2) Exhibiting the world: the production of a
space within which particular objects
were made visible in particular ways,
and by means of which particular claims
to knowledge made by viewing subjects
were negotiated and legitimized.
(3) Normalizing the subject: the production of
spaces of inclusion and exclusion that
treated the subject-position of the white,
middle-class, heterosexual male as the
norm.
(4) Abstracting culture and nature: the production of ‘nature’ as a realm separate from
‘culture’, in which European culture had
made nature yield its secrets and its resources, and in which temperate nature
was ‘normal nature’ (cf. Blaut, 1999).
This argumentation-sketch is more than an
exercise in historical reconstruction. ‘In elucidating the conceptual orders of Eurocentrism,’
Gregory argues, ‘it becomes much more difficult to assume that we have left such predicaments behind, and much more likely that we
will be forced to recognise that Eurocentrism
and its geo-graphs continue to invest our geographies with their troubling meanings.’
dg
Suggested reading
Slater (1992); Gregory (1998a).
Europe, idea of The region that we now call
Europe is the western part of the Eurasian
landmass. Europe has no clearly defined borders, particularly in the east, but the region’s
history can be read as an ongoing attempt to
define what it means to be European and to fix
that identity on the map (Heffernan, 1998).
This process has generated a series of nonEuropean ‘others’, against whom Europeans
have defined themselves.
The term ‘Europe’ is derived from Europa, a
female character in Greek mythology. The
word had no geographical meaning for the
Classical civilizations centred on the middle
east and the Mediterranean basin, and little
significance in the Roman Empire. It is absent
from the Bible, but was used alongside
‘Christendom’ in the early medieval period to
describe the area where Christianity prevailed
and where a literate elite shared a common
Latin language. On medieval world maps,
Europe was depicted as a small, internally
undifferentiated area, vulnerable to incursion
from the Islamic regions of asia and africa,
222
which were Europe’s first constituting ‘others’
(Hay, 1968; Wilson and van den Dussen,
1993).
The expansion of Europe into the americas
from the late fifteenth century was both a cause
and a consequence of the intellectual and technological changes associated with the European
Renaissance, and provoked a major reassessment of Europe’s place in a world still seen as
divinely created (Wintle, 1999, 2008). The
opening of the Americas also generated a new
economic system based on long-distance
Atlantic trade and a new political system based
on competitive European nation-states,
whose interests clashed repeatedly in Europe
and the Americas during the collapse in the
fragile unity of the Christian church following
the Reformation. As ‘Christendom’ disintegrated into a complex mosaic of Catholic and
Protestant communities in the Old and the
New Worlds, the word ‘Europe’ lost its religious connotation. In the wake of the Treaties
of Westphalia (1648), which ended the
European wars of religion, Europe was
defined as the region in which a ‘balance of
power’ might operate between rival nationstates by mutual consent (Pagden, 2002).
The geographical limits of this arrangement
were famously outlined in the Duc de Sully’s
mid-seventeenth-century Grand Design for
European unity. For Sully, the Ottoman
Empire had no part in the ‘concert of Europe’,
because international agreements ultimately
rested on Christian values. Christian Russia
was also excluded, because the Russian people
were deemed essentially Asiatic and hence
culturally inferior. Europe now had two constituting ‘others’, a traditional religious enemy
in the Islamic south and a new cultural enemy
in the Asiatic east. Sully’s cultural definition of
Europe highlights a fundamental irony at the
heart of the European debate. At the very
moment when Europe was defined politically
in the most enlightened terms as an area where
permanent peace might be established by
international agreement, it was also defined
geographically to exclude the peoples of other
regions who were deemed unworthy on
cultural or civilizational grounds (Heater,
1992; Wolff, 1994; Neumann, 1996: see also
civilization; nomos).
The legitimacy of imposing geographical
limits on supposedly universal human rights
was hotly debated during the eighteenthcentury enlightenment, but the freedom
educated Europeans (including those who
had settled beyond Europe) claimed for themselves in their hard-won battles against the
EVERYDAY LIFE
tyranny of unelected rulers in Europe was
never extended to the native peoples of Asia,
Africa and the Americas. The fate of these
people was to be decided by the colonizing
Europeans. The values of enlightened democracy shone brightly in eighteenth-century
Europe and the newly independent European
North America, partly because the rest of the
world had been simultaneously darkened.
During the nineteenth century, the high
point of European imperialism, the cultural
criteria used to define Europe were recast yet
again, this time in racial and biological terms
inspired by the prevalent theories of social
darwinism and environmental determinism. The European peoples were deemed not
merely to have acquired a superior level of
civilization but, rather, to possess an inherent
racial superiority, a consequence of their
uniquely benevolent physical environment
(see race). This both explained and justified
the European domination of the world.
As the last remaining uncolonized regions of
the world gradually diminished, so the tensions
between different European nations increased,
unleashing a more or less continuous period of
intra-European warfare from 1914 to 1945.
This ended with the attempt by the Nazi
authorities in Germany to eradicate long-established European communities, notably the
Jews, in the name of a racially ‘pure’ Europe. If
a ‘dark continent’ has ever existed, it was surely
Europe between 1914 and 1945 (Mazower,
1998: see also genocide; holocaust).
Europe was divided in 1945, the western
and eastern parts of the region dominated by
the opposing military superpowers of the USA
and the Soviet Union, respectively. New measures to foster economic integration developed
on both sides during the cold war from the
1950s to 1980s, most successfully through the
European Economic Community (EEC) and
its successor the European Community (EC),
which eventually encompassed most of the
national economies of western Europe. This
generated remarkable economic success but
little additional discussion about the essential
meaning of Europe, mainly because the
region previously regarded as Europe seemed
permanently divided. The word ‘Europe’ had
little currency in eastern Europe in this period
and acquired only a limited economic meaning in western Europe (Judt, 1996, 2005).
The realignment of central and eastern
Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the reunification of Germany has been
achieved with remarkable speed, and amid
continuing economic success. The enlarged
European Union (EU) now includes 27 countries with a combined population approaching
500 million. Twelve countries, with a total
population in excess of 300 million, share a
single currency (the euro), established in
1999. These seismic developments have
begun to generate new reflections on the fundamental idea of Europe, but it remains to be
seen whether an enlarged Europe will develop
a distinctive identity in the twenty-first century
and emerge as a political and economic counterbalance to the USA. Whether the new
Europe needs such a ‘nation-like’ identity is
a moot point, however, for it might more
usefully be defined as a set of values and aspirations that consciously reject the exclusive
geographies of the past (Delanty, 1995, 2005a;
Amin 2004a; Levy, Pensky and Torpey, 2005;
Beck and Grande, 2007; Heffernan, 2007: see
also cosmopolitanism).
mjh
Suggested reading
Amin (2004a); Heffernan (1998).
everyday life A realm associated with ordinary, routine and repetitive aspects of social life
that are pervasive and yet frequently overlooked
and taken-for-granted. For many commentators, the everyday is inherently ambiguous and
indeterminate, something that is both everywhere yet nowhere, familiar at the same time
as it escapes (Blanchot, 1993 [1969]). The
term ‘everyday life’ is often used to evoke the
lived qualities of a range of activities such as
cooking, eating, drinking, shopping, playing,
walking, commuting, nurturing children,
working for wages and so on, through which
people experience and interact with the world
and with others. Henri Lefebvre (1991b, p. 97)
suggests that it may be defined negatively as
‘ ‘‘what is left over’’ after all distinct, superior,
specialized, structured activities have been
singled out by analysis’. Yet he insists that it
is related to all activities as their common
ground or bond, and he likens it to a ‘fertile
soil’ that ‘has a secret life and a richness of its
own’ (p. 87).
From the perspective of everyday life, ‘geography is everywhere’ (Cosgrove, 1989), its
subject matter found in even the most seemingly ordinary streets, homes, malls, offices,
factories, parks, playgrounds and the like. As
a distinct formulation, ‘everyday life’ has been
widely referenced and problematized in recent
years within geography and many of the
social sciences and humanities, where it has
been seen as offering an important perspective
on social, cultural, political and economic
223
EVERYDAY LIFE
processes and practices, one whose provenance lies between structuralism and phenomenology, and one that raises lived
experience to the level of a critical concept
(Kaplan and Ross, 1987). The subject crosses
disciplinary boundaries and indeed brings
them into question, as suggested by references
to an emerging ‘everyday life studies’
(Highmore, 2002). It has also found prominence in recent arts and cultural practice.
Important for understanding the spaces and
places of everyday life have been theorists such
as Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau and
Lefebvre, whose belated translation into
English has been a significant spur to
Anglophone scholarship. But geographical
interest in the subject is long-standing, and
other significant approaches in recent decades
are associated with humanistic geography
and feminist geography.
Recovering everyday geographical experiences against their erasure within spatial
science concerned many humanistic geographers who, influenced by phenomenology
and writings by Edmund Husserl and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, turned attention to
the lifeworld and to emotional and subjective encounters with and attachments to places,
often privileging notions of home. In the
process, they stressed the work involved in
interpreting geographies of the everyday,
including the need for self-reflexivity. But
while humanistic geographers debated the
necessity for philosophical rigour, with some
preferring a looser constitutive phenomenology derived from Alfred Schutz to concentrate on how the lifeworlds of ordinary social
groups are intersubjectively constituted in particular places, and with others distancing
themselves from theory to embrace ‘experience’ as such, feminists and Marxists criticized
their neglect of the power relations that structure everyday experiences of places, including
within the home, and hence their inability to
advance deeper critiques of exploitation and
oppression. It is with that in mind that many
feminist geographers have focused on ordinary
activities and repetitive social interactions, considering how they are bound into structures that
discriminate against women and reinforce gender hierarchies (cf. structuration theory).
According to Susan Hanson (1992), finding
significance in the everyday is a core analytic
tradition shared by feminism and geography.
She shows how this focus can undermine the
common opposition between home and work,
for example, by demonstrating their interconnections at the level of everyday lives
224
and practices with important implications for
understanding local labour markets and gender divisions of work in both. To bring daily
activities into focus, many feminists have
employed time-geography, which was developed by Torsten Hägerstrand and colleagues
at the University of Lund during the 1960s
and 1970s, in a context in which ideas about
everyday life had been central to Swedish welfare and urban planning. Plotting women’s
daily space–time paths enabled insights into
the role of gender relations in the temporal
and spatial structuring of social action, and
hence into ‘the reproduction of patriarchy
in the banal activities of everyday life’ (Rose,
1993, p. 25). Gillian Rose nevertheless criticizes time-geography’s universal depiction of
space and its claim to exhaustiveness, which
she depicts as masculinist, along with its
inability to address differential embodiment,
emotion and passion. Her concerns relate to
those frequently raised more generally about
the appropriateness or otherwise of different
ways of apprehending the everyday, the actuality of which always exceeds attempts at capture.
Feminist interest in the geographies of the
everyday is also often connected with debates
about social reproduction, which for Cindi
Katz (2004, p. x) is ‘as much the fleshy, messy,
and indeterminate stuff of everyday life as it is a
set of structured practices that unfold in dialectical relation to production, with which it
is mutually constitutive and in tension’. Yet she
insists that social reproduction must be understood as a critical practice marked by the refusal
to see the process as inevitable or natural, and
by attentiveness to resilience as well as to possibilities of reworking, resistance and even revolution. In that sense, Katz likens it to Lefebvre’s
influential double-sided concept of everyday
life, which he developed over many decades
and which is central to his writings on urbanism and the production of space. On the one
hand, Lefebvre used the terms ‘the everyday’
and ‘everydayness’ critically as referring to the
entry of daily life into modernity, as he developed Marx’s account of alienation to address
how everyday life has been colonized by the
commodity and the state through the imposition of an abstract space. But he also sought
redemptive possibilities within the everyday,
arguing that it harbours traces of more authentic living as well as the potential for radical
change and for the production of other differential spaces. It is therefore a key terrain of
struggle.
Challenges to characterizations of everyday
life as self-evident, immutable and universal
EXCEPTION, SPACE OF
have also come through place-specific studies
of changing everyday worlds and language
under conditions of modernity that are attentive to multiple practices and power relations
(Pred, 1990), and cross-cultural enquiries
into everydayness and its conceptualization
as a means of figuring cultural experiences
of modernity and capitalist modernisation
(Harootunian, 2000). Lefebvre’s own critique
needs situating within a French tradition of
everyday life theorizing that developed especially during the 1960s and 1970s in the context of rapid modernization and processes of
decolonization, and that included de Certeau,
Roland Barthes, Georges Perec and the situationists, as well as the surrealists before
them. This tradition’s influence is apparent
in much current human geography, where it
has been taken up alongside phenomenological
and feminist writings to inform studies of practice, performance and embodiment as well as
narrative and rhythm in the construction of
space and time (Simonsen, 2004; see also
body). A concern with drawing out the extraordinary within the ordinary and what Lefebvre
called ‘the minor magic in everyday life’ has
also occupied many geographers, including
those influenced by non-representational
theory, who have sought new means of
noticing the practical knowledge, skilled
improvisation and intuition involved in ‘the
elusive, phantasmic, emergent and often only
just there fabric of everyday life’ (Thrift,
2000d, p. 407). While much work on everyday
life has emphasized the resistant and subversive
tactics of ordinary people, drawing especially
on de Certeau (1984) in the process, some
writers are seeking to re-evaluate repetition,
habit, familiarity and the non-intentional
aspects of the corporeal as demanding fuller
attention in their own right. For others, it is
the utopian impulse concerned not simply with
describing everyday life but also with transforming it for the better that remains so compelling (see also utopia).
dp
The approach began in health care (the term
‘evidence-based medicine’ first appeared in
1992) and has become a world-wide movement
in the Cochrane Collaboration (http://www.
cochrane.org/index0.htm), which aims to provide ‘the reliable source of information in health
care’. Particular emphasis is placed on randomized trials in which the recipient is randomized
to the new intervention (cf. sampling): the epidemiologist Archie Cochrane had famously
argued that researchers should ‘randomise until
it hurts’. The approach has been extended into
the social arena with the Campbell
Collaboration (http://www.campbellcollaboration.org/), named after the distinguished social
science methodologist Donald T. Campbell.
This aims to answer the question ‘What
harms, what helps, based on what evidence?’
and a Centre for Neighbourhood Research
was created as part of the UK Network for
Evidence-based Policy and Practice (http://
www.evidencenetwork.org/).
The orthodox approach to evidence-based
policy is based on a systematic review finding
all the relevant studies including grey literature, weeding these for methodological flaws
and inconsistencies, ranking the evidence so
that the greatest reliance is placed on welldesigned randomized trials, and then combining valid evidence quantitatively in a metaanalysis to provide the ‘weight of evidence’
supporting best practice. A heterodox view is
provided by Ray Pawson (2006), who argues
for what he terms ‘realist synthesis’ that
stresses generative mechanisms and causal
contingency, so that data analysis aims to find
‘what works for whom in what circumstances’
(cf. pragmatism). Consequently, there is not
a single ‘best buy’ for all situations, but a
tailored, ‘transferable theory’ that works in
these respects, for these subjects, in these
kinds of contexts.
kj
Suggested reading
Davies, Nutley and Smith (2000); Torgerson
(2003).
Suggested reading
Highmore (2002); Katz (2004); Lefebvre (2008
[1947, 1961, 1981]); Sheringham (2006).
evidence-based policy Evidence-based policy has been developed in reaction to interventions based on inertia, expediency, opinion,
subjectivity and short-term political pressures.
The term refers to an approach to policy development and implementation that uses rigorous
techniques to develop and maintain a robust,
high-quality, valid and reliable evidence base.
exception, space of A topological space
produced when a sovereign power invokes
the law in order to suspend the law. Its modern formulation is closely associated with
right-wing political philosopher Carl Schmitt
(1888–1985), who declared: ‘Sovereign is he
who decides the exception.’ Italian political
philosopher Giorgio Agamben radicalized
Schmitt’s work to argue that it is the act of
deciding the exception that defines the sovereign: that this is the ground and origin of
225
EXCEPTIONALISM
sovereign power (rather than vice versa)
(Agamben, 1998). This crucial decision – in
the original German sense of ‘a cut in life’ – is
at once performative and paradoxical. It is
performative because it draws a boundary
between politically qualified life and merely
existent life wilfully exposed and abandoned
to violence and death (‘bare life’) that has the
most acutely material consequences. And it is
paradoxical, and all forms of life are thereby
made precarious, because the boundary is mobile
and indistinct (cf. zone of indistinction).
Agamben writes about both a ‘state’ of
exception and a ‘space’ of exception, and his
argument bears on spatiality in at least three
ways.
(1) Agamben uses Set Theory to argue that
the exception – from the Latin ex-capere,
which literally means that which is ‘taken
outside’ – is a paradoxical spacing because it ‘cannot be included in the
whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it
is always already included’ (1998, p. 25).
This limit-figure must be captured topologically (see topology), he concludes,
because only a twisted cartography of
power is capable of folding such propriety (the invocation of the law) into such
perversity (the suspension of the law).
(2) Many analyses of the space of exception
focus on enclosed sites (the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, immigration
and refugee detention centres, and the
US war prison at Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba: see, e.g., Gregory, 2006b) or territorialized configurations of power (the
shattered fragments of occupied Palestine: see, e.g., Gregory, 2004b), but by
their very nature, spaces of exception
may be much more indeterminate than
these exemplary spatial formations imply.
(3) The state of exception is typically associated with the declaration of a national
emergency and the imposition of martial
law by a state, and Agamben argues that
the growth of a national security state
and the intensification of its sovereign
powers through the globalization of
the ‘war on terror’ has turned the state
of exception into a new paradigm of late
modern government (Agamben, 2005,
pp. 1–31: cf. governmentality). But
these national framings are also affected
by transnational geopolitics and geoeconomics, and by international law
(Gregory, 2007).
dg
226
Suggested reading
Gregory (2006b); Mbembe (2003); Pratt (2005).
exceptionalism The view that ‘geography is
quite different from all the other sciences,
methodologically unique’ (Schaefer, 1953,
p. 231). The term was coined by Fred K.
Schaefer to disparage this, the dominant conception of American geography codified by
Hartshorne (1939) in his enormously influential prospectus for The nature of geography.
Instead, Schaefer argued that geography was
just like every other science, sharing a methodology based on identifying and mobilizing
universal laws (see law, scientific).
Hartshorne’s position was based on the writings of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
German geographers. They did not merely
influence Hartshorne’s interpretation: they were
his interpretation. The nature of geography was
determined ‘in light of the past’. That past, or at
least the past on which Hartshorne drew, was
strongly influenced by neo-kantianism that
separated geography and history from other sciences because they were concerned with the
unique and non-repeatable. Geography and
history, Hartshorne argued, were ideographic, not nomothetic. While geography
was a science, in that it provided ‘organized,
objective knowledge’ (Hartshorne 1939,
p. 130), the geographical units in which facts
were organized, of which the most important
were regions, were unique and non-repeatable. Geography was ‘the study of areal differentiation’ and was ‘most clearly expressed in
regional geography’ (Hartshorne, 1939,
p. 468). Methodologically, what followed –
and marked geography as exceptionalist in
Schaefer’s sense – was an inability to deploy
scientific laws, because laws were predicated
on generalization and repetition of phenomena. Hartshorne (1939, p. 446) wrote, ‘We
arrive, therefore, at a conclusion similar to that
which Kroeber has stated for history: ‘‘the
uniqueness of all historical phenomena. . . .
No laws or near laws are discovered.’’ The
same conclusion applies to the particular combination of phenomena at a particular place.’
Geographers, therefore, were not able scientifically to explain, or predict or knowingly intervene, but only describe: ‘Regional geography,
we conclude, is literally what its title expresses:
. . . [I]t is essentially a descriptive science concerned with the description and interpretation
of unique cases . . . ’ (Hartshorne, 1939,
p. 449).
In contrast, Schaefer, who was an economist
and statistician before and during the Second
EXCHANGE
World War, and influenced during his tenure
at the University of Iowa by the logical positivist and former Vienna Circle member,
Gustav Bergmann, believed in the unity
of science, and a single, common scientific
methodology resting on law-based explanation. In his contrary view, geography was
not exceptionalist, but a chip off a uniform
scientific block: to explain phenomena within
or beyond geography ‘means always to recognize them as instances of laws’ (Schaefer,
1953, p. 227). Schaefer argued that geography
should pay particular attention to morphological laws taking the form, ‘If geographical
pattern (morphology) A, then geographical
pattern (morphology) B’ (see morphology).
In his reply, Hartshorne (1955) pulverized
Schaefer, even though Schaefer had been dead
for two years. While Hartshorne (necessarily)
won that battle, Schaefer won the war,
as human geography increasingly rejected
exceptionalism, first during the formalization
of spatial science during the quantitative
revolution and later through its embrace of
social theory. Geography was to be ordinary, not exceptional.
tb
Suggested reading
Barnes and Farish (2006).
exchange As an activity, exchange has
played a more or less critical role in virtually
all societies. It has allowed them to exceed the
constraints of subsistence, intensify production and diversify patterns of consumption
(although by no means equitably), form social
alliances and spatial networks of association,
organize and reproduce social hierarchies by
expanding the reservoir of material surpluses,
and generate new layers of social communication through the symbolic dimensions of
exchange. Exchange is a precursor to commerce and therefore to a market economy
involving transactions of goods and services
between buyers and sellers (see capitalism).
Hence the central claim of Adam Smith’s
influential 1776 treatise, The wealth of nations
– that a growing social division of labour and
specialized production of goods generates economic prosperity without causing society itself
to disintegrate – is premised on the possibility
of ubiquitous exchange; in other words, markets. But this is hardly a given. Some things
(use-values) may never enter the realm of
exchange, because society considers it profane
to sell them. Additionally, some exchanges
may remain individualized and sporadic, and
not result in a market (new institutional
economics has shown, for example, how prohibitive transactions costs can hinder individualized exchange from expanding into a
market). Contrarily, exchange may not occur
as a commodity transaction, or it may occur,
as in situations of barter, as a commodity
transaction not mediated by the money-form.
Finally, the good or service purveyed may take
the social form of a gift, with or without
expectation of reciprocity. The writings of the
Hungarian anthropologist Karl Polanyi (1972)
are particularly illuminating in these matters.
Wherever reciprocity is assumed or implied –
commercial, barter or gift – there is the further
issue of value. In one sense, the issue is straightforward: it seems reasonable to assume that in a
dyadic transaction where individuals A and B
exchange a good or service, they do so because
A has something B wants and vice versa. In
short, both A and B have something that the
other values. At least two complications arise
here. First, there can be no presumption of a
transaction of equivalent value without reference to a third, transcendent standard or measure – whether this takes the guise of: (a) a
subjective marginal utility principle (hence A
and B transact if at least one of them is better
off from the transaction in terms of marginal
utility and neither is worse off – the so-called
Pareto principle of neo-classical economics);
or (b) a principle of equilibration of labour time
(A and B transact goods containing equal
amounts of socially necessary labour time –
the historically grounded Marxist scenario of
non-exploitation: see labour theory of value;
marxian economics).
This already hints at the second complication; namely, that exchange can occur despite
the absence of equivalence because of the
unequal circumstances of transactors. Take
the case of distress sales of crop in a drought
year by a cash-strapped farmer. Given the
choice between not selling and starving and
selling at a loss, the second option is Paretosuperior in terms of marginal utility for both
the farmer who sells and the merchant who
buys. But it appears to pervert any notion of
equivalence. Similarly, take two other
examples: the unemployed person who sells
plasma to a for-profit corporation or the runaway boy who performs sexual favours in return
for money. It is possible to argue in either
instance (and economists do) that the transactors are better off in terms of their respective
marginal utilities (in the corporation’s case, its
marginal utility of profit) – but only, it seems, by
compromising on a notion of equivalence that
enjoins some sense of symmetry. In short, the
227
EXCLAVE
mediation that is required to explain why
exchange occurs yields equivocal answers: all
we can categorically say is that finite availability
of a thing in time and space and actual or
anticipated social use-value are general underlying conditions for exchange.
Gifts are a subset of exchange. They involve
neither mediation by money nor barter. But
like these more conventional forms of transactions, they supply individuals with incentives
to collaborate in a pattern of exchanges that
performatively reproduce society and validate
the status of participants as social beings.
In The gift: the form and reason for exchange in
archaic societies (1990 [1925]), the French
scholar Marcel Mauss built on the ideas of
Emile Durkheim to show how gifts function
as a mechanism by which individual interests
combine to make a social system – a ‘gift
economy’ – in the absence of market exchange.
Because the gift is embedded in the economic,
moral, religious, political and aesthetic dimensions, Mauss termed it a ‘Total social phenomenon’. Mauss’ essay has been extended
in generative ways by social anthropologists
such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas,
Pierre Bourdieu and Marilyn Strathern in their
efforts to identify non-market logics that
cement society. It goes without saying that
the gift economy, far from being an archaic
social mechanism, remains a constitutive force
in contemporary market societies.
vg
Suggested reading
Appadurai (1986); Bourdieu (1990); Davis
(1992); Mauss (1990 [1925]); Polanyi (1972).
exclave A small piece of a state that is physically separate from its main territorial body
but remains within its political jurisdiction
despite being surrounded by the territory
of another state. Robinson (1959) identified
five exclave types by degree of separation from
the homeland: normal, as per the definition
above; pene-, territories barely connected to
the main state in such a way that access must
occur via another state’s territory; quasi-, technically disconnected but connected in practical terms; temporary, as the result of an
armistice; and virtual, areas treated as exclaves
without meeting the strict legal definition.
(See also enclave.)
cf
Suggested reading
Aalto (2002); Robinson (1959).
existentialism A philosophy that flourished in the middle to late twentieth century
228
as a radical defence of human freedom. It
emerged partly in reaction to teleological
and deterministic theories of human nature
that saw human beings as determined by their
biology, by the environments in which they
found themselves, or by their social status or
economic position. It also emerged in direct
response to the racialized ideologies and geopolitics of a colonial (see colonialism) and
cold war world. Against notions of human
subjects, peoples and cultures determined
by their ‘nature’, constrained by their ‘essence’
or being the mere ‘bearers’ of their class functions, existentialism argued that human beings
were free subjects, whose existence defined
who and what they were. For Heidegger (1962
[1927]), the ‘essence’ of this finite subject, this
‘being-in-the-world’, was that it was thrown
into a world not of its own making and radically
oriented to this world through projects, mood,
will and other dispositions. The ontology of
finitude was, for the existential subject, a life to
be lived, with ‘no-exit’ but death and along the
way a profound anxiety and, at times, dread in
the face of the individual’s immense responsibility for his or her own life.
Existentialism emerged in human geography in the 1970s, as part of a desire to refocus geographical enquiry away from the
reductive abstractions of spatial analysis
and structural marxism. It focused on the capacities of human agency, and in so doing
sought to be a corrective to the overly essentialist arguments of much cultural and historical geography (see essentialism), to the
structural arguments of political economy
and to the abstractions of spatial science. It
focused on how human beings at once live in
and make the spaces, places and landscapes
that they inhabit (Samuels, 1978, 1981). Far
from being an abstract science of spatial relations, existential geographies were concrete
descriptions of everyday lifeworlds, and
were engaged with the ethics and values of
what human beings understand to be the
meaning of their lives and worlds (Entrikin,
1976; Tuan, 1976b; Relph, 1981, pp. 187–91).
Radical geographers have been sceptical of
existentialism, tending to see it as overly
focused on the subjective experiences of individuals; a kind of idealism that treated lived
experience (with its anxieties and feelings of
loss, uncertainty or dread) as indicative of a
universal condition of existence instead of a
concrete situation produced by a historical
and oppressive society. In Marcuse’s (1972,
p. 161) view, by hypothesizing determinate
historical conditions of human existence as
EXPLANATION
ontological and metaphysical characteristics,
existentialism became part of the ideology
it attacked: its radicalism was illusory (cf.
critical theory).
jpi
exit, voice and loyalty A theory of consumer
influence on the quality of public goods
developed by Hirschman (1970), who argued
that service quality is likely to be lower in
monopoly conditions than in situations where
consumers have a choice. With the latter, the
following options are available to consumers
who consider a service either inefficient or
ineffective:
. exit – consumers transfer to an alternative
supplier;
. voice – consumers complain about the service, threatening exit if they are not satisfied
with the response; or
. loyalty – consumers remain with their current supplier, without either exercising
voice or threatening exit.
The higher the (exit) costs of switching suppliers, the lower the potential impact of voice,
because suppliers can assume loyalty; under
monopolies, voice need have little impact
on service quality. Although individual voice
may be ineffective, however, collective voice
through organized pressure groups may have
more power over suppliers; such power may
be unequally distributed, however, with wealthier people better able to mobilize support and
sustain their cause.
Hirschman’s ideas have been developed by
governments in recent decades by one or more
of: privatization policies, placing former public services in the private sector, believing
that competition will lead to improved quality;
creating quasi-markets within public services
(among health care providers, for example),
with the same general expectation; or by promoting choice, through providing information
(as in school performance league tables),
which consumers can use in considering exit
strategies. (See also neo-liberalism; public–
private partnerships; tiebout model.)
rj
exopolis
A new city located beyond existing urban forms (see edge city). Soja (1996a)
defines it as representing a new form of urbanism. The exopolis turns ‘the city inside-out
and outside-in at the same time’, he suggests
(p. 239). In this conception, functions formerly associated with central business districts and commuter suburbs are not merely
transposed, but their character and relationships are reconfigured. ‘Exopolis’ and ‘edge
city’ are terms that indicate attempts to understand cities beyond the traditional framework
of the chicago school (cf. los angeles
school) and to analyse urban processes at
the city-regional scale (Brenner, 2002).
em
Suggested reading
Soja (1996).
explanation A statement that identifies the
essential reasons for the occurrence of a given
event or phenomena. Reasons can be physical
causes, mental states, contextual circumstances or even beneficial consequences. For each
of these different kinds of reasons to count as
an explanation, they must be linked to the
event or phenomena by set of general rules
(and at the extreme by universal laws). For
example, to explain why my copy of the
Dictionary of human geography just fell off the
desk, I must connect that specific event to a
wider set of laws governing motion and gravity. Once the reasons behind the occurrence of
a phenomenon or event are determined, the
world is revealed as it really is. As Pierre
Duhem (1962 [1906], p. 19) put it: ‘To
explain is to strip the reality of the appearances
covering it like a veil, in order to see the bare
reality itself.’
Geographers have been trying to discern
‘bare reality’ ever since the nineteenth century,
when the discipline was first institutionalized.
environmental determinism was initially a
favoured explanatory form in which variations
in climate were posited as the reason for geographical variation in human behaviour, beliefs
and institutions. Discussions of explanation as
an idea, however, did not emerge until the
quantitative revolution in the 1960s. In
contrast to those who insisted that geography,
like history, had to be conducted under the sign
of exceptionalism, the proponents of spatial
science insisted that their ‘new’ geography was
a science like any other, and thus had to meet
the strictures of scientific explanation established by philosophy. Those strictures were
originally formalized by Hempel and
Oppenheim in 1948, and known as the
Deductive–Nomological (D–N) model. Scientific
explanation rested on applying a deductive syllogism to a combination of general laws and
initial empirical conditions. For example,
explaining why the Dictionary just fell off my
desk would involve linking by means of a
deductive syllogism the particularities of that
event to a scientific law (e.g. the law of gravity).
Within the philosophy of science, the
D–N model provoked, and continues to
229
EXPLORATION
provoke, significant discussion, an there have
been several refinements and alternatives
(Salmon, 1990). Harvey (1969) made the D–
N model the gold standard for explanation in
geography, but even at the time he recognized
that few geographical events could be located
within such a stringent framework, given the
absence of geographical laws on which explanation would have to depend. By the late 1970s
there was a movement away from the D–N
model of explanation. Geographers were still
concerned to explain events and phenomena,
but they cast around for less narrowly conceived approaches, ones that recognized that
the discipline centred on specific and contingent case studies rather than a larger statistical universe of events. For many human
geographers in the 1980s the philosophy of
realism, with its conceptual vocabulary of
causal powers and liabilities, and contingent
and necessary relations, offered a consistent
explanatory framework couched in terms of
causation and contingency. While realism
is still in use, there is a sense that even its
definition of explanation remains too closely
defined by a natural scientific sensibility.
Consequently, it is inappropriate for those
forms of human geography that draw upon
interpretive, non-essentialist and even nonrepresentational theory. The task is to
re-conceive explanation in a form appropriate
to human geography’s new guise.
tb
Suggested reading
Harvey (1969).
exploration At its basic level, exploration is
usually taken to refer to the growth of knowledge of the globe that resulted from various
voyages of discovery and scientific expeditions. But the very vocabulary of discovery
and exploration is contested by revisionists,
who query its appropriateness in contexts
where it is more morally responsible to speak
of invasion, conquest or occupation. The reason
is that these labels unmask the pretended
innocence and ethical neutrality that the
standard scientific-sounding idioms convey
(see ethics).
Whatever the allocation of moral accountability, there can be no doubting the significance of what Driver (2001) calls the ‘cultures
of exploration’ on the scientific enterprise in
general and the development of geography in
particular (see also geography, history of).
Traditional chroniclers of these exploits have
tended towards a progressivist interpretation
of scientific knowledge, cartographic history
230
and global awareness (Baker, 1931). The vast
maritime expeditions of Chêng Ho from 1405
to 1433, for example, have been commended
for their contributions to Chinese marine cartography and descriptive geography, although,
in contrast to later voyages, the purpose of the
mission was neither the garnering of ‘scientific’
information nor commercial conquest (Chang,
1971). Similarly, the writings of Ibn Battuta
during the late Middle Ages have been read as
an encyclopaedic conspectus of the Islamic
world (Boorstin, 1983).
It is, however, with the European voyages
of Reconnaissance during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries that putative connections
between scientific ‘progress’ and geographical
‘exploration’ begin to be more closely
associated (see also science; travel-writing).
Writers such as Hale (1967), Parry (1981) and
O’Sullivan (1984) suggest that the first scientific
laboratory was the world itself and that ‘the voyages of discovery’ were in a fundamental sense
experiments to test the validity of Renaissance
geographical concepts. In such scenarios, the
names of Bartholomew Dias, Vasco da Gama,
Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan
and, perhaps most of all, ‘Prince Henry the
Navigator’ assume heroic status.
Indeed, the reciprocal links between voyages of exploration and scientific enterprises
were deep and lasting. Francis Bacon reflected
in his Novum organum of 1620 (§ lxxxiv) that
the opening up of the geographical world
through such expeditions foreshadowed the
expansion of the ‘boundaries of the intellectual globe’’ beyond the confines of ‘the narrow
discoveries of the ancients’. Support for this
interpretation has come from those attaching
crucial significance to the Portuguese encouragement of navigational science and mathematical practice through the work of the
Jewish map- and instrument-maker Mestre
Jacome. This Jewish tradition of Mallorcan
cartography, instrumentation and nautical science was perpetuated by Abraham Zacuto and
Joseph Vizinho, while Francesco Faleiro,
Garcia da Orta and Pedro Nuñes did much
to further medicinal botany, cartography and
natural history during the first half of the
sixteenth century (Goodman, 1991). Such
accomplishments have been canvassed to substantiate the claim that this Jewish style of
sixteenth-century Portuguese science provided the catalyst for ‘the emergence of modern science in Western Europe’ (Hooykaas,
1979; Banes, 1988, p. 58).
Nevertheless, even partisan commentators
concede that the scientific advances of the
EXPLORATION
‘Age of Discovery’ were by-products of commercial, evangelistic and colonial motives.
Ostensibly more scientific were the Pacific
exploits of Enlightenment figures such as
Louis Antoine de Bougainville, James Cook,
Joseph Banks, the Forsters, Jean François de la
Pérouse and George Vancouver (Beaglehole,
1966). And yet with them too political factors
loomed as large as scientific ones: pre-voyage
briefings on settlement possibility, resource
inventory and the staking of colonial claims all
revealed the strategic significance of everything
from cartographic survey to ethnographic
illustration (Frost, 1988). Still, the scientific
achievements were substantial – Cook, for
instance, took with him astronomers, surgeons
and naturalists, and successfully completed an
accurate recording of the transit of Venus.
Precisely the same was true of later explorations in South America and Central Africa.
Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland,
for example, used their South American findings at the turn of the nineteenth century to
break the bonds of the static taxonomic system
of Linnaeus, and ultimately to create a distinctive mode of scientific investigation – what
Cannon labelled ‘Humboldtian science’ – in
which ‘the accurate, measured study of widespread but interconnected real phenomena’
was interrogated ‘in order to find a definite
law and a dynamic cause’ (Cannon, 1978,
p. 105; cf. Dettelbach, 1996). Again, Roderick
Murchison, who has been dubbed England’s
scientist of empire, virtually orchestrated the
British colonial assault on Central Africa in
the Victorian period through his oversight of
the Royal Geographical Society, and used a
variety of explorers to test his own geological
theories there (Stafford, 1989).
There is not space here to delineate in any
detail the scientific contributions of a host of
other exploratory ventures: the Napoleonic
survey of Egypt, Baudin’s deadly mission to
‘New Holland’, the succession of Russian voyages into the Pacific by Krusentern, Kotzebue
and Lütke, the Royal Geographical Society’s
efforts to reduce the Australian outback
to cartographic enclosure, Lewis and Clark’s
western territorial expedition, Darwin’s Beagle
circumnavigation, the United States Exploring
Expedition under Charles Wilkes, the voyage
of T.H. Huxley on The Rattlesnake, a variety
of late Victorian ventures to West Africa, A.R.
Wallace’s sojourn in Borneo, the oceanographic survey of The Challenger, and expeditions to the poles in the early decades of the
twentieth century, to name but a very few.
Chief among their scientific achievements
were the discovery of numerous unknown
species of plants and animals, new theories
of organic dispersal, novel interpretations of
human cultures, the mapping of fossils and
strata on a global scale, cartographic intensification and advances in astronomical observation. The power of this scientific legacy is
so engrained in the discipline’s collective
memory that various expeditionary ventures
continue to receive the sponsorship of institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society
and the National Geographic Society, and
to provide a language in which to speak of
geographical excursions into other threatening
environments, such as urban ethnic ‘no-go’
areas.
The acquisition of scientific knowledge by
explorers was a multifaceted enterprise and
raised critical epistemological questions that
have persisted up to the present day (see epistemology), not least in settings where expeditionary space is itself experimental space
(Powell, 2007). The accumulation of scientific
knowledge required careful management.
First, the crying need to discipline distant
observers in the effort to standardize their
findings found expression in works such as
the Admiralty’s 1832 Hints for collecting animals and their products, Richard Owen’s
Directions for collecting and preserving animals
(1835) and later the RGS’s Hints to travellers
(1854). Works of this stripe continued a
long-standing tradition that included John
Woodward’s Brief instructions for making observations in all parts of the world (1696). The
production of manuals such as these was part
of an exercise in what might be called the
geography of trust; namely, how to ensure
observational reliability and disciplined datagathering (Carey, 1997, 2006). Second, the
scientific knowledge gleaned from explorations involved not only the assemblage
and movement of objects, both natural and
cultural, around the world, but their reconceptualization and reclassification according to some prevailing norm or taste
(Thomas, 1991; Dritsas, 2005; Hill, 2006a,
b). Third, the transformation of local data
into universal knowledge that was critical to
exploration science involved metrological
standardization and thus the production and
calibration of precision instruments (see
instrumentation).
The significance of expeditionary exploits,
however, cannot be restricted to matters of
cognitive ‘progress’. And merely stating that
the growth of these scientific knowledges was
situated within the framework of imperialism
231
EXPLORATION
is to pay scant attention to a whole suite of
issues to do with the construction of Western
identity, the representations of ‘exoticism’, the
inscription of ‘otherness’, the reciprocal constitution of scientific discourse and colonial
praxis (see colonialism) and the deconstruction of cartographic iconography.
cultures of exploration were thus woven
with political, artistic and literary, as well as
scientific, threads. It was, for example, as a
consequence of the European Age of
Exploration/Reconnaissance/Conquest
that
the idea of the ‘west’ and ‘Western-ness’
received its baptism. europe’s sense of distinctiveness from the regions that the navigators encountered was embedded in a discourse
about identity that represented ‘the West’ and
‘the Rest’ in the categories of superiority–
inferiority, power–impotence, enlightenment–
ignorance and civilization–barbarism (Hall,
1992b). Seen in these terms, Europe’s rendezvous with the New World in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries was as much a moral event
as a commercial or intellectual one, and
induced a sense of ‘metaphysical unease’
because it confounded standard conceptions
of human nature (see also Pagden, 1993).
The construction of this ‘discourse of the
West’, of course, depended crucially on the
idioms in which the new worlds were represented. The categories, vocabularies, assumptions and instruments that the explorers
brought to the encounter were, understandably, thoroughly European, and so the worlds
of ‘the other’ were interrogated, classified and
assimilated according to European norms.
That the language of the engagement was frequently gendered, moreover, facilitated the representation of new landscapes in the exotic
categories of a potent sexual imagery intended
to indicate mastery and submissiveness.
If the foundations of Western discourse
were laid during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, they were reinforced during the
following centuries when eurocentric modes
of representation continued to constitute
regional identities. One such construction was
what Edward Said termed ‘orientalism’ – a
discursive formation through which ‘European
culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically,
militarily, ideologically, scientifically and
imaginatively’ (Said, 1978, p. 3). And, indeed,
the idea of the Oriental or Asiatic type certainly
gripped Western imaginations. In nineteenthcentury Britain, for example, what was termed
‘oriental vice’ in the very heart of England –
‘heathenism in the inner radius’ as it was
232
called – expressed anxieties about the moral
authority of Christian England (Lindeborg,
1994).
The procedures facilitating the marginalization of the Oriental realm, and – at the same time
– its critical role in European self-definition,
were also perpetuated in other places and in
other terms. The variety of representational
devices that Cook and his coterie of naturalists
and draughtsmen deployed – whether Banks’
abstract taxonomics or Parkinson’s evocation
of anthropological variety – succeeded in
encapsulating the Pacific world within the confines of European epistemologies. Moreover,
their penchant for designating names – the
naming of places (see place names), peoples
and individuals – at once invented, brought
into cultural circulation and domesticated the
very entities that were the subjects of their
enquiries (Carter, 1987). That Cook’s team
was engaged in what Salmond (1991, p. 15)
terms ‘mirror-image ethnography’ is beyond
dispute. But just because their modes of categorization were suffused with the expectations
of eighteenth-century society should not be
permitted to gainsay the remarkable accuracy
of their accounts of physical phenomena.
The cultural politics embedded in these
various ventures were further reinforced by the
artistic and literary crafts of Western exploration. The evocation of distant peoples and
places owed much to the supposedly realist
works of visual art produced by painters such
as Jean-Léon Gérôme (Nochlin, 1991).
Indeed, the standard scholarly practices of
science, history and comparative literature
were themselves profoundly indebted to artistic representation (Smith, 1960; Stafford,
1984). In the tropical world, for example,
travelling artists such as William Hodges and
Johann Rugendas gave visual form to the
changing discourse of tropicality in which
scientific observation and aesthetic preference
reinforced one another (Driver and Martins,
2005). In similar vein, the use of photographic
technology to ‘capture’ distant sites and sights,
served no less to constitute than to represent
imperial subjects and spaces (Ryan, 1997). At
the same time, overseas escapades provided
writers of fiction with resources to stimulate
readers’ imaginations. In some cases, this took
the form of adventure stories that fostered
new senses of heroic masculinity and projected
European fantasies onto non-European worlds
(Phillips, 1997). In others, evocations of faraway realms were shaped by utopian or dystopian literary tropes, which were deployed by
writers not only to imagine foreigners but
EXPLORATION
to re-imagine themselves (Fulford, Lee and
Kitson, 2004).
Evocations such as these contributed massively to the generation of global imaginative
geographies (Gregory, 1994). Thus the
americas, in one way or another, were constructed according to European predilections
(Harley, 1990; Mason, 1990; Greenblatt,
1991); later, the Pacific was re-composed as
a coherent geographical entity (MacLeod and
Rehbock, 1994) – as was ‘darkest africa’
(Brantlinger, 1985) – as these toponymic
labels were brought into cultural currency.
The same can also be said of the tropical
world – a conceptual space that came into
being courtesy of the conjoined forces of
geographical exploration, colonial administration and tropical medicine (Arnold, 1996b;
Livingstone, 1999; Stepan, 2001). Moreover,
exploration and exhibition frequently went
hand in hand, as in the case of Egypt, which
found its people and places enframed, ordered
and exhibited to suit European curiosity
(Mitchell, 1988).
Space does not permit further elucidation
of such motifs in other regions. Suffice to note
that in the African context, according to the
Comaroffs (1991, p. 313), European colonization ‘was often less a directly coercive conquest
than a persuasive attempt to colonize consciousness, to remake people by redefining the
taken-for-granted surfaces of their everyday
worlds’. Yet here too the temptation towards
‘monolithizing’ the encounter must be resisted:
the moral significance of African environments
became a source of endless debate about the
effects of a tropical climate on white constitution and the connections between black racial
character, biological make-up and physical
geography (Livingstone, 1991). In South
America, it was Humboldt’s ‘interweaving of
visual and emotive language’ that contributed
so powerfully towards what Pratt (1992) calls
the ‘ideological reinvention’ of ‘América’ – a
re-imagining so vivid and so vital that
Humboldt’s writings provided founding
visions for both the older elites of northern
Europe and the newer independent elites of
Spanish America.
If these machinations, however tangled
their genealogies, satisfied a European sense
of superiority through constituting the peripheral regions of the globe in its own terms,
those self-same arenas were soon to become
pivotal laboratories for scrutiny into human
prehistory. In this way, the threat that resided
in ‘alien’ human natures could be rendered
benign if those races turned out to be the
persistent remnants of earlier phases in
the story of human evolution. Just as earlier
Scottish
and
French
enlightenment
thinkers, such as Smith, Ferguson and
Buffon, regularly crafted their image of the
bestial or noble savage into evolutionary
schemes depicting a transition from barbarism
to civilization, so early-twentieth-century
students of human archaeology used ‘the
peoples defined as living at the uttermost ends
of the imperial world as examples of living
prehistory’ (Gamble, 1992, p. 713: see also
primitivism). Thereby their identities
remained engulfed within the imperatives of
Western scientific scrutiny. They also
remained subordinated in the cartographic
representations that invariably accompanied
the exploratory process. Whether in their use
as military tools, in their advocacy of colonial
promotion, in their marginal decorations, in
their systems of hierarchical classification or
in their imposition of a regulative geometry
that bore little reference to indigenous
peoples, maps became the conductors of
imperial power and Western ideology (see
cartography, history of).
Imperial readings of exploration, however,
can serve to obscure as much as they reveal
when presented with monolithic tenacity.
Treating ethnicity as simply the invention
of missionary activity, colonial officialdom or
early anthropology, for example, is insufficiently flexible to take the measure of exploration encounters. Such scenarios are not
sufficiently subtle to discern the complex role
of the missionary movement – to take one
activity too easily typecast as the servant
of cultural imperialism – in emerging senses
of nationhood. Thus we are only beginning
to appreciate how, in the African context, a
missionary passion to render indigenous languages into written form (for the purpose of
Bible translation) provided mother tongue
cultures with a vernacular literacy that in turn
cultivated nascent senses of nationhood.
Through translation, written languages were
created and a vocabulary for national selfconsciousness fostered (see Sanneh, 1990;
Hastings, 1997).
The history and geography of ‘exploration’,
then, turns out to be far from antiquarian
chronology. Rather, it focuses centrally on
the identity of people, the wielding of power
and the construction of knowledge; and it is
precisely because these are entangled in such
complex and intricate ways that their elucidation is of crucial importance to the future
dnl
course of human history.
233
EXPLORATORY DATA ANALYSIS (EDA)
Suggested reading
Ballantyne (2004); Burnett (2000); Driver (2001a);
Fernandez-Armesto (2006).
exploratory data analysis (EDA) An attitude
to quantitative methods that encourages
and licences a ‘trial-and-error’ approach. The
term was popularized by the statistician
John Tukey, who recognized two approaches
to data analysis. Exploratory approaches
uncover patterns and anomalies in the data –
he likened this to numerical detective work
whereby evidence is gathered. confirmatory
data analysis, in contrast, equates to significance testing and probabilistic inference, as
in a trial where evidence is put in a formal
manner and a judicial decision made ‘beyond
reasonable doubt’. The exploratory approach
is based on the notion that ‘better a good
answer to a vague question than a precise
answer to the wrong one’ and that ‘by assuming less you learn more’. It has encouraged the
use and development of smoothing procedures that reveal patterns in data, of diagnostic,
often graphical, tools for exposing where
assumptions are not met, and of procedures
that are robust/resistant to anomalies (outliers) in data. Johnston (1986a, ch. 6) argues
that such data analysis should be an integral
part of a non-positivist, realist approach
to doing geography. Exploratory spatial data
analysis (ESDA) extends EDA to detect
spatial properties of data.
kj
Suggested reading
Cox and Jones (1981); Haining, Wise and Ma
(1998).
export processing zone (EPZ) A geographically delimited territory providing special
facilities for foreign branch plants, using
imported inputs to manufacture commodities
for export. Plants locating within the territory
are subsidized with some combination of
infrastructure, tax advantages, relaxed labour
regulations, and eased imports and exports.
EPZs provide incentives to attract foreign
investment to low-wage countries, but also
high-wage countries (there are 300 in the
USA). EPZs typically locate near the periphery of countries, reinforcing external orientation. Workers are predominantly women in
non-skilled jobs, often under draconian labour
relations. Since the first EPZ in Ireland in
1956, there has been an explosion since the
mid-1970s to over 5,000 zones, with employment exceeding 40 million, in more than 100
countries.
es
234
extensive research
Research strategies
directed towards discovering common properties and empirical regularities and making generalizations about them. Sayer (1992 [1984])
argued that extensive research is typically conducted under the signs of empiricism or positivism and relies on quantitative methods,
including descriptive and inferential statistics
and numerical analysis, and on questionnaires and formal interviews. As such, it is
concerned with ‘representative’ studies or
samples and privileges a logic of replication:
Can the results of the study be repeated? Sayer
regarded extensive research as weaker than
intensive research, which is typically conducted under the sign of realism, because
it elucidates formal relations of similarity
or correlation rather than causal or structural
relations.
dg
external economies Closely related to the
concept of externalities, external economies
are economic benefits that derive from sources
outside an organization, such as a firm. These
benefits, which can include the contributions
of specialist suppliers, subcontractors or
skilled workers hired from the local labour
market, accrue to individual companies even
though they are generated elsewhere. In cases
where they are not available, companies must
bear the costs of producing them internally.
The benefits of external economies are often
captured locally, declining with distance. An
early formulation of this argument came in the
shape of the growth pole theory developed
by the French economist François Perroux in
the late 1940s (see Darwent, 1969), which was
influential in regional policy debates in the
1960s and 1970s. Growth poles were geographical concentrations of economic activity,
often dominated by a single industry or a
closely related group of industries, in which
local firms yielded the economic benefits (or
positive externalities) of co-location with other
firms. In this context, the growth of individual
firms might stimulate business amongst suppliers (through so-called backward linkages)
and/or amongst users of outputs or services
(through forward linkages). Driven by propulsive industries, successful growth poles are
characterized by mutually beneficial, cumulative economic growth. These arguments recall
Alfred Marshall’s account of ‘industrial districts’ in nineteenth-century England: in
Sheffield’s cutlery quarter, for example, firms
clustered together to capture benefits of
shared access to critical factors of production
such as skilled labour and technical knowledge
EXTERNALITIES
that circulated, Marshall observed, as if ‘in the
air’ (see Krugman, 1991).
These arguments have been vigorously
rejoined in recent years in discussions of industrial clusters, agglomeration economies,
and flexible accumulation. Allen Scott
(1988b), for example, has argued that the tendency towards vertical disintegration – in which
firms increasingly turn to the market to supply
key inputs and services, rather than organizing
these internally – is a defining characteristic of
the contemporary form of post-fordist capitalism. As firms become increasingly reliant on
external inputs, the competitive imperative of
minimizing transaction costs induces geographical clustering, which in turn accounts
for the continuing significance of localized
centres of production such as Hollywood and
the City of London, even in highly globalized
industries such as movie production and
finance. Likewise, Storper and Walker (1989)
contend that the process of capitalist industrialization is increasingly driven by external
economies of scale and economies of scope
which in the contemporary phase of growth
accrue to entire industries rather than just individual firms. In this analysis, technological
innovation (such as the development of integrated circuits or the internet) assumes the
character of a shared resource, with spillover
benefits for the economy as a whole. In contemporary industrial districts, such as the EmiliaRomagna region of Italy, it is also argued that
even rival firms reap external economies from a
climate of trust and reciprocity, resulting in
collaborative initiatives in areas such as training,
design, marketing and research. These are what
Michael Storper (1997b) calls ‘untraded interdependencies’, which are increasingly salient in
the contemporary era of vertically disintegrated,
flexible capitalism.
jpe
Suggested reading
Scott and Storper (2003).
externalities Costs or benefits borne by an
individual not directly involved in the activity;
or, in broader terms, the social or environmental consequences of private choices. Positive
externalities (sometimes known as external
economies) represent benefits accruing to
third parties; for example, those arising from
a bee-keeper located next to an apple orchard,
or a group of residents living near to highquality local schools. Negative externalities
(which are also known as external diseconomies) refer to the downstream costs of
choices or activities for third parties, the classic
illustration of which is pollution. This is a key
concept in environmental economics, exposing some of the limits of purely market-based
systems of coordination, since negative externalities are costs that fall on actors other than those
directly involved in the activity. A tragedy
of the commons may result, in which individually motivated actors ‘free-ride’ on collective or
shared resources, capturing individual benefits,
but with a net detriment for society as a whole,
as shared resources are depleted or degraded
(see Hardin, 1968). Responses to these
dilemmas can include governmental regulation
such as ‘green taxes’, or market-mimicking
strategies such as pollution pricing.
In economic geography, an example of
negative externalities is the common problem
of firms under-investing in skills training:
these costly and risky investments can be
evaded by individual firms if they poach skilled
workers from other firms, or otherwise plunder
the resources of urban labour markets. The
aggregate outcome is an under-investment in
skills across the urban labour market, as even
scrupulous employers are deterred from training their own workers for fear of poaching (see
Peck, 1996). Meanwhile, examples of positive
externalities include those ‘agglomeration
economies’ captured by firms locating near
to suppliers and customers. Scott (1988c)
reveals how many so-called ‘flexible firms’
are narrowly redefining the boundaries of their
organizations, focusing on core competences
while buying in an increasingly broad array
of goods and services from other firms (e.g.
contract catering, management consultancy,
temporary-agency labour). In order to minimize the transaction costs associated with such
activities, flexible firms are induced to cluster
together in space, generating the dense networks of inter-firm relations that characterize
‘new industrial spaces’ such as Silicon Valley.
Take the example of Wal-Mart, the world’s
largest retailer and the USA’s biggest employer
(see Wrigley, 2002; Brunn, 2006). The longrunning debate around the local community
impacts Wal-Mart centres on externalities.
Critics of the company allege that its practice
of paying low wages is a form of free-riding
on public welfare systems, since many of
Wal-Mart’s employees qualify for government
programmes designed for the poor, such as
food stamps, subsidized housing and publicly
funded healthcare. Other negative externalities follow from Wal-Mart’s ability to hold
down prices (due to its market power), which
often drives smaller, neighbourhood retailers
out of business. On the other hand, defenders
235
EXTERNALITIES
of the company counter that most of the externalities are positive ones: Wal-Mart contributes to local social welfare by generating
employment (particularly by locating in lowincome neighbourhoods that have been largely
abandoned by large employers) and by
236
reducing prices for customers, many of whom
also tend to be poor. A major store can also
generate additional sales for a range of local
companies such as restaurants and gas stations,
another form of positive externality.
jpe
F
factor analysis A statistical procedure for
transforming a (variables by observations)
data matrix into a new matrix whose variables
are uncorrelated. Unlike principal components analysis, the number of variables in
the new matrix is less than in the original as
the unique variance associated with each original variable is excluded. The new variables –
termed factors – are composites of the original
variables: the factor loadings (interpreted in
the same way as correlation coefficients)
indicate the relative strength of the relationship between the original and new variables;
the factor scores provide a measure for each
observation on the new variables (weighted
according to the factor loadings). The matrices of factor loadings may be rotated in order
to enhance interpretation of the new variables.
Most rotations aim to maximize the relationship of the original variables to just one factor;
they may be either orthogonal – retaining the
uncorrelated nature of the factors – or oblique –
allowing intercorrelations among factors.
Factor analysis may be used either inductively, to identify groups of interrelated
variables (cf. exploratory data analysis), or
deductively, to test hypotheses about interrelationships. Factor analysis and the associated principal components analysis (the two
are often treated – although wrongly – as the
same procedure) have been extensively used
within geography since its quantitative revolution, in two ways: as a means of identifying
socio-spatial order in large data sets (not least
in the automated treatment of the raw data in
remote sensing); and to produce composite
variables that could be used to represent and
map general concepts – such as economic
development. It is still widely used in ecological studies (cf. factorial ecology).
rj
Suggested reading
Johnston (1978).
factorial ecology The application of either
factor analysis or principal components
analysis to matrices of socio-economic and
other data for areal units. Generally used
inductively (cf. induction), most factorial
ecologies have been applied to data for
small areas within cities (cf. census tract),
to identify patterns of residential segregation. It is a relatively sophisticated technical
procedure for describing the main elements of
urban socio-spatial structure (cf. social area
analysis).
rj
Suggested reading
Davies (1984).
factors of production The
ingredients
necessary to the production process; that is,
those things that must be assembled at one
place before production can begin. The three
broad headings conventionally adopted are
land, labour and capital. Sometimes the
fourth factor of ‘enterprise’ is added, to recognize the contribution of the ‘entrepreneur’
or risk-taker and the legitimacy of a special
return to this participant in the productive
process. However, in the current complexity
of economic organization, it is hard to distinguish enterprise from general management
functions, so this factor is more appropriately
subsumed under labour. The combination
of factors of production reflects the state of
technology applied in the activity in question;
for example, whether it is capital-intensive or
labour-intensive.
Land is necessary for any productive activity, whether it is agriculture, mining, manufacturing or services. Land may be a direct source
of a raw material, as with mining, or it may
be required for the cultivation of a crop or to
support the physical plant of a manufacturing
activity. Modern industry requires increasing
quantities of land, as factory sites and for such
associated uses as storage, roadways and
parking.
Labour requirements vary with the nature of
the activity in question. Some need numerous
unskilled workers while others require more
skilled operatives, technicians, office personnel and so on. The availability of particular
types of labour can have an important bearing on the location of economic activity.
Despite the growing capital-intensity of modern industry, cheap labour with a record of
stability is still an attraction. That the value
of production can ultimately be traced to
the factor of labour is central to the labour
theory of value.
237
FAIR TRADE
Capital includes all things deliberately created by humans for the purpose of production.
This includes the physical plant, buildings and
machinery (i.e. fixed capital: cf. sunk costs)
plus the circulating capital in the form of stocks
of raw materials, components, semi-finished
goods and so on. Private ownership of capital
and land is the major distinguishing feature
of the capitalist mode of production, which
carries with it important implications for the
distribution of income and wealth (see marxist economics; neo-classical economlcs).
The conventional categories of land, labour
and capital (and enterprise) can serve an
ideological role in legitimizing the differential
rewards of the various contributors to production under capitalism. The concept of
productive forces is preferred in socialist economics. In any event, for practical purposes
these broad categories tend to be subdivided
into the individual inputs actually required in
particular productive activities.
dms
Suggested reading
Smith (1981).
fair trade The demand that producers from
poorer countries should not be denied the
legitimate maximum rewards from their sales
by the actions of richer countries or other
powerful agents. Fair trade campaigns go back
a long way and embrace several related issues.
Indian nationalists complained about a system
of Imperial Preferences and asked for a
measure of protection to help set up infant
industries in areas such as iron and steel. In
the 1950s, Oxfam took a lead in promoting
fair trade ideas under the slogan ‘Helping
by Selling’. Similar ideas were taken up in
the 1960s, when many African countries
demanded ‘trade not aid’. This slogan
became the motif of the first UN Conference
on Trade and Development, held in Geneva in
1964. Other trade justice campaigns have
complained about export dumping by richer
countries. Still others worry about pressures
being placed on developing countries to liberalise their own markets too quickly. Ha-Joon
Chang (2002) has charged that almost all of
today’s advanced industrial economies benefited from protection. Now, however, they and
their representatives in the international
monetary fund (imf) and world trade
organization (wto) want to kick away that
ladder to success in the developing world (see
neo-liberalism).
Campaigns to ensure more open and equitable access to richer markets for developing
238
world producers continue to be important in
the fair trade pantheon. Developing countries
pressed for liberalization of agricultural
markets in the European Union and
North America during the World Trade
Organization talks held in Hong Kong in
2005 (Stiglitz and Chorlton, 2006). The fair
trade issue was also pushed strongly by the
Make Poverty History campaign. Sugar producers in West Africa or the Caribbean will not
receive a fair return for their crop when countries in the richer world offer large subsidies to
domestic producers of sugar cane or beet.
More recently, fair trade campaigners have
put the spotlight on trade negotiations that
link small producers to some of the world’s
largest or most powerful companies. Take the
case of coffee. How are small producers in
Central America meant to strike fair deals
with giant coffee purchasers when those same
companies can use their immense purchasing
power to strike better deals for themselves
with producers in Brazil or Vietnam? The
answer, in part, is for small producers to form
co-operatives. They can then work with campaigning groups to persuade Starbucks and
other coffee giants of the commercial value of
selling ‘fair trade’ brands in their outlets. At
this point, fair trade campaigns rub shoulders
with calls for ethical consumption (Nicholls
and Opal, 2005).
Questions of market access and fair trade
also take shape within poorer countries.
Many small producers in the developing world
are hurt by governments that saddle them with
paperwork. It has been reported that some
banana growers in the Central African
Republic take over 110 days to get their
bananas on a ship to Europe, and need more
than 35 signatures to get them on board. Each
signature creates an opportunity for corruption, or rent-seeking behaviour. Trading structures remain distorted, rather than open or
developmental, and primary producers
continue to lose out.
sco
Suggested reading
Stiglitz and Charlton (2006). See also www.
makepovertyhistory.org
falsification The criterion proposed by the
philosopher of science Karl Popper (1902–94)
to demarcate science from non-science. In
Popper’s view, only statements capable of
falsification – that is, those possessing the capability of empirical refutation – were scientific.
Statements that could not be falsified – that
is, those unable to be proved wrong – were
FAMINE
non-scientific. For Popper, the division
between falsifiable and non-falsifiable statements was inviolate, allowing consistent separation of science from non-science
Popper first proposed falsification in his
1935 book Logik der Forschung (translated as
The logic of scientific inquiry; Popper, 1959). It
was written as a response to discussions at the
Vienna Circle of logical positivism that he
attended, although it was a group to which
he was never admitted as a full member.
Logical positivists argued for the principle of
verification, according to which the truth of a
scientific statement was given by its correspondence to real-world observations. Popper,
dubbed by one member of the Vienna Circle,
Otto Neurath, as ‘the official opposition’,
claimed to the contrary that scientific statements were never verified, only falsified.
Because no one is omnipotent, it is impossible
to know whether in the future a scientific claim
will be disproved by a disconfirming instance
(and a single disconfirming instance is all that
is required to refute a general claim). For
example, the verified truth of pre-eighteenthcentury natural scientists in europe that all
swans were white was invalidated when
Captain Cook sailed to australia and found
black swans. The growth of scientific knowledge, as Popper (1963) would later claim, was
based not on verifying theories, but on falsifying them, and in the process developing alternatives that were less worse; that is, not yet
falsified. This was one of the basal propositions of Popper’s development of critical
rationalism.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
Kuhn (1970 [1962]) provided the root of a
trenchant critique of Popper’s position. Kuhn
portrayed the trajectory of science as punctuated by periods of fundamental change he
called paradigm shifts; for example, the move
from Newtonian to Einsteinian celestial mechanics. During such shifts, everything was in
flux, Kuhn argued, including criteria of falsification. Popper had made such criteria fixed and
constant and yet, as Bernstein (1983, p. 71)
later put it, ‘data or evidence do not come
marked ‘‘falsification’’.’ Criteria of falsification are moving elements, not existing outside
of debate, and settled only after change has
happened.
Falsification should have been an important
criterion for geographers during the period of
the quantitative revolution, when the discipline modelled itself most explicitly on the
natural sciences. But it wasn’t. If anything,
that disciplinary move was backed by logical
positivism, the very philosophy Popper
thought he had dispatched in the 1930s.
Alan Wilson (1972, p. 32), one of the leaders
of geography’s quantitative revolution, did
suggest the importance of falsification in a
1972 statement: ‘The essence of the scientific
method . . . is an attempt to disprove theory –
to marshall observations to contradict the
predictions of the theory.’ But it was programmatic, and never realized in Wilson’s practice,
or the practices of anyone else in geography.
This was precisely Kuhn’s point, and later
developed in science studies: falsification
could never be realized.
tb
Suggested reading
Popper (1963, pp. 33–9).
family reconstitution A method used in
historical demography to create measurements in the absence of data on demographic
stocks and flows made available through
censuses and vital registration that applies
nominative linkage techniques to baptisms,
marriages and burials recorded in parish
registers (see Fleury and Henry, 1965). The
technique can also be adapted for use with
genealogies (see Henry 1956). It starts from a
marriage and links baptisms and burials of
children born to the couple as well as their
subsequent marriages. Family reconstitution
rules devised originally for use with French
parish registers by Louis Henry have been
adapted for use with registers elsewhere, with
a view to establishing a population at risk
or under observation so that age-specific mortality and fertility rates can be calculated.
Marriage age can be derived by linking baptisms and marriage dates and information
can be extracted that will enable fecundity,
birth and pre-nuptial pregnancy rates to be
computed (see Wrigley, 1966a). Linkage is
far more successful where migration is low,
and consequently cities and large towns have
rarely benefited from the technique, which has
been used primarily to reconstruct the population of villages and smaller market towns
(see Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen and Schofield,
1997).
rms
Suggested reading
Wrigley (1966a); Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen and
Schofield (1997).
famine A relatively sudden event involving
mass mortalities from starvation within a
short period. Famine is typically distinguished
from chronic hunger, understood as endemic
239
FARMING
nutritional deprivation on a persistent basis (as
opposed to seasonal hunger, for example).
Definitions of famine are fraught with danger
because (i) cultural, as opposed to biological,
definitions of starvation vary around diverse,
locally defined norms, and (ii) deaths from
starvation are frequently impossible to distinguish from those from disease
Nearly all societies have periodically suffered from the consequences of famine. The
earliest recorded famine, which occurred in
ancient Egypt, dates to 4000 bce; famine conditions currently threaten parts of the Horn of
Africa and parts of North Korea. The dynamics and characteristics of mass starvation in
modern times have similar structural properties, however; typically, such famines involve
sharp price increases for staple foodstuffs,
decapitalization of household assets, gathering of wild foods, borrowing and begging,
petty crime and occasionally food riots, and
out-migration. According to the Hunger
Program at Brown University, the trend in
famine casualties has been downward since
1945, but in the late 1980s states with a
combined population of 200 million failed to
prevent famine within their national borders.
Hunger, and famine in particular, is intolerable in the modern world, however, because
it is unnecessary and unwarranted (Dreze and
Sen, 1989).
Famine causation has often been linked to
natural disasters, population growth and war,
which produces a reduction in the food supply
(Malthus, 1970 [1798]). But some major famines (e.g. Bengal in 1943) were not preceded
by a significant decline in food production or
absolute availability, and in some cases have
been associated with food export. Recent analyses have focused on access to and control
over food resources – sometimes called the
food availability decline hypothesis. Sen (1981)
argues that what we eat depends on what food
we are able to acquire. Famine, therefore, is
a function of the failure of socially specific
entitlements through which individuals command bundles of commodities. Entitlements
vary in relation to property rights, asset distribution, class and gender. Famine is therefore
a social phenomenon rooted in institutional
and political economic arrangements, which
determine the access to food by different
classes and strata (Watts, 1983a). Mass poverty and mass starvation are obviously linked
via entitlements. Mass poverty results from
long-term changes in entitlements associated
with social production and distribution mechanisms; famines arise from short-term changes
240
in these same mechanisms. Famine and
endemic deprivation correspond to two forms
of public action to eradicate them: famine
policy requires entitlement protection to
ensure that it does not collapse among vulnerable groups (i.e. landless labourers, women).
Chronic hunger demands entitlement promotion to expand the command that people have
over basic necessities (Dreze and Sen, 1989).
Since 1945 India has implemented a successful anti-famine policy, yet conspicuously failed
to eradicate endemic deprivation. China, conversely, has overcome the structural hunger
problem (even during the socialist period),
but failed to prevent massive famine in the
1950s. africa has witnessed a catastrophic
growth in the incidence of both mass starvation and chronic hunger (de Waal, 1997).
The role of state policy and of humanitarian aid figures centrally in the discussions of
famine and famine causation. While the
public sphere is key in understanding how
and why the right to food and the right not
to be hungry are made effective, the recent
history of famine shows clearly how the state
can use famine and humanitarian aid for
explicitly political purposes. The case against
Stalin and the Ukrainian famine is clear in this
regard, and the catastrophic Chinese famine
of the late 1950s is a compelling instance of
how inept state policies to achieve rapid
industrialization backfired, but also how
an authoritarian state ignored famine signals
and colluded in the deaths of 20 million
people (Becker, 1997). Sen (1981) has argued
that famines rarely occur in societies in which
there is freedom of the press (and in which
states are therefore held to be accountable
in some way). Humanitarian assistance has
also been an object of critique insofar as it
itself becomes politicized (and rendered as a
business), and often fails to be more than a
short-term palliative (rather than assisting in
the rehabilitation and reconstruction of
famine-devastated communities; de Waal,
1997).
mw
Suggested reading
Davis (2001).
farming Most literally,
the land-based,
human-managed production of food and fibre
by the transformation of seed into crops and/
or the raising of livestock (the latter of which is
also referred to as pastoralism or ranching).
Farming is of general significance for all social
scientists, because it is the most routine and
widespread way in which humans directly
FARMING
interact with nature, and because adequate
food production and consumption has
proven to be crucial for the stability of social
formations.
Farming as a capitalist enterprise preceded
England’s industrial revolution, as tenant
farmers began cultivating wool for the nascent
textile industry (see agricultural revolution). Since the Second World War, the world
has seen massive transformation of farming
sectors. In the industrialized counties, these
transformations began with the proliferation
of technologies of intensive agriculture,
especially those that relied on the development
of petrochemical inputs; these technologies
were extended to some areas of the third
world, with the idea that high-yielding
agriculture (see green revolution) and
industrialization were keys to development
(Goodman and Redclift, 1991). Since the
1980s, however, rural populations have substantially declined (see urbanization). The
1970s was a period of farm expansion, owing
to the USA selling massive amounts of grain to
the Soviet Union, which caused a temporary
food shortage and high prices for farmers. The
collapse in prices that followed contributed
to the international debt crises of the 1980s,
which forced many farmers out of business
who could no longer pay the farm mortgages
they acquired in the previous expansion
(Friedmann, 1993). Recent free trade agreements have allowed low-cost producers, such
as the USA, to dump surplus crops in cashpoor regions and countries, undermining the
livelihoods of peasants and small farmers,
contributing to even more displacement.
Categorizing patterns of farm land use was
a staple feature of traditional agricultural
geography (Tarrant, 1974). Farm size has
continued to be a major analytic in empirical
studies of farming, owing in part to the availability of census data, which are often reported
as acres/hectares in production and/or gross
sales. As the political economy of agriculture tradition came to dominate agricultural
geography in the 1980s, more effort was put
into developing more theoretically informed
typologies of farm business organization and
to help explain changes in farming practice
(see, e.g., Whatmore, Munton, Little and
Mardsen, 1987). These efforts engaged with
a long sociological tradition concerned with
the class location of farmers and the social
organization of farming relative to state and
capital (see Buttel and Newby, 1980). land
tenure, capital ownership, labour relations,
family life-cycle and rent-seeking thus
became primary analytics, and the persistence
of the family farm, defined as that where
family members provide all or most of the
agricultural labour regardless of the extent of
its commercial orientation (cf. subsistence
agriculture) became a central theoretical
question. One widely cited theorization of this
uneven development of capitalist agriculture
was Goodman, Sorj and Wilkinson (1987).
capitalism has developed around farming,
they argued, because with its basis in land
and biology, farming itself remains risky, while
the processes that serve farming are more easily commodified and sold back to the farmer
(see agrarian question; substitutionism).
Watts (1994a) drew on these arguments in
his work on contract farming, noting that the
degree to which buyer firms specify required
processes and inputs in their contracts has
made many peasants equivalent to wage
labourers on their own land. Sachs (1996)
added that the enduring family basis of farming in most parts of the world has in large part
depended on highly gendered divisions of
labour within peasant households. In some
sectors and regions, however, farming operations themselves are large-scale, capitalist
enterprises (Heffernan and Constance,
1994). Highly mechanized corporate farms
should be differentiated from plantations
that, while corporately owned and managed
and large in scale, employ many manual
labourers.
In the early 1990s, agro-food scholars began
to take note of divergent trends in farming and
food production. Heightened pubic concern
with food safety and quality, the ecological
effects of agriculture and the changing
countryside (in some cases depopulation, in
others urbanization) seemed to support a turn
towards farming that would be more sensitive
to ecological concerns and protective of rural
livelihoods. In addition, growth in part-time
and hobby farming, a resurgence of back to
the land sensibilities among those seeking
alternative lifestyles, along with a putative
shift in national forms of farm regulation away
from commodity supports seemed to indicate
a ‘post-productivist’ transition in agriculture
(Marsden, 1992). While the dramatic rise in
organics, for example, seems to provide support for this claim, the European and US
farming sectors are state-supported more
than ever, albeit in different ways to different
ends. Meanwhile, many Third World farming
sectors are producing high-value fruits and
vegetables under conditions of structural
adjustment.
241
FASCISM
Technology-driven intensive agriculture
has hardly gone away, in spite of increased
incidences of biological ‘blowback’ from
industrial food production – such as bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or ‘mad
cow’ disease. Driven in part by the twin
revolutions in information science and biotechnology, farming itself seems to be moving in directions that belie the opening
definition of this entry. Already, surplus commodities, such as corn and oil seed, which
have long been a source of livestock fodder,
are being deployed for industrial uses.
Precision agriculture uses satellite data to
determine local variation in soil conditions
and plant development, and information technologies to track and fine-tune applications of
farm inputs. Genetic engineering has been
used to improve crop protection by, for
example, engineering natural pesticides or
frost protection into plants. The use of genetically engineered livestock or plants to produce medically useful crops – or ‘gene
pharming’ – is just in the pipeline, as is the
introduction of nutrients or vaccines into
existing food crops. These sorts of developments are drawing geographers to new questions and theorizations, many borrowed from
the toolkits of science and technology studies.
At the same time, many of these technologies carry ecological risks and are also leading
to unprecedented degrees of privatization.
Therefore, they have become a major galvanizing feature of contemporary social movements. Since most of these trends point to a
continued decline in rural populations, the
family farm seems to have achieved heightened ideological status. Thus, the distinctions between peasant, family and corporate
forms are not just academic, but are relevant
to political practice, particularly given the reemergence of discourses of agrarian populism
within both institutions of development and
social-justice oriented social movements
(Wolford, 2003).
jgu
Suggested reading
Bell (2004); Duncan (1996); Guthman (2004).
fascism A political ideology that formed
the basis of political parties and social movements that emerged in europe between the
two world wars. The nationalist governments
of Adolf Hitler in Germany (1933–45) and
Benito Mussolini in Italy (1922–43) are the
most notable examples, but fascism was a political force across Europe at the time, including Oswald Mosley’s ‘black shirts’ in Britain,
242
the Iron Guard in Romania and the Croix de
Feu in France (Laqueur, 1996). Despite the
lack of a seminal intellectual text, the following characteristics of the ideology can be identified: extreme racist nationalism; a desire for
a ‘pure’ nation-state that contains just one
national group; goals of territorial expansion
to include all members of a nation within the
borders of the state (cf. lebensraum); anticommunism and other forms of working-class
organization; violence represented as necessary for the survival of the nation and as a
pathway to fulfilling innate human needs; a
glorification of manliness and gender roles,
promoting men as defenders of the nation
and women’s primary role in the biological
reproduction of the nation (cf. masculinism);
and a mass politics in which the state and the
party fuse and mass participation in politics
(based upon a cult of the leader) is encouraged. Elements of these ideologies exist in
contemporary nationalist political parties
across the world, as extreme nationalism is
mobilized in the wake of social dynamics (such
as immigration and a decline in the power of
the state) that are identified as ‘threats’.
Political parties in Russia and Serbia display
some of these traits, as do the British National
Party and some extremist right-wing movements in the USA.
The racism of fascist movements is often,
but not necessarily, anti-Semitic. Jews are frequently targeted as enemies because, prior to
the establishment of the state of Israel, they
lacked connection to a particular territory.
Hence, they were seen as disloyal to the nation
or inimical to the idea of territorial nationstates. The foreign policy of the Nazi Party
was partially informed by the ideas of geopolitik, which saw territorial expansion as a
strategy related to the holocaust and the
extermination of Jews (as well as gypsies,
communists and homosexuals), to create a
political geography of a ‘pure’ and ‘greater’
Germany (Clarke, Doel and McDonough,
1996: see also genocide).
Social scientists and historians have debated
the social bases of fascism. The idea that the
middle classes were the main source of support dominated until recent years, when the
notion of a cross-class support for the Nazis
emerged. The geography of fascism shows that
support is based upon different class coalitions
in different localities, within the broader
context of economic restructuring and
inter-state competition (Flint, 2001). Recent
scholarship has argued that the support for
inter-war fascism was more widespread than
FEMINISM
had been believed (Goldhagen, 1996), with
‘ordinary citizens’’ rather than committed
party members carrying out much of the killing in the Holocaust. This controversial work
has contemporary implications as geographers
have turned their attention to genocide,
under the label of ‘ethnic cleansing’, in the
former Yugoslavia and in Africa.
cf
Suggested reading
Larsen, Hagtvet and Myklebust (1980); Laqueur
(1996).
fecundity An individual’s capacity to reproduce (as distinct from fertility, an individual’s actual reproductive performance). A
physical (biological) component varies with
age and sex, with women reaching peak
fecundity between menstruation and menopause, and male fecundity decreasing, but less
rapidly, with old age. Infecundity increases
with poor nutrition and ill health: the ongoing
HIV/AIDS epidemic has reduced fertility
levels in many regions both because of the
premature deaths of potential parents and
because fecundity is impaired (Gregson,
1994). Research also recognizes a social component when, for example, women believe
they cannot give birth, and when medical
practitioners expressly counsel against giving
birth.
ajb
Suggested reading
Weeks (1999, Ch. 5).
federalism A form of government in which
power and functions are divided between
central and regional authorities with the goal
of providing autonomy to regional units
(Wheare, 1963). Federal forms of government
vary widely, but require a written constitution
to delimit the roles of different levels of government. Federalist states usually experience
a continual political process of defining the
degree of centralization and regional autonomy. In states with geographically concentrated ethnic groups (see ethnicity), federalism
can reinforce ethnic differences, but it also
provides a political solution to ethnic competition for control of the state (Ikporukpo,
2004).
cf
Suggested reading
Smith (1995).
feedback A reciprocal effect within a system, whereby change in one variable (A) influences changes in others (B, C), which may
then stimulate further change in A. Negative
feedback generally maintains the system’s equilibrium: an increase in the number of animals
in an ecosystem may stimulate growth in the
number of their predators, whose actions then
reduce the number of animals to the previous
level. Such systems are morphostatic, in
dynamic equilibrium; the period between any
shock to the system and the return to its equilibrium state is termed its relaxation time.
With positive feedback, an increase in A may
stimulate increase in B, which in turn stimulates further growth in A, as in the multiplier
processes associated with input__output
models. Such systems are morphogenetic. rj
Suggested reading
Langton (1972).
feminism A diffuse political movement,
which has varied over space and time, that
aims to identify and dismantle systematic gender inequality, and the myriad ways in which
gender differentiation, heteronormativity,
masculinism, and phallocentricism naturalize, anchor and relay all kinds of social
exclusion, and physical and symbolic violence. It struggles to improve women’s lives
across a range of issues: violence against
women; sexual harassment; access and equity
in schools, workplaces, before the law and
within political life; the division of domestic
labour; and reproductive rights, among
others. It seeks to revolutionize thought in
daily life and throughout the arts and sciences,
and to undo and reconceptualize the many
naturalized qualities attributed to women and
men, what counts as knowledge, and the
relation between knowledge and practice.
Feminist struggles have been important not
only for their substantive achievements and
goals, but for the process through which these
have been sought; Dietz argues that feminist
movements in the USA are a living repository
of democratic norms and practices that have
‘nearly ceased to be part of the politics of the
United States’ (1987, p. 16). Historical accounts of Anglo-American feminism typically
distinguish between first-wave (late nineteenth
century to the First World War), second-wave
(1960–1980s) and third-wave (1980s–) feminisms, although this periodizing risks simplification. For instance, although first-wave
feminism is known for campaigns to win
women’s right to vote, these were part of
broader concerns about women’s rights to
education, paid employment, sexual freedom
and financial self-sufficiency (Blunt and Wills,
243
FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES
2000). Periodizing risks a second tendency:
this is to code these stages within a narrative
of progress or development, against which
feminisms in other parts of the world can be
judged as advanced or, more typically, backwards (Shih, 2002).
Modern Western feminism was constituted
in relation to the abstract individualism that
is the basis for social and political inclusion
within liberalism. Women have been
excluded from many of the supposedly universal norms and claims of liberalism, but have
used these norms to struggle for inclusion
within them. Insofar as they have shared this
experience of exclusion with other social
groups, this has offered grounds for alliances.
Nonetheless, Western feminism has been
criticized for its own exclusions, concealed by
its universalizing claims about women’s
experience. Criticisms of feminism as white,
middle-class, heterosexist and Western were
prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, and
have led to attempts to understand both the
specificity and diversity of women’s experiences. It is not simply that women’s experiences differ depending on other aspects of
their social locations; feminism as a political
movement takes a different trajectory in
different places, depending on how it articulates with other political struggles. In the
Philippines, as one example, the ‘second wave’
of women’s liberation dating from 1970 was
closely articulated with the nationalist struggle
against the collusion between US imperialists
and landlord–comprador–bureaucrat capitalist allies within the Philippines (West, 1992).
As Morris (2006) writes: ‘ ‘‘Politics’’ is irreducibly plural . . . What I have in mind is not
simply the diversity of [feminist] groups,
movements and ‘‘positions’’ that can be
mapped as active at any given time around
the world, but rather the intrinsically dynamic,
unpredictably complex and consequential
nature of political struggle itself; in failing as
well as in succeeding, political practices alter
the contexts in which they occur . . . [W]e
have little to gain from polemically reducing
our vision to one project . . . We have too
rich a past from which to learn, and too much
to do in the future.’ But this also means
that the translatability across these myriad
feminist struggles can no longer be taken
for granted, and that Western feminists must
‘stop positing themselves as objects of
mimesis’ (Shih, 2002, p. 116) and do the hard
work of fully contextualizing the specificity
of feminist social movements in particular
times and places.
244
Feminism has always been a spatial practice:
to disrupt traditional organizations of space, to
forge productive dislocations and to reconfigure conventions of scale: ‘The dichotomy
between the private and the public is central
to almost two centuries of feminist writing and
political struggle; it is, ultimately, what the
feminist movement is about’ (Pateman, 1989,
p. 118: see also private and public spheres).
The feminist slogan, ‘the personal is the political’, expresses a refusal to accept both conventional boundaries between public and private,
and scalar distinctions between the body and
spaces of politics (see feminist geographies).
The term ‘postfeminist’ emerged in the
1990s, in part to signal differences among
women, the fluidity of gender categories and
the challenges of building a social movement
through the singular identification as women.
But there are many options for reformulating
feminism in terms other than postfeminism,
for instance, as transnational, transversal, as a
solidarity movement articulated through obligations of justice rooted in the interdependencies
of material conditions in specific places, or as
‘an empty signifier’ that gathers struggles over
the production of difference – through political struggle rather than identification (Pratt,
2004). It certainly would be a mistake to assume
that feminist struggles have been won. Although
women make up roughly half the labour force in
many countries, the majority of women in most
countries continue to work in traditionally
female jobs, for significantly lower wages than
men. Reproductive rights won through secondwave feminist activism are under attack in the
USA, and the division of domestic labour is
largely unchanged in many countries. The devolution of care under neo-liberalism has added
to women’s work responsibilities at home, and
the increasing militarization of daily life (cf.
militarism) in many countries has led to remasculization and intensified regulation of
heteronormativity.
gp
Suggested reading
Blunt and Wills (2000); Pratt (2004).
feminist geographies These geographies
focus on how gender and geographies are
mutually produced and transformed, and the
ways in which gender differentiation and heteronormativity permeate social life, and are
interwoven with and naturalize other categorical distinctions. The tradition dates from the
mid-1970s, drawing inspiration from women’s
movements of the 1960s (see feminism); it is
both a sub-field and a force that has reshaped
FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES
the entire discipline. It now has a considerable
institutional presence: the journal Gender,
Place and Culture has been published since
1994 (a series of excellent reviews of sub-areas
within feminist geography appeared throughout 2003 and 2004 to mark the journal’s
tenth anniversary); there are over 12 titles in
the Routledge International Studies of Women
and Place series; regular progress reports of
feminist geography appear in Progress in
Human Geography and Urban Geography; and
there are a good number of textbooks targeted
to varying levels of undergraduate and (post)
graduate students (e.g. Domosh and Seager,
2001; Jones III, Nast and Roberts, 1997;
McDowell and Sharpe, 1997; Moss, 2002;
Sharpe, Browne and Thien, 2004; Pratt,
2004), along with several key reference texts,
including A companion to feminist geography
(Nelson and Seager, 2005), a Feminist glossary
of human geography (McDowell and Sharpe,
1999) and The atlas of women (Seager,
2003a). Although there are distinguishable
strands, some common tendencies cut across
all feminist geographies:
(1) They are critical, not only of gender oppression and various manifestations of
heteronormativity in society, but of the
myriad ways that these are reproduced in
geographical knowledge. There is now a
comprehensive critique of geographical
traditions; for example, political geography (Staeheli, Kofman and Peake,
2004); historical geography (Domosh,
1991); humanistic geography (Rose,
1993); geographies of modernity and
postmodernity (Deutsche, 1991); and
more recent literatures on transnationalism (Mitchell, 1997c) and globalization (Nagar, Lawson, McDowell and
Hanson, 2002). Rose (1993) extends her
critique to the discipline as a whole, cataloguing its various and complementary
forms of masculinism. What the
relationship between feminist geography
and the discipline now is and should be
remains a matter of debate: some note the
lack of impact that more than two decades of vibrant feminist scholarship have
had on the discipline, while others problematize the increased exchange of ideas
between feminist and other strands of
critical human geography (for an excellent discussion of the potential
for exchange between feminist geographers and non-representational theory,
see Jacobs and Nash, 2003). Feminist
geographers’ relations with the discipline
have been framed through notions of ambivalence and the metaphors of paradoxical and in-between space (Bondi, 2004).
(2) Sexism within geographical institutions
(in the teaching of geography, the staffing
of academic departments, and through
the publication process) has been a
persistent concern (Monk and Hanson,
1982; Rose, 1993; Bondi, 2004). In the
past decade, this has been intertwined
with critiques of persistent racism in
the discipline.
(3) Nelson and Seager (2005, p. 6) position
feminist geography as ‘an innately interdisciplinary sub-field’. Within the discipline, feminist geographers practice this
tendency by tracing the interconnections
between all aspects of life, across the subdisciplinary boundaries of economic,
social, political and cultural geography. This entails breaking down
boundaries within sub-disciplines as
well; for instance, by demonstrating the
interdependencies between informal
and formal aspects of the economy (see
domestic labour). In an associated way,
feminist geographers disrupt conventional notions of scale, and move across
scales to trace connections between
similar processes in different places
(Katz, 2001; Nagar, Lawson, McDowell
and Hanson, 2002).
(4) Most feminist geographers share a commitment to situating knowledge, the view
that interpretations are context-bound
and partial, rather than detached and universal (see action research; phallocentrism, positionality; reflexivity;
qualitative methods; situated knowledge). This has produced a large literature on feminist methodologies,
including four journal symposia – Farrow, Moss and Shaw (1995), Hodge
(1995) and Nast (1994b) – and two
books (Jones III, Nast and Roberts,
1997; Moss, 2002). It has also led to experimental writing, including various
modes of self-reflexivity (for a critical
evaluation of these experiments, see
Rose, 1997b), and to efforts to disrupt
the individualist author (e.g. the fused
subject of Julie Graham and Kathy
Gibson as J.K. Gibson-Graham, the
Women in Geography Study Group writing collective, and collaborations between academics and community
groups).
245
FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES
(5) Feminist geographers tend to emphasize
the specificity of processes in particular
places. This has been tied to a critique
of universalizing, masculinist knowledge
claims, and a commitment to agency and
an open, transformable future. Certainly,
this has been an important strand of
feminist geographers’ criticism of masculinist knowledge, but it has been
extended to (non-geographical) feminist
theory as well (Katz, 2001a). Attending
to the particularities of gendered processes in specific places can be an important means of moving beyond highly
polarized academic debates and to engage
a messier, more nuanced and ambivalent
politics (Nagar, Lawson, McDowell and
Hanson, 2002; Pratt, 2004).
(6) Feminist knowledge production is typically aligned with a political commitment
to social transformation.
Despite these common themes, there is a
great deal of variation within feminist geography. Bowlby, Lewis, McDowell and Foord
(1989) sketched an influential history of feminist geographies, in which they identified two
breaks, one in the late 1970s and the other
towards the end of the 1980s (see figure on
page 248). The first break was less decisive in
the USA, where the influence of the geography
of women approach has been stronger (for a
more complete map of national variations in
feminist geography, see Monk, 1994). There is
also a danger that a model of stages will be
read as a progress narrative, with later stages
interpreted as more progressive than earlier
ones. It should be noted, then, that traditions
exist simultaneously and there is a great deal of
heterogeneity (national and otherwise) within
and outside these generalizations.
An important task for feminist geographers
has been to make women visible, by developing a geography of women. The goal has been
to achieve gender equality; the spatial vision
one of integration (Bondi, 2004). Two points
have been central: women’s experiences and
perceptions often differ from those of (white)
men, and the former have restricted access to a
range of opportunities, from paid employment
to services. This is largely an empirical tradition, loosely influenced by liberal feminism
and welfare geography. It has tended to
focus on individuals, documenting how
women’s roles as caregivers and ‘housewives’,
in conjunction with the existing spatial structures, housing design and policy, and patterns
of accessibility to transport and other
246
services such as childcare, conspire to constrain women’s access to paid employment
and other resources.
An early criticism of the geography of
women approach was that gender inequality
is typically explained in terms of the concept of
gender roles, especially women’s roles as
housewives and mothers, in conjunction with
some notion of spatial constraint. Foord and
Gregson (1986) argued that the concept of
gender roles narrows the focus to women (as
opposed to male power and the relations
between women and men), emerges out of a
static social theory, and presents women as
victims (as passive recipients of roles).
Further, although the geography of women
shows how spatial constraint and separation
enter into the construction of women’s position, it typically provides a fairly narrow reading of space, conceived almost exclusively as
distance, or as transparent, and (potentially)
gender-free (Bondi, 2004). In early work in
this tradition, insufficient consideration was
given to variations in gender relations across
places. There has been, however, a very useful
planning component to this literature that
outlines, for example, efforts to restructure
the city so as to reduce gender inequalities
and enhance quality of life (e.g. Wekerle and
Whitzman, 1995). Both successes and frustrations in attempts to implement some of these
reforms have led to critical reconsiderations
of the limits of liberal feminism and towards
a fuller institutional analysis, confirming
Eisenstein’s (1981) point that the practical
and theoretical limits of liberalism are frequently discovered – in practice – by liberal
feminists themselves.
Socialist feminist geographers reworked
Marxian categories and theory to explain the
interdependence of geography, gender relations and economic development under capitalism (see marxist geography). One of the
key theoretical debates within socialist feminist
geography revolved around the question of how
best to articulate gender and class analyses. At
its most abstract, the question was addressed in
terms of patriarchy and capitalism, and the
relative autonomy of the two systems. Socialist
feminist geographers first worked primarily at
the urban and regional scales; arguably, it is a
renewed version of socialist feminist that is now
most insistent about the material effects of the
globalizing forces of capitalism. At the urban
scale, an early focus of Anglo-American feminist geographers was the social and spatial separation of suburban homes from paid
employment; this was seen as crucial to the
FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES
day-to-day and generational reproduction of
workers and the development and continuation
of ‘traditional’ gender relations in capitalist
societies (MacKenzie and Rose, 1983). Given
a feminist commitment to agency, efforts
were made to read these processes in nonfunctionalist terms and as strategies to manage the effects of a capitalist economy (cf.
functionalism). For example, MacKenzie
and Rose argued that the isolation of women
as housewives in suburban locations
emerged from the combined influence of
working-class household strategies, governmental policy and male power within families and trades unions. Socialist feminist
geographers also have been attentive to the
ways in which gender relations differ from
place to place, and are sedimented within
place-specific social and economic relations,
in ways that not only reflect but partially
determine local economic changes. This
argument has been made at urban (Hanson
and Pratt, 1995), regional (McDowell and
Massey, 1984) and international scales
(Pearson, 1986).
Beginning in the late 1980s, many feminist
geographers moved away from an exclusive
focus on gender and class systems, to consider
more expansive geographies of difference
(see identity; recognition). Feminist geographers were increasingly attentive to the differences in the construction of gender
relations across races, ethnicities, ages, (dis)
abilities, religions, sexualities and nationalities; to exploitative relations among women
who are positioned in varying ways along
these multiple axes of difference (see ageism;
ethnicity; homophobia and heterosexism;
race; racism; sexuality); and to the ways
that gender classification orders the existence
not just of men and women, but animals,
commodities, ideas and other entities.
Gender is a powerful means of naturalizing
difference. They began to draw on a broader
range of social, and particularly cultural,
theory, including psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, post-structuralism and queer
theory, in order to develop a fuller understanding of how gender relations and identities are shaped and assumed (see subject
formation). This led to fundamental rethinking of the category, gender, and attending to
the contradictions and possibilities presented
by the seeming instability of gender. With a
focus on multiple identifications and performativity, the emphasis shifted from material
constraint and spatial entrapment to possibilities beyond fixity. This was articulated in
Rose’s (1993) notion of paradoxical space:
the sense that the multiplicity and contradictoriness of the ways in which we are positioned
in space generates possibilities excessive to
hegemonic heterosexual norms and spaces
(for further thoughts about the ways in which
performativity and space are intertwined, see
also Gregson and Rose, 2000; Pratt, 2004).
Metaphors of multiplicity, mobility and
fluidity, of hybridity and paradoxical, inbetween, spaces were immensely popular in the
1990s, including Gibson-Graham’s (2006b
[1996]) influential re-theorizing of capitalism
and class processes. A considerable amount
of writing developed around gendered cultural representation, which extended the
focus to imaginative and symbolic spaces
(see film and geography; imaginative geographies; vision and visuality). A small but
growing number of studies of masculinities
(Berg and Longhurst, 2003) began to deliver
on the promise of a gender relational
approach, by directing the focus away from
women to a larger network of heteropatriarchal relations. The influence of identity politics and post-structural theories refocused
attention on sexuality and the scale of the
body.
Nonetheless, new fault lines emerged
among feminist geographers. Monk (1994)
observed that national differences between
American and British geographers diminished
as both pursued these new directions, but divisions between feminist geographers located in
the global north and global south increased,
an institutional schism that repeats geopolitical ones in troubling ways. By 2006, RamonGarcia, Simonsen and Vaiou declared that
Anglophone hegemony within institutionalized feminist geography was not improving;
on the contrary, it was getting worse. And by
the mid-1990s, cautionary reactions to a focus
on mobility, identity and difference suggested
the need to re-invigorate links with a renewed
socialist feminism.
To a considerable extent this has happened,
and a fourth strand of feminist geography
could be called ‘transversal’ feminist geography. Connections are being drawn in many
directions. Seager (2003b) reviews fruits of
‘boundary breakdown’ within feminist political ecology and animal geography. The latter traces structures of oppression across
gender, race, class and species, as well as
exposing gendered assumptions that underlie
human relations to non-humans and what is
conceived as nature. The lessons from the
debates about difference in the 1990s have
247
FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES
GEOGRAPHY OF WOMEN
Topical focus
Theoretical influences
Geographical focus
Description of the effects of
gender inequality
Welfare geography, liberal
feminism
Constraints of distance and
spatial separation
Topical focus
Theoretical influences
Geographical focus
Explanation of inequality, and
relations between capitalism
and patriarchy
Marxism, socialist feminism
Spatial separation, sedimentation
of gender relations in place
SOCIALIST FEMINIST GEOGRAPHY
FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE
Topical focus
Theoretical influences
Geographical focus
The construction of gendered
heter(sexed) identities;
differences among women;
gender and constructions of
nature; heteropatriarchy and
geopolitics
Micro-geographies of the body;
Cultural, post-structural, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, queer, mobile identities; distance,
separation and place; imaginative
critical race theories
geographies; colonialisms and
post-colonialisms;
environment/nature
FEMINIST TRANSVERSAL GEOGRAPHIES
Topical focus
Theoretical influences
Geographical focus
Citizenship; migration;
nationalism; transnationalism;
ethnographies of the state;
development; political ecology;
geopolitics; state violence;
relations between global North
and global South; material
objects; progressive possibilities
for mapping and GIS; affect and
emotions
Theories of transnationalism,
globalization and transversal
networks and circuitries; nonrepresentational theory; political
ecology; Agamben; political
economy; theories of affect
Global networks and circuits;
multi-scalar and multi-site focus
on connections, relations and
processes; constructions and
disruptions of scale; space of
exception; borders and border
breakdowns; embodiment and
connectivity; dispossession
feminist geographies Interwoven strands of feminist geography
been learnt, and a defining characteristic of
feminist animal rights analyses (as compared
to those of ‘mainstream’ animal rights advocates) is the tendency to theorize an ethics of
care without erasing the differences between
humans and non-humans. Feminist geographers continue to focus on the body, but are
possibly more effective in theorizing the body
at a multiplicity of ‘scales’ and institutional
sites, especially in relation to the economy
(Wright, 1999a) and the state. Feminist
geographers are tending more and more to
develop their analyses beyond their national
boundaries, to understand the connections
between processes and lives in the global
North and global South (Katz, 2001a; Nagar,
Lawson, McDowell and Hanson, 2002; Pratt,
2004). As part of this, feminist geographers
248
are re-inventing critical geopolitics to develop
a politics of security that includes the civilian
body and decentres a focus on state security
(Hyndman, 2005). State violence; the rape
and torture of men and civilian women as
technologies of war; the production of ‘the
monster’, ‘the fag’ and ‘the terrorist’ as figures
of surveillance and criminalization (Puar
and Rai, 2002); the re-masculinization and
militarization of daily life; the impact of neoliberal policies on the global gender division
of labour – these are themes that press for
attention in our contemporary world.
gp
Suggested reading
Domosh and Seager (2001); Moss (2002);
Nelson and Seager (2005); Pratt (2004); Rose
(1993); Sharp, Browne and Thien (2004).
FEUDALISM
fertility Reproductive performance, or the
number of live births. Along with mortality
and migration, it is one of the three components of the balancing equation and, as such, an
important influence upon the growth, composition and distribution of populations (see demography). Unlike mortality and morbidity,
which have been the subject of long-standing
interest in medical geography and geographies of health and health care, and migration,
similarly investigated in population geography, fertility (and fecundity) continues to
receive scant attention within geography
(Boyle, 2003), despite such trends as the emergence of negative population growth rates
fuelled by low fertility, increasingly complex
household forms and a growing emphasis
upon social reproduction in the discipline.
Research on geographical variations in
fertility makes use of two types of measures.
Period measures focus on events that occur
between a starting and ending date, and
include the crude birth rate (the number of
births in a year for every 1,000 persons in a
population). cohort measures focus on
events that occur to a particular group of individuals, such as those born or married in the
same year, and include the total fertility rate,
which represents the number of live births that
a woman currently aged 15 would expect by
the time she reaches age 49 and assuming that
current age-specific fertility rates remain constant. The fact that a large number of countries exhibit total fertility rates well below
the replacement level of 2.1 has stimulated
debate on the fertility and demographic
transition in particular, and the changing
role of children and adults in society more
generally (Greenhalgh, 1995; Waldorf and
Franklin, 2002).
Research on the politics of reproduction
explores discourses surrounding family planning, reproductive health and reproductive
rights movements, particularly as they impacted
upon policy recommendations from successive
meetings of the International Conference for
Population and Development, and the geographical nature of social constructions surrounding, for example, teen pregnancy, childbirth and maternal mortality (Fernandez-Kelly,
1994; Grimes, 1999; Underhill-Sem, 2001). ab
Suggested reading
Bongaarts (2002); Boyle (2003).
feudalism A term used in the analysis of
pre-capitalist societies, especially those of
medieval Europe, but also Japan under the
rule of warlords from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries. Feudalism has a wide range
of meanings, from a legal focus on the military
obligations imposed through the concept of a
fief (see below) to a more comprehensive,
quintessentially political and economic characterization of feudalism as a specific mode
of production or social formation. The
increasing scope of the definition owes much
to a growing interest in comparative history
and, in particular, to studies of the geographically variable relationships between the
decline of feudalism and the rise of agrarian
capitalism (Hilton, 1976; Kula, 1976;
Martin, 1983; Dodgshon, 1987; Glennie,
1987). But this has also prompted a fear that,
outside history and historical geography,
‘ ‘‘feudalism’’ seems to have become a general
catch-all term denoting almost anything in the
pre-modern period; it is as though all societal
relationships, economies and politics of the
medieval period can be defined simply by this
legal term that describes the action of lords
collecting a surplus through a sort of military
protection racket’ (Harvey, 2003b, p. 152).
Such a prospect has been complicated by
more recent analyses that claim to identify
a resurgent feudalism within late modernity,
a sort of ‘medieval modernity’ predicated on a
particular combination of fiefdom and freedom
and the production of fractured and competing
sovereignties associated with the aggressive
advance of neo-liberalism in both the global
north (alSayyad and Roy, 2006; Zafirokski,
2007) and the south (cf. Murray, 2006).
In its classical sense, feudalism comprises
two distinct social groups. The first is a group
of direct producers (broadly peasants) who
maintain direct, which is to say non-market,
access to the means of production (land, tools,
seed-corn and livestock) even though they
may not own them (especially land). This
group is subject to politico-legal domination
by a second group of social superiors, who form
a status hierarchy headed by a monarch or
sovereign (see sovereign power). The sovereign ultimately owns all the land, but land
tenure is effectively decentralized through
grants of land to feudal lords in return for their
political and military support. In such a system, social relations of production are thus
not defined primarily through markets, as in
capitalism, and the means by which a surplus
is extracted from the direct producers is different from systems like slavery.
The key social relationships in European
feudalism were vassalage and serfdom.
Vassalage was an intra-elite relationship by
249
FIELD SYSTEM
which a subordinate (vassal) held rather than
owned landed property, the ‘fief’ (Latin feodum, feudum, hence feudalism) from a lord,
ultimately the sovereign, in return for military
service required by the sovereign. The sovereign’s vassals were tenants-in-chief, who
in turn ‘subinfeudated’ their estates to raise
their own military service. Thus a hierarchy
of feudal tenants came to hold estates of various sizes, composed of territorial jurisdictions
called manors, in what Anderson (1974,
pp. 148–9) described as a complex ‘parcellization’ of sovereignty.
Serfdom was the legal subjection of peasant
tenants to lords through the latter’s manorial
jurisdictions, of which unfree tenants were
legally held to be part. Dependent peasant tenants held land from their lord in return for varying combinations of services in kind, especially
labour services on the lord’s own land within the
manor (the demesne) and money rents. The legal
dependence of peasant tenants enabled feudal
lords both to extract higher than market rents
from their tenants and also to impose a range
of other dues and exactions, including duties
on death and licenses to marry, to migrate or
to brew ale. Peasant tenants were fined at a
manorial court if these activities were undertaken without appropriate licenses, and courts
also exercised a degree of moral regulation.
The level of rents and dues was set more by
lords’ income requirements than by market
forces, although lords gained from the latter as
population growth made land scarce relative
to labour. Seigneurial income requirements
progressively increased as lords competed for
political status through conspicuous consumption. Moreover, since feudal lords could
raise income from intensified surplusextraction, they were comparatively indifferent
to innovations to raise agricultural productivity. These claims have important implications
for the explanatory value of the geography of
manorialism (estate size and fragmentation,
seigneurial character) and of the lord–tenant
struggle in accounting for geographical variations in population density, agricultural
systems and productivity, and standards of
living (Hilton, 1973; Hallam, 1989;
Campbell, 1990, 1991; Dyer, 1993). As lordly
extraction intensified, and medieval European
populations grew (for reasons as yet imperfectly understood), feudal society exhibited
certain crisis tendencies, because the surplus
removal process failed to generate any significant feedback into the productive capacity of
agriculture through investment. A crisis of
social reproduction was inevitable since:
250
(1) Production for the market and the stimulus of competition only affected a very
narrow sector of the economy.
(2) Agricultural and industrial production
were based on the household unit, and
the profits of small peasant and small
artisan enterprises were taken by landowners and usurers.
(3) The social structure and the habits of the
landed nobility did not permit accumulation for investment for the extension
for production (Hilton, 1985).
Hilton’s work remains an important demonstration that towns and trade were integral
to feudal economies, not ‘non-feudal islands
in feudal seas’, exogenous factors that undermined feudal social relations (cf. pirenne
thesis). But recent studies have paid more
attention to the extent of commercialization
within medieval agrarian economies and
its impact on geographies of manorialism
(Power and Campbell, 1992; Campbell, 1995).
While debate continues on the importance
to medieval agrarian contraction of excessive
surplus-extraction (see brenner thesis) and
ecological frailties (see postan thesis), there
has been a general move towards more sophisticated theorizations that broaden analysis of
feudal society beyond property relations.
Greater attention has been paid to accumulation and differentiation within the class of direct
producers (Poos, 1991; Razi and Smith, 1996a).
Important developments in social technologies
changed the geographical structuring of
feudal society. Over time, status came to be
increasingly embodied in property rather than
interpersonal relations. Notable geographical
components stemmed from this shift, including
new legal, fiscal and administrative technologies
to control time and space (Bean, 1989; Biddick,
1990; Clanchy, 1993). Finally, certain social
continuities across the feudalism–capitalism
transition, especially in the functioning of geodemographic and cultural systems, have received
serious attention (Poos, 1991; McIntosh,
1998).
pg/dg
Suggested reading
Brown (1974); Dodgshon (1987); Reynolds
(1994).
field system The fields and other agricultural resource elements, such as wastes and
commons, of a community or communities
that may be regarded as functioning as an
agrarian and social system (Gray, 1915;
Dodgshon, 1980). In a more specific sense,
FIELDWORK
the term can be applied to early patterns of
landholding and husbandry that entwined
groups of cultivators into communities of
mutual or common interests through their
use of landed resources. In studies of the
historical geography of europe, particular
attention has focused on the manner in which
the intermixture of land between landholders
has taken the form of strips or parcels. Other
themes that loom large in defining such
systems are the extent to which the system
possessed a communally regulated system of
cropping, or the degree to which arable cultivators possessed rights in common over the
cultivated area after harvest. Analysis of such
systems has also been linked to the nature of
land tenure and the extent to which individual ownership of land prevailed. Debates surround the extent to which communal systems
of tenure and their associated field systems are
seen invariably to predate those based upon
enclosed fields held in severalty. In considering open field systems, emphasis might be
placed on the way in which individual’s holdings or strips of land were distributed over
larger fields subject to rule-based cropping
practices that were generated internally by
the cultivators themselves or imposed by outside agencies such as landlords, or formed a
means of risk minimization to ensure that
cultivators had lands under different crops on
variable soil types, or whether they were
incompatible with effective and efficient agrarian management. Such systems have formed
the basis of debates in political economy
about the benefits of individual over communal tenure. The debate over the enclosure of
open field systems into enclosed fields and
associated scattered free-standing farms managed without reference to communal rules and
regulations has played a prominent place in
the timing of the agricultural revolution
(Allen, 1992). Other scholars have focused
on the supposed social consequences that
may have flowed from enclosure and how the
removal of access to communal grazing, postharvest gleaning and the right to collect fuel
and other food resources from commons
turned smallholder peasants into rural proletarians (Neeson, 1993).
rms
Suggested reading
Neeson (1993).
fieldwork A means of gathering data that
involves the researcher in direct engagement
with the material world. Once based in the
enlightenment assumption that ‘reality’ was
out there available for straightforward apprehension, fieldwork is now recognized as a
more complicated mode of learning that produces situated knowledge about people,
processes and places. While this perspective
may be seen as a hindrance in positivist
approaches to human geographical research
that seek to neutralize the researcher and
aspire to statistical generalizations, many now
recognize the strength of self-reflexivity and
the necessarily partial nature of the information collected. The two modes of scholarship
endure in fieldwork, and the epistemological
tensions between them can be daunting (e.g.
Sundberg, 2003: see also epistemology).
Field research has a long history in human
geography. Since antiquity, much of it has
been associated with imperial projects, and
thus involved exploration, mapping and the
taxonomic categorization of resources – animal, plant, mineral and human. But fieldwork
is also a means to examine the relationships
between people and their environments, the
material social practices of place-making, the
productions of nature and the sedimentations of these relationships in diverse historical
geographies. Fieldwork in this regard has had
a more ambiguous and contested relationship
with the discipline – pitting observational
against theoretical knowledge and sometimes
challenging received ways of knowing (cf.
Driver, 2000). Its multiple strands include
the ‘stout boots’ tradition of British geography
and Sauerian cultural geography in the
USA (Delyser and Starrs, 2001; cf. Withers
and Finnegan, 2003). Evolving from a natural
history tradition, wherein physical evidence
was collected in and from the environment,
fieldwork of this nature focuses on landscapes
as evidence of differentiated, sequential and
uneven human occupance; seeking relationships and patterns in their production and
persistence. Many of the field methods associated with these traditions are rooted in observation. The taken-for-grantedness of seeing as
well as its reliance on unmarked ‘vantage
points’ has been subjected to a thorough
critique as masculinist, because its claims to
objectivity rest on unstated hierarchies,
detached observers and distancing assumed
adequate to reveal hidden dimensions of the
scene (Barnes and Gregory, 1997b; Rose,
1997b; Sundberg, 2003). Given these concerns and other limits of traditional
approaches to fieldwork, including its interested nature, unsustainable assumptions
regarding the distinction between nature and
culture, and the tendency to focus on visual
251
FILM
rather than more dynamic, relational and contested forms of evidence, many fieldwork practitioners developed a more critical stance to
their work. Feminist geographers (see feminist geographies) were key in this intervention, examining the politics of representation
that percolate through fieldwork, scrutinizing
the uneven power relations that propel it and
calling its epistemological claims into question
(Rose, 1993; Professional Geographer, 1994;
Sundberg, 2003).
Engaging in fieldwork of this kind raises the
question of what constitutes the field. The
field, as Felix Driver (2000, p. 267) reminds
us, ‘is not just ‘‘there’’; it is produced and reproduced through both physical movement
across a landscape and other sorts of cultural
work in a variety of sites’. It is also the effect of
discursive and spatial practices that mark it as
a site of enquiry ‘that is necessarily artificial
in its separations from geographical space and
the flow of time’ (Katz, 1994, p. 67). These
distinctions and the sorts of knowledge
derived from them are constituted through
embodied practices such as travel, residence,
visiting, conversation, observing, eating,
smelling, listening and various (re)presentations of self. The field and the fieldworker
are co-constructions, and the knowledge produced between them reflects the materiality
and mutability of this relationship. Scholars
have addressed the various and multiple connotations of movement among fields – the
constitution of a field site, the way in which
the site and the sorts of knowledge produced
there are constructed in one’s disciplinary
field, and the uneven valences of power that
energize and can confound the multiple translations – spatial, linguistic, and practical – of
fieldwork (e.g. Professional Geographer, 1994;
Pluciennik and Drew, 2000; Saunders, 2001).
Questions of power affect such things as negotiating access, whether and how to conduct
research in areas of conflict and violence,
determining what kinds of knowledge can be
shared and with whom, figuring out what cannot be said and making sense of the silences,
and representing oneself in ‘the field’ and the
field to one’s audience.
The methodology of fieldwork is capacious and eclectic, encompassing quantitative
and qualitative strategies of data collection.
While fieldwork is commonly associated with
case study methodologies and ethnographic
research, it also includes survey research,
broad observational studies, mapping and
measurement techniques. Among the research
methods associated with fieldwork in human
252
geography are all manner of field observation,
including participant observation, landscape assessment and site observation; oral
techniques such as casual conversation,
unstructured and structured interviews, focus
group interviews, oral histories and environmental autobiographies; survey and census
techniques (see survey analysis); digging
through, collecting, sorting, classifying and
interpreting records, whether in the ground,
in place or in archives; measurement and mapping activities; and documenting what is
observed and experienced in a variety of ways,
including written, photographic, cartographic,
aural and artistic means. Recent investigations
of fieldwork have addressed issues such as the
embodiment of the fieldworker (see body),
bringing companions to the field, sexual relations in the field, and the ethics and implications of dishonesty and misrepresentation in
fieldwork. As these concerns suggest, fieldwork produces knowledge that is avowedly
situated, and its validity resides both in that
recognition and in the disciplined reflexivity
that enables researchers to expose their practices and question their findings.
ck
Suggested reading
Geographical Review (2001); The Professional
Geographer (1994); Singapore Journal of Tropical
Geography (2003); Wolf (1995).
film An inherently spatial technology
through which fragments of images and
sounds from different times and spaces are
reassembled, and then transported to audiences in many different locations. It can be
studied as a mobile cultural representation,
a public gathering (at the cinema or movie
theatre), a political opportunity, a mode of
governance and an economic activity. The
boundaries of film now blur into television,
video, music and amusement park culture.
Much film analysis focuses on the film
itself – for example, the narrative structure,
the sets, camera shots and editing – and it
can be a means of studying how dominant
social and geopolitical understandings and
anxieties are expressed, produced, transmitted
and resisted. US noir films of the 1940s and
1950s, for instance, have been interpreted as
expressions of geopolitical and social anxieties:
about nuclear war, the migration of southern
African-Americans to northern cities, and
relations between women and men. The geographies scripted into noir films (e.g. the dark
and foreboding city) express and fuel these
anxieties (Farish, 2005). Alternatively, as a
FILM
mode of storytelling and site-seeing, film can
be a medium for travelling across and juxtaposing different worlds, and rupturing dominant narratives about place; Taylor (2000)
assesses the ways in which The Coolboroo
Club, a film made by and about Perth’s
Nyungah community (an aboriginal community that was banned from entering the central
metropolitan area in the 1930s and 1940s),
draws on aboriginal memories to supplement
and disrupt hegemonic white history of
‘sunny’ Perth. Because film is such a good
vehicle to think with and about dominant
and resistant social meanings, it can be an
excellent pedagogical tool; the Journal of
Latin American Geography instituted an extensive film reviews section for this purpose in
2005, and Cresswell (2000) chronicles his
use of the film, Falling Down, to generate
nuanced classroom discussion of resistance.
Film is more than another medium for
storytelling, and a long tradition of cultural
criticism and avant-garde films make larger
claims about the capacity of film to stimulate
novel sense experiences and generate critical
thought. Close-up shots, cross-cutting, slow
motion and flickering effects, montages of
images that juxtapose the far and near, the
present and the past, and spaces that are ordinarily segregated or otherwise kept apart –
these are some of the cinematic techniques
that can be used to dis-order and re-order
space and time, and shock the senses. Walter
Benjamin (1978) theorized film’s potential to
de-naturalize social relations and social space;
Deleuze (2001) wrote of the promise of ‘pure
optical’ situations in (particularly neo-realist)
film: to release the viewer from linear causeand-effect perceptions and bring the senses
into a new relation with time and thought.
Both theorists draw connections between film
and the city: the modern city in the case of the
former, the rupture forced by devastated postSecond World War European cities for the
latter. It is not just theorists who have appreciated the transformational potential of film;
Olund (2006) argues that urban reformers in
the early-twentieth-century USA embraced
some similar ideas about the ways in which
film works on sense perception, and recognized film as a powerful tool for governance,
especially for assimilating immigrants into
middle-class norms of whiteness.
Aitken and Zonn speculated that geographers have been slow to make a serious study of
film because of ‘the geographer’s traditional
emphasis on the material conditions of social
life wherein representation is subsidiary to
‘‘physical reality’’ ’ (1994, p. 5). Even so, there
are rich opportunities for investigating the play
between filmic representations and concrete
spaces. Analysing the Nigerian film industry,
Marston, Woodward and Jones (2007) argue
that the distinctive aesthetic of ‘Nollywood’
films (long sequences with extensive and
repetitive dialogue, and little or no action)
emerges out of local material circumstances
of small budgets, fast shooting schedules,
small crews and reliance on readily available
locations. At the same time, filmic representations have material consequences. The negative portrayal of the inner city in post-Second
World War Hollywood film, it has been
argued, created a popular disposition in the
USA for massive demolition of inner-city
neighbourhoods and urban restructuring.
The film Chinatown, a fictionalized rendition
of political corruption, personal greed, capitalist development and water policy in Los
Angeles, is now understood to be and
deployed as the historical ‘truth’ by environmental groups who wish to stop contemporary
dam proposals (both case studies are found in
Sheil and Fitzmaurice, 2001). The Hollywood
film Entrapment created an uproar in Malaysia
when it was released in 1999, because images
of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur were
spliced with those of a distant shanty town, to
suggest that the two geographies lie side by
side. This was at odds with the impression that
city boosters wished to project, that of Kuala
Lumpur as a clean, modernizing ‘world class’
city. As the government’s Information Minister
complained, ‘the whole world will come to
believe that the scenery they saw in the
movie . . . is real’ (cited in Bunnell, 2004,
p. 300). Alternatively, popular films can generate informal and formal tourism spin-offs,
when appreciative fans seek out the sites used
in movie scenes. In many cities, the film industry is a major economic activity, certainly in
cities such as Los Angeles (Scott, 2005a),
Mumbai and Hong Kong, but in many other
cities as well, whether as a location or through
the business of film festivals. The geographies
of film production and reception have become
increasingly complex: the transnational nature
of many productions complicates debates
about non-Hollywood ‘national’ cinemas
(Acland, 2003); and diasporic communities
generate demand for films produced outside
of the USA, whilst the heavy dependence
of the US entertainment industry upon international markets disrupts simplistic assumptions about the one-way, global transmission
of US culture.
253
FILTERING
The cinema itself is a public space,
which some have argued was particularly
important for women and immigrants in the
early-twentieth-century US city; Hansen
understands it to be a site for the formation
of a counter-public sphere. Much of this has
changed with new technologies of home videos and DVDs, but Hansen (1995) has been
loathe to understand these new technologies
as simply leading to the diminishment of cinema as counter-public sphere. She speculates
that contemporary film viewers, now used
to having control over their viewing at home,
are more active than they were in the classical
Hollywood period of film spectatorship.
Certainly the material conditions of viewing
film are changing. In North America through
the 1990s, there was a dramatic increase in
the number of screens constructed and a simultaneous reduction in the number of theatres,
reflecting the construction of multiplexes,
facilities that with multiple screens, typically
located in the suburbs. These multiplex amusement spaces generate a different timing and
spacing of film spectatorship (Acland, 2003).
Film (and video) is not simply an object, but
a tool for analysis. Pryke (2002, p. 473) calls
up Lefebvre’s notion of rhythmanalysis to
introduce his video and audio montage of
urban redevelopment of Potsdamer Platz in
Berlin (http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/
geography/research/berlin/). Concerns with
performance and life that exceeds discourse
(see non-representational theory) have
fuelled interest in using film and video as a
means of representation, and electronic journals such as ACME now allow the blending of
text and video (e.g. Pratt and Kirby, 2003).
Media literacy and video production training
has been a useful methodological strategy in
action research.
gp
Suggested reading
Aitken and Zonn (1994); Cresswell and Dixon
(2002); Scott (2005); Shiel and Fitzmaurice
(2001).
filtering A process whereby housing value
and status declines over time while households gain access to increasingly higherquality dwellings. The theory emphasizes
market forces in, and identifies triggers for,
changes in the allocation of housing (see
housing studies; invasion and succession).
The literature includes numerous refinements
to filtering models (Galster, 1996) and also
strong critiques of the normative element
in filtering theory, which tends to legitimate
254
laissez-faire approaches to housing provision
in which demand from wealthier households
for new housing is expected to open up better
housing for lower-income groups (Gray and
Boddy, 1979).
em
Suggested reading
Gray and Boddy (1979).
financial exclusion The process by which
people of poor and moderate incomes are
directly and indirectly excluded from the
formal financial system and denied access to
mainstream retail financial services (see also
money and finance). Financial exclusion
plays an active part in the geographical production
of
poverty,
because
those
who experience difficulty in gaining access to
formal financial serves tend to belong to disadvantaged social groups undergoing multiple
forms of social deprivation (Leyshon and
Thrift, 1997).
Access to mainstream financial services
within contemporary societies is important
because many economic exchanges are now
mediated through financial institutions
through direct transfers between accounts.
Without access to the financial system, individuals and households may find it more difficult and expensive to pay bills, while the lack
of access to products such as insurance denies
them the opportunity to shield against risk.
In this sense, having access to a full range of
financial services at a competitive price may be
taken to indicate ‘financial citizenship’. In
large parts of the developing world, the majority of the population may lack financial citizenship, whereas in industrialized countries
such as the USA and the UK it is estimated
that around 10 per cent of the population is
financially excluded (cf. citizenship).
The process of financial exclusion is a product of a broader bifurcation of the market for
retail financial services. Socio-technologies
such as credit scoring systems sort ‘prime’
from ‘sub-prime’ customers on behalf of
financial institutions. Prime financial markets
are made up of individuals and households that possess socio-economic and geodemographic profiles that make them targets
of the marketing and financial strategies of
retail financial services firms. These middleand high-income customers are actively pursued by retail financial services firms, and
may be described as the financially ‘superincluded’, benefiting from intense competition
between institutions for their business. One of
the drivers of this strategy is the tendency
FISCAL MIGRATION
towards the securitization of retail financial
products, whereby lenders aggregate the loans
made to low-risk customers and sell them to
investors in international securities markets
(Dymski, 2005). Sub-prime customers, meanwhile, have low to moderate incomes and/or
financial assets, and are either excluded from
mainstream financial marketing campaigns for
new products or are denied access to services if
they apply.
The geography of prime and sub-prime
financial markets follows established geographies of income and wealth. Thus, for the
most part, prime retail financial customers
may be found in affluent urban and suburban
areas, whereas sub-prime markets are concentrated in areas of low and moderate income,
typically in inner-city areas (and, in the UK, at
least, on public-sector housing estates). In the
absence of mainstream financial services,
which continue to close branches in such
areas, a host of specialist sub-prime or ‘fringe’
retail financial institutions ply their trade.
They provide similar services to the mainstream, but at a much higher cost. It is now
possible to identify pronounced financial ecologies, made up of distinctive combinations of
markets, customers and institutions (Leyshon,
Burton, Knights, Alferoff and Signoretta,
2004). Public policies to counter the problems
of financial exclusion were initiated
with increased vigour in the late 1990s
(Marshall, 2004), and the explosive growth
of ‘predatory lending’ in sub-prime markets
was a key factor in the global financial crisis
that detonated in 2008.
al
fiscal crisis A fiscal crisis occurs when the
revenue raised by the state is insufficient to
cover the cost of its activities. All governments
experience short-term financial problems as a
result of routine fluctuations in tax revenues
and public expenditure. The term ‘fiscal crisis’
is usually reserved for a more serious shortfall
in the state’s financial position arising from
structural or systematic imbalances between
the cost of providing public services and social
security payments and the ability of the state
to finance them through taxation.
According to O’Connor (1973), a tendency
towards fiscal crisis is a logical outcome of
the contradictory character of the state under
capitalism. O’Connor argues that the state
has two main functions within capitalism: to
promote accumulation by private capital,
and to ensure the legitimacy of this process
among the population. To do the former, the
state needs to make investments in economic
infrastructure (e.g. roads, energy supply
networks, the central bank), systems of regulation (e.g. to ensure the orderly functioning of
market exchange; cf. regulation theory) and
the maintenance of a productive labour force
(e.g. by providing education). To do the latter,
the state seeks to promote social integration
through expenditure on the welfare state
and the maintenance of law and order.
O’Connor’s analysis suggests that with the
emergence of the monopoly form of capitalism
in which markets are dominated by a small
number of large corporations, an increasing
proportion of the costs of investment must be
met by the state, while expenditure on social
problems also grows. This requires the state to
seek to raise extra revenue from taxation,
which has the effect of discouraging private
investment, thereby reducing the tax base
and exacerbating the problem. This can result
in a fiscal crisis as the state’s revenue-raising
capacity is reduced at the same time as
demands for increased state expenditure grow.
The state may seek to resolve the crisis by
trying to reduce public expenditure as a proportion of the economy. However, this may
result in a crisis of legitimation as welfare
expenditure is cut. In some cases, however,
powerful states (notably the USA) have been
able to sustain very large budget deficits for
extended periods and to stave off fiscal crises
by borrowing from overseas. In 2006, approximately one-quarter of the total US public debt
of $8,500 billion was held by foreign governments and international investors.
A tendency to fiscal crisis may be spatially
differentiated, particularly where local governments have autonomous revenue-raising
capacities. In the 1970s and 1980s, many US
cities faced serious fiscal problems as manufacturing industry declined and higher-income
residents moved out to the suburbs (see
fiscal migration). In 1975, New York City
avoided bankruptcy only after the federal government intervened. Subsequently, many local
governments have faced budgetary constraints
as a result of restrictions imposed by the
central state or because of poor credit ratings
imposed by increasingly influential private
rating agencies (Hackworth, 2006).
jpa
Suggested reading
Jessop (2002, ch. 2); O’Connor (1973).
fiscal migration A process by which individuals, households and firms relocate to secure
fiscal benefits. The concept is derived from
the tiebout model, which argues that land
255
FLÂNEUR/FLÂNERIE
users will move to a local government administration that optimizes their tax and services
preferences, trading off the costs of paying
for public services through taxation against
sacrifices in their ability to consume private
services. The model has been used to explore
the geographical consequences of distributed
and competitive local government administrative structures (e.g. Davies, 1982). The process
also operates at an international level, and
underlies the creation of offshore financial
centres, tax havens and export processing
zones, all of which attract international capital
investment partly through fiscal incentives that
include tax holidays and other inducements. al
fla^neur/fla
^nerie The flâneur is associated
with aimless urban wandering and observing,
especially in nineteenth-century Paris, where it
took its first steps. Yet the figure has also
walked further afield, as it has been taken
up more widely in social, cultural and urban
studies as ‘an emblematic representative of
modernity and the personification of contemporary urbanity’ (Ferguson, 1994, p. 22).
Despite becoming a common motif, the
flâneur and activities of flânerie remain elusive
and resist easy definition, although they
usually involve a solitary and anonymous
male, with the emphasis falling variously on
strolling, idling, watching, writing, artistic creativity and detection. Many commentators
suggest that it is most productively seen as a
mythological figure, a strategy of representation, and thus a social construction within
discourse more than a sociological reality.
First referenced in 1806, the flâneur
received its most famous articulation in the
writings of Charles Baudelaire, for whom it
was a ‘modern hero’ and passionate spectator
who derived poetic meaning from an immersion in the city, in the fleeting movement and
electrical charge of its crowd. Baudelaire’s
account played an important role in Walter
Benjamin’s investigations of Paris as ‘capital
of the nineteenth century’, and in his attempts
to decipher the phantasmagorias of urban
modernity. In these texts, the increasing commodification and rationalization of the city
along with the decline of the arcades meant
that the flâneur was already becoming a displaced and bygone figure. Benjamin’s writings
have remained a key source for subsequent
interest in the flâneur, with some critics viewing Benjamin’s own approach as being akin
to flânerie in its mode of reading metropolitan
spaces through attending to urban fragments
and signs. There have also been multiple
256
reinventions of flânerie in the arts, cultural
practice and urban studies through recent
interest in other forms of urban walking (see
urban exploration).
Feminist critics have emphasized the exclusivity of flânerie, arguing that a female equivalent – the flâneuse – was rendered impossible
by the ideologies and sexual divisions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cities that
constrained anonymous and unaccompanied
movement by women. The practice of flânerie
itself, so it is argued, was structured around a
male gaze. However, critical elaborations have
since questioned the extent of the exclusion of
women from the public realm, revealing the
intersections between public and private, and
have also argued that the flâneur was a more
insecure and marginal figure than is often supposed (Wilson, 1991). Writers have further
traced out the possibilities for female flânerie
through the development of department
stores, through writing and literary texts and
through early cinema, which enabled a mobile
urban gaze from within the safety and respectability of a film audience.
Such studies have led to re-evaluations of
the (in)visibility of the flâneuse (D’Souza and
McDonough, 2006). Dissenting voices nevertheless remain, with Janet Wolff arguing that
the problem with the flâneur lies less in its
exclusivity than in the centrality it has been
accorded in urban and cultural studies of
modernity, and in the consequent occlusion
of female experiences. She therefore calls
for the flâneur’s ‘retirement’ from centre stage
and for attention to turn instead to the ‘micropractices of urban living, and the very specific
ways in which women negotiate the modern
city’. In the process, she claims, questions
of female flânerie lose importance and ‘women
become entirely visible in their own particular
practices and experiences’ (Wolff, 2006,
p. 28).
dp
Suggested reading
D’Souza and McDonough (2006); Tester (1994).
flexible accumulation A regime of accumulation emphasizing diversity and differentiation rather than the standardization
associated with Fordist modes (see fordism)
of accumulation. Flexible accumulation
requires workers, machinery and manufacturing techniques that can quickly and regularly
innovate and adapt to changes in consumer
tastes, thus generating profit through economies of scope rather than the economies
of scale. As Harvey (1999 [1982]) points
FLOWS
out, the (re-)emergence of flexibility as a dominant regime of accumulation in the late 1970s
and 1980s was associated with instability in
the economies of developed countries and
competition from third world industrializing
nations that could mass-produce standardized
goods cheaply. For McDowell (1991), it was
also a change in the basic societal conditions –
such as the increasing disappearance of the
nuclear family as the standard domestic unit
and the increasing entrance of women into
the labour force – that challenged the many
of the ideals underlying the Fordist regime of
accumulation and led to the growth in importance of flexible accumulation. However,
Gertler (1988) cautions against assuming that
this means that flexible accumulation replaced
Fordist modes of accumulation; rather, flexible accumulation re-emerged in this period as
the dominant regime in developed countries
(see also Norcliffe, 1997).
For geographers, flexible accumulation is
associated with what Storper (1997b) refers
to as the ‘resurgence of the region’ in industrial geography. Because of the need for
continuous innovation and rapid adaptation
to changes in consumer demands, trusting
relationships with numerous suppliers who
can provide components just in time and
expertise that facilitates innovation is important. At the same time, flexible accumulation
requires producers to have access to a pool of
skilled labour, something that can often be
found in specialized regions or clusters,
where complementary industries exist.
Examples include Motorsport Valley in
Oxfordshire, UK (Henry and Pinch, 2001),
Silicon Valley in California, USA (Saxenian,
1994), and Santa Croche in Italy (specializing
in leather production: see Amin, 1989).
jf
Suggested reading
Cooke (1988).
flows A name for movements between
relatively fixed nodes in networks, flows can
be of commodities, money, people, energy or
even ideas. In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of
developments in both theory and global relations made reference to ‘flows’ increasingly
common in a wide range of academic fields.
In theoretical arguments, long-standing
Marxist concerns with explaining economic
processes in terms of the circuit of capital came
to be critically supplemented with Foucauldian
and other post-structuralist arguments
about the need to understand identity and
power in terms of the flow of power through
social relations. Though it is often forgotten,
the jargon of deterritorialization developed by
the French–Italian philosophical duo Deleuze
and Guattari (1983) was just such an epistemological intervention: not an empirical claim
about the geography of postmodernity, but a
postmodern psychoanalytical argument about
the need to follow diverse flows of desire and
thereby critique containerized concepts of the
human psyche in modern ego-psychoanalysis
(cf. psychoanalytic theory). More generally,
the critical import of treating power in terms of
micro-flows did have implications for theories
of space (see production of space). Just as
marxist geography had challenged absolutist
and fixed assumptions about space in economics by exploring capital as value in motion in
global and urban landscapes (Harvey, 1999
[1982]), so in turn did the ideas of Foucault
help inspire new approaches to politics that
challenged spatial yet geographically dead concepts of places and individuals simply holding
power over powerless multitudes (Sharp,
Routledge, Philo and Paddison, 2000). Power
had to be rethought relationally in terms of the
flows of ideas and interactions that created
people (in different ways in different spaces) as
both agents and subjects, a notable implication
being that sites of subjectivity formation could
thereby be reconceptualized as historical geographies of truth and power (e.g. Clayton, 2000).
Applied to human–environment relations too
and supplemented further by the work of
feminist scholars (Haraway, 1991) and science studies (Latour, 1988), even the most
concrete and stilled natural landscapes – such
as the dammed waterscapes of formerly flowing
rivers – could be rethought this way as flows
of knowledge, power, capital and energy
coming together in hybrid formations in different ways in different contexts (White, 1995;
Swyngedouw, 1999, 2007).
In addition to these epistemological interests
in the overdetermined landscapes of flow,
worldwide events associated with recent rounds
of capitalist globalization have also brought
attention to the increasing flows of commodities, capital, information and people across
borders. For example, the growth of crossborder flows of international trade (especially
their increasing size as a proportion of world
GDP) provides a key index of increasing global
economic interdependency, an index that is
only eclipsed in its significance by the even
more rapid acceleration of cross-border
investment flows (foreign direct investment)
as a sign of the growing importance and
independence of transnational corporations
257
FOCUS GROUP
vis-à-vis nation-states (Dicken, 2003). Other
increasing and accelerating flows – transnational flows of information on the internet,
flows of news images and popular culture
through cable and satellite TV, flows of
migrants and tourists over barriers big and
small, flows of illegal drugs and weapons, for
instance – all comprise complex component
parts of the ‘space of flows’ that has been
famously associated with the rise of a globalized so-called network society (Castells,
1996b). But whereas Manuel Castells was
careful to underline that ‘the space of flows is
not placeless’ (Castells, 1996b, p. 416), other
scholars have been prone to joining their
empirical observations of globalized flows with
extreme epistemological emphases on deterritorialization that tend to suggest an end to
geography altogether. For example, in his
otherwise astute arguments about the transnational networks of modernity (and especially of contemporary migration),
anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996) ignores
the ways in which global flows reterritorialize
and create new landscapes in the same moment
as they eclipse older ones (see Sparke, 2005).
By contrast, geographer John Agnew
approaches the problem with a keen sensitivity
to the ways in which flows create geographical
integration and differentiation at the very same
time. ‘The main novelty today,’ he says in a
comprehensive rebuttal to end-of-geography
arguments, ‘is the increasing role in economic
prosperity and underdevelopment of fastpaced cross-border flows in relation to national
states and to networks linking cities with one
another and their hinterlands and the increased
differentiation between localities and regions
as a result of the spatial biases built into
flow-networks’ (Agnew, 2006, p. 128).
ms
focus group A qualitative method used to
obtain opinions and experiences from between six and twelve people who participate
in a group discussion organized around a
series of topics or questions posed by the
researcher/facilitator. Focus groups typically
supplement other methodologies, and can
be useful at different points in the research
process: to get oriented to a new research
field; to generate hypotheses that can then
be tested more systematically; to gather qualitative data about experiences and opinions;
and as a means of presenting preliminary
interpretations to a community for validation.
Focus groups are used instead of interviews
or questionnaire surveys if the researcher
believes that the group conversation will
258
spark ideas among participants so as to elicit
a richer understanding of the issue at hand.
They provide an opportunity to observe
how ideas develop in context, in relation to
other and sometimes contradictory opinions.
Although the researcher carefully facilitates
the event, it can be a less hierarchical, more
negotiated research event. Focus groups
can also provide an important opportunity
for participants to exchange information and
support each other.
Focus groups must be carefully managed
and are not always appropriate. power hierarchies within the group will persist and can
potentially silence non-dominant members.
When this happens, less dominant individuals
are effectively excluded from the research
process. For this reason separate focus groups
are often conducted for men and women, or
are divided in terms of other social categories,
such as race, especially if this is relevant to
the topic under discussion. It should also
be recognized that focus groups are public
events in which individuals give public performances and may be reluctant to disclose
private details. The focus group risks being
exploitative if the artificiality of the situation
and the legitimacy of the research context lulls
individuals into revealing private details. This
is especially problematic if the individuals
in the group know each other or are likely to
encounter each other after the event.
A focus group is not equivalent to interviews
with between six and twelve individuals. A
focus group is a singular conversational event.
For this reason, at least five or six focus groups
should be done in order to assess the thematic
consistency across them. Similar to interviews,
they are taped and transcribed. But they
invite a different approach to analysis. Rather
than focusing simply on the declarations of
individuals, they provide an opportunity to
study the generation of meaning, as opinions
are debated, qualified and potentially modified. There also is a situational geography to
focus groups that is under-explored. The rules
of discourse, what and how one is told, vary
with the context (Pratt, 2002). Geographers
thus have the potential not simply to use this
methodology, but to develop it in fascinating
new directions.
gp
Suggested reading
Conradson (2005a); Pratt (2002).
food The study of the spatial and environmental aspects of food production, distribution and consumption. Food is a recurring
FOOD
concern in several academic disciplines
because of its centrality to human life for both
physical and social sustenance. As a specific
sub-field with identifiable concepts and
scholars, however, agro-food studies has come
into fruition only recently, a reflection of both
the resurgence of political economy, which
found a new object of study in food systems,
and the ‘cultural turn’ in social science that
brought renewed interest in consumption.
While scholars of food draw from anthropology – foodways has long been a staple of that
discipline – and sociology, owing especially
to the sociology of agriculture tradition, geography is in many respects at the cutting edge
of food studies. Arguably, this is because geography is more ecumenical in its approaches,
and because the spatial and environmental
aspects of food are so critical to its theorizations. At the same time, there is a tendency
to use food to illustrate other geographical
topics, as demonstrated by the dozens of
monographs published within the past 15 years
that tell larger stories through particular food
commodities.
Still, geographers have made considerable
progress in producing and debating a set of
meta-concepts relevant to the study of food
qua food. They have contributed to different
ways of theorizing the agro-food system,
including systems of provision, commodity
chains and food regimes. Recently, ‘food
networks’ has become the favoured term in
recognition of the fact that food distribution is
more contingent than much of this earlier language implies, and that even long-distance
trade depends on embedded social relations
where trust must be secured (Arce and
Marsden, 1994). Geographers have also looked
at the scale dimensions of food provision and
consumption (e.g. Bell and Valentine, 1997);
and they have engaged in important debates
regarding consumption, not only the politics
of consumer purchasing in influencing the
agro-food system (e.g. Cook and Crang,
1996), but also the bodily materiality of eating
practices. In addition, geographers have played
a leading role in developing some meso-level
concepts, based largely on finely tuned empirical studies.
famine, hunger and food insecurity persist
as objects of study, especially as they pertain to
uneven development and geopolitics. Watts
(1983) was one of the first geographers to
develop the concept of social vulnerability as
it relates to the uneven effects of famine.
Geographers have since adopted the language
of food security, which not only encapsulates
a more objective and positive characterization
than ‘hunger’, but also highlights that food
insecurity is rooted in insufficient income,
entitlement or endowment (Dreze and Sen,
1989). These ideas underlie powerful critiques
of how US food aid and concessionary sales
of surplus commodities undercut livelihoods
and thereby contribute to food insecurity.
The activist-developed notion of community
food security (CFS) suggests that the local community is the scale at which adequate and
nutritious food should be ensured. CFS movements have noted the existence of food deserts, which are areas of poor access to the
provision of healthy affordable food, usually
related to lack of large retailers.
The twin themes of anxiety and trust are
also pervasive in the geography of food, especially in light of the policy turn towards standards, labels and private regulation as the major
response to recent ‘food scares’. While the
broader goal of standardization is harmonization in the interest of trade – as exemplified in
the Codex alimentarus – standards and auditing
are increasingly employed to make commodity
chains more transparent. Geographers have
offered important criticisms of this new form
of food regulation. Dunn (2003a), for
example, has shown how attempts to impose
harmony on an uneven geographical surface
can have the effect of exacerbating differentiation among producers. Guthman (2004)
has argued that organic food labels have
perverse consequences for the intended goals
of organic agriculture. Whether voluntary
labels constitute a new sort of commodity
fetish has been the source of a lively debate
within geography.
The other major response to recent trouble
in the food system is the creation of alternative
food networks (AFNs). According to Whatmore,
Stassart and Renting (2003, p. 389), ‘what
they share in common is their constitution
as/of food markets that redistribute value
through the network against the logic of
bulk commodity production; that reconvene
‘‘trust’’ between food producers and consumers; and that articulate new forms of political association and market governance’.
AFNs have become a part of social movement strategies, and thus have been theorized
as both alternative forms of development and
resistance to globalization. For example,
fair trade initiatives, which tie wealthy
consumers’ moral concerns to the livelihood
making of third world peasants, are what
Goodman (2004) calls developmental consumption. Some scholars have been less
259
FOOTLOOSE INDUSTRY
sanguine on these sorts of initiatives, which
have considerable overlap with standard-based
regulation. Mutersbaugh (2002) has noted that
certification processes can create new work
routines and new levels of surveillance.
Another area that has seen a good deal of
recent empirical work is in the transformation
and consolidation of food processing, marketing and retailing sectors. Many have commented on the enhanced power of retailers in
food chains at the same time that supermarkets themselves have been at forefront of ethical trading initiatives (Marsden and Wrigley,
1995). Changing patterns of food consumption associated with the fast food industry and
multiple-job households are becoming major
objects of study, as well, articulating with
public health concerns regarding a widely
discussed crisis of obesity. This is an area that
is likely to incite lively debate with geographers
of the body, who are more sceptical of the
discourse of obesity (Longhurst, 2005). This
last research direction augments a growing
literature attentive to the ways in which eating
is simultaneously metabolic and ethical, such
that the body is a site where various sorts of
food anxieties are mediated (Stassart and
Whatmore, 2003). Of course, virtually all
of the above recent trends are interrelated
and at the same time point to the extreme
bifurcations within both food provision and
consumption. For these reasons and many
others, geography of food has become a rich
area of enquiry indeed.
jgu
Suggested reading
Atkins and Bowler (2001); Freidberg (2004);
Lang and Heasman (2004); Winter (2004).
footloose industry An industry that can
operate successfully in a wide variety of locations because it has no strong material orientation or market orientation requirements and
wide spatial margins to profitability. Transport
usually involves only a very small proportion
of its cost structure – as in the establishment
of call centres in countries many thousands
of miles from the customers served.
rj
Fordism The term used to describe both the
manufacturing techniques and societal conditions underlying the mode of production
developed by Henry Ford in the USA during
the early 1900s. Ford revolutionized the production of the motor car, as well as manufacturing more generally, through his system
which was based around four main principles:
(1) vertical integration, whereby all elements
260
of the manufacturing process take place at one
site and assembly occurs on a moving production line; (2) scientific management and the
principles of taylorism that allow worker
productivity to be increased; (3) standardization and economies of scale with a limited
number or only one product model offered;
and (4) mass consumption as a regime of
accumulation, driven by the fact that workers
are paid well and thus became consumers
themselves and create a self-reproducing
demand for goods.
As work framed under the regulation
theory of political economy has shown,
Fordism was widely adopted by manufacturers in the post-Second World War period and
was applied to industries as diverse as biscuit
production and film. Because of the unprecedented period of economic growth and stability
associated with Fordism up until the 1970s,
the period became known as the ‘Golden Age’
of Fordism (Glyn, Hughes, Lipietz and Singh,
1991). However, the very principles upon
which Fordism was founded were also responsible for its undoing in the 1970s. Consumers
began to develop a disdain for the homogenization associated with the one size fits all
approach of Fordist manufacturing. Scientific
management and the deskilling of work led to
worker dissatisfaction and frustration, because
of the monotonous and time-pressurized
production in factories. In addition, economic
instability, particularly associated with the
OPEC oil crisis, led to a slow-down in wage
increases, thus threatening the whole regime
of accumulation upon which Fordism was
founded. At the same time, workers began to
rebel against the way management and workers were distinct and separate categories in
Fordism. This created little opportunity
for progression, but most significantly meant
that wage negotiations between labour and
management took place through collective
bargaining, something accepted in times of
large wage increases but rejected as wage
increases declined. However, as Sayer and
Walker (1992) point out, this does not mean
that Fordism ended in this period and was
replaced by post-fordism. Rather, Fordism
was challenged (but not necessarily displaced)
by the (re-)emergence of different logics of
production and accumulation.
For geographers, Fordism is often associated with the emergence of important industrial regions such as the Black Country in
the West Midlands of the UK (see Daniels,
Bradshaw, Shaw and Sidaway, 2005); industries such as film production, in particular in
FOUNDATIONALISM
Los Angeles, that adopted Fordist principles
at an early stage (see Christopherson and
Storper, 1986); and also a gendered division
of labour, in which the place of men was seen
to be the factory and women the home
(McDowell, 1991).
jf
Suggested reading
Murray (1989).
forecast The construction of an estimated
value for an observation unit, where the observation might be for a place, region, individual
or time-period. The forecast may be generated
by several quantitative models and methods
(see prediction), and the term is usually
employed for estimates applying to observations outside the group used in the model’s
calibration: it is an ‘out-of-sample’ estimate,
most likely for a future time-period, or, in
a ‘spatial forecast’, for a region not included
in the estimation process (see space__time
forecasting models).
lwh
forestry Most commonly, forestry refers to
the development and application of knowledge
and practices aimed at managing forests for
human use. The word has a scientific connotation befitting the evolution of specialized,
increasingly technical and professionalized
knowledge about trees and forests aimed at
their intentional manipulation, and of the particular emergence of silviculture as the science
of growing trees. As a science, forestry
emerged largely from German and French
antecedents in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, from Japanese and Chinese precedents in the intentional growth and management of forests for wood, and from earlytwentieth-century Scandinavian contributions,
particularly in the areas of provenance, seed
source and the intentional cultivation of seed
stock for plantation forestry (Boyd and
Prudham, 2003). This ostensibly technical
field of knowledge, widely institutionalized
under the auspices of forestry departments
and programmes in universities and colleges,
as well as in state agencies at various scales
from local to national, and propagated via
scientific journals, is part of what is conveyed
by the term ‘forestry’. However, several questions arise in the very invocation of this
specialized term, not least: What is a forest
(and is it merely a collection of trees)? Which
particular human uses dominate in shaping
the trajectory of forest management? These
ostensibly simple questions lead to the realization that forests and forestry, whatever else
they are, comprise sites of struggle where
interacting and contending processes of social
and ecological reproduction are partially
constituted. For instance, the management
of forests emphasizing the reproduction of
commercially valuable tree species, resolved
primarily at the localized level of discrete
stands of forests, has been the dominant practice of scientific forestry in the European tradition (epitomized by the German notion
of Normalbaum). This approach was widely
institutionalized in both europe and North
America between the mid-nineteenth and
mid-twentieth centuries, and has increasingly
been exported around the world. However,
critical examination of this paradigm reveals
that it is hardly ecologically or socially innocent, prescribing the elimination of older trees,
for instance, as well as biological organisms
whose existence depends on habitat compromised by conversion to plantations (e.g.
the northern spotted owl in western North
America), while at the same time privileging
commercial timber interests over competing
human values (e.g. hunting, fishing, trapping,
gathering, recreation, agriculture etc.). All
of this reinforces the need to avoid reifying
apolitical renderings of forests that would
naturalize them as non-human landscapes.
Rather, as works such as E.P. Thompson’s
Whigs and hunters (1975) demonstrates, it
was not so long ago even in English history
that forests were decidedly populated and
contested, not least by conflicting property
claims. Thus, as Willems-Braun (1997) more
recently argued in the context of First Nation
struggles in British Columbia, Canada, the
apparently empty lands typical of scientific
forestry representations are often sites of past
and ongoing forced removals and exclusions.
In short, despite its technical connotations and
widespread professionalization, forestry is a
complex categorical invocation of attempts to
manage complex political ecologies, where
trees, humans and other organisms interact,
and where human attempts at intentional management rely on constructions of what is desirable and useful that can be (and are) politicized
all the way down to the level of what constitutes
a tree, and what does and ought to count as
forest cover (Robbins, 2001).
sp
Suggested reading
Demeritt (2001b); Scott (1998).
foundationalism The assumption that
knowledge claims must be grounded in a
source of certainty that cannot be called into
261
FOURTH WORLD
question, and from which the truth value of
other propositions can be inferred. Rationalist
foundationalism identifies this ground of certainty in intellectual intuition of some sort; in
other words, most of what we know we know
by reasoning. Empiricist foundationalism
identifies the grounds of certainty in sensory
observation; in other words, most of what we
know we know by experience (see empiricism). The key point about discussions of
foundationalism is that they are concerned
with epistemic justification – with establishing
the grounds for justifying when a belief counts
as knowledge (see epistemology).
The most famous example of a foundationalist epistemology is Descartes’ cogito ergo sum
(‘I think, therefore I am’), in which the act of
thinking is identified as the foundational
ground of certainty that can guarantee nonfoundational beliefs. It is from the confidence
of this ‘I think’ (specifically, in response to the
question ‘How do I know?’) that the possibility of justified knowledge claims is derived.
Descartes established the criterion of certainty
as the basis for epistemic justification. This
leads to a radical scepticism about external
reality. All foundationalist epistemologies
share a monological, internalist view of the
(human) subject of knowledge, confronting
the external world wracked with doubt.
Criticisms of foundationalism therefore have
a content, in that they are about more than
simply the best way of justifying belief; they
are fundamentally about disputed pictures of
what it is to be human.
Rorty’s (1979) repudiation of the idea
that philosophy can ever possibly find the
objective, transcendent grounds of certainty
from which to justify belief informs a line of
anti-foundationalist argument in human geography. For him, what confers epistemic justification on beliefs is whether they work,
whether they are useful or whether they are
held valid by a community of practice. This
implies that the philosophical study of knowledge as an abstract conceptual matter of
justification should at least be augmented
by looking at how knowledge claims work
in practical contexts (see philosophy; pragmatism). This type of empirical programme
can certainly help us to understand the conditions that determine when claims will be
believed as knowledge; but it closes down the
question of when they ought to be so believed.
In geography, anti-foundationalist arguments are sometimes invoked to question the
validity of explanatory social science, but it is
far from clear that modern social science is
262
vulnerable to the charge of foundationalism
as this term is used in philosophical debates
(cf. essentialism). Geographers have also
engaged in wider debates about the political
significance of anti-foundationalist perspectives. These centre on the degree to which it
is possible to square the academic disruption
of knowledge claims, by showing them to be
contingent and contextual, with the assumed
requirement for political movements to be
based on secure grounds of identity and
experience. Various formulations finesse this
problem, such as Judith Butler’s contingent
foundations and Gayatri Spivak’s strategic
essentialism. White (2000) develops the idea
of weak ontology to negotiate the fact that any
argument requires making presuppositions
and fundamental ontological commitments,
arguing that it is nonetheless possible to adopt
a degree of rhetorical reflexivity to show their
contingency (see ontology). But all of these
formulas tend to rest on the ‘the implicit
assumption that one could think like a sceptic
but act like a foundationalist’ (Zerilli, 1998,
p. 438), and therefore tend to misconstrue
what is at stake in issues of foundationalism.
The widespread assumption that anti-foundationalism involves a generalized affirmation of
contingency betrays a scholastic perspective
that is unable to grasp the conditions of its
own critical doubt, and remains caught within
the problematic of epistemic certainty. A less
deceitful response to the problems of foundationalism
might
be
derived
from
Wittgenstein’s considerations of scepticism.
He held that absolute doubt of the sort entertained by Descartes does not provide plausible
grounds for understanding the way in which
knowledge works in practice: ‘the questions
we raise and our doubts depend on the fact
that some propositions are exempt from
doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those
turn’ (1969, p. 341). The point here is twofold: the world of human affairs is not only
held together by relationships of knowledge,
either of certainty or contingency; and the
expression of doubt is always undertaken in
context, in relation to a particular set of concerns, and against a background of beliefs and
commitments that stand fast.
cb
Suggested reading
Appiah (2003); Taylor (1995a, ch. 1).
Fourth World The poorest and most
vulnerable groups of people within the developing world (cf. third world; see also
south). Fourth World people are sometimes
FREE PORT
defined as those in extreme income poverty
and/or living in the so-called famine belt of
sub-Saharan Africa. Many suffer from human
rights abuses (see the website for the nongovernmental organization ATD Fourth
World: http://www.atd-fourthworld.org). Other
Fourth World peoples suffer from pervasive
social exclusion on grounds of ethnicity,
gender or religion. Many Fourth World
peoples reject efforts to mark them down as
‘inferior’. For example, adivasis (‘tribals’) and
dalits (the ‘oppressed’, or ex-untouchables)
in India have proclaimed their First Nation
status (see caste).
sco
Suggested reading
See http://www.atd.quartmonde.org
fractal Fractals are irregular objects that
cannot be defined by traditional geometry
but which, in some cases (such as Koch snowflakes) have the property of self-similarity:
their pattern appears the same regardless of
the scale at which they are viewed.
The easiest way to explain fractals is by
appeal to intuition. In cartography we are
used to zero-, one- and two-dimensional
objects representing point, line and area features on a map. Simply by looking, it is obvious
that each higher-dimensional object fills more
of the space than a lesser one: a rectangular
object fills more of the map than a line placed
along one side of the rectangle or a point positioned at one of its corners. There is a connection between dimensionality and space filling.
Now think of a number line. Although we
often count using whole numbers (1, 2, 3,
. . . ), we also accept that the line is continuous
and so provides us with fractions (1, 1.2, 1.31,
1.411 etc.). Can the same principle be applied
to dimensions?
Various nineteenth- and twentieth-century
mathematicians have shown that it can. Of
particular interest to geographers is Benoı̂t
Mandelbrot’s (1967) question, ‘How long is
the coast of Britain?’ As he showed, there is no
one answer: it depends on the precision of the
measuring device – the calliper – used to trace
around the islands (see measurement). As the
precision increases, more of the detail of the
shoreline is included and the apparent length
increases.
To imagine the problem another way, suppose that we could encode the coastline in
perfect detail in a digital mapping package
such as a geographic information system.
Each time we ‘zoomed in’ to a fixed location
on the coast more of its detail would be
revealed. This would happen every time, without limit, because fractals possess infinite
detail. Of course, we cannot really encode
this infinite detail and so the total measured
length of the coastline becomes dependent on
the scale of analysis – by how the coast is
generalized. Knowing this, we can take the
measurement at multiple scales, to plot the
(natural log) of the coastline length against
the (natural log) of the calliper used to measure it. The gradient of the line of best fit to
these values is an estimate of the coastline’s
fractal dimension.
This may sound abstract, but fractals are
evident in nature: leaves, trees, river networks
and so forth. Their relevance is not just to the
physical landscape. Within the social sciences,
fractals can be used to model the processes of
urban morphology (Batty and Longley,
1994). Reciprocally, the fractal dimension, as
a measure of space filling, can be used to
model the sprawl or compactness of cities.
Fractals can be linked to chaos theory: the
idea that physical or social systems that appear
to be chaotic can actually be modelled by
clearly defined ‘laws’ or theories (e.g. using
economic theories to model urban development and growth: see Batty, 2005). Finally,
fractals are used in remote sensing to compress (reduce the file size) of images.
rh
Suggested reading
Batty (2005); Mandelbrot (1967).
free port An enclave within a country –
typically a seaport, though increasingly other
areas – where import and export (customs)
duties are either not imposed or are reduced.
This enables both warehousing and manufacturing functions to be located there producing a local comparative advantage and
generating employment and wealth, at a cost
advantage over other locations (cf. export
processing zone). Free ports (such as
Copenhagen, Danzig and Hamburg) existed
in Europe until the mid-twentieth century,
and free port status was a foundation of
the economic success of Hong Kong and
Singapore. The concept has been adapted for
some airports – as at Shannon in the Irish
Republic – and was reworked into that of
the urban enterprise zone by the geographer
Sir Peter Hall in the late 1980s to promote
redevelopment in run-down industrial areas
through tax advantages. Special Economic
Zones (SEZs) with very similar characteristics
are now widespread in the global south:
India initiated a programme in 2000 and by
263
FREE TRADE AREA (FTA)
2006 had 237 SEZs approved, with a further
306 applications pending (see http://sezindia.
nic.in/).
rj
through this strategy may reward their constituents by winning public expenditure for
the area (cf. neighbourhood effect; pork
barrel).
rj
free trade area (FTA)
A group of nationstates that agrees to practice free trade (no
tariffs or other restrictions) amongst themselves, while retaining trade barriers with
non-members. Unlike a customs union, trade
relations with non-members may differ for
each state. Many link contiguous nations into
a supranational regional bloc, but there are
also non-contiguous FTAs. More than half of
the some 200 FTAs began after 1990. Rules
of origin, defining what counts as production
within a member nation-state, determine
which commodities are subject to free trade.
For proponents, FTAs catalyse global free
trade; opponents see such ‘Preferential’
Trade Areas as detrimental. The two largest
are within the global north, NAFTA and the
EU, and enhance North–South trade barriers,
but many south–South and North–South
FTAs exist (the latter usually initiated from
the North).
es
friction of distance The frictional or inhibiting effect of distance on the volume of interaction between places (including migration,
tourist flows, the movement of goods and the
spread of ideas and diseases: cf. diffusion):
empirical regularities in interaction patterns
consistent with the effect are characterized
by distance decay. The effect is generated
by the combined impact of the time and cost
involved in overcoming distance, which varies
according to the available transport and communications infrastructure. The frictions
of distance are reduced with technological
improvements in that infrastructure – though
not necessarily to the same extent everywhere
(cf. time__space compression; time__space
convergence; time__space expansion).
rj
Suggested reading
Taylor (1971).
friends-and-neighbours effect A form of
contextual effect identified in electoral
geography whereby voters favour local candidates (even if this means abandoning their
traditional party preferences) because either
they know the candidate personally or/and
they believe that her/his election will promote
local interests. The concept was developed in
Key’s (1949) analyses of intra-party voting in
the US South and generalized by Cox (1969)
and others. Candidates who are successful
264
frontier A frontier marks a limit. It has been
used in two main ways. In the first case, it
refers to the limits of a state. The frontier of
a state is its border with another state. In
modern times, this frontier is thought of as a
line, since the sovereignty of a state is
asserted as continuous up to its edges. In
medieval europe, however, feudal monarchs
understood that their authority waned towards
the periphery of their lands: these regions
were termed ‘marches’ and the marcher lords
had significant autonomy (see feudalism).
The emergence of the modern atlas showing
countries in different colours with distinct borders represents (and in part produces) a world
very different from the early modern period
and conformable with the presumptions of
modern nation-states (Black, 1997).
Modern state frontiers are often contentious
too, and a whole branch of geography developed on the pretension that borders could be
settled scientifically (Curzon, 1888; Holdich,
1916). These scholars paid attention to the
distribution of ethnic groups, and to the existence of regions that were difficult to settle
or cross. An efficient border would clearly
separate different sorts of people by a line
that was in an isolated region, presenting a
significant challenge to transgressors. In fact,
these borders reflected the geopolitical interests of global superpowers (see geopolitics),
and the first major international attempts
at comprehensive border-setting served the
colonial interests of European powers in
Africa (at the Berlin Conference in 1884–5)
and of the major global powers with regard to
Eastern and Central Europe (at the Paris Peace
Conference in 1919). The peoples of Africa
and of Eastern and Central europe were not
consulted.
The second sense of frontier is as a line
between settled and unsettled lands, cultivated
and uncultivated. This is equally contentious.
It almost always, in fact, separates one society
from another and yet is presented as the separation of society from emptiness (cf. terra
nullius). The most famous of these frontiers
is that about which Frederick Jackson Turner
developed his frontier thesis. The settlement of North America by Europeans expelled
native peoples from their lands. The
Europeans persuaded themselves that only
sedentary cultivation was true civilization
FUNCTIONALISM
and that lands not used for that purpose were
at best wasted, even empty. Viewed, rather, as
an act of colonialism or imperialism
(Meinig, 1986), frontiers mark an important
topic for comparative study.
gk
Suggested reading
Fawcett (1918); Lamar and Thompson (1981).
frontier thesis The argument developed
by Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932)
concerning ‘The significance of the frontier
in American history’ (Turner, 1893). The US
census had been mapping the limit of
European settlement as a frontier moving
across the land from east to west (Paulin,
1932). In 1890, the Census announced that
there was no longer a clear line separating the
areas to the east settled at greater than two
persons per square mile and those to the west
that were more sparsely settled. Instead, there
was now a patchwork of less densely settled
areas in the west, and the idea of a continuous
frontier between more and less densely settled
parts was no longer valid. Turner took this to
be the end of a distinct process. In 1892,
speaking to historians gathered in Chicago
on the occasion of the 400th anniversary
of European entry to the Americas, Turner
addressed the implications of the closing of the
American frontier for democracy in the USA.
Turner claimed that, at the frontier,
Europeans were forced to revert to more
primitive forms of civilization. In this way
they broke their links with Europe and began
to create a new and distinctly American society. At the frontier, society passed through all
the stages from hunting up to the ultimate
form of civilization, urban–industrial society.
By passing through all these stages, EuroAmericans re-learned for themselves the need
for democracy, lessons that people in Europe
took so much for granted as to have almost
forgotten. Yet this learning was at the heart of
the popular democracy that Turner cherished.
With the closing of the frontier, a new way
would have to be found to keep these lessons
alive. Universities, he argued, would now have
to act as the keepers of a truth that would
no longer be learned naturally at the frontier.
These ideas have been much criticized,
most notably by the so-called New Western
Historians (Kearns, 1998). Limerick (1987)
argues that Turner only credits EuroAmerican men with historical agency, and
ignores issues of race, class and gender.
A historical process that consigns the native
peoples of America to a shrinking margin
makes it difficult for them to make claims
about their right to a future in this land.
Limerick also argues that rather than being
legible as a process moving from east to west,
European colonialism in North America
included significant movement of SpanishAmericans from the south, and of other
Europeans who began not on the east coast,
but on the west. The frontier that Turner
speaks of is a farming frontier based on family
farms, and yet large parts of the USA were
taken from native peoples for large-scale ranching or mining without passing through the sort
of family farms and villages that sustained
Turner’s nascent democracies. Finally, Turner
actually misses many of the distinctive features
about the American West, including the continuous role of the state in the economy. gk
Suggested reading
Cronon (1987); Turner (1893).
functionalism A term found across the
social sciences and used to explain variously
mental, behavioural and social phenomena by
the role that they play – which is to say, their
function – in maintaining the larger system
of which they are part. The larger system
comes first, reaching back to determine the
functional roles of its various parts in enabling
its reproduction and development.
As an explanatory strategy, functionalism
was first systematically stated in nineteenthcentury Darwinian evolutionary biology.
Physiological characteristics were explained
by their functional role in enabling the
systemic ends of species survival and reproduction (see darwinism). Not surprisingly,
when the French sociologist Émile Durkheim
(1858–1917) introduced the same idea into
sociology in the late nineteenth century, he
drew on a biological analogy and likened the
division of labour in society to the functional
role of organs within a body. For Durkheim,
the larger ends of stability and survival
determined how society’s constituent parts
functioned. Durkeheim’s work influenced a
group of British-based anthropologists –
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), Alfred
Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1952), Edward Evans
Pritchard (1902–73) and Meyer Fortes (1906–
83) – who developed structural functionalism. While on the surface the various cultures
that they studied – the Trobianders, the Nuer,
the Tallensi – seemed quite different, they
proposed that a common functional operation
underpinned all of them: the components
of culture worked together to promote smooth
265
FUZZY SETS/FUZZY LOGIC
equilibrium and effortless reproduction.
Structural functionalism entered sociology
through the work of American sociologist
Talcott Parsons (1902–79) and was later developed as ‘systems theory’ by Parsons and by
Niklas Luhmann (1927–99). Outside of the
anthropology–sociology nexus, functionalism
was also incorporated into some forms of
Marxism, provoking new theorizing about the
nature of functionalist explanation (Cohen,
1978; see also analytical marxism), and in
the philosophy of the mind, where mental
states are conceived as a function of the cognitive system of which they are part.
Oddly, given the influence of Darwinism
on geography and the magpie quality of geographical theorizing, functionalism was never
prominent in the discipline. It weaved in and
out of some early writings by European geographers, including Ratzel’s anthropogeography and Vidal de la Blache’s vision
of human geography. There were hints of
functionalism in Hartshorne’s (1939) notion of
the region as an ‘element complex’, and even
stronger ones in the systems analysis introduced to the discipline in the 1970s (although
it was mainly confined to environmental issues:
see Bennett and Chorley, 1978). The most
likely location for structural functionalism
within the modern discipline was social geography, but by the time it became interested in
theoretical formalization, the star of structural
functionalism was fading in both anthropology
and sociology. Functionalism was more significant in early radical geography. Thus Harvey
(1999 [1982]) conceived space and place as
functional elements in the reproduction of capitalism: capitalism reached back to ensure that
its landscape regenerated the system. Even
crises – the annihilation of space, the destruction of place – were functional. Similarly, the
regulation school advocated a posteriori
functionalism in its analysis of capitalism (the
success of the functional relation is known only
after the fact of its success).
266
All this said, the functionalism found in
human geography is often only implicit.
Further, given the drubbing that functionalism
has received over the past half-century – it is
variously accused of determinism, of neglecting historical context, of denying individual
agency, of imbuing collective entities with
characteristics germane only to individuals
and of neglecting causal mechanisms – it is
unlikely ever to become explicit.
tb
Suggested reading
Giddens (1977, ch. 2).
fuzzy sets/fuzzy logic Sets (categories, classes, types) for which the definitions of class
membership are vague or ‘fuzzy’, and contrast
with the sharp, clearly defined definitions
used by standard logic and set theory. Thus
‘deprived’ and ‘middle-class’ are fuzzy categories in everyday life and usage, only converted into precise categories by government
or other statistical definitions. Fuzziness
describes a type of uncertainty, but it is not
the usual uncertainty of probability (e.g. the
percentage chance of a US citizen being in the
‘deprived’ category). It describes ‘event ambiguity’, the degree to which an event occurs,
not whether it occurs. Most quantitative and
statistical modelling assumes non-fuzzy sets,
and only a few studies have developed fuzzyset applications relevant to geography, notably
Openshaw’s work on spatial interaction
using fuzzy distances (‘short’, ‘average’, ‘long’:
Openshaw and Openshaw, 1997). Openshaw
(1996) saw fuzzy logic as a key to make ‘soft
human geography’ more scientific, but most
would paint a much more modest picture of
its potential.
lwh
Suggested reading
Openshaw and Openshaw (1997); Robinson
(2003).
G
game theory A theory of interdependent
decision-making. Individuals (‘players’)
choose their actions (‘strategies’) with limited
or zero knowledge of those of the other players,
but with knowledge of the ‘payoffs’ (costs and
benefits) of different joint outcomes. The theory was taken up by von Neumann and
Morgenstern in Theory of games and economic
behaviour (1944) and has been extensively
developed and applied in economics and
other social sciences, notably political science
and sociology. In geography a pioneering
study was that by Gould (1963), which showed
how African farmers’ agricultural strategies
could be modelled as ‘a game against nature’,
with the farmers gaining different benefits
depending on what they produced and what
weather nature chose to throw at them.
Game theory tries to deduce the equilibrium
strategies of players under rational decisionmaking. Games may be non-co-operative
(where each player only considers their own
benefits and costs) or allow co-operation between the players. A classic example where
individual rational choice leads to collective
sub-optimality is the prisoner’s dilemma. A
geographical example of a simple competitive,
two-person, zero-sum game is the model of two
ice-cream sellers on a linear beach, with a uniformly distributed population of consumers. If
consumers buy from the nearest seller, then the
rational seller strategy is to locate back-to-back
in the centre of the beach – any other location
gives an advantage to the other seller (see
hotelling model). Yet, from the consumers’
angle, this is sub-optimal. They would benefit
more if the sellers located one-third from the
two ends of the beach, so that consumers had to
walk less. (Of course, this assumes that both
sellers have identical prices for identical products: see hotelling model.) Much of the later
theory has concerned how non-co-operative
games can lead to non-zero-sum payoffs under
various assumptions, and this work (starting
with John Nash’s work in the early 1950s) lies
behind much of the modern theory of economic markets and bargaining.
Game theory has been applied to problems
of interregional externalities, where actions
in one region are interdependent with those in
another, as in water resource development,
pollution strategies and environmental policy, and in economic policies within a federal
state such as the USA or an economic union
such as the European Union. It has also been
extended to dynamic games, where learning
takes place and sequences of choices are
made and where there may be ‘leaders’ and
‘followers’ (the Stackelberg game), as in
federal–local policies. However, most of these
studies are by economists, and, as economic
geography has increasingly lost contact with
much of recent economics, few geographers
have pursued these developments.
lwh
Suggested reading
Gould (1963).
garden city A relatively spacious and small,
self-contained planned settlement. Originally
conceived by Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928),
the concept was adopted by the British
Garden City Movement, which he founded.
It formed the basis for two settlements –
Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn (1920) – in
Hertfordshire: both are now much larger than
Howard originally envisaged (c.32,000 people
on a 6,000 acre [2,430 ha] site). The idea of
low-density, relatively small, high-quality
settlements characterized by their ‘greenness’
was adopted in a number of countries during
the twentieth century, as part of a planning
ideology based on community (cf. neighbourhood unit): indeed, the garden city
movement was the precursor in the UK of
the Town and Country Planning Association,
which remains a powerful pressure group. The
general concept was transferred to other countries and influenced the planning of numerous
new settlements – such as Canberra – and new
town movements, as in the USA.
rj
Suggested reading
Hall and Ward (1998).
gated communities While associated with
the large US urban regions (Blakely and
Snyder, 1997), gated communities are increasingly global in their distribution (Webster,
Glasze and Frantz, 2002). They are residential
enclaves demarcated physically by walls,
fences and secured gateways, which are often
267
GENDER
patrolled by private security guards. They are
also frequently governed by community associations that regulate residents’ activities and
design decisions. The proliferation of gated
enclaves, private governance and security
is generally understood to lead to the delegitimization of public services and is a physical
manifestation of growing resistance to ‘democratization, social equalization, and [the] expansion of citizenship rights’ (Caldeira, 2000,
p. 4; but see Salcedo and Torres, 2004). Thus,
gated communities have been the focus of
research not only because of their global presence but also because of what they suggest
about perceptions of security, community,
citizenship, public space, property and the
role of the state in contemporary urban societies (cf. surveillance).
em
Suggested reading
Caldeira (2000).
gender A categorical distinction between
men and women; a technology of classification that naturalizes sexual difference and is
intertwined with other distinctions, such as nature/culture, and racial and national differentiation. places become coded as masculine or
feminine, and this can be one important
means of naturalizing gender difference
(Bondi and Davidson, 2003). Haraway
(1991b) provides a thorough discussion of the
history and meaning of the term ‘gender’
within feminist theory through to the mid1980s (see feminism). The term has a broadly
similar history within geography: there has
been a move away from theories of relatively
static gender roles to gender relations, and
towards a fuller exploration of how diverse
gender relations are constructed in all spheres
of life. Emphasis has been placed on the variety
of femininities and masculinities – ways of living gender, depending on context and intersections with race, class, religion, sexuality,
nationality and other social and geographical
differences (Bondi and Davidson, 2005; see
also feminist geographies).
Within Anglophone feminism, ‘gender’ is
typically contrasted to ‘sex’: the former is
understood as a social construction, the
latter defined by biology. The distinction
has been part of an effort to denaturalize
conventional understandings of women and
femininity, to remove women from nature
and place them within culture as constructed
and self-constituting social subjects (see
phallocentricism). The treatment of gender
within geography is slightly unusual in this
268
regard, as it has not been ‘quarantined from
the infections of biological sex’ (Haraway,
1991b, p. 134) to the same extent as in other
disciplines. In an effort to theorize patriarchy, for instance, Foord and Gregson
(1986) identified necessary relations that constitute gender relations. Following the analytical procedures of realism, they reasoned that
two genders, male and female, are the basic
characteristics of gender relations. In order to
theorize the necessary relations between these
basic characteristics, they ask ‘Under what
conditions do men and women require each
other’s existence?’, to which they answer, for
biological reproduction and the practice of
heterosexuality. Foord and Gregson’s analysis
was quickly criticized, because it made it difficult to theorize how capitalism structures
gender relations (McDowell, 1986) and for
its biologism, especially in terms of its portrayal of heterosexuality as biologically or psychologically fixed (Knopp and Lauria, 1987).
The latter criticism signalled important new
ways of thinking about the relations between
sex and gender. The feminist distinction
between sex and gender may save gender
from essentialist or naturalizing versions of
femininity, but it repeats the problems of the
nature/culture dualism insofar as it posits gender as the (active) social that acts upon the
(passive) surface of sex. It is itself thus vulnerable to the charge of masculinism: ‘‘Is sex
to gender as feminine to masculine [as nature
to culture]?’ (Butler, 1993a, p. 4). A further
problem is that within the terms of the sex/
gender dualism sex seems to disappear once
it is gendered: gender absorbs and displaces
sex (these tendencies within geography are
discussed by Nast, 1998).
Drawing upon theories of discourse,
deconstruction and psychoanalysis, Butler
(1993a) tackled this problem by arguing that
both sex and gender are socially constructed.
Neither sex nor gender has ontological status and neither can be theorized apart from
regimes of (hetero)sexuality. For Butler, sex is
neither extra- nor pre-discursive: the sexed
body is brought into being through the regulatory regime of heterosexuality. Within heteronormativity, we must be gendered and
sexed as either male or female to be human:
she argues that those who are not properly
sexed are threatened by psychosis (unstable
bodily and psychic boundaries) and abjection. Gender is a truth effect of a discourse
of a primary and stable identity: this identity
emerges out of repetitive gender performances, which are instantiations of an ideal/
GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT
norm (see performativity; subjectivity).
Butler does see opportunities to prise performances of sex and gender apart: the subversive
potential of drag performances, for example,
lies in the disjunction between (an assumed
interiorized) sex and exteriorized gender performances, as well as the performance of the
sexually disallowed or unperformable (e.g.
men acting out conventions of femininity).
The implications of this retheorization of gender and sex are far reaching: gender is recast as
derivative of the regulatory norms of (hetero)
sex and as repetitive and unstable practices
enacted in different ways in different places
and times. This invites close attention to the
persistent deployment of regulatory regimes of
heterosexuality, to the sexualities that operate
at the margins of and exceed the boundaries
of these norms, and to the geographies of both
(see homophobia and heterosexism; queer
theory; sexuality; Nash, 1998; Hubbard,
2000).
The material limits to social constructivism
and a focus on life that exceeds discourse has
drawn increasing attention. Another approach
to the problem that the sex/gender dualism
replays a phallocentric binary (one that complements rather than contradicts that of Butler) has been to emphasize the agency and
dynamism of nature. Grosz (2005) articulates
this strategy when she implores feminists to
attend to ‘matter’ as ‘that which preconditions
and destabilizes gender and bodies, that which
problematizes all identity’ (p. 172). Echoing
Butler, she understands gender to be a contained, represented, socialized, phallocentric
ideal and, following Irigarary, she directs
feminist enquiry away from gender to sexual
difference, which she associates with an
unbounding and proliferation of identifications, ontologies and ways of knowing.
Ramon-Garcia, Simonsen and Vaiou (2006)
note that the debates about the sex/gender
binary are specific to particular language
communities: feminists theorizing within
languages for which there is no distinction
between sex and gender have developed nonessentialist arguments about gender without
drawing on this dualism. Even within Anglophone feminism, there have been other approaches to theorizing the category of woman
outside of the gender/sex binary. Bondi and
Davidson (2003) call upon Wittgenstein’s
notion of ‘family resemblance’ to theorize the
category ‘woman’ as a loose network of similarities rather than essential qualities, and Iris
Marion Young (1997b) has theorized the gender of woman as a series brought together
by context-specific material conditions rather
than as a set of embodied characteristics or an
identification.
gp
Suggested reading
Bondi and Davidson (2003).
gender and development A contested landscape of theoretical and political approaches to
gender, or the woman question in development,
where Women in Development (WID), Women
and Development (WAD) and Gender and
Development (GAD) emerged as major discursive fields, broadly paralleling liberal, radical
and Marxist/socialist feminist perspectives
(Saunders, 2002). Of these, WID (whose beginnings can be traced to the works of Esther
Boserup) has been instrumental in defining the
hegemonic field of feminist development practices. Although it has enjoyed legitimacy and
integration with major bi-/multilateral development agencies and the United Nations,
WID has been critiqued within feminist and
alternative development circles for its assumptions about sisterhood and its erasure of
differences based on class, nationality and colonial histories and geographies.
For WAD theorists, inclusion and exclusion
is related to hierarchical spatialization of the
global capitalist economy that shapes the differentiated spaces of core, semi-periphery and
periphery; urban and rural; capitalist and subsistence sectors (see uneven development).
Since peripheral spaces are central to development’s local, regional and global formations,
the third world’s poorest women are seen as
an integral piece of exploitative capitalist
development processes. For many theorists
and collectives from the south, this understanding translates into a close correspondence
between ‘experience’ and ‘visions’ in their theoretical centring of those poor Third World
women whose bodies have become the objects
of developmentalist interventions.
The GAD theorists centre on gender and
class relations rather than on women per se.
They emphasize broader interlocking relationships between the rules, resources, practices
and power through which social inequalities
(gender, caste, class etc.) are constituted and
played out in specific contexts (Kabeer and
Subrahmanian, 1999). Like WID, GAD is
also gynocentric. Unlike WID however,
GAD’s socialistic orientation is reflected in
a belief in the state’s redistributive and welfare role (see socialism). At the level of
practice, the strategy of gender mainstreaming – particularly NGO-linked women’s
269
GENEALOGY
empowerment – has become increasingly
identified with GAD.
Since the 1980s, writings by post-colonial
and Third World feminists have sparked sustained reflection and debate on the political
and intellectual representations of the Third
World woman in Western feminist discursive
practices, and underscored that ‘woman’ is
not a ‘real’ but a political subject, shaped
through discourses and institutional actors
with high political stakes (see post-structuralism; post-colonialism). For geographers,
engagements with post-structuralist insights
also translated into examination of how struggles over labour and resources reveal deeper
contestations over gendered (and other)
meanings in the ways that rights to resources are negotiated and redefined within
the political arenas of household, workplace
and state (Carney, 1996). Katz (2004, p. 227)
further spatializes processes of development
and resistance through the notion of time–
space expansion, which allows a simultaneous
theorizing of: (a) the expanded field within
which gendered and generational subjects engage in material social practices of production
and reproduction; (b) the growing distance of
the Third World’s villages from global centres,
whose own interactions have been intensified
through time–space compression; and (c) an
acute awareness among people living in
impoverished rural places, not only of being
marooned in a reconfigured global space, but
also of what is to be had and the pain of
absences created by this expansion of desire.
(See also feminist geographies.)
rn
genealogy
A mode of historical enquiry
that seeks to trace the emergence and descent
of terms and categories, and the interrelation
of power and knowledge in their deployment.
The term is used in German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1882 work On the genealogy of morality (1994; see Ansell-Pearson,
1994), although it is in a key essay by the
French thinker Michel Foucault (1977c
[1963]) and his subsequent adoption of the
term to describe his own work that it took on
its modern importance.
Foucault is concerned with showing how
taken-for-granted phenomena actually have
complicated and often-forgotten histories.
In works on disciplinary power (1976a
[1975]), sexuality (1978 [1976]) and political
rationalities (see governmentality), Foucault
sought to undermine – in the sense of excavate
and challenge – standard accounts and interpretations. He suggested that genealogy did
270
not confuse itself with a quest for origins, but
rather looked to the moment of emergence
of a problematic and to trace its descent
through all the circuitous paths it may have
taken. Words have not remained with the same
meanings, and so etymology may reveal much
about a subject – an approach favoured by
Nietzsche, and his fellow German philosopher
Martin Heidegger – nor have established
logics always been seen the same way.
Foucault claimed that his purpose in writing
was not to write a history of the past, but a
history of the present, in order to illuminate
how we have arrived where we are, which will
open up future possibilities of change and
resistance. Foucault’s earlier writings had
been described as archaeologies, and although
the two approaches are sometimes seen as
opposites, it makes more sense to see them as
complementary, as Foucault often intimated.
In Foucault’s usage, archaeology tended to look
at the logics that conditioned the formations of
knowledge in a given epoch (see episteme),
while genealogy introduced a complementary
analysis of power, of the practices that follow
from, and enable, knowledge.
Critics have charged Foucault’s approach as
too negative, with Nigel Thrift (2000b, p. 269)
claiming that ‘in Foucault country it always
seems to be raining’. However, Foucault’s analysis of power sought to decentre it from concentration in the hands of a monarch, a state
or a dominant class, and to show how power
flowed throughout society, was not simply repressive and worked in complex interrelations –
what he called ‘games of power’. In his terms,
‘where there is power, there is the possibility of
resistance’, which his genealogical works
sought to exploit. It was in this period that
Foucault himself became much more politically
active in campaigns around prisons, sexuality
and in journalism on the Iranian revolution.
Foucault refused any kind of teleology in
history, suggesting that there was no preordained logic to the course of events. Things
could have been otherwise, and could be otherwise in the future. Geographers have made use
of these ideas to take into account the spatial
and well as temporal aspects (see, e.g., Driver,
1993; Philo, 2004), to which Foucault himself
was generally attentive (see Elden, 2001). A
whole range of historical analyses have been
undertaken that are inspired by Foucault’s genealogical work, which are informed by a political and critical sensibility, an attentiveness to
small details and textual analysis, and to deployments of power and constructions of identity and subjectivity.
se
GENETIC ALGORITHM
Suggested reading
Dean (1994); Elden (2001, chs. 4, 5).
general linear model (GLM) A family of
statistical procedures, used in the analysis of
two or more variables, based on the covariation among those variables – the degree to
which the pattern for one variable across a
set of observations is replicated in another.
Techniques based on this model are at the
core of much spatial analysis, as well as
in the analytical procedures of comparable
disciplines (cf. spatial econometrics), and
operational algorithms are available in most
computer statistical software packages (cf.
software for quantitative analysis).
The core of GLM is the technique of
regression, which identifies relationships
among variables, one or more specified as
the independents (or causes, where causality
is implied in the modelling) and another as the
dependent (or effect): the associated correlation coefficient evaluates the regression’s
goodness-of-fit. Other commonly used techniques include factor analysis and principal
components analysis, which seek underlying
common patterns in the correlations among
groups of variables.
Data deployed in GLM techniques can be
at any one of the four different levels of measurement – nominal, ordinal, interval and
ratio – and variables of each type can be used
in techniques incorporated within GLM, each
having particular technical issues that may
need resolution for it to be validly deployed.
(Some ratio variables have pre-defined upper
and lower values – such as percentages and
proportions – and have to be transformed in
order to meet the GLM requirements, as in
categorical data analysis, logit regression models and poisson regression
models: see also collinearity.) Spatial data
raise the particular problems of spatial autocorrelation.
Apart from regression using interval and/or
ratio data for both the independent and
dependent variables, commonly used GLM
techniques include the following:
Analysis of variance (ANOVA), in which
the dependent variable is either interval or
ratio and the independent variables are
nominal or ordinal (although nominal variables can be incorporated within a regression framework using dummy variables
and continuous – interval and ratio –
variables can be placed in ANOVAs using
covariates).
Binomial and multinomial regression, in
which the dependent variables are nominal
or ordinal (in binomial regression, there
are only two possible outcomes; in multinomial there are more than two) and the
independents are also nominal/ordinal –
although continuous variables can also be
incorporated as independent variables.
multi-level modelling, a form of regression (with either continuous or nominal/
ordinal variables), in which the observations are clustered into nominal categories.
Factor and principal components analysis.
Discriminant analysis, in which the dependent variable is either nominal or ordinal
and the independent variables are factors/
components comprising groups of related
continuous variables (with the groupings
derived empirically rather than predetermined).
Many techniques in spatial analysis (such as
geographical weighted regression: see also
local statistics) are based on the GLM. rj
Suggested reading
O’Brien (1992).
general systems theory (GST) An attempted
development of universal statements about the
common properties of superficially different
systems, initiated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy
(1901–72: see von Bertalanffy, 1968). GST
was introduced to geographers during its quantitative revolution as a framework that could
unite various strands of work, and used by
some to promote links between human geography and physical geography (Haggett,
1965; Coffey, 1981): Chisholm (1967) dismissed it as an ‘irrelevant distraction’. The
search for isomorphisms across systems
focused on three ‘principles’:
allometry – the growth rate of a subsystem
is proportional to that of the system as a
whole;
hierarchical structuring (as in central place
theory); and
entropy.
Few substantial achievements resulted, however, apart from the early work on macrogeography and more recent analysis of
fractals.
rj
genetic algorithm
A search technique
deployed in computers to identify solutions
to large optimization and other problems.
271
GENETIC GEOGRAPHIES
Initially, a large number of possible solutions is
identified using random generating processes,
and by iterative processes built in to the search
algorithm alternatives are generated and
assessed according to a fitness function until
a solution is found that meets predetermined
criteria (cf. cellular automata; neural
networks).
rj
genetic geographies
An umbrella term
for the ways in which geographers, among
others, have been developing critical analyses
in novel theoretical and methodological directions to address some of the profound social
challenges to ideas of bodily integrity and
intervention (see body); social identity and
kinship; and the distinctiveness of living, in
contrast to other material kinds generated by
the practices and technologies of the life sciences (see also human genome). Geographers
have been slower than some (notably anthropologists) to rise to the new questions and
analytical opportunities presented by the biotechnological capabilities, processes and products that rely on various forms of genetic
engineering, data banking and commercialization (Haraway, 1997). As well as contributing to the analysis of the space–times of
bio-informatic scientific practices themselves
(see Hall, 2003), geographers have been
involved in studying the political economy
of global struggles over corporate attempts to
commercialize biodiversity (Hayden, 2003),
the history of the genetic framing of ideas and
practices of social ‘improvement’ (Flitner,
2003) and various interrogations of the bioinformatic management and manipulation of
human genetic materials (see Greenhough
and Roe, 2006). In this, genetic geographies
can be thought of as a subset of the renewed
interest in, and framing of, the project of
biogeography that is distinguished by the
ways in which it refocuses that project from
the malleability of the world of nature ‘out
there’ to the human being ‘in here’.
sw
Suggested reading
Flitner (2003); Greenhough and Roe (2006);
Hall (2003); Haraway (1997).
genius loci The spirit of place, or the distinctive atmosphere found in a place. In
Roman mythology, each place was protected
by a guardian deity (a ‘genius’), embodied in
the form of an animal or supernatural being.
While resonances of this idea remain (e.g. in
New Age notions of sites of mystical energy,
such as Stonehenge), genius loci now primarily
272
refers to the unique assemblage of cultural
and physical characteristics that make a place
distinctive, with a characteristic ambience.
Loukaki (1997, p. 308) describes genius loci
as ‘a place’s fingerprint’. Often found in literary depictions (the novelist Lawrence
Durrell’s works are perhaps the most well
known, especially his Alexandria quartet), genius loci has enjoyed only sporadic use in human
geography, because it is such an imprecise,
difficult to use and contested term. Early on, it
was taken up by Herbertson (1915, p. 153),
who viewed genius loci as the equivalent to the
historian’s Zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the age’ (‘There
is . . . a spirit of place, as well as of time’).
During the 1970s, kindred versions of genius
loci, although rarely the exact term itself, were
championed in humanistic geography under
the guise of ‘sense of place,’ ‘topophila’ and
‘personality of place’. More recently, the term
has been taken up critically by Loukaki
(1997), who has been concerned with its implications for ideology, and by Barnes
(2004b), who links the term to recent work
in science studies.
tb
genocide
The deliberate systematic mass
killing and physical liquidation (‘extermination’) of a group of human beings who are
identified by their murderers as sharing national origin, ethnicity, race, gender or
other social distinction.
The term was proposed by the Polish jurist
Raphael Lemkin in his Axis rule in occupied
Europe (1944), from the Latin genus (birth,
class, order, tribe) and cida (a person who
kills). Lemkin defined genocide as ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group’
and, as the title of his book suggests, he was
concerned with the mass murders carried out
by the Third Reich in occupied Europe, and
specifically with what came to be known as the
holocaust (see also fascism). Lemkin proposed that the industrialized murders of millions of Jews, Romanies, Slavs, gays and others
should be deemed crimes against humanity,
which he suggested involved either ‘barbarism’ – acts directed at the physical elimination
of a group – or ‘vandalism’ – acts directed at
the destruction of the group’s culture. But
these distinctions have turned out to be problematic: partly because the first almost always
involves a series of cultural constructions that
sustain a narrative of purification and contamination to animate and legitimate the atrocities, so that it is difficult to hold the two apart,
and partly because ‘barbarism’ and ‘vandalism’ are themselves historically sedimented,
GENTRIFICATION
racialized terms that are impregnated with a
eurocentrism that identifies europe with a
privileged sense of civilization.
In fact, genocide has a troubling relationship to Europe’s history and to the modern
world more generally. Some commentators
have seen the Holocaust as at once starkly
modern and a hideous deformation of the project of modernity, but others have insisted on
its intimate connections with European modernity (Bauman, 2000b). Taking into account
other genocidal regimes, Rummel (1994) estimated that during the twentieth century six
times more people – 169 million – were killed
by their own governments in what he called
democide or ‘murder by government’ than were
killed in war, and Levene (2000) has explored
the logics of state and intra-state violence in
other directions to try to account for the twentieth century as ‘the century of genocide’.
Although the term ‘genocide’ is modern,
however, and a host of other ‘-cides’ – politicide, ‘terracide’ or ‘the erasure of space’
(Tyner, 2008) and urbicide among them –
have been proposed to identify other supposedly modern horrors, like its hideous kin
ethnic cleansing, the practice of genocide
has a much longer history. Many scholars
have extended the term backwards in time
(see, most comprehensively, Kiernan, 2007)
and drawn attention to the role of genocide in
the biopolitics of colonialism and imperialism. Thus Wolfe (2006) describes a ‘logic of
elimination’ that includes ‘the summary liquidation of indigenous people’ and the calculated
destruction of their ways of life by settler colonialisms, and Davis (2001) identifies a global
series of ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’.
The attribution of the term, past or present,
is always highly charged because it combines
juridical, political and analytical inflections
(see Jones, 2006, pp. 15–22). Its origins lie in
international law: following Lemkin’s campaign, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide in 1948, but it was
almost fifty years before prosecutions for
genocide were brought before International
Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia
(for crimes since 1991) and Ruanda (for
crimes in 1994). The long interval can be
explained partly by the protracted process of
ratification, but partly by the implications of
the term itself: ‘It aims to sound the alarm and
oblige action’ (Stein, 2005, p. 190). In fact,
Stein argues that the initial reluctance to designate clusters of mass killings as genocide has
since yielded to the application of the term to
so-called ‘new wars’ (see war) and other contemporary conflicts ‘in which large-scale
cleansings, killings and brutalities occur . . .
Whereas previously the problem was one of
apparent singularity, currently it is that of
near universality.’ This is something of an
overstatement, as the controversy over the crisis in Darfur revealed (Straus, 2005; de Waal,
2005; Totten and Markusen, 2006), but it
is clear that the attempt to ring-fence the
Holocaust – as both paradigmatic and singular, what Wolfe (2006, p. 402) calls ‘the
non-paradigmatic paradigm that, being the indispensable example, can never merely exemplify’ – has given way to a determination to
analyse the logics and practices of extermination and atrocity, and to understand how ‘ordinary people’ could have taken part in state
and para-state programmes of mass murder.
human rights organizations are vocal in their
investigations (see, for example, http://www.
genocidewatch.org) and there is now an international network of genocide scholars (see
http://www.inogs.com). Geographical analysis
has included the use of satellite photography
and remote sensing techniques to identify
mass graves (cf. Parks, 2001); studies of the
destruction of place and landscape to eradicate any trace or even memory of the targeted
group’s presence; and comparative studies of
contemporary genocides (Wood, 2001).
dg
Suggested reading
Jones (2006); Wood (2001).
genre de vie A French expression meaning
‘mode of life’, used by Paul Vidal de la Blache,
doyen of French regional geography at the
turn of the twentieth century, to describe the
range of possible livelihoods developed by
geographically bounded, socially distinctive,
mainly rural communities. It was used alongside the related concepts of milieu (the
geographical environment that provides a
community with its resources) and circulation
(the communications linking different communities) to make sense of traditional peasant
societies that seemed destined to be replaced
by modern, deracinated urban–industrial societies in both the developed and the developing
worlds.
mjh
Suggested reading
Buttimer (1971); Vidal de la Blache (1911).
gentrification Middle-class settlement in
renovated or redeveloped properties in older,
inner-city districts formerly occupied by a
273
GEO-BODY
lower-income population. The process was
first named by Ruth Glass, as she observed
the arrival of the ‘gentry’ and the accompanying social transition of several districts in central London in the early 1960s. A decade later,
broader recognition of gentrification followed
in large cities such as London, San Francisco,
New York, Boston, Toronto and Sydney
undergoing occupational transition from an
industrial to a post-industrial economy. But
more recently gentrification has been identified more widely, in smaller urban centres, in
Southern and Eastern Europe and also in
some major centres in Asia and Latin
America (Atkinson and Bridge, 2005).
Explanation of gentrification has moved in
several directions. One account focused upon
housing market dynamics, in particular the
power of capital to shape landscape change
(Smith, N., 1996b). Another emphasized the
rapid growth of a ‘new class’ of private- and
public-sector professionals and managers in
post-industrial societies, who were drawn to
urbane inner-city locations (Ley, 1996). Related to this occupational change was the
movement of women into the new class workforce, and the growth of smaller adultoriented-households well suited to central
neighbourhoods. By the mid-1980s, the successful re-colonization in the older inner city
by the middle class was well established, and
more recent developments have been the extension and intensification of gentrification in
new forms, including loft conversions, the
massive development of obsolete industrial
land, frequently on waterfront sites, such as
the London Docklands, and also the deepening of wealth in formerly gentrified areas, a
process named ‘super-gentrification’ by Lees
(2003) from studies in New York and London.
The sustained interest in gentrification research for more than a generation has resulted
in part from its engagement with a number
of important conceptual categories including
class, gender, and, most recently, race, patterns and styles of consumption, housing and
other service needs, social polarization and the
governance practices of neo-liberalism in the
global city. In addition, it has been a forum
where competing epistemological and theoretical positions have met (Hamnett, 2003).
Gentrification has been seen ambivalently.
Positive impacts include new investment in
areas often requiring significant land use and
service improvement, the enhancement of the
urban tax base, and the creation of new
(though typically low-income) service jobs in
such fields as the restaurant and arts sectors,
274
home renovation, cleaning and security. But
against this has been the massive loss of affordable inner-city housing for lower-income
groups, an integral element of the polarization
of life-chances in the global city. Gentrification has become a conscious policy strategy in
many cities seeking to reconfigure their urban
economies and landscapes in the wake of
massive deindustrialization. Regeneration
policies, from Amsterdam to Vancouver, frequently seek a putative ‘social mix’ that
includes middle-class housing in former
working-class neighbourhoods. Not surprisingly, gentrification has frequently become a
politicized and contested process of residential
transformation.
dl
Suggested reading
Atkinson (2003); Atkinson and Bridge (2005).
geo-body The spatial expression of the
modern nation. It is the socially constructed
‘territorial definition which creates effects –
by classifying, communicating, and enforcement – on people, things, and relationships’
(see territory). This definition is derived
from the work of cultural historian
Thongchai Winichakul, who coined the term
in his study of the cultural construction of the
Siamese/Thai nation, in which he argued that
the nation’s spatial extent is not unproblematic but, rather, is a naturalized and mythic
construction, a component of the ‘life of the
nation’ that is at once ‘a source of pride, loyalty, love, passion, bias, hatred, reason, [and]
unreason’ (Winichakul, 1994, p. 17). It is important to distinguish between state mapping
and the construction of the ‘geo-body’. State
mapping, the cartography of the modern
state, entails detailed medium- and largescale topographical mapping which, along
with thematic–statistical mapping, allows the
state apparatus oversight over its territory
and population (see governmentality). The
cartographic imaginary of the modern nation, by
contrast, entails the deployment of simple and
simplistic small-scale maps within emotional
and nationally emotive discourses, especially
those carried on through news media and primary school texts (cf. emotional geographies). It is this second cartographic practice that
finds resonance in subsequent studies of the
cartographic construction of national identity, whether post-colonial (e.g. Ramaswamy,
1999) or European (e.g. Herb, 1997). Indeed,
Winichakul’s work prompted Anderson (1991a
[1983]) to extend his crucial conception of nations as ‘imagined communities’ to encompass
GEOCOMPUTATION
the self-conscious formation of national identities through maps, and in particular through
‘logo maps’ that sketch in outline a simple and
homogenous space imbued with nationalistic
sentiments: more generally, Helgerson (1992)
convincingly argued that a modern nation requires a spatial self-conception and that such
self-conceptions are constructed cartographically. From these studies, it seems appropriate to
limit the use of ‘geo-body’ to the spatial embodiment of the nation and its self-imaginings,
leaving each state to construct and define its
territorial and political limits through markedly
different cartographic practices, technologies
and discourses.
mhe
Suggested reading
Winichakul (1994).
geocoding Geocoding is the act of converting paper maps into computer-readable form
by scanning or digitizing (Clarke, 2002,
p. 313) or, alternatively, the act of assigning a
location to information (Longley, Goodchild,
Maguire and Rhind, 2005, p. 110). Despite
revealing that there is no standardized nomenclature for geographic information systems
(gis), these two meanings cover common
ground. To convert or to encode geographical
information digitally in a GIS requires that
both the characteristics and the locations of
the features of interest be stored in a database,
usually in vector or raster format. Recording
what is found and where gives GIS its mapping and spatial analytical capabilities.
rh
Suggested reading
Longley, Goodchild, Maguire and Rhind (2005).
geocomputation The technique of geocomputation applies the processing power of
computers to enable advanced geographical
analysis and modelling. However, this broad
definition conceals a diversity of methods
and philosophies, leading Couclelis (1998,
p. 18) to ask ‘whether geocomputation is to
be understood as a new perspective or paradigm in geography . . . or as a grab-bag of
useful computer-based tools’.
To some, the spirit of geocomputation is conveyed by Openshaw, Charlton, Wymer and
Craft’s (1987) geographical analysis machine (gam), designed to look for spatial clusters within child leukaemia data for northern
England. As a method of spatial analysis and
local pattern detection, it is characterized by
iterative repeat testing, subdividing the study
region into overlapping regions, within each of
which a significance test of the rate of incidence
(of leukaemia) is undertaken. Such a technique
is often portrayed as inductive (cf. induction):
drawing out ideas, inferences and working
hypotheses from what is found in the data,
and suggesting that the process of geographical
knowledge construction is data-driven or
‘avowedly empiricist’ (Longley, Brooks,
McDonnell and Macmillan, 1998). However,
that portrayal is not entirely satisfactory given
any a priori postulate or theorization that radiation causes leukaemia and therefore an expectation that a cluster of cases be found in
proximity to a nuclear power station. Finding
the cluster does not prove the theory, but it may
add circumstantial evidence. In this manner,
geocomputational practices are abductive (cf.
abduction): interesting cases (or spatial ‘hot
spots’) are used to support a plausible although
not logically necessary conclusion, not a purely
(inductive) empirical generalization.
Others pursue a more deductive tradition of
scientific practice (cf. deduction), with the
foundations of geocomputation established
firmly in the analytical traditions of spatial
science and geography’s quantitative
revolution (see, for example, the history of
geocomputation outlined at www.geocomputation.org). Here, the focus is on modelling,
analysing and theorizing dynamic socioeconomic or physical systems (cf. model);
on modelling spatial distributions, flows,
networks, hierarchies and diffusions. In
particular, there is an interest in methods of
simulation – from a human geography
perspective, of simulating the spatial patterning, causes and consequences of population
change, urban morphology, economic cycles,
transport congestion and so forth. These
methods build on the idea of Monte Carlo
simulation outlined by Haggett (1965). It
means that the rules of the system (assumed
from, say, economic theory) are played out in
virtual spaces, where what came before affects
what follows, but the geographical outcomes
are not entirely fixed or predetermined.
Instead, there is randomness in the system –
the ability to generate particular chance
events – albeit that the consequences of those
events are often constrained by the context in
which they are generated; for example, their
locations and the ‘state’ of the system around
them. Such methods include the use of cellular automata and agent-based modelling
(Flake, 2001) to model complex systems such
as cities (Batty, 2005).
If this vision of geocomputation is nomothetic and law-seeking, does it then risk the
275
GEODEMOGRAPHICS
criticisms of positivism, which have been used
as the stick to beat other areas of quantitative,
computational and spatial scientific human
geography? Not necessarily. For example, if
we accept the proposition that visualization
of pattern suggests insight into the processes
that generate that pattern (e.g. Batty and
Longley, 1994), and if the researcher goes
beyond what is empirically observable to ask
questions and form concepts about the more
fundamental structures and mechanisms for
the events or phenomena under study, then
the tenets of realism or critical realist philosophies are approached (Danermark, Ekström,
Jakobsen and Karlsson, 2001).
Is, then, Couclelis (1998, p. 22) still right
to say that geocomputation has ‘no [single]
philosophy (and proud of it!)’? Perhaps so.
Perhaps, desirably so. For, as computers and
computation develop and evolve, new opportunities are presented for innovative geographical problem solving, alternative expressions of
geographical enquiry and fresh geographical
theorization, explanation and understanding.
A few years ago the character of geocomputation could be conveyed by specifying what it
was not: it was not simply geographic information systems but, rather, a reaction to the
(then) limited geometric data manipulations
and mapping capabilities offered by GIS.
What was sought was the flexibility for more
sophisticated and creative spatial statistical analysis, data visualization, process modelling
and dynamic simulation that broke out of the
GIS straightjacket. These various domains of
geocomputation – spatial analysis, geovisualization, geosimulation and the application
of artificial intelligence for geographical
problem solving and knowledge discovery –
still characterize geocomputation. But the
‘definition’ by counterfactual has begun to
age, as interoperability and the ability to
customise GIS have led to more sophisticated
geocomputational methods to be implemented within a GIS environment (Maguire,
Batty and Goodchild, 2005).
Nevertheless, new technologies could also
yield a clearer identity for geocomputation.
Computational ‘grid’ technologies – an allusion
to electricity power grids – offer the opportunity
for researchers to ‘plug in’ to high-performance
computer networks under the rubric of ‘e-’
(electronic) social science. Martin (2005)
identifies four essential research issues for
e-social science: automated data mining;
visualization of spatial data uncertainty; incorporation of an explicitly spatial dimension
into simulation modelling; and neighbour276
hood classification (see geodemographics)
from multi-source distributed data sets.
These, he argues, could each be considered
as important elements of a grid-enabled, geocomputational toolkit. It is this potential to
contribute to the new e-science research
environments that may crystallize geocomputation as a distinct research field spanning
geography and related disciplines.
rh
Suggested reading
Ehlen, Caldwell and Harding (2002); Gahegan
(1999); Macmillan (1998); Martin (2005).
geodemographics Geodemographics is ‘the
analysis of people by where they live’ (Sleight,
2004) or, more precisely, by a data-based
classification of residential location (although
classifications have also been produced for
workplace, financial services and cyberspace).
The origins of geodemographics include
Charles Booth’s poverty Maps of London
(1898–9; see http://booth.lse.ac.uk) and the
1920s–1930s chicago school of urban sociology. During the twentieth century, the
increasing availability of national census data
and the development of computation permitted multivariate summaries of census zones to
be produced, and for those areas to be grouped
together on a like-with-like basis using clustering techniques (see classification and
regionalization).
Those methodological developments provided the foundation for modern geodemographics – a major industry used by corporate,
governmental, non-profit and political groups
to deliver key advertising and services to their
audiences, customers and users (Weiss, 2000).
Commercial applications emerged during
the late 1970s with the launch of PRIZM, by
Claritas, in the USA and ACORN, by CACI,
in the UK. Today’s classifications include not
only census data, but also shopping, electoral,
financial and other data about the ‘objects’ to
be classified (commonly individuals, households, postcodes, Zip codes, census tracts or
electoral wards). ACORN currently categorizes 1.9 million UK postcodes into one of five,
seventeen or fifty-six types (plus some ‘unclassified’), using over 125 demographic statistics
and 287 lifestyle variables. PRIZM NE incorporates both household and census data to
describe, for example, Beverley Hills 90210 as
containing ‘Blue Blood Estates’, ‘Bohemian
Mix’ and ‘Money & Brains’ (amongst other
segments). There are geodemographic classifications of most of Western Europe, Northern
America, Brazil, Peru, Australasia, South
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SCIENCE (GISC)
Africa, parts of Asia and some of China, including Hong Kong.
Many geographers have been active in
developing geodemographic classifications, including Super Profiles (Charlton, Openshaw
and Wymer, 1985), GB Profiles and a freely
downloadable classification of UK Census
Output Areas (at http://neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk). Others have been more critical.
One concern is that for some applications the
cluster groups are not sufficiently homogeneous for them to represent well the individuals (or households) allocated to them. Voas
and Williamson (2001) suggest that apparent
differences between geodemographic classes
conceal a much greater diversity within the
classes. A related concern is that the montage
of variables forming a geodemographic classification creates something of a black box,
making it hard to determine the key predictors
of the geographical phenomena being analysed. Care needs to be taken when interpreting geodemographic outputs because they are
usually indexed as rates in one cluster, relative
to all others. To find that an event is of above
average prevalence in one geodemographic
group is no guarantee that it is common
there: the result could apply to a small minority of the population but still a larger proportion than for other clusters.
Surrounding geodemographics are broader
debates in human geography, including those
about representation, quantitative methodologies, empiricism, generalization, induction versus deduction, data- versus theoryled approaches to understanding, neo-liberal
economies and the politics and commercialization of data collection, privacy and social
discrimination. Critical theorists have cited
geodemographics as an example of ‘software
sorting’, suggesting that the sorts of labelling
used in geodemographic systems can produce
stigmatization of certain places and potentially
deny them the same level of (e.g. banking or
insurance) service given to other neighbourhoods (Burrow, Ellison and Woods, 2005).
However, the argument cuts two ways: geodemographics can also identify areas of social or
material need, offering opportunity to better
target the resources available to those places.
Geodemographic classifications can be used
to interpolate market research and other survey data to standard administrative or ad hoc
geographies allowing, as examples, estimation
of: the levels of consumption of grocery products by supermarket catchment; demand for
particular makes of car by dealership territory;
or likely levels of diabetes by GP surgery
catchment area. Whereas much academic debate centres on the accuracy (or otherwise) of
geodemographics for predicting the behaviour
of individuals, in practice many users are interested in aggregate behaviour – What, on average, is the most likely event, characteristic or
behaviour at an area level, and how does this
differ from other areas?
Increasingly, uses of geodemographics bring
together academic, public policy and privatesector stakeholders, applying geographical
thinking to tackle questions of social concern.
Geodemographics has stimulated a renaissance in applied geographical research, being
recently used for investigating the spatial distributions of family names, predicting spatial
variation in pupils’ school examination performances, examining inequalities in hospital
admissions and for guiding local policing (all
at www.spatial-literacy.org).
rh
Suggested reading
Charlton, Openshaw and Wymer (1985); Harris,
Sleight and Webber (2005).
Geographic Information Science (GISc) In
the simplest sense, Geographic Information
Science (GISc, or GIScience) is the theory
that underlies geographic information systems (gis). The latter are the collection of
hardware, software, output devices and practices are that used to analyse and map spatial
entities and their relationships. GIS software
might be used to determine the boundaries
that distinguish areas with different average
income levels in a city or a map of optimal
delivery routes for a courier company. These
results are, however, not transparent; the process through which they are derived are known
as black box. Geographic Information Science –
or the theoretical basis for GIS – is concerned
with how results are obtained in GIS and what
questions can legitimately be asked.
GIScience explores how spatial objects become digital entities, what effect that transformation has on their digital ontology,
how different epistemologies affect ontological repesentation, how to model relationships between spatial entities, and how to
visualize them so that human beings can interpret the results (Raper, 1999). This pursuit
draws on and extends developments in data
modelling, computer science, cognition, visualization and a myriad fields that have
emerged in response to information systems.
For the first several decades of GIS use,
little attention was given to the differentiation
between geographical information systems
277
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SCIENCE (GISC)
and science. By the beginning of the 1990s,
however, there was a sense among academic
researchers that GIS had forged new intellectual territory. The term ‘GIScience’ was first
used in a keynote speech given by Michael
Goodchild during the July, 1990 Spatial Data
Handling conference in Zurich. Goodchild
noted that the GIS community is driven by
intellectual curiosity about the representational and analytical capacity of Geographic
Information Systems. He argued that GIS
researchers should focus on fundamental precepts that underlie the technology rather than
the application of existing technology. Furthermore, he argued that there are unique
characteristics of spatial data, and problems
associated with their analysis, that differentiate
GIS from other information systems. These
properties include: the need to develop conceptual models of space; the sphericity of spatial data (based on the shape of the Earth);
problems with spatial data capture; spatial
data uncertainty and error propagation; as
well as algorithms and spatial data display.
Given the distinctiveness of geographical
data analysis and a growing community of
researchers dedicated to solving technical and
theoretical problems associated with GIS,
Goodchild argued that ‘GIS as a field contain[s] a legitimate set of scientific questions’.
Goodchild’s keynote address was followed by
a summary article in the International Journal
of GIS (IJGIS) in 1992. This oft-cited article
(Abler, 1993b; Dobson, 1993), was a beachhead for the very successful effort to change
the meaning of the ‘S’ word in GIS (Goodchild, 1992).
The GIScience acronym subsequently garnered widespread support in most parts of the
discipline. The name shift is manifest in other
areas of geography. Progress in Physical Geography routinely presents updates on GIScience
rather than GISystems (Atkinson, 1997). The
flagship journal IJGIS was renamed International Journal of Geographical Information
Science in January 1997; its editor, Peter
Fisher, stressed that IJGIS had, in ten years
of publication, predominantly reflected the
development of theoretical bases that underpin subsequent systems: the science on which
subsequent systems are based. Fisher turned
to the (shorter) Oxford English Dictionary to
support this distinction, noting that systems
are a collection of related objects or an assemblage while science is defined as knowledge
obtain through investigation. He noted that
the International Geographical Union (IGU)
had developed a working group for Geograph278
ical Information Science in 1996, the implication being that there is broad institutional
support for this designation (Fisher, 1997).
Marc Armstrong, the former North American
editor of IJGIS, recalls that identifying aspects
of GIS as science was an acknowledgement
that many GIS researchers were neither using
nor developing ‘systems’, but were doing basic
theoretical work that involved the ‘systematization’ of knowledge (Armstrong, pers.
comm.). Despite a call for recognition of the
scientific value of GIS, on the part of the academic community, the technology is indisputably social in its construction, especially at the
software level.
Questions about the underlying assumptions written into the code that comprises
GISystems are the basis of GIScience. GIScientists might legitimately question, for
example, the premises of embedded algorithmic models. A hydrological model, for instance, might be outdated and fail to reflect
current understanding of flow processes.
Queries about the assumptions of the model
creators, their efficacy in multiple environments, and whether they are designed for use
with vector (polygon) or raster (gridded)
data all fall in the realm of GIScience. These
types of questions strike at the efficiency and
legitimacy of current Geographic Information
Systems algorithms; their resolution is the
basis for increase in the reliability of GIS for
the average user. Such questions do not represent the entirety of GIScience, however.
Every stage of GISystems, from spatial data
collection and input, to storage, analysis and,
finally, output of maps, is based on the translation of spatial phenomena into digital terms.
At each step of GIS, data are manipulated for
use in a digital environment, and these, often
subtle, changes have profound effects on the
results of analysis. Each of these transformations involves a subtle shift in the representation of spatial entities, and accounting for
these modifications and their implications is
an important part of GIScience. Physical and
social information about the world, once in
digital form, is often manipulated and analysed in order to correspond to the researcher’s
interpretation of the world. Thus it is of
fundamental importance that GIScience develop methods to monitor and account for
the effects that possible transformations have
on final representation. Finally, GIScience
researchers are charged with developing
methods of presenting analysis results such
that their visual display is consistent with
database results.
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS)
GIScience is concerned theoretically with
every stage of digital representation. Spatial
phenomena must be delineated and classified
in preparation for input to data tables. classification systems, however, must be compatible with data tables, and this acts as a
constraint to the development of categories.
Many spatial phenomena manifest multiple
characteristics, but not all of them can be included in a database or the data would be
infinite. The manipulation of data depends
on the attributes that are recorded, or the
objects that are defined. Different community
boundaries, for instance, will render different
results in an assessment of population health.
Visualizing GIS results is likewise vulnerable
to the vagaries of the digital environment, and
must be consistent with human capacity for
perception. At a small scale (larger area), for
instance, only a limited number of attributes
can be displayed or the map becomes overcrowded. At a larger scale (smaller area), a
greater number of attributes can be accommodated. Each of these issues has a bearing on
how spatial data are analysed and interpreted.
The GIScience research purview is the representation of spatial data and their relationships and these are ultimately expressed in
terms of bits and bytes. Working in a digital
environment is akin to speaking another language that uses fundamentally different building blocks. If we think of the English language
as being composed of twenty-six letters that
can be combined in various ways to form
words, sentences and ideas, then GIS is
based on two letters or digits – zeros and
ones – that can be combined and manipulated
to represent and analyse geographical phenomena and relationships. But the environment and rules associated with manipulating
geographical objects are quite different from
those we are accustomed to using for conventional text and graphics. The digital environment is constrained by digital parameters
and the extent of representation possible
through combinations and permutations of
bits and bytes.
GIScience is not limited, however, to
process-oriented issues. It is engaged with
how people represent their geographical environment, and who has the authority to represent space. Public Participation GIS (PPGIS)
studies and engages with non-profit groups
and non-governmental organizations that use
GIS to represent themselves, and advocate for
change (Elwood and Leitner, 2003). Other
GIScientists address questions about feminism and GIS, and whether the technology is
inherently gendered (Kwan, 2002). Stacey
Warren (2004) explains that PPGIS and
feminism and GIS allow us to move the focus
from analysis and representation in GIS to one
that views the technology as a ‘collaborative
process that involves both people and machinery’. This emphasis on social interactions between users, affected populations, and
technology is evident in the growing number
of Critical GIS scholars who have merged
emancipatory agendas and theory from
human geography with GIScience.
Developers and researchers postulate
that GIScience transcends mere information
systems and allows users to ask questions
about spatial relations that were previously
impossible to pose. Its champions argue that
Geographic Information Science extends spatial analysis by virtue of enhanced processing
power that allows data-intensive analyses to
extend their geographical breadth. They
claim that GIScience is a means of investigating previously obscured spatial relationships
and contingencies. There is a tension between
GIS scholars who view the technology as an
emergent phenomenon, capable of initiating
a shift in scientific methodology and other
geographers who view it simply as a vehicle
for concepts that emerge from geography. It
is, of course, both.
ns
Suggested reading
Longley, Goodchild, Maguire and Rhind (1999);
Schuurman (2004).
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) In
the simplest terms, GIS (or GISystems) is
the mix of hardware, software and practices
used to run spatial analysis and mapping
programs. GIS does not refer to a homogeneous entity, nor one machine or a single practice but to a collection of practices, software
and hardware with the ability to collect, store,
display, analyse and print information about
the Earth’s surface (or any other scale of geographical data). Each such system is able to
capture, store, check, integrate, analyse and
display spatially referenced data about aspects
of the earth. GIS allows the combination
of geographical data sets (or layers) and the
creation of new geospatial data to which one
can apply standard spatial analysis tools.
Comprehensive GIS require a means of: (i)
data input, from maps, aerial photos, satellites,
surveys and other sources (cf. remote sensing); (ii) data storage, retrieval, and query;
(iii) data transformation, analysis and modelling, including spatial statistics; and finally
279
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS)
(iv) data reporting, such as maps, reports
and plans.
The GIS acronym has tended to focus on
the software developed by specific corporations with less attention to the spatial data
that are the basis for knowledge generation.
Geographical information is information
about where something is or what is at a certain
location. For example, we may have data from
a forest on where some of the few remaining
spotted owls live – which is geographical
information. What trees grow in the areas
inhabited by the owls is also geographical information, because it has a spatial component.
Spatial data are any data that have a location
that can be geocoded. Increasingly, data from
most domains include spatial data.
GIS are uniquely integrative. Where spatial
data are available, GIS can offer a range of
functionality. Whereas other technologies
might be used only to analyse aerial photographs and satellite images, to create statistical
models or to draft maps, these capabilities are
all offered together within a comprehensive
GIS. With its array of functions, GIS should
be viewed as a process rather than as merely
software or hardware. To see GIS as merely a
software or hardware system is to miss the
crucial role it can play in a comprehensive
decision-making process.
GIS has different uses and meanings among
a range of users. Municipalities, for instance,
view GIS as the software that allows planners
to identify residential, industrial and commercial zones – and store tax information. It maps
the exact location and survey coordinates of
each taxable property, and provides answers to
queries such as: ‘How many properties would
be affected by the addition of an extra lane to
Highway 1 between 170th and 194th Streets?’
Population health researchers, on the other
hand, may use GIS to define the boundaries of
communities that enjoy varying health outcomes. In this instance, GIS is not a piece of
software, but a scientific approach to the problem: ‘How do we define crisp boundaries to
demarcate fuzzy and changeable phenomena?’
(cf. fuzzy sets). The latter is a fundamentally
philosophical issue that must be resolved
through computing and its answer lies somewhere between GIS and the underlying theory
of geographic information science. These
two types of users have different goals and
experiences of GIS. One is interested in
‘where’ spatial entities are or might be, while
the other is concerned with ‘how’ we encode
spatial entities (e.g. communities, urban/rural
areas, forests, roads, bridges and anything that
280
might appear on a map), and the repercussions of different methods of analysis on
answers to geographical questions. The diversity of GIS use is rooted in its history.
The development of GIS began in the
1960s, when the technology and epistemology that underlie it were first being developed.
Methods of computerizing cartographic procedures were coincident with the realization
that mapping could segue neatly into analysis.
In 1962, Ian Harg, a landscape architect,
introduced the method of ‘overlay’ that was
later to become the defining methodology
of GIS. He was searching for the optimal
route for a new highway that would be associated with suburban development. His goal was
to route the highway such that its path would
involve the least disruption of other ‘layers’ of
the landscape, including forest cover, pastoral
valleys and existing semi-rural housing.
He took multiple pieces of tracing paper, one
representing each layer, and laid them over
each other on a light table. By visually examining their intersections, he was able to ‘see’
the only logical route. Ironically, none of
McHarg’s initial analysis was done using a
computer. The metaphor of overlay was,
however, integrated into early GIS, and became the basis for a range of analytical techniques broadly known as ‘spatial analysis’.
spatial analysis is differentiated from
‘mapping’ because it generates more information or knowledge than can be gleaned from
maps or data alone. It is a synergistic means of
extracting information from spatial data. In
the early development stages of GIS, however,
few people recognized the power of analysis,
and the technology was generically referred to
as ‘computerized cartography’. As such, GIS
was unimpressive. Early computerized maps
were very primitive compared to the exquisite
maps produced through manual cartography. This comparison led to reluctance
among geographers to adopt GIS as a ‘substitute’ for traditional cartography.
The questionable aesthetic merit of traditional maps was, however, a detraction from
the power of computerized spatial analysis.
That power was first explored in universities
in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Influenced
by the quantitative revolution and the
development of computers, researchers began
to develop tools that could be used to analyse
and display spatial data – though not always in
map form. One of the earliest computer cartography systems was developed in Canada, the
brainchild of Roger Tomlinson and Lee Pratt.
Tomlinson had been using aerial photography
GEOGRAPHICAL EXPLANATION MACHINE (GEM)
to map forest cover in order to recommend
locations for new growth; Pratt worked for
the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture, which
wanted to compile land-use maps for the entire
country, maps that would describe multiple
characteristics including agriculture, forestry, wildlife, recreation areas and census divisions. Tomlinson suggested that they pioneer
a computerized system in which land-use zones
were digitally encoded so that they could be
overlaid with other relevant layers such as
urban/rural areas, soil type and geology. This
happenstance meeting led, in 1964, to the Canada Geographical Information System
(CGIS). The name of the system was bestowed
by a member of the Canadian Parliament.
There were parallel developments in
Europe. Tom Waugh, for example, developed
an early GIS system with the acronym
GIMMS. It was a vector-based GIS system
with sophisticated analysis, and was eventually
used in twenty-three countries (Rhind, 1998).
GIMMS preceded ESRI (see below) in developing a commercial GIS and was relatively
sophisticated for the 1970s and 1980s – including cartographic options and batch processing.
In the USA, the Harvard Graphics Laboratory
was a tinderbox of the GIS revolution. Research at the laboratory established an efficient
method for computerized overlay using polygon (vector) boundaries. The laboratory was
populated by a host of researchers who had a
profound influence on the development of current GIS, including Nicholas Chrisman and
Tom Poiker. A diaspora of researchers from
the Harvard Laboratory in the 1970s contributed to the dissemination of GIS, especially into
the private sector. Scott Morehouse, a junior
member, left in 1981 to work for a company in
California called Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), where he re-developed
the algorithm for vector overlay which became
a cornerstone of the program ARC/INFO. This
dispersion of ideas from the Harvard Laboratory
was the beginning of one GIS identity: that
linked to software packages, hardware systems
and technology in general (Chrisman, 1988).
Institutional and governmental support for
GIS was also a major impetus for its growth
and adoption from the 1970s onward. In the
UK, four multidisciplinary Regional Research
Laboratories (RRLs) were designated by the
Economic and Social Research Council. They
were designed to facilitate primary functions
of GIS, including spatial data management,
software development, spatial analysis and
training of GIS researchers (Masser, 1988). In
the USA, the National Center for Geographic
Information Analysis was funded by the
National Science Foundation (NSF). Three
US universities with GIS expertise were
chosen as primary research centres. Their
role was to facilitate understanding and implementation of geospatial methodologies and
develop university adoption of these techniques. The NCGIA also played an important
role in hosting and responding to epistemological and pragmatic critiques of the technology (Pickles, 1995b; Curry, 1998).
The development of GIS, however, is not
rooted solely in computer laboratories and
universities in the latter part of the twentieth
century. It is also an outgrowth of attempts to
automate calculation in the nineteenth century reflected in efforts, for example, to code
population data for the US census in 1890
(Foresman, 1998). Pre-eminent GIS scholar
Michael Goodchild makes the point that GIS
was developed during a period when information was increasingly being translated into
digital terms and disseminated widely (Goodchild, 1995). If geographers had not explored
the possibilities of digital manipulation of spatial data, other disciplines would have initiated
the process. As it is, many roots of GIS are in
disciplines other than geography including
landscape architecture and surveying. Like
all technologies, GIS is an outcome of both
social and technological developments.
ns
Suggested reading
DeMers (2000); Longley, Goodchild, Maguire
and Rhind (1999); Schuurman (2004).
geographical analysis machine (GAM) An
example of automated spatial data analysis
catalysed by three factors: the growing availability of digital data with point (x,y) geocoding; a move from statistical techniques
‘smoothing over’ geographical variation to
local statistics revealing geographical patterns in data; and increased computational
power to guide where to look. GAM passes a
moving window of fixed radius (or population
count) across a study region, repeatedly testing for unusual clusters of a particular feature.
Successfully used to study the clustering of
cancers, GAM and its primary architect –
Stan Openshaw – inspired much of the
research in geocomputation.
rh
Suggested reading
Openshaw (1998).
geographical explanation machine (GEM)
Whilst the geographical analysis machine
281
GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINARY
discovers spatial patterns in geographical data
sets, the geographical explanation machine
tries to ‘explain’ them by identifying predictor
variables with a spatial distribution matching
the patterns found. As a tool for computerassisted learning, GEM is pioneering. The
problem, however, is that looking hard enough
through sufficient data sets – as a computer
can – will probably reveal an association although not necessarily one with scientific or
rational meaning. Many geographers will baulk
at an approach to social scientific explanation
that is so avowedly empiricist and not guided
by theory. Perhaps the ‘E’ in GEM could better be described as exploration.
rh
Suggested reading
Openshaw (1998).
geographical
imaginary A
taken-forgranted spatial ordering of the world.
‘Imaginary’ is a concept derived from psychoanalytic theory, in particular the work of
Jacques Lacan and Cornelius Castoriadis,
and in its original versions it implied a sort of
primitive or ur-geography: ‘The imaginary is
the subject’s whole creation of a world for
itself’ (Castoriadis, 1997; cf. Gregory, 1997a).
In human geography, a ‘geographical imaginary’ is typically treated as a more or less unconscious and unreflective construction, but it
is rarely given any formal theoretical inflection. It usually refers to a spatial ordering
that is tied either to the collective object of a
series of imaginative geographies (e.g. ‘the
geographical imaginary of the Tropics’: see
tropicality) or to their collective subject (e.g.
‘the imperial geographical imaginary’). Watts
(1999) brilliantly combines the two in an exceptionally careful reconstruction of the ways
in which the Ogoni people of the Niger delta
fashioned a precarious sense of collective identity tied to space, territory and land. Like
Watts, most studies recognize the crucial importance of language, especially metaphor,
and of visuality in producing these orderings.
Geographical imaginaries involve bordering
as well as ordering: the hierarchical division of
the globe into continents, states and other
sub-categories (see scale), for example, and
the oppositions between global north/south,
urban/rural, inside/outside and culture/nature. These divisions also often act as tacit
valorizations (‘civilized’/‘savage’, for example,
or ‘wild’/‘safe’) that derive not only from the
cognitive operations of reason but also from
structures of feeling and the operation of
affect. As such, geographical imaginaries are
282
more than representations or constructions
of the world: they are vitally implicated in a
material, sensuous process of ‘worlding’.
Thus, for example, Howitt (2001a, pp. 236–7)
identified a geographical imaginary that was
intimately involved in the European construction of a ‘bounded self’ and which, in the colonial past of australia and on into its present,
worked to construct equally bounded spaces
‘that provided certainty, identity and security’
from which indigenous peoples were excluded. More generally, but closely connected,
Massey (2004, pp. 9–10) attributed a pervasive
‘Russian-doll geography of care and responsibility’ to ‘the persistence of a geographical imaginary which is essentially territorial and
which focuses on the near rather than the far’.
It follows that a vital critical task for human
geography is the disclosure of these takenfor-granted geographical imaginaries and an
examination of their (often unacknowledged)
effects.
dg
Suggested reading
Watts (1999).
geographical imagination A sensitivity
towards the significance of place and space,
landscape and nature, in the constitution
and conduct of life on Earth. As such, a geographical imagination is by no means the
exclusive preserve of the academic discipline
of geography. H.C. Prince (1962) portrayed
it as ‘a persistent and universal instinct of
[humankind]’. The geographical imagination
as he saw it was a response to places and
landscapes, above all to their co-mingling of
‘culture’ and ‘nature’, that ‘calls into action
our powers of sympathetic insight and imaginative understanding’ and whose rendering
‘is a creative art’ (cf. Cosgrove, 2006b).
Prince’s emphasis on art and, by implication,
on geography’s place among the humanities,
was in part a critical response to the reformulation of the discipline as a spatial science.
To Prince, these formal abstractions were ingenious and inventive but, ‘like abstract painting’, they would always remain indirect
approaches to a world to which the freshest,
fullest and richest response was, in his view,
literary (whereas Cosgrove, who was profoundly sympathetic to Prince’s vision, made a
compelling case for a visual and aesthetic sensibility – though he expressed this in luminous
prose too). In Prince’s view, it was vitally
important to preserve ‘a direct experience of
landscape’ through the art of geographical
description (see also representation).
GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION
Some ten years later, David Harvey (1973)
provided a discussion of the geographical imagination that also recognized the value of the
aesthetic, but Harvey departed from Prince’s
account in two particularly significant ways:
Harvey’s critique of spatial science was much
more open to formal theoretical vocabularies
(indeed, it relied on them), and its characteristic emphasis was on place and space rather
than landscape and nature (which had occupied a much more prominent position in
Prince’s discussion). In Harvey’s eyes, therefore, the geographical imagination enables ‘individual[s] to recognize the role of space and
place in [their] own biographies, to relate to
the spaces [they] see around [them], and to
recognize how transactions between individuals and between organizations are affected
by the space that separates them . . . , to
judge the relevance of events in other places
. . . , to fashion and use space creatively, and to
appreciate the meaning of the spatial forms
created by others’. Harvey wanted to contrast
the geographical imagination with, but also to
connect it to, what sociologist C. Wright Mills
(1959) had called ‘the sociological imagination’, a capacity that ‘enables us to grasp
history and biography and the relations between the two in society’. Neither Harvey
nor Mills confined the terms to their own
disciplines; they both said they were talking
about ‘habits of mind’ that transcended particular disciplines and spiralled far beyond
the discourse of the academy. Nonetheless,
much of the discussion that followed from
Harvey’s intervention was concerned with
formal questions of theory and method.
A central preoccupation was the articulation
of social theory, broadly conceived, and
human geography. ‘It has been a fundamental concern of mine for several years now,’ so
Harvey (1973) had written, ‘to heal the breach
in our thought between what appear to be two
distinctive and indeed irreconcilable modes of
analysis’, and he presented his seminal Social
Justice and the City as (in part) a ‘quest to
bridge the gap between sociological and geographical imaginations’. It was urgently necessary to humanize human geography, and ideas
and concepts were drawn in from the humanities and (especially) the social sciences – in
particular, from political economy, social
theory and nominally ‘cultural’ disciplines
such as anthropology and cultural studies.
En route, however, it became clear that the
reverse movement was equally important,
sensitizing these other fields to a geographical
imagination, because most of them took a
so-called ‘compositional’ approach that had no
interest in place or space (cf. contextuality).
This was a challenging project, and it involved
not only geographers but also original, vital
contributions from other disciplines. Indeed,
some of the most intriguing and influential
spatializations were produced by scholars outside the formal enclosures of Geography:
Foucault and Deleuze in philosophy, Giddens
and Urry in sociology, and Jameson and Said
in comparative literature. Some ten years after
Social justice, Harvey (1984) calibrated the magnitude of the collaborative, interdisciplinary theoretical task like this:
The insertion of space, place, locale and
milieu into any social theory has a numbing
effect upon that theory’s central propositions . . . Marx, Marshall, Weber and
Durkheim all have this in common: they
prioritize time over space and, where they
treat the latter at all, tend to view it unproblematically as the site or context for historical action. Whenever social theorists of
whatever stripe actively interrogate the
meaning of geographical categories, they
are forced either to make so many ad hoc
adjustments to their theory that it splinters
into incoherence, or else to abandon their
theory in favour of some language derived
from pure geometry. The insertion of spatial
concepts into social theory has not yet been
successfully accomplished. Yet social theory
that ignores the materialities of actual
geographical configurations, relations and
processes lacks validity.
Subsequent commentators reported considerable progress in sensitizing social theory and
social thought more generally to these concerns. There was (and remains) an immensely
productive dialogue between marxism and
human geography, especially through economic geography and historical geography (see also marxist geography), and
these conversations and their critiques
spilled over into a number of other politicointellectual traditions (Harvey, 1990; cf. Castree, 2007). The rise of postmodernism was
hailed as emblematic of a distinctively geographical (or at any rate ‘spatial’) imagination (Soja,
1989), and the interest in post-colonialism
and post-structuralism contributed in still
more radical ways to the critique of abstract
and universal models of subject, society and
space. But three other dimensions of the geographical imagination have received close
attention in recent years, and each of them
works towards the production of ‘impure’
283
GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION
geographies that depart considerably from the
closures and clinical approaches of Geographywith-a-capital-G.
In the first place, there has been a renewed
interrogation of academic versions of the geographical imagination, and in particular of the two
versions proposed by Prince and Harvey
(above). Influenced by post-structuralism in
different ways and to different degrees, and
in particular by a focus on geography as discourse, several critics have argued that geography is not simply framed by or reflective of
changes in the ‘real’ world: on the contrary, its
discourses are constitutive of that world. For
Gregory (1994) and Deutsche (1995), drawing on Mitchell’s (1989) account of the worldas-exhibition, human geography is construed
as ‘a site where images of the city and space
more generally are set up as reality’, as fabrications in the double sense of imaginative
works and works that are made, and hence as
‘the effects rather than the ground of disciplinary
knowledge’ (emphasis added). Thus the modern geographical imagination, in its usual
hegemonic form, not only ‘stages the worldas-exhibition and at the same time is fabricated by the picture it creates’; it also characteristically disavows its dependence by
adopting an objectivist epistemology that
separates itself from the picture as an autonomous,
all-seeing
‘spectatorial’
subject
(Deutsche, 1995). Such an epistemology is,
as she remarks, a vehicle for ‘the silent spatial
production’ of ‘the self-possessed subject of
geographical knowledge who, severed from
its object, is positioned to perceive an external
totality and so avoids the partiality of immersion in the world’ (cf. situated knowledge).
Gillian Rose (1993) emphasizes that this is
both an act of mastery – hence her critique of
the masculinism of geographical knowledge –
but also an act that is shot through with
ambivalence:
In geography, a controlling, objective distance is not the only relationship which
positions the knower in relation to his object
of study. There is rather an ambivalence,
which produces the restlessness of the signifiers within the discipline’s dualistic thinking. On the one hand, there is a fear of the
Other, of an involvement with the Other,
which does produce a distance and a desire
to dominate in order to maintain that distance. This is central to social-scientific
masculinism. On the other hand, there is
also a desire for knowledge and intimacy,
for closeness and humility in order to
284
learn, and this is the desire of aesthetic masculinity to invoke its other. (Rose, 1993,
p. 77)
Rose’s critique identifies the first position
(‘social-scientific masculinity’) with projects
such as Harvey’s and the second position
(‘aesthetic masculinity’) with projects such as
Prince’s.
Rose and Deutsche both urged that this
recognition of the limits (rather than the
presumed completeness) of geographical
knowledge’s involve an engagement with
psychoanalytic theory in order to grapple
not with the conscious and creative exercise of
the ‘imagination’ – something that concerned
Prince (1962) in particular and humanistic
geography in general – but with the imaginary: in other words, with ‘the psychic register
in which the subject searches for plenitude,
for a reflection of its own completeness’ (cf.
geographical imaginary). By this means,
Rose (1993, p. 85) suggests, it is possible ‘to
think about a different kind of geographical
imagination which could enable a recognition
of radical difference from itself; an imagination
sensitive to difference and power which
allows others rather than an other’ (see also
feminist geographies; queer theory). In
the same spirit, experiments with nonrepresentational theory may also be seen
as creative attempts to apprehend the world in
terms that are not limited to cognition and
consciousness (see also affect).
In the second place, and closely connected
to these departures, there has been a pluralization of geographical imaginations. Many human
geographers have become reluctant to speak of
‘the’ geographical imagination – unless they
are referring to a hegemonic form of geographical enquiry, and then usually as an object of
critique – and are much more interested in
the possibilities and predicaments that arise
from working in the spaces between different
philosophical and theoretical traditions
(see Gregory, 1994). Closely connected to
the production of these ‘impure’ geographies,
there has also been a considerable interest in
geographical knowledges that are not confined
to (indeed, have often been excluded from)
the formalizations of the academy. The
boundaries of geography have thus been called
into question through the recovery of quite
other imaginative geographies that can
have extraordinary powerful effects (cf. performativity): for example, the geographical
imaginations deployed to wage war (see military geography), conveyed through travel
GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETIES
writing, or mobilized in popular culture and
politics (e.g. Pred, 2000). Critical studies of
these geographical imaginations are not being
conducted in an annex to the central structures of geography. Not only are they informed
by contemporary politico-intellectual preoccupations but they also contest the conventional
partitions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures
and imaginations. The circulation of discourses in and out of academic institutions is
of vital importance to the elucidation of the
politics of geographical imaginations, but also
to their conduct: hence the interest in public
geographies that transcend a narrow, instrumental concern with policy formulation to address political issues within a wider public
sphere. A number of these contributions have
been informed by post-colonialism, which has
inspired a belated recognition of the whiteness of dominant geographical imaginations
and the importance of geographical imaginations outside the global north (see anglocentrism; ethnocentrism; eurocentrism).
Third, there has been a renewed engagement
with ‘nature’. The impetus for this has come
from outside the discipline as much as from
within, through precisely the political engagements and public, ‘popular’ geographies identified in the last paragraph. And yet in the
previous paragraphs ‘nature’ has effectively
been displaced from the central position it
was once accorded within most major traditions of geography and its place taken by
space. The price paid for the articulation of a
distinctively ‘human’ geography in the wake of
what many critics saw as a dehumanizing spatial science was ‘a peculiar silence on the question of nature’ (Fitzsimmons, 1989). This has
changed dramatically in recent years. These
newer formulations do not eschew the significance of space – on the contrary, often
informed by actor-network theory, they
elaborate a topological ‘spatial imagination’ – but they do so in ways that produce
a much more sensuous, lively geographical
imagination. For they ‘alert us to a world of
commotion in which the sites, tracks and contours of social life are constantly in the making
through networks of actants-in-relation that
are at once local and global, natural and cultural, and always more than human’ (Whatmore, 1999b, p. 33). Such an approach, as
Whatmore notes, ‘implicates geographical imaginations and practices both in the purifying
logic which . . . fragments living fabrics of association and designates the proper places of
‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘society’’, and in the promise of
its refusal’ (p. 34; emphases added). To fulfil
such a promise, critical enquiry will require
the production of radically ‘impure’, heterogeneous geographies. The philosopher A.N.
Whitehead once famously remarked, ‘Nature
doesn’t come as clean as you can think it.’ And
for the reasons spelled out in these paragraphs,
many would agree that geographical imaginations are – at last – becoming much dirtier.
All that said, there are two further dimensions of geographical imaginations that have
received rather less attention, and both return
us to the concerns originally voiced by Prince
and Harvey. On one side, there have been
attempts to experiment with forms of geographical expression – to realize the imaginative capacities and creative potential of
geography in something like the sense that
Prince used the term, the sort of sensibility
that invites a reaction of surprise, even wonder: ‘I’ve never thought of the world like that
before.’ Most of these have been confined
to linguistic play in the pages of academic
journals or monographs, however, though
some human geographers have been drawn
to the possibilities of art installations and dramatic performances as ways to reach wider
audiences in non-traditional, non-academic
forms. Without this outreach, which will almost certainly also involve the imaginative
use of new technologies of communication,
the possibility of public geographies will
remain just that – a possibility. On the other
side, and closely connected to this concern,
there have been remarkably few attempts to
imagine other worlds in the sense that Harvey
(2000b) gave the term: ‘spaces of hope’. This
too is crucial; the transformations and extensions of geographical imaginations described
above, and throughout this Dictionary, reveal
an extraordinary capacity within and beyond
the discipline for critique, for the pursuit and
even the privileging of what Benhabib (1986)
identified as the explanatory-diagnostic. But,
as she also shows, a genuinely critical enquiry
must also include the anticipatory–utopian
(see utopia): without releasing and realizing
our geographical imaginations in this vital
sense, then, we will turn forever on the treadmills of somebody else’s present.
dg
Suggested reading
Gregory (1994, ch. 2); Harvey (1990); Rose
(1993, ch. 4).
geographical societies Voluntary organizations, some of them professional, whose goal is
the promotion of geography as a subject and/
or an academic discipline.
285
GEOGRAPHICALLY WEIGHTED REGRESSION (GWR)
The early and middle nineteenth century saw
the formation of several societies in the former
category – both national (the Royal Geographical Society – RGS – and the American
Geographical Society – AGS, for example) and
local (e.g. the Manchester Geographical Society). Set within the context of a massive expansion of trade – associated with colonialism,
imperialism and militarism (Driver, 1998) –
the societies promoted exploration, by financing expeditions and the dissemination of
their findings, and cartography, to represent
the ‘new worlds’ that were mapped. Some of
that dissemination was focused on commercial
and government users (cf. commercial geography), but the societies also popularized
geography, through their lecture programmes
and publications. Some continue both functions. In their popularizing role they have been
joined by others, such as the National Geographic Society, whose National Geographic
Magazine sells millions of copies each month:
similar magazines are produced as commercial
ventures, such as New Zealand Geographical and
the Geographical Magazine, now called simply
Geographical, which is owned by the RGS.
In the late nineteenth century, many of
these societies identified the need for geography to be included in school curricula, as
part of children’s general education as world
citizens as well as a means of promoting national identity (cf. nationalism). They were
more successful in some countries (notably the
UK and several in continental Europe) than
others (the USA, for example: Schulten,
2001). They then turned their attention to
their countries’ universities, seeking to have
the discipline taught there in order to ensure
an adequate supply of trained teachers and
others knowledgeable about geography and
its techniques: the RGS funded the initial
appointments at Oxford and Cambridge, for
example, and also provided support to fledgling departments at Aberystwyth, Edinburgh
and Manchester (Johnston, 2003).
With the establishment of geography as a
school and university subject, separate professions were created and societies formed to
promote geographers’ interests: for school
teachers, for example, these included the
Geographical Association in the UK and the
National Council for Geographic Education in
the USA. In the universities, the research culture was nurtured by professional learned
societies such as the Association of American
Geographers (AAG) and the Institute of British Geographers (IBG), whose main functions
were to hold conferences and other meetings
286
and to publish journals and monographs.
These learned societies operated largely independently of the longer-established societies
with their wider briefs, although the AGS
provided much early support for the AAG:
the IBG and RGS merged in 1996.
Identification of geography as an important
subject in contemporary society and then the
creation and continued existence of the academic discipline owes much to the pioneering
and continued efforts of these societies – critical ‘spaces of science’ in Livingstone’s
(2003c) geographies of scientific knowledge
(see science). The societies are major nexuses
in the social networks through which academic geographers collaborate and promote
their discipline – especially at a national level
– and their journals are widely considered as
among the leading media for the dissemination of and debate over research findings. rj
Suggested reading
Bell, Butlin and Heffernan (1995); Brown
(1980); Capel (1981); Dunbar (2002); Martin
(2005); Steel (1983).
geographically weighted regression (GWR)
Standard regression models, like most
quantitative methods, fit an average relationship across all measured units; that is, an
overall global model is fitted, thereby
assuming that processes are constant over
space. GWR, as proposed by Brunsdon,
Fotheringham and Charlton (1996), is an exploratory data analysis technique that allows the relationship between an outcome
and a set of predictor variables to vary locally
across the map. The approach aims to find
spatial non-stationarity and distinguish this
from mere chance; as such it is a development
of Casetti’s (1972) expansion method. With its
emphasis on the potential importance of local
contextuality, GWR is similar in intent to
multi-level modelling: indeed, GWR-like
models can be regarded as a specific type of
multilevel model, the multiple membership
model (Lawson, Browne and Vidal Rodeiro,
2003). As always, however, there is the danger
that the results reflect not genuine spatial
non-stationarity but, rather, simple misspecification, as when important predictor
variables have been omitted from the model,
with these variables themselves varying
geographically.
The GWR technique works by identifying
spatial subsamples of the data and fitting local
regressions. Taking each sampled areal unit
across a map in turn, a set of nearby areas
GEOGRAPHY
that form the ‘local’ surrounding region is
selected, and a regression is then fitted to
data in this region in such a way that that
nearby areas are given greater weight in the
estimation of the regression coefficients than
those further from the sampled unit. This surrounding region is known as the spatial kernel
or bandwidth; it can have a fixed spatial size
across the map, but this could result in unstable estimation in some regions where there
are relatively few areas on which to base the
local regression, and possibly miss important
small-scale patterns where a number of local
areas are clustered together spatially. Consequently, an adaptive spatial kernel is often
preferred, so that a minimum number of
areas can be specified as forming the region
and the kernel extends out until this number
has been achieved. Changing the kernel
changes the spatial weighting scheme, which
in turn produces estimates that vary more or
less rapidly over space. A number of techniques have been developed for selecting
an appropriate kernel and testing for spatial
stationarity (Leung, Mei and Zhang, 2000;
Paez, Uchida and Miyamoto, 2002).
Once a model has been calibrated, a set of
local parameter estimates for each predictor
variable can be mapped to see how the relation
varies spatially. Similarly, local measures of
standard errors and goodness-of-fit statistics
can be obtained and mapped. An increasing
number of applications of GWR includes
models of house price and educational attainment level variations. Software for GWR is
available from the original developers at
http://ncg.nuim.ie/GWR.
kj
Suggested reading
Fotheringham, Brunsdon and Charlton (2002).
geography Literally, ‘earth-writing’ from
the Greek geo (earth) and graphia (writing),
the practice of making geographies (‘geographing’) involves both writing about (conveying, expressing or representing) the world
and also writing (marking, shaping or transforming) the world. The two fold in and out of
one another in an ongoing and constantly
changing series of situated practices, and
even when attempts have been made to hold
‘geo-graphing’ still, to confine its objects and
methods to a formal discipline, it has always
escaped those enclosures. In consequence, as
Livingstone (1992, p. 28) insisted, ‘The idea
that there is some eternal metaphysical core to
geography independent of circumstances will
simply have to go’. While the history of
geography (see geography, history of) is
neither bounded by its disciplinary formation
nor the North Atlantic, recent historians of
geography have paid close attention to the
institutionalization of geography as a university discipline in Europe and North America
from the closing decades of the nineteenth
century onwards. This focus on the academy
overlooks two important considerations. First,
‘the institutional and intellectual form of the
university is itself a series of [situated] practices that have changed over time’: the present
sense of a ‘discipline’ was alien to the early
modern university, but this did not prevent
the provision of instruction in both descriptive
and mathematical geography (Withers and
Mayhew, 2002, pp. 13–15). Second, like
Molière’s M. Jourdain, who was astonished
to learn he had been talking prose all his life
without knowing anything about it, many
scholars (and others) have produced what
could be regarded as geographical knowledge
in the course of enquiries that they construed
in quite other ways. More than this, their reception within the discipline has been uneven.
Some contributions have been recognized
(and even appropriated) as geography, while
others have been disavowed for nominally
‘professional’ reasons: so, for example, research in spatial statistics may be seen as central to the discipline by some geographers,
while travel-writing may be rejected as the
impressionistic work of the amateur. As these
examples suggest, however, such evaluations
are themselves necessarily historically contingent, and Rose (1995) has cautioned that disciplinary geography ‘has so often defined itself
against what it insists it is not, that writing its
histories without considering what has been
constructed as not-geography is to tell only
half the story’.
All boundary-drawing exercises are fraught
with difficulties, therefore, and intellectual
landscapes are no exception: such projects
are never ‘only’ about ideas, but also about
the grids of power in which they are implicated. The boundary question became intrusive with the creation of modern disciplines,
and the inclusion of modern geography among
them. Its disciplinary formation was a
response to political and economic concerns
(most viscerally, the demand for a military
geography in the service of modern war
and, in the UK at least, a commercial geography to underwrite international trade) and
also to pedagogical ambitions (the desire to
transmit particular, nationalistic geographical
knowledges through school curricula: see
287
GEOGRAPHY
education; nationalism). These practical
considerations were hardly unique to the nineteenth century. Geography had long articulated political and commercial interests – in
the seventeenth century Varenius had emphasized the importance of Special Geography
(or regional geography) to both ‘statecraft’
and the mercantile affairs of the Dutch Republic, for example – and it was already deeply
invested in what Withers (2001) calls ‘visualizing the nation’. But its academic institutionalization raised questions about the distance
between ‘professional’ and ‘popular’ geographies, and about the very possibility of geography as a field of scholarly research (rather
than the compilation of others’ observations)
that continue to resonate today. Soul-searching
(or navel-gazing) about the ‘spirit and purpose’ or ‘nature’ of geography has become
markedly less common in recent years,
however, as the contingency and fluidity of
intellectual enquiry have been embraced.
There has been much greater interest in charting future geographies, whose variety confirms
the radical openness of geographical horizons:
there is no single direction, still less a teleological path, to be pursued (cf. Chorley, 1973;
Johnston, 1985).
It follows that no definition of geography
will satisfy everyone, and nor should it. But
one possible definition of the contemporary
discipline is: (The study of) the ways in which
space is involved in the operation and outcome
of social and biophysical processes. When it is
unpacked, this summary sentence provides
six starting-points for discussion:
(1) As the opening brackets indicate, ‘geography’, like ‘history’, has a double meaning:
it both describes knowledge about or study of
something (most formally, a discipline or field
of intellectual enquiry) and it constitutes a
particular object of enquiry, as in ‘the geography of soil erosion’ or ‘the geography of
China’ (so that ‘soil erosion’ and ‘China’
have geographies just as they have histories).
In fact, the relations between geography and
history have long exercised philosophers.
Classical humanism distinguished between
chorology and chronology, for example, orderings in space and orderings in time, while
enlightenment aesthetics asserted that the
object of the visual arts (painting or sculpture)
was the imitation of elements coexisting
in space and that of the discursive arts (narrative poetry) the expression of moments
unfolding in time. In the course of the twentieth century, disciplinary geography was
288
increasingly troubled by both ways of making
the distinction.
First, Hartshorne’s attempt to legislate The
nature of geography (1939) had treated geography and history as non-identical twins born
under the sign of exceptionalism. They were
held to be different from one another because
they classified phenomena according to their
coexistence either in space (geography) or in
time (history), but this also made them both
different from all other forms of intellectual
enquiry, which classified phenomena according to their similarity to one another (see
kantianism). This, in its turn, was supposed
to limit concept-formation in geography
and history to particularity rather than generalization, to the idiographic rather than the
nomothetic (which was the preserve of the
sciences). These distinctions proved to be
constant provocations. Most geographers
insisted that time and history could not be
excluded from geographical enquiry, and
Hartshorne eventually conceded the point. Indeed, studies of landscape evolution, physical
and cultural, were regarded as such mainstays
of geographical enquiry that Darby (1953,
p. 11) could describe geomorphology and historical geography as its twin foundations:
even then, ‘space’ was not understood as a
static stage. More than this, however, particularly after the quantitative revolution of the
1960s, the study of diffusion, the development of dynamic modelling and the capacity
to capture the modalities of environmental
and social change required any rigorous analysis of the concrete specificities of geographical
variation to be informed by the theories and
methods of the mainstream sciences and social
sciences: geography could not be separated
from other fields by philosophical fiat.
Second, the emphasis on geographical
change raised what Darby (1962) called ‘the
problem of geographical description’: How was
it possible for a field that placed such a premium on the visual to convey any sense of
place and landscape by textual means?
Darby’s original sense of this reactivated that
Enlightenment sensibility: ‘We can look at a
picture as a whole,’ he wrote, ‘and it is as a
whole that it leaves an impression upon us; we
can, however, read only line by line.’ The question (and Darby’s way of framing it) later
seemed problematic to many human geographers, who enquired more closely into practices of
representation and interpretation. They
examined the visual ideologies of cartography
and the poetics of prose, for example, both the
nominally objective prose of scientific enquiry
GEOGRAPHY
that dominated geographical journals and
more evocative modes of expressing places
and landscapes. En route, geography’s connections with the humanities spiralled far beyond
history, to include art history, dance, film
studies, the literary disciplines, music and
performance studies. These were more than
exercises in critical interrogation or deconstruction; they also involved creative experiments in writing (see, e.g., Harrison, Pile and
Thrift, 2004; Pred, 2004) and collaborations
with artists, curators, film-makers and performance artists.
(2) These close encounters with the sciences,
social sciences and humanities have ensured
that there is no single paradigm or method of
enquiry in geography. In order to elucidate the
multiple ways in which space is involved in the
conduct of life on Earth and in the transformation of its surface, geographers have been
drawn into many different conversations:
human geographers with anthropologists, art
historians, economists, historians, literary
scholars, psychologists, sociologists and others;
physical geographers with atmospheric scientists, botanists, biologists, ecologists, geologists,
soil scientists, zoologists and others. These
conversations have varied through time, and
the history of geography (see history of geography) is an important part of understanding
how the contemporary field of geographical
enquiry has come to be the way it is, marking
both its ruptures from as well as its continuities
with any presumptive ‘geographical tradition’
(Livingstone, 1992). These conversations have
also varied over space, so that there is a ‘geography of Geography’ too. The same claims can
be made about any discipline, but in geography
they have been increasingly interconnected.
Most recent studies of the history of geography
have recognized the importance of the spaces in
which geographical knowledge is produced and
through which it circulates. This has involved
attempts both to contextualize geography – to
understand the development of geographical
ideas in relation to the places and situations
from which they have emerged and the predicaments to which they were responding – and to
de-territorialize geography: to open the disciplinary ring-fence, to appreciate that geography is
not limited to the academy and to interrogate
the production of geographical knowledges at
multiple sites (Harvey, 2004a).
These studies have produced a heightened
sensitivity to the specificity and partiality of
Euro-American and, still more particularly,
Anglo-American geography. Contracting geo-
graphy’s long and global history, Stoddart
(1985) proclaimed that modern geography
was a distinctively European science that could
be traced back to a series of decisive advances
in the closing decades of the eighteenth
century. It was then, so Stoddart argued, that
‘truth’ was made the central criterion of
objective science through the systematic
deployment of observation, classification and
comparison, and in his view it was the extension of these methods from the study of
nature to the study of human societies ‘that
made our subject possible’. But the critique of
the assumptions that underwrote such a claim,
sharpened by the rise of post-colonialism,
prompted many commentators to re-situate
that project as a profoundly Eurocentric and,
more recently, Euro-American science (see
eurocentrism: Gregory, 1994). Geography
has thus come to be seen as a situated knowledge that, of necessity, must enter into
conversations with scholars and others who
occupy quite different positions.
This is not only (or even primarily) a matter
of interdisciplinary dialogue; it also implies
inter-locational dialogue. The more restricted
idea of an Anglo-American geography was
largely a creature of the 1960s and 1970s
when, at the height of the quantitative revolution, it seemed that a unified and coherent
model-based geography was emerging on
both sides of the Atlantic. ‘theory’, too,
seemed to offer a universal language that held
out the promise of a unified, even unitary
discipline. The subsequent critique of spatial
science opened up many other paths for geographers to explore, and in that sense promoted
diversification, but in human geography in
particular it also heralded divergence as it
prised apart the commonalities that once
held the Anglo-American corpus together (cf.
Johnston and Sidaway, 2004). This coherence
(or rigidity, depending on your point of view)
has also been assailed by a growing concern
about the grids of power and privilege that
structure the international academy, and in
particular the silences and limitations of a narrowly English-language geography. If, as Wittgenstein observed, ‘the limits of my language
mean the limits of my world’, then a geography that privileges one language is not only
limited: it is also dangerous (Hassink, 2007).
This poses an obvious difficulty for dictionaries of geography such as this one (cf. Brunotte,
Gebhardt, Meurer, Meusburger and Nipper,
2002; Levy and Lussault, 2003).
That said, Anglophone geographers have
not been wholly indifferent to work in other
289
GEOGRAPHY
languages. Hartshorne’s (1939) enquiry into
the nature of geography was an exegesis of
a largely German-language tradition, and
British and American historians of geography
have long acknowledged the foundational role
of figures such as Alexander von Humboldt
(1769–1859), Karl Ritter (1779–1859),
Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) (see anthropogeography) and, in France, Paul Vidal de la
Blache (1845–1918). From the closing decades of the twentieth century, however,
as human geography took an ever closer interest in continental European philosophy –
Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger,
Jürgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva and Henri
Lefebvre have all occupied prominent positions in contemporary discussions – there
was, until very recently, little or no equivalent
interest in continental European geography
(apart from the work of Nordic and Dutch
geographers available in English). One of the
ironies of Stoddart’s thesis about geography as
a European science has been the extraordinary
indifference of much of the Euro-American
discipline to the multiple European genealogies
of geographical discourse (cf. Godlewska, 1999;
Minca, 2007b: see anglocentrism). colonialism and imperialism continue to cast long
shadows over the discipline too: outside development geography there has been a comparable lack of interest in the work of geographers
from the global south (cf. Slater, 2004).
It is true that conferences under the auspices of the International Geographical Union
and major national geographical societies
(especially the Association of American Geographers and also the Royal Geographical
Society/Institute of British Geographers)
attract participants from all over the world,
but being together is not the same as talking
together. Smaller, more focused meetings have
usually been more successful at encouraging
dialogue, and the activities of the International
Critical Human Geography Group, the Aegean Seminars and international conferences
in historical geography and economic
geography have all helped to dissolve these
parochialisms. But it has proved remarkably
difficult to facilitate a less episodic, global
exchange of ideas, and concern continues
to be expressed about the hegemony of
English-language geography in nominally
‘international’ meetings and journals (GarciaRamon, 2003; Paasi, 2005). It may be that
physical geographers have been more successful in resolving these issues, and that their
ideas travel through more effective and multi290
directional channels. Their main journals
attract contributions from authors in many
countries, and the International Association
of Geomorphologists has promoted a series
of international and regional conferences.
But this apparent success may also reflect a
problematic conviction that ‘science’ is itself
an international and ‘interest-free’ language
(cf. Peters, 2006).
(3) To make ‘space’ focal to geographical enquiry is not to marginalize place, region or
landscape. These constructs have often been
opposed in geography’s theory-wars, but while
they are certainly different concepts with different entailments, genealogies and implications (all of which need to be respected) they
all also register modes of producing space as
a field of differentiation and integration. To
say this is to recognize geography’s dependence on a series of technical and theoretical
devices. This was so even when geography was
conducted under the sign of a supposedly
naı̈ve empiricism, what William Bunge and
William Warntz once called ‘the innocent science’, because the production and certification of its knowledges involved a series of
calculative and conceptual templates. Technically, the ongoing formation of geography
has been intimately involved with the changing capacity to conceive of the Earth as a
whole (Cosgrove, 2001) and to fix and discriminate between positions on its surface (in
geodesy, navigation and the like), and thus
with the development of cartography and
geographic information systems (gis) that
provide compelling demonstrations of the
relevance of ‘location, location, location’ to
more than real estate sales (Pickles, 2004;
Short, 2004). The history of these procedures is closely associated with that of exploration, the politico-economic adventures of
capitalism, the occupations and dispossessions of colonialism and imperialism, modern war and the deep interest of the modern
state in the calculation and imagination of
territory. To list these entanglements is not
to imply a simple history of complicity, but
this in its turn is not a plea for exculpation of
‘Geography Militant’ (Driver, 2001a): it is
merely to note that many of these technical
devices can be (and have been) turned to critical account, as the development of critical or
radical cartographies and critical GIS attests
(Harvey, Kwan and Pavovska, 2005; Crampton and Krygier, 2006), and to underscore
that the ‘technical’ is never far from the political. These means of knowing and rendering
GEOGRAPHY
the world have been reinforced by formal theories about location, spatialization and interdependence that have offered an increasingly
sophisticated purchase on geographies of
uneven development and the variable intersections between capitalism, war and globalization (Smith, 2008 [1984]; Harvey, 2003b;
Sparke, 2005). These formulations are themselves marked by their origins, and the privileges of location that they address – and
incorporate (Slater, 1992) – have been underwritten by less formal but no less rhetorically
powerful imaginative geographies that not
only inculcate a ‘sense of place’ that is central
to identity-formation and the conduct of
everyday life, but also work to normalize
particular ways of knowing the world and to
produce allegiances, connections and divisions
within it (Gregory, 2004b: see also geographical imaginaries).
By these various means, ‘space’ has been
produced, at once materially and discursively,
through a series of what are profoundly political technologies. Hence, for example, Pickles’
(2004, p. 93) pithy sense of the performativity of cartography: ‘Mapping, even as it claims
to be reproducing the world, produces it.’
Attempts to understand these processes of
production have involved historical accounts
of the development of concepts and the
systems of practice in which they have been
embedded, in both physical and human
geography (see, e.g., Beckinsale, Chorley and
Dunn, 1964/1973/1991; Gregory, 2008).
They have involved explorations of other versions of those spatializations too: experiments
with different concepts of landscape, place,
region and space itself (see, e.g., Holloway,
Rice and Valentine, 2003). In the same vein,
there have been repeated forays into the vexed
question of scale, which most physical geographers – in the wake of Schumm and Lichty’s
(1965) classic essay – seem to regard as the
very skeleton of their subject (Church and
Mark, 1980), while at least some human geographers see it as the disarticulation of theirs
(cf. Sheppard and McMaster, 2004; Marston,
Jones and Woodward, 2005). The interrogation of these concepts has been an increasingly
interdisciplinary project – none of them is the
peculiar possession of geography, even if geographers have done their most characteristic
work with the tools they provide: ‘Space is
the everywhere of modern thought’ (Crang
and Thrift, 2000, p. 1) – and some commentators have identified a ‘spatial turn’ across the
whole field of the humanities and the social
sciences (Thrift, 2002).
(4) This turn has been sustained, in part, by
a recognition that the outcome of processes
differs from place to place. The variable character of the Earth’s surface has long driven
enquiries into areal differentiation in both
physical and human geography, and contrary
to the predictions of prophets and critics of
modernity, the transformations brought
about by globalization have not planed away
differences: instead, they have produced new
distinctions and juxtapositions. Physical geography has always been acutely sensitive to
macro- and meso-variations in landforms and
processes, particularly those related to climate
and geology. But we now have a clearer sense
of the ways in which those variations have
been culturally coded and constructed: W.M.
Davis’ once canonical (1899a) description of
fluvial erosion in temperate regions as the
‘normal’ cycle of erosion (which would startle
people living in other regions), for example,
and the vast discursive apparatus of tropicality that yoked land to life in low latitudes.
Spurred on by the rapid rise of Earth Systems
Science, we also have a much surer understanding of the global regimes and interdependencies in which environmental variations
are enmeshed (Slaymaker and Spencer, 1998).
In much the same way, human geography
retains its interest in the particularity of
place, but now usually works with a ‘global
sense of place’ (Massey, 1994a; cf. Cresswell,
2004). Similarly, regions are now rarely seen
as the independent building blocks of a global
inventory; a revitalized regional geography
focuses instead on the porosity of regions and
on the intersecting processes through which
their configurations are produced and transformed (Amin, 2004b). Here too, geography
is not alone in its interest: area studies, international relations and international studies
have declared interests in these issues too,
though where these interests have been wired
to the conduct of foreign policy they have
typically provided a narrower, more instrumental framing of interdependence than is
now usual in geography.
More fundamentally, however, the spatial
turn has also been sustained through investigations of the ways in which space affects the
very operation of processes. It is now widely
recognized that processes are not indifferent
to the circumstances and configurations in
which they operate, and it is this ‘throwntogetherness’ that has prompted a renewed
interest in spatial ontology (Massey, 2005).
This was, in a way, precisely Hartshorne’s
point – and it is also the pivot around which
291
GEOGRAPHY
so much of Torsten Hägerstrand’s extraordinary experiments with time-geography
moved – but it is now being sharpened in
radically different ways. It is also why geography has always placed such a premium on
fieldwork (which was focal to Stoddart’s
account too). Unlike field sciences, laboratory
sciences can, in some measure, control for
disturbances and isolate parameters to create
idealized states. In much the same way, spatial
science was an attempt to prise apart different
spatial structures – the hexagonal lattices of
central place systems, the wave forms of
diffusion processes – and then search for
commonalities within these spatializations
(market areas and drainage basins as hexagons) or combine them in idealized models
(the diffusion of innovations through central
place systems). These were all attempts to
order what is now most often seen as a partially ordered world – to tidy it up. As the
philosopher A.N. Whitehead warned, however, ‘Nature doesn’t come as clean as you
can think it’, and it is in this spirit that much
of geography is increasingly exercised by the
ways in which the coexistence of different spatializations perturbs, disrupts and transforms
the fields through which social and biophysical
processes operate. Physical geography was
in the vanguard of attempts to find the terms
for what B.A. Kennedy (1979) memorably
described as ‘a naughty world’, and since
then human geography has also recognized
the non-linearity, contingency and complexity
of life on Earth.
(5) The processes with which geography is
concerned are conventionally and collectively
identified as ‘social’ (economic, cultural, political etc.) and ‘biophysical’ (biological, chemical, geophysical etc.). These two realms have
often been assigned to a separate human
geography and physical geography, and
the relations between the two have frequently
prompted concern, on occasion even antagonism. In some institutional systems the two are
more or less completely separate – in the
Nordic countries, for example, there are usually separate university departments of human
and physical geography – while in others one
more or less dominates to the virtual exclusion
of the other (in India, human geography is
considerably more prominent than physical
geography, for example, while in the USA,
until very recently, ‘Geography’ was overwhelmingly human geography). Although
most major geographical societies publish
general journals that include papers in both
292
physical and human geography – in the
English-speaking world, these include the
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Canadian Geographer, Geographical
Journal, Geographical Research, Geographical
Review, South African Geographical Journal
and the Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers – in recent years many of them
have found it difficult to attract physical geographers to their pages. (In Sweden, the
English-language Geografiska Annaler is published as separate series in physical and human
geography.) There are some newer, general
journals produced by commercial publishers
too, notably Geoforum, GeoJournal and Geography Compass, and also technical journals
such as Geographical Analysis and the International Journal of Geographical Information
Science. Publishing in the same journals does
not imply a common discursive community, of
course, and neither does it necessarily produce
one: the sheer volume of academic publication
makes most readers ever more selective (and
perhaps idiosyncratic). But in any case the
numbers of general journals have been dwarfed by the explosion of specialized, sub-disciplinary journals such as Earth Surface Processes
and Landforms, The Journal of Biogeography,
Physical Geography and Progress in Physical
Geography on one side, and Antipode, Cultural
Geographies, Economic Geography, the Environment and Planning journals, Gender, Place and
Culture, Journal of Historical Geography, Political Geography, Progress in Human Geography
and Social and Cultural Geographies on the
other. Many of these journals advertise themselves as ‘interdisciplinary’, but the two groups
reach out in opposite directions – to the atmospheric, biological and Earth sciences, or to
the humanities and social sciences – rather
than to each other.
Openness to other disciplines is widely
accepted as indispensable for intellectual vitality, but there has also been a persistent anxiety
that arrangements and practices such as these
make a mockery of claims that geography
studies the relations between the human and
physical worlds, and at the limit threaten geography’s institutional survival when ecological
awareness and demands for sustainable development are being articulated by other disciplines and emerging interdisciplinary fields
(cf. Turner, 2002). To be sure, human geographers have long had important things to say
about nature – it was only on the isotropic
planes of spatial science that the biophysical
environment was erased – and a host of studies
in cultural ecology, environmental
GEOGRAPHY
history, hazards research and political
ecology testify to the power of their contributions. Similarly, physical geographers have
long been interested in the intersection of
human and physical systems (cf. Bennett and
Chorley, 1978). In geomorphology, many consultative, geotechnical projects – perhaps most
obviously on flooding, soil erosion, slope stability and the like – reveal the continuing vitality of this stream of work, and the atmospheric
sciences have placed considerable emphasis on
their practical relevance. In the future, a revitalized biogeography (as a sort of ‘living Earth
science’) may well make some of the most
direct connections to human geography and,
indeed, to green politics, while pressing issues
of global environmental change and global
warming require a transdisciplinary approach
that speaks across the sciences, social sciences
and humanities (see also Turner, Clark, Kates,
Richards and Mathews, 1990).
But to have important things to say – and
vital questions to address – does not mean that
human and physical geographers speak the
same language, and translation has its own
problems (Bracken and Oughton, 2006).
Many commentators, inside and outside geography, have insisted on a fundamental distinction between the methods of the natural
sciences (that probe an ‘object-world’) and
those of the humanities and social sciences
(that probe a ‘subject-world’). Unlike pebbles
rolling along the bed of a river or grains of
sand cascading over the crest of a dune,
human beings are suspended in webs of meaning: those meanings make a difference to
conduct in ways that have no parallel in the
domain of the natural sciences, and their elucidation requires radically different interpretative procedures. Proponents of humanistic
geography were among those most likely to
advance these arguments in the 1970s and
1980s, but the rise of postmodernism and
the correlative cultural turn across the
humanities and social sciences in the 1990s –
and in particular the so-called ‘science wars’
epitomized by the Sokal affair (in which physicist Alan Sokal successfully submitted a spoof
‘cultural studies’ article to the journal Social
Text; cf. Ross, 1996) – must have convinced
many physical geographers that their commitment to ‘Science’ put them at a considerable
distance from many, if not most, human
geographers.
There have been three major responses
to such polarizing views. The first has been
to appeal to science studies (see science) to
argue that physical geography, like ‘science’
more generally, is a social practice too; it has
its own, highly formalized rules, but it constantly traffics in meanings and interpretations. Seen thus, physical geographers are
caught in the hermeneutic circle, and as
invested in (serious) language games and
qualitative modes of representation – and
hence in textualization, rhetoric and the
like – as human geographers (Sugden, 1996;
Spedding, 1997; Phillips, 1999, pp. 758–9;
Harrison, 2001). These commonalities extend
beyond the notebook or the printed page,
however, and include, crucially, the performance of fieldwork (Powell, 2002). The
second response has been to return to
philosophy and explore post-positivist philosophies of science that provide more nuanced
explanations of both social and biophysical
systems, and allow for a more sophisticated
understanding of contingency than the objectivist canon. realism has played a pivotal role
here, not least through its qualified naturalism, and following its early consideration by
human geographers (Sayer, 1992 [1984])
it has been explored by a growing number
of physical geographers (Richards, Brookes,
Clifford, Harris and Lane, 1998; Raper and
Livingstone, 2001). The third response,
stimulated by attempts to theorize the production of nature (Smith, 2008 [1984]),
has been to call into question the very distinction between the ‘social’ and ‘biophysical’
(Braun and Castree 1998; Castree and
Braun, 2001) and to recognize the vital importance of ‘hybrid geographies’ (Whatmore,
2002b). A host of new approaches has confounded the deceptively commonsensical partitions between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’,
including actor-network theory, agentbased modelling, complexity theory and
non-representational theory. With one or
two exceptions, it seems that human geographers are more drawn to some of these possibilities and physical geographers to others,
and they do not in themselves constitute a
common intellectual language. But what C.P.
Snow famously castigated as ‘the two cultures’
in the late 1950s, one literary-social and the
other physical-scientific, has come to be recognized as an artifice, and there have been a
number of attempts to conduct what the
Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers called ‘conversations across
the divide’ (Harrison, Massey, Richards,
Magilligan, Thrift and Bender, 2004).
Not all observers of interventions like these
are sanguine about the prospects for a plenary
geography (cf. Johnston, 2005b; Viles, 2005),
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GEOGRAPHY
and at the end of the day it may not matter
very much. Most physical and human geographers are probably too involved in their own
teaching and research to bother very much
about such meta-issues. If they are interested
in (say) residential segregation in cities or the
dynamics of gravel-bed rivers, most scholars
pursue whatever avenues of enquiry seem
most promising, and do not draw back at disciplinary borders or worry about disciplinary
integrity. It is hard to say – or see – why they
should. To be sure, some work is by its very
nature hybrid – hence the rise of various ‘environmental’ geographies – but it is a mistake
to identify institutional politics with intellectual substance. Funding for teaching and research has become a crucial issue for all
disciplines, and its impact should not be minimized. Advertising the capacity of geography
to bring together the sciences, social sciences
and humanities may bring its institutional rewards, but the intellectual realization of an
interdisciplinary project through disciplinary
privilege is surely a contradiction in terms.
Disciplines are contingent institutional arrangements, and while each has a canon of
sorts, activated through courses and textbooks, students and professors, societies and
journals, and while there have often been attempts to police the frontiers (or to extend
them through disciplinary imperialism), the
fact remains that intellectual work of any significance has never been confined by administrative boundaries. Most scholars travel in
interdisciplinary space, and while geography
may have been unusually promiscuous in its
encounters, it is by no means alone: as Gregson
(2005, p. 7) astutely remarks, ‘ours is increasingly a post-disciplinary world in which the
geographical is critical but not ours to possess’.
(6) The emphasis on process-based explanations is common to human geography, physical geography and many of the interchanges
between them. Contemporary geographical
enquiry does not stop at mapping outcomes –
a sort of global gazetteer – and the friction of
distance is no longer viewed as an adequate
surrogate for the operation of the processes
that produce those outcomes. Hence the focus
on practices and structures, micro-processes
and systems. In human geography, the
argument was put with characteristic force by
Soja (1989, pp. 37–8), who identified a persistent disciplinary tendency to limit enquiry
to the description and calibration of ‘outcomes
deriving from processes whose deeper theorization was left to others’ in ‘an infinite regres294
sion of geographies upon geographies’. His
solution, like those of an increasing number
of his peers, was not to import theorizations of
processes from social theory, but (much
more radically) to ‘spatialize’ social theory
ab initio and to think about the production
of space in ways that eventually troubled the
dualism (even the dialectic) of spatial form
and social process. Others followed other
routes to different destinations, but the common result was to underline the importance of
ontology to human geography. Some physical geographers had started to focus on process-based explanations in the 1950s, under
the influence of American geologist and geomorphologist Arthur N. Strahler (1918–2002)
and his graduate students, and by the time
human geographers were recoiling from
spatial fetishism, their physical colleagues
were heavily invested in the measurement of
atmospheric, biological and geomorphological
processes. But here too there has been a concerted attempt to think about process in less
mechanistic terms than those early projects
allowed, and in consequence to recognize
the practical importance of ‘philosophical
speculation about the fundamental ‘‘stuff’’ or
substance of reality’ for geomorphology and
other fields of physical geography (Rhoads,
2006, p. 15; cf. Harvey, 1996).
This interest in process is, in one sense, a
peculiarly modern fascination: in a world
where, as Marx so famously put it, ‘all that is
solid melts into air’, there is a particular premium on describing, monitoring and accounting for change. But there is also a vital interest
in planning, predicting and implementing
change. This has had two crucial impacts on
the development of contemporary geography.
The first is a renewed interest in political and
ethical questions. Intervening in situations of
politico-ecological catastrophe or war, where
environmental justice, human rights and
even our very survival as a species may be
at stake, requires more than a detached, analytical gaze. In its classical, Greek form, geography was closely associated with political and
moral philosophy, and the luminous writings
of the gentle anarchist geographer Pyotr
Kropotkin (1842–1921) provided a rare,
modern insistence on the importance of such
questions. These were revived most effectively
by David Harvey in the second half of the
twentieth century, whose forensic dissection
of late capitalism through a close reading
and reformulation of Marx’s writings did
much to alert human geographers to the ineluctable politics of their enquiries. This raised
GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY OF
a series of questions about epistemology and
the limits of geographical knowledge that required a critique not only of geography’s technical and conceptual armatures – including
those derived from its newfound interest in
marxism – but of (for example) the masculinism that was reproduced through its concepts
and practices (Rose, 1993). The ongoing formation of a critical human geography, including critical geopolitics and feminist
geographies, reinforced and generalized
these concerns (see also radical geography).
Physical geographers were by no means indifferent to them, but they seem to have been
more directly moved by the consideration
of an explicitly environmental ethics. Indeed,
moral philosophies more generally have assumed such prominence alongside philosophies
of science in contemporary geographical
enquiry that some observers have discerned a
‘moral turn’ across the discipline as a whole
(Barnett and Land, 2007; cf. Smith, 2000a;
Lee and Smith, 2004).
The second consequence of orienting geographical enquiry towards change and the
future has been a recognition that geography’s
responsibilities extend beyond a critical involvement in public policy – important
though that is – to a considered engagement
in public debate (Murphy, 2006). This involves
a more rigorous reflexivity: not only a careful and constructive critique of theories,
methods and materials, but also an examination of the circumstances in which geographies
are being produced and circulated and of
the consequences in which they are implicated.
This process might well begin ‘at home’, in the
classroom and the lecture theatre, but it
cannot end there. The late-modern corporate
university, with its audit culture, its vested
interest in the commodification of knowledge,
and its incorporation of many of the modalities of neo-liberalism, materially affects
teaching and research. At the same time, however, precisely because geographical knowledges are produced at so many sites outside
formal educational institutions, public responsibility also involves a willingness to learn from
and engage with audiences far beyond the
academy, many of whose lives have been
ravaged by the unregulated intrusions of the
supposedly ‘free’ market, by new rounds of
accumulation by dispossession and by the
forcible installation of radically new geographies (Harvey, 2003b; Lawson, 2007). To analyse and challenge these impositions requires
more than ‘earth-writing’ in its literal sense;
geographers neglect the art of writing at their
peril, but they also need to write in different
(‘non-academic’) styles for different audiences, to explore new technologies and
media, and to experiment with different
modes of presentation. None of this is about
experimentation for its own sake, because the
new-found interest in public geographies
is not only about producing counter-publics
imbued with a critical geographical imagination: it is also, crucially, about learning
from and engaging them in open and respectful dialogue. This matters because geography
is not, as the old saw has it, ‘what geographers
do’: it is, in an important sense, what we all
do. Claims about ‘the end of geography’ have
been made since at least the early twentieth
century, but (then as now) they have also
always been claims about the rise of new geographies and, less obviously perhaps, the grids
of power that they forward (Smith, N., 2003c).
‘Geo-graphing’, whether ‘professional’ or
‘popular’, thus never works on a blank surface:
it always involves writing over (superimposition) and writing out (erasure and exclusion:
Sparke, 2005, p. xvi). Textbooks and dictionary entries are no exception.
dg
Suggested reading
Bonnet (2007); Castree, Rogers and Sherman
(2005); Livingstone (1992); Thrift (2002) [and
subsequent debate].
geography, history of The term ‘geography’ defies simple definition. The standard,
non-specialist dictionary characterization of it
as ‘The science which has for its object the
description of the Earth’s surface’ fails to capture the complexity of geography’s history: the
disorderliness of the past, to put it another
way, resists essentialist specification. As an
enterprise – whether scholarly or popular,
whether in terms of disciplinary history, discursive engagements or practical operations –
geography has meant different things at different times and places. In fact, geographical
knowledge and practice been intimately intertwined with a host of enterprises: natural
magic, imperial politics, celestial cartography,
natural theology, conjectural prehistory, mathematical astronomy, speculative anthropology,
travel-writing, national identity and various
species of literary endeavour. It is therefore
understandable that there is no unchallenged
consensus on what it means to write geography’s history. And although the task of reconstructing geography’s history has had its
critics, some of whom are suspicious of the
entire enterprise (Barnett, 1995), it would
295
GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY OF
not be unreasonable to suggest that some of
the most significant interventions into recent
debates on the relationships between knowledge, representation and power have emanated from those concerned with the ways in
which geographical knowledge is constituted
socially, historically and spatially.
As a professional discipline, geography’s
genealogy is part and parcel of the story of
the division of intellectual labour that delivered modern ‘disciplines’ around the end of
the nineteenth century. It has been claimed
that before this period, in particular during
the period of the European enlightenment,
the label ‘geography’, as the precursor of the
modern discipline, had fairly specific connotations that distinguished it from other fields
of endeavour through its focus on the determination of relative location and description
of ‘phenomena to be found in those locations’
(Mayhew, 2001, p. 388). But it has been
shown that boundaries around the subject
were never quite so sharply delineated
and that geography took various shapes in different texts, at different sites and in different
practical pursuits (Withers, 2006). However
that particular terminological debate is to be
resolved, histories of geography as a discourse
continue to be written without the definitional
constraints that recent history and contingent
institutional arrangements necessarily impose
on the modern-day discipline. To be sure,
the histories of geography as discourse and
discipline are interrelated in intimate ways,
and there is good evidence to suppose that
recent practitioners of these enterprises deploy
similar historiographical tactics, though there
do remain differences of substance and style
in the conduct of these two enterprises.
The increasing acknowledgement too that
geographical pursuits in the public sphere –
popular geographies – are in need of further
scrutiny parallels, in some respects, the surge
of interest in social studies of popular science.
So far as the modern discipline of geography
is concerned, then, those chronicling the
course of historical change have conducted
their investigations in a variety of ways. A range
of different strategies has been pursued. First:
institutional history. Those dwelling on the
history of geography’s institutions have concentrated on the subject’s organizational expression, and accordingly have produced
narratives of a range of geographical societies, or have enquired into the evolution of
geography in different national traditions.
Such projects have tended to concentrate on
geography’s modern narrative, but even in its
296
pre-professional guise, the subject’s institutional manifestation was significant. Its presence in university curricula, for example, has
been traced back to the period of the scientific revolution, when it was taught in conjunction with practices such as astronomy and
practical mathematics (Withers and Mayhew,
2002; Livingstone 2003c). Yet there remains
significant work to be done. For the Englishspeaking world, to take a single example,
the dimensions of the Royal Geographical
Society’s influence on the mutual shaping of
geographical knowledge and Victorian society
still remain to be charted. In other national
and provincial settings, similar questions are
in need of resolution.
Second: biography. The life stories of a
number of key professional geographers,
including Halford Mackinder, Ellsworth
Huntington, Mark Jefferson, William Morris
Davis and Elisée Reclus, have been narrated.
Some (though not all) of these accounts have
been frankly disappointing in their lacklustre
narrative line and an absence of historiographical sophistication, though N. Smith’s (2003)
more recent analysis of Isaiah Bowman
displays a richness and depth to which other
accounts could profitably aspire. Alongside
these full-length studies, a suite of shorter biographical sketches of a wider range of figures
continues in the serial Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies. Biographical treatments are
also available of figures looming large in the
history of the subject’s pre-professional past,
including more recently studies of Alexander
von Humboldt (Rupke, 2005), George Perkins
Marsh (Lowenthal, 2000) and Nathaniel Shaler (Livingstone, 1987b). New energy has also
been injected into the biographical impulse by
the pursuit of what might be called ‘life geographies’ or ‘life spaces’ – namely, by taking
with much greater seriousness the sites and
spaces through which human beings transact
their lives (Daniels and Nash, 2004). Recent
autobiographical experiments by geographers
have also added to this perspective; these raise
significant questions about the relative value
of autobiography and biography, the difference between a ‘life as it is lived’ and ‘a life
as it is told’, and the inescapable hermeneutic
complications involved in fusing present
horizons with those of the past.
Third: histories of ideas. Alongside institutional history and biographical narrative, a
number of works dwelling on the history of
geographical ideas within academic geography
have appeared. Some are specialist treatments
of how modern geographical thought has
GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY OF
engaged with wider theoretical currents (Peet,
1998); some rehearse the internal history of
sub-disciplines (for historical geography,
for instance, see Butlin, 1993); others have
centred on school geography texts and their
role in conveying imperial attitudes about
race and gender (Maddrell, 1998). Cumulatively, works such as these demonstrate the
diverse range of interests and styles employed
to interrogate geography’s academic history.
Contributions dealing with geographical
discourses also come in a variety of guises
and encompass a wide spectrum of topics.
Beazley’s (1897–1906) The dawn of modern
geography emphasized the history of medieval
travel and exploration; Eva Taylor’s (1930)
portrayal of Tudor geography centred on
mathematical practice, surveying and navigation; and J.K. Wright’s (1965 [1925]) account
of the Geographical lore of the time of the Crusades rehearsed place description, cartographic
ventures and cosmographical convictions in a
project that self-confessedly covered ‘a wider
field than most definitions of geography’ (p.
2). Newer ways of thinking about medieval
geography have also recently surfaced, notably
the researches of Lozovsky (2000), who explores medieval scholars’ perceptions and representations of geographical space and its
transmission. Glacken’s (1967) monumental
Traces on the Rhodian shore mapped the contact
zone between nature and culture, and
openly acknowledged that he transcended the
conventional limits of the modern discipline.
Bowen’s (1981) compendious survey of geographical thought from Bacon to Humboldt
constitutes a sophisticated historical apologia
for an ecological, anti-positivistic vision of
the subject. Alongside these treatments of geographical discourse is a range of related contributions dealing with allied subjects such as
biogeography (Browne, 1983), meteorology
(Anderson, 2005a), Earth and environmental
science (Bowler, 1992; Rudwick 2005), cartography (Edney, 1997; Burnett, 2000),
oceanography (Rozwadowski, 2005) geomorphology (Davies, 1969; Kennedy, 2005),
human ecology (Mitman, 1992) and ideas of
Nature (Coates, 1998). In many cases, these
undertakings have deepened connections between geographers and historians of science,
and opened up new and fertile lines of enquiry.
If these works are indicative of geography’s
long-standing location within the scientific
tradition, there is equally abundant evidence
for the subject’s textual heritage that connects
it with the humanities. Since the period of the
scientific revolution, geography has also been
concerned with matters of commerce and
strategy, and also with regional descriptions
(Cormack, 1997). This realization has led
Mayhew (2000) to argue that early modern
geography was deeply implicated in debates
about political theology and cultural identity
during the so-called long eighteenth century.
The subject’s intimate connections with
historical scholarship, moral philosophy,
speculative anthropology and various species
of literary endeavour, alongside its association
with natural philosophy, have thus been emphasized. One mark of this connection is the
way in which geographical works depicted
denominational spaces, the Dissolution of the
Monasteries and political insurrection at
the time of the English Civil War; thereby,
the inescapably political character of regional
description and geographical compilation is
disclosed. Another indication is the extent to
which writers such as Samuel Johnston and
Shakespeare’s commentators were concerned
with matters of geographical sensibility
(Roberts, 1991).
These relatively specialist studies are supplemented by a number of what Aay (1981)
calls ‘textbook chronicles’ – synthetic treatments designed for student consumption that
provide an overview of the field. It is now
plain, however, that these surveys have all too
frequently lapsed into apologetics for some
particular viewpoint – geography as regional
interrogation, the study of occupied space
or some such. Moreover, their strategy was
typically presentist, namely using history to adjudicate on present-day controversies (though
the inescapability of certain dimensions of the
present as indicated above need to be registered); internalist, in the sense that they paid
scant attention to the broader social and intellectual contexts within which geographical
knowledges were produced; and cumulative,
portraying history in terms of progress towards
some perceived contemporary orthodoxy.
Scepticism about precisely these assumptions
has fostered greater sensitivity to currents
of historiographical thinking, and a range of
strategies have therefore been deployed in the
endeavour to deepen analyses of geography’s
genealogy.
Leaving aside their problematic reading of
Kuhn, some have turned to his Structure of
scientific revolutions (1970 [1962]) to characterize the history of geography as an overlapping succession of paradigms enshrined in a
number of key texts: Paul Vidal de la Blache’s
possibilism, Ellsworth Huntington’s environmental determinism, Carl Ortwin Sauer’s
297
GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY OF
landscape morphology, Richard Hartshorne’s areal differentiation and Fred K.
Schaefer’s exceptionalism are typical candidates for paradigm status (see scientific revolution(s)). In such scenarios, however, a
good deal of historical typecasting and editorial management has had to be engaged in.
Others have taken more seriously the role of
‘invisible colleges’ and ‘socio-scientific networks’ (Lochhead, 1981). At the same time,
perspectives from historical materialism
have been marshalled as a means of elucidating
the way in which geographical knowledge and
practices have been used to legitimate the social
conditions that produced that knowledge in
the first place (Harvey, 1984). Still others have
seen in the philosophical literature on the
cognitive power of metaphor a key to unlocking
aspects of geography’s history (Buttimer, 1982),
through delineating the different uses of, say,
mechanistic, organic, structural and textual
analogies. The insights of Foucault on the intimate connections between space, surveillance, power and knowledge, and of Said on
the Western construction of ‘non-Western’
realms (see orientalism) have also opened up
new vistas to the history of geography by
unmasking the pretended neutrality of spatial
discourse in a variety of arenas both within
and beyond the academy. The related need to
open up conventional histories of geography to
non-Western traditions is a real desideratum.
More recently, rapprochement with science
studies has opened up new lines of enquiry
in which the social constitution of knowledge
and an empirical examination of actual
knowledge-making practices have come to
the fore. Barnes (1996, 1998), for example,
has drawn on the methodology of social studies of scientific knowledge in his account of the
history and conceptual structure of modern
economic geography in general, and geography’s quantitative revolution in particular. Other applications of this general
perspective within human geography are advertised in this Dictionary’s entry on science
(including science studies). Among these
are the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour, the so-called Edinburgh strong programme in the sociology of knowledge, a range of
feminist epistemologies, the ethnographic
methodologies of the micro-anthropology of
science and various other constructivist perspectives. All of these combine to situate cognitive claims in the conditions of their making,
and to render problematic distinctions between internal and external history of scientific
knowledge.
298
Cumulatively, such calls for re-reading
geography’s history have contributed to a
wide range of revisionist accounts of particular
episodes, among which mention might be
made of the links between magic, mysticism
and geography at various times (Livingstone,
1988; Matless, 1991), geography’s complicity
in the shaping of imperial ambitions and
national identity in the early modern period
(Withers, 2001: see imperialism), the intimate connections between geography, empire,
health and racial theory (Livingstone, 1991;
Bell, 1993; Godlewska and Smith, 1994;
Driver, 2001a), the relations between landscape representation, artistic convention
and denominational discourse (Cosgrove
and Daniels, 1988; Mayhew, 1996), the circumstances surrounding debates over the
boundary between geography and sociology in
turn-of-the-century France (Friedman, 1996),
the imperial mould in which early environmentalism was cast (Grove, 1995), the relations between geography and travel-writing,
and calls for feminist readings of the tradition
(Domosh, 1991, Rose, 1995). There is a growing recognition too that the narrative of Western geography cannot be sequestered from its
wider channels of intellectual exchange even in
the early modern period. Patterns of trade and
the transmission of knowledge between ‘East’
and ‘West’ played a major role in the shaping of
various European geographies. As for practical
engagements, Ryan’s (1998) account of the
connections between geography, photography
and racial representation in the Victorian era,
and feminist reflections on fieldwork have
opened up these arenas to theoretically
informed interrogation. Embedded within at
least of some of these accounts is a conviction
that ‘geography’ is a negotiated entity, and that
a central task of its historians is to ascertain how
and why certain practices and procedures come
to be accounted authoritative, and hence normative, at certain moments in time and in certain spatial settings.
It is plain, then, that the ‘history of geography’ comprises a variety of enterprises
that have been engaged in various ways.
Nevertheless, a broad shift can be detected
from the ‘encyclopaedism’ of earlier works
(which operated in a cumulative-chronological
fashion) towards a more recent ‘genealogical’
perspective (which aims to disclose the tangled
connections between power and knowledge).
The subversive character of the latter has been
embraced with differing degrees of enthusiasm: some now insist that the idea of history
as a single master narrative is a Western
GEO-INFORMATICS
‘myth’, while others, unenamoured of an altogether radical relativism (in which truth
is taken to be relative to circumstance) or
suspicious that the genealogist is implicated
in an impossible self-referential dilemma
(namely, that the thesis is self-refuting), suggest that there is more value in thinking of
discourses as ‘contested traditions’ – socially
embodied and temporally extended conversations that act as stabilizing constraints on
the elucidation of meaning (MacIntyre,
1990). Insofar as ‘encyclopaedia’, ‘genealogy’ and ‘tradition’ as modes of historical
interrogation reflect differing attitudes towards what has come to be called the Enlightenment project, the history of geography – as a
scholarly pursuit – has a significant role to
play in debates within the discipline over
the relations between knowledge, power,
representation and social construction
(Gregory, 1994).
Moreover, recent reassertions of the significance of place and space in historical investigations of human knowing (Shapin, 1998;
Livingstone, 2003c) are bringing the issue of
geography’s own knowledge spaces to the fore.
Thus attention is beginning to be directed
towards understanding the different sites
and spaces – at a range of scales – within
which geographical knowledge is produced
and circulates. Investigations of the performative geographies in seventeenth-century
court masques and triumphal processions
(Withers, 1997), field sites and expeditionary
settings as venues of geographical enquiry
and evocation (Driver and Martins, 2005),
museums as spaces of display (Naylor, 2002),
archives and the construction of geographical knowledge (Withers, 2002), the use of
personal diaries and field journals to reconstruct learning experiences (Lorimer, 2003),
mission stations as imperial sites of local
knowledge (Livingstone, 2005b), ships as instruments of geodetic survey (Sorrenson,
1996), and meteorological stations (Naylor,
2006) are illustrative of this spatial turn. The
city itself – as a laboratory field-site – has also
been investigated as an epistemic ‘truth-spot’
and thus fundamental to the credibility of
certain scientific claims; this is exemplified
par excellence in the chicago school of
urban studies (Gieryn, 2006). Other venues
such as census bureaus, GIS laboratories,
botanical gardens, trading floors, art studios,
fields of military operation (see war) and
government departments – where geographical knowledge of various sorts is made
and remade – are no less in need of interro-
gation. Interest too is developing on the ways
in which geographical texts have been read in
particular locations, and of regional differences in what has been called reviewing cultures (Rupke, 1999). All this confirms that
‘the history of geography’ as an undertaking
is now beginning (all too ironically) to take
‘geography’ much more seriously – namely,
by reconceptualizing the enterprise as ‘the
historical geography of geographical knowledges and practices’.
dnl
Suggested reading
Glacken (1967); Johnston and Sidaway (2004);
Livingstone (1992); Stoddart (1986).
geo-informatics Geo-informatics is the
interface and collaboration between the
Earth and the information sciences (notably
computer science) to use geocoded data (see
geocoding) to better model, visualize and
understand the Earth’s complexity. More
specific topics of research that have been included at the annual international conference
in geo-informatics have included: discovery,
integration, management and visualization of geoscience data; internet-enabled
geographic information systems (gis);
location-based services, including global
positioning systems; spatial data modelling
in hyperspaces; remote sensing; and
interoperability.
Looking at the research themes listed above,
it is evident that the interests of geo-informatics
overlap with those of geographic information science and geocomputation. To find
common ground is not surprising: each has an
interdisciplinary nature, bound by an interest
in geographical datasets and the computational requirements to store, process and
make sense of them. Each also brings a spatial
perspective to answer the questions of social
and physical science (and also the interactions
between social and physical systems). And
each is a young field of research, born out of
much older traditions. However, whereas the
origins of GISc are in navigation, cartography, demography, resource management
and spatial analysis, and the roots of geocomputation lie in using high-performance
computing for applied spatial science, the
seeds of geo-informatics were germinated in
the geodetic (e.g. surveying) traditions of
engineering, geology, oceanography and
other geosciences.
These geodetic and geoscientific foundations are revealed by the keen focus of
geo-informatics on geographical data – their
299
GEOPIETY
storage, integration, analysis and visualization.
Traditional surveying in the geosciences has
involved a methodological and spatially ordered
collection of data or samples of a phenomenon,
in order to better understand that which is
being investigated. The need for scientific rigour has not changed in research. What is new is
the more extensive surveillance of the Earth’s
social and natural systems (e.g. by remote
sensing) that has developed over recent
decades, and the huge amounts of data that
routinely are collected by (or to enable) the
functioning of societies (e.g. population data
from governance, consumer data from commerce, organizational data from pubic service
management and so forth).
Increased data sharing, new technologies
and new techniques for analysis affect the theory and practice of handling geographical information (Goodchild and Longley, 2005).
For example, storing extensive and multivariate datasets to model and represent complex
systems (physical or social) is not best
achieved by the sorts of simplifying assumptions commonly used to capture and to map
socioeconomic data. A straightforward database design used in GIS takes the idea that
geographical features have a fixed and unambiguous location which can be defined by their
coordinate position in a planar space, the
encoding of which is prioritized. Other information, such as the height of the Earth’s
surface at the feature’s position, the height of
the feature itself or the data/time at which the
feature was observed are secondary information, stored as ‘just another’ attribute alongside other information about the feature (e.g.
what the feature is called, its size etc.) (Worboys,
2005). Such an approach works well when
mapping, for example, census information
collected on a particular date, once every ten
years, and describing geographical features
that are fixed in time and space (i.e. the census population, per census tract, on the date
of enumeration). It is not suitable for storing
or visualizing data about dynamic processes
where the temporal component of the analysis
is at least as important as the spatial, or
for modelling or querying genuinely threedimensional features – for example, rock or
soil layers, or subterranean walkways (at subway stations) that can fold under themselves
and therefore occupy multiple positions in
multidimensional space (Raper, 2000).
To integrate and to extract meaningful
knowledge from data collected for different
reasons, at different times, at different scales,
using different classification frameworks
300
and different ontologies, is a task that
bridges between science and computers and
that provides the structure of geo-informatics
research. It is not an easy task. As the geoinformatics portal at the Pan-American Center
for Earth and Environmental Studies states,
‘currently, the chaotic distribution of available
data sets, lack of documentation about them,
and lack of easy-to-use access tools and
computer modeling and analysis codes are
major obstacles for scientists and educators
alike’ (http://paces.geo.utep.edu). There,
geo-informatics is described as the ‘field
in which geoscientists and computer scientists are working together to provide the
means to address a variety of complex scientific questions using advanced information technologies and integrated analysis’.
Writing from an urban and regional
planning perspective, Holmberg (1994)
sums up the scope of geo-informatics which
incorporates elements of computation, science, systems modelling and society. To
him, geo-informatics is the technological and
scientific discipline guiding the design of systems for sensing, modelling, representing,
visualizing, monitoring, processing and communicating geo-information. The ‘big challenge’ of geo-informatics, then, is to handle
geographical information in geographically
minded ways, to help understand geographical
systems, to undertake geographical problem
solving and to progress the development of
the geographical sciences.
rh
Suggested reading
Kavanagh (2002); Wolf and Ghilani (2005).
geopiety A term coined by J.K. Wright
(1947) to refer to a reverential attitude towards and caring for the Earth. After three
decades of relative obscurity, the term was
re-introduced to a new generation of geographers in the mid-1970s by Yi-Fu Tuan
(1976a). It formed an important component
of Tuan’s notion of topophilia, which in turn
was one of the key concepts in humanistic
geography. The implied spiritual approach
to nature, while rooted in nineteenth-century
romanticism, continues to resonate for contemporary romantics, including the exponents
of deep ecology.
jsd
Suggested reading
Tuan (1976a).
geopolitics A title of an academic journal, a
catch-all category for international violence,
GEOPOLITICS
an orphaned sub-field of late imperial geography resurrected in neo-imperial America
and, simultaneously, the focus of diverse
forms of demythologization and debunking
by scholars of critical human geography,
this is a term that defies easy definition. As a
category of news reporting, it is used in the
media to describe violence relating to the
division, control and contestation of territory. The business pages of newspapers thus
often feature references to ‘geopolitical concerns’ as a way of describing the impact of
international politics and violence. After terrorist attacks on commuter trains in India
and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, for instance, The Financial Times
review of global markets read as follows: ‘Gold
also pushed higher on continued geopolitical
concerns following bomb blasts in Mumbai
and clashes around the Israel–Lebanon border’ (Tassell, 2006, p. 26). Academically,
however, geopolitics is a much more complex
and contested term, with a long history of
formal definition and redefinition.
The original definitions of the field go back
to the ‘classical geopolitics’ of military-minded
academics such as the British imperialist Halford Mackinder, the Nazi expansionist Karl
Haushofer and the Dutch-American Cold
War strategist Nicholas Spykman. For them,
geopolitics was all about how international
relations relate to the spatial layout of oceans,
continents, natural resources, military organization, political systems and perceived territorial threats and opportunities (for an
excellent overview, see Foster, 2006). In this
respect, a constant geopolitical focus has been
the Eurasian continental meta-region stretching from Eastern Europe through Russia to
Central Asia. This was the so-called ‘Heartland’ that Mackinder argued was key to global
imperial power (see imperialism). It was some
of this same territory that Haushofer argued the
Nazis should seize as lebensraum, or livingspace, for their self-described master race.
After the Soviet Union established control
over the region at the end of the Second
World War, it was this same area that Americans such as George Kennan argued should be
contained, an argument that underpinned US
cold war geopolitics aimed at controlling what
Spykman had previously described as the
‘Rimlands’ around the ‘Heartland’ (Dalby,
1990). Isaiah Bowman, the US geographer
and presidential advisor who, early on, advocated American dominance in and around the
region, was once dubbed ‘the American
Haushofer’ (Smith, N., 2003c). However, just
as American imperialists have traditionally
talked about an American Century rather
than a geographically defined american
empire, American advocates of geopolitical
dominance have generally avoided talk of geopolitics because of its associations with European imperialism and fascism. This reticence
amongst US strategists began to change after
11 September 2001: a shift towards unabashed
imperial attitudes occurred that was also signalled by the return to influence of the old Cold
War geopolitical grandee Henry Kissinger. But
whether referring explicitly to geopolitics or
not, geopolitical discourse has continued to
develop apace since the end of the Cold
War; the transition from President Reagan’s
anti-Soviet invocation of an ‘Evil Empire’ to
President Bush’s angst about an ‘Axis of Evil’
being just one of the more imaginative and
egregious attempts to remap the terrain of
Mackinder’s Heartland as a way of simultaneously defining the American homeland
(Coleman, 2004).
While classical geopolitics continues to inform policy-making, critical geographers have
over the past two decades developed a vibrant
new field of critical geopolitics. Under this
broad umbrella they have sought to examine
the ways in which a broad range of imaginative geographies, such as the ‘Evil Empire’,
actively shape world politics (see Ó Tuathail,
1996b; Ó Tuathail and Dalby, 1998; Agnew,
2003a). Critical geopolitics continues to grow
more diverse by the year: ranging from examinations of geopolitical discourse in the history
of popular culture (Sharp, 2000a), to studies
of the orientalism that informs the geopolitics of both the colonial past and present
(Gregory, 2004; Slater, 2004), to critiques
of the geopolitical justification of torture
(Hannah, 2006b), to reflections on the geopolitical preoccupations of revolutionary Islam
(Watts, 2007). Thus while practitioners of
classical geopolitics keep producing geopolitical representations that they claim are real,
the core concern for the critics is precisely
this objectivist claim on reality. Critical geopolitics instead demonstrates the ideological
power of geopolitical representations to
‘script’ space – to concoct, for example, a
story about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and then using that script to legitimate war. However, in debunking such
geopolitical scriptings, the critical scholarship
raises at least three further sorts of question
about the relationships between geopolitics
and the real world: the first concerns the relationship between imaginative geopolitical
301
GEOPOLITIK
scripts and the far from imaginative death and
destruction they inspire or help legitimate; the
second relates to how such destructive consequences relate to the creative destruction
of globalization and neo-liberalism; and
the third concerns the reciprocal influence of
these economic mediations on the ongoing articulation of new neo-liberal geopolitical
scripts that emphasize economic integration
over Cold War containment.
Geographical scholarship on the ‘war
on terror’ has connected critical geopolitical
concerns about the US President Bush administration’s fear-mongering with all three questions about the ties between geopolitics and
real world relations. Derek Gregory (2004b)
has shown how in Afghanistan and Iraq the
people construed by the ‘war on terror’ script
as the enemy have suffered lethal consequences as a result of the ‘god-tricks’ of longdistance geopolitical representations. He also
has continued to argue in this way that the
geopolitics has constructed spaces of exception (see exception, spaces of) and legal vanishing points, where huge numbers of people
are treated as outcasts from humanity and
the tenuous protections of international law
(Gregory, 2007). Focusing, by contrast, on
the arrogance of the American exceptionalism
that has helped create these spaces of exception, recent reflections on the ties between
American imperialism and neo-liberalism
have highlighted how the relationship is also
highly contradictory. For example, geopolitical strategies about building American dominance over the middle east and its oil spigots
exist in uneasy tension with ongoing interests
in maintaining transnational business, class
harmony and support for the dollar against
the backcloth of rising concerns about American indebtedness to East Asian and OPEC
owners of US bonds (Smith, N., 2003c;
Harvey, 2004b). These economic contexts in
which geopolitical scripts are developed and
implemented have further been found to be
changing the nature of the scripts themselves,
leading to a neo-liberal geopolitics (Roberts,
Secord and Sparke, 2003) which, with its distinctly economic emphases on globalization
and connection over isolation and containment, has also been called ‘geoeconomics’
(Sparke, 2005).
ms
Geopolitik A school of political geography,
and specifically geopolitics, disseminated in
inter-war Germany by the geographer and
military officer Karl Haushofer (1869–1946)
and the journal Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (1922–
302
44). The term in fact originated with the
Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellen,
whose ideas, along with Ratzel’s organic theory of the state, provided a spurious rationale
to justify German expansionism (Parker,
1985: see also anthropogeography; lebensraum). Although Geopolitik was associated
with Hitler’s Nazi Party, however, there were
important differences. Whereas Geopolitik
was influenced by the significance of natural
laws in its understanding of social and political life (cf. darwinism), National Socialism
saw societies as determined by biological inheritance and was both predicated on and
powered by racism (Bassin, 1987a: see also
fascism). The term is often used to portray
Geopolitik as a purely German phenomenon,
but it should be noted that the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder also made reference to organic or natural understandings of
state and society.
cf
Suggested reading
Bassin, Newman, Reuber and Agnew (2004).
geostrategic realms The
largest-scale
division of the globe in Cohen’s (2003) geopolitics of the world system. Large enough to
be of global significance, geostrategic realms
serve the interests of the powers that dominate
them. Held together by trading, cultural and
military connections, they change as economic
and military forces evolve. Reflecting longstanding concerns with land and sea power
in geopolitical thinking, three geostrategic
realms have been identified: the Atlantic and
Pacific trade-dependent Maritime realm; the
Eurasian Continental Russian Heartland
realm; and the mixed Continental Maritime
East Asia realm. The intellectual or practical
significance of Cohen’s typology is far from
straightforward, but the US military has developed its own geostrategic division of the world,
the practical significance of which is only too
clear (see Morrissey, 2008b). Different ‘unified
combatant commands’ are assigned to different
world regions:
US Africa Command (all of Africa except
Egypt);
US Central Command (middle east and
Central Asia);
US European Command (centred on Europe,
including Russia);
US Pacific Command (including Australia,
and South and South East Asia)
US Northern Command (North Africa)
GHETTO
US Southern Command (Central and South
America and the Caribbean).
sd
gerrymandering
The deliberate drawing
of electoral district boundaries to produce an
electoral advantage for an interested party. The
term was coined by enemies of Massachusetts
Republican Governor Elbridge Gerry, who
created a district in 1812 that his party would
win: it was shaped like a salamander – hence
the neologism and the widespread (if false)
belief that gerrymandering necessarily involves
odd-shaped district boundaries. Although
gerrymandering has long been practiced in
the USA, it has only recently – and in specific
conditions – been interpreted by the courts
there as a constitutional violation (cf. districting algorithm; electoral geography;
redistricting).
rj
Suggested reading
Monmonier (2001).
ghetto An extreme form of residential concentration: a cultural, religious or ethnic group
is ghettoized when (a) a high proportion of the
group lives in a single area, and (b) when the
group accounts for most of the population in
that area. Although the practice of ghettoization – forcing a group to live separately within
a city – originated in the urban quarters of
pre-classical cities, the first use of the term
occurred in late medieval Venice, where city
authorities required Jews to live on a separate
island (called gheto), which was sealed behind
walls and gates each night (Calimani, 1987).
social exclusion was imposed by the dominant culture and, as such, reflected and reinforced the marginalization of the Jewish
minority. However, while the ghetto was overcrowded and prone to fire and disease, Jews
also gained some benefit from their enforced
isolation, especially the right to practice their
religion and legal system and, perhaps, a
degree of protection from more drastic forms
of persecution (Wirth, 1928).
Instances of complete ghettoization have
been rare (two modern exceptions are the
Warsaw Ghetto, established as a way-station
to the Nazi holocaust and designated areas
for Black residential settlement in South African cities during the apartheid regime). Early
in the twentieth century, the term came to be
used indiscriminately for almost any residential area identified with a particular group,
even when it did not form a majority, and
even when segregation was not the result of
discrimination. This ambiguity was especially
prevalent in the influential work of the
Chicago sociologists (see chicago school),
who even referred to a wealthy neighbourhood in the city as the ‘gilded ghetto’.
Researchers began in the 1970s to call for
more analytical precision. Philpott (1991
[1979]), for example, distinguished between
‘slums’, areas of poverty where residents (frequently immigrants) leave as they acquire the
means to do so, and ghettos, areas where residents are trapped in permanent poverty (also
see Ward, 1989). Also, ghettos should not be
confused with ethnic enclaves, areas dominated by a single cultural group. Ghettos emerge when political and/or other institutions,
such as the housing market, operate to restrict the residential choices of certain groups,
channelling them to the most undesirable neighbourhoods (Thabit, 2003). They are the
product of racialization (see also ethnicity;
race), where particular minority groups are
judged by the majority to be genetically and
socially inferior (Wacquant, 2001). There is always a degree of involuntary behaviour in the
formation of ghettos, whereas ethnic enclaves
arise when members of a group choose to live
in close proximity (Boal, 1976; Peach, 1996ab).
The situation of African-Americans in the
USA is typically seen as the defining example
of contemporary ghettoization (see Darden,
1995; Wacquant, 2001). In the 1960s, some
American social scientists began to assert that
ghetto environments are so debilitating that a
‘culture of poverty’, associated with high
crime rates, substance abuse, broken families
and a reliance on social services, is transmitted
from parents to children (cf. cycle of poverty). These alarming views were instrumental in the ‘war on poverty’ declared by the US
government, and were important ingredients
in the inauguration of urban redevelopment
programmes, increased social spending, educational reform, and heightened policing and
surveillance of the inner city (cf. urban
renewal). These initiatives were largely
withdrawn in the conservative 1980s, but the
argument that ghettos should be the focus of
public policy was revived later in the decade,
as part of the underclass debate. Again,
proponents of this thesis believe that ghettos
are not just places of grinding poverty, but
also places where poverty is institutionalized
(Wilson, 1987). Racialization and stigmatization combine to sharply circumscribe the
opportunities available to residents of ghettos,
so children are locked into the same circumstances as their parents, if not worse. Similar
arguments have surfaced in the UK (e.g. Rex,
303
GIS
1988; but see Peach, 1996ab, for an alternate
view).
Current attempts by various authorities in
Italy to create separate, gated ‘camps’ for
Roma (Gypsy) people constitute one of the
clearest examples of ghettoization today. Governments justify this policy of segregation on
two grounds: that Roma people are nomadic
and ill-adapted to ‘regular’ urban environments, and that they need to be protected
from racist incidents in the wider society
(there have been a number of violent attacks
on housing occupied by Roma people). Inevitably, though, by separating Roma from
other groups, this policy further racializes the
population and severely limits their opportunities for integration (Sigona, 2005).
As in the original Venetian case, though,
ghettos, once formed, may provide a context
for the maintenance and development of minority cultures: ironically, these cultural forms
are sometimes embraced by the dominant culture (e.g. the many types of music pioneered
by African-Americans).
dh
Suggested reading
Peach (1996ab); Sigona (2005); Thabit (2003);
Wacquant (2001).
GIS See geographic information systems.
global cities/world cities
Major nodes in
the organization of the global economy: hubs
of economic control, production and trade, of
information circulation and cultural transmission, and of political power. They are often
represented in a hierarchically ordered network formation that spans the globe (for several representations, see Taylor, 2004). Peter
Hall has credited Scottish urbanist Patrick
Geddes (1854–1932; see Geddes, 1915) with
introducing the term – although German literary giant Johann Wolfgang Goethe employed
it as far back as the early nineteenth century, in
reference to Paris. In Hall’s groundbreaking
book The world cities ([1984] 1966), six urban
regions were analysed under this title. In this
first systematic examination, Hall treats the
world cities predominantly as internationally
oriented national metropolitan centres of the
industrial age. It was only during the 1980s
that world cities began to be seen in a different
light. Based on historical work from the
annales school, theoretical insights derived
from world-systems analysis and explorations of the new international division of
labour (nidl) (Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye,
1980), a new generation of urban theorists
304
began to think of global cities as articulators
of international and global economies.
Accordingly, Michael Timberlake (1985,
p. 3) explained that ‘processes such as urbanization can be more fully understood by beginning to examine the many ways in which they
articulate with the broader currents of the
world-economy that penetrate spatial barriers,
transcend limited time boundaries and influence social relations at many different levels’.
Work on historical tendencies of global urbanization had laid the groundwork for understanding city systems as global and subject to
long-term and macro-geographical shifts in
the capitalist accumulation process. Writing
in this tradition, Christopher Chase-Dunn
examined the relationships between the
expanding boundaries of the world system
and the system of cities since ad 800 (ChaseDunn, 1985). In a related fashion, some global
city researchers have pointed to the complex
colonial and post-colonial histories as well as
the long trajectories of world city formation.
Economic specialization has long been known
to be the basis of world market-oriented urbanization, which propelled financial nodes
such as Amsterdam, London or New York or
industrial centres such as Leiden, Manchester,
and Houston into the rank of leading world
cities in subsequent historical periods (Nestor
and Rodriguez, 1986). Defying any tendency
to see global cities as a product of recent shifts
in the world economy, Janet Abu-Lughod, for
example, has argued that New York City has
been a global city from its very inception as
Dutch, and later English colonial outpost,
and certainly as an industrial and financial
powerhouse of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries (Abu-Lughod, 1999). Similarly,
Anthony King (1990) has presented the global
city formation of London as a complex process
of the city’s history as a colonial centre.
Still, the case can be, and has been, made to
see global cities in their current form as a product of today’s period of globalization. Brenner and Keil have suggested that one could see
the emergence of a New International Division
of Labour and the crisis of Atlantic fordism in
the 1970s and 1980s as the starting points for
this round of world city formation (Brenner
and Keil, 2006, pp. 8–10). At the outset of
this line of reasoning was the publication of
John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff’s seminal
article in 1982 under the title ‘World City Formation: An Agenda for Research and Action’.
In this influential piece, which arguably laid
the foundation for an entire industry of global
cities research, Friedmann and Wolff pointed
GLOBAL CITIES/WORLD CITIES
to a network of global cities that spanned
the globe as the skeleton of the global economy. They suggested that ‘[t]he world city
‘‘approach’’ is, in the first instance, a methodology, a point of departure, an initial hypothesis. It is a way of asking questions and
of bringing footloose facts into relation’
(Friedmann and Wolff, 1982, p. 320). Observing the emerging globalized world economy
with its central actors, the transnational corporations, Friedmann and Wolff put forth the
hypothesis that there would be a hierarchical
system of urban regions, in which this world
economic system would find its most typical
socio-spatial expression. They assumed that ‘a
small number of massive urban regions that we
shall call world cities’ would be at the apex of
this hierarchy (Friedmann and Wolff, 1982).
They present the world cities as a flexible and
ever-changing group of command centres of
the world economy. The extent and nature of
their integration into that economy can only
be determined through empirical research in
each city. The rapid changes that these urban
regions are going through can specifically be
studied in the areas of economic, social and
physical restructuring. Political conflict at
various scales of the formation of the world
city can be expected and is itself productive of
the world city. In particular, the gulf between
the globalized ‘citadel’ of the elite and the
‘ghetto’ of the popular classes will continue
to widen and create tension in the political
landscape of the global city. In 1986, John
Friedmann added a more precise taxonomy
of global city development, as he presented
seven interrelated theses that added up the
‘world city hypothesis’:
(1) The form and extent of a city’s integration with the world economy, and the
functions assigned to the city in the new
spatial division of labour, will be decisive for any structural changes occurring within it.
(2) Key cities throughout the world are
used by global capital as ‘basing points’
in the spatial organization and articulation of production and markets.
(3) The global control functions of world cities are reflected in the structure and dynamics of their production sectors and
employment.
(4) World cities are major sites for the concentration and accumulation of international capital.
(5) World cities are points of destination
for large numbers of both domestic
and/or international migrants (see
migration).
(6) World city formation brings into focus the
major contradictions of industrial capitalism – among them spatial and class
polarization.
(7) World city growth generates social costs
at rates that tend to exceed the fiscal
capacity of the state.
Friedmann also impacted the way in which
from now on world cities would be viewed by
proposing a powerful image of networked
interconnectedness showing the articulation
of primary and secondary world cities in the
core and the semi-periphery. The tremendous
impact of the ‘world city hypothesis’ was subject to an international conference in 1993,
from which the first multidisciplinary collection of global city essays was drawn (Knox and
Taylor, 1995). In a review of the empirical
and theoretical work done since his methodological intervention from 1982, Friedmann
detected a lively paradigm that had grown
from the original propositions (1995).
In the meantime, Saskia Sassen had
published The global city: New York, London,
Tokyo (2001 [1991]), which made her instantly
the most prominent scholar in the rapidly
expanding field. In this and subsequent publications, Sassen drew attention to the global city
as a production site of the kind of internationally oriented business services that pushed for
dominance in the global economy. These producer services (finances, law, marketing, advertising etc.) relied on regional production
complexes, which remained tangible and led
to more metropolitanization and urbanization
despite the increased availability of networked
electronic means of communication, which
suggested the growing independence from fixed
spatial arrangements. While The global city focused on the cities at the top of the global hierarchy – New York, London, Tokyo – Sassen
expanded her argument in a short but incisive
book Cities in a world economy (2006 [2000]),
which identified and isolated specific strategic
places where the globalized economy is taking
shape: export processing zones, offshore
banking centres, high-tech districts and global
cities. Sassen insists on the interdependence
of these disparate spaces as much as on the
regional economy being the basis of the global
city. Scott (2001, p. 4) similarly suggests
that global city-regions serve ‘as territorial
platforms for much of the post-fordist economy that constitutes the dominant leading
edge of contemporary capitalist development,
305
GLOBAL COMMONS
and as important staging posts for the operations of multinational corporations’. Sassen’s
work on the global city has also strongly
emphasized the social and political aspects of
global city formation as she has consistently
asked ‘whose city’ the global city is: Will the
constant pressure for commodified and gentrified (see gentrification) elite space or new
citizenship claims by the ‘Othered’ majorities
of the immigrant labour forces of the typical
city prevail (Sassen, 1996)?
Proponents of the world city thesis have
often been criticized for not providing conclusive data on the existence of a distinct set of
global cities. The GaWC (Globalization and
World Cities) research group at Loughborough University was set up in the late 1990s
to rectify this deficit and to produce systematic
empirical research on global city interconnectedness. On the basis of this research, Peter
Taylor has recently provided the synthetic
World city network (2004), in which he painstakingly prepares a massive pool of quantitative data to produce the first comprehensively
researched and thoroughly theorized study of
the network of global cities from a large variety
of methodological angles. As Taylor (2004b,
p. 21) argues, ‘The world city literature as a
cumulative and collective enterprise begins
only when the economic restructuring of the
world-economy makes the idea of a mosaic of
separate urban systems appear anachronistic
and frankly irrelevant.’
The world city literature is not without its
detractors. On the one hand, a group of seasoned urban theorists have criticized the
exclusiveness of the global city hypothesis,
which ostensibly seems to pay too little attention to the ‘ordinary cities’ (Amin and Thrift,
2002) that continue to be the majority of
urban places. Michael Peter Smith (2001a)
has denounced the structuralist bias of the
world city debate and has instead proposed
the notion of ‘transnational urbanism’, which
explicitly includes reference to the grassroots
processes that constitute the global city. Peter
Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen have criticized the apodictic assumptions of global city
research, which allegedly expects similarly
polarizing socio-spatial effects everywhere,
and have instead proposed a multidimensional
and more diversified view of ‘globalizing cities’
of all sorts (2000, 2003). A younger group of
post-structuralist geographers have meanwhile
critiqued the global cities literature from the
point of view of globalized culture (Flusty,
2003) and agency (R.G. Smith, 2003d). Writing from a standpoint of urbanization in the
306
global south, Jennifer Robinson (2002) has
pointed out that the literature on world cities
has a clear bias towards Western standards:
‘The world city approach assumes that cities
occupy similar placings with similar capacity
to progress up or fall down the ranks. . . .
A view of the world of cities thus emerges
where millions of people and hundreds of cities are dropped off the map of much research
in urban studies, to service one particular
and very restricted view of significance or
(ir)relevance to certain sections of the global
economy’ (Robinson, 2002). Despite these
critiques, global city research is alive and
well, and continues to produce a rich output
of empirical work and theoretical insights.
The breadth of the work produced under this
banner has recently been published in a reader
(Brenner and Keil, 2006).
rk
Suggested reading
Brenner and Keil (2006); Friedmann (2002);
Sassen (1999, 2002). The GaWC (Globalization
and World Cities) website (http:www.lboro.ac.
uk/gawc/) presents a wide variety of bibliographies, research bulletins, project descriptions, data
sets and web links related to research on global
and world cities.
global commons This concept emerges
from the traditional commons used by a local
community (see common property regimes),
but also includes elements of free market
environmentalism (Rose, 1999a). The notion of ‘commons’ is expanded to the global
scale to address concerns about the environmental destruction of the oceans, atmosphere, forests, Antarctica and biodiversity
caused primarily by open access beyond the
jurisdiction of nation-states. In essence,
the concept seeks to make modern humans,
like traditional villagers, responsible for the
commons so that it does not deteriorate due
to neglect or exploitation. The concept has
been applied to the oceans to prevent overfishing, to Antarctica and to outer space,
which recognize these locations as the ‘common heritage of (hu)mankind (CHM)’ (in
Whatmore, 2002a, p. 104). Since the emergence of issues such as ozone depletion and
global warming (see global warming), the
concept is also applicable to the atmosphere.
Attempts have been made to construct the
world’s biodiversity, including gene pools,
as global commons. This can be understood
as an attempt to preserve original nature
against the enclosures that enable property
rights to be exercised, but with genetic
GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEMS (GPS)
manipulation it raises questions about the
distinctions between so-called ‘gifts of nature’
and social artefacts derived from nature.
The global commons idea is used to avoid
the problems of open access, and to stop the
privatization of the world’s environment
(Buck, 1998; Goldman, 1998). There are
important questions about who ‘owns’ the environment, and who should ‘own’ the environment. For example, is the Amazon rainforest
the property of indigenous communities, the
state of Mato Grosso or the country of Brazil,
to be logged for economic benefits if so desired? Alternatively, is the Amazon rainforest
the ‘green lungs’ of the Earth – in other words,
part of the global commons? The concept of
the global commons is appealing in that it can
avoid the dangers of open access and private
ownership, but it also potentially represents a
new form of conquest where indigenous
peoples’ rights to self-determination and their
ability to survive are made subservient to what
are seen as the environmental agendas of
affluent Western countries.
The concept of a ‘global commons’ requires
international agreements to be enacted in national legislation. Whatmore (2002a, p. 107)
questions the global commons approach in
relation to genetic material, and notes that
legal arrangements for the proposed global
commons, which unravelled, must be understood as emerging from ‘amidst, rather than
‘‘outside’’, the spatial practices of national
sovereignty and private property’. The necessity and the ability to include air, water
and other environmental considerations
within a form of property rights is contentious.
Rose (1999a, p. 50) questions the necessity
of a ‘global commons’ approach, when many
of the so-called global problems ‘have components that are much more localized’. She
challenges Garrett Hardin’s largest issue for
the global commons – that is, population
growth (see population geography) – and
suggests that it is the impacts of population
growth (specific pressures on specific resources) that should be managed at a local
level.
pm
Global Positioning Systems (GPS)
The
most widely known Global Positioning System
(GPS) consists of 24 satellites, orbiting the
Earth twice daily at a height of 200 km, used
to find locations and to geocode data
(see geocoding). It was developed by the
US Department of Defense and is managed by
the US Air Force. A similar system, GLONASS
(Global Navigation Satellite System), is
operated by the Russian Federation. The
European Union and Space Agency are developing Galileo, to be deployed in 2010 as a service independent of, but interoperable with
(see interoperability), both GPS and
GLONASS.
The basic idea of a space-borne positioning
service is that at least four of the system’s
satellites will be above the local horizon at
any given time or location on the Earth’s surface. The GPS receiver identifies a signal from
those satellites, which contains information
about each satellite’s orbital position and
the time of the signal’s transmission. From
these data and by trilateration (triangulation),
the coordinate location and the elevation of
the receiver can be calculated. In practice,
built structures and vegetation canopies may
obscure the line of sight between GPS
receivers and satellites, reducing the accuracy
of the measured location. Three satellites
need to be visible to calculate location; four
if elevation is also required (Clarke, 2003;
Longley, Goodchild, Maguire and Rhind,
2005).
GPS readings typically are accurate to about
5–25 m: horizontal accuracy is generally
greater than vertical accuracy. A problem is
the distortion of the satellite’s signal as it passes
through the atmosphere. The effects of this can
be measured at fixed receivers where the locations given by the GPS are compared against
their known positions, communicating any
correction to calibrate GPS receivers nearby
(a process known as differential GPS).
An extension to this approach is to upload the
information back to satellites for automatic
correction (a Wide Area Augmentation
System). However, no positioning service is
absolute: it depends on the datum (model of
the Earth’s shape) that is used. For GPS, this is
the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84).
Further errors will arise as this is converted to
a local datum or coordinate system (notably
when the three-dimensional model is projected
on to a two-dimensional grid).
GPS is popular for in-car ‘satellite navigation’ and likely to be integrated more fully with
portable communication and computing technologies such as mobile telephones and PDAs
(Personal Digital Assistants), further fuelling
the growth of location-based services, including ‘Where am I?’ or ‘Where’s my nearest
. . . ?’ queries. GPS can enable personal navigation and discovery, and have clear social
benefits (in search and rescue and emergency
management, for example). However, because
people might be tracked and located, so GPS
307
GLOBAL WARMING
(together with closed circuit television, radiofrequency ID chips, biometric ID cards and
high-resolution remote sensing imagery technologies) is sometimes given as an example
of geosurveillance, emotively described by
Dobson and Fisher (2003) as threatening
geoslavery – the erosion of privacy, permitting
governments or other organizations the ability
to locate where ‘their’ people are at any time of
day and to monitor (or control) their time–
space geographies (cf. surveillance).
rh
Suggested reading
Brimicombe (2006); Monmonier (2004).
global warming Global warming is the increase in global temperature resulting from
human activities that ‘enhance’ (exacerbate)
the so-called natural ‘greenhouse effect’. The
term ‘climate change’ (see climate) is used
increasingly, because although the global impact is warming, impacts vary throughout the
world. Human-induced climate change is
seen by many environmentalists as the most
serious environmental problem, because it exacerbates other environmental issues.
Greenhouse gases are mostly natural compounds (water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) that allow the
Earth’s atmosphere to trap heat released as
longwave energy from the Earth’s surface.
This process, called the greenhouse effect,
means that the earth is 338C warmer than
expected given its distance from the sun.
At an average temperature of 158C, the Earth
supports many lifeforms.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) has provided scientific analyses
of various greenhouse scenarios to inform the
United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (1992) and the Climate
Change Convention in Kyoto in 1997
(O’Neill, Mackellar and Lutz, 2001). The
Kyoto Protocol came into effect in February
2005, after ratification by 55 countries that
were responsible for 55 per cent of emissions in
1990. The largest emitter of greenhouse gases,
the USA, and the largest emitter per capita,
Australia, rejected ratification. Concerns
about the Kyoto Protocol range from weak targets and an emphasis on creating trading systems (see environmental economics), to its
exclusion of rapidly developing economies
such as China and India. There are also issues
of ‘baseline inflation’. The choice of 1990 as a
base year meant that pollution from redundant
heavy industry in the former East Germany was
included in the base figure. Under the Kyoto
308
Protocol, the Annex One (developed) countries
agreed to an average reduction of 5.2 per cent of
greenhouse gas emissions from a base year of
1990 by 2008–12. Australia secured an 8 per
cent increase in emissions, including foregone
land clearing (Hamilton, 2001).
There have been natural cooling and heating periods throughout the Earth’s history, but
the IPCC found that ‘most of the warming
observed over the past 50 years is attributable
to human activities’ (IPCC, 2001, p. 10).
These include increased levels of carbon dioxide (coal burning, transport and clearing of
forests), methane (burning natural gas, seepage from landfill sites, rice paddies and cattle)
and nitrous oxide, mainly through agricultural
activities (see Munasinghe and Swart, 2005).
The impacts include rising sea levels and
changes in the location, intensity and frequency of cyclones, droughts and floods.
The changes are yet to be fully understood,
because of the lag time between emission and
cumulative impacts. While initial predictions
of global warming have been lowered, there is
uncertainty about the significance of clouds,
the operations of ocean currents and the
threshold levels of ecosystems. What is certain
is that emissions of carbon dioxide and some
other greenhouse gases are increasing, that
they have a long lifetime, and that the average
temperature of the Earth is about 0.78C
warmer than 100 years ago. While these processes are still occurring, lowering the initial
predictions merely means that the impacts will
be delayed by a few years.
pm
globalization
A big buzzword in political
speech and a ubiquitous analytical category
in academic debate, globalization operates
today rather like modernization did in the
mid-twentieth century as the key term of a
master discourse about the general state
of the world. The most common political version of the discourse depicts globalization as
an unstoppable process of global integration,
a supposedly inevitable process that while
being driven by free market capitalism also
necessitates all the free market reforms of neoliberalism. Here, for example, is Thomas
Friedman (1999, pp. 7–8), a columnist of the
New York Times who has made a name for
himself by interpreting practically any event
anywhere in the world through this same
simple discourse. Globalization, he says,
involves the inexorable integration of
markets, nation-states, and technologies to
a degree never witnessed before – in a way
GLOBALIZATION
that is enabling individuals, corporations
and nation-states to reach around the
world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper
than ever before. The driving idea behind
globalization is free-market capitalism – the
more you let market forces rule and the
more you open your economy to free trade
and competition, the more efficient and
flourishing your economy will be.
There is both a historical irony and a logical
paradox in this sort of argument.
The irony is that while Friedman and others
hype the new-ness of globalization to promote
free market capitalism, they forget that in the
middle of the nineteenth century global economic integration was depicted in very similar
ways as a prelude to advancing a defiantly
anti-capitalist Communist manifesto. In their
famously lyrical account of the globalizing
activities of the capitalist business class (the
‘bourgeoisie’), Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels argued thus that:
The need of a constantly expanding market
for its products chases the bourgeoisie over
the entire surface of the globe It must nestle
everywhere, settle everywhere, establish
connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie
has, through its exploitation of the world
market, given a cosmopolitan character to
production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it
has drawn from under the feet of industry
the national ground on which it stood. All
old-established national industries have
been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.
They are dislodged by new industries,
whose introduction becomes a life and
death question for all civilized nations, by
industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn
from the remotest zones; industries whose
products are consumed, not only at home,
but in every quarter of the globe. In place of
the old wants, satisfied by the production of
the country, we find new wants, requiring
for their satisfaction the products of distant
lands and climes. In place of the old local
and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,
we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. (Marx
and Engels, 1998 [1848], p. 38)
Marx and Engels saw these interdependencies
forged by capitalist globalization as leading ultimately to a global revolution by the workers
of the world. By transcending local loyalties,
increasing competition and intensifying exploi-
tation, globalized capitalism would, they
thought, create a globally united working
class that would eventually revolt. This global
revolution has still not happened, but the logical steps in the argument made by Marx and
Engels were clear. By contrast, the contemporary argument that globalization is inexorable
and yet necessitates reform is paradoxical.
Global integration cannot be inexorable
exactly if politicians and pundits have to keep
promoting neo-liberal policies as the only way
for it to function effectively. Nevertheless, this
is precisely what they have been doing from
the late 1970s onwards (see Harvey, 2005).
‘There Is No Alternative’ to free market
policies, argued the British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and, following her lead, TINA-touts the world over have
endlessly repeated the mantra that globalization is inevitable and that it necessitates neoliberal policy-making (e.g. Bhagwati, 2004;
Wolf, 2004; Friedman, 2005). In the context
of this instrumental use of globalization
in creating a taken-for-granted world for
policy-makers, there have been four main
academic responses.
The first and most sceptical scholarly
approach to globalization has been to argue
that it is nothing but hype. Hirst and
Thompson (1996) have suggested in this way
that globalization is a myth, and that the picture of integration proceeding farther, faster,
deeper and cheaper than ever before is empirically unsound. Against the claim that globalization is new, they highlight how significant
forms of globe-spanning economic integration
existed in the first decades of the twentieth
century as a result of imperialism and the
other nineteenth-century economic developments noted by Marx and Engels. Against
the claim that corporations have become stateless engines of border-crossing enterprise, they
show how even large transnational corporations remain shaped by national supports
and norms. And against the TINA-tout promotion of free market fundamentalism, they
argue that policies that are not neo-liberal can
still provide successful models of national development. However, in attempting to counter
the hype, Hirst and Thompson miss many of
the ways in which new networks have
expanded and deepened global interdependency from the 1970s onwards.
Charting the development of global networks over time has in turn been the basis
of the second main academic approach to globalization. Perhaps the most exhaustive examination available defines globalization thus in
309
GLOBALIZATION
terms of the extension, acceleration and intensification of consequential worldwide interconnections (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and
Perraton, 1999). The four authors argue that
if globalization is conceptualized as ‘the widening, deepening and speeding up of global interconnectedness’ (p. 14), it is also possible to
pick it apart as ‘a process which embodies a
transformation in the spatial organization of
social relations and transactions – assessed in
terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and
impact – generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction and the exercise of power’ (p. 16). The
precision of this approach is useful insofar as it
provides clear parameters for assessing just
how far global integration dynamics have created globally shared forms of common fate.
They themselves also provide tremendous
amounts of empirical data showing the changing extensity, intensity, velocity and impact of
different sorts of space-spanning networks over
time. However, their approach has two limitations. First, it obscures the ways in which global
interconnections can also create deeply divergent global fates, or what critics of cosmopolitanism and other idealistic accounts of
transnationalism describe as discrepant cosmopolitanisms (Robbins, 1998). These discrepant communities are all also underpinned
by global interconnections, but in ways that
create vastly varied fates ranging from the soft
cosmopolitanism of wealthy migrants and
transnational capitalists (Sklair, 2001; Calhoun,
2003; Mitchell, 2003), to the carceral cosmopolitanism of those imprisoned in global
spaces of exception (see exception, spaces
of) (Gregory, 2004b; Sparke, 2006), to the
critical cosmopolitanism of grassroots globalization activists and associated antineoliberal NGO networks (Routledge, 2003;
Sparke, Brown, Corva et al., 2005). Part of
the reason why Held and co-authors tend to
downplay such discrepancies between global
networks may in turn be traced to a second
limitation with many network-centric accounts; namely, their relative inattention to
the uneven development of spatial organization itself. This weakness is often amplified in
assessments of globalization that stress what
the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1984) once
called time–space distanciation; that is,
the establishment of space-spanning relations
of regulation, trust and interaction between
people at a distance. Commentators from
across the political spectrum, Giddens himself
amongst them, have thus unfortunately tended
to describe globalization as some sort of end to
310
geography in which time–space distanciation
has reached its final fulfilment in the creation
of a smooth, borderless, post-national, supraterritorial global landscape or, what Thomas
Friedman has recently described as a ‘flat’
world (see, e.g., Giddens, 1995; Ohmae,
1995; Appadurai, 1996; Hardt and Negri,
2000; Scholte, 2000; Friedman, 2005).
In response to all the pre-emptive epitaphs to
geography, a third more geographically sensitive approach to globalization highlights how
capitalism has created new forms of uneven
development involving both deterritorialization and reterritorialization. David Harvey
(1989b, 2006b) has argued thus that while capitalists shrink distance and create time–space
compression because of their deterritorializing efforts to reduce the frictions of
distance, they also episodically require a
reterritorializing spatial fix in which fixed capital investments are made and through which
crises of over-accumulation can be temporarily resolved (see also Harvey, 1999 [1982]).
This argument has also led him to interpret
the recent resurgence of american empire in
terms of the tensions between placetranscending and place-remaking dynamics
on a global scale (Harvey, 2004b). Drawing
further attention to the changing shape of
American global place-making in particular,
many other academics have highlighted how
flat-world visions of globalization obscure the
asymmetries and attendant geopolitics of today’s US-centric global order, including the
exceptional privileges reserved by the USA
within global governance institutions such
as the international monetary fund and
the World Bank (Anderson, 2002b; Gowan,
2003; Peet, 2003; Agnew, 2004; Pieterse,
2004; Smith, 2004; Sparke, 2005). In a
different way, research on the governance of
international borders has shown how the border-softening emphasis in flat-world business
discourse also obscures diverse forms of contemporary border hardening (Nevins, 2002;
Newstead, Reid and Sparke, 2003; Sparke,
Sidaway, Bunnell and Grundy-Warr, 2004;
Coleman, 2005; Sparke, 2006). Meanwhile,
the ongoing need to track how business practices are themselves constantly reorganizing the
geography of commodity chains has led yet
other scholars to chart the unevenness of the
global economic map of production, trade, distribution and consumption (e.g. Dicken, 2003:
see also Mittelman, 2000). And it is this uneven
and constantly shifting map that has in turn
inspired interest in glocalization as way of exploring reciprocal local-global relations that
GLOBE
avoids end-state end-of-geography ideas about
global flattening (Swyngedouw, 2004).
With a related repudiation of what she calls
an ‘impact model’ of globalization, the geographer Gill Hart’s recent work also illustrates a
fourth form of academic response to globalization focused on how its hegemony as a neoliberal discourse both works and breaks
down in practice (Hart, 2004). Hart argues
that this hegemony serves amongst other
things to make the forced privatization of
public goods and spaces seem natural, and in
response she suggests that ethnographies of
the ties between different places and people
can help denaturalize such dispossession
(Hart, 2006: see also Tsing, 2004). Such
counter-hegemonic critiques of neo-liberal
globalization discourse have now developed a
diverse set of compliementary strategies for
debunking TINA-tout inevitability ideology.
Such strategies range from efforts to chart the
emergence and marketing of globalization discourse as a form of ‘Globaloney’ or globalist
common-sense (Steger, 2005; Veseth, 2005),
to examinations of how it has been re-engineered and spread internationally by ‘World
Bank Literature’ (Kumar, 2003), global business schooling (Roberts, 2004; Olds and
Thrift, 2005) and business-funded thinktanks (Peck, 2001b, 2004), to studies of its
uneven implementation in the actual organization of business practices themselves (Dicken,
2003; Ho, 2005), to research into its impact as
a form of geo-economics that shapes both national and transnational statecraft (Smith,
2002; Roberts et al., 2003; Sparke and Lawson,
2003; Hay, 2004; Jones and Jones, 2004; Gilbert, 2005), to feminist investigations of the
masculinism of arguments about the inevitability of global capitalist penetration (GibsonGraham, 1996; Massey, 2005). Such examinations of the performance of globalization
discourse can bring it down to size and
allow academics and their audiences to see it
‘stutter’ (Larner and Walters, 2005, p. 20),
but, just as importantly, they also clear the
way for investigations of the actual powergeometries of globalization in the lived
worlds beyond the buzzword and its flatworld imaginative geography (see also geographical imaginary).
ms
Suggested reading
El Fisgón (2004).
globe A solid sphere; in geography, the
globe refers to the Earth itself or a physical
model of it (although the Earth’s actual form
as an oblate spheroid has been known since
Newton theorized it in his Principia and
French field scientists demonstrated it in
1736). The globe is a conventional symbol
of geographical science, the geographer
traditionally pictured measuring distances
with dividers placed on a terrestrial globe.
Celestial globes showing the pattern of forms
in the visible heavens have long been paired
with geographical globes. Recognition of the
Earth’s sphericity is dated to Eratosthenes
(276–195 bce), but only celestial globes survive from Antiquity, and were used in Chinese
and Islamic science too. No terrestrial globes
pre-date the European Renaissance, although
it is a nineteenth-century myth that before
Columbus the Earth was believed to be flat.
Construction of terrestrial globes is described in Ptolemy’s second-century ad book:
Geography, known in the West from the late
fourteenth century. The earliest existing terrestrial globe dates from 1492, made by a
Nuremburg merchant knowledgeable about
Portuguese oceanic navigations. Circumnavigation of the globe in 1522 produced a scientific and diplomatic demand for model globes,
although their bulkiness and the size required
for detailed representation of seas and coasts
severely limited their practical navigational use
on board ship (Brotton, 1997). Globe sets of
terrestrial, celestial and armillary spheres (see
cosmography) were objects of beauty, status
and display as much as scientific instruments
(cf. scientific instrumentation) in the early
modern world, and the largest globes were
made for monarchs such as Louis XIV of
France, or as public spectacles; for example;
in the great (‘world’) exhibitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The globe
remains an icon of power as much as an educational object today, signifying control over the
space that it represents. Model globes or globe
images are thus common in advertising and
entertainment as an indicator of international
reach and significance, and are used by airlines,
communications corporations and at selfconsciously international events such as exhibitions, fairs and sports spectacles (Pickles, 2004).
The discourse of globalization draws on
the idea and image of the globe as a symbol of
connectedness and unity, drawing on an association of the globe image with cosmopolitanism. Since the appearance of satellite images
of Earth, ‘thinking globally’ has become a
mantra of environmentalist discourse, while
the globe has become in some respects a
banal object, appearing on balloons, key fobs
and other playthings (Cosgrove, 2001). dco
311
GLOCALIZATION
Suggested reading
Cosgrove (2001); Woodward (2006).
glocalization This awkward adversary of
spell-check programs globally has been used
in three quite different ways in debates over
globalization. First, it has proved useful
for critics of what Gillian Hart calls the
‘impact model’ of global economic integration
(Hart, 2003). Challenging the idea of global
capitalism simply entering and transforming
local regions, geographers such as Erik
Swyngedouw have thus invoked glocalization
to describe the dialectical local–global relations through which local regions mediate
and change global processes even as they
are remade and rescaled themselves
(Swyngedouw, 2001, 2004a, 2006). Second,
social theorists who are interested in the
development of contemporary cultural hybrids refer to glocalization as a way of examining syncretic mixes and other forms of
so-called heterogenization that are obscured
by visions of global cultural homogenization
(Featherstone, 1995; see Hybridity). And
third, the most banal appeals to glocalization
are from business strategists who talk about
the need to ‘glocalize’ big brands so that they
can be better targeted at particular local markets (e.g. vegetarian Big Macs in India). ms
governable space
Geographical space
shaped and organized in ways that make it
amenable to technologies of government.
The term was used by Rose (1999c) in his
development and extension of Foucault’s
ideas about government and governmentality. Rose argues that ‘governing does not just
act on a pre-existing thought world with its
natural divisions’; rather, ‘to govern is to cut
experience in certain ways, to bring new facets
and forces, new intensities and relations into
being’ (1999, p. 31). This involves ‘the making up of governable spaces: populations, nations, societies, economies, classes, families,
schools, factories, individuals’ (1991, p. 31).
Governable spaces are not, however, ‘fabricated counter to experience’. On the contrary,
they ‘make new kinds of experience possible,
produce new modes of perception, invest
percepts with affects, with dangers and opportunities, with saliences and attractions’ (1999,
p. 32; cf. affect). Rose distinguishes three
dimensions to the analysis of governable
space (1999, pp. 34–40). These are:
(1) Territorializing
governmental
thought
through, for example, the formation of
312
national ‘societies’ and ‘territories’.
Smaller-scale territorializations such as
the city and the region can also be
traced (cf. territoriality).
(2) Spatializing the gaze of governors through
technologies of vision and visuality,
and particularly cartography and the
use of cartographic reason (Pickles,
2004).
(3) Modelling the space of government. This
typically takes two forms: isotropic
models and depth models. Isotropic
models conceptualize space as ‘the same
everywhere’. This might involve the use
of plans, grids and surveys to tame space
and make it comprehensible to rationalities of government. Isotropic models are
particularly important in the biopolitics
of colonialism, where they enabled the
extension of Western forms of governmental rationality and judicial sovereignty into the spaces of racialized
‘Others’ (Olund, 2002). The model of
political economy, on the other hand,
involves a depth model with ‘hidden’ determinants, such as the ‘law’ of supply
and demand, that can be distinguished
from the surface appearance of things.
Space is thus made governable through the
application of specific technologies and practices, including population monitoring, statistics, surveying and cadastral mapping.
On the other hand, despite the prevalence
of such abstract and calculative techniques,
bodily violence remains a widespread mechanism for the production of governable space,
as shown by Watts’ (2006) study of the Niger
Delta.
jpa
Suggested reading
Olund (2002); Pickles (2004); Rose (1999);
Watts (2006).
governance A term that is sometimes used
loosely to mean simply government, but more
precisely refers to the process of social and
economic coordination, management and
‘steering’. Under this umbrella definition
may be found a number of sometimes contradictory usages. At its broadest, governance can
mean any kind of coordination between organizations, parts of organizations, groups and
individuals, ranging from hierarchical ‘command and control’ systems to decentralized
forms of interaction (such as market forms of
exchange). Most commonly, however, governance refers to forms of inter-organizational
GOVERNANCE
coordination modelled neither on hierarchies
nor on markets but on networks, especially
where these are ‘self-organizing’. For Jessop,
governance is ‘the ‘‘self-organization of interorganizational relations’’ ’ (1997, p. 59), while
Rhodes defines it as ‘self-organizing, interorganizational networks’ (Rhodes, 1997, p. 53).
Rhodes expands this definition as follows:
(1) Interdependence between organizations.
Governance is broader than government,
covering non-state actors. Changing the
boundaries of the state meant the boundaries between public, private and voluntary sectors became more shifting and
opaque.
(2) Continuing interactions between network members, caused by the need to
exchange resources and negotiate shared
purposes.
(3) Game-like interactions, rooted in trust
and regulated by rules of the game negotiated and agreed by network participants.
(4) A significant degree of autonomy from
the state. Networks are not accountable
to the state; they are self-organizing.
Although the state does not occupy a
sovereign position, it can indirectly and
imperfectly steer networks.
Such definitions make it possible to speak
of a shift from government (coordination
through hierarchy) to governance (coordination through networks). Like Rhodes, most
writers on governance take the view that networks may include a wide variety of organizations and are not limited only to state
institutions. Indeed, one of the central propositions of governance research is that those
involved in the generation and implementation of public policy are not only the formal
agencies of government, but may include private firms, NGOs, voluntary organizations,
faith- and community-based groups and grassroots campaigns. In part, this merely recognizes that the coordination of complex social
systems and the steering of societal development have never been the responsibilities of
the state alone. Most writers, though, go further and argue that the state has become less
prominent and that non-state organizations
have become relatively more important within
the coordination process.
Reducing the role of the state has also been
an important goal of efforts by international
development organizations to promote what
they term ‘good governance’. The World Bank
and the international monetary fund in
particular have often made development assistance to poorer countries conditional on
programmes of public-sector reform. In this
context, ‘good governance’ involves transparency and accountability in public administration, the efficient use of public resources,
participation in decision-making and respect
for the rule of law. Critics (e.g. Evans, 2004)
object that these reforms require governments
in developing countries to adopt inappropriate
Western models of public administration, to
reduce public expenditure and to privatize
the provision of goods and services, leading
to detrimental impacts on the lives of poorer
people (cf. privatization). In both developing
and developed countries the shift from government to governance and the increased public
role of non-state actors has raised concerns
about the lack of democratic control over
decision-making and policy implementation.
Research on the geographies of governance has focused on two main overlapping
themes:
(1) The role of networks. Rhodes’ own work
on ‘policy networks’ has been adapted
and supplemented by other approaches
to examine, for example, processes of
urban development (McGuirk, 2000).
Research has also focused on the growing use of inter-agency partnerships as an
institutionalized expression of networked
governance (Geddes, 2006) and on
inter-urban networks (Leitner, Pavlik
and Sheppard, 2002).
(2) The ‘re-scaling’ of governance. Early accounts of the shift from government to
governance linked it to the ‘hollowingout’ of the state, which was said to involve
the loss of central state functions to both
supra-national scales (e.g. the European
Union) and sub-national scales (e.g. autonomous regions, local bodies). The nature of governance processes at subnational spatial scales has been examined
in detail in urban and regional geography (Painter and Goodwin, 2000;
Jones, 2001; Brenner, 2004). One strand
of this work focuses explicitly on ‘multilevel governance’, highlighting relations
between local or regional, national and
supranational scales (e.g. Bulkeley and
Betsill, 2005).
jpa
Suggested reading
Brenner (2004); Jessop (2000); Painter (2000);
McGuirk (2004).
313
GOVERNMENTALITY
governmentality A concept devised by the
French thinker Michel Foucault (1926–84) to
describe the practices of government of a
population as they emerged in europe in the
modern period. Foucault used the term to
describe the particular practices of the state
under the organizational regime that he
termed ‘security’. Government is thus not a
property of the space, but the performance
of its power in a historically and geographically specific way. Foucault’s notion of
disciplinary power required the enclosure,
circumscription, partition and control of
space, while security was concerned with opening up spaces to allow circulation and passage.
This requires regulation, but of a minimal
kind. In Foucault’s terms, discipline is isolating, working on measures of segmentation,
while security seeks to incorporate and to distribute more widely (see also security). The
practices particular to this model of governmental organization are what Foucault means
by governmentality.
Foucault’s researches on governmentality
emerged in the late 1970s as part of his project
of understanding the birth of the modern
human subject. He was therefore interested
in the way in which humans – both as individual bodies and as the collective body of population – were governed. This government
was both government of the self by the self,
to which his last works on technologies of
the self and ethics speak, and government by
others. His works on governmentality itself, in
lecture courses from 1978 and 1979 (Foucault, 2007 [2004], 2008 [2004]), from
which the lecture ‘Governmentality’ (1991) is
extracted, concentrate on government is as it
is exercised in political sovereignty, political
rule.
Foucault traces the emergence of governmentality historically, suggesting three main
sources: the Christian pastoral, diplomatic–
military techniques in early modern Europe
and the police. The first provides a model for
codes of conduct and the concern for the
population as a flock; the second looks at the
techniques of external governmental relations;
and the third at internal mechanisms of the
policing or ordering of a society. Foucault
understands the ‘police’ as something much
more than a uniformed force for the prevention and detection of crime but, rather, as
what allows the functioning of a society or
polity as a whole (cf. policing). In this sense
it is closer to the analyses of Hegel, Adam
Smith or Adam Ferguson, with a concern for
things including public infrastructure such as
314
roads and bridges, pricing mechanisms, and
public health and property. In each, he is concerned with how government is interested in
‘each and all’ – individual bodies subject to
governmental procedures, and the population
measured and calculated through larger scale
campaigns (Foucault, 1988). In both, the
practices are tied to the development of knowledge, which in turn conditions the practices
themselves.
In order to understand the transition from
earlier sovereign models of political power
to discipline and security or government,
Foucault does not propose a linear narrative.
Rather, he suggests that we understand this
model as a triangle of sovereignty–discipline–
government (governmental management),
whose primary target is population, whose
principal form of knowledge is political
economy, and whose essential mechanism or
technical means of operating are apparatuses
of security. Conceiving of these three ‘societies’ not on a linear model but, rather, as a
space of political action allows us to inject
historical and geographical specificity into
Foucault’s narrative. Different places and
different times might be closer to one node
or another, while recognizing that this is a
generally useful and transferable model of
analysis. Although Foucault’s work is largely
tied to France and Germany, and dependent
on better known historical transitions such
as that between feudalism and capitalism,
the birth of modern philosophy and schisms
in the church, some writers have used his
ideas to look at places that did not follow such
chronologies.
Foucault’s work on governmentality has
been widely taken up across the human
sciences, including human geography. Key
works by his colleagues in France have been
collected in The Foucault effect (Burchell,
Gordon and Miller, 1991) and collections
of writings developing and augmenting his
researches have continued to appear (see,
e.g., Barry, Osborne and Rose, 1996; Dean,
1999; Walters and Larner, 2004). Geographers have looked at a range of spaces
through a governmentality perspective, including those that exceed Foucault’s largely
eurocentric perspective (Braun, 2000;
Hannah, 2000, Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and Veron, 2005). These have largely
been developments of the original lecture on
the topic, and related writings (i.e. Foucault,
1988), so it is likely that the publication of the
full lecture courses (Foucault, 2007 [2004],
2008 [2004]), with their rich analyses, will
GRAND THEORY
reinvigorate this sub-field (see Lemke, 2001;
Elden, 2007b; Legg, 2007b).
se
There have been two critical responses
to this search, fastening on (i) its theoretical
ambitions and (ii) its totalizing ambitions:
Suggested reading
Burchell, Gordon and Miller (1991); Dean
(1999); Foucault (1988, 1991); Huxley (2007).
Grand Theory A term devised by American
sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959) to attack
what he took to be the obsessive concern of
post-Second World War social science with
empty conceptual elaboration (‘the associating
and dissociating of concepts’) at high levels of
abstraction. In his view, Grand Theory was
more or less severed from the concrete concerns of everyday life and largely indifferent
to its immense variety in time and space. His
main target was Talcott Parsons, another
American sociologist and the architect of
structural functionalism, against whom
he insisted ‘there is no ‘‘grand theory’’, no
one universal scheme in terms of which we
can understand the unity of social structure,
no one answer to the tired old problem of
social order’.
In geography, the postwar development
of spatial science made similar promises to
Parsons’, but about spatial rather than social
order: indeed, Chorley and Haggett (1967)
anticipated the construction of a ‘general
theory of locational relativity’ and a unified
spatial systems theory (see system). The critiques of structural functionalism (in the
social sciences) and spatial science (in geography) did not lead to the demise of Grand
Theory, however, so much as its reformulation.
By the 1980s, so many other candidates had
emerged that Skinner (1985) could write of
‘the return of Grand Theory’. These included
critical theory, structuralism, structural
marxism and structuration theory, all of
which left their marks on human geography.
Indeed, Barnes and Gregory (1997a, p. 64)
claimed that much of the late-twentiethcentury history of Anglo-American human
geography had involved ‘the search for a single or tightly bounded set of methodological
[and theoretical] principles that, once found,
would provide unity and intelligibility to the
disparate material studied. When located,
such principles would function as a kind of
philosopher’s stone, transmuting the scattered
base facts of the world into the pure gold of
coherent explanation. No matter the kind of
phenomenon investigated, it could always
be slotted into a wider theoretical scheme.
Nothing would be left out; everything would
be explained.’
(1) There has been a continuing debate
about the scope of theory in human
geography. Few would advocate a return
to the supposedly theory-less world of
empiricism, but Ley (1989), in the spirit
of Mills’ original objections, nonetheless
complained of a fixation upon theory (or
rather Theory): of the privilege accorded
to the ‘theorization of theories’, secondorder abstractions ‘doubly removed from
the empirical world’, whose proliferation
threatened to produce a disturbing fragmentation of geographical enquiry. Yet in
the same year Harvey and Scott (1989)
were exercised by what they saw as a withdrawal from ‘the theoretical imperative’
and, in consequence, the dissolution of
intellectual enquiry into a host of empirical particulars. The fragmentation that
dismayed both these responses (in different ways) was often the product of theoretical work conducted outside the
confines of (and in large measure working against) Grand Theory: see, for example, historicism, postmodernism
and post-structuralism. Hence Dear’s
(1988) exuberant insistence that ‘there
can be no grand theory for human geography!’ was coupled with an equally exuberant demand for human geography to
engage with social theory. His intention was to fashion a human geography
that was at once theoretically engaged
and sensitive to empirical particularity –
to ‘difference’. Similarly – but differently
– Thrift (1996, p. 30; see also 2006)
argued that a yet more ‘modest’ form of
theorizing was needed to avoid a ‘theorycentred’ style of research ‘which continually avoids the taint of particularity’,
though to his chagrin several critics
plainly regard his own project of nonrepresentational theory as yet another
exorbitation of Theory with a capital T.
Whether Thrift has successfully clipped
the wings of Grand Theory remains an
open question, but in any event Katz
(1996) urged human geographers to find
other ways of letting theory take flight.
She recommended an openness to
minor theory: subverting the claims to
mastery registered by Grand Theory by
working in the heterogeneous ‘spacesin-between’ different traditions, by
315
GRAPH THEORY
activating the disjunctures and displacements between different voices and vocabularies, and so ensuring that theoretical
work is ‘relentlessly transformative’ and
elaborates ‘lines of escape’.
(2) There has been a parallel debate about
the capacity of any single theoretical system to account for the world (cf. essentialism; foundationalism). Many,
perhaps most, human geographers seem
to accept: (a) that no single theoretical
system can possibly ask all the interesting
questions or provide all the satisfying
answers; and (b) that most scholars necessarily work in the spaces between overlapping, often contending theoretical
systems, which redoubles the importance
of theoretical critique to clarify dissonances, reveal erasures and evaluate consequences (Gregory, 1994, pp. 100–6).
But these nostrums have neither soothed
geographers’ anxieties nor dispelled their
ambitions. Much of the controversy attached to Harvey’s historico-geographical
materialism, for example, centres on his
attempt to develop a totalizing critique
through what his critics see as the annexation, incorporation and marginalization
of other politico-intellectual traditions
(Castree and Gregory, 2006). And while
few geographers have pursued the
Ariadne’s thread linking Humboldt’s
grand eighteenth-century vision of the
Cosmos to Chorley and Haggett’s
twentieth-century vision of a unified
field theory for Geography, there has
been considerable interest in theoretical
systems that trouble the divide between
the human sciences and the natural sciences: for example, chaos theory and
complexity theory. If Manson and
Sullivan (2006, p. 678) are right to describe complexity as ‘the grand theory to
end all grand theories’, perhaps Grand
Theory always rings twice. dg
Suggested reading
Curry (2006).
graph theory A branch of mathematics that
studies topological phenomena that can be
represented by network diagrams comprising
nodes and the links between them: the classic
pioneering work was that of Leonhard Euler
(1707–83) on the Königsberg bridge problem
(see
http://www.contracosta.cc.ca.us/math/
konig.htm). topology refers to spatial connections and relationships that are unchanged
316
after distortion: for example, Canada has a
border with the USA regardless of which
datum and map projection system is used to
map the Earth. Graph theory was first deployed
by geographers in the study of a range of network types – such as river systems and road
networks (Haggett and Chorley, 1969) – but
is widely deployed through the social sciences
to study the structure and functioning of a
range of social networks and how information
flows through them (a field known as sociometrics). (See also optimization.)
rj
Suggested reading
Biggs, Lloyd and Wilson (1986).
gravity model A mathematical and statistical model used to represent many types
of spatial interaction and flow patterns
in human geography and regional science
(such as migration and commodity flows),
and subsequently extended for use as a planning tool. The original formulation, as devised
by members of the social physics school, was
based on an analogy with Newton’s equation
of gravitational force:
Gij ¼ gMi Mj =dij2 :
This can be interpreted as follows: the gravitational force (Gjj) between two masses (Mi and
Mj) is proportional to a gravitational constant
(g) and to the product of their masses (MiMj)
and inversely proportional to the square of the
distance between them (dij2). The analogy for
migration was therefore given as
Fij ¼ gPi Pj =dij2 ,
where the migrant flow (F) from i to j was
modelled as being proportional to the product
of their populations and inversely proportional
to the distance between them. In such an application, the constant g was empirically determined from the data set by simple arithmetic
methods. At a later stage the model was fitted
by regression methods in logarithmic form,
and both g and the exponent for distance were
empirically determined by calibration. This
basic form of the model is unconstrained,
and empirical studies demonstrated that the
model fitted much better if origin and destination constraints (e.g. the total numbers of
people starting or ending in each region)
were incorporated. This was most effectively
developed by Alan Wilson in his entropymaximizing formulation of the model, based
on an analogy with statistical physics rather
GREEN REVOLUTION
Suggested reading
facto partition lines in Beirut (Lebanon) and
Nicosia (Cyprus). The Israeli line was demarcated in 1949 following the 1948–9 war
between Israel and several Arab states over
the 1947 UN partition plan for Mandatory
Palestine. The Green Line separated Israel
from Palestinian territories captured by
Jordan and Egypt. In 1967, Israel conquered
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. There have
been repeated attempts to ‘erase’ the Green
Line, although it has remained to date the
de facto border demarcating the limit of internationally recognized Israeli sovereignty.
The military occupation of the Palestinian
territories continues, however, and Israel has
also built a so-called ‘separation barrier’ or
wall beyond the Green Line and extending
deep into the Occupied Territories.
oy
Fotheringham and O’Kelly (1989); Sen and
Smith (1995); Senior (1979).
Suggested reading
than Newtonian equations, and in this form it
is widely used today. It may be used for the
assessment of likely policy impacts by projecting changes to origin and destination totals,
introducing different travel mode and pricing,
and making the model dynamic. The gravity
model approach has come under heavy criticism because of its mimicking of equations
and models from physics, rather than being
rooted in social science, but much recent
work has shown how the various assumptions
of the models (such as distance decay) may
be derived from concepts of accessibility,
utility theory and intervening opportunity. The physical analogy is just that, an
analogy and no more.
lwh
Biger (2004); Newman (1995).
green belt A designated area of land surrounding a built-up area, into which urban
expansion is strictly limited by planning policies. Initially proposed as part of the garden
city movement, delimitation of green belts
around all major urban areas was part of
the innovatory procedures made mandatory
under the UK’s 1947 Town and Country
Planning Act, both to contain urban sprawl
and to protect high-quality agricultural land
plus that used for recreational and other
amenity purposes. The proportion of the
land surface designated as green belts has
been substantially increased since, despite
opposition from interest groups – such as
development companies that want to build
there in response to growing pressure for new
housing, which governments instead wish
to focus on ‘brownfield’ (i.e. redevelopment)
sites within existing urban areas. The policy’s
success has stimulated urban development
beyond the green belts, leading to increased
commuting costs for many workers and
casting doubt on the overall economic and
environmental justification for the continued
constraints (cf. counter-urbanization).
Comparable policies have been instituted in
many other countries.
rj
Suggested reading
Elson (1986).
Green Line The most common use of the
term denotes the Armistice line separating
Israel and the Palestinian territories of the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The term
is occasionally used elsewhere, as in the de
Green Revolution A term coined in the late
1960s to refer to the so-called miracle seeds –
the high-yielding varieties (HYVs), and especially wheat and rice – that held out the
prospect for spectacular increases in cereal
production in the third world. Associated
with 1970 Nobel Prize winner and crop geneticist Norman Borlaug, the term ‘Green
Revolution’ continues to have wide currency
30 years after it was minted. Nonetheless, it
remains somewhat controversial and indeed
there is often little consensus on what the
Green Revolution actually denotes. The adjective ‘Green’ implies, at least in our epoch, a
sensitivity to sustainability (but ironically the
ecological costs of the HYVs have been a purported major failing) and implicitly is opposed
to ‘Red’ in a way which technical achievements – a technical fix – could banish not
simply hunger but political unrest. In order
to understand the origins and genesis of the
‘heroic age’ (Jirstrom, 1996, p. 15) of the
Green Revolution between 1963 and 1970,
the miracle seeds must be located on the earlier landscape of the cold war, which embraces American imperialism in Vietnam, a
Malthusian view of food shortages in the
post-1945 period, and the recognition that
the Green Revolution was wrapped up with
US foreign policy and the perceived threat
posed by poor peasants inclined towards
socialism (cf. malthusian model).
The meaning of ‘Green Revolution’ remains
a contested issue. The heart of the revolutionary thrust was quite simple: seeds plus nitrogen plus water would produce increased yields
317
GREEN REVOLUTION
per unit area. As a consequence, there is a
narrow and broad interpretation of the technologies themselves. In the narrow sense, it
consists primarily of the adoption of the new
high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice and
associated technologies. In the broad sense it
includes not only this, but all other economic
changes, as well as the social and cultural
changes that either contributed to the technological and ecological changes or were derived
from them (Leaf, 1984, p. 23).
The Green Revolution as a set of new production practices for the tropical or subtropical peasant or smallholder rested on the
development of Mendellian genetics, applied
plant breeding (led by the UK and the USA),
fertilizer (the petrochemical industry) and the
water development/irrigation technologies.
The coordination between the biochemical,
technological and social components embraced US philanthropic organizations, the
US State Department and Third World
governments. What began in the 1940s in
Mexico under the auspices of the US government and the Rockefeller Foundation, focused
on improving wheat, has grown in half a century to a massive multi-billion dollar network
of international agricultural research centres
(the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research, CGIAR), administered by
the World Bank and dealing with virtually all
the major food complexes. HYVs are now
grown worldwide – for example, 100 per cent
of rice in China and Korea, and 70 per cent in
India and the Philippines is miracle rice – and
there is no question that the ability of food
output to exceed population growth in the
Third World since 1950 has been a function
of the productivity gains of the Green Revolution (Lipton, 1989). But the Green Revolution, insofar as it is an example of applied
plant breeding, has of course a long history –
human history is synonymous with successive
Green Revolutions, associated with the
domestication of plants, with the European
agricultural revolutions in the eighteenth
century, the Chinese improved rice varieties of
ad 1000 and so on – and is a process (still
ongoing) rather than an event (Rigg, 1989).
If the Green Revolution was facilitated by
new practices associated with plant breeding,
soil fertility science and hydrological development, the genesis was stimulated by the
activities of the Rockefeller Foundation in
conjunction with the Office of Special Operations of the US Government in Mexico during the Second World War (Perkins, 1997).
Whatever the intentions of the early plant
318
breeders in Mexico, the combination of Malthusians thinking about food crises and the
Cold War atmosphere favouring national security and the threat of peasant insurgency
contributed mightily to the Green Revolution
project, and to its subsequent backing and
support by the Ford Foundation, USAID
and the major Western donors. In the first
phase of the Green Revolution, rice and
wheat were the primary crops and Mexico
and India its crucibles. The International
Rice Research Institute (IRRI) was founded
near Manila in 1960 and the Center for
Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT)
in Mexico in 1963. Today, there are 16 international agriculture research centres, focusing
on potatoes, germ plasm collection, agroforestry and tropical agriculture.
The research programme for HYVs brought
together in university-type settings transnational congeries of scientists, which constituted sophisticated breeding programs. The
IRRI, for example, built upon rice-breeding
expertise and dwarf varieties from Taiwan
and Japan to produce, through hybridization,
new dwarf HYVs that were resistant to lodging, were sensitive to nitrogen fertilizers and
that could be double or triple cropped through
a reduction in the growing period. Its first
success – IR-8 – was released in 1966 and
spread rapidly through South and South East
Asia. The diffusion of the seeds and mechanical packages (pump sets, small tractors)
involved strong state intervention, typically
involving new subsidies, credit, extension
services, irrigation development and national
breeding programmes. By the mid-1980s,
more than half of the total rice in the area
of the Third World was planted in HYVs
(Lipton, 1989).
There has been considerable disagreement
over the productivity increases attributable to
HYVs. In one of the best-known and earliest
reviews by UNRISD/UNDP, Griffin (1974)
painted a bleak picture of the effects of HYVs
between 1970 and 1974, arguing that there
had been no Green Revolution in rice. A subsequent assessment by Michael Lipton (1989)
in the mid-1980s showed that the output
increases in wheat and maize were indeed
dramatic (at least 4 per cent per year) and
that those in rice were slower but no less substantial overall. Lipton pointed, however,
to regional dilemmas – africa was neglected
on balance – and to the problems of equity
within countries, which reflected disparities
in irrigation development and water control
investment. In the first phase of the Green
GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT (GDP)
Revolution, a number of important problems
emerged: first, increasing pest and weed problems; second, problems of storage and processing; and, third, ecological deterioration
(especially loss of germ plasm, water depletion
and toxicity). All of these direct and indirect
consequences initiated a still ongoing debate
over the consequences of HYVs (see Shiva,
1991, 1996).
At the heart of the impact question are
equity, poverty and social justice. In the
early years, the adoption of HYV packages
(and the recognition that the packages were
not scale neutral) prompted much speculation about new forms of social differentiation
among peasantries, of class conflict between
adopters and non-adopters, of deteriorating
labour conditions, as HYVs were labourdisplacing rather than labour-saving – of the
‘green revolution turning red’. As the Indian
case shows, there was in fact no simple polarization of landholding, though there has been
the consolidation of a class of increasingly
commercialized and organized rich peasants
who have benefited from the Green Revolution (these are the heart of the New Farmers
Movement in India, which has changed the
face of local and national politics: see social
movements). The impact on labour markets
(new forms of migration, changing forms
of labour permanency and tenancy), on landholding (cf. land tenure) and on social
inequality is enormously complex, in part
because of the linkages and off-farm employment (Hazell, 1987). On balance, the mechanization that has followed the HYV adoption
has been labour displacing and has favoured
those with concentrated capital displacement.
New forms of inequality have emerged, but
this is often attributed by the proponents
of the HYVs to population growth and state
rent-seeking rather than technology per se. The
debate continues.
The Green Revolution has unquestionably
increased food output per capita, but this has
not necessarily increased food availability for
the poor (Dreze and Sen, 1989), and nor has it
improved the lot of the poor (Lipton, 1989).
The first issue turns less on output than on
availability and entitlements – in short, the
social component of the Green Revolution
(including land reform). The second speaks
to the problems of both the uneven adoption
of HYVs and the biases built into the breeding
programmes themselves. The miracle seeds
are often not pro-poor and do not speak
to the circumstances of the land-poor and
landless.
There is a debate over whether the Green
Revolution has ‘ended’ in the sense that there
are no new seed breakthroughs likely in the
world staple crops. The pessimists foresee a
Malthusian nightmare of famine and pestilence, compounded by the growth of Chinese
staple food imports. Nonetheless, the Green
Revolution has entered a second phase associated with the breakthroughs of molecular
science and recombinant DNA. Here, the
issue is increasingly the power of large transnational seed and pharmaceutical companies,
who develop new crops with built-in requirements for particular inputs, and the intellectual property rights that attend to the
concentration of power in agribusiness companies (Shiva, 1996). Genetically modified
HYVs (whether soy or corn) have become
part of an embattled agricultural landscape in
which environmental questions have been tied
to corporate power and the pressures exerted
through the world trade organization by
First World states to liberalize protected
agricultural sectors in the global south.
Many of the most vociferous of the antiglobalization movements have often expressed concerns over the ways in which the
second phase of the Green Revolution is now
refiguring the international food order, now
dominated by corporate power and a new
round of privatized agricultural and seed technologies (Rosset, 2006). The current debates
over farmer breeding rights, genetically modified crops and intellectual property rights
suggests that the next Green Revolution will
be as fraught as the first.
mw
Suggested reading
Bayliss-Smith and Wanmali (1984); Grigg (1989).
greenhouse effect See global warming
gross domestic product (GDP)
A monetary estimate of the value (at current market
prices) of final goods and services produced
within an economy (usually national) during
a given period. Capital expenditure, indirect
taxes and subsidies are excluded, as is the
value of intermediate products (such as raw
materials) which is included in the value of
final goods. GDP is often favoured over
gross national product (gnp) as a measure
of economic activity because it excludes net
income from abroad. International comparisons of GDP, either in aggregate or per capita,
are difficult because of fluctuations in currency
values through floating exchange rates, and
some attempt to standardize for this using
319
GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT (GNP)
purchasing power parities, derived from data
on the costs of a ‘standard basket’ of goods
and services. In addition, as a recent OECD
(2006) report indicated, comparison of GDP
levels internationally is difficult because: it
takes no account of leisure time and the quality of the environment; it is not standardized
for income inequality (an extra $1,000 per
annum means much more to a poor than to a
rich person); it does not factor in negative
contributors to the quality of life (such as
pollution); and it takes no account of the
depreciation of capital stock. Unfortunately,
though measures have been devised to capture
these, they are not readily available for many
countries.
rj
gross national product (GNP)
A measure
of economic activity in a given period of time,
usually applied to national economies. It comprises gross domestic product (gdp) plus
the net return from profits, dividends and income earned abroad. GNP estimates are used
to compare the volume of economic activity
over time and space – either in aggregate or
per capita – but to avoid complications introduced by inflation and exchange rate fluctuations they have to be converted to a common
base. This involves the use of purchasing
power parities (the costs of a ‘standard basket’
of goods and services at a given period) – as in
the calculated rate of inflation within a country, which is taken into account when calculating a ‘real terms’ rate of GNP growth. GNP
is not necessarily a valid measure of ‘economic
health’ since harmful consequences (e.g. on
the environment) are not taken into account,
whereas the later costs of their amelioration
are: increased expenditure on policing could
stimulate GNP growth, for example, even
if it was merely a response to an increased
crime rate.
rj
growth coalitions Alliances of urban elites,
with shared interests in local economic
growth, partnered in pursuit of businessfriendly and market-oriented forms of city
governance and resource allocation (Logan
and Molotch, 1987). Typically centring on the
rentier class (including developers, financiers
and realtors), the business interests of whom
are ‘place-based’, growth coalitions also comprise a range of auxiliary players such as universities,
media
and
utility
owners,
representatives of business and civic organizations, cultural leaders and labour unions.
What are sometimes called ‘growth machines’
or ‘urban regimes’ have assumed increased
320
significance in the context of the entrepreneurial turn in urban politics since the 1970s. jpe
Suggested reading
Jonas and Wilson (1999).
growth pole A dynamic and highly integrated set of industries, often induced by the
state, organized around a propulsive leading
sector or industry. Growth poles are intended
to generate rapid growth, and to disseminate
this through spillover and multiplier effects
in the rest of the economy. The concept
was devised by French economist François
Perroux (1903–87), who, in 1955, located
the pôle de croissance in abstract economic
space. It was translated into more concrete
geographical terms by J.R. Boudeville (1966).
On the bases of external economies and
economies of agglomeration – and hence of
uneven development – Boudeville argued
that the set of industries forming the growth
pole might be clustered spatially and linked to
an existing urban area. He also pointed to the
regionally differentiated growth that such a
spatial strategy might generate. The precise
meaning of the term ‘growth pole’ is difficult
to pin down, however, because it is frequently
used in a far looser fashion to denote any
(planned) spatial clustering of economic
activity.
The apparent simplicity of the notion, its
suggestion of dynamism and its ability to connect problems of sectoral growth and planning
with those of intra- and inter-regional growth
and planning, led to its ready acceptance
and widespread use in the 1970s and 1980s.
Although some commentators have seen Perroux’s ideas resurfacing in the new economic
geography (Meardon, 2001), there were several persistent difficulties associated with
growth poles in both theory and practice that
led to its fall from grace. These included the
following:
(1) Technical problems, notably: (a) the interdependent decisions to be made on the
location, size and sectoral composition of
a growth pole – this was not a serious
problem for Perroux, who defined growth
poles around a single propulsive industry,
but more recent research on the related
ideas of clusters and industrial districts identifies networks of industries
as central to urban and regional development; (b) the distinction between spontaneous and planned poles, with the latter
requiring integrated social and physical
GROWTH THEORY
planning; (c) the nature of the intersectoral and interregional transmission of
growth; (d) the relationship between the
public provision of infrastructure and
the success of the growth pole; (e) the
relationship between the growth pole
and existing city distributions; and (f)
the need for monitoring and management
to avoid dis-economies.
(2) Political and policy horizons: the appropriate time-span over which to judge success or failure of a growth pole – say, 15–
25 years – is often too long in political
terms, as elected governments prefer results of their policies to be evident over
the length of the electoral cycle (which is
usually less than four years).
(3) Space–time path dependence: the success of
a growth pole depends upon the extent to
which it is linked to, and energizes and
dynamizes an existing space-economy or
economic landscape. Without such conformities, the spillover effects are severely
inhibited. Porter’s (1998a, 2000) advocacy of clusters as a means of enhancing
the competitive advantage of localities has
prompted critics such as Martin and
Sunley (2003) to object that such policy
interventions are merely one effective
geography of production that may lock
out other possibilities.
rl
Suggested reading
Buttler (1975).
growth theory In the wake of the Second
World War, and after the experience of the
Marshall Plan in assisting the recovery of
war-torn europe, several economists with direct experience in multilateral institutions
and the Marshall Plan turned their attention
to the question of economic development in
the third world. Among these pioneers of
development thinking were Finnish economist
Ragnar Nurkse (1953), Austrian economist
Paul Rodenstein-Rodan (1976), Germanborn and American-naturalized economist
Albert Hirschmann (1958), West Indian
Nobel Laureate Sir Arthur Lewis (1984), and
American economic historian Walt Rostow
(1960). Their ideas were far from identical,
but they formed a loose school of thought –
growth theorists – emphasizing a historically
informed and practical approach to economic
development, and stood at an angle to the
neo-classical models of Solow and others.
Rostow was something of an odd man out
insofar as his simple stage theory of
European industrial replication was both less
analytical and less historically sophisticated
than the others (cf. rostow model).
The growth theorists were framed by three
historical dynamics: the legacy of the Keynesian
revolution and the experience of international
Keynesianism through the European recovery
programme; the political agenda of the USA in
the wake of 1945 and increasingly during the
cold war, which turned on the use of Bretton
Woods institutions to foster development and
fair dealing, as President Truman put it in
1949; and the nationalist developmentalism (cf.
nationalism) associated with the last wave of
decolonization, which also emerged during
and after the Second World War. Growth theory in its emphasis on aggregate phenomena
and on industrialization bred a predilection for
authoritative intervention – in which the state
was a necessary actor – which involved planning systems, the application of economic
growth models and aid mechanisms.
All of the growth theorists shared some
sort of affinity for Keynes. They emphasized
aggregate economic processes such as rates
of saving and rates of investment (cf. neoclassical economics). Poor economic performance and lack of aggregate demand were
related. They also revealed a preference for
industrialization as a driving force – indeed,
they were advocates of what in the 1930s had
become import-substituting industrialization –
and for short-term state interventions. markets were means not ends, and like Alexander
Gerschenkron (1968 – one of their contemporaries), they realized that late developers
required a dirigiste state. However, as growth
theorists they presumed that an economy
would achieve its best results within a competitive market structure.
Each of the growth theorists is a major intellectual figure in the history of economics,
but there were important commonalities and
points of confluence (if not necessarily agreement), which animated their policy and theory
during the 1950s.
There was the concept of hidden development
potential in the less developed nations. As
Gerschenkron had argued, there were ‘advantages to backwardness’, and in these advantages
lay hidden comparative advantages:
A recognition of market failures and the role
of positive externalities in creating virtuous circle effects. Rodenstein-Rodan’s
(1976) emphasis on social overhead capital
and the role of government was a case in
point.
321
GROWTH THEORY
The differences and merits of balanced and
unbalanced growth, and how each was
related to the necessity for a ‘big push’ to
trigger economic growth. Nurkse (1953),
like Rodenstein-Rodan, emphasized the
need for coordinated increase in the
amount of capital utilized in a wide range
of industries if industrialization was to be
achieved. Hirschmann (1958), while
agreeing with Nurske and others, also argued that unbalanced growth could,
through linkage effects, generate innovations created by market responses to
shortage and surpluses.
The potential, as Lewis (1984) indicated,
for surplus labour as a stimulant to growth in
so-called dual economies.
The significance of saving at particular
historical moments in order to enter what
Rostow (Rostow) called the ‘take-off stage’
of industrialization.
as an instance of Keynesian internationalism
in which market failures, planning, social capital and some aspects of political economy
are put to the service of ‘developing’ the
poorer nations of the world. All of these
growth theorists identified key developmental
issues – equilibrium, social overhead capital,
planning – which have continued to be objects of debate, and each (perhaps with the
exception of Rostow) contributed to both the
building of postwar multilateral development
institutions and to the idea, which in a way
was crushed by the weight of the Cold War, of
a sort of liberal developmental internationalism (see liberalism). In the 1980s, a ‘new
growth theory’ emerged in which endogenous
growth can occur especially through human
capital and new technologies (rather than
being assumed, as in neo-classical approaches, by an exogenous savings rate or rate
of progress of technical change).
mw
Growth theory, from the vantage point of the
neo-liberal revolution of the 1980s, appears
Suggested reading
322
Cypher and Dietz (1997); Preston (1996).
H
habitus A term coined by French anthropologist/sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to convey
the routinized, yet indeterminate, nature of
social practice. It mediates between objectivist
accounts, such as from structuralism, and
individualistic accounts, such as from phenomenology. The former would see individual practice as determined by social factors,
while the latter would emphasize the individual’s intentions. In essence, then, it speaks to
the oxymoronic nature of always improvised
yet repetitively predictable practices of everyday life. Bourdieu himself defined habitus as
the system of:
durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as
structuring structures, that is as principles
which generate and organize practices and
representations that can be objectively
adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an
express mastery of the operations necessary
in order to attain them. Objectively ‘regular’
and ‘regulated’ without being in any way the
product of obedience to rules, they can be
collectively orchestrated without being the
product of the organizing action of a conductor. (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 53)
This definition, then, emphasizes that practices are not (generally) subject to the anarchy
of individual intentions. He plays down the
role of intention, rejecting conscious planning
as a principle, in favour of routinization. He
also stresses that there are collective patterns
without implying there is a conscious plan or
conformity.
Rather, there is adaptation to a constricted
set of opportunities presented to each actor in a
‘social field’. These have been variously interpreted, but usually represent a social domain in
which there are shared rules of operation.
These can be defined by institutions but can
be more open, and are defined by the circulation of specific forms and practices. Bourdieu
himself worked with the ‘artistic field’, or what
he more broadly defined as the field of cultural
production, the field of consumption and the
‘educational field’. Clearly, a critique is that the
edges of these can be vague and that applied
mechanically they merely render a institutional
sociology. However, the virtue of his approach
is that these fields are relatively autonomous
from each other – thus advantage in one field
does not automatically mean advantage in another. Most famously, he thus developed a notion of the accumulation of cultural capital
as separate from economic capital. The plurality of fields provides for multiple dimensions
of power and status in society. Each field has its
own tacit rules and continual adaptation produces ingrained dispositions. For example, in
Bourdieu’s study of amateur photography –
a voluntary activity, in which few people
have any training – he found people’s pictures
remarkably similar, so ‘there are few activities
which are so stereotyped and less abandoned to the anarchy of individual intentions’
(Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 19). Bourdieu has been
criticized for being reductive and emphasizing
the structural side of practices, and his work
has an unfashionable belief in the ability to
objectify the conditions of the emergence of
practices.
Within geography, his work was first taken
up as a way of mediating in debates between
structuralism’s focus on determinations of action and accounts focusing on human agency
(e.g. Thrift, 1983). Along with structuration
theory, it offered a middle way in debates of
the 1980s. In the 1990s, his work on cultural
capital was heavily invoked in studies of consumption, connecting habitus to the lifestyles
of different class fractions (e.g. Bridge, 2001).
Finally, from the 1990s interest in his notion
of habitus has focused around how tacit knowledge might connect with work on the body
and routinized habit, and embodied memory
(e.g. Alsmark, 1996).
mc
Suggested reading
Alsmark (1996); Bourdieu
(2001); Thrift (1983).
(1995);
Bridge
hazard An event or phenomenon that does
harm to human lives. Today, most researchers
view hazards as the joint product of risk (the
potentiality or probability of harmful events)
and vulnerability (the degree to which riskaffected populations are likely to suffer from
the event occurring) (Mitchell, 2003b, p. 17).
The field of hazard research opened up in
323
HAZARD
response to so-called ‘natural disasters’ – the
suffering visited upon human populations by
such extreme geophysical phenomena as
floods, earthquakes and hurricanes (see also
environmental hazard). These events remain core concerns. The prominence of
physical forces as causes or triggers of
human suffering points to the need for
input from both the human and natural
sciences, which would seem to present
special opportunities for the discipline of
geography, with its constitutive concern
with both social and physical processes.
However, the various twists and turns in the
development of hazard research thus far
should caution against any sense that the
field offers a straightforward or self-evident
bridge between the study of the social and
the natural, within geography or more generally. This is all the more so considering
that the study of hazards increasingly concerns itself with more obviously humaninduced harms, such as technological accidents, war, terrorism and social violence.
Within human geography, the crystallizing
of a concern with hazards is usually traced to
the mid-twentieth century work on floods in
the USA by Gilbert White. In what became
known as the human ecology tradition,
White and his collaborators sought to provide
an alternative to the environmental determinism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by exploring the range of ways
in which individuals or communities could
construe and respond to hazards in their environment. However, later critics found the
human ecology approach overly managerialist
or technocratic – too concerned with adjustment or adaptation of human populations
to hazards, and not concerned enough with
the social processes that rendered people
vulnerable to hazards (Pelling, 2001; Mustafa,
2005).
The late 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of a
perspective on hazards that viewed vulnerability as having at least as much to do with the
conditions of everyday social life as with the
specific physical events on which the human
ecologists focused. This turn was signalled by
the work of Amartya Sen (1981) and Kenneth
Hewitt (1983), and further developed by input
from the tradition of political economy. Addressing issues at both local and global scales,
the political–economic perspective draws attention to the ways in which socio-economic
marginalization and powerlessness leaves
some people living and working in conditions
of vulnerability to hazard that the more privil324
eged sectors of society are able to avoid. As
Emel and Peet sum up: ‘the geography of
social relations thus determines the occurrence and extent of natural disasters’ (1989,
p. 68). Researchers and activists have also
sought to reveal how dominant discourses
serve to frame hazard as a physical problem
amenable to technocratic or managerial solutions, rather than one that calls for changes in
the social structure.
By reconstituting hazard as a facet of everyday existence rather than as the exception to
normality, the political–economic perspective
has helped resituate hazard research in the
broader stream of critical social theory (see
Blaikie, Cannon, Davis and Wisner, 1994;
Emel and Peet, 1989). Its ‘denaturalizing’ of
natural disasters has facilitated the extension
of interest in hazard beyond events with a
geophysical or biological trigger, to encompass
technological accidents and other humaninduced threats. Among other things, this
paves the way for a convergence of hazard
research with environmentalist discourses
and theories of risk society. The growing
integration of the study of natural disasters
with the study of environmental problems
manifests itself in a shared concern with sustainability, including the processes by which
different social groups struggle for sustainable
livelihoods and places of habitation (see
environmentalism; social justice). Pursuing
these leads, researchers of the political–
economic camp tend to encourage a participatory approach to hazard mitigation, based on
the recognition that successfully diminishing
vulnerability and increasing resilience in the
face of a volatile world requires input from
the bottom up (Mustafa, 2005).
However, care must be taken so that emphasis on the social construction of hazard
does not overshadow the significance of those
aspects of the physical world or ‘cosmos’ that
cannot be reduced to the measure of the
human. As James Mitchell reminds us, ‘natural hazards . . . represent an ‘‘other’’ that can
be modified by humans but is not ultimately
reducible to a human construction in either
the material sense or the mental one’ (1999,
p. 2). Moreover, the downplaying of the exceptionality of the hazard, whatever its trigger
may be, can also detract attention from the
very things that are most disturbing and provocative about those events that impact ‘disastrously’ on human life. As the philosopher
Maurice Blanchot pointed out, the literal
meaning of the term ‘disaster’ is the loss of
one’s star (1995, p. 2). The disaster causes us
HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE
to lose our bearings, it disturbs and destabilizes,
he argued, precisely because it exceeds our
experience or comprehension of the world.
Viewed in this way, accounting for the disastrous dimensions of hazards calls for something more than simply the extension of our
rational understanding of causes and consequences. It invites us to contemplate the limits
of our knowledge and how we might respond
intellectually, politically and ethically, to such
limits. The terrorist attacks of 11 September
2001 prompted Judith Butler to reconsider
the precariousness of human life, and to
muse on ‘the emergence and vanishing of the
human at the limits of what we can know’
(2004, p. 151). For her, such a disaster impels
us to reassess the way we address others who
have suffered, and to think deeply about the
role of loss and mourning in modern life
(see ethics). This is not to make light of
the achievements of apprehending hazard as
socially constructed, but it is a reminder to
think also about the capacity of hazards to
shape and define our human condition, and
to raise questions about the limits of knowing,
writing about and ordering the volatile worlds
that we inhabit.
nhc
Suggested reading
Blaikie, Cannon, Davis and Wisner (1994); Emel
and Peet (1989); Mustafa (2005); Pelling
(2001).
health and health care ‘The concept of
‘‘health’’ is open to differing interpretations’
(Curtis, 2004, p. 2). It can mean ‘the presence
or absence of diagnosed diseases’, but also
many different dimensions potentially contributing to the corporeal, emotional and social
well-being of people in their everyday lives.
Gesler and Kearns (2002, pp. 30–2) discuss
‘cultures of health’, identifying the explanatory models deployed by different people
(e.g. experts contra lay people) and drawing
inspiration from ‘ethnomedicine’ as the study
of how such models (and their deeper
cultural, religious, cosmological moorings)
vary from place to place. Additionally,
assumptions about health clearly vary within
places according to class, ethnicity, gender
and other markers of social difference (Lewis,
Dyck and McLafferty, 2001).
Acknowledging such variability in health
beliefs suggests an approach to a geography
of health that squares with recent shifts in the
sub-discipline of medical geography. Indeed, some argue that medical geography
should be widened to include not just health
defined through the lenses of Western biomedicine, casting health in the negative sense
of not being physically or mentally ‘ill’, but
rather in the broader sense indicated above,
of health as well-being. This orientation demands a holistic focus on the great variability
of the human condition, commonly at the
scale of populations within territories, but in
principle also at that of individual people
interacting with quite specific sites. One upshot is then the enlarging of what is meant by
risk, with geographers addressing the many
risks to health that people face from infectious
illnesses but also from the likes of environmental hazards, interpersonal violence and
occupational stress, all of which constitute
multiple ‘spaces of risk’ figuring in domains
of human decision-making from the state
to the household (Curtis, 2004, pp. 5–9).
A link exists here to a long-standing geographical concern for human well-being,
sometimes configured as quality of life, in
which a political commitment to uncovering
spatial injustice is never far below the surface.
This concern awakened in the 1970s with the
contribution of welfare geography, and has
continued into more recent work on the sociospatial constitution of ‘health inequalities’.
A key development has been Gesler’s (1992)
notion of ‘therapeutic landscapes’, highlighting how places in all of their complexity can
foster people’s senses of healthful well-being,
and Curtis (2004, ch. 2) mobilizes this notion
when fashioning new perspectives on the
meeting-grounds of ‘health and inequality’.
Another link exists to the various currents
now coalescing under the heading of emotional geographies, wherein varying human
mind–body assemblages (see also Butler and
Parr, 1999) are examined for how they are
constituted, enacted, experienced, re-presented
and perhaps politicized in relation to diverse
spaces, places, environments and landscapes.
Work in this vein asks about what might comprise places conducive to, or alternatively
destructive of, ‘emotional health’.
These new trajectories complicate what is
meant by health care, since such care can
no longer be envisaged solely as providing
medical facilities of varying kinds (hospitals,
clinics, GP surgeries or even conventional
medical outreach and educational services).
Geographers have long studied these medical
facilities (see medical geography), but they
have now begun to consider less overtly medicalized versions of care (Parr, 2003) – elder,
hospice and terminal care (Brown, 2003);
complementary and alternative medicines
325
HEARTLAND
(Doel and Segrott, 2004); psychotherapy and
counselling (Bondi with Fewell, 2003) –
alongside diverse retreats and centres offering
massage, yoga, nature therapies and many
other healing techniques. Attention is
prompted to the intimacy of embodied encounters performed through these sites of
non-mainstream health care (Conradson,
2003b, 2005b), but another option is to regard
the latter as servicing the new ‘health consumer’ who can pick and mix from whatever
kinds of health care, medical or otherwise, are
available to them locally (or perhaps further
afield for the ‘health tourist’). Gesler and
Kearns (2002, ch. 8) discuss this issue of ‘consumption, place and health’, and a further
direction might follow Michel Foucault’s
claims about ‘technologies of the self’ (Martin,
Gutman and Hutton, 1988) – alighting on
issues of personal, especially sexual, health –
when considering myriad instances of people
past and present working on their own health.
The French Revolution’s dream of complete
‘dehospitalization’ (Philo, 2000b) and everyone
becoming ‘their own physician’ has arguably
now come to pass – partly fuelled by governments cajoling populations into a ‘care of the
self’, partly by capitalism’s courting of health
consumers – and the emerging geographies of
health care, exploding beyond the hospital
gates, signal a challenging new frontier for critical research. (See also biopolitics.)
cpp
Suggested reading
Curtis (2004); Gesler (1992); Gesler and Kearns
(2002).
heartland Many core regions are referred to
as heartlands. For example, the Midwest of
the USA is often termed ‘the Heartland’,
with the implication that it is not only central
in a geographical sense but also foundational
in a normative sense, the place where the core
American values that come from the frontier
process are to be found (cf. homeland).
The most important use of the term, however, was by British geographer Halford Mackinder (1861–1947). Mackinder argued against
the late-nineteenth-century belief that seapower was the basis for global supremacy.
Mackinder (1904) suggested that the resources of a secure land-power could now be
moved around more easily with the development of transcontinental railways. Further, he
proposed that the largest basket of resources
of what he termed the ‘World Island’ (europe,
asia, africa) lay in Eastern Europe and western Russia. The core of this region was
326
inaccessible by ocean-going navies. Gunboat
diplomacy was ineffective against it. Were
Russia, Germany or an alliance of the two to
prevail in this region, they could mobilize resources that would make them invincible
rulers of the World Island and almost certainly
ultimate rulers of a World empire. Thus,
Mackinder’s advice to the leaders drawing up
a political map of Europe after the First World
War was: ‘Who rules East Europe commands
the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: Who commands the
World-Island commands the World’ (1919,
p. 194). From this followed two main strategic
priorities: first, to separate the Soviet Union
and Germany with a viable network of buffer
states and, second, to prevent the Soviet Union acquiring the string of warm-water
ports that would enable it to extend its landpower on to the ocean-ways of the world. The
first of these was close to the state-building
that was attempted from the ruins of the empires of Eastern Europe after the First World
War. The second of these was close to the
policies of Soviet containment that animated
the cold war after the Second World War.
There have been many evaluations of Mackinder’s ideas. A favourable review that emphasizes Mackinder’s prescience is provided by
Parker (1982), while more critical reviews of
the central concepts of race, space and history
used in Mackinder’s geopolitics are provided
by Agnew (2003a) and Kearns (2006a; see also
Kearns, 2009). Advocates of the heartland
thesis believe that it expresses more or less timeless relations between resources, space and military strategy. Critics argue: that in modern war,
land- and sea-power have ceased to be distinct
modalities; that far from being impregnable, the
heartland has actually been occupied by hostile
forces more than once in recent history (by the
French under Napoleon, and the Germans
under Hitler); that forceful relations between
states do not exhaust the forms of international relations and that ignoring peaceful
co-operation and multilateral institutions in
fact makes the resort to force more likely by
presenting it as inevitable; and, finally, that as
technology changes, new resources will be valued and the geography of the competition for
resources will shift. Despite these criticisms, our
present hydrocarbon economy seems destined
to focus attention for some time to come on
parts of Mackinder’s heartland, with the
Caspian Basin still vital in the resource wars
between the world’s Great Powers.
It is clear, then, that Mackinder’s heartland
thesis has been very heavily cited and must
HERITAGE
rank as one of the most significant geographical theories of the twentieth century. It has
been claimed as central by various nationalists
and imperialists, from Nazi Germany to modern Russia and the United States.
gk
Suggested readings
Kearns (1993); Mackinder (1919).
hegemony The capacity to exercise control
by means other than coercive force; namely,
through constructing a willing mass acquiescence towards, and participation in, social
projects that are beneficial only to an elite.
Hegemony is the dissemination of the values
and cultural practices of the elite in such a way
that they become unquestioned. Thus, in
everyday life the beliefs and values of the elite
are reinforced, and a hierarchical social order
is reinforced by the everyday actions (see
everyday life) of those who benefit less, if at
all, from its existence.
Contemporary usage of the term is derived
from the writings of Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci (Gramsci, 1971 [1929–35]) who,
while imprisoned by the Italian fascist regime
between 1928 and 1935, reflected upon how
the majority of citizens gave support to a repressive social order. The Frankfurt School of
Marxism described how the post-1945 consumer culture was a form of hegemony, entrapping the working class in the pursuit of
material possessions rather than social change.
Cultural geographers have used these Marxist
foundations to explore the role of landscape
and place in perpetuating particular hegemonic ideals (Martin, 2000a: see cultural
geography). Such works have extended the
Marxists’ original concentration upon class
relations to questions of race and patriarchy.
Particular attention has been paid to the practice of hegemony in colonial settings, especially
how the landscape was used to inculcate ideals
of racial hierarchy (McKinnon, 2005).
The term ‘hegemony’ has been utilized in a
complementary fashion in the analysis of interstate politics in political geography, though
with the same roots and general meaning.
A hegemonic power is the single most powerful
state in the inter-state system. Though originally conceived in terms of material power (productive capacity and military might), scholars
increasingly looked to the integrative power
of the hegemonic state, or its ability to set a
global agenda that, on the whole, other states
followed. Post-1945, the USA was identified
as the contemporary hegemonic state. Its
material power is complemented by its
dissemination of a ‘prime modernity’ (Taylor,
1999), or the definition of the ultimate modern
way of life. Connecting back to the Frankfurt
School, the US ‘prime modernity’ is the consumer culture epitomized in its suburban lifestyle. Hegemony is maintained by other states’
desire to emulate this lifestyle and perceiving
the adoption of particular economic and political practices as the means.
Hegemony, in both senses, is a process.
Hence, discussion has arisen of the way hegemony is resisted. In the first meaning of the
term, working-class and subaltern groups
have adopted cultural practices that run counter to hegemonic demands. In the second
meaning, discussion of the decline of
US power, the challenge of other states and
terrorist groups, and the meaning of ‘empire’ question whether hegemonic rule is
being replaced by more coercive practices. A
counter-argument is found in the notion of
‘imperial overstretch’ in which hegemonic
states are eventually bankrupted by their overseas commitments and lose their primacy
(Kennedy, 1988).
cf
Suggested reading
Agnew (2005a); Lears (1985).
heritage Although ‘heritage’ includes and
derives from a highly individualized notion of
personal inheritance or bequest (e.g. through
family wills and legacies), human geography
is concerned with collective notions of heritage
that link a group to a shared inheritance.
In this context, heritage usually denotes two
related sets of meanings. On the one hand,
it refers to iconic cultural landscapes or,
usually and more specifically, to tourism
sites with an historical theme that have often
been protected or preserved in some way for
the nation-state and become part of the ‘heritage industry’; for example, a museum or an
archaeological site (Urry, 2002 [1990]). On
the other hand, heritage refers to a suite of
shared cultural values and memories inherited over time and expressed through a variety
of cultural performances – for example, song
or parade (Peckham, 2003). The basis of this
group identification varies across time and
space and can hinge on allegiance derived
from, for instance, a communal religious tradition, a class formation, geographical propinquity, and a national or imperial identity
(Moore and Whelan, 2007).
Traditionally, historians and geographers
have viewed heritage sites as spaces for inscribing nationalist narratives of the past on to the
327
HERMENEUTICS
popular imagination (see nationalism). The
historical perspectives transmitted through
these sites were seen to be selective, partial
and distorting. They offered a ‘bogus’ history
that ignored or sanitized what are now taken to
be the less savoury dimensions of the past.
They therefore were contrasted with the
work of professional historians, represented
in textbooks and monographs, where ‘testable
truth is [the] chief hallmark [and] . . . historians’ credibility depends on their sources
being open to scrutiny’ (Lowenthal, 1997,
p. 120).
This distinction between ‘true history’ and
‘false heritage’ has been challenged from a
variety of directions. Samuel (1984) made an
important case for treating heritage sites as
important loci for retrieving the history of the
marginal, the dispossessed and the subaltern.
Samuel suggests that they can act as important
spaces for representing those voices often
omitted in textbooks. So, for instance, industrial heritage sites can represent the lives and
practices of working-class people in ways that
are provocative and interesting to a popular
audience and not always found in textbook
accounts. post-structuralism suggests that
all historical narration is perspectival, and
thus queries the distinction between representation and reality, between fake heritage
and genuine history, while Urry (1990, p. 82)
claims that postmodernism involves ‘dissolving of boundaries, not only between high
and low cultures, but also between different
cultural forms, such as tourism, art, music,
sport, shopping and architecture’ (1990,
p. 82) (see also culture).
Recently, geographers have begun to tackle
the performative elements of heritage production and consumption (Duncan, 2003;
Hoelscher, 2003: see performativity). In
this work, not only are the narrative structure
and visual elements of a heritage attraction
analysed, but also the impact of the other
senses, and the emotional response of the
audience and the ‘actors’ to the site become
crucial parts of the analysis. This broadens the
discussion beyond the purely visual element of
heritage, to focus attention on the whole embodied experience involved in making and
participating in a heritage site. While this
work is still in its infancy, it is pointing to
important new themes that human geographers can address in their analysis of the everincreasing number of heritage places.
nj
Suggested reading
Hoelscher (2003); Peckham (2003).
328
hermeneutics The study of interpretation
and meaning. Hermeneutics derives from the
Greek word meaning to announce, to clarify
or to reveal. In this sense, hermeneutics has
always been an integral part of the use of language. The first stirrings of hermeneutics as a
formal discipline began with the elucidation of
biblical texts: both clarifying God’s word, and
adjudicating among competing interpretations. By the end of the eighteenth century,
with the work of F. Schleiermacher (1768–
1834), hermeneutics broadened to include
the interpretation of historical texts more generally. In claiming that to understand a text
required scrutiny of the intentions of its
author, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics implicitly challenged the relevance of the emerging
scientific method for the human sciences.
Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911) writings both
generalized hermeneutics and made its critique
of natural science explicit. He argued that the
human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) required a
special methodology, hermeneutics, in order to
understand the meanings of its objects of study.
Those certainly included texts, but under
Dilthey’s view they could include any entity in
which human meaning was invested. In contrast, the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften)
were not concerned with human meaning,
and consequently applied an abstract universal
vocabulary: the laws of physics, chemical
formulae and geometrical relations.
For Dilthey, meaning is recovered through
practicing the hermeneutic circle. By tacking
back and forth both between our presuppositions and the text itself, as well as between
individual parts of the text and its whole,
meaning and understanding are attained.
This same procedure can be used to clarify
meaning in the non-textual, such as works of
art, the artefacts of material culture or cultural landscapes. More generally, the hermeneutic method is intrinsically circular,
indeterminate and perspectival. It is circular
because it involves a constant movement from
us, the interpreter(s), to the interpreted and
back again, thereby implying that every interpretation is itself reinterpreted. It is indeterminate because that loop of interpretation
has no end. And it is perspectival because
interpreters are embedded in their situations,
making their knowledge partial and incomplete (cf. situated knowledge). None of this
means that interpretation is merely personal
whim and fancy. Interpretations are always
made against a set of socially agreed upon
canons and texts (albeit interpreted ones)
that are publicly accessible.
HETERONORMATIVITY
In the twentieth century, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) took
Dilthey’s epistemological rendering of hermeneutics and transformed it into an ontological one, making its focus ‘being’ rather
than ‘knowledge’ (cf. epistemology; ontology). The details are complex, but the gist is
that problems of understanding unfold from
our ‘being in the world’. Just as the hermeneutic circle for Dilthey involved tacking between parts of a text and its whole, for
Heidegger it involves a movement between
an anticipatory pre-understanding, which
comes from our ‘being-ness’’, and our role as
knowing subjects. Hans-Georg Gadamer
(1900–2002) subsequently took Heidegger’s
notion of pre-understanding and showed its
relation to notions of prejudice, authority and
tradition. Since the enlightenment, Gadamer
argued, there has been prejudice against prejudice. For him, however, ‘pre-judgement’, or
pre-judice, is what makes understanding possible. In particular, the prejudices of historical
‘traditions’ are vital; without immersion in traditions, there is no understanding. It is not
that traditions are frozen and immutable:
Gadamer’s point is that we can never escape
traditions and the historical perspective that
they bring. Historical understanding proceeds
by a movement from our prejudices (traditions) to the historical totality and back, making understanding ‘an open and continuously
renewed ‘‘fusion’’ of ‘‘historical horizons’’ ’
(Thompson, 1996, p. 381).
Gadamer’s work, in turn, provoked two
other formulations. First, the German critical
theorist Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) thought
that Gadamer made humans too much the
dupes of historical tradition. Consequently,
he developed a critical theory of society
by setting hermeneutics against quasitranscendental forms of ‘communicative reason’ that in conjunction produce the possibility of emancipation and liberation. Second,
American philosophers Richard Rorty (1931–
2007) and Richard Bernstein, writing under
the sign of neo-pragmatism, were sceptical of
Gadamer’s claim that hermeneutics was the
method of the human sciences, but acknowledged its importance for the critique of grand
theory and other forms of foundationalism
(thus connecting hermeneutics to poststructuralism). Both Rorty and Bernstein
upheld the pragmatist ideal of ‘conversation’,
which they believed was another version of the
hermeneutic circle, in this case, juxtaposing
new evidence and ideas with existing and possibly incommensurate ones.
Hermeneutics was introduced to human
geography to contest the empiricism and
positivism found in spatial science. Buttimer’s (1974) ‘dialogical approach’, which involved bringing together inside and outside
views, was an important early contribution,
as were Tuan’s (1971) reflexive approach to
topophilia (‘to know the world is to know
oneself’) and Harrison and Livingstone’s
(1980) ‘presuppositional approach’. These
early forays were codified under humanistic
geography, which made human meaning and
intentionality the very core of its concern.
Since then, the explicit working out of the
hermeneutical approach has become less important, although there have been some exceptions, such as Barnes’ (2001) invocation
in his work on the cultural turn within economic geography and Livingstone’s (2002c)
writings on a distinctly ‘tropical hermeneutics’
(see tropicality). In addition, hermeneutics
has been implicitly present in the burgeoning
discussions about ontology, especially those
drawing upon Heidegger, and which in turn
have seeped into debates around spatiality.
More generally, the spirit of hermeneutical
enquiry – that is, the recognition of the importance of interpretation, open-mindedness
and a judicious, reflexive sensibility – is
as great as it has ever been, and is certainly
evident in critical human geography,
including those versions informed by poststructuralism.
tb
Suggested reading
Bernstein (1983).
heteronormativity A
social regulatory
framework that produces binary sex division,
normalizes desire between men and women,
and marginalizes other sexualities as different
and deviant. Much like whiteness, heteronormativity is naturalized so as to be invisible to
the heterosexual population, but is a compulsory norm that itself produces nature;
namely, bodies sexed as male or female.
Reversing the assumed relations between sex
and gender, Butler (1990) has argued that
heteronormativity is the foundation on which
sexual difference is built. Predicated on the
paternal law of kinship, heteronormativity
‘requires conformity to its own notions of
‘‘nature’’ and gains its legitimacy through
the binary and asymmetrical naturalization
of bodies’ (Butler, 1990, p. 106: see performativity). Bodies outside this binary are unintelligible or monstrous. Berlant has argued
that in the USA in the past 20 years, the
329
HETEROTOPIA
political has collapsed into the intimate sphere
of the heterosexual family, such that ‘the family sphere [is] considered the moral, ethical,
and the political horizon of national and political interest’ (1997, p. 262); this has led to
the intensified regulation of heteronormativity. Honig (1998) cites the role of immigration in reinforcing heteronormativity.
Geographers have drawn attention to the
many ways in which space is bound up with
the processes through which sexual identities
are constructed, naturalized and contested,
and to the need to study the particularity
of heterosexualities in specific contexts
(Hubbard, 2000). ‘Homonormativity’ has
been identified as a new strand of heteronormativity. It is a politics that emerged in the
1990s, associated with state-sanctioned
same-sex marriages and other rights for gays
and lesbians, and it has been criticized for
upholding, rather than contesting, dominant
heteronormative assumptions and institutions.
The globalization of this trend has led to
criticisms of Western cultural imperialism;
Oswin (2007) questions the geographical assumption that lies behind this critique – that of
the diffusion of ideas from Western to other
societies – and argues for the need to assess the
specificity of homonormativity in context. gp
Suggested reading
Hubbard (2000).
heterotopia Literally ‘another place’ or
‘place of otherness’, a term introduced into
the humanities and social sciences by French
thinker Michel Foucault (1926–84). Foucault
borrowed the term from medicine, and uses it
in opposition to utopia. While utopias – idealized happy places – do not really exist, but
function as fantasies or spaces of hope, heterotopias for Foucault are places that do exist.
But in their existing they radically undermine
or challenge existing spatial orderings, they
disturb, they are places of transgression or
otherness.
Foucault initially uses the term to describe
linguistic or visual challenges, such as the writings of José Luis Borges or the paintings of
René Magritte (Foucault, 1970 [1966], 1983).
For Foucault these examples destroy ‘syntax’ –
not just the syntax we use to make sentences,
but also the syntax that constructs relations
between words and things and allows classification and order. Borges’ fictional Chinese Encyclopaedia, with its outlandish categories, and
Magritte’s shoes with toes, paintings that are
part of the landscape that they portray and
330
mirrors that reflect what they conceal, all disrupt and upset the commonplace. In a 1967
lecture, only published in French in 1984,
shortly before his death (in English, see Foucault, 1986), Foucault broadened the analysis
to include places he described as ‘counter-sites,
kinds of effectively enacted utopias’. Although
Foucault suggests that in the modern period
space is characterized by the relation between
sites generally, he concentrates on those sites
that link with and contradict other sites. His
examples include the boarding school or the
honeymoon hotel, where transitions between
stages of life are managed; care homes, hospitals and prisons, where deviation is placed;
and a wealth of other examples, such as travelling fairgrounds, hammams, saunas, brothels,
boats and colonies.
The term has been developed in a number
of English-language writings in human geography and related fields (e.g. Marks, 1995;
Soja 1996b). One of the most important and
original analyses is found in the work of
Hetherington (1997b), who understands heterotopias as ‘spaces of an alternative ordering’
that must be seen in relation to the sites they
differ from. He uses this understanding, together with a number of historical readings of
the Palais Royal, Masonic lodges and factories, to illustrate how modernity is constituted
through resistance and difference as much
as through the process of ordering.
‘Heterotopia’ was also used by the French
Marxist Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), but the
meanings are not entirely congruent with Foucault (see, e.g., Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]).
Lefebvre understood the city through the
three terms of utopia, isotopia (the same
place) and heterotopia (places that are other,
other places, or places of the other). He uses
these terms to understand the uniformity, difference, contradictions and dialectical relations of urban space. Indeed, Lefebvre thinks
that urban space in the singular is restrictive,
and needs to be understood as urban spaces,
as the differentiated spaces and the spaces of
difference found in the city (see also production of space).
se
Suggested reading
Foucault (1986); Hetherington (1997b, Ch. 3).
heuristic A
problem-solving procedure,
which may be a set of formal rules (such as
an algorithm) but more likely a pragmatic or
‘short-cut’ approach, such as drawing a diagram or reducing the set of all possible solutions to those that seem most probable. Many
HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY
heuristics involve ‘intelligent guesswork’ based
on experience (as in games of chess) and can
involve trial-and-error procedures, moving
towards a ‘better’ solution (as with neural
networks). Heuristics are often deployed in
optimization studies – as with the travellingsalesman problem – and in various forms of
classification (as in remote sensing).
rj
Suggested reading
Gigerenzer and Todd (1999).
Hindutva This concept encapsulates the
cultural justification for Hindu nationalism,
a ‘Hinduness’ allegedly shared by all Hindus.
Its first full articulation as a Hindu nationalist
manifesto was made by Vinayak Damodar
Savarkar in his 1923 work Hindutva/Who is a
Hindu? For Savarkar, Hindutva was the life of a
great race; it signified the religious, cultural
and racial (‘blood’) identity of Hindus. He
claimed that the membership of the Hindu
nation depended upon an acceptance of
India as both fatherland and holy land. The
spatial strategies of Hindutva, aimed at rearticulating the link between the imagined community of Hindus and the sacred geography of
its territorial domain (the nation-space), have
had a significant impact on contemporary
Indian society and politics.
sch
Suggested reading
Sharma (2003).
hinterland The tributary (or catchment)
area of a port, from which materials for export
are collected and across which imports are
distributed: its complementary area – the destination for the exports and source of the imports – is the foreland. In more general usage,
hinterland is deployed to describe a settlement’s catchment area (or that of an establishment within the settlement): it is the area for
which the settlement acts as a trading nexus
(as in the hexagonal hinterlands of central
place theory).
rj
historical demography
The application of
demographic methods (see demography) to
data sets from the past that are sufficiently accurate for formal analysis. Such data sets may
take the form of vital records and censuses, but
most frequently, and particularly if produced
before the nineteenth century, would not have
been created for the purposes of demographic
enquiry. Parish registers, militia and tax lists,
testamentary records and genealogies have
been the most prominent among the great
variety of documentary sources used by historical demographers (see Hollingsworth, 1969).
Demographic history may subsume historical
demography as a field of enquiry, but it is more
wide-ranging in its subject matter, being just
as concerned with charting the impact of
demographic change on society and economy
as with the measurement and explanation of
demographic change (see Wrigley, 1969).
Historical demography first secured a formal
status in France at the Institut National
d’Études Démographique (INED), where
Louis Henry had begun research after the Second World War on contemporary fertility and
fecundity. His investigations were handicapped because those states that produced the
most accurate demographic statistics were by
then all controlling their fertility by family limitation, and so he was drawn to the historical
study of European populations to unravel ‘natural fertility’. Henry (1956) devised the technique of family reconstitution for exploiting
genealogies of the Genevan bourgeoisie, and
then developed detailed rules of family reconstitution using parish registers. The first published
study concerned the Normandy parish of Crulai
(Gautier and Henry, 1958), but the method was
quickly adapted and modified for work on
English parish registers by historical geographer
and economic historian E.A. Wrigley (1966a).
Wrigley (1966b) undertook a reconstitution of
the East Devon parish of Colyton, where the
population appeared to have been limiting its
fertility in the late seventeenth century.
In the past thirty years, a large number of
reconstitution studies have been completed
and they have shown little, if any, evidence of
parity-dependent fertility control, although
the levels of fertility within marriage have varied enormously by region. For instance, marital fertility in Belgian Flanders was 40 per cent
higher than that of eighteenth-century England, although the two regions were separated
by only a few miles across the English Channel.
Likewise, marital fertility was almost 50 per
cent higher in Bavaria than in East Friesland.
By measuring birth intervals and relating infant
deaths to the time elapsed to new conceptions,
family reconstitution has enabled historical
demographers to show that breastfeeding practices varied greatly and thereby influenced the
tempo of conceptions (see Wilson, 1982).
Breastfeeding also correlated closely with infant mortality rates, which were also revealed
by family reconstitutions to be very frequently
in excess of 300 per 1,000 in non-breastfeeding
areas and as modest, by pre-industrial standards, as 150 per 1,000 or lower in areas
331
HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY
where women breast-fed well into the second
year of the child’s life (see Knodel, 1988).
Such techniques have also made it possible to
cast light on the geography of marriage and to
test an important thesis about the distinctiveness of marriage patterns in north-west
Europe proposed by Hajnal (1965), who argued that females married uniquely late in life
and that a large proportion remained entirely
out of marriage. Hajnal discovered this pattern
from census data of the nineteenth century,
and family reconstitutions of France and
England, southern Scandinavia and much of
the German-speaking areas of Western and
Central Europe showed this marital geography
to have been firmly embedded before 1600
and hence not derived from urbanization or
industrialization, and common to both
Protestant and Catholic areas (Smith, 1990).
The Cambridge Group for the History of
Population was the first centre of research
exclusively devoted to historical demography,
and it developed techniques for the study of
early censuses and aggregative counts of baptisms, burials and marriages to recreate demographic processes without employing the timeconsuming method of family reconstitution.
One such technique – generalized inverse projection – is a technique that projects back from
a census providing accurate data on age structures and so making it possible to obtain age
structures, population sizes, emigration rates,
and measurements of fertility and life expectancy. This technique was first applied to
English data and showed that fertility changes
were considerably more important in determining demographic growth rates from
c.1600, and to some extent endorsed the
more optimistic view of Malthus as presented
in the second edition of his Essay (Wrigley and
Schofield, 1989 [1981]; see malthusian
model). As research by historical demographers accumulated, it became apparent that
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European
demographic patterns, even in the area of the
so-called north-west European marriage and
household formation systems, varied greatly
(see Wrigley, 1981). Furthermore the extension of formal historical demographic enquiry
to asia, utilizing early listings of inhabitants
and population registers, has cast doubt on
the assumed uniqueness of certain features
frequently supposed to be peculiar to historic
europe (Lee and Feng, 1999).
rms
Suggested reading
Hajnal (1965); Smith (1990); Wrigley and
Schofield (1989 [1981]).
332
historical geography A sub-discipline of
human geography concerned with the geographies of the past and with the influence of
the past in shaping the geographies of the present and the future. Before the twentieth century, the term ‘historical geography’ was used
to describe at least three distinct intellectual
endeavours: the recreation of the geographies
described in the Bible and in ‘classical’ Greek
and Roman narratives; the ‘geography behind
history’ as revealed by the changing frontiers
and borders of states and empires; and the
history of exploration and discovery (Butlin,
1993, pp. 1–23). Fragmented and incoherent,
these early writings had little impact on contemporary historical geography, whose intellectual
roots can be traced to the late-nineteenthcentury writings on regional landscape formation by French geographers such as Paul Vidal
de la Blache (whose influence spread into
Britain through the work of H.J. Fleure and
A.J. Herbertson) and by the German school of
anthropogeography led by Friedrich Ratzel
(a perspective successfully promoted in the
USA by Ellen Semple).
Historical research on landscape change
received a powerful stimulus after the First
World War, when the reorganization of national boundaries in europe and the creation
of new ones in the middle east re-focused
attention on regional landscapes as products
of long-term economic, social and political
evolution that could be analysed by the scientific interrogation of archaeological and historical evidence. The study of landscape change
varied in different national contexts and was
by no means always described by the term
‘historical geography’. Continental European
research on regional, especially rural, landscape change continued without embracing
a new disciplinary terminology. In inter-war
France, the annales school produced a
body of interdisciplinary research that might
reasonably be described as historical geography, but that is more usually regarded as a
distinctively French style of History. Likewise,
in Germany, historical research on rural settlement change was generally seen as continuing
an existing tradition of research on the cultural landscape rather than blazing a new
trail in historical geography.
The situation was different in the UK,
where the term ‘historical geography’ was
deployed more frequently under the charismatic influence of H.C. Darby. Darby’s vision
of historical geography exhibited many similarities with research carried out simultaneously on the history of the English
HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY
landscape by social and economic historians
W.G. Hoskins and Maurice Beresford, but it
was distinguished by its emphasis on cartography as a means to both interrogate and
display the archive: by the use of historical
sources to construct visually impressive and
typically thematic maps. According to Darby,
historical geography was a fundamentally geographical endeavour, one of the ‘twin pillars’
of the larger discipline, alongside geomorphology (Darby, 2002). Geomorphology and
historical geography were both concerned
with landscape formation and evolution,
Darby argued, the former based primarily on
field evidence derived directly from the natural
environment and the latter on historical
evidence gleaned indirectly from archival
sources. Darby placed a special emphasis on
the reconstruction of geographical patterns as
cartographic cross-sections, exemplified by his
seven-volume reconstruction of the human
geography of medieval England, published
with a series of collaborators and based on
tabulations in the Domesday Book (Darby,
1977). He sought to link such cross-sections
into larger sequences of landscape change
(vertical themes), encapsulated in his work
on the changing fenland landscapes of eastern
England (Darby, 1940).
Darby’s version of historical geography
spread to other parts of the English-speaking
world, but the study of regional landscape
change in the USA developed along distinctive
lines under the influence of Carl Ortwin
Sauer, doyen of the berkeley school of cultural geography. Sauer wrote enthusiastically about historical geography, but his own
work is more commonly described as cultural
or cultural–historical geography, in accordance with his interest in anthropological and
archaeological evidence, following in some
part the German tradition of Landschaft
research. In Sauer’s view, this was a more
appropriate model for the study of long-term
landscape change in the New World, where
the scale of analysis was necessarily larger
(so he claimed) and where written evidence
was non-existent before European colonization.
It is important to note, however, that some of the
most successful ‘big-picture’ accounts of US
history since Columbus have been written by
American historical geographers working outside the Sauerian tradition (notably Earle,
2003; Meinig, 1986–2004), and that a number
of historical geographers studying the interrelations between European conquest and native
peoples have excavated archaeological and
palaeo-environmental records and attended to
oral traditions in ways that could not have been
anticipated by Sauer.
The diffusion of spatial science in the
1960s and 1970s challenged many of the
assumptions and practices of traditional historical geography, particularly the sourcedetermined, cross-sectional studies that,
through their disregard of social theory and
their inattention to social process, seemed to
have little purchase on the analysis of subsequent geographical structures. A lively debate
ensued, some of it conducted in the pages of
the Journal of Historical Geography, which was
established in 1975. Several different kinds of
historical enquiry emerged within human
geography as a consequence of this period of
rethinking and reformulation.
The first was advocated by those historical
geographers who had become critical of their
field’s source-bound empiricism, and who
now welcomed a methodology that allowed
historical data to be incorporated into more
complex models of geographical change
(Baker, 2003, pp. 37–71). The result was a
more quantitative historical geography that
had been anticipated by Torsten Hägerstrand’s
early studies of diffusion and of ‘population
archaeology’ that issued in his timegeography; both left enduring legacies
(Pred, 1973; Dodgshon, 1998). Statistically
minded historical geographers also became
centrally involved in the field of historical
demography, particularly in Britain, where
E.A. Wrigley was a dominant influence (Wrigley and Schofield, 1989 [1981]). In Wrigley’s
case, this involved an institutional move from
geography to economic and social history, a
well-trodden and often two-way career path.
These interdisciplinary exchanges explain why
some of the most important research on Britain’s agricultural history has been published
by scholars trained as historical geographers
(Campbell and Bartley, 2006; Overton, 1996:
see also agricultural revolution; field systems). The significance of quantitative historical research within human geography is also
attested by highly sophisticated studies of historical epidemiology and disease diffusion,
consistently identified by their authors as historical geography (e.g. Smallman-Raynor and
Cliff, 2004). The emerging field of historical
geographical information science confirms
the continuing strength of the enumerative
tendency within historical geography (Gregory
and Ell, 2007).
Other historical geographers, particularly
those who had familiarized themselves with
previously unexplored literatures in critical
333
HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY
theory and social theory, were less convinced by the claims made by spatial science.
Some of the original advocates of a quantitative approach also shifted their position and
ultimately rejected the philosophical assumptions derived from positivism that underwrote
spatial science. From their perspective, statistical explanation lacked the capacity for ethical
or political critique and failed to acknowledge
human agency, intentionality and emotion
(Harris, 1971; Gregory, 1981). Traditional
forms of historical geography could scarcely
claim a better track record, of course, so the
solution was not to defend existing methods
but, rather, to create a critical, theoretically
informed historical geography within a new,
historically sensitive human geography.
For some, this demanded a more direct engagement with historical materialism and a
sustained analysis of the deeper economic, social and political forces determining geographical change, an approach that was strongly
influenced by developments in social and economic history in general and the work of E.P.
Thompson in particular (e.g. Gregory, 1982).
The same concerns can be detected in other
work on urbanization and the industrial
revolution in Britain (Langton, 1979, 1984;
Gregory, 1982; Dennis, 1984) and in more
synoptic works such as Harvey’s extended
(1985) essay on nineteenth-century Paris (see
also Harvey, 2003a). Since the mid-1980s,
new historical geographies of space, power
and the social order have extended this style
of historical research, inspired by other developments in social theory more critical of historical materialism, notably structuration
theory, and a series of formulations that are
conventionally identified as post-structuralism, notably the work of Michel Foucault
(Driver, 1993; Ogborn, 1998; Hannah, 2000;
Philo, 2004). Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to connect these diverse post-positivist
thematics into an agenda for historical geography was Harris’ programmatic essay on modernity (Harris, 1991).
A somewhat different style of historical
investigation arose from a second attack on
spatial science. This sought to reconnect geography with a wider range of disciplines in the
arts and humanities, based in part on hermeneutics. While sympathetic to historical
forms of geographical enquiry, the leading advocates of a broadly humanistic geography
refused to privilege the past as arena of investigation and therefore tended to define their
work as (new) cultural geography allied to
(comparative) literature, cultural studies and
334
the visual arts rather than history. The cultural landscape has been the central preoccupation of this form of historical enquiry,
which has generated a rich geographical literature, including several theoretically ambitious
attempts to uncover the origins and development of landscape as social and political construction and as a way of envisioning and
representing space, a project far removed
from the way in which landscape was apprehended in traditional historical geography
(Cosgrove, 1993; Cosgrove and Daniels,
1988; Duncan, 1990; Daniels, 1999). Investigations into the relationship between landscape, heritage and tourism generate
continuing interest (Graham, Ashworth and
Tunbridge, 2000), as does the relationship
between landscape and memory (Johnson,
2003b), while research on twentieth-century
debates about landscape, identity and social
practice has been especially influential
(Matless, 1998). There have also been important historical studies of cultures of travel and
travel writing that pay close attention to the
texts and the images that accompanied them
(Schwartz and Ryan, 2003) and, moving historical geography still further from the seemingly obdurate physicality of landscapes,
studies of ways in which the very technologies
of writing were caught up in the transmission
of power (Ogborn, 2007).
These distinct forms of historical research in
geography, always closely related, have effectively merged in the past two decades (Graham
and Nash, 1999; Withers and Ogborn, 2004).
The single, hybrid term ‘cultural–historical
geography’, originating in North America
and in some measure a legacy of the Berkeley
School, is now widely deployed to describe a
different style of research in which three
closely related themes have animated recent
discussions. The study of imperialism and
colonialism has grown steadily more important. This has shifted the focus of historical
research in geography away from the global
north, although the constellations of EuroAmerican empire, hegemony and power continue to cast long shadows over many of these
studies, in both their theoretical form and historical substance. This work has revealed how
landscapes, identities and values in the core
regions and in the colonized territories of
africa, the americas and asia were fashioned
by a process of imperial interaction and transculturation involving the circulation of
people and practices, objects and ideas on a
global scale (Harris, 1997; Driver and Gilbert,
1999a; Clayton, 2000; Lester, 2001; Lambert,
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
2005; Legg, 2007b; Ogborn, 2007). These
studies have involved a close and critical engagement with various forms of post-colonialism.
The colonial project was largely concerned
with the acquisition and exploitation of natural resources, and much of the new work
on historical geographies of colonialism has
focused on its environmental consequences.
This is scarcely an unheralded development
(Clark, 1949; Powell, 1988; Williams, 1989;
Donkin, 1999), since the relationship between
environmental history and historical
geography has always been extremely close,
particularly in the USA (Williams, 1994a).
However, recent environmentalism has generated a more politically charged historical
geography that has explored the impact of
natural resource exploitation on regional and
urban development (Cronon, 1991), and
which includes explicitly Marxist historical
geographies on the interactions of class, race
and the physical environment in industrializing
regions (Mitchell, 1996; Walker, 2001).
Western science, including the science of
geography, was directly implicated in the
processes of agricultural and industrial transformation, urbanization and imperial expansion that historical geographers have
increasingly investigated. This has prompted
a renewed interest in the critical history of
post-enlightenment geographical and environmental thought (Livingstone, 1992; Grove,
1995). Inspired in part by the writings of the
literary critic Edward Said, this work has emphasized the constitutive significance of geographical knowledge in the creation of national
and imperial identities (Smith and Godlewska, 1994; Bell, Butlin and Heffernan,
1995; Driver, 2001a; Withers, 2001: see also
orientalism). It has also reconnected historical geography with the history of cartography
(see cartography, history of), particularly
through the seminal work of historical geographer J. Brian Harley (Harley, 2001b).
No single methodological or philosophical
orthodoxy has prevailed since the 1970s, and
historical geography has become increasingly
eclectic. This demonstrates the growing influence of perspectives from allied disciplines but
is also evidence of a wider ‘historicization’ of
human geography that has partially compromised historical geography’s status as a distinctive sub-discipline (Driver, 1988). This has
generated some unease about sub-disciplinary
identity, notably in the debate about the legitimacy of the terms ‘historical geography’ and
‘geographical history’ (Baker, 2007). But for
all its thematic diversity, twenty-first-century
historical geography has become increasingly
focused on the (relatively) recent past, a trend
partly determined by the need for reliable,
spatially extensive data, but also influenced
by the instrumentalist assumption that historical research should have immediate relevance to contemporary issues (Jones, 2004b).
That said, its continued vigour is demonstrated in the pages of the Journal of Historical
Geography and in the steady stream of innovative work in historical geography that also appears in the pages of mainstream journals
inside and, crucially, outside geography. mh
Suggested reading
Baker (2003); Butlin (1993); Harris (1991);
Morrissey, Whelan and Yeoh (2008).
historical materialism The materialist conception of history, formulated by Karl Marx
(1818–83) with Friedrich Engels (1820–95),
and the ‘guiding thread’ of their joint work
(see also marxism). Historical materialism is
a theory of history incorporating a series of
bold theses about the dynamics of historical
change, most succinctly summarized in the
1859 ‘Preface’ to ‘A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy’.
Social development is driven by progress in
meeting social needs through the development
of productive forces (means of production and
labour power). In the process of production,
men and women necessarily enter into certain
social relations of production. These include both
work relations (technical relations and forms
of co-operation) and forms of ownership and
control of the means of production, which are
at the root of class formation. The totality of the
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, ‘‘the real foundation,
on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of
social consciousness’. The economic base and
superstructure together constitute the mode of
production of a society. (See also base and
superstructure.)
Each mode of production is subject to
internal tensions and contradictions (see
dialectic). Thus, at a certain stage of their
development, the material productive forces of
society come into conflict with the dominant
relations of production, which reflect entrenched forms of property ownership and
class relations. The relations of production
increasingly become fetters on the further development of the productive forces. ‘Then begins an era of social revolution’, transforming
the economic structure, and with it the whole
335
HISTORICISM
immense superstructure, its institutions and
forms of consciousness. In illustrating this theory of contradiction and change, Marx refers
variously to the ancient, Asiatic, feudal and
capitalist modes of production.
The theory outlined in the 1859 Preface
appears disarmingly simple, and has tended
to be downplayed by Marxists who find it too
close to a form of economic, or even technological, determinism. Nevertheless, Cohen
(1978) has shown how it can be given a rigorous and sophisticated modern defence if one is
prepared to accept the validity of functionalist
forms of explanation (see functionalism).
Wright, Levine and Sober (1992) have also
shown how the basic argument for economic
primacy can be disaggregated into at least six
linked sub-theses, not all of which are asserted
with equal force in Marx’s many writings, and
some of which are more defensible than
others. It is thus possible to extract both
‘strong’ and ‘weak’ versions of historical
materialism from Marx’s writings, with the
latter placing more emphasis on the role of
class conflict in social change, the role of the
superstructure in shaping and reacting back
on the economic base, and the role of contingent factors in opening up different historical
trajectories.
Adding a spatial dimension to historical materialism brings further complexities. Giddens,
for example, attempted to purge historical
materialism of any evolutionary, functionalist,
or reductionist tendencies, and his structuration theory incorporated spatial concepts
such as ‘time–space edges’ and time–space
distanciation into what he described as a
weaker ‘anti-evolutionary, episodic model of
social change’ (Giddens, 1981). However,
the work of geographer David Harvey represents the most sustained and systematic
attempt to incorporate space into a more general ‘historical–geographical materialism’ (see,
centrally, Harvey, 1999 [1982]; also Castree
and Gregory, 2006), and his study of nineteenth-century Paris demonstrates what can
be achieved if such a framework is used subtly
and flexibly as a guiding thread for research
(Harvey, 2003a).
kb
historical contexts to the interpretation of
cultural texts and practices.
Historicism in the first sense invokes transhistorical forces to structure its explanations
of human ‘progress’ (most visibly in the movement of the world-spirit, or Geist, in G.W.F.
Hegel’s philosophical history). The appeal of
teleology – of ‘unfolding’ models of social
change – is now much diminished, and few
scholars would see human history as predictable and susceptible to the formulation of
universal scientific laws. When Karl Popper
famously railed against the ‘poverty of historicism’ in this sense, he had a reading of
Marxism as economic determinism in his
sights, but subsequent versions of historical
materialism have offered a much more openended view of human history and the spaces
for political action (Popper, 1960 [1945]).
The second sense of historicism is much
more important to contemporary social enquiry. Historical context and historical specificity are articles of faith in historical
geography, and while they were undermined
by spatial science in the 1960s and 1970s, the
emergence of a cultural–historical geography
with a critical edge brought a closer, if largely
tacit, engagement with a so-called ‘New Historicism’ – an approach to literary and cultural studies that originated in the USA in the 1980s
(Gallagher and Greenblatt, 2001). Among the
sources on which it draws, three are particularly
important for human geography:
Suggested reading
New Historicism has influenced studies of colonial discourse in post-colonialism and has
much in common with work in cultural
geography and the ‘contextual approach’
to the history of geography (see geography,
history of). It should be noted that when
Soja (1989, 1996b) objects to ‘historicism’, he
has in mind an over-valuation of historical
Bassett (2005); Shaw (1978).
historicism Historicism has two meanings:
(i) intellectual traditions that assume human
history to have an inner logic, overall design or
direction (a ‘telos’); and (ii) critical traditions
that insist on the importance of specific
336
(1) the thick description of anthropologist
Clifford Geertz, which underwrites the
importance of a close reading of minor
events in such a way that they reveal the
larger situations of which they are a part
and to which they can be made to speak;
(2) the genealogy of philosopher–historian
Michel Foucault, which resists ‘power’s
descriptions of itself’ by looking to the
margins and the peripheries of situations;
and
(3) the cultural materialism of cultural
critic Raymond William, which emphasizes the materiality of cultural formations
and their contradictory constitution.
HOLOCAUST
explanation and a marginalization of a ‘spatial
imagination’; but there are many practitioners
of New Historicism who have no problem
in attending to both the historicity and the
spatiality of their objects of enquiry.
dg
Suggested reading
Hamilton (1996).
history of geography See geography,
history of
holocaust
Most generally, the systematic
deaths of large numbers of people, but most
specifically the campaign of genocide pursued
by Hitler’s Third Reich during the Second
World War (1939–45) and identified by its initial capital: the Holocaust. Both usages depend
on political and cultural processes of distinction
and exclusion (see racism) and a studied indifference to the suffering of those construed
as radically ‘Other’ (see bare life). Thus
Thornton (1990) and Stannard (1992) connect
European colonialism to the mass destruction
of indigenous societies in the americas, Davis
(2002) identifies a series of late-nineteenthcentury famines across the global South as a
‘cultural genocide’ brought about by the logics
of imperial power and free trade, and all historians of the Nazi genocide acknowledge its roots
in a racial fantasy of ‘Aryan’ supremacy and
a profound anti-Semitism (see also fascism).
The Nazis did not confine their predations
to Jews. They also systematically murdered
millions of non-Jewish Soviet and Polish citizens, hundreds of thousands of Roma and
Sinti (Gypsies), mentally and physically disabled people, gay men, religious dissidents
and political opponents, including trades
unionists, communists and socialists; the first
concentration camp that the Nazis established
at Dachau in 1933 was for political prisoners.
But the (capitalized) Holocaust is increasingly
and usually reserved for their concerted murder of approximately 6 million European Jews
who died through malnutrition, medical experimentation and slave labour in concentration camps, who were shot or gassed by mobile
killing units, or who were killed in gas chambers. This particular usage is problematic,
however: in its original Greek form, ‘holocaust’ denoted sacrifice by fire, and while
these spiritual connotations may resonate
with the role Christianity played in legitimizing the deaths visited on indigenous peoples
by European colonialism, their inappropriateness to describe the mass murder of European
Jews has prompted many scholars to prefer the
Hebrew Shoah (‘catastrophe’) (though this in
turn may evoke the biblical sense of retribution found in the book of Isaiah).
Whichever term is preferred, Cole and
Smith (1995, p. 30) identified the Nazi
Holocaust as ‘the most remarkable blank-spot
in geographical research’. It is strange that
it should have attracted so little analytical
attention, even by Israeli historical geographers, not merely because the Holocaust ‘had’
a geography – it was distributed over space and
varied from place to place (Gilbert, 2009) – but
more fundamentally because geography as
both discipline and knowledge was central to
the project (Charlesworth, 1992):
(1) Particular conceptions of space and
spacing were indispensable to the conception of the Nazi Holocaust. Clark, Doel
and McDonough (1996) identify two crucial spatial templates. The first was developed through a racist version of
geopolitik that asserted the right to an
expanded lebensraum for the masterrace, but such a project for ‘mastery of
concrete, de-populated, physical space’
was inseparable from a second spacing,
Entfernung: ‘an effective removal of the
Jews from the life-world of the German
race’ (Bauman, 1991, p. 120). To these
three writers, Bauman’s cardinal contribution was ‘his recognition of the rupturing of the imaginary social space of the
Reich by the diasporic space of the Jews’.
The non-national space of the diaspora
was ‘a wholly Other conception of social
space’, they argue, a fundamental contradiction to the project of National
Socialism and its territorial inscription of
the ‘Aryan’ Same: in short, ‘a void’
(Clarke, Doel and McDonough, 1996,
pp. 474–5; see also Doel and Clarke,
1998).
(2) The realization of Lebensraum and
Entfernung entailed at once a deterritorialization of physical space and
its re-territorialization as social space.
This involved the conjoint production of
a series of physical and social spaces (a)
from which Jews were excluded,
(b) within which they were gathered and
sequestered, and (c) through which they
were subsequently transported to the
camps. These spatial strategies – which
might be thought of as ‘a series of concentric circles that, like waves, incessantly
wash up against a central non-place’
(Agamben, 1999, pp. 51–2) – produced a
337
HOLOCAUST
vast genocidal archipelago (figure 1, page
339) and can in some measure be mapped
on to Hilberg’s (2003 [1961]) four-stage
model of the Holocaust: deprivation; expulsion; segregation; annihilation. Friedlander (1997, 2007) reworked these stages
as follows (the examples given are illustrative, not exhaustive):
Persecution (1933–9): the rights of German Jews were increasingly restricted,
and in 1935 they were stripped of their
citizenship; they were also subject to
physical attacks and, from March
1938, many were imprisoned in concentration camps at Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald.
Terror (autumn 1939 to summer 1941):
Polish Jews were confined to ghettoes and subjected to extraordinary
deprivation, and as the Reich
expanded, the number of concentration camps multiplied and the use of
forced labour intensified.
Mass murder (summer 1941 to summer
1942): from October 1941, German
Jews were deported to the occupied
eastern territories; 33,700 Kiev Jews
were shot in the Babi Yar ravine
outside the city, and around 27,000
Jews were taken from the Riga ghetto
and shot.
Shoah (summer 1942 to spring 1945):
in 1942, six concentration camps in
occupied Poland – Auschwitz/Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek,
Sobibor and Treblinka – were designated as extermination camps, dedicated to the so-called ‘Final Solution’
of the ‘Jewish Question’, and gas
chambers were used for mass killing:
Jews throughout occupied Europe
were arrested, deported to transit
camps, and then sent to the extermination camps.
It is crucial to understand that these
phases, and their correlative spaces,
cannot be contained by a narrative of
German policies and actions: as Friedlander (2007, p. xv) insists, ‘at each step
in occupied Europe the execution of
German measures depended on the submissiveness of political authorities, the
assistance of local police forces or other
auxiliaries, and the passivity or support
of the population and mainly of the
political and spiritual elites’.
338
(3) The planning and execution of the Holocaust thus relied on extensive geographical knowledge. The Reich Foundation
for Geographical Studies was instrumental in the ethnic profiling and mapping of
occupied territories, particularly in eastern Europe, while Walter Christaller, the
architect of central place theory, was
closely involved in developing the
Generalplan Ost for the east of Poland.
This vast region was under direct SS administration and was to be a laboratory for
a new territorial order (figure 2, page 340):
Germans were to ‘resettle’ the area, Poles
reduced to slave labour, and Jews deported
to the ghetto in Lodz and ultimately to the
death camps (Rössler, 1989, 2001).
As the previous citations indicate, in recent
years several geographers have concerned
themselves with philosophical and historiographical issues surrounding the Nazi
Holocaust, but there have also been substantive studies of the enforced production of Jewish ghettoes (Cole and Smith, 1995; Cole,
2000) and of the role of landscape in the
work of memory and memorialization (Charlesworth, 1994, 2004). All of these enquiries
raise profound questions about representation and the capacity of language to render
the experience of such extreme trauma (Friedlander, 1992; Agamben, 1999; LaCapra,
2000; Waxman, 2006). These have engaged
the attention of geographers too, but the analysis of the Holocaust is necessarily both an
interdisciplinary and a comparative project,
and the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum publishes a journal dedicated to
these issues: Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
The Nazi genocide continues to cast long
shadows over the present. It has prompted politico-intellectual campaigns against both those
who deny it and those who exploit it: to fight
‘for the integrity of the historical record’, as Finkelstein (2000, p. 8) puts it. The Holocaust materially affects political debates, policies and
practices in Germany, Israel and the middle
east. And it still troubles continental European
philosophy and social theory, not least in
their understandings of modernity and the
very possibility of critical enquiry. Indeed, Agamben (1998, 1999) sees the Nazi concentration
camp as paradigmatic of political modernity:
Auschwitz is precisely the place in which the
state of exception coincides perfectly with
the rule and the extreme situation becomes
the very paradigm of daily life . . . As long as
the state of exception and the normal situation
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1,000
FREE CITY
OF DANZIG
Moly Trostenets
1,000
Stutthof
SOVIET UNION
X Treblinka
Neuengamme
NETHERLANDS
106,000
Ravensbrück
Sachsenhousen
Oranienbarg
Chelmno X
BergenBelsen
Esterwegen
3,000,000
160,000
Buchenwald
BELGIUM
24,387
GrossRosen
Auschwitz/
X X Birkenau
Theresienstadt
Flessenburg
LUXEMBOURC
700
Natzweiler
Dachau
FRANCE
83,000
X
1,000,000
Sobibor
Lublin-Majdanek
GERMANY
Wight Dora-Mittelbau
Drancy
POLAND
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
217,000
X Belzec
RUTHENIA
60,000
HUNGARY
200,000
ROMANIA
40,000
Laborgrad
Jesenovac
Stara Gradiska
BESSARABIA
200,000
NORTHERN
TRANSYLVANIA
105,000
Mauthausen
AUSTRIA
65,000
RUKOVINA
124,632
Black Sea
Zemun
YUGOSLAVIA
60,000
ITALY
8,000
THRACE
4,221
Ad
ria
tic
Se
MACEDONIA
7,122
a
ALBANIA
200
GREECE
65,000
COS
120
RHODES
1,700
CRETE
260
International boundary 1937
Scale 1:17,000,000
0
250
Med
iterra
500 kms
nean
Sea
0
125
250 miles
Zenithal Equidistant Projection
LIBYA
562
holocaust 1: The main concentration camps and estimates of the numbers murdered from each country (from
Dear, 1995)
are kept separate in space and time, as is
usually the case, both remain opaque, though
they secretly institute each other. But as soon
as they show their complicity, as happens
more and more often today, they illuminate
each other . . . (Agamben, 1999, pp. 49–50)
Given the spatial foundations of this state of
exception, the Nazi Holocaust should surely
trouble geography too.
dg
Suggested reading
Clare, Doel and McDonough (1996); Friedlander (2007). See also the Israeli Holocaust
Museum at http://www.yadvashem.org.il and
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
at http://www.ushmm.org.
home An emotive place and spatial imaginary that encompasses lived experiences of
everyday, domestic life alongside a wider
339
HOME
DIE ZENTRALEN ORTE
IN DEN OSTGEBIETEN UND
IHRE KULTUR- UND MARKTBEREICHE
HAUPTDORF 600 EINW.
GEHOBENES HAUPTDORF 1200 EINW.
AMTSSTADTCHEN 3000 EINW.
GEHOBENE AMTSSTADT (HEUTIGE KREISSTADT) 9000 EINW.
KREISSTADT 30 000 EINW.
GEHOBENE KREISSTADT 100 000 EINW.
GAUHAUPTSTADT 450,000 EINW.
GRUPPENDORFGRENZE GEBIET: 2500 EINW.
AMTSBEZIRKGRENZE GEBIET: 22 500 EINW.
KREISGRENZE GEBIET: 210 000 EINW.
GAUGRENZE GEBIET: 2 700 000 EINW.
NEUGRÜNDUNG
ENTWICKELN AUF TYPISCHE GRÖSSE
ABWERTEN AUF TYPISCHE GRÖSSE
holocaust 2: Central place theory and the Generalplan Ost
sense of being and belonging in the world. As a
space of belonging and alienation, intimacy
and violence, desire and fear, the home is
invested with emotions, experiences, practices
and relationships that lie at the heart of
human life (see emotional geographies).
Geographies of home span memory and
340
nostalgia for the past, everyday life in the
present, and future dreams and fears, and are
imagined and materialized on scales from the
domestic to the global (Blunt and Dowling,
2006). Through its internal intimacies and
connections with the wider world, the home
is ‘perhaps the most emotive of geographical
HOME
concepts, inextricable from that of self, family,
nation, sense of place, and sense of responsibility toward those who share one’s place in
the world’ (Duncan and Lambert, 2004,
p. 395). Although home might take the material form of a house or other shelter, it extends
far beyond a material dwelling, the household
and the domestic. Rather than viewing the
home as a private sphere that is separate
from the public world of work, citizenship
and politics, a wide range of research in historical and contemporary contexts has explored the importance of paid and unpaid
work within the home, the ways in which
home-making practices are tied to ideas
about citizenship, and the political significance of the home and domesticity (see domestic labour; private and public spheres).
The home has long been part of a geographical imagination, as shown by early
research on cultural hearths and the diffusion of different house styles. More recently,
humanistic, feminist and post-colonial geographers have been particularly influential in
studying the home. Humanistic geographers
have written eloquently about the home as a
site of authentic meaning, value and experience, imbued with nostalgic memories and the
love of place. In the 1970s and 1980s, humanistic geographers, in contrast to the abstractions of spatial science and inspired by the
phenomenological work of Gaston Bachelard
(1994 [1958]), described the home as a personal, intimate and poetical place. For Bachelard, ‘a home, even though its physical
properties can be described to an extent, is
not a physical entity but an orientation to the
fundamental values . . . with which a home, as
an intimate space in the universe, is linked to
human nature’ (Bunkše, 2004, pp. 101–2; original emphasis). Humanistic geographers
(including Bunkše, 2004) continue to write
evocative accounts of home that bind individual
dwelling to the wider cosmos (see humanistic
geography). Other geographers have begun to
study the home as a ‘more-than-human’ place,
reflecting the entangled geographies and
complex co-habitations of nature and culture
(including Kaika, 2004).
Feminist geographers have also been concerned with the relationships between the intimate relationships of home and the wider
world, but in very different ways. Across a
wide range of areas and contexts, feminist
geographers have analysed the home as a gendered place, shaped by different and unequal
relations of power, and as a place that might
be dangerous, violent and unhappy rather
than loving and secure (on home and feminist
politics, see Young, 1997a). feminist geographies challenge the masculinism that either
ignores the home or overlooks the power relations that exist within it. Inspired by the work
of many black feminists who have rewritten
home as a site of creativity, subjectivity and
resistance (including hooks, 1991), such studies also challenge a white, liberal feminism that
has understood the home primarily as a site of
oppression for women. For socialist feminists,
the home is a site of social reproduction –
for housing, feeding and nurturing workers –
and is crucial for analysing the wider interdependence of capitalism and patriarchy. For
those geographers drawn to post-structuralism
and post-colonialism, the home is part of a
wider spatial lexicon that has become important in theorizing identity, often closely tied to
ideas about the politics of location and an
attempt to situate both knowledge and identity (Pratt, 1997).
Post-colonial geographers have also explored
the relationships between home, nation and
empire; the material and symbolic geographies
of home and homeland; and the spatialities of
home, dwelling and belonging in relation to
indigeneity, settlement and diaspora (including Blunt, 2005). A central theme within this
research is the home as a site of power and
resistance, as shown by studies of imperial
home-making, the importance of the home in
anti-imperial nationalist politics, social justice, belonging and the politics of home for
indigenous people, and the contemporary politics of homeland (in)security. Rather than
viewing the home as singular and static, a
wide range of research on migration and diaspora unsettles notions of fixed roots and origins (including Ahmed, Castañeda, Fortier
and Sheller, 2003), revealing multiple attachments and belongings that are materially manifested in home-making practices and
material cultures at home (Tolia-Kelly,
2004).
Reflecting the current vibrancy of geographical interest in the home, Blunt and Dowling
(2006) have developed a critical geography of
home, arguing that:
Material and imaginative geographies of home
are closely intertwined. ‘[H]ome is a relation
between material and imaginative realms
and processes, whereby physical location
and materiality, feelings and ideas, are
bound together and influence each other
. . . Moreover, home is a process of creating
and understanding forms of dwelling and
341
HOMELAND
belonging. Home is lived as well as
imagined. What home means and how it
is materially manifest are continually created and re-created through everyday
home-making practices, which are themselves tied to spatial imaginaries of home’
(p. 254). The materialities of home – including domestic architecture, interior design, material cultures and home-making
practices – are themselves shaped by, and
interpreted through, a wide range of ideas
about home.
Home, power and identity are intimately
linked. ‘Home as a place and as a spatial
imaginary helps to constitute identity,
whereby people’s senses of themselves are
related to and produced through lived and
metaphorical experiences of home. These
identities and homes are, in turn, produced
and articulated through relations of power’
(p. 256). Rather than view the home as a
fixed and bounded site, grounding and
containing identity, geographers have unsettled both home and identity to reflect
their mutual locatedness and porosity,
rootedness and mobility. The home has
become an important site for studying inclusions, exclusions and inequalities in
terms of gender, class, age, sexuality
and ‘race’.
Geographies of home are multi-scalar. ‘Home
is a socially constructed scale that extends
beyond the house and household. . . .
[T]he relations of domesticity, intimacy
and belonging that construct home not
only extend beyond, but also help to produce
scales far beyond the household’ (p. 257;
also see Marston, 2004a). Ideas and lived
experiences of home are located within,
travel across and help to produce scales
from the body to the globe, as shown by
the political significance of embodied domesticity in reproducing and resisting nations and empires; the bungalow and the
high-rise as transnational domestic forms;
migratory transformations of home; and the
employment of domestic workers in the
global economy (including Pratt, 2004).
A wide range of research across the humanities and social sciences interrogates normative
ideas of home as a private, bounded, autonomous, safe and comfortable place. The emotive power of home is not only evident in
feelings of attachment, belonging and familiarity and their material manifestations, but also
in feelings and experiences of loss, alienation
and exclusion, as shown by research on do342
mestic violence, homelessness and displacement. The term domicide, for example, has
been coined by Douglas Porteous and Sandra
Smith (2001) to refer to ‘the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in pursuit
of specified goals, which causes suffering to
the victims’ (p. 12). Distinguishing between
its ‘everyday’ forms – through, for example,
urban redevelopment and economic restructuring – and its ‘extreme’ forms – including
war and the forced resettlement of indigenous
people – Porteous and Smith estimate that at
least 30 million people across the world are
victims of domicide (cf. urbicide).
ab
Suggested reading
Bachelard (1994 [1958]); Blunt (2005); Bunkše
(2004); Duncan and Lambert (2004); hooks
(1991); Kaika (2004); Marston (2004a); Pratt
(2004); Tolia-Kelly (2004); Young (1997a).
homeland An area to which a people or a
political community is closely attached.
‘Attachment’ has a profoundly cultural and
political meaning in all major uses of the
term. In much of European geography, ‘homeland’ carries resonances of the German
Heimat, a spiritual, even mystical and often
romanticized attachment to a native land, the
place to which a person is tied by blood that is
also the space of the nation. In the first half of
the twentieth century, ‘homeland’ in this sense
became infused with ideologies of racial purity
and patriotism in the veneration of the
Fatherland that was central to the rise of fascism in general and the Third Reich in particular. For others, and particularly for the
peoples of the diaspora, ‘homeland’ became
an object of nostalgia, desire and identification, most viscerally so for those displaced
and without a home of their own: hence, for
example, the project of a ‘Jewish Homeland’
that gained momentum after the First World
War and culminated in the formation of the
State of Israel in 1948. In the 1960s and
1970s, the term was cynically invoked to secure the system of apartheid in South Africa
through the creation of ‘black homelands’
(Transkei was the first). These were purely
instrumental attempts to confine black
Africans to scattered rural areas whose delimitation bore little relation to their own cultural
geographies (Butler, Rotberg and Adams,
1977).
In American cultural geography, ‘homeland’ became a term of art in the second half of
the twentieth century. It too implied an historically sedimented sense of identity that
HOMO SACER
derived from an intimate interaction between
people and land (cf. cultural landscape),
but it was invariably tied to the region rather
than the national scale. Thus Nostrand (1992,
p. 214) emphasized how inhabitants come to
have ‘emotional feelings of attachment, desires
to possess, even compulsions to defend’ their
homeland. He was describing an Hispanic
homeland, and cultural-historical geographers
have identified other ethnically based homelands within the USA (Nostrand and Estaville,
2001). In the early twenty-first century, however, in the wake of 9/11, the USA revived the
concept of homeland on a national (and nationalist) scale. The political-cultural affiliations of the term were intensified with the
creation of a federal Department of Homeland
Security in 2002. Its actions are directed towards border security and the prevention of
terrorism against the USA through advanced
systems of surveillance, profiling and the like,
but it is also deeply invested in what Kaplan
(2003) perceptively identifies as ‘the cultural
work of securing national borders’.
dg
Suggested reading
Kaplan (2003); Nostrand and Estaville (2001).
homelessness A complex social problem
that, in the most basic terms, is defined by a
lack of shelter in which to sleep and to perform
basic activities such as bathing. The characteristics of homeless populations vary geographically. There are distinctions between the
identities and experiences of homeless people
in developed versus less developed countries,
where service-dependent substance abusers
sleeping rough would be an example of the
former, while the latter would be exemplified
by rural–urban migrants occupying squatter
settlements (see squatting). There are also
variations in homelessness among countries,
stemming from differences in national economies, welfare policies and so forth.
In developed countries, the diversity of the
homeless people has increased markedly since
the 1970s. For instance, middle-aged white
males, who traditionally dominated homeless
populations in North America, are now
eclipsed numerically by ethnically diverse
women, children, and youth, including
people with mental disabilities, substance abusers, victims of domestic violence, and the
elderly (Takahashi, 1996). While often
regarded as largely an urban issue, homelessness among these groups is also increasing in
rural areas (Cloke, Milbourne and Widdowfield, 2001). Finally, the break between being
housed and being homeless is neither sharp
nor definitive. Rather, homeless people may
find themselves in a cycle, moving back and
forth between the streets and shelters, after a
prolonged decline from cheap rental housing,
through living with friends or family, to shelters and the street. This sequence also hides
many homeless people, contributing to difficulties in counting the population.
The causes of homelessness are a longstanding topic of debate. Takahashi (1996)
suggests that geographers largely adhere to
structural explanations, which focus on interconnections between increased levels of poverty and decreased availability of affordable
shelter (Wolch and Dear, 1993). Specifically,
this perspective identifies a combination of the
following factors as crucial to the rise of homelessness in developed countries: economic
change, leading to the expansion of low-paid,
no-benefit, insecure service-sector jobs; the decline in welfare state benefits exacerbating
economic problems, coupled with other policy
shifts such as the deinstitutionalization of
mental health services; demographic changes,
including changing family structures, the feminization of poverty, and increases in the elderly
population; and the reduced availability of affordable housing, in cities experiencing upward
pressures on rents as a result of a back-to-thecity movement and gentrification, in suburban and rural areas where prices are also rising,
and in the wider context of declining state provision of social housing. The structural perspective contradicts other explanations that suggest
that individual failings and vulnerabilities (e.g.
drug addiction, family instability) are the primary causes of homelessness.
Solutions and responses to homelessness and
their implications for social life have been another focus for geographers. The privatization
and reorganization of public services has had a
complex impact on the geographies of homeless
people’s lives, as some cycle through institutional settings (DeVerteuil, 2003). Also, public
stigmatization of homeless people and increasingly harsh policy responses to their presence in
public spaces (represented by anti-panhandling ordinances and ‘bum-proof’ benches)
have spurred ongoing investigations and interventions into questions of homeless people’s
rights to space (Mitchell, 2003a).
em
Suggested reading
Mitchell (2003a); Wolch and Dear (1993).
homo sacer Literally both ‘sacred man’ and
‘accursed
man’,
homo
sacer
was
a
343
HOMOPHOBIA AND HETEROSEXISM
subject-position conferred by archaic Roman
law on those whose lives and deaths were
deemed to be of no consequence. This dismal
figure has come to be of considerable significance in contemporary political philosophy
and human geography. People placed in this
position could not be sacrificed (because they
were outside divine law – their deaths were of
no value to the gods) and they could be killed
with impunity (because they were outside juridical law – their lives were of no value to their
contemporaries). Agamben (1998) argues that
homo sacer emerges at the point at which sovereign power suspends the law, whose absence falls over a zone of abandonment. The
production of this space – the space of exception (see exception, space of) – is central to
his account of modern biopolitics. Critics
have dismissed Agamben’s retrieval of homo
sacer as extravagant (Fitzpatrick, 2005) and
even mythical – certainly Agamben does nothing to recover the wider cultural constructions
of death in early Roman society, and the ways
in which (for example) figures such as the
gladiator were also exposed to death – but his
purpose is not primarily historical or exegetical: it is, rather, to project homo sacer into the
present as a cipher for bare life. Agamben
does so in order to claim that sovereign
power has so aggressively reasserted itself
that the state of exception is increasingly becoming the rule and that, in consequence, we
are all potentially homines sacri. These arguments have been important for debates around
human rights and the very definition of ‘the
human’, where geographers have insisted on
the uneven and differential distribution of vulnerability: homo sacer is marked by class, gender, sexuality and ‘race’ (Gregory, 2004b;
Sanchez, 2004; Pratt, 2005). These analyses
also reveal the importance of the body: homo
sacer is thus transformed from a metaphysical
sign into a corporeal materialization of political violence.
dg
Suggested reading
Fitzpatrick (2005); Pratt (2005).
homophobia and heterosexism Though
interrelated, these terms refer precisely to different exercises of oppression. Homophobia
refers to the fear of lesbians and gays, the
existence of ‘homosexuality’, and sometimes
other dissident or non-normative sexualities,
bodily performances or political struggles. The
term is used diffusely around queer theory,
however, to describe sentiments ranging from
the disciplining, distancing, unease, disgust or
344
hatred towards a queer other (who may be an
embodied other or a dimension of the self:
see abjection; psychoanalytic theory). By
contrast, heterosexism (also called heteronormativity) refers to structures or agencies
in society that privilege and normalize male–
female sexual relations over same-sex (or
queered) ones, as well as the gendered performances that accompany them (see
performativity). The terms may refer to
structural barriers, or to human agency, consciousness or subjectivity. Most if not all recent work across queer geography and
sexuality-and-space studies explore, document or critique the panoply of forms that
either homophobia or heterosexism can take.
There are at least two ways that geography
is implicated in these terms. The first is that the
topical interests of geographers, especially spatiality and nature–culture relations, are dimensions through which critical geographers
are exposing and critiquing homophobia and
heterosexism. For example, the popular spatial
metaphor of ‘the closet’ to describe the concealment, denial, or erasure of gays and lesbians has been spatialized to show how
homophobia and heterosexism work through
spatial arrangements and practices (Brown,
2000). Scales of analyses have ranged from
the body (how sexuality functions as a
performative, and its spatial situatedness affects performance), to the global (as in questions of international tourism, migration and
refugees, and post-colonial legacies; e.g. Puar,
2002). Both place and movement can be assessed as heteronormative or homophobic.
The second way of conceiving the links between geography and homophobia involves
the discipline’s long and under-exposed history of internal homophobia and heterosexism, which has certainly been associated with
its masculinism. Yet the discipline has long
been populated by lesbians, gays, bi- and
omni-sexuals, even transgendered and transsexual people, some in quite prominent positions, with stellar reputations. These
geographers have often experienced damaging
and painful repercussions because of their sexual identities or practices (e.g. homophobia
was implicated in the closure of the Harvard
geography department; see also Valentine,
2000). The widest array of charges of homophobia and heterosexism have been brought
by Binnie (1997), who has detected strains,
not simply in conventional positivist branches
of the discipline, but also in allied critical areas
such as marxist geography and feminist
geography.
mb
HOUSEHOLD
Suggested reading
Bell and Valentine (1995); Browne, Brown and
Lim (2006).
hot money Portfolio capital investment
that is both short-term and volatile in nature
(Froot, O’Connell and Seasholes, 2001). Hot
money accumulates rapidly in periods of economic boom, but dissipates quickly in times of
crisis, which tends to exacerbate and intensify
such crises. Portfolio capital investment is
risk averse, and is directed mainly towards
property and financial commodities, for
which there are well developed secondary markets. These secondary markets expedite both
the rapid entry and exit of money from an
economy. The inflow and outflow of hot
money has been associated with numerous financial crises since the beginning of the twentieth century, and recently with financial crises
in South East Asia, Russia and Argentina. al
Suggested reading
Froot, O’Connell and Seasholes (2001); Naylor
and Hudson (2004).
Hotelling model A classic model of the location strategy deployed by firms seeking to maximize their market share through the size of
their hinterlands. The original model produced by Harold Hotelling (1895–1973: see
Hotelling, 1929) identified the strategies of
two firms competing in a linear market, where
customers were evenly distributed, and was
generalized with the example of ice-cream
sellers competing on a beach (Alonso, 1964b).
As formulated, the model showed that, whatever their starting locations (e.g. figure 1), the
two firms would converge at the centre of the
beach (figure 2), from where each would serve
the half of the customers closer to them than to
their competitor: those furthest from the centre
would pay more for the product because of the
greater transport costs/time involved in making a purchase. The most efficient equilibrium
distribution for two firms sharing the market
equally would be that shown in figure 3, with
each serving half of the beach and the total
transport costs less than in figure 2. Each firm
would realize, however, that if it moved closer to
the centre it could capture customers from its
competitor, hence the two providers congregate
there.
Hotelling’s model has been used to account
for patterns of agglomeration under certain
circumstances, and has also been applied to
other competitive situations, exemplified by
the large literature on the ‘spatial theory of
Hotelling model
voting’ developed from Downs’ (1957) classic
work (cf. public choice theory).
rj
household
A socio-economic formation
comprised of one or more individuals who
share living quarters, often framed as those
who ‘eat from the same bowl and live under
one roof’. While this notion provides some
latitude against the common assumption that
the household is coterminous with family,
whether nuclear or extended, it lacks the spatial robustness to encompass more expansive
notions, including the increasingly common
formation of transnational households.
Wright and Ellis (2006) frame the household
‘simultaneously as a spatial scale and a set of
practices; not situated in one place, but involving heterogeneous lives interacting with others
all over town’, or further afield, as recent
migration research suggests.
Considering the household as a spatial scale
can illuminate its structural relations with other
scales, and bring to the fore the interconnections
345
HOUSING CLASS
between production and social reproduction at its heart. This understanding provides
a corrective for the common assumption that
the household is a ‘natural’ unit; a perspective
that allows it to be disregarded in economic
analyses, its substantial contributions to local
and national economies ignored or taken for
granted. But without the domestic labour provided in and through the household, ‘there
would be no labour force and no society’
(Townsend and Momsen 1987). Not only is
the household at the nexus of social reproduction, which encompasses biological reproduction – if not generational, then that associated
with daily sustenance – cultural reproduction,
and consumption, but it is also the site of
economic production, including both paid and
unremunerated work. The balance between
these activities – as much as who carries them
out and for whom – is a social question. While
household members manage, maintain, perpetuate, contest and sometimes change these
arrangements and the social relations that hold
them in place, they do so in a particular historical and geographical context.
Prior to the interventions of feminist theorists beginning in the late 1970s (see feminism),
the household was assumed to include affectively related individuals with largely homogenous interests, and altruistic and co-operative
intentions towards each other (e.g. Folbre,
1986), but as Townsend and Momsen (1987)
long ago cautioned, the household can be an
‘arena of subordination’. It is a realm of differentiated and unequal social relations, structured by age, class, ethnicity, gender, life
course, nationality, race and sexuality (e.g.
Brydon and Chant, 1989). These internal divisions, which are associated with particular and
shifting divisions of labour and allocations of
resources, are constituted by – as they are
constitutive of – broader social relations of production and reproduction. Household composition; location (whether matrilocal,
patrilocal or neither); power dynamics, such
as who heads the household and under what
terms implicit or explicit; and the allocation of
work and consumption practices among members are effects of this interrelationship. These
differences are historically and geographically
contingent. If capitalist industrialization has
been associated with the separation of home
and work, and households of individuals or
nuclear families tend to predominate in the
global north, while extended family households are more common in the global south,
it is important to remember that these differences themselves vary according to class, race,
346
ethnicity, sexuality and location, among other
things.
ck
Suggested reading
Marston (2000); Walton-Roberts and Pratt
(2005).
housing class A social group defined by its
housing tenure (Rex and Moore, 1967). It
suggests that tenure status shapes the material
conditions of life. Rex developed a categorization of housing classes – including owners,
tenants in publicly or privately owned housing, and lodgers in another household’s dwelling, among others – which permitted analysis
of the experiences of immigrant groups in the
UK and emphasized the role of urban managers and gatekeepers in constraining housing market choice (see housing studies).
Those interested in urban politics have also
debated the concept, since it suggests that
housing class interests might be the basis for
collective political action (Purcell, 2001). em
Suggested reading
Rex and Moore (1967).
housing studies An interdisciplinary field
with a wide array of research foci, dealing
with aspects of housing from property market dynamics, through the provision and management of special needs accommodation, to
questions of design and sustainability,
among others. Geographical approaches to
housing have frequently addressed the uneven
geographies of housing production, consumption, meaning and policy. These uneven geographies reflect and produce differences in
housing within cities, across countries, and
between more- and less-developed countries.
One focus is the provision of housing
via various mechanisms (Ball, Harloe and
Martens, 1988). The production process
leads to the spatial segregation of certain
types of housing and therefore, certain people
in specific neighbourhoods – a process that is
frequently inflected with racism. The nature
of provision, tenure type, the cost of housing,
and its quality and maintenance all vary in
ways that impact its character not only as a
shelter but also as a symbolic element of the
landscape (e.g. Bunnell, 2002), as an investment and as a resource that shapes residents’
life chances.
For those with high incomes who can buy
into neighbourhoods where the housing
stock is appreciating, home ownership presents opportunities for capital gain. These
HUMAN AGENCY
opportunities are, in many countries (e.g. the
USA), supported by state policies that provide
subsidies and tax benefits for homeowners or
that, more generally, mitigate the negative
impacts of other land uses on higher-income
residential neighbourhoods (cf. urban and
regional planning; zoning). Low-income
owners, on the other hand, frequently face discrimination based on income, race and other
factors (cf. redlining; urban managers and
gatekeepers) and are often penalized financially as risky investments. Furthermore, they
frequently face instability in their neighbourhoods as a result, for instance, of gentrification and urban renewal. These conditions
enforce and deepen existing patterns of social
polarization.
Similarly, while housing – no matter what the
tenure type – is a resource that aids in access to
jobs and various types of services from shops to
recreational facilities, it is a socially and
spatially uneven resource. For example, highquality food at reasonable prices is often difficult to find near low-income housing, as are
high-quality, safe recreational facilities for
children. These factors, among others, both
reflect and reinforce inequalities relating to nutrition and health and are, in turn, directly related to housing (Smith and Mallinson, 1997).
The social, economic and geographical
characteristics of housing production and
consumption are closely related to public
policy. In different countries and at different
times, policy-makers see housing as a tool for
and/or an object of policy intervention. Housing construction has been used to kick-start
economies (cf. suburbanization) and to reshape inner cities (cf. urban renewal). It
has also been central to attempts by states,
charities and other organizations to improve
social conditions such as health. The state’s
decreasing role in public housing provision
raises new challenges in this regard, but has
been paralleled by growth in alternative forms
of housing tenure associated with community
development (DeFilippis, 2004) and in attempts to reduce the impact of housing development on the environment.
em
Suggested reading
Ball, Harloe and Martens (1988).
human agency The ability of people to act,
usually regarded as emerging from consciously
held intentions, and as resulting in observable
effects in the human world. Questions about
whether individuals have the freedom to act or
whether their actions are constrained, or even
determined, by structural forces have been at
the heart of many debates in contemporary
human geography.
At the turn of the twentieth century, individuals’ actions were viewed by geographers as
being the result of a higher logic or force,
whether the imperatives of environmental
determinism or the conditioning of Sauer’s
(1925) ‘superorganic’ notion of culture.
There were exceptions such as Vidal de la
Blache’s (1926) possibilism, which allowed a
range of possible actions to emerge from any
situation, but for most the role of the individual was secondary to process.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the introduction of
spatial science allowed a decision-making
agent, but only in as far as it followed the
logic of neo-classical economic modelling.
The adoption in geography of structural versions of marxism also regarded individual motivations and interpretations as necessarily
secondary to the determinants of the structures of historical materialism. humanistic
geography emerged in the 1970s with the
stated goal of reanimating geography, to put
people and their thoughts, emotions and beliefs at the heart of the discipline. It offered a
challenge to structural Marxism, which
humanistic geographers felt offered ‘a passive
model of man [sic] that is conservative and
results in an obfuscation of the process by
which human beings can and do change the
world’ (Duncan and Ley, 1982, p. 54). Focusing on issues such as dwelling, lifeworld
and rhythms, humanistic geographers believed
that social life was constructed through human
actions. For them, structure appeared due to
reification, and seemed ‘autonomous only because it is anonymous’ (Duncan, 1980). While
there were attempts by some humanistic geographers to recognise the limitations of human
agency – such as Ley’s (1983) focus on intersubjectivity – most tended towards epistemological idealism. This led to the criticism that
humanistic geography was naı̈ve about the
limitations put on individual ability to act.
structuration theory and realism sought
to explain how social structures were both
outcome and medium of the agency that constitutes them. Giddens’ (1984) structuration
theory avoids the extremes of arguing that
society is comprised of individual acts or is
determined by social forces by holding these
two extremes in tension with one another. It
is through repetition that the acts of individual agents reproduce social structures such
as institutions, moral codes, norms and
conventions.
347
HUMAN ECOLOGY
Post-structuralists (see post-structuralism),
following Foucault (1980a [1976]), argued
that the coherent, independent subjectivity required for conscious agency is an epiphenomenon of discourse: there is no prior
ontological self but, rather, a sense of selfhood is an effect of discourse. The ‘selfcontained, authentic subject conceived by humanism to be discoverable below a veneer of
cultural and ideological overlay is in reality a
construct of that very humanist discourse’
(Alcoff, 1988, p. 415). Others have critiqued
the intentionality of humanism and structuration theory where agency is equated with action, thus assuming intentionality and capacity
to act. As a result, some have investigated
psychoanalyic theory to expose the motivations behind actions, to reveal that subjects
are not entirely self-aware and self-fashioning
agents. Feminists have reacted more powerfully to postmodern and post-structural pronouncements of the ‘death of the subject’,
wondering whether this had occurred just
when the male, white, subject might have had
to share its status with those formerly excluded
from agency (see Fox-Genovese, 1986; Mascia-Lees, Sharp and Cohen, 1989: see also
global warming).
The structure–agency debate continued
through the discipline’s cultural turn, with
some fearful that the favoured discursive approach represented a new determinism that
denied individual agency – see the debate between Duncan and Duncan (1996) and
Mitchell (1995). For others, the privileging
of discourse was an over-interpretation of
agency, which regarded people as overly theoretical beings in their own decision-making.
As a result, some have turned to ethnomethodology and non-representational
theory approaches in an attempt to record
human agency without imposing the intentionality of discourse (Thrift, 1997c).
Another dimension of the debate over
agency concerns the extent to which humans
are the only active or creative agents. Traditional cultural geographers challenged the androcentric accounts of early agriculture by
suggesting that certain plants and animals
may ‘elect’ to live near humans rather than
human subjects knowledgeably selecting species for domestication. Others have offered
theoretically more sophisticated accounts of
the effects of non-human actors. Haraway
(1992, p. 331) suggests broadening our understanding of the place of agency, arguing that
non-humans ‘are not actants in the human
sense, but they are part of the functional col348
lective that makes up an actant’, and has
developed this in terms of the ‘cyborg’ subject.
Whatmore’s (2002a) ‘more-than-human’
geography similarly highlights the agency of
a variety of objects (see actor-network theory), and has offered an image of a network
of capable, but not necessarily conscious,
agents.
jsh
Suggested reading
Duncan and Ley (1982); Giddens (1984); Thrift
(1997c); Vidal de la Blache (1926); Whatmore
(2002a).
human ecology This term is in some ways
as suggestive as it is substantive, at least from
the standpoint of contemporary sensibilities in
the geographical tradition of studying human–
environment relations. Specifically, the term
carries an almost seductive appeal in promising transcendence of the pervasive nature–
society dualisms that are widely noted and
of considerable contemporary preoccupation
in explorations of the geographies of socionatures, techno-natures and the like (see, e.g.,
Haraway, 1997; Swyngedouw, 1999). And indeed, to the extent that the term is actually
invoked by contemporary geographers, it is
typically in the context of research on the
human origins and implications of environmental change, and on the complex interrelations between societies and the biophysical
resources and systems on which these societies
rely. For example, in their discussion of factors
shaping social vulnerability to global climate
change, Bohle, Downing and Watts (1994) invoke ‘human ecology’ to refer to highly specific
relations between society and nature, but with
emphasis on the ways in which ‘ . . . social organizations and [social] reproduction (encompassing, for example, population growth) have
direct implications for sustainability and how
the environment is experienced in terms of
risk and threats . . . ’ (p. 40). Notably, they
reject the mere application of ecological concepts and methods to the study of human populations. Similarly, Bassett (1988) refers to
human ecology [specifically human ecologists]
in much the same way; that is, a concern with
the articulations between human populations
and key biophysical resources (somewhat consistent with the term ‘political ecology’).
References to ‘human ecology’ should, however, be accompanied by knowledge of its
polyvalence, not least as a product of the
term’s history of usage by geographers and
non-geographers. This history can be traced
at least to the early twentieth century, when
HUMAN GENOME
human ecology was used to describe the object
of geographical enquiry as well as in reference
to the adaptation of concepts from the science
of ecology for sociological analysis. Thus, in
his 1922 presidential address to the Association of American Geographers, Harlan H.
Barrows defined geography simply as ‘the science of human ecology’, a science concerned
with ‘ . . . the relationships existing between
natural environments and the distribution
and activities of man [sic]’ (Barrows, 1923,
p. 3). And yet at virtually the same time, the
chicago school of Sociology was placing its
influential stamp on human ecology, defined
by Robert E. Park (1936, p. 1) as ‘ . . . an
attempt to apply to the interrelations of
human beings a type of analysis previously
applied to the interrelations of plants and animals’. The Chicago School, of course, featured not only Park’s work on the influence
of racial difference in shaping the experience
of newcomers and immigrants to the city of
Chicago, but also Ernest Burgess and his development of a zonal model (Park, Burgess
and McKenzie, 1925).
What is perhaps critical to note here (particularly in light of the profound influence of
that the Chicago School would have on the
emergence of urban geography) is that ‘environment’ for the likes of Park and Burgess
primarily meant the built physical as well as
the more general social and cultural environment of the city, including spatial configurations. This is somewhat at odds with
contemporary connotations of human ecology, which tend to emphasize relations between human and non-human nature (cf.
cultural ecology; political ecology).
And while the Chicago School’s influence on
urban geography is recognized (Harvey,
1973), Park understood at the time that his
version of human ecology overlapped with
geography. Yet, he attempted to relegate geography to a particularistic, descriptive enterprise, leaving to sociologists the development
of a more nomothetic human ecology complete with generalizations and formal theory
(Entrikin, 1980).
All of this seemingly arcane intellectual history matters, because contemporary use of the
term ‘human ecology’ can carry a fuzzy imprecision. Moreover, the term has ‘baggage’, associated as it is with mechanistic, positivistic
conceptions of social and cultural relationships to the environment (however conceived)
based on organicist metaphors of social formations borrowed from ecology. These are critiques (warranted or otherwise) long directed
at the Chicago School(s) (for an early example
of this critique, see, e.g., Gettys, 1940).
The term is still somewhat widely invoked
(particularly in environmental sociology) as a
synthetic, holistic approach to understanding
the interrelationships of different social formations and their biophysical environments,
including the specific and often highly complex and interactive relations governing the
mobilization of key material and energy
resources on the one hand, and cultural
(material and symbolic), institutional and
technological trajectories of social development on the other. Considerable contemporary impetus is given to this line of work by
attempts to understand the origins and implications of modern anthropogenic environmental problems by looking at how past societies
(or non-industrial, non-Western ones) have
precipitated, managed, responded to and
been affected by environmental changes (Diamond, 1999; Harper, 2004). Yet fears of
mechanistic, if not deterministic, renderings
of the role of physical geographies in shaping
social outcomes dog this line of scholarship,
particularly when it comes time to formulate
causal inferences and historical generalizations
(Mazlish, 1999).
It also bears noting that human ecology is
recognized as something of a contemporary
field of holistic scholarly enquiry (complete
with eponymous journal and a handful of academic departments). In this context, it is defined by Lawrence (2003, p. 31) as no less
than ‘ . . . the study of the dynamic interrelationships between human populations and the physical, biotic, cultural, and social characteristics of
their environment and the biosphere’ (emphasis
added). All this points to the need for geographers and others to consider carefully the polyvalence of this term, and to invoke it reflexively,
and with some degree of caution.
sp
human genome
The complete set of genes
that make up the DNA of a human being. It is
one of a number of species genomes that constitute a form of bio-information in which biological material is translated from corporeal
formats, such as an organic bank, to informational formats, such as a database. Creating
genomes relies on the DNA-sequencing technologies developed in the life sciences since the
1970s that make it possible to extract DNA
from whole organisms and to elucidate and annotate its structure in the form of coded information. This is a laborious process, involving
various methods for separating out nucleotides
(the building blocks for the polymer molecules
349
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
DNA and RNA, which act as the repositories of
genetic information in the cell), usually by rendering them visible as a pattern of bands in an
acrylamide gel that can then be ‘read’ manually
(with the naked eye) or scanned photographically, to translate the banding sequence into a
digital code made up of four genetic digits – A,
C, G, T – which can be stored in large computer
databases such as the Human Genome Project
Database.
The sequencing of the human genome was
achieved almost simultaneously by a team at
the University of Cambridge led by Peter
Sanger, in competition with a team led by
Craig Ventner in the USA in 2001. Not only
did the methods of these two teams differ but
so, crucially, did their research ethos. Whereas
the Sanger team advocated that genomic databases should be a public resource, the Ventner team advocated the commercialization of
such databases through the ascription of
intellectual property rights. (See also
genetic geographies.)
sw
Suggested reading
Parry (2004); M’charek (2005).
human geography A major field of geography that is centrally concerned with the
ways in which place, space and environment
are both the condition and in part the consequence of human activities. The history of
geography (see geography, history of) as a
systematic and ordered body of knowledge
was long dominated by the physical and natural sciences. This did not preclude studies
focusing on the variation of human activities
on the surface of the Earth (on the contrary:
see areal differentiation), but the modern
sense of geography as a disciplined mode of
intellectual enquiry emerged through those
scientific formations and their constitutive
interest in ‘making sense of nature’
(Stoddart, 1986, p. ix). The templates of the
physical and natural sciences shaped the
human sciences and the social sciences as a
whole, but geography’s concern with the relations between peoples and their physical environments ensured that they marked human
geography more than most. Those formations
were not purely ‘scientific’: they were also
philosophical, theological and irredeemably
political and social. All of them were caught
up in (and constituted through) relations of
power.
A separate and distinctive human geography
emerged alongside physical geography soon
after the admission of geography to the mod350
ern academy towards the end of the nineteenth century, and it gained considerable
momentum in the 1920s from the reaction
against environmental determinism. This
‘new’ human geography took two main systematic forms on both sides of the Atlantic: a
commercial geography that laid many of the
foundations for modern economic geography (epitomized by the handbooks produced by G.G. Chisholm from 1889 through
to 1928) and a political geography (dominated by F. Ratzel, H.J. Mackinder and later
I. Bowman) that was primarily concerned with
the state, territory and geopolitics. Like
many other disciplines of the period, both
under-laboured for capitalism and empire:
for the extension of European and American
power abroad through networks of commodity circulation and military (especially naval)
might (see Smith, N., 2005a). In doing so, the
two sub-disciplines also underwrote what
eventually came to be recognized as cultural
geography, which at that time was charged
with inculcating a sense of national identity
and nationalism at home, while exhibiting
the non-white world in a series of overseas
tableaux.
These systematic geographies intersected in
several ways, most visibly in studies of regional geography, and the political, economic and cultural interests that animated
them were articulated with a special force in
a distinctive ‘tropical geography’ (cf. tropicality). Regional geographies all treated the
physical environment as a foundation for
human activity, but none of the systematic
geographies was divorced from the study of
nature either. Much of commercial geography focused on resource inventories; securing access to those same resources was a
strategic concern of political geography; and
cultural geography emphasized the varying relations between peoples and environments in
different parts of the world. Ratzel’s anthropogeography had made this a touchstone
of human geography, and subsequently
Paul Vidal de la Blache (in France) and Carl
Ortwin Sauer (in the USA) made equally
cogent cases for the incorporation of the physical environment. For Vidal, this was a matter
of disciplinary identity, even survival. He was
no narrow disciplinarian, and geography was
always closely allied to history in his vision of
la géographie humaine. But he was taken aback
by Emile Durkheim’s new science of sociology, which was laying claim to much of
human geography as ‘social morphology’,
and Vidal insisted that this would leave society
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
‘suspended in the air’. In his contrary view,
drawing on advances in the physical sciences,
it was essential to conceive of ‘Nature’ as providing a portfolio of opportunities within
which societies and cultures made variable
selections (see possibilism: Andrews, 1984).
Sauer worked on the marchlands between
geography and history too, and the studies
produced by the first berkeley school are
often described as ‘cultural–historical geography’. He was also keenly interested in anthropology, however, and this led him to
formulate an approach in which a collective
(and quasi-Durkheimian) culture worked
on the raw materials of the so-called ‘natural
landscape’ to produce a climactic cultural
landscape that not only evolved over time
but also differed from place to place.
Human geography’s interest in nature has
continued to provide important axes of debate. The rise of spatial science after the
Second World War briefly threatened to erase
the physicality of human life from human
geography, with many of its models relying
on the physical sciences for stimuli (either
through physical analogies about the friction
of distance or through neo-classical economics, which was rooted in statistical mechanics). Many practitioners of spatial science in
human geography soon returned to a consideration of environmental issues, however,
through a behavioural geography that
urged the importance of environmental perception and through a systems approach that
dissected, or at any rate diagrammed, the
intersections of nominally ‘human’ and ‘physical’ systems. At that time, urban geography
was markedly less interested in these questions, and it took much longer for urban geographers to recognize that modern cities were
not triumphant memorials to a human victory
over ‘Nature’ and that the physico-ecological
vertebrae of cities were crucial objects of enquiry. But it is now widely acknowledged that
studies of pollution, waste and water in cities address more than questions of public
health and policy located at the crossroads
of medical geography and urban planning:
they also intersect with concerns about environmental justice, governmentality and social exclusion that have become central to
human geography more generally (see, e.g.,
Gandy, 2006a,c). This new agenda was advanced in part through a critique of spatial
science that emphasized the material bases of
capitalism as a mode of production – the
production of space was thus intimately
related to the production of nature, most
viscerally in studies of political ecology
(Watts, 1983a; Peet and Watts, 2003 [1996];
Robbins, 2004) – and in part through an engagement with other forms of social theory
that brought the biopolitical foundations of
modern life into view (see biopolitics). The
convergences between these streams of work
have suggested a series of intrinsically ‘hybrid
geographies’ (Whatmore, 2002a).
These developments reactivated and reformulated long-standing questions about the
relations between human geography and
physical geography, but it is only recently
that the relations between the sub-disciplines
of human geography have provoked equal discussion. The relative importance of the subdisciplines has changed over time. Many of the
core models of spatial science were the mainsprings for an economic geography dominated by location theory and driven by the
search for systematic structures within a modern space-economy. The subsequent critique
of spatial science had many sources (Gregory,
1978a), but much of its vitality derived from a
political economy based on a close reading
of Marx’s analysis of capitalism. This not
only reshaped economic geography, where it
set the space-economy in motion and allowed
for more incisive analyses of (for example) the
crisis-ridden dynamics of capital accumulation, spatial divisions of labour, industrial
restructuring, commodity chains and the
circulation of capital in multiple forms. It also
opened the doors to a revitalized political
geography that more closely and critically
engaged with the powers and practices of the
state, and a social geography that became
centrally concerned with spatial formations
of class and ethnicity. These two subdisciplines drew on contributions to social
theory that spiralled far from Marx’s original
writings – though a diffuse Western marxism
remained a significant source of inspiration to
both of them – and these interactions issued in
the rise of critical geopolitics and the emergence of vigorous feminist geographies that
widened their horizons still further. These
interdisciplinary exchanges also projected a
central question for the humanities and the
social sciences into the centre of human geography. Just as there were (for example) ‘two
anthropologies’ and ‘two sociologies’, one emphasizing human agency and the other emphasizing systems and structures, so there
were two human geographies: one an avowedly humanistic geography (in which idealism vied with materialism) and the other
much more invested in structural logics and
351
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
constraints (but not reducible to a structuralism). structuration theory proposed to
replace this persistent dualism with a duality,
but this promised to do much more than integrate ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ in explications of
the conduct of social life: it also made place
and space the pivots around which agency and
structure turned. This further troubled the
boundaries between contemporary and historical geography, already assailed by historical materialism, because time as well as
space was seen as focal to the production and
reproduction of social life. In a sense, this
vindicated older claims that ‘all geography is
historical geography’ and socialized the formalism of classical diffusion models, though
in terms that their original protagonists would
scarcely have recognized. These developments
were reinforced by the ‘cultural turn’,
which inaugurated a ‘new’ cultural geography whose development was marked by a
series of theoretical ‘posts’ – postmodernism,
post-structuralism and post-colonialism –
though here too Marxisms in various forms
continued to provide baselines for many geographers (Soja, 1989; Gregory, 1994).
This simple sequence is necessarily a caricature – human geography is not a single project
and its history cannot be reduced to a linear
narrative – but it does capture some of the
major shifts in intellectual fashion in human
geography in much of the English-speaking
world since the Second World War. To describe
them as fashion is not misleading; the links
between cultural capital, the commodification of knowledge and academic prestige ought
not to be discounted. Yet they were also more
than fads. While it would be misleading to plot
these changes in an ascending arc of ‘progress’
in human geography, they have derived from
intellectual debates inside and outside the discipline, and they were responses to issues of
substance that required public address. This
is clear from the theoretical sensibility that distinguished postwar human geography from its
predecessors. Although few would welcome a
return of the grand theory that preoccupied
many areas of human geography as recently as
the late twentieth century, critique as a rigorous
interrogation of the ways in which concepts are
freighted with relations of power is now firmly
established as a central moment in geographical enquiry (cf. genealogy). It is also clear
from the success of both critical human
geography and radical geography in establishing the crucial importance of politics alongside the narrower and usually more
instrumental focus on policy in applied geog352
raphy, although Martin (2001b) complained
that what he saw as ‘faddishness’ (in philosophy and theory) has limited the practical purchase of much of this contemporary work.
These developments have contributed to a
considered blurring of the boundaries between
the sub-disciplines of human geography; economic geography and political geography were
brought into conversation through political
economy, for example, and both have been
markedly affected by a cultural turn (see
also cultural economy) that requires recognition of the commodification of cultural forms
and practices and their enrolment in economic
and political figurations (cf. Harvey, 1989b).
This ‘blurring’ has several sources. ‘Theory’
has itself become interdisciplinary, even postdisciplinary, and the same authors and texts,
motifs and themes recur across the spectrum of
the humanities and social sciences, while any
critical theory worthy of the name cannot
draw back when it encounters disciplinary
boundaries. More than this, however, compositional approaches that separate ‘economy’,
‘polity’, ‘society’ and ‘culture’ – all of them at
once as real and as constructed as the disciplines that have come to be identified with them:
they are all fabricated rather than found objects
– are confounded by geography’s constitutive
interest in the contextual: in the coexistence of
objects, institutions and practices in time and
space (cf. Hägerstrand, 1984, pp. 374–5: see
also contextuality).
It is thus not surprising that the interactions
between human geography and the other humanities and social sciences should have been
a two-way street. It is perfectly true that many
of the early encounters were largely derivative.
Methods and theories were borrowed from
other fields and put to work on the research
frontier in order to stake a series of supposedly
distinctive geographical claims (and, not coincidentally, to identify the adventurousness of
the intellectual avant-garde). Gradually, however, a return flow was established and crossdisciplinary exchange increased:
(1) Human geographers have made substantial methodological contributions.
Among the most significant have been
those to mathematical and statistical analysis, particularly through advances in
the study of spatial autocorrelation
that address the problem of applying
techniques associated with the general
linear model to spatially referenced
data, and the development of geographical information systems that have
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
made it possible to display and interrogate vast, spatially distributed data arrays; and to modes of visual analysis
through critical readings of the spatialities of art, cartography, film and
photography (see visual methods). Yet
these methods have been unevenly developed and deployed: quantitative
methods have always been most important in economic geography, where they
are presently undergoing a considerable
resurgence; studies in electoral geography have been the principal locus of
quantitative work in political geography,
which has otherwise preferred qualitative
methods, especially in critical geopolitics; and cultural geography has been
almost entirely produced through qualitative methods.
(2) Human geographers have also made significant theoretical contributions. An explicit interest in theorization was a lasting
achievement of spatial science: the socalled quantitative revolution was
often hailed as a local ‘scientific revolution’, but it was fundamentally a theoretical
revolution, and it was the commitment to
theorization that did much to constitute
human geography as a research discipline
(and en route to facilitate conversations
with other disciplines). In the 1960s there
were several calls for the development of a
distinctively geographical body of theory:
a theoretical corpus that would be the exclusive preserve of geography and thus
serve to guarantee its intellectual and institutional legitimacy. At the end of that
decade, Harvey concluded his prospectus
for Explanation in geography (1969) with
an injunction: ‘By our theories you shall
know us’. This was always an unlikely prospect at best (and a dangerous one at
worst), and most human geographers –
including Harvey himself (see Castree
and Gregory, 2006) – became much
more interested in establishing the interdisciplinary significance of place and space
for social analysis. This has itself been an
interdisciplinary project, not least because, as Harvey has constantly emphasized, the incorporation of such spatial
concepts (the contextual) into conventional social theory (the compositional) is
radically unsettling. What is sometimes
called ‘the spatial turn’ has thus been described by more than human geographers:
so much so, in fact, that accounts of landscape, place, region and space have be-
come commonplace in many areas of the
humanities and social sciences (Crang and
Thrift, 2000; Hubbard, Kitchin and Valentine, 2004; Warf and Arias, 2008).
The developments summarized in the previous two paragraphs resulted in what Kwan
(2004) identifies as a divide – even a ‘rift’ –
between
‘spatial–analytical
geographies’
invested in the development and use of quantitative techniques and geospatial technologies
on one side and ‘socio-cultural geographies’
involved in the development and use of critical
social theory and more qualitative methods on
the other. Kwan insists that this is unproductive: there is no direct and immediate relation
between epistemology and method, she insists, so that ‘the choice between critical social
theory and spatial analysis is false.’ She urges
the development of ‘hybrid geographies’ that
‘challenge the boundary and forge creative
connections between socio-cultural and
spatial–analytical geographies’ (p. 758).
Kwan’s hybrid geographies are not (quite)
Whatmore’s (2002a) hybrid geographies, but
they both speak of transcending the divisions
between the cultural, social or ‘human’ sciences and the biological, physical or ‘natural’
sciences, and they both emphasize the role of
feminist theories and feminist geographies
in ‘talking across the divide’ (cf. Kwan, 2007).
In disciplinary terms, however, what matters
most is the substantive work carried out under
the sign of human geography. Although they
are unlikely soul mates, Martin (2001b) and
Harvey (2006c) have both criticized what they
characterize as the deflection of human geography from rigorous, substantive inquiry
through a fixation on, even an obsession
with, abstract philosophical and theoretical
issues. Although they were writing from opposite sides of the Atlantic, their complaints
were largely addressed to a British audience
and arise, in part, from recent differences in
intellectual history and institutional context. It
has become increasingly difficult to identify a
common ‘Anglo-American’ human geography
(cf. Johnston and Sidaway, 2004a,b), a development that has coincided with an emerging
critique of Anglo-American hegemony within
the international discipline(s). If the coincidence seems ironic, this last critique is about
more than language: it is about language used
to privilege particular conceptual formations.
And the criticisms made by Martin and
Harvey also arise from opposition to equally
particular philosophies and modes of theory.
philosophy was once given extraordinary
353
HUMAN RIGHTS
legislative authority in human geography, particularly the philosophy of science, and standard textbooks have commonly distinguished
different philosophical traditions and mapped
them more or less directly on to human geography (Johnston, 1986b [1983]; Cloke, Philo
and Sadler, 1991; Peet, 1998) (see phenomenology; positivism; realism; structuralism). But as human geographers were drawn
away from foundational philosophies like
these and, coincidentally, into considerations
of political and moral philosophy, so they became less impressed by exclusively scientific
credentials and the power of Philosophywith-a-capital-P to provide them (see hermeneutics; pragmatism; post-structuralism). Many of the philosophical writings that
have attracted human geographers in recent
years have engaged most directly with (and
transformed) the core concerns of the humanities and the human sciences – see, for example, deconstruction, discourse and
performativity – and in doing so they have
opened up wholly new areas of geographical
reflection: affect, desire, memory and the
like. This has produced a complex terrain in
which different philosophical concerns have
been brought into relation and juxtaposition
with one another, and where philosophy has
come to be treated more as a resource and less
as a tribunal. Similarly, it was once possible to
map human geography as a series of positions
on an intellectual landscape that was, in effect,
an absolute space: theoretical coordinates established the singularity of different systems of
concepts. But here too there has been a seachange, and most human geographers now
accept that no one theoretical system can ask
all the important questions, still less provide
all the cogent answers. They thus find themselves working in (and producing) the tense
space between contending and colliding systems of concepts. The result of these philosophical and theoretical innovations has been
to shake the very foundations of enquiry in
human geography, as they have in the other
humanities and social sciences, and the oppositions that once skewered the field (such as
‘agency’ and ‘structure’, but the list is now
much longer) have been called into radical
question (Cloke and Johnston, 2005). A second response, then, might be that critics such
as Martin and Harvey lament these tectonic
shifts and yearn for solid ground (though they
undoubtedly stand in different places on it).
Whatever one makes of this, however, their
point remains a sharp one. It is not difficult to
see why the demands of navigating this new
354
terrain should have prompted some human
geographers to become so preoccupied with
philosophical and theoretical issues that these
become not so much moments in as substitutes for substantive inquiry: a refuge from the
capriciousness and, indeed, riskiness of the
empirical. On this reading, it is symptomatic
that of the 26 ‘key texts in human geography’
identified by Hubbard, Kitchin and Valentine
(2008), barely a handful focus on the results of
empirical analysis. But there are many other
key texts, and many writers have reactivated
and reformulated sites that have long been
focal to human geography – borders, cities,
industries, regions and territory, for
example – and opened up new ones, such as
the body, the home, the shopping mall, the
prison and the zoo. They have reworked traditional themes in both the past and the present, including colonialism, development,
imperialism, industrialization, modernization, urbanization and war, and explored
new ones such as film, law, money, music,
performance, sexuality, terrorism and
tourism. And there has been a continuing
stream of principled work on different places
and their interconnections that collectively
gives the lie to the monstrous assertion that
‘the world is flat’ (cf. Smith, 2005a: see globalization). It would take a brave or foolhardy
person to issue a programmatic statement in
the face of such diversity, but this has not
prevented attempts to chart the future of
human geography. The spirited reactions to
Harvey’s (1984) ‘historical materialist manifesto’, or Amin and Thrift’s (2005a: cf. Thrift,
2002) revisionist prospectus twenty-odd years
later, testify not only to the diversity of human
geography, but also to a continued vitality that
depends on an irreplaceable intimacy between
theory and practice.
dg
Suggested reading
Cloke and Johnston (2005); Gregory (1994, chs
1 and 2); Massey, Allen and Sarre (1999).
human rights A right is an entitlement that
is usually encoded in a legal context (see law).
One can distinguish between human rights
and citizenship rights. citizenship rights are
guaranteed by governments for nationals of a
particular territory, whereas human rights
are thought to be geographically and politically universal. Hannah Arendt (1973) warned
that human rights are the least desirable rights
because they imply the absence of protection
by a nation-state; the rights of citizens are
superior to human rights because they are
HUMAN RIGHTS
both applicable and enforceable. Matters
are not that simple, however, because rights
may be, and in fact often are, legally suspended during a ‘state of emergency’ (see exception, space of).
The liberal model of rights is derived from
seventeenth-century political thought that focuses on the rights accorded to individuals as
well as the obligations that individuals owe
society and the state (Kofman, 2003). Critics
of liberalism question the scale at which
rights are borne – in other words, that of the
individual – and highlight group or communal
rights (Isin and Wood, 1999), or deconstruct
political community as pre-given (Mouffe,
1992). Despite the limits of liberalism and
rights-based political change, Blomley (1994,
p. 410) argues that ‘[r]ights have not gone
away. As such, the dismissal of rights-based
struggles as incoherent or counter-progressive
seems condescending.’ Blomley and Pratt
(2001) contend that rights are open to a variety of readings, their meaning indeterminate.
Rights can be mobilized effectively at different
scales to constructive ends.
Pratt (2004, p. 85) explores the limits and
possibilities of human rights discourse, noting
that any form of the universal is ‘necessarily
exclusionary but paradoxically holds within it
the means to be challenged by those who are
excluded by it’. This paradox is evident in the
struggles of the Filipino caregivers who live in
their employers’ homes and trade their freedom and mobility for paid work. Pratt maps
the ways in which rights are mobilized in different spaces: at the scale of the body, between
the [private] home and [public] Canadian society, in the context of the Canadian state and
on the global commons. Similarly, Bosco
(2006, 2007) charts the ways in which human
rights have been fought for by the Madres de
Plaza de Mayo in Argentina through the mobilization of a series of territorially dispersed
social networks.
Practically speaking, human rights have
been encoded in United Nations documents
and institutions, and in international law,
since the Second World War. In 1948, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights was
adopted, though it was not legally binding (it
was a declaration, not a treaty). In 1966, two
legally binding human rights instruments were
created to protect civil and political rights,
on the one hand, and economic, social and
cultural rights on the other. These covenants
depend upon the ratification of a sufficient
number of states, which they received in
1976.
The provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights have been
privileged over those of the Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The
first ensures respect for citizens regardless of
language, religion, sex, political opinion
and so on, as well as the right to liberty of
movement and freedom. The latter includes
provisions that are more applicable to developing countries than to highly industrialized
ones, such as the right to food, shelter, work,
and basic medical and educational services.
While the first covenant applies to individuals,
the second refers to particular groups of
people.
Tensions exist between the sovereignty of
states to govern and the human rights of their
citizens. The slippage in scale between the
state with its right to govern and individuals
with human rights can be traced to the potentially contradictory terms enshrined in the
1945 UN Charter and the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. While the ‘General
Assembly shall . . . [assist] in the realization
of human rights and fundamental freedoms
for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion’ (Article 13 (1b)), its constituent members are states whose sovereignty
and security prevail. The UN Charter has
mechanisms to ensure the protection and enforcement of peace and international security, but it outlines few obligations for the
protection of human rights.
Since the early 1990s, the UN Security Council has extended the meaning of what constitutes
a threat to international peace and security in the
Charter, and increased the conditionality of sovereignty. Developing countries have expressed
concern about this interpretation as potentially
interfering in internal affairs. Sovereignty is seen
as a last line of defence against the will of the
(largely Western) ‘international community’.
While the UN remains an organization comprised of member states within a framework of
liberal rights and freedoms, it has challenged the
abuse of sovereignty in places such as northern
Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia and East
Timor. Sovereignty is qualified, and the abrogation of people’s human rights within a given state
is no longer a domestic matter, at least with a UN
context.
There are many human rights instruments
that have been ratified, including the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination again
Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the
Rights of the Child (CRC). The USA has signed
neither of these legal instruments, illustrating
that unilateralism by the world’s superpower
355
HUMANISM
can undermine the application and monitoring
of basic human rights provisions.
jh
Suggested reading
Bosco (2006); Kobayashi and Proctor (2003);
Koffman (2003).
humanism A philosophical tradition that
places human faculties (reason, consciousness
and the like) at the centre of human action in
order to account for and inform conduct.
Humanism has a long history in European
philosophy, where it is usually traced back
to the Renaissance, but it played a pivotal
role in much later reformulations of modern
human geography. The architects of an explicitly humanistic geography used a broadly
based humanism as a crucial foundation for
their critique of spatial science. To Tuan
(1976b, p. 266), humanism in its various
forms provided ‘an expansive view of what
the human person is and can do’. ‘More comprehensive than science’, he continued, humanism accords a central place to those
uniquely human capacities that lie at the core
of the humanities: consciousness, critical reflection and creativity that in turn inculcate a
sense of historicity. While he did not see humanism as an alternative to ‘scientific geography’, Entrikin (1976, pp. 616, 632) argued
that such an approach ‘helps to counter the
objective and abstractive tendencies of some
scientific geographers’ and reviewed the twin
philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology to reaffirm ‘the importance of the
study of meaning and value in human geography’. Others insisted on the political and
ethical significance of humanism. A stream of
work on human agency and human geography challenged the narrowly conceived and
often deterministic assumptions about human
action that had been incorporated into both
spatial science and behavioural geography
(Ley, 1981) and reworked one of Marx’s
iconic statements thus: ‘People make geography, but not just as they please and not
under conditions of their own choosing’
(Gregory, 1981). Others treated humanism
as a well-spring for ethical reflection: ‘The
recovery of the human subject’, Buttimer
(1990, p. 28) concluded, allowed for what
would now be called a cosmopolitanism and
a heightened sensitivity to what she identified
as ‘the ‘‘barbarism’’ of our times’ (see also
ethics).
Even as these claims were being registered,
however, Cosgrove provided a series of
compelling reconstructions of the historical
356
trajectory of humanism that suggested a less
celebratory interpretation. Focusing on the
concept of landscape, Cosgrove (1984)
showed that Renaissance humanism was
about certainty rather than individual subjectivity, and that it was deeply implicated not
only in the geometric obsessions that the
critics of spatial science sought so strenuously
to repudiate, but also in a visual ideology that
underwrote a constellation of distinctively
bourgeois power and privilege. Others took
different routes to arrive at parallel conclusions. Approaches through feminist geography and post-colonialism revealed that
the supposedly universal ‘human subject’ at
the centre of conventional humanism was not
only a subject whose class position was artfully unmarked, as Cosgrove had shown, but
also a subject whose heterosexuality, masculinity and whiteness were concealed too. Seen
thus, humanism was exposed as a normative
political–ideological project. Many of these
subsequent critiques were informed by poststructuralism, which licensed what came to
be categorized as an anti-humanism: an approach that, far from being uninterested in or
dismissive of human subjects and human actions, seeks to analyse the multiple ways in
which different human subjects are constituted. This project has been radicalized by
a posthumanism that, critical of the anthropocentrism shared by humanism and antihumanism, admits non-human actors to the
production of nominally ‘human’ but in fact
constitutively ‘hybrid’ geographies.
Similar critiques have been mobilized to
question and contest the rise of what Douzinas
(2003) calls a ‘military humanism’ that promotes military intervention and war in the
name of supposedly universal human rights,
or ‘Humanity’ more generally. These projects
often promote, on their dark side, the coproduction of spaces of exception (see
exception, spaces of), whose denizens are
constructed as sub-human and hence unworthy of protection. Here, humanism functions as a sort of anthropological machine,
conferring and withdrawing the status of
‘human’ from its objects (cf. bare life). dg
Suggested reading
Cloke, Philo and Sadler (1991, ch. 3); Douzinas
(2003).
humanistic geography An approach that
seeks to put humans at the centre of geography. Accounts of disciplinary history have
created for humanistic geography a sense of
HUMANISTIC GEOGRAPHY
singularity of vision that overlooks the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, approaches
that humanistic geographers have adopted.
They have drawn upon a wide range of humanist philosophies, which has led to a generic
humanistic geography in addition to versions
based around essentialism, idealism,
phenomenology and pragmatism (see also
humanism). Despite this, there are key similarities in terms of the reasoning behind the
emergence in the 1970s of humanistic geography; it was a response to what were seen as
the dehumanizing effects of both positivism
and structural marxism, in addition to promoting a positive model of a humanistic geography. Buttimer has argued that:
From whatever ideological stance it has
emerged, the case for humanism has usually
been made with the conviction that there
must be more to human geography than
the danse macabre of materialistically motivated robots which, in the opinion of many,
was staged by the post-World War II ‘scientific’ reformation. (Buttimer, 1993, p. 47)
For many humanistic geographers, the
world is primarily the sum of human experiences through their encounters with ‘external
reality’, which cannot be accessed other than
through the human mind (Cloke, Philo and
Sadler, 1991). However, others were less reductionist, and recognized that the ‘external’
world was mediated through subjective layers
of meaning in complex ways. Talking of
‘body–subject’ to transcend the separation of
material life from thought, Seamon (1979)
sought to capture the meaning of place that
was orchestrated through the ‘pre-reflective
intentionality’ of ‘body ballets’ – the movement, often unthinking and unroutinized, of
people through their environments, weaving
the rich texture of place (a view echoed by
recent returns to ethnomethodological techniques and feminist theorizations of the body).
This is not simply an ontological move in
terms of focusing on individuals and their various activities, but also a philosophical one
which puts human experience and understanding of the world at the centre of geography. It further insists that all human
experience is articulated through geographical
concepts such as space, time and landscape.
Drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology,
Buttimer (1976) talked of the concept of
the lifeworld to provide a sense of this intimacy between place and people (see also
Seamon, 1979). Thus, appropriate qualitative methods are required, as ‘[n]o decimal
notation of time, no geometric commandment, no camera or tape recorder could easily
articulate the experience of this lifeworld’
(Mels, 2004, p. 3). Phenomenological strands
of humanistic geography were concerned with
essences – for example, of space or experience
(Tuan, 1976b) – or with the nature of existence, elucidating previously taken-for-granted
ways of being in the world.
In their attempts to articulate the human
experience of place and landscape, some humanistic geographers turned to the humanities, particularly art and literature, as forms
of expression that were seen to provide insights that were unavailable to the more scientific gaze of the geographer (Meinig, 1983).
However, the enthusiasm of some (e.g.
Pocock, 1981) for the transcendental ability
of the artist or author to capture the essence
of human experience has been criticized for its
ignorance of the common origins of European
Renaissance artistic representation with geometric knowledges of possession and control
(Cosgrove, 1984), and the nature of genres in
literature (Sharp, 2000b).
In addition to drawing the human as the
subject of geography, humanists also turned
to examine the humanity of the geographer.
The emphasis on interpretation and intersubjectivity that humanistic geography propounded meant that the researcher could not
be seen as ‘an individual whose humanity
stands outside the research process: as an individual who is nothing but a vessel for taking
in information, processing it and then arriving
at conclusions’ (Cloke, Philo and Sadler,
1991, p. 71). Instead, the researcher had to
acknowledge her or his role in the process of
interpretation and the production of knowledge, and thus Buttimer (1974) stressed the
importance of values in geography. This necessitated the adoption of ethnographic and
participatory research methodologies (e.g.
Ley, 1983; Western, 1992) and experiments
with writing styles to move away from sterile
scientific language (e.g. Olsson, 1991).
Because humanistic geography emphasized
experience and human subjectivity, it tended
towards idealism and voluntarism, and as a
result has been criticized, particularly by
marxist, realist and structurationist theorists for overplaying the freedom that individuals have to act and for tending to focus on the
micro-scale at the expense of important structural connections (although, in both cases,
note E.P. Thompson’s socialist humanism).
Despite superficial similarities, the cultural
turn in human geography has offered a critical
357
HUMANITIES
challenge to humanism, and most ‘new
cultural geography’ is characterized by posthumanisms of various sorts. Theorists of poststructuralism would further suggest that the
perception of human agency so promoted in
humanistic geography is a product of dominant
discourse. Feminist geographers have shown
how these dominant discourses create an
image of normal subjecthood that is white,
male, bourgeois, heterosexual and able-bodied,
an image that can only be maintained as coherent through the exclusion of all that is ‘Other’
(see feminist geographies). Thus, a whole
range of others are denied full subjectivity and
agency (Alcoff, 1988). The exposure of the fiction of coherent subjectivity has also led some to
turn to psychoanalytic theory to seek to
understand unconscious motivations for actions, something overlooked by many humanistic geographers who regarded human agency as
the result of conscious decisions (but again,
there were exceptions, such as Seamon’s
‘body-ballets’). Recent developments of posthumanism, or what Whatmore (2004) has
called ‘more-than-human’ geographies, have
sought to populate the world with agents other
than humans (see actor-network theory).
Although these critiques have meant that
the influence of humanistic geography per se
has waned since the 1980s, many of its arguments are still key to current debates in human
geography. Recent critique of the cultural turn
insists that geographers’ enthusiasm for discourse and representation have drawn them
away from ‘the more ‘‘thingy’’, bump-intoable, stubbornly there-in-the-world kinds of
‘‘matter’’ (the material)’ (Philo, 2000a, p. 33).
New cultural geographers’ presentations of
landscapes as already structured through discourse draw attention from the variety of corporeal practices as instances of how ‘senses of
landscape and self are mutually configured’
(Wylie, 2005, p. 239). Wylie (2005) talks in
terms of a ‘post-phenomenology’ in which
human agency is reconnected with networks
of non-human agents, through which place
and experience emerge.
jsh
Suggested reading
Adams, Hoelscher and Till (2001); Buttimer
(1993); Cloke, Philo and Sadler (1991); Mels
(2004); Seamon (1979).
humanities Emerging in europe during the
Renaissance from medieval scholastic study of
the seven liberal arts (i.e. the quadrivium of
arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy,
and the trivium of rhetoric, logic and grammar), the humanities today denotes both an
358
approach to knowledge and a specific set of
disciplines (see also humanism).
As an approach to knowledge, the humanities
are (still) characterized by broadly hermeneutic or interpretive methods and work
through cycles of criticism rather than the
establishment of theory and scientific law
(see law, scientific), although concepts, the
rule of evidence and logical argument are vital
to their practice. Expressions of this include
privileging the monograph or essay rather than
the research paper as the preferred style of
scholarly communication, individual authorship, and the use of the footnote or endnote
rather than the ‘Harvard’ referencing system,
suggesting ‘conversation’ rather than progressive and cumulative advance of knowledge
(Smith, J., 1992a). The humanities thus foreground the active role of the author in the construction of knowledge and understanding
(Cosgrove and Domosh, 1993).
The humanities disciplines concern the study
of distinctively human actions and works; for
example history, philology (language, literature, linguistics), philosophy, theology and
studies of Antiquity. The principal goals of the
humanities are both active and contemplative:
they were long regarded as fundamental to the
educational preparation of rulers, but their success was gauged in part by the degree of selfknowledge and self-reflection they produced in
the student (Grafton and Jardine, 1986). geography, sometimes characterized as the ‘eye’ of
history, as history in turn was proclaimed
‘queen’ of the humanities, has a long record as
a humanities discipline, initially because it
based its knowledge of the world upon the authority of ancient texts and subsequently, as
exploration, autopsy and empiricism displaced such authority, because it entailed the
comparative study of places and peoples.
The evolution of modern geography as a
university discipline has been strongly affected
by both natural science and social science
epistemologies and methods, although historical geography’s natural allegiance with
history has continuously if contentiously sustained geography’s connection with a key humanities discipline. The rhetoric of ‘science’
within geography has long tended to subordinate a broader humanities tradition, although
recent studies of science as a social, irredeemably human practice have not only drawn in
some measure from the humanities but also
interrupted the authority of science understood
as objectivism. The values and value of
humanities scholarship have also been marginalized by geography’s postwar focus on
HUNGER
research, policy relevance and critique as opposed to pedagogy. A self-styled ‘humanistic’
geography in the 1970s and 1980s (Ley and
Samuels, 1978) owed less to conventional humanities study than to then fashionable psychological theories and twentieth-century
phenomenology, but it opened human geography to questions of perception and interpretation that had long been associated with the
humanities (see humanistic geography).
Probably the most productive and widely read
contemporary practitioner of geography as a
humanity is Yi-Fu Tuan, whose autobiography
is explicit about his practice of geography as a
vehicle for self-understanding through reflection on the true, the good and the beautiful in a
world of places and landscapes (Tuan, 1999).
Many human geographers are profoundly
sceptical of the universalistic claims of ‘humanity’ and the humanities’ focus on individual agency (both in subject matter and
authorship), and indeed many contemporary
scholars in the humanities have also sharply
questioned such traditional orthodoxies (see
post-structuralism). But recent critical and
cultural study within human geography signals
the discipline’s engagement in the convergence of social sciences and humanities that
has emerged with the rejection of positivism
and the embrace of interpretive methods on
the part of the former, and acceptance of the
value of social theory on the part of the latter
(see also Gregory, 1994). The ‘cultural
turn’ has thus seen human geographers working with both materials and methods conventionally associated with the humanities – for
example, the interpretation of texts and
images – although the ‘new’ cultural geography
represents an uneasy alliance between those
pursuing a traditionally social science agenda
and those who cleave to the more conventionally individualistic, reflective and pedagogical
concerns of the humanities. Still, that the Association of American Geographers could convene a major interdisciplinary conference on
‘Geography and the Humanities’ in June 2007
says much about the salience of contemporary
conversations between the two, appropriately
enough, and hence about the continuing importance of the humanities in geography and
geography to the humanities.
dco
Suggested reading
Tuan (1996).
hunger The right to food – and relatedly the
right to not starve – represents one of the foundations of international and national human and
political rights. The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948), the International
Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights (1964) and the UN Millennium
Declaration (2000) all refer to freedom from
hunger as a basic and inalienable human
right. The reality is, of course, very different.
According to the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), there are 854 million
people undernourished worldwide (FAO,
2006): 820 million in the developing world, 25
million in the transition (former socialist) countries and 9 million in the industrialized states.
Virtually no progress has been made towards the
Rome World Food Summit (1996) target of
halving the number of undernourished people
by 2015. There has been little change in
developing-world hunger since 1990–2. It is
true that the proportion of undernourished
people has fallen by three percentage points,
but the FAO projects that it is unlikely that the
UN Millennium Goal for hunger will be met.
The Near East, South asia and especially subSaharan africa have seen sharp increases in the
number of hungry people; currently, 33 per cent
of sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished.
poverty and hunger are very much part of the
landscape of the twenty-first century. In the
period since 1980, economic growth in 15 countries has brought rapidly rising incomes to 1.5
billion people, yet one person in three still lives in
poverty and basic social services are unavailable
to more than 1 billion people. Nowhere is this
privation more vivid and pronounced than along
gender lines. Of the 1.3 billion people in poverty,
70 per cent are women. Between 1965 and 1988,
the number of rural women living below the
poverty line increased by 47 per cent; the corresponding figure for men was less than 30 per cent
(UNDP, 1996). A key measure of poverty is the
extent to which individuals are able to secure
sufficient food to conduct a healthy and active
life. By the conventional measure of hunger,
namely the FAO’s definition of household food
security (HFS) [‘physical and economic access
to adequate food for all household members,
without undue risk of losing such access’
(FAO, 1996, p. 50)], millions of people are not
household food secure. The FAO provides a
number of measures pertaining to food, hunger
and undernutrition. Currently, over 800 million
consumed so little food relative to requirements
that they suffered caloric undernourishment
(which often leads to anthropometric deficiency
and the risk of damaged human development).
Malnutrition (or undernutrition) refers to physical conditions that result from the interaction
of inadequate diet, poor food consumption,
359
HUNGER
nutrient imbalance and illness/disease. All of
these conditions – typically measured through
key indicators such as infant growth, weight for
height, body mass, birth weights, dietary energy
supply and so on – can be the result of differing
sorts of food security. Some of the rural poor
may be hungry for short or long periods, but they
are relatively secure that things will not deteriorate (starvation); others may have adequate
nutrition or food intake but are food insecure –
however, their conditions may change very rapidly and throw them into abject hunger. These
differing forms of security and vulnerability are
intimately wrapped up with the sorts of entitlements and protections afforded to different
classes, genders, ages and social groups.
Currently, global food consumption provided 2720 dietary calories per person, which
would have been sufficient if distributed in proportion to requirements. In global terms, then,
food consumption is so unequal that caloric
undernourishment is serious. It is true that
the proportion of malnourished people has
fallen greatly (more in the past 50 years than
in the previous 3000) but hunger and undernourishment remains endemic in some regions
(notably sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia).
Paradoxically, there is much evidence to suggest
growing hunger in some of the North Atlantic
economies and within a number of post-socialist
societies. According to the International Food
Policy Research Institute (see Von Braun,
Serova, tho Seeth and Mely 1996), agricultural
production fell by 30 per cent in Russia between
1989 and 1994 and hunger was widespread
during the 1990s. In California (a place where
the more affluent are seemingly obsessed by
eating less and losing weight), the reform of
‘welfare as we know it’, has produced 8.4 million
who were ‘food insecure’ by 2000.
A conventional way to think about hunger is
in terms of output or gross availability. Food
security decreases accordingly as food availability declines. famine, an extreme case of food
insecurity, is a function of a massive collapse of
food availability, a sort of Malthusian event. In
contrast to the Malthusian and demographic
approach, in which food insecurity arises as
food output is incapable of keeping up with
population growth (see malthusian model),
Amartya Sen (1981) approaches hunger, and
most especially how hunger and food insecurity
can degenerate into famine, from a micro-economic vantage point and entitlements. Sen is
able to show how gross food insecurity may
occur without a decline in food availability,
and how entitlements attached to individuals
through a generalization of the exchange
360
economy – through markets – may shift in
complex ways among differing classes, occupational groups and sections of the population.
Sen begins with the individual endowment,
which is mapped into a bundle of entitlements, the latter understood as ‘the set of
alternative commodity bundles that a person
can command’ (1981, p. 46) through the use
of various legal channels of acquirement open
to someone of his or her position. Such entitlement bundles confer particular capabilities
that ultimately underline well-being.
Central to Sen’s account of why hunger exists is the process of transforming endowments
into entitlements, so-called E-mapping. The
sorts of entitlements that Sen details are rewards to labour, production, inheritance or
asset transfer, and state provisioning (transfers), typically through social security and
food relief policies (i.e. anti-famine policies, of
which the Indian Famine Codes are customarily seen as a model: Dreze and Sen, 1989).
Insofar as an individual’s entitlement set is the
consequence of E-mapping on the endowment
set, entitlements can only change through
transformations in the endowment or
E-mapping. Hunger and shortage occurs
through a collapse or adverse change in endowment or E-mapping, or both (Sen, 1981).
Entitlement, in contrast to other theories,
‘draws our attention to such variables as ownership patterns, unemployment, relative prices,
wage-price rations, and so on’ (1993, p. 30).
Sen situates hunger, then, on a landscape,
irreducibly social, of the capabilities that individuals, and potentially classes, may mobilize. By
examining mapping as an active and transformative process – how the capacity to labour, or
access to land, can generate an entitlement – it
dislodges a concern with output per se and focuses on access to and control over food. It offers
a proximate sort of causal analysis predicated on
what immediate or conjunctural forces might
shift such forms of access and control, and permits a social mapping of such shifts to understand who dies or starves (say, artisanal
craftsmen versus peasants) and why. Entitlements – the central mechanism in his intellectual
architecture – are individually assigned in virtue
of a largely unexamined endowment, and are
legally derived from state law (ownership, property rights, contract). Entitlements necessitate
making legitimate claims; that is to say, rights
resting on the foundations of power (opportunity or actual command) and law (legitimacy and
protection). A concern with entitlement failure
in market circumstances leads Sen to emphasize
public action through entitlement protection
HYBRIDITY
(state-funded famine protection through food
for work or public food distribution) and promotion (a public social security net).
Sen’s concern with entitlements, and relatedly
the capabilities of individuals, can be extended
to better grasp the conditions under which
people become food secure. To begin with entitlements themselves, geographer Charles Gore
has noted that ‘command over food depends
upon something more than legal rights’ (1993,
p. 433). Extended entitlements, for example,
[, for example,] might include socially determined
entitlements (a moral economy, indigenous security institutions), non-legal entitlements (food riots,
demonstrations, theft) and non-entitlement transfers (charity). This highlights a rather different
way of thinking about E-mapping. First, entitlements are socially constructed (not just individually conferred): they are forms of social process
and a type of representation. Second, like all
forms of representation, entitlements are complex congeries of cultural, institutional and political practice that are unstable: that is to say,
they are both constituted and reproduced
through conflict, negotiation and struggle. Entitlements are, then, political and social achievements that are customarily fought over in the
course of modernization (in this sense, one
can think about the means by which entitlements
enter the political arena in the course of the
differing routes to modernity). And, third, social entitlements confirm Sen’s unelaborated observation that the relations between people and
food must be grasped as a ‘network of entitlement relations’ (1981, p. 159; emphasis added).
Hunger or famine-proneness are the products of
historically specific networks of social entitlements.
One of the great strengths of Sen’s approach
to food and hunger is that entitlements are part
of a larger architecture of thinking about development as a state of well-being and choice or
freedom. In his language, the capability of a
person reflects the ‘alternative combinations
of functioning the person achieves and from
which he or she can choose one collection’
(1993, p. 3). Functionings represent parts of
the state of a person, and especially those things
that a person can do or be in leading a life. In
seeing poverty or hunger as a failure of capabilities – rather than insufficient income, or inadequate primary goods as in the Rawlsian sense
of justice – Sen shows how the freedom to lead
different types of life is a reflected in the person’s
capabilities (see Sen, 1999).
mw
Suggested reading
Bread for the World (http://www.bread.org/
learn/hunger-basics/hunger-facts-international.
html) and Hunger Notes (http://www.world
hunger.org/).
hybridity A condition
describing those
things and processes that transgress or disconcert binary terms that draw distinctions
between like and unlike categories of object –
such as self/other, culture/nature, animal/machine or mind/body. Hybridity has entered
popular parlance through the commercial mobilization of techno-scientific innovations (e.g.
the cultivation of hybrid seeds and plants or
the proliferation of hybrid vehicles), or cultural innovations such as cyber-culture or
fusion music (see cyborg). As these examples
suggest, the mixing of properties ascribed to
opposing ontological categories established
through academic and everyday use inspires
both social anxiety and excitement.
In geography and the wider social sciences
and humanities, hybridity has come to be used
rather too loosely to mean any number of different kinds of mixing, such as the notion of
‘hybrid methods’ – which means little more
than combining qualitative and quantitative
methods in the conduct of research, or what
used to be called multi-method approaches.
Such usages tend to treat hybridity as an intrinsically desirable quality or strategy. More
theoretically or philosophically rigorous explorations of hybridity are associated primarily
with two bodies of work: (i) cultural studies
(see cultural turn) and identity politics,
particularly in the field of post-colonial studies
(e.g. Bhabha, 1994; see post-colonialism)
and (ii) science and technology studies and
posthumanist politics (e.g. Latour, 1993).
In the case of post-colonial studies, hybridity
is associated with the interrogation of those
contact spaces in which cultural differences
are contingently and conflictually negotiated
(see Pratt, 1992; cf. transculturation). In
the case of science and technology studies, it is
enrolled as a device to negotiate the temptations
of the ‘one plus one’ logic or ‘mixture of two
pure forms’ that pervade binary and dialectical modes of analysis of nature–culture relations (see Whatmore, 2002a). The problem
here, as Bruno Latour suggests, is that:
critical explanation always began from the
poles and headed toward the middle, which
was first the separation point and then the
conjunction point for opposing resources
. . . In this way the middle was simultaneously maintained and abolished, recognised
and denied, specified and silenced . . . How?
By conceiving of every hybrid as a mixture of
two pure forms. (1993, pp. 77–8)
361
HYPERSPACE
As many, particularly feminist, scholars
working in philosophy and science and technology studies make clear, the importance of
hybridity in these terms is that it insists that
questions of social justice cannot be understood in terms of human relations or reasoning
alone, and invites ethical and political projects that re-frame these questions in terms of
the more-than-human company of bodies,
technologies and forces implicated in, and consequential for, the conduct of social life.
sw
Suggested reading
Bhabha (1994); Castree and Nash (2004); Haraway (1991); Latour (1993); Pratt (1992);
Whatmore (2002a).
hyperspace Hyperspace has four or more
dimensions. Geographical tradition privileges
location and three (Euclidean) dimensions: (x,
y, z) or (Easting, Northing and height)(see
euclidean space). Yet, it is rarely just where
something happens that is important but also
when, giving a fourth dimension: time. Space–
time is therefore a hyperspace that becomes
more complex (e.g. to visualize) if variables
recording what happened (or what is found)
are treated as further dimensions of the space.
The literary critic Frederic Jameson (1991, pp.
38–44) famously described multi-dimensional
‘hyperspace’ as the characteristic spatiality of
postmodernity that disrupts and exceeds
conventional modes of representation. rh
Suggested reading
Mlodinow (2001).
hypothesis A provisional idea requiring further assessment to test its merit. The etymological origin is from the Greek meaning ‘to
put under, suppose’. Within geography, the
formalization of hypotheses was closely associated with the quantitative revolution, in
which the ‘supposed’ was a scientific statement capable of empirical testing using formal
statistical techniques (see also deduction).
In its early use, however, ‘hypothesis’ meant
an imagined idea, with only a distant connection to the real. In 1616, Cardinal Bellarmine
(1542–1621) warned Galileo Galilei (1564–
1642) not ‘to hold or defend’ the idea of a
heliocentric solar system, but to treat is as a
‘hypothesis’, not reality. And a similar sense
was given to the term when Sir Isaac Newton
(1643–1727) said about his theory of gravity:
‘I feign no hypotheses’ – that is, his work was
based on observation and experiment, not
speculation. By the nineteenth century, in
362
contrast, the use of hypotheses was increasingly seen as an integral part of the very practice of science – not at odds with it, as
Newton implied. Hypotheses were where science began; with interesting but as yet unproven
ideas that stemmed from scientific theory or
models. Whether hypotheses were accepted
depended upon the criteria applied. Criteria
have included: simplicity (the capacity to minimize new explanatory entities); scope (the
power to maximize the domain of application);
fruitfulness (the capability to generate future
hypotheses); fit (the compatibility with other
hypotheses); and, perhaps most important, empirical fidelity (the ability to match the facts).
This last criterion was taken up and formalized within the discipline of statistics from the
late nineteenth century. In the late 1920s, the
statisticians Jerzy Neyman (1894–1981) and
Egon Pearson (1895–1980) set out what was
to become the standard framework for statistical hypothesis testing that proved so influential in geography. They provided step-by-step
procedures stipulating how to frame a hypothesis and how to assess its empirical merit rigorously and precisely. Formulating the null
hypothesis was step one. Accepting the conservative supposition that it is better to assume
that one is wrong rather than right, the null
hypothesis stated the opposite of what one
believed to be correct. The remaining steps
then defined what was necessary in order either to reject or accept the hypothesis for the
specified level of statistical significance.
The first widespread use of the Neyman–
Pearson procedures for statistical hypothesis
testing in geography occurred in the mid1950s, at the start of the Quantitative Revolution. This transformation of the geographical
agenda into spatial science was also associated
with the introduction of formal theory, which
generated a plethora of hypotheses to be tested.
Newman (1973, p. 22) reports that in 1971, at
the height of the Quantitative Revolution, 26
per cent of all papers published in the top three
American geographical journals were concerned with hypothesis testing. That seems impressive, but Newman doubted whether many
of the authors understood what they were
doing, and whether they were doing it correctly.
The point became moot, however, as human
geographers increasingly abandoned formal hypothesis testing, and the very vocabulary of a
hypothesis. But they have never lost sight of the
importance of ‘imagined ideas’.
tb
Suggested reading
Harvey (1969, 100–6).
I
iconography The description and interpretation of visual images in order to disclose and
interpret their hermetic or symbolic meanings;
a hermeneutic practice, closely paralleled
by semiotics in linguistic studies. Initially
applied to religious icons and painted images,
and theorized as a methodology within
Renaissance art history by the cultural historian Erwin Panofsky, iconography was initially
introduced into human geography by Jean
Gottmann (1952) alongside ‘movement’ as
one of two counterposing forces structuring
the political geography of nations: the latter acting to integrate territories, and the
former to separate them through local allegiances. While this formulation acknowledged a
political efficacy on the part of cultural symbols, its impact on geographical study was
limited, and only decades later was the symbolic significance of national icons such as
landscapes, paintings, buildings and monuments subjected to more systematic iconographic analysis by geographers and others
(Daniels, 1993; Schama, 1995).
In contemporary human geography, iconography is principally used as a method of
landscape and map interpretation (Daniels
and Cosgrove, 1988; Harley, 2001b). Landscapes, both on the ground and in their representation through various media such as maps,
painting and photography, can be regarded as
visible deposits of cultural meanings (see also
cartography, history of; visual methods).
The iconographic method seeks to address
these meanings through describing the form,
composition and content of such representations, disclosing their symbolic conventions
and language, and interpreting the significances and implications of their symbolism
by re-immersing landscapes in their social
and historical contexts. Successful iconographic interpretation requires close formal
reading, broad contextual knowledge, interpretative sensitivity and persuasive writing
skills: it reveals human landscapes as both
shaped by and themselves active in shaping
broader social and cultural processes, and
thus possessed of powerful human significance. Geographical iconography today accepts that landscape meanings are unstable
over time and between different groups,
always negotiated and contested, and thus
political in the broadest sense. Through this
recognition, a connection may be made in
terms of politics between current geographical
uses of iconography and Gottmann’s original
formulation. This is exemplified by the significant body of work on landscapes, monuments, spatial images and the expression and
performance of identity that has been produced by geographers since the early 1990s
(see, e.g., Whelan, 2003).
dco
Suggested reading
Atkinson and Cosgrove (1998).
ideal type An operational construct originally proposed by the sociologist Max Weber
(1864–1920) as a way of exposing the essentials of a situation to analysis for particular
purposes: ‘An ideal type is formed by the
one-sided accentuation of one or more points
of view and by the synthesis of a great many
diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those
one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct.’ The ideal type is
‘ideal’ in the sense of ‘idealized’: it is always a
partial characterization of a phenomenon that,
by emphasizing particular features and ignoring others (marginalizing them, holding them
constant), draws out what the analyst regards
as particularly important. It is thus purposive,
an abstraction, and ideal means ‘pure’ or
‘abstract’, with other elements stripped away
(cf. model).
dg
idealism A humanist philosophy based
around the belief that the world is constructed
through the human mind (see humanism).
Idealism’s assertion that ‘all reality is in some
way a mental construction so that the world
does not exist outside its observation and representation by the individual has long been
posed against the positivistic epistemology
and its emphasis on objective evidence’
(Johnston, 1986, p. 55). Idealism was set in
opposition to materialism, which privileged
matter, rendering the import of mind or spirit
secondary, dependent or invisible. In geography, this is most closely associated with
363
IDENTITY
the work of Leonard Guelke, who drew on
historian R.G. Collingwood’s ‘historical idealism’, which insisted that ‘all history is the history of human thought’. Idealism in geography
regarded its aim as being one of ‘rethinking the
thoughts behind the actions (the ‘‘insides’’ beneath the ‘‘outsides’’) of ‘‘human events’’
with tangible environmental–landscape impacts’ (Cloke, Philo and Sadler, 1991, p. 70;
emphasis in original). In a challenge to what he
considered to be over-theorization of contemporary human geography, Guelke’s idealism
required a move from concern with the theories
that geographers held about the world and its
workings to a primary focus upon the theories
used by human beings acting in the world. For
Guelke, a geographer’s role is to understand
the theories lying behind action that essentially
make up human agency. As he put it, the
‘intention behind an action can be regarded as
the source of its power and theory in it can be
considered to be the guidance system’ (Guelke,
1974, p. 197).
Any insistence of the theory-neutrality of
academic research is problematic. Moreover,
Guelke’s vision of geography suggests a world
in which humans act ‘rationally’ on the basis
of how they conceptualize their worlds. Thus,
in many respects Guelke’s idealism is an
extension of behavioural geography, rather
than having a close association with the philosophically charged recovery of agency in (most)
humanistic geography (which focused upon
notions of feeling, emotion and meaning).
Guelke viewed human agency as being based
upon intentional decisions, ignoring both the
constraining and enabling effects of economic
structures and cultural discourse. Geographies influenced by psychoanalytic theory
have challenged the possibility of individual
agents knowing their motivations and have
turned to the effects of the unconscious.
The concern of new cultural geographers
with discourse and representation, although very different conceptually from
Guelke’s idealism, have nevertheless generated new debate around idealism, with both
marxist and social geography expressing
concern about the lack of attention given to
issues of the material (see Mitchell, 1995;
Duncan and Duncan, 1996; Philo, 2000a).
Theorizations of the body as an inscriptive
surface where the material and discursive articulate have sought to transcend the idealism–
materialism debate (Nast and Pile, 1998). jsh
Suggested reading
Cloke, Philo and Sadler (1991); Guelke (1974).
364
identity The origins of a term that is
increasingly used throughout the social sciences
are somewhat obscure, but its shifts reflect
changing conceptions of the human subject
in the discourses of modern and late-modern
thought. With its inheritance of Renaissance
humanism, which posited Man (sic) as the
‘measure of all things’, and the dramatic
changes inaugurated by the Protestant
Reformation, the enlightenment is usually
identified as the context within which the
identity of the modern subject definitively
emerges. Based on a conception of a selfsustaining entity, possessed of the capacity of
conscious reason and whose internal ‘centre’
was seen as essentially fixed – continuous or
‘identical’ with itself across time – the
Enlightenment aligns identity to a decisive
form of individualism. Prioritized in the seventeenth century by René Descartes (‘I think,
therefore I am’), John Locke (who equated
individual identity with the ‘sameness of a
rational being’; see Locke, 1967 [1690]) and
attenuated through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the individual is positioned
as the author of historical development, his
identity seen as the sovereign source from
which all social laws and categories of knowledge are derived.
The changing formations of modern society, and the development of sociology that
sought to understand them, provided the first
critique of this model. Locating individual
identity within group processes and submitting it to the dynamics of collective and contractual norms, sociologists such as G.H.
Mead (see symbolic interactionism) argued
the ways in which identities are positioned
within wider social relations and, conversely,
function to sustain wider social structures.
While such theories of socialization clearly
break with the autonomy of the humanist
self, they nonetheless continue to uphold the
principle of a stable identity; the relation between the individual and society being an
interaction between two reciprocal, but nonetheless distinct, entities.
A key revision that resolutely displaced the
Cartesian and sociological subject was the reconstruction of Marxist social theory in the
late 1960s. For the Marxist structuralist
Louis Althusser (1970), the privileging of social formations did not just invert the relations
between the individual and society, but jettisoned subjective agency from the processes of
history, the concerns of ethics and the terms
of philosophy itself (see marxism; structuralism). From this perspective, identity is not
IDENTITY
only conditional, lodged in contingency, but
divested of any transcendental authority it becomes little more than the effect or ‘bearer’ of
a social structure. ‘Self-hood’ thus does not
derive from any faculty held in the mind, but
via the mechanism of ‘interpellation’; that is, by
those ideological processes that on the one
hand ‘speak to us’ or ‘hail us into place’ as
the social subjects of particular discourses
and, on the other, produce us as subjects that
can ‘speak’ and can be ‘spoken’. To this novel
understanding of identity must be added the
impact of Freud on twentieth-century Western
thought. Indeed, if Freud’s original ‘discovery’
of the unconscious put paid to the humanist
project of the self-knowing individual, later
psychoanalytic theorists, such as Jacques
Lacan, insist on identity as unresolved and
irresolvable: not something that evolves organically or intentionally from inside the core of
cognitive being, but via a struggle that charts
the infant’s difficult entry into various systems
of symbolic orders, including language, culture and sexual difference. For Lacan, the
agony of this ‘entry’ not only leaves the subject
always divided in itself (the perception of
wholeness being, for Lacan, as for Althusser,
only an ‘imaginary’ or fantasized pleasure),
but maintains this improper fit as an initial
and continuing experience. Psychoanalytically, then, we should speak not of identity as
something achieved or achievable, but of identification as an always imaginary search for the
image of a resolved self (see psychoanalytic
theory).
With the de-centred subject located as the
unstable core of modern and late-modern
thought, identity is not only exposed as a social and psychic process, but is posed as a
political problem (Pile and Thrift, 1995).
With the growth of cultural studies in the
1970s, it is deployed not only a critical tool
useful in the analysis of cultural forms, but as
an active site of conflict and resistance within
social relations fractured by divisions of gender, class and race. Energized by the ferment
of ideas produced by the late 1960s – the
counter-culture, civil rights, feminist, anticolonial and anti-war movements (see
feminism) – the ‘politics of identity’ emerged
to mobilize new, and hitherto untheorized,
individual and collective possibilities. While
very different kinds of identity were examined
(from working-class to sexual and gendered
identities; from racial to generational identities), such analyses were determinedly committed, with a distinctively autobiographical,
reflexive and strategic charge. The dialogue
between identity and the ‘politics of location’
was to become key, especially within debates
of how affective investments in the idea of a
home(land) relate to the resources of history,
language and culture in the production of subjective and collective allegiance. Thus various
theorists (Gellner, 1983; Renan, 1990 [1882];
Balibar, 1991b; Hall, 1992a) explored the
ways in which identities relate to the (relatively
modern) invention of the nation, which they
invite us to read less as a political or territorial
site than as the particular expression of cultural
tradition; as an articulation of communal
belonging sustained as much by myths of origin
and homogeneity as it is by the supposed continuities of character, value and custom. From
this perspective, national identity is decisively
not a primordial gift of birth, nor even a coincidence of geographical location, but the willed
incorporation into an ‘imagined community’
(Anderson, 1991 [1983]), a fiction continually
formed and transformed by the narratives, and
counter-narratives, of its telling.
By the late 1980s, this account was given
fresh prominence with the explosion of postcolonial theory (see post-colonialism),
which sought, amongst other things, to deconstruct the unity of the sovereign self written
into European knowledge, theory and history.
If at one end of the spectrum modern Western
nations have produced stories of familial membership in order to negotiate internal contradictions (Matless, 1988; Cresswell, 1996) or
exercise forms of territorial expansion
(Daniels, 1993; Driver, 2001a), at the other
end conscious assertions of identity have been
mobilized as a strategy of resistance for those
dispossessed by the legacy of empire (Blunt
and McEwan, 2002). Yet – as in fantasies of
the ‘whole’ self of which Lacanian psychoanalysis speaks – this often releases a regressive
desire to reclaim the (lost) integrity of a ‘local’
or national particularity as a way of negotiating
the competing pressures of existent and emergent multiplicities. In this context, identity
means not only the aspiration to Selfhood,
but the assumption of a fictive Otherness.
Having no positive meaning, but positioned
within a field of differences, identity thus entails discursive work: the binding and marking
of symbolic boundaries, the defining of identity by what it produces as its negative excess
or ‘constitutive outside’. The crucial point,
however, is not simply that identity derives its
distinction from what it is not. More precariously, the ‘Other’ returns to breach the foreclosure that we prematurely call ‘identity’
(Butler, 1990).
365
IDEOLOGY
At present, processes of migration, transnationalism and diaspora place identity (or
the project of identification) firmly on the theoretical agenda. In the midst of such
mobilities – as much a geographical and historical reality as a theoretical benefit – new
spatial metaphors of the ‘out of place’ and
‘in-between’ render identity as a performance
of ambivalences, doublings and dissimulations. Various theories of the post-colonial
(Said, 2003 [1978]; Spivak, 1988; Bhabha,
1990a) have all sought a more complex, nonbinary mode of identity, replacing neat national and ethnic divisions with the more
fluid terms of ‘translation’, hybridity and
transgression, and using these as critical strategies for destabilizing the power, and polarities, of Western thought. As a countercurrent, however, the resurgence of neonationalisms (Eastern Europe post 1989), the
rise of religious absolutisms (from India, to the
Middle East to the USA) and a renewed rhetoric of civilizational differences (the image of a
‘clash of civilizations’) speak directly of an
anxiety at the core of our contemporary selves.
Indeed, if a hardening of identities is one
symptom of the contradictions of the local
and the global in postmodernity, from another perspective the national frame in which
people have conventionally positioned themselves has been eroded by a new social order in
which the homogenizing effects of global markets has reconfigured identity as a ready-tobuy, consumer option.
All of this charges identity with questions of
our present and future political and ethical
practice. While recognizing its fictive nature,
the disruption of conventional paradigms of
social experience and analysis (the nation,
ideology, gender, race, class) heralds different
possibilities of identification, placing new emphasis on subjective agency in its relational
negotiations and improvisations. At this
point, as Stuart Hall puts it, the question is
not about ‘who we are’ or ‘where we have
come from’ so much as ‘what we might become, how we have been represented and how
that bears on how we might represent ourselves’ (Hall and du Gay, 1996).
jd
Suggested reading
Duncan and Rattansi (1992).
ideology Ideology originally referred to a
‘science of ideas’, proposed by French rationalist philosophers at the end of the eighteenth
century. It is now more widely used to refer to
any system of beliefs held for more than purely
366
epistemic reasons. Some theories of ideology
are neutral when it comes to accounting for
the role of ideas and beliefs in social life.
Others involve normative claims about how
knowledge and belief function epistemologically to reproduce power-relations. In this second set of theories, ideology is understood as a
distorted, inverted, upside down or false view
of reality. In this usage, ideology is therefore
implicitly or explicitly counterposed to some
mode of knowing that sees reality in a true and
accurate way. The most influential source for
this second type of understanding is Marxism.
Despite never having been clearly worked
through in his own work, ideology is arguably
Marx’s most powerful bequest to modern social theory. In the German ideology of 1845,
Marx and Engels argued against idealist philosophies that saw ideas as the prime movers of
historical change (see idealism), asserting instead that ‘social being’ determined people’s
‘consciousness’. This is a basic axiom of materialist analysis (see historical materialism). They also argued that in class-divided
societies such as those of capitalism, the ruling ideas would be those of the ruling class,
since they owned and controlled the means for
producing and circulating the knowledge,
beliefs and values through which people
made sense of their own experiences. In
Marx’s early work, this ideological determination of people’s consciousness is theorized in
terms of the alienation of the working class,
who come to see social relations in inverted
form. The argument was subsequently later
reformulated as commodity fetishism. In 1867,
Marx argued in Capital that under generalized
capitalist commodity production, the social
dimensions of human labour and interaction
take on the appearance of free-standing objects, and commodities take on apparently
magical qualities independent from the labour
processes that produce them. Commodity
fetishism is a theory of how people come to
misrecognize reality through the medium of
distorted appearances. This kernel of a mature
theory of ideology was further refined in 1923
by György Lukács, in History and class consciousness, with the concept of reification,
whereby people appear to each other as things
rather than as active agents of historical processes, which he held to be a form of false
consciousness.
The epistemological understanding of ideology as a generalized system of misrecognition
in the interests of capitalist reproduction was
systematized into models of base and superstructure, in which economic processes are
IDEOLOGY
seen to be the prime movers shaping other
aspects of social formations, such as law, religion or general modes of consciousness. The
vast Marxist literature on ideology is beset by
the recourse to functional explanation (see
functionalism), drawing of loose analogies,
and imputing of structural isomorphisms between economic patterns and behaviour and
belief. It is not too strong to suggest that the
Marxist theory of ideology is ‘partly anecdotal,
partly functionalist, partly conspiratorial, and
partly magical’ (Elster, 1982a, p. 199).
Marxist theories of ideology share two features: a formal aspect, in which ideology is
understood to be a medium for the inversion
or obscuring of reality; and a content, in which
ideology is held to function in the interests of
particular classes, by presenting their particular interests as if they were the interests of all
classes. In both respects, there is a presumption that ideology is politically effective by
making social relations and historical processes appear natural, inevitable, objective or
a-historical. This is the strongest legacy of the
Marxist heritage of theories of ideology, which
lives on in a widespread assumption that
the task of critical social science is the exposure
of naturalized, de-historicized, objectified
appearances as historical products and social
constructs (see critical theory).
A recurrent theme in Western Marxism
from the 1920s onwards was how to understand the means by which capitalist exploitation was legitimized through the active
consent of those who were the main sources
of economic value and the primary victims of
injustice. The prevalence of this problem of
reproduction helps account for the flourishing
of Marxist cultural theory (Anderson, 1976).
The absence of widespread political upheaval
against capitalism was identified as a failure at
the level of culture, attributed to the operations of ideology. In short, sophisticated theories were developed to explain capitalist
reproduction on the assumption that ‘people
must have been got at’ (Sinfield, 1994, p. 22).
Some of Marxism’s most important contributions emerge from this explanation of capitalist reproduction as a problem of culture and
ideology. These include a shift away from focusing on false consciousness towards a consideration of the unconscious dynamics of
personality formation, in the work of Herbert
Marcuse for example; Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer’s seminal account of the culture industries; Antonio Gramsci’s account of
cultural hegemony; and V.N. Volosinov’s account of the inherently social qualities of the
linguistic sign. The development of Marxist
theories of ideology relied heavily on nonMarxist traditions such as psychoanalysis,
Weberian sociology and semiotics. For all the
sophistication of this tradition, it led to a curious ‘blindspot’ in Western Marxism, which
came to think of cultural media such as
radio, television or film primarily as ideological devices, neglecting to analyse these
practices as sources for the production and
distribution of surplus value (Smythe, 1978).
The nemesis of Marxist theories of ideology
came in the figure of the avowedly Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Combining Lacanian
psychoanalytic theory with Gramsci’s account
of hegemony, Althusser (1971) recast the concept of ideology in ways that still resonate in a
range of cultural theory. He argued that ideology was not something that people could be
liberated from, but was, rather, a constitutive
dimension of all social formations: ideology was
the mechanism through which individuals were
made into subjects. The formation of subjectivity worked through the practices embodied
in institutions such as churches, schools and
universities. These he called Ideological State
Apparatuses (ISAs). For Althusser, ideology
referred to the ‘representation of the imaginary
relationships to their real conditions of existence’. Imaginary in this formulation does not
mean false or unreal. It refers to the idea that
this relationship is always, necessarily, mediated
by way of images. In short, Althusser claimed
that misrecognition was the constitutive mechanism of subjectivity in all societies, not just
under capitalism; therefore it was not something that people could be liberated from.
Althusser’s account of ISAs laid the basis for
a generalized analysis of cultural practices in
terms of practices of subject-formation rather
than consciousness. The notion of ideological
subjectification in ISAs served as a crucial
way-station for the development of feminist
theories of subjectivity, psychoanalytical theories of sexuality, and for the eventual supervention of ‘ideology’ by concepts of discourse,
disciplinary power, governmentality and
other notions drawn from Michel Foucault’s
work (Barrett, 1991). The class content of
ideology that Althusser took for granted was
filled by other identities: ethnicity, gender,
race and sexuality. The assertion that subjectivity was formed in ISAs was instrumental to
the recognition that that struggles within civil
society were a crucial dimension of counterhegemonic political struggles (it also tended to
flatter academics’ sense of their own centrality
to these struggles).
367
IDIOGRAPHIC
The traces of Althusser’s account of ideology are still evident in theories of culture, discourse, governmentality and hegemony, even
if the concept of ideology is rarely used in a
strong analytical sense any more. There are
three such traces of ideology in cultural theory,
post-Marxism and post-structuralism: an emphasis on practices of subject-formation; an
emphasis on the cognitive dimensions of this
process, understood in terms of the naturalizing or de-historicizing of contingent relationships through the medium of representations;
and an emphasis on how macro-level processes of subordination, exploitation and
oppression are reproduced through this microlevel process of subject-formation. These
related conceptualizations are given a geographical inflection by analysing the ways in which
spatial forms (such as boundaries, scale relations or place identities) are inscribed in the
representations that are supposed to function
as mediums for subject-formation. The primary
emphasis of post-Marxist, post-structuralist theories of discourse and hegemony remains on the
ways in which people’s subjectivities are socially
constructed (see social construction). Human
geographers have largely ignored the more productive turn towards analysing ‘ideology’ in
terms of rhetoric, focusing on the relationships
between active, socially constructing human
subjects negotiating various argumentative dilemmas in everyday situations (Billig, 1996).
Marxist theories of ideology have not fared
well in recent social theory. Abercrombie, Hill
and Turner (1980) challenged the idea that
ideology was a crucial factor in the reproduction of capitalism, calling attention to the degree to which this assumption depended on a
functionalist view of society as a tightly integrated totality, whose parts contribute to the
better operation of the whole. Criticisms of
this sort have led to the revival of more neutral
accounts of ideology. Thompson (1990) defines ideology as any system of signification
that facilitates the pursuit of particular interests by a social group. Mann (1986) defines
ideology as one of four sources of social power
(along with economic, political and military
sources), involving the mobilization of values,
norms and rituals. In this sense, ideology is not
false, although it does involve holding beliefs
that surpass experience. These sorts of definitions see ideology in general as a ubiquitous
feature of human affairs, while particular
ideologies can be analysed for their practical
effects and normative implications. Nevertheless, all concepts of ideology remain dogged by
the problem that while it may be plausible to
368
assume that ideas are produced with certain
intentions to influence and effect people, it is
conceptually and empirically very difficult to
account for just how these intended purposes
actually come off successfully at all.
Theories of ideology, and their successors,
are faced with two fundamental limitations.
First, they emphasize the cognitive and epistemological dimensions of knowledge and belief, and assume that non-cognitive grounds
for belief are at least suspect, if not false.
This is an impoverished view of what it is to
be a functioning human being, and it leads to a
deeply problematic understanding of the politics of critique (Hanssen, 2000). Second, theories of ideology and their analogues face a
persistent problem in justifying and accounting for their own epistemological claims (see
epistemology). The persistence of modes of
‘ideological’ problematization in academic analysis might even be interpreted as a symptom
of scholasticism – the process by which the
untheorized conditions of separation, distanciation and detachment that enable academic
reflection are projected on to objects of critical
analysis (Bourdieu, 2000).
cb
Suggested reading
Barrett, (1991); Billig (1996); Eagleton (1991);
Thompson (1990).
idiographic Concerned with the unique and
the particular (cf. nomothetic). The term
originated at the end of the nineteenth century
when two German philosophers, Wilhelm
Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, made a
famous distinction between the idiographic
and the nomothetic sciences that, so they
claimed, entitled history (by virtue of its central concern with the unique) to be regarded as
radically different from other forms of intellectual enquiry (see kantianism). Their arguments were challenged by other philosophers,
but they made a forceful entry into geography
in the middle of the twentieth century through
the Hartshorne–Schaefer debate over exceptionalism, when traditional regional geography was seen – in parallel with history – as
essentially idiographic and not directed towards generalization. These claims were intensified during the quantitative revolution,
which was widely advertised as re-establishing
geography within the mainstream of the sciences as a nomothetic system of knowledge
‘after the lapse into ideography’ (Burton,
1963). The term is rarely used today, and the
idiographic/nomothetic binary has largely disappeared from most framings of geographical
IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES
enquiry, but the issues it signals continue to
animate geographers concerned with articulating theoretical claims with empirical particulars (see Burt, 2006).
dg
image ‘According to ancient etymology the
word image should be linked to the root imitari’ (Barthes, 1977). Thus we go to the heart
of a problem first posed in Pliny’s Naturalis
Historia, later refined by Renaissance aestheticians and subsequently up-ended by modernists and postmodernists alike. Is the image
(eikon) a particular kind of medium through
which the world is most persuasively relayed
to our understanding? Or is the image a
graphic language that ‘invisibly’ encodes
whole systems of value – a history, geography,
a morality, an epistemology? Whatever the
case, to consider the image is to be aware of
a trick of consciousness: an ability to see
something as ‘there’ and as ‘not there’ at the
same time; to appreciate that while the image
might duplicate reality, it is itself not ‘real’.
With the status of the mimetic challenged by
both the conceptualism of twentieth-century
Western art and the critical charge launched
by the textual or ‘cultural turn’ from the
mid-1970s onwards, the image is now most
commonly considered as a cultural encoding
of a particular kind: as visual mode that involves the intervention of language and thus
relies on those arbitrary, though conventionalized, signs to be accessed and read correctly. The image, in this sense, is what
displays itself most and hides itself
best. Accordingly, much contemporary geography (Daniels, 1993; Duncan and Duncan,
1992; Cosgrove, 1998 [1984]) has focused on
the ideological force and function of the
image; the ways in which by rooting itself in
the apparent obviousness of the visible, the
image effectively conceals the practices of
its making.
But the power of the image does not consist
merely in being a vehicle for interrogating
what it occludes or for interpreting the relationship between expressed visual content and
external or referential context. The image also
interprets us. It does so in the sense that our
attempts to understand the precepts and practices within we make our critical, political and
epistemological choices are organized by tacit
images, by a panoply of visual structures (e.g.
the photographic ‘freeze’, cinematic mobility,
digital malleability and its global relay)
through which we create our orders of time,
space and subjectivity (see film; vision and
visuality).
What emerges is a vast aggregate of things
that go by the name of the image, deputized
across a variety of methodologies, institutions
and disciplines. Thus while some contemporary geographers have been concerned with the
encoding and deciphering of pictorial or technological images (e.g. landscape painting or
photography), others have examined imagery
in its proper or literal sense (graphic or plastic
artefacts such as maps, diagrams, monuments
and buildings). More abstractly, geography
has considered various metaphorical extensions of the concept at work within literature
(the image as ornamented language in travelwriting, for example), epistemology (the image
as idea in the ‘eye of the mind’), physics (the
image in optical theory), psychoanalysis (the
image as dream, memory, fantasmata) and
even, conceivably, within the possibilities of
biotechnology (the genetic code-as-image).
While it is impossible for so many category
definitions to settle into comfortable coexistence, contemporary debates about the image
share a degree of critical consensus: a rejection
of truth as a matter of accurate imaging and an
understanding, instead, of its cultural significance, historical circumstance and its power
as epistemological constituent. All images,
whether visual, graphic, textual, perceptual or
psychic, are thus viewed as reflective mediations of objects, concepts and affects. Accordingly, all are disorderly and riddled with
error. The misconception, then, is to think
that we can know the truth about the world
by knowing the right images of it. But the
other misconception is to think that we can
know anything about the world without images. One need not favour the postmodern
conviction of reality as a depthless simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1983), nor want to oppose
such cynicism with a more corporeal and performative approach (see performativity), to
acknowledge that since the image is all we have
to work with, we need to regard it not only as a
site of semiotic or perceptual convention but as
a starting point for a dialogue with convention
that leads us to its limits. This includes investigating what might lie outside or beyond the
image, as well as thinking about the relation of
the image to the non-image, of vision to notseeing, to invisibility and even to blindness. jd
Suggested reading
Crary (1990b); Melville and Readings (1995);
Rose (2001).
imaginative geographies Representations
of other places – of peoples and landscapes,
369
IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES
cultures and ‘natures’ – that articulate the
desires, fantasies and fears of their authors
and the grids of power between them and
their ‘Others’. The concept is not confined to
ostensibly fictional works. On the contrary,
there is an important sense in which all geographies are imaginative: even the most formal,
geometric lattices of spatial science or the
most up-to-date and accurate maps are at
once abstractions and cultural constructions,
and as such open to critical readings.
The concept was originally proposed by the
Palestinian/American literary critic Edward
Said (1935–2003) in his influential critique
of orientalism (Said, 2003 [1978]; see
Gregory, 1995a). His emphasis on power
(and in particular colonial power) was alien
to the concepts of environmental perception and mental maps then current in behavioural geography, and underscored the
radical ‘non-innocence’ of representation.
In some measure, Said’s formulation anticipated ideas of situated knowledge: he was
concerned to disclose the privileges that
European and American authors typically
claimed when representing other cultures, to
chart the asymmetric grid of power within
which (as he put it) ‘the West’ watches, ‘the
East’ is watched, and hence to criticize the
partialities of their constructions.
Said’s emphasis on viewing, watching, looking, observing – on vision and visuality –
drew attention to the cultural construction of
the gaze. While Said’s critique of Orientalism
was shot through with visual metaphors, the
imaginative geographies with which he was
centrally concerned were textual. Human
geographers have been drawn to both the textual and the visual image, however, including
art forms such as film and photography
(Schwartz and Ryan, 2003), and they have
drawn attention to viewing as an embodied,
vitally sensuous practice (Martins, 2000). Unlike the other constructs of behavioural geography, therefore, none of these imaginative
geographies are seen as the product of purely
cognitive operations. As cultural constructs,
their images are animated by fantasy, desire
and the unconscious, and indeed the very
idea of an ‘imagination’ has been extended
through geographies indebted to various
forms of psychoanalytic theory (Pile,
1998). These images carry within them comparative valorizations – what Said called a
‘poetics of space’ – by means of which places
are endowed with ‘figurative value’. Such
constructions also involve a poetics (and a
politics) of nature, and there has been con370
siderable interest in recovering imaginative
geographies of other ‘natures’ as well as other
cultures. At the limit, these distinguish a ‘normal’, temperate nature from other, intemperate natures and install their own cultural
subtext about those who inhabit such ‘unnatural natures’ (Gregory, 1995b; Sioh, 1998; see
also tropicality).
Said claimed that these figurative values
enter not only into the production of ‘otherness’ but also into the identity-formation of
the viewing subject in a complex dialectic.
Imaginative geographies thus sustain images
of ‘home’ as well as ‘abroad’, ‘our space’ as
well as ‘their space’: ‘Imaginative geography
and history help the mind to intensify its own
sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and
difference between what is close to it and what
is far away’ (Said, 1978, p. 55). Hence Orford
(2003) showed that imaginative geographies
are regularly mobilized to separate the space
of ‘the international community’ from the
space of those facing security crises, so that
intervention is always after the event and constructed as selflessly humanitarian; she argues
that this separation is achieved through tactics
of localizing and distancing (‘their space’) that
work not only to legitimize the actions of the
global North as so many virtuous efforts to
find a solution, but also in many cases to obscure the active involvement of its international actors in the generation of the crisis.
Similarly, Graham (2006) contrasts the imaginative geographies that have been used to
separate homeland cities from ‘terror’, ‘target’ or Arab cities during the ‘war on terror’,
even as they are also being integrated through
techno-science ‘into a single, transnational
battlespace’. Studies like these show why
Gregory (2004b, p. 256) concludes that ‘imaginative geographies are doubled spaces of
articulation’ whose ‘inconstant topologies are
mappings of connective dissonance in which
connections are elaborated in some registers
even as they are disavowed in others’.
‘Dramatization’ is not the same as ‘falsification’, however, and Said’s discussion undercuts the distinction between ‘real’ and
‘perceived’ worlds on which behavioural geography depended. This is the most complicated
and contentious part of Said’s argument.
There are certainly passages where he contrasted what he called ‘positive geographies’
with imaginative geographies produced under
the sign of Orientalism. And yet, if imaginative
geographies are ‘fictions’ in the original Latin
sense of fictio – something made, something
fabricated – this does not mean that they are
IMMIGRATION
necessarily without concreteness, substance
and, indeed, ‘reality’. On the contrary, imaginative geographies circulate in material
forms (including novels, paintings, photographs and film; intelligence reports, academic
geographies and popular travel writing; and
collections and exhibitions) which become
sedimented over time to form an internally
structured and, crucially, self-reinforcing archive. This supplies a ‘citationary structure’ for
subsequent accounts that is also in some substantial sense performative: it shapes and
legitimizes the attitudes and dispositions, policies and practices of its collective audience, so
that in this way imaginative geographies spiral
into and out of a sort of cultural paradigm of
‘otherness’ that has the most acutely material
consequences.
Imaginative geographies thus act to both
legitimize and produce ‘worlds’. The circulation and sedimentation of imaginative geographies produces a sense of ‘facticity’ and
hence of authority: the repetition of the same
motifs becomes a taken-for-granted citation of
Truth (Vanderbeck, 2006). In some cases, imaginative geographies work to domesticate
other spaces and hence validate (for example)
colonial dispossession: thus Carter’s (1987)
project of an avowedly spatial history showed
how the landscape of australia was brought
within the horizon of European intelligibility
through a series of explicitly textual and cartographic practices. In other cases imaginative
geographies articulate spaces of (radical) difference, but here too, through their implication in systems of power and practice, they
may be read as so many performances of
space. Thus Gregory (2004b) distinguished
three strategies put to work during the ‘war
on terror’ to bring ‘the enemy’ into view within
three different spaces: reduced to targets in the
coordinates and pixels of an abstract, geometric space; reduced to barbarians attacking the
gates of civilization from a wild, savage
space; and reduced to the inhuman, lodged
in a paradoxical space of exception (see exception, space of) wherein their deaths were of
no consequence (see also terrorism).
Strategy
Locating
Inverting
Excepting
Register
Space
Techno-cultural
Cultural–political
Politico-legal
Abstract, geometric
Wild, savage
Paradoxical,
topological
Seen thus, imaginative geographies are
spaces of constructed (in)visibility and it is
this partiality that implicates them in the play
of power.
In response, imaginative counter-geographies
are deliberate attempts to displace, subvert and
contest the imaginative geographies installed by
dominant regimes of power, practice and representation. Usually produced from within the targets of representation, they seek to give voice and
vision to their subjects and to undo the separations between ‘our space’ and ‘their space’: thus
‘the empire writes back’ and ‘the subaltern
speaks’ to undermine the impositions of imperialism and subalternity (Slater, 1999: see subaltern studies). Testimonies of this sort have a
long history, but today they frequently use socalled ‘new media’ to produce new publics:
hence Gregory (2009c) explores blogs from
Baghdad whose counter-geographies of everyday life contest US political and military imaginaries of Arab cities.
dg
Suggested reading
Driver (2005); Gregory (1995a); Said (2003
[1978, pp. 49–73]).
immigration A form of migration that occurs when people move from one nation-state
to another. Immigrants change their permanent dwelling place and are therefore distinct
from sojourners, who relocate temporarily, usually for employment-related reasons; immigrants also move voluntarily and are therefore
distinct from refugees, who are forced to
leave their homes because of persecution.
When immigrants settle in a new country
without the knowledge and approval of the
government in power, they are called ‘undocumented’, ‘illegal’ or ‘unauthorized’ immigrants. Millions of people immigrate each
year, and this form of migration is one of the
most significant causes of social change in the
world today (Clark, 1986; Sassen, 1996).
There have been several episodes of mass
migration in history, but the decades following
the Second World War have seen the largest
population movements of all time. Immigration, in the sense in which the term is used
today, began after the creation of nation-states
and, until recently, was closely associated with
colonization (cf. colonialism). For example,
British subjects migrated to the colonies and
created settler societies; after colonies gained
independence, this movement continued in
the form of immigration. Others, at first
mainly from European countries, joined them
and many former colonies, such as Australia,
Canada and the USA, consider themselves
‘immigrant societies’ in the sense that the
371
IMMIGRATION
overwhelming majority of their citizens are
either immigrants themselves or the descendents of immigrants. Until recently, virtually
all immigrants migrated towards what they
believed to be greater economic opportunities.
These historic patterns have changed in the
past twenty-five years, in two key ways. First,
both source and destination regions have
multiplied, and immigration now is more
global in scope than at any time in the past
(Castles and Miller, 2003). Second, in marked
contrast to past periods, a small but highly
significant number of today’s immigrants are
wealthy. These ‘designer immigrants’ are especially concerned with political issues (i.e.
stability) and lifestyle. They are sought by
many countries for their entrepreneurial skill
and capital, and have significantly changed the
way in which immigrants are perceived in the
places in which they settle (Skeldon, 1994;
Mitchell, 2004a).
According to the influential report of the
UN Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM, 2005), there are nearly 200
million people in the world who have been
living, for at least one year, outside their country of birth, which translates to roughly 3 per
cent of the global population. According to the
GCIM (p. 2), ‘The Commission concludes
that the international community has failed
to capitalize on the opportunities and to meet
the challenges associated with international
migration.’ In particular, the GCIM concluded that the reception policies of destination countries do not enable immigrants to
integrate efficiently.
Immigrants, wherever they settle, are usually culturally different from their receiving
societies. Often, they are ‘visible minorities’
(i.e. of a different skin colour than the dominant population). The reception of immigrants
varies widely between countries, but three
types of responses are typical: isolation,
assimilation and pluralism. Some societies
believe that immigrants are necessary to fulfil
certain functions – for example, when they
face labour shortages – but that they should
remain separate from the dominant population and, ideally, leave when no longer
needed. This was the case, for example, in
many Western countries in the period following the Second World War, and it is true of
countries such as Japan and Singapore today
(Yeoh, 2006). Countries that ascribe to this
view make it difficult for immigrants to acquire
full legal rights and, especially, citizenship.
Others, such as France and, to a more limited
extent, the USA, expect immigrants to
372
conform, or assimilate, to a predefined
national culture. In this case, full legal rights
and citizenship are often granted in stages, in
step with the assimilation process. Finally, a
few countries, notably Australia and Canada,
have enacted legislation enshrining the concept of multiculturalism, a policy that fosters the coexistence of many forms of cultural
expression. These countries typically allow
immigrants to become citizens quickly and,
acknowledging the complexities of identity,
allow individuals to hold dual or multiple
legal citizenship(s). Note, though, that the
differences between these policies are easily
overstated, and that countries rarely follow
single immigration policies that are applied to
all groups equally. Also, recall that the GCIM
has concluded, generally, that reception
policies are inadequate.
Traditionally, immigration has been analysed in straightforward terms as a push–pull
process: people leave a country to escape
problems, such as poverty or political conflict, and are drawn to particular places that
offer them a better life. In this conception,
people are treated as rational individuals who
are willing to cast aside their old identities and
loyalties and embrace new ones if they believe
it is to their advantage. Settlement is seen as a
unidirectional, progressive process, where immigrants eventually become indistinguishable
from the society that receives them – they
become assimilated. This interpretation arose
out of the research of the chicago school in
the early twentieth century and continues to
affect immigration research. However, recent
work, drawing on different understandings of
history, culture and identity, offers an alternate
perspective. First, migration is seen as a collective process that occurs sequentially and in
both directions. Immigrants rarely sever the
links between their previous and present
places and social contacts, and life in the new
country is linked to life in the old (cf. chain
migration). As a result, immigrant culture
becomes a mélange of practices, and identities
are in flux rather than fixed, or in an inexorable progression from old to new. More and
more, immigration studies are adopting the
view of cultures as diasporic – as scattered,
but connected across vast distances. This realization has led to the concept of transnationalism, the idea that many people live in
societies that stretch across – and perhaps
even transcend – national boundaries (see
Appadurai, 1996; Van Hear, 1998).
These new understandings of the immigration process are particularly salient given the
IMPERIALISM
importance of immigrants in (re)defining
contemporary economic, political and cultural systems. For example, non-white people
are about to become the majority of the
population in the state of California, the
first time in history where a white society
has voluntarily become a minority in a territory under its control (Maharidge, 1996).
Similar cultural transformations are occurring
in large cities throughout the Western world,
which are becoming more multi-ethnic and
polyglot than ever before (e.g. nearly 200
languages are spoken in the area served by
the municipal government of Toronto).
There are few studies of the cultural dynamics of living in multi-ethnic cities (though see
Jacobs, 1996; Germain, 1997), but it is clear
that these new contexts raise fundamental
questions about the meaning of equity, public
participation, and even citizenship itself
(Jacobson, 1996).
dh
Suggested reading
Castles and Miller (2003); Global Commission
on International Migration (GCIM) (2005);
Richmond (1994); Segal (1993).
imperialism An unequal human and territorial relationship, usually in the form of an
empire, based on ideas of superiority and
practices of dominance, and involving the
extension of authority and control of one
state or people over another. Derived from
the Latin word imperium (‘sovereign authority’), imperialism is closely affiliated with
colonialism. Both are intrinsically geographical – and traumatic – processes of expropriation, in which people, wealth, resources
and decision-making power are relocated
from distant lands and peoples to a metropolitan centre and elite (through a mixture of
exploration, conquest, trade, resource extraction, settlement, rule and representation),
although the latter differs from the former in
terms of the intensity and materiality of its
focus on dispossession. ‘Imperial’ is used to
denote attitudes and practices of dominance
befitting an empire.
The term was originally used in the second
half of the nineteenth century to describe a
state-centred ethos of territorial expansion –
epitomized by the imperial partition of Africa
between 1885 and 1914 – that involved both
aggressive national competition for prestige
and a more general rationalization of imperialism as a ‘civilizing mission’. This era of
‘classical imperialism’ drew old and new imperial powers (Britain, France, Portugal and
Belgium; Germany, Italy, Japan and the USA)
into an expanding and volatile capitalist world
system, and two world wars that precipitated
the swift disintegration of the sprawling
colonial empires that had been built over the
previous four centuries (Baumgart, 1982; cf.
decolonization). Geography – as both a discipline and wider discourse - forged an intimate relationship with imperialism during this
period (cf. geography, history of). Projects
of exploration and mapping, geopolitical
models and climatic arguments for European
superiority and racial difference played especially important imperial roles (Bell, Butlin and
Heffernan, 1995; cf. climate; heartland).
Yet the idea and practice of imperialism has
a longer history, and attempts have been made
to explain it in more systematic terms. It has
been traced back to Antiquity and into what
David Harvey (2003b) has called ‘the new
imperialism’ (or ‘neo-imperialism’) currently
being expedited through American military
and economic overlordship (especially in the
Middle East), and justified as a ‘war on terror’.
The Romans left some important imperial
precedents, such as the imperative to legitimize colonization by recourse to divine or
secular law. However, a series of advances –
initially in navigation and military technology,
and then in commerce, administration and
methods of knowledge production – helped
European powers to create overseas empires
on a scale never imagined or deemed feasible
before; and recent work on imperialism emphasizes how the imperial prerogative of the
West (and especially the USA: see american
empire) now resides in the power to circumvent international institutions and law (see,
e.g., exception, space of) and thus in some
measure leave behind the moral and political
legacy of Rome.
Critical approaches to imperialism emphasize its innately exploitative and dehumanizing
nature (evidenced, for instance, by slavery),
and – at the risk of oversimplification – have
come in three main forms and phases. First,
and beginning with the early-twentiethcentury work of J.A. Hobson, V.I. Lenin and
Joseph Schumpeter, imperialism has been
analysed in economic and political terms – as
central to the evolution of capitalism and
the nation-state. A large historical and geographical literature seeks to account for the
specificity of imperial power, and examines
how different phases of capitalist accumulation (mercantile, industrial, monopoly) have
been connected to different forms of imperialism (maritime and land-based, formal and
373
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
informal) and cycles of global dominance
(Blaut, 1993; Taylor, 1996; Abernethy, 2000:
cf. world systems theory). Monocausal,
teleological and diffusionist explanations
(including Marxist ones) of the West’s rise to
global dominance – encompassing 85 per cent
of the Earth’s surface at its 1920s peak – have
been discredited in historical terms but remain
culturally and politically resilient, not least
in ‘end of history’ scenarios that see liberal
capitalism as the high point and terminus of
human progress (cf. neo-liberalism).
Second, since the 1980s, imperialism has
been studied as a discourse – or grammar –
of domination fuelled by images, narratives
and representations, and shaped by categories
of gender, sexuality, race, nation and religion, as well as capital and class. Critical
energies are focused on the potency of binary
and essentialist thinking – us/them and self/
other stereotypes, such as the opposition between civilization and savagery – and the ways
in which Western knowledge effects and secures empire and dispossession by denigrating
indigenous knowledges and representing the
Earth as the imperialist’s rightful inheritance.
Edward Said’s work on orientalism, and how
imperialism works as a multi-faceted ‘struggle
over geography’, has been particularly influential in spurring interdisciplinary interest in the
culturally and spatially constructed nature of
Western knowledge about the ‘Other’ (Said,
1993, p. 7). While geographers have paid
close attention to how a range of geographical
ideas, practices and texts might be conceived
as imperial discourses, they have warned
against reducing imperialism to discourse,
and insist on the need to materially ground
understanding of imperialism’s operations
(Lester, 2000; cf. post-colonialism).
A third approach – and one currently making great headway in history and geography –
is concerned with the locational basis of imperialism. It mobilizes web and network concepts to redress the residual Eurocentrism and
metro-centrism (and textualism and abstraction) of much writing on imperial/colonial
discourses, and guards against portraying imperialism as either rigidly hierarchical, or all
seeing and knowing. Stemming from older
historical debates about the ways and extent
to which actions and policies emanating from
the imperial core were shaped by peripheral/
colonial events and pressures, this ‘imperial
networks’ approach treats metropole and
colony as mutually constitutive (rather than
separate and isolated) entities, and breaks
down the strict equation of imperialism with
374
the centre/core and colonialism with the
periphery/margin. This literature examines
the variegated, shifting and unstable make-up
of different imperial and colonial projects, and
how multiple forms of affinity, difference,
asymmetry and inequality became mapped
across nation and empire. Imperialism can
thus be seen as both unitary and highly differentiated (Lester, 2001). However, questions
can be raised about how adequately this literature addresses questions of power.
dcl
Suggested reading
Lambert and Lester (2006); Said (1993); Taylor
and Flint (2000); Wolfe (2004).
indigenous knowledge This term represents the understandings thought to be embedded within indigenous communities (see also
aboriginality), and usually posed against
universalized, Western, scientific knowledge.
While indigenous knowledge was regarded
as a traditionalist or backward-looking barrier
to effective development in the period
immediately following the ‘development decade’, more recently the idea of indigenous
knowledge as an alternative to increasingly
discredited scientific social management and
developmentalism has gained significant
credibility as a way out of the ‘development
impasse’. The valorization of indigenous
knowledge represents a shift away from privileging the knowledge of ‘development experts’
towards the voices and experiences of the inhabitants of the global South, at whom development is usually projected, ‘listening seriously
to what the rural poor have to say, learning
from them and respecting their realities and
priorities’ (Briggs, 2005, p. 100). Interest in
indigenous knowledge is most often traced
back to Chambers’ (1983) challenge to put
the last first, but there are also clear affinities
with the post-colonial focus on power/
knowledge. post-development writers see indigenous alternatives as offering the only real
possibilities for progressive change for the
majority world. For instance, Escobar (1995,
p. 98) suggests that the ‘remaking of development must start by examining local constructions, to the extent that they are the life and
history of the people, that is, the conditions for
and of change’.
Until recently, the literature on indigenous
knowledge has tended to suggest a binary
between scientific and indigenous knowledge,
seeing science as a groundless set of ideas,
and ignoring the hybrid forms combining
various scientific and local knowledges that
INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT
emerge in the actual practice of everyday life
(Agrawal, 1995). For others, the idea of indigenous knowledge as a singular concept ignores the multiplicity and power relations
inherent in any community, and is particularly
problematic in terms of gender relations. This
has led some to talk in terms of local knowledges (Briggs, 2005). Furthermore, a focus
on knowledge can turn attention away from
the material matters of development and exploitation, or the fact that while some might
have knowledge, it is not always possible for
them to act on it (Jewitt, 2002). Finally, some
commentators have suggested caution, because the recent adoption of indigenous knowledge by development agencies such as the
World Bank, while on the surface a positive
move, is most often uncritical and tokenistic.
In such cases, indigenous knowledge (often
reduced to the singular label ‘IK’) is expected
to be added to already existing knowledges
and practices, rather than being allowed to
offer a more fundamental challenge to the
epistemologies of conventional development
approaches (see Briggs and Sharp, 2004). jsh
Suggested reading
Agrawal (1995); Briggs (2005).
indistinction, zone of A space in which
nominally opposing categories not only become blurred (‘indistinct’) but also actively
bleed into one another (cf. third space).
This topological figure animates key claims in
the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben,
which have attracted considerable attention in
cultural, social and political geography.
Agamben’s formulation of the space of exception (see exception, space of) identifies a
space in which exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, violence and law ‘enter into a
zone of irreducible indistinction’ where each
passes over into the other (1998, pp. 9, 32).
The basis for this, he argues, is the process
through which bare life is both excluded from
and captured within the political order and, in
its most radical form, the process through
which sovereign power uses the law to suspend the legal (or juridical) order (1998,
pp. 18–19). Agamben argues that the exception has now become generalized to the point
at which it threatens to become the norm:
‘The ‘‘juridically empty’’ space of the state of
exception . . . [transgresses] its spatiotemporal
boundaries and now, overflowing outside
them, is starting to coincide with the normal
order in which everything again becomes possible’ (p. 38). Whatever one makes of such a
general claim, there is compelling evidence for
the multiplication of particular zones of indistinction: thus, for example, Gregory (2004b,
pp. 122–36) traces the ways in which the
Israeli occupation of Palestine has involved
the calculated proliferation of zones of indistinction, while Gandy (2006b) suggests that
zones of indistinction have become characteristic of a late-modern ‘anti-biotic urbanism’
that is producing new modes of exclusion. dg
induction A form of reasoning that moves
from the specific to the general, usually
deploying information/knowledge from a
small number of (possible non-representative:
cf. sampling) cases to develop general laws.
Inductive reasoning is usually contrasted
with deductive logics. (See also abduction;
deduction.)
rj
Suggested reading
Harvey (1969).
industrial district A term developed to capture the local geography, institutional density
and interlinked connectivity of productive
(agro-industrial, manufacturing financial and
services) activities. The common reference
point is the foundational work of Alfred
Marshall in his Principles of economics (1919),
in which he referred to industrial districts as
‘the concentration of specialized industries in
particular localities’ (see locality). In its contemporary usage, the most telling property of
industrial districts turn on the dynamics of
close internal (intra-district) linkages based
on horizontal and vertical dis-integration
and the operations of particular customary
norms and taken-for-granted rules and routines that collectively bind together firms and
simultaneously provide the productive infrastructure of the district.
Marshall coined the term in an account of
the Sheffield cutlery and specialized steel industry and the south-east Lancashire cotton
textiles sector. He noted distinctive characteristics of the localities, what he called the
‘industrial atmosphere’, which collectively
provided a sort of industrial hothouse with a
highly competitive economic momentum.
Some of the key characteristics noted by
Marshall, and subsequently elaborated by
others (Scott, 1988c; Amin and Thrift, 1992)
included: a business structure dominated by
small, locally owned firms; limited scale economies; intra-district trade among buyers and
suppliers; long-term contracts and commitments between local buyers and suppliers;
375
INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY
a highly flexible labour market, internal to
the district; a unique local cultural identity;
specialized sources of finance, technical expertise and business services available within the
district outside of firms; limited co-operation
or linkage with firms external to the district;
investment decisions made locally; labour inmigration, with lower levels of out-migration;
and worker commitment to districts rather
than to firms.
A contemporary example of an industrial
district is ‘motor sport valley’ in the UK, a
cluster of firms in mid-Oxfordshire in and
through which has developed the world’s
major agglomeration of Formula 1 and Indy
car engineering (see Henry and Pinch, 1997).
This region is a community of knowledge sustained by and expanding through the rapid
production, application and dissemination of
knowledge (through observation, gossip, rumour and direct and indirect contact) among
and between a network of highly secretive
small and medium-size enterprises. High
rates of new firm formation and knowledge
transmission through a mobile workforce
with a small area (a 160 km long narrow crescent, 60 km north and west of London) rests
on a knowledge pool and has created a ‘constant learning trajectory’ (Henry and Pinch,
1997, p. 7). Integral to the district is a socially
and industrially created matrix of firms.
Motor sport valley is an illustration of new
industrial spaces (Scott, 1988), such as the
Third Italy and Orange Country, California,
through which the transmission of impulses
around integrated and interdependent firms
is both effective and flexible (hence the
Marshallian argument that locality exercises a
powerful influence upon productive dynamism: see Storper and Scott, 1989). In these
sorts of districts, other characteristics not anticipated by Marshall are specially important,
including a high incidence of exchanges of
personnel between customers and suppliers;
intense co-operation among competitor firms
to share risk, and to stabilize market share and
market instability; a collaborative system of
local innovation; a disproportionate share of
workers engaged in design and innovation;
robust trade associations providing management training, marketing, technical or financial help; and, last but not least, a strong local
government role in regulating and promoting
core industries. This argument is compelling
in its spatiality. Geography is central, in
other words, to the ‘untraded interdependencies’ and conventions that provide the ether in
which industrial districts flourish (Storper and
376
Salais, 1997). Amin and Thrift (1992) argue
relatedly that while place constitutes social
and economic practice in the City of London
and Santa Croce in Tuscany, the way in which
this constitution takes place is itself shaped by
geographical requirements of social practice.
The localization of economic geographies is
not an autonomous or independent influence
on productive spaces, but is also shaped by the
geographical demands of increasingly global
economic geographies. One of the conditions
of existence of such geographies is the presence of a place or centre to act as a site of
representation (a centre of authority), interaction (a centre of sociability) and as a means
of making sense of data and information
(a centre of discourse). In short, industrial
districts are doubly geographical: both required for and constitutive of social practice.
The industrial district is not restricted to
manufacturing and financial services, but has
also been productively deployed as a way of
describing the globalization of agriculture
and the changing geography associated with
what has been called ‘high-value agriculture’.
commodity chain analysis has provided a
powerful optic through which one can explore
the emergence of key agro-industrial nodes, in
which many of the properties described in the
Third Italy or the Silicon Valley can be seen in
the agro-export region of the Sao Francisco
valley of Brazil or the wine-producing terroires
of France (see Goodman and Watts, 1997).
Here, the intersection of local specialized
knowledge (often with a deep, if modernized,
history), commercial and customary conventions pertaining to inter-firm interdependence
(between growers, buyers, shipper and processors), and various forms of linkages to banking
and the local state provide for similar forms of
industrial dynamism, often draped in the cultural language of attachment to the land. The
rise of the organic industry provides simply one
way in which these agricultural districts are
made and remade by shifts in, and as responses
to, industrial agriculture (Guthman, 2004).
(See also agricultural geography.) rl/mw
industrial geography A sub-branch of economic geography concerned with describing
and explaining the spaces, places and geographical circulation of industry. Interest in
the discipline emerged in the early twentieth
century, driven partly by theoretical arguments developed in economics. The history
of industrial geography has been punctuated
by moments of illuminating theory and novel
INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY
methods, but the disciplinary norm tended to
meticulous, empirically descriptive case studies of one firm, industry or industrial region or
another. Iconic male-dominated industries
such as sawmilling, iron and steel, and automobile assembly were the primary subjectmatter; the field was thus marked by
masculinism, reflecting the gender of the
discipline’s practitioners and their substantive
interests (a version of ‘toys for boys’), and
generally uncritical methods.
In 1910, economic geographer George
Chisholm drew upon the German location
theorist Alfred Weber to explain ‘the seats of
industry’. In the late 1950s and much of the
1960s, industrial geographers rediscovered
Weber and other members of the German
location school (see location theory), and
turned to neoclassical economic theories of
rational choice and maximizing behaviour
(Smith, 1981a [1971]) to explain industrial
location. Propelling this disciplinary intellectual move was a combination of the quantitative revolution in human geography, which
emphasized the importance of rigour and
abstraction, and the influence of regional
science, which applied neoclassical theory to
the space-economy, including to the optimal
location of industry (Isard, 1956). However,
even at the time, it was unclear exactly how
many industrial geographers were convinced
of the need for this more formal theorization,
and most of the practitioners lacked the necessary skill set to apply it. Within a decade,
neoclassical formalism was criticized by: (1) a
behavioural approach (following economists
such as Herbert Simon), which stressed suboptimal outcomes (‘satisficing’) rather than
maximization (Pred, 1967, 1969: see decisionmaking); and (2) an institutional approach –
known initially as the ‘geography of enterprise’
and later ‘corporate geography’ – which treated
the firm as a complex entity, like an organism,
that evolved, adapted and struggled in a larger
competitive setting, was often not rational, and
whose inner workings defied formalization
(McNee, 1960).
The high-water mark of the field was from
the late 1970s to the end of the 1980s, when
disciplinary intellectual ferment matched ferment on the ground. Not only was the intellectual environment changing, so too was the
very object of investigation. It was then that
seemingly entrenched Western industrial regions were beset by gales of deindustrialization, industrial restructuring and corporate
hollowing-out, which both destroyed and created anew. Hitherto bread-and-butter indus-
tries of Western economies, such as iron and
steel, shipbuilding and textile manufacturing,
were subject to severe economic trauma as
firms went bankrupt, moved offshore, or
turned lean and mean. Millions of traditional
manufacturing jobs were lost.
Events on the ground produced new theory
and new methods in industrial geography, and
even began to challenge the discipline’s masculinism. Scholars began to turn to radical
geography. In the UK, Doreen Massey’s
watershed book, Spatial divisions of labour
(1984), provided original theoretical explanation and trenchant empirical analysis: in
the USA, Allen Scott’s (1988b) transactions
costs approach to the firm was the exemplar.
Both resulted in impressive empirical work:
Massey’s led to the British locality project
(Cooke, 1989), and Scott’s to case studies
based in California, especially on the vibrant
high-tech and film industries. Both bodies of
work were influenced by political economy,
as well as a new methodological sensibility,
critical realism (especially true in the UK,
where critical realism became the unofficial
methodology of the discipline). Codified
and circulated primarily by Andrew Sayer
(1992 [1984]), critical realism suggested industrial geography proceed methodologically
by ‘intensive’, on-the-ground, case studies of
specific industries and their geographical sites.
Not everyone accepted ‘critical realism’,
however, with critics complaining it was only
another version of the old disciplinary sin
of empiricism and was producing geographically parochial studies. Moreover, there was
also an underlying clash between the UK
version of industrial geography emphasizing
capitalism’s decline and fall, and the US (Californian) version highlighting capitalism’s vitality. However, the UK and US versions came
together in the late 1980s through regulation
theory, and which set the sub-disciplinary
intellectual agenda for the following decade.
Developed to explain why capitalism survived
in spite of Marx’s best prediction of its
demise, regulation theory introduced ideas of
fordist and post-fordist (see also flexible
accumulation) modes of production, and the
fraught transition between them. What the
distinction made clear was that while British
industrial geographers had been documenting
the disintegration of an older Fordist industry,
US industrial geographers had been examining the formation of a brand new one, postFordism. They were different sides of the
same Janus face of industrial capitalism
(Tickell and Peck, 1992).
377
INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION
In unpacking the geographical character of
post-Fordism during the 1990s, industrial
geographers rediscovered the idea of an industrial district, the propensity of firms in the
same sector to cluster spatially, and to be
tightly interlinked (and first recognized by
the early-twentieth-century English economist
Alfred Marshall). In turn, that idea was joined
to ‘embeddedness’, a concept associated with
the economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi, implying an inseparable relation between the
economic and the sociocultural. It was precisely this inseparability, argued industrial
geographers, that characterized and accounted
for the success of post-Fordist industrial districts such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the
Third Italy and Baden-Württemberg. They
flourished because their firms were so closely
embedded within the cultural institutions, relations and forms of life found in those places
(Amin, 2000: see also cultural economy).
An interest in globalization has recently
defined the field, with investigations into
both new geographical patterns of production
and new forms of industrial organization that
make them possible. Peter Dicken’s Global
shift (2007) is the exemplary text (first published in 1988, and now in its fifth edition).
The reverse side of deindustrialization has
been, and continues to be ever more so, rampant industrialization in the global South: certainly the post-1979 market reforms in China,
but also in India, South East Asia, Central and
South America and Mexico (Dicken, 2007).
Industrial geography is conceptually still
coming to grips with the enormous task of
representing, analysing and explaining the
fundamental industrial spatial transformation
that is occurring. A novel conceptual vocabulary and theoretical framework is being forged,
as well as new methods, which have included
commodity chain analysis, global networks,
actor-network theory, the analytics of
transnational corporations and global ethnography. All have contributed, but industrial geography remains a work in progress, as
is its object of enquiry.
tb
Suggested reading
Dicken (2007).
industrial organization Do a small number
of large firms (oligopoly) or a large number
of small firms dominate an industry? Why is
this and what difference does it make for industrial geography, corporate behaviour, and
economic and social outcomes? These are the
questions of industrial organization. Oligopoly
378
may arise from such factors as economies of
scale or collusion. The result may be spatial
concentration, high profits and high wages.
Competitive industries may be geographically
dispersed, labour-intensive, low-margin and
low-waged. Industrial organization may
change due, for example, to technological
shifts or the internationalization of markets.
Understanding its causes and consequences
illuminates the economic landscape.
esch
industrial revolution A transformation in
the forces of production, centring on but not
confined to the circuit of industrial capital (see
capitalism). Generally attributed to Blanqui
(1837), but popularized in Britain by Arnold
Toynbee, the term originally applied to a set of
dramatic changes occurring in the British
economy c.1760–1840, when the old economic order was ‘suddenly broken to pieces
by the mighty blows of the steam engine and
the
power
loom’
(Toynbee,
1884).
Subsequent analyses identified British ‘industrial revolutions’ both earlier (in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries) and later (towards
the end of the nineteenth century), while the
term has also been invoked to describe
changes taking place across Western Europe
and North America in the nineteenth century.
This questions the unique nature of the classic
industrial revolution, portraying it as simply
another peak on the long-term waves of innovation and development (see Hudson, 1992:
cf. kondratieff cycles). The gradualist
perspective is reinforced by ideas of protoindustrialization and by econometric studies. The former emphasize the continuities
between modern factory-based manufacturing
and earlier systems of domestic production;
while the latter highlight the growth of industry
earlier in the eighteenth century, and question
the extent and pace of structural change in the
British economy before 1840. On top of these,
models of dual economies – which counterpoise a small technologically dynamic sector
with a much larger traditional sector – have
further qualified the revolutionary nature of
change.
As with other aspects of modernization,
industrialization was temporally and spatially
uneven: there were periodic crises of capital
accumulation and circulation, and an increasingly heterogeneous space-economy. Different products and production systems were
increasingly associated with particular parts
of the country, creating a new regional geography that was based on industrial specialization (see Langton, 1984; Langton and Morris,
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
1987; Hudson, 1989). There were many different routes to industrialization: in its timing,
causes and manifestation, the industrial revolution varied from place to place. Much emphasis has been placed on the availability of
raw materials (particularly coal) in determining both the course and geography of industrialization (Langton, 1979; Wrigley, 1988).
Linked to this is the role of transport in facilitating the exploitation of mineral resources,
integrating regional economies and thus promoting industrial growth. More recent analyses have highlighted the importance of a
range of sociocultural factors in which economic processes were embedded (see cultural turn). These influenced access to
credit and capital, determined labour mobility
and discipline, and shaped attitudes to entrepreneurship (Gregory, 1990). Linked to this,
neo-institutional approaches have stressed
the role of networks (of people, credit, information and towns) in effectively integrating
regional economies and in shaping the industrialization process (Wilson and Popp, 2003;
Stobart, 2004). Ultimately, sustained development was contingent on the establishment of a
critical mass of interdependent industries, services, infrastructures and communications.
The varied composition of such industrial
complexes and the different production systems on which they were based, led to regional
variations in the experience of industrialization. Indeed, Langton (1984) argues that as
regional economies became ‘more specialized,
more differentiated from each other and more
internally unified’, they found expression in
coherent regional cultures. Others, though,
have highlighted the varied nature of production systems, work practices, and social and
cultural identities within regions: most were
characterized by a symbiotic relationship
between factory- and domestic or workshopbased production (Berg, 1994). Recent critiques argue that these debates are too narrow
in their focus, ignoring non-industrial forms
of capitalism and the wider global/imperial
context of industrialization. Most influential
is the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ thesis which,
in broadening the geographical bounds of
analysis, argues that Britain’s economy and
overseas policy were driven not by the growth
and needs of industrial capitalism, but by
landed, mercantile and financial interests
(Cain and Hopkins, 2001). Historical geographers have yet to engage fully in these
debates, however: largely inspired by postcolonialism, work on empire has had little
to say about economic processes and the
global geographies of nineteenth-century
British industrialization.
For individuals and communities, as well
as for regions and nations, the industrial
revolution had profound social and cultural
repercussions (Berg and Hudson, 1992).
Experiences of work were transformed as
production was centralized and control was
removed from the individual. Resistance to
such change was occasionally dramatic, surfacing in a variety of protests across industrializing districts that often targeted new
labour-saving machinery (Gregory, 1982,
1990; Hudson, 1989). More generally, the
contours of the new political economy of
industrial capitalism were sharply contested
as the established relationships of a so-called
moral economy were replaced by those based
on the market. Of particular significance was
the way in which the transformation of the
labour process was central to the emergence
of class consciousness. Yet the extent to
which such social identities transcended
local and regional allegiances remains an
area of considerable debate. Moreover, the
new social relations of production were structured by gender as well as class. Many of the
new machines were operated by women and
children, creating a new sexual division of
labour in which men’s work was characterized
as more skilled and (consequently) better
paid (Hudson, 1992; Berg, 1994). Nonetheless, the earnings of all members of the household were vital in determining standards of
living, conventionally seen as falling, then rising, as real incomes were first undermined,
then augmented by industrialization. Living
conditions and social relations were also
shaped by the transformation of the urban
milieu, which was both cause and consequence of industrial development (see
Stobart, 2004). Towns grew both in number
and size, with those in the industrializing districts experiencing the most rapid expansion.
This caused a rapid deterioration in living
conditions in many towns, as the construction
of houses, and physical and social infrastructure, failed to keep pace with demographic
growth. It also led to a restructuring of
Britain’s urban geography and hierarchy, and
with it the geopolitical relationship between
centre and periphery. London remained dominant as the focus of commercial, financial
and political activity, but debates and policies
were, for a brief time in the mid-nineteenth
century, shaped by experiences in and the
concerns of Britain’s industrial towns, most
notably Manchester.
jst
379
INDUSTRIALIZATION
Suggested reading
Berg (1994); Gregory (1990); Langton (1984).
industrialization The process whereby
industrial activity comes to play a dominant
role in the economy of a region or nation-state.
Historically, industrialization has involved a
more complex division of labour and the
spread of mechanized production (machinofacture) in place of hand production (manufacture). These changes brought about a
transformation in what Karl Polanyi called
the form of economic integration, from the
reciprocity of a moral economy to the market
exchange of capitalism. In certain Western
societies, industrialization took place spontaneously, small-scale domestic production for
local consumption being replaced by largerscale ‘factory’ production aimed at more
distant markets. For Adam Smith, such industrialization formed part of the ‘natural progress’ of economic development, founded on
the production of agricultural surpluses, but
ultimately leading to specialist industrial
regions and to international trade. Growth
was organic, and the shift to mechanized
production, prompted by supply being outstripped by growing demand, was dependent
upon the development of appropriate technology and the accumulation of capital for
investment (Berg, 1994).
As part of modernization theory, such readings of the past were instrumental in linking
industrialization with development and in its
portrayal as a solution to poverty in the developing world (Power, 2003). As a result, many
less-developed countries made industry central to their development strategies. This
planned (rather than spontaneous or ‘organic’) industrialization has generally taken one
of two forms: (a) import substitution, wherein
governments encourage the development of
indigenous manufacturing to produce consumer goods for the domestic market, or (b)
export-orientated industrialization, which
aims to enhance production for overseas markets. In the 1950s and 1960s, Western governments favoured import substitution as a
development strategy for the third world.
Influenced by the theories of Rostow and
others (see stages of growth) – which
accorded a pivotal role to the availability of
investment capital – they provided loans to
developing countries to facilitate industrial development. The problems of such strategies
were thrown into stark relief by the economic
crises of the 1970s. The infusion of capital,
technology and business organization from
380
outside brought with it problems of dependency, most obviously manifest in the mounting debts of many developing countries
(Schurmann, 2001). More fundamentally,
Marxist scholars challenged the ‘development
myth’ by emphasizing the inevitability of
uneven development under capitalism.
In recent years there has been a rearticulation of modernization theory, partly
through the rhetoric of globalization, which
now points to the experience of developing
countries experiencing rapid industrialization.
Most striking are the so-called asian miracle/
tiger economies of South-East Asia, where the
rate of industrial growth – much of it fuelled by
export-orientated industries drawing on abundant cheap labour – has far exceeded that of
europe during the industrial revolution.
China has industrialized particularly rapidly
and, in doing so, has highlighted many of the
mounting ecological problems associated with
industrial growth. In addition to those of
pollution of land, sea and air, is the more
fundamental question of the sustainability of
industrialization based on finite mineral resources (Phillips and Mighall, 2000). What the
example of South-East Asia also shows is the
emergence of service activities as an alternative
source of employment and route to economic
development (cf. services).
jst
inequality, spatial The uneven distribution
across space of a particular set of attributes,
over which there is a moral politics of right or
wrong. So, whereas spatial differentiation refers
to conditions over which moral questions do
not arise, spatial inequality refers instead to
those characteristics over which there is a
sense that their production is the result of
human agency. The uneven distribution of
natural resources is an example of spatial
differentiation. On the other hand, variations
between regions in terms of income levels or
health rates would be examples of inequality.
Think about the battles that have raged over
the uneven distribution of access to some
forms of medication, particularly between the
wealthiest nations and those of the third
world. social movements of one kind or another have lobbied multinational pharmaceutical companies, in an attempt to get them to
do their bit in addressing spatial inequalities in
the treatment of HIV/AIDS.
welfare geography since the 1970s has
been concerned with inequality in living
standards, in the broadest sense. Attention
has continued to be paid to traditional concerns, such as those in differences in living
INFORMAL SECTOR
standards, which remain of fundamental
importance (Smith, D.M., 1994a). Additionally, however, work has focused on the spatially uneven distribution of sources of need
satisfaction, reflecting a departure in welfare
geography, away from narrow definitions of
standards of living. While an emphasis on spatial inequalities can reveal the particular socioeconomic trajectories of spatial units, it can
run the risk of obscuring other factors at
play. For example, we can think of inequality
along the coordinates of class, gender and
race (Perrons, 2004). The categories cut
across one another, so that we can now understand how all forms of identity and distinction
– including those shaped by space – in different contexts, produce situations in which
individuals suffer the consequences of inequality. Moreover, the emphasis on spatial patterns
risks losing sight of the structural basis of
inequalities (Smith, 2008 [1984]).
While we might all think that spatial inequality is, by definition, bad, it cannot automatically be labelled as wrong. social justice
involves the conditions under which it might
be possible to argue ethically and morally that
spatial inequality is justified. Perhaps some
groups or some spatial units are disadvantaged
for the greater societal good. Given the rising
inequalities, both within nations and between
nations, what we can say perhaps is that the
responsibility lies with those advocating inequality to justify their position in ways that
do not fall back on trickle-down economics or
neo-liberalism (Smith and Lee, 2004). kwa
Suggested reading
Perrons (2004); Smith and Lee (2004).
informal sector A contested term that refers
to forms of employment and exchange relations that may be some combination of the
following: small-scale; unregulated, poorly
regulated or over-regulated (De Soto, 1989);
sometimes illegal and untaxed (the black
economy); precarious; family-oriented; strongly entrepreneurial; poorly remunerated;
and/or based on low-level technologies.
Trying to define the informal sector more precisely is unhelpful, although one can usefully
consider it in relation to its assumed opposite,
the formal sector.
In the context of developing countries in the
1950s, it was widely assumed that the modern
sector of an economy would in time come to
replace all or most of the pre-modern economy (see modernization). It was further assumed that the formal (‘Western’) sector of a
dual economy was populated by unionized,
mainly male workers, who enjoyed high real
wages from manufacturing and a large number
of benefits, including dearness allowances and
paid leave. This was the (semi-)skilled labour
aristocracy that Lenin had written about. The
informal sector, in contrast, described an
economy made up of shoe-shiners, domestic
servants and other untenured workers:
women, men and children who contributed
little to the economy as a whole, and who
had to be encouraged into the modern (manufacturing) economy from small-scale commercial or service activities.
This teleological view of the informal sector
giving way to the formal sector was sharply
challenged in the 1960s and 1970s. The International Labour Organization (ILO) developed the concept of an urban informal sector
in 1969, when it launched its World Employment Programme. The ILO aimed to move
beyond measures of the labour force in developing countries that were restricted to the
employed and the unemployed. A new generation of urban–rural migration models now
appeared, which suggested that migrants to
the city were faced with a choice of remaining
among the urban unemployed while searching
for work in the formal sector, or of accepting
work and lower wages in the informal economy. Non-economists, meanwhile, led by the
anthropologist Keith Hart, began to challenge
the terms of the debate. Instead of emphasizing the separation of the formal and informal
sectors, theorists began to focus on the ways in
which ‘popular entrepreneurship’ (Hart,
1973) helped to reproduce capital–labour
relations in the formal sector. For example,
three-wheel taxi services helped to speed up
circuits of exchange in city-systems not well
served by freeways or mass transit systems.
Micro-enterprises subcontracted intermediate
goods from formal-sector firms. What marked
out the informal sector was ease of access
to new entrants, including migrants, both
domestic and international.
Barbara Harriss-White (2003) has suggested that the hype surrounding ‘hi-tech’
India is blind to what she calls the India of
the 88 per cent, or those men, women and
children who work largely unprotected in
India’s agricultural, industrial and service
economies. Other studies have estimated the
scale of the informal sector in parts of Africa at
over 50 per cent, and at over 40 per cent in
Latin America and the Caribbean. The informal sector is also well entrenched in richer
countries. The growth of Local Economic
381
INFORMATION ECONOMY
Trading Systems (LETS) is evidence of this
(see alternative economics). So too is the
growth of gardening and maid services in
cities such as Miami and Los Angeles in the
USA, largely staffed by labourers from Latin
America.
sco
(Theil, 1967). In geography, it has been used
to measure organization in settlement patterns,
information in choropleth mapping techniques and in regional classification, as well
as in the applications involving entropymaximizing models.
lwh
Suggested reading
informational city A term coined by
Manuel Castells (1989) to describe a city
whose development is dominated by the restructuring dynamics of manufacturing and
research and development (R&D) in ‘hi-tech’
industries (primarily information technology,
defence, biotechnology and nanotechnology).
Based on a detailed analysis of urban change
in the USA in the late twentieth century,
Castells suggested that such developments
were underpinning the emergence of a global
urban system made up of world cities dominated by centralized clusters of innovation in
these high-technology sectors. He argued that
these sectors were located in suburban complexes called technopoles, which tended to be
associated with increasingly dualized social
structures and the dismantling of welfare
state systems (Castells and Hall, 1994).
sg
Roberts (1994); Tripp (1997).
information economy A term dating from
the late 1960s and early 1970s, describing the
growing centrality of information to the development and restructuring of advanced
industrial economies. Pioneering work by
sociologist Daniel Bell (1973) outlined the
increasing significance of the distribution,
production and consumption of information
within what he called post-industrial society. Since then, human geographers –
amongst many others – have made major
contributions to understanding the spatial
dynamics of information-intensive industries
(Hepworth, 1989) and the highly uneven
geographies of computer networks such as
the Internet that integrate information economies (Zook, 2005: see also knowledge
economy; learning region).
sg
Suggested reading
Castells (1989).
Suggested reading
Hepworth (1989).
information theory A mathematical approach originally developed in communication
science to measure the amount of information,
degree of organization or uncertainty in a
system. The measure is closely related to
that for entropy. The basic equation developed by Shannon (Shannon and Weaver,
1949) is as follows:
X
pi log (1=pi ),
H¼
i
where H is the information statistic and pi is
the probability (or proportion) of a variable in
a given region. The individual pis might be
employment in different regions, the proportion of agricultural land in N counties or the
probabilities of N possible outcomes in a stochastic experiment. H ¼ 0 when one of the pi is
unity – all the employment is concentrated in
one region – whilst H approaches a maximum
(given by log N) when all the pi are equal. H
is perfectly related to log W, the entropy
measure. Information theory was extensively
applied to the measurement of social and
economic inequality by Henri Theil
382
infrastructure In conventional economic
theory and planning, infrastructure refers to
the underlying structure of services and amenities (social overhead capital, or SOC) needed to
facilitate directly productive activity (or DPA).
Examples include public services, transport,
telecommunications, public utilities, and social and community facilities. Infrastructure
tends to be immobile, labour intensive,
indivisible and open of access, and to have
economy-wide effects. There is considerable
argument over the extent to which infrastructural investment is a sufficient or even a necessary precondition for economic development;
whether it should be provided before development in the form of excess capacity or whether
scarce resources should be devoted primarily
to DPA; and whether it should be publicly or
privately owned. Indeed, the widespread
growth of the private ownership of infrastructure and its ability to generate stable returns
over long periods has led to significant financial interests in infrastructural development,
not just in terms of ownership and financing,
but as the basis of a range of disintermediated
financial instruments.
Within marxism, ‘infrastructure’ has a more
precise and theoretically charged meaning.
INNER CITY
It refers to the forces and relations of material
production that, in Marx’s classic writings,
provide the foundation (or ‘base’) for a legal,
political and cultural ‘superstructure’ (see
base and superstructure). This formulation
marked the site of a considerable debate
within historical materialism over the relationship between infrastructure and superstructure: some critics claimed that Marx saw
this in reductive terms (‘economic determinism’), while most informed scholars provided
more nuanced readings of the ways in
which economic practices and structures are
implicated in the conduct of social and
political life.
rl
inheritance systems In theory, inheritance
is the transmission of exclusive rights in property at death. Such transmission is part of the
wider devolution of rights between holders
and heirs, and usually between generations.
This process of devolution can also involve
transfers between the living for education,
marriage and property purchase, as well as
transfer of any residual at the holder’s death.
In societies where production is based on the
household and where property rights are
vested in the domestic group, the evolution
of such rights is of vital importance. In simple
hoe agricultural societies, such as found over
much of sub-Saharan Africa, inheritance between spouses is rare, with transfers tending to
be from males to males or from females to
females. In such settings, economic differentiation is limited and access to land relatively
easy, with inheritance occurring within unilineal descent groups such as clans or lineage.
In plough-based agrarian systems, a diverging
or bisexual form of devolution is more common, and frequently involves children inheriting from both parents and parents transferring
property to both daughters and sons – and not
necessarily at death. One such form of premortem inheritance is dowry given to daughters
at their marriage, which has been widespread
in Eurasia. At marriage, some kind of conjugal
fund is created and the property transmitted,
although not in equal proportions, to the
children. The different treatment of siblings
depending on birth order takes the form
of primogeniture (impartibility), multigeniture
(partibility) or ultimogeniture (Borough English).
Systems of impartible inheritance in which the
eldest son was sole heir were common among
elite groups in europe, where title and position were linked to estate and income.
Younger sons might seek their fortune through
careers in the church or the army, to which
they had access as a result of the political
power embodied in the parental estate. In
European peasantries (see peasant), the parents might hand over the farm to a son or a
daughter on the occasion of his or her marriage, reserving for themselves right to bed
and board, although frequently giving rise to
extended or stem family households. Such
arrangements might create familial tensions,
since an early transfer might weaken the authority of the elderly, and a delayed transfer
might create hostility towards the elderly
among the young. In capitalist societies,
where the majority of the population has no
ownership of the means of production, inheritance is of far less significance. However, the
ability to transfer privilege as well as residential property is intrinsic to family life in all
economic systems. Most modern societies
place a progressive tax on inherited property,
which could be viewed as a means of equalizing advantage. Ways of avoiding tax on personal assets at death are found in the use of
trusts, life estates and charitable giving. In the
USA, where charitable gifts are tax-exempt,
private foundations gain enormous benefits,
and in the UK major contributions to national
collections of art, buildings or land result
from attempts to avoid death duties (Shoup,
1966).
rms
Suggested reading
Goody (1962, 1978); Goody, Thirsk and
Thompson (1976); Shoup (1966); Smith (1984).
inner city That region of the metropolitan
area consisting primarily of older residential
areas in close proximity to the downtown core.
By the late nineteenth century, inner-city neighbourhoods were mainly blue-collar districts,
providing shelter for the families of working
men employed in the wholesaling, manufacturing and transportation sectors that were located
in the ring of industrial uses adjacent to port
and railway terminals outside the central
business district. In the industrial city, then,
the inner city was the home of the working poor,
including immigrants, as famously described by
the chicago school between 1910 and 1970
(Wirth, 1928; Suttles, 1968). In such cities,
minimal land-use regulation introduced serious
traffic congestion and severe air, land and water
pollution, encouraging the withdrawal of the
middle class to tram/streetcar and commuter
suburbs. Separation bred a suspicion and even
fear of the inner city by the middle class, a
condition that survives in some nations to the
present.
383
INNOVATION
Consequently, a definition of the inner city
cannot be limited to location and age of housing alone (see housing studies). In the past
150 years or more, the inner city has experienced a spoiled identity. The grotesque
nineteenth-century imagery of Dickensian
London, Engels’ poignant depictions of life in
industrial Manchester, the later portrayals of
Inner London by the Booths (Charles and
William) and of Inner Montreal by Herbert
Ames, and the photo-documentary essays of
Jacob Riis in New York all consolidated a highly
stigmatized image of both need and menace. In
many respects, the social sciences were born
into the problem of the inner city, with William
Booth, the Pittsburgh Survey and the Chicago
School all concerned with the mapping of
various personal and social pathologies in
inner-city districts. Not surprisingly, the influential verdict of the Chicago School was that
the inner city was the natural habitat of individual and social disorganization. Such a
judgement led easily to a view that demolition
and rebuilding would effect social as well as
urban renewal, and the nascent welfare state
engaged in widespread clearance in older inner
districts, beginning in the 1930s.
In the aftermath of deindustrialization,
the inner city remains a site of social problems:
Margaret Thatcher’s infamous, deprecating
allusion to ‘those inner cities’ in 1987 (Robson, 1988) revealed not only an abiding social
construct but also a social reality in many
declining industrial centres. Indeed, in the
same year as Mrs Thatcher’s declaration,
William Julius Wilson (1987) published his
celebrated text on concentrated and racialized
urban poverty in American inner cities. His
underclass thesis, drawing attention both to
macro-economic employment trends as well
as a culture of poverty in the inner city, established an urban research agenda. In Western
Europe, an explosive literature emerged in the
1990s on multidimensional social exclusion,
targeted on (but not limited to) inner-city districts, some of it importing American underclass language (Mingione, 1996; Madanipour,
Cars and Allen, 1998). Addressing social exclusion and deprivation in the inner city and
priming urban regeneration have become significant policy directions in many European
states.
However, the fusion of place and identity
that sees only social problems in the inner city
is too rigid. For one thing, as the French ‘banlieu’ riots of 2005 revealed so clearly, deprivation and exclusion may be even sharper in
suburban sites (see suburb). Second, the
384
view of the inner city as a problem is an oversimplified fabrication (Ley, 2000). Just as the
Chicago School displayed a patronizing suburban perspective on the inner city, so middleclass policy-makers and politicians through
the urban renewal era and later have sustained
the same stereotype. In her famous polemic
against urban renewal, Jane Jacobs (1992
[1961]) contrasted the detached view of the
urban bureaucrat with the view at ground level
of urban residents in medium-density older
neighbourhoods, extolling an insider’s perspective of local vitality, diversity and selfhelp. Her 1961 message was prophetic and in
the next decade the beginnings of gentrification indicated an equally sympathetic view of
the inner city by young urban professionals.
In post-industrial cities such as London,
New York, Toronto or Sydney, gentrification
has led to a massive middle-class make-over
of many inner-city districts (Hamnett, 2003),
sometimes as an objective of regeneration policies (Cameron, 2003). Frequently, gentrification has diffused outwards from the real estate
anchor of existing upper middle-class districts,
whose longevity over several generations also
reinforces a more accurate view of inner-city
diversity rather than homogeneity.
dl
Suggested reading
Ley (2000); Wilson (1987).
innovation The introduction of a new phenomenon or the phenomenon itself (which
may include concepts and objects, practices
and systems, variously combined in products,
and processes). In human geography an early
stream of work focused on the origin and
spread of innovations, particularly in cultural geography, and it was the study of
innovations that provided the mainspring for
Torsten Hägerstrand’s development of the formal study of innovation diffusion in spatial
science (itself an example of an intellectual
innovation that combined new concepts
such as the mean information field, new
objects such as the computer that enabled
Hägerstrand to construct his model, and
new practices such as the algorithms that
powered his Monte Carlo simulations: see
Hägerstrand, 1967). A more recent stream of
work in economic geography has focused on
the research and development processes in
which commercial innovations are embedded,
on spillover effects (see clusters) and on the
spatial variations in productivity that may
result from differential geographies of innovation (Feldmann, 2000). Taken together,
INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS
these generate such complex outcomes over
space that Morgan (2004) proposed a focus
on territorial innovation systems sensitive to the
multiple scales at which effects are registered,
though most research continues to focus on
the region (Asheim and Gertler, 2005; see
also learning regions).
dg
input^output An analytical framework
developed by economist Wassily Leontieff to
describe and model the inter-industry linkages
within the economy, and to use this information to examine economic and policy impacts.
It traces how the outputs of one sector become
the inputs for others: thus the machine-tools
industry uses energy, steel and other inputs,
and its outputs are in turn inputs to car and
aircraft industries. The model requires extensive data and estimates from surveys, and the
input-output table can then be manipulated
to calculate multipliers and so model the
impact of policy changes. These models were
originally calculated at the national scale, but
have been extended to regional and multiregional models.
lwh
Suggested reading
Miller and Blair (1985).
institutional economics
Institutionalist
thought has come to the fore in economic
geography since the 1990s, following its revival in economic theory during the late 1980s
around two very different strands. The first is
new institutional economics, most closely associated with the work of Oliver Williamson on the
theory of the firm and others such as Mancur
Olson and Douglass North on the role of
(public) institutions in economic regulation
and evolution. In this work, the focus falls on
how firms, networks and institutions arise as
organizing mechanisms in the market economy, complement market transactions and
generally provide stability, steer and judgment
in an otherwise multi-interest and multidirectional economic space composed of
competing individuals. The economy is conceptualized as a constellation of firms, markets and
institutions, each working to a different logic
and with specialist properties. New institutional
economics does not break with mainstream
economics, since it shares its core assumptions
relating to individual motivation (e.g. maximization, hedonism, rational choice) and market behaviour (e.g. price as a core allocation
mechanism, informational transparency).
New institutional economics has had limited impact in economic geography, having
lost momentum after an initial flurry of interest sparked by extensions of Williamson’s
transaction cost model to explain agglomeration. For example, Scott’s (1988c) work on
high technology and other types of industrial
agglomeration added an important spatial dimension to Williamson’s model by showing
how proximity in conditions of specialization
and inter-firm linkage served to reduce transaction costs and transactional uncertainty.
More recently, there has been a slight revival,
through the work of some economic geographers engaging with the work of Paul Krugman
to explain inter-regional disparities on the
basis of trade differentials and national or
regional institutional settings.
One reason why new institutional economics has faltered in economic geography is due
to the historical dominance within the subdiscipline of heterodox economic traditions
critical of the methodological individualism,
rationalism, formalism and a-historicity of
mainstream economics. The second strand of
institutional economics – old institutionalism –
fits more easily into an influential lineage that
includes classical political economy accounts
in the 1950s and 1960s of urban and regional
growth and inequality (e.g. Nicholas Kaldor,
Albert O. Hirschman and François Perroux on
cumulative causation); Marxist explanations
during the 1970s of uneven development and
unequal exchange, based on the imperatives of
capitalist accumulation and the consequences
of class/gender/race exploitation and struggle;
and regulation theory explanations in the
1980s of long-term economic stability, structural crisis and renewal, and capitalist
variety in terms of the match or mismatch
between historical regimes of accumulation
and regulation.
Old institutional economics, named so in recognition of influence of US pioneers such as
Thorstein Veblen, Wesley Mitchell, John
Commons, Clarence Ayres, John Dewey, and
later Karl Polanyi and John Galbraith, envisages the economy itself as an instituted process
in all its manifestations. Thus, macroeconomic rules and institutions, markets and
market practices, prices and values, production conventions and exchange norms, financial rules and economic rationalities, and
corporate and regional or national standards
are all conceptualized as socially instituted arrangements guiding individual action. Institutions, however defined, are not seen as a
particular form of organization and distant
from markets, in the way that new institutional
economics does, but as the very life and
385
INSTITUTIONALISM
substance of the economy. Institutional
parameters, as Hodgson (1988) argues in his
celebrated book, explain economic variety,
economic impulse and organization, evolutionary change, historical specificity and rules
of meaning, interpretation and action.
The term ‘institution’ covers a wide variety
of meaning to progressively thicken the idea of
the economy as an institution. Most obviously,
this includes the formal institutions of economic and regulation such as firms, banks,
corporate rules, business standards and government regulations that are societally
specific, slow to change and significant channelling devices. It also includes informal institutions such as social conventions of power,
deference, respect, trust and legitimacy, which
are also highly localized, and which guide behaviour in different markets, organizations and
territories. In turn, taken-for-granted economic canons such as profit maximization,
market individualism, price signalling and
actor rationality are read as value-laden in a
dual sense: first, as embedded fictions that
need to be worked at; and, second, as socially
generated norms that are neither incontrovertible nor universal. Then, economic continuity
and change are explained in terms of recursive
routines and habits – personal, interpersonal,
organizational and social – treated as the hidden hand of daily economic practice and
consensus, as the social genes of economic
evolution and path-dependency, and as a
core determinant of learning and innovation
capability. Old institutional economics, thus,
rejects the premises of mainstream economics,
but it also injects a considerable degree of
texture, contingency and socio-institutional
specificity in heterodox economic theory
traditionally dominated by big-picture generalizations.
In economic geography, this variant of institutional economics has had some impact in
development geography by soliciting critical
work on the role of international organizations
such as the World Bank or major NGOs;
research on the social and institutional parameters of particular markets, such as microcredit or open-air trade; and studies of local
economic potential based on an analysis of
formal and informal institutions, social conventions and learning processes. The conceptual thrust, however, has come from studies of
urban and regional economic dynamism and
creativity in the global North. Many new concepts, such as cluster dynamics, industrial
atmosphere, institutional thickness, untraded
interdependencies, associational ties, indus386
trial slack and redundancy, urban buzz and
creativity, trust and reciprocity, and intelligent
regionalism, have been inspired by institutional economics to account for local economic success. Researchers associated with
institutionalism in this field include Annelee
Saxenian, Amy Glasmeier, Michael Storper,
Allen Scott, Meric Gertler, Trevor Barnes,
Chris Olds, Phil Cooke, Kevin Morgan, Ron
Martin, Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift, Jamie
Peck, Ray Hudson, Peter Maskell, Anders
Malmberg, Bjorn Asheim, Gernot Grabher,
Peter Sunley and Harald Bartheld.
The work of these researchers has brought
new insight into the spatial dynamics of the
economy in three broad areas. The first relates
to the role of spatial proximity between firms
such that the full benefits of specialization,
agglomeration, and trust and reciprocity can
be exploited. The second relates to the different ways in which social capital developed in
civic associations, institutional activism and
reflexivity, and public-sector leadership can
contribute to local economic vitality. The
third relates to the spatial foundations of the
knowledge economy and economic learning in
general, where the research has highlighted the
significance of localized R&D, technology
transfer, learning in inter-firm networks, tacit
knowledge formed in interpersonal networks
of common purpose and mutual obligation.
This body of work has considerably expanded
understanding of how space affects the
institutions of economic development and
change.
aa
Suggested reading
Amin and Thrift (1994a); Hudson (2005);
Martin and Sunley (2006).
institutionalism A term with many meanings in the social sciences, all intended to signal the varied ways in which institutions
structure social life in time and space. It is an
approach that rejects actor-centred approaches that stress individual human intention and will. It also seeks to interpret
structure in terms of historically and socially
embedded institutions, seen to evolve slowly,
often unpredictably and sometimes inefficiently. Structures are not seen as immutable,
universal, or machine-like. In political geography institutionalism has influenced the
study of political institutions and their effects
on electoral geography, and studies of
geographies of belonging, citizenship and
conflict. In social geography, it has had
some impact on studies of social and cultural
INTEGRATION
institutions and their role in the making of
space and place. But its most significant impact has undoubtedly been in economic geography, where it has forged a path between
mainstream approaches and radical political
economy (see institutional economics). aa
instrumental variables A statistical and
econometric technique to estimate models of
the regression type that have problems of
endogeneity. In the standard multiple regression model of the general form:
Y ¼ b0 þ b1 X1 þ b2 X2 þ e,
where Y is the dependent variable, X1 and X2
are the independent variables and e is the random error term, the assumption is that the two
independent variables are genuinely exogenous. Suppose, however, that X1 is endogenous, itself determined by Y and other
exogenous variables such as X3 and X4. An
example might be if Y represents regional employment growth in ‘hi-tech’ services and X1 is
regional income: Y is influenced by X1, but X1
is itself influenced by Y, implying that X1 is
correlated with e, a violation of the assumptions of regressions.
The technique of instrumental variables
works by finding a set of ‘instruments’, variables that are themselves exogenous and are
good at predicting X1. Such a set would
include X3, X4 (and X2 for the version of instrumental variables known as two-stage leastsquares), other X variables and perhaps spatial
or temporal lagged values of X3 and X4.
Denoting this set of instruments as Z, one
regresses X1 against Z, obtaining the predicted
or fitted estimates of X1, denoted as X^1. The
estimate X^1 depends only on Z, and so is
uncorrelated with e, and the original regression for Y is now estimated, replacing X1 by
X^1. This procedure, which thus requires two
regressions, eliminates the endogeneity bias.
The limitation of instrumental variables lies
in the ability to find a suitable set of instruments that is both exogenous and good
at predicting X1 – weak instruments will
circumvent the endogeneity but provide
poor estimates of the b coefficients (for a full
discussion, see Bowden and Turkington,
1990).
An interesting recent geographical example,
widely publicized through The Economist
magazine, is a study by James Feyrer and
Bruce Sacerdote of the economic prosperity
of 80 former-colonial islands around the
globe. They argue that the current prosperity
is directly related to length of colonization, but
recognize that fertile and promising islands
may have attracted colonists; that is, endogeneity. They then use instrumental variables
with measures of wind speed and direction
as instruments: before steam-ships, such variables may well have influenced the date of
colonization, but are strictly exogenous. lwh
Suggested reading
Kennedy (2003). See also The Economist, 2
November 2006.
instrumentalism A philosophy of science
concentrating on end results such that science
becomes an instrument judged in terms of
practical utility rather than the truth or falsity
of theory. Gregory (1978a) identified instrumentalism as a feature of geography’s quantitative revolution, informed by a particular
reading of positivism, the generation of
models being welcomed for their potential to
shape policy. Such work entailed a narrow
conception of relevance, subsequently critiqued. Concerns over instrumentalism have
informed debates over geographic information systems, with calls for GIS to adopt a
more critical and reflexive perspective on the
conditions of its production and utilization
(Pickles, 1995a).
dmat
Suggested reading
Gregory (1978).
integration The creation and maintenance
of intense and diverse patterns of interaction
and control between formerly more or less
separate social spaces. Integration involves
the bringing together of different systems of
meaning and action founded in different sets
of social relations. It takes place in different
registers – economic, political and cultural –
and so is an inherently uneven process. This is
compounded because integration takes place
through – not merely over – time and space:
without the formation of new times and
spaces, the social relations embedded in integration could not be constituted. As such, it is
profoundly affected by technical change.
Innovations in the movement of people and
commodities, and most recently in the electronic transmission of ideas, images, information and cultural forms, have made possible
new modes of interaction and new ways of
being ‘present’ in other places (see time–space
compression; time–space distanciation).
Places have never been closed, cellular systems; people have always been caught up in
387
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS (IPR)
the lives of others. But the porosity of place
has varied, and may be transformed forcibly
(by war), peacefully (through agreement or
negotiation), or through a mix of the two.
Historically, colonialism and imperialism
have been powerful vehicles of integration,
although the processes were highly asymmetric and shot through with differentials of
power and profit. Today, economic integration usually depends on market mechanisms,
through the circulation of capital, labour and
knowledge, through the global integration of
consumer practices and consumer culture,
and through political interventions in international political economy (policies on trade,
investment, immigration etc.), but these processes may also have violent correlates that
Harvey (2003b) connects to a continuing global
regime of accumulation by dispossession.
Integration does not automatically imply
the erasure of difference. Economically, it
may impose or allow greater degrees of specialization and promote areal differentiation (see globalization); politically, it may
raise questions about autonomy, identity and
independence within national or transnational
formations; culturally, it may allow the dissemination of new hybrid cultural forms (see
hybridity; transculturation). All three
issues have surfaced in successive enlargements of the European Union and the project
of a united europe (see Bialasiewicz, Elden
and Painter, 2005). More generally and over
the longer term, Braudel (1985, p. 45) emphasizes that the integrative world economy is
simply ‘an order among other orders’, and
that the struggle between integration and differentiation/distinction has always been and
remains a powerful determinant of economic,
political and cultural relations.
rl
Suggested reading
Bialasiewicz, Elden and Painter (2005); Lee
(1990).
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) The collective term used to refer to the protection
offered by a variety of legal instruments –
most notably copyright, patents and trademarks – with respect to the use of certain
intangible goods including ideas and information. Typically, the holder of such rights is
entitled to a temporally or spatially limited
degree of exclusivity in the use of the matter
in question, an exclusivity that is designed to
stimulate and reward the inventiveness involved in making it useful. Like all property
rights, IPRs are very much social rights,
388
embodying how societies choose to recognize
the claims of certain individuals and groups
but not others to certain particularly significant and/or potentially limited things. As such,
they have varied over time and between places
on the one hand, and been the object of
much debate on the other. A series of related
developments over the past half-century or so
has seen an intensification of the implications
of these differences and contestations, bringing intellectual property rights to the very
forefront of contemporary intellectual and
political discussion.
First, a technologically enhanced ability on
the part of scientists and others to translate,
manipulate and circulate biological materials
has multiplied the kinds of things which might
potentially be covered by IPRs. Second, the
advent of what has been called a ‘knowledge
economy’ has seen a scramble by relevant
parties of all sorts to protect as much and as
many of the intangible aspects of their products and services as possible (and thereby their
profits and position). Finally, moves by global
bodies ranging from the United Nations to the
World Trade Organization (WTO) to harmonize and regulate how intellectual property
rights are defined and practiced worldwide has
publicly exposed the extent and magnitude of
the issues at stake, as well as the profound
disagreements that need to be overcome.
At this point, it is probably fair to say that
the aspect of intellectual property rights that
has most exercised geographers’ interest has
been the questions that they raise about the
ownership of biological materials. In the 1994
Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) (which is
administered by the WTO and is undergoing
almost continuous renegotiation), provision
was made for certain kinds of materials to be
patentable. This reflected a trend since the
1970s of business interests (and especially
the life science firms involved in producing
medicines), to successfully argue that patents
are essential for their ability to make a return
on their investment in research and development required to discover, produce and get
regulatory approval for new products. The
idea that biological materials (if not animal,
plants or processes themselves) should be
privately owned – even in the temporary
form offered by patents – has been hugely
controversial. Some object that it is morally
inappropriate that the legal-commercial logic
of property should be extended to living
things in any form. For others, what is
inappropriate is the imposition of a Western
INTERNAL RELATIONS
model of property on to situations involving
peoples who might collectively make sense
of the world in very different terms. What
they demonstrate is how important an understanding of the legal geographies of IPRs is
likely to be for the foreseeable future (see
law).
nb
Suggested reading
Brown (2003); Coombe (1998); Dutfield
(2004); Parry (2004); Whatmore (2002).
intensive agriculture Intensive agriculture
is broadly characterized as repeated cultivation and/or grazing of the same area of land
using supplementary energy inputs to enhance
the fertility of the land: it is contrasted with
extensive agriculture, which involves seasonal
patterns of transitory land use over large
areas (Simmons, 1996). As a process, intensification refers to improving the yield on land
already in production, usually by efforts to
speed up, enhance or reduce the risks of biological processes in agrarian production;
whereas extensification refers to bringing
more land into production. Boyd, Prudham
and Schurman (2001) have drawn parallels
between these two ideas and marxian economics concepts regarding the subsumption of labour. Food regime theorists such as Freidmann
and McMichael (1989) have used regulation
theory to posit a broad shift from extensive to
intensive agriculture in the postwar period, although many have contested these assumptions and have noted a much more variegated
landscape of extensive and intensive production.
As a historical process, intensification has
been associated with the transition from feudalism to capitalism (see enclosure), and the
ensuing development of markets in land, labour, credit and farm inputs. One theory of
intensification is through the penetration of
commodity relations into peasant households.
What Bernstein (1995a) has called the ‘simple
reproduction squeeze’ is when inputs and reproductive needs once produced by households need to be purchased at the same time
that household members are drawn into offfarm employment, reducing the labour applied to farming and social reproduction. The
prospect of declining yields and income thus
forces agrarian producers to adopt more highyielding configurations of capital, labour and
technology. Blaikie’s (1985) theorization as to
how this squeeze can lead to soil erosion in
developing countries was seminal in political
ecology. Since increased yield can be
achieved with more rotations (fewer fallows),
reduced crop loss or faster-growing varieties/
animal breeds, today intensive agriculture is
associated with high input use, including chemical fertilizers and pesticides, animal
pharmaceuticals and growth hormones, mechanization and genetic engineering. Nontechnical innovations in labour control can
be considered intensification as well; for example, the use of vulnerability to ensure a
timely, and compliant, labour force. Because
farmers are ‘price-takers’, agriculture is
plagued by systematic over-production, a problem that intensification only exacerbates. At the
introduction of a new technology, early innovators enjoy surplus profits, based on improved
productivity. As others jump in, price competition ensues, causing rates of profit to fall,
until marginal returns are very low. Intensification has come to be associated with high
land values, since land tends to be capitalized
at the ‘highest and best use’ (see Guthman,
2004).
Intensive agriculture practices have become
closely associated with growing public concerns about the environmental and food safety
problems of industrial systems of food production. These problems range from water pollution caused by agricultural chemical runoff
and the loss of biodiversity associated with
monocultures, to the incubation of animal diseases such as BSE. Sometimes, the industrialization of agriculture, which can also
connote corporate control, largeness or
factory-like conditions, is more precisely
described as intensification.
jgu
Suggested reading
Kimbrell (2002).
intensive
research Research strategies
directed towards discovering the causal chains
that connect social structures, social practices
and individual agents in particular time–space
contexts. Sayer (1992 [1984]) argued that intensive research is typically conducted under
the sign of realism and relies on qualitative
methods, including ethnography. As such, it
is concerned with substantial relations of connection and privileges a logic of corroboration.
Sayer insisted that such studies are every bit as
‘objective’ as extensive research and, indeed,
are more powerful, since their focus on causal
mechanisms means that they are likely to
produce ‘abstract knowledge [that is] more
generally applicable’.
dg
internal relations Necessary relations between objects or practices that make them
389
INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND (IMF)
what they are. Formally, ‘a relation AB may be
defined as internal if and only if A would not
be what it essentially is unless B is related to it
in the way that it is’ (Bhaskar, 1998 [1979]).
Internal relations are of two kinds:
(1) The relation between landlord and tenant is an internal relation, for example: in
this case, each presupposes the other, so
that the relation is symmetrical.
(2) The relation between the state and
local authority (or ‘social’) housing is
also an internal relation: the latter presupposes the former, but the converse is
not true, since it is perfectly possible to
think of a state that makes no provision
for social housing, so that the relation is
asymmetrical.
These distinctions are important for the
process of abstraction that is the mainspring
of the philosophy of realism, because they
guard against so-called chaotic conceptions that
‘combine the unrelated and divide the indivisible’ (Sayer, 1982).
Sets of internal relations may be termed
structures. Thus Harvey (1973, pp. 286–314)
defined a structure as ‘a system of internal
relations which is in the process of being
structured through the operation of its own
transformation rules’. In his subsequent writings, Harvey provided a more developed account of the structures of capitalism as a
mode of production and, in particular, of
the dialectic within which ‘each moment is
constituted as an internal relation of the
others within the flow of social and material
life’ (Harvey, 1996, p. 81; see also Jessop,
2006). Harvey was following Marx, and his
project was directed towards what he termed
historico-geographical materialism (see marxism; materialism). In his exploration of the
philosophy of internal relations, however,
Olsson (1980) elected to follow a radically
different direction. For Olsson, echoing
Hegel in a transposed key, thought, language
and action are internally related to such a
degree that ‘the world and our ideas are so
entangled in each other that they cannot be
separated’. Hence, so he claimed, ‘social relations between people [are] like logical relations between propositions’ and vice versa:
they are all internal relations. This prompted
Olsson to make a linguistic turn and embark
upon a series of linguistic experiments that
took him into the realms of surrealism
and beyond, but always circling around the
internal relations that skewer thought-and390
action through the logics of ‘cartographic
reason’ (Olsson, 2007).
dg
International Monetary Fund (IMF) One of
the two international financial institutions created at the meeting of national leaders held in
Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, shortly before the end of the Second World War – the
other being the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development, better
known as the World Bank. A third proposed
Bretton Woods institution, the International
Trade Organization (ITO), was stillborn because of opposition from the US Congress,
and a body with the powers to be accorded
the ITO did not come into existence until the
founding of the World Trade Organization
(WTO) in 1996.
The IMF was created with the task of promoting international trade through facilitating monetary co-operation, and it was
allocated funds for the specific purpose of
helping countries get past short-term
balance-of-payments crises. This made its
tasks complementary to the longer-term
development funding undertaken by the
World Bank. Both institutions had a somewhat
Keynesian mandate. The Articles of Agreement of the IMF included among the purposes of the organization to ‘facilitate the
expansion and balanced growth of international trade, and to contribute thereby to
the promotion and maintenance of high levels
of employment and real income’. This was to
be accomplished by promoting exchange rate
stability among national currencies and avoiding ‘competitive exchange depreciation’
(Holborn, 1948, p. 172).
With the breakdown of the fixed exchange
rate regime in the early 1970s, however, the
IMF began to take on new and distinctly antiKeynesian roles that mark the beginnings of
neo-liberalism. The IMF is today more favourably inclined towards floating exchange
rate regimes, even when this results in competitive devaluations, and its favoured policies
of structural adjustment have frequently
sacrificed goals of high employment and
wages in favour of ensuring international
financial investors against the consequences
of inflationary government policies such as
domestic price supports (Payer, 1974; Kolko,
1988, pp. 265–9).
In its role as the dispenser of short-term
funds to countries undergoing balance-ofpayments crises, the IMF has increasingly
demanded as its price for loans conformity by
recipient governments to neo-liberal policies
INTERNET
(see aid). This has generated criticisms from a
range of popular organizations, governments
and economists, making the IMF somewhat of
a lightening rod for criticisms of neo-liberalism, especially in the wake of the 1997 Asian
economic crisis, when many critics perceived
IMF policies to have been inappropriate
and to have exacerbated the crisis (see antiglobalization). In addition, because voting
rights at the IMF are allocated on the basis of
contributions, and because the US government is the leading contributor, the IMF has
been seen by many critics as a USA-dominated
institution, pushing an agenda favoured by the
US Treasury Department (Stiglitz, 2002). jgl
Suggested reading
Holborn (1948); Kolko (1988); Payer (1974);
Stiglitz (2002).
international relations The term has two
meanings: (1) the relations between states;
and (2) the study of international politics
(where it is often abbreviated as IR).
(1) International relations are conventionally
understood as the political issues (especially foreign, defence and security policy) that take place between states and
beyond the borders of states. These ‘high
politics’ are sometimes said to be in contrast to the ‘low politics’ of domestic
issues. In this conception, states are
understood to be bounded and sovereign, unitary and rational, and the primary actors on the international stage.
World politics is thus understood as the
sum of diplomatic, economic, military
and political interactions between states
as they prioritize their national interests
and seek security by maximizing power.
This view is said to be historically valid,
traceable to thinkers such as Thucydides
and Machiavelli, and formalized in
agreements such as the 1648 Treaty of
Westphalia.
This conception of world politics as
international relations – which shares
much with classical approaches to geopolitics – can be questioned empirically.
International trade, the global circulation
of capital and the movement of labour
involve ‘non-state’ actors (e.g. corporations, markets and migrants) and traverse both ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’
spaces, demonstrating that the varied
scales of local, national and global are
intertwined. Environmental issues, the
transmission of disease, mobile cultural
forms and fundamentalist religions are
social forces that call sovereign spaces
into question. They are developments
that can require transnational governance
that involves co-operation rather than
conflict, collective interests rather than
national priorities, and international organizations rather than military alliances.
(2) International Relations – especially when
capitalized as IR – represents the academic study of relations between states
and international politics. Although previously approached via the study of law,
history and politics, as a formal discipline
IR was established in the aftermath of the
First World War, with positions at the
University of Wales, Aberystwyth and
the London School of Economics. As a
predominantly Anglo-American enterprise ever since, IR has been subject to
a series of paradigmatic debates that
have pitched realists against idealists, scientists against historians, and globalists
against statists. Only in the past 20 years
or so, however, have the metatheoretical
assumptions – the questions of epistemology and ontology – of all these contending positions been subject to debate.
Drawing on developments in critical
social theory associated with theories of
discourse – which have also been behind
developments in critical geopolitics – this
intellectual ferment has seen questions of
borders, identities and the construction
of international order receive much
greater attention. Approaches derived
from constructivism (see social construction), feminism, marxism, political ecology and post-structuralism
have taken on, but not displaced, the
realist and neo-realist mainstream in the
study of international politics.
dca
Suggested reading
Baylis and Smith (2004); Burchill, Devetak,
Linklater, Paterson, Reus-Smit and True
(2001); Dalby and Ó Tuathail (1998).
Internet A vast network of interconnected
computers used to make the information,
services, data and programs stored on one
computer accessible to remote users, permitting them to purchase goods, download music,
query databases, communicate messages and
so forth.
Whilst partly developed from US defence
research during the Cold War, the Internet’s
391
INTEROPERABILITY
birth date is usually taken to be 1985, when
the US National Science Foundation created
NSFNet, allowing universities access to five
supercomputer centres. Other networks
existed at that time (e.g. the UK’s Joint
Academic Network and CompuServe’s networking capabilities for corporate clients),
but NSFNet was TCP/IP enabled: it used
the protocols underpinning the Internet
today, directing ‘packets’ of data to computers
by assigning unique addresses to host
networks and machines (e.g. IP address
68.142.226.55 is yahoo.com).
The Internet emerged as a public utility due
to the popularity of the World Wide Web
(WWW) – a series of interconnected documents (web pages). This development is credited to Tim Berners-Lee, who fused the
concepts of hypertext (e.g. the ability to hyperlink pages) with the architecture of the Internet
and developed the first web browser, in 1991.
Amazon.com began in 1995, the same year that
the Java programming language was integrated
with a web browser. Google started life as a
research project in 1996 – the year in which
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was incorporated into Windows. Wikipedia, the free online
encyclopaedia (and invaluable resource for this
Dictionary entry), was launched in 2001.
Clearly, the Internet and WWW have grown
rapidly in both use and scope. Whilst future
trajectories and their long-term socio-economic
effects are difficult to judge, recent history is
suggestive. The ‘dot.com bubble’ may have
peaked in 2000, but e-commerce (including
online banking and music downloads) is still
growing (e.g. downloads contributed 6 per
cent of total worldwide record sales in the
first half of 2005 – a 350 per cent increase in
value from 2004: www.ifpi.org). If cyberspace develops as a dominant transaction
space, then undoubtedly it will impact upon
service- and retail-sector employment, and
perhaps also on the landscapes of commerce.
(Will the iconic ‘high street’ of shops and services be threatened by e-commerce or benefit
as specialist shops are able to extend their
global reach?) The Internet also contributes
to alternative workspaces and practices, including home-working and ‘hot-desking’,
and the collaboration of geographically separated persons in virtual meeting rooms and
e-seminars (technologies that are being used
to facilitate e-learning, taking traditionally
place-bound universities into global education
markets and ‘knowledge economies’).
It is likely that the WWW will continue to be
the primary point of access to more and more
392
information in online repositories, archives
and data warehouses. Who should control or
own this information? Google’s Book Search
facility allows the full text of books to be
searched but has involved digitizing the
book collections of some libraries, raising
copyright concerns amongst some publishers
and authors. Other parties may want to restrict
access to certain information for various
reasons, including anti-terrorist protection or
to close down undesirable websites. When
Google.cn was launched in 2006, Chinese
regulators required that ‘sensitive information’
be removed from its search results. This occasionally happens in France, Germany and the
USA too (source: Google official blog).
Finally, whilst the Internet–WWW network
can confidently be predicted to expand, it is
unlikely to be perfectly ubiquitous. There are
digital divides globally in terms of communication infrastructures, as there are nationally
(e.g. broadband access is uneven across the
UK, generally to the detriment of rural
areas). Other geographies of cyberspace reflect
on who owns the various components of the
Internet–WWW (including IP addresses, content and service provision), raising social and
geopolitical questions (see geopolitics). rh
Suggested reading
Dodge and Kitchin (2002); Gillies and Cailliau
(2002).
interoperability The ability for something
to work or interface between separate operations or systems without error or changed
meaning. For example, digital downloads
from online music stores to portable storage
devices are facilitated by interoperability
standards such as MP3 audio compression.
The converse to interoperability is proprietary
data formats locking the user into particular
software. This was a problem with GIS,
addressed by the Open Geospatial (formerly,
Open GIS) Consortium leading the development of standards for geospatial and locationbased services (www.opengeospatial.org) –
including the Geography Markup Language
(GML), a schema for the modelling, transport
and storage of geographical information.
rh
Suggested reading
Lake (2004).
intervening opportunities A concept developed by the American sociologist
S.A. Stouffer (1940) to explain migration
patterns and subsequently applied in studies
INTERVIEWS AND INTERVIEWING
of commodity flow, passenger trips, traffic
movements and so on. The volume of movement between an origin and a destination is
proportional to the number of opportunities at
that destination, and inversely proportional to
the number of opportunities between the origin and the destination. Stouffer argued that
distance of itself has no effect on interaction
patterns and that any observed decline in the
number of movements with distance (see distance decay) is due to the increase in the
number of intervening opportunities with distance. A variant of this approach was developed in Fotheringham’s (1983) ‘theory of
competing destinations’.
rj
interviews and interviewing Widely used
methods for learning about the experiences,
attitudes and demographic characteristics of
individuals, households or groups. Interviews
can be structured or unstructured, and they
can be administered face-to-face, over the
telephone or via email. An interview using a
survey questionnaire follows a set order of
pre-established questions. Survey data underpins large scale quantitative social science, and
can be effective for establishing attitudinal,
demographic and socio-economic patterns
across large samples representative of vast
populations (see quantitative methods;
sampling; survey analysis). A census is a
national survey of the entire population.
Unstructured interviews are more conversational than a questionnaire, and allow interviewees to express the details and meanings of
their experiences in their own terms and at
their own pace. Unstructured interviews can
be conducted with individuals, households or
as focus groups, and are an appropriate
qualitative method for understanding complex and contradictory social processes and
experiences, and when respondents need the
opportunity to explain and qualify their
accounts. But even the least structured ethnographic interview is very different from an
ordinary conversation. It is important for an
interviewer to recognize this, so as not to be
caught within implicit rules of social conversation (Anderson and Jack, 1991). In contrast to
ordinary conversations, the norm in ethnographic interviews is to repeat questions, ask
for clarification of terms, and introduce a series of ethnographic explanations and styles of
questions (Spradley, 1979: see ethnography).
Because they are unstructured, in-depth interviews are time-consuming (they typically last
for between one and two hours), and the sample is usually much smaller (and likely less
representative of the population) than is the
case for questionnaire surveys.
There has been considerable discussion of
the influence of the interviewer on what is told
and heard, and of the power dynamics between interviewers and interviewees. Although
it is advisable for interviewers to dress and
comport themselves so as to ‘fit in’, it is widely
assumed to be impossible and undesirable
for them to neutralize their presence. The researcher is integral to the interview process,
and his or her gender, age, sexuality, class
and race (and many other characteristics) will
affect access and what they are told. In survey
research, this is known as the ‘interviewer
effect’. There are two issues here. First, what
we are told is situational, depending on the
perceived social characteristics of the interviewer, the location of the interview, and
many other contextual factors. Second,
because most interviews are structured by ‘a
division of labour in which one talks and one
listens’, relations of oppression and domination may be unwittingly reproduced within
them (Bondi, 2003, p. 70; but see England
(2002) and McDowell (1998) for a different
set of dynamics when interviewing elites). Both
concerns have led to recommendations that
interviewers reflect upon their positionality
in order to assess how they may be affecting
(and affected by) the interview situation (see
situated knowledge). Rose (1997b) cautions,
however, that there are limits to such reflexivity, because we are not and cannot be fully
conscious or transparent to ourselves; and
Bondi (2003) notes that much communication within an interview is non-verbal and
non-cognitive (see also non-representational
theory). Power relations, and points of commonality and difference between interviewers
and interviewees are also mobile and complex
(McDowell, 1998; Kobayashi, 2001; Crang,
2002; England, 2002). Concerns about power
relations have led to experiments training and
working with community-based interviewers
(Gibson-Graham, 1994; Pratt, 2004), and to
calls for more activist research (Kobayashi,
2001; see also activism, action research).
Key objectives for any unstructured interview are to create an intersubjective space in
which the interviewee can express him or
herself fully, and to strive to understand
what is communicated as fully as possible,
whilst causing no harm to the interviewee.
Bondi (2003) makes a distinction between
empathy and identification: the former (the
recommended stance) involves the capacity
to understand the interviewee’s feelings
393
INTIFADA
without becoming absorbed within and overwhelmed by them. If overwhelmed, the interviewer can move too quickly through difficult
topics, or rush to comfort the interviewees
without allowing them the opportunity to
fully express their thoughts and feelings.
Unstructured interviewing involves a process
of ‘learning to listen’ rather than searching to
confirm pre-existing ideas or theories. Anderson writes of her disappointment with the
transcripts from her life history interviews
with rural women, because the transcripts
lacked detail and offered little insight into
these women’s emotional lives. Anderson
closely and very usefully analyses the many
moments in her interviews where she foreclosed opportunities for women to describe
their lives, and thus subtlety communicated a
double message: ‘Tell me about your experience, but don’t tell me too much’ (Jack and
Anderson, 1991, p. 15). She recommends that
all researchers review their transcribed interviews ‘to listen critically to [their] interviews,
to [their] responses as well as [their] answers.
We need to hear what [the interviewee] implied, suggested, and started to say but
didn’t. We need to interpret their pauses and,
when it happens, their unwillingness or inability to respond’ (Jack and Anderson, 1991,
p. 17). As this quote suggests, qualitative
interviews typically require textual rather
than the statistical analyses typical for questionnaire surveys. The desire to extract the
most meaning from transcripts has led some
researchers to use transcription systems
developed for conversational analysis, in
which attempts are made to signal pauses
and capture some of the emotional content
of the interview within the transcription
(England, 2002).
Domosh (2003) has criticized geographers
for tending to analyse interview transcripts as
if they are authentic expressions of experience.
The need to examine interview data as
discourse and performance rather than
raw experience is nicely demonstrated in
Visweswaran’s (1994) description of her discovery that several of her interviewees had
deceived her. Her analysis shows interviews
to be performances in which the interviewees
display limited and sometimes falsified aspects
of their selves and experiences. Rather than
worrying about the fact of deception, Visweswaran tries to understand why she was told
particular things for specific reasons. These
reasons include the fact that interviewees
were unable to express some ideas or criticisms within dominant discourse. It is only
394
through repeated interviews, supplemented
by ethnographic and archival research, that
she is able to glean this. Nightingale (2003)
approaches the incompleteness of in-depth
interviews from another angle, stressing the
advantage of mixed methods. Given the partial nature of all knowledge, she recommends
that interview material be combined with
other types of data, and that it be treated as
no more authentic or less mediated than quantified forms of data, in the case of her research,
remote sensing maps. Because survey methods
are more appropriate for establishing patterns
over a large population, they can be used
effectively in combination with qualitative
interviews.
There are many excellent methodology textbooks that introduce the basics of interviewing
methodology, including Limb and Dwyer
(2001) and Valentine (2005).
gp
Suggested reading
Crang (2002); Limb
Valentine (2005).
and
Dwyer
(2001);
intifada A popular uprising against military
occupation (see occupation, military), derived from the Arabic for a ‘shaking off’. The
term originated in two phases of Palestinian
resistance to Israeli occupation. Israel occupied
Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 and, despite
United Nations Security Council resolutions
and international law, encouraged its civilians
to establish colonies (‘settlements’) there (see
verticality, politics of). The First Intifada
was a spontaneous uprising that began in
December 1987. It involved a disengagement
from systems of Israeli administration and
developed into a vigorous assertion of the
Palestinian right to national self-determination.
After a protracted struggle, the uprising came
to an end in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo
accords, the promise of a phased Israeli withdrawal and the establishment of the Palestinian
National Authority. The process of Israeli
colonization continued unchecked, however,
and in September 2000 a Second Intifada,
the al-Aqsa Intifada, broke out (Carey, 2001;
Gregory, 2004b). It was rooted in the failure of
the ‘peace process’ and the accelerated dispossession of Palestinians, but it spluttered to an
end during 2005. The Second Intifada was
more desperate and more violent than the
first: B’Tselem, the Israeli Center for Human
Rights, estimates that 422 Israelis and 1,551
Palestinians were killed between 1987 and
2000, whereas 468 Israelis and 3,418
Palestinians had been killed from 2000 through
INVESTMENT
to April 2006. The term ‘intifada’ was also
invoked by some Iraqi political movements
opposed to the US occupation since 2003 and
by some Lebanese activists in their struggle
against Syrian domination in 2005.
dg
Suggested reading
See Electronic Intifada at http://eletronicintifada.
net; and the Forum on al-Aqsa Intifada, in Arab
World Geographer (October 2001) at http://users.
fmg.uva.nl/vmamadouh/awg/
invasion and succession A concept adapted
from ecology by sociologists of the chicago
school to describe processes of neighbourhood change within cities. Within ecology, the
concept is derived from ideas regarding the
‘survival of the fittest’ in the competition for
living space (cf. darwinism).
According to the Chicago School model of
urban residential patterns (cf. zonal model),
the main stimulus to urban expansion is inmigration of relatively low-income groups.
These are largely constrained to low-cost,
high-density, relatively poor-quality housing,
much of which is concentrated in the inner
city; in addition, many move to that area
because of the presence there of family and
friends who assist their initial assimilation to
a new milieu (cf. chain migration). The pressure that this puts on inner-city housing stock
stimulates existing residents to seek housing
further from the centre, initiating a ripple effect
through all of the city’s zones with residents on
the urban edge responding by moving into new
housing. Growth at the centre thus leads to
expansion on the urban fringe through a process of filtering, whereby housing moves
down the socio-economic scale as one group
replaces another in a neighbourhood, whilst
households move up the housing scale in
terms of housing age and quality.
Given the context in which the model was
developed – 1920s Chicago – many of the
immigrants who initiated the invasion-andsuccession sequence were members of ethnic
minorities (see ethnicity). Their movement
into areas might be challenged, causing housing stress (as densities then build up in the
areas that they already occupy), until eventually pressure on an adjacent area leads to its
residents yielding (cf. blockbusting).
rj
Suggested reading
Bulmer (1986).
investment Most commonly discussed by
geographers in the context of Foreign Direct
Investment (FDI), which Dicken defines as
‘direct investment which occurs across national boundaries, that is, when a firm from
one country buys a controlling investment in a
firm in another country or where a firm sets up
a branch or subsidiary in another country’
(2003, p. 51). FDI involves either an ‘organic/greenfield’ strategy, in which investment
is used to establish operations in an overseas
country from scratch, or a ‘merger’ strategy,
where investment is used to buy an existing
operator.
When a firm or individual makes an investment, the aim is usually to reap financial benefit, either by selling the commodity or
resource purchased at a later date at a profit
(as investment banks do through stock and
commodities markets) or by extracting valueadded in some other way. FDI usually follows
the latter strategy, aiming to use an overseas
investment to enhance long-term profitability
by extracting value from presence in another
country. As Dunning and Norman’s (1987)
‘theory of international enterprise’ suggests,
FDI can allow: (1) the leverage of existing
assets overseas, usually resulting in increased
sales and profits; and/or (2) access to new
assets, again resulting in either increased
sales (through innovation, for example, when
the asset is skilled labour) or improved profitability (e.g. when costs are reduced because
access is gained to cheap labour).
The geography of investment can be studied
at two scales. At the macro scale it is possible
to study the worldwide aggregate trends in
FDI. Shatz and Venables (2000) show that:
(1) the developed countries provide the dominant origin of FDI (90 per cent), although
traditional sources such as the USA and the
UK are declining in their relative share because of the growing importance of Eastern
European and South East Asian nations; (2)
the developed nations are also the dominant
receivers of FDI (70 per cent). This does
not, however, mean that developing countries
are not important sources and sinks of FDI.
Indeed, there are a small number of countries
that are significant destinations for FDI because of the way firms seek to exploit the
new international division of labour. Predominantly, though, FDI is used to access
developed markets, in particular as a strategy
to overcome trade restrictions and access
consumer markets.
At the micro scale the patchiness of the geography of investment can be explored and theorized. Firms usually choose a place for
investment that will bring particular market
or asset benefits. For example, those seeking
395
IRREDENTISM
access to knowledge-rich workers will seek to
invest in clusters, such as Silicon Valley
(Saxenian, 1994), rather than rustbelt districts
of a country. Those seeking access to markets
will seek out agglomerations where demand
is high, such as advertising and law producer
service firms that congregate in the world
cities of London and New York (Sassen,
2006). This means, however, that those
regions that fail to attract investment can
become backwaters of the global economy, as
has been experienced to a certain extent in
the North East of England since the closure
of the coal mines in the 1970s and 1980s
(Hudson, 2005) and the American Rust
Belts, around Detroit in particular (Glasmeier,
2005).
jf
Suggested reading
Shatz and Venables (2000).
irredentism The claim by the government,
or by political groups, of one country that a
minority living in a neighbouring country
belongs instead to it because of historical and
cultural connections. Though at times the
minority may live in peace within the neighbouring country, in other contexts irredentist
movements may mount a campaign to ‘unite’
the minority, leading to border disputes,
active guerilla-like conflict (as in Northern
396
Ireland), and even war. The term originated
from a disputed part of Austria in 1871, which
Italian nationalists called Italia irredenta, or
unredeemed Italy. The 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia was driven by a combination
of irredentist claims.
cf
Suggested reading
Ambrosio (2001).
isolines Lines on a map describing the intersection of a real or hypothetical surface with
one or more horizontal planes. On a topographic map, typically compiled from aerial
photographs by stereocompilation (Lyon,
Falkner and Bergen, 1995), each isoline, or
contour, represents a constant elevation, and
because the vertical interval is constant, their
relative spacing is a readily visualized indicator
of slope. On a statistical map, isolines may be
threaded manually through a network of data
points or plotted automatically by an interpolation algorithm, which provides comparative
consistency and gives the map author some
control over the appearance and reliability of
the map (Schneider, 2001). Spot heights are
occasionally added to emphasize local minima
and maxima.
mm
Suggested reading
Yang and Hodler (2000).
J
just war A war whose cause and conduct
can be ethically justified (see ethics). The
desire to specify the conditions under which
it is morally acceptable to resort to military
violence has a long and complicated history,
in which religion, geopolitics and law have
all played central roles.
Christianity has embraced both a presumption against war and a belief that war may be
justified to spread or defend the faith (the
Crusades) or to combat evil. In Islam, the
concept of jihad involves a struggle against
evil, but the ‘greater jihad’ is a personal, spiritual struggle, while the ‘lesser jihad’ is reserved for armed struggles to spread or
defend the faith (Devji, 2005). Much of the
rhetoric surrounding the ‘war on terror’ (see
terrorism) has traded on these twin versions
of a supposedly ‘holy war’, Christian and
Muslim, but within both theological traditions
geopolitical and juridical issues have also
loomed large.
Both theological traditions have invoked a
geographical imaginary in which the locations of the sacralized ‘heartland’ or homeland and that of the enemy Other are
identified. Modern geopolitics has often appropriated the language of Just War traditions
too, but typically in a secularized form in order
to legitimize conventional wars and, more recently, military interventions in the name of
what Chomsky (1999) calls a ‘new military
humanism’ (cf. Douzinas, 2003; see also humanism). But Megoran (2008) objects that,
while critical geopolitics has no hesitation
in advancing all sorts of normative claims and
moral judgements, it has conspicuously failed
to interrogate its own ethical presuppositions
in any systematic and detailed fashion. In opposing some wars and endorsing others, practitioners of critical geopolitics have implicitly
adopted the categories of just war reasoning,
he argues, but ironically failed to subject them
to critical scrutiny. This has a number of consequences, Megoran concludes, the most important of which is a silence over the
production of spaces of non-violence and ‘a
vision of peace and justice that explicitly eschews the resort to force’ (p. 494). This is true
of human geography more generally, how-
ever, which has long been more invested in
war than in peace (cf. Wisner, 1986).
Modern juridical doctrines of just war distinguish (1) law governing when a war may be
fought (jus ad bellum) from (2) law governing
how a war is to be conducted (jus in bello).
In general, the first requires a just cause (for
example, self-defence, not aggression), a
declaration by a legitimate authority, a right
intention (so that the motivation must be
moral rather than, for example, economic: cf.
resource wars) and a reasonable prospect of
success. The second requires, among other
things, discrimination between military
targets and civilians, the proportional use of
force, and the humane treatment of prisoners
of war and civilians (cf. Gregory, 2006). These
two sets of requirements raise considerable
philosophical and legal issues, and several
commentators insist that they need to be suspended in situations of ‘supreme emergency’
(Walzer, 2000) (cf. exception, space of). But
they have been put under further strain by
new forms of war and their geographies, including the ‘war on terror’, which raise complex
questions about sovereign power and territory, and which often refuse any clear distinction between military and non-military spaces.
The rhetorical power of a ‘just war’ depends on
more than legal arguments, however: it also
depends on the mobilization of imaginative
geographies to legitimize the identification
and characterization of the enemy – which is,
of course, where theological and geopolitical
claims so often make their most forceful
appearance (Falah, Flint and Mamadouh,
2006).
dg
Suggested reading
Megoran (2008).
just-in-time production A system of manufacturing in which inputs are supplied and
outputs are delivered very soon after demand
for a finished good has been registered.
Perfected by Japanese automobile producers,
and since emulated by North American
and European assemblers, this set of practices
has also diffused to other industrial sectors
such as computer manufacturing. As one
397
JUST-IN-TIME PRODUCTION
objective is to reduce the quantity of producers’ capital tied up in inventories of parts
and finished products, producers no longer
keep large buffer stocks on hand. This has
the consequent effect of forcing lower defect
rates in parts supplied, and hence improves
overall quality. Because suppliers are able to
meet buyers’ varying requirements (in both
number and type) at short notice, the system
398
allows manufacturers to respond more flexibly
to changing market demands (see, more
generally, flexible accumulation and postfordism). Adoption of such practices may
exert an agglomeration effect, bringing
buyers and suppliers closer together to facilitate rapid delivery at short notice, but in
any case transforms the dynamics of the
commodity chain.
msg
K
Kantianism A philosophy developed by
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) (see Kuehn,
2001). Kant’s conception of the nature of
geography and its location within the system
of knowledge as a whole provided the basis
for a series of major disagreements in the
twentieth-century discipline (see May, 1970).
Kant considered that knowledge could be
classified in two ways: either logically or
physically (cf. classification): ‘The logical
classification collects all individual items in
separate classes according to similarities of
morphological features; it could be called
something like an ‘‘archive’’ and will, if pursued, lead to a ‘‘natural system’’ ’ (Büttner and
Hoheisel, 1980). In a ‘natural system’, Kant
noted, ‘I place each thing in its class, even
though they are to be found in different,
widely separated places’ (cited in Hartshorne,
1939). He assumed this to be the method of all
the sciences except history and geography,
which depended, in contrast, on physical
classification. The physical classification collects individual items that ‘belong to the same
time or the same space’. In this connection,
Kant asserted:
History differs from geography only in the
consideration of time and [space]. The former is a report of phenomena that follow
one another (Nacheinander) and has reference to time. The latter is a report of phenomena beside each other (Nebeneinander)
in space. History is a narrative, geography a
description. Geography and history fill up
the entire circumference of our perceptions:
geography that of space, history that of time.
(Kant, cited in Hartshorne, 1939)
Although Kant’s views on geography were
broadly similar to those of architects of the
modern discipline like von Humboldt and
Hettner, they appear to have had ‘no direct
influence’ other than ‘as a form of confirmation’ (Hartshorne, 1958; but cf. Büttner
and Hoheisel, 1980). Indeed, they were not
explicitly endorsed in any programmatic
statement of the scope of geography in
English until Hartshorne’s account of The
nature of geography (1939), which accepted
that geography’s basic task was essentially
Kantian:
Geography and history are alike in that they
are integrating sciences concerned with
studying the world. There is, therefore, a
universal and mutual relation between
them, even though their bases of integration
are in a sense opposite – geography in terms
of earth spaces, history in terms of periods
of time.
Others were more sceptical. Blaut (1961) concluded that, for Kant,
Knowledge about the spatial location of
objects is quite distinct from knowledge
about their true nature and the natural
laws governing them. The latter sorts of
knowledge are eternal and universal, are
truly scientific [whereas] spatial and temporal co-ordinates are separate and rather
secondary attributes of objects, and spatial
and temporal arrangement of objects is not
a matter for science.
Like Schaefer (1953), therefore, Blaut saw
Kant as the originator of an exceptionalism
that was inimical to the explanations and generalizations (rather than mere ‘descriptions’)
required for geography to be reconstituted as
a spatial science. That this was not a necessary consequence was later demonstrated by
Torsten Hägerstrand, who revitalized Kant’s
distinction in order to demonstrate the possibility of a recognizably scientific approach to
physical orderings. Although time-geography
was predicated on a rejection of divisions
between ‘history’ and ‘geography’, ‘time’ and
‘space’, the contrast that Hägerstrand drew
between a conventional compositional approach
and his own contextual approach paralleled that
between ‘logical’ and ‘physical’ classifications
(see contextuality).
Most of the foregoing formulations
depended on Kant’s lectures on physical
geography delivered from 1755 to 1796 and
recovered from various notes, but other
writers drew attention to Kant’s Critique of
pure reason (1781) and its emphasis on ‘the
structuring activity of the thinking subject’ to
develop an alternative to spatial science:
Space is not something objective and real,
nor is it a substance or an accident, or a
relation, but it is subjective and ideal and
399
KANTIANISM
proceeds from the nature of the mind by
an unchanging law, as a schema for coordinating with each other absolutely all
things externally sensed. (Kant, cited in
Richards, 1974; emphasis added)
This stress upon ‘the epistemic structuring
of the world by the human actor was the
essence of the Kantian heritage’, so it was
claimed, and ‘constitutes the common theme
which has, in practice, been distilled from
the variety of humanistic philosophies to
which geographers of a subjectivist orientation
have turned in their endeavour to transcend
the dichotomy inherent in subject–object
relations’ (Livingstone and Harrison, 1981a:
see behavioural geography; humanistic
geography).
Many of these endeavours might more
properly be described as neo-Kantian. NeoKantianism emerged in Germany in the closing
decades of the nineteenth century. Whereas
Kant had held the a priori to be ‘externally
fixed and eternally immutable’ – the ‘unchanging law’ in Richard’s quotation above – the
neo-Kantians rejected the vision of a unitary
scientific method that this allowed. They substituted a key distinction between:
the cultural and historical sciences (the
Geisteswissenschaften), which dealt with an
intelligible world of ‘non-sensuous objects
of experience’, which required interpretation and understanding (verstehen),
and which were thus concerned with the
idiographic – this was the focus of the
‘Baden School’, which included Windelband and Rickert – and
the natural sciences (the Naturwissenscahften), which dealt with the ‘sensible world
of science’, which required explanation
(erklären), and which were thus concerned
with the nomothetic – this was the focus
of the ‘Marburg school’, which included
Cassirer.
Within human geography, neo-Kantianism
has been seen at work in the possibilism of
the early-twentieth-century French school
of geography (Berdoulay, 1976), in the programme of the chicago school of urban sociology (Park completed a doctoral dissertation
under Windelband: Entrikin, 1980), and
in humanistic geography more generally
(Jackson and Smith, 1984). In a still more
fundamental sense, Entrikin (1984) proposed
that Hartshorne’s view of the nature of geography (above) incorporated a number of
400
patently neo-Kantian arguments, and that
Cassirer’s writings might provide a means of
reinvigorating geography’s various perspectives upon space (see also Entrikin, 1977).
Until recently, most geographers limited
their interest in Kant to his lectures on physical geography and his first critique, largely –
one suspects – because of their interest in (or
objections to) the scientificity of geographies
underwritten by positivism. But several
writers have since reflected on Kant’s second
and third critiques, Critique of practical reason
(1788) and Critique of judgement (1790–9). In
the closing decades of the twentieth century
there was a widespread (if often tacit) acceptance of an essentially Kantian distinction
between three forms of knowledge or ‘reason’.
Following Habermas, for example, several
writers associated the enlightenment project
in particular and modernity in general with
the formation of three autonomous spheres
(see table).
science
morality
art
truth and knowledge
cognitive–instrumental rationality
norms and justice
moral–practical rationality
authenticity and beauty
aesthetic–expressive rationality
The task of Habermas’ version of critical
theory was, in part, to re-balance these three
spheres: to guard against the inflation of
‘science’ (and the detachment of its expert
culture from public scrutiny) which he
believed was characteristic of capitalism in
the early and middle twentieth century;
and against the inflation of the aesthetic
that he saw within late-twentieth-century
postmodernism (Ingram, 1987). Certainly,
Kantian aesthetics played an important part
in discussions of postmodern sensibilities in
human geography, and particular attention
was paid to the aestheticization of politics to
be found in versions of both modernism and
postmodernism (Harvey, 1989b).
More recently still, there been a renewed
interest in Kant’s view of cosmopolitanism
set out in ‘Perpetual Peace: a philosophical
sketch’ (1795). To some critics, it is frankly
bizarre to juxtapose Kant’s essay with the
ethnocentrism (at best) and at worst the
‘racisms and ethnic prejudices’ of his lectures
on physical geography (Harvey, 2000a,
p. 544). But Harvey also recognized that the
‘contrast between the universality of Kant’s
KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
cosmopolitanism and ethics and the awkward
and intractable peculiarities of his geography
is important’ precisely because it opens a
space for a crucial ‘dialectic between cosmopolitanism and geography’ (Harvey, 2000a,
pp. 535, 559). Other critics have mapped
that space in radically different terms. Since
the end of the cold war, and even more insistently after 9/11, several hostile and usually
(though by no means invariably) American
commentators have described contemporary
europe as in thrall to Kant and his vision of
‘perpetual peace’, while leaving the USA the
supreme task of bringing order to the Hobbesian world of ‘failed states’ and collapsing
states, of warlords and transnational terrorism beyond its boundaries. That said, Elden
and Bialasiewicz (2006, p. 644) argue that ‘the
characterisation of a ‘‘Kantian’’ Europe, weak,
complacent, and ‘‘out of touch’’ with current
global realities, tells us more about the United
States and its imagined role than it does about
Europe’.
dg
Suggested reading
Büttner and Hoheisel (1980); May (1970);
Elden and Bialasiewicz (2006).
kibbutz A collective Zionist village. Over
250 rural kibbutz settlements (‘kibbutzim’ in
the plural) have been established in Israel/
Palestine since 1909. Kibbutz communities
combine two ideals – socialism and Zionism.
Until the 1970s, kibbutzim were considered
the torch bearers of the Zionist project by
embodying its main goals: colonizing,
Judaizing and farming the contested frontiers,
leading the Israeli army, and symbolizing
the new national culture. The ‘kibbutznik’
became an icon of Zionist identity – the
‘new Jew’ – a strong, independent, settler–soldier. However, with the gradual decline of
hegemony held by Israel’s Ashkenazi (Western)
Jews and Labor Movement, the special status
of the kibbutzim has eroded. Today, most kibbutzim have become urbanizing villages, and
have shed many of their socialist features. oy
Suggested reading
Gavron (2000); Rosner (2000).
knowledge economy An economic regime
in which knowledge-intensive manufacturing
and service activities become dominant, and
in which the skill and expertise of workers
and the innovation that this facilitates lie at
the heart of the success of firms, regions and
national economies. The idea of a knowledge
economy derives from Drucker’s (1969)
account of the role of the ‘knowledge worker’
in manufacturing industries, and it has been
developed through knowledge-based views of
the firm and arguments about the centrality
of knowledge to the competitiveness of
national economies. The concept of a postindustrial society based on advanced,
knowledge-rich services was also instrumental
in attracting the attention of academics and
policy-makers.
From a policy perspective, the idea of
the knowledge economy has been used to foreground discussions, in the Anglo-American
world in particular, about the need to invest
in skills development and training for workers,
and to promote the shift towards advanced
knowledge-intensive industries (OECD, 2000).
These debates have often been tied to discussions of national competitiveness (Dunning,
2000), which tacitly assume a spatial division
of labour in which the economies of Western
Europe, North America and South East Asia
act as ‘leaders’ in the knowledge economy,
whilst less developed nations will fulfil less
knowledge-intensive roles, particularly in
manufacturing assembly processes.
Academic debates have addressed three
main issues. First, Gregersen and Johnson
note that ‘all economies are knowledgebased. Even so-called primitive economies
depend on complicated knowledge structures’
(1997, p. 481). Consequently, discussion has
recognized degrees of knowledge-intensity.
Second, the regional geography of the
knowledge-economy has been foregrounded
in analyses of clusters, learning regions,
industrial districts and innovative milieux.
But Martin and Sunley (2003) remain unconvinced that the region is the appropriate
scale of analysis, while others position regions
within global networks of knowledge that
include both the embodied movement of
personnel and the virtual circulation of
knowledge through global telecommunication
systems (Amin and Cohendet, 2004). Third,
considerable attention has been paid to the
discursive effect of the concept itself (see discourse). Thrift (1997b) posits the contemporary emergence of a ‘soft capitalism’,
whose ideologies and practices powerfully
shape the ways in which policy-makers use
ideas of competitiveness and innovation associated with the knowledge economy. Thus
Larner (2007) shows how the New Zealand
government developed policies based on the
logics of the knowledge economy to harness
the expertise of expatriates and emigrants in
401
402
Kondratieff waves A schematic representation of the major features associated with long-wave economic cycles (Knox and Agnew, 1989: adapted from Marshall, 1987)
KONDRATIEFF WAVES
order to improve competitiveness. Peck
(2005) sounds a cautionary note, however,
noting that discourses surrounding the knowledge economy and a supposed ‘creative
class’ have led to the prioritization of the
needs of workers with certain skill sets and
the marginalization of nominally ‘non-creative’, ‘non-innovative’ workers in non-knowledge-intensive occupations (from cleaners to
caterers to public transport operators), without which the knowledge economy cannot operate.
jf
Suggested reading
Dunning
(1997).
(2000);
Gregerson
and
Johnson
Kondratieff waves Cycles in economic
activity in the world economy, with a wavelength of 40–60 years. Shorter oscillations may
be superimposed over these long waves,
but Kondratieff waves imply fundamental
qualitative transformations through alternating sequences of growth and stagnation
rather than mere quantitative fluctuations in
economic activity (see figure on page 401).
Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff (1892–
1938) claimed to have identified long waves in
the 1920s, and since then there has been considerable interest in and controversy over the
connections between them and the dynamics
of uneven development under capitalism.
Mandel (1980) argues that there is a systemic
relationship between long waves and capitalist
restructuring, for example, while Maddison
(1982) accepts the existence of major phases
of capitalist growth but insists that these have
been the result of ‘specific disturbances of
an ad hoc character’. Scholars who accept
a systemic relationship typically fasten on
technological change: technical innovations
often cluster during recessions, when they
open the door to revived profits and to wider
transformations in the labour process, regimes of accumulation and the like. On
this basis, Kondratieff waves have been associated with technological revolutions (cf. industrial revolution) and sectoral growth – for
example:
(1) steam power and machinofacture in the
textile industries;
(2) the spread of railways and the growth of
the iron and steel industries;
(3) electricity, petroleum and the chemical
and automobile industries;
(4) electronics, synthetics and petrochemicals; and
(5) information technology, telecommunications and biotechnology.
This is only an example; several different
schemes have been proposed. Technical innovations are not only distinguished by periodicity, however, but also have distinctive
geographies: spatial loci of experimentation
and innovation, and networks of diffusion.
The complex of changes represented by these
cycles and phases thus has a profound impact
on and is also deeply affected by geographies
of production and reproduction (see, e.g.,
Marshall, 1987; Hall and Preston, 1988;
Dicken, 2007). Some scholars have also proposed a close association between Kondratieff
waves and the global geography of war (see,
e.g., Goldstein, 1988; Devezas, 2006).
rl
403
L
laboratory A laboratory is a site of experimentation. Not simply a physical space where
a certain sort of scientific research takes place,
the full significance of laboratories can only be
appreciated if they are understood as a very
particular achievement. A historically specific
configuration of people, practices, machines
and measurements, the laboratory is organized
as an arena in which – purified of the contingencies of the field – the truth of the
matter-phenomena under investigation will
supposedly reveal itself. As the privileged
generator of the particular form of knowledge
that is the scientific fact, laboratories are thus a
source of great authority and potentially power,
particularly if a network allowing the extension
of its results elsewhere can be built and maintained (see also science/science studies). nb
Suggested reading
Knorr-Cetina (1999); Latour (1999b).
labour geography Straddling economic,
political, social and cultural concerns, labour
geography is now an established part of the
geographical discipline. In its earliest manifestations, the sub-field was driven by an effort
to highlight the agency of labour in making the
landscape, most particularly through collective trade union organization. Rather than seeing labour as simply a factor in production, or
even as an agent of a socialist dawn, labour
geographers sought to document the ways in
which workers’ organizations developed as
part of the lived experience of place. As
such, trade union organization is understood
as being co-constituted with place. As Herod,
Peck and Wills (2003, p. 176) explain in a
recent overview of the field and its relationship
to industrial relations:
Axiomatic for labour geographers is the claim
that spatial factors – such as the inescapably
uneven geographical development of capitalist economies, the geographical scale and
scope of legislation, the role of distinctive
regional ‘cultures’ of industrial relations
practices, the structure and dynamics of
local labour markets, the spatial hierarchies
of trade union organisation, the locally-differentiated processes of social reproduction,
404
gender and race relations, the shifting landscape of political activism and labour-organisational capacities – really matter in the
practice of industrial relations and in the trajectories of workplace politics.
Hence, labour geographers argue that we cannot understand matters of work, managerial
cultures, trade union organization, local politics or culture without attention to geography.
Moreover, recent work in this field has highlighted the extent to which trade unionism
itself has its own geography: the organizational
structures and strategies deployed reflect the
politics of scale, past and present. In responding to the challenges posed by global neoliberalism, for example, trade unions are
experimenting with new ways to find leverage and re-scale their organizations beyond the
workplace to encompass community, regional
and global dimensions (Herod, 2002; Savage
and Wills, 2004; Hale and Wills, 2005).
As it has matured, labour geography has
moved from its initial focus on trade union
organization to speak to most of the significant
debates in human geography as a whole.
What started as a polemical effort to put
labour on the map of the discipline has become part of the mainstream. Labour geography continues to evolve, now encompassing
research into matters such as labour markets,
public policy in relation to employment and
the labour market, and questions of work and
identity (Castree, Coe, Ward and Samers,
2005). Contemporary research includes a
focus on the dynamics of labour migration,
the extent to which labour is able and willing
to take its place in a multi-scalar civil society
that includes the emergent global justice
movement, the way in which class and identity are changing, as well as questions of
globalization and its implications for work,
wealth and power relations.
jwi
Suggested reading
Herod (2002); Herod, Peck and Wills (2003).
labour market The geographical arena in
which labour power is bought and sold –
where those looking for work (workers) and
those looking for workers (employers) find
LABOUR MARKET
each other. As such, labour markets are necessarily geographical (Martin, 2000b). These
labour markets are often very local, including
places such as the street corner where day
labourers stand hoping for work or the town
in which the local newspaper publishes adverts
looking for staff. However, under conditions of
neo-liberal globalization these transactions
are being spatially stretched to incorporate
migrants who might cross continents looking
for work. Thus, the labour markets in some
global cities such as London are places
where native-born Londoners are competing
for jobs – at both the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ ends
of the occupational hierarchy – with workers
from the rest of the world. Indeed, there is
now a large literature exploring the complex
labour markets of such cities and regions
(May, Wills, Datta, Evans and Herbert, 2007).
Geographical understandings of the labour
market were traditionally focused on mapping
the geographical area from which workers
travelled to work. As such, large urban
connurbations often attracted workers from
relatively far away, using the commuter transportation networks on which all cities depend.
However, this approach to mapping the labour
market tells us nothing about the power relations or the role of geography in the operation
of labour markets. Labour power is a unique
form of commodity and in order to buy labour power, employers have to deal with the
people who embody that power (Peck, 1996).
As such, the labour market depends upon
employers managing their workers through
the labour process in order to realize the
commodity – labour power – that they buy.
People come to work with their own personalities, expectations of work and political
traditions, and the potential conflict between
employers and workers is the root of trade
union organization (see labour geography).
Such social relations also reflect the place
in which the labour market is grounded.
Unequal opportunities to develop skills and
different life experiences afford people varying
potential to ‘sell themselves’ in the market for
jobs; skills reflect previous opportunities for
education, work and training, and the history
of employment, in any location. As is well
documented, workers in rustbelt regions
that long depended on male manual work
struggle to find work in the new service economy (see services). The changing nature of
the economy demands new kinds of workers,
with different physical and mental qualities
(McDowell, 2003). There is often a spatial
mismatch between the needs of employers
and the needs of those looking for work, and
workers find themselves being de-skilled or
having to re-train in order to secure employment. As such, the labour market has a direct
relationship to and impact upon the configuration of gender, ethnic and class relations in
and across space. Processes of direct and indirect discrimination in labour demand further accentuate these structural divisions in
labour supply. Employers view potential workers through their own characterization of the
‘good worker’ and employees find themselves
in segregated workplaces and jobs as a result.
Jobs are gendered and women are still largely
concentrated in part-time, lower status and
lower paid work (McDowell, 2001). Jobs
are similarly racialized and socially constructed as being better suited to men and/or
women from particular ethnic groups. Thus,
while many minority ethnic women are nurses
in the UK, they face direct and indirect
discrimination in securing employment in
managerial grades.
In recent years, governments have turned
their attention to the labour market in order
to reduce welfare receipt and ‘make work pay’.
In what has been called workfare, governments
in many post-industrial economies have reduced welfare payments and/or developed active labour market strategies that demand
evidence of job-search and training on the
part of the unemployed. These policies have
been developed without regard to the geography of labour demand or the cost of going
to work. Governments have altered the supply
of labour without concern for the quality of
the jobs to be filled. As such, and despite
national-level variations in legal minimum
wages and statutory employment rights, there
have been concerted efforts directed at labour
market flexibility. A number of scholars have
argued that these strategies are ideologically
driven, seeking to create new sources of very
cheap labour. As Peck puts it:
Stripped down to its labor-regulatory
essence, workfare is not about creating jobs
for people that don’t have them; it is about
creating workers for jobs nobody wants. In a
Foucauldian sense, it is seeking to make ‘docile bodies’ for the new economy: flexible,
self-reliant and self-disciplining (2001, p. 6).
In countries such as the UK and the USA,
these labour market policies are being augmented by efforts at managed migration,
whereby workers are recruited to fill specific
gaps in the labour market, often doing jobs
that native workers are unwilling to do. This
405
LABOUR PROCESS
drive for labour market flexibility has fuelled
the growth of the working poor in many locations, and new forms of political resistance,
such as living wage campaigns, are growing as
a result.
jwi
Suggested reading
McDowell (2003); Peck (1996).
labour process The means through which
labour power is extracted from workers: the
phrase originates in marxism, though it refers
more broadly to the organization of work. Be
they in the field, factory or filing department,
when workers are employed, they enter into a
labour process through which their work is
organized and surplus (which is realized as
capital) is extracted. As such, writers who
use this phrase are often doing so with a
focus on power relations in the workplace:
they have an interest in the relationship
between managerial control, technologies of
work, subjectivity and workers’ resistance.
Research into the labour process exploded
with the publication of Braverman’s (1974)
Labor and monopoly capitalism, which suggested that the de-skilling of work was the
dominant tendency in the capitalist mode of
production. Geographers, however, played
very little part in this subsequent explosion of
work on de-skilling. Instead, these ideas about
the labour process have been manifest in debates about spatial divisions of labour.
In her seminal work, Spatial divisions of
labour, Massey (1984) highlighted the ways in
which the drive for profitability leads corporations to reconfigure the geography of their
operations, breaking up and stretching out
the labour process across space. Thus, managerial functions tend to be separated from
those of manual labour and, increasingly,
companies have developed complex structures
of production at global dimensions. In what
have been called global commodity chains,
many of the largest transnational corporations now take advantage of a complex and
fast-changing international division of labour,
using subcontracted production and service
delivery companies to reduce costs, minimize
risk and increase flexibility (Dicken, 2003;
Hale and Wills, 2005). As such, the labour
process has a very clear geography, in which
the map of manufacturing and, increasingly,
service industries (such as call centres) is
organized at a global scale. The separation of
control from production raises a number of
important questions about responsibility and
power. Workers are generally disempowered
406
by this extension of corporate geography and
the spatial reorganization of the labour process. As a result, trades unions are experimenting with new forms of internationalism and are
attempting to forge alliances with consumers
to find new sources of power (see labour
geography).
Ultimately, geographers have sought to
root understandings of the labour process in
place, highlighting the way in which the
labour process changes social relations and
political possibilities within and between different locales.
jwi
Suggested reading
Burawoy (1979).
labour theory of value A cornerstone of
classical economics, prominent in the writings
of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The work
of the French Physiocrats (notably François
Quesnay and the elder Mirabeau) was a proximate influence on Smith’s formulation of a
labour theory; more distantly, the writings of
the proto-liberal philosopher John Locke,
especially his Second treatise on government
(1681), were a likely influence. In his moralpolitical theory, Locke defended the virtues of
individual labour, the sanctity of property
acquired by mixing labour with objects
and the natural rights of individuals – and
conceived for the state the limited but
critical role of regulating and securing private
property (see liberalism).
Why have a labour theory of value at all? For
one, Locke’s version of the labour theory provided no indication of how to bring into
equivalence different forms of private property
within a generalized exchange economy.
Adam Smith’s version of the labour theory
attempted exactly that: his purpose was to
demonstrate the ‘natural price . . . [or] the
central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating’ (1991
[1776], p. 61), or in other words, their intrinsic worth above and beyond the ephemeral
fluctuations of market price. This, of course,
begged the question: Which commodity
served as the natural basis of all others?
During the early industrial era (see industrial
revolution), it was tempting to infer that
‘labour’ was the common basis of all
exchanged goods. But neither Smith, nor
Ricardo, who adopted his labour theory,
could resolve a basic contradiction; namely,
what the natural price of labour should be.
Karl Marx made the breakthrough. He drew
a distinction between the ‘use-value’ and
LAMARCK(IAN)ISM
the ‘exchange-value’ of a commodity, and designated ‘labour’ as use-value and ‘labourpower’ – the actual commodity transacted
between employers and employees – as
‘exchange-value’. This in turn allowed him to
claim, without contradiction, that in a capitalist mode of production (see capitalism),
‘labour-power’ as a commodity had both a
market price and an underlying value, which
was the socially necessary labour time necessary
for its (re)production. Capitalists purchased
‘labour power’ in order to consume its usevalue, ‘labour’, which had the unique capacity
to produce more value than necessary for its
reproduction – in short, ‘surplus-value’.
Hence, in one fell stroke, Marx was able to
resolve the contradiction that had plagued
Smith and Ricardo, recuperate the labour theory of value, and provide a basis for capital
accumulation as the accumulation of surplus-value. Notice that Marx did not seek a
‘natural price’ explanation; rather, he clearly
inserted the adjective ‘socially necessary’ in
order to indicate the geographical, historical
and relational basis of value. Marx’s labour
theory of value was subsequently attacked on
several fronts, most persistently around its
ostensible failure to systematize the relationship between value and market price – the
so-called ‘transformation problem’.
Diane Elson’s (1979) innovative reading of
Marx’s theory of value – which David Harvey
endorses in Limits to capital (1999 [1982]) –
circumvents both the critique that Marx’s formulation stands – and falls – on labour being
the physical substance of value as well as the
transformation problem by arguing that what
Marx really intended was to draw attention to
the rationalizing practices whereby labour in a
capitalist mode of production is continuously
enrolled in abstracted form through the wage/
money relation. This not only involves a disciplining of labour through surveillance, monitoring, punishment and incentive contracts; but,
more pointedly, these mechanisms are to be
themselves viewed as symptomatic of a system
of generalized commodity exchange – that is,
a dominant and more-or-less competitive
market system – where wealth and worth are
measured in an impersonal, abstract money
form. Thus, a ‘value theory of labour’, as
Elson presents it, is a condensed expression
of the imperative for capitalists to constantly
cut labour costs and raise labour productivity
in order to survive, and for workers to become
continuously more productive at their tasks in
order to not become dispensable. In Elson’s
words: ‘My argument is that the object of
Marx’s theory of value was labour. It is not a
matter of seeking an explanation of why prices
are what they are and finding that it is labour
[thus, Elson sidesteps the nettlesome ‘transformation problem’]. But rather of seeking an
understanding why labour takes the form it
does, and what the political consequences
are’ (1979, p. 123).
vg
Suggested reading
Althusser (1997 [1970]); Cohen (1978); Elson
(1979); Engels (1978 [1884]); Postone (1996);
Read (2003).
Lamarck(ian)ism A theory of evolutionary
change originating with the French naturalist
Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829). A
non-Darwinian doctrine of organic progression, early Lamarckism differed significantly
from its later Neo-Lamarckian successor. The
dynamic behind Lamarck’s own scheme of
evolution along separate lines of development,
rather than by common descent, was the
active power of nature (combining processes
of environmental stimulus, the adaptive habits
of organisms in adjusting to modified conditions, and the use and disuse of organs) to
impel life along predetermined sequences
(Burkhardt, 1977).
In the decades around 1900, when Darwinism was in eclipse as a consequence of a series of
criticisms within the scientific community, the
Lamarckian mechanism of the inheritance of
acquired characteristics achieved considerable
support as providing an alternative mechanism
for evolutionary transformism (Bowler, 1983).
This marginal component of Lamarck’s original scheme became the central plank in NeoLamarckian interpretations of evolutionary
change, which routinely considered that those
organic modifications on which natural selection operated were environmentally induced.
Particularly in the USA, but also in Britain,
this alternative evolutionary theory attracted
widespread support during the second half of
the nineteenth century despite the absence of
agreed empirical corroboration. Particularly
prominent were the palaeontologists Edward
Cope and Alpheus Hyatt, the geologists Joseph
LeConte and Clarence King, and the Duke of
Argyll and George Romanes in anthropology
and psychology. In France, the Société Zoologique d’Acclimatation under Isidore Geoffroy StHilaire vigorously promulgated Lamarckism in
projects on environmental adaptation that had
implications for human migration and colonialism (Osborne, 1994). Most dramatic of
all was the theory’s official endorsement in the
407
LAND TENURE
Soviet Union during the 1930s, where T.D.
Lysenko used Lamarckism to justify his ideas
about agricultural improvement and judged
that it fitted more comfortably with Marxist
political ideology than did classical neo-Darwinism.
Like Darwinism, Lamarckism also had
social implications. Indeed, many social
evolutionists drew more inspiration from
Neo-Lamarckian dogma than from standard
Darwinism. For some, it provided grounds for
looking to environment as the driving force
behind social processes; for others, who were
enthusiastic about the role it attributed to mind
and will, it reserved space for psychic elements
in evolution and thereby enabled them to escape the pessimism that gripped many at the
beginning of the twentieth century. Either way,
Lamarckism could be mobilized to justify the
politics of social and political interventionism.
Given its various enthusiasms, it is not surprising that a number of geographers would
find Neo-Lamarckism attractive, not least
because the environment played such a key
directive role in the scenario (Livingstone,
1992). In the USA during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, numerous advocates of environmental determinism, such as
Nathaniel Shaler, W.M. Davis, Ellen Semple,
Albert Brigham and Ellsworth Huntington,
displayed Lamarckian sympathies and used
the theory to provide naturalistic readings of
human culture. Similarly Turner’s frontier
thesis, which portrayed American society as
recapitulating the stages of social evolution
with each advance of frontier settlement,
drew inspiration from Lamarckian environmentalism (Coleman, 1966). Griffith Taylor
in Australia found it equally attractive, though
he did not discount the significance of Mendelian genetics (Christie, 1994).
In late-Victorian Britain, similar convictions
are discernible among those sympathetic to
Lamarckism’s emphasis on the significance of
consciousness. Patrick Geddes used it to
advocate various urban planning and educational reforms on the grounds that their benefits would accumulate, by social inheritance,
in successive generations; Peter Kropotkin,
critical of the cut-throat ethics of capitalist
competitive struggle, found in Lamarckism
the grounds for a more benign social order –
a mix of anarchism and humanism – built upon
mutual aid (Todes, 1989); and Andrew
Herbertson and H.J. Fleure both mobilized
the idea in their considerations of regional geography. Lamarckian motifs have also been discerned in Paul Vidal de la Blache’s possibilism.
408
More generally, Neo-Lamarckism facilitated
geography’s transition from a natural theology
framework to that of evolutionary naturalism
largely due to the ease with which it could be
given a teleological reading (Livingstone, 1984:
see teleology). Its impact on the evolution of
geography around the time of the subject’s professionalization was thus very considerable (see
geography, history of).
dnl
Suggested reading
Bowler (1983); Campbell and Livingstone
(1983); Stocking (1962).
land tenure The practices through which
land is possessed. Land tenure entails both
formal property rules and rights, sanctioned
by some collective, and more symbolic and
culturally coded forms of, land attachment.
Land, in particular, is both an object with use
value, and a symbol endowed with meaning.
Scholars of land tenure tend to emphasize the
latter, noting the significance of complex, ritually reproduced relations of land-holding.
Land is often spoken of as an active agent,
encompassing the interests of the living and
the dead. Rules governing access and use
rights are embedded within complex and
often highly localized lifeworlds (Hann,
1998). Land tenure should be distinguished
from housing tenure – that is, the variegated
ways in which people acquire rights in real
property – hence the distinction between renters, private owners, leasehold tenants, and so
on (see housing class).
Scholarship has tended to emphasize
tenurial relations amongst peasant and
hunter–gatherer communities, located in the
premodern history of the West, or within
the contemporary developing world. However,
it should be noted that culturally laden and
often collectively oriented forms of landholding can be found within the modern
West, as noted by some of the contributions
in Abramson and Theodossopoulos (2000).
Land tenure, as a means through which a
place is known and represented, and a social
order enacted and sustained, is clearly geographical. One interesting strain of scholarship
concerns the ways in which landscape – as both
a material and representational resource – connects to land tenure (Olwig, 2002). Another
crucial dimension concerns systematic attempts at the remaking of land tenure,
of which Western colonial displacements of indigenous property (see colonialism), state collectivization or individualization of landholding, the enclosure of the commons,
LANDSCAPE
and clashes between agrarian and hunter–gathering societies are all examples. The geographies of these often violent reworkings (Peluso and
Watts, 2001), and associated forms of resistance (Peluso, 2005), have been compellingly
documented.
nkb
land use and land-cover change (LULC) A
component of contemporary studies of global
environmental change that focuses on both
land cover (i.e. the land’s physical attributes,
such as forest, grassland etc.) and the purpose
for which those attributes are used and/or
transformed by human actions. Large-scale
international research programmes into land
cover (making extensive use of data obtained
via remote sensing) have been undertaken recently under the auspices of the International
Geosphere–Biosphere Programme and related
institutions. The goal is not only to establish
the nature and pace of land-use cover change,
at a variety of scales, but also to understand
its causes, thereby facilitating modelling
of likely future change, in the context of
searches for sustainable development (cf.
sustainability).
rj
Suggested reading
Gutman, Janetos, Justice et al. (2005).
landscape A cardinal term of human geography, landscape has served as central object
of investigation, organizing principle and
interpretive lens for several different generations of researchers. Through periods of
both ascendancy and eclipse, landscape’s
constancy lies in its function as a locus for
geographical research into culture–nature and
subject–object relations.
The etymology of the English word ‘landscape’ is complex. Many sources (e.g. Jackson,
1984; Schama, 1995) refer to the Dutch word
landschap as having migrated into English
usage through the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, with ‘landscape’ gradually coming
to refer to both the visual appearance of land,
most often countryside, and its pictorial depiction via perspectival techniques for representing depth and space. The association of
landscape with visual art, and with rural or
natural scenery, is cemented in its contemporary colloquial definition as, (a) a portion of
land or scenery which the eye can view at
once, and (b) a picture of it.
In partial contrast, Olwig (1996) notes that
the Old Dutch landskab and the Germanic
landschäft both also connote legal and administrative notions of community, region and
jurisdiction: landscape as customary administrative unit. Landschäft was also the term
adopted by American geographer Carl Ortwin
Sauer (1963b [1925]) in his seminal monograph The morphology of landscape. This sought
first to establish a definition of geography as a
field science of landscape and, second, to
define landscape itself in terms of interactions
between human cultures and natural environments (see morphology). Thus landscape
was conceived as a cultural entity, the distinctive product of interactions between people
and topography. Sauer’s argument that ‘culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result’ (1963b
[1925], p. 343), oriented several decades of
American cultural geography towards the historical reconstruction of cultural landscape
forms through fieldwork and archival study.
However, Richard Hartshorne’s (1939)
influential The nature of geography notably
critiqued landscape’s incorporation of both objective and subjective elements (the land and
land-as-perceived), concluding that the term
could not serve as the basis of a properly scientific geography. The subsequent rise of regional
and then spatial science paradigms following
the Second World War thus saw something of
a decline in landscape’s purchase and salience
as an organizing term for human geographers.
In this period, most notable and innovative
geographical writing on landscape appeared
the journal Landscape, founded in 1951 by J.B.
Jackson. Through his own extensive writings,
Jackson defined landscape in terms of the material world of ordinary everyday or ‘vernacular’
life – in postwar America an often-bypassed
world of garages, motels, neon-lit strips and
backyards. Jackson’s writing also extended the
empirical emphasis of Sauerian cultural geography through attending seriously to the symbolic and iconic meanings of landscape. This
vision of landscape as at once an everyday,
lived-in world and a repository of symbolic
value chimed with the agenda of North American humanistic geography in the 1970s, and
found its clearest expression in a volume of
essays on The interpretation of ordinary landscapes
(Meinig, 1979).
A raft of innovative writing on landscape
emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
constituting a significant element of the
cultural turn in Anglo-American human
geography as a whole. The work of Denis
Cosgrove (1998 [1984]) and Stephen Daniels
(Daniels and Cosgrove, 1988) in particular
advanced an influential definition of landscape
as a way of seeing and representing the world.
409
LANDSCAPE
Here, landscape was largely equated with
Western visual traditions of landscape painting
and gardening. In drawing upon and extending the work of cultural Marxist critics such as
John Berger (1972) and Raymond Williams
(1973), these cultural geographies of landscape focused upon the critical interrogation
of the ideological function of landscape
images, arguing that landscapes worked so as
to reflect and reproduce the values and norms
of socio-economic elites. In pinpointing its
Italian Renaissance origins, Cosgrove (1985)
sought to highlight the complicity of landscape
as a way of seeing with notions of objective
knowledge and distanced visual authority and
control. In speaking of landscape’s ‘duplicity’,
Daniels (1989) noted that the aesthetic function of artistic landscapes masked their ideological role in naturalizing socio-economic
hierarchies and patterns of land ownership
(see art; iconography). In defining landscape as a text to be critically read via the
principles of structuralist semiotics, Duncan
and Duncan (1988) argued that landscape operated as a signifying system for the production and transmission of cultural meanings.
Gillian Rose (1993) further extended and
critiqued this body of work through highlighting how, for geographers and others, the landscape way of seeing was a particularly
masculinist gaze. Thus, in addition to systems
of cultural and political power and capitalist
forms of social relation, landscape visually
indexed specific forms of patriarchy and disembodied, detached observation. For Rose, the
academic landscape gaze involves a duality between an active masculine eye and a passive,
‘naturalized’ femininity. This eye, however, oscillates ambivalently between asserted rational
observation and repressed visual pleasure, in
the form of voyeurism and narcissism. This
critique thus applied psychoanalytic principles
to landscape interpretation, further aligning
cultural geographies of landscape with work in
visual and cultural theory (e.g. Mulvey, 1989;
Nash, 1996: see vision and visuality).
Work through the 1990s sought to inflect
and extend the cultural turn focus on landscape images and texts by further apprehending landscape in terms of action, process and
movement, both discursive and material. Don
Mitchell’s (1996, 2003) materialist analyses
aim to re-invigorate Marxist understanding of
landscape in terms of production as well as the
cultural consumption and circulation of landscape imagery. For Mitchell, the production of
actual, material landscapes such as mining
towns or agricultural belts is a matter of
410
ongoing struggle and conflict between different social and economic groups within capitalist networks of violence, inequality and
profit. With a similar focus upon issues of
power, but in a more discursive and interpretative vein, an influential collection edited by
cultural theorist W.J.T. Mitchell (2002e
[1994]) sought to define landscape as a verb,
not a noun – that is, as a process, not an object
or image. Here, understood in terms of culturally specific styles of moving, seeing and representing, landscape is historically identified
with European imperial discourse, the visual
modus operandi of European explorers, artists
and cartographers. Extending the focus of
earlier work upon landscape in national contexts, linkages between the landscape gaze,
science, exploration and imperialism have
been extensively discussed by cultural geographers and historians (see Pratt, 1992;
Ryan, 1996; Clayton, 2000).
A further distinctive strand of current geographical writing on landscape, closely associated with the work of David Matless (1992,
1998), places emphasis upon cultures of landscape, most often in a British context. Drawing
upon Michel Foucault’s accounts of discourse,
power and subjectivity, landscape practices
such as walking, boating and driving are analysed here in terms of the discursive regimes
(e.g. those of health and citizenship, state planning, environmental activism), through which
codes of proper conduct for using, appreciating
and indeed creating landscape are elaborated.
Although these various discursive, iconographic and interpretive approaches have defined cultural geographies of landscape since
the 1980s, they have of late been challenged,
modulated and to some degree superseded by
work advocating phenomenological, corporeal
and performative perspectives. The cultural
anthropologist Tim Ingold (1993, 2000) in
particular has argued that the definition of
landscape as a way of seeing perpetuates a
duality of culture and nature, and erases firstorder issues of materiality, agency and
embodied performance by locating landscape
within a disembodied realm of cultural discourse and signification. Ingold’s remedy proposes a landscape phenomenology, inspired by
the writing of Martin Heidegger and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, and focusing substantively
upon embodied practices of dwelling and
being-in-the-world. Here, landscape is defined
as a processual, material and perceptual engagement of body and world, enacted in terms
of a distinctive temporality – a rich duration
of inhabitation. This emphasis on bodily
LANGUAGE
performance and perception is further developed in recent work on landscape from interpretive archaeology and performance studies
itself (Shanks and Pearson, 2000; Tilley, 2004).
Albeit with reservations regarding both the
ontological principles and topical orientations
implied by terms such as ‘dwelling’, phenomenological and performative studies of landscape, practice and perception have emerged
strongly in human geography in recent years;
for example, in writing focusing on issues of
inhabitation (Hinchcliffe, 2003), mobility
(Cresswell, 2003), biography and memory
(Lorimer, 2003) and embodied perception
(Wylie, 2002a). While there has been no wholesale rejection of the critical agendas and positions associated with work on landscape as a
way of seeing, Mitch Rose (2002a) has cogently
identified the epistemological difficulty of, on
the one hand, presenting landscapes as already
ideologically structured, while, on the other,
paradoxically retaining subjects with the ability
to flexibly inhabit and interpret landscapes. At
the same time, the development of actor-network theory and hybrid geographies has arguably created a lacunae within landscape
studies, through providing an alternative conceptual platform from which culture–nature
issues may be apprehended. Most recently,
however, in an attempt to address this lacunae,
the task of producing a ‘post-phenomenological’ account of landscape has been identified, supplementing the work of writers such as
Ingold by attending to self-landscape relations
via ideas of affect and narrative (Wylie, 2005)
and Derridean conceptions of presence and
care (Rose, 2004b).
jwy
Suggested reading
Cosgrove (1985); Rose (1993); Ingold (1993);
Rose (2002); Wylie (2005).
Landschaft A German term roughly corresponding to the English ‘landscape’. The
scenic, pictorial and aesthetic connotations of
the latter are downplayed, however, and
Landschaft is instead more usually associated
with attempts by nineteenth- and twentiethcentury German scholars to fashion geography
as a ‘landscape science’ engaged in the task
of identifying and classifying distinctive natural and cultural regions. In Anglophone
geography, the term Landschaft is closely connected with the work of Carl Ortwin Sauer
and the berkeley school. Sauer (1963a
[1925]) in part adopted and modified the
Landschaft approach in the development of
his own morphological approach to landscape,
placing greater emphasis upon the role of
human agency and culture in shaping (as well
as being shaped by) landscape.
jwy
Suggested reading
Sauer (1963a [1925], ch. 16).
land-use survey The
investigation and
cartographic representation of land use.
Large-scale surveys were launched in the UK
in the 1930s by Dudley Stamp (1898–1966),
based on extensive fieldwork and widely
used as a land-use planning tool for several
decades. Most surveys now deploy remote
sensing and geographic information systems for data collection, collation, display
and analysis (cf. land use and land-cover
change).
rj
Suggested reading
Stamp (1946).
language Study of the changing distribution
and social usages of language (including dialect/
idiolect) is an enduring yet varied tradition in
human geography. Broadly, two main themes
may be distinguished. In the first – the geography in and of language – attention focuses on
studying language distributions, upon spatial
and social variations in linguistic form and in
the origins of and changes in place names. In the
second – the language in and of geography –
consideration is given to the connections between language, social power and identity and
the practice of geography. Although it is not
appropriate to see these two themes as mutually
discrete, chronologically distinct or methodologically separate, the first is more securely
rooted in certain traditions of cultural geography, the second more a feature of cultural
politics and post-colonialism and contemporary interests in unequal power relations and
in language as a political agency (see also discourse; qualitative methods; rhetoric).
The mapping of language areas, often in association with ethnicity, has been an established
feature of anthropogeographical work since the
nineteenth century (see anthropogeography).
Here, language is treated as a cultural artefact, its
changing distribution a reflection of the world’s
shifting linguistic mosaic (and Anglicization: see
Crystal, 2003), its study evident in what has been
variously termed language geography or language
mapping. In linguistic geography (sometimes
termed dialect geography), the emphasis is upon
local differentiations within speech areas, the
variable distribution of given speech forms or
the political authority and cultural identity
411
LATIN AMERICA
rooted in certain languages (geolinguistics). In
many such studies (but not all), the geography
of language in such terms is a form of historical
geography (e.g. Withers, 1984). Attempts to
reverse language decline or obsolescence may
involve direct language planning.
Attention to the language in and of geography is more concerned with the study of
language as the medium through which intersubjective meaning is communicated, and in
the power relations intrinsic to such meaning.
Thus understood, interest in the role and
nature of language within geography is part
of the ‘linguistic turn’ within twentiethcentury philosophy and social theory. It is
evident in work on the politics of language, in
the connections between spoken and written
languages and authorial power, in attempts to
‘recover’ or do interpretative justice to others’
words and worlds in quantitative methodologies (e.g. Crang, 1992), in a recognition that
the limits to our understanding of the world
may indeed be the limits of our language (e.g.
Farinelli, Ollson and Reichart, 1996) and, for
some, in practices of resistance to an AngloAmerican hegemony within geography evident
in the dominance of English as the discipline’s
lingua franca (e.g. Braun, 2003; Desbiens and
Ruddick, 2006: see anglocentrism). cwjw
Suggested reading
Crang (1992).
Latin America In conventional usage, the term
refers to those countries of the American continent that share a history of Spanish, Portuguese
and French colonialism. However, the term also
is widely used to denote all countries south of the
USA (Lewis and Wigen, 1997, p. 182). The
term’s ambiguity has led to academic disputes
over how the category is defined and which countries properly belong within it. For instance,
Quebec is not included, despite a history of
French colonialism; nor are the Mexican states
annexed by the USA in 1848. The problem with
such debates is that they presume a natural congruence between geographical categories and an
underlying social reality, which can be accurately
mapped. Obscured are ontological questions
concerned with how categories are constituted
through intersecting discourses and interlocking
power-geometries.
Since its inception, the term ‘Latin
America’ has been tangled in colonial and
post-colonial contests over identity and territory (Mignolo, 2005). John Phelan (1968)
attributes the term to nineteenth-century
French scholars, who positioned France as
412
the leader of a Latin ‘race’ engaged in a struggle for domination against Anglo-Saxon and
Slavic racial blocs. According to Phelan (1968,
p. 296), the term ‘Latin America’ was baptized
in 1861 in La revue des races Latines, a magazine ‘dedicated to the cause of Pan-Latinism’.
Theories of Pan-Latinism were called upon to
naturalize attempts by Napoleon III to expand
imperial power in what was then commonly
called Hispanic America.
However, the idea of pan-Latinism also circulated in Spain and Hispanic America in the
mid-nineteenth century, as intellectuals from
the Creole elite expressed anxiety about the
imperial ambitions of Anglo-Saxon America
(Ardao, 1992). Chilean scholar Miguel Rojas
Mix (1986) attributes the term to Francisco
Bilbao (1823–65), an exiled Chilean writer
living in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century.
According to Rojas Mix, Bilbao used the term
in a speech in 1856. Arturo Ardao (1992)
credits the Colombian writer José Marı́a
Torres Caicedo (1830–89), also living in
Paris, with its christening in 1856 in his poem
‘The Two Americas’. In any case, both authors
used the term to delineate fundamental cultural and political distinctions between a Latin
America characterized by spirituality and a
quest for independence versus a materialist,
individualistic and imperialist Anglo-Saxon
America. With the US invasion and dismemberment of Mexico in mind, Bilbao, Torres
Caicedo and others echoed Simon Bolivar in
calling for a union of South American nations
to detain the imperialist interests of the USA.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
the term ‘Latin America’ appears in the USA
in 1890, the year of the First International
Conference of American states, held in
Washington, DC. A precursor to the PanAmerican Union, the conference led to
increased academic interest in the countries
south of the Rio Grande. The first academic
course on ‘Spanish American History and
Institutions’ was offered at the University of
California in 1895 (Hanke, 1964, p. 10). In
1917 the Encyclopedia of Latin America was
published, with a foreword from the then
Director General of the Pan American
Union, who suggested that the spread of ‘accurate information will serve Pan American
solidarity and community of action and purpose’ (Wilcox and Rines, 1917, p. 4). His
message explicitly positions ‘Latin America’
as an important object of study at a time
when the USA sought to bring the region in
line with its policies; here, knowledge is made
a key instrument of geopolitical power.
LATIN AMERICA
Drawing from Edward Said’s understanding
of orientalism, Mark T. Berger (1995)
argues that ideas about Latin America in the
USA are inseparable from and the effect of US
imperialism in the region. Berger elaborates
this argument along three lines. First, he
points to the blurred boundaries between the
state and Latin American studies. Not only
have academics moved back and forth
between academia and the various agencies
of the government, but the state has also
attempted to shape the kinds of research
undertaken. Hence, ideas about Latin
America tend to reflect and constitute state
interests. For example, Santana (1996,
p. 459) illustrates how US-based geographical
researchers in Puerto Rico advanced a theory
of ‘non-viability’, suggesting that the island
was ‘not viable as an independent state’.
Such studies were used to support arguments
for continued US occupation.
Second, Latin American studies scholars
have used organizing concepts that facilitate
reductionism and allow the region to be analysed as a coherent unit. This is especially true
after the Second World War, when the US
government began to promote area studies.
In the newly conceived world region framework, the term ‘Latin America’ replaced
‘South America’ (Martin and Wigen, 1997,
p. 162). Area studies presumed the existence
of coherent, naturally bounded regions,
wherein human–environment relations had
produced unique cultural groups. Contemporary regional geographies of Latin
America continue in this tradition by seeking
to delineate the core cultural traits organizing
the region. Thus, Clawson’s (1997, p. 7) textbook defines Latin America as a ‘cultural
entity’ bound by ‘a common Latin, or
Roman, heritage’. Clawson identifies the core
as that area where Latin or Hispanic culture is
dominant: in fringe areas such as the US
Southwest and the Caribbean, ‘traditional
Hispanic values are largely missing’. Such
demarcations between what properly belongs
inside and outside a region are deeply problematic, for they obscure differences within
nations and render invisible the interconnections and interdependencies between them.
Third, Latin American studies tend to use
the USA as the frame of reference or benchmark for encoding representations of, and
measuring the material progress in, Latin
America (Berger, 1995; Schoultz, 1998). As a
result, academic knowledge tends to be underwritten by a United Statesian – Self/Latin
American – Other binary, which constitutes
difference and distance within a hierarchical
framing. No matter the theoretical approach
used in the USA, from environmental determinism in the 1930s to area studies, regional
geographies and development studies from
the 1940s on, Latin America is conjured
to embody everything that the USA is not:
handicapped by climate and geography,
isolated, backward, traditional, violent, peripheral, underdeveloped and poor. Such
imaginative geographies are called upon to
authorize or legitimize US intervention in the
region, whether to protect national interests or
foster development (Santana, 1996).
When the term ‘Latin America’ began to
have broad circulation in English and Spanish
in the early decades of the twentieth century,
some Spanish intellectuals decried its use.
Writing in 1918, Ramón Menéndez Pidal
complained that the term deprived Spain of
its historical and geographical titles in the
New World (Ardao, 1992, p. 17).
South of the Rio Bravo, the idea of Latin
America has conjured ambivalence and passionate attachment. For Daniel Mato (1998), the
continuing salience of Latinoamericanismo
stems from its association with nationalist, antiimperialist struggles. Thus, for example, Alonso
Aguilar (1968, p. 30) contrasts the US vision of
Pan-Americanism with the ‘Latin-Americanism
of Bolı́var, San Martı́n, and Morelos which stood
for the struggle of their people for full independence’. Appropriating such associations, ruling
elites and state bureaucracies, Mato argues, repeatedly constitute and address a pan-ethnic
group called Latinoamericanos to advance nation-building projects founded upon the myth
of mestizaje (‘racial mixing’). For instance, in
¿Existe América Latina?, Luis Alberto Sanchez
(1945, p. 239) suggests that the future of the
region depends upon accepting mestizaje in a
positive sense, as integration and creation. In
Mato’s view, the notion of a mestizo ‘extended
ethnic group’ perpetuates the exclusion of
indigenous and African-descendent peoples.
The idea of Latin America has come under
intense public criticism since the Columbus
Quincentennial in 1992. While state officials
planned elaborate celebrations – many funded
by the Spanish government – indigenous and
Afro-Latin American groups took to the streets
throughout the region in an organized effort to
posit alternative perspectives on the conquest
and its aftermath. The increasing political
power of such groups calls into question hegemonic views of the region’s Latin heritage, which
work to obscure the contributions of indigenous
and African-descendent peoples, as well as the
413
LAW
many other immigrant groups involved in producing the cultural landscapes of the Americas.
Since the 1990s, a number of Latin American
countries have ratified new constitutions recognizing their multicultural foundations. In this
context, a number of indigenous social movements have formed viable political parties.
Currently, social movements in Latin
America are fostering new geographical imaginaries to contest the US-driven Free Trade
Area of the Americas, which would unify
all of the Americas under a single free trade
agreement promising to benefit transnational corporations. Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian alternative for the Americas aims to
create a socially oriented trade bloc built
upon effective mechanisms to eradicate the
economic disparities that exist within and between countries.
jsu
Suggested reading
Ardao (1980, 1992); Berger (1995); Mignolo
(2005); Van Cott (2000).
law An enforceable body of rules and related
norms governing social conduct. Geographers
have long been interested in law, defined more
or less broadly. Historically, analyses tended to
divide into those, such as Ellen Semple, who
sought to ground law in place, and others, like
Derwent Whittlesey, who focused on what he
termed the ‘impress of effective central authority upon the landscape’. Whether law is
explained by reference to space, or space
seen as produced by law, the tendency was to
impose separations on law, space and society.
From the 1980s onwards, when the ‘spatial
turn’ in social theory made such a separation
untenable, such binaries came under attack.
Influenced by debates within social and legal
theory, critical legal geographers have developed a very different reading of law, space and
their mutual relation, with scepticism towards
existing legal structures and the social relations that they embody. The distinguishing
feature of this perspective is its refusal to accept either law or space as pre-political or as
the unproblematic outcome of external forces.
Both are regarded as deeply social and political. Law is seen both as a site in which competing values, practices and meanings are
fought over, and also as the means by which
certain meanings and social relations become
fixed and naturalized, either in oppressive or
potentially empowering ways. Law is understood not only as a set of operative controls,
but also as a powerful repertoire of cultural
and political meanings. Similarly, space is
414
regarded as both socially produced and as
socially constitutive, with attention being
directed to the ‘politics’ of space. The relation
between law, space and society is redefined
and extended in important ways, opening up
many new areas to critical geographic enquiry.
This scholarship is remarkably diverse and
lively, engaging with topics such as nature,
landscape, state practice, nationalism and
boundaries. Scholars draw from a range of
theoretical sources, including queer theory,
urban political economy, actor-network
theory and cultural studies. Scholars also
work across a range of scales, addressing not
only national law (in relation to civil rights,
crime, employment and housing, for example) but also international law (in relation
to genocide, human rights, the laws of war
and spaces of exception). Though fluid and
non-institutionalized, some foci of interest over
the past decade have included the following:
(1) The analysis of the manner in which legal
action and interpretation produces certain spaces. The role of the legal apparatus – especially the judiciary – is often
given prominence, it being noted that
court decisions have profound (and
often problematic) effects within local
settings in both material and discursive
terms, given the manner in which legal
categories and discourse can come to
frame local debates (cf. Forest, 2001).
(2) The related study of the situated nature
of legal interpretation, it being argued
that legal practice and interpretation is
often bound up in the place in which it
occurs (cf. Cooper, 1998; also situated
knowledge).
(3) The study of the geographical claims and
representations (see representation)
contained within legal discourse: in
much the same way that law relies on
claims concerning history and time, so
it both defines and draws upon a complex range of geographies and spatial
understandings. The construction of
such spaces can be seen, for example, in
relation to the designation of boundaries
between private and public spheres
(Pratt, 2004), struggle over the meanings
of ownership and property rights
(Blomley, 2004a) or conceptions of jurisdiction (Ford, 1999).
While insightful, scholarship on law and geography requires further development. While
empirical accounts abound, the theorization of
LAW OF THE SEA
the geographies of law and legal struggles is still
undeveloped and somewhat ambiguous. Pressing questions include: What analytical and
ethical difference does space make to the analysis
of law? What sort(s) of power is law? How can
space and law be brought together without succumbing to a binary logic? Are legal geographies
only discursive? Finally, the ‘critical’ aspects of
this enquiry need to be worked through more
carefully. Some years ago, Vera Chouinard
(1994a, p. 428) called for ‘meaningful political
action in and against the legal system’. While this
has been embraced in some quarters (Razack,
2002; Mitchell, 2003a), the political edge to
critical legal geography remains undeveloped.
Whether this entails intellectual challenges to
legal ‘closure’ or grounded and inclusionary research projects concerning law remains an
important question.
nkb
Suggested reading
Blomley (1994); Blomley, Delaney and Ford
(2001); Clark (1989); Holder and Harrison
(2003); Sarat and Kearns (2003).
law (scientific) A statement of an invariant
relationship holding between different phenomena, or between different states of the
same phenomena. The best known formulation is found in orthodox philosophy of science and is represented in symbolic form as ‘If
A, then B’. Boyle’s Law, for example, states
that if the volume of gas at a given temperature
increases, then pressure decreases proportionately. Similar law-like statements have been
proposed for geography, of which perhaps the
best known is Tobler’s (1970, p. 236) First
Law of Geography: ‘Everything is related to
everything else, but near things are more
related than distant things.’ In the orthodox
rendering, scientific laws are presumed eternal, universal, absolute, true and capable of
expression in formal terms. They form the
basis of scientific explanation and prediction
– ground zero for understanding how the universe works. Two major objections have been
levelled against these conventional views.
First, realism argues that the orthodox ‘If A,
then B’ form of a law says nothing about causality, instead asserting only the (weak) relation
of conjunctional association. A stronger statement is required assigning causation. Second,
work in science studies disputes many of the
characteristics attributed to scientific laws by
arguing that they represent local knowledge
rather than universal knowledge, and ex-post
rationalization rather than fundamental explanation. In this spirit, Barnes (2004a) draws
on science studies to contest Tobler’s First
Law of Geography.
tb
Suggested reading
Barnes (2004a).
law of the sea On 10 December 1982, the
third United Nations Convention on the Law
of the Sea (UNCLOS III) was opened for
signature in Montego Bay, Jamaica, marking
the culmination of over 14 years of work.
More than 150 countries participated in drafting the treaty (representing all regions of the
world, legal and political systems, and degrees
of socio-economic development, and including coastal, archipelagic, island and landlocked states, as well as states ‘geographically
disadvantageous with regard to the ocean
space’; see Friedheim, 1993). The Law of the
Sea entered into force on 16 November 1994.
As of 16 March 2005, the number of parties to
UNCLOS III, including the European
Community, stood at 149 – 130 coastal and
eighteen landlocked states.
The treaty aims at ensuring peace and
security in the world’s oceans; promoting equitable and efficient utilization of their resources;
and fostering protection and conservation of
the marine environment. Equally significant is
its role in clarifying and balancing the rights and
duties of coastal states regarding adjacent maritime areas. Several ‘mini-packages’ of delicately
balanced compromises emerged from the
lengthy negotiations. For example, the convention allows coastal states certain rights in the
‘exclusive economic zone’ (Articles 55–75) –
up to 200 nautical miles – for the purpose of
economic advantage, notably rights over fishing
and exploitation of non-living resources, as well
as the concomitant limited jurisdiction in order
to realize those rights. At the same time, however, neighbouring landlocked and geographically disadvantaged states must be allowed
access to those resources of the zones that the
coastal state does not exploit.
The LOS reserves the seas and ocean for
peaceful and co-operative purposes, but
regional conflicts, illegal activities (piracy,
maritime terrorism and drug smuggling), competitive and unsustainable exploitation of marine resources, and environmental degradation
are undermining human security at an alarming
pace. Despite the obvious importance of polar
maritime areas, there is a lack of general international law rules or conventions dealing with
polar law of the sea problems (Chaturvedi,
2000). The LOS raises difficult questions in
the following areas: ice-covered waters, polar
415
LEARNING REGIONS
baseline, maritime zones and the deep-seabed,
high-sea freedoms and navigation, and marine
pollution and environmental protection.
The international community continues its
efforts to strengthen the international legal
framework to prevent and suppress acts of
terrorism (including acts at sea), safety of navigation, maritime security and the protection
of marine environment. The 1995 United
Nations Fish Stocks Agreement, considered
the most important multilateral legally binding
instrument for the conservation and management of high-seas fisheries since the conclusion of UNCLOS III, calls upon states to
establish new regional fisheries management
organizations where none exist in a particular
region or sub-region. Its objectives are to ensure the long-term conservation and sustainable use of straddling and highly migratory fish
stocks and to protect marine biodiversity. sch
Suggested reading
Rothwell (1996).
learning regions Spatial clusters of linked
industries whose continued growth is a function of permanent innovation, through interfirm co-operation and competition. agglomeration economies were first associated with
industrial districts by the economist Alfred
Marshall (1890) and the role of innovation in
spatially proximate linked networks of firms is
usually associated with the work of Piore and
Sabel (1984), who stress that the importance
of both formal and informal linkages within a
cluster mean that the whole is more than the
sum of its parts because of both the local
‘industrial atmosphere’ and the ‘mutual knowledge and trust’ resident there. Scott (2006)
uses the alternative term creative field to
describe the social relations within such a cluster, defining it as ‘all those instances of human
effort and organization whose spatial and locational attributes, at whatever scale they may
occur, promote development and growthinducing change’ (p. 54). Recognition of the
importance of such fields to the development
of clusters such as Silicon Valley in California
has stimulated many public policy initiatives
aimed at creating and fostering learning
regions – as with science parks.
rj
Suggested reading
Longworth (2004).
Lebensraum Literally translated as ‘living
space’, the term was used by Friedrich Ratzel
in his representation of the state as an organism
416
to identify a ‘geographical area within which
living organisms develop’ (see anthropogeography). The term was developed by the
Geopolitik school and partially adopted by the
Nazis to justify the extension of the borders of
the German state eastwards for the benefit of
Germans and at the expense of the Slavs, who
were represented as inferior and ‘unworthy’ of
the territory (Smith, W.D., 1986; Clarke, Doel
and McDonough, 1996). Territorial expansion
was represented as a ‘natural’ consequence of
the survival of the fittest (cf. darwinism). cf
Suggested reading
Smith, W.D. (1986b)
leisure Either freedom from doing some
things, or freedom to do other things – both
definitions connote an existential state that
involves pleasure and enjoyment, alongside
choice. In many definitions and surveys, it is
construed as activities that are not biologically
necessary, that are not constrained by demands
of work or other social actors, but that are
chosen for personal pursuits. Much analysis has
looked either at the changing ways in which
‘leisure’ intersects with other activities or at the
changing forms of leisure activities themselves.
The first approach thus looks at how leisure
fits into the mix of activities that make up life.
The most influential founding work in this regard is Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of the leisure
class (first published in 1899). In it, Veblen sees
leisure as a positional good that shows relative
status and power within a system of consumption. For Veblen, ability to consume leisure was
a signal of wealth and status. This was set within
the context of long struggles in the later nineteenth and much of the twentieth century
between labour and capital over reductions in
the working week and paid holiday time. Considerable argument has emerged over whether
the deregulated economies beginning in the late
twentieth century, with demands for 24/7 services, have reversed that trend (e.g. Schor, 1991)
or whether people feel more stressed, and leisure
is more structured, but may have increased. All
these studies focus on the amount of leisure time.
However, difficulties arise about definitions
when one considers forms of leisure that involve
‘serious leisure’, such as volunteering or educational hobbies (Stebbins, 1992), or social reproduction, such as cooking or eating, which
may be for pleasure as well as necessity. These
latter highlight gender issues in definitions, and
that men in developed countries enjoy far more
choice than do women with what to do with time
that is free from paid work.
LIBERALISM
The second approach focuses upon the nature of leisure activities. This approach points
to the significance of leisure both economically
and in shaping personal identities. Classic
critical theory argued that nothing was as
abhorrent to capital as ‘free time’ and that
leisure was its commodification into a product
to be bought and sold. Originally, criticism
focused on the fordist mass production of
homogeneous leisure products. Adorno and
Horkheimer, in the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, argued that
amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work . . . mechanization has
such a power over man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the
manufacture of amusement goods, that his
experiences are inevitably after-images of
the work process itself. (1979, p. 137)
Later work has argued that in a postfordist or postmodern world these patterns
fragment and their meaning changes. Thus
many analysts point to the emergence of
social groups defined not by work identities
but by shared leisure activities, such as different kinds of music or skateboarding, as
subcultures or neotribes (Maffesoli, 1995).
Others point to the emergence of a serviceled ‘experience economy’, where we move
from selling tangible products to consuming
the memory of an event or experience (Pine
and Gilmore, 1998).
mc
Suggested reading
Gershuny (2000); Koshar (2002); Maffesoli
(1996).
liberalism The view that individual freedom
should be the basis of human life. Liberals
believe that human well-being is maximized
when individuals are free to pursue their
own interests provided that doing so causes
no harm to others. According to classical liberalism, the state should be as small as possible and only as strong as is necessary to
maintain the conditions that will safeguard
individual liberty. Liberal models of citizenship thus emphasize the formal equality of all
citizens, civil rights, the rule of law and the
protection of individuals from the arbitrary
exercise of state power. Much debate within
liberalism has been concerned with how to
deal with conflicts of interest between individuals. Liberal models of democracy emphasize
the expression of individual preferences
through voting. In economics, liberalism
favours private ownership and production
and market mechanisms of resource allocation, based on the non-coerced interactions
of individual producers and consumers.
Liberalism has been highly influential. All
the world’s major industrialized countries are,
formally at least, liberal democracies with
market economies. In practice, however, their
political institutions and economic systems
rarely come close to liberal models, and in
many places even basic civil rights are under
threat in the name of the ‘war on terror’. The
governments of some other countries, most
notably China, have explicitly eschewed liberal
democracy, although market mechanisms have
been widely adopted in the economic arena.
Despite its apparent global hegemony, liberalism has been subject to many critiques and
challenges (see, e.g., anarchism; communitarianism; environmentalism; fascism;
feminism; marxism; post-colonialism; socialism). According to some contemporary
defenders of liberalism, religious fundamentalism (see religion) poses the principal political
threat to liberalism in the early twenty-first
century. For others, there are inherent limits
to liberalism and it is time to chart the contours of post-liberalism (Gray, 1996) or to
push the democratizing impulse in liberalism
in more radical and pluralist directions (see
radical democracy).
Geographers have contributed to debates
about liberalism in numerous areas. Much
research has focused on neo-liberalism: the
widespread revival of liberal economics since
the 1970s and its application to public policy by
national governments and international
organizations (Harvey, 2005). Work on geographies of the body has questioned the concept
of the sovereign and autonomous individual.
Geographers have also engaged extensively
with debates about rights and citizenship, focusing on the differential socio-spatial distribution
of rights and obligations. The fundamental liberal distinction between the private and public
spheres has been destabilized by geographical
research into the fluidity and porosity of the
public/private boundary. The universalizing imperatives of liberalism have been challenged by
geographers charting the geopolitics of humanitarian and military intervention (Smith, 2006b).
Studies of the geographies of governmentality
have revealed how liberal governance involves
what Nikolas Rose (1999c) calls ‘powers of freedom’. In this view, freedom is a mechanism of
governance, rather than its antithesis.
jpa
Suggested reading
Gray (1995); Kelly (2005).
417
LIFE EXPECTANCY
life expectancy The additional number of
years of life that individuals who reach a certain age can anticipate. It is calculated by
using current data on mortality and making
assumptions about future trends in growth
rates within the framework of the life table.
Life expectancy is most often reported for individuals at age zero (i.e. at birth) and shows
marked variation over space and time, and by
sex and ethnicity/race (Shaw, Davey and
Dorling, 2005). Such variations are linked to
the access that individuals and groups have to
economic, social and political resources, making life expectancy a surrogate measure of
social justice within society (e.g. the human
development index compares overall well-being
between societies and is calculated using life
expectancy, measures of knowledge and
standard of living).
ajb
Bailey, Blake and Cooke, 2004). While stages
in the life course are associated with biological
age, these associations vary across time and
place, given widespread differences in life
expectancy and chances depending on political economic conditions.
ck
Suggested reading
Cortesi, Cristaldi and Fortuijn (2004); Katz and
Monk (1993).
lifeworld Synonymous with the taken-for-
shows how many persons die before, and
survive beyond, successive birthdays. The
methodology dates to the seventeenth century
and calculates, among other measures, life
expectancy on the basis of how many members of a hypothetical cohort of 100,000
newly borns survive to reach each of their
subsequent birthdays, assuming that the pattern of age specific death rates that prevailed
at the moment of birth continues into the
future. While the intermediate information
on survival rates continues to be of direct
interest to those calculating insurance and
pension premiums, the related method of survival analysis has emerged as an important tool
in longitudinal studies of migration, marriage
and poverty (Plane and Rogerson, 1994). ajb
granted world, the everyday lifeworld of
habitual actions and attitudes is the foundational setting of Schutzian phenomenology
and the closely related symbolic interactionism of G.H. Mead. Introduced to geographers in the humanistic geography of
Anne Buttimer (1976) and others, lifeworld
comprised the relational and meaningful
places of direct experience where intentional
actions unfolded and identity was assembled.
Lifeworld is socio-centric and corporeal in its
range and clarity. However, it is not static but,
as Buttimer stressed, dynamic, concerned with
movement and rhythm that integrates parts
into an experienced whole, with routines that
sediment a way of life in a geographic setting
(Mels, 2004). Such a fusion of intersubjective
meaning and physical location is inherent to
the geographies of home, community and
nation. The lifeworld is a basic building
block in attempts to construct a meta-social
theory by Berger and Luckmann, Giddens
and others. In his influential formulation,
Jürgen Habermas counters the practical intersubjective interests of the lifeworld, retrieved
through hermeneutic study, with the instrumentality of political and economic systems
accounted for through positivist methods (see
critical theory).
dl
Suggested reading
Suggested reading
Rowland (2003, ch. 8).
Dyck (1995); Jackson and Smith (1984, ch. 2);
Mels (2004).
Suggested reading
Weeks (1999, ch. 4).
life table An accounting framework that
life course/life-cycle The notion of life
course has largely replaced life-cycle in social
science research, to call attention to the
socially constructed nature of shifts in experience and practice associated with ageing.
Research examines both the normative patterns of behaviour associated with different
life stages, and the relationships among social
actors at different stages, weaving together
production and social reproduction to
address such issues as child and elder care,
labour force participation, residential mobility and migration (see McDowell, 2003;
418
limits to growth The proposition, central to
much modern environmentalism, that the
finiteness of biophysical resources places
absolute limits on demographic and economic
growth. Although the idea is important in classical political economy, the phrase entered
widespread modern circulation only in 1972,
when it appeared as the title of a report by a
group known as the Club of Rome (Meadows,
Meadows, Randers and Brehens, 1972).
Based on early exercises in computer modelling, the report argued that humanity was on
LITERATURE
the brink of exceeding the Earth’s carrying
capacity and precipitating widespread social
and ecological crisis. Although the report
looked at resources in addition to those directly related to agricultural production, its
argument was essentially a Malthusian one
(see malthusian model). It was an important
milestone in the development of neo-Malthusian
trends in modern environmentalism, such as a
concern with the ‘population bomb’, as well as
an impetus towards calls for a ‘steady-state
economy’ and the development of the field of
environmental economics.
Belief in absolute limits to economic growth
based on material scarcity, and the politics
that follow from such a position, constituted
a direct challenge to the Promethean views of
human activity arguably shared by neo-classical economics and classical Marxism, both
of which denied the necessity of such absolute
material limits to human productivity. In
geography, David Harvey (1974a) and others
strongly criticized resurgent neo-Malthusian
models for overlooking issues of distribution,
justice, scale, changes in technology and productivity, and other factors that would complicate or undermine their predictions. A
significant amount of geographical work over
the subsequent several decades has essentially
reproduced and elaborated this debate in various arenas. Perhaps the most notable example
is the rapid growth of scholarship centred on
the concept of environmental security. This
literature is constituted largely by debates between dominant neo-Malthusian views, which
continue to articulate theories of how demographically fuelled conflicts over increasingly
scarce natural resources will produce escalating violence and geopolitical instability (see
resource wars), and more critical voices,
which continue to insist on attention to the
social causes, contexts, and complexities of
such scenarios (see Dalby, 2004).
Other work in geography, though, has revisited the question of natural limits with increasing theoretical nuance, moving beyond the
simple rejection of it in much of the Marxist
tradition. Theorists of natural resource industries in particular have begun to take nature’s
materiality seriously by attempting to understand not only the constraints, but also the
affordances and surprises, that biophysical systems present to human activities in specific
circumstances, developing concepts such as
appropriationism, substitutionism, eco-regulation, hybridity, and the formal versus the
real subsumption of nature to capital (see
Boyd, Prudham and Schurman, 2001). Nat-
ural ‘limits’ are thus increasingly understood
and investigated as differentially malleable
conditions of possibility for particular forms
of human activity, rather than as absolute
and universal barriers. Such a perspective has
proved compatible with recognition of the necessarily political and social character of any
claims about natural limits, as emphasized in
the literature on social constructionism.
jm
Suggested reading
Benton (1989); Boyd, Prudham and Schurman
(2001).
linear programming A type of optimization
model used to find the optimal solution to a
wide variety of economic, business and geographical problems, such as the minimum total
transport cost of shipping goods through a geographical network. Optimization models have an
objective function (the quantity to be minimized
or maximized) and a set of constraints that define
the possibilities and requirements (limits on supply, demand requirements, route characteristics). In linear programming both the
objective function and the constraints are linear
functions and this makes solution fast and easy,
even for very large problems. The transportation problem is a special form that has many
geographical applications.
lwh
Suggested reading
Greenberg (1978); Killen (1979, 1983).
linkages The contacts and flows of information and/or materials between two or more
individuals. The term is widely used in both
industrial geography and the geography of
services to indicate inter-firm interdependence and its effects on location choice (see
agglomeration). A firm’s linkages can be
divided into: (1) backward, which provide
goods and services for its production activities;
(2) forward, links with customers purchasing
its products; and (3) sideways, interactions
with other firms involved in the same processes. Membership of such networks in
increasingly seen as crucial to success and
survival for a firm, especially a small firm.
(See also integration).
rj
literature
Although the meanings of this
term have varied widely, two have been of
special interest to geographers: (a) imaginative
writing, especially that deemed to be of especially high quality or status by a critical establishment; and (b) published scholarly work on
a particular topic.
419
LITERATURE
Literature in the sense of imaginative writing has attracted the analytical attention of
cultural geographers over the past 30 years in
particular. Novels, stories, poems and travel
narratives have been studied for their representations of places, landscapes and nature, of
regions and nations, and of geographical processes such as urbanization, migration and
colonization. An interest in literature was evident in some of Alexander von Humboldt’s
writings, and received scattered attention at
moments through the early and mid-twentieth
century. Darby’s essay on the regional geography of Hardy’s Wessex (1948) was an early
outlier, but it extracted the descriptions of
landscape from the novels and used them to
reconstruct the regional geographies of Dorset
in the first half of the nineteenth century: as
Darby had it, placing ‘the pictures that Hardy
drew’ in ‘the sequence that stretches from
John Coker’s survey in the seventeenth century up to modern accounts of the land utilization of Dorset’ (p. 343). Darby displayed
no interest in exploring the significance of
these places for the characters and events in
the novels, still less in approaching these
‘geographies’ with the sensibility of a literary
scholar (cf. Barrell, 1982). Hardy’s texts were
read as more or less inert sources, and Darby
had no interest in (or awareness of ) how, as
Brosseau (1995, p. 89) later put it more generally, a novel ‘has a particular way of writing
its own geography.’
It was not until thirty years after Darby’s
essay that literature received any sustained and
systematic attention in human geography, as
part of the growing attention to environmental
perception, imagery, attitudes and values, and
to consciousness as an aspect of culture. This
was the product of the critique of spatial science and the flowering of a humanistic geography that renewed the discipline’s traditional
connections with the humanities in different,
more analytical, registers, and which had a
particular impact on cultural geography
(Salter and Lloyd, 1977; Pocock, 1981).
These explorations intensified through the
closing decades of the twentieth century and
into the opening decades of the twenty-first.
This was achieved, in part, through a much
closer and usually theoretically informed engagement with the work of literary scholars
and cultural critics – from Walter Benjamin
and Mikhail Bakhtin through Edward Said
and Raymond Williams to Terry Eagleton
and Fredric Jameson – many of whom had
an interest in spatiality and the cultures of
colonialism, capitalism and modernity that
420
was at once close to and consequential for
human geography more generally. Their critical writings had a considerable impact on
explorations of modernism and postmodernism in the cities of the global North, of imaginative geographies produced under the
signs of orientalism, tropicality and similar
projects, and on theorizations of power and
culture. These endeavours were reinforced
through a second source of interest in literary
matters: human geography’s engagement with
styles of contemporary philosophy that Rorty
once described as forms of cultural criticism:
these included his own version of pragmatism but also post-structuralism (the literary sensibilites of Foucault and Derrida
are especially salient, though Eagleton has
railed against Spivak’s).
The turn to literature has raised an interesting question in a field dominated by the discourses of social science: Exactly what kind of
evidence is literature? For some human geographers, it is both indicative of the capacity of
human beings to make meaning and an
expression of a specific meaning-filled culture
(e.g. Bunkse, 2004); for others, and not
mutually exclusive of other meanings, it is at
once a reflection of political–economic realities and a way of thinking them through (e.g.
Henderson, 1999); for others, it is part and
parcel of the production of regional identity
and memory (e.g. DeLyser, 2005). In human
geography, the meaning of ‘imaginative writing’ extends to some degree to narratives of
travel and exploration (see travel writing).
While not pure figments of imagination, these
writings are often structured around certain
tropes and narrative conventions that give
textuality as such a constitutive role in their
making: travel narratives do not simply mirror
or correspond to the world (e.g. Blunt, 1994).
It is probably safe to say that most contemporary geographical study of literature is not so
much interested in literature per se than in
literature as a species of representation, discourse and text, interest in which has grown
with the cultural turn in the social sciences
(Barnes and Duncan, 1991). It is not entirely a
one-way street, and the traffic has been
marked by both interesting departures and
juddering collisions: literary scholars would
have no difficulty in recognizing the force
and originality of Kearns’ (2006b) reading of
the spatial dialectics of James Joyce, for
example, and the three spatial motifs he identifies (circulation, labyrinth and palimpsest)
thread out on to the wider terrain of British
colonialism and Irish nationalism; but most
LITERATURE
human geographers would be bemused at the
traces of spatial science to be discerned in
Moretti’s (1998, 2005) spatialized apprehensions of the European novel and literary
history.
Literature as a social and geographical phenomenon, involving the geographical spread
of avowedly ‘literary’ forms (e.g. the novel),
the emergence of publication and printing
centres, literary celebrity and certain ideological effects, has been studied extensively.
Few such studies have been undertaken by
geographers, but the classic account of ‘the
coming of the book’ in Europe devoted a central chapter to ‘the geography of the book’
(Febvre and Martin, 1984 [1958], pp. 167–
215), and historians and historical geographers followed in their footsteps to study the
diffusion of printing, the spread of literacy,
the spatial impress of censorship and other
topics. These historical treatments underscore
that both the forms and meanings of literature
have changed dramatically. Literature’s meaning as a form of imaginative writing endorsed
by a critical establishment came about over
time (see Williams, 1977; Eagleton, 1983).
Its early meaning (into the eighteenth century)
was closer to the idea of literacy; that is, it was
the property or characteristic of learned, reading elites. Literature’s meaning as a mark of
distinction regarding what one could do (read)
was then extended to what one read (books).
The question of what kinds of books counted
as literature then followed (Williams, 1977).
There was (and there remains) no easy distinction between fiction and fact as the way to
demarcate literature from other sorts of writing – witness the example of travel writing.
The difference between works of, say, philosophy, history and politics as opposed to fictional writing was codified in response to
industrial capitalism, which was seen as suppressing creativity. This is not to say that literature, or more specifically what cultural
elites claimed counted as literature, escaped
an ideological function within industrial capitalism (Eagleton, 1983). Literature as creative
output was also caught up with the notion of a
‘national’ literature and the establishment
(and struggle over) nation-state based literary
canons. The formation of the literary canon
carried with it a new meaning: literature
exemplified for national critical establishments
the best of what a nation-state could achieve
and served the purposes of unifying national
identity (see also nation; nationalism). (The
logic of specifically regional literatures and
regional literary canon formations runs in
parallel. But contrast these impulses towards
national and regional narratives of literary
formation with the recent identification of a
‘global literary space’ à la world systems
theory: see Casanova, 2005.)
Yet the meanings of literature have in fact
remained multiple, or perhaps become multiple once again, albeit in different ways.
Most of what human geographers have had
to say about ‘literature’ has focused on the
book, specifically the novel or the travel narrative, and yet many of the scholars on whose
work they draw have also had important things
to say about other cultural media: art, drama,
film, music, photography and video. Human
geographers have explored these too, but they
have displayed much less interest in literary
dramatic works (other than their staging: see
Chamberlain, 2001; Pratt and Johns, 2007)
except, by analogical extension, in ideas of
performance. This is surprising since, as
the image of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre
reminds us, drama has long had important
things to show us about the production of
human geographies (cf. Gillies, 1994).
Printed work of many kinds continues to be
referred to as literature, whether this is the ‘literature’ produced by political campaigns, advertising literature, best-selling novels or, still,
literature-capital. Within the academy, ‘literature’ also means the collective, published scholarly work pertaining to some field (‘the
geographical literature’), which typically has
its own (contested) canon and its own (contentious) critical establishment. Literature as specifically scholarly work is not simply a product
found on the bookshelf or downloadable as a
PDF. It is a process that involves discernment,
vetting, peer review, editorial negotiation and
not a little politics. The scholarly literature is
thus not a thing: it is a social relation out of
which are wrought scholarly debate or consensus, cases for tenure (or not), new journals or
lapsed subscriptions, expectations among researchers and between teachers and students,
and struggles won or lost over the lingua franca
of scholarship as such.
A much less explored resonance between
geography and literature is the idea that
scholarly geography can be literature in the
creative sense of the word (cf. Bunkse,
2004), though today’s human geography is
no stranger to experiments with literary form,
as in the work of Marcus Doel, Gunnar
Olsson or Allan Pred, for example, and there
are many other human geographers who
write with an ear to cadence and an eye to
image. But even ‘geographical literature’ in
421
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE
its radically non-experimental, more technical
sense can be subject to the same disciplined
processes of critical reading that literary
scholars apply to poems and novels, and in
as many ways. The process of theoretical
critique in human geography is not only
about the collision of contending concepts,
therefore, but is also about its text-ures,
the very languages and grammars of geographical enquiry: it can and should include the
analysis of metaphor and rhetoric, a disclosure of the masculinism and phallocentrism of the formal structure of an
argument or the deconstruction of geographical texts. This ought to come as no
surprise: the root meaning of ‘Geo-graphy’,
after all, is ‘Earth-writing’.
ghe/dg
Suggested reading
Bunkse (2004); Thacker (2005–6).
local knowledge A term coined by the
English philosopher Gilbert Ryle, and popularized by the American anthropologist
Clifford Geertz (1983). Local knowledge refers to the double idea (1) that all knowledge is
geographically and historically bounded, and
(2) that the local conditions of its manufacture
affect the nature of the knowledge produced.
Note that local knowledge refers to the context
in which knowledge is produced, not the geographical domain to which knowledge applies.
The physicist’s string theory, for example, is
a piece of local knowledge even though its
explanatory province is infinitely large, even
beyond the known universe. To take in turn
the two parts of the definition:
(1) Knowledge is historically constrained,
and produced within particular material
settings that include geographical site,
particular kinds of human bodies, and
specific types of buildings, machines
and equipment. The key word is produced. Producing knowledge contrasts
with the conventional view that knowledge is acquired through discovery
(dis-cover, literally to uncover). In the
discovery view, knowledge is assumed
to be free floating and pre-existent,
requiring only the right conditions to be
revealed. For knowledge to be produced,
however, suggests something different;
that there is an active process of creative
construction ‘on site’ according to
specific local rules and conditions. An
example is graduate students making vigorous use of large desk calculators in the
422
statistics laboratory at the University of
Iowa in the late 1950s, and in the process
producing geography’s quantitative
revolution (Barnes, 2004b).
(2) The material and historical setting, and
associated social interests, enter into the
very lineaments of knowledge. Knowledge does not come from the sky, from
heavenly inspiration, but from engaging
in particular kinds of social practices that
are historically and geographically
grounded (see situated knowledge).
Knowledge is irreducibly social, never innocent, always coloured by the context of
its production. This does not mean that it
is singularly determined by its context.
Multiple responses to any situation are
possible, though their range will be constrained by the places and predicaments
that have in various ways, sometimes unremarked and unconscious, both summoned and shaped them. Examples are
legion: environmental determinism expressed (and helped to legitimize) the racist and imperialist impulses of latenineteenth-century Europe; regional
science represented the instrumentalist, masculinist and economistic sentiments of much of mid-twentieth-century
America; and postmodernism reflected a
late-twentieth-century consumer capitalism constituted by flickering images and
fabricated identities. In each of these
cases, the knowledge that emerged is
shaped by the particular, non-repeatable
constellation of forces, causes and determinations found at a given time and
place. One can begin to trace their effects,
and they clearly travel and will be found in
other times and places too, but not in the
exact same combination with the same
consequence. Each local context will be
different, producing different knowledge.
The important corollary is that universal
claims to truth are unsupportable. Knowledge is always made inside the bubble of
local context, with no means of moving
outside for ‘a god’s eye view’ (Haraway,
1991c, p. 193).
The issue of local knowledge has been
central recently in at least two disciplines.
First, in anthropology, Clifford Geertz (1988,
p. 137) argues for the impossibility of ‘telling it
like it is’, because ethnographic accounts are
as much about the world of the ethnographer
as the world that is represented (and transparently obvious in early ethnographies; Geertz,
LOCAL STATE
1988: see also ethnography). A recent complication is the effect of an increasingly fluid,
mobile and hyperactive world, which seemingly undermines the idea of fixed local knowledge. The problem is that while knowledge is
produced at local sites, it increasingly travels.
The response has been to examine networks
of knowledge, conceived as inter-local interactions. Local knowledge travels, but it never
achieves universality.
Second, in the field of history and philosophy
of science, ‘telling it like it is’ is also not an
option, since Kuhn (1970 [1962]) devised his
concept of a paradigm. Science is conceived
as being shot full of social interests, reflecting
the time and place of its manufacture: it is
local knowledge. Initially the Edinburgh
School, and feminists such as Haraway (1989),
provided detailed, historical studies, laying bare
the local social interests at play. Other work – for
example, Latour and Woolgar (1979) – concentrated on specific local sites, such as the laboratory, and concomitant micro-practices of
research and relations of power that produce
knowledge. The point, as Rouse (1987, p. 72)
writes, is that scientists ‘go from one local
knowledge to another rather than from universal
theories to their particular instantiations’.
In spite of geography’s historical concern with
the local, the discipline’s recent past has been
dominated by a quest for universal knowledge.
After the Second World War much of geography,
or at any rate those areas colonized by spatial
science, was bound up with the search for
grand theory and its universals, predicated on
essentialism and foundationalism. Things
have changed since the 1990s with the advent
of postmodernism and post-structuralism.
Although the term ‘local knowledge’ is rarely
used as such, the sentiments that it expresses
are now found in recent works on disciplinary
history (Livingstone, 2003c: see geography,
history of), around biophysical process in
nature (Castree, 2005a) and economic geography (Gibson-Graham, 2006b [1996]).
tb
Suggested reading
Rouse (1987, ch. 4).
local state The set of institutions of the
state that have sub-national territorial remits.
The local state includes elected local government as well as local agencies of public administration and public service provision and local
regulatory and judicial authorities. However, it
does not include all the actors involved in local
governance, some of which are drawn from
the private and voluntary sectors.
The concept of the local state came to
prominence with the publication of Cockburn’s The local state: management of cities and
people (1977). Cockburn argued that the local
state should be understood as an integral part
of the capitalist state as a whole, and that it
operates to sustain the social relations of capitalism at the local level through its management of social reproduction. Rejecting this
approach, Saunders (1979) proposed a ‘dual
state’ thesis that theorized the state in terms of
two distinct roles: the promotion of production (the sphere of the central state) and the
maintenance of consumption (the sphere of
the local state). In this view, the local state is
concerned particularly with providing the
means of collective consumption, such as
housing and local public services. These two
positions were representative of a more general debate about the degree of autonomy of
the local state. Is the local state merely an arm
of the central state operating at the local level,
or does it have at least some effective independence? All large nation-states find that
some system of local administration is a practical necessity to cope with the complexities
of managing extensive territories. However
the autonomy of local state actors varies considerably according to the legal, constitutional
and fiscal framework within which local
institutions operate and the extent to which
they can be ‘captured’ by political parties or
interest groups opposed to central government
policies.
The concept of the local state was particularly important in geographical research
during the 1980s (e.g. Clark and Dear, 1984;
Duncan and Goodwin, 1988). This was in
part a reflection of the conflict-ridden nature
of central–local relations during the political
ascendancy of the New Right. Since then,
a number of factors have contributed to a
decline in the use of the concept. First, the
hegemony of neo-liberal models of social
and economic development in many countries
has curtailed the scope for the local state to
pursue alternative political strategies. Second,
the recognition that non-state actors play important roles in shaping local areas has contributed to a shift in research focus away from
theories of the state and towards theories of
governance. Third, extensive research on the
re-scaling of the state has drawn attention to
the relational nature of scale, and challenged
the notion that particular kinds of institutions
or practices necessarily operate at particular
spatial scales. Fourth, the idea that ‘the’ local
state exists as a unified or coherent entity has
423
LOCAL STATISTICS
been undermined by new theoretical perspectives including post-marxism and various
forms of post-structuralism.
jpa
Suggested reading
Brenner (2004); DiGaetano (2002).
local statistics A local statistic is often a
numerical value describing some aspect of a
locality or its population (e.g. the percentage
unemployed) and offering greater detail than
more aggregate regional or national statistics.
The meaning is similar in spatial statistics,
where local statistics are values obtained
for geographical subsections of a larger study
region, often compared to each other or to an
average. Here they contrast with global
methods, including regression analyses
fitted for the entire region, that risk missing
statistically significant and geographically
localized variations in the relationships between
variables. Local statistical methods include
point pattern analysis, geographically
weighted regression and local indicators of
spatial association (Anselin, 1995).
rh
Suggested reading
Fotheringham, Brunsdon and Charlton (2000).
locale A setting or context for social interaction, typically involving co-present actors.
In structuration theory (Giddens, 1979,
1984), locales provide the resources on which
actors draw. Different kinds of collectivities
are associated with characteristic locales
(Giddens, 1981, p. 39): the locale of the school
is the classroom; that of the army, the barracks; and so on. Despite his emphasis on copresence, Giddens (1984, p. 118) also suggests
that locales may range ‘from a room in a house
. . . to the territorially demarcated areas occupied by nation states’: as Thrift (1983) emphasizes, ‘a locale does not have to be local’. jpa
Suggested reading
Thrift (1983).
local^global relations A concept that seeks
to capture the dialectical nature (see dialectics) of the connections between global
processes and local forces. The term ‘local–
global’ resonates differently for different
scholars, resulting in a number of different
approaches to the intersections of local and
global forces. Some scholars have pursued
empirical cases in which they identify strong
global forces – especially those of modernity
and the market – that impact and alter local
424
places and customs. An example of this type
of scholarship can be found in Allan Pred’s
(1990) work on late-nineteenth-century
Stockholm, where the rapid growth of capitalist production processes greatly affected the
language and symbolic codes of the city residents (see also Pred and Watts, 1992).
A second type of research investigates the
ways in which local places and cultures incorporate and/or transform global processes.
Particularly prevalent in the work of cultural
anthropologists, this body of scholarship
eschews meta-narratives of global capitalism
and emphasizes instead the power of diverse
local traditions in altering the meanings and
workings of global processes. A good example
is Watson’s (1997) edited volume investigating
the localization of American corporate
and culinary culture (via ethnographies of
McDonald’s) in numerous cities of East Asia.
A third body of research attempts to combine and transcend these earlier formulations
by arguing for a process of glocalization,
foregrounding the ways in which the local
and the global are completely interwoven and
impossible to pull apart. Economic geographers who seek to emphasize the inter-textual,
multi-layered nature of scale have employed
this concept (Swyngedouw, 1997; Brenner,
2003). It has also been used frequently by
those interested in the changing nature of citizenship and the hybrid qualities of identities
formulated in conditions of transnationality
(Yuval-Davis, 1999).
A number of critiques have been levelled at
all three of these employments of the local–
global conceit. The strongest has emerged
from the feminist literature, which has interrogated the binary nature of the paired words
as well as the often uncritical and ungrounded
invocations of both the global and the local
(see also Freeman, 2001). As Hart (2001,
p. 655) notes:
In addition to active/passive and dynamic/
static, these [binaries] include economics/
culture, general/specific, abstract/concrete
and, very importantly, dichotomous understandings of time and space, in which time
is accorded active primacy while space appears as a passive container. This conflation
of ‘the global’ with dynamic, technologicaleconomic forces restlessly roving the globe
defines its inexorable – and inexorably masculine – character. By the same token, ‘the
local’ appears as a passive, implicitly feminine recipient of global forces whose only
option is to appear as alluring as possible.
LOCATION QUOTIENT
Other critiques include the observation that
many of the local–global narratives that
scholars employ have focused on the moment
of impact between global and local processes,
and as a result have underplayed the ongoing
power dynamics between local–local forces
(Ortner, 1995). By the same token, the actual
workings and trajectories of perceived global
forces such as capitalism are often assumed
rather than investigated empirically, leading
to a blind spot with respect to global–global
dynamics. This latter critique has been taken
to the extent of questioning the very nature
of capitalism itself (Gibson-Graham, 2006b
[1996]). A final, more implicit critique has
emerged with the literature on transnationalism, wherein scholars have preferred to privilege the ongoing movements between scales
and across borders rather than the perceived
static conceptualization of both scales and
borders that is suggested by the local–global
terminology.
km
locality
A place or region of sub-national
spatial scale. Locality studies were a prominent feature of British urban and regional research in the 1980s and 1990s. They
developed from attempts to understand the
process of socio-economic restructuring
and the role of place and spatial variation
within it. Locality was a key organizing concept
for three research programmes funded by the
UK’s Economic and Social Research Council
in the 1980s: the ‘Changing Urban and
Regional System’ initiative (CURS), the
‘Social Change and Economic Life’ initiative
(SCELI) and the ‘Economic Restructuring,
Social Change and the Locality’ programme.
At the centre of each was a series of studies
of the impact of restructuring on particular
places or regions. A key concern of these
‘locality studies’ was to collect detailed empirical evidence to assist the identification of
the nature, causes and consequences of spatial
differentiation in processes of change (Cooke,
1989).
The research raised a series of methodological and theoretical issues that became
bound up with wider and sometimes acrimonious debates. These included: the delimitation of localities for research; the relationship
between locality studies and critical realism;
the extent to which localities should be seen as
‘pro-active’ agents of their own transformation; the politics of the ‘empirical turn’; the
question of whether a concern with local difference risked limiting the scope for generalization and theoretical development (Smith,
1987); and the gendered implications (see
gender) of most locality studies’ focus on the
sphere of waged labour and their limited treatment of cultural relations.
Since the end of the formal research programmes, the concept of locality has been
much less prominent in the geographical literature, but two more recent developments
during the 1990s may be noted. First, there
has been a much stronger emphasis on relational and networked concepts of locality and
on the links between localities and other
spatial scales. Murdoch and Marsden (1995)
draw on actor-network theory to suggest
that ‘localities should be seen as constituted
by various networks operating a different
scales’ (p. 368), while Amin (2004b) has
proposed a wholly non-territorial view of
places as ‘unbound’.
Second, many of the issues highlighted by
the localities debate have been translated into
new conceptual frameworks. For example, the
upsurge of interest in globalization during
the 1990s has involved a recasting of the
issue of local specificity in terms of global–
local relations, while the further development
of cultural geography has seen increasingly
sophisticated treatments of the relationships
between politics, place and identity.
jpa
Suggested reading
Duncan (1989); Environment and Planning A
(1991).
localization A term often contrasted with
globalization and meant to capture the
importance
of
place-based
activities.
Localization refers to the necessary embeddedness of economic processes, which always
reflect their social, political and geographical
context. All activities require some degree of
spatial fixity and many obtain significant
advantages from being geographically localized. These advantages include economies of
agglomeration as well as more sociocultural
advantages pertaining to face-to-face contact,
the formation of personal networks, and the
creation of centres of innovation and knowledge (Amin and Thrift, 1994a).
km
Suggested reading
Amin and Thrift (1994a); Cox (1997).
location quotient A quantitative measure
used to describe the concentration of a group
or an activity in a locality or region relative to
that of a larger area such as the countrywide or
national norm. The quotient is the ratio of the
425
LOCATION THEORY
local concentration to the national figure, and
location quotients have been widely used to
measure regional employment specialization.
For example, if locality A has 53.2 per cent
of its employed population working in manufacturing and the national percentage is 28.6,
then the quotient for region A is 53.2/
28.6 ¼ 1.86. A quotient greater than 1.0 indicates greater concentration in the region than
the national norm, and a value less than 1.0
indicates relative absence. Location quotients
provide a simple way of making economic
base theory operational.
lwh
location theory
A historically and intellectually varied body of theory and techniques concerned with the explanation and
sometimes prediction of the location of individual and aggregate economic activities.
Until around 1980 location theory was a distinct canon, with a well-defined history, core
issues and methods, and a roll-call of alumnae.
No more. Location theory is less shapely,
more voluminous, spilling out of its earlier
constraints, but more interesting as a result.
Scott (1976a, p. 106) claims that the first
location theorist was Sir James Steuart (1712–
80), a Scottish political economist. Most other
histories, however, start with the German location school, whose first member was Johann
Heinrich von Thünen (1783–1850) (Blaug,
1979; Ponsard, 1983). A Prussian landowner,
agriculturalist, political reformer and embryonic
neo-classical economist (Alfred Marshall said, ‘I
loved von Thünen above all my masters’; quoted
in Blaug, 1990, p. 23), von Thünen crafted an
abstract location model using a method he
called ‘Form der Anschaung’. Deploying calculus
and capacious observations made from his country estate, he developed a theory of concentric
agricultural land use based on the variation of
land rent by location (see von thünen model).
Alfred Weber (1869–1958), brother of sociologist Max, was a second member of the
German school (‘the true heir of von Thünen’;
Blaug, 1979, p. 28). Although much of his
work concerned cultural history, he also
experimented with a method of establishing
the most profitable location for a factory
in his quest to understand the origins of
agglomeration in an early twentieth-century
Germany racked by a pervasive sense of crisis
in its great cities. His discussion isolated
the relative geographical pull of factors of
production conceived initially on a triangular
grid, and he used both a physical model
(the Varignon frame) as well as complex
mathematics (so complex that he needed
426
help from Georg Pick, the mathematician
who assisted Einstein in formulating relativity)
to derive a solution for optimal location
(minimizing costs, maximizing revenue).
August Lösch (1906–45) and Walter Christaller (1893–1969) round out the school.
Christaller, who was trained as a geographer,
developed central place theory in the 1930s
both to explain the location of different kinds of
services and also to undertake regional planning. Its geometries assumed a truly grotesque
form when Christaller was employed by the
Third Reich’s Planning and Soil Office in
1940: he proposed to deploy the theory to reconfigure the geography of Poland following
its depopulation by relocation, deportation
and extermination (see holocaust). Lösch,
an economist trained at Bonn University, independently developed his version of central
place theory during the same period, but
unlike Christaller couched it in mathematical
terms as spatial equilibrium, with services,
industry and consumers arranged within
a hexagonal net of market areas. Like
Christaller, there was a normative impulse to
his project, but Lösch despised Hitler (as did
Alfred Weber), and died from deprivations he
suffered in maintaining his values against those
of the Nazis (see fascism).
The contributions of the German location
school were rigorous, conceptually pointed
and abstract. Theirs was a world apart from
the a-theoretical approach that dominated
economic geography until the mid-1950s,
in which location was ‘explained’ by merely
inventorying a set of ad hoc, unique geographical factors. Isard (1979, p. 9) recalls that economic geographers at that time had ‘‘little
concern for analysis’ and that they made ‘no
attempt’ even ‘to fuse . . . location[al] factors
into a simple cost calculus’. Isard’s own regional science movement, which for a period
was symbiotically linked with economic
geography, helped from the outside to push the
sub-discipline into the mould of the German
locational school – and which Isard (1956) was
also concerned to extend. A similar move to
reshape the field came from inside the discipline,
with the attempt to establish human geography
as spatial science during the quantitative
revolution of the late 1950s. Work at two of
the earliest sites of that revolution was explicitly
directed towards creating a location theory
that was systematic, general and empirically
exact: McCarty, Hook and Knox (1956) at
Iowa drew on correlation and regression
techniques to explain regional industrial location, while Garrison, Berry, Marble, Nystuen
LOCATION THEORY
and Morrill (1959), including several of his
soon-to-be-famous graduate students (the
‘‘space cadets’), combined German location
theory with demanding statistical analysis in
their studies of highway development in
Washington State.
Haggett’s influential (1965) book, Locational analysis in human geography, summarized
and solidified the new approach to location
theory (see also locational analysis). It was
to be formal, empirically rigorous, and undergirded primarily by neo-classical economics
(both indirectly via the German school and
regional science and directly from mainstream
economics). A central topic was the firm, a
staple of neo-classical micro-economic analysis and underpinned by assumptions of
rational choice theory and perfect competition (many small producers, none of which
control price). The theory of the firm was
translated directly into spatial terms by Isard,
and later in economic geography by Smith
(1981a [1971]). But chinks in the armour of
classic location theory were soon revealed.
First, the determinacy of rational choice was
shown to be unrealistic, and ideas of ‘bounded
rationality’, or ‘satisficing behaviour’ were
preferred, producing a literature on the behavioural geography of firm location (Pred,
1967, 1969). Second, perfect competition
was demonstrably imperfect for understanding the contemporary world of transnational
corporations, leading to an alternative literature on the ‘geography of enterprise’ (later
‘corporate geography’) focused on firms as
institutions, decision-making hierarchies and
branch plant economies (McNee, 1960;
Hayter and Watts, 1983).
The disquiet only got worse. David Harvey,
who earlier in his career had drawn on classical
and neo-classical models of agricultural location, including von Thünen’s work, and explored general models of the evolution of
spatial patterns, turned to marxism, and particularly Marx’s own writings, in the early
1970s and pursued a radically different approach. His subsequent analysis of the historical geography of capitalism, brilliantly
realized in The limits to capital (Harvey, 1999
[1982]), did not so much ignore the questions
of traditional location theory as pose them in
another register altogether. His emphasis was
less on accounting for the locations of
economic activities than in disclosing the connections between the crisis-ridden dynamics
of capitalism and its uneven development
as a space-economy. Doreen Massey’s work
around the same time was indebted to Marx-
ism too, but it had a much more direct impact
on location theory. Like Harvey, she was
trained in the orthodox approach, even studying briefly with Isard. Her reformulation
began in the early 1970s with a detailed
internal critique of orthodoxy arguing that
applying neo-classical economic theory to location generates fundamental and irreparable
logical contradictions. The alternative that she
constructed over the next decade or so combined the theoretical postulates of political
economy with the philosophical armature of
realism, culminating in her watershed book,
Spatial divisions of labour (Massey, 1984). This
was crucially important because it demonstrated that location theory need be neither
formal nor neo-classical, and because it considerably expanded both what could count as
factors bearing on location (in her case, class
and gender, politics and culture) and what
could constitute theoretical explanation (in
her case, a ‘geological metaphor’, taking the
form of layers of investment; Barnes, 2001).
Massey’s larger point was that the object of
location theory – sites of economic activity –
could not be separated from the wider, geographically variegated social setting of capitalism. Her argument was starkly reinforced by
the setting of her own study: the massive
deindustrialization of the UK during the
late 1970s and early 1980s (see also division
of labour; locality studies).
A similarly inspired argument emerged
shortly afterwards among a group of economic
geographers in California, although their
context was utterly different: the study of
vibrant capitalist production associated particularly with high-tech and high-end economic activities. Scott (1988b) developed
what he called ‘neo-Weberian’ location theory
drawing eclectically on the work of neoMarxist economicst Piero Sraffa (see neoricardian economics) and that of institutional economists Ronald Coase and Oliver
Williamson (see institutional economics). Storper and Walker (1989) elaborated
an ‘inconstant geography of capitalism’
roiled by technological change and social
conflict. They stressed the tightly interlinked – ‘network’ – character of activities
in which social and economic institutions
cross-cut and interleaved within specific
regional formations. The consequence was
a rediscovery of the idea of industrial
districts, first recognised by Alfred
Marshall at the turn of the twentieth
century: dense geographical nodes of
tightly knit complementary manufacturing
427
LOCATIONAL ANALYSIS
activities, sustained by strong formal and
informal social connections – which
Storper (1997b) labelled ‘untraded interdependencies’. During the 1980s and early
1990s, ‘industrial districts’ seemed to be
the answer to every (important) locationtheoretical question. Industrial districts
were variously linked to post-fordism
(and often presumed as its characteristic
locational form); to high-tech industries
and the information economy (the stress
on social connections seemed uncannily
made for their study: see Saxenian, 1994);
and to an emerging institutional and
‘cultural turn’ within economic geography itself.
But the shortcoming of the concept of industrial districts, as with Massey’s geological
metaphor, was its confinement to the local
rather than its ability to address a scale increasingly on the lips of economic geographers
(and everyone else’s as well): the global (see
globalization). One solution was to argue
that the global was nothing more than an
interlinked set of industrial districts – Scott’s
(1998) answer, and at one time, Amin and
Thrift’s (1992) too. Another was to continue
with the network idea but to expand it to the
whole world. Location theory’s charge was to
represent and explain network relations – that
is, social and economic institutional linkages –
wherever they were found across the globe.
This approach, also called ‘the relational
turn’, drew upon actor-network theory
and was not only concerned with social and
economic relations, but with material ones too
through the incorporation of commodity
chain analysis (for examples, see Dicken,
Kelly, Olds and Yeung, 2000; Dicken, 2003;
Hughes and Reimer, 2004; Yeung, 2004).
Location theory, as its long history makes
clear, is no autonomous creation, propelled by
its own logic. The logic is only that of its
human creators, reflecting their own changing
circumstances: from life on an isolated farm to
life in an interconnected globe. The vitality of
location theory is a consequence of economic
geographers keeping abreast of the restless
world that they inhabit.
tb
Suggested reading
Barnes (2003); Storper (1997b).
locational analysis A term best associated
with Peter Haggett’s (1965) seminal book,
Locational analysis in human geography, referring to the logically and empirically rigorous
investigation of the spatial arrangements of
428
phenomena and related flow patterns. The
heyday of locational analysis in geography
was the 1960s and early 1970s, when vigorous
attempts were made to recast the discipline as
spatial science, but its roots can be traced
back to the first half of the nineteenth century
and the formation of a German school of
location theory. Although locational analysis is now out of fashion in contemporary
geography, it has recently been reactivated in
economics and advertised as a component of a
new economic geography.
Haggett’s (1965, p. 1) scrupulously ordered
book was fundamentally about ‘the search
for order’, by which he meant locational
order or ‘spatial structure’, as it might be
studied in (and as) human geography. He
(re)turned to the science par excellence of spatial order, geometry, which he described as
a ‘neglected tradition in geography’ (p. 15).
Accordingly, he organized his first five
substantive chapters in geometric terms (see
figure):
movement – the interaction between
points;
networks – the lines of linkage among
points;
nodes – the convergence of links;
hierarchies – the differential role played by
different nodes;
surfaces – the spaces among nodes.
For each of the five geometries, he deployed
rigorous theory and formal numerical methods
to analyse and explain associated location
issues: this was locational analysis.
Haggett made it clear, though, that his
approach was a continuation of the longstanding, albeit ‘deviant’, intellectual tradition
of location theory that historically twinned
geometrical reasoning with theoretical and
empirical analysis. Its origins lie with the
nineteenth-century Prussian landowner cum
part-time geographer, Johann Heinrich von
Thünen (1783–1850), who combined meticulous empiricism, theoretical innovation and a
concentric geometrical sensibility to describe
and explain location patterns of agricultural
land use (see von thunen model). Later contributors to the project, and their geometries,
included Alfred Weber (1869–1958) (industrial location and triangles), and August
Lösch (1906–45) and Walter Christaller
(1893–1969) (central place theory and
hexagons). Walter Isard (1919– ), writing in
1956, nine years before Haggett, synthesized
these contributions within his own account of
LOGICAL EMPIRICISM
Locational analysis Stages in the analysis of nodal regional systems: (a) interaction: (b) networks: (c) nodes:
(d) hierarchies: (e) surface: (f) diffusion (Haggett et al., 1977)
locational analysis, which he termed regional
science (although it was longer on theory and
shorter on geometry than Haggett’s version).
Both Haggett’s and Isard’s accounts of
locational analysis enjoyed considerable success within human geography for a period,
but their star waned from the 1970s for
reasons both internal and external to the
discipline (see quantitative revolution).
During the 1990s, however, the baton of locational analysis was passed to the economists in
the form of a New Economic Geography
(Fujita, Krugman and Venables, 1999). Unsurprisingly, it was more theoretical and
mathematical, less empirical and geometrical,
than in its previous version, but the basic
mission was unaltered: to represent and analyse economic geographical distributions, and
interactions, at all scales using exact, formal
techniques and vocabularies.
The tie that binds locational analysis over
its more than 150-year history is a conviction
that the secrets of location are to be revealed
by a ruthless pursuit of rational enquiry and
methods, which takes its most perfect form
in the logical structure and techniques of
mathematics including geometry. The specifics of the location question vary – from
point-to-point interaction to the composition
of regional networks and surfaces – but the
universal rationalist method is constant,
thereby ensuring certainty, progress, and
truth (so its protagonists claim). In contrast,
Barnes (2003) argues that it is not as clear-cut:
as with science more generally, or any other
form of knowledge, the historical and
geographical circumstances of the locational
analysts intrude and inevitably corrupt their
supposedly pure rationality (cf. local knowledge). This does not detract from the
achievements of locational analysis, but it
casts them in a different light. For it requires
an understanding of the peculiar historical
and geographical context of their production,
an emphasis ironically quite different from
the one offered by locational analysts
themselves.
tb
Suggested reading
Barnes (2003).
logical empiricism Sometimes used as a
synonym for logical positivism, but more
often used to mark the post-Second World
War Anglo-American movement in philosophy that built upon and extended it (drawing
on earlier strands of positivism and empiricism). Committed to empirical verifiability
and logic, the original logical positivists were
sceptical of theory, because it was neither facts
nor operations of logic. Such scepticism could
not be sustained in the face of the massive
explosion (sometimes literal) of war and
postwar science defined by theoretical construction and empirical testing. Something
had to give. In this case, ‘empiricism’ was
substituted for the troubling term ‘positivism’
(and the root cause of the scepticism). Those
working under the banner of logical empiricism were some of the pre-war logical positivists who had immigrated to the United States
and there revised their position, such as
429
LOGICAL POSITIVISM
Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) and Hans
Reichenbach (1891–1953), but there were
also American adherents, of whom perhaps
the best known was Ernest Nagel (1901–85).
David Harvey (1969) drew heavily on Nagel’s
logical empiricist justification of the scientific
method in presenting his own argument
for the importance of explanation in geography.
tb
Suggested reading
Giere and Richardson (1996).
logical positivism A particular version of
the philosophy of positivism associated with
the work of a group of primarily Austrian scientists and philosophers in the 1920s and
1930s known as the Vienna Circle. The convenor of the discussions at the University of
Vienna in 1922 was the physicist Moritz
Schlick, who invited figures such as the mathematician Kurt Gödel, philosophers Rudolf
Carnap and Herbert Feigl, economist Otto
Neurath and physicist Phillip Frank. On the
edge of the circle but not strictly members
were the philosophers Karl Popper (see critical rationalism), A.J. Ayer (who later popularized the movement for an English-language
audience) and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein was behind the defining proposal of the group, ‘the verifiability principle’.
It asserted that scientifically meaningful
propositions are those that (1) can be verified
empirically by the five senses; or (2) are true
tautologically – that is, their truth arises from
the very meaning of the terms in which they
are expressed such as in logic or mathematics.
Propositions incapable of satisfying the principle, and which included most issues that
made up the history of Western philosophy
until that point concerning aesthetics, morality and religion, were judged senseless if not
nonsense. Carnap declared that the Circle
‘reject[s] all philosophical questions, whether
Metaphysics, Ethics or Epistemology’. Meaningful propositions would be found in philosophy only when it modelled itself on the natural
sciences, and particularly physics.
An immediate criticism was that the verifiability principle could not itself be verified: it
was neither an empirical proposition, nor a
logical or mathematical tautology. The Vienna
Circle’s criterion of meaning was thus, disturbingly, meaningless. Additionally, Popper
argued early on that even those in the Circle’s
Pantheon, the physicists, did not engage in
empirical verification but only falsification:
that is, they sought to disprove, not prove,
430
their theoretical claims. As a result of these
objections, as well as the physical dispersal of
the group (many were Jewish and left-wing
and fled Vienna with the rise of Nazism),
logical positivism quickly unravelled. By the
1950s, the movement was dead. Its extreme
positions were discarded, and any useful ideas
were absorbed within the larger movement of
analytic and empiricist philosophy that came
to define the post-Second World War AngloAmerican field (Reisch, 2005).
In human geography, however, Guelke
(1978, p. 46) suggests that ‘from Hartshorne
to Harvey geographical writing on methodology and philosophy has to a greater or lesser
degree shown the influence of logical positivist
ideas’. But Hartshorne’s (1939) panegyric
tome on regional description as the core of
the geographical project makes no reference
to logical positivism or, indeed, to a single
logical positivist. It was in fact Hartshorne’s
methodological arch enemy, Frederick Schaefer (1953), who came under the spell of logical
positivism. He was influenced at the University of Iowa in the late 1940s and early 1950s
by Gustav Bergmann, one of the Vienna Circle
refugees, and became the first geographer to
apply formal principles of logical positivism to
geography through his work on morphological
laws that were to take the form: ‘If spatial
pattern A, then spatial pattern B.’ Watereddown versions of logical positivism were subsequently proffered by an intellectual disciple
of Schaefer, William Bunge (1966), and in the
form of a textbook by two former graduate
students at the University of Iowa, who took
the mandatory Bergmann course (Amedeo
and Golledge, 1975). All three contributions
were part of the quantitative revoluton, the
movement towards modelling the study of
geography on the natural sciences in general,
and physics in particular, as part of the project
of spatial science. That said, many quantitative revolutionaries were ignorant of
logical positivism, and not interested anyway.
Harvey’s (1969) prospectus for scientific
explanation in geography bears only traces
of logical positivism. Its central preoccupation
was the scientific method, not philosophy as
such, and certainly not the philosophy of
logical positivism: Harvey’s understanding of
the scientific method was indebted, rather,
to logical empiricism. Furthermore, both
Harvey and the discipline at large were subsequently to move away from this version of
the scientific method, rendering discussions
of the usefulness of logical positivism of only
historical value.
tb
LONGITUDINAL DATA ANALYSIS (LDA)
Suggested reading
Guelke (1978).
log-linear modelling Procedures for analysing data at the nominal level of measurement
– that is, when the variables comprised unordered categories (such as a binary division –
urban/rural – or a set of political parties –
Conservative/Labour/Liberal-Democrat etc.).
The goal – as in regression (hence the alternative term logistic regression) – is to fit an
equation that estimates the values in the cells
of a contingency table, where the independent
variables are also measured at either the nominal (categorical) or ordinal level only; models
can also be fitted if one or more of the independent variables are measured at interval or
ratio level. The terms of the model, presented
in logarithmic form, indicate the deviations
from the individual cell values of the contingency table from the grand mean for the entire
sample being analysed, and can be interpreted
as the odds of getting a particular outcome
(e.g. the likelihood that electors in urban
areas are more likely to vote for one political
party than those in rural areas). (See also
categorical data analysis).
rj
Suggested reading
O’Brien (1992).
logit regression models These models belong to the family of techniques for categorical
data analysis. They are used when the response
variable is either binary (e.g. a person either
moved or stayed) or a proportion (the proportion who have moved). The nature of this
response variable, such that it cannot exceed
0 and 1, means that the standard regression
model should not be used. Instead, the logit
(the logarithm of the odds of moving) is modelled and the random part of the model takes on
a binomial form so that the stochastic variation
(see stochastic process) around the underlying
relationship is structured to be least when the
values of 0 and 1 are approached. Although
the modelling is undertaken on the logits, it is
simple to transform these to both probabilities
and odds for interpretation. The popularity of
this form of the binary response model stems
from the ability when the predictor is categorical
of giving a relative odds interpretation, generating, for example, the relative odds of a person
aged over 35 moving in comparison to someone
aged under 35.
The multinomial form of the logit model is
used when there are more than two possible
outcomes; the conditional form is used when
analysing choice alternatives and the predictor
variables may include attributes of the choice
alternatives (e.g. cost) as well as characteristics
of the individuals making the choices (such as
income); the multi-level logit (see multilevel modelling) assesses the effects of
variables measured at different levels (such as
individual, household and neighbourhood
effects on an individual moving); and the
nested logit model is used when there is a
hierarchical structure to the outcomes (with
moves broken down into short- and longdistance, for example).
kj
Suggested reading
Hensher and Greene (2004); Hosmer and
Lemshow (2000).
longitudinal data analysis (LDA) A set of
quantitative methods that involve measures
over time. In contrast to time-series analysis,
in which there tends to be one entity measured
a large number of times (cf. sequence analysis), LDA is usually concerned with a large
number of entities (e.g. people, places or
firms) measured a relatively few times. Data
for such analysis come from extensive designs
(see extensive research) such as panel or
cohort studies. LDA is increasing in importance because it allows the study of development and change, including: the transition
from one state to another (e.g. from single to
married to separated); the time spent in a
particular state (e.g. the length of unemployment); and the determinants of such duration.
LDA is fundamental to adopting a life-course
perspective in which people are affected by
cumulative stimuli over a long period.
The value of such an approach can be seen
by contrasting the data analysis of crosssections with that of a panel. In the former,
because we are measuring different people at
each time point, we can only assess net or
aggregate change – we can only know, for
example, that the percentage of the population
below the poverty line has increased from 10
to 12. But with panel data we can assess the
volatility of micro-social change as individuals
move in and out of poverty, thereby tackling
questions about the permanent nature of an
underclass. Such questions are of particular
importance in evidence-based policy when
we are concerned with either affecting change
or removing barriers to change. Crosssectional analysis can also be misleading
about the direction of causality, for without
repeated measures over time we cannot distinguish between, say, unemployment causing
431
LOS ANGELES SCHOOL
illness or illness causing unemployment.
Measurements over time usually show strong
state dependence in that individuals do not
move rapidly and continually between different states, so that current behaviour is influenced by past or previous behaviour. Only
LDA is capable of taking account of prior
information when examining current situations. Moreover, only longitudinal data can
separate age and cohort effects – the life
experiences of those aged over sixty years
may be quite different between cohorts born
before and after 1945. Unlike cross-sectional
analysis, which analyses variation between
cases, LDA also works within cases between
occasions. As such, it is much better able to
take account of ‘unobserved heterogeneity’,
unexplained variation due to the omission
of explanatory variables that are either unmeasured or even un-measurable. LDA will
improve control for such heterogeneity and
help to provide a measure of the extent of its
presence (Davies and Pickles, 1985).
Longitudinal data sets have a number of
features that provide a challenge for analysis.
Thus if the outcome has not yet occurred the
sequence is censored, so that in an analysis of
longevity there will be people who are still alive
at the end of observation period. Standard statistical models are based on the assumption of
independence, but repeated measures over
time are likely to be strongly autocorrelated.
Missing data are also a particular problem, as
the requirement of multiple follow-up often
leads to attrition: this is a particularly challenging problem when the drop-out is informative,
because it depends on what would have been
observed if the person had not dropped out.
Technically, there are three broad sets of
approaches to LDA:
Repeated measures analysis, in which data
on repeated occasions are seen as being
nested within individuals, so that we can
examine, for example, the growth of income over time and evaluate the changing
gender gap; multi-level modelling is
increasingly being used for such data, as
it does not require the measurement of
every individual on all occasions to allow
between-individual, within-individual and
between-occasion variation to be explicitly
modelled.
Event history analysis (duration analysis or
hazard modelling) is concerned with the
timing of transitions from one state to
another, so that it is possible to test how
the transition rate of moving from one state
432
(e.g. unemployed) to another (employed)
is affected by other variables such as education level: these explanatory variables
may be either time invariant (such as
gender) and/or time varying. In such
analyses, the dependent variable is the
duration until event occurrence. Single
non-repeatable event analysis (e.g. the
transition to death) was developed first
and is often called ‘survival analysis’, but
it is now possible to analyse repeated
events (e.g. multiple spells of unemployment and employment), competing risks
(e.g. different reasons for leaving a job
such as voluntary choosing another job,
redundancy, retirement), multiple states
(e.g. transitions between single, marriage
and cohabitation states) and multiple
processes (e.g. joint modelling of partnership and employment histories).
sequence analysis, which works holistically to identify characteristic time-based
trajectories.
These methods have been extended to model
spatial choice (Wrigley, 1990), the duration
of point patterns (Pellegrini and Reader,
1996) and spatial processes more generally
(Waldorf, 2003).
kj
Suggested reading
Allison (1984); Blossfeld and Rohwer (2002);
Dale and Davies (1994); Fitzmaurice, Laird
and Ware (2004); Ruspini (2002); Singer and
Willett (2003); Taris (2000); Wrigley (1986).
Los Angeles School A loose affiliation of Los
Angeles-based geographers and urbanists, connected by their theorizations of the LA region
and the implications of its dynamics for all cities. The School is associated with a notion of
‘postmodern urbanism’ and an argument that
LA’s complex urban form, new economic clusters and inequality signal the future of urbanism (see postmodernism; postmodernity). Its
members argue that contemporary urbanism
can be understood less through the concepts
of the chicago school and more through the
fragmentary geography of Southern California
(Dear, 2001). The School’s work has been
the subject of much criticism and debate continues on the efficacy of framing LA, or any
single city, as an exemplar of urbanism (Dear
and Dahmann, 2008; Mollenkopf, 2008;
Simpson and Kelly, 2008).
em
Suggested reading
Dear (2001).
M
macrogeography The search for macroscale empirical regularities in spatial distributions as a basis for generalizations about spatial structures. The approach was pioneered
by a physicist, John Q. Stewart (1894–1972),
and developed with William Warntz (1922–
88) in a pioneering project funded by the
American Geographical Society (cf. geographical societies). Their lasting contributions to spatial analysis/spatial science
were (a) the concept of population potential, a cartographic density surface that
generalized point (and point-in-area) distributions and was used as a measure of accessibility, and (b) their research on the gravity
model of spatial interaction and the related
‘law of least effort’. (See also fractals.)
rj
Suggested reading
Warntz (1965).
malapportionment An electoral abuse in
which districts are either defined or allowed to
remain in use with unequal popula,tions/electorates, which thereby favours one party over
another in the translation of votes into seats.
The most successful malapportionment strategy for a party involves defining relatively small
districts in areas where it is likely to win seats,
and larger ones elsewhere, thereby enabling it
to win more seats with the same total number of
votes than opponents who win where seats are
on average larger. Malapportionment was
deemed unconstitutional by US courts in the
1960s, under the equal treatment (14th)
Amendment to the Constitution, and all districts within a state must be redrawn with
almost exactly the same population after
each decennial census. British legislation also
requires Parliamentary constituencies to be of
equal size, but variations are allowed and produce malapportionment-like effects in the
translation of votes into seats.
rj
Suggested reading
Johnston, Pattie, Dorling and Rossiter (2001).
See also http://www.aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/
bd/bdy/bdy_us/
Malthusian model An influential and controversial
model
of
population
and
resources, proposed by Thomas Malthus
(1766–1834). Malthus read mathematics at
Cambridge and was then ordained in 1793.
He published his Essay on the principle of population in 1798 and soon became a controversial
figure. The first edition of the Essay was written as a counter to William Godwin’s Enquiry
concerning political justice (1793) and the radical interpretation of the science of politics and
the means of social improvement associated
with the French Revolution in general and
the Marquis de Condorcet in particular.
Malthus was far less optimistic than his antagonists, maintaining that misery and vice were
the inevitable result of the fundamental law of
nature, which was impervious to institutional
and legislative change.
Malthus specified two ‘postulata’: that food
was necessary for life and that the ‘passion
between the sexes’ could be regarded as a
constant. He then gave mathematical form to
his basic Principle: a maximum potential rate
of population growth in the form of the geometric ratio (1,2,4,8,16 . . . ) with an assumed
arithmetic growth (1,2,3,4,5 . . . ) in food supply. Malthus recognized that population
growth would be curtailed either by a rise in
mortality associated with what he saw as
‘positive checks’ (war, disease, starvation) or
through a reduction in births through ‘preventative checks’ (adultery, birth control,
abortion or infanticide), although he was
inclined to regard these as all variants of ‘misery and vice’. This was a deductive model,
but it was given empirical substance through
Malthus’ interest in the population growth
that had been observed in the American population, where large acreages of land were made
available to settlers who had few if any subsistence constraints.
Malthus’ pessimism about the prospects for
England and the Old World in the first edition
was tempered somewhat in the much larger
and thoroughly researched second edition,
published in 1803, in which he was more optimistic than other political economists such as
Smith and Ricardo, and held out the possibility of a better balance between numbers and
resources achieved through moral restraint,
which he primarily regarded as a restraint
on marriage. He was inclined to see certain
433
MAP
European societies as exhibiting nuptiality
controls, an observation that has led some to
argue for a distinctive form of late and variable
marriage age, particularly for women, in western europe (Hajnal, 1965), and which has been
used as a basis for understanding the notion of
a nuptiality valve primarily responsible for English demographic growth rates rather than the
positive check in the period between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Wrigley
and Schofield, 1989 [1981]).
While the Malthusian model has been
viewed as a particularly effective device
through which to understand a key period in
England’s demographic history, it has also
received much criticism. It is thought to have
failed as predictor of the future, at least in its
more pessimistic form, since population
growth was sustained at a high rate through
much of the nineteenth century, and living
standards rose and fertility fell as populations
resorted increasingly to marital fertility control, and at the same time infant and child
mortality fell dramatically, principally as a
result of eradication of infectious disease,
largely through relatively low-cost public
health interventions. Of course, others would
argue that Malthus’ arguments applied largely
to an inorganic economy in which land was in
fixed supply and the principal source of energy
was the sun, and animal and human muscle
power, so that when human societies began to
use locked-up energy in the form of coal and
oil, the constraints that Malthus took as a basis
for this approach were removed. A major criticism of Malthus’ notion of famine as a positive check brought about by overpopulation
is associated with the work of Amartya Sen
(1981), who has suggested that few if any
famines can be directly attributed to food
availability declines but, rather, to institutional
and market failures in delivering food to those
whose entitlements were not being met.
Critics have also rejected Malthus’ conservative acceptance of the political status quo and
his objection to welfare from the collectivity in
the form of poor relief, which he supposed
undermined the willingness of populations to
exercise moral restraint (Winch, 1998). More
recently, historical demographers of asia in
particular have taken issue with Malthus’
inherent eurocentrism, reflected in his
portrayal of China as exemplifying a highpressure demographic regime in which unrestricted fertility and high mortality brought
about recurrent crises as populations grew to
sizes far too large for their food base (Lee and
Feng, 1999). Such critics emphasize the role
434
of breast-feeding, birth spacing and infanticide
as means of constraining reproduction,
notwithstanding early marriage of women,
and stress the presence of effective welfare
institutions, particularly controls on grain
supplies and markets as insulation against
harvest failure.
rms
map A representation of all or a portion of
the planet or some other vast environment: the
typical map is graphic and includes discernible
elements of scale, projection (see map projection) and symbolization. As this definition
suggests, delineating the notion of map is
hardly straightforward (Andrews, 1996). For
one thing, not all maps are graphic, and even
though the term is derived from the Latin
mappa (the cloth-paper on which early maps
were inscribed), not all graphic maps are
drawn or printed on paper. Aerial photography and remote sensing gave rise to the
image map, which has scale, projection and
symbol-like tones, and readily becomes a
cartographic map with the addition of line
symbols or feature names. digital cartography introduced the digital map, which can
be queried and analysed by a geographic
information system (gis) without ever creating a graphic image. Definitions that include
the territory mapped are problematic insofar
as telescopes and rocketry, in making possible
maps of the Moon, Mars, other planets or
various asteroids (not to mention representations of the solar system, galaxies and the universe), have rendered ‘graphic representation
of Earth’ inaccurately narrow. Robinson and
Petchenik (1976, p. 16), who worried that
‘representation of the environment’ might
unduly privilege physical features, contrived
the relatively neutral but rarely used ‘graphic
representation of the milieu’. Harley and
Woodward (1987, p. xvi), in promoting the
history of cartography (see cartography,
history of) as a scholarly endeavour, offered
the comparatively wordy definition ‘graphic
representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes or events in the human world’, which
concisely describes the focus of most contemporary scholars who claim cartography as a
specialization. As this last definition implies,
academic cartographers study not only cartographic artefacts but also the process of mapping and its impacts.
All map images have three principal elements: scale, projection and symbolization.
Scale is defined as the ratio of distance on the
map to the corresponding distance on the
MAP
ground. When recorded as a ratio or fraction,
a map’s scale expresses these two distances in
identical units of measurement, with map distance reported first as one unit, as in 1:10,000
or 1/10,000, which means that a centimetre on
the map represents 10,000 cm on the ground.
(A dimensionless number, 1/10,000, also indicates that an inch on the map represents
10,000 in on the ground.) Fractional representations of scale afford a distinction between
large scales such as 1/5,000 and small scales
with huge denominators. Scale may be
expressed verbally, as in ‘one inch represents
one mile’, which some users might find more
helpful than the equivalent ratio 1:63,360
(Goodchild and Proctor, 1997). Maps often
include a graphical scale, on which a carefully
measured line, perhaps subdivided with
appropriately labelled ticks, portrays one or
more typical distances. Unlike ratio or verbal
scales, a graphical scale remains true when the
map is photocopied at a larger or smaller scale.
Cartographic scale is occasionally confused
with geographical scale, which refers to the
areal extent of a physical or human process
or phenomenon (see scale). Physical geographers study entities that range in size from
the small drainage basin in which soil permeability affects stream discharge to the global
stage of atmospheric circulation and climate
change. Social, political and economic processes also involve a range of scales, in which
a specific process or phenomenon is usually
associated with a particular level in a hierarchy
ranging from ‘local’ to ‘global’, perhaps with
intermediate levels labelled ‘provincial’,
‘national’ and ‘continental’. When a geographical phenomenon is represented graphically, cartographic scale is typically determined
by the size of the page, map sheet or display
screen as well as the map’s geographical scope;
that is, the area to be covered. That a map
with a broad geographical scope typically
has a small scale, while a map with a narrow
geographical scope often has a comparatively
large scale, underscores the inverse relationship between geographical scale and cartographic scale.
When a major portion of the planet is represented on a flat map, scale will vary markedly,
not only from place to place but also with
direction (see map projection). The latter
distortion is particularly obvious on rectangular world maps, on which the poles are as long
as the equator, while angles and small shapes
are noticeably more distorted in poleward
regions than at lower latitudes. A noteworthy
exception is the Mercator projection, which is
conformal, meaning that scale at a point is the
same in all directions, even though scale varies
enormously across the map. Devised to solve a
specific problem in navigation by rendering
lines of constant geographical direction as
straight lines, the Mercator projection famously enlarges the size of mid-latitude countries, relative to tropical nations, and because
north–south scale equals east–west scale
everywhere, the poles lie at infinity. While its
conformality makes the Mercator projection
an acceptable choice for large-scale maps
with a comparatively small geographical
scope, it is a poor framework for world maps
that have nothing to do with navigation.
Because a map’s projection determines the
type and pattern of distortion, and thus affects
the viewer’s perception of size, shape, distance
and direction, selecting an appropriate projection is a crucial decision for the map author
(Canters, 2002). An appropriate projection is
especially important for a world map, which
should never include a graphical scale because
extreme distortions are unavoidable. For most
thematic maps, a projection that preserves
relative area is desirable, although the more
extreme distortions of shape found on equalarea maps of the whole world can be mollified
by a compromise framework such as the
Robinson projection, which attempts to balance distortions of area and angles (Ipbuker,
2004). The point or line at which a wholeworld map is centred is also important, not
only because distortion is usually low near
the centre but also because territories thus
favoured might be perceived as more important or accessible than those on the periphery.
Another useful compromise is the interrupted
projection, typified by Goode’s homolosine
equal-area projection, which partitions the
world map into six lobes, for which separate,
locally centred projections minimize shape
distortion for continents and coastlines.
The third principal element of a map is the
graphic coding of geographical features, or
symbolization. Although labels that connote
land masses, oceans and cities can expedite
decoding, standardized symbols that draw on
cartographic conventions, such as blue for
hydrographic features and green for vegetation, are especially helpful for at-a-glance
assessments of their extent. Also useful are
logical linkages between a map’s content and
the six ‘retinal variables’ readily manipulated
by the map author. As defined by Bertin
(1983), non-verbal cartographic symbols typically vary in shape, pattern, hue, orientation,
size and greytone value, each of which is
435
MAP
especially suited for portraying a particular
kind of geographical variation. For example,
hue, related to wavelength of visible light and
often associated with named colours such as
red and green, is appropriate for representing
qualitative differences among, for example,
various categories of land use. Bertin’s rationale was straightforward: because red, green,
and yellow look different to persons with normal color vision, they are ideal for mapping
differences in kind, especially for area features
large enough to require discernible patches of
hue. Similarly, readily recognized differences
in form among point and line symbols make
shape an appropriate visual variable when a
map must distinguish churches from schools
and footpaths from railways. By contrast,
quantitative data are better represented with
symbols that vary in size or greytone value;
that is, relative darkness. Viewers are well served by map authors who distinguish between
count or magnitude data such as total population or number of employees, and intensity data
such as population density or the proportion of
the labour force unemployed. With count data,
for example, point symbols that vary in size
support a logical larger-means-more metaphor
that promotes comparisons without looking
repeatedly at the map key, whereas for intensity
data symbols ranging from white to black support an equally obvious darker-means-more
decoding rule (Monmonier, 2005). Although
symbols that vary in direction are logical
for representing phenomena such as wind direction and one-way streets, pattern variation is
largely limited to dashed-line symbols and area
symbols, such as the arrays of dots that
connote orchard land and vineyards on
topographic maps. Dynamic cartography has
produced additional visual variables, notably
the duration, rate of change and order of
scenes (DiBiase, MacEachren, Krygier and
Reeves, 1992).
Because place and feature names use natural language to link cartographic symbols to
specific locations, typography is another
important part of the map’s symbolic code
(Wood, 2000). And because type comes in
various shapes and sizes, map labels reflect
conventions such as the use of italic type for
hydrographic features as well as an extension
of Bertin’s theory of retinal variables. Although
aesthetic dictates that map authors avoid using
numerous typefaces to represent qualitative
differences among places or features, style
variations (roman/italic, all-uppercase/initial
capitals, bold/plain, underlining) support the
typographical coding of differences in kind,
436
whereas type size affords a readily decoded
representation of magnitude. Some reference
maps use a redundant coding in which the
sizes of point symbols and their labels offer
a mutually reinforced treatment of population
size.
Names on maps can have deep cultural–
political significance, especially when conquest or revolution allows the victor to rename
places and geographical features, and even install a new language or orthography (writing
system). As illustrated by the renaming and rerenaming of St Petersburg in Russia, control
of a country’s official cartography presents an
irresistible opportunity to underscore the
loser’s defeat by replacing its toponyms
(place names). As pervasive symbols of domination, names on map and road signs can
arouse resentment as well as inspire alternative
cartographies similar to the Palestinian maps
of Israel, rendered crudely in Arabic atop
photographic copies of official maps
(Kadmon, 2000, pp. 80–1). And because maps
reveal otherwise obscure, pejorative feature
names inherited from earlier, less politically
sensitive times, they can trigger the belated
removal of names (Monmonier, 2006). Recent
disputes over cartographic labels have focused
on waters separating feuding countries (e.g.
Sea of Japan/East Sea, Persian Gulf/Arabian
Gulf), the toponyms and orthography of indigenous peoples (e.g. in Hawaii and northern
Canada) and a country’s right to police the
rendering of its name beyond its borders (e.g.
Macedonia and Myanmar, both resisted by the
USA).
Because cartographic scale is usually too
small for an exact treatment of shape and
other geometric relationships, maps are almost
always generalized, even large-scale maps of
small areas (Buttenfield and McMaster,
1991). Cartographic generalization begins
with the selection of features, some of which
represent the phenomenon portrayed while
others provide a frame of reference linking
new information to the viewer’s existing
understanding of the region mapped. For
example, coastlines, national boundaries and
highway networks are common frame-ofreference features on maps not explicitly concerned with coastal geomorphology, geopolitics or transportation. Map authors must
select features carefully, because legibility often
requires line and point symbols proportionately thicker than the features portrayed. For
instance, a road five metres wide represented
on a 1:50,000 map by a barely visible line
one millimetre thick occupies a cartographic
MAP PROJECTION
corridor corresponding to a ground swathe 50
metres across. Because the exaggeration is
much greater at very small scales as well as for
boundaries and contour lines, which in principle
have no width, the map author must not only
eliminate less significant features but also
smooth out meandering streams and contorted
coastlines, displace symbols that would otherwise overlap, and replace the intricate boundaries of small cities with tiny circles (Dutton,
1999). Visibility and coherence might also require, as examples, the widening of narrow entrances to important bays, the exaggeration of
an important kink (jog) in a road, the amalgamation of distinct but adjoining patches for
forested land, and the blurring of distinctions
between diverse types of cropland. Additional
accommodations are often needed to create
room for important labels – although wellknown abbreviations can shorten street and feature names, failure to label key features invites
confusion or misinterpretation.
Generalization can be especially problematic with statistical maps, which are notorious
for using aggregated counts or averages to describe trends in census data. A uniform area
symbol for a large, inherently diverse nation
or county can suggest an unwarranted homogeneity as well as dilute coherent patterns obvious on maps with smaller, more reliable areal
units (Crampton, 2004). Potentially troublesome are choropleth maps, readily generated
with commercial, off-the-shelf mapping software that arbitrarily chops the range from lowest to highest data values into five equal
intervals, which are then portrayed with a
spectral sequence of hues (blue, green, yellow,
orange, red) that defies the logical darkermeans-more metaphor for area symbols representing intensity data (Brewer, 1997).
Maps can be categorized in numerous ways,
to reflect their content (e.g., topographic map,
street map), symbolization (e.g., choropleth
map), intended use (e.g., cadastral mapping,
road map), publisher (e.g., government map,
commercial map), format (e.g. wall map, atlas
map, newspaper map) or medium (e.g. paper
map, video map). Especially noteworthy are
several new map forms that emerged solely or
largely during the twentieth century. Image
maps, rooted in the invention of the hot-air
balloon and photography in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, became an important mapping technology with the development
of fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters and artificial
satellites, as well as customized cameras and
electronic scanners used in remote sensing
(Dahlberg, Luman and Vaupel, 1990). Also
known as photomaps, image maps have
become a valuable supplement to the conventional topographic ‘line map’, so called
because features are inscribed by crisp symbols rather than inferred from tonal contrast.
Although a single aerial photograph is a perspective view, with distances distorted locally
by variation in elevation, photogrammetry
allows the compilation of topographic maps
from overlapping aerial photographs as well
as the efficient generation of distortion-free,
‘orthorectified’ photomaps (as in Google
Earth: www.earth.google.com).
Electronic technology has radically altered
the appearance and usability of maps. Animated maps, first produced on film but now
generated by software, treat time as a scalable
entity and afford historical maps with two
scales, for example, ‘ten seconds represents
one year’ for time and ‘one inch represents
five miles’ for distance (Harrower, 2004).
Dynamic maps afford dramatic fly-by renderings of terrain or statistical surfaces, while
interactive topographic maps overcome
conventional treatments of scale and generalization by letting viewers zoom in or out.
Interactive maps that let users retrieve additional information by clicking on or merely
rolling over a symbol can remove the inherent
uncertainty of categories on a choropleth map,
or promote a fuller understanding of an unfamiliar country or a local hazardous waste site
(see visualization). The internet not only
expedites the delivery of geographic information, such as timely radar weather maps, but
also affords instant access to historic maps in
public archives and free, advertiser-supported
route maps with supplementary verbal directions. Societal impacts are especially apparent
in Web-based deliberative mapping, which
fosters negotiated solutions of planning or
political issues by multiple authors (Wiegand,
2002), and in a ‘cybercartography’ that
promises a wider exploitation of multi-sensor
formats, an unprecedented degree of integration and customized products, and inevitable challenges for designers, politicians
and scholars (Taylor, 2003). (See also map
reading.)
mm
Suggested reading
Brewer (2005); Dorling and Fairbairn (1997);
MacEachren (1995); Monmonier (1993);
Peterson (2003); Southworth and Southworth
(1982).
map projection A geometric transformation
of the spherical world on to a flat map. Map
437
MAP PROJECTION
Cylindrical
Cone
Plane
Cylinder
Conic
Azimuthal
map projection Principal developable surfaces (above) generate distinctive projection grids (below)
projection is readily understood as a two-stage
process that begins by shrinking the world to a
hypothetical globe, which establishes the
map’s stated scale. The second stage develops
an azimuthal, a conic or a cylindrical projection by transferring meridians, parallels, coasts
and boundaries on to, respectively, a plane,
cone or cylinder. Each of these three developable surfaces has a distinctive grid of meridians
and parallels. Sometimes a third stage
readjusts locations and shapes, as when the
sinusoidal projection corrects for the enlarged
poleward areas on a cylindrical projection by
bending meridians inward towards a central
meridian.
Because of unavoidable stretching, compression or shearing, map scale generally
varies from place to place across the projection
as well as with direction at a point. On a
cylindrical projection, for instance, scale in
the north–south direction might be constant
while east–west scale grows indefinitely large
near the poles. In general, scale will equal the
stated scale only at the point, line, or lines of
contact between the globe and the developable
surface. Moreover, distortion increases with
distance from the tangent point or standard
line, the location of which positions a zone of
comparatively low distortion. Allowing the
438
developable surface to penetrate the globe provides a ring of low distortion on an azimuthal
projection and two zones of low distortion on a
conic or cylindrical projection. A map author
can tailor a projection to a specific country
or region by carefully selecting the developable surface and its orientation to the globe
(Robinson and Snyder, 1991; Canters, 2002).
Many perspectives and orientations are possible. Although all projections distort most
distances, an equidistant projection might
preserve true distance from the Equator, one
of the poles or some other point of interest.
Similarly, an equivalent projection can preserve the true relative areas of countries and
continents, whereas a conformal projection,
which preserves small shapes as well as angles
around points, is especially useful on largescale maps of small areas. Unfortunately,
equidistance, equivalence and conformality
are mutually exclusive.
Because the mapped area of a country or
region can be seen as signifying its importance,
the well-known Mercator projection, which
significantly reduces the relative size of tropical nations, has been attacked as biased and
eurocentric, with the most strident objections
emanating from proponents of the Gall–Peters
projection, an equal-area map touted as ‘fair
MARKET
to all peoples’ despite severe north–south
stretching in the Tropics and comparatively
reliable shapes and angles across western
Europe and the northern USA (Monmonier,
2004b). Several other equal-area projections
offer a more balanced pattern of shape distortion, and numerous compromise projections attempt to balance distortions of area
and angles. Map authors eager to focus on
people, rather than land area, can map socioeconomic data on a cartogram, on which area
represents population (Tobler, 1963).
mm
Suggested reading
Monmonier (2004b); Snyder (1993).
map reading The process of extracting
information from a map, which is fundamental
cartographic practice (see cartography).
Textbooks on the reading and use of maps
and globes were produced from the 1500s
onwards, as a required part of a noble or genteel education. After 1650, they became a
mainstay of public discourse and, after 1800,
of regularized primary education in centralizing European states. Exercises in map-reading
were integral to Heimatkunde, the initial stage
of the formal curriculum in geography
adopted in German primary schools after
1871 and subsequently emulated throughout
western Europe and Japan. After 1900, the
interpretation of larger-scale topographical
maps developed as a key skill for the study of
landscapes within both academic geography
and the military (cf. military geography).
Militaries have generated a variety of technical
manuals, and military-orientated tasks dominated the curricula of introductory map-reading
courses in many US universities after the
Second World war. The needs of the military
also drove academic research in cartography
and human geography into the cognitive processes of map reading to support the production of maps that could be read easily and
effectively, while behavioural geography
included research into the development of
map-reading skills among children and adults
(and also their production of mental maps).
In all these circumstances, map reading has
been understood as comprising four tasks,
regardless of map scale:
(1) the identification and location of particular places;
(2) navigation, which entails route-selection,
position-verification and anticipation of
the future;
(3) the identification of patterns, distributions
and morphologies of spatial features;
(4) the cartometric endeavours of taking
measurements from maps, whether as
simple as determining distances or areas
or as complex as the statistical analysis of
a map’s geometrical accuracy (Maling,
1989).
These tasks have all been applied to old as well
as modern maps (see cartography, history
of). In terms of ontology, such map-reading
practices sustain the modern ideology of
cartography (see also cartographic reason).
Their repeated performance within authoritative state institutions has naturalized the
expectation that maps are intended to be used
only in such specific ways. (The automatic
reaction to critical approaches to cartography
is thus to appeal to the functional authority
and so legitimation of the road map.)
Against this limited and only partially
adequate perspective, recent critics have sought
to read maps as cultural documents, to elucidate their cultural and social significance
(Edwards, 2003). Two approaches are especially rewarding. Strongly influenced by arthistorical studies in iconography, Harley
(2001b) construed maps to comprise two layers
of meaning: an overt layer of factual data, directly accessed through standard map-reading
techniques, and an obscured layer of cultural
meaning to be elucidated through identification
and consideration of a map’s conventional and
iconological symbolism. Wood and Fels (in
Wood, 1992, pp. 95–142) advanced a more systematic analysis of maps as semiotic systems in
their reading of a common road map; their essay
has deservedly become the paradigm of critical
map interpretation. Even so, their analysis of the
differential and structured deployment of signs
was preliminary. That is, the desideratum of a
comprehensive and rigorous methodology for
reading maps as cultural documents remains
to be completed. (See also culture.)
mhe
Suggested reading
Edwards (2003); Wood (1992, esp. pp. 95–142).
market The market is indisputably an
example of what Raymond Williams (1976)
called a ‘keyword’. It is as a consequence
rather complex, its meanings have been unstable
historically, and its use and deployment always
‘inextricably bound up with the problems it
was being used to discuss’ (p. 15). Adam
Smith famously noted that there was an intrinsic human propensity to truck, barter and
439
MARKET
exchange things – in other words, to commodify the world through active participation in
markets (cf. economy). Yet one of the great
paradoxes of contemporary economics is that
most textbooks do little to dispel the notion
that markets are magical or supernatural,
reflecting the extraordinary (and sometimes
utopian) powers of the hidden hand. None
other than Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase
noted that markets had a ‘shadowy role’ in
economic theory at least until they attracted
the attention of other Nobel Laureates such as
George Akerloff and Joseph Stiglitz (see
McMillan, 2002).
How, then, is the term ‘market’ deployed?
One meaning is resolutely empirical and geographical: it is a ‘public place where a market
is held’, where the latter is ‘a meeting together
of people for the purpose of trade by private
purchase and sale’ (Online Merriam-Webster
Dictionary). In this sense, of course, markets
have a very deep history – commodities
exchanged through some medium (money) –
extending back millennia. Numismatic
research suggests that while there were no formal markets as such, proto-monies facilitating
exchange may date back 10,000 years; gold
coins were certainly in circulation 2,500 years
ago in Turkey, and the Sumerians had made
use of silver bars as a money 2,000 years earlier. Markets are also in the business of commodity circulation. Markets facilitate and
promote generalized commodity circulation.
The multiplication of markets – the purchase
and sale of virtually everything – implies commodification and the expansion of the commodity frontier to every nook and cranny of
the world we inhabit (Willams, 1983 [1976]).
Even if some domain of our social world
remains immune to the deadly conceits of the
market, the extent to which the logic of the
marketplace has insinuated our culture and
social life is historically unprecedented: we
do not as a matter of right or principle buy
and sell children, and yet human organs,
sperm and ova can and are part of brisk market
exchanges. There can even be markets in
abstractions and fictions – in climatic risk,
in future bundles of currencies, in derivatives.
Yet this dictionary definition is superficial,
because it says little of what actually constitutes – and what are the conditions of possibility of – market transactions. Most
economists – influenced by transaction
cost analysis, by the studies of economic
norms, and by the institutionalism of some
forms of neo-classical economics (see
Williamson, 1985) – identify decision-making
440
autonomy and participation as key to market
operations: buyers and sellers willing participate in the exchange and can veto any deal
(McMillan, 2002). The purported ‘freedom’
of the market – buyers and sellers controlling
their own resources and not acting under
(extra-economic) compulsion – turns on
choices and preferences subject to certain constraints (on their resources and the ‘rules’ of
the market). Several aspects of this definition
are important. First, where an authority relationship shapes the transaction, it is not a
market transaction (it is another sort of transaction: administered or forced or perhaps
black market). Second, for the poor the
degrees of freedom, participation and choice
are very constrained. Bargaining power
between buyer and seller is unequal, yet
economists would see the right of veto as
‘a kind of freedom’. Third, while competition
is not a defining feature of the market (markets
might be oligopolistic), there is a presumption
that adds to autonomy (by virtue of there
being alternatives). As a consequence of
these attributes, a market transaction is typically defined as:
An exchange that is voluntary; each party
can veto it, and (subject to the rules of the
market place) each freely agrees to the
terms. A market is a forum for carrying out
such exchanges. (McMillan, 2002, p. 6)
Market transactions defined in this way are,
of course, limited: markets are never wholly
ubiquitous and there are realms in which the
reach of the market is limited even in
advanced capitalist states. Many of the transactions within households, within firms and
within governments are not market transactions as defined conventionally. Yet these
non-market transactions take place within a
universe of dominant market transactions
and indeed are directly and indirectly shaped
by the powerful logics of the operations of the
market. It is also clear from the definition of
market transaction that markets are always in
a limited sense ‘free’. They always have rules,
more or less formal. They require patterns of
trust and social convention. And, not least,
they demand the role of government in defining property rights, and typically providing
complex bodies of law pertaining to contracts.
All of this endorses the idea that there are
many different forms of markets, that market
transactions presuppose quantities and qualities of information (often unevenly unavailable – information asymmetries is the neoclassical argot), and that market transactions
MARKET
may be wildly different in their costs to buyer
and seller alike.
When Simmel (1978) noted that exchange
is one of the ‘purest and most primitive of
forms of human socialization’, he endorsed
the idea that a market is a social construction. As Stanford economist John McMillan
puts it: for markets to work they must be ‘well
built’: the field of market design, accordingly,
refers to the analysis and pragmatics – the
purposeful building – of institutions for transacting market exchanges. As McMillan says:
Market design consists of the mechanisms
that organize buying and selling; channels
for the flow of information; state-set laws
and regulations that define property rights
and sustain contracting; and the markets
culture, its self-regulating norms, codes
and conventions governing behavior . . . A
workable design keeps in check transaction
costs . . . Transaction costs are many and
varied. (2002, p. 9)
And yet even in acknowledging these properties, it is not unusual to hear the claim from
economists that ‘no one is in charge of the
market’ (McMillan, 2002, p. 7). And to this
extent, as Vaclav Havel once put it, the market
‘is the only natural economy’. This, of course,
raises another meaning of market that is both
ideological and political (see ideology). In
addition to markets and market transactions,
there is the idea of ‘the market’, or ‘the market
system’ or ‘the free market’. It is an abstract
notion – abstracted from the actual interactions and functionings of many different
forms of market – but one that arises in at a
particular moment – its modern founding
charter is associated with Adam Smith’s The
wealth of nations – and it has a long and complex history. Smith was fully aware of the fact
that markets had their limits, that government
provisions and public goods were indispensable to the operations of markets, and that
markets left to their own devices could in fact
be destructive. And yet he retained the ideological notion that markets were natural –
rooted in human impulses to truck, barter an
exchange. There is, of course, an alternative
narrative. Even at the time of Smith’s writing,
his world was awash with the operations of a
distinctively moral economy that privileged
use-value above exchange-value (Thompson,
1991) and of claims for a just price. Popular
reactions in defence of an arena that was seen
to be beyond the market – the commons –
defined much of what passed as politics
(Neeson, 1993). At the very least, then, the
modern market was not so much natural as
the product of struggle. And it is a struggle
that is central to the operations of the market
in the twenty-first century. The global commons represent a frontier of contemporary
resistance to – and shaping of – the rules of
the market (Saad-Filho and Johnson, 2005).
The contested nature of markets – in the
details or their operations or as a utopian
vision – is central to any understanding of
economy, liberalism and modernity
(Harvey, 2005). Karl Polanyi’s The great
transformation and Friedrich Hayek’s The road
to serfdom were both published in 1944.
Hayek, an Austrian economist trained at the
feet of Ludwig von Mises, but forever associated with a largely non-economic corpus
produced at the London School of Economics
and the universities of Chicago and Freiburg
between 1940 and 1980, is widely recognized
as one of the leading intellectual architects of
the neo-liberal counter-revolution (see neoliberalism). Margaret Thatcher pronounced
that ‘this is what we believe’ as she slammed a
copy of Hayek’s The constitution of liberty on
to the table at Number 10 Downing Street
during a Tory Cabinet meeting. Hayek’s critique of socialism – that it destroys morals,
personal freedom and responsibility, impedes
the production of wealth and sooner or later
leads to totalitarianism – is the ur text for
market utopians. Collectivism was by definition a made rather than a grown order: it was,
Hayek said, constructivist rather than evolutionary, organized not spontaneous, a ‘taxis’ (a
made order) rather than a ‘cosmos’ (a spontaneous order), an economy rather than a ‘catallaxy’, coerced and concrete rather than free
and abstract (see Gamble, 1996, pp. 31–2).
Its fatal conceit was that socialism (and social
democracy for that matter) admitted the ‘reckless trespass of taxis onto the proper ground of
cosmos’ (Anderson, 2005b, p. 16).
The other half of Hayek’s project was a robust defence of Western civilization – that is
to say of liberty, science and the spontaneous
orders that co-evolved to form modern society
(‘Great Society’, as he termed it). It was a
buttressing of the liberal (unplanned) market
order from which the preconditions of civilization – competition and experimentation – had
emerged. Hayek, like Weber, saw this world as
an iron cage constituted by impersonality, a
loss of community, individualism and personal
responsibility. But unlike Weber, Hayek saw
these structures, properly understood, as expressions of liberty. From the vantage point of
the 1940s this (classical) liberal project was, as
441
MARKET
Hayek saw it, under threat: what passed as
liberalism was a travesty, a diluted and distorted body of ideas corrupted by constructivist
rationalism (as opposed to what he called ‘evolutionary rationalism’). The ground between
liberalism and much of what passed as Keynesianism or social democracy was, on the Hayekian account, catastrophically slight. What was
required, as he made clear at the founding of
the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, was a
restoration, a purging of true liberalism (the
removal of ‘accretions’). There was to be no
compromise with collectivism: the seized territory had to be regained. In his writing and his
promotion of think-tanks such as the Institute
of Economic Affairs in Britain – the brains trust
for the likes of Keith Joseph and Margaret
Thatcher – Hayek aggressively launched a
cold war of ideas. He was part of the quartet
of European theorists (Carl Schmitt, Leo
Strauss and Michael Oakeshott were the
others) whose ideas, while standing in a tense
relationship to one another, have come to shape
a large swath of the intellectual landscape of the
early twenty-first century (see Anderson,
2005b). Hayek was neither a simple conservative or libertarian, nor a voice for laissez-faire
(‘false rationalism’, as he saw it). He identified
himself with the individualist tradition of
Hume, Smith, Burke and Menger, thereby providing a bridge that linked his short-term allies
(conservatives and libertarians) to classical liberals in order to make common cause against
collectivism (Gamble, 1996, p. 101). To roll
back the incursions of taxis required a redesign
of the state. A powerful chamber was to serve
as guardian of the rule of law (striking all under
45 years off the voting roll), protecting the law
of liberty from the logic of popular sovereignty.
As Anderson (2005a, p. 17) notes, the correct
Hayekian formula was ‘demarchy without
democracy’.
Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian economic
historian and socialist who believed that the
nineteenth-century liberal order had died,
never to be revived. By 1940, ‘every vestige’
of the international liberal order had disappeared, the product of the necessary adoption
of measures designed to hold off the ravages of
the self-regulating market (market despotism).
It was the conflict between the market and the
elementary requirements of an organized
social life that made some form of collectivism
or planning inevitable (Polanyi, 1944). The
liberal market order was, contra Hayek, not
‘spontaneous’ but a planned development,
and its demise was the product of the market
order itself. A market order could just as well
442
produce the freedom to exploit as it could the
freedom of association. The grave danger, in
Polanyi’s view, was that liberal utopianism
might return in the idea of freedom as nothing
more than the advocacy of free enterprise, the
notion that planning is nothing more than ‘the
denial of freedom’ and that the justice and
liberty offered by regulation or control
becomes nothing more than ‘a camouflage of
slavery’ (1944, p. 258). Liberalism in this
account will always degenerate, ultimately
compromised by an authoritarianism that will
be invoked as a counterweight to the threat of
mass democracy. Modern capitalism contained the famous ‘double-movement’, in
which markets were serially and coextensively
disembedded from, and re-embedded in,
social institutions and relations – what Polanyi
called the ‘discovery of society’. In particular,
the possibility of a counter-hegemony to the
self-regulating market could be found in resistance to the commodification of the three fictitious commodities (land, labour and money):
such reactions represented the spontaneous
defence of society (Burawoy, 2003).
The market and anti-market mentalities of
Hayek and Polanyi were both forged in the
context of fascism, global economic depression, revolution and world war. To look back
on the birth of The great transformation and
The road to serfdom from the perch of 2008 is
quite salutary: we see american empire (military neo-liberalism), a global ‘war on terror’
(see terrorism), the dominance of unfettered
global finance capital, a worldwide Muslim
resurgence, a phalanx of ‘failed states’ (otherwise known as the failure of secular nationalist
development) and a raft of so-called antiglobalization movements, and the rise of
civic regulation. There has been, intellectually
speaking, a consequent Polanyi boom (see
Williams, 2005a) within the academy, but
fewer careful readings of the Hayekian ideas
that helped spawn these developments. From
within the bowels of this turmoil, the Hayekian vision is triumphant – the Liberal International has come to pass. Its long march,
from Mont Pelerin to the collapse of the Berlin
Wall and TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’)
took about forty years and, according to
Harvey’s (2005) brief history, passed through
the Chicago Boys in Chile, the IMF/IBRD
complex, the Reagan–Thatcher revolutions
and the corporate (class) seizure of power in
the 1970s against a backdrop of declining
profitability and income share. Even if
‘global neo-liberalism’ has now assumed a
neo-conservative and military cast (Saad-Filho
MARKOV PROCESS (OR MARKOV CHAIN)
and Johnson, 2005), nobody seems to question
its hegemony: as Gramsci might have put it,
there has been a Hayekian ‘passive revolution’
from above as (Silver and Arrighi, 2003).
We have witnessed what the Left’s great pessimist Perry Anderson (2000c) has dubbed a ‘neoliberal grand slam’, with neo-liberalism ruling
undivided across the globe as the
most successful ideology in world history
(Anderson, 2002c). This ‘fluent vision’ of the
Right has no equivalent on the Left: Anderson
cedes that embedded liberalism (let alone something called socialism) is now as remote as
‘Arian bishops’, resistances are like ‘chafe
in the wind’ and the Left can only ‘shelter
under the skies of infinite justice’. Of course,
with the vertiginous collapse of Wall Street and
a raft of financial institutions in late 2008, followed by the massive bailouts initiated by various governments in Europe and America,
Anderson’s grand slam now looks very different.
The very process by which neo-liberal market hegemony was established – and against
which forms of resistance are to be assessed –
remains a story for which at present we have
no full genealogy. The cast of characters may
be lined up – from the school of Austrian
economics to the Reagan–Thatcher–Kohl
troika – but this explains very little. Neoliberalism can be seen as a class reaction to
the crisis of the 1970s. The global multilaterals and the Treasury–Wall Street certainly
imposed brutal forms of economic discipline –
structural adjustment – to eradicate forever
any residue of collectivism in the Third World.
But beyond these general descriptions we are
left with paradoxes and questions, of which I
will list just a few. Why did the LSE and
Chicago – the centres of Fabianism and a
certain sort of American liberalism – become
the forcing houses of neo-liberalism? Hayek,
after all, was not associated with the Economics Department; it was the arrival of Ronald
Coase at Chicago that marked a neo-liberal
turning point. How did the World Bank – a
bastion of postwar development economics
and a certain sort of statism – become the voice
of laissez faire? Harry Johnson (who held
Chairs at the LSE and Chicago) certainly figures in the process, but how can we explain
economic liberalism’s capture of key sectors of
the Bank (often by second-rate economists)
against a backdrop of robust Keynesianism?
How did the ideas of economists such as Peter
Bauer and Deepak Lal gain traction? Criticism
of Keynes dovetailed with the anti-statism levelled by many on the Left during the 1970s.
In other words, tracing the ways in which
government failures came to outweigh market
failures in development thinking demands a
complex picture of discursive contestations
and political practices. Indeed, by the mid- to
late 1970s many of neo-liberalism’s intellectual architects (Milton Friedmann among
them) claimed that nobody took their ideas
seriously – Hayek believed that The road to
serfdom had ruined his career and marginalized his entire project. It was the inflation of
the 1970s, said Friedmann, that revealed the
cracks within the Keynesian edifice. The point
is that the ‘neo-liberal grand slam’ was preceded by decades of mediocrity, pessimism
and contestation, and that the class forces
around and through which embedded liberalism had been built necessarily shaped
the manner and forms in which the counterrevolution could proceed (if at all). How to
think about the power of the market now
turns on how one sees this long march through
institutions. The catastrophic collapse of the
US investment banks and the discrediting of
the various regulatory and financial rating
agencies – with the prospect of a 1930s-style
world depression in the offing – suggests that
the neo-liberal project has come crashing to a
halt. As the New York Times put it in early
2009, ‘we are all Keynesians now’.
mw
Suggested reading
Elyachar (2005); Prasad (2006); Scabas (2007).
Markov process (or Markov chain) A type
of stochastic process in which the probability of being in a particular state at time t is
wholly dependent upon the state(s) at some
preceding time(s). It is named after the
Russian mathematician who first defined the
process. The simplest form, known as a firstorder Markov process, is where the dependence is entirely on just the immediately preceding state. This process can be represented
by a transition probability matrix in which the
rows and columns represent the different
states and the cells represent the probabilities
of movement between states. For example,
migration movements between three regions
A, B and C could be modelled as follows:
State at time t þ 1
State at time t
A
B
C
A
0.80
0.08
0.10
B
0.15
0.90
0.05
C
0.05
0.02
0.85
443
MARXISM
From this we may see that, between time t and
time t þ 1, 80 per cent of the population in A
remain there, 15 per cent move to B and 5 per
cent to C, and similarly for movements from
regions B and C in rows 2 and 3. By repeated
operation of the matrix, the population pattern
redistributes to a stable pattern independent of
the initial pattern (assuming no births, deaths
or movements in or out of the total system).
This Markov model has been used to study
population migration, epidemic processes,
the growth and movement of firms, and trends
in regional economic convergence and divergence, and is a component of more sophisticated demographic modelling.
lwh
Suggested readings
Collins, Drewett and Ferguson (1974); Rees and
Wilson (1977).
Marxism The body of ideas and practices
developed by Karl Marx (1818–83) and
greatly elaborated since his death by his followers. His voluminous writings fall into several broad categories. First, there are those
writings that develop a broad theory of history
(historical materialism) as a succession of
modes of production, in which changes in
economic and class structures play a central
dynamic role. Second, there are writings (such
as the three volumes of Capital) that develop
a more detailed political economy of capitalism as a mode of production, using the
labour theory of value to explore its underlying contradictions and tendencies to crisis.
Third, there are various, more sketchy,
writings on dialectical philosophy and method
(see dialectics). Fourth, there are a wide
range of analyses of contemporary events,
often designed to illustrate broader theories
(such as The eighteenth brumaire of Louis
Napoleon), polemical addresses and a mass of
journalistic writings for various newpapers.
Marx did not present a single, codified version of his ideas, which in any case changed
over the course of his lifetime. Some later
Marxists, such as Louis Althusser (see Althusser and Balibar, 1970), have even claimed to
detect a major ‘epistemological break’ in his
work between the earlier more philosophical
and ‘humanist’ texts, strongly influenced by
Hegel, and the later, more ‘scientific’, analyses
of political economy. Gouldner (1980) also
sees a distinction between a younger and
older Marx, but more in terms of a tension
between a voluntaristic ‘Critical Marxism’
and a more deterministic ‘Scientific Marxism’.
Even those (the majority of commentators)
444
who prefer to stress the underlying continuities in his work differ in the emphases they
place on different themes and texts. As a result
of such multiple possible readings, Marxism
has become more a family of theories with
many strands than a single codified framework. This is part of its attraction and contributes to its continuing vitality.
Histories of Marxism usually identify several
phases of development and divergence (McLellan, 1979). The first codified version of ‘orthodox Marxism’ was developed after Marx’s death
by Engels, Kautsky, Bernstein and Plekhanov,
who published systematic expositions of historical and dialectical materialism, the nature of
capitalism and the theory of revolution. Lenin
subsequently adapted Plekhanov’s orthodox
‘stages’ view of history to justify revolution in a
backward capitalist state such as Russia. However, with the degeneration of the revolution and
the onset of Stalinism, ‘Marxism–Leninism’
rapidly hardened into the official ideology of
the centralized Soviet state.
The Western Marxism of Lukacs, Korsch,
Gramsci and the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer and Adorno) was developed partly as a
reaction against this dogmatism, shifting the
emphasis away from political economy more
towards neglected aspects of culture, ideology and art. A return to Hegel and his influence on Marx provided an underlying
philosophical thread to this work (see also
critical theory).
The post-Second World War period has
been marked by increasing internal diversity
within the Marxist tradition, as Marxists have
responded to, and interacted with, other
developments in philosophy and social theory. Jean-Paul Sartre tried to blend a reinterpretation of Marxism with the philosophy of
existentialism. Althusser developed a rereading of Marxism – indebted, in part, to
structuralism – that attempted to save
Marxism from what he regarded as the twin
deviations of historicism and economism.
Althusserian Marxism presented a science of
social systems, with a relative autonomy of
levels ‘structured in dominance’ and an economy only ‘determinant-in-the-last-instance’.
Althusser’s structuralism provoked strong
reactions, leading to a proliferation of new
currents over recent decades. Harvey (1999
[1982]) has preferred to go back to Marx’s
own writings, demonstrating the continuing
potential of an essentially ‘orthodox’ version
of Marxism. The architects of analytical
marxism, such as Cohen, Roemer and
Elster (Mayer, 1994), have sought to build
MARXIST ECONOMICS
micro-economic foundations for Marxism
using rational choice theory, and to displace dialectics with analytical philosophy and
the labour theory of value with neo-classical
economics. Realist Marxists have sought to
provide a stronger philosophical shell for
Marxism by drawing upon recent developments in the philosophy of realism (Brown,
Fleetwood and Roberts, 2002). Anti-essentialist Marxists have sought to expunge the last
remnants of economic determinism from Althusserian Marxism (Resnick and Wolff, 1987;
cf. essentialism) and ‘postmodernist Marxists’
such as Laclau and Mouffe (1985) have tried to
find a rapprochement with Jacques Derrida’s
deconstruction (see also postmodernism;
post-structuralism). Whether many of these
lines of development are still definably ‘Marxist’ or whether they are ‘post-marxist’ is an
open, and perhaps irrelevant, question.
Indeed, some of the most interesting work is
being generated through dialogues and critiques across boundaries, such as Deleuze
and Guattari’s (1984) conjunction, in Capitalism and schizophrenia, of Sigmund Freud,
Marx and Baruch Spinoza, or critical realist
attempts to find complementarities between
Marx and Michel Foucault (Marsden, 1999)
or Hardt and Negri’s fusion of elements from
Marx, Gilles Deleuze and Spinoza in their
Empire (2000). There have also been vital
engagements with human geography. Many
geographers have been influenced by the discipline’s remarkably late reading of Marx:
most other social sciences – notably anthropology, economics and sociology – had a much
longer history of coming to terms with Marx
and Marxism, but it would be a mistake to
limit the influence of Marx’s writings to the
ongoing project of a marxist geography, not
least because so many of the other disciplines
with which human geography has entered into
conversation have themselves been marked by
Marxism, and those traces have in turn left
their own marks on geographical enquiry.
There has also been a still more belated return
movement, in which contemporary Marxism
has started to come to terms with the core
concerns of human geography. On one side,
these have involved conceptual elaborations of
place, space and nature that in turn require
reformulations of some of Marxism’s basic
postulates. Harvey (1999 [1982]) in particular
has sought to re-theorize Marxism as a
historico-geographical materialism capable of
addressing the characteristically uneven
development of capitalism (cf. production
of space). On the other side, there has been
a constructive critique of the ethnocentrism
of not only classical Marxism (where the formalization of an ‘Asiatic’ mode of production
is today an embarrassment) but of the
‘Westernness’ of Western Marxism. This has
involved an appreciation of the production of
substantive geographical differences, which
has been made possible by studies in regional
geography that have been revitalized by an
engagement with a post-colonialism that
has itself been inspired and provoked by
Marx’s legacy. As a result of these various
challenges, critiques and conversations,
Marxism continues to develop as a living
tradition, interacting with surrounding currents in new ways, and spinning off a variety
of hybrid forms.
kb
Marxist economics A heterodox field that
spans the methodological gamut from structural and class-centred relational and dialectical approaches to individual-centred
rational choice approaches. If something
called ‘Marxist economics’ coheres, it is because of what it is not – namely, neoclassical economics (however, subsets of
rational choice Marxism that seek to give
Marxist economics a ‘micro-foundation’ –
these would include the projects of Adam
Przeworski, Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis
or John Roemer – veer perilously close to
post-Walrasian variants of neo-classical theory). In the simplest formulation, Marxist
economics, unlike its neo-classical counterpart, views individuals as social beings: as
such, it emphasizes social structure more
than individual behaviour. It draws attention
to class struggle, which, it contends, is interwoven with every other aspect of society in
complex and contradictory ways. The economy is understood as a terrain where class
exploitation occurs and exerts its powerful influence over the rest of social life. ‘Exploitation’
is a key operator in most versions of Marxist
economics, and refers to a ‘class process in
which the person who performs surplus labor
is not also the person who appropriates it’
(Wolff and Resnick, 1987, p. 167). Note that
the description of Marxist economics so far is
not confined to the analysis of capitalism.
The historian Robert Brenner, for example,
has offered a remarkable class-based analysis
of the jagged transition from feudalism to
early capitalism in Western Europe and convincingly illustrated the generality of Marxist
economics as a framework for understanding
economic crises and growth cycles. Parting
company with those rational-choice Marxists
445
MARXIST GEOGRAPHY
who claim that the institutional preconditions
of economic growth are the outcome of
(parametric or strategic) actions undertaken
by sovereign economic actors (see Carver
and Thomas, 1995), Brenner instead contends that it is unwarranted ‘to take for
granted a society of free economic actors,
rather than one of economic actors subject
to non-economic constraints’ (Brenner, 1986,
p. 25). Second, rationally self-interested
action in such circumstances will, as a rule,
exhibit the goal of maintaining existing property relations, thereby impeding economic
development; and, third, should economic
development occur, it must be viewed – in
light of the second premise – ‘as an unintended consequence of . . . conflicts between
[antagonistic] classes’ (ibid., p. 26).
The distinctive contribution of geographers
to Marxist economics has been to show that
capitalist dynamics are intrinsically geopolitical. Thus, radical geographers such as David
Harvey and Doreen Massey have demonstrated,
in quite different ways, how class relations involving the extraction of surplus labour are
stretched out spatially and profoundly implicated in differing patterns of uneven development – whether locally, regionally or globally.
Whereas studies such as those of Massey examine how place-specific contingencies – including gender and race relations – mediate
economic outcomes within wider spatial
structures of capitalism, others such as Harvey
have been more interested to elaborate how the
historical and geographical dynamics of capitalism might be charted as corrective responses to
recurring ‘overaccumulation’ crises that are
generated by limits immanent to it. There is
continuity here with the Marxist economics of
Henryk Grossman, Ernest Mandel and James
O’Connor who, in varying formulations, hitch
Marx’s theory of capitalist accumulation to
the theory of crisis. (See also and marxist
geography; radical geography.)
vg
Suggested reading
Harvey (1985b); Massey (1995).
Marxist geography The analysis of the geographical conditions, processes and outcomes
of socio-economic systems, primarily capitalism, using the tools of Marxist theory. Marxist
geography is significant both for its role in the
evolution of the discipline and, more importantly, for its analytical claims about the world
in which we live.
Marxism first became an important theoretical influence in geography in the late 1960s
446
and early 1970s. Motivated by the radical politics of that era, many younger geographers
grew dissatisfied with the then-dominant vision of geography as a technocratic, positivist
spatial science. They noted that: (i) a narrow
focus on spatial patterns often left unexamined
and unchallenged the social processes that
produced the inequalities evident in those
patterns; (ii) technically oriented, ostensibly
neutral geographical techniques and analyses
often served in practice to enable and perpetuate various relations of domination; and (iii)
the ‘universal laws’ advanced by spatial analysts were often merely generalizations about
industrialized Western societies. Marxist theory, by contrast, was dialectical, overtly political, focused on the analysis and remediation
of exploitation and inequality, and internationalist. It therefore seemed to many an
ideal theoretical foundation for a critical geography aimed at understanding and combating
the production of unequal geographies. Radical geography framed in terms of Marxist theory grew quickly in the discipline: its arrival
was signalled by the publication of the first
issue of Antipode in 1969, and its theoretical
architecture and points of departure from
positivist spatial science were first laid out
clearly in David Harvey’s Social justice and the
city in 1973.
For much of the 1970s and 1980s, Marxist
approaches were the dominant ones in critical human geography. Scholars working in
this area developed increasingly comprehensive and detailed accounts of the geographical
dynamics of capitalism, demonstrating
persuasively both that Marxist theories of capitalism were incomplete without attention to
spatial dynamics, and that identifiable capitalist processes and relations lay at the root of
many issues of concern in contemporary
human and environmental geography. Despite
the fact that much of this work emerged from a
critique of spatial science, some of it still bore
the stamp of that theoretical tradition, inasmuch as much early Marxist geography sought
to provide systematic, logical, deductive and
generalizable accounts of the spatial processes
and outcomes likely to result from endogenous
dynamics understood as inherent to capitalism.
David Harvey’s The limits to capital (1999
[1982]) remains the single most ambitious
and significant work in this vein. In this and
other works, Harvey sought to build upon
Marx’s basic framework (see Marx, 1967
[1987]) to analyse the ways in which capitalism
uses and produces space and particular geographical relationships. For instance, ongoing
MARXIST GEOGRAPHY
uneven development at multiple scales was
interpreted as the inevitable result of the tension between the need for capital to be fixed in
place-bound material forms in order for production to occur on the one hand, and the
imperative for it to remain liquid and mobile
in the face of competition and shifting rates of
profit in different places and sectors on the
other. Similarly, Harvey explored how geographical relationships and strategies could be
used to stave off crisis tendencies. Other work
in this period was more historical in nature,
examining the role that geographical relationships played in the origins of capitalism –
whether those that concentrated large numbers
of wage labourers in urban areas, thereby fostering class consciousness, or those that violently extracted and transferred labour and
raw materials from colonies to industrializing
core countries (e.g. Amin, 1976). Marxist
geography (broadly conceived) also intersected
productively with debates in third world
Marxism in this period, leading to the development of explicitly geographical theorizations of
the global capitalist economy, including world
systems theory (Wallerstein, 1979) and dependency theory (Frank, 1967), as well as
critiques of the geographical imaginations
underlying what often remained eurocentric
conceptualizations of the global economy
(Blaut, 1993). This brief review cannot do justice to the extent of Marxist geography in these
decades, which also examined questions ranging from regional economic development
strategies and industrial location decisions
(e.g. Storper and Walker, 1989) to historical
materialist interpretations of cultural politics (e.g. Harvey, 1989b). Marxist geographers’
engagement with the discipline’s nature–
society tradition proved highly fruitful as
well: the intersection of Marxist theory, cultural ecology and related work in the 1970s
led directly to the burgeoning field now known
as political ecology (e.g. Watts, 1983a), while
Neil Smith, focusing more on industrialized
countries, made the strong claim that nature
under capitalism was increasingly materially
produced (1990). Such engagements sparked a
line of work on the production of nature that
continues up to the present (e.g. Henderson,
1999), including debates about the primacy
that such perspectives accord humans in general, and capitalist processes in particular, in
the co-construction of nature. Much recent
work in Marxist geography has focused less on
structuralist marxist economics, and sought
instead to provide critical ethnographies of
capitalist societies (Postone, 1993; see, e.g.,
Chari, 2004; Wright, 2004), while at the same
time re-evaluating core Marxist concepts, such
as primitive accumulation, in light of contemporary geographies (e.g. Glassman, 2006).
Marxist geography itself soon became an
object of critique, however, not least because
of its very scope. Beginning in the early 1990s,
much critical theory in geography and related
fields moved strongly towards ‘post-marxist’
theoretical frameworks that accept many basic
elements of Marxist theory (e.g. the centrality
of commodification and exploitation in capitalist societies) while criticizing much Marxism
as fatally ‘modern’; that is, as an overly ambitious and totalizing meta-theory that seeks to
explain nearly all human experiences, differences and power relations via a narrow, economistic schema in which interests, conflicts,
outcomes and even forms of consciousness
can be deterministically read off from the position of an individual or group within relations
of production (see Castree, 1999b). Whether
such critiques rest upon a fair reading of all
Marxist theory is debatable, but what is
beyond question is that in recent years many
critical geographers have found Marxism
unhelpful, and sometimes even a hindrance,
in attempts to analyse and combat multiple
and intertwined forms of oppression. Instead,
theoretical frameworks broadly characterizable
as post-structuralist (see post-structuralism)
have dominated critical geography in recent
years, providing different entry points and tools
with which to grapple with the problematics of
gender, racism, sexuality, post-colonialism
and what might constitute ‘Left’ or radical politics in the contemporary era. Gibson-Graham
(2006b [1996]), for instance, made a widely
influential argument that Marxism often grants
‘capitalism’ far more coherence and power than
it actually has, and that radical politics would be
better pursued by seeking to identify and foster
more modest alternatives to capitalist relations
from the ground up, rather than by attempting
to analyse and transform ‘capitalism’ as a global
totality. Framings that pit these various theoretical frameworks against one another frequently
rely upon quite reductive and static renderings
of each; the most robust work in critical
geography makes use of multiple theoretical
perspectives in order to develop the fullest and
most rigorous critical analyses possible.
Nonetheless, Neil Smith’s observation (2005a,
p. 897) that Marxism, ‘ . . . may be the one
oppositional politics which really has not been
significantly rescripted into media fodder,
integrated, in greater or lesser part co-opted,
but always has to be opposed’, suggests at
447
MASCULINISM
the least Marxism’s enduring significance for
critical geography.
jm
Suggested reading
Gibson-Graham (2006b [1996]); Harvey (1999
[1982]); Henderson (1999); Smith (1990).
masculinism The tracing of connections
between cultures of masculinity, knowledge
and power. It is located within traditions of
Western scientific rationality; in particular, the
dualisms between mind and body, and subject
and object, and the presumption that scientific
knowledge can and should be objective and
context free. Masculinist knowledge is criticized for claiming to be exhaustive or universal,
while actually ignoring women’s existences or
casting them within a gendered binary, framed
from the perspective of men. Rose (1993) argues that geography is a masculinist discipline,
and that masculinism determines conventions
of what is deemed worthy of geographical
investigation, fieldwork practice, theory development, writing and representation, as well
as everyday academic life – from conduct in
seminars to job searches and promotion. She
identifies two masculinities (social scientific
and aesthetic) that frame this pervasive masculinism within the academic geographical
imagination. (See also epistemology;
feminist geographies; phallocentrism;
post-structuralism.)
gp
material
culture Relationships between
people and things, or, more formally put, the
expression and negotiation of cultural, political and economic relationships via the material world of objects. Appadurai’s (1986) noted
text in this area supplies a further shorthand
definition: The social life of things. Culture has
often been conceived as an immaterial and
disembodied entity, composed of ideas, customs, knowledges and shared beliefs and values. One task for material culture studies –
today an interdisciplinary venture, bringing
together researchers from human geography,
archaeology, anthropology, sociology and cultural and social theory – has been to examine
how cultural beliefs and values gain permanence, power and significance through being
given material form and expression in buildings, artefacts, commodities, visual symbols,
displays, rituals and so on. Beyond this, however, writers in this area have also increasingly
been concerned to think through the inherent
materiality of culture itself. This has involved
attending to the question of how cultural values are materially produced and circulated. It
448
has further involved rethinking the categories
of ‘culture’ and ‘materiality’ themselves.
The origins of material culture studies are
complex. Traditionally, archaeology and anthropology have been the disciplines most
clearly associated with the study of material
forms of culture. Archaeology takes a realm
of recovered material objects as the basis from
which it seeks to reconstruct past cultures.
Equally, anthropology places emphasis upon
the importance of material forms and processes
– objects, clothes, buildings – in the formation
and communication of distinctive cultures and
subcultures. However, contemporary material
culture studies also draws inspiration from
semiotic and interpretative analyses of the significance of particular commodity forms under
capitalism. In such analyses (e.g. Roland
Barthes’ 1957 Mythologies), cultural objects
such as cars, wine and washing powders are
understood as texts which are authored (or
produced) and read (consumed) in various
ways, and this is viewed as a process in which
particular hegemonic or ideological cultural
meanings are communicated and reproduced.
The study of commodities and their use
and consumption has continued to be a mainstay of material culture studies (e.g. Miller,
1997), and this has further been one of the
most important ways in which human geographers have contributed to and interacted
with this field (e.g. Jackson, 1999). Over the
past ten years, studies of the materiality of
cultures and commodities have indeed flourished in human geography. In part, this has
been framed in terms of an agenda seeking to
‘re-materialize’ human geographies (Jackson,
2000), in the wake of a cultural turn which,
it is argued, placed undue emphasis upon the
determining role vis-à-vis cultural practice of
imaginative geographies of texts and
images. This renewed geographical empiricism takes shape through studies ‘following’
material objects within circuits of capital and
commodity chains (e.g. Cook, 2004), and
through studies focused upon the physical
materialities of particular spaces and practices.
At the same time, work drawing inspiration
from actor-network theory and new vitalisms has aimed to overcome a traditional duality in which matter is viewed as dead and
inanimate, and can only be given meaning
and form via the conduits of human thought
and discourse. Writing in this area (e.g.
Anderson and Tolia-Kelly, 2004) has been
explicitly concerned to rethink the epistemological status of material objects, and has
sought to develop languages and methods
MEASUREMENT
through which the agency and, it is argued,
inherent ‘liveliness’ of the material world
might be addressed.
jwy
materialism The history of materialism as a
keyword in Western philosophy can be traced
back to the Early Atomists in Greek thought,
particularly Democritus, and thereon in
the writings of Epicurus and Lucretius.
Materialism has multiple strands, more-orless mechanistic and more-or-less sensationalist. What each shares is the metaphysical claim
that the nature, constitution and structure of
reality are physical. Materialism is typically
contrasted to various forms of spiritualism or
otherworldly existence (such as belief in God
or supernatural beings), or to idealism – that
is to say, a metaphysics that privileges mental
entities – in other words, minds and their
states – over physical entities. Of course, dualist metaphysics that admit as ‘real’ both physical and mental entities are also possible.
The Italian philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro
provides one of the most forthright definitions
of materialism on record. In his monograph
On materialism, he writes:
By materialism we understand above all
acknowledgement of the priority of nature
over ‘mind’, or if you like, of the physical
level over the biological level, and of the
biological level over the socio-economic
and cultural level; both in the sense of
chronological priority . . . and in the sense
of the conditioning which nature still exercises on man and will continue to exercise
for the foreseeable future. Cognitively,
therefore, the materialist maintains that
experience cannot be reduced either to a
production of reality by a subject . . . or to
a reciprocal implication of subject and
object. (1976, p. 34)
Few would disagree that the physical world
precedes life and consciousness, and that
other life forms precede the human. But to
contend that nature is a self-evident or even
autonomous domain that unilaterally conditions ‘man’ is problematic. As Raymond
Williams (2005b [1980]) notes, Timpanaro’s
separation of nature and human wilfully
ignores the fact that the materials that comprise nature are extrinsic and intrinsic to
human beings. Additionally, a diverse literature on the production of nature within
fields such as agrarian studies, marxist geography, and science and technology studies
(see science/science studies) – armed with
a retinue of concepts such as ‘social
nature’, ‘cyborg’, ‘techno-natures’ and ‘posthumanism’ (See posthumanism) – demolishes
the notion of an independent nature.
What, then, binds materialism in its various
forms – historical, dialectical, linguistic, cultural and postmodern? First, there is a rejection of spiritualism and idealism (indeed,
radical materialists would contend that the
dichotomy between idealism and materialism
is itself an artefact of idealism); second, there
is an emphasis on the social effects of an
object- or material-world that is at least partly
autonomous of humans; and, third, there is a
commitment to forms of explanation that are
attentive to the specific properties of materials
as they influence – in often unpredictable ways
– various sorts of interactions between human
and non-human bodies. A specifically Marxist
materialism might additionally assert that
materialism is ultimately about how a mode
of production constitutes matter (nature,
human bodies, language) through social
labour – which then carries the implication
that any being is a historical and political
fabrication.
vg
Suggested reading
Althusser (1977 [1965]); Smith (1984); Williams
(2005b [1980]).
mean information field (m.i.f.) The representation of a distance-decay relationship by
a rectangular spatial grid, used in Torsten
Hägerstrand’s (1916–2004) classic studies of
migration and diffusion (see Hägerstrand,
1967). The m.i.f. was used in simulation
models, in which the central square in a
5 5 grid represented a migrant’s origin,
and the probabilities in the other 24 squares
indicated the likelihood of them being the destination: the probabilities were either obtained
from empirical analyses of migration patterns
or pre-defined arbitrarily. Running the model
many times generated an average pattern of
the likely population distribution following a
period of migration or the spread of an innovation – such as a new practice or a disease.
(See also agent-based modelling.)
rj
measurement A classification of data types,
the characteristics of which are important in
determining what quantitative analytical procedures can be deployed. Four levels are generally recognized:
nominal – each individual is allocated to
one selected from an exclusive list of
categories;
449
MEDIA
ordinal – each individual is allocated to one
selected from an exclusive list of rankordered categories;
interval – in which individuals are assessed
on a continuous quantitative scale; and
ratio – in which the values on a quantitative
scale can be relatively evaluated.
Thus, for example, 10 million people live in
either Birmingham (UK) or London – which
is a nominal allocation; London is bigger than
Birmingham, which is ordinal; London has 9
million residents and Birmingham 1 million,
which is interval; and London is nine times
larger than Birmingham, which is ratio. Data
from all forms of measurement can be analysed quantitatively, but different procedures
are applied to different measurement types (cf.
categorical data analysis; general linear
model; regression).
rj
media Cultural technologies for the communication and circulation of ideas, information, and meaning. These are usually taken to
include various mass communication media
such as books, newspapers, radio, television,
film and now various forms of ‘new media’.
In the past two decades, research on mediarelated topics has flourished in human geography, without adding up to a theoretically or
methodologically coherent agenda for media
research. In cultural geography, media
texts are often taken as a resource for analysing
various forms of representation (of landscapes, places, identities, cities etc.). In
economic geography, there is also a burgeoning literature on media production, distribution and consumption, given a further
boost by the growth of digital media economies and culture industries. Nevertheless,
the inherent spatiality of media processes
has attracted surprisingly little attention from
geographers. Early work by Pred (1973)
reconstructed the geographies of pre-telegraphic information circulation through newspapers in the USA in suggestive ways, but his
main focus was on using these diffusion processes to recover the emerging system of interdependencies between cities, rather than
providing a close reading of the media reports
themselves. More recent work in human geography has focused on the forms of social interaction that different media help to constitute
(Adams, 1998). But in the main it is scholars
working outside geography who have provided most insight into the spatialities of
media and communications. Thompson
(1995) provides the clearest articulation of
450
the study of media with the central concerns
of social theory, and in the process develops
an analysis of the spatial and temporal constitution of social relations and institutions. He
argues that different media and communications practices uncouple time and space, enabling the transmission of symbolic forms over
time and space without physical transportation of objects; and they thereby enable new
forms of simultaneous co-presence between spatially and temporally distanciated subjects and
contexts (see also time–space distanciation).
This type of analysis implies thinking of
‘media’ as a process of mediation operating
‘wherever human beings congregate both in
real and in virtual space, where they communicate, where they seek to persuade, inform,
entertain, educate, where they seek in a multitude of ways, and with varying degrees of success, to connect one to the other’ (Silverstone,
1999, p. 4).
As in other disciplines, media research in
geography is prone to overestimate the causal
power of media practices, and to make functionalist assumptions about the degree to
which social formations are held together
by the mass-mediated circulation of values
over integrated political, economic and cultural territories (see functionalism). There
is a tendency to assume that subjectivity is
media-dependent, and to presume that either
the content of media texts or the patterns of
ownership and control of media production
and distribution are highly determinate in
shaping patterns of belief, knowledge and
practice. Media research in geography could
benefit from taking seriously Garnham’s
(2000, p. 5) claim that ‘the central question
underlying all debates about media and how
we study them concerns the way in which and
the extent to which humans learn and thus how
through time identities are formed and actions
motivated’. Combining Garnham’s question of
whether and how people learn through their
engagements with media practices with
Silverstone’s idea of media as processes of mediation points towards a more coherent agenda
for media research: one that investigates how
the spatio-temporal organization of media
practices helps to distribute different possibilities of agency and communicative competency
(Couldry, 2006) (a project that also bears directly on recent discussions of public geographies, since a crucial question concerns
precisely how publics are produced).
cb
Suggested reading
Barnett (2003); Couldry and McCarthy (2004).
MEDICAL GEOGRAPHY
medical geography A concern for ‘medical
geography’ has been around for centuries,
since Hippocrates, the Ancient Greek scholar
associated with the origins of modern
medicine, stated the importance of ‘airs,
waters, places’ as an influence on human
health, achievements and history. Such an environmental perspective has prevailed in many
situations over the centuries, supplemented on
occasion by a spatial perspective, and nowhere
more obviously than in the celebrated case of
Dr John Snow in mid-nineteenth-century
London. Snow ascertained from empirical observations on the spatial distribution of cholera
outbreaks something about the causal factors,
contaminated water from a particular pump,
within the transmission of this malaise. It is
easy to detect the deep historical roots of medical geography, then, as a particular way of
connecting many dimensions of human illhealth to a variety of environmental preconditions through the analysis of spatial patterns
(revealing something about causes or vectors
of transmission).
In more recent times, formalized in the First
Report of the Commission on Medical Geography to the IGU (May, 1952), a sub-discipline
of medical geography has arisen within academic geography and on the fringes of medical
and related sciences. Prompted by contributions by the likes of May (1958) and Stamp
(1964), the sub-discipline flourished, becoming
the basis for research groups organized nationally (e.g. the AAG Medical Geography Speciality Group; the CAG Health and Health Care
Study Group; the RGS–IBG Geography of
Health Research Group) and with an international profile through the IGU Commission
on Health and the Environment, International
Medical Geography Symposia held since the
1980s, its own specialist journal Health and
Place (founded 1995) and enduring prominence
in the leading interdisciplinary journal Social
Science and Medicine. Periodic worries have
plagued the identity of the sub-discipline, however, with some objecting about too close a link
with the concepts and practices of Western biomedicine, thus failing to take seriously alternative and ethno medicines rooted in quite other
personnel, practices and places (Gesler and
Kearns, 2002). Some (esp. Kearns, 1993; cf.
Mayer and Meade, 1994) have speculated
about the need for a broader characterization
of the field as health geography or even ‘postmedical geography’, where health is defined as
more than just the medically ascribed absence of
ill health and health care as more than conventionally designated ‘medical’ interventions
(Gesler and Kearns, 2002, p. 9; Parr, 2002: see
health and health care). The conceptual borrowings and methodological practices of the
sub-discipline have also varied through time,
with an empiricist and positivist stream deploying quantitative, modelling and GIS techniques
being gradually supplemented – and on occasion challenged – by a diversity of approaches
derived from Marxian political economy,
humanism, post-structuralism, feminism
and queer theory (Litva and Eyles, 1995;
Philo, 1996; Milligan, 2001, Ch. 9; Parr, 2002).
It is often suggested that medical geography
splits into the ‘twin streams’ of ‘geographical
epidemiology’ and ‘health systems planning’
(Mayer, 1982), or ‘geography of disease/illhealth’ and ‘geography of health care’ (Litva
and Eyles, 1995); although Gesler and Kearns
(2002, p. 8) respond that these streams ‘have
increasingly merged and . . . become more
like a braided river’. One broad trajectory –
connecting with population geography’s
interest in mortality and morbidity – has
studied geographical variations in ill-health at
a range of scales from the global to the local,
examining many different manifestations of illhealth for evidence of clear patterns in maps of
prevalence and impact. Initially the interest
here was disease, with the earliest studies concentrating on the obvious ecologies of diseases
such as malaria in tropical settings (Pelzer,
1957, pp. 335–43: with links back to the colonial origins of geography), but with subsequent studies soon considering all parts of
the globe (Howe, 1977). The ‘natural’
environment, in all of its climatic, topographic,
fluvial, pedological and vegetative complexity,
was inspected for its correlations with different
diseases – chiefly those known to be infectious
(tuberculosis, smallpox, influenza, HIV–
AIDS), but also those with less certain aetiologies (the cancers, heart conditions, bone and
nervous disorders) – creating an approach to
medical geography readily positioned within
the orbit of tracing human–environment relations (May, 1958; Learmouth, 1988; Meade
and Erickson, 2000; Curtis, 2004, Ch. 6). An
offshoot here shifted to a more narrowly conceived spatial epidemiology, building from
basic mapwork to more advanced spatial–
statistical techniques modelling the time–
space diffusion of contagious illnesses (specifically influenza and HIV–AIDS) from
person to person, place to place and through
settlement hierarchies (Gould, 1993; Cliff,
Haggett and Smallman-Raynor, 2004: for
a rather different/critical take, see Brown,
1995 – and disease, diffusion of). Human
451
MEDICAL GEOGRAPHY
movements obviously shape such diffusion
patterns, and some time ago Maegraith
(1969) mused on what ‘jet age medical geography’, speeded up by the pace of worldwide travel and migration, might eventually
look like.
This first stream of medical geography has
been complicated by a concern with facets of
ill-health for which the metaphor of disease is
arguably less relevant, things such as malnutrition, obesity and stress, and extending to the
vexed domain of ‘mental illness’ (as in Giggs,
1973, recognized as a classic of medical geography: see disability). Aspects of the social
environment have also begun to feature, calling attention to phenomena such as employment, income, housing quality, lifestyle issues
and related factors that predispose the illhealth of (certain) peoples in (certain) places,
and demanding that medical geography foster
dialogues with the likes of social geography,
urban geography and other sub-disciplinary
geographies (a decisive point made by Hunter,
1974; also Mayer and Meade, 1994). Additionally, as Dorn and Laws (1994, p. 107)
underline, it becomes important to register
the human body as more than just ‘a host to
some lesion or pathology waiting to be ‘‘discovered’’ by the medical practitioner’, and
thus to recognize the variability of the human
body, complete with differing material circumstances and cultural ascriptions bound up with
its particular place in socio-spatial hierarchies
of difference (Dear, Wilton, Gaber and
Takahashi, 1997). Variable configurations of
the body, marked by class, ethnicity, gender, ageing, sexuality, being a traveller or a
refugee and so on (as discussed by Curtis,
2004, chs 3 and 4; see also Gesler and Kearns,
2002, Ch. 6), explain the greater or lesser
likelihood of (certain) population cohorts in
(certain) places ‘getting sick’, being interpreted
as ‘sick’ and in need of assistance or avoidance, or as themselves being the possible
sources of ‘sickness’ in others (as happened
with the Chinese in nineteenth-century San
Francisco: Craddock, 2000a). The emerging
picture hence becomes less the hypothesized
causal relations between easy-to-define environments, stable resident populations and their
ill-health indicators, maybe cross-cut by the
migrations of people bearing diseases, and
more a mosaic of ‘health inequalities’ traced
out across diverse, multiple and fluid bodies
and places, wherein ecological influences enter
into entangled admixtures alongside ones
more obviously social, cultural, economic
and political in origin (Curtis, 2004: echoing
452
Eyles and Wood, 1983; Jones and Moon,
1987; Gesler and Kearns, 2002). Further
challenges are posed by Smith and Easterlow
(2005) when critiquing the ‘strange geographies’ of health inequalities research that
emphasize how places determine (variable
resilience to) death and disease, but neglect
how such placed ill-health is itself bound into
a more systematic operation of ‘health discrimination’ – notably within labour and
housing markets – fundamental to ‘the structuring of society and space’ (a thoroughly
compositional matter, not a mere contextual
effect).
The second stream of medical geography,
concerned with health care as linked into
health systems and planning, appeared in the
1960s when researchers began to study the
spatial distributions of medical facilities.
Questions were asked about spatial regularities
in the locating of both hospitals of various
kinds (Mayhew, 1986) and surgeries run by
GPs, dentists and other primary serviceproviders (Curtis, 2004, 133–43), as linked
to the accessibility and utilization of such facilities (Joseph and Phillips, 1984), and spatial
mismatches were identified between provision
and demand as a potential input to the more
efficient spatial planning (location-allocation
modelling) of healthcare systems (Clark,
1984). More recently, it has been argued that
the basic geometries of health care cannot be
explained solely by the principles advanced in
spatial science but, rather, by recognizing the
competing pressures on health managers in
choosing where to locate facilities which arise
from a wider socio-economic landscape that is
itself unevenly constituted at a range of spatial
scales (Mohan, 2002). Beyond such decisions,
moreover, researchers have explored the political economy of health care, whether delivered
by the welfare state (a public sector supposedly guaranteeing equality of access to
all), an emerging shadow state (comprising
voluntary-sector involvement) or an increasingly neo-liberal state in which all actors
are compelled to pursue private-sector principles, entering or creating markets (internal
or otherwise) to ensure competition and efficiency gains, and aiming at deregulation (even
as legal–administrative demands are continually reinserted). More baldly, ‘there has been
explicit recognition by health geographers of
the underlying social forces that create inequalities, often expressed in terms of the impact
of the capitalist economic system on health
care provision’ (Gesler and Kearns, 2002,
p. 51; see also Jones and Moon, 1987). Part
MEMORY
of this story has also been the growing commodification of health care, turning it into
something that ‘customers’ elect to ‘consume’,
quite likely using their (or others’) capital in
the process, not a bundle of resources available to them as matter of right. The ‘selling’ of
medical facilities, loosely equivalent to the
marketing of places discussed by urban geographers, has become a sub-theme in the
ongoing research of Kearns and co-workers
(Kearns and Barnett, 1999; Curtis, 2004,
pp. 125–33).
On a different but related tack, researchers
have explored more cultural aspects of health
care (Gesler, 1991; Kearns and Gesler, 1998;
Gesler and Kearns, 2002), prompting enquiries into various cultural influences – the
‘thought-worlds’ of given societies, as well as
everything from buried ideologies through to
the discursive scripting of health policies –
that play out in the geographies of health
care. Attention is paid to how agendas of
power, control, medical authority and fiscal
efficacy translate into the form, content and
spaces of medical facilities, helping to explain
location patterns (within overall systems),
environmental associations (of particular facilities) and even architectures, decorations and
layouts (of, say, hospital wards). At the latter,
distinctly human scale, focus alights on the
embodied relations between the ‘medics’ and
the ‘medicalized’, and on how such relations
are shaped by and performed across an array
of in- and out-patient spaces of treatment,
illuminating how both the power of the former
is extended and the possible agency (maybe
resistance) of the latter is expressed. This
also means taking seriously the grounded
experiences of the people involved, establishing how they perceive, feel about and understand what is occurring within spaces of health
care, and recognizing the tensions that can
fragment professional and lay judgements
about what makes the best kind of ‘place’ for
the delivery of the health care required
(Milligan, 2001). Tellingly, this research strand
begins to press at the limits of what is conventionally meant by ‘health care’, and has started
to consider more ambiguous landscapes of
health care – what Gesler (1992) has termed
‘therapeutic landscapes’ – wherein all manner
of phenomena (mountains and springs, streets
and malls) can be significant in how they promote or undermine senses of healthful wellbeing for those who access them. A further
elaboration is work on health practices that
possess an awkward relationship to Western
biomedicine – that is, complementary and alter-
native medicines, as well as the diverse forms of
psychotherapy and counselling – which then
suggests a still more inclusive interest in ‘geographies of care’ (Conradson, 2003a) wherein
the overtly medical element is largely left
behind (and a large step is taken towards that
post-medical geography speculated about by
Kearns, 1993).
cpp
Suggested reading
Curtis (2004); Gesler and Kearns (2002);
Kearns (1993); Meade and Erickson (2000);
Parr (2002).
megacities Very large, high-density urban
centres, usually defined as those with populations exceeding 5 million. The International
Geographical Union MegaCity Task Force
(http://www.megacities.nl/) identified only
four such centres in the 1950s, but 28 in 1985
and 39 in 2000: it estimates that there will be 60
by 2015. Most of these are in the ‘developing
world’ (especially East and South Asia and
latin america), are growing extremely rapidly,
and face major problems of infrastructure
provision and social inequalities.
rj
Suggested reading
Hall and Pain (2006).
megalopolis A Greek word (combining those
for ‘great’ and ‘city’) coined by Patrick Geddes
and adopted by Jean Gottmann (1915–94: see
Gottmann, 1964) to describe the discontinuous
urban complex of the USA’s northeastern
seaboard. It was also used some decades before
by Lewis Mumford (1895–1988): to him,
megalopolis was the end-state in the process of
urbanization, in which giant, fragmented cities
become dysfunctional, whereas Gottmann
deployed it as a descriptive label for extensive
urban sprawl.
rj
Suggested reading
Baigent (2004).
memory An inherently geographical activity: places store and evoke personal and collective memories, memories emerge as bodily
experiences of being in and moving through
space, and memories shape imaginative
geographies and material geographies of
home, neighbourhood, city, nation and
empire. human geography includes an
important body of work on the role of the
built landscape – museums, monuments, artefacts, heritage sites – in creating a sense of a
common identity through memory, on how
453
MEMORY
collective memories are made material in
the landscape, and the practices of memorymaking through performances and rituals of
remembrance. There is also a substantial
literature on heritage entrepreneurship as a
marketable good (see also postmodernism).
Maurice Halbwachs’ book On collective
memory (1992 [1941]) was an important early
text theorizing memory as simultaneously
social and spatial (as opposed to highly individualized and purely psychological) (Hebbert,
2005). Activities enhancing remembrance of
a collective past, including commemorative
rituals, story-telling, place naming and the
accumulation and display of relics, trigger a
social memory that solidifies a common shared
identity. Halbwachs emphasized the importance of anchoring these memories in spatial
imagery and physical artefacts, arguing that
social memory endures best when there is a
‘double focus – a physical object, a material
reality such as a statue . . . and also a symbol,
or something of spiritual significance, something shared by the group that adheres to and
is superimposed upon this physical reality’
(1992 [1941], p. 204).
This focus on the social constitution and
context of memory informed French historian
Pierre Nora’s (1997) influential project, which
traced the development of French national
identity through the analysis of a variety of
‘lieux de mémoires’, or sites of memory (see also
nationalism). Nora (1989, p. 9) argued that
with the demise of peasant societies, ‘true
memory’, available ‘in gestures and habits, in
skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in
the body’s inherent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories’, has been
replaced by ‘modern memory’ that is selfconscious, historical and archival. In modern
society, we ‘must deliberately create archives,
maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations
because such activities no longer naturally
occur’ (1989, p. 12). In short, the primordial
memory of peasant societies embedded in
milieux de mémoires (environments of memory)
has been substituted by much more selfconsciously created lieux de mémoires. The
production of these lieux, or sites, has been a
result of the transformations wrought by
modernity, including globalization, the
rise of mass media and the institutionalization
of a professional discipline of history. While
Nora’s distinction between true and modern
memory may be overwrought, in the 1980s his
work spawned widespread interest in memory
and place throughout the humanities and
social sciences, and it continues to provide
454
the impetus for a vast array of studies of different types of memory spaces (Legg, 2005).
The dominance of the nation-state in
framing memory has been the focus of much
research on monuments and memorials.
Because memory is always shadowed by forgetting, is vulnerable to manipulation and has
a capacity to facilitate (or coerce) social cohesion, what is remembered and forgotten in
national memory both reflects power relations
and is of political consequence. Elite and
dominant memory is typically mobilized by
the powerful in the cultivation of a national
imaginary, through monuments, memorials,
public ritual, architectural and urban design,
and through the erasure of previous place
names or settlements of the dispossessed.
However, human geographers have regularly
noted the contested nature of meaning surrounding even official symbolic sites, and the
production and consumption of such sites
often involve conflict (Till, 2001, 2005;
Foote, 2003). They are neither uniformly
designed nor read (and space is significant in
the construction of that meaning; Johnson,
2005). Nor do elites inevitably have a hold
on landscape production. Burk (forthcoming) describes the creation by grassroots
groups in Vancouver of monuments to memorialize violence against women. Recognizing the ‘power of place’ to repair cultural
amnesia and nurture a more inclusive public
memory, Hayden (1997) details a series of
commemorative projects that concretize long
histories of settlement of African American,
Latina and Asian American families in downtown Los Angeles. Alderman (2003, p. 171)
has examined how African Americans struggled to control and determine the scale of
streets in which Martin Luther King Jr.
would be remembered and thus the scale at
which his memory would find public expression. He notes that the scale of memory was
‘open to redefinition not only by opponents to
his political/social philosophy but also people
who unquestionably embraced and benefited
from this philosophy’.
Memory cannot be dictated, and popular
memory can be an important vehicle through
which dominant, official renditions of the past
and present are resisted by mobilizing groups
to create subaltern and counter-memories,
and alternative futures (Legg, 2005). Shared
memories of loss and longing for land may
form the basis for collective claims to rights
or reparation: Kosek (2004) argues that
shared memories of dispossession from land
by Mexicans living in northern New Mexico
MENTAL MAPS/COGNITIVE MAPS
are what make the Hispanic community in
this region of the USA cohere as a social and
political force. The same could be argued
for Palestinians or, in Canada, First Nations
groups. In diasporic and post-colonial contexts – in which memory is threatened by
both nostalgia and coerced assimilation – ‘cultural memory offers promise of epistemological
grounding’, though not necessarily within a
singular national identity (Sugg, 2003, p. 469:
see also diaspora; post-colonialism; transnationalism). Counter-memories may be assembled
and transmitted through oral tradition, but also
in less bureaucratized time-places: the body,
domestic spaces (Blunt, 2003), neighbourhoods
or ‘temporal re-territorializations’ of formal
spaces (such as carnivals, festivals or rallies;
Legg, 2005).
The memory projects of marginalized
groups may bear the traces of trauma, such
that the possibilities of memory are altered.
With traumatic recall, events remain in the
vivid present, resisting integration through
narrativization. Though the state often incorporates violent or tragic events into a linear
narrative of national redemption and overcoming, what Edkins (2003) calls ‘trauma
time’ works differently, and its repetitive disruptive quality can reveal the violent foundations of sovereign power. Trauma thus has a
relation not just to time but also space and
geography; for instance, to narrations and
experiences of nation and persistent claims to
homeland. Sugg (2003) draws on Hirsch’s
concept of post-memory to understand the
‘suspended migration’ of second-generation
Cuban Americans: children of exiled parents
may inherit the collective cultural trauma of
their parents and remember their parents’
stories of exile as their own within a dynamic
of longing and return. Alternatively, memorializing trauma in the landscape may constitute a witnessing public, setting in motion an
emerging narrative (and a potential release
from traumatic recall; Burk, forthcoming).
The recent tendency has been to expand the
scope of memory studies by considering the
role of performance and bodily and nonbodily practices in the making of memorial
landscapes (Hoelscher, 2003), by examining
the wider production of social memory beyond
demarcated sites of monuments and memorials, and by considering the landscape implications of the memories of animals or other
than human beings (Lorimer, 2006).
nj/gp
mental maps/cognitive maps Perhaps the
Suggested reading
Suggested reading
Johnson (2003b, 2005); Legg (2007a); Till (2003).
Gould and White (1993).
best-known research outcome from behavioural geography was the retrieval of the
imagined or mental maps widespread in the
popular knowledge of places, mental constructs that were seen as intervening between
geographical settings and human action. An
early study was the simple sketch mapping of
urban areas from memory supervised by Kevin
Lynch in the pursuit of good urban design,
which permitted an image of the city to be constructed, revealing districts of knowledge and
ignorance, and the role of such remembered
features as nodes, edges and landmarks in
establishing urban legibility. Behavioural geographers, including Roger Downs and David
Stea (1973), in contrast referred to cognitive
maps, which they associated with the spatial
tasks of orientation and way-finding. More
formal and widely replicated were the experiments with paper and pencil tests conducted by
Peter Gould and his students (Gould and
White, 1993 [1974]), which were intended
not so much to identify place knowledge and
place ignorance but, rather, to establish a surface of place preferences. From surveys in several countries, mental maps were constructed
that revealed both a national preference surface
and also a local surface of desirability for a
home area. Subsequent work sought to establish the developmental growth of maps among
children of increasing age, and examined
linkages between geographical preference
surfaces and future residential choice and
migration propensities (Gould and White,
1993 [1974]).
Mental maps were part of a broader movement in environmental perception, which in
turn has elided into an interest in the representation and social construction of places
in a variety of disciplines using less positivist
methods and emphasizing social rather than
psychological factors. Nonetheless, the older
analytical methods continue to generate interesting results (Kitchin, 1994), even if with
interdisciplinary dissemination the links with
the original work are truncated or forgotten.
So a current study of the role of the media in
shaping the spatial surface of fear in Los
Angeles (Matei and Ball-Rokeach, 2005),
contains the key words mental maps, GIS
and spatial effects, but omits any reference to
Gould’s work, including his celebrated feature
in Time magazine that included a map of the
perceived fear of urban areas.
dl
455
METAGEOGRAPHY
metageography ‘The set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world: the often unconscious
frameworks that organize studies of history,
sociology, anthropology, economics, political
science, or even natural history’ (Lewis and
Wigen, 1997, p. ix). The prefix ‘meta-’ implies
an abstraction, a concept that in some sense
goes beyond the term to which it implies, so by
extension a metageography is a conceptual grid
that structures how geographies are ordered.
These grids are cultural constructions, and the
emphasis Lewis and Wigen place on the fact that
they are used more or less automatically and
unconsciously, without critical reflection, connects the concept to that of a geograhical imaginary. ‘Meta-’ can also imply an umbrella
concept, and Lewis and Wigen focus their attention on the global scale and the conventional
division of the world into continents. But the
division of the globe into a mosaic of states is
no less commonplace and taken-for-granted,
against which Beaverstock, Smith and Taylor
(2000) have proposed ‘a new metageography’:
a global network of flows between cities. dg
metaphor For Aristotle, a metaphor ‘consists
in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else’. Such practice is rampant in human
geography, as in other disciplines: cities are
plant biomes (chicago school), cultural
landscapes are texts, economic localities
are geological strata ‘layers of investment’ and
non-renewable resources take on a life-cycle.
While pervasive, some writers have criticized metaphors for being ornamental and
obfuscatory. Plato said that they make ‘trifle
points seem important, and important points
trifles’, while Thomas Hobbes believed that
they ‘deceive others’, and in geography,
Harvey (1967, p. 551) argued that they ‘hinder
objective judgment’. In each of these cases,
metaphor was attacked because it resulted in
ambiguity: it is ‘a sort of extra happy trick with
words’, as I.A. Richards (1936, p. 90) put it.
More generally, such misgivings result from a
particular view of language held by such
critics: that language should be transparent,
limpid and utterly dependable, all of which
are undermined by metaphor.
Over the twentieth century there was an
increasing recognition that language takes on
none of those characteristics (see, in particular, deconstruction) and, concomitantly,
that metaphors are an indispensable part of
both writing and theorizing. Metaphorical
use comes in two shapes and sizes (Barnes
and Curry, 1992).
456
Small metaphors that pepper individual writing and research are part of the very infrastructure of language construction, an
‘omnipresent principle’ (Richards, 1936,
p. 92). Mobilizing them requires skill and
sensitivity, forming an important component
of rhetoric, the attempt to persuade others of
the force of one’s argument by using tropes
such as metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003
[1980]). Large metaphors, in contrast, structure entire research paradigms. Some, such
as ‘organism’ or ‘mechanism’, are so deeply
ingrained that they become ‘root metaphors’
(Pepper, 1942), whereas others are only temporary, mobilized for a particular use and then
discarded. However long their durability, all
large metaphors operate through a process of
‘metaphorical re-description’ (Hesse, 1980);
that is, transferring meanings and associations
of one system in order to re-describe the explanandum (the part of the explanation that does
the explaining) of another system. An example
is Isaac Newton’s metaphorical re-description
of sound in terms of waves. Metaphorical
re-description is ubiquitous, as well as ‘potentially revolutionary’ (Arib and Hesse, 1986).
When Adam Smith coined the metaphor of
the ‘invisible hand’ to describe the efficacy of
the market, or when Marx said ‘workers have
nothing to lose but their chains’, or when
Bunge (1966, p. 27) asked, ‘Why cannot . . .
concepts dealing with exotic and dioric
streams be applied to highways?’ revolutions,
albeit of different kinds, were set in motion.
There has been sporadic interest in metaphor
in geography since the 1960s, when the proponents of spatial science first discussed the
linkages between models and metaphors (Haggett and Chorley, 1967). Later, those who advocated a humanistic geography, such as
Tuan (1978) and Livingstone and Harrison
(1981b), were drawn to metaphors because of
resonances with human creativity and meaning,
twin planks of the larger project (see also
humanities). Most recently, critical attention
has come from geographers interested in epistemology. Large metaphors sometimes carry
unexamined intellectual freight, resulting in
unintentional and sometimes contradictory
meanings. They need to be unpacked, inspected
critically for their coherence, consistency and
compatibility. Doing so also means scrutinizing
their historical and material origins. Metaphors
require ‘worlding’ (Smith and Katz, 1993). tb
Suggested reading
Lakoff and Johnson (1980); Smith and Katz
(1993).
METHODOLOGY
methodological individualism The view
that social events must be explained by reducing them to individual actions, where, in
turn, those actions are explained by reference
to the intentions of individual actors. For the
methodological individualist, all macro-scale
social entities are ultimately decomposable to
the acts and underlying intentions of individuals. society, therefore, is a chimera, something that appears real, but which is not. As a
perspective, methodological individualism is
usefully contrasted with, on the one hand,
approaches that accentuate the importance
and reality of trans-individual social structures
(as found, for example, in structural Marxism,
a form of marxism that trades on structuralism) and, on the other hand, approaches that
deny the autonomy of individual human subjects altogether (as found, for example, within
post-structuralism).
The term ‘methodological individualism’
was first systematically deployed by the
German sociologist Max Weber, in his book
Economy and Society (1968 [1922]). He was
keen to argue that social collectivities such as
firms or governments ‘must be treated as
solely the resultants . . . of the particular acts
of individual persons, since these alone can be
treated as agents in a course of subjectively
understandable action’ (Weber, 1968 [1922],
p. 13). Weber’s point was not to privilege
individuals over social institutions, but to
stress that understanding social phenomena
should rest methodologically on action-based
theory; that is, theory providing motivations
for agents to act (in Weber’s theory, this
turned on the methodological protocols of
Verstehen (‘understanding’) and ideal types).
In subsequent versions this point was lost,
however, and methodological individualism
was used to privilege the individual primarily
for the purpose of disparaging especially
Marx’s theory of historical materialism,
which rested precisely on collective social
entities. This impulse is found in Friedrich
von Hayek’s and Karl Popper’s writings of
the 1940s and 1950s, and then again in Jon
Elster’s (1982b) work on analytical marxism
in the 1980s and 1990s. While there are differences among these three writers, they also
have commonalities. First, Hayek and Elster,
and perhaps Popper too through his model of
psychological reductionism, adhered to a
rational choice model of the individual
derived from neo-classical economics: rationality was posited as the only action-based
motivation for agents. Second, all three
accepted that rational individuals represented
‘rock-bottom explanations’ of social phenomena
(Watkins, 1957, p. 105).
Both the specific rational choice model and
the more general notion of an individualist
‘rock-bottom’ explanation have been criticized: the underlying intentions of an act are
not always known, and so it may be impossible
to provide individual action-based accounts;
non-individual based forms of explanation –
for example, aggregate-statistical – can in
some cases provide better explanations than
ones resting on individual motivations; individuals in interaction with one another produce emergent effects irreducible to
individual acts; and individuals are the consequence, not the cause, of social structures and
institutions (‘methodological holism’).
Because of the association with the rationality postulate, in human geography methodological individualism was found most
readily in economic geography, since it was
most influenced by neoclassical economics,
and it also reappears in regional science and
the new economic geography. But the cultural turn and the turn to institutional
economics have resulted in the strong assertion of the importance of social phenomena on
their own terms, and hence a falling away of
methodological individualism from the one
sub-discipline where it had gained a foothold
(Lee and Wills, 1997).
tb
Suggested reading
Heath (2005).
methodology The principles and assumptions underlying the choice of techniques for
constructing and analysing data. Methodology
should not be confused with ‘methods’: it is
the conceptual rationale for which methods
are used, and how. Methodology brings
together and links the underlying philosophical and conceptual bases of a study with
appropriate techniques. Good methodologies
thus align the ontology of a study, how it
conceives of the world, with its epistemology,
how it claims to know things about the world.
This is more than, though it includes, competently using one or more research ‘techniques’.
This Dictionary, for instance, lists at least
11 groups of techniques and many more
analytical and representational procedures
for the data thus created. Methodology is a
meta-level issue about fitting techniques to
research questions, rather than simply learning
a method.
A weak formulation of methodology as
recounting how research was done was
457
METHODOLOGY
inspired by the sciences and is often a hallmark of social science perspectives. This
recounting of procedures offers a methodological transparency that is the hallmark of
scientific studies in that it allows readers the
chance to ‘disprove’ a study’s conclusions.
Even beyond formally scientific studies, transparency is often still advocated as a way of
ensuring rigour and validity across a variety
of approaches. Baxter and Eyles (1997) suggest adapting ideas from Lincoln and Guba so
that for all methods, including qualitative
methods, the following have to be shown:
credibility of the account (i.e. authenticated representation of what actually
occurred);
transferability of the material (i.e. making
what occurred intelligible to the audience);
dependability of the interpretation (i.e.
that it is not illogical, or how partisan it
is); and
confirmability of the study (i.e. the ability
to audit the process that made it through
personal reflection, audit processes or
opportunities for informants to reply).
The emphasis here is on the clear statement
of procedures undertaken, the techniques and
steps of analysis as a means to enable the reader to examine the process leading to the
results and conclusions. Traditions of transparency are variable across even sub-disciplinary
fields where, for instance, in a comparison of
the Journal of International Business Studies
and Economic Geography, around 80 per cent
of articles in the former had formal sections
on methodology and the collection of data,
while in the latter only 30 per cent or less
had such sections (Poon, 2007). A degree
of transparency might also be intended to
enable a reflexive account that positions
the research process, and allows the reader to
see the contingent and situated production
of knowledge. This may in fact be aimed
at undercutting notions of authoritative
social science by demonstrating fallibility and
the limits to knowledge, and may be inspired
by approaches to research ethics that foreground the contributions of research participants. Thus feminist methodology stretches
from design to dissemination of research,
but must also consider the ‘relationships
among people involved in the research process, the actual conduct of the research, and
process through which the research comes
to be undertaken and completed’ (Moss,
2002, p. 12).
458
A stronger definition of methodology points
out the different ways in which these criteria
of reliability reflect theoretical approaches.
For example, sampling within extensive
research would have to meet criteria of
representativeness to support statistical analysis of the data, while within qualitative
methods it might aim to capture a particular
group’s perspective, where its validity depends
on the quality of material derived from their
positionality. In this case, methodology is
about joining the stages in the research from
underlying philosophy to research questions
to techniques generating data to forms of analysis and presentation of the results.
A methodology thus involves considering
how the specific techniques can be assembled
and used to generate the sort of data that will
enable an answer to the questions posed
through a specific conceptual framework.
There have been extensive arguments about
whether specific conceptual frameworks demand specific methodological linkages and preclude some methods. For instance, feminist
geography had a long debate over whether
it required feminist methods, that sought to
empower, give voice to women and treat
them as ‘subjects’ who made knowledge, or
whether it could use the quantitative
methods that feminist theorists had often
critiqued for treating people as objects of
knowledge and using a detached masculinism
in its logics. This debate has seen special issues
of journals, such as the Professional Geographer
in 1995, assessing whether a feminist methodology can include various techniques such as
gis.
If methodology is about assessing how to
create material that will answer the conceptual
questions in a study, the answer may well be to
use multiple methods. Thus some parts or
issues might be addressed via one method
while others could be addressed by another.
This is often called triangulation, named
metaphorically after the surveying practice
of taking bearings from different landmarks.
Here, methodology is about combining
methods to help validate each others’ findings
and, optimistically, integrating different forms
of data in the analysis (Knigge and Cope,
2006). On the other hand, it might be argued
that the different techniques, with different
ontologies, construct radically different versions of the world that cannot be brought into
the same epistemological approach. How
can, say, a social constructivist account be
allied to modes of statistical inference that rely
on realism or assumptions of objectivity? In
MIDDLE EAST, IDEA OF
such a case, a methodology might be about
holding tensions that show these gaps and
differences to offer a ‘transgressive validity’
that problematizes or crystallizes the issues of
reliability and truthfulness between methods,
rather than integrating them or using one to
corroborate the other (Guba and Lincoln,
2005). An exemplary account in geography
is Nightingale (2003) on forest cover in Nepal,
illustrating the partiality of and contradictions
between both villagers’ oral histories and aerial
photography.
Methodology is thus about organizing
research practices in relation to concepts.
There is no singular way of doing this;
nor is methodology simply the application
of methods. It involves thinking through
the connections relating concepts, topics,
information-gathering and representation,
which will inevitably vary from project to
project.
mc
Suggested reading
Hoggart, Lees and Davies (2002); Limb and
Dwyer (2001); Pryke, Rose and Whatmore
(2003); Sharp (2005).
metropolitan area A general term for large
urban settlements. Metropolitan districts were
first defined by the US Bureau of the census
in 1910, by grouping together large central
cities (i.e. administrative districts) with their
contiguous suburbs into a single built-up area
to be used for reporting data. Over time, with
continued urbanization and urban sprawl,
definitions changed and there is now a hierarchy of areas:
Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) –
groups of counties (or similar administrative units) with total populations exceeding
100,000, comprising a central city (with
50,000 þ residents) and surrounding suburbs;
Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas
(CMSAs) – larger units with populations
exceeding 1,000,000; and
Primary Metropolitan Statistical Areas
(PMSAs) – separate components within
CMSAs: the Detroit/Ann Arbor CMSA
comprises the separate Detroit and Ann
Arbor PMSAs, and the New York/New
Jersey/Long Island CMSA contains ten
separate PMSAs.
Analysts have also defined Metropolitan
Labor Areas, which extend beyond the builtup areas to incorporate places from which at
least 5 per cent of the workforce commutes to
a metropolitan area.
Similar schemes (with terminological variations) have been defined by the census
authorities to represent and report data for
the urbanized areas in a large number of
other countries.
rj
Suggested reading
See
http://www.census.gov/population/www/
estimates/metrodef.html.
micropolis A term introduced by Thomas
(1989) and adopted by the US Bureau of the
census in 2003, referring to urban agglomerations with total populations between 10,000
and 49,999. Each micropolis comprises a
number of separate but socially and economically integrated settlements (as measured by
commuting patterns), one of which (the ‘core
centre’) has a population of at least 10,000; for
example, the separate settlements of Lebanon
(CT), Hanover and Enfield (NH) and
Norwich and Hartford (VT) in the Upper Connecticut Valley comprise a micropolis based
on Hartford. Using 2001 census data, 578
separate micropoli were identified, containing
about 10 per cent of the total US population.
(See also metropolitan area.)
rj
Suggested reading
Heubusch (1997).
microsimulation Microsimulation operates
at the ‘micro’ (not aggregate) scale, where
the ‘units’ include the individual, household,
firm or vehicles (International Microsimulation
Association, www.microsimulation.org). These
units and their socio-economic trajectories are
modelled by assigning them data attributes that
are altered over (simulated) time by a set of rules
governing the system in which they exist.
Changes may be deterministic (they must happen, given certain characteristics) or stochastic
(see stochastic process: there is a probability
that they might happen). In this way the impacts
of, for example, government policies and economic decision-making can be modelled.
There are links between microsimulation and
geocomputation, especially cellular automata and agent-based modelling.
rh
Suggested reading
Ballas, Rossiter, Thomas, Clarke and Dorling
(2005).
Middle East, idea of
The term has its origins in European and eventually American
459
MIDDLE EAST, IDEA OF
discourses of diplomacy, geopolitics and
security, and in a more diffuse cultural register as imaginative geographies of a largely
Arab ‘Orient’. The two cross-cut in complex
ways, but they have their origins in Napoleon’s
military occupation of Egypt in 1798 (see
occupation, military), in some measure
part of a plan to cut Britain’s lines of communication with India, and the bloody campaigns
that he fought through the Levant. In invading
Egypt, Cole (2007, p. 247) argues, ‘Bonaparte
was inventing what we now call ‘‘the modern
Middle East’’ ’, and ‘the similarities of the
Corsican general’s rhetoric and tactics to
those of later North Atlantic incursions into
the region tell us about the persistent pathologies of enlightenment republics’. Said (2003
[1978]) locates the formation of a distinctly
modern orientalism in the textual and visual
appropriations of Egypt made for a European
audience by the scientists, scholars and artists
who accompanied the French troops.
French politicians and diplomats had
described the Ottoman Empire as la ProcheOrient (‘the Near East’) from the end of the
eighteenth century, and for most of the nineteenth century the ‘Eastern Question’ that
concerned high politics in europe was invariably an Ottoman one. But in the course of the
nineteenth century civil servants in Britain’s
India Office started to describe what was
then Persia and its surrounding regions as
‘the Middle East’, and it was the geo-strategic
relation to Britain’s Empire in India that gave
the term its eventual currency. In 1902 an
American naval officer, Alfred Thayer Mahan
(1840–1914), in what proved to be an extraordinarily influential essay on ‘The Persian
Gulf and International Relations’ (Mahan,
1902), argued that Britain’s control over its
approaches to India via Suez and the Gulf
(which is how he loosely defined ‘the Middle
East’) was threatened by Russian advances in
Central Asia and by the proposed construction
of a rail link between Berlin and Baghdad; not
surprisingly, he championed the importance of
sea power, and recommended that the Middle
East would ‘some day need its Malta as well as
its Gibraltar’. The term was popularized by
Valentine Chirol, who published a major series
of articles in the Times, followed by a book
under the title The Middle Eastern question, or
some political problems of Indian defence (1903).
The ‘Middle East’ was envisioned as a security
belt running from Persia through Mesopotamia
and Afghanistan to Kashmir, Nepal and Tibet:
as Scheffler (2003, p. 265) notes, an abstract
space whose common denominator was a
460
strategic location across the northern and
western approaches to India.
The region was redefined after the First
World War, the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire and the attempt by the Great Powers
to divide most of the spoils between them, but
it retained its strategic inflection and gained
new geo-economic significance as the importance of oil came to be recognized (at first, as
the basis for naval supremacy). The European
powers drew new lines on the map to create
new states. In 1921, Churchill created a
Middle East Department in the Colonial
Office, whose area of responsibility was Iraq,
Palestine, Transjordan and Aden; and during
the Second World War Britain established a
Middle East Command, whose area of responsibility spiralled out from Iran, Iraq, Palestine,
Syria, Transjordan and the Arabian Peninsula
to include Greece and Malta in the Mediterranean and Egypt, the Sudan and swathes of
East Africa. After the war, the region was
plunged back into conflict by the partition
of Palestine, the foundation of the state of
Israel in 1948 and the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. By then,
Britain’s star was fading – a fact dramatically
confirmed by the Suez Crisis of 1956 – and
growing American geopolitical and geo-economic interest in the region, partly in response
to the expanding Soviet sphere of influence
during the cold war, was signalled by the US
State Department’s focus on a Middle East that
it now delimited as Egypt, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. This new regionalization was
underwritten by financial support for
area studies and Centers for Middle Eastern
Studies at major American universities.
Europe and America continued to be exercised by the region throughout the second half
of the twentieth century and on into the
twenty-first, and its geopolitical construction
as what Sidaway (1998) called an ‘arc of crisis’
spanned successive wars between Arab states
and Israel, the Israeli occupation of Gaza and
the West Bank after 1967, the unresolved
Palestinian question and the intifada, chronic
crises and civil wars in Lebanon, the Iraq–Iran
War (1980–8), the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
and the first Gulf War (1990–1). A key US
response to these crises was the formation of
a unified combatant command in 1983, US
Central Command (CENTCOM), to cover
‘the ‘‘central’’ area of the globe between the
European and Pacific Commands’ and which
(in significant part) retraced the outlines of
the former British Middle East Command.
MIGRANCY
Its importance was further increased by the
terrorist attacks on the United States on 11
September 2001 and the US-led invasions of
Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 (see
terrorism).
CENTCOM articulates a highly particular
imaginative geography of the region (Morrissey, 2009), but the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq were underwritten by, and also
extended, a series of cultural formations that
could be traced back through the long history
of British and American interventions in the
region to a deep-seated Orientalism (Gregory,
2004b). In doing so, they confirmed that the
‘Middle East’ is a profoundly ethnocentric
construction, as Bernard Lewis (1999) once
had it, ‘meaningless, colorless, shapeless, and
for most of the world inaccurate’. This
reached its nadir in portrayals such as this,
from Fareed Zakaria, writing in Newsweek
soon after 9/11: ‘This is the land of suicide
bombers, flag-burners and fiery mullahs.’ In
one astonishing sentence, the various, vibrant
cultures of the region were fixed and frozen
into one diabolical landscape (Gregory, 2004b,
p. 60). And yet this (in)sensibility captured
the accumulated rhetorical effect of constructions of the Middle East with dismal fidelity. For the ‘Middle East’ as a concept has
been constructed, both geopolitically and discursively, largely from the ‘outside’: and yet its
problems and predicaments are almost always
assigned solely to those on the ‘inside’. As
Mamdani (2002) put it, within the optic of a
Euro-American ethnocentrism, the world is
divided into two, ‘so that one part makes culture and the other is a prisoner of culture’. dg
Suggested reading
Khalidi (1998); Lockman (2004); Scheffler (2003).
migrancy The state or condition of being a
migrant; ‘migrancy’ generally emphasizes the
cultural, social and political constructions and
experiences of migrant groups and displaced
people (cf. migration). Historically, the slow
and discontinuous process of sedentarizing
populations and fixing political borders and
boundaries was often accompanied by a suspicion of those who remained constantly on
the move. Thus, for example, the figure of the
merchant forever travelling to fairs and distant
markets occupied an ambiguous position
within the territorializations of feudalism in
much of medieval europe, even though such
movements provided essential functions for
trans-regional economies. mobility was often
a privilege, to be sure, and it was threaded in
to wider circuits of power and authority, so
that it was (and remains) those who were
homeless and forced to move (through disease or poverty, for example) who attracted
the most suspicion and even hostility. Some
social groups regarded migrancy as a cultural
formation constitutive of their very identity:
‘travelling peoples’ such as the Roma
(‘Gypsies’), the tramping artisans of nineteenth-century Britain (Southall, 1991) or
the hobos of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America (DePastino, 2003).
Even though globalization and modernity are predicated on movement and depend
on migration, these capacities are still subject
to social discrimination. Under neo-liberal
globalization, the world may be ‘flat’ for business travel and international tourism, but
those who travel under other, no less legitimate, signs are subject to policing, restriction
and even detention: the Roma continue to
encounter social exclusion (Sibley, 1998;
Bancroft, 2005) and groups such as asylumseekers and refugees, and guest-workers in
europe, the Gulf, Asia and Canada, find
their living conditions and civil rights circumscribed by their very migrancy. The suspicion
of migrancy is shared by colonial and postcolonial states alike, whose governments
often view migrant populations as threats to
their ordering design and apparatus of control.
Pastoralists and shifting cultivators were (and
continue to be) seen by states as lesser producers whose activities thwart efficiency, erode
environments, and undercut the positive externalities that putatively attach to private
property and sedentary agriculture (see pastoralism). Lurking in these assessments is a
sense that migrancy equates to vagabond conduct, an equation that is frequently sharpened
through racialization: thus the Bedouin in
Israel have been constructed by the Israeli
government as inimical to the property and
political regimes of the settler state and,
through their supposedly aberrant spatiality,
left literally ‘out of place’ and ‘suspended in
space’ (Shamir, 1996; Mair, 2008).
In counterpoint to these bleak assessments,
however, and the unilinear teleology of a
singular Western modernity that sustains
some of them, Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan
(2003) have emphasized that the subjectpositions produced through migrancy cannot
be axiomatically reduce to passivity or victimhood and that, in particular circumstances,
these mobilities – often marginalized in conventional accounts – may be vehicles for cultural and political assertion. To recover the
461
MIGRATION
complex contours of migrancy and the web
of diasporic populations thus requires both
critical analyses of the institutions that frame
and facilitate, entrap and exclude migrants,
but also careful and intrinsically spatialized
ethnographies of the migrant condition.
dg/vg
Suggested reading
Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2003); Mills
(1999).
migration The residential relocation of an
individual, family or group from one place to
another (see also migrancy). It is distinct
from tourism or other short-term visits that
do not involve a change in residence.
Geographers have been particularly interested
in migration, since it is so clearly related to
both the development of places and the relationships between them (Skeldon, 1997;
Black, 1998). According to the most recent
figures, there are nearly 200 million migrants
in the world, defined as people who are living
outside their country of birth (Global
Commission on International Migration,
2005). Traditionally, migration is classified
according to four broad criteria: intra-national
versus international; temporary versus permanent; forced versus voluntary; and legal
versus illegal (Bailey, 2001; Castles and
Miller, 2003). Within geography and other
social science disciplines, scholars tend to specialize according to these distinctions. For example, the field of intra-national migration
(also known as mobility) is generally distinct
from that of international migration. Similarly,
largely separate groups of researchers study
forced migration, or the movement of refugees and asylum seekers, versus those who
study migration arising from economic motivations. If nothing else, these categories reveal
that migration is a complex phenomenon that
can be generated by a number of processes.
Just as there are many causes of migration,
there are also many consequences. Recently,
critical geographers and other progressive
scholars have called these sharp distinctions
into question, noting that most migrants take
a variety of factors into account when making
their decision to move (Bailey, 2001). While it
may seem an obvious point, this is a crucial
issue, since all of the systems that seek to
regulate migration are based on the assumption that the causes of each individual movement are identifiable and discrete.
Ernest George Ravenstein is acknowledged
as the first person to theorize migration and he
462
introduced a number of ‘laws’ – in the 1880s –
that he believed captured the most important
processes involved (Grigg, 1977). For example, he stated that: the tendency for migration varies inversely with the distance between
source and destination (i.e. there are far more
short-distance moves than long-distance
ones); the majority of migrants move in order
to improve their economic circumstances;
therefore migration is mainly directed to
places of concentrated economic opportunity,
particularly cities; migration accelerates when
movement becomes easier (e.g. once transportation infrastructure is in place); women
tend to move shorter distances than men; and
migration in one direction eventually generates its opposite – movement in the opposite
direction. These early generalizations are still
seen as relevant and form the basis of the most
prominent model of migration. The gravity
model uses a simple mathematical equation to
predict the amount of migration between any
two places, which is projected as the product
of the population size of the two places divided
by the distance, squared, between them. More
elaborate versions of the gravity model take
more factors into consideration and are correspondingly more mathematically complex.
Migration theories today are dominated by
three strands of thought. The first is a legacy
of the Ravenstein approach, but informed by
more recent economic theories. It posits that
individuals migrate when it is in their economic interest, and will go to the place that
maximizes their life-long earning potential.
Meanwhile, governments create migration
policies to attract the talents that they lack
(cf. public policy). The world is therefore
seen as a kind of ‘migration market’, much
like the labour market, with rational actors and
predictable outcomes (Borjas, 1989). Individuals with high levels of human capital (education and work experience) go to places that
provide the highest wages for that group.
Meanwhile, less-skilled individuals gravitate
to countries with the least polarized wage
rates and the most generous welfare policies.
These types of migration are labelled, respectively, ‘positive’ versus ‘negative selection’.
There is also an emerging new economic theory of migration that considers families the
basic unit of decision-making rather than
individuals. According to this theory, families
seek to enhance their survival through minimizing risk (as opposed to atomized individuals
seeking to maximize their earnings), and
therefore attempt to place individual family
members in several countries at the same
MIGRATION
time, providing multiple possibilities should
life become difficult in any particular place
(Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino
and Taylor, 1993). Economic theories of
migration, old and new, are often used to generate predictions of the scale and direction of
migration. For this reason, they are considered
to be highly relevant by governments that are
interested in regulating migration. Critics
charge that these models make invalid
assumptions (e.g. that individuals are fully
informed about opportunity structures in
other countries), and produce highly simplified results.
The second major strand of migration theory is based in the logic of world systems
theory. According to this view, migration is
generated by the expansion of the capitalist
system throughout the world, which destabilizes traditional ways of life – both economically and environmentally – in an everexpanding periphery (Black, 1998). People
move because their livelihoods are compromised, especially when they also become captivated by the lure of high wages and consumer
capitalism in affluent countries. However,
affluent countries create barriers to migration
in an effort to preserve their privilege. They
therefore allow the selective admission of
highly skilled individuals (such as trained
medical professionals or high tech engineers)
and relatively small numbers of individuals
who are deemed to be unskilled, who are
expected to accept jobs that are shunned by
domestic citizens (Castles and Miller, 2003).
Typically, members of the first group are
granted permanent residence, while those
belonging to the latter are expected to return
home when their labour is no longer required
(e.g. the guestworker programs in Europe
from the 1950s to the 1970s). In this sense,
migration is a key ingredient in the development of dual, or segmented, labour markets,
with migrants, who are typically racialized cultural minorities, employed in ‘3D’ jobs (dirty,
dangerous and difficult) and members of
mainstream society in better-remunerated
jobs that are protected by professional associations or unions. Migration regulations are
therefore implicated in a continuing process
of development versus underdevelopment,
both across societies and within them
(Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino
and Taylor, 1993).
The third major body of theory emphasizes
social aspects and is especially concerned with
the relationship between social networks
and migration. Individuals make migration
decisions in the context of imperfect information that is shared across social networks,
which often include people who have migrated
(Tilly, 1990b; Weiner, 1995). Migrants tend
to follow those who have gone before them, in
a process that is called chain migration. This
is a rational process, since new migrants benefit from the experiences of their predecessors.
Newcomers are also assisted when they arrive
in the destination country. As this process
gains momentum, immigrant communities
emerge and gradually build in-group sociocultural institutions. Frequently, these communities are geographically concentrated and may
be seen by mainstream society as ghettos,
places that are both isolated from mainstream
society and also disadvantaged – though there
are important exceptions to this tendency
(cf. underclass). The network approach to
migration has led to three particularly powerful insights. First, chain migration leads to a
process of cumulative causation; that is, each
move helps build pathways that facilitate additional migration. Migration begets migration
(Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino
and Taylor, 1993). Gradually, people in the
source society become convinced that migration is ‘normal’ and even expected as a rite
of passage. Second, social networks become
stretched between source and destination societies, with people who are closely connected
on both sides. Echoing the point first made by
Ravenstein, people begin to move back and
forth across these networks in a process of circular migration. frequently, these moves are
linked to significant life-cycle turning points,
such as entering tertiary education, looking
for work, raising a family and retirement.
Moreover, information flows quickly across
these stretched social networks, as people
communicate on a regular basis and economic
links also intensify. People in these transnational networks develop new, combinatorial identities that include elements of both
source and destination societies, and are conscious of political and social developments in
both societies (Vertovec, 1993; Levitt and
Glick Schiller, 2004). Geographers have contributed significantly to understanding these
forms of transnational behaviour and identity.
Finally, scholars who study migration networks highlight the significant differences
between men and women in all aspects of
migration, including: the reasons for migration; migration pathways; and the consequences of migration for the individuals
involved (Pessar, 1999; Silvey, 2006; Yeoh,
2006).
463
MILITARISM
All of these theories are much better
equipped to understand voluntary migration,
where people make choices about when to
leave and where to go. Actually, the bulk of
international migration is forced: people are
compelled to leave their residence due to conflict, persecution, environmental degradation, natural disasters or development
projects (Black, 1998; Hyndman, 2000). Certain types of forced migration are monitored
and, to a degree, regulated by international
agencies, particularly the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
and the International Organization for Migration. These organizations assist migrants by
helping build and service refugee camps, facilitating repatriation when circumstances in
conflict zones improve, and arranging resettlement in other countries in cases when conflict
or persecution persists. In 2006, the UNHCR
estimated that there were approximately 20
million ‘persons of concern’, or refugees,
worldwide. The UNHCR and other agencies
attempt to ensure that the principles of the
1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status
of Refugees, and the 1967 UN Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees are upheld.
Note that other types of migration are mainly
regulated by nation-states rather than international agencies. That is, nation-states generally have the right to decide who can enter
their borders and on what terms (Castles and
Miller, 2003). However, signatory states to the
aforementioned UN Convention and Protocol
are obligated to provide asylum to refugees.
Since the 1980s, researchers have sought
to understand the ethical issues involved in
migration. This sub-field tends to concentrate
on three major issues. First, is migration a
human right? That is, should individuals
have the right to live where they choose
(based on an individual rights perspective;
Carens, 1987), or should states have the right
to control their membership by selective admission policies (based on a collective rights
perspective; Weiner, 1996)? Second, who
should realize the rewards of migration and,
conversely, pay the costs associated with it: the
migrant, the destination society, or the source
society (Castles and Miller, 2003)? Generally
speaking, governments of countries that
receive migrants create admission policies
that are intended to secure the benefits of migration for their societies, and pay little attention to migrants and virtually none to source
countries. For example, affluent countries frequently encourage highly trained medical personnel to immigrate without consideration for
464
the difficulties involved for the migrants (in
re-establishing their credentials) or for the
consequences for source countries (which are
losing scarce individuals who have typically
been trained in public education systems).
Third, what should be expected of migrants
once they join a new society? Should they be
required to assimilate or be encouraged to
retain their cultural traditions? Each of these
questions has generated vigorous debate in the
scholarly and policy-oriented literatures. dh
Suggested reading
Black (1998); Castles and Miller (2003);
Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino
and Taylor (1993); Weiner (1996).
militarism The extension of military influence into civilian political, social and cultural
spheres. This is achieved through both the
direct extension of the immediate influence
of state militaries and the indirect influence
of military agendas on political institutions,
social norms and cultural values (see
Woodward, 2005). In his farewell address to
the nation in 1961, US President Dwight
D. Eisenhower warned against the ‘acquisition
of unwarranted influence’ by what he called
‘the military–industrial complex’: since then,
the connections between militaries, defence
industries and the global arms trade have
become ever more intimate, but over the
same period the multiple extensions of militarism have prompted many analysts to identify
an even more extensive military–industrial–
media–entertainment complex (MIME).
Geographically, militarism is manifest in military control of place, space and landscape;
military influence over civilian law enforcement and legal geographies, and the militarization of security; military research within
universities and research and development
organizations (for militarism in geography,
see Barnes and Farish, 2006; Barnes, 2008b);
and military themes in popular geopolitics,
linked to the dissemination of distinctive
imaginative geographies through films,
novels, video games, web sites, and television
drama and news (see, e.g., Power, 2007;
Stahl, 2006, and Stahl’s documentary film
on the militarization of American popular culture, ‘Militainment Inc.’: description and
trailer at http://www.freewebs.com/apocalicious/militainmentinc.htm). In these various
ways, militarism serves as an ideology that
makes particular claims on notions of citizenship (Stahl, 2006; Cowen and Gilbert, 2008)
and, not least through its appeals to particular
MILITARY GEOGRAPHY
notions of masculinism, also legitimizes and
even glorifies the pursuit of war. (See also
military geography.)
dg/sg
Suggested reading
Barnes and Farish
Woodward (2004).
(2006);
Stahl
(2006);
military geography The study of geographies of military activities and operations.
Facilitating the military activities and operations of nation-states was central to the emergence of modern geography as a formal
academic discipline. The enlistment of geography in the service of empire has become a
commonplace of the history of geography (see
geography, history of), and the foundation
of the Royal Geographical Society in Britain in
1830, for example, was closely associated with
the desire to formalize geographical knowledge to be put to work in the extension and
management of the British Empire through
exploration and survey, often closely connected with military personnel and military
objectives, and through the conduct of military campaigns (Woodward, 2005). Some historians point to the Franco-Prussian War of
1870–1 as a major spur to the institutionalization of the discipline in europe: the
unexpected victory of the Prussian army was
attributed, in part, to its superior training
in geography. Across the Atlantic, a subdiscipline identified as military geography
could trace its origins to the establishment of
schools of geography at military establishments such as the US Military Academy at
West Point in the early nineteenth century.
These versions of military geography were
not only instrumental (as one would expect)
but also largely descriptive, and they emphasized the use of geographical knowledge,
particularly location – via cartography and
map reading – and physical terrain to facilitate military operations. Perhaps the closest
connections between in-service military geography and the academic discipline came
during the Second World War, when many
professional geographers collaborated in the
production of detailed regional geographies, for use in identifying targets and conducting offensive campaigns (Clout and
Gosme, 2003; Barnes and Farish, 2006).
Geographical knowledge remained crucial to
the subsequent conduct of the cold war, and
its ‘hot’ campaigns in Indochina and elsewhere.
Much of the traditional function of regional
intelligence in the USA was contracted to
programmes in area studies rather than
geography, while the armed forces and intelligence agencies (on both sides) placed a premium
on surveillance from air- and space-platforms,
and new technologies of remote sensing,
satellite photography and the like.
The repeated emphasis on regional knowledges and regional intelligence, even in more
sophisticated, space-sensing technical forms,
may seem to reduce military geography to
what Woodward (2005) calls a ‘largely atheoretical, descriptive regional geography’,
divorced from intellectual developments in
the academic discipline at large. There are
elements of truth in this, but two caveats are
crucial. First, the technical elaborations of
regional intelligence could be conceptual
ones too; Barnes and Farish (2006) identify a
series of vital connections between these seemingly commonplace activities and the conceptual ferment of spatial science and the
quantitative revolution, and it is surely no
accident that the Office of Naval Research in
the USA took such a close (and often financial) interest in what might otherwise seem
remarkably abstract spatial modelling and
geographical research. Second, advanced militaries (and the paramilitaries that they now
often find themselves fighting) have recognized the need to think of what the US Army
now calls ‘battlespace’ as more than physical
terrain. Wars have always depended on the
visualization of space, but ‘battlespace’ not
only has a much more complex geometry
than conventional battle fields or theatres of
war – it is no longer possible to make clear,
linear separations between fronts (even during
the First World War the front line decomposed
into a bewildering maze of trenches and
dugouts; contemporary conflicts transpose
these geometries to the large scale) – but it is
also increasingly understood as a human geography. The Pentagon has become increasingly
preoccupied with urban warfare, which has
required the construction of new, militarized
models of cities and urbanization, particularly in the global south, a development that
Graham (2009c; see also 2004a) calls ‘a new
military urbanism’, while the experience of
military occupation (see occupation, military) and the revival of counterinsurgency in
the wake of the American-led invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq has prompted the US
military to undertake a cultural turn of its
own in order to map ‘the human terrain’ in
ways that resonate, however awkwardly and
imperfectly, with contemporary developments
across the social sciences (Gregory, 2008b,
2009c).
465
MIMESIS
All of these issues can be studied critically,
as most of the references above testify. But
while Palka and Galgano (2000) suggest that
writings such as these have cast ‘a persistent
shadow on military geography as an academic
discipline’, critical interventions in military
geography, seeking to enlarge its compass
beyond military circles, have only become a significant strand of work in human geography in
recent years: and over that same period many
advanced militaries, particularly in Europe and
North America, have redoubled and rethought
their interventions in the production and appropriation of geographical knowledge. Significantly, these have involved far more than the
direct application of geographical methodologies
and knowledges to ‘kinetic’ (offensive) and now
‘non-kinetic’ operations: they have also involved
a deepening engagement with the ideology of
militarism.
dg/sg
Suggested reading
Flint (2005); Woodward (2004).
it is a species of mutual compliance’ (Burke,
1906).
If mimesis in aesthetic theory refers us to the
consensual and reproductive in social terms, it
is no surprise that the concept has been variously modified and attacked in contemporary
cultural and critical theory. Thus Adorno
(1977), Lacoue-Labarthe (1989) and Derrida
(1981) not only variously demonstrate how
mimetic imitation subtends all of our institutions as well as our concepts of history and
language. They also argue the ways in which
a critique of mimesis requires us to rethink the
relation between nature and technology, and
to re-conceive the mediations between lived
experience and aesthetic expression. From a
different perspective, Homi Bhabha’s (1984)
deconstructive appropriation of the mimetic
principle has become a critical concept in postcolonial analysis, in which the colonized subject’s mimicry of colonial knowledge systems
serves to estrange the basis of an authoritative
discourse and so registers as a form of counterdomination (see post-colonialism).
jd
mimesis Described in ancient aesthetics as
the ‘imitation of nature’, mimesis is generally
concerned with how representation in art
is related to truth, or how effectively a copy
may mirror or make present an original scene
or perception. Can the image reproduce an
actual object as it is? Or does it merely reproduce the appearance of the object as it
looks, as semblance? The question, famously
allegorized in Pliny’s tale of a contest staged
between two fifth-century painters, features
centrally in Plato’s analysis of vision and epistemology. Plato’s answer is that representation is not only antipathetic to reality, but that
the degree to which it aspires to lifelikeness is
the degree to which it is adulterated, or distorted. While this remarkably ‘modern’ position prefigures present-day debates – from
Marxian critiques of commodity fetishism to
the unmasking, within post-structuralism,
of ‘given meaning’ – the mimetic tradition
has been notably resilient. From the Italian
humanists onwards (see humanism), it has
been thought of as the desire to bring nature
towards its specular perfection. As an aesthetic formulation, mimesis also has applications within political philosophy, especially
within enlightenment struggles between
custom and reason. Thus for Edmund Burke,
as for David Hume, the perpetual forging of
resemblances forms the condition for all
human sociality: ‘It is by imitation, far more
than precept, that we learn everything . . .
It is one of the strongest links of society;
466
minor theory A way of thinking that takes
off from and builds upon Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1986) notion of minor literature.
It offers a means of working with material that
self-consciously refuses ‘mastery’ in practices
and claims, striving instead for a self-reflexive
scholarship that subverts ‘major’ theory from
within. Minor theory is a different way of
‘doing theory;’ a way of reading, writing, and
talking that is insistently material – embodied,
sensual, positioned – and refuses to ignore the
different political–economic and social conditions in which knowledge is produced and
shared. It recalls Adrienne Rich’s (1976)
anguished call to ‘think through the body’ in
the hopes of making a materialist knowledge
streaked with the peculiar temporality and
spatiality of everyday life (Katz, 1996).
This situated knowledge is interstitial with
and inseparable from ‘major’ productions of
knowledge, and uses displacement to expose
and chafe their limits so that they crack. In
these cracks new knowledge and practice can
emerge, but the process itself is transformative. In dynamic relation major theory, minor
theory, and the relations that hold them in
tension are reworked.
Deleuze and Guattari (1986) focus on the
writings of Franz Kafka, a Czech Jew living
in Prague, who wrote in German. They argue
that Kafka was doubly displaced in this ‘major
language’, which was neither his mother
tongue nor the language of his community,
MOBILITY
but that he pushed this displacement to its
limits to create what they call ‘lines of escape’.
Minor literature is about the conscious use
of displacement to call into question and
change dominant modes of writing and using
language. By extension, minor theory is intent
on making alternative subjectivities, spatialities and temporalities. It seeks to rework
major theory from within, destabilizing
received modes of knowing and the power/
knowledge that produces and frames their
objects. What is constituted as major or minor
is historically and geographically specific.
Deleuze and Guattari make clear that the
major and minor are not different languages
but, rather, different ways of working with the
same language. This work – or play – can
enliven and renovate language (and theory)
so that it is made to express something new
because the limits of its traditional forms are
breached.
The idea of ‘becoming’ is crucial to Deleuze
and Guattari’s notion of the minor. ‘Becoming’ suggests change and mutability, but also
movement that ruptures, decomposes and
recomposes. ‘Becoming’ invokes temporality,
but its space is one of betweenness. Both work
against the sort of dualism that would pit
major against minor, or vice versa, but if the
notion of becoming is to produce a critical
politics, it must be understood as positioned
somewhere (Braidotti, 1994; Katz, 1996). As
a mode of thinking relationally, minor theory
offers a means to reframe and move through
theoretical impasses between, say, marxism
and feminism or local and global (cf. Massey,
Allen and Sarre, 1999; Anderson 2000b). It
can be a powerful strategy for recognizing and
re-imagining difference; of thinking race
through class through gender, for instance,
and through the iterative displacements such
work calls forth, creating new spaces of and for
political practice and engagement.
ck
Suggested reading
Anderson (2000b); Massey, Allen and Sarre (1999).
mobility There are two main uses of the term
in human geography: (1) the movement of
people, ideas or goods across territory (physical mobility); and (2) change in social status
(social mobility). Reflecting current interest,
the journal Mobilities was instituted in 2006.
Human mobility occurs over varying temporal and spatial scales, with migration referring to mobility that involves a change in
residential location, whether within a city or
across continents and daily mobility, including
commuting, referring to movements that do
not entail a change of residence. Involving any
one of a variety of means (e.g. feet, automobile, train, bicycle, airplane, wheelchair), mobility incurs costs in both time and money. As
the costs of mobility have fallen (for example,
the cost of sending a letter; the cost of travel
between London and Mumbai), the separation
between places has shrunk, a process known as
time–space convergence, which has contributed greatly to globalization. In addition to
incurring costs, mobility – the ability to move
between and among places, whether on a daily
basis or over the life course – also confers
benefits; indeed, humans could not exist without some form of mobility, and at every geographical scale we have been consuming ever
more of it. Because mobility is important for
accessibility, it is often considered an important component of independence and quality of
life (Hanson and Pratt, 1995), such that populations who lack the temporal or financial resources required for mobility (e.g. the elderly,
children or working parents with young children) become the focus of concern and mobility-enhancing programmes.
With the advent of telecommunications,
physical mobility is no longer required for
spatial interaction, and geographers have
devoted considerable attention to understanding the complex relationship between physical
mobility and virtual mobility (e.g. shopping
for books on the internet after browsing in a
local bookstore). Whereas physical mobility
does not require networks (one need not
cross a meadow on a path), it is certainly
enhanced by them, as movement is easier on
a network than off of one. Virtual mobility
does rely on network structures. For both
physical and virtual mobility, networks are
crucially important in channelling and shaping mobility patterns.
Social mobility, which refers to upward or
downward changes in the socio-economic status of individuals or households, has drawn
considerable attention in urban and social
geography. Of particular interest has been
the relationship between social mobility and
spatial mobility; in theories associated with
the chicago school of urban sociology: for
example, the upward social mobility that
accompanied the assimilation of immigrants
into American society took place via residential
movement ever outwards from the urban core.
Like other forms of mobility, social mobility
also involves networks; the size, social composition and spatial location of a person’s network
of social contacts can affect the probability of
467
MODE OF PRODUCTION
upward or downward mobility (Granovetter,
1982; Hanson and Pratt, 1991).
sha
Suggested reading
Cresswell (2006).
mode of production Karl Marx refined
‘mode of production’ to explain determinate
ways of harnessing social labour to the transformation of nature. Nonetheless, Marx and
Engels use the concept variously: sometimes as
a unity in tension between ‘forces of production’
(technology, materials, human–environment
relations) that fetter the transformation of
‘relations of production’ (property, work,
law, class); while elsewhere, well-known passages from the Communist manifesto lend weight
to an epochal, teleological interpretation of successive modes, including primitive communism,
slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism
and, finally, communism. Marx’s Capital systematically explores the dynamics of one mode
of production, through commodities produced by ‘free labor’: dually freed from the
means of production of necessities for
survival, and free to sell all they have left, their
capacity to labour, without obligations from
workplace or employer. On this exploitation,
Capital constructs ramifying, spiralling, anarchic forces of innovation, class struggle,
crisis, resolution and destruction – dynamics
long debated as periodic or catastrophic
(see dialectic). Twentieth-century orthodox
Marxists carried the burden that precise determination of the mode had vital political effects.
This orthodoxy was called into question, at
least ‘West’ of the Iron Curtain, through the
revisionist marxisms of the 1970s. The revival
of ‘modes of production’ in the plural spoke to
new exigencies: British Marxists broke with
Stalinism and evolutionism, as social history
reopened histories of transition to capitalism;
scholars of decolonization and development in africa, latin america and asia
questioned the politics and political economy of peasantries (see peasant) in relation
to capitalism and imperialism; and Marxist
feminists questioned agrarian households’ internal and external relations to markets (see
agrarian question). A translation of Marx’s
(1857) ‘Introduction’ to his Grundrisse exemplified a hinge between his early and late
thought, calling into question an economistic,
mature Marx. Passages from Marx’s corpus
were re-read with an eye to ‘subsumption’ and
persisting relations between modes of production. In debate with radical dependency and
world-systems theorists, French structuralists
468
(see structuralism) – in particular, the philosophers Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar,
economic anthropologists Claude Meillassoux
and Maurice Godelier, and sociologist Nicos
Poulantzas – conceived of internally systematic
modes ‘structured in dominance’. Debates
in Economy and Society, collected in Wolpe
(1980) – including Wolpe’s own classic article
on South Africa – questioned the historical
and political articulation between the reproduction of capitalism and that of subordinate, precapitalist modes within the social formation.
Eric Wolf’s (1982) critique of Marxist structuralism appealed instead to consciousness
and historical diversity, to show how ‘people
without a history’ organized capitalist, tributary and kin-ordered modes of production in
relation to a diffusing global capitalism. Talal
Asad (1987) questions Wolf’s recourse to
‘permanent criteria’ in distinguishing modes
rather than explaining complex histories of
articulation to the unequally global history of
capitalism. Instead, ‘articulation’ would have
to contend with traditions, constructions,
aspirations and conditions through which
people could or could not participate in ‘making history’. Central to work in this vein since
has been Stuart Hall’s (1980) reworking of
‘articulation’ as both ‘joining up’ and ‘giving
expression to’: a Gramsican analytic that he
uses to explain state-sanctioned racism as one
form of cultural, material and political articulation of multiple modes.
sc
model An idealized and structured representation of (part of) the world (cf. abstraction; ideal type). Model-building has a long
history in many sciences, but its formal and
conscious incorporation into geography is
usually attributed to attempts to establish
geography as a spatial science in the 1960s
and 1970s. Scientificity was central to the
benchmark collection of essays edited by R.J.
Chorley and P. Haggett as Models in geography
(1967). They treated models as ‘selective
approximations which, by the elimination of
incidental detail [or ‘noise’] allow some fundamental, relevant or interesting aspects of
the real world to appear in some generalized
form’. The accent on generalization was vital
to their project, and this was achieved through visual–geometric representations of spatial structures and through mathematical–
statistical generation of spatial patterns. The
twentieth anniversary of the original Models
was marked by an international conference
attended by both revisionists who sought to
rethink and revitalize the project and
MODERNISM
dissidents who were sceptical of its ability to
address what they regarded as more important
questions. On one side, Harvey claimed that
‘those who have stuck with modelling since
those heady days have largely been able to do
so by restricting the nature of the questions
they ask’. To Cosgrove, modelling was the
quintessential expression of high modernism,
and the privilege it accorded to abstraction,
functionality, generalization and simplicity
was altogether incapable of responding to the
challenge of difference in a late modern,
even postmodern, world. On the other side
were a large number of unrepentant spatial
scientists who had no time for such concerns,
and who reaffirmed their faith in the central,
instrumental importance of formal modelling. The publication of these exchanges
two years later, as Remodelling geography
(Macmillan, 1989) coincided with a radically
different collection edited by R. Peet and N.
Thrift entitled New models in geography (1989).
Their subtitle indicated a tectonic shift in the
foundations of model-building: ‘the politicaleconomy perspective’ signalled a range of different approaches that had a common grounding in various forms of political economy,
critical social theory and historical materialism. Partly as a consequence, the original
claim for analytical model-building as the central object of geographical enquiry was displaced and efforts were directed towards methods
as means rather than ends in themselves.
Since then, however, the prospectus
advanced by Haggett and Chorley has been
renewed in two ways. First, model-building
had been advanced as (at least in part) a solution to an exploding data matrix: the architects
of the model-based paradigm insisted that
geographers had no choice but to move
beyond the accumulation of ‘facts’ that had
reduced their field to an endlessly enlarging
global gazetteer, with no clear logic of selection or organization. Since then, however, the
development of electronic modes of data storage and retrieval, analysis and display – most
visibly through geographic information
systems – has provided much more sophisticated algorithms for data management. Second, model-building was originally advertised
as a necessary moment in the ‘puzzle-solving’
activity required for the inauguration of a new,
properly scientific, paradigm for geographical
enquiry: ‘That there is more order in the world
than appears at first sight,’ Haggett and Chorley reminded their readers, ‘is not discovered
till the order is looked for.’ Since then, many
human geographers have been drawn to
forms of cultural and social theory that insist
on the radical non-innocence of just ‘looking’,
and non-representational theory, poststructuralism and science studies (among
others) have directed attention towards the
ways in which ideas and images enter directly
into the very constitution – the ‘ordering’ – of
the world.
dg
modernism Strategies of representation
closely identified with late-nineteenth- and
twentieth-century movements in the arts that
challenged the conventions of romanticism
and realism. There are many modernisms,
but Lunn (1985) identified four common
preoccupations:
(1) Aesthetic self-consciousness. ‘Modern artists, writers and composers often draw
attention to the media or materials with
which they are working’ and in doing so
emphasize that their work is a fabrication
in the literal sense of ‘something made’;
they thus seek to escape from the idea of
art as a direct reflection of the world
(cf. mimesis).
(2) Simultaneity and juxtaposition. Modernism often disrupts, weakens or dissolves
temporal structure in favour of simultaneity: different perspectives are often juxtaposed within the same frame or narrative.
(3) Paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty. Modernism often explores ‘the paradoxical
many-sidedness of the world’: instead of
an omniscient narrator, for example,
modernist writers may use multiple
points of view.
(4) The demise of the centred subject. Modernism often exposes and disrupts the fiction
of the sovereign individual or the ‘integrated subject’.
Modernism did not emerge in a vacuum: it
was a critical response to a series of crises
within capitalist modernity. Its coordinates
included: the explosive growth of modern cities and the radical transformation of their
built forms, economies and cultures; the
restructuring of European capitalism, especially through the Agricultural Depression at
the end of the nineteenth century and the
intensified technical changes brought about
by a new round of industrialization; the aggressive advance of European colonialism
and imperialism; and the turbulence of the
First World War and the Russian Revolution.
This mapping has three implications of direct
relevance to human geography:
469
MODERNISM
(1) These episodes involved significant
changes in conceptions of time and space
in the west (Kern, 1983) which also had
dramatic repercussions far beyond the
shores of europe and North America.
Huyssen (2007) insists that modernism
‘cut across’ imperial and post-imperial
cultures – it included Baudelaire’s Paris
and Joyce’s Dublin, but also Borges’
Buenos Aires and Kahlo’s Mexico City –
so that ‘metropolitan culture was translated, appropriated and creatively mimicked in colonized and post-colonial
countries in asia, africa and latin
america’.
(2) The ways in which these changes were
registered in the arts, literature and elsewhere were profoundly gendered and
sexualized. ‘The territory of modernism,’
Pollock (1988, p. 54) argues, ‘so often is
a way of dealing with masculine sexuality and its sign, the bodies of women’.
Representations of modern spaces were
made to revolve around masculine
subject-positions – like the mobile figure
of the flÂneur – and to privilege encounters ‘between men who have the
freedom to take their pleasures in many
urban spaces and women from a class
subject to them who have to work in
those spaces often selling their bodies to
clients or to artists’. Indeed, Lefebvre’s
account of the production of space,
which was partly inspired by his encounters with surrealism and the Situationists,
repeatedly draws attention to the significance of modernism for the triumph of
a ‘visual-phallic-geometric space’.
(3) Modernism was connected not only to
experimentation in the arts, but also to
new styles of philosophical reflection and
to the formation of the social sciences
(including critical theory and Western
marxism, Lunn’s primary concern). But
most of these intellectual projects
retained the social markings, marginalizations and exclusions written into
metropolitan modernism.
Lunn’s characterizations work best when
applied to modern art and literature and
probably have less purchase on modern architecture, which has its own chronologies
(Frampton, 1992). These architectural motifs
assumed a wider significance in the 1950s and
1960s, when a high modernism emerged as a
dominant cultural thematic, distinguished by
what Bürger (1992) described as a ‘pathos of
470
purity’. ‘In the same way as architecture
divested itself of ornamental elements,’ he
argued, so ‘painting freed itself from the primacy of the representational, and the nouveau
roman liberated itself from the categories
of traditional fiction (plot and character).’ In
much the same way, too, spatial science
divested human geography of an interest in
the particularities of areal differentiation,
which became so much ‘surface noise’, in
order to reveal the purity of geometric form
and spatial structure (often, like architecture, cast in terms of functionalism). It
would not be difficult to present other high
modernist movements in social thought in
much the same way, notably structuralism.
From such a perspective, postmodernism
becomes a critique of high modernism rather
than of modernism tout court. It contains important echoes of the early-twentieth-century
avant-garde, and a number of writers have
urged the reclamation of that earlier modernism as an indispensable moment in the formulation of critical social theory. In fact, Berman
(1983) suggests that it had its roots even earlier, in the nineteenth-century writings of
Baudelaire and Marx, both of whom (in different ways) sought to come to terms with a
world in which ‘all that is solid melts into air’.
Those human geographers most invested in
these reclamation projects have paid close
attention to the historical–geographical coordinates of modernism (above). Thus Harvey
(1989b) sought to expose some of the connections between the cultural formations of
modernism, the experience of time__space
compression and the changing political economy of capitalism, which in turn provoked a
critique of the ways in which his own representations erased the characteristic gendering
and sexualization of their maps of modernity
(Deutsche, 1996c). There have also been
specific studies: Harvey’s (2003a) excavation
of modernism and its material foundations in
nineteenth-century Paris, and Pinder’s (2005c)
exploration of forms of utopian modernism in
the twentieth century (see situationism).
But the most deliberately modernist contributions to contemporary human geography
are to be found in the work of Gunnar Olsson
and Allan Pred. Pred’s experimental studies of
European modernities (1995) and his extraordinary re-creation of a ‘heart of darkness’ at
the very centre of ‘Swedish modern’ (2004)
were freely informed by the example of Walter
Benjamin; they beautifully exemplify all four
of Lunn’s diagnostics (above) and the radical,
critical impulse of early modernism that
MODERNITY
Berman so admires. In a transposed key,
Olsson’s (2007) critique of cartographic
reason recalls those earlier modernisms too,
and stages crucial encounters with the art of
Duchamp, Malevich and Rothko; but its careful minimalism also reinscribes the pathos of
high modernism in a newly critical register.
Taken together, these thought-works show
that modernism still has much to contribute
to the jaded critical cultures of human geography (and much more besides).
dg
Suggested reading
Brooker and Thacker (2005); Harvey (1989a,
chs. 2, 16).
modernity A notoriously ambivalent and
highly contested concept, the notion of ‘modernity’ has nonetheless acquired wide currency
within human geography, not the least
prompted by the proliferation of ideas drawn
from postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s.
Broadly speaking, the term has been used to
designate a number of discrete, yet interrelated, phenomena that, in most cases until
recently, place europe at the centre of the
world stage (see eurocentrism):
(1) First and foremost, modernity is used as
a means to periodize European (and, by
implication, ‘world’) history by designating a distinct epoch. The boundaries
surrounding this ‘modern’ epoch are unclear, starting as early as the dawn of the
Italian Renaissance (fourteenth century),
through the invention of the printing
press (fifteenth century) to the industrial revolution (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). As Bauman (1993,
p. 3) put it: ‘ ‘‘How old is modernity?’’
is a contentious question . . . There is no
agreement on dating. There is no consensus on what is to be dated.’ Common
to all epochal definitions, however, is the
idea of a break with the past: with established modes of representation, for
example, with economic practices and
regimes, with technologies, or with
cultural and social relations.
(2) Modernity is also used to designate a
particular mental attitude that seeks
rationally to understand the world we
live in by finding order within and achieving domination over nature (cf. Withers,
1996). Here, ‘modernity’ becomes synonymous with the notion of progress and
gradually affects most areas of life, from
the medicalization of bodies and environ-
ments to the rationalization of urban life
through the discourse of planning (see
also biopower). science and the pursuit of knowledge in the wake of the
European enlightenment was central
to this evidence-based spirit of modernity, which finds its perfect geographical
expression in the notion of Cartesian, isotropic space. Aspirationally, it is perhaps
best captured by Kant’s famous 1784
maxim, sapere aude, or ‘dare to know’.
(3) A third dimension employs ‘modernity’
to designate a thoroughly secular project
of liberation and emancipation that arguably culminated in the related American
and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century, and which led to the
emancipation of slaves and the establishment of human rights across a range
of differences. This ‘political’ modernity
heralds a set of historical tasks that seeks
the implementation of novel forms of
political representation, of legal and
social rights of individuals, and of justice
in a host of different contexts (cf.
Schama, 1989; Howell, 1993; Delaney,
2001: see also liberalism).
(4) A final sense in which the concept of
‘modernity’ is used specifies a particular
process of global incorporation that leads
directly from the Age of Exploration to
the European colonialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this
context, 1492 marks the dawn of a new
era: the beginning of globalization
within and through a set of clearly structured, if historically developing, core–
periphery relationships (Taylor, 1999)
and motivated, perhaps, by what Max
Weber famously described as a ‘protestant work ethic’. The most basic element
to this notion of modernity is the nationstate and its territorially expanding capacity to organize and make social processes anonymous (see also Harris, 1991).
Thus, it would seem best initially to conceptualise ‘modernity’ as a broad semantic field
marked by tensions, contradictions and possible dialectical energies, rather than streamlining them into an organic totality. The
concept is thus implicitly linked to other
concepts such as capitalism, ‘nation-state,’
mobility, literacy, democracy and urbanization, to name but the most prominent. Any
one of these, individually or in combination,
are customarily invoked when attempting to
define ‘modernity,’ so much so that often the
471
MODERNITY
link is established by rendering modernity as
an implicit adjectival, and thus clarifying, part
of any of the nouns just listed. In other words,
while ‘ways of thinking’, ‘economic practices’
or ‘modes of transportation’ become paradigmatically different by being prefaced and
hence associated with ‘modern’, ‘democracy’
and other key concepts appear semantically to
embody ‘the modern’ as such. Furthermore,
throughout its history (however conceptualized), ‘modernity’ has been contested (e.g.
the Counter-Reformation in the seventeenth
century, the Romantic Movement in the late
eighteenth century, the back-to-nature movements of the late nineteenth century, the student and worker uprisings associated with
May 1968, or the current religious revival,
especially in the USA).
What perhaps unites most definitions of
‘modernity’ is an emphasis on the notion of
the ‘new’. Modernity is synonymous with
change and thus becomes a declared enemy
of traditions. This is the root of many subsequent binary distinctions that characterize
modernity: the ‘new’ is explicitly set apart
from the ‘old’ – and it is the distance between
the two that acquires explanatory power. The
importance of this threshold is encapsulated in
the different figures employed to characterize
modernity: Georg Simmel’s ‘stranger’, Max
Weber’s ‘adventurer’, or the ‘flÂneur’ and
the ‘gambler’ invoked by Walter Benjamin all
emphasize a border, be it between inside and
outside, old and new, presence and absence
or private and public (Shields, 1992;
Strohmayer, 1997). It is in the nature of such
borderlines to invoke an ‘uncanny’ sense of
existence where the ‘new’ constantly has the
power to threaten or disrupt, as exemplified in
Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M.
The notion of the ‘new’ (and the close,
intertwined relationship between modernity,
and filmic and urban space: see film) also
points us towards another geographical context surrounding modernity: its thoroughly
urban, or better yet metropolitan character
(Ogborn, 1998; Frisby, 2001; Pile, 2005). It
is in urban settings that the ‘new’ materializes
an exuberant side of modernity, where the
‘new’ is not synonymous with order but paradoxically becomes associated with a set of
practices subverting traditions (Berman
1983). The undermining of sexual mores,
diversification of consumption practices, the
rise in artistic freedoms and forms of expression culminating in the notion of an avantgarde, the growth in new and decidedly
urbane forms of ‘destructive’ capital assem472
bled in the hands of the bourgeoisie so effectively analysed by Marx, or simply the
development of different lifestyles all encompass ‘experiences of modernity’ (Frisby, 2001,
p. 2; see also Glennie and Thrift, 1992) that
are not so easily, if at all, attained in non-urban
spaces. Small wonder, then, that it takes
another quintessentially modern and urban
figure, the detective (as exemplified by virtually any film noir), to reorder a world threatening to become unreadable. The urban has
become synonymous with the ‘modern’ in
another sense as well: novelty principally also
attaches to architecture, where ‘order’ translates into a functional approach to questions of
housing and urban design (Dennis, 1994;
Heynen, 1999). L.H. Sullivan’s phrase that
‘form (ever) follows function’ (1896) and A.
Loos’ insistence that ‘ornament is crime’
(1908) together capture the architects’ aspirations materialised in modern buildings.
Rather crucial for any understanding of
modernity is the tension emerging at the
heart of this and related ‘ordering’ impulses:
the tension between any order given or imparted upon architecture or urban design and
the restless, destructive tendencies embodied
by the ever-changing nature of ‘the new’
(Donald, 1999: see modernism). As postmodernists would later lament (and remaining
within Loos’ dictum), ‘order’ thus becomes
its own ornament.
A solution to this impasse is offered by a
further element common to many definitions
of modernity: the projection of ‘progress’ on to
constantly developing technologies. Effectively reconciling the notion of ‘the new’ with
the desire (or necessity) to impart order, the
very idea of ‘progress’ imparts a sense of direction to ‘modernity’ and thus renders it
potentially legible. Trusted or not, technological developments ranging from seafaring
innovations, the invention of paper moneys,
the steam engine, entertainment technologies
such as panoramas or the cinema to the internet of our present age all impacted upon
everyday life in a way that has lent credence
to the idea of an ephemeral and constantly
changing; that is, a modern world that is
defined by its technologically progressing
nature (Asendorf, 1993). As this listing implies, these technologies have threaded different
places into new conjunctions, and the intensification of multiple processes of time–space
compression under contemporary modes of
globalization has reworked both senses of
place and structures of space (Entrikin,
1991; Hetherington, 1997b; Oakes, 1997).
MODERNITY
Modernity does not, of course, merely
denote a set of particular constellations characteristic of the material world. In addition to
such historically contingent interpretations of
modernity (or interpretations of the world
through the lenses crafted by ‘modernity’), a
number of critiques of modernity have been
formulated within philosophy and the social
sciences, themselves a direct product of modernizing tendencies within society at large.
Perhaps chief amongst these is the recognition
that the quest for order inherent in many modern tendencies embodies an element of systemic control that has been used historically
to suppress progressive movements. Examples
include the rationalization of urban space in
Haussmann’s Paris, seen by contemporaries as
the very ‘capital of modernity’ (Harvey, 2003b),
the biopolitics and the central function of
markets under neo-liberalism. Returning to
the four main definitions of modernity presented above, we may thus infer a formative
tension, not to say contradiction, between
modernity as scientific progress and modernity as an emancipatory project. Even so, to
state matters in this way may well imply an
all too overt reliance on modern ways of
seeing. As Bruno Latour has insisted, most
attempts to infuse a clear sense of ‘order’
have always been implicated in non-ordered,
hybrid and networked social practices (cf.
Swyngedouw, 1999).
Another critique that has gained wide currency in the geographical literature is that
modernity is inherently reductionist in its
insistence on the primacy of the ‘eye’ over
other sensual modes of connecting to the
world (see also vision and visuality). Chiefly
building on the work of Walter Benjamin and
the writings of Guy Debord and the situationists, this strand of critique centres on
the importance of optical metaphors and
instruments in modern environments (Crary,
1990a). From René Descartes’ early-seventeenth-century insistence on the importance
of evidential modes of reasoning to telescopes,
microscopes and cameras, through the optically structured spaces of modernity such as the
arcades, boulevards and parks (Ogborn, 1998;
Strohmayer, 2006), to ‘ocular’ writing in
general with its focus on landscapes and the
mappable nature of events (Guarrasi, 2001;
Dubbini, 2002: see also cartographic reason), modernity is characterized as a mode of
engaging with the world that favours visual
relations over and against other modes of connecting with and being in the world. As before,
this critique has a double edge: it attaches to a
‘modern’ world that has become increasingly
reliant on visual modes of communication,
while also being critical of modes of understanding the modern world that in turn rely
on visual technologies, rhetoric and categories.
The ensuing dual practice of deploying the
visual both as a structuring principle informing modern spaces and as a mode of understanding such spaces has perhaps best been
characterized in the notion of the spectacle,
as critically developed by Debord (1994).
Central to this critique is the reliance common
among critical social scientist and geographers
alike on that which arguably requires critique
itself: visual modes of existence. We ‘shed
light’, we ‘illuminate’, we ‘enlighten’ – all the
while the world we live in has become saturated with visual forms of commerce, information and entertainment. In other words: the
critique of modernity all too often relies on
modern modes of communication and exchange, rendering it vulnerable to the charge of
being but another mode of consumption and
distraction. Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer’s earlier disenchantment with an
Enlightenment, and their claims that modernity had surrendered its better impulses to an
‘entertainment industry’ are akin to this critique.
In all of this it is important to remember
that such dis-enchantment, especially in the
context of the twentieth century, was often
brought about by real and often life-threatening crisis experiences. Nazism in particular
and its thoroughly rational implementation of
the holocaust, but also the Stalinist experiments, Hiroshima and the constant development
of underdevelopment structurally endemic
to modern capitalism have all contributed
(see also war). So too have those politicolegal responses to modern crises that have
worked to produce an ‘outside’ to the modern,
a heterogeneous and dispersed space of exception where particular groups of people are expelled from the privileges and protections of
the modern even as they are made subject to its
disciplines and punishments (Minca, 2007a).
For some commentators, this disenchantment inspired the development of the concept
of ‘postmodernity’. Others have seen fit to
speak of a second modernity (e.g. Beck, 1992) or
of hypermodernity (e.g. Pred and Watts, 1992).
More interesting still, given the complexities
surrounding the term and its thoroughly eurocentric origins, are recent developments that
attempt to broaden the linguistic field surrounding ‘modernity’ (Gilroy, 1993; Appadurai,
1996; Gaonkar, 2001; Venn and Featherstone,
2006: see also Martins and Abreu, 1996;
473
MODERNIZATION
Power and Sidaway, 2005; Walton-Roberts
and Pratt, 2005). The resulting post-colonial
notion of ‘modernity’ aims to reconcile the
often devastating impact that modernity has
on non-Western cultures and societies with the
progressive, emancipatory impulse also associated with modernity (see post-colonialism).
Acknowledging that modernity has impacted
unevenly across space, the focus of these often
surprisingly modern investigations is chiefly
on the concrete negotiations that contextualize
adoptive or rejective practices locally in a
global setting. Gilroy’s (1993) studies of the
complex formation of a ‘Black Atlantic’ exemplify this strand of scholarship. The main
innovation of such work resides in its willingness to break with a notion of linearity that
has characterized notions of modernity from
Descartes to Hegel (see Duncan, 2002). At
the same time, and in close analogy to other
attempts to broaden analytical concepts, any
gains achieved need to be measured against
losses in clarity, argumentative bite and
explanatory power: ‘broadening’ often also
entails elements of diluting argumentative
claims. In the case of ‘modernity’, with (as
we have seen) its already wide semantic field,
the abandonment of linearity carries the risk of
no longer being able critically to differentiate
if, or to what extent, societies (or elements
thereof) can meaningfully be compared
through the use of the conceptual apparatus
developed in conjuncture with the term ‘modernity’. In the absence of such comparative
yardsticks, how can scholars translate findings
from one geographical locale to another?
In fact, ‘translation’ may well be an apt term
to use within modern discourses. Translations have always posed quite fundamental
problems in that acts of translation tend to
reduce a semantic multitude to more circumspect and singular set of equivalences. Attributing modernity to this process at least has the
practical virtue of ensuring compatibility at a
relatively accessible point in an argument.
Traditional notions of modernity would, for
instance, have firmly placed practices associated with or emanating from ‘witchcraft’ as
being either pre-modern or outside the realm
of the modern by presupposing incompatibility between the two terms. The very thought of
‘alternative modernities’ (Gaonkar, 2001)
undermines this robust principle. By ensuring
that translation between different practices
can always involve or lead to a broadening of
categories or non-linear historical trajectories,
the notion of ‘the modern’ risks the loss of
normative aspects associated with modernity
474
as an emancipatory and, in the words of
Jürgen Habermas, an ‘unfinished’ project
(see critical theory).
Arguably, many debates currently taking place
in the first decade of the new millennium labour
with precisely this point: the possibility of the
universality of modern dreams, aspirations and
normatively inspired practices. Can we think
of ‘modernity’ in the absence of pre-formulated
yardsticks, or clearly associated practices?
Whether we invoke the notion of a ‘clash of
cultures’, a re-investigation of notions of ‘tolerance’ or insist on established, modern norms
(especially in the legal context) in the face of
challenges, we are talking about modernity and
its survival into an increasingly less certain future. Modernity may yet prove its most enduring qualities by remembering its own inherent
insistence on the importance of the ‘new’. In
geographical terms, this ‘new’ translates into an
insistence on the importance not of preserving a
status quo but of constant experimentation and
improvement (Toulmin, 1990). In other words,
it involves a resolve to preserve and produce
alternative spaces of modernity, rather than
spaces of alternative modernities.
us
Suggested reading
Berman (1983); Gaonkar (2001); Minca (2007a);
Venn and Featherstone (2006).
modernization Often conflated with development in general and Westernization in
particular, modernization describes processes
unleashed by the transformation of traditional
societies into capitalist ones or by their incorporation through adaptation into an increasingly globally operating form of capitalism.
If the former process is traditionally held to
characterize the transformative processes attaching to Western societies in the context of
the nineteenth century, it is the latter, nonindigenous form of modernization that has
come to dominate the world since the end of
the Second World War. As such, notions of
modernization partake in discourses of the
evolutionary transformation of societies and
are often deeply implicated in notions of progress, growth, liberalization and the diffusion
of particular values. Up until fairly recently,
such processes of modernization were thought
to entail a clearly legible and often teleological register of changes in the economic,
cultural, social and political sphere of societies
undergoing transformation. Not so any more.
Initially criticized for being too narrowly
focused on economic forms of modernization
and for disregarding the many different direct
MODIFIABLE AREAL UNIT PROBLEM (MAUP)
and indirect costs linked with modernization
processes, attention has also moved to forms
of contestation and resistance that accompany and often undermine modernization
processes (Scott, 1985; Nabudere, 1997).
More recently still, the term has been recast
as reflexive modernization in the work of Ulrich
Beck and others (cf. reflexivity). Rather than
following a preset and, indeed, general path
(see modernity), modernization is now
thought to entail the ability constantly to
adapt and thus to create a ‘second modernity’.
Where older modernization discourses argued
with reference to timeless and abstract principles, a newer and reflexive practice seeks
constantly to review its goals and practices in
dialogue with incoming information. Key in
this attempt is the geographical term ‘boundary’, which is seen less as a fixed entity than a
conscious practice (Shields, 2006): just as
boundaries emerge from processes of negotiation and remain open to future negotiations,
reflexive modernization both relies on the
boundedness of its practices while acknowledging their potential for change. Structurally
similar to recent attempts to broaden the
notion of ‘modernity’ by incorporating nonWestern practices, reflexive modernization
thus constitutes a discursive process, rather
than marking the outcome of discursive practices, as older notions of modernization had
attempted to do (see discourse). It is hence
no surprise to see the term ‘reflexive modernization’ often being conflated with the notions
of ‘third way’ or ‘third (or ‘new’) modernity’.
Likewise, the realization that modernity may
well have become a problem in its own right
shares the key assumption of a required dialogical openness with reflexive notions of modernization. Principally, such problematization
takes place through the recognition that unintended consequences within industrial societies, which proliferate as risks beyond the
accepted certainties, are created within modernity. In this form, ‘reflexive modernization’
has been heralded by many as an agencyorientated alternative to postmodern discourses and attitudes (Beck, Bonss and Lau,
2003) and is related to structuration theory
(Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994).
us
Suggested reading
Alexander (1996); Beck (1997); Galloway
(2005); Gleeson (2000); Nabudere (1997);
Shields (2006).
modifiable areal unit problem (maup) A
particular
form
of
ecological
fallacy
associated with the analysis of spatial data
sets, in particular those in which data on individual observation units (such as households)
are aggregated into areal units (such as census
tracts and counties) for analysis.
Robinson (1950) provided the classic
exposé of the maup for social scientists (see
also Gehlke and Biehl, 1934), in which he
showed that a high correlation between two
variables (the percentage of the population
who were African-American and the percentage who were illiterate) at the state scale
within the USA was not replicated at the individual level; in other words, whereas the aggregate data analysis showed that states with more
African-Americans also had more illiterates,
leading to the ecological inference that AfricanAmericans were more likely than non-AfricanAmericans to be illiterate, this strong claim
could not be substantiated by analyses of individual level data. (The correlation coefficient for
the state-level analysis was 0.946, but for the
individual level it was much smaller, at 0.203.)
The maup was introduced to the geographical literature by Openshaw (1977; see also
Openshaw and Taylor, 1979), whose empirical
studies corroborated and extended Robinson’s.
With one data set, for example, they showed
that different aggregations (or regionalizations,
since most geographical examples involve aggregations into territorial blocks) could generate
correlation coefficients covering almost the
entire potential range from
1.0 to þ 1.0 (in
one example, the range found was
0.73 to
þ 0.98), although most distributions were leptokurtic, with the majority of observed coefficients
close to the median value. They showed that
the problem is made up of two components.
With the scale effect, there is a tendency for larger
correlations to be associated with larger (and
thus almost invariably a smaller number of) spatial units. The aggregation effect refers to the large
number of different ways in which individual
units can be combined into a set of areal units –
usually with constraints such as size and contiguity (Openshaw, 1982).
The maup is important in many areas of
spatial science using quantitative methods,
because it indicates the need for caution in
inferring a relationship between two variables
based on a single aggregation at a particular
scale: a result identified from one such analysis
may not be replicated exactly in another.
Openshaw and Taylor (1981) identified three
possible responses to the maup:
it is an insoluble problem, and so can only be
ignored;
475
MONEY AND FINANCE
it is a problem that can be assumed away,
with the results obtained from the particular available data set being accepted as ‘the
real ones’; or
it is a very powerful analytical device for
exploring various aspects of geography
and spatial variations, since alternative
regionalizations can be produced – this
allows the creation of both frequency distributions with which one regionalization
can be compared and, in some cases,
optimal regionalizations for particular purposes (see classification and regionalization).
Although the existence of the maup is
widely recognized as posing a problem for
much spatial analysis, in very many cases
researchers have had to adopt either the first
or the second of these positions because they
are constrained by available data sources
(especially those provided by censuses).
Attempts have been made to develop methodologies that can take the maup into account and
produce unbiased ecological estimates (as in
the work of Holt, Steel, Tranmer and Wrigley,
1996, and King’s, 1997, classic volume on
solving the ecological inference problem;
see also a recent overview in Swift, Liu and
Uber, 2008), but few analysts have adopted
the third of Openshaw and Taylor’s suggested
responses, preferring to accept the outcome of
one aggregation as providing a reliable estimate
of the ‘real’ relationship.
The maup is not only an issue in spatial
analysis: it is also relevant to a range of practical issues – notably redistricting. Many
electoral systems use territorially defined constituencies, which comprise aggregations of
smaller territorial units; UK Parliamentary
constituencies, for example, are aggregations
of contiguous local government electoral
wards with a size constraint. Johnston and
Rossiter (1982; see also Cirincione, Darling
and O’Rourke, 2000) have shown that there
is a large number of possible solutions to the
constituency-building problem in every area,
which can produce different election results,
so that the selection of a particular aggregation
can not only lead to a particular outcome in
one constituency (hence the widespread practice of gerrymandering in some countries),
but can also contribute to considerable bias in
election results, whereby not only is the percentage of seats won by a party disproportionate to its share of the votes cast, but other
parties with the same share of the votes
might win very different shares of the seats
476
(Johnston, Pattie, Dorling and Rossiter,
2001: see electoral geography).
rj
Suggested reading
Openshaw (1982).
money and finance human geography was
late in recognizing the geographical significance of money and finance, with few attempts to write geographies of money and
finance much before the 1980s (for exceptions, see Conzen, 1975, 1977). However,
since then a new sub-field of geographical research has emerged (Corbridge, Thrift and
Martin, 1994; Leyshon and Thrift, 1997;
Martin, 1999; Clark, 2005a). As this work
has evolved, it has followed a similar trajectory
to the wider discipline, with earlier work being
influenced by more abstract economic and
social theory, while more recent work has
tended towards substantive, cultural accounts
of the geographical consequences of money
and finance.
The first systematic engagement with the
geography of money and finance emerged
from marxist analyses of the broader dynamics of capitalism, best exemplified by the
work of David Harvey (1989b, 1999 [1982]).
Marx drew attention to the role that money
and finance played in the financial system
within capitalism, which revolves around
money and the social power that its possession delivers in a market economy. Drawing
on this insight, Harvey developed the concept
of time__space compression, which provided a
propulsive element to earlier theories of a
shrinking world, such as time__space convergence and time__space distanciation. The
social power of money increases the pace of
life over time as part of a generalized process
to reduce the turnover time of capital, and the
faster realization of profits and incomes. This
encourages the introduction of new spaceshrinking technologies, bringing in their wake
the progressive dislocation of economic and
political systems. Money has become ever
more mobile and fungible, and is now the
most heavily traded commodity in the global
economy. The sheer weight of money in circulation within and between financial markets
has made governments more sensitive to their
operation, and economic development has
been destabilized by a series of serious financial crises in various parts of the world, including latin america and Sub-Saharan
africa in the 1980s (Corbridge, 1993a), and
South East Asia and Latin America (again)
in the 1990s (Beaverstock and Doel, 2001;
MONEY AND FINANCE
Webber, 2001; Rock, 2002). These crises have
often been caused by the movement of hot
money, which moves in but, significantly,
also out of economies at short notice in search
of investment opportunities. Growing attention is being paid to such investors, such as
hedge funds and pension funds, which control
large volumes of capital in circulation within
the global economy. For example, Clark
(1999a) has argued that the current era is
characterized by ‘pension fund capitalism’.
The rise of these institutions has coincided
with the retreat of the state, particularly
within Anglo-American economies. As voters
have demonstrated their unwillingness to pay
the taxes that would fund social welfare programmes and public infrastructure development, so large institutional investors have
moved in to fill the gap, footing the bill, but
for private gain. This has implications not only
for what kind of infrastructure is built, but also
for how it is run. Similar arguments about the
growing power and influence of the financial
system have been made in a body of work that
emerged in the early twenty-first century,
which has a focus on the process of financialization, which has focused on the ways in which
money and finance has been colonizing economic life, both in the boardroom (Froud,
Sukhdev, Leaver and Williams, 2006) and in
the household (Langley, 2004, 2006).
A second area of research has focused on the
regional effects of money and finance, mainly
through the impacts of the reorganization of
the financial services industry. Since the
1970s, and working in parallel to, and combination with, the process of financialization,
there has been a process of neo-liberalization
that has brought about a wave of financial
re-regulation to economies in North America,
Europe and South East Asia (Moran, 1991,
2003; Dymski, 1999). These developments
have brought about an increase in retail financial services employment, and economic geographers have documented and explained these
uneven geographies of growth (Leyshon,
Thrift and Toomey, 1989; Richardson, Belt
and Marshall, 2000) (see neo-liberalism).
A third area of work has focused on the
urban dynamics of money. One strand of
research has sought to explain the persistence
of financial centres in an era of time–space
compression. Geographers have sought to
explain why financial centres such as the City
of London and New York continue to control
the majority of the world’s financial activity
(Thrift, 1994a; Agnes, 2000; Clark and Wojcik, 2001). The answer is to be found in the
ways financial centres facilitate close interpersonal contact through episodes of co-presence.
This facilitates the rapid generation, capture
interpretation and representation of business
information (Boden and Molotch, 1995;
Boden, 2000). The financial centre may therefore be seen as a collective way of coping with
the vast amount of monetary information that
circulates within the global economy. It is a
centre of financial expertise founded in a complex division of labour embodied in the skills
of the workforce, technology, and textual material (Thrift, 1994a), and which collectively
generates and disseminates financial information as well as interpretations and narratives
about what this information actually means.
This is the reason why it is unlikely that financial centres ‘will simply melt away into a generalised ‘‘space of flows’’ . . . leaving money
obligations to speed their way along the cables
and through the aether [sic], to and from
many different terminals located in places’
across the global economy (Thrift, 1994a,
p. 327). A second strand of research focuses
on the urban dynamics of money upon spaces
of financial exclusion, the process by which
people of poor and moderate incomes are directly and indirectly excluded from the formal
financial system and denied access to mainstream retail financial services (Leyshon, Burton, Knights, Alferoff and Signoretta 2004a;
Dymski, 2005).
A fourth area of research has focused on
geographies of money as they are played out
through institutions and individual actors. A
particular focus of this work has been on the
bodies that perform tasks in the service of the
financial system. This work has focused in the
main on the changing ‘gender cultures’ of
financial institutions (Jones, 1998), such as
the transformation of cultures of paternalistic
masculinity within British retail banking
(Halford and Savage, 1995), and analyses of
labour market segregation within the City of
London, and the ways in which highly paid
jobs in corporate finance and trading are
implicitly and explicitly coded as masculine.
A fifth and final area of research has been
that which has focused on local currency systems, such as Local Exchange and Trading
Systems (Lee, 1996; Lee, Leyshon, Aldridge,
Tooke, Williams and Thrift, 2004). This
work, influenced by debates on diverse or alternative economies, has sought to explore
the moral geographies of money and exchange, and the possibilities of local communities of creating their own systems of
exchange based more on the pursuit of social
477
MONUMENTS
and welfare gains, rather than narrow financial
advantage
(Williams,
1996;
Williams,
Aldridge, Lee, Leyshon, Thrift and Tooke,
2001; Maurer, 2003).
al
monuments Built icons of identity usually
in the form of public statues or symbolic buildings that are designed and executed to evoke a
sense of national and regional identity, and to
induce in the collective imagination remembrance of specific events or people. Although
the study of monuments has increased in
human geography over the past 20 years, a
result of a heightened interest in the symbolic,
ritualistic and performative dimensions of
identity formation, historians were the first to
explore the relationships between public
monuments and nationalism. Mosse’s
(1975) study of the role of the public statue
in the development of German nationalism is
still an exemplary analysis, while Schorske’s
(1979) discussion of the redevelopment of
Vienna’s Ringstrasse in the nineteenth century
provides a brilliant interpretation of the role of
Austria’s rising middle class in impressing
their political vision on the architecture of the
city.
There are several reasons for studying the
links between monuments and political–
cultural identities. First, the erection of public
monuments in public space has proliferated
since the nineteenth century, and this expansion of public statuary corresponds with the
heyday of nation-building projects. Second,
unlike other arts such as painting or literature, monument-making is usually a collective process ‘more democratic than painting
because it is simpler and more solemn, more
appropriate to the public square, to huge dimensions, and to emblematic figures that are
both a product of, and stimulus to the imagination’ (Agulhon, 1981, p. 4). Third, the rituals
surrounding the unveiling of monuments and
the dynamics of their reception and consumption help us to identify their role in the public
consciousness. Icons in bronze or stone are
made meaningful by the ways in which they
visually and verbally invoke particular versions of
identity. Finally, the spatiality of public statuary is important in the constitution of meaning
and it is here that geography has a particular
contribution to make (see also memory).
A seminal geographical study of a monument is Harvey’s (1979) analysis of the Basilica de Sacré Coeur in Paris and its role in the
development of class politics in the capital.
Subsequent studies have pursued several
different themes. Studies of the role of war
478
monuments in articulating national and sectional commemoration range from extensive
surveys of memorials to the two world wars
(Heffernan, 1995; Johnson, 2003b) to indepth studies of individual statues (Till,
1999). These analyses pay close attention to
the iconographic debates surrounding the use
of particular motifs (see iconography) and to
the conflicts over identity engendered by
them. The spatiality of commemorative sites
has been another focus: Leib’s (2002) analysis
of the Arthur Ashe statue in Richmond,
Virginia, for example, highlights the role of
place and race in the public discussion of
the location of the monument, while BentonShort (2006) recovers the politics of location
that animated recent discussions of monuments and memorials on the Mall in Washington,
DC. All of these studies focus on the visual
and verbal languages surrounding public
monuments, but more recently human geographers have started to address the performative dimension by examining the textual and
non-textual, bodily and non-bodily practices
involved in the making of public icons (e.g.
Howe, 2008).
nj
Suggested reading
Leib (2002); Till (1999).
moral geographies The study of the interrelationship of moral and geographical arguments. Work has considered the way in which
assumptions about the relationship between
people and their environments may reflect
and produce moral judgements, and how the
conduct of particular groups or individuals in
particular spaces may be judged appropriate
or inappropriate. D.M. Smith (1998a) sees
moral geographies as one of six research
areas linking geography and moral philosophy, alongside the historical geography of
moralities, inclusion and exclusion in bounded
spaces, the moral significance of distance and
proximity, questions of social justice and environmental ethics. Smith extends his discussion in Moral geographies (2000a), a wideranging treatment of geography, morality,
ethics and justice (see also moral
landscapes).
The term ‘moral geographies’ achieved prominen within human geography through
Driver’s study of allied ‘environmentalism’
and ‘moralism’ in nineteenth-century social scientific urban studies: ‘ ‘‘Moral science’’ was . . .
a science of conduct and its relationship to environment, both moral and physical’ (Driver,
1988, p. 279). Driver argues that such moral
MORAL LANDSCAPES
geographies ‘permitted the birth of social science in England’ (p. 276), the implication being
that subsequent academic geographies may also
have drawn on moralistic assumptions concerning environment and society. Jackson’s account of the work of the early-twentiethcentury chicago school of urban sociologists
conversely shows how the identification of
forms of moral order underlying ‘apparent social disorganization’ (1984, p. 178) may allow a
critique of conventional moralistic assumptions
concerning life in the modern city. Matless
(1994) develops the theme of moral geographies of conduct by considering how the geography of a particular region, the Norfolk
Broads in eastern England, can be understood
in terms of competing formulations of appropriate behaviour in the landscape. Moral geographies are here constituted through
assumptions concerning class and landscape.
Such work echoes studies of social exclusion
and transgression in highlighting the basis on
which people may be labelled as in or out of
place feedback.
Some moral geographical work has sought a
prescriptive role. Sack (1997) argues for the
inherently geographical nature of moral actions in order to develop a framework through
which we might improve ourselves as moral
geographical subjects: ‘Thinking geographically heightens our moral concerns; it makes
clear that moral goals must be set and justified
by us in places and as inhabitants of a world’
(p. 24). Sack recognizes the complex variations of morality between different times
and places, but the aim, in common with the
tenor of much humanistic geography, is to
seek a normative framework for being human;
for being, in Sack’s terms, a ‘geographical
self’. For other work noted above, however,
the term ‘moral geographies’ is not prescriptive, its use being informed by a philosophical
and political assumption that senses of moral
order are produced through environmental
and spatial practices that are always bound
up with relations of power. Here, the connection of the moral and the spatial in moral
geographies is bound up with a suspicion
regarding any claim to be able to define morality, and with a sceptical attitude to the social
power of the moral.
dmat
Suggested reading
Driver (1988); Smith, D.M. (2000a).
moral landscapes The association of particular landscapes with schemes of moral
value (see also moral geographies). Tuan
(1989) reviews the wide-ranging historical
and geographical association of particular
moral values with the landscapes of city, country and garden. A moral–spatial dialectic may
also be identified whereby moral landscapes
both reflect and reproduce senses of moral
order. Work has focused on such processes in
the geography of institutions, in the use of
architecture and landscape design to promote
particular moral principles, and in the production of consciously ‘alternative’ social spaces.
The institution as moral landscape is considered in Ploszajska’s (1994) work on the
Victorian reformatory school as an ‘environment of moral reform’. Such moral landscapes
are one element of a geographical interest in
relations of space and power, whereby spatial
organization is shown to be not only reflective
of but central to the workings of power.
Daniels’ (1982) study of the ‘morality of landscape’ in the work of Georgian landscape gardener Humphry Repton shows how aesthetic
values of landscape design were at the same
time moral values concerning social harmony,
plebeian deference and aristocratic responsibility. The theme of moral landscapes thereby
connects to aesthetic, social, political and
economic issues: indeed, all of those categories are shown to be mutually constitutive.
Pinder’s (2005c) study of utopian urbanism
in the twentieth century similarly draws out
the strong senses of moral order informing the
modernist urban schemes of architects and
planners such as Le Corbusier (see utopia).
Studies of moral landscapes may also address the ways in which moral value is located
in particular environments. Matless (1997)
considers how moral debates over conduct
in open-air landscape shaped cultures of
landscape, leisure and the body in twentiethcentury England, and served to reproduce
versions of English national identity.
Associations of morality and nature, whereby
moral order may be equated with a sense of
natural order, may also serve to enable particular groups or individuals to claim a moral landscape close to nature. Locating the moral in the
natural is a common trope of certain forms of
environmentalism, which cultivate an ecological morality or environmental ethic around
an assumed moral community of the human
and nonhuman. Such work differs from much
of the work discussed above in operating with
a strongly normative sense of morality (see
also moral geographies). A normative use
of the term moral landscape is also found in
Ley’s (1993) work on co-operative housing
in Canada, presented as embodying moral
479
MORPHOGENESIS
principles of community and individuality
through an oppositional postmodern architectural style. Other forms of ‘oppositional’
moral landscape might be traced in studies of
the geographies of transgression, where landscapes labelled by others as immoral are upheld as pointers towards the production of
alternative social space.
dmat
Suggested reading
Matless (1997); Tuan (1989).
morphogenesis (The study of ) change in
form over time. The term derives from developmental biology, and is sometimes used as a synonym for positive feedback in systems analysis
(see also complexity theory). Its most developed use in human geography to date has been
in studies of landscape change in historical
geography. (See also morphology.)
dg
morphology Form or the study of form.
Morphology became a contested term in the
struggle between the human geography of
Paul Vidal de la Blache and the emerging sociology of Émile Durkheim at the turn of the
twentieth century. Durkheim argued that the
systematicity of the social – and thus what
made its scientific study possible – was the
result of its morphology, by which he meant
the spatial forms through which individuals
were held together as a social structure. For
this reason, any account of the constitution of
social life would have to include many of the
propositions of human geography, which
Durkheim regarded as one of the ‘fragmentary
sciences’ that had to be drawn out of their
isolation to contribute to the plenary social
science of sociology (Andrews, 1993). This
sense of social morphology can be traced
through twentieth-century sociology in the
writings of Maurice Halbwachs, Georg
Simmel and others, but Vidal complained
that Durkheim’s view ignored the physical–
ecological dimension and left society suspended in the air.
It was exactly this conjunction between ‘the
social’ and ‘the natural’ that prompted Carl
Sauer to insist that the morphology of landscape was the central object of geographical
enquiry. For Sauer (1963b [1925]), geography was ‘a science that finds its entire field
in the landscape on the basis of the significant
reality of chorological relation’. Sauer’s conception did not neglect spatial arrangements,
in his terms ‘the connections of phenomena’
(as these differed from place to place: see
480
chorology), but his emphasis on morphology
derived from J.W. Goethe’s eighteenth-century interest in ‘the science of forms’ and registered two other claims of equal importance:
‘nature’ and ‘culture’ had to be seen as
interdependent in the co-production of
landscapes; and
the same basic forms recurred across the
whole field of transformations.
The first of these was focal to Sauer’s sense of
historical geography, so that his enquiry
was not confined to the morphology of landscape but was directed towards its morphogenesis; that is, the development of its forms
over time. It was in this sense that Sauer
described ‘all geography [a]s physical geography’: in its focus on physical form, on the
material inscriptions of culture on the surface
of the Earth. This intersected with his second
claim, because he insisted that ‘a definition of
landscape as singular, unorganized or unrelated has no scientific value’ and he was concerned to develop a conception of landscape as
‘a generalization derived from the observation
of individual scenes’. Much later, others developed this in directions that Sauer refused to
take. In particular, some early work in spatial
science involved a search for geometrical and
mathematical regularities in the evolution of
spatial patterns of settlement (see Harvey,
1967). This too can be seen as a revivification
of the science of morphology, but it usually
acknowledged a debt neither to Goethe nor
Sauer but to D’Arcy Thompson’s On growth
and form (1992 [1917]) and his pioneering
search for ‘essential similarities’ between ‘animate and inanimate things’.
The interest in morphogenesis has continued in both European and American
geography. There has been a long-standing
interest in the historical evolution of rural
landscapes (e.g. Helmfrid, 1961) and urban
landscapes (e.g. Conzen, 1960: see Whitehand, 2001). Much of the early work was
qualitative and descriptive, but in recent
years, and in conjunction with parallel studies
in archaeology, there have been considerable
advances in the quantitative measurement of
landscape forms (metrological analysis), including the integration of space syntax with GIS
(Bin Jiang and Claramunt, 2002; Lilley,
Lloyd, Trick and Graham, 2005). Urban morphogenesis remains a vital area of geographical
enquiry (Vance, 1990). The International Seminar on Urban Form (http://odur.let.rug.nl/
ekoster/isuf2/index.html) was established in
MULTICULTURALISM
1996 and publishes a journal devoted to Urban
Morphology. There has been a particular interest
in the political economy of urban morphogenesis (Whitehand, 1987), and more recently
in the cultural and symbolic dimensions of
urban morphology (Lilley, 2004a,b).
dg
Suggested reading
Lilley (2004a); Whitehand (2001).
mortality The incidence of death, or rate of
dying, in a population. Along with fertility,
this controls natural increase which, together
with migration, completes the balancing
equation that is used in demography to assess
population growth, decline and age composition. Exploring national and regional variations in crude death rates, infant mortality
rates, infanticide and life expectancy has
increased understandings of epidemiological
transitions (Omran, 1983), uneven development and gender discrimination (Rafiq, 1991)
(see health geography; medical geography).
ajb
Suggested reading
Weeks (1999, ch. 4).
multiculturalism An ideology and state
policy that seeks to establish a model of governance to permit the coexistence of culturally diverse populations. Its distinctive feature
is a respect for cultural difference and, in
contrast to assimilation, support for the
maintenance of old-world cultures. While not
new, cultural diversity assumes its accentuated
current profile from the large movements of
documented and undocumented workers
from the global South to the depleted labour
markets of the global North (see migration;
north__south).
Multiculturalism is not an inevitable policy
response to cultural diversity; in western
europe, while the UK invoked some commitment to multiculturalism, France’s republican
model rejected reference to pre-existing immigrant cultures in favour of assimilation to a
putatively egalitarian national citizen, while
the German tradition of ius sanguinis, or ethnic
exclusivity (see ethnicity), envisaged temporary guest-workers rather than permanent immigrants. The UK, the Netherlands and the
Scandinavian states would most readily have
described themselves as multicultural nations,
though there has been some back-pedalling of
late. More complete multicultural commitment occurs in Australia and especially Can-
ada, the only country with a Multiculturalism
Act and which includes multicultural rights
within its constitution.
In an important respect, all states are multicultural inasmuch as they include culturally
distinct minorities. But the existence of demographic multiculturalism is no basis for assuming that institutional and legal recognition of
diversity will occur. A necessary development
is, at minimum, a tolerance of ethnic difference, and more positively a respect and welcoming of cultural diversity that may lead to
heritage multiculturalism, where the state
celebrates diversity with grants to permit the
expression and survival of folk cultures,
including literature, dance and religion. In
the USA, the principal manifestation of multiculturalism has been the often controversial
use of Spanish as a heritage language of
instruction in schools in some districts with
concentrations of Latino immigrants. But
heritage multiculturalism offers no protection
of citizenship rights, and a more mature
development is a rights-based multiculturalism
that offers legal protection against groupbased discrimination, where minorities can
claim rights in such fields as anti-racism,
social service delivery, employment equity,
policing and immigration policy.
Despite its liberal objectives, multiculturalism has attracted considerable criticism. The
political right fears the escalation of an identity politics that fragments the national
project (Huntington, 2004: see also nationstate; nationalism). The political left, in
contrast, challenges the existence of a veil of
cultural equality that conceals structures of
economic inequality, and suspects that multiculturalism has been co-opted as a vehicle to
promote neo-liberal trade and investment
(Mitchell, 2004b; see neo-liberalism). To
this, Ghassan Hage (1998) has charged that
multiculturalism in Australia has become a
tool of an older white elite to divide new immigrants, thereby maintaining traditional political privileges. But following September
2001 and subsequent terrorist attacks in
Europe and Asia, such intellectual challenges
have been superseded by a populist and media
barrage that has falsely blamed multiculturalism for nurturing hostile criminal and terrorist
cells within the matrix of tolerated cultural
difference. In the present decade, multiculturalism is a policy forced on the defensive
(Joppke, 2004).
dl
Suggested readings
Mitchell (2004b); Parekh (2000).
481
MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCALING (MDS)
multidimensional scaling (MDS) Methods
for simplifying matrices of distances between
a set of points, while as far as possible retaining their relative ordering (i.e. of the distances
between the observations). Developed by psychologists for identifying similarities among
individuals on a wide range of attitudes (the
distances measure how much each pair differ
on a set of attitudinal scales), MDS locates the
individuals in a smaller number of dimensions
than the original scales, so reducing a multidimensional situation to more comprehensible
proportions (cf. factor analysis). MDS has
been adapted for simplifying maps on the basis
of, for example, the time taken to travel
between two points rather than the distance
between them.
rj
Suggested reading
Gatrell (1983).
multilateralism Foreign policy actions involving agreements, treaties and co-operative
actions between more than two states. In
contrast to actions by single states (unilateralism) or between two states (bilateralism),
multilateralism involves international treaties
between many parties or regional agreements between groups of neighbouring states.
Multilateralism is often a strategy advocated
by medium-sized states hoping to shape international agreements in their favour in the
face of the greater power of large states. The
term is sometimes used derisively by power
brokers in the great powers, and as a term
of virtue and aspiration by those anxious to
limit the capabilities of great powers to act
unilaterally.
But in fact superpowers and great powers
frequently use multilateral institutions; indeed, the USA used its power after the Second
World War to establish many multilateral
institutions, especially through the Bretton
Woods financial arrangements and alliances
such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which in turn were useful in the
pursuit of its hegemonic international goals
(Latham, 1997). Multilateralism is often directly linked to such institutions. Ruggie (1993,
p. 14) suggests that the term ‘multilateral’ is
best understood as ‘an adjective that modifies
the noun ‘‘institution.’’ What distinguishes the
multilateral form from others is that it coordinates behavior among three or more states on
the basis of generalized principles of conduct.’
This suggests that multilateralism is frequently
also about building norms or rules that guide
state conduct.
482
Currently, the most high profile multilateral
institutions are the United Nations (UN) and
the world trade organization (WTO),
which deals with most international trade in
the global economy. Given that these organizations provide legitimacy for states, and act
to censure and sanction those that violate the
multilateral codes of conduct, great powers
frequently use these institutions to justify
their actions. The USA’s use of the UN in
1990 and 1991 to justify military intervention
in Iraq during the first Gulf War, and the
invocation of the alliance commitments
under NATO in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, illustrate
that multilateralism has many uses even for
superpowers.
Multilateralism in European history is usually traced to the ‘Concert of europe’ arrangements set up after Napoleon’s final defeat in
1815. Designed to produce the peaceful
resolution of conflicts, the Concert facilitated
diplomatic agreements and, despite notable
lapses such as the Franco-Prussian war of
1870–1, managed to maintain relatively
peaceful relations between the European
powers for a century. This system was shattered by the First World War in 1914 and
replaced by the League of Nations, which in
turn was replaced in 1945 after the Second
World War by the UN in a further attempt to
establish a multilateral institution to prevent
war between states. The UN now includes all
the states in the system as members. Among
the multilateral norms that the UN system has
established as ground rules for international
conduct three are of particular importance:
territorial integrity (see territory); nonintervention; and sovereign equality among
states (see sovereignty). In combination,
these have produced a territorial order of formally sovereign states in the aftermath of the
decolonization of the European empires.
This multilateral norm has also effectively
fixed the boundaries of states, creating a (relative) territorial permanence to the world political map (Zacher, 2001).
Ironically, however, just as state borders are
becoming increasingly fixed, and thus a major
source of international conflicts is being removed, many major problems are spilling over
those borders and require concerted international co-operation. In recent decades,
multilateral action by international social
movements and campaigns on human rights,
global warming and a host of other predicaments confronting what is sometimes described as global civil society have injected
MULTI-LEVEL MODELS
new norms into the international system and
thereby added a further dimension to multilateralism (see also cosmopolitanism). Arguments about humanitarian intervention in the
face of state failure and environmental disasters have suggested a more activist stance for
international institutions in the face of human
suffering, and in the process challenged the
UN norm of non-intervention. Advocates
insist that all states have a responsibility to
protect their citizens and that, in extreme
cases when they obviously fail to do so, intervention from abroad is justified (International
Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty, 2001): a claim that is controversial precisely because it overrides the territorial
integrity principle of the UN.
Simultaneously, in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, the Bush administration in the
USA frequently preferred to act alone in a
unilateral manner, and refused multilateral
co-operation on such matters as the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. This stance makes
multilateral action more difficult on many
issues, and yet, given the increasing number
of international agreements on numerous matters, multilateralism as a foreign policy approach has now become a widely accepted
and routine diplomatic practice. But in the
process territorial sovereignty has become a
more fluid principle in international relations (Agnew, 2005b).
sd
Suggested reading
Ruggie (1993).
multi-level models quantitative methods
that can analyse research problems with a
complex data structure. In a hierarchical
structure, the lower-level unit is nested in
one and only one unit – for example, people
in neighbourhoods in a two-level structure,
and people in neighbourhoods in regions in
a three-level structure. Other examples are
repeated measures of individuals as in a panel
study (cf. longitudinal data analysis) and a
multivariate design when there is more than
one response variable, so that it is possible to
model several aspects of individual behaviour
simultaneously. There are two types of nonhierarchical structure. In a cross-classified design, lower units may nest within more than
one set of higher-level units, so that pupil performance may be affected by individual,
school and neighbourhood characteristics (cf.
neighbourhood effect). Both schools and
neighbourhoods are higher-level units, but
they are not nested within each other. The
remaining type is a multiple membership
model in which lower-level units are affected
by more than one higher-level unit, so that
people’s voting behaviour may be affected by
the different households and neighbourhoods they have been members of, with a
weight proportional to the relative time spent
in each. It is possible to combine these structures in a rich fashion, so that spatial models
(e.g. geographically weighted regression)
can have a hierarchical structure in which individuals are affected by the area they live in,
and a multiple membership relation by which
they are affected by spillover effects from
nearby neighbourhoods (see ecometrics).
Such models can handle continuous and
categorical data responses and variables
and, indeed, interactions between predictor
variables at each level of the structure (cf.
measurement). In terms of specification, in
addition to the usual regression coefficients
that estimate the mean (or fixed) relationship
across all structures, there is considerable development of the random stochastic part of the
model (see stochastic process) so that it is
possible to separate between-individual from
between-neighbourhood variation and, indeed, to allow a variable to have a differential
effect on the outcome in different neighbourhoods. Because of this specification, these are
also known as random coefficient or mixed
models (fixed and random).
Multi-level models are increasingly being
used in social science research, as they have a
number of advantages. Technically, they can
model complex data dependencies, including
spatial and temporal correlation, and thereby give correct standard errors for the fixed
estimates; this is particularly important for
variables measured at the higher level. They
also allow explicit modelling of heteroscedasticity at any level of the model. Substantively, by modelling simultaneously at the
micro- and macro-levels, they overcome the
atomistic fallacy of modelling individuals and
ignoring context, as well as the ecological
fallacy, of not modelling at the individual
level. Most importantly, they can incorporate
an element of context so that there does not
have to be a single relationship fitted for all
times and places, so that the class effects on
individual voting can be allowed to vary from
place to place (Jones, Johnston and Pattie,
1992).
kj
Suggested reading
Jones (1991); Jones and Duncan (1998).
483
MULTIPLE NUCLEI MODEL
multiple nuclei model Generalization of the internal structure of cities. The concentric-zone theory is a
generalization for all cities. The arrangement of the sectors in the sector theory varies from city to city. The diagram for
multiple nuclei represents one possible pattern among innumerable variations (Harris and Ullman, 1959)
multiple nuclei model A model of intraurban land-use patterns developed by Chauncy
Harris (1914–2003) and Edward Ullman
(1912–76: see Harris and Ullman, 1945) that
combines and extends the features of the earlier
zonal models and sectoral models of the
chicago school. Rather than being based on
a mono-nuclear city, this model has land-use
patterns organized around several nodes (see
figure), on the argument that different uses
cluster together (in some cases to share specialized facilities) and wish to avoid other uses,
thereby creating a number of nuclei around
which the city is organized.
rj
indirect or ‘knock-on’ consequences. Thus a
new manufacturing plant creates initial employment; this creates a demand for services in the
locality, so triggering other new jobs. The manufacturing expansion also generates demand for
additional inputs of energy and steel, so having
ripple effects on supplying sectors. Such multiplier effects can be traced using input__output
models. There is also a need to track the geography of these multiplier effects, to see what
‘leaks’ from the local economy into other
regions, and estimating spatial multipliers
undertaken in spatial econometrics.
lwh
Suggested reading
Suggested reading
Anselin (2003); Smith (1981).
Harris (1997).
music Although geography has often been
multipliers A measure of the total economic
impact of an investment decision, policy
change or external ‘shock’. This includes not
just the initial, immediate impact, but also the
484
dominated by visual means of representation, the study of music, and indeed sound
more generally, has a long if discontinuous
history within the discipline. The earliest
MUSIC
work is probably that by the Finnish geographer J.G. Granö, whose studies of sonic
landscapes in Finland date back to 1929 (see
Granö, 1997 [1929]). However, evidence of
a concerted interest in either music or sound
does not exist until the early 1970s. Studies
influenced by the berkeley school of cultural geography examined musical performances, music association memberships,
musical listening and musicians’ birthplaces
alongside a variety of other cultural artefacts.
The purpose was to identify cultural hearths
and trace diffusions across space and through
hierarchies, mapping out culture areas,
regions and landscapes. This traditional approach to the geography of music is exemplified in Carney (2003). Early studies focused
substantially on rural folk cultures and regional styles in the USA. More recently, the
focus has switched to consider how popular
musical genres such as those based in
Nashville, Seattle or Liverpool evolve within
a given place (Carney, 2003, pp. 1–2).
Geographical studies of music have proliferated since the mid-1990s. Developing themes
and methods from the cultural turn, studies
have examined issues concerned with sense
of place, belonging, gender, style and identity, the politics of landscape representation,
and national and transnational identities
(Leyshon, Matless and Revill, 1998; Brunn
and Waterman, 2006). One theoretical starting point was the concept of ‘soundscapes’
adopted by S.J. Smith (1994b) to bring out
the inherently spatial aspects of auditory environments. However, many of these studies
drew substantially from theoretical developments in related disciplines. From sociology,
for instance, these include the functioning of
institutions and organizations in the production and consumption of music and the role of
sound in the fabric of everyday life; from
cultural studies/anthropology, the place of
music in politics of cultural hybridity, subaltern groups and alternate lifestyles; and from
critical musicology, the social production of
musical experience and critiques of conven-
tional conceptions of popular and elite, worthy
and worthless musics. The rise to prominence
of culture industries as a vehicle for economic regeneration has provided further impetus, resulting in studies centred on the merits
of cultural policy, cultural quarters, cultural
tourism, creative capital and festivals, as well
as local and regional place marketing. The context of new digital and networked communications media has produced studies grounded
in new economic geography primarily concerned with media synergies and with global,
regional and local networks of production and
marketing (Connell and Gibson, 2002).
Recent work often critiques the new cultural
geography’s apparent preoccupation with text
and representation. Although music can be
considered a material artwork like painting or
literature, the ephemeral qualities of sound
make music a distinctively performative cultural medium. As geographers have engaged
with art forms beyond their conventional concern for the visual, so the performative aspects
of music and dance have become an increasing
focus of study. Investigations of affect and
emotional geography have resulted in studies centred on listening practices, performing
and making music, rhythm, embodiment and
the dancing body. Much of this work explores
both the subjective experience of music and its
physical presence as it is embodied in objects
such as instruments, recordings and sheet
music; their associated organizations and
infrastructures, venues, recording companies
and radio stations; and the practices of
performing and listening. Concerns for the
co-construction of nature and the materiality
of cultural life now produce studies that
explore the multi-sensory richness of environmental experience whilst remaining sensitive
to both the phenomenology and cultural
politics of sound (Anderson, Morton and
Revill, 2005). Such studies connect environmental history and ecology with a critical
interrogation of regional and local cultures, in
ways that acknowledge the pioneering work of
Grano’s early sonic geographies.
485
N
narco-capitalism It is almost impossible to
assess the gross value of the global illegal drug
trade – a worldwide black market in the production, processing, distribution and retailing of
illegal psychoactive substances. According to
the United Nations World Drug Report in
2006, the retail value of illegal drugs (including
drugs seized) was $322 billion. Other sources
estimate the total figure to be well in excess of
$400 billion. The trans-border trade typically
links – consistent with a much longer history of
the drugging of the First World by the Third –
impoverished producer states (Afghanistan,
Colombia) with transatlantic economy consumers. The consumption of illegal drugs is,
however, a global phenomenon (200 million
people between 15 and 64 years have consumed
some type of illegal drug in the past 12 months,
according to the UN Drug Report in 2006).
Illicit drugs are as central to the slum world of
Rio and Jakarta as they are in the white-collar
Wall Street and American ghettos. The massive
scale of the drug business and the direct (and
complex) actors in the cocaine or heroin global
commodity chain – the peasant producers, the
local processors, the middlemen, the wholesalers, the mules, the drug cartels, corrupt
military and state security apparatuses and so
on – can only be grasped as a particular sort of
market – albeit exceptionally violent, well-policed, often quite competitive, and of course
illegal. Narco-capitalism refers to the structure
and organization of the production, distribution
and sale of illegal drugs, understood as a system
for the production of profit; that is to say, a global
system of accumulation not unlike other drugs
(sugar, coffee).
It is commonplace to assume that the key
illegal drugs – especially in trans-border
activity – are cocaine, heroin and cannabis, but
narco-capitalism also includes the illegal sale of
legal drugs (tobacco, for example, is often smuggled across borders, taking advantage of differential tax and tariff systems, while some
prescription drugs may be available through
illegal networks, thereby eliminating the need
to manufacture and process the drugs). Some
forms of narco-capitalism – the industrial
manufacture of LSD or methadone – may be
largely national or local in organization. The
proliferation of small-scale marijuana produc486
tion systems under hydroponic conditions may
lend itself in particular to local urban markets in
the same way that some centres of cannabis
production (northern California; Vancouver,
BC) may supply regional rather than international demand. Narco-capitalism for hard drugs
such as cocaine, ecstasy, meth and heroin has a
number of structural features that are especially
important in understanding the dynamics of the
industry. First, a number of key cartels – Cali and
Medellin in Colombia, Juarez and Sonora in
Mexico and Puerto Rico – are often linked
through a syndicate-like organizational structure
(e.g. the Mexican cartels typically traffic drugs
provided by the larger Colombian cartels).
Second, the cartels cannot operate without the
complicity and active co-operation of corrupt
governments and militaries that facilitate the
transit operations by ‘mules’ (carriers).
To the extent that cocaine is representative
of narco-capitalism in general (80 per cent of
all cocaine is consumed in the USA), there
have been no large US cartels discovered,
and much of the drug profit is not returned
to latin america but stays in the USA, where
it is laundered for other business operations.
A number of corrupt and often military third
world states have become key actors in the
global narco-capitalism system (e.g. Nigeria
and Panama). What are called ‘failed’ or
‘rogue’ states are often the pillars for the
world drug business. As a particular form of
capitalism, the narco-economy has two
organizational forms: the spoke-and-hub
model, in which a combination of violence
and relations of trust draw together a central
cartel and dispersed gangs and mafia-like
organizations; and a vertically integrated
‘corporate’ form of narco-capitalism, in
which the cartel controls and orchestrates the
entire commodity chain through a system of
force and consent, for which the Mafia may be
an organizational model (and to which the
drug business is in any case organically
linked).
mw
Suggested reading
Clawsonn (2006); Mares (2005).
nation A product of nationalism, the
nation is nevertheless treated by nationalists
NATIONAL PARKS
as the naturalized geo-historical foundation
for national community. Such foundational
thinking often uses geography, and in particular
imaginative geographies of place and landscape, to create and consolidate conceptions
of primordial nationhood. Sometimes such
imaginative geographies of the nation space
can also be violently exclusionary, based on
racist, ethnicist and/or masculinist phobias
about keeping the nation pure by hardening
borders (Gilroy, 1987; Theweleit, 1987;
Parker, Russo, Sommer and Yaeger, 1992;
Radcliffe, 1998; Gallaher, 2003; Flint and
Fallah, 2004; Mayer, 2004). At other times,
formal spatial depictions of the nation operate
more subtly to encode and normalize the
political geography of the nation-state as
it relates to international and subnational
governmental practices (Schulten, 2001; Anderson, 2006a; Flint and Taylor, 2007 [1985]). And
in yet other anti-colonial cases of nations
without states, or with states that have been
repeatedly undermined by colonialism and
neo-colonialism, imaginative geographies of
the nation serve to keep alive hopes of a future
national state free from occupation and external control (Gregory, 1994; Guibernau, 1999).
In all these cases, innumerable geographical
representations from official maps to landscape
depictions to monumental architecture can be
drawn upon to affirm and/or question notions of
national identity.
In theoretical work that is less attuned to
geography, the division of the world map into
a series of parcels defined by a standardized
nation form tends to be ascribed to more
generalized social dynamics. Conservative theorists have tended to fall back on essentializing
ideas about ethno-linguistic homelands (e.g.
Huntington, 2004; see also Kedourie, 1960).
By contrast, liberal theorists have tended to
explain the abstract nation form in terms
of either the global march of modernity
(Gellner, 1983) or the formation of the modern nation-state as a monopolist of administrative information and, in Weberian terms,
the so-called legitimate use of violence
(Giddens, 1985). Subsequently, post-colonial
reflections on global struggles against illegitimate imperial violence have displaced the
eurocentrism of the liberal accounts, all the
while arguing – as in one famous case – that
the assumption of a coherent nation form
in the former colonies remains a ‘derivative
discourse’ shaped as much by the performance
of European nationalist norms as by the cultural complexities of the colonies themselves
(Chatterjee, 1986; see also Amin, 1987).
Chatterjee advances his arguments by noting
the hybridity of the historical record, but
by focusing on the past, his derivative discourse thesis fails to explain how the nation
form may be challenged and hybridized by
extra-national flows in present and future
historical moments. By contrast, marxist
accounts, with their attention to the changing
scale of capitalism’s organization (e.g.
Harvey, 1999 [1984]), and Foucauldian accounts, with their interest in the epistemic
enframing of the nation as a container for ‘the
economy’ amidst twentieth-century fordism
(e.g. Mitchell, 1998), seem better placed to
theorize the historical contingency of the nation form alongside its discursive performance. This does not mean explaining the
nation in economic terms alone. As Marxist
philosopher Etienne Balibar emphasizes: ‘It is
quite impossible to ‘deduce’ the nation form
from capitalist relations of production’ (1991,
p. 89). But it does mean coming to terms
with the overdetermination of the nation
as part of modern twentieth-century nationstates that were once territorialized but
which now seem increasingly re-territorialized
amidst the political geographical tensions of
global capitalism (Sparke, 2005). To ignore
such changes and to continue to examine
global politics with a methodological nationalism that treats the nation as a universal norm is
to fall into what Agnew calls the ‘territorial
trap’ (Agnew, 2003a) – a trap that exists in
the first place because of ignorance of the geographical processes and representations
through which nations are constructed.
ms
national parks The first national park was
created at Yellowstone in Wyoming, USA, in
1872, although the Yosemite Valley in
California (made a national park in 1890),
had been a state park since 1864, and the
idea of a national park was first expressed in
the USA by George Catlin in 1832. The first
US national parks were proposed as a way to
protect the sublime and monumental landscapes of the American West, and as a reaction
to the threat of the closing ‘frontier’ and the
pioneering spirit as a formative element in the
American character (Nash, 1982 [1967]).
The US model of national parks was built
on a conception of nature as wilderness,
pristine, separate and separable from humantransformed lands (Cronon, 1995). Yet in
national parks, wilderness was created by
the deliberate actions of the state, often involving military action: the US Army managed
Yellowstone until 1918. The presence of
487
NATIONALISM
indigenous people in these areas was systematically ignored. The same process of physical
clearance and conceptual deletion of previous
human presence accompanied the extension
of the Yellowstone model outside the USA. It
was soon copied in the British Dominions
(Canada 1887, Australia 1891 and New
Zealand 1894) and in colonial possessions in
africa (the Belgian Congo in 1925, South
Africa in 1926). Following the Second World
War, the model was adopted in East Africa,
asia and eventually globally as the international conservation movement grew
(Adams, 2004). The International Union for
the Conservation of Nature and Natural
Resources (IUCN) established a Provisional
Committee on National Parks in 1958, now
the World Commission on Protected Areas
(www.iucn.org/themes/wcpa). The United
Nations adopted a ‘World List of National
Parks and Equivalent Reserves’ in 1962, and
IUCN defined a series of protected area categories, of which US-style National Parks are
widely regarded as the most important (www.
unep-wcmc.org/protected_areas/categories/).
The global protected area network expanded
rapidly. By 2005, there were over 100,000
protected areas covering over 2 million
square kilometres, more than 12 per cent of
the Earth’s land surface.
National parks created internationally on
the Yellowstone model are imagined as places
free from human settlement. Their creation
has therefore often caused displacement of
indigenous or other peoples, either through
restrictions on access to land and resources
(including cultural sites) or direct forced
resettlement. Globally, there has been a persistent failure to recognize historic human occupation of and rights to land placed within
national parks, or to recognize the extent
of human modification of ‘wilderness’
(Neumann, 2004b). Partly because of opposition to such imposed parks, there has been
significant emphasis in international conservation policy on ‘community-based conservation’ and ‘park outreach projects’ that seek to
create local political and economic support for
parks (Hulme and Murphree, 2001). There
are also alternatives to the exclusive national
park model; for example, British National
Parks and French Parcs Régionaux, which
are essentially planning designations to preserve the quality of privately owned land.wma
nationalism A name for the modern social
and political formations that draw together
feelings of belonging, solidarity and
488
identification between national citizens and
the territory imagined as their collective national homeland. The existence and coherence
of a particular nation is in this sense best
understood as an ongoing product and not
the primordial precursor of nationalism. But
while nationalism can therefore be said to
make nations, they are neither illusions nor
invented like works of fiction. Although
Benedict Anderson’s phrase ‘imagined communities’ has sometimes been misinterpreted
as suggesting such an inventive account, in
fact, his emphasis on the politically and
socially constructive work of nationalism in
producing nations is the heart of his muchreprinted book (2006). Nations are imagined,
he argues, because nationalism mobilizes a
strong but abstract sense of community
between distant strangers in a way that
consolidates their identification with both a
common historical inheritance and a shared
national space. This is also why nationalism
is more social than the personal passions of
patriotism and less legal than the regulative
norms of citizenship, even though – as feminist and queer geographers in particular have
underlined – it is clearly interwoven with each
(see Bell and Binnie, 2000; Marston, 1990:
see also feminist geographies).
In the most recent edition of his book,
Anderson reviews its many translations and
globe-trotting travels, further documenting
how nationalism clearly fosters distinct
national cultures of reading, writing, teaching
and communication. He underlines too that
one of his initial intentions in the book (and
one that he thinks accounts for much of its
global popularity) is that it shifted the geographical focus of the study of nationalism away
from europe (and the eurocentrism that
traditional Marxist accounts shared with traditional liberal accounts) and towards various
post-colonial nationalisms of the global
south, including not least of all what he calls
the ‘creole nationalisms’ of the Americas
(a formulation that itself also usefully undermines exceptionalist American arguments
about US republicanism as the uniquely
pioneering prototype of post-colonial nationalism). In making this case, however, Anderson
does not directly address the many ways in
which his arguments have both resonated with
and been advanced by various versions of
post-colonial theory (see post-colonialism).
His own attention to the role of maps and
other geographical depictions in imagining the
communities of nationalism clearly resonates,
for example, with Edward Said’s theoretical
NATION-STATE
concerns with the imaginative geographies of
orientalism; one connection being the ways in
which the cultures of imperialism worked
contrapuntally to construct the modernity
of Euro-American nationalism by constantly
contrasting the supposedly pre-modern
human geographies of their colonies with the
ordered and enframed landscapes of metropolitan museums, exhibitions and textbook
cartographies (Said, 1993, 2003 [1978]; cf.
Mitchell, 1988; Gregory, 1994). Other postcolonial studies of nationalism have advanced
these ideas by problematizing the diverse
geographical arguments and assumptions that
continue to create hierarchies of national
belonging, national achievement and national
blame in the course of imagining community.
Whether it is concerned with the fate of women
on the margins of the post-colonial nation
(Spivak, 1992), or interest in the necessarily
extra-territorial affiliations of anti-racist and
anti-colonial activists (Gilroy, 1993; Singh,
2004), or reflection on the historical tragedies
that have led to geographies of blame for the
so-called failure of post-colonial nationalism in
countries such as Haiti (Scott, 2004; see also
Farmer, 1992), scholarship addressing the
imagined communities of nationalism has increasingly also complicated pre-emptive epistemological assumptions that limit national
history to national geography. At the same
time, work on the ways in which national geography is taught and learned in nationalist teachings themselves has also increasingly sought to
unpack how the performance of nationalism
can both close down and open up opportunities
for imagining territory anew (compare
Bhabha, 1994 with Brückner, 1999; Schulten,
2001; Sparke, 2005). All these post-colonial
questions indicate how nationalism can be
implicated in racialized imaginings of space
and place in both dominative and resistant
ways, an ambivalence that has historically
been one of the reasons why defining nationalism has been so vexing for critical theorists. As
Etienne Balibar puts it, with both a question
and an answer of his own:
Why does it prove to be so difficult to define
nationalism? First, because the concept never
functions alone, but is always part of a chain
in which it is both a central and weak link.
This chain is constantly being enriched . . .
with new intermediate or extreme terms:
civic spirit, patriotism, populism, ethnicism,
ethnocentrism, xenophobia, chauvinism,
imperialism, jingoism . . . (1991, p. 46)
ms
nation-state The combination of national
governance and national governmentality
that emerged as the norm of European statemaking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that spread across the world in the
twentieth century as a basis for post-colonial
state-making in the former colonies of the
global south. In all these contexts, the hyphen
in nation-state has traditionally symbolized
the articulation of nationalism with the
development of the modern state, its sovereignty over territory, and its capacity to
police and administer the spaces contained
by national borders (Giddens, 1985; Sparke,
2005). None of these articulations have ever
been comprehensive and complete, and while
most nation-states presume to govern all
inhabitants as if they were a single nation,
in practice they often also dominate and
marginalize populations who speak minority
languages, identify with minority ethnic communities and/or who live in borderlands
(Flint and Taylor, 2007 [1985]). Thus while
the hyphen in nation-state is considered a conventional and quite unremarkable linguistic
convention, it points to social and political
practices that often put an oppressive line
through the possibility of statehood for ‘subnational’ nations.
The volatile and often violent two-way geographical dynamic between state-making and
nationhood only really became stabilized in
the mid-twentieth century, at the same time
as it was extended through anti-imperial
independence movements across much of the
world (Blaut, 1987). At this point, Fordist
regimes of accumulation in core countries
of the world economy tended to systematize
‘official nationalism’ as a basis for managing
class divisions through redistributive taxation,
state education and welfare administration
(see fordism). And in the global south,
nationalism meanwhile served to rally popular
support for new post-colonial development
initiatives based on import substitution –
albeit ironically also sometimes being twisted
into neo-imperial projects of quelling the
resistance of unofficial nationalism (Trouillot, 1990). But even at this high point of
the nation-state as a container of politics,
the hyphenated hybrid was wracked by the
geopolitical tensions of the cold war and
global uneven development (Taylor, 1994a).
Even the institutions of international
relations where nation-states were supposedly represented in their full normative
and sovereign roles simultaneously revealed
their precariousness: the United Nations was
489
NATURAL RESOURCES
famously described in 1977, for example, as
‘little more than the meeting place for representatives of disunited states’ (Seton-Watson,
1977). It is scarcely surprising, therefore,
that today, while we have by no means arrived
at the end of the nation-state, as business-class
globalists advertise (e.g. Ohmae, 1995), we
are seeing nation and state being pulled
apart in the context of recent rounds of
globalization.
Macro forms of state-making are increasingly
becoming transnational in their scale of organization in concert with the entrenchment of
neo-liberalism as the dominant free-market
model of governance (Peet, 2003; Harvey,
2005). Meanwhile, micro models of neo-liberal
governmentality that promote entrepreneurial forms of subjectivity and benchmarking
approaches to place-making come together in
context-contingent ways with global market
forces to create new assemblages of identity,
affiliation and citizenship that are no longer so
clearly bound-up in the nation-state (Mitchell,
2004a; Ong and Collier, 2005). If the nationstate is not dead, it is clear that it is being
remade in different ways in different places by
both roll-out and roll-back forms of neo-liberalism; it is becoming redefined as the managed
mediator of neo-liberal hegemony (Peck and
Tickell, 2002): on the one hand, a relentless
enforcer of free trade rules and neo-liberal
governance in arenas ranging from land management to regional development to workfare to
the warfare of the coalition of the billing; and,
on the other hand, a bulwark of the status quo
and an excuse for business as usual when
non-neo-liberal visions of development, debt
relief, women’s rights and environmental
protection are proposed at transnational and
subnational scales (Public Citizen, 2007).
Meanwhile, social relations and identifications
are themselves also becoming remade and
re-territorialized by the globalizing forces. The
accelerated flows of tourists, migrants, money,
information, movies, sports and news programmes are challenging the old print media of
national consciousness, and turning the hyphen
in nation-state into more of an index of disjuncture (Appadurai, 1996). All these changes have
not (notwithstanding Hardt and Negri, 2000)
led to the complete eclipse of the nation-state by
a new global empire, but they have led to the
withering of the national state as an institutional
enabler of national democracy, and they have
therefore made the search for new transnational
convergence spaces for of democracy all the
more urgent (Routledge, 2003: see also transnationalism).
ms
490
natural resources Conventionally, this term
refers to biophysical materials that satisfy
human wants and provide direct inputs to
human well-being. The term may, however,
be defined more broadly to include any component of the non-human world that performs
a socially valuable function. Natural resources
are the product of geological, hydrological and
biological processes: the adjective ‘natural’
denotes this location anterior to human labour.
It is for this reason that classical political
economy described as ‘gifts of nature’ the
raw materials and productive energies of the
non-human world.
A distinctive vocabulary is available for differentiating the qualities and properties of a
vast range of natural resources. A primary distinction is between exhaustible (stock) and
renewable (flow) resources, based on the
potential of different biophysical materials to
regenerate (see figure). For stock resources, a
secondary distinction is between materials that
are consumed by use and cannot be recovered
(such as fuels) and those that may be recycled
(most applications of metals). Flow resources
may be subdivided according to whether use
of the resource subtracts from the amount
and/or quality of the resource base: for socalled ambient resources, use of the resource
degrades neither the amount nor quality (e.g.
solar radiation, wind, waves). For other flow
resources, there is a threshold beyond which
further consumption exceeds the capacity of
the resource to regenerate: these ‘critical zone’
resources can be ‘mined’ to depletion/extinction (e.g. ground water, fish, game species).
Basic distinctions such as these have underpinned the development of different models for
managing renewable and non-renewable resources (see resource management). Recent
developments in the biological sciences and
the so-called ‘new ecology’, however, have
thrown into question many of the assumptions
that underlie these models, and have drawn
attention to the non-linear behaviour of many
ecological systems and their capacity for
‘surprise’ (Botkin, 1990). At the same time,
environmental economics has re-framed
many of the questions surrounding natural
resources in terms of the management of
‘ecological capital,’ a new vocabulary that
facilitates the commensurability of the nonhuman world.
From both an historical and a philosophical
perspective, ‘natural resources’ are a significant
misnomer. First, the practices of exploration,
surveying, measurement and experimentation
by which natural resources come to be known
NATURALISM
FLOW
STOCK
Consumed
by use
Oil
Gas
Coal
Theoretically
recoverable
All
elemental
minerals
Recyclable
Critical zone
Fish
Metallic
minerals
Forests
Animals
Soil
Water in
aquifers
Non-critical
zone
Solar
energy
Tides
Wind
Waves
Water
Air
Flow resources
used to extinction
Critical zone resources
become stock once
regenerative capacity
is exceeded
natural resources exhaustible (stock) and renewable (flow) resources (from Rees, 1991)
(‘discovered’) highlight their deeply social
origins. Second, resources are a dynamic category: different parts of the non-human world
slip into (uranium, coltan) and out of (alum,
flint, osiers, guano) this category across time
and place (see resources). The remarkable
history of natural gas, for example, demonstrates how a single substance may be considered as variously hazardous waste, ‘neutral stuff’
or a valuable natural resource, depending on
knowledge, price, social norms and expectations
(regarding pollution), and the availability of
alternatives. geography continues to make
contributions to the practical art and science of
managing natural resources, but there is also a
robust tradition of critical enquiry that acknowledges how ‘natural resources are not naturally
resources’ (Hudson, 2001).
gb
Suggested reading
Bakker and Bridge (2006); Rees (1991).
naturalism Apart from the denial of the existence of God or the rejection of the Cartesian
dualism of mind and body, the term ‘naturalism’
is nowadays commonly used to mark one’s
acceptance of a scientific philosophy (see philosophy; science). An overwhelming majority
of Anglo-American philosophers claim to subscribe to some form of naturalism. From the
vantage point of contemporary philosophy, naturalism is the twofold view that: (1) everything is
composed of natural entities – those studied in
science – whose properties determine the properties of things, including persons and abstract
mathematical objects; and (2) that science consists essentially in the registration of (or refutation of claims about) empirical invariances
between discrete events, states of affairs and the
like. This view, which can be aptly termed
‘scientific naturalism’, argues the strong claim
that natural science provides a true or essential
picture of nature. More contentious versions of
scientific naturalism or scientism assert that it is
the only true picture. Thus, in the words of
Wilfred Sellars, ‘science is the measure of all
things, of what is that it is, of what is not that it
is not’ (1963, p. 173). Scientific naturalism
contends that the great successes of the modern
natural sciences in predicting, controlling and
explaining natural phenomena – mathematical
physics and Darwin’s theory of evolution are
exemplars – imply that the natural sciences’
conception of nature is very likely to be true
and, moreover, that this is our only bona fide or
unproblematic conception of nature.
Importantly, scientific naturalism rejects
any goal of First Philosophy – which claims,
as in Cartesian or Kantian thought, to provide
the epistemological and metaphysical foundations for the natural sciences. Instead, scientific naturalism takes the resolutely Humean
stance that the human is simply a part of
nature, not set over against it. This in turn
denies the possibility of a First Philosophy
prior to the natural sciences, such that philosophy can no longer claim to be the master
discipline that sits in judgment over the claims
of natural sciences or supplies the foundations
for their operation. Instead, philosophy is
491
NATURE
rendered continuous with science: it is science
in its general and abstract reaches. A further
implication for the social sciences is an essential unity of method with the natural sciences
and, in some formulations, an actual identity
of subject matter as well.
The philosopher Roy Bhaskar, whose work
has been influential for several radical geographers, counterposes ‘critical naturalism’ to
scientific naturalism and its thesis of continuity between the social and natural sciences. He
instead asserts that ‘ontological, epistemological and relational considerations all place
limits on the possibility of naturalism (or
rather, qualify the form it must take); and
that these considerations all carry methodological import’ (1998 [1979], p. 3; author’s
italics). Thus, Bhaskar denies that natural
and social objects are alike in their make-up;
rejects empirical realism (Humean epistemology) in favour of transcendental or critical
realism as the protocol of knowledge more
appropriate to the human sciences; and offers
Marx’s analysis in Capital as paradigmatic of
a substantive use of this transcendental
procedure (see realism).
Baruch Spinoza’s naturalism is worth a mention, given his current resurgence within
human geography and allied fields. While
the renewal proximately derives from studies
on Spinoza by scholars such as Gilles Deleuze,
Antonio Negri, Genevieve Lloyd and Louis
Althusser, their wide uptake by human geographers suggests a desire for an ethics and
politics of interaction rooted in an immanentist
ontology – that is to say, an affirmative ontology
of connections between human and nonhuman entities that (a) denies any prior
separation of nature and society, (b) rejects
any form of transcendence (God or otherwise)
as source of an authorizing design or telos for
society, and (c) maintains that combinations of
bodies are all there is, and our ethical–political
task is to dare to strive for sameness in ways
unknown.
vg
Suggested reading
Bhaskar (1998); De Caro and Macarthur (2004);
Lloyd and Gatens (1999); Negri (2000).
nature A term with three main meanings:
the essence or defining property of something;
a material realm untouched by human activity; and
the entire living world, of which the human
species is a part.
492
These meanings often overlap and are
sometimes contradictory. They are used in,
and reproduced through, everyday speech
as well as artistic and scientific discourses.
This multivalency led the cultural critic
Raymond Williams to observe that ‘nature is
perhaps the most complex word in the
[English] language’ (1983 [1976], p. 221)
and that a history of its changing use would
amount to a history of a large part of human
thought (ibid., p. 225). Something of these
complexities and histories can be glimpsed by
juxtaposing two Anglo-Western attitudes to
nature that are 300 years apart. The leading
British political commentator John Locke,
writing in the late seventeenth century,
as the European settlement of North America
got under way, made the following observation:
In the first ages of the world men were more
in danger to be lost, by wandering from their
company, in the then vast wilderness of the
earth, than to be straitened for want of room
to plant in. And the same measure may be
allowed still without prejudice to anybody,
as full as the world seems. (Locke, 1988
[1690], p. 294)
Writing in the late twentieth century, as climate change entered global public consciousness, the North American environmental
observer Bill McKibben articulates a very
different vision:
An idea, a relationship, can go extinct just
like an animal or a plant. The idea in this
case is ‘nature’, the separate and wild province, the world apart from man. [ . . . ] By
changing the weather, we make every spot
on earth man-made and artificial. We have
deprived nature of its independence and
that is fatal to its meaning. (McKibben,
1990, pp. 48 and 58)
As both of these accounts suggest, there is a
powerful geographical imaginary associated
with the idea of nature, particularly with the
second of the three meanings identified above.
This geographical imaginary translates the categorical opposition between things attributable to nature and those attributable to
human society into a spatial purification, in
which nature is understood as a pristine wilderness – a space–time outside or before the
presence (or taint) of human settlement or
activity (Cronon, 1995). It is an imaginary
with very real consequences as it is taken up
and reproduced through scientific, political
and legal practices (Delaney, 2003).
NATURE
Alongside space and place, the question of
nature is one of the most central and enduring
of geographical concerns (Fitzsimmons, 1989).
As every undergraduate knows, geography
stakes its disciplinary identity on being uniquely
concerned with the interface between natural
environments and human cultures. Nowhere is
this better epitomized than in the work of Carl
Ortwin Sauer in the 1920s and the legacy of
the berkeley school, with its emphasis on
cultural landscape in which ‘culture is the
agent [and] the natural area the medium’
(Sauer, 1963b [1925], p. 343). However, even
here, it is evident that this definitive geographical concern has tended to be cast in terms that
engage the world as if it were already divided
up into things belonging either to nature or to
culture, a division entrenched in the very
fabric of the discipline and reinforced by the
sometimes faltering conversation between
human and physical geographers (see geography; physical geography).
In consequence, as human geographers set
about trafficking between nature and culture,
a fundamental asymmetry in the treatment of
things assigned to these categories has been
smuggled in to the enterprise. Geographies,
like histories, become stories of exclusively
human achievement played out over, and
through, a seemingly indifferent medium of
matter and objects made up of everything
else. Such stories percolate through diverse
currents in human geography. These include
marxist accounts which advance the apparently contradictory idea of the ‘production
of nature’, arguing that more and more of
the things we are accustomed to think of as
natural – from resources to landscapes –
have increasingly become refashioned as the
products of human labour (e.g. Mitchell,
1996; Gandy, 2002). Such accounts identify
this intensifying social capacity to produce
nature as second nature, a distinct phase in
the historical development of nature–culture
relations that supersedes its original or
‘God-given’ state – first nature (Smith, 1990).
Equally, they include cultural accounts that
explore postmodern theories to understand
better the ways in which our ways of seeing
nature are always mediated and shaped by
representational practices and devices – from
cartographic surveys to wildlife film-making (e.
g. Wilson, 1992). These accounts emphasize
the politics of representation, recognizing
that representational processes are instrumental in constituting our sense of what the natural
world is like, rather than merely a mirror image
of a fixed external reality. In consequence, such
accounts suggest, multiple and often incompatible representations of the same natural
phenomena or event can and do coexist (e.g.
Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988).
Whether their emphasis has been on
nature’s material transformation or on its
changing meaning, these are geographies
whose only subject or active inhabitants are
people, while everything else is consigned to
nature and becomes putty in our hands. In
this, human geography’s long march from
environmental determinism to social constructionism seems to have brought us to the
same place as that identified by the environmentalist Bill McKibben as the ‘end of nature’
(see Castree, 2005a). This humanist stance is
premised on two working assumptions (see
humanism). The first is that the collective
‘us’ of human society is somehow always already removed from the rest of the world, for
only by placing it a priori at a distance can
human society be (re)connected to everything
else on such asymmetrical terms as those between producer and product, or viewer and
view (Ingold, 2000). The second is that in
different ways the generative energies of the
Earth itself, in rivers, soils, weather and oceans
and the living plants and creatures assigned to
‘nature’, are effectively evacuated from the
terms of these analyses (Haraway, 1991c).
Such assumptions do not square with the anguish and infrastructure of existential concern
that characterize the twenty-first century. In
unimaginable and unforeseen ways, the forcefulness of all manner of things has come to
make itself felt in our social lives and political
agendas. From climate change to mad cow
disease, there is a growing sense that our
worldly interactions with, and indifference to,
more-than-human forces and entities are
returning to haunt us. Since the last edition
of this Dictionary was published (2000), a
major thrust of work in human, particularly
cultural, geography has been to challenge
these premises and rethink the ‘human’, and
the status of the ‘non-human’, in the fabric of
human geography (Whatmore, 2002b).
Much of this work has drawn inspiration
from post-structuralist philosophies relatively new to geography, through intermediaries such as science and technology studies
(STS) (see Hinchliffe, 2007). The argument
advanced here is that what we are experiencing is less a ‘crisis of nature’ and more a ‘crisis
of objectivity’, in which the things ascribed
to nature are refusing to stay passively in their
boxes and are assuming their irrepressible
part in the possibilities and achievements of
493
NEIGHBOURHOOD
social agency that had been falsely ascribed
exclusively to humans (Latour, 2004, p. 21).
Taking up this argument, human geographers
have been exploring the intricate and dynamic
ways in which people, technologies, organisms
and geophysical processes are woven together
in the making and remaking of spaces, places
and landscapes. Three of the most important
currents in recent work in this vein have been
those addressing post-colonial, animal and
bodily reframings of what matters, what must
be taken into account, in the making of human
geographies.
The first current is concerned with showing
that the idea of nature as a pristine space outside society is an historical fallacy. This idea is
so pervasive today that it is difficult for many
of us to recognize it as a particular and contestable way of seeing the world. A specific
concern has been to expose the ways in
which the presence of native peoples was
actively erased from the landscapes that came
to be seen as wilderness in colonial European
eyes (see colonialism), and that are now revered by many environmentalists as remnants
of ‘pristine’ nature (e.g. Braun, 2002). The
second current extends this historical repudiation of the separation of human society and
the natural world by paying close attention to
the mixed-up mobile lives of people, plants
and animals in everyday life time out of
mind. Here, animals have become a vehicle
for opening up the ways in which non-human
creatures have long been caught up in all manner of social networks, from farming to wildlife, in ways that disconcert our assumptions
about their, and our, ‘natural’ place in the
world. The third, and perhaps most provocative, current of work in this vein explores the
bodily as an important site for geographical
research in which the human, quite as much
as the non-human, is molten in the heat of
technological achievements that recombine
the qualities associated with these categories
in new forms ranging from transgenic organisms to bionic enhancements (e.g. Thrift,
2005a: see also body; cyborg).
sw
neighbourhood An urban area dominated
by residential uses. While no fixed scale can
be assigned, neighbourhoods have traditionally been understood to be relatively small or
walkable, although they may vary considerably
in terms of population (Martin, 2003).
Neighbourhood has long been conflated with
the notion of community as described in the
work of the chicago school sociologists.
Neighbourhood is the more explicitly territorial
494
concept of the two. Efforts at defining and using
the term ‘neighbourhood’ fall roughly into four
areas: typologies (identifying primary neighbourhood characteristics); neighbourhood
change; neighbourhood effects; and as a territory for political action (Martin, 2003).
Typologies of neighbourhoods draw upon
and also echo the conflation with community
in the Chicago School approach. These combine physical and social features of territories within cities in order to classify each area
as some type (Hunter, 1979). The features
included in such typologies include race and
ethnicity, religion, family status, and class
of the area population, housing tenure, age
and other infrastructure characteristics.
Neighbourhood types can then be correlated
with neighbourhood change over time, drawing
upon the notion of mobility associated with
the Chicago School and from invasion and
succession.
Neighbourhood change focuses on both population and infrastructure. Population may
change by one or more measures (such as
dominant ethnicity or household structure)
due to residential mobility (where people
move to a different area within a city or a
different location entirely). A neighbourhood’s
physical infrastructure changes due to
decline (due to age or active disinvestment)
or renewed investment (as with urban renewal or gentrification).
‘neighbourhood effects’ approaches investigate neighbourhoods as loci of social
norms that shape individual attitudes, experiences and health (Hunter, 1979; Ellaway,
Macintyre and Kearns, 2001). This literature
seeks to link individual outcomes with local
social and physical conditions. For example,
Ellaway, Macintyre and Kearns (2001) found
that individuals perceive their health differently depending upon physical conditions of
the neighbourhood. However, Mandanipour,
Cars and Allen (2000) argued that structural
exclusions of the poor (e.g. uneven access to
resources, due to segregation) are more
powerful forces in an individual’s life chances
than local cultural factors.
An approach that highlights the contingency
of any definition of neighbourhood upon local
context and/or scholarly purpose is that of
conceptualizing neighbourhood as a territory for
political action (Martin, 2003). In this conceptualization, neighbourhoods are constituted
by practice: daily life and particular social
and political claims, which are dynamic over
time and space. The particular meaning of
neighbourhood – as a social community or
NEO-CLASSICAL ECONOMICS
historical district, for example – will be articulated and deployed according to the people
involved and issues at stake. As the other
three approaches suggest, ‘neighbourhood’ is
a term that is highly dependent upon the particular location in which it is embedded,
the local political and social culture, and the
perspective of the individual experiencing or
observing the neighbourhood.
dgm
Suggested reading
Mitchell (1993); Urban Studies (2001).
neighbourhood effect A type of contextual effect whereby the characteristics of
people’s local social milieux influence the
ways in which they think and act. Neighbours
present individuals with models of attitudes
and practices that may either: (a) conform to
their own, and so reinforce their self-identity
and behaviour; or (b) contradict them and suggest alternatives that they may adopt, especially
if there is considerable pressure to do so.
The search for neighbourhood effects has
been especially characteristic of electoral
geography, with a number of studies showing
greater spatial polarization of, for example,
support for a political party in an area than
suggested by its residents’ characteristics.
Most of those studies use aggregate data, however, and may involve an ecological fallacy.
Relatively little is known about the processes
that generate the observed patterns, although
the importance of interpersonal influence is
often assumed, generating what is known as
‘conversion through conversation’. Similar
effects are postulated in the spread of other
attitudes and behaviour patterns, in education, for example.
rj
Suggested reading
Johnston and Pattie (2006).
neighbourhood unit A relatively self-contained urban residential area. Most units are
in planned residential developments, either
suburban districts or new towns and similar
settlements.
The concept of a neighbourhood unit was
first deployed in Chicago in 1916 and formalized by Clarence Perry (1872–1944) in 1929.
It suggested the importance of scale in planning residential areas: each neighbourhood
unit should be of sufficient size that it was
relatively self-contained for certain functions –
primary schools and daily shopping, for example – and should develop as an integrated
community. British garden cities were
planned with neighbourhood units of about
5,000 persons: all unit facilities were within
walking distance and motorized transport
largely excluded.
Although the general concept continues to
underpin some urban planning, the assumption that people wish to constrain parts of their
daily/weekly lives to such relatively small
bounded territories has generated criticism,
while greater reliance on personal transport
has broken down the utility of such a cellular
division of urban space.
rj
Suggested reading
Hall (2002).
neo-classical economics A school of economics defined by the study of rational
economic choice and the price-based optimal
allocation of resources, using a body of analytically rigorous and mathematically sophisticated theory and techniques. It is the school of
economics, at least in Anglo-America,
ubiquitous, hegemonic and mainstream. The
economist Roy Weintraub says, ‘we are all
neoclassicists now’.
Robbins (1932, p. 16) provided the iconic
methodological definition of neo-classicism:
‘a science which studies human behaviour as
a relationship between ends and scarce means
which have alternative uses’. The origins of
neo-classicism are earlier, however, with the
writings of a troika of late-nineteenth-century
European economists: the Englishman William Stanley Jevons (1835–82), the Austrian
Carl Menger (1840–1921) and the Frenchman Léon Walras (1834–1910). Alfred
Marshall (1842–1924), the first economist at
Cambridge, codified, systematized and elaborated their works (including inventing supply
and demand diagrams: see figure) in his
enormously influential textbook Principles of
economics (published in eight editions between
1890 and 1920). After the Second World War,
the centre of neo-classical economics crossed
the Atlantic to the USA, taking its now familiar abstract, mathematical form. A key influence was MIT’s Paul Samuelson (1915– ), the
second winner of the Nobel Prize in economics (1970), and author of the canonical text
of formal neo-classical theory, Foundations of
economic analysis (1947).
Neo-classical economics is neither monolithic nor static, but there are a number of
core concerns that continually surface:
(1) The focus on rational economic
choice, the belief that individuals have
495
NEO-GEOGRAPHY
both the mental agility and access to information to obtain the most for the
least, and applying both to consumers
who maximize utility, and producers
who maximize profits.
(2) A concern with determining conditions
for equilibrium. Rational responses by
producers and consumers to market signals produce equilibrium such that there
is no incentive for any individual to
change their decision: market equilibrium is the solution to the problem of
individual maximization.
(3) An emphasis on defining competitive
market efficiency such that there is an
optimal allocation of resources among
competing uses. If not, there is competitive market failure, requiring correction.
(4) An assertion of the methodological sovereignty of independent, rational individuals, and who form the back-stop of
neo-classical explanation. Everything –
institutions, firms, social classes – is reducible to the law of individual rational
choice (methodological individualism).
Criticisms of neo-classical economics are
endless. They include objections that neoclassicism is nothing but an ideology, a sop
for market capitalism; that the rational choice
assumption is empirically false, logically inconsistent and morally suspect; that equilibrium, with its assumption that time has
stopped, holds at best in Heaven and never
on Earth; that society is always more than
the sum of its rational agents (there is such a
thing as society); and that the use of mathematics is primarily for internal sociological
purposes and not for meeting scholarly ends
(even Samuelson said that his intensive knowledge of mathematics made him feel like an
Olympic-trained athlete with no race to run).
Neo-classical economics entered economic
geography as part of the quantitative revolution from the late 1950s, and also at the
same time through an allied movement,
regional science (King, 1979). The central
intellectual problem was to introduce space to
a theoretical system that had never systematically included it. While economic geographers and regional scientists made attempts to
do so via location theory, there always
remained fundamental problems in couching
neo-classical competitive equilibrium models
within an economy distributed over space (see
space-economy), because the spatial constitution of an economy inherently confers monopolistic advantage. Consequently, the core
496
Price
Supply
Demand
Quantity
neo-classical economics
Supply and demand
neo-classical postulate of competitive market
efficiency is violated (see (3) above). This is
yet another example of what Harvey (1985b,
p. 142) identifies as the ‘numbing effect’ of
space on the ‘central propositions of any social
theory’. In any case, economic geographers
were never as mathematically astute as neoclassical economists, nor did most of them
share their penchant for abstraction and rigour. Consequently, the importation of neoclassical theory was frequently half-hearted,
incomplete and prone to mistakes. From the
late 1990s, there was a second-wave attempt
to link economic geography to neo-classicism
through the new economic geography, but
this has been even more unsuccessful as measured by the degree of disciplinary acceptance
than in the first go-around.
tb
Suggested reading
Robinson (1962).
neo-geography A term – coined by a nongeographer – referring to the bespoke creation
of maps using the internet, involving the
shared use of mapping resources (such as
Google Maps and geographical information systems) to which information is added.
Those bespoke maps can incorporate a range
of other materials to illustrate the characteristics of individual places – such as photographs. It is seen as part of a movement that
is de-professionalizing cartography and making map construction feasible for a wide range
of users. Such construction can involve the
input of data from devices such as global
positioning systems – allowing, for example,
the real-time mapping of journeys and tracking of movements.
rj
Suggested reading
Turner (2006). See also http://platial.com/splash
and http://neogeography.net/
NEO-LIBERALISM
neo-liberalism A doctrine, loosely conceived, that argues for the desirability of a
society organized around self-regulating
markets, and free, to the extent possible, from
social and political intervention (Cypher and
Dietz, 1997, pp. 222–32). The term came into
prominence in the 1980s, especially in latin
america, where it referred to agendas imposed
by leaders such as Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet – who, with backing from US-trained
economists, opened the economy to foreign
investors while pushing economic deregulation
and privatization of state enterprises – and
to the forms of restructuring promoted
under Margaret Thatcher in the UK and
Ronald Reagan in the USA (Harvey, 2005,
pp. 7–9). The US government, along with the
international monetary fund (IMF), the
World Bank and the world trade organization (WTO), has aggressively promoted the
policies associated with neo-liberalism; and
with the collapse of socialist and communist
projects since the 1980s, US leaders asserted
broad agreement over neo-liberalism under
the heading of ‘the Washington Consensus’.
Notwithstanding this geographical locus,
neo-liberal policies have gained adherents
around the world (Toye, 1987).
Neo-liberalism can be analysed in various
ways, including as a set of theoretical propositions, as a variety of actual practices and as a
manifestation of specific social interests. As a
set of theoretical propositions, neo-liberalism
is to its advocates an update of basic ideas
about economic and social life that the classical liberal theorists of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries put forward (see liberalism). Neo-liberals cite favourably Adam
Smith’s contentions about the capacity of
markets to regulate themselves and to produce greater social prosperity than mercantilism (Smith, 1976 [1776]), as well as David
Ricardo’s arguments for the greater aggregate
prosperity that trade specialization can produce, based upon comparative advantage
and minimal tariff barriers (Ricardo, 1992).
Theorists such as Friederich von Hayek and
Milton Friedman (Friedman, 2002 [1962];
Hayek, 1981) reworked these ideas and used
them to argue against a range of Keynesian
economic policies – especially social welfare
and counter-cyclical government spending
policies – that had become prominent in Western countries since the Great Depression of
the 1930s. Their arguments, however, did
not gain substantial support in governing circles until the 1970s, when some of them came
to be advertised as part of the theoretical basis
for the policies of the New Right (Harvey,
2005, pp. 19–31).
As policy, many neo-liberal practices differ
from the theories (Peck and Tickell, 2002;
Harvey, 2005, pp. 70–81). While neo-liberals
have argued the virtues of minimalist or
‘night-watchman’ states, the states that have
most aggressively promoted neo-liberalism
have often been far from non-interventionist.
Pinochet’s military dictatorship provided a
model that was to be replicated in many
other developing countries undergoing IMFmandated structural adjustment policies,
imposing specific forms of economic liberalization through a strong state that engaged in
political repression. Similarly, neo-liberal reforms in China have been accomplished under
a one-party state that exercises strict control
over various aspects of social and economic
life. Moreover, actual neo-liberal economic
measures have typically been selective and
uneven.
Contradictions between theoretical propositions and actual practice lead some commentators to argue that neo-liberalism is best seen not
as a fully coherent doctrine, consistently applied, but as a reflection of the class interests
of particular capitalists and their allies (Duménil and Lévy, 2004; Harvey, 2005). In this view,
the global economic downturn in the 1960s and
1970s led the most internationally mobile
groups of investors – especially those involved
in international finance – to begin attacking
state policies that were seen as hindering capital mobility and reducing profit rates.
Through both reinvesting capital abroad and
advertising the allegedly undesirable effects of
regulations on capital mobility, these investors
attempted to restore profitability by driving
down wages and production costs in core areas
of the global economy, selectively making use of
lower wages, production costs and emerging
markets in countries of the global south.
These efforts to restore profitability through
neo-liberal globalization have been partially
successful, but they have also generated
various forms of backlash. First, the attacks
on state programmes that enhance social welfare have generated responses from popular
forces that see neo-liberalism as antithetical
to improved life chances for the least privileged members of society (Harvey, 2003b,
pp. 137–82; Harvey, 2005, pp. 198–206).
Second, neo-liberalism has come under increasing attack from within the ranks of the
elite after Washington Consensus policies
were seen to have been inappropriately applied
during the Asian economic crisis of 1997–8
497
NEO-RICARDIAN ECONOMICS
(Stiglitz, 2002, pp. 89–132). Third, the rise of
neo-conservatives to power in Washington
since 2000 has generated new contradictions,
since many supporters of neo-conservatism
claim in principle to favour free trade while
openly calling for high tariff barriers and
other forms of protection for national industries threatened by foreign competition
(Harvey, 2005, pp. 81–6).
The purported hegemony of US-led global
neo-liberalism – the neo-liberal grand slam as
one commentator put it – came crashing to a
halt in late 2008 with the failure of a number of
major US investment banks, the bankruptcy of
a number of insurance houses, the discrediting
of the credit rating agencies and the Security
and Exchange Commission (purportedly organizations designed to regulate financial institutions) and a $700 billion bailout by the
outgoing Bush administration. While triggered
by a US housing bubble and a crisis in the
mortgage industry, the crisis quickly became
global in scope. It remains unclear whether
massive infusions from central banks will unfreeze the credit sector, and most commentators expect the world economy to enter into a
deep recession comparable perhaps to that of
the 1930s. The high tide of neo-liberalism has
passed, and many of the G8 countries now
openly talk of the need for Keynesianism and
more government regulation.
jgl
Suggested reading
Cypher and Dietz (1997); Duménil and Lévy
(2004); Friedman (2002 [1962]); Harvey
(2003b, 2005); Hayek (1981); Peck and Tickell
(2002); Ricardo (1992); Smith (1976 [1776]);
Stiglitz (2002); Toye (1987).
neo-Ricardian economics A modern school
of economics that draws upon and reworks the
ideas of the English classical economist David
Ricardo (1772–1823). The founding text is a
slim monograph by an Italian economist at
Cambridge University, Piero Sraffa (1898–
1983), The production of commodities by means
of commodities (1960). Sraffa’s model of the
economy consists of two components:
(1) Production is conceived as circular and
interdependent where the output in one
production period is used as an input for
the next production period.
(2) When outputs exceed inputs, a ‘‘surplus’’ exists that forms the basis of the
social conditions of income distribution.
Sraffa subtitled his book Prelude to a critique
of economic theory. Although he did not engage
498
in the critique himself, his model has provided
the basis for subsequent criticisms of both
neo-classical economics and marxist economics. These were first taken up in the ‘capital controversy’, where the neo-classical
theory of profit (profit is the marginal product
of capital) was shown to be logically untenable, and later in the ‘value controversy’,
where the Marxist labour theory of value
was shown to be redundant in calculating
prices. A number of economic geographers
have elaborated Sraffa’s work since Scott’s
(1976b) pioneering paper linking Süraffa’s
model of production with von thünen’s theory of agricultural rent. But the formal, minimalist style of Neo-Ricardianism is out of
synch with the more expansive, empirically
grounded, and less formal economic geography of today, and connections have been
few, and even more rarely taken further. tb
Suggested reading
Sheppard and Barnes (1990).
network society A term coined by Manuel
Castells (1996b, 1997, 1998) in an influential
trilogy of books to describe globalizing societies dominated by accelerated economic,
cultural and social flows, mediated predominantly by information technologies (see also
globalization). The trilogy explored the
growth of networked enterprises, global processes of social exclusion and the changing
nature of time and space, identity and state
formation. Its key argument was that network
societies are dominated by a separation of the
space of flows – the globalized and accelerated
domains that are orchestrated through new
information and communications technologies – from the space of places – geographically
confined sources of individual and collective
identity.
sg
Suggested reading
Castells (1996b).
network(s) A particular kind of spatial
arrangement that consists of a collection of
linked elements which typically exhibit a decentred and non-hierarchical form. With the
word ever more ubiquitous in popular, business and academic usage, it is increasingly
important to recognize that the proliferation
of the basic topological metaphor of the network can conceal a range of very different
analytical commitments, both explicit and
implicit. At least the following approaches
may be usefully distinguished, each with
NEW ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY
their different main constituents/actors, types
of relation foregrounded and methods of
analysis:
(1) Infrastructural technically based networks, such as electrical, road, rail, sewerage and telecommunications systems,
can be described according to their
density, connectedness and orientation
(Haggett, 1969: see infrastructure).
(2) social networks, such as kinship,
friendship and communities, have historically been analysed both quantitatively
by social network analysis and more
qualitatively using tools derived from
social anthropology (Strathern, 1996).
(3) Network-based models of organization
have tended to merge the distinctive features of the previous two approaches, as
the nature of collectives from the informal and local to formal and global are
increasingly seen as exhibiting this kind
of form (Castells, 1996b; Barry, 2001).
(4) Finally, actor-networks (Latour, 1993)
are the distributed forms of agency that
emerge from articulation of humans and
non-humans as seen by practitioners of
the conceptual approach that originated
in science and technology studies
(STS) and is known as actor-network
theory.
nb
neural networks Methods of finding solutions to a range of technical problems using
computer algorithms based on models of the
human brain. The networks are ‘trained’ to
find solutions to new problems by being
given exemplars on which to base their decisions, such as which category to assign an
individual observation to when the category
boundaries are fuzzy (cf. fuzzy sets). The
approach is particularly valuable in various
forms of pattern recognition and classification
and is widely used in remote sensing studies
for classifying segments of the Earth’s surface
according to their land cover (Foody, 1996).
The spectral signatures of different land-cover
types vary, and many small areas for which
data are obtained contain a mixture of types.
The goal is to allocate each observation unit
(pixel) to a relatively homogeneous category.
‘Training’ sites are defined, using synthetic
pixels with homogeneous land cover, and the
neural network algorithm, through an iterative
procedure, allocates all of the observed pixels
to the type it most closely resembles. It is then
possible to estimate the proportion of the land
surface under different types of cover.
A similar approach has been suggested for
classification of socio-economic data. Very
few small areas – such as census tracts – are
homogeneous in their population characteristics so clear boundaries between types of
area cannot be defined a priori on other than
pragmatic grounds (e.g. use of quartiles); they
are the same as pixels with mixed land
uses. Using neural network approaches,
ideal types are defined (with different levels
of homogeneity and mixtures, for example)
and the individual tracts are allocated to
those they most resemble (Mitchell, Martin
and Foody, 1998).
rj
Suggested reading
Openshaw and Openshaw (1997).
New Economic Geography An approach associated primarily with a group of American
neo-classical economists (see neo-classical
economics) who from the early 1990s sought
to apply theoretical rigour, analytical methods
and econometric (statistical) techniques to a
space-economy. Such interest was surprising,
given economists’ historical attachment to
an a-spatial economy, to ‘a wonderland of
no dimensions’ (Isard, 1956, p. 25). For Paul
Krugman (1995a, p. 33), however, the economist most central to the movement, the New
Economic Geography was ‘a vision on the road
to Damascus’: ‘I suddenly realised that I had
spent my whole professional life . . . thinking
and writing about economic geography, without being aware of it’ (Krugman, 1991, p. 1).
Krugman’s epiphany was that the analytical
framework he previously deployed to understand international trade was perfect for comprehending economic geography: ‘Economic
geography, like . . . trade theory, is largely
about increasing returns and multiple equilibria. The technical tricks needed to make
models tractable are often the same’
(Krugman, 1995b, p. 41). That term ‘model’
is critical. While conventional economic geography was ‘a field full of empirical insights,
good stories and obvious practical importance’, it was ‘neglected’ – that is, neglected
by economists – ‘because nobody had seen a
good way to formalize it’ (Krugman, 1995b,
p. 41). Krugman’s project was to take works of
economic geographers and to make them (as
he saw it) intellectually viable by expressing
them in the formal vocabulary of economic
models. As he writes, ‘we will integrate
spatial issues into economics through clever
models . . . that make sense of the insights of
the geographers in a way that meets the formal
499
NEW INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF LABOUR (NIDL)
standards of the economists’ (Krugman,
1995b, p. 88). In his manifesto, Krugman
(2000, p. 51) identifies ‘a slogan’ for his project: ‘Dixit–Stiglitz, icebergs, evolution, and
the computer.’ Dixit–Stiglitz is the ‘clever
model’; icebergs refers to the ‘technical trick’
for introducing transport costs (and hence
geography), evolution points to the dynamic
character of the models (as opposed to the static
kind characterizing traditional location theory), and the computer simulates solutions
for multiple equilibria (Krugman says that his
laptop ‘lets me produce a paper – equations,
simulations and all – in a hotel room over a
weekend . . . ’ (Krugman, 1995a, p. 37).
There was a precedent for the New Economic Geography in regional science,
which was established in the 1950s to apply
rigour, scientific analysis and statistical
methods to a space economy. Unsurprisingly,
given the attempt to occupy the same terrain,
the two movements have an uncomfortable
relation. Krugman implies that regional scientists have yet to find ‘clever models’, while
regional scientists dismiss Krugman’s work
by claiming that ‘it’s obvious, it’s wrong, and
anyway [it was] said years ago’ (Isserman,
1996). The relationship between the New
Economic Geography and economic geography as practised in human geography is
also uneasy. There was an initial flush of
interest represented by the publication of a
joint reader, The Oxford handbook of economic
geography (Clark, Gertler and Feldman,
2000), and a new journal, the Journal of
Economic Geography, which started publishing
in January 2005. Both organs promoted
cross-disciplinary exchange. At least as measured by citation impact scores, the new journal
attracted large numbers of readers from both
economic geography and economics. But
being between the same covers does not
prove intercourse, and Martin’s (1999b,
p. 70) verdict on the New Economic Geography, that it produces a ‘dull sense of déjà vu’,
is still likely to be shared by many economic
geographers. The more than 100-year history
of economic geography is littered with failed
attempts to engage economists. This is turning
out to be another one.
tb
Suggested reading
Martin (1999b).
New International Division of Labour
(NIDL) A recasting of the international division of labour associated with the internationalization of capital and the growth of
500
newly industrializing countries and regions.
In one sense, the term is unhelpful, for the
uneven development of capitalism ensures
that the global division of labour is constantly
changing. As Marx and Engels (2002 [1848])
put it in The communist manifesto, ‘All that is
solid melts into air.’ In another sense, however, the phrase has some merit. Particularly
in the heyday of the Bretton Woods system
(1944–73), neither capital nor labour moved
extensively across the global stage. National
economies were placed squarely at the heart
of an international trading system. This was
partly in response to a reading of the
Depression years and the Second World War.
The Bretton Woods system was meant to protect national space economies in the ‘First
World’ against undue economic and political
turbulence (Corbridge, 1994). When the
Bretton Woods system came undone, it gave
way to high unemployment and inflation.
According to Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye
(1980), many capitalist firms in the West now
had to face the consequences of the postwar
corporatist settlement – a settlement that had
increased returns to labour, including labour
employed by the state, relative to those
returned to capital. Firms could evaporate,
innovate or emigrate. With the emigration of
capital, they reasoned, came a change in the
international division of labour that was distinctive – new – when viewed against the
period from 1950 to 1975.
There is no doubt that the rise of newly
industrialized countries such as Taiwan and
South Korea came as a shock in the 1970s
(see asian miracles/tigers). Some versions
of dependency theory maintained that the
development of the core depended upon the
continued non-industrialization of the periphery. Gunder Frank argued that Taiwan and
South Korea were exceptions to a rule that
still held. They had simply been allowed to
develop by the USA for geopolitical reasons.
Less blinkered theories accepted that geopolitics was part of the story, but they also noted
the way in which the state in both countries
had achieved a degree of relative autonomy
from domestic proprietary classes. They had
used this power to effect land reforms and
proactive industrial policies. In the case of
South Korea, industrial policy was fastened
mainly around large-scale domestic capitals,
including leading banks and chaebol such as
Samsung. In Taiwan, industrial development
was sponsored by networks of small-scale
firms (Kohli, 2004). What NIDL theorists
have added to this mix – and their work has
NOMADISM
been continued by globalization theorists –
is close attention to the ways in which these
new industrial spaces (including high-tech
spaces in Indian cities such as Bangalore and
Hyderabad) are linked to international capital
and consumer markets by firms such as IBM,
Hewlett-Packard and Sony. NIDL theorists
largely discounted the domestic bases of industrial success in the Asian Tiger economies
and important policy differences between
them. They were ahead of the game, however,
in recognizing some of the global shifts set in
motion by the restructuring of capitalism as it
moved into an era of neo-liberalism and deepening time__space compression.
sco
international agencies with large professional
staffs to small groups of unpaid volunteers.
Their functions are diverse and include campaigning, humanitarian relief, development
work, social welfare, cultural activities and
conservation. Many provide services and
programmes on behalf of governments and
intergovernmental organizations and some
have become highly dependent on government
financial support. According to some accounts
they operate in the space between the state
and the private sector and are sometimes misleadingly regarded as synonymous with civil
society.
jpa
Suggested reading
Suggested reading
Townsend, Porter and Mawdsley (2004).
Dicken (2003); Schatz and Venables (2000).
new town A planned town in an area that
previously lacked a substantial urban settlement. Although such planned settlements
can be found throughout history, the term
was first widely used after passage of the
British New Towns Act 1946. The New Town
movement there, based on the earlier garden
city movement and the concept of neighbourhood units, stimulated the creation of a
number of new settlements, most of them outside London, designed to limit urban sprawl
and protect agricultural land (see green belt),
to decentralize population and economic activity and to contribute to rehousing policies
necessitated by both slum clearance in inner
cities and the destruction of much housing
during the Second World War. The first of
those towns was Stevenage, with ten being
created between 1946 and 1950. Eventually,
28 were designated and built, including major
cities such as Milton Keynes, which incorporated several small existing towns.
The model set in the UK has been widely
adopted over the past 60 years, and there are
New Towns in a large number of countries.
Although the utopian ideals of many of the
movement’s originators have not been met –
notably with regard to the creation of relatively
self-contained communities – most new
towns represent relatively high standards of
housing and urban design.
rj
Suggested reading
Hardy (1991); Osborn (1977); Stein (1966).
NGO The acronym for Non-Governmental
Organizations – not-for-profit voluntary associations that seek to act for the public good.
The term covers a variety of bodies from
NIMBY The acronym for ‘Not-In-My-BackYard’, an attitude adopted by individuals
resisting the siting of a source of perceived
negative externalities (such as shelters for
the homeless (see homelessness) and those
recently released from prison) close to their
homes, and campaigning for it to be located
elsewhere (cf. zone of dependence).
rj
nodal region A region whose defining characteristic is the links between its component
parts and one or more focal points. Nodal (or
functional) regions are usually defined using
flow data, as in the definition of hinterlands:
they form the core of Haggett’s (1965) locational analysis schema.
rj
nomadism A livelihood – including hunter–
gathering, pastoralism, begging and commerce – that involves the intra-annual movements of families (or other social production
units), necessitating the displacement of
their dwelling(s). During the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the term was used
more indiscriminately to refer to any livelihood
associated with intra-annual human mobility.
Nomadism has historically elicited both fascination and revulsion (negative connotations of
the terms shiftless, rootless, vagabond, vagrant,
itinerant etc.) within Western culture and
science (see also migrancy). Cultural evolutionists have seen it as a primitive cultural trait,
while environmental determinists and cultural
ecologists have portrayed it as a feature inhibiting the development of complex, hierarchical
political systems (see cultural ecology; environmental determinism). Reflecting this
history, nomadism incorrectly conjures up essentialist notions of wandering and livelihood
501
NOMADOLOGY
stasis. However, studies of nomadic societies
find that their mobility is neither socially nor
ecologically aimless, but rather shaped by the
physical availability of resources and by the
social networks required for security and
maintaining access to these resources.
Moreover, the degree of mobility (rate and distance of displacements) varies significantly
among nomadic households, reflecting the
different opportunities and constraints that
they face.
mt
Suggested reading
Khazanov (1994).
nomadology Although they do not provide
an explicit definition of the term, Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) present
the discipline of nomadology as the opposite
of history, which they associate with a sedentary, state-centric point of view. For Deleuze
and Guattari, the point of nomadology is not a
historical study of nomadic peoples but, rather, a study of different spatial practices.
Unlike the state, the nomadic (or rhizomatic,
see rhizome) ‘war machine’ is understood to
occupy space without ordering, counting or
surveying it. Nomadology is thus the study of
what these philosophers call ‘smooth space’, a
space of creativity, emergent properties and
intensive becomings.
ajs
Suggested reading
Cresswell (1997); Deleuze and Guattari (1987).
nomos The matrix of laws, norms and
conventions that orders conduct within a society. The nomos is: (a) socially constructed,
and so varies over space and time; and (b)
generally accepted, and so serves as a template
for political–moral ordering. The term
emerged with the rise of democracy in fifthcentury Athens, where the political structure
of the classical city-state implied that the nomos
is also (c) spatially articulated (in the sense of a
distribution or assignment of powers). The
term entered geopolitics through the
German jurist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985),
who invoked the concept to argue that in europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
the theological–moral model of the just war
yielded to the secular–juridical model (i.e. the
nomos) of a regulated war between sovereign
states that claimed a monopoly of the legitimate means of violence. Unrestrained
violence was then projected ‘beyond the line’
into the non-European world: ‘Europe sublimate[d] its animality by establishing the
502
americas as an extralegal zone in which bestial deeds [could] be ‘‘acted out’’ far away’
(Rasch, 2003). Schmitt identified this zone
with ‘the state of nature in which everything
is possible’ and with the space of exception
(see exception, space of). He argued that
by the early twentieth century the line had
dissolved, and the wild zones of colonial
violence had appeared within the ruins of the
European order (Schmitt, 2003 [1950]).
Schmitt’s writings have attracted renewed critical attention today, through the bearing of his
political theology on the Bush administration’s
war on terror (see terrorism), and through
the radicalization of his work in the political
philosophy of Giorgio Agamben (see Minca,
2006). In both cases, considerable interest has
attached to Schmitt as ‘above, all, a spatial
thinker’, where the concept of nomos is central
(Dean, 2006, p. 7).
dg
nomothetic Concerned with the universal
and the general. The term derived from the
German philosopher Wilhelm Windelband
who, in 1894, used it to identify one of two
possible goals of concept formation:
The theoretical interests associated with
nomothetic concept formation highlight
those common qualities of objects of experience that lead to the formulation of general
laws of nature. The process is one of continual abstraction in which the special qualities of an object are filtered out and the
object is seen as a general type that exists
with certain relations to other, general types.
(Entrikin, 1991)
Windelband contrasted this with idiographic
concept-formation, which is concerned to
achieve a complete understanding of the individual case (see kantianism; cf. ideal type).
Windelband’s views were considerably more
nuanced than the caricatured oppositions between idiographic and nomothetic that were
propelled into geography after the middle of
the twentieth century. These versions ignored
Windelband’s insistence that both approaches
were directed towards the formation of
analytical concepts. Instead, in the wake
of the Hartshorne–Schaefer exchange over
exceptionalism, the proponents of spatial
science ridiculed regional geography in
particular for its focus on the unique – its
supposedly inherent inability to provide conceptual rigour or intellectual substance – and
claimed that geography should focus on
generalization and work towards the formulation of scientific theories and laws of spatial
NON-REPRESENTATIONAL THEORY
organization. But these caricatures have
largely disappeared, not least through the critique of classical spatial science, the emergence of post-positivist geographies and the
reformulation of regional geography. As
Phillips (2004, p. 40) concluded, ‘the debates
over idiographic/regional interpretive geography versus nomothetic/quantitative/scientific
geography have come and (mostly) gone; contemporary critiques emphasizing contextuality and contingency are with us now’.
dg
discipline’s cultural turn. It responds to two
questions:
non-place A term coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé to describe certain qualities of airports, highways, theme parks,
motels, department stores and shopping
centres, tourist sites and so on. These sites
have in common gatherings of individuals
and groups of people who temporarily
come together at the same site, but who have
no particular bond to each other. Rather
than a social bond determining the nature
of these collective gatherings, it is typically
signs and texts that guide people’s movements
within these spaces or that direct them to
other spaces. In that latter capacity, the
non-place is a conduit, a potential that structures the gaze to some other site. Some interpreters take non-place to be a negation of
place (cf. placelessness) but in Augé’s
terms ‘place’ works dialectically with ‘nonplace’: ‘the first is never completely erased,
the second never totally completed; they
are like palimpsests on which the scrambled
game of identity and relations is ceaselessly
rewritten’ (Augé, 1995, pp. 78–9). But for
some critics, Augé has not been clear about
the dialectics of place and non-place,
and one gets the impression that a timeless
passenger/commuter subject is the sole inhabitant of the non-place. Against this view is one
that recognizes that those who, for example,
work in these spaces have a much richer and
more complicated relation to them and to
one another, so that it becomes necessary to
think of multiple ‘placings’ (of diverse
people, plans, histories, blueprints) as the substantive content of ‘non-places’ (Merriman,
2004).
ghe
Non-representational theory is not a new
paradigm that would eliminate or supersede
others, nor does it offer a set of rules and
conventions that could form one of a number
of holistic conceptions of the world; rather,
it names a differentiated set of ways of learning
to address these two questions. Non-representational theory is consequently composed of
a multiplicity of perspectives and takes its
inspiration from a range of sources, including
Heideggerian theories of practice, postphenomenology, various micro-sociologies,
actor-network theory, Deleuze and
Guattari’s heterodox version of poststructuralism and corporeal feminism (see
figure). The plural – ‘non-representational theories’ – perhaps conveys a better sense of the complicated genealogy of these theories and the
constantly shifting, contestable foundations of
non-representational theory in human geography
[compare Thrift (2008) with Thrift (1996)].
Whilst non-representational theory is, irredeemably plural, it is held together by two
broad starting points – one an imperative, the
other a promise – and both of which have been
subject to criticisms.
First, non-representational theory affirms
an imperative to expand the foci of (‘new’)
cultural geography beyond either a focus
on a sphere of representation or a human
subject who relates to the world by representing aspects of the world through an act of
interpretation (by, for example, undertaking
active ‘readings’ of dominant or residual meanings). Each mirrors the other in that they
both assume that the primary relation between
an (individual or collective) subject and the
world is at the level of signification. In contrast, non-representational theories are theories of practice in that their focus is on what
humans and/or non-humans do, and how the
reproduction and revision of practices underpin the genesis and maintenance of interpretation and thus meaning. Whilst this move
resonates with the attention to practical logics
of the body in some humanistic geographies
non-representational theory A style of engagement with the world that aims to attend to
and intervene in the taking-place of practices.
Non-representational theory – a term first
coined in human geography by Thrift (1996)
– emerged from a caution and a concern about
the overvaluation of the ‘representational–
referential’ dimensions of life following the
(1) How to disclose and attend to life as a
differential, expressive process of becoming, where much happens before and
after conscious reflexive thought?
(2) How to foster types of description or
presentation that attempt to co-produce
new events by engaging with and intervening in the practices that compose life?
503
NON-REPRESENTATIONAL THEORY
NORTH
AMERICA
1860
RUSSIA
AND
EASTERN
EUROPE
CONTINENTAL EUROPE
1870
1980
Bakhtin
Vygotsky
Bourdieu
Giddeas
1970
Foucault
Irigaray
1960
de Certeau
Deleuze
1950
Blumer
Garfinkel
1940
Goffman
1930
Benjamin
Merleau-Ponty
1920
Heidegger
1910
Bergson
Bachelard
Wittgenstein
1900
Mead
1890
Husserl
1880
1940s
1960s
1980s
1990
Shotter
Haraway Butler
Game Grosz Latour Law
non-representational theory The life-time-lines of non-representational theory (from Thrift, 1999)
and borrows from various forms of micro-sociology, a critical difference is that practices tend
to be conceptualized as processually emergent
compositions of human and non-human
materialities (Whatmore, 2002a). From
within this context, practices are understood
as always embodied and composed of a set of
modalities – including affect and emotion
(see emotional geography) – that do not
have to cross over a threshold of signification
to achieve political effects (see Harrison,
2000). One forceful response to this has been
to claim that non-representational theory
cleaves the non-representational from the representational and installs a dualism between
the two by attending to the former and ignoring the varied effects of the latter. But Dewsbury, Harrison, Rose and Wylie (2002) take
care to stress that non-representational theories are not anti-representation (cf. Jones,
2008) but, rather, conceptualize representations as ‘presentations’. That is, representations are not understood as masks or veils
that express some a priori system of transcendent categorizations, but are instead encountered as constitutive elements within
practices (although this has raised questions
about how to develop conceptual vocabularies
for describing the a-signifying effects of different forms of ‘presentations’ that do not repro504
duce a naive psychologism or a cause/effect
model). Non-representational theory, then,
enacts a break with the version of culture as
structuralizing/signifying that defined the
‘new’ cultural geography. Such a move is
seen as a necessary response to a contemporary political moment in which various nonrepresentational modalities – including affect
– are caught up in the emergence of new forms
of sovereign power and biopower (Thrift,
2008; but see Barnett, 2008).
Second, non-representational theory expresses the promise of encountering a now
expanded social as a practical achievement –
an ordering rather than an order – emergent
from multiple spatially and temporally distanciated relations. The result has been an attention to how more or less durable, differentially
extensive, orderings are composed from relations between human and non-human actors –
or perhaps more properly actants (see actornetwork theory). society then becomes a
set of partially connected networks or assemblages in which embodied, expressive practices act as the ongoing basis for coherence
and change (Rose, 2002b). Recent work has
moved to address early criticisms that such a
focus on the non-representational reproduces
or even celebrates a figure of the undifferentiated human (Nash, 2000) by exploring how
NORMATIVE THEORY
social differences such as race or sexuality
are enacted through and disrupted by the
workings of a range of non-representational
modalities (e.g. Lim, 2007). However,
heavily
influenced
by
Deleuze
and
Guattari (McCormack, 2005) and work on
performativity (Dewsbury, 2000), the prefix
‘non-’ in ‘non-representational theory’ names
an attunement to moments of indeterminacy
and undecidability, in which new events
emerge to exceed and potentially disrupt
given orderings (although see Anderson
(2004) and Harrison (2007a) on boredom
and suffering for criticisms internal to nonrepresentational theory around how an attention to newness can downplay relations which
are, respectively, suspended and broken).
To work through the imperative and promise of non-representational theories, there has
been a nascent experimentation with research
methods, as well as diagrammatic and narrative forms of presentation, that take as their
task to learn to witness the ongoing takingplace of life as a composite of embodied practices. theory is called here to act as a ‘modest
supplement’ to life that would enable new
forms of description – a move that has occasionally sat uncomfortably with the intense
theoretical experimentation that has also
been a mark of non-representational theory.
Substantive work has begun, however, to
draw this set of theories into often disruptive
encounters with a range of sub-disciplines –
see, for example, Wylie (2005) on landscape
or Horton and Kraftl (2006) on children’s
geographies. Taking the two commonalities
together, non-representational theory can
be understood as a style of engagement with
the world that, encountering a range of
non-representational theories that exceed
human geography, begins from the nonrepresentational dimensions of practice and
performance.
ba
Suggested reading
Dewsbury, Harrison, Rose and Wylie (2002);
Lorimer (2005); Thrift (2008); Whatmore
(2002a).
normative theory A theory or theoretical
claim that is prescriptive, saying what ought
to be. The theory of neo-classical economics says that markets should be competitive;
the theory of marxism says that expropriators
should be expropriated. Whenever the word
‘should’ appears, a normative theoretical
claim is lodged. The contrast is positive theory,
which is a claim about what is. Competitive
markets exist in China. Donald Trump is an
expropriator. Positive claims (such as these)
might be wrong but, if so, they can be scientifically falsified by facts. Normative theory
is never falsifiable, and for that reason often
engenders sharp disagreement.
The use of the distinction is most associated
with economics. The early Cambridge economist John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) in his
The scope and method of political economy (1930
[1891], pp. 34–5) distinguished between positive economics, which is ‘a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is’, and
normative economics, ‘relating to criteria of
what ought to be and concerned therefore
with the ideal as distinguished from the actual’. Keynes made the distinction so that
economists could be scrupulously clear about
their role and status: when speaking of what is
(positive economics), they were scientists, and
when speaking of what ought to be (normative
economics), they were policy advisors. The
two should never be confused.
In human geography the distinction between the positive and the normative was
found most often in economic geography
– not surprisingly, given its origins – and
connected with the period of the quantitative revolution, when economic geographers most demanded criteria delineating
scientific work (positive theory). Ironically,
however, much of the location theory
seized upon and elaborated during that
period was normative rather than positive,
and so did not constitute science in Keynes’
terms. Location theory was underpinned by a
set of ‘ideal’ assumptions such as an isotropic
plain, transportation costs proportional to
distance, equal population density and perfect rationality. August Lösch, one of the
principal architects of location theory, was
perfectly clear about its normative character:
‘the real duty of the economist is not to explain our sorry reality, but to improve it. The
question of the best location is far more dignified than determination of the actual one’
(Lösch, 1954, p. 4[1940]). But this motivation was rarely registered by economic geographers at the time.
In any case, the discussion became moot
as the very distinction between positive and
normative theory began to unravel from the
early 1970s. Olsson (1980), a former acolyte
of positive theory, argued that a mainstay of
economic geography’s scientific approach, the
family of spatial interaction models, was
irredeemably compromised by value judgements – ‘is’ disguised as ‘ought’. Similarly,
505
NORTH–SOUTH
Harvey (1973, 1974a) found hidden normative
claims lurking in every corner of positive theory:
in economic theories of the city, in theories of
population and resources, in quantitative
techniques. All theory is normative theory.
Our values go all the way down, and we can
no more escape them than avoid the smell of the
air we breathe (see also ethics).
tb
Suggested reading
Olsson (1978).
North^South The phrase gained in popularity in the 1970s as a way to describe richer,
industrial countries on the one hand (the
North) and poorer, mainly non-industrial
countries on the other (the south). The
phrase had the advantage of moving beyond
the First, Second and Third Worlds. Although
the South clearly referred to mainly ex-colonial
or developing countries in latin america,
africa and asia, it seemed a more neutral
term than the third world. It also spoke to
the fact that Southern countries were reorganizing themselves politically in the 1970s. In
the 1950s, the Third World referred to a
group of non-aligned countries determined
to forge a new way in the global political
economy. In the 1960s, the meaning of the
Third World was changed to define a group of
countries that were marked by what was
then called underdevelopment. The idea
that these countries might have significant
geopolitical or geo-economic power was
not taken seriously. This changed, however,
when the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) drove up oil
prices fourfold in 1973–4. The success of
this action encouraged a broader group of
developing countries, the Group of 77 –
formed in 1964 at the first UN Conference
on trade and development – to press for a
New International Economic Order. It was
partly through the Group of 77’s demands
for fairer and more stable trading arrangements, more aid, special financial facilities
and greater voting rights in the UN that a
notion of the South was born.
In the 1980s, the Americans and other
Northern powers roundly defeated their demands for a New International Economic
Order. However, a group of well-meaning
social democrats in the North did speak back
506
to the South’s demands through the first
and second reports of the Brandt Commission: North–South (1980) and Common crisis
(1983). Although Brandt Commissioners
tried to direct attention to the widening (and
in their view dangerous) gaps between Northern and Southern countries, not much happened. Indeed, it can plausibly be argued
that the end of the cold war weakened Southern countries, particularly in sub-Saharan
Africa (Dodds, 1999; Fawcett and Sayigh,
2005). These countries were no longer important to either the USA or the former Soviet
Union. The irony, then, or the tragedy, is this:
in the 1970s, a map of the world that sought
to depict the global North was clumsy in
the extreme. It stretched to include mainly
temperate regions both sides of the Equator,
pulling together North America with Australia
and New Zealand. Most of the world’s land
mass, in any case, is north of the Equator. The
South mainly occupied a more discrete space
in the sub-tropical and tropical worlds. By the
end of the century the conceptual integrity
of the North seemed to make more sense,
bolstered in part by globalization. The
South, for its part, has found it increasingly
difficult to advance a coherent political position. The Group of 77 now has 133 members,
but is largely impotent in the face of the
North’s veto on key economic and political
changes.
sco
Suggested reading
Dodds (1999); Payne (2005).
nuptuality The extent of marriage (or marriage rate) within a population. As research in
demography associated being married with
elevated fertility, delaying the age of marriage
is argued to reduce fertility, such as occurred in
some European countries in the early expanding phase of the demographic transition.
However, sensitivity to the growing diversity
of partnering and parenting arrangements in
contemporary society complicate this thesis,
and have contributed to considerable interest
in family and household organization (e.g.
Duncan and Smith, 2002; Wright, Houston,
Ellis, Holloway and Hudson, 2003).
ajb
Suggested reading
Bongaarts (1982).
O
objectivity The term ‘objectivity’ has at
least three distinct meanings in geography.
The first is a relatively common everyday
one, where objectivity is associated with
impartiality or disinterestedness. Here, one or
another approach is said not to have a particular axe to grind, or any pre-set principles or
ideological positions to defend. This commonsense understanding of objectivity has a parallel in some of the humanities and professions,
where objectivity derives from professionals
following well-established codes to guide the
careful marshalling of evidence, crosschecking of sources and accurate and unbiased
presentation of information. Objectivity, in this
sense, is thought to derive from careful gathering of information, mastery of the evidence and
‘balance’ in presenting an argument.
In a more profound sense, objectivity as an
element of scientific method refers to claims
about the characteristics of an object that are
said to exist independent of our perception of
it. In this view, objectivity presupposes some
form of unmediated or direct observation –
what Haraway (1985) called the ‘god-trick’ –
and became the basis for the claims by objectivist science that it was merely mirroring
nature in a form that was unmediated and
‘value-free’ (see cartesianism).
Since the 1970s, many human geographers
have reacted against the objectivist conception
of objectivity. Drawing from hermeneutics,
they acknowledged pre-judgements (‘prejudices’) as indispensable to a developing, dialogical process of understanding. Drawing on
feminism and marxism, they argued that all
claims to objectivity are ideological, denying
their histories, commitments and embeddedness in particular social institutions (see
ideology). As Habermas (1987a [1968]) proposed, knowledge and human interests are
always necessarily connected. Critical human
geography insisted on the need for an ideology
critique to unmask the actors, interests and
consequences of such claims to objectivity
(Gregory, 1978a). A transcendental or universal ‘god’s eye’ view of objectivity was displaced
as critical human geographers turned to analyses of the role of social interests, human
agency and institutions in shaping existing
and possible worlds (Harvey, 1974b). Thus,
a third meaning of objectivity sees knowledge
(including scientific knowledge) as always
historically and socially constructed out of
specific projects in particular times and places:
knowledge is always produced by someone;
knowledge and human interests are always
inextricably linked; and the production
of knowledge is a social practice like any
other with its own commitments, forms of
embeddedness and geographies (see situated
knowledge). The turn to critical human
geographies of this kind marked a rejection of
grand narratives, and initiated a period of rich
methodological experimentation and the writing of more fallible and open geographies
(Natter, Schatzki and Jones, 1996, p. 1). jpi
Occidentalism The systematic construction
of ‘the west’ (‘the Occident’) as a bounded
and unified entity. Occidentalism is often treated as the inverse of orientalism: just as
Western cultures systematically construct(ed)
stereotypes of ‘the Orient’, so non-Western
cultures produce(d) their own stereotypes of
‘the Occident’ (Carrier, 1995). Hence
Occidentalism has been described as an inversion of the Western imaginary, ‘the world
turned upside down’, or as a counter-discourse
to Orientalism (Xiao-me Chen, 1995). Bonnett
(2005) has provided one of the most sophisticated and sensitive readings of Occidentalism
in these terms. Writing against those who regard the idea of asia as yet another exterior,
European construction, he reads two authors,
one Japanese and the other Indian, to show
how they used their independent constructions of the west to explore non-Western
forms of modernity.
In contrast to all these versions, however,
Edward Said, one of the main architects of
the critique of Orientalism as a system of
power-knowledge, insisted that ‘no one is
likely to imagine a field symmetrical to [Orientalism] called Occidentalism’ because the
imaginative geographies produced by nonWestern cultures were not bound into a system
of power-knowledge comparable to the tensile
strength and span of modern colonialism
and imperialism (Said, 1978, p. 50). For
Said, the distinctive quality of Orientalism
was its structural involvement in globalizing
507
OCCUPATION, MILITARY
projects of domination and dispossession.
For this reason, Coronil (1996) prefers to
treat Occidentalism as the condition of possibility of Orientalism itself: ‘the conceptions of
the West’ that underwrite – that make
possible – its own representations of nonwestern cultures. This tactic reminds us that
Orientalism not only constructs ‘the Orient’
but also simultaneously constructs and privileges the West-as-Subject (see eurocentrism).
Occidentalism in a more populist sense
gained new impetus in the aftermath of the
terrorist attacks on New York City and
Washington on 11 September 2001. A common response was to ask ‘Why do they hate
us?’ and to look for answers among ‘them’
rather than ‘us’ and, in particular, ‘their’ supposed hostility to the political and cultural
formations of a universal modernity. So, for
example, Buruma and Margalit (2004) provided a thumbnail sketch of Occidentalism as
‘the West in the eyes of its enemies’ and sought
to locate ‘today’s suicide bombers and holy
warriors’ within a larger history of ‘hatred’
and ‘loathing’ of the West and all works.
Theirs was a remarkably shallow reading,
which revealed more about the authors than
their object of enquiry, and in this sense was
another mapping of the Occidentalism that
Coronil had so presciently in mind.
dg
Suggested reading
Bonnett (2005); Coronil (1966).
occupation, military The assumption of
effective control through military action by a
sovereign power over a territory to which it
has no legal title. Military occupation is thus
distinct from military rule, though both may
rely on the suspension of the pre-existing
rule of law, the imposition of martial law
(cf. exception, space of) and the violent
domination of the civilian population (see,
e.g., Hudson-Rodd and Hunt, 2005).
Occupations have taken place throughout
human history, most obviously in the expansion of empires through conquest and annexation, and these often involved transfers of
population: slaves to Rome, Roman settlers
to the colonies. But since the Second World
War modern occupations have been governed
by international law that both proscribes the
acquisition of territory by force (so that occupations are supposed to be temporary affairs)
and specifically forbids population transfers.
The same body of law requires the occupying
power to restore and maintain public order, to
respect private property, and to safeguard the
508
health and welfare of the occupied population. In practice, however, as Benvenisti’s
(2004) review of twentieth-century occupations reveals, these obligations have been
more honoured in the breach: most either denied their status as Occupying Powers (even
though international law makes it clear that
occupation is a matter of fact, not intention
or proclamation) or assumed wide discretionary powers.
Military occupations raise at least three sets
of crucial geographical questions:
Strategy. What are the objectives of military
occupation? Some are the result of military
success in war: they may be directed
towards permanent annexation and the
creation of tributary states for geopolitical
and geo-economic reasons (e.g. the Nazi
occupation of continental Europe between
1939 and 1945, or the Soviet occupation
of much of Central and Eastern Europe
between 1945 and 1989); or they may be
temporary (but nonetheless protracted) affairs directed towards the replacement of
one political system by another (e.g. the
US occupation of Japan, 1945–52: see
also geopolitics). Many contemporary
occupations are the result of international
interventions to end regional or civil war
(‘peace-keeping’; e.g. the NATO occupations of Kosovo and Bosnia from 1995 to
the present), though some have entailed
the use of military violence on a scale
that recalls Tacitus’ description of the
Roman occupation of Britain: ‘They create
a devastation and call it peace.’ Still others
are attempts to create buffer zones to guarantee security (e.g. the Israeli occupation
of southern Lebanon, 1982–2000: and see
Schofield, 1993). But many occupations
have a mix of motives – occupation is rarely
a coherent or transparent project – and
while modern occupations often cloak
themselves in the rhetoric of ‘liberation’,
they often have long-term, transformative
ends in view (Bhuta, 2005) and the presence of foreign troops often meets fierce
resistance from the occupied population.
Logistics. What power-geometries are
necessary to maintain control over an
occupied population (e.g. Weizman, 2004)?
Military occupations depend on the spatial
circulation of information (intelligence
about the occupied population and its
activities, military orders and public
announcements), on supply networks to
provide essential resources for occupiers
OCEANS
and occupied, and on the capacity to
mobilize troops to enforce public order.
In most cases, cities function as the pivots
for all three, but during the US occupation
of Afghanistan, for example, it was (and
remains) far from clear how far the authority of the USA and its proxies extended
into the countryside. The crucial importance of cities also makes them centres of
rebellion and resistance to military occupation (Gregory, 2007).
Contact zones. Many of the relations
imposed by occupying armies are intrinsically violent – including sexual violence,
arrest and imprisonment, forced labour
and even genocide – but the occupied
also view interactions across the contact
zone in complex ways: Why are some construed as collaboration, others as doing
business to survive and yet others as resistance? During the US occupation of Iraq
from 2003 onwards, resistance increased
to the point at which it became increasingly
difficult to distinguish occupation from the
continuation of war (Gregory, 2004b).
It is not necessary to maintain a massive and
permanent military presence to continue an
occupation: Israel’s continued control over
Gaza and the West Bank rests on its capacity to
mobilize military force at will (‘incursions’) and
on the continuing development of colonies
(‘settlements’) as the eyes of what Segal and
Weizman (2003) call ‘a civilian occupation’. dg
Suggested reading
Benvenisti (2004); Weizman (2004).
oceans Even though the decline of sea travel
and diminishing dependence on self-supplied
food sources has removed the maritime world
from the realm of landlubbers’ everyday
experience, the sea remains a crucial domain
for the essential wherewithal that sustains
humanity. Three perspectives have dominated
most studies of human–marine interactions:
the ocean as a resource provider, the ocean
as transport surface, and the ocean as a surface
for moving troops and projecting military
power. Embedded in each of these analytical
perspectives is a certain conception of oceanspace and ocean governance.
The value of the oceans to mankind has political, social, economic, ecological and cultural
dimensions. Marine industries include fisheries, mining, non-conventional energy industries, fresh water production, coastal services,
environmental services, trade, tourism,
sub-marine telecommunications and fibreoptic cable, safety and salvage, naval defence
and ocean-related education, training and
research. The economic importance of the
oceans is immense. According to the Independent World Commission on the Oceans,
‘one recent study suggests that the sum total
of marine industries for which data are available, amounts to approximately US$ 1 trillion
out of a total global GDP of US$ 23 trillion’
(IWCO, 1998, p. 102).
Ecological services provided by various marine and coastal ecosystems of the Earth include the regulation of gaseous exchange with
the atmosphere (e.g. the balance between carbon dioxide and oxygen, maintenance of
ozone for ultraviolet radiation protection), climate regulation, disturbance regulation (e.g.
storm protection, flood control), water supply,
cycling of nutrients, waste treatment, food
production and raw materials supply. The
value of these too is immense.
Climate change is also projected to have
effects such as global sea-level rise and intensifying global warming. According to a recent Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report
(ACIA, 2004), the Arctic climate is warming
rapidly, at almost twice the rate as the rest of
the world in the past two decades. At least half
the summer sea ice in the Arctic is projected to
melt by the end of this century, along with a
significant portion of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Climatic variations will have a large impact
on marine environments and marine-related
activities, including rising sea levels, changes
in ocean salinity (which could strongly affect
regional climate), the decline or extinction of
marine species due to habitat loss, expanding
marine shipping and the enhancement of some
major Arctic fisheries together with the decline
of others.
On 26 December 2004, the Indian Ocean
tsunami devastated coastal communities. In
its reports on the environmental impact of
the Tsunami in Sri Lanka and Maldives, the
United Nations Environmental Programme
(UNEP, 2006) has noted that coastal areas
where coral reefs, mangrove forests and natural vegetation had been removed suffered the
greatest damage. Fishing communities were
the worst hit. The challenges include not
only the restoration of the livelihood of fishermen and raising the income of coastal communities above pre-tsunami levels, but also
capacity building to improve skills of boat
builders, enforcement of standards to reduce
potential risks to fishermen, and the revival
of the tsunami-hit aquaculture industry. sch
509
OIL
Suggested reading
ACIA (2004); IWCO (1998); Steinberg (2001);
UNEP (2006).
oil Petroleum, it is sometimes said, is the
economic bedrock of our hydrocarbon civilization. The fuel of modernity, oil is an archetypal global commodity, the repository of
unimaginable wealth (‘black gold’) and part
of the largest business on Earth (see capitalism). More than anything else, petroleum is a
sort of lie: it reveals the profound mystification, the paradoxes and that contradictoriness
that surround natural resources in our modern world (Coronil, 1997).
If oil is a natural resource – arguably the
most global, the most strategic and among
the most valuable – what exactly is natural
about it? It is a flammable liquid that occurs
as a product of geophysical and biological processes of great historical depth. A by-product
of pre-human geological history, oil is deposited in subterranean formations and consists
principally of a mixture of hydrocarbons with
traces of nitrogenous and sulphurous compounds. In practice, of course, the composition of what passes as petroleum varies quite
considerably, as one might anticipate in view
of the heterogeneous circumstances associated
with its 600 million year history of sedimentation and organic decomposition. Oil’s natural
properties, one might say, are unstable and
variegated (see nature).
Petroleum is customarily extracted through
drilled wells, pumped along pipelines and refined into different ‘fractions’ or components.
The science and practice by which oil is explored, located, pumped and fractionated has, in
the past 150 years, deepened and proliferated to
the point at which it is now part of a massive
engineering and technical infrastructure. The
oil industry is now dominated by the ‘majors’, a
cluster of transnational and highly diversified
energy companies (see transnational corporations). It is sometimes said that oil drilling was
invented by E.L. Drake, when he sunk his now
infamous 69 foot well in Pennsylvania in 1859.
But several hundred years before the birth of
Christ, the Chinese were sinking 3500 ft wells
to exploit petroleum for a multiplicity of purposes. Surface oil deposits had been used as
asphalt and as a sealant by Sumerians 3,000
years before the Chinese. In other words, oil’s
natural resource use spans a vast swathe of
human history.
Currently, oil and related gas exploitation
covers two-thirds of global energy needs:
according to the International Energy Agency,
510
by 2030 the figure will have fallen only marginally. Industrialized countries of the OECD
account for almost two thirds of world oil
demand. Global demand for oil is about 80
million barrels per day (compared to 47 million in 1970). The USA consumes by far and
away the largest quantities of petroleum
(roughly 25 per cent) and is extremely dependent on oil imports (largely from the middle
east, Canada and Mexico, and increasingly
africa). The geology of oil and gas has a distinctive geography: two thirds of known oil
reserves reside in the Middle East (which is
overwhelmingly Muslim, a fact that has
assumed particular significance in the context
of 9/11 and the US occupation of Iraq). Saudi
Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait alone account for
almost 500 billion barrels of reserves. Over
three-quarters of all known reserves of petroleum are found in eight oil-exporting countries.
The centrality of the USA in the global oil
acquisition strategy – a fact sealed by the special relationship between the USA and Saudi
Arabia, made in 1945 – has meant that the
geopolitics of oil have been a central plank
in US foreign policy over the past 80 years.
The US addiction to cheap oil – which is to say
to the automobile – turned, in the postwar
period, on imperialist relations with three
key suppliers: Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and
Iran. By 2001, this policy had proven to be a
catastrophic failure – even if the US consumer
had benefited from oil prices at the gas station
that bore no relation to actual costs of production (which necessarily would have to include
the massive expenditures on the military and
the costs of global climate change and other
‘externalities’).
The structure of the oil industry is characterized by a recent (post-1970) reorganization
(Yeoman, 2004). The global oil and gas industry is dominated by five transnational oil companies (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and
TotalElfFina) with combined revenues over
$1 trillion, and a number of massive national
oil companies (owned by oil-producing
states). The assertive petro-nationalism of
the 1970s saw national oil companies account
for an increasingly large proportion of oil reserves, while transnational companies increasingly moved downstream to control refining
and petrochemical sectors. Many of the
world’s most important oil producers are
petro-states, marked by an extreme dependence (measured as a proportion of exports or
GDP) derived from oil and gas. Rentier economies of this sort are plagued by what has
been called the ‘resource curse’ (Auty, 2001):
ONTOLOGY
massive corruption, conflict, poor social
achievement, authoritarian politics and low
economic growth (see Karl, 1999: see also
rent). Oil states, transnational companies, national oil companies, international financial
institutions and various sorts of military and
security forces combine to produce an ‘oil
complex’ (Watts, 2005), which operates as a
powerful system for dispossession and primitive accumulation. Industrialized oil importers have been only too happy to build warm
and friendly relations with corrupt petrostates, turning a blind eye to human rights
violations and failed development, provided
that the oil continues to flow.
Petroleum is the quintessential modern natural resource. It is present in and produced by
nature, and a material source of wealth that
occurs in a natural state. But this is a contradictory and non-sensible claim on its face. Oil
is natural insofar as it resides in its Jurassic
bedrock. But it is not immediately accessible
or useful: it presupposes human knowledge
and practice (drilling, exploring, refining).
Oil’s wealth is not conferred solely by natural
process, but rests upon an appraisal – a state of
knowledge and practice – that is social, technological and historical. Petroleum is profoundly of nature – it is typically subterranean
and has peculiar biophysical properties. And
yet its naturalism is expressed and understood
in quite determinate ways: how differently
would the first-century bce Chinese bureaucrat and the twentieth-century hard-rock
geologist have described petroleum’s natural
properties! Petroleum’s ‘resourcefulness’ is
not natural at all. Its expressive form as wealth
– the defining property of a resource – presupposes acts of transformation, distribution and
use which, incidentally, were very different for
sixteenth-century North American Indians
than for a twenty-first-century Louisiana
petrochemical industry. Petroleum as a natural resource rests, then, on particular meanings of natural (e.g. theories of biophysics),
and particular renderings of resource (e.g. theories of wealth predicated on scarcity and natural limits).
But there is another realm in which natural
resources must operate; namely, the social
imaginary – in other words, how oil is rooted
in the imagination of people living in the specific historical and social circumstances of
its use and deployment (see geographical
imaginaries). Oil as a natural resource carries
it own mythos, also shaped by place and time.
From the vantage point of the oil-importing
North Atlantic economies, oil stands in a
specific relationship to the mosque and the
Arab world. For oil-producing states, petroleum provides the idiom for nation-building
and the financial wherewithal for modern development (think, for example, of the petrolicambition of a great modernizer such as Shah
Palavi in Iran). Oil is inextricably bound up
with unimaginable personal power (Rockefeller, Nobel, Rothschild, the Sultan of Brunei),
untrammelled corporate hegemony (‘the Seven
Sisters’) and a history of spectacular imperial
violence and war. Did not the long and
dark tentacles of oil appear in the catastrophic
demise of the twin Trade Towers in New
York? Was not Osama bin Laden a product
of oil as much as of Wahabbi Islam? Was not
the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in 1979
fuelled by oil-inspired resentments and grievances? Need one mention Enron? Oil and
Islam, war and violence, corruption and
power, wealth and spectacle, scarcity and crisis are, in our times, seemingly all of a piece.
In contemporary America or Europe, oil is a
particular type of commodity used, exchanged
and fetishized in quite precise ways. It is a
bundle of natural (biophysical), productive,
cultural and economic relations. It is altogether appropriate to recall that petroleum
is popularly referred to as ‘black gold’. But,
after all, gold isn’t black. And neither are many
forms of oil. They are colourless.
mw
Suggested reading
Clarke (2007); Juhasz (2008); Klare (2008).
ontology The study and description of
‘being’, or that which can be said to exist in
the world (cf. epistemology). Although
ontology has many definitions and approaches
in philosophy and in geography, it tends to
be formulated by considering interactions between the world as-it-is and ideas or conceptions about the world. Western thought has
been greatly influenced by the classical, formal
ontology of essences, exemplified by Plato’s
Ideals (where objects in the world are imperfect copies of ideal forms) and Aristotle’s
categories (where all such forms emerge
inductively out of the stuff of the world).
Concern with ontology in the natural sciences
and the human sciences typically focuses less
on the general conditions of existence than on
the objects, relations and concepts serving as
the foci of their specific disciplines. In this vein,
the main ontological hobbyhorses in human
geography have included the character of the
relations between society and nature, and
concepts of place and space.
511
ONTOLOGY
Ontological repositionings within human
geography over recent decades have largely
been a response to the scientific ontology of
high modernism, the belief that the world is
transparently knowable to the knowledgeable
observer. This approach, best exemplified by
spatial science, is articulated through the
philosophy of positivism and its derivatives:
given enough information about objects and
events in the world, it is possible to derive a
series of scientific laws that account for or
explain them. Such positions are predicated
on the ontological assumption that the universe is a closed system whose movements
are determined by a finite (albeit complex)
set of causal forces and, further, that the objects making up the world are discrete, stable
and categorizable (Dixon and Jones, 1998).
This reading also holds that both the general
laws pertaining to causal forces and the essences or forms that demarcate discrete objects are themselves real and objective parts
of the world ‘out there’, awaiting discovery.
behavioural geography and humanistic
geography, though sometimes falling back
into versions of positivism, provided a critical
response to these objectivist claims by
gradually incorporating insights from nonpositivist philosophies including phenomenology, and by paying particular attention to
the importance of variations in perspective produced through the experience, perception and
lifeworld of the individual. Here, ontology is
a matter of ‘being-in-the-world’, wherein the
world reveals itself through the phenomena of
experience. As such, the objectivity of positivism is replaced by an experiential subjectivism.
This difference has often framed the distinction
between space and place (Entrikin, 1991).
The hints of perspectivalism within humanistic geography in particular found fuller
fruition within feminist geographies, which
critiqued spatial science for masking a masculinist epistemology under the name of ontology (see masculinism). While rarely making
explicit ontological statements, the partial
and situated standpoints of feminist theory
(cf. situated knowledge) were not inconsistent with a Leibnitzian ontology of proliferated,
situated difference. Perhaps most importantly, this resulted in the ontological notion
of relational space (Massey, 2005), a conceptualization of co-productive spatiality emerging
with the mobile and mutable interactions between space and the human subject. Such
entanglements point to dialectics (Harvey,
1996), an ontology of internal relations
rather than external relations. In contrast to
512
positivism, therefore, dialectical thought refuses discrete objects and events as things ‘in
themselves’, and with this denies the separation of phenomena from experience, theory
and politics. An ally in this mode of thought is
the philosophy of critical realism, an ontology
of levels aimed at understanding the causal
powers of necessary and contingent social
relations (Sayer, 2000).
With the advance of post-structuralism in
human geography, ontology and its cousin
metaphysics were increasingly critiqued as a
series of epistemological constructs mired in
cultural, political and, most importantly,
linguistic and discursive imaginaries. Thus,
the ontological distinctions formed in key
geographical binaries such as nature–culture,
order–chaos, time–space and individual–
society could, under this epistemological critique, be called out as false dichotomies that
reflect more the Western bias of either/or-ness
than any serious reflection on the social construction of such categories. While the poststructuralists never denied that there was a real
‘out there’ in the world, they denied that it was
possible to know it through some form of direct, pure experience (Deutsche, 1991). By this
point, ontology itself became a target: the
‘real’ world, it was argued, was shut out from
the observer by virtue of the very knowledges
that constitute the ‘observer’ as such, as well
as by the culturally inflected modes of representation at hand to describe it. In a similar
vein, human geographers influenced by poststructuralist renderings of psychoanalytic
theory, particularly those arising out of the
work of Lacan and Žižek, drew from suggestions that immersion in language and symbols
makes access to the ‘Real’ impossible.
Despite the aversion to ontology during the
epistemological turn of the 1990s, however,
interest in the topic has re-emerged in human
geography in large measure through the growing popularity of the works of Gilles Deleuze.
Drawing largely upon Baruch Spinoza,
Deleuze (1994) creates a ‘flat’ ontology of
‘pure difference’ by theorizing becoming,
multiplicity and differentiation as ontologically antecedent to the traditional foundations
of being, categoricality and sameness, thereby
rejecting long-held conceptual centrepieces.
Here, being, models, structures and categories
are not the stuff of ontology proper, but
are rather the results of the way that thought
deals with difference and continuous differentiation (i.e. by producing orders of similitude).
Deleuzean ontology is not a search for
transcendental objects, structures and forms
ORIENTALISM
making up the world, but an immanent
material self-organization that allows for the
possibility of new types of things to come
into the world. This work has been highly
influential for recent theoretical experimentations in human geography, providing perhaps
the fundamental ontological support for
non-representational theory (Deleuze himself had been treating the non-representational
ontologically since the 1960s) and for elaborations of actor__network theory (for
re-theorizations of human–nature relationships).
kwo/jpj
Suggested reading
Cloke and Johnston (2005); Dixon and Jones
(1998); Massey (2005); Sayer (2000); Tuan
(2001).
opportunity costs An important concept in
neo-classical economics, with the costs of
an action expressed as opportunities foregone –
usually in monetary terms. If rural land is set
aside as a nature reserve, there will be costs to
both the landowner and society in terms of
the net value of the agricultural products not
produced: similarly, a commuter may see the
cost of travel time as earnings foregone. The
concept can therefore be used in explaining
the allocation of productive resources between
competing activities, especially where they are
in short supply. It plays an important role in
theories of rent, comparative advantage and
linear programming.
rj
optimization models Mathematical models
that are used to search for the optimal solution
to a problem. These models have a quantity
to be either maximised or minimized, known
as the ‘objective function’, such as the minimization of total transport costs or the maximization of a firm’s profits, together with a
set of constraints that limit the range of
possible solutions, such as limits on supply
and demand, or the capacity of transport
routes. linear programming is the most
widely used form of optimization, but the
models may take a great variety of mathematical forms and many spatial applications
(such as optimal location decisions) involve
non-linear forms.
lwh
Suggested reading
Killen (1983).
Orientalism The term ‘Orientalism’ has
three main meanings. The first two involve
(i) the scholarly study of the Orient, and (ii)
a more general (and especially aesthetic or
cultural) interest in the Orient. But neither of
them pays much attention to the possibility
that the object of their interest – ‘the
Orient’ – is itself a predominantly European
and American construction produced within a
specific grid of power and knowledge (cf.
occidentalism). This is the focus of the
third definition proposed by the Palestinian/
American literary critic Edward Said (1935–
2003): Orientalism as (iii) both a discourse
and a ‘corporate institution’ for the production and domination of ‘the Orient’ (Said,
1978, p. 3). It is this definition that has
attracted most attention in human geography, but it is important to notice Said’s
double emphasis on production and domination: representations of ‘the Orient’ often
have the most acutely practical, material consequences (cf. performativity).
Said acknowledged that Orientalism in
this third sense has a long and tangled history, but he focused on the specifically modern apparatus of power-knowledge that
emerged towards the end of the eighteenth
century. His proxy for this was the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt (1798–1801)
and, in particular, the Description de l’Égypte
produced by the scholars who accompanied
the expeditionary army. Said’s emphasis on
the materiality of power-knowledge is also
significant. While he was keenly interested
in the production of imaginative geographies of ‘the Orient’, Said insisted that Orientalism was not ‘an airy European fantasy
about the Orient, but created a body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been considerable material
investment’ (1978, p. 6; emphases added).
What gave Orientalism its peculiar power
was that it was produced from the outside
and marginalized or silenced the voices of
those who were its collective subjects:
‘What gave the Oriental’s world its intelligibility and identity was not the result of his
own efforts but rather the whole complex
series of knowledgeable manipulations by
which the Orient was identified by the
West’ (p. 40). It was this, above all else,
that implicated Orientalism in the operations
of colonizing power, because it made ‘the
Orient’ appear as ‘an essentialized realm originally outside and untouched by the West,
lacking the meaning and order that only colonialism can bring’ (Mitchell, 1992,
p. 313). For Said, then, Orientalism operated both in advance and in conjunction
513
ORIENTALISM
with colonialism, underwriting colonial
power through two crucial operations:
First, ‘the Orient’ was constructed as an
exotic and bizarre space, and at the limit
a pathological and even a monstrous space:
‘a living tableau of queerness’ (Said, 1978,
p. 103).
Second, ‘the Orient’ was constructed as a
space that had to be domesticated, disciplined and normalized through a forceful
projection of the order it was presumed to
lack: ‘framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual’ (Said, 1978, p. 41).
It is not difficult to hear the echoes of Michel
Foucault’s archaeologies and genealogies in
these arguments, though Said was perplexed
(and vexed) by the French philosopher’s metropolitan obsession and his disinterest in the
operations of colonial power (Gregory, 1995b).
Said’s critique of Orientalism was closely
connected to his political commitment to the
Palestinian cause, and his work has met with
vigorous criticism from Right and Left. Theoretically, critics have been exercised by the
complicity of Said’s humanism with the very
tradition that he criticizes (Sardar, 1999,
p. 73); by his conjunction of humanism with
Foucault’s anti-humanism (Clifford, 1988);
by his complicated relationship with historical materialism (Ahmad, 1992); and by his
seeming inability to break out from the binary
oppositions of Orientalism itself (Young,
1990b). Substantively, others have criticized
Said’s readings and substituted more affirmative interpretations of some contributions to
the Orientalist canon (Livingstone, 2004;
Irwin, 2006).
Much of this discussion comprises variations on the theme of essentialism. Said is
charged with reducing the complexity of European and American engagements with other
cultures to a single, totalizing essence that
projects its will to power upon them. Other
scholars, including Said himself, have sought
to meet this objection by developing a more
nuanced analysis of Orientalism. Their key
propositions include the following:
(1) Orientalism is not a synonym for colonial
discourse. There are overlaps with other
colonial discourses, but different imaginative geographies were fashioned for
different places and periods: see primitivism and tropicality. Indeed, Said
(1993) subsequently extended his en514
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
quiries to the wider relations between
culture and imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Orientalism is not cut from a single cloth:
there are different Orientalisms and different
‘Orients’. The substantive focus of Said’s
original enquiry was not ‘the Orient’ at
large but the middle east in general and
Egypt and Palestine in particular. It is
important to recognize other versions of
Orientalism developed in relation to (for
example) India, China and Japan.
There are significant differences between the
collective authors of Orientalism. Said focused on British and French Orientalisms because they had such a close
connection with colonialism, but other
scholars have drawn careful distinctions
between (for example) American, British, French and German Orientalisms.
Orientalism is not a simple projection of the
will to power. Power, including the power
of representation, did not lie entirely
with the outsider and the colonizer, and
a more nuanced view of the contact zone
is required that can recognize transculturation and the achievements of anticolonial struggles. Said accepted this
criticism, but Sardar (1999, pp. 74–5)
noted that his commitment to a secular
humanism allowed little space for Islam
as a counter-discourse.
Orientalism is a gendered and sexualized
discourse. Said was more interested in
Orientalism’s feminizing metaphors
(‘the Orient as woman’), but feminist
scholars have examined how gender
and sexuality entered into the experiences and practices of travellers, artists
and writers operating under its sign
(Melman, 1992; Yegenoglu, 1998).
Orientalism produced other ‘natures’ as well
as other ‘cultures’. Like Oriental culture,
Oriental nature was often constructed as
an ‘unnatural nature’, capricious and extreme, to be domesticated, disciplined
and normalized through Euro-American
cartographic, scientific and engineering
projects (Gregory, 2001b).
Orientalism is not confined to texts. Said’s
field was comparative literature, so it is
scarcely surprising that he focused on the
written traces of high culture, but other
scholars have focused on other modes of
representation (including art and photography) and its involvement in mundane practices such as travel and
tourism (Gregory, 1999).
OUTSOURCING
Most of these critical elaborations have been
historical, but the spectre of Orientalism still
haunts the present. Its imaginative geographies have been activated in two new rounds of
demonization of the ‘Oriental Other’. First, a
techno-Orientalism has been directed against
the economic rise of Japan and, more recently,
China, which have both been represented as
threats to the global economic power of europe and the USA (Morley and Robbins,
1992). Second, a neo-Orientalism has been mobilized in the ‘war on terror’ against political
actors, groups and organizations in the Middle
East, and against Arab and Muslim communities in Europe, North America and Australia
(Tuastad, 2003; Gregory, 2004b: cf. terrorism). These new activations have an insistently
practical dimension too, which is by no means
confined to grand strategies and political or
military campaigns. Haldrup, Koefoed and
Simonsen (2006) identified the rise of a practical Orientalism grounded in the corporeal
encounters and routines of everyday life, in
which Orientalist versions of the friend/enemy
distinction are reproduced through the countless ‘small acts’ and stories that make up the
intimacies of everyday life. Seen thus, the
critique of Orientalism is far more than a
theoretical or textual affair: it is also a profoundly political and practical project.
dg
Suggested reading
Haldrup, Koefoed and Simonsen (2006); Said
(2003 [1978]); Sardar (1999).
Other/Otherness The Other is that which is
excluded from the Self and through this exclusion comes to constitute the boundaries of the
Self. In Phenomenology of spirit (1807), G.W.F.
Hegel introduced the master/slave dialectic,
which founded an idea of the ‘Other’ that has
since been absorbed from continental philosophy into the social sciences and geography. Simone de Beauvoir built upon the
Hegelian master/slave dialectic, in which a
hierarchical dualism defines a superior position in relation to an inferior one, to show
how woman has been constituted as the
Other to man. As long as women remain
locked in this relationship, de Beauvoir argued, they cannot become subjects in their
own right (see subjectivity). For both Hegel
and de Beauvoir, true freedom requires a
struggle in which the Other comes to risk her
life. The masculinism of the Self/Other binary
has been taken up in feminist geographies to
show how some kinds of geographical knowledge have been privileged over others.
The idea that the Self is defined in relation
to Others is also a key component of psychoanalytic theory. According to Jacques
Lacan (2002), the ‘mirror stage’ of infancy
occurs when the child first realizes that what
he had until then experienced as fragmented is
in fact his ‘self’. Following this recognition
comes a desire to delimit these boundaries
and thereby to maintain the Self through the
exclusion of the Other. Drawing upon the
work of Sigmund Freud, the relationship between one’s self and the objects of the world
has come to be referred to as ‘object relations
theory’. Geographers have drawn upon these
ideas to show how the Self is a cultural production that relies on socio-spatial practices of
inclusion and exclusion.
The Self/Other duality has come to inform
post-colonialism, feminism and their intersection. In his critique of orientalism, Edward
Said (2003 [1978]) showed how European
and American representations of ‘the Orient’
have worked to constitute the self-identity of
the west as superior to the East. Bringing
Said’s critique together with feminist theory,
others have shown how the interlocking hierarchies of race, class and gender have been
constitutive of both imperial relations and
domestic social structures. In other words,
hierarchical dualities of Self and Other (West
and East, man and woman, human and lessthan-human) have been shown to be the building blocks of Western modernity. ‘[I]t is only
insofar as ‘‘Woman/Women’’ and ‘‘the East’’
are defined as Others, or as peripheral, that
(Western) Man/Humanism can represent
him/itself as the center. It is not the center
that determines the periphery, but the periphery that, in its boundedness, determines the
center’ (Mohanty, 1991, pp. 73–4).
Geographers have shown how the Self/
Other duality has worked to produce and delimit geographical knowledge. For example,
Derek Gregory (2004b) has built upon Said’s
work to show how everyday cultural practices
work to produce spaces of ‘the same’ and
spaces of ‘the other’ at the global scale. Gregory shows how some peoples are represented
as occupying a space ‘beyond the pale of the
modern’, and therefore to have forfeited the
rights and dignity associated with Western
modernity and humanism (p. 28).
ajs
Suggested reading
McClintock (1995); Sibley (1995).
outsourcing A mode of business organization that has become increasingly common
515
OVERPOPULATION
since the 1980s, in which businesses contract
with third-party subcontractors to provide
product components and business services
such as accounting and customer relations.
Whether or not it is explicitly discussed in
terms of post-fordism, the recent explosion
in subcontracting and business-to-business
(‘B2B’) networking is widely associated with
the pressures to abandon fordist models of
vertical integration and develop more flexible,
market-mediated business practices in the
context of globalization. For the same reason, outsourcing is often used synonymously
with ‘off-shoring’ in political discourse. In his
2004 campaign for the US presidency, for example, Senator John Kerry assailed outsourcing by talking about ‘Benedict Arnold
corporations’. The implication in this analogy
with the eighteenth-century American traitor
(who had planned to surrender the American
fort at West Point to the British) is that outsourcing by US companies is a betrayal of
American independence. But outsourcing
need not necessarily involve sourcing from
foreign suppliers, and in fact is often based
on localized regional supply networks.
Indeed, economic geographers who study
these networks are interested in the ways in
which they both depend upon and foster forms
of spatial agglomeration, because the economic ties of outsourcing supply chains necessitate diverse social and cultural ties –
‘untraded interdependencies’, as one leading
researcher calls them (Storper, 1997b) – in
order to function effectively. That said, even
some of these clustering effects have been
transnational in scope; for example, between
Western European clothing retailers and
Eastern European suppliers (see Smith, A.,
2003a). More generally, the increasing turn
to sourcing from foreign companies (from
Infosys in India, for example) has captured
the public imagination in North America
and Western Europe since the 1990s (e.g.
Engardio, 2006). Consequently, for critics,
516
outsourcing has become widely associated
with the downward pressures on wages and
benefits that make the corporate search for
sourcing efficiency synonymous with a global
race to the bottom.
Since 9/11, outsourcing has been used in
arguments against ‘extraordinary rendition’ —
the clandestine US policy of sending suspected
terrorists abroad to be violently interrogated
by third parties in countries such as Egypt
and Syria (Smith, N., 2006a). There are obvious differences between this externalization of
interrogation and torture by government and
the externalization of business activities by
transnational corporations, but neo-liberal
commonalities underlie them, including the
use of private logistical services (such as rented
business jets) as well as the unaccountability in
the use of foreign third parties (Sparke, 2006).
By decrying extraordinary rendition as the
‘outsourcing of torture’, critics have suggested
in turn that it combines a sort of penal race to
the bottom with a twenty-first century betrayal
of American liberty (Mayer, 2005).
ms
overpopulation The idea that the size,
density or organization of an area’s population
is too great to be sustained. Neo-Malthusian
work argues that increased population reduces
an areas’ resource base until the carrying
capacity is breached (see limits to growth;
malthusian model). However, neo-Marxist
scholars have countered that overpopulation
makes a structural contribution to the continuation of certain modes of production,
as an increased supply of potential workers
reduces wage rates (Harvey, 1974a). The
associated terms over-urbanization and overruralization have sparked considerable debate,
with recent work on China supporting a
transition from an under-urbanized to an overurbanized society (Shen, 2002).
ajb
Suggested reading
Cohen (1999).
P
Pacific Rim A geographical region stretching
across the Pacific Ocean and incorporating the
westernmost cities of North America in addition to Japan, Australia, and the coastal cities
and city-states of East Asia. The term became
prominent in the 1980s as a result of Asia’s
increased economic power and the intensification of cross-Pacific trade and financial linkages (Appelbaum and Henderson, 1992).
Academic and popular writings on the region
became so saturated with hyperbole that many
critics began to argue that the region was
itself a literary creation – one that served the
economic agendas and geopolitical visions
of a pro-laissez-faire Euro-American audience
(see, e.g., Dirlik, 1993).
km
Suggested reading
Appelbaum and Henderson (1992); Dirlik (1993).
pandemic A term (derived from the Greek
pan-, all þ demos, people), used in the health
sciences to describe the occurrence of a specified illness, health behaviour or other healthrelated event that is unusually prevalent
(epidemic) over an extensive geographical
area. The term is often applied to periods
associated with the international spread of
major human infectious diseases such as cholera, influenza, plague and smallpox (e.g. ‘pandemic influenza’; see Patterson, 1986), with
the expression ‘global pandemic’ reserved for
periods of rapid worldwide transmission of a
disease agent. Global pandemic events of the
past 100 years include ‘Spanish’ influenza
(1918–19), El Tor cholera (1961– ) and the
Acquired
ImmunoDeficiency
Syndrome
(AIDS) (1981– ); see Kohn (1998). (See also
biosecurity.)
msr
Suggested reading
Cliff, Haggett and Smallman-Raynor (2004).
Panopticon Philosopher and jurist Jeremy
Bentham’s design for a building, most commonly a prison, in which centralized power is
all-seeing – pan-opticon – is described in his
book of that title (1791; see Bentham, 1995).
Bentham’s design was for a circular building,
with rooms arranged around the circumference, open at both ends, of one or more
storeys. The individual rooms, or cells, would
thus be illuminated from behind, and visible at
the front to a central tower. The occupant of
the tower would thus be able to look into each
and every cell from a fixed position. However,
it would be possible to construct a system of
blinds that prevented the occupants of the
cells from seeing into the control tower, and
so they would be unaware if they were being
observed at that point or not, or even if there
was an occupant in the tower. Not only would
they therefore be subject to external power,
they would turn that power on to themselves,
being self-disciplining. Bentham’s design was
suitable for any building in which it was necessary or useful to be able to continually observe
individuals who would have no contact with
the other occupants, such as a school, a factory, a hospital, barracks, a poor-house or,
most commonly, a prison. Bentham’s design
was offered to the British government as a
model for the prisons being constructed as
transportation to the colonies became less
viable in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but was only taken up in part
in model prisons such as Pentonville and the
Millbank Penitentiary. Panopticons were also
built outside Britain, including in Spain, the
Netherlands, the USA and Cuba.
Bentham’s model assumed a wider contemporary significance as a result of Foucault’s
1976a [1975] analysis of the Panopticon as
an exemplar of disciplinary power (see
Patton, 1979). Foucault saw the Panopticon
as the architectural conjunction of two models
of dealing with social problems, which he analysed as the problem of lepers and the problem
of the plague. With leprosy, victims were
excluded from society; with the plague, they
were rigidly controlled from within. While ‘the
leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion . . . the
plague gave rise to disciplinary diagrams’. In a
plague town there was a strict spatial partitioning, with careful surveillance, detailed
inspection and mechanisms of ordering.
These illustrate two models: a pure community as opposed to a disciplined society. Both
are symbols of wider models of power, as is
the Panopticon in Foucault’s analysis. It is
the architectural fusion of these models, where
the organization of the plague town is brought
517
PARADIGM
to bear on the spaces of exclusion. Foucault
suggested that the society that emerged in this
period can be better understood as one of generalized panopticism, where the ideal of surveillance and ordered behaviour is spread through
cities as a whole. Foucault’s analysis has not
been without its critics, but his account,
together with his re-edition of the French text
with an introductory interview (1980d), helped
to bring Bentham’s work back into discussion.
In human geography, Foucault’s arguments
have influenced historico-geographical studies
of poverty, welfare and workhouses (Driver,
1993) and contemporary critiques of security,
surveillance and incarceration (Hannah, 1997;
Dobson and Fisher, 2007).
se
Suggested reading
Bentham (1995); Foucault (1978); Wood (2007).
paradigm An old English word meaning
pattern, exemplar or model, but rescued from
obscurity by the American philosopher and
historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1922–96)
in his short monograph The structure of scientific
revolutions (1970 [1962]), reportedly the most
cited book of the twentieth century. The precise definition of ‘paradigm’ is contentious,
with one critic counting 21 different meanings
in the first edition of Kuhn’s book (although
the second edition offered clarification:
Masterman, 1970). Roughly, a paradigm is
the constellation of values, assumptions,
methods and exemplars shared by a given
scientific community, making it what it is. A
paradigm shapes what scientists think about
something before they think it.
Kuhn’s use of ‘paradigm’ was part of his
larger project to provide an alternative to the
traditional history of science that stressed
science’s progressive and heroic character.
For Kuhn, most science was puzzle-solving,
with practitioners working within a common
frame of reference, shared assumptions, techniques and standards; that is, a paradigm.
Consequently, the activities of scientists were
run of the mill, not heroic. Within this framework of normal science, however, anomalies
occurred that could not be explained within
the prevailing paradigm. Given enough of
them, a crisis eventuated, precipitating extraordinary research (not mere puzzle-solving). If
successful, in the sense that the new research
accommodated the anomalies, revolutionary
change occurred in the form of a paradigm
shift, setting the blueprint for the next period
of normal science. Paradigms, however, by
their very constitution, were incommensurable.
518
Scientific knowledge, therefore, moved not
as linear progress, but as incomparable,
discontinuous transformations (‘scientific
revolutions’).
Kuhn’s work garnered an enormous amount
of critical attention. There were the definitional ambiguities already mentioned.
Kuhn’s response was to clarify ‘paradigm’ by
separating out the global characteristics of a
scientific community, labelled the ‘disciplinary
matrix’ (Kuhn, 1970 [1962], p. 182), from
‘concrete problem solutions’ (Kuhn, 1970
[1962], p. 186) such as the use of a particular
book or mathematical technique, termed
‘exemplars’ (Kuhn, 1970 [1962], pp. 186–7).
Other criticisms went to his substantive
claims. Toulmin (1970) argued historically
that paradigm change was not revolutionary,
but occurred all the time. The rarity was normal science. For this reason, Popper (1970,
p. 53) thought that ‘one ought to be sorry for’
Kuhn’s ‘normal scientist’. Likewise, Kuhn’s
thesis of incommensurability drew fire with
its implication that science does not progress.
Lakatos (1978), while accepting incommensurability between ‘hard cores’ of rival theories, claimed that one could still meaningfully
speak of progress using empirical prediction
and corroboration to construct research
programmes.
These are important points, but they do not
help us to understand why Kuhn’s book was
such a runaway success. There are many
reasons, but the most important was its antirationalism, and its resonance with a similar
sentiment washing over a number of humanities and social sciences from the 1960s
(where the book was read much more than in
science), and culminating in postmodernism
and post-structuralism. Whether he meant
to or not (and the evidence is that he did not),
Kuhn represented scientific knowledge not as
an unsullied, abstract form of rationality (the
progressive, heroic view), but relativistically as
mired in context-specific cultural beliefs and
ordinary practices, in paradigms. Not that this
was the interpretation of paradigm by geographers who first made use of Kuhn during
their own ‘scientific revolution’, the self-styled
quantitative revolution that was to usher in
spatial science through ‘extraordinary
research’. Perversely Kuhn’s ‘paradigm’ was
interpreted as a justification for that movement’s
rationalist
scientific
approach
(Haggett and Chorley, 1967) and paradigms
were treated as scientific models (cf. Billinge,
Gregory and Martin, 1984a; Mair, 1986).
Some later exponents, however, tried to
PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
recoup some of the radical anti-rationalist
possibilities of Kuhn’s work through interpretations of the discipline’s history (Barnes,
2004b). But while Kuhn’s book might have
been on the Times Literary Supplement’s list of
top 100 most influential books since the
Second World War, it was never on geography’s top 100 list. Even so, ‘paradigm’ is no
longer an obscure term, and is now widely
used to mean ‘exemplar’ or, in a much looser
sense than Kuhn intended, to describe a more
or less systematic way of thinking about or
doing something.
tb
Suggested reading
Kuhn 1970 [1962]; Mair (1986).
Pareto optimality
Pareto optimality A situation in which it is
impossible to make some people better off
without making others worse off. This criterion of ‘economic efficiency’ was devised by the
economist and sociologist V.F.D. Pareto
(1848–1923), and is an important element in
neo-classical economics. The Pareto criterion may be applied to efficiency of resource
allocation, optimality being achieved when it is
impossible to reallocate resources to produce
an outcome that would increase the satisfaction of some people without reducing the satisfaction of others.
The attainment of Pareto optimality is illustrated in the figure. Resources are available to
generate a certain amount of income distributed among A and B – these could be individuals, groups of people or even the inhabitants
of two different territories. The line AB indicates the possible distributions of the maximum total income available, ranging from all
going to A and none to B (at point A) to all
going to B (at B). Point X is a position of
Pareto optimality, where any redistribution in
the direction of either A or B (along the line)
will make the other party worse off. In fact,
any starting position on the line is Paretooptimal. It would be impossible to increase
A’s share from X to Z (thus leaving B in the
same position) because this conflicts with
the resource constraint. However, point Y
inside the triangle ABO is sub-optimal by the
Pareto criterion because available resources
are not fully utilized and it is possible to
increase A’s income to X, for example, without
taking anything away from B. Such a move
would be a ‘Pareto improvement’.
The Pareto criterion figures prominently in
traditional welfare economics, where it is
argued that acceptance of Pareto optimality
as a rule for allocative efficiency or distributive
equity involves minimal ethical content.
However, adoption of the Pareto criterion carries some important implications that tend to
strengthen the status quo. Once society has
reached the limit of production possibilities –
that is, there is no more growth – then the poor
cannot be made better off without conflicting
with the Pareto criterion, for any such move
would be at the expense of others (the rich).
Thus however badly off the poor may be, they
can be made better off only if more income (or
whatever) is produced. In practice, the application of the Pareto criterion in a no-growth
economy would prevent redistribution in
the direction of the poor, no matter how
unequal the existing distribution (cf. welfare
geography).
dms
participant
observation
A research
method in which the researcher aims to participate in the process under study so as to
gain intimate knowledge of subjects and their
habits, which insiders to a realm of practice
might not otherwise reveal – or be able to
reveal – in contrived situations such as interviews. Participant observation was a valued technique for the ethnographies of the
Chicago School of urban sociology, as well as
for the social anthropologists Bronislaw
Malinowsky and E. Evans-Pritchard, and the
cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. As
Malinowsky famously put it, participant
observation provides a means ‘to grasp the
native’s point of view, his relation to life, to
realize his vision of his world’ (1961, p. 25),
which would then have to be analysed in
broader institutional terms through intellectual resources that the anthropologist considered to be ‘far surpassing the natives’. This
gendered and colonial defence of expertise
519
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY
has come under strong critique, not least
within anthropology. However, attentiveness
to the quality of relationships necessary to
access contextual knowledge, the central
concern of participant observation, remains
central to a post-positivist or hermeneutic
social science.
Michael Burawoy (see Burawoy, Burton,
Ferguson and Fox, 1991) frames participant
observation against both positivism and cultural relativism, as a method defined along
two axes: a scientific or theory-data axis,
which arrays objects from self-evident to subjects of theoretical scrutiny, and a hermeneutic
axis, which arrays ‘observer’ and ‘observed’
across a range from estrangement to immersion. Burawoy stresses the importance of
choice in locating oneself across both axes in
the process of ethnographic research (see ethnography). Self-consciousness about location
in both these senses is crucial in analysis of
what Donna Haraway (1991c) calls situated
knowledges: products of perpetually tenuous
relationships that cannot be resolved by claims
to objectivity through familiarity or the cryptoreligiosity of omniscient science.
Burawoy’s analytic can be pushed farther by
asking how objectification on the scientific axis
presumes the translation of only some aspects
of local knowledge into ‘universal’ science,
through specifically raced and sexed practices
of intimate affiliation. As Hugh Raffles (2002)
eloquently argues, most local knowledge
remains in the not-universal, not-scientific,
ethnographic context: a realm of intimate
knowledge that is embodied, spatialized,
affective (see affect) and relational. Raffles’
challenge is to represent this broader affective
geography through attention to multiple forms
of participant theorization, on differentiated
terms set by unequal access to broader intellectual, social and spatial resources. A key
challenge of participant observation today is
to find ways of representing the political economic, cultural, textual and affective resources
through which knowledge is actually negotiated in context. This method can then defend
the way in which specific products of participant observation become scientific evidence,
not through Malinowsky’s suppression of subjugated knowledges, but through norms of
accountability that contend with the unequal
conditions of production of scientific knowledge. Such an approach also allows for
ongoing claims to responsibility and redress
for human subjects and their geographies,
through evidence that explicitly shows reliance
on the nature of ‘participation’.
sc
520
participatory democracy A system of government in which those being governed participate directly in decision-making and/or policy
formation. It is contrasted with representative
democracy, in which those being governed
elect representatives to an assembly that takes
decisions on behalf of the voters. Participatory
democracy is usually thought to have originated in ancient Athens, where decisions were
made by an assembly comprising all citizens.
Although full participatory democracy is difficult to implement for large populations, popular participation in decision-making remains
an aspiration for many social movements.
However, community participation in governance has also been criticized for its association
with neo-liberal policies (Herbert, 2005). (See
also radical democracy.)
jpa
Suggested reading
Barber (2004).
partition In recent times, the idea of partition
(connected to the interaction between competing diverse notions of statehood and nationhood) has attracted fresh attention as the
inevitable, though not ideal, solution to protracted ethnic conflicts. Before the First World
War, partition was a tool of the empires, dividing territories between themselves or using
them to strengthen their rule. After the war,
partition took place either in the devolution of
authority granting independence to nations or
as a solution to ethnic conflicts perceived to
be irreconcilable. Even then, the ‘solutions’
proved to be volatile and precarious since the
territories they created were not culturally
homogeneous, as the partition of Palestine
through the creation of the state of Israel or
the successive partitions of India and Pakistan
(with East Pakistan eventually becoming Bangladesh) have shown. In the ‘short partitions’,
such as Vietnam and Germany, the nationalist
journey might succeed without much difficulty,
whereas in the ‘long partitions’, (marked by a
long history of the politics of otherness and its
persistence) the nation often fails the state.
The project of harmonizing the nation with
the state becomes nearly impossible.
According to a critical geopolitical perspective, ‘partition’ is not the end (product) of a
geopolitical conflict or rivalry but, rather, a
means of resolving or managing that conflict,
accepted by various parties either as a matter
of choice, or due to persuasion or pressure. In
other words, partition is to be seen not as an
inevitable consequence of actual or imagined
predestined differences but, rather, as a
PASTORALISM
consciously developed and deliberately
deployed spatial strategy of eliminating real
or imagined differences – a method preferred
over other methods, including ‘mutuality/
consociation/power sharing’.
A comparison of partitions around the
world, from British India to Yugoslavia, from
Canada to Ireland, from Nigeria to Rwanda,
from the Soviet Union to Palestine, appears to
suggest that territory is, in fact, a crucial factor
in the process of disrupting and reshaping
states and loyalties. It is further revealed that
the process of partition cannot be reduced to a
state separation event (as in the cases of India
and Pakistan, Serbia and Croatia, Ireland and
Britain or potentially Canada and Quebec).
This process also has to deal with additional
regional sub-partitions, family divisions and
religious contrasts. Partitioning British India,
for instance, has generated a subsequent
partition of Punjab and Bengal. Similarly, the
partition of Yugoslavia has implied the subpartition of Istria, Krajinas and Sandzak, and
of Yugoslav populations and minorities.
Historically, there are very few examples of
partition where violence could be avoided.
Wherever and whenever partitions have been
implemented, a large-scale destruction of the
sociocultural landscape has invariably followed. In the vast majority of cases, violence
becomes a determinant for reconfiguring political societies, where territory (or geopolitics),
sources of loyalty and collective/individual
psychology are forced to reshape and modify.
To a certain extent, the stronger the preexisting ties, the greater is the deployment of
violence to construct new sources of identifications by redrawing maps. Among several
icons of ‘partitioned times’ on the Indian subcontinent are millions of refugees who continue to live with bitter memories of loot,
plunder, rape and murder, and in whom such
memories live.
sch
Suggested reading
Pandey (2001).
pastoralism Social and economic systems of
peoples who both practice and strongly identify with livestock husbandry (most commonly
of camels, cattle, goats and sheep). Identities
of ethnicities, castes or lineages to livestock
husbandry have typically formed historically
during periods of occupational specialization.
Mobile forms of pastoralism require fundamentally different demands on knowledge,
social connections and labour than sedentary
productive pursuits. Therefore, more mobile
forms of pastoralism have been most associated with the occupational specialization tied
to identity formation. For this reason, common uses of the term ‘pastoralism’ often suggest systems of herding specialists relying on
more mobile forms of animal husbandry.
However, pastoralism encompasses systems
of variable reliance on livestock production
and on livestock mobility.
From a cultural ecology perspective,
pastoralism is an effective adaptation to ecosystems that are marginal for crop agriculture
due to soil, topography or climate constraints.
Thus, while historically not necessarily the
case, contemporary pastoralism is increasingly
found largely within marginal areas, due to
agricultural encroachment in productive
areas. More mobile forms of pastoralism are
seen as ideally suited for environments with
significant spatio-temporal heterogeneity of
vegetative productivity. Two axes of mobility
within pastoral systems are human and livestock mobility. Nomadic pastoralism (see
nomadism) involves the movement of pastoral
families and their livestock, which does not
allow the establishment of a permanent
human dwelling. There are many other mobile
pastoral systems, such as transhumance, in
which the whole production unit (family, clan
etc.) does not move with the animals. Studies
have found that the mobility of pastoralists is
highly variable (over time and between production units), making categorizations of pastoral peoples based on their mobility and that
of their livestock extremely hazardous.
Despite widely held romantic visions of isolated, individualistic pastoralists relying solely
on their animals to meet subsistence needs,
most pastoralist societies have historically
aligned themselves to broader military/political
authority for security and have relied variably
(depending in part on livestock ownership) on
farming and/or trade to procure grain and
cash. This engagement with broader political
and economic systems has become more evident since the mid-twentieth century in many
parts of the world. More mobile pastoral livelihoods have generally not only not had the
support of nation-states, but have, in certain
contexts, been actively attacked and dismantled by states that see pastoral mobility as
working against their development and political aims (see migrancy). Resource dispossession along with the economic vulnerability of
livestock producers to market and climate fluctuations has led to increased impoverishment
of pastoral peoples. While many pastoralists
maintain identities tied to animal husbandry,
521
PATENTING
their livelihoods often depend more on other
economic pursuits.
mt
Suggested reading
Galaty and Johnson (1990); Ingold (1980);
Niamir-Fuller (1999).
patenting Patents are a category of intellectual property rights designed to provide
inventors with legal rights for a fixed period
(usually 20 years) to prevent others from using,
selling or importing their innovations. An application for a patent must satisfy a national and/
or international patent office that the invention
described in the application is new, useful and
that its creation involved an inventive step
either beyond the present state of the art or
unobvious to a skilled practitioner.
Over time, more and more things (e.g. certain
biological materials) have become patentable as
business interests (and especially recently the
life science firms involved in producing medicines) have successfully argued that patents are
essential for their ability to make a return on the
high R&D investment required to discover, produce and get regulatory approval for new products. Such an extension is reflected in the
TRIPS (Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights) agreement administered by
the World Trade Organization (WTO) and is
hugely controversial.
nb
Suggested reading
Coombe (1998); Parry (2004).
patriarchy A system of social structures and
practices through which men dominate,
oppress and exploit women. A distinction is
made between classic or paternal patriarchy, a
form of household organization in which the
father dominates other members of an
extended kin network (including younger
men) and controls the economic production
of the household, and fraternal patriarchy, in
which men dominate women within civil society; the latter provided a key focus for feminist
theorizing and organizing during the 1960s
and 1970s. By the 1980s, the utility of the
concept was in doubt; critics saw it as ahistorical and insensitive to cross-cultural variation.
Efforts to theorize patriarchy in relation to
capitalism seemed to collapse into functionalism, or leave the relations between the two
systems unresolved. And if patriarchy operates
autonomously from capitalist relations, as posited by dual systems theory, did this not leave
the patriarchal relations of capitalism undertheorized? In geography, efforts were made by
522
Foord and Gregson (1986) to resolve these
dilemmas through realism: Walby (1989)
criticized their model for neglecting paid work,
the state and male violence (for other critical
reactions, see gender and Women and
Geography Study Group, 1997), and posited
a dual systems theory of patriarchy at three
levels of abstraction – system, structure and
practice. Patriarchy, according to Walby, is
composed of six structures: the patriarchal
mode of production, male violence, patriarchal relations in paid work, the state, sexuality and cultural institutions. But in Acker’s
view (1989), the moment of theorizing patriarchy in this way had passed: the object of
feminism had moved from patriarchy as a system to gender relations (and now heteronormativity and sexual difference: see gender).
Interest had also moved away from delineating
the cause(s) of patriarchal relations to understanding the diversity of effects.
As early as 1980, Barrett suggested that
patriarchy is better conceived as an adjective
than as a noun. The term is still used as a
noun, but typically in the plural: Grewal and
Kaplan (1994, pp. 17–18) urge the need ‘to
address the concerns of women around the
world in the historicized particularity of their
relationships to multiple patriarchies as well as
to international economic hegemonies’, but
their concern is to compare ‘multiple, overlapping, and discrete oppressions’ and not to
construct ‘a theory of hegemonic oppression
under the unified sign of gender’ (i.e. under
the sign of patriarchy). Post-colonial theory
has alerted feminists to the ways in which
accusations of patriarchal relations among
immigrant groups or in countries in the global
South can be used to discriminatory, colonial
or imperialist ends. The Bush administration’s
justification of the US invasion of Afghanistan
in 2001 – as in part a defence and liberation of
Afghan women – is one example. Young
(2003a) asks Western feminists to consider
how they ‘laid the ground work’ for the success of this appeal through their own campaigns against the Taliban and the ‘stance of
protector’ that they sometimes adopt ‘in relation to . . . women of the world who [Western
women] construct as more dependent or subordinate’ (p. 3) and more oppressed by patriarchal relations.
gp
Pax Americana
Also known as ‘Pox
Americana’, this synonym for american
empire makes parallels with the ancient
Roman Empire to either critically unpack
(e.g. Johnson, 2003a; Foster and McChesney,
PAX AMERICANA
2004) or uncritically expound (e.g. Steel,
1967) the argument that US global dominance makes the world safe for long-distance
trade, communication and democracy.
Most recently, it has been put forward by the
National Intelligence Council (NIC; the US
government’s ‘strategic intelligence’ planning
body) as one of four extraordinary scenarios
for what the world map of geopolitics will
look like in the year 2020 (National
Intelligence Council, 2005). ‘Mapping the
global future’ with a keen attention to what
the strategic planners view as the long term
‘mega-trend’ of globalization, the NIC envisions Pax Americana as a benign extension of
contemporary US military dominance alongside a faltering but still extant American ability
to dominate the institutions of global governance. The NIC contrasts this vision of 2020
with three others: Davos World, which is also
imagined as a relatively utopian scenario,
albeit with US economic authority increasingly overshadowed by rising Asian influence;
The New Caliphate, a very different and distinctively dystopian vision of a world rendered
unstable by what is depicted (using the
imaginative geographies of orientalism) as
tradition-bound Muslim resistance to globalization and American influence; and, finally,
the unremittingly bleak dystopia of a so-called
Cycle of Fear, in which weapons of mass
destruction circulate through globalized terror
networks (see terrorism), in turn envisioned
as spurring an authoritarian governmental
backlash of which – most fearfully of all for
the NIC’s futurists – ‘globalization may be the
real victim’ (NIC, 2005, p. 104).
While Pax Americana is imagined as a fairly
unexceptional continuation of the current
global order (relative to the three other 2020
scenarios), it is useful to consider what the
alternative scenarios tell us about what has to
be repressed by the NIC to continue with its
exceptionalist imagining of America as a
uniquely freedom-loving and anti-imperial
nation-state. Cycle of Fear, for example,
imagines authoritarianism and the future victimization of globalization, but all the while it
obscures the already existing victims of the
CIA’s own programmes of torture in Black
Sites and other spaces of exception (see exception, spaces of). The New Caliphate likewise
dissembles the huge role of the US intelligence
agencies in helping to start, arm and even train
many of the key leaders of the more violent
and territorially ambitious jihadist movements
in Central Asia and the Arabian Peninsula.
And Davos World meanwhile betrays the still
deeper contradictions that at once underlie
and undermine the exceptionalist American
idea that the spread of freedom and the spread
of free enterprise are one and the same thing.
If the rapid development of cadre capitalism
in China has not made this completely clear
for the NIC, then the fiasco in Iraq that has
continued unabated since the publication of
the 2020 report most certainly must. Here, in
what was announced by many war promoters
as the inaugural battle for a new and more
peaceful American century, the brutality,
death and destruction of a terribly unpeaceful
Pax Americana has been writ large on the
landscape.
Even if Pax means peace, the more important aspect of the reference to Pax Romana has
always been to the violence of the ancient
empire and the punitive approach that the
Roman army took to subduing and incorporating the periphery into a unipolar world dominated by Rome. In 1963, President Kennedy
acknowledged as much when he said that the
world peace that the US sought was ‘not a Pax
Americana enforced on the world by American
weapons of war’ (quoted in Foster and
McChesney, 2004). However, by the new millennium this return to the Roman model was
exactly what the administration of President
Bush was openly advocating as the rationale
of the Iraq war. Given the hubris of some of
the advocates of this neo-conservative foreign
policy, it is not surprising that their identities
often remain anonymous, but the following is
reporter Ron Suskind’s (2004) account of one
Bush aide’s comments:
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in
what we call the reality-based community’,
which he defined as people who ‘believe that
solutions emerge from your judicious study
of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
‘That’s not the way the world really works
anymore’, he continued. ‘We’re an empire
now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again,
creating other new realities, which you can
study too, and that’s how things will sort
out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of
you, will be left to just study what we do’
This sort of attitude clearly put the US
intelligence agencies in a difficult situation –
in which they had to help invent realities that
helped justify the policy of attacking Iraq
(Rich, 2006). The subsequent turn to scenario
523
PEASANT
building at the NIC seems to be of a piece with
this story-telling-cum-war-mongering geopolitical inventiveness, albeit announced instead
as a peace-loving geo-economic homage to
globalization. Elsewhere, though, the turn
away from reality in the name of Pax
Americana has been widely criticized. With the
possible exception of fans of non-representational theory, geographers have stayed put as
denizens of a reality-based community that
acknowledges both the limits and possibilities
of situated knowledge. Thus rather than map
a futuristic scenario of Pax Americana for 2020,
leaders in the field have instead charted the
violent destruction and dispossession that constitutes Pox Americana on the ground in the
colonial present (Harvey, 2004b; Johnston,
2005d; Gregory and Pred, 2007; see also
Retort, 2005). And rather than counterpose
globalization and fear as opposites, critical
geographers have also explored the globalization of fear that has followed from the unremitting American pursuit of an informal and, as
such, exceptionalist empire that is founded on
ideas about peace and justice for all, but which
is always also foundering in human geographies
– from slave plantations to export-processing
zones to Guantanamo – where exceptions are
made in the name of the exceptionalist vision
(Miller, 2006; Mitchell and Rosati, 2006;
Sparke, 2005, 2007; Wright, 1999b). A brand
name for this tortured concoction of capital
and coercion is only fitting: Pax Americana1
certain restrictions may apply.
ms
peasant A term that was in common use in
the English language from the fifteenth century,
referring to individuals working on the land and
residing in the countryside. By the nineteenth
century, ‘peasant’ was employed as a term of
abuse (e.g. by Marx on the idiocy of rural life),
and in the recent past it has been imbued with
heroic and revolutionary connotations (as in
Maoism, for example). In modern usage, peasants are to be found on family farms (farming
households) that function as relatively corporate units of production, consumption and
reproduction (Chayanov, 1966). The particular social structural forms of the domestic unit
(nuclear families, multi-generational extended
families, intra-household sexual divisions of
labour and property systems), the social relations between households within peasant communities and the ecological relations of
production (the peasant ecotype) are, however,
extremely heterogeneous (Wolf, 1966). The
terms ‘peasant’ and ‘peasantry’ have often been
employed loosely to describe a broad range of
524
rural producers as generic types characterized
by certain social, cultural or economic traits:
the backward or anti-economic peasant, the
rational and moral peasant, the uncaptured
peasant. These and other terms such as ‘traditional’, ‘subsistence’ or ‘smallholder’ detract
from the important analytical task of situating
peasants as specific social producers in concrete, historically specific political economies
with their own dynamics and laws of motion.
Peasants are distinguished by direct access
to their means of production in land, by the
predominant use of family labour and by a
high degree of self-sufficiency (see subsistence agriculture). Nonetheless, all peasants
are by definition characterized by a partial
engagement with markets (which tend to function with a high degree of imperfection) and
are subordinate actors in larger political economies, in which they fulfil obligations to holders of political and economic power. Peasants
as forms of household enterprise rooted
primarily in production on the land have a
distinctive labour process (the unity of the
domestic unit and the productive group) and a
unique combination of labour and property
through partial market involvement. Peasants
stand between those social groups that have
lost all or most of their productive assets (proletarians or semi-proletarians), on the one
hand, and farming households that are fully
involved in the market (so-called petty or simple commodity producers), on the other. Seen
in this way, peasants have existed under a
variety of economic, political and cultural circumstances (e.g. feudalism, capitalism and
state socialism) spanning vast periods of history, and are ‘part societies’. Peasant societies
are often seen as transitional – they ‘stand
midway between the primitive tribe and industrial society’ (Wolf, 1966, p. vii) – and yet are
marginal or outsiders, ‘subordinate to a group
of controlling outsiders’ (Wolf, 1966, p. 13)
who appropriate surpluses in a variety of forms
(rent, interest, unequal exchange).
In many third world societies in which
peasants continue to constitute an important
and occasional dominant stratum, a central
question pertains to the fate of the peasantry
in relation to growing state and market involvement. Peasants are invariably the victims of
modernity (Moore, 1966). The questions of
growing commercialization and mechanization
of peasant production and of the growth of offfarm income (migration, craft production,
local wage labour) are reflected in the longstanding concern with internal differentiation
among peasantries and hence their long-term
PERFORMANCE
survival (hence the debates over peasant
persistence, de-peasantization and captured
peasants). It is probably safe to say that the
period from 1950 to 1975 witnessed an epochal
shift in which peasantry became for the first
time a global minority.
The proliferation of peasant studies in the
past 30 years has been the source of important
theoretical innovations in political economy
speaking to questions of commoditization,
class formation, resistance and rebellion
(Shanin, 1988). The study of peasants was also
key to the evolution of cultural ecology and
political ecology insofar as peasant knowledge and practice is an indispensable starting
point for the understanding of household management of resources, and hence the processes
of ecological change and rehabilitation (Watts,
1983a; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987).
In the context of the transitions to and from
capitalism, the role of peasantry is central.
Barrington Moore (1966) argued that the relations between landlord and peasantry are fundamental in understanding the various routes
of democracy and dictatorship in the modern
world. Peasant revolutions in Mexico, Algeria
and China, for example – the antithesis of the
idea of apolitical or tradition-laden peasantries
– have fundamentally shaped the twentieth century (Skocpol, 1980). Kautsky (1988 [1899])
referred to the agrarian question in western
Europe in the nineteenth century to underscore
the political ramifications of the new forms of
differentiation and proletarianization associated with growing commercialization, and the
political and strategic questions that arose from
peasant protest and struggle. One of the major
features of the period since 1989 and the decollectivization of agriculture in the former socialist bloc has been the re-emergence of millions
of peasant households (re-peasantization) in
China, Russia and eastern Europe. The role of
peasants in post-socialist transitions has been a
crucial part of the political landscape in these
parts of the world and they represent intriguing
cases for the study of new forms of agrarian
capitalist trajectories (see Verdery, 1996;
Selenyi, 1998). In other parts of the world,
peasant entrepreneurial and political activism
has also gained momentum in India (Gidwani,
2008), Indonesia (Li, 2006) and Mexico
(Bobrow-Strain, 2007).
mw
Suggested reading
Scott (1988).
performance A concept that ‘is, at this
moment, one of the most pervasive metaphors
in the human sciences’ (Thrift, 2000a, p. 225).
Its popularity has been tied to: current interest
in embodiment or habits of the body; noncognitive experiences and knowledges and
the production of social life through everyday
practices; and desires to de-naturalize social
categories and processes, create new political
opportunities and emphasize the creativity of
social life. Although different approaches to
performance share most of these objectives,
they also differ significantly in conceptions of
human agency, subjectivity and power
(Gregson and Rose, 2000), and tend to direct
attention to different geographies and spaces.
It is common to distinguish between four
approaches: a sociological dramaturgical
approach, performativity (often as outlined
by Butler), non-representational theory
and performance studies.
The sociological, dramaturgical approach is
typically traced to Erving Goffman’s ideas
about the codes of conduct that govern behaviour, and the various strategies that we use to
manage ourselves in the presence of others.
Social life is conceived as staged by conscious
agents who adhere to scripts. This is a geographical narrative that distinguishes front-ofthe-stage from backstage, and public from private. Gregson and Rose (2000) argue that this
has been the most prevalent notion of performance in geography. A number of studies
look at the performances demanded in
specific, usually service-sector, workplaces
(e.g. McDowell and Court, 1994). Davidson
(2003) develops the dramaturgical analogy to
consider agoraphobia as a kind of ‘stage fright’
that compels those suffering from it to restrict
their public performances to obviate the need
to engage in ‘impression management’.
Whereas the dramaturgical analogy implies
a conscious agent that exists prior to performances (Gregson and Rose, 2000), performativity outlines a process through which social
subjects are produced through performances.
These are ‘command’ performances, regulated by social norms, but possibilities for subversion arise from slippages between actual
performances and the norms/ideals that they
cite. Although Butler largely works in a temporal rather than spatial register, she points to
the importance of geographical context for the
meaning of any performance: ‘subversiveness
is the kind of effect that resists calculation . . .
the demarcation of context is . . . already a
prefiguring of the result’ (1993b, p. 29).
Gregson and Rose (2000) have extended the
notion of performativity to space, arguing that
‘performances do not take place in already
525
PERFORMATIVITY
existing locations . . . specific performances
bring these spaces into being’ (p. 441).
Non-representational styles of thinking
bring to the notion of performativity more
emphasis on creativity, what is excessive to
representation, cognition and discourse,
everyday skills, affect and the ‘binding of
bodies-with-environment’ (Thrift, 2004c,
p. 177). With respect to the last, Thrift writes
of the ‘technological unconscious’, a vast ‘performative infrastructure’ that provides the
stable ground for our practices and is producing the vast standardization of space. The
spatial imaginary is that of connections, intersections, movement and assemblages; the
temporality that of becoming and the
momentary event.
Non-representational styles of thought take
much from performance studies, an interdisciplinary focus with closer ties to the performing arts, especially theatre and dance. It shares
the emphasis on creativity and play, the intermingling of the normative and transgressive,
the limits of representation, the expressive
qualities of the body beyond discourse, and
the full range of the senses, including the
kinaesthetic (as well as attempts to develop
vocabularies to document these). Performance studies places especial emphasis on
liminal times and spaces that allow the temporary suspension of norms and transitory
nature of an event, which can never be fully
captured, preserved or repeated.
The focus on performance has opened new
ways of thinking of and about research
methods. The emphasis on the extra-discursive
underlines the importance of witnessing in
order to understand – not just how people
describe their world – but how they act in their
world (see ethnomethodology). Witnessing
this ‘doing’ can offer opportunities to access a
range of experiences and emotions that are not
easily expressed through interview talk. It also
prompts a different methodological approach
to talk. Instead of asking respondents to
describe their world, researchers have become
more interested in listening to potential
respondents talk while they are in their worlds.
They are interested in the talk that does things.
More and more researchers are experimenting
with performative writing strategies, and
expanding the boundaries of what counts as
valuable research data and research products,
to include theatre and video productions (see
qualitative methods). Self-conscious research
performances stretch debates about positionality and research ethics in new directions
(Routledge, 2002).
526
Despite the convergences and overlap
between different approaches to performance,
there are significant disagreements that warrant further debate, especially about what
counts as politics and effective political strategy. Thrift (2004c) directs us to the minutiae
of performativity to harness ‘the energy of
moments’ (p. 188). Houston and Pulido
(2002) have criticized the individualism of
much of the work within geography influenced
by the concept of performance and the tendency to reduce resistance to the scale of the
body. They direct us back to historical materialism and collective politics. Jacobs and Nash
(2003) are also measured in their reception of
non-representational theory. They argue that
the emphasis on escaping categorical fixity, in
an effort to accentuate processes of becoming,
risks returning the unmarked (implicitly masculine) subject. They argue as well for the
need to discriminate between power relations:
‘In a world in which power is understood to be
radically dissimulated (as much about negotiating subjectivity or negotiating household
chores, or work relations, or claiming and
refusing rights), the . . . research imperative
becomes one of being sensitive to the relations
and proximities that matter, either in their
determining forces or their transforming
potential’ (pp. 274–5). How to make these
determinations offers grounds for debate. gp
Suggested reading
Butler (1990); Jacobs and Nash (2003); Phelan
and Lane (1998); Thrift (2000a).
performativity One strand of the recent
thinking about performance: it has been an
important means of theorizing the workings of
power in the production of rules and norms.
The concept is rooted in the linguistic distinction between constative and performative
utterances. A performative utterance (famously
exemplified by the statement: ‘I pronounce
you . . . ’, uttered at the marriage ceremony) is
itself an act that performs the action to which it
refers. The performative ‘brings to centre stage
. . . an active, world-making use of language’
(Culler, 1997, pp. 97–8).
The concept has been worked up most thoroughly by Judith Butler in relation to gender
and norms of heterosexuality (1990, 1993a;
see queer theory). She argued that gender is
a performance without ontological status:
‘There is no gender identity behind the
expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘‘expressions’’
that are said to be its results’ (1990, p. 25).
PETRO-CAPITALISM
This is a more radical position than that of
conventional feminist social construction,
because she argues that biological sex is also
produced: there is no interiorized, biological
foundation on which gender rests. In this
sense, gender norms are materialized by the
body: they literally become matter. Butler also
wrestles with a more complex subjectivity
than is evident in many social constructivist
accounts, because she attempts to hold psychoanalysis in tension with discourse
analysis. She argues that identities are not
simply performed on the surface of the body:
what is performed always operates in relation
to what cannot be performed or said (notably
homosexual relations), mediated by the
unconscious. In contrast to some accounts of
social performances, those analysed as performative are not seen to be freely chosen; they
are compelled and sanctioned by the norms of
compulsory heterosexuality (heteronormativity), and the subject has no choice but to
exist within gender norms and conventions
of nature (i.e. binary sex difference).
Performances are also historically embedded;
they are ‘citational chains’ and their effect is
dependent on conventions (i.e. previous utterances). Norms and identities are instantiated
through repetitions of an ideal (e.g. the ideal of
‘woman’ or ‘man’). Since we never quite
inhabit the ideal, there is room for disidentification and agency (see human agency).
Geographers have been divided in their
reactions to performativity theory. Bell,
Binnie, Cream and Valentine (1994) were
among the first to deploy the concept, in their
case to consider the subversive potential of
particular performances of sexuality. Critics
have been concerned that the subject of performativity is abstracted in time and place, has
little agency, is conceived within a purely discursive, non-material world and is one that
shares characteristics with the masculinist sovereign subject (for a review of these criticisms,
see Pratt, 2004). Others have found the concept fruitful to think with: some have theorized
space itself as performative (Gregson and
Rose, 2000); others have drawn out the spatialities that are under-theorized in Butler’s
work but necessarily underpin the process
described by the concept (Thrift, 2000;
Pratt, 2004). In Thrift’s words: ‘Social practices have citational force because of the
spaces in which they are embedded and
through which they work’ (2000, p. 677).
Non-representational styles of thinking, in
particular, emphasize the significance of the
non-discursive and the instability of the
citational process, envisioning social life ‘as processually enactive, as styles and modes of performative moving and relating rather than as
sets of codified rules’ (McCormack, 2003,
p. 489; original emphasis). The concept has
been put to work to theorize more than gender
and sexuality. Gregory (2005), for instance,
brings the concept to his analysis of sovereign
power; Thrift (2000) outlines a new ‘ecology’
of capitalist business practices that produce
‘fast’ managers with aptitudes for constant
innovation and permanent high performance
(see also cultural economy).
gp
periodic market systems The regular provision of retail and other service functions at
fixed points on predetermined days in the
week. All of the functions may be available on
certain days only: in others – as with ‘market
days’ in British towns – additional functions to
those available every day are provided on set
days each week. There are analogies in their
distribution with central place theory, as in
a classic series of papers by Skinner (1964–5)
on Chinese market systems. In situations with
relatively low ranges and high thresholds,
traders moving around markets on set days
overcome problems of insufficient demand to
justify permanent provision. Empirical analyses have identified a considerable range of
ways in which such systems operate, however,
often reflecting local cultural norms.
rj
Suggested reading
Bromley (1980).
petro-capitalism It has been said that modern life is a form of ‘hydrocarbon civilization’
(Yergin, 1991). Energy, said one critic, is ‘the
precursor of economies’ (Shelley, 2005, p. 1).
oil and gas account for over two-thirds of the
world’s energy supply and are indispensable to
modern forms of mobility and power supply.
Since the early part of the twentieth century,
petroleum and industrial capitalism (and
indeed industrial socialism) has been predicated on the availability of cheap petroleum.
Petro-capitalism refers to two distinct but
related ideas. The first is that petroleum is
the fuel of modern industrial capitalism. In
the context of contemporary debates over
global climate change (see global warming),
addiction to (or dependency on) oil as a geopolitically risky strategy for oil-importing
states and the continuing debate over whether
global peak oil output has been reached, there
may be the beginning of a turn to other
sources of energy (biofuels, nuclear and solar).
527
PHALLOCENTRISM
But in the short and medium term, petroleum
(and gas) will continue to drive the global
capitalist economy. The second meaning is
that oil-producing states that depend heavily
on oil revenues (as a proportion of exports or
as a proportion of GDP) – what are called ‘oildependent economies’ in some circles (Le
Billon, 2005) – are specific sorts of capitalist
economy insofar as they are not simply reliant
upon oil as a source of energy but are forms of
rentier economy in which oil rents (royalties,
taxes, sales) are the driving the entire political
economy. Petro-capitalism is a particular type
of extractive economy in which oil revenues,
typically under state control, undergird an
ambitious programme of state-led development and modernization (an exemplary case
would be the Shah’s Iran in the 1970s).
Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Equatorial Guinea
and Azerbaijan would be other cases of
petro-capitalism – though, it needs to be said,
they are customarily quite undisciplined and
corrupt forms of capitalism that ‘under perform’ in relation to comparable non-oil states.
Petro-capitalism in this second sense is associated with the ‘resource curse’ (Ross, 2001)
(see also conflict commodities).
mw
Suggested reading
Kaldor and Karl (2007); Shaxon (2006); Watts
(2004).
and multiple) ways of writing and reading, of
defining and investigating problems, including
a diversity of intellectual standards for knowledge production, and diverse ways of conceiving the relations between theory and practice.
Jardine (1985) terms such explorations gynesis.
She regards the works of the male philosophers in particular with some suspicion,
framing them as instances of male paranoia:
such men began to desire to be woman as
a way to avoid becoming the object of
female desire.
Phallocentrism is an important concept
within geography. Jardine (1985) attributes
the critiques of phallocentrism (e.g. a disbelief
in origins, master narratives, humanism and
progress) that developed throughout the twentieth century to the end of European imperialism, as well as to the growing influence of
feminism. Critiques of phallocentrism have
been important to the process of rethinking
the concept of nature, because they are tied to
attempts to displace ‘man’ from the controlling
centre and to refigure nature in active, less
exploitative, terms. To the extent that humanism and phallocentrism are intertwined, the
critiques of that latter extend to humanistic
geography. Framed through the analogous
concept of masculinism, Rose (1993) claims
that phallocentrism pervades geographical
knowledge. (See also gender; homophobia
and heterosexism; sexuality.)
gp
phallocentrism Placing man at the centre; a
masculine way of representing and approaching the world that some theorists root in male
genitalia and a masculine libidinal economy;
conceiving knowledge as neutral and universal, whilst refusing alternative knowledges;
knowledge that represent the interests and
perspectives of men. It is intertwined with
logocentrism, the fixing of meaning in hierarchized binary oppositions (hence the term phallogocentrism). Phallocentrism acknowledges
women, but locates their identities only in
relation to men, contained within a series of
binarized concepts and terms: ‘It is because
sexual difference hides itself in other concepts
and terms, other oppositional forms – in the
distinctions between form and matter,
between space and time, between mind and
body, self and other, nature and culture, and
so on, that it remains the latent condition of all
knowledges and all social practices’ (Grosz,
2005, p. 177). Critiques of phallocentrism
have led French feminists such as Hélène
Cixous and Luce Irigarary, and male philosophers such as Jacques Lacan and Jacques
Derrida, to explore feminine (i.e. more open
528
Suggested reading
Grosz (2005).
phenomenology While the term ‘phenomenology’ was used in philosophy by
J.H. Lambert (1728–77), Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804) and Ernst Mach (1838–1916),
and is a vital part of G.W.F. Hegel’s
Phenomenology of spirit (1807), in the twentieth
century phenomenology began with Edmund
Husserl (1859–1938) and the elaborations of
his work by Martin Heidegger, Roman
Ingarden, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul
Sartre, Max Scheler, Alfred Schütz, Jacques
Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Badiou
and Giorgio Agamben, among others (see
Kockelmans, 1967, pp. 24–5). For Husserl,
the definition of phenomenology was straightforward: it was himself and Martin Heidegger
(1889–1976).
Phenomenology entered human geography in the early 1970s as a reaction to and
critique of the reductive and objectivist
approaches of spatial science, and of the
structuralism and functionalism of some
PHENOMENOLOGY
versions of marxism then also entering the
field. humanistic geography in particular
turned to phenomenology to redress abstract
notions of people and places. This ‘geographical phenomenology’ focused variously on
everyday practices, human agency, movement, place, and social and environmental
ethics (Relph, 1970; Tuan, 1971; Buttimer,
1976; Entrikin, 1976). Phenomenology was
seen as a philosophical and methodological
approach that was attuned to human subjectivity, and its proponents read in its claim for a
return to ‘the things themselves’ – an argument at once opposed to scientific abstraction and in favour of a more direct social
geography of everyday lives and lifeworlds
(Casey, 1993).
In a major critical intervention, Pickles
(1985) forcefully questioned these subjectivist
readings of phenomenology. Pickles argued
that ‘geographical phenomenology’ had overlooked Husserl’s and Heidegger’s critique of
both objectivism and subjectivism in science as
remaining in what Husserl called ‘the natural
attitude’. The real crisis of the European sciences was not that they treated the everyday
world in overly abstract ways, but that they
failed to recognize that their claims to objectivity in the natural attitude had always to be
clarified and situated in terms of their constitutive regional ontologies (see ontology).
Werlen (1993 [1988]) subsequently elaborated such a regional ontology of everyday life
and social action through a close, creative
reading of the constitutive phenomenology of
Alfred Schütz (1899–1959).
Seen thus, phenomenology is not an alternative to the abstractive tendencies of science
but a necessary correlate to it, seeking as it does
to ground the relationship between scientific
and the pre-scientific, the theoretical and the
everyday, in a carefully prepared and reflective
ontological analysis. Phenomenology ‘does
not subscribe to a ‘‘standpoint’’ or represent
any special ‘‘direction’’; for phenomenology is
nothing of either sort, nor can it become so as
long as it understands itself. The expression
‘‘phenomenology’’ signifies primarily a methodological conception. The expression does not
characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research as a subject matter, but
rather the how of that research. The more
genuinely a methodological concept is worked
out and the more comprehensively it determines the principles on which a science is to
be conducted, all the more primordially is it
rooted in the way we come to terms with the
things themselves, and the farther is it
removed from what we call ‘‘technical
devices’’ though there are many such devices
even in the theoretical disciplines (Heidegger,
1927, p. 27: see methodology).
It was precisely the fact that the sciences had
forgotten their own histories of concepts and
approaches (cf. genealogy) that led to the
need for phenomenology to clarify the regional
ontologies of the sciences, knowledge production and the lifeworld. In Pickles’ view,
phenomenology is concerned not first and
foremost with individualized, subjective geographies, but with the ways in which phenomena
are constituted as intentional objects through
complex historical and social processes of distanciation, thematization, abstraction and formalization (and sometimes mathematization)
that constitute meaning-making in its many
forms. Phenomenologists are, therefore, always
interested in the constitution of the specific
objects, with their relational nature as objects
of consciousness, intention or meaning, and
with the lifeworld context that always escapes
all thematization but is the precondition for any
such thematization. The task of phenomenology in this sense is not to assert the priority
of the everyday world over the world of science,
or of place over abstract spaces, but to understand through ontological investigation how
each is constituted in various historical projects
of abstraction and thematization (see also
Gregory, 1978b).
By the 1990s and 2000s, new directions in
geographical thought led to even more
expanded readings of phenomenology in
post-positivist geography. Phenomenology
was renewed by a growing interest in postmodernism and post-structuralism, particularly in ways in which anti-essentialist
writings questioned what Jacques Derrida
called phenomenology’s residual ontotheology: its specific commitments to
particular interpretations of foundationalism,
rationalism, and subject. More recently,
growing interest amongst human geographers
in the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Michel de
Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Gayatri Spivak and others
has led to an appreciation of the ways in which
these thinkers have adapted phenomenological thought to new ends, and the advance
of non-representational theory in human
geography has also been achieved in part
through a reading of various forms of (post-)
phenomenology.
jpi
Suggested reading
Pickles (1985).
529
PHILOSOPHY
philosophy The relationship between philosophy and geography has been a long and
interesting one. To provide examples from a
broadly Western tradition: Strabo argued for a
close and necessary relationship between
moral philosophy and geographical knowledge; Sir Isaac Newton published his own
editions of Varenius’ Geographia generalis in
1672 and 1681; Immanuel Kant lectured on
physical geography throughout his teaching
career (1755–96); and in a 1976 interview
Michel Foucault declared that geography
‘must necessarily lie at the heart of my concerns’. Each of these authors had a different
view of philosophy, of course, but also of geography and geographical knowledge. For
Strabo, chorography was to provide empirical particulars for reflection on truth, nobility
and virtue (and also to underwrite Roman
imperialism); Newton was interested in a
mixed mathematical–spatial conception of
geography; Kant’s lectures were descriptive,
comprising a series of observations about
oceans, landforms and the weather, an outline
of the plant, animal and mineral ‘kingdoms’,
and a survey of the ‘four parts of the world’
(asia, africa, europe and america); and
Foucault’s remark arose from his forensic
enquiries into the relationships between
power, knowledge and space.
Historians of geography had been keenly
aware of this historical itinerary – at least as
far as Kant – and major studies in the history
of geography (see geography, history of)
paid close attention to philosophical reflections
on the tangled relationships between ‘culture’
and nature, notably Glacken’s landmark
(1967) survey. But modern geography was slow
to treat philosophy as a guide to contemporary
enquiries, and interest in it was, at first, largely
informal. Hartshorne’s (1939) exegesis of The
nature of geography repeatedly turned to Kant to
underwrite a view of concept-formation in
geography as idiographic, concerned with
the unique and the particular, but this was not
the product of any rigorous engagement with
Kant’s lectures on physical geography or their
place within his work as a whole, still less with
kantianism writ large. Even the repudiation of
Hartshorne’s views in the 1960s was less
informed by philosophy than it was driven by
the desire to reconstruct geography as a spatial
science: its foundations in the philosophy of
science (and in particular positivism) were not
codified until Harvey’s Explanation in geography
(1969).
In contrast, the critique of spatial science
and the formation of a series of successor
530
projects undoubtedly depended on – and in
several cases were directed by – explorations
of different, avowedly post-positivist philosophies. Many of these approaches sought, like
positivism or logical positivism, to identify a
sort of central generating mechanism (see
essentialism) and to ground their knowledge
claims in a bedrock of certainty (see foundationalism). Thus the first explorations of
post-positivist philosophies in human geography typically found their anchors in the
human subject, language or the mind (Gale
and Olsson, 1979: see also humanistic geography; phenomenology; structuralism).
But these are deep waters, and at the time
many geographers navigated them by treating
philosophy as a ready-made ‘machine for
explanation’ through which geographical cases
were to be fed (Barnes, 2008a); there was little
sense of a conversation between philosophy and
geography. Johnston’s (1983) mapping of
‘philosophy’ on to the terrain of ‘human geography’ was typical in the privilege it accorded
to philosophy, and it proved to be a template
for other general surveys. Even Sayer’s (1984)
influential work, one of the most philosophically astute investigations of the period, limited
place and space to context and circumstance;
the architectonics of explanation were derived
directly from the principles of critical realism.
Pickles’ (1985) careful reading of phenomenology (principally Edmund Husserl and
Martin Heidegger) was almost alone in its
recognition of spatiality as a crucial concern
of both philosophy and human geography.
Olsson’s (1980, 1991, 2007) imperturbable
odyssey through philosophy (and beyond)
not only had much to say to human geographers but also focused directly on some of the
root-concepts in the field, especially since its
reworking through spatial science: but it
was conducted in such an exquisitely abstract
register that many readers were probably
lost en route. Part way through Olsson’s
quest, the rise of postmodernism in human
geography (and across the spectrum of the
humanities and social sciences) did much
to distract attention from the sort of modernism that informed projects like Olsson’s.
Postmodernism, in concert (and often in tension) with the other ‘posts’, post-colonialism
and post-structuralism, brought new writers
to the attention of human geography at large.
Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault were
perhaps the most prominent, later followed
by Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Gilles
Deleuze and others. But whether any of these
figures could properly be limited to the field of
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
‘philosophy’ is an open question, and none of
them would be comfortable with the legislative
function that the other humanities and social
sciences so often accorded to philosophy.
In fact, appeals to philosophy as judge and
arbiter were subjected to two main criticisms.
The first accepted the importance of philosophical reflection, but warned against its
ideological deployment:
At its best, the ‘philosophy of geography’ is
that system of general ideas concerned with
the direction and content of geographical
work which practitioners elaborate during
praxis . . . At its worst, the ‘philosophy of
geography’ is where those who have read
philosophy in general and disciples of
‘more advanced ideas in other disciplines’
exercise ideological power over those who
remain with practical concerns. (Peet,
1998, pp. 8–9)
Closely connected to this complaint is Marx’s
injunction, repeatedly invoked by those committed to critical human geography and
radical geography: ‘Philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in various ways; the
point, however, is to change it.’ That said,
the development of various forms of marxist
geography was accompanied by an increasingly rigorous reading of philosophy: Louis
Althusser’s ‘symptomatic’ reading of Marx’s
texts had a limited audience in human geography, but Harvey’s reworking of classical
Marxism and Smith’s (1984) dissection of
the ligatures between capitalism and uneven
development prompted a close engagement
with a series of materialist philosophies to clarify not only questions of method but also questions of substance – see, for example,
dialectics, process and production of
space – and even a ‘symptomatic’ reading of
Harvey himself (Castree, 2006a; Castree and
Gregory, 2006b; Harvey, 1996).
The second objection was, in some ways,
even more radical. American philosopher
Richard Rorty called for the wholesale demolition of ‘Philosophy-with-a-capital-P’ and its
replacement by a post-philosophical culture.
He was suspicious of those who thought philosophy could provide a single, canonical language into which all questions could be
translated and through whose terms all disputes could be resolved. Rorty’s pragmatism
acknowledged the creative capacities of discourse, and treated post-philosophical culture
as a sort of ‘cultural criticism’ that claimed ‘no
extra-historical, Archimedean point’ from
which to offer its readings (cf. situated
knowledge: see Barnes, 2008a). Rorty’s prospectus did not provide a detailed model for
post-foundational geographies, and nor was it
intended to, but the discipline’s more recent
reactivation of philosophical reflection can be
read as inviting a more open and dialogical
relationship between philosophy and geography. There is clearly a considerable distance
between the essays on philosophy in geography collected from geographers by Gale
and Olsson (1979) and the essays from both
fields published in Philosophy and Geography
(2001–4).
Still more significantly, however, and closely
paralleling Rorty’s concerns, the renewed
interest in philosophy extends far beyond philosophies of science to address political and
moral philosophies. Indeed, a crucial focus of
enquiry has been the entanglement of political
and moral philosophies with the conduct of
science: hence human geographers have
effectively reactivated some of Glacken’s
(1976) most vital concerns through debates
about the contemporary constitution of
‘Nature’ and life itself in ways that, at the
limit, invite a re-mapping of the horizons
of the social and the biological (Thrift,
2008: see also bare life; biopolitics; nonrepresentational theory). Less epically,
there have been investigations of cosmopolitanism and ethics, dwelling and place, involving critical reworkings of Heidegger, Derrida
and Emmanuel Levinas (e.g. Barnett, 2005;
Harrison, 2007b); investigations of exception, law and violence, involving critical
reworkings of Agamben and Foucault (e.g.
Gregory, 2006; Minca, 2007a); and investigations of subjectivities and spatialities, involving critical re-readings of Butler and Foucault
(Pratt, 2004). This list is indicative, not
exhaustive, but it points to some of the ways
in which philosophy is increasingly being treated as resource rather than writ, used to
inform rather than police geographical
enquiry. This does not dispense with the need
for close, careful and contextual reading, and
collections such as Crampton and Elden’s
(2007) multi-faceted readings of Foucault
and geography show that the freedom to
experiment with philosophical texts is not a
license to ransack them.
dg
physical geography The characterization
and explanation of geological, hydrological,
biological and atmospheric phenomena and
their interactions at, or near the Earth’s
surface. This is often, but not exclusively, in
relation to human occupation and activity.
531
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
Physical geography is something of an intellectual chimera, whose role, relations and definition have changed as the nature and focus
of the geographical enterprise itself have
shifted. Throughout its modern history, physical geography has been implicated in most of
the central debates within geography but,
arguably, prospered from none. From formal
beginnings in the early Victorian age through
to the period between the two world wars, a
credible case can be made that physical geography was geography. Physical geographers
were part of the disciplinary elite, and geographical education and research necessarily
began with the physical foundations of the
Earth environment, as deployed in and across
natural (geographical) regions. Somewhere in
the inter-war period, all this changed.
Geography was recast as a subject with an
essential duality of character. For the greater
part of the twentieth century, debates concerning either the curse or the virtue of this
duality underscored geographical reflection,
while in terms of geographical endeavour, it
was physical geography that repeatedly lost
its place as trend-setter in the changing geographical tradition. By the later twentieth century, geography had become an amorphous
and disconnected enterprise, whose concerns
were less with disciplinary identity, and
more with following humanistic approaches.
In what became a postmodern and postparadigmatic world, multiple and contested
viewpoints were new virtues, but intellectual
largesse was not bestowed on physical geography, which was represented as the manifestation of an unyieldingly, restrictive and
unwelcome positivism. In the new millennium, physical geography may, however, be
on the verge of renaissance. Having fought
something of a quiet rearguard action within
the discipline, it may yet be revived from without: first, as a new class of environmental
issues demand a new kind of scientific
approach; and, second, as Earth systems science – physical geography by another name
and from other places – moves in to meet
this need.
Earlier nineteenth-century works provided
apparently firm foundations for the contemporary discipline. For example:
Physical geography is a description of the
earth, the sea, and the air, with their inhabitants animal and vegetable, of the distribution of these organized beings, and the
causes of their distribution. (Somerville,
1849, p. 1)
532
Physical geography was thus a broad, inclusive
body of knowledge, embracing the work of the
great natural scholars such as Alexander von
Humbolt and Charles Darwin, and claiming
an intellectual heritage as Immanuel Kant’s
‘propaedentic of natural knowledge’ (Huxley,
1877). Its project was that of geography as a
whole. Its scope and its holism, however,
became problems as early modern science
sought sophistication and institutional organization (see Livingstone, 1992), and as more
and more about a wide class of natural phenomena became both known and knowable
(Dickinson and Howarth, 1933). Physical
geography provided an elegant underpinning
of classificatory schemes:
Few sciences offer better opportunities than
physical geography for studying large units
and grouping their various phenomena.
(Emerson, 1909, p. vii)
Its virtues were repeatedly extolled in general
education, and in support of emergent environmentalism (Marsh, 1965 [1864]). It was
less secure, however, as a coherent intellectual
enterprise, particularly as explanation of phenomena became the goals of science. Arnold
Guyot, drawing a distinction between anatomy (description) and physiology (explanation) demanded that:
Physical geography . . . ought to be, not
only the description of our earth, but the
physical science of the globe, or the science
of the . . . present life of the globe in reference
to their connection and their mutual dependence. (Guyot, 1850, p. 3)
Here, then, were the seeds of a basic dilemma
within physical geography, which provided the
backdrop for the later schism within geography as a whole. Physical geography, in
search of both scientific prowess and academic
distinction, had somehow either to narrow its
focus (and risk trespass on established fields –
particularly geology), or make ambitious claim
to unoccupied territory (which, as the century
progressed, could draw on post-Darwinian
biology). Its response, in the shorter term,
was physiography – another pervasive term
with tortuous associations – and in the longer
term, a dalliance with environmental determinism and its nemesis, human ecology.
In some incarnations, physiography was
physical geography in all its aspects:
Physiography is a description of the substance, form, arrangement and changes of
all the real things of Nature in their relation
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
to each other, giving prominence to comprehensive principles rather than isolated facts.
(Mill, 1913, p. 3)
and having:
. . . a unique value in mental training, being
at once an introduction to all the sciences
and summing up of their results . . . (Mill,
1913, p. 14)
In others, physiography was a more limited
and scientifically precise component of physical geography, which had been:
. . . too often degraded into a sort of scientific curiosity shop, in which there is a vast
collection of isolated facts . . . without the
slightest attempt . . . to show how interdependent they are . . . (Skertchly, 1878, p. 2)
Interdependence of natural kinds was a common theme in these early writings (see also
Thornton, 1901) and recourse to the fundamental physical concepts of matter, work and
energy (which seemed more at home under
the label of physiography) was the common
means by which this was treated. Indeed, the
approach bore a striking resemblance to later
attempts to rejuvenate physical geography
through the applications of systems theory
(see below).
Thomas Henry Huxley’s volume of 1877
was different. Huxley had ‘ . . . borrowed the
title . . . which had . . . been long applied . . .
to a department of mineralogy . . . ’.
Significantly, Huxley’s purpose was to:
. . . draw a clear line of demarcation, both
as to the matter and method, between it
[physiography] and what is commonly
understood by ‘Physical Geography.’
(Huxley, 1877, p. vi)
The grounds for this demarcation lay in the
belief that physical geography had become too
thoroughgoing a physical science! Huxley’s
project, of course, was the extension of general
elementary education, and the comments
reflect his disappointment that the unique
educational value of physical geography had
been lost in more specialist study. Despite
Huxley’s ambition to give a sense of place
and purpose, where knowledge was grounded
in the local and observational, his physiography was far from regional geography. Its
content reflected such practicalities as how to
find the North Pole or read a Times weather
chart, alongside (by then) standard chapters
on ice, sea, earthquakes and the sun.
Notwithstanding Stoddart’s (1986) attempt
to place it more centrally within geography, it
probably held back, rather than promoted,
the subject – albeit ahead of its time in educational terms and somewhat misunderstood.
Certainly, more contemporary observers were
able to label physiography as the elementary
component of physical geography, and one
more influenced (and limited) by concerns of
relevance to human activity (Salisbury, 1907).
Later use of physiography confined it to the
description of landscape, and placed it firmly
within the geological tradition (Tarr, 1920).
Indeed, according to Lobeck, physiography.
. . . should not be called physical geography, . . . because the idea of the relation
of life to physical environment is not within
the scope of physiography. (Lobeck, 1939,
p. 3)
Physiography was thus identified with geomorphology, and both terms became increasingly synonymous with physical geography.
Davis (1899b) attempted to distinguish physiography from physical geography based upon
a test of the presence or absence of ‘causes and
consequences’ (p. iv) between environment
and organic life. Physical geography made
these connections; in their absence was pure
landform study, or physiography as now cast.
Davis rarely applied this prescription to his
own work, and largely under his influence,
physical geography become closely associated
with regional landform description and evolution. In suggesting the test as a kind of prescription for study, he had, however, helped
raise the spectre of environmental determinism, and to some, had thereby eased the
passage of other areas of physical geography
into a long, but ultimately blind, alley
(Leighly, 1955).
Thus, while physiography allowed, as it
were, greater room for manoeuvre in the jostling arena of nascent disciplines, it did nothing
to clarify or confirm physical geography (or
geography itself) as a coherent whole. On the
one hand, physiography was a polyglot physical geography, whose project remained more
ambitious than its achievements warranted.
On the other, it was a specialism, related to
geography around its circumference, along
with the other applied sciences (Fenneman,
1919: see figure 1). So many circumferential
fields of enquiry begged the question of
what was at the centre. It was into this that
physical geography was placed in uneasy alliance with the varying forms of regional
enquiry.
533
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
y
ph
ra
iog
Mathematical
geography
ato
log
y
GEOGRAPHY
Po
geo litica
gra l
phy
sto
ry
og
l
cia
er hy
mm rap
o
C og
ge
n
Eco
Biology
Hi
Clim
Bio
geography
Astronomy
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Ph
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physical geography 1: The circumference of geography: ‘ . . . each one of the specialized phases [spheres]
of geography belongs equally to some other science . . . In
a loose way, the central part . . . may represent regional
geography’ (Fenneman, 1919, fig. 1, p. 4)
For the first half of the twentieth century,
physical geography informed regional geographic enquiry. At its most obvious, physical
geography provided a natural definition of
regions where economic and social activity
appeared adjusted to, or bounded by, the natural environment. Away from the obvious
physio-climatic regions, where physical geography was merely a convenient backdrop, the
degree and manner in which physical geography truly engaged the human landscape
was a vexing issue. Failure to answer this satisfactorily legitimized a fundamental dualism
of geography, which was never successfully
reconciled. Environmental determinism ran
its course rather quickly, and human ecology
(Barrows, 1923) became not merely its successor, but one of the defining and prescriptive
terms for geography itself (Turner, 2002).
While the concern was still to find something
new and unique to define the subject, there
was a critical twist for physical geography,
insofar as:
I believe that the age-old subject of geography, though it has lost many specialities,
still seeks to cover too much ground, and
that it would benefit by frankly relinquishing physiography, climatology, plant ecology, and animal ecology. (Barrows, 1923,
p. 13)
In this way, geography was not only reorientated but, with it, physical geography was
534
cancelled from the geographical project (for
an accessible treatment of these issues, see
Unwin, 1992). Physical geography was
increasingly identified as a particular form of
geographical activity (most frequently manifest as applied geography) rather than as a
coherent intellectual field, and at best, referred
to obliquely when considering the role of
human–environment relations within geography as a whole.
Not all were happy with a separation of
human and physical geography, of course,
and displeasure or unease came from many
quarters. Hartshorne (1939), for example,
was at pains to draw attention to the effective
elimination of physical geography, and thereby
to the restriction of geography. This was not
advocacy of physical geography for its own
sake, but an appeal to the heritage of
Humbolt and others, which held that nature
was essentially unitary. Geography’s mission
was to disclose areal association, and systematic
study took precedence over any particular subject matter. Dualism had arisen because of
philosophical abstraction and a concern to
study categories of phenomena in isolation
(Hartshorne, 1959). Much the same sentiments were expressed by physical geographers
such as Miller or Wooldridge, who maintained
a belief in the foundational role of physical
geography for regional study, even where connections were subtle or unclear:
. . . to hurry on content with a few shallow
remarks based on perfunctory observation
of the physical elements of the environment
may result in overlooking or falsifying the
natural intimacy of relation that nearly always exists between the physical and the
cultural landscape. (Miller, 1953, p. 196)
Such convictions, although deeply situated,
were rarely compellingly demonstrated, and
the prevailing view of geography was one of
numerous separate branches, united only in
the far distant past (figure 2). Moreover, the
very appeals to unity based upon identification
or prescription of some essential property of
geographical analysis may have contributed to
the overshadowing of physical geography,
both within geography and in relation to the
other environmental sciences (Leighly, 1955).
Leighly argued, very simply, that geographical
study of any Earth surface phenomenon could
be justified not for its own sake (as often misrepresented) but because its existence in place
gave it legitimacy as the subject of geographical enquiry. By contrast, a physical geography
that required a more complex geographical
Penok
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Agassiz
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Cook
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Buckan
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HUMAN
Bort
Peary
EX
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:
TIO
ON
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A
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Mackenzie
OG
GE
D’Anville
Harrison
PHYS
1700
THEOCRATIC
1750
Scott
Suess
Monn
CLIM
ETH
N
Worming
Bjerknes
De Morranne
Davis
Peschel
HIST: G
E
SOCIOL: GEOG
G
STIN
ECA
Ratzel
OLO
GY
Ripley
Brunhes
Blache
Chistiolm
Leploy
Ritter
Matthew
OGY
Huntington
Cuvier
Humboldt
1800
Bowman
Fleure
FOR
GEO CRATIC
Kappen
MENT
SETTLE
URBAN
1850
NS
TER
PAT
1900
WEOCRATIC
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
Delisle
Newton
Varenius
physical geography 2: The ramifications of modern geography since 1700 (Taylor, 1953, fig. 1, p. 4)
justification for its material and methods hampered progress in achieving scientific engagement with the environment. This kind of
physical geography (founded either in the disclosure of spatial associations or in
the examination of human–environment
relations – the contested identities of the subject: Turner, 2002) demanded a vocabulary
and style of enquiry adapted to the scale and
scope of landscape and regional study, which
set it far apart from the other sciences, and
which, throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, did not seem relevant to their
increasingly reductionist methodologies.
As regionalism itself receded from the geographical stage, the role and relations of physical geography were once more examined. By
this time, climatology, geomorphology and
ecology were all well advanced separately,
and without areal relations as a touchstone,
there were uncomfortable parallels with the
identity crisis of earlier generations:
It is clear that physical geography, however
much it overlaps with the earth sciences,
must be distinguished from disciplines
which study terrestrial phenomena for their
own sake, irrespective of their relevance to
the spatial characterisation of man’s occupancy and exploitation . . . (Chorley, 1971,
p. 95)
For Chorley, there were several ways forward
for physical geography to avoid increasing
divergence within geography and to ensure
‘relevance’ to science and society beyond:
common application of techniques and
methods (model-building and increasingly,
GIS); study of resources and development;
and (general) systems theory (GST), in large
part adapted from Ludwig von Bertalanffy (a
biologist). Of these, only the last topic was
new, and for Chorley, it was only this that
provided a truly integrating concept and a
widely transferable approach:
. . . systems can be visualised as threedimensional structures in which the very
complicated flows and relationships forming
the socio-economic spatial decision-making
systems interpenetrate the physical processresponse systems . . . (ibid., p. 22)
535
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
Chorley attempted, for a modern generation,
to reconnect (physical) geography with the
integrative strands of natural science, and to
recapture for the subject the high ground of
ambition and application (brilliantly revived in
Stoddart, 1986). GST was the best way to
date of representing those elusive linkages and
connections (i.e. patterns and processes) that
were fundamental to geography from
Victorian times. The systems approach transferred readily, and enduringly, to physical
geography (see Chorley and Kennedy, 1971),
but appeared overly mechanistic and controlorientated (see, e.g., Bennett and Chorley,
1978), with the ascendancy of humanistic perspectives. There quickly followed a time when,
as Haggett (1990, p. 152) put it, consensus
around a common nature of areal differentiation and common methodology evaporated
as human geography was ‘Cut-off from its
older geographical roots . . . ’ and drifted
towards the social sciences.
Aside from the overt concerns with disciplinary definitions and coherence, the mid-tolate twentieth century was not devoid of
important substantive scholarly, as well as
practical achievements by physical geographers. With hindsight, these also provided
important points of attachment with contemporary scientific and environmental agendas.
Barry and Chorley (1968), for example,
helped to keep alive synoptic climatology as
a foundational strand of physical geographical study, and their book was followed by
more technically and scientifically challenging texts such as Oke’s on boundary layer
climates (1978), and Henderson-Sellers’ and
McGuffie’s (1989) early contribution to climatic modelling. All of these are now considered ‘classics’ and have run into multiple
editions. With respect to climatic history,
substantiating the character and scale of natural environmental change was arguably one
of physical geography’s greatest achievements in this period. Contributions by
physical geographers remain fundamental to
the sub-discipline of Quaternary studies (see
Goudie, 1977, and its numerous editions
for review). The traditional emphasis on
human–environmental interaction was also
not forgotten, with physical geographers
and physical geography very well represented
in the landmark text, Man’s role in changing
the face of the Earth (Thomas, 1956), and in
its successors such as Manners and
Mikeswell (1974) and Goudie (1981).
(This latter volume offers a very accessible
synthesis of the diverse geographical and
536
non-geographical literature in its several
newer editions.)
Another strong manifestation of physical
geography in the later twentieth century
occurred in environment and development
studies, with the fusion of political–economic
analysis and scientific–technical environmental expertise into what is now termed political
ecology. Works by Blaikie (1985) and Blaikie
and Brookfield (1987) are paradigmatic exemplars, and again offer enhanced valence with a
much wider (geographical) literature and
through the study of globalization, economics
and uneven development. In the USA, for
example, Butzer (2002) places concern for
environment and development at the heart of
a reinvigoration of physical geography that has
been able to shape and enact globally significant agendas outside, as well as within academic circles. A good example of this is the
conservation and environmental movement, where physical geographers have been
central in charting its origins and changing
characteristics, and in defining and popularizing new directions – see, for example, the very
different perspectives offered by Grove
(1995), Pepper (1996) and Adams (2004).
Returning to a disciplinary theme, by
the 1990s, geography inhabited a postparadigmatic world (Abler, Marcus and
Olson, 1992) and there seemed renewed possibilities to revisit older themes and once more
to look for disciplinary coherence, if not unity.
Indeed, physical geography was itself punctuated by a series of debates examining postpositivist epistemologies (notably realism)
and hence ontological depth (Rhoads and
Thorne, 1996). Both it and human geography
might thus visit intellectual territory, if not
with common purpose, then jointly armed
with methodological and philosophical sophistication. There are, too, signs of more awareness of the role of physical geography and
physical geographers in defining and progressing the discipline as a whole (Matthews and
Herbert, 2004).
Outside the discipline, there are strong
imperatives for the repositioning of academic
approaches favourable to, if not reliant upon,
physical geography. Systems approaches are
being revisited across many disciplines, with
a deeper theoretical perspective and the
enhanced vocabulary of ‘complexity studies’
(see complexity theory). Environmental
debate increasingly identifies an essential linkage between science, ethics and sustainability,
which necessitates both mechanistic and
humanistic modes of analysis (Nordgren,
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
Environmen
lysis
tal he
alth
Di
sa
nt
er
st
Impac
t as
Geomorphology
ent
Climatology
em
nag
ma
Hydrology
se
ss
m
e
R is
na
ka
Biogeography and
ecological processes
tur
n
Na
s
em
an
ag
em
ent
ra
ne
re
rc
tio
Quaternary environmental
change
al
ou
ba
Ur
S u st a in
nr
eg
e
able development
physical geography 3: The five overlapping sub-disciplines of physical geography in the context of multidisciplinary and problem-orientated themes (Gregory, 2005c, fig. 2, p. 83)
1997). Academic subjects are reordering, with
inter- and trans-disciplinarity not merely
becoming fashionable but seen as prerequisites to tackle more complex environmental
and societal issues (see especially the concept
and consequences of hybridity – Whatmore,
2002a). In this climate, it would seem obvious
that:
. . . widening the existing divide would be a
tragic mistake that would weaken the discipline at a time when . . . society needs a
synthetic, coherent view of how humanity
uses and abuses the physical environment
. . . (Abler, Marcus and Olson, 1992,
p. 397)
Gregory (2005c), in perhaps the most comprehensive evaluation of the recent scope and
history of physical geography, provides a welter of optimistic scenarios for its engagement
to this task (see figure 3).
The recent identification of sustainability
science (Kates, Clark, Corell et al., 2001) is a
clear example of physical geography being
used to identify and coordinate transdiscplinary agendas that respond to largescale, complex and hybrid environment–
society–development issues. The growing ability of gis to move from the realms of a research
technology to practical application, particularly when used in tandem with a vastly
increased information flow from a variety of
remote platforms spanning observations of the
human and biophysical world, would also
seem to make the case for the renewed prospering of physical geography a compelling
one. Nonetheless, there are warning signals,
for while Gregory reiterates one of those critical attributes defining physical geography,
whose purpose:
. . . is to understand how the Earth’s physical environment is the basis for and is
affected by human activity. (Gregory,
2005, p. xxvii)
It is this emphasis that over a long period, has
so divided and, paradoxically, often downgraded the subject outside particular ‘applied’
studies. Expectations are raised, to be disappointed in the follow-through. Crucially, the
new millennium is a time when physical geography conducted on the margins of, or away
from, the geographical arena is very strong. A
new scientific network devoted to Earth
systems science has developed, which claims
the same human–environment agenda, and
that may be better placed to take advantage
of wider intellectual and analytical advances,
and to fulfil societal needs (Pitman, 2005).
The natural claims of physical geography to
privilege as an environmental discipline thus
need to show an added value that transcends
that derived from the collected expertise of
others. It is, for example, quite possible to
view physical (and environmental) geography) as smaller components in a very
broad, holistic science–environment framework that claims much of the same intellectual heritage and rationale as geography itself
(see figure 4).
Once more, then, the hunt is on for a distinctive way forward, and for a more robust
means of integrating physical geography into
geography and science as a whole.
njc
537
PIRENNE THESIS
Nature
conservation
areas
Scenery and
nature park
conservation
Regional and
spatial planning
European
Landscape
Convention
Landscape and
architecture planning
Town, park and
garden planning
Landscape
painting
Convention for
Biological Diversity
Ecology
Landscape
ecology
Human
ecology
Total
human ecosphere
landscape
(Naveh)
Land art
(Serra, Christo)
Regional
geography
Human
geography
Landscape
character
Total-Kunstwerk
(Wagner)
Historical
geography
HOLISM
Poetry and
music
14th century Renaissance:
arts. perception and philosophy
16th−18th century Age of Discovery:
cartography and naturalists
FRANCESCO
PETRARCA
ALEXANDER
VON HUMBOLDT
Bio- and physical
geography
Middle Ages: regionalization
Landscape =
politically defined area of land
(region, territory)
physical geography 4: The relations between landscape, conservation, geography and landscape ecology
(Wascher, 2005)
Suggested reading
Chorley (1971); Fenneman (1919); Gregory
(2005), which includes a reprint of Chorley
(1971); Pitman (2005); Rhoads and Thorne
(1996); Turner (2002) and subsequent discussions.
Pirenne thesis A model of the relations
between international trade and urbanization in post-Roman and medieval europe,
proposed by the Belgian historian Henri
Pirenne (1862–1935) (Pirenne, 1925, 2001
[1937]). The fall of the Roman Empire in ad
476 produced a politico-military crisis, but
538
Pirenne argued that the major economic shock
to the urban system came much later, from the
Islamic conquest of the eastern Mediterranean
and North Africa, Sicily and southern Spain
(al-Andalus) in the eighth century. Long-distance Mediterranean trade was cut ‘with the
elemental force of a cosmic cataclysm’, and
the urban foundations of Europe crumbled as
it was ‘forced to live by its own resources’.
Europe fractured into a series of cellular, insular regions. It was not until the tenth and
eleventh centuries, so Pirenne claimed, after
the Christian Reconquista in Spain and the
military campaigns of the Crusades, that
PLACE
commercial recovery revived the fortunes of
cities: ‘Just as the trade of the west disappeared with the shutting off of its foreign markets, just so it was renewed when these
markets were re-opened.’ Merchants led the
urban revival, spearheaded by cities in the
south (especially Venice) and on the North
Atlantic coast (Bruges), where they settled in
grey zones close to but outside former, preurban fortified enclaves: the faubourg or portus.
Later work has used archaeological, numismatic and textual sources to show that the
Mediterranean remained a practicable trade
route throughout this period, however, though
activity was concentrated in the more secure
central zones, and that trade was also vigorous
along the Atlantic and Baltic coasts. Still more
arrestingly, McCormick (2001) argued that
communications between the Frankish empire
and the eastern Mediterranean surged in the
final decades of the eight and ninth centuries,
so that Islam did not so much ‘apply the coup
de grâce to a moribund late Roman system’ as
offer ‘the wealth and markets which would fire
the first rise of Europe’ and its commercial
economy (see also Hodges and Whitehouse,
1981). It is now also clear that towns ‘of
unambiguously commercial character’ grew
in north-west Europe from the seventh and
multiplied in the eight and ninth centuries,
with important implications for both geographies of local and long-distance trade and
the role of merchants in shaping urban
morphology (see Verhulst, 1999).
dg
comparable to equally generic meanings of
area, region or location. In human geography and the humanities more generally,
however, place is often attributed with greater
significance (cf. landscape). It is sometimes
defined as a human-wrought transformation
of a part of the Earth’s surface or of preexisting, undifferentiated space. It is usually
distinguished by the cultural or subjective
meanings through which it is constructed and
differentiated, and is understood by most
human geographers to be in an incessant state
of ‘becoming’ (Pred, 1984). Place is a central
concept in human geography in general and in
cultural geography in particular, but there
has also been renewed interest in the concept
in economic geography, where it stands for
the necessity of economic processes to be
grounded in specific locales and for those
locales to be proactive competitors within the
global economy (Massey, 1984; Harvey,
1989b). For many geographers, place and the
differences between places are the very stuff of
geography, the raw materials that give the
discipline its warrant (cf. areal differentiation). But the potential interchangeability
of place with other concepts is a sticking point.
Place, region, area and so on all can denote a
unit of space that has discrete boundaries,
shared internal characteristics, and that
changes over time and interacts with other
similar units. What then makes place a distinctive concept? There are three arenas of
discussion of special interest:
Suggested reading
(1) The idea that place, to be a place, necessarily
has meaning. Although there are glimmers of this idea throughout the history
of geography, it grew in popularity in
the modern discipline with the rise of
humanistic geography. Tuan (1977),
Relph (1976) and a host of others
approached place as a subjectively
sensed and experienced phenomenon.
Often taking their inspiration from phenomenology, humanistic geographers
regarded place as not only the phenomenological ground for geography but also
an irreducible component of human
experience, without which human
experience itself could not be constituted
and interpreted. Such experiences
included perceptions of place, senses of
place and human dwelling in and memories of place (see environmental perception;
memory).
These
were
understood to be formative of the unique
experiences of individuals, while also
Hodges
(1989).
and
Whitehouse
(1983);
Verhulst
pixel The term ‘pixel’ is a corrupted abbreviation of picture element – the individual
elements arranged in columns and rows to
form a rectangular, composite image. For
example, a 1980s VGA (Video Graphics
Array) monitor had a maximum resolution of
640 480 pixels (with 16 colours), whereas a
modern Super VGA monitor can have
1,024 768 pixels (and 16,777,216 colours!).
Raising the number of pixels per fixed area
increases the resolution of an image, but also
the amount of information to be processed
and stored. Consequently, raster images
are often compressed, as are digital photographs (as JPEGs) and DVD frames (using
MPEG2).
rh
place In a generic sense, a place is a geographical locale of any size or configuration,
539
PLACE
being specific to different cultures.
Places themselves were understood as
unique, meaningful material constructions that reflected and articulated cultural perceptions and habits. With the
rise of feminist geographies and a
‘new’ cultural geography in the 1980s,
place was understood less through the
notion of a self-adequate, intentional
human subject and more through the
lens of power-laden social relations
through which human subjects were at
once constituted and de-centred. That
is, subjects were not understood as
authors of their own intentions and
meanings, but as bearers of social identities that they did not themselves create. Place meanings came to be seen as
specific to particular racial and gender-,
sexual- and class-based identities (e.g.
Keith and Pile, 1993; McDowell,
1997b). (This was part and parcel of the
changing meanings of culture in geography.) At the same time, meaning itself
was cast in a new light, being viewed as
much less self-evident than before.
Particular attention was given to how
places are represented in different cultural forms (e.g. art, film, literature,
maps), which themselves were given over
to specific social uses within power-laden
fields of activity (e.g. Duncan and Ley,
1993). But meaning was understood to
be controlled neither by its producers
nor by its consumers. Meaning had no
ultimate locus: it was understood to be
contestable and alterable at each point of
dissemination. Another important stream
of place as meaning-filled sees place as a
concept that helps mark the distinction
between social order/disorder, the
proper/improper and so on. Place in this
regard is inextricable from imposed/
internalized social and cultural rules that
dictate what belongs where. It denotes
the (alterable) state of belonging versus
exclusion, as suggested by the expression
that something or someone is ‘in place’ or
‘out of place’ (Creswell, 2004) (see also
heterotopia).
(2) Place as becoming locale. Temporal change
as a constituent feature of place has long
been accepted, particularly in culturalhistorical geographies. It is an unexceptional (yet at times politically charged)
statement that places do not remain the
same. Instead, place is continually emergent. This has meant various things. It
540
has meant that place involves a transformation of some kind; for example,
the transformation of a non-human
element (the physical environment) by
human beings into a hybrid of culture
and nature (see cultural landscape).
A different kind of transformation often
spoken of is the transformation from
space to place. The introduction of the
notion of the production of space
has made the space and place opposition
difficult to sustain, however, as it seems
to render place largely as a particular
moment within produced space. More
recently, the emergence of place has
been understood as wrought through a
process of immanence. In this sense,
place is not derived from something else
(as place from space); it is, rather, an
always-already ongoing assemblage of
geographically associated, ontologically co-constitutive elements and relationships. (Space, one might say, is fully
saturated with place.) This idea of place
builds upon structuration theory
(e.g. Pred, 1984) and, later, on nonrepresentational theory and on the
monistic thought of Gilles Deleuze and
other theorists of immanence (Hetherington, 1997a; Thrift, 1999a).
(3) The de-centred, global sense of place.
Recently, geographers and others have
taken up the question of whether globalization has eliminated place as a
social-spatial reality (in much the same
way that globalization is claimed to have
brought about the ‘death of distance’
and, still more apocalyptically, ‘the end
of geography’), and whether places are
degenerating into ‘non-places’ under
the signs of late modernity (see also
placelessness). There seems to be
broad agreement that place does still
matter, and that it would be wrong to
see place and globalization as negating
one another. For example, places/locales
continue as salient features of a globalizing economy that is still marked by the
production of differences through a constitutive process of uneven development. Also interesting is the way in
which some geographers, notably Massey (1991), have promulgated an idea of
place that takes the notion of global
interconnection as a precondition for
place or sense of place. For Massey,
place is not constituted by what is internal to it, but by its distinct lines of
PLACE-NAMES
connection to other parts of the world.
One place is different from another on
the basis of its relations to the outside.
This effectively renders the distinction
between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ moot.
Massey’s ‘global sense of place’ has the
added virtue of a politics that looks towards the outside rather than towards a
defensive localism on the basis of embattled, threatened traditions. Her sense
of place nonetheless leaves open the
question of whether to construe places
as centres of some kind, even if only as
meeting places of lines of global connectivity. Hetherington (1997), drawing
upon actor-network theory, advocates somewhat differently for place as
an ‘ordering process’ of diffuse but connected placings, through which a network of potentially far flung sites are
enrolled into relationship with each
other. (See also contrapuntal geographies.)
ghe
Suggested reading
Cresswell (2004); Hetherington (1997a).
place-names Attaching a name to a place is
a way of differentiating one place from
another, but place-names are more than markers in a system of differences: they are also
ways of staking some sort of claim (often of
rule, domination or possession) and, as such,
are frequently sites of contestation. The two
spatial registers, linguistic and social, are
intimately connected (cf. Pred, 1990).
In historical geography, especially in
europe, the study of place-names or toponyms
is a philological discipline based principally on
written evidence revealing early spellings of
names. Such studies have often been used to
make inferences about settlement history and
landscape evolution, and have also attracted
considerable controversy. Thus for Britain it
was once claimed that pagan names and settlements with the element -ingas (e.g. Hastings)
denoted the very earliest Anglo-Saxon settlement, while -ingaham (e.g. Birmingham)
represented the next stage of settlement, and
the numerous instances of x’s tun names (e.g.
Edgbaston: Ecgbald’s tun) marked a later
establishment (Gelling, 1997). Adherents to
these views also believed in the so-called ‘clean
sweep’ theory, which asserts that the AngloSaxons were the originators of English landscapes, since a wholesale disappearance of
Celtic place-names in the eastern counties
denoted a land area devoid of settlers and
settlements (cf. settlement continuity).
Almost all of these claims have been rejected
in the past 40 years. The main objection is that
-ingas and -ingaham place-names coincide
with early Anglo Saxon archaeological remains
about as little as possible, given that both
occur in substantial numbers in south and east
England (Dodgson, 1966). Furthermore,
there are great difficulties consistently distinguishing ham meaning ‘village’ from hamm
meaning ‘land in a river bend’, probably dry
ground in a marsh, which opens up the possibility of mistaking topographical and habitative meanings (Dodgson, 1973). However, it is
recognized that if there is one nominative form
more frequently associated with the early
Anglo-Saxon settlers than any other it is the
topographical name. It is now supposed
that -tun is associated with manorialization,
when society was organized in a more sophisticated manner with the establishment of the
powerful institutions of kingship. A stronger
continuity of Celtic populations is suggested
by work charting the incidence of the word
walh, which is supposed to establish the presence of substantial Welsh-speaking populations
(Cameron,
1980).
Studies
of
Scandinavian names have, however, produced
greater consensus and led to some successful
integrations of philological, archaeological and
landscape history. These studies consistently
suggest that the Danish-named villages were
located in the least desirable locations from an
ecological and agricultural perspective, and
imply that the victorious Danes were a militarily smaller group than once claimed and did
not take over or absorb pre-existing English
settlements (Fellows-Jensen, 1975).
The modern world has by no means been
insensitive to the histories carried in solution
in place-names. Beyond Europe, and sometimes within, colonialism and imperialism
exercised the power to impose new names on
the landscape: naming a place coincided with
the taking of place. Although the practice continues – as in Israel’s colonization and settlement of Gaza and the West Bank under its
military occupation (see occupation, military: Cohen and Kliot, 1992) – subject populations do not passively adopt the new
nomenclatures. Indeed, the post-colonial
period has usually been marked by the recovery or invention of place-names that register a
pre-colonial history and an indigenous culture
(Herman, 1999; Nash, 1999). Thus, for
example, Salisbury, the capital of the British
colony of Rhodesia, was named after a British
Prime Minister, but in 1981 it became Harare,
541
PLACELESSNESS
the capital of the newly independent state of
Zimbabwe. Many states have attempted to fix
place-names through the institution of
national committees, such as the South
African Geographical Names Council or the
United States Board on Geographic Names (a
federal institution supported by a network of
committees in individual states). modernity is
as much an economic as it is a political project,
and it is scarcely surprising that place-names
have come to function not only as markers of
national or cultural identity, but also as sites
of commodification. A place-name, through
its association with a particular regional expertise, may thus become a bearer of value for a
commodity (cf. intellectual property
rights). For this reason, the European
Union has attempted to regulate the attribution of regional place-names to food (e.g.
Roquefort cheese) and wine (e.g. Beaujolais)
through a law on ‘protected geographical
indications’: despite bilateral agreements,
however, it has proved difficult to enforce
these restrictions and protections outside the
EU. In this sphere, as in so many others,
place-names continue to mark sites
of struggle in the present as they did in the
past.
dg/rms
Suggested reading
Gelling (1997); Nash (1999); Pred (1990,
pp. 92–142).
placelessness If by one definition place
represents a ‘fusion’ of human and natural
worlds that become ‘significant centers of our
immediate experiences’ and make it possible
to live authentic, original and meaning-filled
lives, then placelessness represents its antithesis (Relph, 1976, p. 141). It ‘describes both
an environment without significant places and
the underlying attitude which does not
acknowledge significance of places’ (Relph,
1976, p. 143). Relph devised the concept as
an object of critique in a treatise that became a
key text in humanistic geography, particularly in those versions that were inspired by
phenomenology. Placelessness is said to
result from the tyranny of ‘technique’, efficiency, interchangeability and replicability, in
the design and construction of the human
landscape. It is evident everywhere from suburban houses and shopping centres to tourist
attractions, restaurant chains and airports. In
this sense, placelessness is a distinctly modern
phenomenon that is all of a piece with the rise
of mass culture, mass communication, multinational corporations and overweening central
542
governments (see also alienation; modernity; postmodernity).
The concept of placelessness is not without
controversy. The kinds of ‘places’ it names
(suburbs, shopping strips, tourist sites and so
on) have been viewed more tolerantly, even
affectionately, by students of popular and vernacular culture, especially in the USA, as
evinced by the writings of J.B. Jackson and his
students (e.g. Jackson, 1970; Wilson and
Groth, 2003). They claim an important distinction between the crass imposition of bureaucratic planning, on the one hand, and
culturally original solutions to the spatial problems of everyday life, on the other. Moreover,
they see in these inventive responses (not all of
them ‘good’, but none so destructive as to undo
place as such) a great deal of popular meaning
and symbolism. More recently, geographers
who study the consumption of mass goods,
including clothing, food and shelter, have
argued that production does not determine
consumption: thus places produced with one
set of uses in mind can be claimed and hence
consumed by people for quite other, often
resistant, purposes (e.g. Gregson and Crewe,
2003). Placelessness has also been argued to be
a necessary and important resource for the
exercise of marginalized and oppressed sexual
identities, a realm of relative freedom, liberation and anonymity versus the constraints
imposed by otherwise ordered places (see
Knopp, 2004) (cf. heterotopia).
ghe
plantation The meaning of the term ‘plantation’ has changed over time. Originally a
plot of ground with trees, it came to mean a
group of settlers or their political units during
British overseas expansion (e.g. the Ulster
Plantation; see colonialism). Later, ‘plantation’ came to mean a large farm or landed
estate, especially one associated with tropical
or subtropical production of ‘classical’ plantation crops such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, tea,
cocoa, bananas, spices, cotton, sisal, rubber
and palm oil (Thompson, 1975b: see farming). Most plantations combined an agricultural with an industrial process but
technologies, labour processes, property rights
and infrastructure have varied enormously
across space and time, making a generic definition of plantation impossible (see agribusiness). Plantations have witnessed historical
transformations in labour relations between
slave, feudal, migratory, indentured and free
wage labour, and many plantations in latin
america operated on a mixture of these labour
forms (see labour process; slavery).
POINT PATTERN ANALYSIS
All definitions of plantation tend to differentiate it from other agricultural forms of production by size, authority structure, crop or labour
force characteristics (low skills, work gangs,
various forms of servility). The theory of
plantations has had a long lineage that can be
traced back to David Ricardo and John Stuart
Mill in the nineteenth century through to
H.J. Nieboer and Edgar Thompson in the twentieth. An important distinction has been made
between old- and new-style plantations, in
which the former (e.g. the hacienda in Central
America) were essentially pre-capitalist, with
surpluses directed at conspicuous consumption,
while the latter were capitalist enterprises driven
by the rigours of capitalist accumulation
(see capitalism; feudalism; market).
Recent work has seen plantations as ‘totalizing institutions’ whose historical connections
with racism and slavery have fundamentally
shaped entire social and political structures (as
in the Caribbean and the US South), but have
also acted as powerful agents of underdevelopment (Tomich, 2004; Edelson, 2006; Pons,
2007). Plantations and plantation economies
and societies cannot be understood in the
terms of the narrow logic of production of the
enterprise alone, however. The enormously
diverse forms and circumstances in which the
plantation has persisted and transformed itself
must be rooted in the historical forms and
rhythms of capitalist accumulation under specific land, labour and capital markets.
mw
pluralism A term with more than a single
distinct meaning in human geography and
the social sciences:
(1) In social and cultural geography,
anthropology and cultural studies, the
term is invoked to describe a condition of
societal diversity, usually (though not
necessarily) along ethnic lines. In such
uses, cultural pluralism can become
synonymous with multiculturalism,
and features prominently in discussions of
the management of diversity – for example,
the achievement of social cohesion in the
states of the new europe (Amin, 2004a).
Such pluralism is usually regarded as
malleable, and subject over time to the
conforming forces of assimilation.
(2) More specifically, plural societies are the
outcome of European colonialism in
the tropics, where, according to the writings of J.S. Furnivall (1948), a distinct
society emerged of indigenous and marginalized labourers, Asian merchants and
European elites, and where power was
commonly held in inverse proportion to
group size. Furnivall’s initial work in
South-East Asia was extended to the
Caribbean islands by M.G. Smith, and
influenced a number of studies by social
geographers (Clarke, Ley and Peach,
1984). The sense of these studies is that
stratification is more rigid, sustaining
intergenerational divisions well into the
post-colonial period.
(3) In political decision-making, ‘pluralism’
refers to a thesis associated with Robert
Dahl concerning the mobility of power in
modern democracies among defined
interest groups. conflicts are temporary
rather than structural and may be addressed pragmatically, with elections
forming the final court of arbitration.
This optimistic thesis of self-governing
checks and balances in the political
arena has received sharp criticism, and
has been superseded in the urban context
in which it was first formulated by studies
of growth coalitions (Jonas and Wilson,
1999) that revive the earlier elite theory
that Dahl set out to undercut.
dl
point pattern analysis Point pattern analysis involves looking for geographical patterns
in data sets that have point (x, y) geocoding
given National Grid References, for example,
of where a geographical phenomenon exists or
takes place. A pattern is said to occur if the
locations of the geographical feature or event
are non-randomly distributed across a study
region, meaning that they are either clustered
into particular places or evenly spaced across
the same.
A simple way to find patterns in point data is
to plot their locations on a map. Reference is
often made to the physician and epidemiologist John Snow, whose map of the distribution
of deaths from the 1848 cholera epidemic in
London provides an appealing allegory about
how processes (the transmission of disease)
create geographical patterns (a concentration
of deaths around a water pump in Broad
Street, Soho) which, when revealed (by mapping), suggest new information about how
those patterns were caused (the discovery that
cholera is a water-borne disease: see medical
geography). Whilst this popular telling is part
fable – the map was not actually present in
Snow’s original work – the element of myth
says something useful about the nature of
point pattern analysis, offering an important
caveat to the otherwise undoubted value of
543
POISSON REGRESSION MODELS
maps in supporting geographical enquiry and
knowledge discovery. Shaw, Dorling and
Shaw (2002) demonstrate that had Snow
extended his map to include all of London,
then a greater concentration of deaths would
have been found south of the Thames (Soho is
north of the river). Snow’s map is a rhetorical device – centred on a particular pump
in London to illustrate his pre-existing finding
that cholera is harboured by polluted water.
The general problem is that maps can be created for very deliberate purposes and the eye
can find (or be led to find) apparent patterns
that are not necessarily validated by the data.
Point patterns are therefore verified analytically against the usual statistical benchmark
by asking ‘Could we expect this by chance?’
quadrat analysis overlays a raster grid on
the study region to compare the incidence rate
in each cell against the average for all. Other
methods of cluster detection include calculating the distance from events to either their
nearest neighbour (the earliest form of pattern
analysis within quantitative geography, linked
to testing hypotheses derived from central
place theory) or to other events in the study
region, and also the geographical analysis
machine. Assessing the significance of the patterns can use probability theory or, in an era of
geocomputation, use random redistributions
of the data to simulate the effects of geography
(controlling for the fact that it is hardly surprising to find more of an event in a particular
part of a study region if more people live
there).
As well as in epidemiology, point pattern
analyses are used in environmental and crime
mapping (Chainey and Ratcliffe, 2005),
supported by a range of software that include
geographic information systems, GeoDa
(Anselin, Syabri and Kho, 2006) and
CrimeStat (Levine, 2006). As examples of
local statistics, the geographical principles
of these analyses can be extended to use predictor variables to help explain what is found
(see, e.g., geographically weighted regression and the geographical explanations
machine).
rh
Suggested reading
O’Sullivan and Unwin (2002); Wong and Lee
(2005).
Poisson regression models These models
belong to the family of techniques for categorical data analysis. They are used when
the response variable in a regression-like format is a count (e.g. the number of crimes in an
544
area) and the researcher wants to relate this to
other area characteristics. The nature of this
response variable, which cannot be negative,
means that the standard regression model
should not be used. Instead, the natural log of
the count is modelled and its random part
takes on a Poisson distribution so that the stochastic variation (see stochastic process)
around the underlying relationship has a variance constrained to be equal to the mean. The
Poisson distribution is also used in log-linear
modelling for the analysis of multiway crosstabulations. If the distribution of the count
(having taken account of the predictor variables) has marked positive skew so that the
variance of the residuals exceeds the mean, an
overdispersed Poisson or Negative Binomial
model is needed. An example of such a model
is when hospital length of stay is the response;
while the typical stay is a few days, some individuals may experience a stay of several
months. The multi-level Poisson model
can accommodate spatial random effects.
An important use of Poisson regression is as
part of a model-based approach to disease
mapping, as the Standardized Mortality Ratio
is the ratio of observed count to an expected
count. In the model, the log of the observed
count is regressed on the log of the expected
count and other predictor variables, with the
coefficient associated with the expected count
being treated as an offset, constrained to
1. Another important area of application is
the calibration of spatial interaction models
in which the response is the log of the number
of flows between areas. Guy (1987) shows
how the Poisson model can be used to estimate
quite complex models, including attraction
and destination constraints.
kj
Suggested reading
Griffith (2006); Griffith and Haining (2006).
policing At the most general level, policing
refers to practices aimed at the regulation and
control of a society and its members, especially
with respect to matters of health, order, law
and safety. More specifically, policing refers to
the actions of those agents of the government
equipped with coercive power to enforce law
and maintain order. Amongst the key expectations of police officers is that they will work to
reduce the incidence and severity of crime
through surveillance and arrest. Policing is
thus the first stage in a criminal process that
can lead to conviction and punishment.
Most research on policing in geography
focuses on the legal, bureaucratic and cultural
POLITICAL ECOLOGY
structures that shape the geographical imaginations (see also geographical imagination)
and tactics of police officers. This work is
largely ethnographic, and emphasizes the
geographical routines through which the
police engage their work (Fyfe, 1992) and
their interest in securing territorial control
(Herbert, 1997; see territory). This research
shows that the nature of such territorial
actions by officers is strongly conditioned by
their prior definition of the spaces in which
they are operating. For instance, police construct ‘no-go areas’ (Keith, 1993) or ‘antipolice areas’ (Herbert, 1997), places where
histories of conflict with minorities cause
officers to engage in either avoidance or
heavy-handed tactics.
In recent years, police agencies have
embraced geographical techniques to isolate
and target specific locations of ongoing criminal activity, so-called ‘hot spots’. Through reliance on geographic information systems,
police departments seek to determine where
crime is perpetuated and to mobilize intensive
enforcement to reduce it. Evidence suggests
that these tactics can be successful in reducing
crime at particular places. However, such operations are expensive to conduct, and may serve
merely to displace crime to other locales.
Other research on policing seeks to situate it
within broader power structures of the state
and state–society relations. Notable here is
work on community policing, a contemporary
reform movement meant to increase cooperation between officers and citizens.
Observations of community policing in action
demonstrates how officers retain authority in
defining problems and constructing solutions
(Saunders, 1999; Herbert, 2006). Research
also focuses on the blurring of the lines
between military and police in the growth of
the ‘security forces’.
Analyses of policing outside the specific
context of uniformed agents of coercive state
power largely occur in the context of discussions of governmentality. This refers to the
processes through which individuals and
groups are encouraged to assume responsibility for their own welfare and control. Such
‘self-help’ actions as creating defensible
spaces, forming neighbourhood watch groups,
and employing private security represent
instances where policing is presumed to
extend beyond the sole province of the state.
This devolution of police authority is often
criticized for exacerbating class-based differences; wealthier individuals and communities
can more easily protect themselves and their
property, and thereby preserve their social
standing.
skh
Suggested reading
Fyfe (1992); Herbert (1997).
political ecology An approach to, but far
from a coherent theory of, the complex metabolism between nature and society (see Blaikie,
1985; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987). The
expression itself emerged in the 1970s in a variety of intellectual contexts – employed by the
journalist Alex Cockburn, the anthropologist
Eric Wolf and the environmental scientist
Graheme Beakhurst – as a somewhat inchoate
covering term for the panoply of ways in which
environmental concerns were politicized in the
wake of the environmentalist wave that broke in
the late 1960s and early 1970s (see environmental movement). In its academic, and specifically geographical, usage, political ecology
has a longer and more complex provenance –
which both hearkens back to human and cultural ecology, and to an earlier history of relations between Anthropology and geography in
the 1940s and 1950s, and incorporates a more
recent synthetic and analytical deployment in
the early 1980s associated with the work of
Piers Blaikie (1985), Michael Watts (1983a,
1986), and Suzanna Hecht (1985). In the
1990s the core empirical concerns of political
ecology – largely rural, agrarian and third
world – were properly expanded, and the theoretical horizons have deepened the original
concerns with the dynamics of resource
management (see Peluso, 1992; Zimmerer,
1997; Neumann, 1999). Political ecology has
also splintered into a more complex field of
political ecologies, which embraces environmental history (Grove, 1995), science
studies (Demeritt, 1998), actor-network theory (Braun and Castree, 1998), gender theory
(Agrawal, 1998: cf. feminist geographies; gender; gender and development), discourse
analysis (Escobar, 1995) and a reinvigorated
marxism (O’Connor, 1998; Leff, 1995; cf.
marxist geography).
Two geographical monographs – The political economy of soil erosion (1985) by Piers
Blaikie and Land degradation and society
(1987), edited by Harold Brookfield and
Piers Blaikie – provided the intellectual and
theoretical foundation stones for the formalization of political ecology as such. What
Blaikie achieved in The political economy of soil
erosion was to systematize the growing confluence between three theoretical approaches:
cultural ecology (Nietschmann, 1973) in
545
POLITICAL ECOLOGY
geography, rooted in ecosystems approaches
to human behaviour; ecological anthropology,
grounded in cybernetics and the adaptive
qualities of living systems (see Rappaport,
1968); and the high tide of Marxist-inspired
political economy, and peasant studies in
particular, of the 1970s. A number of people
contributed to this intersection of ideas –
Richards’ (1985) work on peasant science,
Hecht’s (1985) analysis of eastern Amazonia,
Grossman (1984) on subsistence in Papua
New Guinea, and Watts (1983) on the simple
reproduction squeeze and drought in Nigeria –
but Blaikie pulled a number of disparate
themes and ideas together, drawing in large
measure on his own South Asian experiences.
In rejecting the colonial model of soil erosion
that framed the problem around environmental constraints, mismanagement, overpopulation and market failure, Blaikie started from
the resource manager, and specifically households from whom surpluses are extracted,
‘who then in turn are forced to extract
‘‘surpluses’’ from the environment . . . [leading] to degradation’ (1985, p. 124). The analytical scaffolding was provided by a number of
key middle-range concepts – marginalization,
proletarianization and incorporation – that
permitted geographers to see the failure of soil
conservation schemes in class or social terms;
namely, the power of classes affected by soil
erosion in relation to state power, the classspecific perception of soil problems and solutions, and the class basis of soil erosion as a
political issue. Blaikie was able to drive home
the point that poverty could, in a dialectical
way, cause degradation – ‘peasants destroy
their own environment in attempts to delay
their own destruction’ (1985, p. 29) – and that
poverty had to be understood not as a thing or
a condition, but as the social relations of production, which are realms of possibility and
constraint.
In this work, political ecology came to mean
a combination of ‘the concerns of ecology
and a broadly defined political economy’
(Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987, p. 17), the latter understood as a concern with effects ‘on
people, as well as on their productive activities, of on-going changes within society at
local and global levels’ (1987, p. 21). This is
a broad definition – an approach rather than a
theory – which was adopted by the editors in
the inaugural issue of the Journal of Political
Ecology in 1995. Political ecology has three
essential foci.
The first is interactive, contradictory and
dialectical: society and land-based resources
546
are mutually causal in such a way that poverty,
via poor management, can induce environmental degradation that itself deepens poverty. Less
a problem of poor management, inevitable natural decay or demographic growth (see demography), land degradation is seen as social
in origin and definition. Analytically, the centrepoint of any nature–society study must be
the ‘land manager’, whose relationship to
nature must be considered in a historical, political and economic context.
Second, political ecology argues for regional
or spatial accounts of degradation that link,
through ‘chains of explanation’, local decisionmakers to spatial variations in environmental
structure (stability and resilience as traits of
particular ecosystems in particular). locality
studies are, thus, subsumed within multilayered analyses pitched at a variety of regional
scales.
Third, land management is framed by
‘external structures’, which for Blaikie meant
the role of the state and the core__periphery
model.
If early political ecology was not exactly clear
what political economy implied, beyond a sort
of 1970s dependency theory, it did provide a
number of principles and mid-range concepts.
The first is a refined concept of marginality in
which its political, ecological and economic
aspects may be mutually reinforcing: land degradation is both a result and a cause of social
marginalization. Second, pressure of production on resources is transmitted through social
relations, which impose excessive demands on
the environment (i.e. surplus extraction). And
third, the inadequacy of environmental data of
historical depth linked to a chain of explanation analysis compels a plural approach.
Rather than unicausal theories one must, in
short, accept ‘plural perceptions, plural definitions . . . and plural rationalities’ (Blaikie and
Brookfield, 1987, p. 16).
Political ecology had the advantage of seeing land management and environmental degradation (or sustainability) in terms of how
political economy shapes the ability to manage
resources (through forms of access and control, of exploitation), and through the lens of
cognition (one person’s accumulation is
another person’s degradation). But in other
respects political ecology was demonstrably
weak: it often had an outdated notion of ecology and ecological dynamics (including an
incomplete understanding of ecological
agency: Zimmerer, 1994b); it was often remarkably silent on the politics of political ecology; it
had a somewhat voluntarist notion of human
POLITICAL ECONOMY
perception; and, not least, it did not provide a
theoretically derived set of concepts to explore
particular environmental outcomes or transformations. These weaknesses, coupled with
the almost indeterminate and open-ended
nature of political ecology, not unexpectedly
produced both a deepening and a proliferation
of political ecologies in the 1990s (see Hecht
and Cockburn, 1989; Peet and Watts, 2003
[1996]; Bryant and Bailey, 1997). A number
of studies address the question of politics,
focusing especially on patterns of resistance
and struggles over access to and control over
the environment, and how politics as policy is
discursively constructed (Moore, 1996; Leach
and Mearns, 1996; Pulido, 1996; Neumann,
1998; see environmental justice). Others
have taken the political economy approach in
somewhat differing directions: one takes the
poverty–degradation connection and explores
outcomes with the tools of institutional economics (Das Gupta, 1993) and entitlements,
whereas another returns to Marx to derive
concepts from the second contradiction of
capitalism (O’Connor, 1998). Much work
has addressed the original silence of political
ecology on questions of gender (Agrawal,
1998). And still others, often drawing upon
discourse theory and social studies of science,
examine environmental problems and policies
– often outside the third world – in terms of
ecological modernization, risk and governmentality (see Leach and Mearns, 1996;
Braun and Castree, 1998; Keil, Bell, Penz
and Fawcett, 1998; Forsyth, 2003; Li, 2007).
Political ecology has in a sense almost dissolved itself over the past two decades as
scholars have sought to extend its reach. At
the same time, it has met up with the proliferations of forms of environmental studies, science
studies, post-structuralism and new social
movements. Some of the most interesting work
now speaks to the political ecology of cities (see
urban nature), commodities and of forms of
green rule and subject formation (Agrawal,
2005; Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2006;
Swyngedouw, 2004b) and violence (Peluso and
Watts, 2001). Much of this work continues to
struggle with the dialectical relations between
nature and society that the early political ecology identified (see Harvey, 1996), however, and
which continues to provide the central conundrum for what is now a hugely expanded and
polyglot landscape of political ecology.
mw
Suggested reading
Adam (1998); Demeritt (1998); Faber (1998);
Fairchild and Leach (1998); Forysth (2003);
Guha and Martinez-Alier (1997); Hajer (1995);
Kuletz (1998); Moore (1996).
political economy The study of the relationship between economic and political processes.
Aristotle’s Politics distinguished between oikos,
the operation of the household (on patriarchal principles) to meet daily needs, and
the polis, the domain of public association and
political life. In the early seventeenth century,
political economy began to be used in France
to discuss how economic activity might contribute to the powers of the sovereign and the
prosperity of his subjects. This made economy
a public rather than private activity, and
located the problematic of political economy
at the scale of the state (and implicitly as a
european concern). Mercantilists explored
how the sovereign/nation could prosper from
running a trading surplus at the expense of
other nation-states. The physiocrats, motivated by economic crises in France, argued that
the source of wealth lies in agriculture: the
‘natural’ fertility of the nation. Physiocrats
began to argue that the sovereign should not
govern the economy too much.
By the mid-nineteenth century, British political economy began to emerge, crystallized
around the earlier ideas of Adam Smith
(1723–90), flourishing into a school of thought
of global influence throughout the nineteenth
century. Experiencing Britain’s shift from a
society founded on landowning and rural agricultural economic activities to an urban and
industrial capitalist society (see industrial
revolution), as well as the wealth brought to
Britain as a result of unequal trading networks
with its colonies (see colonialism) and less
industrialized European neighbours, it came
to be argued that national wealth was embedded in labour rather than land (a labour theory of value), and that crucial driving forces
were the division of labour, the extension of
the market, and free domestic and international trade. Smith, Thomas Malthus,
David Ricardo, James and J.S. Mill conceived
the relationship between economic activities
and the national polity in terms that aligned
political economy with Lockean liberalism.
Freedom was founded in men (sic) owning
private property, and political intervention
into their activities was an invasion of liberty
and privacy. With this geographical shift from
monarchical France to democratic Britain, the
political came to be equated with the national
state rather than the sovereign.
By the end of the nineteenth century, political economy had split into two very different,
547
POLITICAL ECONOMY
Marxist and liberal, schools. Refining
Ricardo’s labour theory of value, Marx argued
that capitalism exploits workers, and that the
crucial relationship between political and economic processes is the way in which capitalism
engenders, and is shaped by, political struggle
between classes (see marxist economics). In
his view, capitalism was an advance over previous modes of production, as it promoted
the autonomous individual in the workplace
and in political life, but sooner or later would
founder on class conflicts that neither the market nor the state could finesse, giving way to a
more collective, political economy founded on
communism or socialism.
In the 1890s, partly in response to Marx’s
critique of capitalism, a marginalist, subjectivist political economy emerged almost simultaneously in Britain, France, Austria, Sweden
and Italy. William Stanley Jevons, Léon
Walras, Carl Menger and Knut Wicksell
argued that value was determined by consumers’ utility, not labour value (see utility
theory). Using a pleasure/pain calculus, they
argued that the marginal utility of everything –
that is, the extra pleasure from obtaining an
extra unit of a commodity – is inversely proportional to supply. In free markets, consumers would thus pay the right amount for
everything purchased: its marginal utility to
them. The American John Bates Clark
extended the calculus to labour and capital,
concluding that labour and capital will always
be paid fairly in free markets, according to
their marginal productivity to society. This
school of neo-classical economics came to
describe itself as simply ‘economics’, because
in this view the economy, if left alone by the
state, would maximize social welfare all by
itself, harmoniously coordinating citizens’
desires. In short, the political could be evacuated in favour of the economy, to the benefit
of society.
Just as liberalism has conservative and progressive variants, so does liberal political economy. Conservative, Lockean liberalism argues
that freedom is the result of maintaining a minimal ‘night-watchman’ state; progressive liberalism (beginning in late-nineteenth-century
Britain and migrating to the USA during the
twentieth century) argues that state intervention is necessary to secure the freedom and
well-being of those impoverished by capitalism. The former school, now associated with
the project of neo-liberalism and its architects
Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek,
became global common sense. It still sees itself
as undertaking political economy (publishing
548
in the Chicago school’s Journal of Political
Economy), and pays close attention to political
processes, but only because such processes tendentially undermine what it regards as the
proper functioning of a capitalist economy.
The latter school flourished in Britain and
Europe during the Great Depression and until
the mid-1970s, under the magisterial influence
of John Maynard Keynes. As fordism or
Keynesianism, it pursued the principle of continual state intervention to manage the contradictions of capitalism to the benefit of the
nation and its least well-off citizens, and saw
itself as inheriting the mantle of the ‘classical’
nineteenth-century political economy of
Smith, Ricardo and Marx. This rapidly fell
from favour in the context of the crises of postwar Fordism and the Reagan and Thatcher
revolutions, although contemporary economic
commentators such as Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey
Sachs and Paul Krugman seek to keep the
flame alive.
Whereas liberal political economy dominates political science and economics, at least
in the global north, political economy in
geography is usually taken to mean some
variant or critical elaboration on the line of
thought precipitated by Marx. During the
1970s, radical geography successfully displaced liberal market-oriented approaches to
economic geography, associated with location theory and spatial science, and diversified itself. In sum: versions of marxism, from
dialectical to analytical, articulate a political
economy approach centred on class struggle.
realism examines how the necessary
economic relations and political conflicts of
capitalism are complicated by differences
in geographical context. regulation theory
explores state-economy relations at various
scales, comparing Fordist and post-Fordist
regimes of accumulation across space and
time. Approaches via governmentality argue
for more attention to everyday behaviour,
the conduct of conduct, rather than the state,
as shaping state-civil society relations.
Approaches influenced by feminism and poststructuralism draw attention to gender and
identities other than class as emergent
domains of inequality and conflict under capitalism. social movements approaches theorize
the emergence of social contestations of capitalism (see also resistance). The cultural
turn stresses the importance of discourse and
representation to the dynamics and contradictions of capitalism. Diverse and community
economies approaches emphasize the ongoing
importance of non-capitalist economic and
POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY
social relations, while approaches informed
by post-colonialism pay attention to the geographically differentiated ongoing imprint of a
colonial past, and question norms of progress
and well-being associated with European capitalism (see also post-development). If there is
one thing shared across these different, at times
hotly debated, critical approaches to economic
geography, it is a resonance with Marx’s political economic conception of capitalism.
es
Suggested reading
Barnes (1996); Lee and Wills (1997); Sayer
(1995); Sheppard and Barnes (2000).
political geography A subdivision of
human geography analysing ways in which
politics and conflict create spaces and places
and, in turn, are themselves partially determined by the existence and nature of geographical entities. The division of human
geography into the broad spheres of economic,
socio-cultural and political geography topics
reflects the pre-eminence of disciplinary
boundaries in academia. However, contemporary geography reflects criticism of disciplinary
constraints and, in turn, political geography
has become more eclectic and connected to
other spheres of human geography. To understand the importance of this trend, a brief history of political geography is necessary.
At the outset of the development of modern
human geography, political geography played
a central role. Indeed, the term political geography was applied in a general sense to human
aspects of geography and served as an adjunct
of history. The establishment of geography as
a university discipline created the initial subdisciplines of colonial geography, commercial
geography and political geography; a reflection of the discipline’s role in imperialism.
The key text for the new sub-discipline was
Friedrich Ratzel’s (1897) Politische geographie,
which used an organic theory of the state to
connect cultures with environments within
dynamic state borders. Ratzel’s influential
text connected political geography to social
darwinist ideas whereby a hierarchy of competitive cultures was defined by their differential ability to utilize the environment, with the
most successful culture having the right to
establish a state in a particular territory.
The result was the concept of lebensraum,
or living space, which would later prescribe
Germany’s right to move its boundary eastwards into territory populated by Slavs.
At about the same time, Sir Halford
Mackinder was both establishing political
geography in universities in Great Britain
and creating a political geography framework
to advocate British imperialism. Also, influenced by social Darwinism and the organic
theory of the state (Ó Tuathail, 1992),
Mackinder is best remembered for claiming
that political geography had a role in formulating grand geo-strategic plans. His ‘geographical pivot of history’ article (1904),
later known as the heartland theory, defined
a historical geography of European continental powers in perpetual conflict with maritime
powers. In the context of Germany’s growing
challenge to Britain, Mackinder saw technological change facilitating German control of
Eurasia and subsequent global dominance.
His solution was a strong British Empire to
counter the threat. In the USA, Isaiah
Bowman promoted a political geography
to serve the needs of governments defining
an ever-increasing role in world politics
(Smith, N., 2003c).
Mackinder and Ratzel illustrate some
important features of the early political geography with contemporary implications. First,
they utilized grand universal theories of dubious strength to offer academic authority to
state-specific foreign policy choices. Second,
they connected the establishment and vitality
of political geography to national security
threats and the ability to offer ‘practical’
advice. Third, the analysis was state-centric,
identifying states as the only important actors.
Fourth, the theoreticians were socially privileged, white males, but, and fifth, they still
claimed to ‘know’ the world and classify
large swathes of territory as the venues for
particular behaviours or characteristics. In
Haraway’s (1988) phrase, they practised a
‘god’s eye-view’.
The relationship of political geography to
foreign policy was epitomized by portrayals of
General Karl Haushofer as the ‘evil genius’
behind Adolf Hitler’s Second World War
plans for world domination (Ó Tuathail,
1996b). Greatly exaggerated by American
media, the end-result was a tarnished image
for political geography, as it became associated with German geopolitical expansion (cf.
geopolitik). The sub-discipline withered as a
research enterprise in universities on both
sides of the Atlantic, ironically at the same
time that the US government was expounding
geopolitical theories as it achieved the status
of superpower. Political geography was
pushed into the academic doldrums, although
it continued to be taught in many institutions,
albeit with somewhat ‘dated’ textbooks and
549
POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY
approaches. Its focus became a functional
view of the state that promoted national integration and the accumulation of capital.
Two types of states were identified; independent sovereign states and dependent countries
(colonies and other possessions) (Hartshorne,
1950). The latter were largely ignored as were
the power relationships between rich and
poor, or colonized and colonizing states.
Without the previous environmental framework and with little political purpose, political
geography lost its coherence and relevance
(Claval, 1984). Instead, political geographers
described political events (such as elections)
or features (such as boundaries) in an
attempt to oil the wheels of state integration
and capital growth. Political geography
remained state-centric, but inward-looking
rather than geo-strategic, and normative
rather than prescriptive.
Political geography, as with all academic
studies, is a product of its social and intellectual contexts. Global competition between
states and concepts of social Darwinism
stimulated Mackinder and Ratzel, and postwar prosperity fuelled the blandness of functionalism. In the 1960s the global politics of
the Vietnam War and internal crises manifested in race riots were linked to a growing
intellectual engagement with the work of Karl
Marx (see marxism). Political geography was
not immune, and over time a critical political
geography began to emerge. The process was a
step-by-step identification of social issues and
marginalized groups, adoption of new and
fertile social theoretical frameworks, and the
recognition of different useful methodologies.
Initially, two broad themes were explored,
both relying on spatial analytical techniques:
the distribution of resources and opportunities in cities (Cox, 1973), and electoral
geography (Taylor and Johnston, 1979).
Both branches brought the belated introduction of analytical techniques to political geography. However, these were seen as
inadequate in discovering the causes of social
inequality. The parallel emergence of radical
geography was seen by some as a means of
identifying underlying structures that were
producing social inequality and related political conflicts.
The urban problems of racial strife and economic disparity and the global problems of
war and gross economic inequality provoked
different uses of radical literature. David
Harvey’s (1999 [1982]) Limits to capital
deployed the work of Karl Marx to explain
how the production of urban spaces was a
550
necessary and contested part of capitalism.
On the other hand, Peter Taylor (1985)
adopted the neo-Marxist world-systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein to situate states
within the dynamics of the capitalist worldeconomy. The product was a concentration
on the political geography of geographical
scale with the local/urban, nation-state and
global scales being identified as interlinked.
Institutional support for political geography
blossomed to match the changing intellectual
climate. The journal Political Geography
Quarterly (later Political Geography) was established in 1982. The first edition of Peter
Taylor’s (1985) textbook Political geography:
world-economy, nation-state and locality and a
host of conferences and related edited volumes
(Burnett and Taylor, 1981) identified the subdiscipline as a reinvigorated component of
human geography.
However, in the 1990s human geography
took what has been labelled the ‘cultural
turn’ and engaged with social theorists other
than Marx (see social theory). The result
was a challenge to what was perceived as the
existing reification of scale and the concentration upon economic structures. The politics of
the production of scale was theorized with
increasing sophistication, and feminist geographers and queer theorists (see feminist
geographies; queer theory) demanded
focus upon the scales of the body and the
household. Political geography became
increasingly eclectic as cultural geography
emphasized the political conflicts inherent in
cultural constructs and political geography
included the cultural representation of politics. The boundaries of the sub-discipline
became increasingly blurred (Painter, 1995).
One outcome was a renewed interest in the
topic of geopolitics. Since the Second World
War, political geography had defined itself as
different from geopolitics. The topic of critical geopolitics (Ó Tuathail, 1996b) focused
on the existing geopolitical practices of states
and deconstructed the rhetoric of politicians
and ‘experts’ to illuminate the underlying
power politics. Critical geopolitics also promoted a concentration on non-state actors,
such as social movements and indigenous
groups, which also reflected calls for increased
study of race, gender and sexuality
(Kobayashi and Peake, 2000; Staeheli,
Kofman and Peake, 2004); though these topics
and theoretical perspectives are not yet fully
integrated into political geographical analyses.
The concentration upon the state, nationalism and international politics, or formal
POLLUTION
Politics, which had led the revival of political
geography, was complemented by attention to
the politics of representation and governance,
or politics with a small ‘p’ (Flint, 2003a). The
philosophies of Michel Foucault and Pierre
Bourdieu, amongst others, challenged the
structuralism and economism of some versions
of Marxist theory, and geographers used these
works to focus upon topics of governance
(Hannah, 2000) and social constructions of
space (Mohan and Mohan, 2002). Feminist
scholars challenged the binary nature of existing theories and analyses (Staeheli, Kofman
and Peake, 2004). In turn, the discipline saw
an explosion of journals (Space and Polity,
Geopolitics, Society and Space) as well as a surge
in the publication of textbooks as political geography classes became more common in universities (Flint and Taylor, 2007 [1985]; Jones,
Jones and Woods, 2004).
A coherent political geography played a key
role in establishing the modern discipline of
geography. However, the price of a dubious
theoretical foundation was application in the
name of imperialism and war. Contemporary
political geography is eclectic and constantly
engaging in self-critique challenging the prioritization of particular theories and social
groups, and identifying key actors beyond the
state. The result is a number of creative tensions. Within the sub-discipline, competing
theoretical perspectives vie for attention.
Also, as the ‘war on terror’ has become a dominant context (see terrorism), the issue of
relevance has reappeared; producing a tension between social scientists critical of foreign
policy, on the one hand, and administrators
and politicians looking for geography to provide the tools and analysis to facilitate counter-terrorism.
cf
Suggested reading
Agnew (2002); Cox and Low (2003); Flint
(1999); Painter (1995); Staeheli, Kofman and
Peake (2004); Flint and Taylor (2007 [1999]).
pollution Substances released into an environment that cause harm to living organisms or
built structures (e.g. roads, buildings). The
substances may be human-made or natural
(see environmental hazard; hazard). Harm
occurs when the receiving environment cannot
easily assimilate the type or quantity of substance released.
The effects of pollution range from aesthetic
nuisance through to economic loss, health
damage, death and long-term environmental
degradation. The release of pollution may be
sudden, or it may involve a slow accumulation
of substances, such as the concentration of
heavy metals, herbicides and pesticides in
food chains. The impacts of pollution may
also be gradual or sudden. The impact may
be short-lived or exist for a long time. It may
be local, widely dispersed or far from the
source of pollution (see acid rain). Pollution
may be described by its medium (e.g. air or
water pollution), its character (e.g. noise pollution and acid rain) or its source (e.g. industrial pollution).
Pollution is both physical and socially constructed
(see
social
construction).
Bickerstaff and Walker (2002) demonstrate
the moral geography of pollution, risk,
responsibility and blame in an English city.
Pollution may be regarded by some people as
an ‘accident’, or understood by others as the
deliberate and inevitable consequences of production processes. Sections of the environmental movement have strongly criticized
production processes that generate pollution.
Increasingly, efforts are being made to ‘close
the circle’ by using former wastes from processes as inputs into new production processes, in what is known as ‘industrial
ecology’. Regulations are enforced to prevent
the deliberate emission of pollution that is
considered unacceptable. Sometimes the pollutant must be treated to a standard before it is
emitted. The setting of standards and their
enforcement vary throughout the world
because the receiving environments are different, and partly because of desires to maintain
economic growth.
Concern about pollution rose dramatically
after more than 4,000 people died in a photochemical smog in London in December 1952,
and following the publication of Silent spring
by Rachel Carson in 1962. Kates (1995)
observed that the sharp decrease in pollution
after the UK’s Clean Air Act of 1956 was part
of a longer trend to improved air quality,
resulting from the displacement of coal as a
source of energy. Rachel Carson identified
the dangers of a new pollutant, the insecticide
DDT (Carson, 1962). It was the forerunner
for concerns about many human-produced
substances, ranging from pesticides through
to nuclear industry waste. Continental- and
global-scale pollutants such CFC emissions,
acid rain and pollutants that contribute to
global warming have caused most concern
for governments, the environmental movement and citizens in developed countries.
Pollution is an important aspect of environmental justice in the USA (see Pastor,
551
POPULATION DENSITY
Morello-Frosch and Sadd, 2005), where pollution and other differences in environmental
quality are seen as discrimination, and increasingly in other countries (see Walker, Mitchell,
Fairburn and Smith, 2005). In areas said to be
in a state of underdevelopment, it is often the
local forms of pollution, such as the lack of
clean drinking water, that cause the greatest
immediate concern.
pm
population density The number of persons
divided by the area that they occupy. Within
urban geography, neighbourhood and
housing-based measures of density became
part of discussions about urbanism, which
linked context to the well-being of population
groups. Within demography and population
geography, density is mostly calculated at a
national and regional scale, and sheds light on
links between environmental conditions and
population well-being (see malthus model;
overpopulation). However, wide variations
between countries in rates of urbanization
and the availability of cultivable land undermine the use of the simple measure in a comparative sense, and have led some to favour
physiological density, which divides the number
of persons by the area of potentially productive
land (Sambrook, Pigozzi and Thomas, 1999).
The availability of geo-referenced data and
flexible models is supporting the further development of density-related classifications
(Hugo, Champion and Lattes, 2003).
ajb
Suggested reading
Plane and Rogerson (1994, ch. 2).
population geography Scholarship on the
geographical organization of, and connections
between, groups. Between 1953 and the 1990s,
population geography defined itself as the
systematic study of ‘(1) the simple description
of the location of population numbers and
characteristics . . . (2) the explanation of the
spatial configuration of these numbers and
characteristics . . . (3) the geographic analysis
of population phenemona (the inter-relations
among areal differences in population with
those in all or certain other elements within
the geographic study area)’ (Zelinsky, 1966,
pp. 5–6). Accordingly, the sub-discipline
thought of populations as groups synonymous
with political jurisdictions (e.g. urban residents, Australians), ethnic and national identities (e.g. latino/as), phenotype (e.g. white,
black), and demographic events (e.g. migrants,
the elderly, families, baby boomers, refugees).
As links between classifications such as these
552
(i.e. the construction of knowledge) and the
circulation of power became acknowledged,
views on how populations were made and
maintained, and for what purposes, have
greatly expanded. This enlarged reading of
groups also takes into account the relations
and connections between groups, as with work
that examines the meanings of whiteness in the
context of blackness, or the experiences of
migrancy in relation to those of sedentarism.
Scholarship similarly investigates more plural
views of geographical organization that go
beyond the one time focus upon areal differentiation in space to recover and rework ideas
about place and environment. For some, the
widening agenda threatens the integrity of the
vision for the sub-discipline first proposed by
Trewartha in 1953; for others, growing plurality signals strength and the relevance of the field
to other branches of geography and to society
more generally. The recent rebranding of the
flagship journal to Population, Space and Place
has occurred with the rise of critical accounts
(see critical human geography), and at a
time
of
increasing
‘post-disciplinarity’
(Conway, 2004).
Contributions to population geography
have long been cross-disciplinary, not least
because ‘geographical’ epistemologies (particularly those related to environment, place
and space) have been variously developed as
part of enlightenment thinking in different
disciplines, including economics, sociology
and demography. Classical economic thought
– most notably the malthusian model –
argued that population growth rates could
lead to the demand for food (resources)
exceeding the capacity of the environment to
supply necessary inputs. Neo-Malthusian
work has expanded the concept of carrying
capacity to include social and cultural factors,
and use has been made of large-scale simulations and models, including the limits to
growth model. Neo-Marxist critiques and
views of a population–environment–resource–
ideology nexus have served to complicate
ideas about overpopulation and drawn
greater attention to political factors (see political ecology).
While accounts concerned with environment drew attention to the links between
population,
scarcity
and
production,
approaches focused upon place saw important
links between population, culture and production/consumption. Reflecting the still influential ideas of the French géographie humaine
school, Beaujeu-Garnier (1956–8) believed
that by studying the ‘ways of being’ of
POPULATION GEOGRAPHY
populations, the field could integrate livelihood (or environmental and economic possibilities for production) with a concern for
norms, values and cultural change. This integrative account of population and nature–
society links resisted the compartmentalization of population issues as separate from economic or cultural concerns, took for granted
who or what constituted a population and
continues to prove difficult to apply (compare
Bruhnes’ 1910 treatment of settlement geography with contemporary work on global
cities).
After the Second World War, population
geography became institutionalized as a subdiscipline concerned with empiricist and
positivist statements about spatial variations
in the distribution, composition and growth of
populations. The call to arms had been issued
by Trewartha (1953), who saw a synthetic
geography that existed for, and began with,
people (populations) and their geographical
organization. Trewartha made his case as
spatial science gained prominence, ensuring
that a view of space as a container through
which the order of population phenomena
could be both described and, through the
development of theory, explained and modified (see location theory) permeated the
field. Inspired by new data and international
collaborations, and drawing on the contributions of demography in general, and demographic transition and stable population
theory more specifically, population geography
contributed work on the diffusion of vital
transitions (notably Zelinsky’s pioneering
1971 hypothesis of the mobility transition), spatial variations in the components of population
change (fertility, mortality, migration)
and composition (particularly on ageing),
and the development of more accurate and
sub-national population projections and
life table methods (Jones, 1981; Woods,
1982). Interest grew in the disaggregated
behaviour of individuals with, for example,
rational choice theory and social physics
frameworks extended to model migration
decisions at residential and regional scales
(see also behavioural geography; regional
science). The growth of studies in medical
geography on morbidity, mortality and geographical variations in accessibility to health
care combined with the relative neglect of fertility to leave commentators both bemoaning
the migration-centred foci of much work and
debating the need for continued disciplinary
border-crossing to rejuvenate the field. While
links with demography remain strong, the
consolidation of fields such as spatial demography and geodemographics (Woods, 1982;
Wachter, 2005) have occurred alongside, but
not to the exclusion of, alternative treatments
of space (White and Jackson, 1995).
The well-known critiques of Enlightenment
knowledge that had taken root in human
geography in the 1980s impacted upon the
field in at least two ways. In methodological
terms, greater emphasis was placed upon
qualitative methods and ‘mixed’ methods
of approaching human subjects, and taking
feelings, aspirations and discourses more seriously. life course frameworks extended lifecycle explanations of, for example, household formation, location and dissolution patterns to take account of interdependent spatial
and temporal contexts, and better integrate
accounts of structure and agency along structurationist lines (Van Wissen and Dykstra,
1999). The rapid development of microsimulation, agent-based modelling and geographic information science in general
further exploited new data products, deepened
the field’s already strong engagement with
public policy and business planning, and further extended (some have argued, democratized) how population groups are defined, by
whom, and for what purpose.
Indeed, the question of how knowledge
about the geographical organization of population reflects and reinforces the circulation of
power in society continues to shape the direction of the field. In particular, a number of
commentators have questioned the categories
used in the study of populations and, most
poignantly, the question of how populations
are classified, named and legitimized as
objects of study and policy. post-structural
views argue that populations are socially constructed institutions that both enable and
counter inequality and oppression in society.
Drawing on Michel Foucault, research has
examined the use of political technology and
discourse by states to create inferior others
that legitimize political projects. Examples
include the deployment of race-based classifications to underwrite ethnic cleansing and
genocide, including the Nazi holocaust, and
the exploitation of gender and sexuality
norms against civilians and refugees in wars.
post-colonial research has investigated the
link between population classifications, census and registry systems, and the mapping of
ethnic populations to further colonial ends,
and the neo-colonial use of discourses of
migrancy to legitimize development agendas including structural adjustment
553
POPULATION POTENTIAL
programmes (Kosiński, 1984; Lawson, 2000).
Drawing on feminist geographies and
social geography, the field has re-examined
the meaning of concepts of demography,
including age (literatures on children’s geographies and ageing), reproduction, disease,
disability, death and dying (Pratt, 1999;
Valentine,
2001;
Kalipeni,
Craddock,
Oppong and Ghosh, 2004; Silvey, 2004).
The diverse readings of space, which
increasingly call upon notions of environment
and place, run through the field’s expanding
engagement with the economic, cultural and,
to a lesser extent, ecological dimensions of
globalization
and
neo-liberalism.
Research on global cities explores patterns of
skilled migration, the diversification of families
and households, and variations in experiences
of settlement, incorporation, assimilation
and social exclusion among immigrant communities (Clark, 1998; Beaverstock, 2002;
Wong, Yeoh and Graham, 2003). Balancing
production-centred accounts of family migration, an emphasis upon gendered migration
has drawn attention to factors of social reproduction and institutional context among
domestic workers and persons trafficked
(Boyle, Halfacree and Robinson, 1998). The
growing social and spatial plurality of household living arrangements has been linked to
ageing and immigration, and has sparked
new research on the demographic transition.
Historically, low levels of fertility have been
connected to the interplay of changes in concepts of self and a range of state policies,
including housing supply and social support.
Similarly, the variable ways in which states
mediate transnational and diasporic communities, including border controls, remittance management and through discourses of
long-distance nationalism, have witnessed a
more explicitly integrative approach, combining economic, cultural and political readings
(Samers, 1997; Jackson, Crang and Dwyer,
2004).
There are a number of key engagements
within population geography that relate to
the direction of travel and the broader influence of its scholarship. The simultaneous
embrace of plurality, and the deepening methodological specialism of many approaches,
ensure that time-honoured questions about
intellectual coherence and vitality remain.
While there is an implicit suggestion that moderation and balance (in approach, in topic and
so forth) will best serve ongoing research
needs and meet funding expedients, there is a
tendency to define balance in terms of the
554
long-standing demographic approach to the
field. That is, migration is seen as exerting an
overdue influence on research agendas, at the
expense of work on fertility (and to a lesser
extent mortality and composition, which are
the subjects of other fields of enquiry within
geography). Under post-structural and critical
readings, however, this divide is artificial and
problematic.
Similarly, spirited debates on methodological pluralism have supported the development of mixed methods approaches almost to
the exclusion of single-method techniques,
which are seen as the preserve of more specialized fields, including spatial demography.
Methodological specialization has tended to
exaggerate a divide between those using quantitative, qualitative and ethnographic tools at a
time when many agendas require flexible and
plural approaches. The growth in interest in
participatory geographies represents another
opportunity for reflection about the relationship between knowledge and power in the
field.
Furthermore, it remains largely the case that
analyses of risk remain absent from debates
within the field, despite increased public
attention to matters of securitization, broadly
defined (see security). Given the profound
implications of well-documented ecological
and cultural transitions, to name two, for the
geographical organization of populations and
the structure of society, work is needed to
understand the roles that groups play in affecting global futures.
ajb
Suggested reading
Bailey (2005); Findlay (2004); Jones (1981);
Kalipeni, Craddock, Oppong and Ghosh
(2004); Plane and Rogerson (1994).
population potential A measure of the
nearness of a spatially distributed population
to a point (developed as part of the macrogeography project). The potential exerted on
a point (Vi) is as follows:
k
X
(Pj =dij ), j 6¼ i,
Vi ¼
j¼1
where Pj is the population at point j, dij is the
distance between i and j and summation is over
all k points (dij may be raised to some power, to
reflect the friction of distance: cf. distance
decay). The higher the potential at a point – Vi
– the more accessible it is to the population
concerned. Isopleth maps of population potential indicate the relative accessibility of a set of
POPULATION PYRAMID
experiences of every five-year cohort in a
population as it ages. The increased application of population projections in business and
planning has helped fuel a virtuous circle of
methodological innovation, which includes
developments in sub-national projections,
small-area projections, multi-region models
and ethnic minority projections (Wilson and
Rees, 2005).
ajb
points, weighted by their populations and the
distances between them (as in the gravity
model). Population may be replaced by
another variable, such as purchasing power, to
give a measure of market accessibility for
each point i.
rj
Suggested reading
Stewart and Warntz (1959); Warntz (1965).
population projection A scenario about the
size and composition of a population in the
future (or past) that is based on a set of demographic assumptions. As ‘what if’ scenarios,
projections should be distinguished from estimates (which aim to provide the most accurate
picture of current populations) and forecasts
(which aim to statistically predict the most
probable scenario based on a broad range of
information). The key (direct) mathematical
methods for making projections include the
extrapolation of demographic trends, the use
of the balancing equation (see demography)
and, notably, the cohort component method,
which makes specific assumptions about the
fertility,
mortality
and
migration
Rowland (2003, ch. 12).
population pyramid A graphical depiction
of the age–sex structure of a population.
This provides a visual record of the current
population structure and differentiates
between expanding populations (pyramid
shape with concave sides), stationary populations (straight-sided) and constricting populations (beehive shape with convex sides: see
the US Census Bureau for contemporary pyramids that can be animated). Pyramids also
provide visual clues as to prior demographic
events, including the arrival/departure of sexselective migration streams, the impact of
Age
100
MALES
1907
1
80
1927
Year of birth
1907
90
1
1917
1917
1927
70
1937
3
1947
1897
FEMALES
60
2
2
1937
3
50
4
4
1947
1957
40
1957
1967
30
1967
1977
20
5
1987
1997
500
5
300
200
100
0
0
1977
1987
10
400
Year of birth
1897
Suggested reading
0
Size of age groups (thousands)
100
200
300
400
1997
500
Size of age groups (thousands)
1 Shortage in births due to the 1914–18 war (‘empty classes’)
2 Passage of ‘empty classes’ to age of fertility
3 Shortfall in births due to 1939–45 war
4 Baby boom
5 Non-replacement of generations
population pyramid France, 1897–1997 (Lévy, 1998, p. 4)
555
POPULISM
wars upon the male population, infanticide
and the movement of boom–bust cohorts
(Momsen, 1991). The figure for France is
typical of populations of the global North. It
shows the general influence of ageing, which,
because of lower male life expectancy,
produces a strong excess of women in the
over-70 age groups. The recent decline in birth
rates is also evident in the shortfall in those aged
under 25 years. The demographic consequences of war are also apparent in the pyramid; for example, the sharp decline in births
during the First World War is reflected in the
shortfall in the numbers of people in their late
seventies and early eighties. In countries of the
global South, population pyramids are more
steep-sided, reflecting higher fertility (which
adds more people to the base of the pyramid)
and higher mortality through the life course,
that steadily removes them.
ajb
Suggested reading
Shryock and Siegel (1973).
populism An enormously complex term that
refers to both political ideologies and economic development strategies that are bound
up with notions of the ordinary, the people, antiindustrialism and small-scale enterprise (‘small
is beautiful’). Populism as practice can be seen
as a counter-current, a minority discourse, to
the rise of industrial capitalism. While certain
lines of populist thinking can be traced to preindustrial Leveller and Digger movements of
seventeenth-century England, the intellectual
origins are typically traced to Sismondi and the
Ricardian socialists (Kitching, 1982).
Kitching notes that there are two senses in
which populism is employed. One turns on its
opposition to large-scale urban manufacture and its
promotion of small-scale, moral, efficient enterprises, and the other on a particular sort of politics
in which an effort is made to manufacture a nationalcollective will (see also hegemony; nationalism).
Populist political strategies and rhetorics reside in what Laclau (1977) calls a double articulation: first, the creation of a stable bloc
consisting of the people and powerful classes;
and, second, the discourses by which ‘the
people’s’ interests are configured with those of
other classes (see class and state). Populist
movements can, for example, encompass farmer
radicalism, agrarian socialism, populist dictatorship (Peronism), populist democracy and
urban social movements (Canovan, 1981; see
also squatting). Populist, or neo-populist,
development strategies can include peasant
co-operatives, the informal sector, land reform
556
and third world flexible specialization
(Kitching, 1982). A powerful line of populist
thinking in development geography and agrarian
studies includes the work of Chayanov (see
peasant).
mw
Suggested reading
Canovan (1981); Laclau (2006); Watts (1995).
pork barrel An American term for the
unequal distribution of public goods in order
to promote a political party’s or candidate’s reelection prospects. Pork-barrelling is usually
associated with legislators obtaining benefits
for the spatially defined constituencies that
they represent, but the term is also used more
generally to refer to any apparent government
favouritism of particular areas.
rj
positionality
The fact that a researcher’s
social, cultural and subject positions (and
other psychological processes) affect: the
questions they ask; how they frame them; the
theories that they are drawn to; how they read
– Bondi (1999) draws a distinction between
intertextual and experiential reading; their
relations with those they research in the field
or through interviews; interpretations they
place on empirical evidence; access to data,
institutions and outlets for research dissemination; and the likelihood that they will be
listened to and heard. Debates about positionality have been ongoing since the 1980s, especially within feminism and feminist
geographies and among those using qualitative methods. They emerge with the understanding that all knowledge is partial and from
particular perspectives, embedded within
power relations. In a highly influential statement, Haraway (1989) distinguished between
situated knowledge and relativism, arguing
that attending to positionality, as it is mediated
by particular technologies for seeing (such as
quantification, mapping and survey methodologies), is the route to objectivity (rather
than a sign of subjectivism), and a way of
making responsible knowledge claims that
simultaneously chart their limits and create
opportunities for developing connections
across different types of knowledges.
Approaches to positionality have changed
over the years, reflecting changing theories of
subjectivity. In early discussions, positionality often took the form of self-critical introspection, through which researchers attempted to position themselves within power
relations (often as middle-class, white and
Western) in order to understand how this
POSITIVISM
entered into their research process (see
reflexivity; see also Moss, 2005). Rose
(1997b) criticized these efforts to make positionality transparent. Not only is it impossible
to do so, given the complexity of psychological
processes, but these efforts approximate the
‘god-trick’ of complete vision criticized by
Haraway. In a position that is now widely
accepted, she argued that there is an irresolvable ‘unknowability’ of our own positions and
those of others. From quite another direction,
some have taken the position that only members of a cultural community have the right to
speak for their community (England, 1994).
This reflects concerns – especially among marginalized communities – that middle-class,
often white, researchers reproduce existing
patterns of domination through the research
process and products. They often have access
to information unavailable to marginalized
groups, they treat the experiences of those they
research as ‘raw data’ that they then interpret,
they have the capacity (unavailable to marginalized groups) to present their interpretations
within scholarly and sometimes policy contexts, and their research often seems to more
clearly benefit them (through career advancement) than those that they study. Both the
practical difficulties of identity politics and
the influence of post-structural theories of
the subject (see post-structuralism) have
tended to soften this position. The understanding that subject positions are multiple
and that social differences are constructed
within relations of power has shifted focus
away from binary thinking (i.e. the researcher
is the same as or different from those studied)
to understanding points of partial connection
between researcher and researched, and how
difference is constructed, including within the
research process: ‘[T]he question of ‘‘Who
speaks for whom?’’ cannot be answered upon
the slippery slope of what personal attributes –
what color, what gender, what sexuality –
legitimate our existence, but on the basis of
our history of involvement, and on the basis of
understanding how difference is constructed
and used as a political tool’ (Kobayashi,
1994, p. 78).
Rather than stable positionalities and relations of sameness or difference, the language
has shifted to that of alliances, solidarities, collaborations, common ground and in-betweenness. Katz (1994) recommends a re-focusing of
objectives, away from studying ‘those poor
people’ to researching processes or sets of relations. Researchers can also re-deploy their privilege to access spaces of data collection and
dissemination unavailable to the groups they
collaborate with, support marginalized groups
in their self-representation and multiply their
communication resources (Butz and Besio,
2004). Rather than assuming that their
research will benefit a needy group, a stance
that Katz (1994) identifies as suspect because it
elides the subjectivity of those researched, they
can create situations in which all of the participants (academic, community partners and
those researched) can appropriate the research
products and use them in different ways to
achieve their shared goals for social justice.
Besio (Besio and Butz, 2004) cautions, however, that the capacity to position oneself in this
way itself depends on positionality; in some
cultural circumstances, for instance, it not a
simple matter for women to enter into these
kinds of research collaborations. Concerns are
also raised about the hazards of over-identification with particular groups and there are
good arguments for the practical and analytical
benefits of scholarly distance (Brown, 1995).
Finally, solidarity with activist groups can
raise ethical issues, posed most forcibly by
Routledge (2002), when he performed a false
identity in a duplicitous way to access information for activist allies. What are the ethical
limits of this flexible positionality (see ethics)?
This goes to the heart of what we understand
as the purpose of scholarly knowledge production.
gp
Suggested reading
Katz (1994); Kobayashi (1994); Rose (1997).
positive discrimination An approach that
favours peoples who have traditionally suffered
one or more forms of disadvantage. Positive
discrimination or affirmative action programmes aim to rectify imbalances and injustices through direct intervention. In some cases,
this might mean targeting policies spatially; for
example, giving children from certain deprived
neighbourhoods preferential access to university places. In other cases, it might involve sector targeting; for example, in the appointment
of women in senior positions in industries, in
which men have traditionally dominated
(Berman, 1984). The aim of both is to create a
more egalitarian society, reducing if not eliminating inequalities (Leach, 1974).
kwa
Suggested reading
Berman (1984).
positivism A historically variegated movement in philosophy, affirming that only
557
POSITIVISM
scientific knowledge is authentic knowledge,
and denying validity to metaphysical (nonscientific) speculation (see also science). The
antecedents are Enlightenment thinkers such
as David Hume (1711–76) and Pierre-Simon
Laplace (1749–1827). But the term was first
invented, and the philosophy formally codified, by the French philosopher and sociologist
August Comte (1798–1851), and published in
hefty instalments in his Course in positivist philosophy between 1830 and 1842 (six volumes).
Subsequently, each future generation constructed positivism in accordance to its own
ends, frequently minting a new title, perhaps
the best known being logical positivism,
born at discussions of the Vienna Circle during
the 1920s (see also logical empiricism).
Six features characterize the different strains
of positivism (Hacking, 1983):
(1) An emphasis on the importance of observation as the foundation for all (nonmathematical) knowledge. Scientific
statements were to be grounded in immediate and accessible experience of the
world, through the five senses (cf. empiricism). Such immediacy guaranteed
that facts were pure, untainted by theory
or value judgements; they represented
the world as it really was – incorrigible
and inviolate. In particular, for Comte
recognition of observation as the source
of knowledge was the culmination of an
historical process in which the errors of
previous eras, characterized by the (mistaken) dominance of first religious and
later metaphysical thought, were finally
overcome.
(2) A belief in either verification (using observations to prove a thesis), or its variant, falsification (using observations to
disprove a thesis). Verification or falsification is undertaken formally, using
common methods and employing rigorous techniques such as statistical inference to scrupulously determine the truth
or falsity of a statement.
(3) A conviction that causality seen in nature and society is nothing more than
the repetitive concurrence of one event
followed by another. Positivism rejects
the usual interpretation of cause reckoning it obscure metaphysical baggage
(who has ever observed ‘a cause’?). The
alternative is a formulation tethered only
to experience, the constant conjunction
of observable events (‘If event A, then
event B’: see law (scientific).
558
(4) A suspicion of theoretical entities that by
definition are non-observable. Comte
said that theoretical generalizations
must always be regarded at best as mere
hypotheses, and logical positivists tried
to reduce all theoretical statements to
(legitimate) propositions of logic (an endeavour that ended disastrously). Even
the less extreme solution of ‘operationalism’, that tied the meaning of a theoretical term to the empirical operations
required to measure it, unravelled given
the implication that each new measuring
instrument defined a new theoretical
term.
(5) A faith in the unity of the method allowing positivism to be as efficaciously applied to the humanities and social
sciences as to the physical and life sciences. This is known as naturalism: one
method fits all, revealing Truth wherever
it is found. Comte envisioned the unity
as a hierarchy in which disciplines studying more complex phenomena relied on
the laws discovered in disciplines concerned with less complex phenomena
(Hacking, 1983), whereas logical positivists (or at least Otto Neurath) championed the Unity of Science Movement,
which cast knowledge of any discipline
into the single mould of physics (the
monumentally conceived International
encyclopaedia of unified science was to
show how this was to be done, but only
two volumes were ever written: Reisch,
2005).
(6) The ardent denial of metaphysics (i.e.
propositions bearing on the nonphysical). Comte had no interest in metaphysical meaning, believing that their
time literally had passed: now was the
era of positivism. Logical positivists were
just as extreme. A.J. Ayer (1936) titled the
first chapter in his logical positivist manifesto for an English-language audience
‘The elimination of metaphysics’.
Several of these six features have been found
in geography since its institutionalization in
the nineteenth century, although sporadically,
often only tacitly and never all at once. Before
the Second World War, Anglo-American geography was not much of a fit. While the discipline defined itself in terms of the meticulous
recording of empirical observations, often
from the field, and so met positivism’s first
criterion, very few of the other criteria held,
or at least for the reasons given by positivists.
POSSIBILISM
For example, while geographers during this
period were sceptical of theory, it was not
because they were persuaded by philosophical
arguments about the non-translation of an
observation vocabulary into a theoretical one,
but because theory implied a level of generalization that was deemed inappropriate to geographical subject matter (cf. exceptionalism).
The advent of the quantitative revolution in the late 1950s made positivism much
more relevant to geography. Empirical observations continued to be central, although they
were now often observations made by others
and recorded in thick census volumes or on
drums of magnetic tape (thereby shifting
much geographical empirical enquiry from
the field to the desk). Verification became a
definitive pursuit undertaken using a set of
ever more sophisticated formal statistical techniques (see quantitative methods). Constant
conjunctions were pursued, and Tobler
(1970) announced the First Law of
Geography: ‘Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related
than distant things.’ Positivism’s fourth feature, suspicion towards theoretical terms, did
not apply. Geography’s quantitative revolutionaries were besotted by theory. In fact, the
revolution had been primarily a theoretical
one, especially in economic geography and
urban geography, which were transformed
by importation of second-hand theory from
physics, economics and sociology. The prospect of a unified method, however, was one
of the quantitative revolution’s strongest selling points. physical geography and human
geography would share a common language,
and geographical science would be at one
rather than a house divided. Finally, quantitative revolutionaries prosecuted less the open
warfare on metaphysics that positivist philosophers urged than a continual undertone of
carping about the need for greater precision,
less vagueness and the importance of the
exclusion of value judgements (see normative
theory).
All of this said, there were few explicit discussions of positivism as such until it was on
the way out. Morrill (1993, p. 443), one of the
pioneers of the quantitative revolution, said he
‘never met a positivist’. And even Harvey’s
(1969) methodological compendium for scientific geography, Explanation in geography,
barely used the word (it does not appear in
the index), preferring instead ‘scientific
method’. The quantitative revolution was
much more about getting on with the tasks of
theoretical development and application, or
crunching large data sets, than philosophizing
about what was being done in the name of
positivism. As a result, when some human
geographers later vigorously attacked positivism, it did not necessarily undermine the practices of quantitative revolutionaries and spatial
analysts, because the latter often neither knew
nor deployed the full array of positivist tenets
to begin with.
The critique of positivism was long and sustained, and in many ways still continues. Each
one of the six features was criticized: (1) facts
do not speak for themselves, but are always
embedded in values, judgements and schemes
of interpretation (see paradigms); (2) truth is
chimerical, and imbricated in larger social
relations of power and knowledge (see critical theory; discourse); (3) constant conjunctions lead only to mindless statistical
exercises, and not to explanation (see realism); (4) theory should be central to our
enquiries, albeit not conceived as a mirror of
the world, but as reflexive, critical, productive
and provisional; (5) physical sciences offer no
privileged method, but are fallible, contradictory, and limited by their historical and
geographical situation (see science); and
(6) metaphysics goes all the way down, the
lifeblood of our social existence and production of knowledge (see ethics; relevance;
values).
These counter-claims amount to a reassertion of the social foundations and responsibilities of intellectual enquiry, and a refusal to
separate science from other discourses. Few
geographers would now count themselves as
positivist. Post-positivist geographies have:
dimmed the enthusiasm for unbridled use of
quantitative techniques; given a new slant to
areas that formerly were characterized as positivist, such as economic geography and, more
recently, geographical information systems; and opened up new fields such as feminism and post-colonialism. In general, the
fall of positivism in geography undermined the
certainty and even optimism that the
Quantitative Revolution and spatial science
had promised, replacing it with what Gregory
(1994) calls a ‘cartographic anxiety’ (see
cartographic reason). Geography had
grown up.
tb
Suggested reading
Gregory (1978); Kolakowski (1972).
possibilism A claim that human societies
may respond in a variety of ways to the influences of the physical environment. Possibilism
559
POSTAN THESIS
is primarily associated with the French School
of human geography that had its roots in the
writings of Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–
1918), but also found favour in Britain in the
early-twentieth-century work of Patrick
Geddes and H.J. Fleure, and in the USA in
Carl Ortin Sauer’s insistence on the transformative power of human culture (see also
berkeley school). It thus stands in contrast
to environmental determinism and was classically expressed in Lucien Febvre’s dictum
‘There are no necessities, but everywhere possibilities; and man, as master of the possibilities, is the judge of their use’ (Febvre, 1932,
p. 27). Different philosophical roots of the
doctrine have been identified, including neoKantian
philosophy
(see
kantianism:
Berdoulay, 1976), probability theory associated with Poincaré (Lukermann, 1965), and
Lamarckian biology (see lamarck(ian)ism:
Archer, 1993). Differences between possibilism, environmental determinism and probabilism are more easily identified when taken
as ideal types rather than as operational perspectives in geographical research.
dnl
Suggested reading
Lukermann (1965).
Postan thesis A major interpretation of the
dynamic of the medieval economy, proposed
by historian Michael Postan (1898–1981).
The thesis was first developed for England,
but subsequently extended to cover much of
Western europe. Postan’s ideas derived from
classical political economy, particularly
Ricardo and Malthus, which he saw as a
framework for understanding the links
between population, landed resources and
living standards over the long term (Postan,
1966, 1972; Hatcher and Bailey, 2001; see
malthusian model). In so doing, he reacted
negatively to linear interpretations of the
medieval economy that were underwritten by
a belief in the progressive growth of the market and monetization as frameworks for
understanding change. Indeed, the thesis was
eventually utilized as a means of understanding both European medieval and early modern
pre-industrial economies (Le Roy Ladurie,
1966; Abel, 1980).
Postan accepted classical political economic
assumptions about the fixity of land supply as
a factor of production, minimal technological
innovation in farming and diminishing returns
to increased labour inputs. As a result, he
viewed population growth to be unsustainable
in the long term, as it led to an oversupply of
560
labour on the land and fragmentation of land
holdings. Consequently, he argued that as a
result of population growth over the thirteenth century, associated with real wage falls
and shrinkage of holding sizes, an increasingly
harvest-sensitive population emerged that was
vulnerable to periodic crises (Postan and
Titow, 1958–9). These were observable in a
consistent tendency for death rates to rise
with grain prices and responsible for cataclysmic phases such as the Great European
famine of 1315–22. Furthermore, he was
inclined to see susceptibility to high death
rates associated with epidemic disease such
as the Black Death as a manifestation of
society’s vulnerability resulting from an
imbalance between population and resource
available per capita. Postan added other
elements to this interpretation, such as a belief
in the decline of soil fertility that arose as
populations cropped land too frequently and
nitrogen levels plummeted, driving communities to cultivate soil types that were inherently
unsuitable for arable farming and grain
production. He believed that population
decline in the fourteenth century was a
punishment for ‘overfishing’ in the previous
century, and that the damage done to soil
fertility was not repaired until at least the
sixteenth century when population totals
began again to recover.
Since Postan’s death, historians and historical geographers have contested the idea that
technology was unchanging and argued that
the thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century
economy was showing signs of developing specialization and genuine comparative advantages in a manner more consistent with
Smithian growth theory (Britnell, 1993;
Britnell and Campbell, 1995). It has also been
argued, in conformity with the boserup
thesis, that in densely populated areas of
England grain yields were increased by an
increase in labour inputs as land was cropped,
weeded and fertilised more frequently
(Campbell, 1983, 2000). Others have sought
alternative explanations for weakness in the
economy associated with seigneurial exploitation through the removal of surpluses legitimated by serfdom as a relation of production
(see brenner thesis). More recently, it has
been claimed that the difficulties associated
with harvest failure were in many instances
caused by extreme natural events that would
have impacted adversely on any pre-industrial
economy (Bailey, 1992). It has also been
argued that exogenously generated epidemic
disease that brought down population
POST-COLONIALISM
levels after 1347 had little to do with the
living standards of the population since rich
and poor were equally susceptible (Bailey,
1996). Nonetheless, the model remains a
powerful statement to which many interpreters still adhere on account of its conceptual
elegance.
rms
Suggested reading
Campbell (2000); Hatcher and Bailey (2001);
Postan (1972).
post-colonialism An intellectual movement
originating in literary and cultural studies concerned with the diverse, uneven and contested
impact of colonialism on the cultures of colonizing and colonized peoples, in terms of the
way in which relations, practices and representations are reproduced or transformed
between past and present, as well as between
the ‘heart’ and the ‘margins’ of empire and its
aftermath. While the proliferation of uses and
implied meanings of the term ‘post-colonial’
(and its conflation with other terms such as
‘neo-colonial’, ‘ex-colonial’, ‘anti-colonial’,
‘post-independence’ and ‘post-imperial’) has
resulted in a tangled skein of intellectual
threads, post-colonialism as a form of ‘critical
analysis of colonialism and its successor projects’ takes as axiomatic the following: (1) a
‘close and critical reading of colonial discourse’; (2) an understanding of ‘the complicated and fractured histories through which
colonialism passes from the past into the present’; (3) a mapping of ‘the ways in which
metropolitan and colonial societies are drawn
together in webs of affinity, influence and
dependence’; and (4) a sensitivity to the ‘political implications’ of the way history is constructed (Gregory, 2000).
Post-colonialism may refer to something
tangible, with ‘real political and historical referents in space and time, locating cultural as
well as economic and political connections
between metropole and colony’ (King, 1993,
p. 90). This take on post-colonialism can be
distinguished in work focusing on forms of
post-colonial expressions and identity such
as the social, demographic, political, cultural
and spatial forms, styles and identities in oncecolonial societies of the periphery (Simon,
1998, p. 230). Post-colonial nation-states
are often ‘overwhelmed with the onslaught of
representational spaces’ in attempts to produce the ‘ideal of the post-colonial citizen’
(Srivastava, 1996, p. 406). Urban forms and
architecture, in particular, have been treated
as ‘a social and political means of
representation in which a post-colonial nation
forms a dialogue with its colonial past’
(Kusno, 1998, p. 551). Post-colonial strivings
for a new identity do not completely banish
the colonial past, but involve the selective
retrieval and appropriation of indigenous (see
indigenous knowledge) and colonial cultures to produce appropriate forms to represent the post-colonial present. Often ‘ironic’,
‘contradictory’ and anxious about ‘inauthenticity’, post-colonial identity is constituted by
both a ‘relatively unproblematic identification
with the colonizer’s culture, and a rejection of
the colonizer’s culture’ (Kusno, 1998, p. 550).
Using the term ‘post-colonialism’ to refer to
a specific period after colonialism is, however,
problematic, as the historical reality in the
second half of the twentieth century in the
once-colonized world was shaped by ‘a modernity that is scored by the claws of colonialism, left full of contradictions, of half-finished
processes, of confusions, of hybridity, and
liminalities’ (Lee and Lam, 1998, p. 968).
Post-colonialism must be understood in a
plural sense, for there are ‘quite radical differences in the ‘‘colonial’’ relationship between
the imperial centre and the colonized in the
various parts of the former empires’ (Mishra
and Hodge, 1991, p. 412). The term is hence
less usefully tied to a specific historical
moment, a political status or a concrete object.
Instead, more critically, the ‘post-colonial’ is
used to signify ‘an attitude of critical engagement with colonialism’s after-effects and its
constructions of knowledge’ (Radcliffe, 1997,
p. 1331). It provides a conceptual frame that
works to destabilize dominant discourses in
the metropolitan West, to challenge inherent
assumptions, and to critique the material and
discursive legacies of colonialism (Crush, 1994;
Jackson and Jacobs, 1996; Jacobs, 1996, Blunt
and McEwan, 2002; McEwan, 2003). Postcolonial critique engages with ‘the monumental
binary constructions of East/West, traditional/
modern, natural/cultural, structural/ornamental’ in order to locate ‘productive tensions arising from incommensurate differences rather
than deceptive reconciliations’ (Nalbantoglu
and Wong, 1997, p. 8).
The emancipatory radicalism and recuperative stance ascribed to the ‘post-colonial’ have
been questioned in a number of ways. Critics
argue that just as the application of the category ‘pre-colonial’ to societies prior to their
incorporation into European political and economic systems tend to fix the ‘colonial’ as the
main point of reference, adding the prefix
‘post-’ may also impose ‘the continuity of
561
POST-DEVELOPMENT
foreign histories’ and ‘subordinate indigenous
histories’ (Perera, 1998, p. 6). It begs the
question whether the condition of the world
today has been so reconfigured as to be ‘incontrovertibly post-colonial’ (Hall, 1996, p. 256),
or whether it is more likely that ‘colonialism
left the everyday life of many quite untouched;
or that the changes it did bring often passed
unrecognized as changes’ (During, 1992,
p. 346). Privileging ‘the moment of the
‘‘post-colonial’’ . . . [may] simply revive or
re-stage exactly what the post-colonial so triumphantly declares to be ‘‘over’’ ’ (Hall,
1996b, p. 248; cf. Gregory, 2004).
Others have cautioned against the navelgazing tendencies of certain forms of postcolonial studies – which seem reluctant to go
much further beyond theorizing ‘the meaning
of the hyphen’ (Mishra and Hodge, 1991,
p. 399) – and have emphasized instead the
need for post-colonial studies to engage with
‘material practices, actual spaces and real politics’ (Sylvester, 1999, p. 712: see also Driver,
1996; Jackson and Jacobs, 1996; Barnett,
1997, p. 137; Lester, 1998; Driver and
Gilbert, 1999b). If the main limits of postcolonial theories lie in their mistaken ‘attempt
to transcend in rhetoric what has not been
transcended in substance’ (Ryan, 1994,
p. 82), then an important starting place in
overcoming some of these limitations would
be to dissect post-colonialism as threaded
through real spaces, built forms and the
material substance of everyday biospheres.
At the same time, the ‘prospects of getting
past the post’ (Yeoh, 2001) must be tied to the
larger enterprise of constructing and elaborating alternative post-colonial geographical traditions that will steer a path through what
Ram (1998, p. 628) calls ‘on the one hand, a
sphere of the modern which is so hopelessly
contaminated by its colonial origins that it
seems exhausted as a source of critique and
action, and on the other, a non-elite discourse
which is completely unconnected with the
modern and is unable to represent anything
other than utter otherness’. The first steps
are the most difficult, as Chatterjee (1994,
p. 216) points out: ‘‘europe and the americas,
the only true subjects of history, have thought
out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also
our anti-colonial resistance and post-colonial
misery.’ Sidaway (2000, p. 593) also notes
that ‘any postcolonial geography must realize
within itself its own impossibility, given that
geography is inescapably marked (both philosophically and institutionally) by its location
562
and development as a western-colonial science’. For a post-colonial geography to aspire
to significant breaks with the prescribed script,
one step forward would be to view postcolonialism as a highly mobile, contestatory
and still-developing arena, where opportunities for insight may be gained at multiple sites.
While its redemptive features as a means of
resisting colonialisms of all forms and its
manipulative aspects as a vehicle for colonialism to reproduce itself cannot be totally disentangled, its critical edges may be sharpened
not only to ‘dismantle colonialism’s signifying
system’, but also to articulate the silences of
the native by ‘liberating the suppressed in discourse’, and to speak back to the centre
(Alatas, 1995, p. 131: see also Rattansi,
1997; Nagar and Ali, 2003). In this vein,
Robinson (2003a, citing Chakrabarty) calls
for a ‘provincialising’ of Western scholarship,
followed by a more sustained engagement with
cosmopolitan practices in the production of
post-colonial knowledge.
by
Suggested reading
Blunt and McEwan (2002); Robinson (2003);
Sidaway (2000).
post-development A tradition of thinking
and political action that refuses to accept that
development is somehow natural or innocent.
Its proponents also dispute the suggestion that
‘developing countries’ can or should follow in
the footsteps of the west/north. Some postdevelopmentalists go further and argue that
the discourse of development has done
immense damage in the global South. Arturo
Escobar (1995) has famously maintained that
development produced only famine, debt and
increased poverty for the majority world.
Post-1950 development had failed, he said,
and other modes of being had to be discovered
and worked through. In this vein, postdevelopment refers to that set of ecological,
economic and cultural experiments that will
produce new and presumably better ways of
being human.
Post-development thought is really a spectrum of oppositional thinking that mixes old
and new insights in roughly equal measure. At
one end of the spectrum is a tradition of
anti-development thought that is frankly dismissive of development. Anti-development
activists reach back to Mahatma Gandhi and
Leo Tolstoy when they contend that development is violent and dehumanizing. There is
more than a hint of this thinking is Escobar’s
book, Encountering development: development
POST-DEVELOPMENT
has failed and it must be overcome. But
Escobar also draws on work produced by
dependency theorists in the 1960s, including André Gunder Frank. Like many others,
he maintains that the dominant model of economic modernization in the North cannot be
exported to the global south. The core countries use their power to prevent balanced
development. It would also be unwise, and
probably impossible, for the majority world
to copy the ecologically exploitative model of
development pursued in the North (see also
core__periphery model).
What made Escobar’s work so challenging,
however, was the fact that he drew on work by
Michel Foucault and the subaltern studies
collective to think about the production of
development as a form of governmentality.
Escobar argued that the third world had
been invented by American aid programmes
as the residual in a cold war struggle between
the First and Second Worlds. There is nothing
natural about this social construction –
nothing, save for an uncommon history of
colonialism – that produced this diverse mix
of countries as a singular space that henceforth
would be defined by its ‘mass poverty’ and
pathological lack of development. Escobar, in
other words, argued that an imagined geography of underdevelopment was constructed
by a discourse of development that infantilized
the majority world in relation to a mythical
view of a perfect and benevolent West. Under
the sign of development, Western experts (aid
workers, technicians, military personnel) were
then set free in the Third World ostensibly to
secure its own dissolution. The fact that the
United Nations designated the 1960s as the
Development Decade speaks to the hubris that
Escobar is so keen to skewer.
Escobar’s work has been important in forcing a re-evaluation of the (un)productive
work performed by developmentalism. By
linking the study of development to geopolitics, Escobar was able to raise important
questions about the meanings of colonialism.
Was development not simply the continuation
of colonialism by another name? Did it not
turn Third World men and women into a set
of experimental subjects, to be dissected later
in a museum or university? (See Ashis Nandy’s
comments on the back cover of Encountering
development.) At the same time, there are
weaknesses in Escobar’s account. His suggestion that development began in 1949 ignores a
history of thinking about progress and disorder (about development) that has been
explored in some detail by Arndt (1981) and
Cowen and Shenton (1996). Corbridge
(1998) and Kiely (1999) have further argued
that Escobar’s insistence on a singular discourse of development blinds him to the different governmental interventions that emerge
from, for instance, the basic needs agenda, a
gender and development framework or neoliberalism. At times, Escobar comes close to
the anti-development position of wanting to
escape from all forms of governmentality. But
it is not clear how this escape will be effected;
nor is it clear that Escobar has spelled out the
opportunity costs of his development alternatives. In part, this is because he damns development in its entirety, failing to note that life
expectancies in many parts of the world
increased at a historically unprecedented rate
after 1950.
If Escobar uses Foucault to moralize about
developmentalism, other versions of postdevelopment thinking are less obviously
normative. Partha Chatterjee (2004), for
example, has begun to develop a postcolonial response to what he calls the
‘unscrupulously charitable’ gestures of neoliberalism, and of the new public administration
(NPA) that so often goes with it. He has
repeatedly drawn attention to the different
chronologies of the creation of the modern
state in the West and in the countries of asia
and africa. In his view, technologies of governmentality and the creation of named populations pre-date the formation of the nationstate and civil society in most of the world.
NPA demands for good governance and participatory development by individuals are
often wildly at odds with local realities, where
people need the support of skilled brokers in
political society. In an exploration of development and bureaucratization in Lesotho, James
Ferguson (1990) has charged that, while individual development projects fail on a regular
basis, they combine to produce an anti-politics
machine that substitutes the technical jargon
of development for concerted public discussion of gender relations, land rights, the nature
of the state and so on. Ferguson’s argument,
in other words, is not that development has
failed (pace Escobar). Rather, it is that a reasonably diverse range of development interventions has failed to end rural poverty in
Lesotho, but has succeeded, sometimes
unwittingly, in extending bureaucratic state
power in the countryside.
Ferguson’s work on the anti-politics
machine suggests one fruitful avenue for a
post-developmentalism that maintains links
to radical development thinking. Similar
563
POST-FORDISM
accounts of the depoliticization of development have been essayed by Peter Uvin
(1998) on aid agencies in Rwanda, John
Harriss (2001) on the banalities of Robert
Putnam’s work on social capital theories
and David Mosse (2005) on the power effects
of a major UK aid project in India. It is here
perhaps, and in explorations of the ways in
which development thinking continues to
express Western anxieties or fantasies about
‘itself’ (Gilman, 2003), that post-development
thought has most to offer.
sco
Suggested reading
Cooper and Packard (1998); Escobar (1995);
Ferguson (1990); Watts (2003).
post-Fordism A set of production techniques that are more flexible than those associated with fordism and are used as part of
flexible accumulation. The techniques have
three main characteristics: (1) flexibility is
emphasized both in the skills of workers (who
may be part-time to allow their flexible
deployment as and when there is demand for
a product) and in the functionality of
machines that need to be reprogrammable
and useable for producing a variety of different
products; (2) vertical disintegration rather
than vertical integration, as production relies
on a close-knit network of suppliers who can
quickly respond to changes in demand; and
(3) an emphasis on accurate and high-quality
final products because of the just-in-time
production and the selectivity of consumers.
Post-Fordism is often said to have emerged in
response to the crisis conditions of the 1970s,
when Fordism as a mode of production and
regime of accumulation became unstable.
However, others have pointed out that in reality many of the techniques associated with
post-Fordism have existed since before the
emergence of Fordism itself and were simply
reinvented in the early 1980s (Gertler, 1988;
Amin, 1994). Indeed, the term ‘after-Fordism’
was used by Peck and Tickell (1994) in recognition of the lack of a coherent set of principles
underlying post-Fordism and the way in which
elements of both Fordism and flexible accumulation often coexist in the production techniques and strategies of firms.
For geographers, post-Fordism is inextricably
linked with the region or cluster, because of the
importance of agglomeration and localization economies for flexible production.
jf
posthumanism An intellectual and cultural
style of work, evident in critical theory,
564
architecture, philosophy and the social sciences, that emphasizes the impurities involved
in becoming human, oriented against a humanist tradition that has long been the dominant
mode of understanding in the humanities and
social sciences. Where humanism supposes
that humans, with their capacities for rationality, consciousness, ingenuity, soul, language
and so on, stand at the centre of social action
and can transcend the natural realm, posthuman work insists that all of these capacities
are achieved with the help of many others
(including non-humans). Two related bodies
of theoretical understanding are often used to
make such claims (Braun, 2004a). The first
draws upon new forms of vitalism (Watson,
1998), associated with readings of Henri
Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, where matters
as elusive as consciousness, mind, memory
and other repositories often labelled quintessentially human, are taken to be nothing more
and nothing less than complex movements of
matter. Some of this style of working has been
taken up under the label of actor-network
theory. The second intervention draws more
upon deconstructive traditions, and demonstrates the impossibility of a purely human
subject (Badmington, 2000). In the latter the
human project, or anthropological machine as
Agamben (2002) has called it, can be demonstrated to be little other than an always partial
differentiation of humans from non-humans,
frequently taking the form of human/animal
distinctions. While the prefix ‘post’ can sometimes be read as describing a newly emergent
historical condition, wherein a once pure
human is increasingly in danger of being
made extinct by the growth of prosthetics,
genetic technologies, new reproductive technologies and so on (Fukuyama, 2002), such
historicism misses the point. The contention
is that the human and humanist project has
always been a fraught and heterogeneous
endeavour, involving more than human
beings, even if the promiscuities have
achieved new forms and intensities (Hayles,
1999). The result is a challenge to re-imagine
the social of social science and the human of
human geography. It is also a politicization
of many suppressed things once left at the
margins of human debate. Posthumanism,
positively spun, involves ‘Mixing wild imaginings with routine inventiveness, . . . [heralding] a politicisation of the technologies of life
in which intellectual disputes and public controversies become inextricably entangled in
the event of food scares, organ harvesting,
genetic profiling and any number of other
POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
bio-political controversies’
2004, p. 1360).
(Whatmore,
sjh
Suggested reading
Whatmore (2004).
post-industrial city A city whose economic
geography has passed from a dependence on
manufacturing to an emphasis on service
employment (see services). Typically, its dual
labour market is characterized by a division
between well-paid private- and public-sector
professional and managerial workers and
lower-paid service staff. The pattern of land
uses and social areas in the post-industrial city
shows marked variations from the arrangement in the classic concentric-ring model of
industrial cities (cf. zonal model). The downtown skyline is now marked by new investment in office towers, public institutions, arts
and sports complexes, and restaurant and
leisure services. The brownfield sites of old
industrial and transportation land uses around
downtown have given way to waterfront
redevelopment of condominiums and public
leisure spaces, often the result of public__
private partnerships. A number of innercity neighbourhoods have experienced
reinvestment and gentrification as the housing market responds to the downtown labour
market of advanced services. New immigrants
and the working poor are being displaced outwards to suburban sites, which have become
the new focus of manufacturing and wholesaling, adjacent to the airport and regional highway routes. The suburbs are diversifying in
lifestyle and social status, and with the emergence of satellite town centres (or edge cities
in the largest metropolitan areas) are assuming a more urban status themselves.
The characteristics of the post-industrial
city extend beyond its population and landuse features. Canadian studies indicate that
the gender and family traits of post-industrial
cities differ from those with a manufacturing
base, with smaller households, a greater tendency for gender equality in the workplace,
and lower and later marriage rates (Ley,
1996). Lifestyle liberalism and higher levels
of secularism are among distinctive attitudinal and cultural associations.
Though typically experiencing economic
and population growth, the post-industrial city
faces significant challenges. Since the 1980s,
neo-liberal policy has tended to trade welfare
services for entrepreneurial objectives (Harvey,
1989a), accentuating social and spatial polarization (Walks, 2001). The emphasis upon
quality of life considerations for the middle
class might compromise provision of more
basic services; for example, tax dollars
expended on consumer attractions such as
sports stadia could diminish the quality of life
of more impoverished populations (Friedman,
Andrew and Silk, 2004). Population growth
and a large middle-class labour market are
often associated with challenges to housing
affordability (see housing studies). Underinvestment in public transportation has heightened the dependence on the private car, leading to traffic congestion and severe air
pollution episodes. And, as the Paris banlieu
riots of 2005 demonstrated so keenly, suburban sites may be a newly emergent zone of
acute social exclusion.
dl
Suggested reading
Ley (1980); Robson (1994).
post-industrial society A conceptualization
of the changing conditions of economy and
society in the global north, beginning
approximately in the 1960s. The term was
popularized by Daniel Bell’s immensely influential book (1999 [1973]), and has enjoyed
widespread dissemination, though not always
with the specificity that Bell intended. Postindustrial society is concerned with an occupational transformation in advanced societies
as, with automation and outsourcing, employment moves increasingly to a white-collar, service profile, with specialized information and
information technology playing a key role in
the shaping of society and economy. Beyond
this, some authors see an evolutionary process,
with societies passing through discrete economic and social stages from the harvesting
of raw materials, to manufacturing, and finally
to the provision of services aiding both consumption and production.
Through the 1970s, several variations on the
theme of post-industrial society emerged.
Influenced by the French student reaction
against inaccessible state bureaucracies,
Alain Touraine (1971) proposed that the holders of specialized information were becoming a
privileged technocracy, extending control over
growing domains of everyday life. A second
stream of work emphasized the holders of specialized knowledge as a new middle class of
professional and managerial workers, though
internally fragmented by their variable access
to economic and cultural capital and their
location in the public and private sectors
(Gouldner, 1979). A third track emphasized
by Manuel Castells and his followers identified
565
POST-MARXISM
the role of information nodes and flows in the
shaping of new social configurations.
The dominant figure, however, has been
Daniel Bell. Although concerned with occupational transformations to a service society, his
thesis went considerably further, as he sought
to trace the forward trajectory of advanced
societies, using the paradigmatic case of the
USA, in the three interlocking domains of
social structure, politics and culture. He
noted a potential non-correspondence of the
parts in this forward process, as, for example, a
steadily more disciplined economy was tied to
a steadily more antinomian culture. For Bell, a
knowledge theory of value replaced a labour
theory of value, and this opened up serious
disagreement with Western Marxist theorists
and more doctrinaire versions in Moscow (see
marxism). By the mid-1980s, however, leftist
critics were acknowledging the accuracy of
Bell’s cultural and labour force projections
(Wright and Martin, 1987). Nonetheless,
Bell’s thesis, like all social theory, was a
child of its time. Published as the unprecedented postwar boom was about to end, it is
written from an overly optimistic and middleclass perspective, where scarcity and conflict
do not deflect a track of upward social mobility. But it has proven a seminal paradigm for
subsequent research, and its basic propositions are now part of the taken-for-granted
world of contemporary social science.
dl
In consort with other post-Marxist scholars
who follow or precede Laclau and Mouffe, a
good part of this new enterprise concerns itself
with the array of discourses – that is, signregimes allied to institutional apparatuses –
which constitute subjects and identities in differing and differentiated ways. Indeed, if there is
a common thread to ‘post-Marxist’ analysis, it is
the insistence that there exists neither a sovereign, self-present subject who can be recognized
as the centre of initiatives and the natural holder
of individual rights (as in liberal political theory:
see liberalism); nor a collective class-actor that
commands ontological primacy as agent of
history (the proletariat in classical marxism).
The subject is instead posited as radically incomplete or overdetermined in varying registers –
psychological
(Jacques
Lacan,
Louis
Althusser), representational (Jacques Derrida,
Jean-François Lyotard, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak) or social/political (Stuart Hall, Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, J.K. GibsonGraham). Connected to these disavowals is a
series of others – namely, rejecting a presumed
primacy of the economic, class, historicism,
totality and a predominantly union-based labour
or progressive politics.
vg
Suggested reading
Callari and Ruccio (1996); Gibson-Graham
(2006b [1996]); Laclau and Mouffe (1985);
Sim (1998).
Suggested reading
Bell (1999 [1973]); Clement and Myles (1994).
post-Marxism Although the term ‘postMarxism’ is sometimes applied to diagnose the
post-Soviet era of geopolitics, this chronological usage trivializes an intellectual ferment
that pre-dates the fall of the Berlin Wall by at
least two decades. If calendar time is the touchstone, the year 1968 is a more precise marker of
post-Marxism. Moreover, intellectual ferment
neither implies a cohesive intellectual project
nor necessarily an identifiable body of theory.
And so it is with post-Marxism, which has
instead become a convenient rubric for varying
analyses of exploitation in capitalist societies
that depart from the rigidity and exclusivity of
class-centred Marxist orthodoxy. The first
explicit allegiance to a post-Marxist agenda is
found in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s
influential manifesto for radical democracy,
Hegemony and socialist strategy, where they
declare: ‘[I]f our intellectual project in this book
is post-Marxist, it is also post-Marxist’ (1985,
p. 5).
566
postmaterialism A generously roomy term
that is suggestive rather than definitive. The
prefix highlights an historical discontinuity in
cultural expectations surrounding the relationship between society and the non-human
world. The term captures the elevation of aesthetic and quality of life concerns over
issues of production and distribution. Coined
by Inglehart (1977), it describes the growth of
environmentalism and the decreased dominance of class-based politics in the postwar era.
Postmaterialism may be interpreted as an
‘ecology of affluence’ that is distinguishable
from the ‘environmentalism of the poor’,
whose ecological claims are rooted in the
defence of livelihoods rather than quality of
life (Guha and Martinez-Alier, 2000).
gb
Suggested reading
Guha and Martinez-Alier (2000).
postmodernism An
important architectural, aesthetic and intellectual movement that
flourished in the latter quarter of the twentieth
POSTMODERNISM
century. It is easily (but mistakenly) conflated
with its more philosophical contemporary,
post-structuralism, as well as with the
deeper currents (economic, political, social)
signalled by its epoch-defining cousin, postmodernity. And though it is sometimes indistinguishable from the intellectual trajectories
of the other two ‘posts’, most would agree to
constrain it to the cultural sphere (see culture). Uncertainty exists as to whether or
not postmodernism has ended, but clearly
the excitement and controversy it generated
has for the most part abated. While there is
evidence that its roots are older, beginning in
the 1960s and 1970s, many put postmodernism’s apex alongside the popularization of
video media and the televisualization of the
Reagan presidency in the 1980s (or
the politician’s digital counterpart, Max
Headroom).
Broadly speaking, the thematics that characterize postmodernism’s artistic dimensions
were said to constitute either a break from or
an extension of the desire of modernism to
turn the everyday and the mundane into art.
Perhaps the most important result of this (dis)
connection was the effort to take art out of the
hands of the rich elite (historically, the main
consumers of art) by collapsing the distinction
between ‘high’ and ‘low’ aesthetic forms. The
notorious tendency of postmodernists to blend
multiple media in one work was often accomplished by combining forms that had previously been dismissed as vulgar elements of
popular culture and thus marginalized in art
– as in, for example, comic books, advertisements and graffiti. Modernist thematics often
encouraged, if not required, reflection and
contemplation about the layered meaning of
a work, which was in some cases paired with
the goal of faithfully recovering the artist’s
intentionality. In addition, many modernist
works highlighted themes of alienation,
increased mechanization and rationalization.
Postmodernism, to the contrary, often celebrated pastiche, depthlessness, multiplicity,
uncertainty and fragmentation. In the hands
of some postmodernists, history became less a
reservoir of facts awaiting excavation than a
playground of potential appropriations in
which authenticity, timeless values and fealty
to the truth were mocked by unceremonial
gestures towards nostalgia.
Postmodern architecture concretized these
concepts in the built environment. In contrast
to modern architecture’s allegiance to functionality and its dismissal of ornamentation
(Relph, 1987), postmodern designs were
playful if not exuberant, aimed at creating
confusion by overlapping and juxtaposing in
contiguous spaces many different aesthetic
styles. As in art, postmodern architecture was
to pillage rather than revere history, borrowing
elements such as Greek and Roman pillars and
embellishing façades with touches of Art
Deco. Postmodernism’s exchangeability of
parts implied a relativistic approach to meaning, one that denies centres, or ‘depths’, of
understanding (see relativism). Even the
popular reflective windows of the 1980s were,
according to Harvey (1989b), a flippant
response to profundity, a refusal of a deeper
inside that turns the gaze back upon the
viewer.
That these architectural forms appeared
alongside gentrification and a raging consumerism in the 1980s and 1990s was not lost
on human geographers, and for the most part
their reaction was unfavourable. Harvey’s
(1989b) critique of the condition of postmodernity famously first situated postmodern
urban forms within a set of deeper economic
and political transformations (notably from
fordism to post-fordism or flexible accumulation), and then explained what he
regarded as the cultural ‘response’ (depthlessness, relativism, the ransacking of history etc.)
as the surface-level outcome of dislodged sensibilities produced by time–space compression
under late capitalism. Among the spaces read
as signs of a distinctively postmodern spatiality were Baltimore’s revitalized harbour
(Harvey, 1989b), Los Angeles’s Bonaventure
Hotel (Jameson, 1984), New York’s South
Street Seaport (Boyer, 1992), and Los
Angeles and Orange counties, in California
(Soja, 1989, 1992). Whether indicted for presenting false history, structuring space for
maximum surveillance, or attempting purposefully to disorient, each were tied in one
way or another to the excesses of postmodernism. As Sorkin (1992b, p. 4; see also Goss,
1993) put it in describing Canada’s West
Edmonton Mall, ‘Mirrored columns . . . fragment the scene, shattering the mall into a kaleidoscope of ultimately unreadable images.
Confusion proliferates at every level; past and
future collapse meaninglessly into the present;
barriers between real and fake, near and far,
dissolve as history, nature, technology, are
indifferently processed by the mall’s fantasy
machine.’ Another part of the urban underbelly of postmodernism was its socio-spatial
segregation, denounced by Davis (1990) as
‘Fortress LA’ (1992), and described by Dear
and Flusty (1998) as alternating between
567
POSTMODERNITY
Dreamscapes of Privatopia and the Carceral
City’s Mean Streets. As Smith (1996b) was to
make clear within the context of gentrification
more generally, the new spaces of the
‘revanchist’ city were not simply drawn by
capital, but were forged out of an unholy
alliance between it and the state. Looking back
on these dreary accounts of postmodern
urbanism, it is hard to remember the democratically minded intentions of one of its most
influential progenitors – Robert Venturi – who
reacted against the sparseness of orthodox
modernism by collapsing the distinction
between high and low architecture in his famous book, Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi,
Scott Brown and Izenor, 1972).
Postmodernism elicited several different
responses in human geography. As the foregoing suggests, many of the first responses
were influenced by postmodernism in architecture and planning (rather than literature or
the creative arts more generally). Some saw in
postmodernism’s attention to difference and
specificity an opportunity to revive and refashion humanistic geography as a form of
irredeemably critical and affirmative local
knowledge (e.g. Ley, 1987, 1993, 2003a),
while others saw an opportunity for a far more
theoretically ambitious, insistently radical
reconstruction of human geography writ large
(Dear, 1986, 1988; Dear and Flusty, 2002).
Many of these discussions were inspired in
some measure by experiments in urbanism
on the west coast of North America, notably
Los Angeles and Vancouver, and they fostered
the emergence and identification of a los
angeles school. One of its principal protagonists was Edward Soja, who straddled the
Modernism
Postmodernism
Compartmentalism
Individualism
Rationalism
Nationalism
Imperatives
Holism
Communalism
Spiritualism
Globalism
Tolerance
fields of geography and planning. Unlike
Ley and Dear, however, he had a much more
positive view of historical materialism and
of the (crucial) possibility of its spatialized
reconstruction through a critical engagement
with postmodernism (see Soja, 1989). Against
this, however, as noted above, Harvey (1989b)
mobilized his own historico-geographical
materialism as a vigorous critique of
568
postmodernism and postmodernity. These
more architectonic versions of postmodernism
as critical project (Soja) and critical object
(Harvey) were roundly criticized by feminist
geographers in particular for their insensitivity
to difference. These critiques were part of a
growing interest in post-colonialism and
post-structuralism that soon eclipsed postmodernism in human geography and beyond.
Today, the hullabaloo over postmodernism
has waned, but it manages to live on in some
contexts, including not only architecture
but also, strangely enough, religion. Part
philosophical engagement inspired by poststructuralists such as Jacques Derrida (see
Caputo, 1997; Caputo and Scanlon, 1999),
and part a cultural wave of new Age, Eastern
mysticism, this latest reconfiguration of postmodernism is paired against a disbelieving
modernism, elements of which (see table) have
been deployed in epic battles against religion.
How the religion–postmodernism nexus will
evolve remains to be seen, but one thing is
certain: whether we are in a state of modernity or postmodernity, it will not take long for
contemporary culture to construct nostalgia
for postmodernism, making pastiche out of it
as it did to everything else, serving up ironic
quotations of the movement that gave new
meaning to the term ‘irony’.
kwo/jpj
Suggested reading
Dear and Flusty (1998); Harvey (1989b);
Jameson (1991); Ley (2003a); Soja (1989).
postmodernity Not to be confused with the
cultural and aesthetic movement postmodernism, postmodernity refers to the contemporary historical period that arguably closed
the door upon modernity. The advent of the
historical era and its associated artistic movement occurred during roughly the same
period (the mid-to-late twentieth century),
but the driving forces of postmodernity operate at a longer time-scale than do those of
postmodernism (particularly now that the cultural form is into its dotage). While modernity
was characterized by an insistence upon the
possibility and knowability of ‘Truth’, postmodernity replaced its foundational assumptions of solvability in scientific enterprises (see
science), universality in ethical imperatives
(see ethics) and transcendence in the essence
of things (see ontology) with uncertainty,
singularity and immanence. For better or
worse (and it has certainly been both), the
defining elements of postmodernity arose
from a series of major transformations in the
POSTMODERNITY
social, economic and political understandings
about the how the world is materialized
and experienced (Jones, Natter and Schatzki,
1995).
Intellectually, postmodernity is generally
considered to be a period initiated by a thorough rupture in the history of Western
thought, with its confident allegiances to what
Jean-François Lyotard (1984) called ‘metanarratives’ – grand theories of society and
human progress. These were thoroughly critiqued and often rejected by postmodernity’s
more philosophical wing, post-structuralism,
which was a concurrent response to structuralism and its endless proliferation of binarized
power relations. Post-structuralism quickly
extended its critical scope to the hegemonic
conceptual cornerstones of Western modernity,
sometimes even back to their foundational theorizations in Greek philosophy. More broadly,
postmodernity’s historical break might be
loosely described in terms of an avoidance of
theoretical absolutism, an investment in epistemological constructivism (sometimes bastardized and mischaracterized under the
slogan ‘everything is relative’: cf. relativism),
a celebration of difference, a fascination with
open systems and a devotion to complex relations of power (for a review of key thinkers, see
Best and Kellner, 1991). Its rise alongside the
information age inflects it away from modernity’s faith in our ability to accurately and
adequately represent the world, and for some,
such as Jean Baudrillard (1993), postmodernity’s products are not simply bad reproductions but ‘simulacra’, copies taken as more real
than the reality that they represent (see representation; simulacrum).
The uptake of these notions was in great
part a response to the horrors that attended
the rise of fascism and the holocaust. Often
read by members of the postwar Frankfurt
School (see critical theory) and later by
post-structuralist thinkers as the logical culmination of the worst parts of modernity and
as the political crisis to which all future ethicopolitical thought must respond, these events
effectively signalled the end of an era. As postmodernity has progressed, its central ideas
have been adopted and adapted for both progressive and quite cynical, reactionary ends.
By the late 1980s, it appeared that postmodernity and postmodernism were co-extensive,
and indeed the intellectual fashions of the former fed the cultural currents of the latter. The
geographer David Harvey sought to explain
these connections in his 1989 book, The condition of postmodernity (see also Jameson, 1991;
Soja, 1989). A testament to the broader
importance of both ‘posts’ across the intellectual and popular landscape, the book was
wildly successful inside and outside human
geography, making Harvey one of the most
well known Anglophone theorists of the
twentieth century. The argument draws
primarily from Harvey’s reformulation of political economy as an explicitly historicogeographical materialism, and situates both
postmodernity and postmodernism within the
transformations of space and time (or, rather,
time–space) brought about by the latest stage
of capitalism, which began to take on a new
shape in the 1970s. As Harvey explained, the
age of postmodernity was characterized by a
series of growing crises in capitalism, the
results of which heralded a shift from a relatively stable set of production relations, fordism, exemplified by the capital–state–labour
contract sealed by the New Deal in the USA,
to the contemporary era of post-fordism.
When that contract expired under the weight
of international competition for low wages,
Western capitalists responded with just-intime production, a credit-based economy,
and the spatial fixes of capital relocation and
fresh market penetration. The new economy’s
spatial, technological and labour processes
had become, under the regime of flexible
accumulation, more nimble and quicker to
change. Harvey’s argument was not, however,
to draw a direct line of causality from these
disruptions in the economic sphere to postmodernity’s seemingly similar loss of moorings in
the intellectual domain. It was, rather, to
couple these transformations through shifts
in the ‘experience of space–time’; as he put
it, economic change led to time__space compression, which dramatically redrew our cognitive maps of the social order. Into this
confusion arose postmodernity, the result of a
profound disenchantment with modernity’s
long-held matrix of certainty and order. For
its turn, postmodernism was simply a cultural
blip, an ephemeral reaction in art and architecture to the deeper anxieties brought forth
by postmodernity (for an extended discussion,
see Gregory, 1994, Part III, esp. pp. 406–14).
From Harvey, it follows that we should not
welcome postmodernity as a new, emancipatory era that moves us beyond a confining,
stodgy and conservative modernity, but see it
rather as a description of forces that are deep,
complex and surprising. And since 1989,
arguably, things have intensified: the collapse
of communism, massive consumption and
even larger looming crises fuelled by
569
POST-NORMAL SCIENCE (PNS)
570
High
Decision stakes
speculation, a troubling expansion of the
privatization of state functions, high levels
of economic inequality alongside increased
racial and ethnic tensions, and a neo-liberal
excitement for free markets for capital
but sealed borders for labour (see neoliberalism). Meanwhile, all of these markers
of instability are smoothed over with a blind,
middle-class nostalgia for a media-invented
image of modernity, democracy and white
heteronormativity. Meanwhile, the exportation of cowboy capitalism to the global south
serves to hide exploitative production practices and their associated environmental consequences from the eyes of Northern
consumers, while simultaneously exporting
jobs and hardening borders. Finally, capitalism has had its own hand in the selective
deconstruction of the notion of property, particularly in spaces in the South where indigenous rights are repeatedly trampled or simply
ignored as opportunistic state leaders and corporations collude to exploit local resources in
the name of the global consumer.
Within all of this we might find some optimism in the postmodern character of new
social movements and alternative forms of
political organizing, both of which have seen
radical transformation in the late twentieth
century as the union-based strategies of
Fordism gave way to the post-NAFTA emergence of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas,
Mexico. To the extent that postmodernity
is associated with flexibility, so too goes
resistance. Characteristic of the contemporary scene are roving protests against neo-liberalism sparked by the successful disruption
of the world trade organization meeting in
Seattle, Washington in 1999; the emergence of
hundreds of globally linked collectives of indigenous peoples, operating under a common
proclamation of rights while preserving the
singularities of their different political projects;
and the widespread attraction of youth across
the world to the ‘new anarchism’, to minor
theory, to grassroots environmentalism, to
living beyond racial and national identifications, and to sexual freedom. These contrast
markedly to mobilizations under modernity,
which insisted on coherence in political ideology and uniformity in goals for change (think
global proletariat) – often topped off by rigid
organizational hierarchies. In their place, and
taking cues from many post-structurally
inflected approaches to feminism, antiracism, queer theory, anti-statism and anticapitalism, are thousands of collectives geared
to produce radical change from the
Post-normal
science
Professional
consultancy
Applied
science
Low
Systems uncertainty
High
post-normal science
perspective of difference. Contemporary activists produce a continuously unfolding multiplicity of small, terminal actions that
constantly work at ‘expanding the floor of the
cage’ (in Noam Chomsky’s words) within
which we currently find ourselves.
kwo/ jpj
Suggested reading
Gregory (1994, pp. 406–14); Harvey (1989b);
Soja (1989).
post-normal science (PNS) Silvio Funtowicz
and Jerome Ravetz (1993) contend that a new
form of science is needed when ‘facts are
uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and
decisions urgent’. The figure shows that where
‘decision stakes’ and ‘systems uncertainties’
are low, there is routine Kuhnian science (see
paradigm): when both are moderate, we have
consultancy, which copes with uncertainty
by working within tolerances and by professional judgement. But with high stakes and
high uncertainty (the ‘post-normal’ condition),
policy has to be implemented before the
evidence is certain (cf. risk society). This
requires new ways of working based on an
‘extended peer community’ (all those affected
by an issue who are prepared to enter into
dialogue) and ‘extended facts’, which include
anecdotal evidence, confidential information,
local knowledge and ethical commitments. As
such, PNS aims to provide a coherent framework for participation in decision-making,
which includes tools developed by Funtowicz
and Ravetz to manage and communicate
uncertainty and to allow for the qualitative
assessment of quantitative information as provided by the NUSAP website (http://nusap.
net/), and that goes beyond confirmatory
POST-STRUCTURALISM
data analysis. As such, it provides an antidote
to nihilistic relativism about facts, values and
reality. Saloranta (2001) shows how PSN can
be used in the climate change debate.
kj
post-socialism The various complex political and economic transformations occurring
(particularly after 1989) in the former socialist
states of Central and Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union. It signals an historical
break with models of social and economic
development organized around a centralized
bureaucratic state socialist project, a command economy, and the demise of the geopolitical hegemony of the Soviet Union over
its satellite states. There is still debate about
whether Chinese market socialism can be
thought of as post-socialist with its opening
of markets to foreign investment and export
markets, and the expansion of private ownership in an economy still strongly controlled by
the party state.
Post-socialism is also a description of a
reorientation in a broader epistemological
and political structure of thought. Along
with other similar ‘postings’ (such as postmodernism, post-structuralism and postcolonialism), post-socialism has signalled a
conceptual break and has initiated a series of
thorough-going theoretical transformations
of socialist thought, as these others had
with modernism, structuralism and colonial
thought. With its enormous geographical
scope and the depth of its impacts on regional
and global economies, post-socialism has also
reshaped the intellectual and institutional
practices of many of the social sciences (e.g.
the perestroika movement in political science,
post-marxism and rethinking marxism in economics, political economy and geography,
and the resurgence of anarchist thought and
practice in social movements and global justice movements).
Despite the salience of the historical
changes wrought after 1989, post-socialism
retains the binary nature of its origins. On
the one hand, it represents one of the deepest
politico-philosophical breaks of the twentieth
century, the break with socialism and the
return to the market ideology of Friedrich
von Hayek. This break has fuelled the resurgence of neo-liberalism in former socialist
states, particularly by the Bretton Woods
organizations such as the IMF and World
Bank. In this view, there is no alternative for
reform societies but to privatize their economies, democratize their polities and liberalize
their societies. De-communization must
accompany structural adjustment, shock therapy and the building of open markets. On the
other hand, post-socialism has also been a
political–theoretical movement of socialist
and social-democratic thinkers deeply concerned by the shocking deepening of social
and economic inequalities produced by structural adjustment and shock therapy, yet
optimistic about the possibilities of what
Jacques Derrida called ‘democracy-to-come’
(Derrida, 1994). For such scholars, the technocratic implementation of shock therapy and
the dire consequences for regional economies
and livelihoods has been a cause for serious
concern. From this perspective, the social and
geographical contingencies of state socialism
are matched by the deep complexities and
contradictions of post-socialism (van Hoven,
2003). In response, geographers have explicitly challenged the dominant transition
framework that examines organizational forms
in Eastern Europe according to the degree to
which they conform to or depart from the
blueprints of already existing capitalisms. In
their place, they have focused on the diversity
of
‘actually
occurring
post-socialisms’
(Grabher and Stark, 1997; Pickles and
Smith, 1998).
With accession to the European Union, the
geographies of post-socialist Central and
Eastern europe have become ever more
focused on issues of regional and institutional
integration, the creation of common economic spaces, and issues of immigration
and labour market change. Here, postsocialism finally comes to mean something
it probably ought to have meant much earlier; the process of regional change wrought
on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
jpi
Suggested reading
Hann (2002); Pickles (2007); Rainnie, Smith
and Swain (2002); Smith (2004); Žižek (2001).
post-structuralism A post-1960s intellectual movement that countered the perceived
rigidities, certainties and essentialisms thought
to characterize structuralism. Yet poststructuralism has always been indebted to its
predecessor, to which it is tied in productive
ways (hence ‘post-’ and not ‘anti-’ structuralism). Post-structuralism was developed first in
philosophy and later took hold in literary
theory and criticism (see cultural turn). Its
birth is usually marked by a 1966 conference
paper by Jacques Derrida (republished in
1978; also see Derrida, 1979). Other key
figures and contributions include Foucault
571
POST-STRUCTURALISM
(1972a [1966], 1978 [1976], 1980b), Barthes
(1977), Spivak (1988), Butler (1990, 1993a),
Baudrillard (1993), Latour (1993), Bhabha
(1994) and Badiou (2005). Often conflated
with postmodernity and postmodernism,
post-structuralism, while always in the mix
of these theoretical and cultural currents, is
more contained, analytic and philosophical.
It has been, and continues to be, profoundly
influential in the humanities and critical
social sciences, and is noteworthy for underwriting many of contemporary human geography’s engagements with actor-network
theory, feminism, post-colonialism, postdevelopment theory, posthumanism, postmarxism, psychoanalytic theory, queer
theory and subaltern studies. Its influence, direct and indirect, is felt in nearly all
branches of human geography, though not
without critics and dissenters, especially
among humanists and Marxists (cf. humanism; marxism). Its primary effects can be felt
in four theoretical shifts since the 1980s:
(1)
A rethinking of the relationships
between the production of space and
its representation, especially through
reconfigured concepts of cultural
landscape and landscape, but also in
other sites of text and textuality,
such as literature, film, the media,
music and so on.
(2) New concepts of what power consists of,
where it is ‘located’ and how it operates.
(3) A destabilization of foundationalism,
leading to post-foundational accounts of
identity and difference (including critiques of standard categories in social
science, such as class and development), a questioning of the binary between culture and nature, and a
suspicion towards older and less reflexive
understandings of objectivity.
(4) A somewhat more recent reversal of
post-structuralists’ tendency to privilege
epistemology over ontology in accounts of social life.
Jacques Derrida’s version of poststructuralism is fundamental to the destabilization of meaning that lies at the heart of the
concept. He began with the recognition that
any structure relies upon a centre, an organizing
principle (e.g. God, the individual, truth,
objectivity), around which the remainder of the
structure is constructed. Derrida then famously
unhinged the centre from its effronteries of selfactualization and independence by asserting its
572
relational constitution with an ‘other’, an outside periphery that is the raw material for the
centre’s construction. In helping forge the identity of the centre through a process of negation
(i.e. not ‘other’), this ‘constitutive outside’ is
said to leave its ‘trace’ within the centre, highlighting their co-dependence and providing the
entry point for the post-structuralist method of
deconstruction, a form of analysis that demonstrates the reliance of the centre on its
excluded other (cf. discourse analysis).
Derrida’s main contribution in human geography has been to help undo the security of
traditional binaries, such as objectivity/subjectivity, space/place and nature/culture.
Foucault’s brilliant contribution to poststructuralism was to trace the historical evolution – or genealogy – of socially constructed
categories and to ask in whose name and in what
contexts certain objects became associated with
certain categories. His work typically linked
analyses of the interrelated production of institutions (hospitals, prisons: see carceral geographies; panopticon), scientific and political
discourse (see critical geopolitics) and their
subjects (see disciplinary power). Further, it
led him to envision capillaric rather than fixed
sites of power, which operates as a differencenaming and boundary-drawing effect of discourse. Probably the most influential of the
post-structuralists to date, Foucault’s impact
on studies of space have been plentiful: in studies of governmentality (counting and placing
bodies), identity (naming bodies in terms of
race, deviance, health etc.) and sexuality
(controlling bodies and populations: see biopower), as well as in post-structuralist studies
of landscape, where discourse and space meet,
and where the operation of power is concretized
(see Crampton and Elden, 2007).
feminism has a complicated relationship to
post-structuralism. On the one hand, Butler,
within the context of feminism and queer theory, described the production of the human
subject as a matter of performance, signs
acted out upon – through iteration and
citation – the bodies of individuals. Like
Foucault, Butler rejects any notion of an
innate subject, suggesting that performativity is a matter of approximating idealized imaginaries of gender, and of resisting or even
satirizing such ideals. (Geographers have
mostly taken up performativity by insisting
on the context-specificity within which identities are formed.) On the other hand, some
feminists have not welcomed the destabilization of identity that post-structuralism heralded, noting that the rise of anti-essentialist
POVERTY
thought was curiously coincident with
women’s successes in demanding a voice
based on sex and gender (see Nicholson,
1989). In any case, a number of concepts
and debates within feminist geographies are
intimately tied to the rise of post-structuralism
(see alterity; body; difference; essentialism; identity; positionality; subjectivity).
The above thinkers have an aversion to
metaphysical or ontological speculation, and
so it has been said that, in their tradition of
theorizing, epistemology trumps ontology
(Dixon and Jones, 1998). But Deleuze
(1994) never refrained from attempting to
develop a thoroughgoing post-structuralist
philosophy that incorporated ontology.
Central to this – and what makes it possible
to consider Deleuze a post-structuralist – was
his rejection of all conceptions of the world
that relied upon transcendental or ideal
objects, such as essences (see also minor theory: see Katz, 1996). Instead, he describes an
immanent universe of force and affect, one
that organizes itself according to the matter
(literally) at hand. Thus, things in the world
do not correspond to a set of ideal forms, but
are instead singular products of continuous
material differentiation. Thought – by its very
nature, but particularly so under modernity –
retrofits objects and relations into categories
and orders of similitude, and thus keeps the
thinker at a conceptual distance from the ‘pure
difference’ expressed by the material world. As
his is an approach that often has more in common with complexity theory than dialectics, Deleuze too has been controversial among
some post-structuralists and many Marxists.
Together with his colleague Félix Guattari
(see Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), he developed a rich spatial vocabulary populated with
concepts such as assemblage, nomadology,
rhizome, (de)territorialization, smooth and
striated spaces, and the like (Bonta and
Protevi, 2004; see also Doel, 1999). kwo/jpj
Suggested readings
Bonta and Protevi (2004); Butler (1990);
Crampton and Elden (2007); Doel (1999); Foucault (1980); Harrison (2006); Murdoch (2006).
poverty A much-contested term that suggests a state of welfare/illfare in which a person
cannot function in one or more respects as a
capable human being. Poverty is not a term
that is easily defined. In so-called ‘poor’ or
‘developing’ countries, attempts are often
made to define poverty in ‘absolute’ or nutritional terms. The official definitions and
measurements of poverty used in India highlight some of the complexities and challenges
associated
with
this
category.
The
Government of India tracks the number of
people in the country who cannot purchase
enough commodities to ensure that they get
on average 2,400 calories per day in rural areas
or 2,100 calories per day in urban areas. These
are aggregate figures that are collected at the
household level by the census authorities or
by officers of the National Sample Survey.
Attempts are also made to count the number
of women or children in absolute poverty, or
people in female-headed households or those
over 60. The Indian government maintains
that the head-count ratio of people living
below the poverty line has halved since
1973–4, coming down from about 55 per cent
of the population to about 26 per cent of the
population in 1999–2000. This still amounted
to more than 260 million people. Independent
scholars have challenged the India’s government data and generally put the 2000 figure
at 300–350 million people.
About one in five people who suffer from
absolute poverty live in India, despite recent
progress there. Rates of poverty are higher for
females than for males. It has also been estimated (Sen, 1990) that more than 100 million
women are ‘missing’ in South asia and China
as a result of gendered social practices before
and after birth (female abortion and infanticide, male preference in feeding and health
care). Yet it is Sub-Saharan africa that generally comes to mind when discussion in
Northern countries turns to absolute poverty.
It is here that Jeffrey Sachs, the American
economist and adviser to Ban Ki-Moon at
the United Nations, has demanded action to
secure ‘the end of poverty in our lifetime’.
Sachs (2005) has called for the elimination of
what he calls ‘extreme poverty’ by 2025. He
wants the US government to impose a 5 per
cent income tax surcharge on Americans earning more than $200,000 per annum. This will
generate over half of the $70–80 billion per
year that he reckons is necessary to kick-start
economic growth in the poorest countries.
The remaining funds must come from other
richer countries. Such concerted spending,
Sachs argues, can ensure that the first
Millennium Development Goal is met – the
UN-agreed target of halving between 1990
and 2015 the proportion of people whose
income is less than one US dollar a day. It
might also eliminate extreme poverty and
hunger by 2025, particularly if increased aid
spending is directed not only towards
573
POVERTY GAP
economic growth, but also to better educational provision and healthcare delivery,
including for HIV/AIDS patients.
Not everyone agrees with Sachs’ vision of
what causes absolute poverty (he directs a lot
of attention to physical geography) or his
suggestion that it is best addressed by massive
programmes of public spending (see also
development). Part of the reason for this is
that Sachs is mainly concerned with calorific
or income poverty. Adam Smith famously
argued that a definition of poverty should
include the right not to feel shame in public.
In other words, he recognized that people cannot function in ways that they might want to if
they are the targets of physical or verbal abuse.
This tradition of thinking has been continued
by John Maynard Keynes and Amartya Sen.
One virtue of Sen’s (2000) work is that it
directs us to think about poverty in relational
– and not simply absolute – terms. What matters, Sen suggests, is whether we have the
capability to live our lives in ways that we
consider meaningful, however differently we
might define what a meaningful life is. This
is partly qualified, for Sen, by the prior
requirement that all human beings must have
a minimal level of food intake, shelter, education and health to function as humans. One
can imagine a family in Punjab, then, that is
above a state-defined poverty line. Perhaps the
family has benefited from rising incomes as a
result of the green revolution. But what if
females in the family lose paid jobs to male
kin, perhaps on the basis that their labour in
the fields is no longer ‘required’? What if this
loss of earning power translates into a system
of purdah, where women find it harder to venture into public space? For Sen, this can also
be a sign of poverty, precisely because it
defines a gendered system of social exclusion. The same argument can be extended to
members of social groups who are not allowed
to worship with others, or who cannot easily
draw water from public wells (Erb and
Harriss-White, 2002).
This way of thinking about poverty also directs attention to social norms and thus to the
geographical nature of poverty. In richer countries, ‘poverty’ is most commonly defined as
relative deprivation, and here as elsewhere it
tends to be feminized (Jones and Kodras,
1990; but see also Chant, 2006). People are
considered to be poor relative to some
assumed bundle of goods or services, or of
capabilities and functionings, that provides
for at least a minimum level of access to what
is considered ‘normal’ in a given social setting.
574
For example, in the USA, not having a television set might be considered an index both of
social exclusion and of relative deprivation, at
least where this is not an active family choice.
Once the word ‘normal’ comes into play, however, we recognize that ‘wars on poverty’ are
discursive constructions and not just political
campaigns (Yapa, 1998: see discourse).
Social scientists now pay close attention to
the powers of state and non-state actors to
define ‘poverty’. They also look at the governmental effects of describing someone as poor
or, as in India, as a Below Poverty Line (BPL)
person or household (Corbridge, Williams,
Srivastava and Véron, 2005). Work on these
issues is being published alongside academic
research on poverty, inequality and globalization in the world economy (Wade, 2004;
Wolf, 2004). There is clearly room for both
types of work: for studies that are sharply
attentive to the cultural constructions of poverty and its effects in different locations, and
for studies that carefully seek to map out what
has been happening to absolute poverty in the
developing world (with and without considerations of India and China, whose enormous
size affects all calculations) in an age of apparently increased spatial interdependencies. sco
Suggested readings
Gordon and Spicker (1999); Jones (2004a);
Sachs (2005); World Bank (2001).
poverty gap poverty is conventionally
measured in terms of an Absolute Poverty
Line, expressed in monetary terms: it is the
income or expenditure below which a minimum nutritionally adequate diet plus essential non-food requirements are no longer
affordable (e.g. spending per capita of less
than US$1.00 a day, which is the conventional
measure or threshold for the Absolute Poverty
Line everywhere). A poverty line distinguishes, then, the poor from the non-poor
(Ravallion, 1995; UNDP, 1998). Poverty estimates are typically based on data from actual
household budget or income/expenditure
surveys. In this way, a proportion of a country’s population or an absolute number of persons or households can be designated as living
in absolute poverty: this is the Head Count
Index. Currently, for example, it is estimated
that 47 per cent of the population in Nigeria
live in absolute poverty. Using this Absolute
Poverty Line, it is possible to calculate what
proportion of the GDP of a country would be
required to lift those in absolute poverty above
the poverty line (e.g. the proportion of
POWER
Nigeria’s GDP that would be required to lift
the 70 millions who are absolutely poor to a
condition in which their basic needs were fulfilled). This is the poverty gap: the poorer the
country and the larger the number of people in
poverty, the greater is the gap (i.e. the
resources that must be devoted to raise those
in poverty). The poverty gap thus speaks to
the scale and depth of poverty, and what it
would take as a measure of national output
to bring all of the population above the poverty
line. The Poverty Gap Ratio refers to the mean
distance below the $1 a day poverty line
expressed as a percentage of the poverty line
(currently 34 per cent for Nigeria). The
Poverty Gap Index refers to additional money
the average poor person would have to spend
(in aggregate or as a proportion of total consumption) in order to reach the poverty line.
The poverty gap for India is currently 4 per
cent, for China 1 per cent and for eastern
Europe 0.1 per cent. The Poverty Severity
Index measures the distribution of welfare of
those below the poverty line (i.e. between the
poor and the ultra-poor).
mw
power A minimal definition of power would
refer to the ability of one agent to affect the
actions or attitudes of another. Like most concepts that are central to social science, the
meanings, causes and effects of power are continually being re-assessed. One thing we know
for sure is that it is trite to think of power only
in negative terms. The possibility of having a
conversation with someone, of running a class
or seminar in which people can learn, of playing a football match, depends upon the
deployment of power: of people taking turns
to speak and listen, of students and teachers
doing work as agreed, of players deferring to a
referee. People both exercise power and are on
the receiving end of power at different times
every day, in all realms of life. More important
than the fact that power is exercised is the way
in which power is constructed and deployed.
To what extent is power concentrated in certain institutions, relationships or agencies?
How visible is it? What are the opportunities
for power relations to be contested or rotated?
Are accountability mechanisms in place, and if
so how well do they work?
The idea that power is fundamentally negative continues to be a powerful one, even when
it is coupled with an idea of necessary
restraint. Thomas Hobbes (1968 [1651])
argued that all men (sic) acted as egoists, bent
on the satisfaction of their desires through
relentless power plays. Given a world of
scarcity, only the sovereign could prevent
these individualized acts of power from adding
up to an intolerable state of nature (cf. sovereign power). Contemporary work on
international relations by so-called
Realists presents a similar view of power, in
which all states seek to maximize their selfinterest and are prepared to use violence to
this end. Anarchy is prevented only by the
exercise of hegemony by a dominant power.
Some versions of marxism come close to this
argument. Marxists argue that capitalist
states deploy their power to guarantee the
accumulation process under the rule of capital. It is not surprising, then, that many
Realists and Marxists share the view that the
war in Iraq was fundamentally about oil and
the protection of America’s self-interest. As
David Harvey puts it in The new imperialism,
joining Marx to Mackinder, ‘Whoever controls
the middle east controls the global oil spigot
and whoever controls the global oil spigot can
control the global economy, at least for the
near future’ (2003b, p. 19).
Of course, there is more to Marxism on
power than a perspective on international relations. Marxist work on power in human geography first made its mark through a critique of
behavioural and pluralist models of power.
These models, developed by political scientists
such as Robert Dahl to look at power coalitions in US cities, emphasized the overt and
dispersed nature of power. Power could be
observed when A made an open attempt to
force B to do something that s/he would not
otherwise do. If A succeeded, s/he had power
in this ‘issue area’. Happily, however, or so
Dahl (1963) concluded, B would probably
exercise power over A in another issue area.
Given the nature of democracy in the USA,
power was hard to monopolize.
Radical scholars disagreed. Steven Lukes
(2005) argued that this view of power was
one-dimensional. The work of power was
most often done in smoke-filled rooms and in
the setting of agendas. Lukes referred to this as
two-dimensional power, and he did not stop
there. Lukes further argued, as did many
Marxist geographers (see marxist geography), that not only were agendas bent to
serve certain class interests (not least through
the state), but also that many people at the
wrong end of power were unable to see their
powerlessness. In part, this is because of what
Marxists call ‘false consciousness’. Ordinary
people cannot see their ‘objective interests’,
because their political antennae have been
deadened by years of watching sport, shopping
575
POWER-GEOMETRY
in the mall or buying into the dream of a better
life within capitalism (see ideology).
In the 1980s, cultural and political geographers began to explore some of these constructions of hegemony, drawing usefully on
the work of Antonio Gramsci. feminist geographies also explored the different ways in
which relations of patriarchy were embedded
and understood in different parts of the world
(Rose, 1993), and explored questions of
resistance to power, including discussions of
the weapons of the weak (Hart, 1991; see
feminist geography). In the 1990s these
explorations were significantly extended as
geographers began to draw more broadly on
the work of Michel Foucault, and through him
the work of Edward Said and other theorists of
post-colonialism or post-structuralism.
John Allen (2003) has suggested that power
can be thought of as an inscribed capacity
inhering in certain agents and networks; as a
resource; and as a set of strategies, discourses and technologies of government (see
biopower; disciplinary power; governmentality). This last view of power begins to hint
at the richness of Foucault’s legacy to the
human sciences. Foucault (2001) recognized,
as some of his followers have not, that power
can be enabling. For the most part, however,
geographers have read Foucault as a guide to
the ways in which power inhabits and flows
through all of the ‘capillaries’ of modern life.
They have also taken from Foucault the
notion that power is strongly territorialized. It
is embedded in jurisdictions that run from the
human body (powerfully disciplined by ideas
of ‘normal’ sexuality, for instance), through
the organization of schools, hospitals, asylums
(Philo, 2004) and prisons, and on to the construction of boundaries that express ideas of
inclusion and exclusion. Power, in this view,
can be challenged, critiqued and contested –
this is the job of an oppositional social science
– but it cannot be transcended: the line to
Foucault runs through Weber and Nietzsche
more strongly than it does from Marx.
The idea that power animates all spatial
practices, and that power is always spatialized,
is now widely understood in geography. So
too is the idea that power is most effective
when it is least visible. critical human geography seeks to denaturalize some of the most
powerful discourses that are at play in the
subject – ideas of development, for example,
or the west, or whiteness. In so doing, it aims
to reveal other ways of assembling power and
knowledge. At the same time, however, as
Harvey’s work on the new imperialism
576
reveals, some geographers are also concerned
to keep their eyes focused on materialist conceptions of power, and the powers of capital
and the state. When it was revealed that the
Bush administration in the USA was pursuing
a policy of ‘extraordinary rendition’ (the
alleged torturing of suspected ‘terrorists’ in
prison camps outside the USA), it became
clear that work on the sovereign powers of
states (Agamben, 1998: see exception, space
of) had to be linked to work on spatial strategies of demarcation, Othering and distanciation (see Gregory, 2004b, on the Israel–
Palestine conflict), and to robust accounts of
the deployment of US power in an age of neosco
liberalism (Smith, 2005a).
Suggested reading
Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and Véron
(2005); Gregory (2004b); Lukes (2005);
Mamdani (2004).
power-geometry The more or less systematic and usually highly uneven ways in which
different individuals and groups are positioned
within networks of flows and interactions.
These variable positions derive from the
intimate connections that exist between productions of power and productions of space:
spatial modalities of power are differentially
engaged such that different actors in different
places have different degrees of freedom. The
concept was proposed by Doreen Massey
(1993) as both a critique of David Harvey’s
concept of time__space compression and an
attempt to open up conventional, ‘bounded’
conceptions of place.
Massey (1993, pp. 60–1) argued that
Harvey (1989b) had emphasized capitalism
to such a degree that his account of time–
space compression collapsed into an economism, and paid so much attention to class
that he failed to acknowledge the wider range
of social positions that were involved, including gender. In short: time–space compression ‘needs differentiating socially’. In
parallel, Gregory (1994, p. 414) argued that
the process also needs to be differentiated
spatially: there is a complex geography to
time–space compression. The concept of a
power-geometry speaks to these twin concerns. It was developed independently of
actor-network theory, with which it has
some affinities, but it provides a multidimensional conception of space that is intended to
be unwaveringly political in its orientation.
positionality is crucial to power-geometry
(see also Sheppard, 2002). From the outset,
PRAGMATISM
Massey (1993, p. 63) emphasized the politics of
mobility that derive directly from different positionalities within a particular powergeometry: ‘We need to ask whether our relative
mobility and power over mobility and communication entrenches the spatial imprisonment of
other groups’. For Hyndman (1997, p. 151), this
remains a promissory note, and Massey does not
delve far enough into the economies of power
that regulate, facilitate and disrupt transnational
movement. Although her argumentationsketches are often impressionistic and usually
operate at a high level of abstraction,
Massey’s later writings are nonetheless directed
towards the elaboration of what she calls ‘a
global sense of place’. For her, places are open,
porous and hybrid – literally, ‘meeting places’ in
which trajectories of all kinds (people, ideas,
commodities) collide – and to represent them
as containers, building blocks or objects (cf.
regional geography) is to foreclose the possibilities of an intrinsically spatial politics. This
openness is not a peculiarity of modern globalization and cannot be reduced to the choreography of contemporary capitalism. Over the long
term, she proposes, different places have been
drawn into engagement with one another in ‘a
power-geometry of intersecting trajectories’
(Massey, 2005, p. 64), but there is no single,
plenary narrative within which these can be convened (p. 82); the outcomes of these intersections have always been open-ended (though not,
of course, unconstrained) because the spatial is
‘the realm of the juxtaposition of dissonant narratives’, and it is out of this ‘throwntogetherness’
that new narratives are generated and negotiated
(pp. 140–2). Seen thus, power-geometries not
only shape and constrain mobility: they are
themselves in constant if irregular motion, so
that their analysis is necessarily both historical
and geographical (cf. contrapuntal geographies). Place can then be recognized as ‘woven
together out of ongoing stories, as a moment
within power-geometries, as a particular constellation within the wider topographies of space’
(Massey, 2005, p. 131).
dg
Suggested reading
Massey (1993); Sheppard (2002).
pragmatism An American tradition of philosophy that emerged in the late nineteenth
century associated with John Dewey (1859–
1952), William James (1842–1910), George
Herbert Mead (1863–1931) and Charles
Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) (see Barnes,
2008a). The movement is best known for the
idea that what counts as knowledge is
determined by its usefulness. As James
(1987, p. 578) wrote, ‘the true is the name of
whatever proves itself to be good in the way of
belief’. Pragmatism is thus a philosophy of
practical achievement. Ideas are labelled true
when they enable humans to get things done,
to cope with the world. After enjoying widespread popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, pragmatism fell out of favour
after the Second World War following the
ascendancy of empirical social science and
analytical philosophy, a narrowly conceived,
often technically abstruse form of reasoning
concerned with assessing the coherence, consistency and precise meaning of an argument.
The publication of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy
and the mirror of nature (1979) revived pragmatism’s fortunes, however. As an ex-analytical
philosopher, Rorty diagnosed with forensic
precision the pathology of modern philosophy,
prescribing as cure a large dose of American
pragmatism. Now found in a range of humanities and social sciences, the rehabilitation of
pragmatism is also a consequence of the wider
interest in post-structuralism and postmodernism, movements with which it shares common interests.
James coined the name pragmatism in 1898
to describe the movement, but there were
always strong differences among its proponents. At one point, for example, Peirce minted
his own neologism, ‘pragmaticism’, to mark
off what he was doing from his colleagues,
and sufficiently ‘ugly to be safe from kidnappers’ (Bernstein, 1992a, p. 813). Bernstein
(1992b, appendix) usefully characterizes pragmatism by five features:
(1) Anti-foundationalism, the belief that
there are no secure anchors either in the
world or in the mind that holds and guarantees the permanency of true knowledge.
(2) Fallibilism, the belief that no truth is ever
final, and that knowledge should always
be subject to further investigation, critical scrutiny, and questioning.
(3) Communal enquiry, the notion that
scholarship takes place within a wider
community involving trust, conversation,
and shared norms and responsibilities.
(4) Radical contingency, the belief, stemming partly from Darwin’s theory of evolution, that change is propelled by
chance and accident, that the only certainty is uncertainty (and for this reason
humans must always be ready to expect
the unexpected) (cf. darwinism). Peirce
577
PRAGMATISM
(1982, vol. 4, p. 544) wrote, ‘Everything
that can happen by chance, sometime or
other will happen by chance. Chance will
sometime bring about a change in every
condition.’
(5) ‘Radical pluralism’, the belief that neither bits of the world nor of philosophy
coherently fit together all of piece. Radical pluralism, as James (1977, p. 26)
writes, is a ‘turbid, muddled, Gothic
sort of affair without a sweeping outline
and little pictorial nobility’. But for
James it is all we have.
The rise of analytical philosophy in America
from the 1940s brought with it everything that
pragmatism formerly shunned – foundationalism, certainty, individual rationality, necessity and monism. Consequently, pragmatism
was pushed, and sometimes shoved aside.
After his death Dewey, for example, was
regarded by one analytical philosopher as ‘a
nice old man who hadn’t the vaguest conception of real philosophical rigor or the nature of
a real philosophical problem’ (quoted in
Gouinlock, 1972, p. xi). Analytical philosophy’s hold on the profession was relatively
short-lived, however, and by the 1980s it was
vigorously challenged by a new group of pragmatists, including Richard Rorty (1931–2007)
and Richard Bernstein (b.1932).
Rorty, drawing upon the writings of Dewey
and James, seeks first to dismantle from the
inside out the edifice of contemporary analytical philosophy, especially the variant known as
realism; and, second, to substitute for it, a
neo-pragmatic alternative which he calls, possibly tongue-in-cheek, ‘postmodernist liberal
bourgeois ironism’ (Rorty, 1989). Very briefly,
Rorty argues that the problems of analytical
philosophy stem from its appropriation of an
inappropriate metaphor, vision or sight, or
‘ocularism’. The metaphor mistakenly convinced philosophers that it was possible for
the mind to mirror the world (cf. vision and
visuality). In contrast Rorty, following the
pragmatists, argues for a different central metaphor, ‘conversation’. Under this model there
are no fixed end points, strict rules or necessary
logics. This is evident by unpacking the terms
of Rorty’s alternative: ‘postmodernist’
because Rorty does not believe in the grand
metanarratives of high modernism that supposedly make all parts of the world commensurable; ‘liberal’ because for the conversation
to continue there must be freedom of expression and democracy (thereby echoing Dewey’s
concerns); ‘bourgeois’ because Rorty thinks
578
that liberalism has so far only been possible
under capitalism; and ‘irony’ because for the
conversation to continue we need to affirm
certain beliefs even though there are no firm
philosophical foundations for them. Rorty
approvingly quotes Joseph Schumpeter
(1942, p. 243), who says that one needs ‘to
realise the relative validity of one’s convictions
and yet stand for them unflinchingly’.
While sympathetic to many of Rorty’s ideas,
Bernstein (1992b, ch. 8) is sharply critical of
his economic conservatism, and his disengagement from questions of unequal power and
resources. Bernstein (1992b, p. 233), says that
Rorty’s version of pragmatism is ‘little more
than an apologia for the status quo’. In contrast, Bernstein deals with those absences by
joining to pragmatism various strands of continental European philosophy, producing what
he calls ‘the new constellation’ (Bernstein,
1992b). An important component within
Bernstein’s mix are writers identified with
post-structuralism such as Foucault and
Derrida, who are not economic conservatives,
and who deal vitally with questions of unequal
power and resources. In no small part, the
renaissance of American pragmatism is a
result of its resonance with the concerns of
those writers.
In human geography, there have been
sporadic, but neither consistent nor concerted,
attempts to draw upon pragmatist writers.
Jackson and Smith (1984) utilize Mead’s more
applied prescriptions in their portrayal of
social geography; Westcoat (1992) describes
the relation between White’s environmental
outlook, and particularly Dewey’s ideas; both
Barnes (1996, chs. 2 and 5) and GibsonGraham (2006b [1996]) make use of Rorty’s
work in countering essentialism in economic
geography; and Sunley (1996) takes the ideas
of another ex-analytical-philosopher-turnedpragmatist, Hilary Putnam, and puts them to
work in a discussion of the relationship
between the new institutional economics
and economic geography. A special issue of
Geoforum (2008) is devoted to assessing the
usefulness of pragmatism for human geography and connecting it to contemporary intellectual formations: thus Allen (2008)
conducts a series of radical experiments that
insert pragmatism into the play of power,
Bridge (2008) reactivates pragmatism in
theorizations of performativity and spatiality, while Jones (2008) identifies a series of
connections between pragmatism, poststructuralism and non-representational
theory.
tb
PRICING POLICIES
Suggested reading
Barnes (2008a); Bernstein (1992a); Menand
(2001).
prediction The construction of an estimated
or expected value for an observation being
studied, where the observation might be for a
place, region, individual or time-period. The
estimate or prediction may be generated by a
statistical model (e.g. regression), a mathematical model (e.g. an entropy-maximizing
model) or a more informal simulation process. The term ‘predicted value’ is usually
employed for the ‘fitted’ or estimated values
for observations within the data set being calibrated or modelled, and the out-of-sample
extrapolation is termed the forecast.
lwh
pre-industrial city All cities prior to the
industrial revolution, plus those in nonindustrialized regions today. The term reflects
the theory, initially advocated by Gideon
Sjoberg (1960; see sjoberg model), that all
pre-industrial cities, regardless of their time,
place or cultural backdrop, share similar
reasons for existence, social hierarchies and
internal spatial structures. The term is now
rarely used, as few researchers believe that
the variety of urban forms created by preindustrial and non-industrialized societies
have enough in common to be considered as
variations of a single category.
dh
preservation The protection, maintenance
and care of relict features of the built environment, including historic buildings, archaeological sites and individual human artefacts
(e.g. the Colosseum in Rome). Preservationists
complement the work of conservationists, who
aim to protect specific ‘natural’ landscapes or
features of the biophysical environment (e.g. the
Grand Canyon) (cf. conservation). Agencies
such as the National Trust in the UK are
awarded statutory powers to preserve houses
and gardens of particular historical significance
(see heritage). This may involve the extensive
restoration of buildings to bring them back to
their original condition or their revival through
the reproduction of past features (e.g. gardens).
Human geographers have been concerned both
with the practices involved in preservation projects and with the types of landscape imagery,
iconography and interpretation provided in
preserved landscapes (e.g. Ashworth and
Tunbridge, 2004). As the example of the
Colosseum suggests, however, ‘preservation’
has a complex and often contentiously imaginative relationship with restoration (see Hopkins
and Beard, 2005, chs. 1 and 6; and, more generally, Lowenthal, 1985). Relict features typically
have multiple, sedimented histories inscribed in
and on them: they are not the product of a single
historical moment. It was for this reason that
the French architect Viollet le-Duc (1814–79)
argued that restoration should restore a building to an idealized state of completion, perfection ‘that may never have actually existed
at any given time’: which is why, in turn,
his ‘restorations’ (e.g. of the French city of
Carcassonne) proved so controversial in the
past and in the present.
nj /dg
Suggested reading
Ashworth and Tunbridge (2004); Lowenthal
(1985, ch. 7).
pricing policies The arrangements whereby
the prices at which commodities are offered to
consumers are determined. In spatial economic analysis, the important distinguishing
feature of pricing policies is the extent to
which price varies with distance from the origin or source of the commodity. There are two
major alternative policies. The first is known
as the f.o.b. (free on board) price system, under
which there is a basic price at origin and the
consumer pays the transport cost involved
in getting the commodity to the point of purchase. The second is the c.i.f. (cost, insurance,
freight) price system, under which the producer adds insurance and shipping cost to the
production cost and offers the commodity at
a uniform delivered price irrespective of distance from origin. The distinction between
these two policies is important, for commodities sold c.i.f. should have no bearing on locational comparative advantage for productive
activities requiring them as inputs; similarly,
distance from origin should not affect level of
demand for goods offered on a c.i.f. basis
(other things being equal). There is an increasing tendency for commodities to be sold at a
uniform delivered price.
Various alternative pricing policies may be
implemented. An f.o.b. system does not
necessarily have minor incremental increases
in price for small increases in distance; more
often, the prevailing freight rates on which
delivered price is based will be constant over
broad zones. There may be forms of spatial
price discrimination, under which customers
in some areas are charged a high price (perhaps because the supplier has a local monopoly) so as to subsidize the price charged in a
more competitive market elsewhere. A wellknown variant is the basing point price policy,
579
PRIMARY DATA ANALYSIS
whereby customers are charged as if the commodity originated at a certain (base) point;
this can be used to protect producers in the
basing point location, for commodities actually produced elsewhere will cost more. The
operation of some pricing policies may involve
collusion on the part of producers to maintain
an artificially high price in the industry as a
whole – an increasing tendency in the
advanced capitalist world.
dms
primary data analysis In contrast to secondary data analysis, this involves data collected and analysed by the same researchers.
This allows a great deal of control over what is
collected and how it is collected, so that there
can be high coherence between theoretical and
operational concepts. Such an approach can
be costly in time and resources, however, and
there can be a lack of compatibility with other
work in the field; use of resources such as the
Question Bank (http://qb.soc.surrey.ac.uk/)
and of harmonized questions in survey analyses can ameliorate the latter problem, while
effective sampling can address the former. kj
Suggested reading
Government Statistical Service (2003).
primate city, the law of An empirical regularity identified by Mark Jefferson (1863–1949:
see Jefferson, 1939). The populations of the
three largest urban areas in some countries
approximated the ratio sequence 100 : 30 : 20,
which he attributed to the largest city’s preeminence in economic, social and political
affairs. Although the sequence is now largely
ignored, the concept of primacy, implying a
city’s predominance within an area, is frequently
deployed (cf. hegemony; rank-size rule). rj
Suggested reading
Vance (1970).
primitive accumulation In Capital I, having
explained the laws of development of capitalism, and the distinctive features of the capitalist mode of production, Marx turns to the
process by which capitalism historically established itself (Marx, 1967 [1867]). To pose this
historical question – how did capitalism arise?
– Marx focuses not simply upon the way in
which one set of relations of production is
transformed into another – the transition from
feudalism to capitalism – but on how one
class of workers, defined by their lack of property, came to confront another, capitalists,
who monopolized the means of production.
580
The ‘so-called secret’, as Marx terms it, of
primitive accumulation resides not in the simple expansion of the provision of the means of
production in a quantitative sense but, rather,
in a revolutionary reorganization of the relations of production. Primitive accumulation
for Marx was, in other words, the process by
which a pre-capitalist system of largely agrarian relations and small-scale property holding –
a peasantry having some form of direct control
over the means of production, namely land –
was dispossessed. The origins of capitalism are
to be found in the process by which the peasants are freed – there is much irony in Marx’s
use of this word – to become wage labourers in
agriculture (on large commercial estates) and
in industry. Marx turns to the case of the
enclosure movement in Britain – in effect,
the violent expropriation of forms of common
property – and the political and extraeconomic means by which this long process
of the creation and disciplining of a proletariat
was achieved. Marx made it clear that this
process always required the powers of the
state and was necessarily violent – written in
blood and fire, as he put it (see violence).
In seeing the enclosure movement as paradigmatic of primitive accumulation, Marx
opens up a complex debate over the transition
from feudalism to capitalism and how other
parts of europe, and subsequently the colonial
and post-colonial world, stood in a different
relation to the ‘original sin’ of primitive accumulation. The debate between Dobb and
Sweezy (see Hilton, 1976) turns precisely on
the interpretation of other European experiences and the weight attributed to the role of
exchange and market transactions as the
force in the disintegration of pre-capitalist
relations, or whether the pre-capitalist solidity
was broken by the dynamics of class structure
and struggle over property (see brenner
thesis). These debates were, of course, central
not only to the origins of capitalism in Europe
but to the dynamics of capitalism at the ‘periphery’; that is to say, how forms of capital
took hold of agrarian societies in the context
of European empire (the first age of empire)
and the genesis of a mercantile world system.
The primitive accumulation question has
always been central to the agrarian question;
that is to say, the ways in which peasant systems of production are differentiated as capital
takes hold of production. Much of this work
dates back to the classic studies of land, labour
and markets instigated by Karl Kautsky (1988
[1899]) and Vladimir Lenin (1964) in their
studies of German and Russian agriculture.
PRIMITIVISM
In the 1960s, the boom in peasant studies
increasingly focused on the land and landed
inequality question; for example, how the
green revolutionary technologies were (or
were not) producing an agrarian proletariat
(Harriss, 1982: see green revolution).
Primitive accumulation has also been central
to theories of imperialism, building upon
Marx’s observation of the ways in which colonialism dispossessed Third World property
holders and laid (or attempted to lay) the
foundations for systematic accumulation. In
so many cases, colonial capitalism proved to
be dominated by merchant and other forms of
capitalism, in which the speed and depth of
proletarianization was often constrained
(Watts, 1983a).
Against the backdrop of the counterrevolution in development theory and the rise
of neo-liberalism globally in the past three
decades, primitive accumulation has returned
as a category of analysis. Much of this has been
spurred by the new ways in which various sorts
of commons – common property resources, the
airwaves, human and plant genetic materials –
have been subject to the violent forces of privatization and what Marx called ‘dispossession’. Massimo De Angelis and the electronic
journal The Commoner have been especially
important in rethinking primitive accumulation in the context of globalization and neoliberal hegemony (see also RETORT, 2005).
Harvey (2005) has also returned to primitive
accumulation in his account of neo-liberalism.
Here he draws upon the important observation
made by Arendt (1958) that primitive accumulation – the ‘original sin of simple robbery’ –
was repeated historically as capitalism
expanded into non-commodified areas, sectors, countries and frontiers. Harvey deploys
this insight to show that neo-liberalism has typically operated in global terms, especially under
the auspices of american empire, as a form of
dispossession – what he calls accumulation by
dispossession – rather than intensive accumulation. The forms of dispossession are enormously varied – privatizing public housing,
raiding pension funds, displacing indigenous
people through dam projects, privatizing germ
plasm – and throw up quite varied forms of
resistance, typically articulated around the
defence of the commons, which have been a
fundamental force in the so-called antiglobalization movements.
In the socialist arena, a notion of primitive
socialist accumulation was developed by
Preobrazhensky in the 1920s, in postrevolutionary Russia (see Preobrazhensky,
1965). He emphasized that maintaining the
equilibrium between the market share of industrial and agricultural output at pre-war levels
meant upsetting the balance between rural
effective demand and the commodity output
of the town. A large increase in heavy investment was required that could not be funded
internally; hence agriculture had to bear the
burden. State trading monopolies would divert
excess demand from the peasantry to investment from consumption. This was to be
achieved by a sort of unequal exchange in
which agrarian goods were underpriced and
manufactures overpriced. This monopoly pricing by the state – in effect, a massive tax on
peasants to kick-start heavy industry – was the
socialist model of primitive (originary) accumulation. The presumption was that the terms
of trade would strike the kulaks hardest. A brilliant theorist of socialist accumulation, he
broke with both Trotsky and Stalin and was
arrested and shot in the late 1930s.
mw
Suggested reading
De Angelis (2006).
primitivism A Euro-American discourse
that represents the indigenous cultures of subSaharan africa, South america and the Pacific
islands as outside the perimeter of civilization.
It was inspired by European travel-writing,
and in particular by the discoveries made by
European explorers in the South Pacific in the
closing decades of the eighteenth century. Its
imaginative geographies received formal
expression in post-enlightenment philosophy
(Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’), in modern art
(Gauguin’s Tahiti), and in early anthropology
(Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific).
In all three cases, the possessive is significant:
while primitivism was often connected to a critique of modernity (a ‘oneness’ with nature,
for example, an intrinsic simplicity, and a
celebration of the sensual and the spiritual
through the fantastic), it was also closely tied to
colonialism. In many ways, it acted as the cultural dual to the concept of tropicality, and is a
powerful reminder that colonial discourse was
about more than orientalism. Historically,
‘primitivism has its place in the genealogy of
relationships between the West and the Other:
it allows one to grasp the geography by which the
West has constructed itself in reference and
opposition to ‘‘Elsewheres’’. Conversely, primitivism accounts for the geography of these
‘‘Elsewheres’’, in that they were transformed,
and even produced by the West’ (Staszak,
2004, p. 362). But primitivism continues to
581
PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS ANALYSIS (PCA)
haunt contemporary culture (Torgovnick,
1991), and its tropes continue to be mobilized
in modern tourism and the quest for the ‘exotic’.
Indeed, Li (2006) contends that it continues to
be a powerful if hidden presence in critical theorizations that ostensibly seek to expose the
ethnocentrism of the West. ‘In order for the
west to reflect,’ he concludes, ‘the savage must
dance’ (Li, 2006, p. 223).
dg
Suggested reading
Staszak (2004).
principal components analysis (pca) A statistical procedure for transforming a data matrix so that variables in the new matrix are
uncorrelated. Unlike factor analysis (with
which it is often confused/treated synonymously), there are as many variables (termed
‘components’) in the transformed as in the
original matrix. Component loadings and
scores are interpreted as are those derived
from factor analyses, and component matrices
can also be rotated. The pca procedure has
been widely used in human geography: (a) to
identify groups of interrelated variables
inductively; (b) to simplify a data set by
removing redundant information; (c) to
reorganize a data set in order to eliminate
collinearity; and (d) to test hypotheses.
(See also factorial ecology.)
rj
Suggested reading
Johnston (1978).
prisoner’s dilemma An application of game
theory that illustrates the benefits of cooperative behaviour in certain situations and
has been deployed to suggest a rationale for
the state.
In the game’s classic version (see Rapoport
and Chammah, 1965), two men are arrested
on charges of both car theft and armed robbery. The first offence can be readily proven,
but the other cannot; convictions for the latter
will only be obtained if one of the men confesses and implicates the other. The suspects
know that if they both stay silent they will be
found guilty of theft and serve a short prison
sentence (one year); they also know that if
both are found guilty of the armed robbery
they will serve eight years. They are interrogated separately and not allowed to consult,
let alone collude. Each is offered the deal that
if he confesses to the robbery, resulting in the
accomplice being found guilty, he will be freed
and the accomplice will get ten years. The four
options are set out in the following matrix:.
582
Suspect B
Suspect A
Not confess
Confess
Not confess
1,1
0,10
Confess
10,0
8,8
The first figure in each cell indicates Suspect
A’s punishment if that option is chosen by
them both, and the second indicates
Suspect’s B punishment. Thus if neither confesses to the robbery, each serves one year in
prison; if A confesses and B does not, however,
then A will be freed and B will serve ten years.
For each, the best option is to confess, because
if either remains silent and the other confesses,
he will get ten years’ imprisonment. Neither
dare stay silent for fear that the other will not.
If the two could collude, or could guarantee
that the accomplice would stay silent, then the
optimal solution is for both to remain silent – a
one-year sentence. But because neither can
guarantee the other’s choice, each selects a
sub-optimal outcome and gets an eight-year
sentence.
The dilemma has been used as a metaphor
not only to illustrate that selfish behaviour
may not be in an individual’s best interests,
but also that it is not in a person’s interests to
act unselfishly if everybody else takes the selfish option, particularly in issues regarding
resource use and resource management
(cf. tragedy of the commons). In most situations involving more than a small number of
actors, it is argued, unselfish behaviour can
only be guaranteed if enforced by an external
authority, such as the state, which exists to
promote both the collective and the individual
good – although there are many situations
(some illustrated by more complex versions
of the prisoner’s dilemma game – such as the
iterated prisoner’s dilemma, in which the
‘game’ is played many times: see Axelrod,
1984) in which co-operation is sensible and
can promote the collective good without state
involvement.
rj
Suggested reading
Barrett (2003); Laver (1997); Poundstone
(1992).
prisons Segregative institutions designed to
punish, typically for criminal offences. Prisons
are usually strictly regulated and tightly surveyed environments, to which offenders are
confined for varying lengths of time, and
sometimes for life. Often referred to as ‘penitentiaries’ or ‘correctional institutions’,
PRIVATE AND PUBLIC SPHERES
prisons may also seek to reform inmates to
reduce the possibility of re-offending.
Although confinement is central to all prisons,
incarcerative institutions vary in the types of
offenders they house and the degree of security
that they ensure.
The geographical literature on prisons is
scant, despite the manifold geographical conditions and consequences of practices of incarceration. Imprisonment is essentially a
territorialized form of punishment, a banishment from social life. In this way, it is an
extreme manifestation of the territorial power
of the state. Prisons can also be considered in
terms of their own internal geographies, the
ways in which they are constructed to maximize surveillance and control, a process colourfully and famously outlined by Foucault
(1995 [1975]). These geographies, in turn,
structure a particular social order, a ‘society
of captives’ (Sykes, 1958), who adapt to
prison life and its various dangers. Prisons
typically contain different levels of confinement, such that those who are viewed as especially problematic inmates can be isolated in
solitary conditions. Increasingly, whole institutions – so-called ‘super maximum security’
(or ‘supermax’) prisons – are dedicated to
housing those violent criminals presumed to
be habitual offenders in conditions of extreme
isolation (Rhodes, 2004).
More macro-oriented analyses see prisons as
reflective of wider social patterns, such as economic dynamics. Since 1980, the number of
people imprisoned in the USA has increased by
more than 450 per cent, and Gilmore (1998,
2007) attributes this extraordinary expansion
to the production of disposable or ‘surplus’
populations under the signs of an aggressive
militarism and neo-liberalism. She traces
the formation of an American prison–industrial
complex to state-sponsored prison construction in declining rural areas and the outsourcing and privatization of incarceration.
Prison populations can also be analysed in
terms of their demographic characteristics.
That prisons are commonly occupied by poor
people of colour is suggestive of wider patterns
of social differentiation and spatial exclusion:
incarceration can thus be understood as yet
another manifestation of racialized discrimination (see racism). The experience of incarceration works to increase these social
divisions further still, because those convicted
of crimes often face significant odds in returning to the economic mainstream. These negative consequences of incarceration can affect
entire neighbourhoods where ex-convicts
cluster, and further reinforce wider social and
economic divisions between different spaces
within a metropolitan area (Fagan, 2004).
Prisons are also a key component of wider
carceral geographies. These geographies
promise to enlarge as concerns about terrorism intensify. Sites such as Guantanamo Bay
are part of a carceral archipelago, a ‘global war
prison’, used to further the ‘war on terror’
(Gregory, 2007). Indeed, the logic of imprisonment is arguably extended to other terrains
– such as Gaza, often described as an extended
‘open-air prison’ – to monitor and control
those deemed hostile to the particular interests
of a state.
skh
Suggested reading
Gilmore (2007); Rhodes (2004).
private and public spheres Discursively
constructed, contested categories that define
boundaries between households, market economies, the state and political participation.
The concepts are central to two distinctive,
yet intertwined, discussions of: the public
sphere, and ideologies and practices of separate spheres.
Jürgen Habermas’ account of the bourgeois
public sphere has been particularly influential
(see capitalism; critical theory). He argued
that early capitalist societies were organized
into four institutional spheres: familyconsumer (private), market economy (private), the state (public) and citizen-political
participation (public) – the last he identifies
as the bourgeois public sphere. As both a historical phenomena and normative ideal, the
bourgeois public sphere functioned as a counterweight to the state; it was where ‘the public’
was organized and represented, and served to
mediate the relations between the state and
society. This liberal model of the public
sphere (see liberalism) was never fully
achieved, he argued, but became less attainable in welfare state capitalist societies, in
which the separation between the state and
economy, public and private, was dissolved,
and family-consumer and citizen roles were
transformed. The role of citizen assumed
new forms (see citizenship): of passive recipient of publicity and social welfare client.
Habermas’ account is suggestive to geographers: he analyses landscape changes that
concretize and reinforce both the rise and
decline in active public debate (e.g. coffee
houses and nineteenth-century urban culture,
and the suburb, respectively: Habermas, 1989
[1962]). His account of the ideal of the
583
PRIVATE INTEREST DEVELOPMENTS (PIDS)
bourgeois public sphere is nonetheless widely
criticized for universalizing a model that arose
within exclusionary (male, bourgeois, white)
spaces in historically specific European
societies (Howell, 1993; Mitchell, 2003a).
Feminists have argued that gender exclusions
are constitutive (and not simply incidental to)
Habermas’s idealization of the bourgeois public sphere (Fraser, 1997), and that he unwittingly reproduces a separate spheres ideology
that has been the focus of so much feminist
criticism and organizing (see feminism; feminist geographies). This is an ideology that
renders domestic space as the repository of the
emotions and private interest, and women ‘by
nature, guardians of the ‘‘household of emotions’’ . . . a kind of sphere within [the private]
sphere’ (Marston, 1990, p. 456).
A notion of public sphere is nonetheless
central to democratic theory and practice
(see radical democracy), and there have
been numerous, including important feminist,
attempts to rethink it in contemporary contexts. Fraser (1997) does this by questioning
four of Habermas’ assumptions, including the
liberal assumptions that private interests are
antagonistic to the public sphere, and that
one cohesive public sphere is the ideal. She
argues for a theory of multiple, contending,
sometimes mutually exclusive public spheres.
This questioning and retheorization reflects a
feminist understanding that what counts as
private and public is itself the result of political
struggle, and a scepticism about the ways in
which concepts of ‘privacy’ and ‘the private’
often protect dominant (male) interests by depoliticizing a range of issues (such as spousal
assault and child care) and legitimating the
oppression of women.
Feminist retheorizing of multiple public
spheres tends to emphasize the many ways in
which a separate-spheres ideology continues
to haunt dominant public spheres, and the
persistent traffic between constructions of
public and private. Fraser (1989) has
described how the US state has installed a
separate-spheres ideology within systems of
social welfare provision, so that women are
often positioned as dependents and men as
deserving bearers of rights. In her analysis
of a powerful coalition of women’s organizations advocating the rights of women to public
safety in northern Mexico, Wright (2005)
notes that activists in these organizations ‘face
the paradox that by exercising their democratic voices through public protest, they are
dismissed, by their detractors, as ‘‘unfit’’ citizens, based on their contamination as ‘‘public
584
women’’ ’ (p. 279). And though they can challenge this ‘twisted logic’, ‘they cannot fully
escape its implications’ (p. 279). Berlant
argues that in the USA over the past 25 years,
the public sphere has collapsed into the intimate, such that ‘the family sphere [is] considered the moral, ethical, and political horizon
of national and political interest’ (1997,
p. 262).
Geographers have sought to theorize the
relations between the public sphere(s) and
public space. There is a reticence simply to
layer the terms on to each other, in part
because much political organizing, especially
for non-dominant groups, takes place in socalled private spaces, and thus there is a need
to expand our thinking about the spaces of
politics (or the public sphere) (Staeheli,
1996). Nevertheless, public spheres and public spaces are linked. The regulation of public
space is instrumental in regulating public
debate and excluding some groups from
public life, and ‘public spaces are decisive,
for it is here that the desires and needs of
individuals and groups can be seen, and
therefore recognized, resisted, or . . . wiped
out’ (Mitchell, 2003, p. 33). The distinction
between spheres and spaces preserves the
understanding that the concept of public
sphere is in large part a democratic ideal that
we strive towards, in and through the construction and use of public space. It is an
ideal that can be redeployed by those who
are excluded from actual political spaces – to
demand inclusion within them. For this reason, some theorists have been drawn to the
metaphor of ‘empty space’ to articulate the
inevitably unfulfilled promise of a democratic
public sphere (Pratt, 2004).
gp
Suggested reading
Fraser (1997); Mitchell (2003).
private
interest
developments
(pids)
Communal housing projects in the USA (also
known as community interest developments and
common interest communities), in which the
property is held in common and its use governed by a homeowners’ association. Those
associations – many of which have considerable power over what can be done within the
development – operate as ‘private governments’ separate from the state apparatus,
although their decisions can be challenged
legally. Originally associated with condominiums, the pid form of governance has spread
to other housing types, covering more than
10 per cent of all US housing and a much
PROBABILISM
higher proportion of all new housing. Most pid
residents are relatively affluent, using a territoriality strategy to distance themselves from
perceived negative externalities.
rj
Suggested reading
Barton and Silverman (1994); McKenzie (1994).
privatization An increase in private ownership, control and action relative to public ownership, control and action. This may occur in
three main ways. Assets and activities can be
transferred from the public sector to the private sector (e.g. when a state-owned company
is sold to private shareholders or the cleaning
of a public building is contracted-out to a
private company); private interests can
increase their influence in the public sphere
(e.g. when private retailers are given greater
control over the uses of public space outside
their shops); or private provision may grow
faster than public provision (e.g. if more private than public housing is built in an area, the
local housing stock becomes relatively more
privatized). Privatization is often understood
as one element of the rise of neo-liberal political economy (see neo-liberalism).
Privatization has been prominent in many
countries since the 1980s. Three major drivers
of privatization can be identified. The rise of
New Right politics during the 1980s in several
Western countries (notably the USA under the
Reagan administration and the UK under the
government of Margaret Thatcher) was associated with economic policies that emphasized
market solutions and the rolling back of the
state. This led to major sales of public assets
(from utility companies to housing) and an
expansion of private provision of services
through contracting out and competitive tendering. A second phase of privatization was
associated with the structural adjustment
programmes require by the international
monetary fund as a condition of much of its
lending to low-income countries. The third
driver has been the collapse of state socialism
and the reintroduction of capitalist relations of
production in former state socialist countries
(cf. post-socialism).
Geographers’ interests in privatization focus
on the unevenness of the process and its outcomes within and between countries, on the
effect of privatization in generating wider processes of socio-spatial restructuring, on its
implications for understandings of state spatialities and on the privatization of space itself,
through the growth of such things as semiprivate shopping malls and urban gated
communities, and the sale of public land to
private developers.
A binary view of privatization as a straight
switch from public to private may be oversimplified. It risks neglecting the role of the
‘third sector’ of voluntary organizations, ngos,
civic associations and the social economy,
which are neither wholly public nor narrowly
private. In addition, marketization – the introduction of internal trading and quasi-markets
in the public sector, reductions in state subsidies to the private sector and the growth of user
charges for public services – blurs the boundary between the public and the private, as does
the widespread use of public–private partnerships in the governance of social and economic development.
Privatization has been an important source
of capital accumulation and corporate profitability since the 1980s, but it has also been
the target of major political protests. The privatization of water distribution in low-income
countries has been of particular concern to
protestors, because of the negative effect of
charges on poor households’ access to clean
water.
jpa
Suggested reading
Han and Pannell (1999); Mansfield (2004);
Painter (1991); Shiva (2002).
probabilism A thesis about the relationship
between culture and nature, which proposes
that while the physical environment does not
determine how human societies will react to its
influence, it renders some responses more
likely or probable than others. Probabilism
thus aims to occupy a philosophical position
somewhere between environmental determinism and possibilism. While debates over
this issue were most characteristic of latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century geography, recent reassertions about the power of
the environment to channel human history in
certain directions – such as those of Jared
Diamond (1987) – have reopened aspects of
the debate in some quarters (for a critique,
see Judkins, Smith and Keys, 2008: cf.
cultural ecology; political ecology).
Despite its abstract clarity, in historical terms
probabilism was perfectly compatible with the
possibilist geographies associated with the
French School of human geography led
by Paul Vidal de la Blache (see Lukermann,
1965).
dl
Suggested reading
Spate (1968).
585
PROBABILITY MAP
probability map A probability map displays
the estimated likelihood that a pre-defined
event will occur at a specific point or defined
area within a geographical space, during a particular period of time. For example, probability maps are used in meteorology to show the
likelihoods of above-normal rainfall occurring
around the globe (see, for example, the UK
Met Office’s seasonal forecasts at www.metoffice.com/research/). To interpret probability
maps, it is important to know how the probabilities were calculated and interpolated
across the map space, and the period for which
the event is predicted (a 33 per cent chance of
annual flooding being worse than a 33 per cent
chance of decennial flooding).
rh
process A flow of events or actions that produces, reproduces or transforms a system or
structure.
It was not until the 1960s that modern geography was alerted to the complexity of the
concept of a process. Blaut (1961) insisted
that the standard distinction between spatial
structure and temporal process derived from
a kantianism that had been discredited by
what he called ‘the relativistic revolution’. It
was now clear, so he claimed, that ‘nothing in
the physical world is purely spatial or temporal; everything is process’. In Blaut’s view,
therefore, ‘structures of the real world’ that
seemed to have a fixity and permanence were
simply ‘slow processes of long duration’. In
principle, most formalizations of spatial science appeared to accept this claim – Golledge
and Amedeo (1968) and Harvey (1969,
pp. 419–32) gave ‘process laws’ a central place
in their models of explanation in geography
(see positivism) – but in practice many studies
simply used distance as a surrogate for process
(hence ‘spatial processes’) and thus confirmed
the geometric cast of locational analysis
and spatial analysis as these were conceived
at the time (see distance decay).
Many of these locational–spatial models
depended on formal language systems; that is,
language systems whose elements have
unassigned meanings. The xs and ys in their
equations or the points and lines in their diagrams could refer to anything – they were
empty of concrete content – and so analysis
was governed by the relations between these
abstract elements in the language system itself:
by (say) the theorems of geometry, the calculus of probability theory or the mathematical
theory of stochastic processes, rather than
by what Olsson (1974) called ‘the things we
are talking about’. These locational–spatial
586
models of spatial process were reviewed in
Cliff and Ord (1981).
Subsequently, however, there was a turn
towards human geographies based on ordinary
language systems whose elements have assigned
meanings. This allowed more substantive conceptions of process to be utilized in human
geography: cultural processes, ecological processes, economic processes, political processes,
social processes and so on. Early examples
included a focus on cognitive and decisionmaking processes in behavioural geography,
on the dynamics of the labour process and
cycles of capital accumulation in economic
geography, and on practices of social and symbolic interaction in cultural geography and
social geography. This in turn, and of necessity, opened up a sustained dialogue with the
other humanities and social sciences. For, as
Harvey (1973) recognized, ‘an understanding
of space in all its complexity depends upon an
appreciation of social processes [and] an understanding of the social process in all its complexity depends upon an appreciation of spatial
form’. One of his most pressing concerns was
thus to ‘heal the breach’ between the sociological and geographical imagination.
The distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ definitions of process was cross-cut
by a second distinction drawn by Hay and
Johnston (1983), between ‘sequences’ and
‘mechanisms’:
(1) Process as sequence in time and/or
space. This view of process is characteristic of the vertical themes of traditional historical geography and of
mathematical–statistical
space–time
forecasting models. In both cases, the
account is morphological and descriptive: compare Darby’s (1951) identification of the processes that changed the
English landscape (‘clearing the wood’,
‘draining the marsh’ etc.) with Bennett’s
simple (1979) typology of barrier, hierarchy, network and contiguity processes.
(2) Process as mechanism. This view of process
is characteristic of both systems analysis
in geography and of geographies conducted under the sign of realism (which
require the identification of the relations
between the ‘causal powers’ of structures
and the conditions under which they are
realized). In both cases the account is
interactive and explanatory: it seeks to
show how – by what means, through
which networks – particular outcomes
materialize.
PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE
Hay and Johnston (1983) insisted that it was
possible (and necessary) to reconcile these two
approaches. Since their objective was also to
use quantitative methods to analyse spatiotemporal sequences and networks of connection and consequence, they were also seeking
to employ formal language systems to substantive effect.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, most human
geographers resisted such ecumenical attempts
to integrate these different conceptions of process, however, and the dominant approaches
focussed on describing processes through
ordinary language systems and conceptualizing
them as mechanisms. ‘Mechanism’ was soon
replaced by more fluid metaphors, a
sharper sense of agency, and a greater historical
sensibility (see, e.g., structuration theory).
The most common focus was on power and
practice and on the capacity of various forms of
socio-spatial theory to elucidate their operation
and outcome (see, e.g., Pred, 1984). More
recently still, there has been a return to the sort
of (non-Kantian) philosophical reflection
recommended by Blaut forty years earlier, as a
way of reworking these understandings of
place, power and, crucially, practice. Much of
this effort has been directed towards the elaboration of a relational philosophy in which ‘process’ takes centre stage, but in startlingly
different guises. Thus Harvey (1966) turned
to G.W. Leibniz (1646–1716) and A.N. Whitehead (1861–1947) to guide his theorizations of
a dialectical space–time (Sheppard, 2006) and
co-productions of space and nature (Braun,
2006). Thrift (1999) and his collaborators
turned to a dazzling array of European philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889–1951), Martin Heidegger (1889–
1976), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61),
and Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Félix Guattari (1930–92), to address similar themes, but
in ways that animate an altogether different
politics. Thrift’s non-representational theory involves an attempt to rethink our most
basic ontology as a means of coping with an
always becoming world of contingency, change
and emergence (through what Thrift (2006,
p. 140) calls a ‘processual sensualism’); to
invoke radically different conceptions of time
as well as space as a means of sensing the multiple elements that flicker into being in networks of places; and to incorporate
performance and performativity as a means
of grasping the precarious, conditional and
always consequential achievements of ‘worldmaking’ and ‘geo-graphing’ (Thrift, 1999).
There are substantial disagreements between
these materialisms, but they share a view of
human geography as incomplete project and
unmastered process.
dg
Suggested reading
Pred (1984); Harvey (1996); Thrift (1999a).
producer services Services provided as
inputs into the production process. This is in
contrast to those services – consumer services
– that are supplied to individuals or ‘end’ consumers, such as other firms or governments.
Producer services are often characterized as
intermediate inputs, before the product is
completed. They include a diverse set of economic activities, such as accountancy, advertising, finance, marketing and research and
development. It was in the late 1970s that
geographers first became aware of the growing
contribution that this type of economic activity was beginning to play towards economic
growth (Dicken, 2006). Work on producer
services became important in economic
geography in the 1980s and early 1990s in
its own right (Daniels, 1993), as well as being
the basis for research into the emergence and
classification of global cities.
The research in the geographically uneven
development of producer services has revealed
how and why they have important economic
consequences (Bryson, Daniels and Warf,
2004). First, the supply and the demand for
these services need not take place in the same
place. Adverts can be produced or supplied in
one place, and then e-mailed elsewhere, to the
end consumer, from where there is demand.
Second, and stemming from this spatial disjuncture between supply and demand, producer services are only partially dependent on the level of
economic activity in their cities and regions.
clusters of interconnected activity – around,
for example, advertising in London (Grabher,
2001) – raise the city’s profile but are not reliant
on selling the product, in this case the advert, in
London. Rather, the producer service is sold all
over the world. The economic development to
be wrung out of expanding producer services
has been noted by policy-makers and politicians, and the sectors have found themselves
important elements in the formation of urban
and regional policy.
kwa
Suggested reading
Bryson, Daniels and Warf (2004); Dicken
(2006).
product life cycle A concept used to connect
the evolution of a product to changes in the
587
PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE
location of its production (cf. profit cycle).
The idea is usually attributed to Vernon
(1966), although its antecedents are considerably older. Vernon intended his model as an
alternative to the Heckscher–Ohlin model of
international trade, and he insisted that international investment decisions taken by
manufacturers were driven by more complex
considerations than differences in factor and
transport costs. He proposed instead that
products evolve through three distinct stages,
and that manufacturers choose different locations in each of them:
(1) The new product tends to be unstable,
since its design and production are still
being modified and perfected. This usually involves considerable interaction
between producers and suppliers and
between producers and consumers as
modifications are introduced, testmarketed and appraised. Producers thus
require swift and effective access to a
deep and diverse pool of suppliers and
to consumers. These requirements are
most likely to be met in major metropolitan industrialized economies.
(2) The maturing product undergoes a process of increasing standardization and,
as market demand grows, the scale of
production increases. Uncertainties
about design and marketability diminish,
so the need for flexibility is reduced. The
major concern for most manufacturers
becomes minimizing production costs,
and they seek locations outside the most
heavily industrialized economies, where
labour costs are lower.
(3) The standardized product prompts manufacturers to turn still further afield, to less
developed countries, particularly where
their products are labour-intensive, have
a high price elasticity of demand, and are
only weakly dependent on external
economies for their production.
Although these ideas were directed at international trade, they enjoyed their most intensive application at the sub-national scale.
Thompson (1968) recast Vernon’s hypothesis
as a ‘filtering-down’ theory of urban economic
change. New products were supposed to originate at the top of the urban hierarchy
because of the concentration of highly educated scientific and technical workers, universities and other research institutions. The
earliest production of such innovations
would occur in the same regions for the
588
reasons outlined by Vernon. With increasing
standardization of the product and production
process, the tie to such highly skilled labour
would weaken, and cost considerations would
drive manufacturers to seek out locations in
intermediate urban centres where semi- and
unskilled workers would be available in large
numbers at lower wage rates. As products
reached advanced maturity, their production
would shift to the lowest tiers of the urban
hierarchy or out into rural locations.
Thompson’s assessment of the long-term prospects for such regions was unequivocal: ‘their
industrial catches come to them only to die’
(p. 56). When Vernon and Thompson began
to work on the product life cycle concept, the
long-term dominance of established industrial
regions such as the Manufacturing Belt of the
USA was unchallenged. For Thompson, the
decline of such regions was unthinkable,
because of their proven ability over the long
run to continue to generate new products. The
loss of manufacturing to more peripheral
regions through the filter-down process was
thus little cause for concern. A scant decade
later, however, these assumptions were called
into question by a major shift in economic
activity between the regions of the USA. For
Rees (1979) and Thomas (1980), the decline
of the Manufacturing Belt could be explained
by the accelerated rate of decentralization of
production activities, as intensified competition from newly industrializing countries
heightened the importance of cost-reduction
for US-based manufacturers. And in contrast
to Thompson’s views, Rees and Stafford
(1986) argued that previously peripheral areas
such as the US Southeast could eventually
achieve a critical mass once a sufficient volume
of capital had been invested in production
facilities in the region. At this point, they suggested, the ‘incubator’ functions generating
new products and firms traditionally associated
exclusively with the largest metropolitan regions
in the Northeast and Midwest could take root in
these new locations. This thesis found empirical
support in studies showing that many of the
largest manufacturing firms had already shifted
some of their highest-order (especially research
and development) functions away from their
original headquarters locations to places further
down the urban hierarchy (Pred, 1977: see also
sunbelt/snowbelt).
More recently, the product life cycle concept has been criticized for its excessive determinism and essentialism, especially its
implicit claim that all products follow a similar
trajectory over time (Storper, 1985; Taylor,
PRODUCTION OF NATURE
1986). Critics have pointed out that even
standardized and mature products can be rejuvenated through innovation in the later stages
of a product’s life cycle. A case in point is the
automobile which, while hardly a new product,
has been continuously modified and improved
over time. It has also been argued that many
commodities never achieve the status of cheap,
standardized, mass-produced goods – especially
those that, under a regime of post-fordism,
exhibit a high degree of variability, customization and qualitative differentiation.
msg
Suggested reading
Malecki (1991).
production complex A spatial cluster of specialized, interrelated economic activities bound
together by the creation and exploitation of
external economies (Scott, 1988b). Such
clusters offer producers the ability to establish, and easily realign, transactional linkages
with other local buyers and suppliers, thereby
encouraging the development and maintenance of a social division of labour (see just-intime production; transaction costs; transactional analysis). They also provide a local
labour market specialized to match the needs
of local producers. They are further sustained
by the existence of public and quasi-public
institutions developed to support specialized
local economic activity and to foster non-market forms of interaction and interdependencies
between local economic actors. (See agglomeration; commodity chain/filiÈre; industrial district.)
msg
production of nature This rather strikingly
counter-intuitive phrase comes from Neil
Smith, originally in his book Uneven development (1984). Despite its critics, perhaps nothing attests to the power of the idea more than
the fact that the phrase becomes less counterintuitive with time.
At the simplest level, and clearly influenced
by Lefebvre’s understanding of the production of space, Smith conveys by this phrase
that nature is socially produced and, more
specifically, that nature is increasingly an artefact of capitalism in the contemporary world.
At one level, this is not so counter-intuitive at
all. Increasingly, at scales from the atmospheric to the genetic, the material natures of
everyday life are increasingly transformed
either by intentional manipulation for the purposes of commodity production (e.g. genetically modified crops), or by the myriad
ecological impacts of industrial, capitalist
activities and related processes (e.g. the deposition of persistent organic pollutants in Arctic
and Antarctic ecosystems). Since Smith’s
book, empirical processes that confirm the
material production of nature to suit economic
purposes have proliferated, including the
onset of commercial aquaculture and the continued globalization of plantation forestry.
Moreover, empirical research has elaborated
Smith’s thesis, indicating that the capitalist
production of nature, often in shifting and
complex institutional configurations, has been
ongoing for some time (Prudham, 2003).
While agriculture would be the most obvious
example to draw on here, under which the
intentional transformation of crops and animals is probably in excess of 10,000 years
old, Smith is at pains to differentiate the capitalist production of nature from all that has
come before it. This is not, as he argues,
because widespread anthropogenic change is
unique to capitalism (quite the opposite).
Rather, it is because the particular ways that
nature is transformed under capitalism are
unique. This includes, for instance, the appropriation and transformation of biophysical
processes as a constitutive facet of uneven
development under capitalism. An elaboration of this, with some qualification, can be
found in Robbins and Fraser (2003), who note
‘ . . . if the state can put non-commercial Scots
pine woodland in the place of industrial forests, it is only, after all, because increased
extraction is occurring in the Baltic states,
Indonesia, and Ghana . . . ’ (p. 113). Here,
produced nature is worked through as a complex set of spatial and scalar logics that link
far-flung places, not least through market
relations and exchange, as well as in the realm
of production per se.
However, Smith’s thesis is not only about
the material transformation of nature under
capitalism. Rather, he also posits that a unique
feature of what might be called ‘capitalist
nature’ is the ways in which ideas about nature
are also produced in and through capitalist
production, commodity circulation, and capitalist social relations and institutions. This is a
complex and controversial thesis. Yet, at one
level, Smith’s observation is no different than
those who have long recognized the rise of
instrumental, utilitarian thinking alongside
industrial capitalism. Smith’s argument is that
such an instrumentalist disposition specifically
towards nature is reinforced by capitalist social
relations and processes of valuation, and that
these ideas become increasingly influential in
the construction of meaning around nature in
589
PRODUCTION OF SPACE
a capitalist society. Examples would include
instrumental, utilitarian arguments for biodiversity conservation, which tend to both
render species in terms of net present value of
future benefits, while also individuating such
species in relation to their ecological (and social!)
context. A key facet of Smith’s thesis in this
respect is his anticipation of social construction debates within critical environmental
geography, but his mobilization of specifically
capitalist ideologies as decisive influences on
how nature comes to be known (constructed).
The production of nature thesis, despite
being influential and widely cited in critical
environmental geography, has arguably not
been sufficiently developed or elaborated since
its first publication. An exception is Castree
(1995), who argues (sympathetically) that the
thesis may reinforce Promethean discourses
by downplaying the productive capacity of
biophysical processes. Here, there is room for
some sort of rapprochement with the hybridity
literature (e.g. Whatmore, 2002a), which
emphasizes the epistemological and ontological co-production of nature by human
and non-human alike. Another avenue not well
travelled would explore the links between
Smith’s thesis and James O’Connor’s second
contradiction of capitalism (O’Connor, 1998).
While O’Connor would quibble little with the
notion of capitalism producing nature in this
respect (it also comprises part of his theory),
he places greater emphasis on this as a source
of contradiction and crisis inherent to capitalism because of the under-production of nature
as a condition of social reproduction.
sp
production of space A term made famous
by French Marxist Henri Lefebvre (1901–91)
in his 1974 book The production of space
(trans. 1991). Lefebvre seeks to bring a
Marxist analysis of production to bear on
the way space is created, coded and used
through social, political and everyday processes (cf. production of nature). Social space
is, for Lefebvre, a social product. Lefebvre
came to the analysis of space through three
main routes: his reworking of the philosophy
of marxism and in particular the notion of
the dialectic; work supplementing Marxist
political economy, with an experiential
emphasis on everyday life; and work on
rural and urban sociology. Lefebvre was in
his early seventies when The production of
space was published, and had been publishing
for almost 50 years: this mature work is one
of the culminations of these varied interests
and concerns (for overviews, see Kofman and
590
Lebas, 1996; Shields, 1999; Elden, 2004;
Merrifield, 2006).
In the opening chapter of The production of
space, Lefebvre suggests that we should understand space in three ways – as perceived, conceived and lived. The first of these, what he
calls spatial practices, are spaces that are concrete, material, physical. The second is what
he calls representations of space, the space of
abstract plans and mental processes. Both of
these ways of thinking about space are relatively common within human geography, but
it is with the third that Lefebvre makes his key
contribution. Lefebvre claims that both these
spaces need to be thought together, in dialectical relation. But this is not a linear sense of the
dialectic, in which the two terms react and
form a new term that then itself comes into
relation with its opposite. Rather, this is a
dialectic where the third term continues to
exist in relation with the other two (cf. trialectics). Lefebvre’s third term here is what he
calls spaces of representation – confusingly rendered as ‘representational spaces’ in the
English translation – spaces that are lived,
experienced and recoded through the actions
of those that occupy and use them. Lefebvre
therefore challenges both a crudely materialist
analysis and a politically detached idealist one.
For Edward Soja, whose reading of Lefebvre
has been influential in Anglophone human
geography, in contrast to the ‘real’ or
‘imagined’ spaces of the other two models,
these are ‘real-and-imagined’ spaces, which
he has deployed himself in readings of Los
Angeles and in his construction of third space
(Soja, 1989, 1996).
In the remainder of The production of space,
which is a complex work that defies straightforward summary, Lefebvre returns to this
three-part model and illustrates, complicates
and historicizes it. His is an analysis in the
tradition of historical materialism, and the
spaces of a particular epoch are related,
though not slavishly dependent on, the mode
of production (see figure 1) (for a summary,
see Gregory, 1994, who also emphasizes
Lefebvre’s suggestive reading of the changing
historical modalities of the body, visuality
and space). Thus capitalism produces a particular political economy of space, centrally
defined through the ‘colonization of everyday
life’ through the production of abstract space
(see figure 2), which Lefebvre sought to
develop into a politics of space. As he declared
in a 1970 essay, ‘there is a politics of space
because space is political’. Lefebvre was
indebted to a range of thinkers who he used
591
production of space 1: The production of space (Gregory, 1993; after Lefebvre)
PRODUCTIVITY
production of space 2: The colonization of concrete space (Gregory, 1993)
to supplement Marx – notably G.W.F. Hegel,
Friedrich Nietzsche and, more critically,
Martin Heidegger. Each of these thinkers was
useful, Lefebvre contended, in adding things
that Marx’s analyses alone could not provide.
Marx was the indispensable starting point for
Lefebvre at each stage of his career, but
Heidegger was particularly useful in thinking
about the question of space. Heidegger’s
analysis of how modern thought’s mathematical, geometrical sense of space is reductive
and we need to recall how to dwell or live is
crucial to Lefebvre’s thinking through of the
alienating properties of capitalist space, particularly in the city (cf. alienation).
Lefebvre’s work has come under sustained
criticism from more orthodox Marxists, for
whom his emphasis on space trembles on the
edges of or, more directly, simply is a form of
spatial fetishism. In fact, these criticisms,
and other engagements with his writings, by
scholars such as Manuel Castells, David
Harvey and Neil Smith, were available in
English before Lefebvre’s work was translated,
and it was left to later commentators to explore
quite other dimensions of his work. The utilization of thinkers such as Heidegger and
Nietzsche brought Lefebvre into a tense proximity with the post-structuralism of thinkers
such as Michel Foucault, but Lefebvre was
strongly critical of their anti-humanism and
their use of spatial metaphors in the absence
592
of more concrete analyses (cf. Gregory, 1997b).
It has largely been left to Anglophone geographers such as Soja (1989, 1996), Gregory
(1994) and Dear (1997) to develop the commonalities and complementarities of their
approaches (see also Gunewardena, Kipfer,
Milgrom and Schmid, 2008).
Although The production of space remains his
most influential work in human geography,
Lefebvre’s writings on cities (e.g. 1996),
everyday life and Marxist theory are also available in English translation and provide much
useful material. Lefebvre is commonly looked
at as a theorist of space, yet he would have
equally stressed his work on time and temporality (Lefebvre, 2004 [1992]: see rhythmanalysis), suggesting that space and time need to
be rethought, and thought together, in any
genuinely radical political action.
se
Suggested reading
Elden (2004, ch. 5); Gregory (1994, ch. 6);
Lefebvre (1991a [1974]); Merrifield (2006);
Soja (1996b, ch. 1).
productivity A measure of output relative to
input, usually expressed as the ratio of the
returns from sales to the costs of production.
The term was developed in analyses of the
efficiency of manufacturing industry, where
it is equivalent to the rate of surplus value or
rate of exploitation in marxist economics.
PROPERTY
The higher the amount of value-added in the
production process relative to the costs
incurred (of labour, materials and fixed capital), the greater is the productivity. In primary
industries, however, productivity usually
implies the ratio of production per unit area
of land rather than to its (imputed) cost.
With the growth of service industries in
advanced capitalist societies, attempts have
been made to measure productivity in sectors
other than manufacturing – not least in higher
education! – though the concept of value
added is not readily applied in many such
situations.
rj
profit cycle A sectoral approach to understanding changes experienced by regional
economies, developed by economist Ann
Markusen as an alternative to the product
life cycle model. Instead of focusing on
regularities in the changing scale of output or
changes in the qualitative characteristics of a
product and its production process over time,
Markusen (1985) argued that the economic
variable most crucial to determining industrial
change is the rate of profit. Drawing her inspiration from both Marx and Schumpeter, she
argued that change within an industry should
be understood in terms of two central processes, each of which is pursued by firms to
increase market power and hence profit rates:
(i) innovation and (ii) imperfect competition.
She proposed a five-stage model through
which industries move:
. New industries are born and core products
are being designed: a regime of zero profits.
. Once an innovation is commercially successful, and so long as its production is
concentrated in the hands of a single
(monopoly) firm, super profits are likely.
. As patents expire and/or imitation and innovation diffusion facilitates entry by new
firms, the market power once held by the
monopoly firm dissipates. Profits decline
to normal profit levels as the industry
moves towards market saturation. It is
only at this stage that conditions resemble
perfect competition.
. If some firms increase their market shares
through mergers and acquisitions, this
move towards oligopoly will raise profit
rates to normal-plus levels. But if the industry evolves along a path of predatory pricing and excessive competition, profit rates
will be squeezed to normal-minus levels.
. Once the sector matures to obsolescence,
negative profits will ensue.
Markusen argues that ‘distinct spatial tendencies’ accompany each stage of a sector’s passage through the profit cycle (1985, p. 24) (see
table).
Stage
Profit rate regime
Spatial tendency
1
2
3
4
5
Zero profits
Super profits
Normal profits
Normal-plus or -minus profits
Negative
Concentration
Agglomeration
Dispersion
Relocation
Abandonment
The approach is a suggestive one, but it was
roundly criticized by Storper (1985) for its
essentialism. While he accepted that the
model was one of the most effective ways to
comprehend ‘multilocational, large-scale production systems and sectoral location patterns
over time’, he saw it as a premature formalization and argued for a much more historically
informed analysis of the dynamics of geographical industrialization.
msg
property Relationships
between persons
with respect to the use or benefit of valued
things. Legal scholars tend to see property
rights as residing in the ‘jural relations’
between individuals, rather than in the thing
itself. If I claim a property right in a thing
(such as land), what is really being asserted is
that I can exclude you from access to it
(Macpherson, 1978a). The law of property
concerns itself with the legally recognized distribution of rights, benefits and responsibilities
associated with the objects of property.
Variations can occur in terms of the range
of objects over which property rights are recognized, the extent of rights that are recognized and the entities that can bear such
rights. These can all be construed very
broadly: for example, the objects of property
can include not only land (land tenure) and
money, but intangibles such as names, knowledge and shares in joint-stock companies.
Despite this diversity, Western liberal societies
(see liberalism) tend towards a strikingly
narrow view of property, summarized by
Singer (2000) as the ‘ownership model’.
Private property, the default category here, is
viewed in largely asocial terms: The owner is
assumed to hold a full bundle of property
rights (alienation, use, exclusion etc.), and is
expected to be motivated by self-regarding
behaviour. state intervention is presumptively suspect, and must be justified in relation to the prior and superior rights of the
593
PROPINQUITY
owner. A rich corpus of writing explores and
critiques various justifications for private
property (Macpherson, 1978b).
This model, it has been noted, exerts a
powerful imaginative hold, shaping collective
understandings of the possibilities of social
life, the ethics of human relations and the
ordering of economic life (Blomley, 2005). In
response, scholars have criticized prevailing
views of property: Singer (2000), for example,
characterizes the ownership model as both
descriptively and normatively flawed. One
central argument, variously phrased, is that
property is irreclaimably social and political
in its constitution and effects (Alexander,
1998). Property rights, insists Underkuffler
(2003), ‘are not simply private interests with
which the state neutrally coexists. Property
rights . . . are collective, enforced, even violent
decisions about who shall enjoy the privileges
and resources which this society allocates
among its citizens’ (p. 146).
Given its historical development under a
liberal capitalist society (see capitalism),
many critics have cast property rights in a
negative light, pointing to the manner in which
privatized property rights instrumentally and
ideologically underpin class rule, patriarchy
and colonialism. However, recent years have
seen an attempt to uncover the progressive
potential of property – both private and collective (Blomley, 2002).
Property is a political instrument, an element
in social struggle, an object of consumption
and a site for identity formation. Given its
importance, it is heartening to note some interest
in geography in property. Blomley has sought to
uncover the ways in which conflicts over innercity gentrification frequently invoke property
claims, refracted through representations of
local landscapes (Blomley, 2004b; Mitchell
and Staeheli, 2005). Everyday understandings
of domestic and public space are also seen to
entail surprisingly complex and overlapping renderings of public and private property (Blomley,
2004a). The dynamics of colonialism are also
shown to entail the simultaneous reworking of
space and property (Forman and Kedar, 2004).
Property, of course, extends beyond claims to
land: Sarah Whatmore (2002a), for example,
traces the intersecting geographies of landed
and
intellectual
property
rights.
Geographers have also expressed interest in
common property: David Harvey (2003b), for
example, has argued that the enclosure of the
commons, rather than an episode of early capitalism, continues across the globe (see primitive
accumulation), as does political organizing in
594
defence of common rights (global commons;
primitive accumulation).
nkb
Suggested reading
Corr (1999); Geisler and Daneker (2000);
Nedelsky (1990); Rose (1994); Verdery and
Humphrey (2004).
propinquity A measure of nearness or proximity, usually with reference to distance, but
also to time.
rj
prostitution Broadly defined, prostitution
refers to the exchange of sexual services for
money or payment in kind. Though often
socially marginalized, the prostitute has
remained a central figure in geographical
debates concerning both the gendering of
space and the spatial regulation of conduct.
Notably, it is the place of women sex workers
that has attracted most attention. While some
accounts have been excessively voyeuristic and
uncritical, work informed by feminist theory
has generated some insightful geographical
commentaries on the regulation of female
sexuality and the role of space in the maintenance of heteronormativity. Broadly
speaking, these document the spatiality of
prostitution on at least three related scales.
First, attention has been focused on the moreor-less enforced movement of women sex
workers across international boundaries, a
phenomena that appears to be growing as
criminalized global networks extend their
range and influence (Samarasinge, 2005).
Reading these movements as indicative of gendered global inequalities, increasing stress is
also being placed on the formation of a diasporic sex workers’ movement opposed to
enforced
prostitution
(Doezema
and
Kempadoo, 1998: see slavery). Second, on a
national scale there has been a strong
emphasis on the connections between prostitution laws and the particular concerns and
anxieties projected on to the bodies of prostitute women. This literature often has a strong
historical dimension, tracking the moral and
political debates encouraging the use of particular forms of surveillance and biopower
to categorize and control sex work (Howell,
2000). Finally, there is an established tradition
of urban research that documents the microgeographies of sex work in red-light districts. One important strand of this explores
the relationship between sex workers and local
residents, with a particular focus on the nimby
campaigns of displacement that are often
associated with incipient gentrification
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY
(Hubbard, 2004). In all cases, research suggests the gendered inequalities of sexual
commerce produces a series of spaces where
women’s sexuality can be bought and sold by
men with relative impunity, albeit that these
spaces may be important in the forging of new
gender identities and formations (Law,
1997). In this sense, the relative silence on
forms of male sex work poses some interesting
questions about gender inequalities within and
without the discipline.
ph
Suggested reading
Hubbard (1999).
proto-industrialization A term proposed by
economic historian Franklin Mendels (1972)
to denote ‘the rapid growth of traditionally
organised but market-oriented, principally
rural industry’. Whilst the presence of such
industries had long been recognized,
Mendels presented proto-industrialization
not merely as a description of (pre-)industrial
organization, but also as an explanation of
industrial change, arguing that it ‘preceded
and prepared for’ industrialization. In
emphasizing the continuities between traditional systems of domestic production and
the centralized and mechanized factory system, Mendels’ thesis is central to the broader
reconceptualization of industrial revolution
as an evolutionary and gradual process. Two
different models have been proposed, each
with its own empirical and conceptual
emphasis. Ecological models focus on the
pre-conditions for proto-industrialization, particularly the ways in which under-employed
peasant labour was drawn into industrial production. There is little consensus on the type of
agrarian economy that would favour such
development, with rural industries emerging
in both arable areas (with seasonal unemployment) and pastoral regions (with diurnal timebudgets). In reality, much depended upon the
social and institutional environment of the
area, especially land holding and the type and
flexibility of labour skills. Once established, it
is argued that comparative advantage led to a
growing division of labour between specialist
industrial and agricultural regions. However,
this not only makes unwarranted assumptions
about individual and collective rationality, but
also fails to acknowledge the importance of
other variables, such as the presence of commercialized mercantile and urban networks
(Stobart, 2004).
Economic models focus on the structural relationship between the peasant/artisan and the
merchant/capitalist. The artisan household
sought to balance production and consumption by adjusting the level of engagement in
manufacture for the market, whilst the merchant collected together the products of
domestic labour and consigned them to distant markets. Although mutually dependent,
the interests of these two parties were inherently contradictory. When prices fell, artisans
increased production to maintain household
income, thus saturating the market and worsening the recession. When prices rose, artisan
households could more easily satisfy their
needs and production slowed, just when merchants would seek to take advantage of
increased profits. This conflict is seen as being
resolved through the increasing control exercised by merchants over the production process. Initially, this involved a shift from the
Kaufsystem of independent artisan production
to the Verlagssytem of putting out, wherein the
means of production remained in the hands of
the merchant, who effectively employed
dependent outworkers. This was subsequently
superseded by a merchant-led centralization
of production into proto-factories (Kriedte,
Medick and Schlumbohm, 1981).
This version of proto-industrialization as a
theory of industrial change has been challenged from three very different directions.
At the level of the peasant household, de
Vries (1994) has argued that consumption as
well as production became ever-more market
oriented, increasing household specialization
and growing consumption inspiring an
artisan-centred ‘industrious revolution’. At a
broader scale, studies of regional industrialization have emphasized that the logic of capitalism was played out differently in different
places: factory production was one of a range
of possibilities, which included workshopbased flexible specialization as well as hybrid
factory–workshop systems (Berg, 1994). More
fundamentally, others have questioned
whether proto-industrialization was, indeed,
a necessary stage in industrial development,
arguing that the switch from organic to
mineral resources was the real key to industrialization.
jst
Suggested reading
Berg, Hudson and Sonenscher (1983); Houston
and Snell (1984).
psychoanalytic theory Originating in the
late nineteenth century in the work of
Sigmund Freud (1986–1939), psychoanalytic
theory and practice offers a distinctive way of
595
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY
thinking about the human mind and of
responding
to
psychological
distress.
Psychoanalysis has travelled widely from its
central European origins, and has evolved into
a complex, multifaceted and internally fractured body of knowledge, situated at the interface between the human and natural sciences,
and between clinical practice and academic
theory.
Notwithstanding critiques of its eurocentric
origins, psychoanalysis has been taken up in
many different cultural contexts, perhaps most
notably in latin america, but also in India,
Japan and elsewhere. Its geography and
spatiality have become topics for geographical
study, albeit primarily within the Anglophone
literature (Kingsbury, 2003; Cameron, 2006).
Along with the more general rise of psychological thinking, psychoanalytic ideas have had
a pervasive influence on such arenas of life as
child-rearing, education and popular culture.
Within the academy, psychoanalytic theory
has been taken up most extensively in the
humanities and more sporadically in the
social sciences, including human geography,
where a distinct sub-discipline of psychoanalytic geography has shown tentative signs of
formation since around the turn of the
twenty-first century.
The unconscious is perhaps the most fundamental and defining idea of psychoanalysis,
albeit one that has a much longer history. For
Freud, only a small proportion of the human
mind is knowable through rational thought.
The greater part is outside conscious awareness and full of hidden dangers. It makes its
presence felt in a variety of ways, including
dreams, slips of the tongue, the clinical
method of ‘free association’ and other actions –
the motivations for which are not discernible
by, and are often contrary to, conscious intent.
The psychoanalytic unconscious acts as the
repository for experiences, thoughts and feelings that are unacceptable to, and are
repressed by, the conscious mind. The unconscious therefore exemplifies a means by which
rational human agency is ‘de-centred’ in the
sense of not being the driving force of human
action, an idea that has been highly influential
in human geography. The radical otherness,
profound strangeness and disruptiveness of
Freud’s concept of the unconscious is emphasized by Felicity Callard (2003) in her review
of geographers’ engagements with psychoanalytic theory.
Freud developed his ideas over a period of
nearly 50 years. Not surprisingly, there are
shifts, tensions and ambiguities within his
596
work. Moreover, he founded an approach
taken up by many others, who have variously
extended, challenged, supplemented and
reworked his ideas. One of the most influential
lines of differentiation within the psychoanalytic tradition lies between those theorists who
attach primary importance to the psychic life
generated by the instinctual drives of the
human organism, including especially drives
towards pleasure and towards death or annihilation, and those theorists who attach primary importance to the psychic life generated
by a different kind of drive or condition of
existence, namely the drive to relate to others.
Among the former, the French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan (1901–81) has been especially
influential, while the latter has given rise of
object relations theory and other relational
approaches to psychoanalysis, developed
through such theorists as Melanie Klein
(1882–1960) and Donald Winnicott (1896–
1971).
Human geographers have engaged with different strands of psychoanalysis for a variety of
purposes. One of the earliest examples in the
Anglophone literature was methodological in
focus and drew as much on psychoanalytic
practice as theory: Jacquelin Burgess and colleagues (Burgess, Limb and Harrison, 1988)
applied ideas from group analysis (a form of
psychoanalysis that focuses on the relationship
between individuals and their social context)
to facilitate the exploration of environmental
values in focus groups. Continuing this
methodological theme, others have appealed
to key ideas informing psychoanalytic practices to deepen and enrich understandings of
the dynamics in play within research encounters (Bondi, 2005). Yet others have drawn on
approaches derived from Carl Jung’s analytic
psychology to facilitate research participants
to connect with unconscious childhood
experience (Bingley, 2003).
Several human geographers have deployed
psychoanalytic theories to develop accounts of
human subjectivity and its spatial forms. In a
highly influential contribution, David Sibley
(1995) examines geographies of exclusion
combining Melanie Klein’s object relations
account of the unconscious expulsion of
feared and dreaded aspects of our selves with
the post-Lacanian psychoanalyst Julia
Kristeva’s discussion of the fascination and
horror, preoccupation and repulsion, associated with that which is expelled. Using these
ideas, Sibley (1995) illuminates the profound
emotional power of exclusionary processes for
the different groups whose members identify
PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY
with each other and against others in ways that
generate highly potent lines of demarcation.
While Sibley’s (1995) account draws primarily
on object relations psychoanalysis, Robert
Wilton (2003) draws on Freud’s concept of
castration together with Lacan’s reworking to
explore how the geographical exclusion of disabled people may serve to shore up illusions of
‘ableism’ (cf. disability). Lacanian readings of
Freud are also evident in geographical accounts
of topics such as racism (Nast, 2000) and
embodied experiences of cities (Pile, 1996).
A product of nineteenth-century European
culture, Freud hypothesized that the repressed
unconscious contains much material of a sexual nature, which would be highly disruptive if
allowed to break through into consciousness.
He argued that in order to grow up in socially
acceptable ways, boys and girls were called
upon to repress their ‘natural’, sexual (or libidinal) desires. Normative heterosexual masculinity and femininity were theorized by Freud
as demanding psychical achievements.
Although aspects of his theories of gender
and sexual identity have been highly controversial, his approach has also been welcomed
as a resource for challenging assumptions
about what is ‘natural’, and for elaborating a
theory of subjectivity as situated in a zone of
creative interplay between the ‘personal’ and
the ‘cultural’. For this reason, some feminist
geographers have turned to psychoanalysis in
their theorizations of the interplay between
gender, sexuality, subjectivity and space,
and to contribute to critiques of the ‘masculinism’ of dominant forms of knowledge
(Rose, 1996; Nast, 2000: see feminist geographies). Against critics who consider psychoanalysis to be an intrinsically individualistic
theory and practice, these applications find
that it offers a powerful way of understanding
how social and cultural milieux are embodied
and personalized by human individuals, as
well as how unconscious aspects of human life
are manifest in the social world.
lb
Suggested reading
Bondi (2005); Callard (2003); Craib (1990);
Sibley (2003).
psychogeography The ‘study of the precise
laws and specific effects of the geographic
environment, consciously organized or not,
on the emotions and behavior of individuals’,
according to Guy Debord (1981 [1955], p. 5).
Psychogeography is typically traced back to
this definition, and to the activities of Debord
and members of the Letterist International in
1950s Paris, for whom it was a means of
exploring urban spaces and everyday life,
and who established it as a key concern of
the early situationists. Yet the definition’s
academic tone belies its politicized and playful
engagement with cities, as a way of challenging
dominant representations and practices, and
seeking to change urban spaces and life as part
of a revolutionary project. Psychogeography
combined a conscious and political analysis
of urban ambiences with experiments in ludic
behaviour, principally through dérives or drifts
on foot, and included the construction of
‘psychogeographic maps’ that challenged the
values of dominant cartographies.
The term was independently employed by
geographers engaged in politically motivated
versions of environmental psychology in the
late 1960s, especially at Clark University in
Massachusetts, including David Stea and
Denis Wood (Wood, 1987). While influential
on subsequent work in environmental psychology (see also mental maps), that usage has
been relatively sidelined in the recent resurgence of interest in psychogeography since
the 1990s that has taken more inspiration
from the terminology, if not always the politics, of the situationists. Much interest has been
literary, involving the tracing of a longer tradition of imaginative and wayward urban
exploration, especially in London and Paris,
though writers such as William Blake, Thomas
de Quincey and Charles Baudelaire, and the
surrealists around André Breton (see also
fla^neur /fla^ nerie). Contemporary heirs of
this visionary tradition include Iain Sinclair,
whose peripatetic investigations of London,
especially its East End, have done much to
popularize the term ‘psychogeography’
(Coverley, 2006).
Contemporary artists and urban explorers
have also embraced the term in their engagements with emotional and psychic spaces,
through urban interventions as well as new
media (Pinder, 2005a). Recent years have further seen a proliferation of psychogeographical
associations or organizations in Europe and
North America, whose investigations of places
have typically been drawn by the marginal,
hidden and forgotten, and whose networking
has been facilitated by the internet (and documented in journals such as Transgressions, 1995–
2001). As psychogeography has moved increasingly into the mainstream, much of its early
radical political edge has been lost. Yet its
political ambitions as well as humour and idiosyncracies are also finding new and at times
challenging modes of expression.
dp
597
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Suggested reading
Debord (1981 [1955]).
public administration Studies of the spatial
organization and management of the state
apparatus (Bennett, 1990). The public
administration sector comprises the different
government agencies that administer, oversee
and manage public programmes and that have
executive, legislative or judicial authority over
other institutions – such as quangos – within a
given spatial unit, such as a nation-state or a
region. Studies of the spatiality of public
administration have explored the relationships
between, on the one hand, the types of services being delivered, and, on the other, the
scale of their delivery (Barlow, 1991). kwa
Suggested reading
Bennett (1990).
public choice theory Using the techniques
of neo-classical economics, public choice
theory examines issues of political decisionmaking and of the behaviour of government.
It derives from the pioneering work of Duncan
Black (1958) and James Buchanan and
Gordon Tullock (1962), and was conceived
to study politics on the basis of economic
principles. Its original proponents argue that
it should be understood as a research programme rather than as a discipline, or even a
sub-discipline, of economics. It contends that
elected politicians and government bureaucrats make decisions on the basis of selfinterest. So, the behaviour and decisions of
all individuals within the political sphere is
purely instrumental. Politicians enact policies
in terms of ensuring re-election, the voters
remain deliberately ignorant because individually they do not understand it to be in their
interest to learn more, and bureaucrats – those
who put decisions into practice – do whatever
is necessary to keep their jobs and get promoted. All involved strive to maximize their
own welfare. At each decision, politicians,
voters and bureaucrats make a rational
choice. Public choice theory covers a series
of issues; namely, government constitutions,
state bureaucracies and voting behaviour.
While the staple diet of political scientists,
these concerns, and in particular their spatial
patterns and trends, have been analysed in
electoral and political geography.
Within public choice theory, there are five
core theoretical tensions. First, there are difficulties in aggregating individual choices and
decisions to produce a collective outcome.
598
How is it possible to produce policies on the
basis of the preferences of individuals?
Second, there is the range of issues that stem
from the introduction of public goods and
market failure. There is a tendency, stemming
from their monopoly power, for governments
to extend public ownership beyond that
deemed efficient by the market. Third, there
is the issue of political party competition.
According to public choice theory, the outcome of two vote-maximizing parties is almost
identical parties. Only with three political parties vying for the votes of the electorate is
policy variability introduced (cf. hotelling
model). Fourth, there is the difficulty of forming and organizing interest groups due to the
free-rider problem (see game theory). Fifth,
there are a number of conceptual difficulties in
assuming and treating public finance as a
rational exchange amongst citizens. These
issues have been the subjects of much empirical
and theoretical work over the past four and a
half decades. As a branch of neo-classical
economics, public choice theory is subject to
all the standard critiques of that school and, in
particular, the supposition of rational choice.
Within geography, a small number of key texts
have explored the issues of public goods and
market failure (Cox and Johnston, 1982) and
public finance and government decentralization (Bennett, 1990).
kwa
Suggested reading
Bennett (1990); Cox and Johnston (1982).
public finance Human geographers have
studied the spatial distribution of publicsector income and expenditure. In addition
to producing and analysing spatial patterns,
work has examined the mismatch between
the geographies of public-sector revenue generation and expenditure (Bennett, 1990) – put
another way (Bennett, 1980, p. ix): who gets
what, where, and at what cost? The twin focus
on spatial patterns and their consequences
allows the exploration of differences between
individuals and between the local governments that collect and spend the revenues
(cf. collective consumption). As the needs,
costs and preferences for public goods vary
geographically, so a failure to attend to the
spatial consequences of public finance matters
to issues of social justice. Once the ‘who’ and
the ‘where’ are known, it is then possible to
attend to the third element to the question, ‘At
what cost?’ So, for example, how might the
state-led geographical redistribution of
resources alleviate spatial inequality? While
PUBLIC GOODS
concern with how the state apparatus produces and can then address spatial inequality
through its finance functions remains an area
of interest of geographers, Bennett (1985) has
argued that equity in the distribution of public
goods is a utopia. As such, the state should
reduce its provision of public goods and services – and the role of the private and of the
third sector should be increased, perhaps
through
public–private
partnerships
(Pinch, 1997).
kwa
Suggested reading
Bennett (1990); Pinch (1997).
public geographies Contributions to geographical knowledge that address audiences
beyond the academy and seek to intervene in
public debate and public policy. The formal
discipline of geography has a long tradition of
‘applied’ or ‘policy relevant’ work (see applied
geography; relevance), but the recent interest in public geographies has been nurtured by
a renewed interest in the normative – in the
political and ethical dimensions of geographical enquiry – and by two further, more particular, considerations. First, there has been a
recognition that geographical knowledge is
produced at multiple sites inside and outside
the academy, and the interest in ‘public geographies’ is thus, in part, an attempt to acknowledge the importance of those other
productions and sites. This means more than
an interest in ‘popular geographies’. While
many geographical knowledges remain
undeveloped, and are often tacit and takenfor-granted, other non-academic contributions are highly developed and explicit about
their intellectual and substantive basis: see, for
example, the regional reports produced by the
International Crisis Group, at http://www.
crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm. Second, there
has been a recognition of the importance of
developing and engaging audiences outside
the academy, and the interest in ‘public geographies’ is thus also, in part, an attempt to
speak in less technical vocabularies and to take
advantage of non-academic publishing and the
development of new media (particularly the
internet) to intervene in current debates in
a timely and accessible fashion. These twin
rationales speak to an interest in both the
changing geography of the public sphere (see
private and public spheres) and the critical
participation of geographical knowledges in its
affairs (Gregory, 2005b), and they intersect
with a renewed interest in ‘public intellectuals’
(Castree, 2006b; Ward, 2007). Oslender
(2007) adds a crucial rider: a focus less on
public intellectuals as ‘super-stars’ illuminating the public sphere and more on the collaborative contributions of what he calls ‘the
collective intellectual’ is likely to produce a
genuinely public geography that is both more
effective and more democratic. There have
been parallel developments in other fields –
public anthropology, public history and public
sociology, for example – but some of the most
impressive have been interdisciplinary: see,
for example, the international forums on
‘public issues’ published by the US-based
Social Science Research Council at http://
publications.ssrc.org/essays/.
Public geographies have their own geographies: Ward (2006) insists on the continuing
importance of the academy as one public
among many – and hence on the importance
of education and pedagogy – and it is as well
to remember (as the example of the SSRC
shows) that the academy and those other publics are increasingly transnational in their composition and concerns. In this sense, perhaps,
public geographies can contribute to the
deconstruction of the myth of the ‘ivory tower’
– universities are enmeshed in wider webs of
political, social and economic practices –and
also capitalize on the partialities of situated
knowledge to articulate new collaborations,
develop new conversations and forge new alliances (cf. the People’s Geography Project at
http://www.peoplesgeographyproject.org/). dg
Suggested reading
Oslender (2008); Ward (2007).
public goods Goods and services that are
either freely available to all or provided equally
to citizens of a delimited territory. Public
goods are normally always provided by the
state and fall within three main categories
(Bennett, 1980, 1985). First, pure public goods
are those that are non-excludable and nonrival in consumption. One person’s consumption does not restrict another person’s. These
goods are freely available to all people through
a state’s territory. An example is national
defence. However, we can also think of global
public goods. The eradication of smallpox, for
example, would benefit all of humanity, now
and in the future. While all public goods
should fall within this category, they do not.
It is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to
ensure the equal provision of public goods. A
second type is impure public goods, which are
provided at fixed locations or along fixed
routes. A park is a public good, and so is a
599
PUBLIC POLICY
public transport service. However, due to distance decay, the further a person lives from
these immobile public goods, the less is the
usage of them, and their (potential) benefit.
The conflict over the production of these
types of impure public goods, in the form of
turf politics, is an important aspect of territorial justice. The third and final type are
public goods impurely distributed, due to
decisions by the state to vary geographical
provision (Bennett, 1990). At each stage of
the distribution of public goods, political
decision-making will determine how much
of a good is provided, when and to whom.
So, while one local government might decide
not to provide one type of public good, a
neighbouring authority might, producing a
series of geographies of uneven provision.
Moreover, there might be differences within a
local or national government territory on the
basis of the privileging of one geographical
area’s need over another (cf. pork barrel)
(Pinch, 1997).
kwa
Suggested reading
Bennett (1990); Pinch (1997).
public policy Geographers have paid close
attention to the creation, implementation,
monitoring and evaluation of public policies.
Work in this area has increased in recent years
in capitalist countries because of: (a) the growing importance of the state in economic and
social affairs, offering enhanced opportunities
for such work; (b) increased governmental
recognition of environmental and spatial problems awaiting resolution; (c) the desire among
individual geographers to contribute to attacks
on such problems; and (d) the perceived need
for geographers to demonstrate the relevance
of their field and so promote their discipline’s
claim for resources within higher education
institutions
in
increasingly
materialist
situations.
Most geographical analyses have been concerned with evaluating policies addressed at
identified ‘spatial problems of environment,
economy and society’ (House, 1983) and with
assessment of their ‘geographical impact and
degree of effectiveness’: in the volume of
essays that he edited on United States public
policy,
. . . Critique stops short of prescription but
there is some attempt to look ahead and
also, in some cases, to set the problems
within a theoretical, as well as an operational, framework. (pp. v–vi)
600
He saw the benefits of such work as
twofold:
. . . [T]o non-geographical academic or lay
audiences . . . [it reflects] a particular set of
perspectives on some urgent problems
which face policy-makers in our very critical
times. To geographers in training, the relevance of applications of the discipline
should be a major concern, whether to add
practical purpose to their studies, or to point
in the direction of possible professional careers outside the education field.
House identified the discipline’s technocratic
skills and its practitioners’ ability to synthesize
the many component parts of a complex problem as the geographical perspectives most
valuable to public policy study (see his survey
of early British contributions in House, 1973);
later promotions of geographers’ utility have
stressed their technical skills, such as those
associated with geographic information
systems (see National Research Council,
1997). Others, such as C.J. Smith (1988),
suggest that because many social problems
are exacerbated, if not created, by environmental, time, place and circumstance contexts
(cf. contextual effect), then changing those
contexts, through the geography of service
provision and delivery, can be as influential
as moves to solve the problems.
The nature of geographers’ applied contributions has been largely pragmatic, reflecting
the available opportunities and the ability of
geographers to capitalise on them with their
technocratic skills, hence the current promotion of remote sensing and GIS (Openshaw,
1989). Whereas some geographers claim that
such involvement is necessary for the discipline’s survival (Berry, 1970; Abler, 1993a),
others have queried this by pointing to the role
of much public policy as sustaining, if not
enhancing, the inequalities and exploitation
that are inherent to capitalism: hence
Harvey’s (1974b) question ‘What kind of
geography for what kind of public policy?’
(cf. applied geography).
rj
Suggested reading
Abler (1993a); Berry (1970); Harvey (1974b);
House (1973, 1983); Openshaw (1989); Smith,
C.J. (1988).
public^private partnership (PPPs) A collaborative project involving the state apparatus
and private companies, with the latter
involved in some aspects of the provision of
PUBLIC SERVICES
public services. Such partnerships have been
promoted as part of the neo-liberalism
agenda for two main reasons. Ideologically,
private companies are presented as more efficient at managing large projects than the public sector (cf. privatization). Pragmatically,
undertaking developments in this way can
allow governments to avoid bearing the capital
costs in their budgets – thereby reducing the
public-sector borrowing requirement and, it is
believed, interest rates and/or avoiding large
increases in taxes to pay the upfront costs.
An example of such partnerships in the UK
has been the Private Finance Initiative
launched in the 1990s, whereby contractors
undertake the capital works – building a
prison, hospital, school, or road, for example
– and then lease the facility to the government,
which pays for the facility through its current
rather than capital account. In some cases, the
private contractor may either operate the new
facility and pay part of the profit to the government (as with a toll road) or is given some
role in its management (as with a place on a
school’s governing body) – this is known as the
state ‘contracting out’ part of the provision of
public services.
Examples of PPPs include New York’s
Central Park, which is managed for the City’s
Department of Parks and Recreation by the
Central Park Conservancy, and an extension
of California’s State Route 125 south of San
Diego, which was built by a private company –
California Transportations Ventures Inc; the
Lane Cove Tunnel under Sydney Harbour in
Australia was constructed under a similar
scheme, with the contractor then operating it
on a 33-year lease. In the UK, the National Air
Traffic Services (NATS), which control use of
the country’s airspace, is part-owned by the
government (which has a 49 per cent stake),
with most of the remainder held by a consortium of companies involved in the airline business: as with many such projects in the UK,
the work of NATS is overseen by an independent regulator, which can control prices and the
quality of service provision.
Whether the use of PPPs is either more
efficient or more effective is open to doubt.
Some claim that the overall cost of the leaseback arrangements will be greater than the
initial capital costs, so that PPPs in effect
involve the taxpayer creating profits for the
private sector, which may be enhanced by the
private companies’ employment practices: in
response, others argue that without such partnerships many projects would not happen,
because the public sector cannot bear their
cost without substantial increases in tax rates,
which would deter other investment and
entrepreneurship.
rj
Suggested reading
Bovaird (2004); Walzer and Jacobs (1998); Wettenhall (2003). See also http://www.hm-treasury.
gov.uk/documents/public_private_partnerships/
ppp_index.cfm
public services Services that are provided by
(or on behalf of) the state according to nonmarket criteria; that is, on the basis of the
need for the services rather than the ability to
pay. Although the boundaries between what
counts as a ‘public’ or a ‘private’ service have
historically been subject to change, together
with which sector has done the providing, in
general services are provided collectively
because provision through the market or the
third sector is believed to be either inefficient,
ineffective or inequitable. Studies inside and
outside of geography have tended to focus on a
number of areas of public service provision
and utilization, such as education, health
care and housing (see housing studies: see
also Walsh, 1995). In each case a particular
type of collective consumption politics has
been found to exist, over the provision of the
public service and the conditions under which
it is provided. Geographers have been particularly sensitive, not surprisingly, to the geographical aspect of provision of services,
related to wider concerns over spatial
inequalities, territorial justice and welfare geography (Smith and Lee, 2004).
Three arguments have been made for the need
for a geographically attuned analysis of distribution of public services and the level of provision: first, that service provision varies by
territory; second, that the benefits of a public service decrease the further an individual is
away from its provision (cf. distance decay);
and, third, that the location of services matters
to surrounding areas and neighbourhoods, in
the form of externalities – these are impacts
that are not part of the initial decision-making process, and can be either ‘negative’ or
‘positive’, although in many cases externalities
are both, how you regard them depends on
your own position.
Underpinning much geographical work on
public services is an attention to the restructuring of the welfare state (Pinch, 1997).
Decisions made by the state apparatus, over
the provision of public services, reflect wider
economic and political processes. Geographical
distribution is often the outcome of a range of
601
PUBLIC SPACE
territorial influences. For example, politicking
by local government, regional voluntary
agencies, nation-states and transnational
corporations might produce a particular geographical configuration of public service provision. Current concern with the process of neoliberalism, and what this process means for the
qualitative restructuring of the state apparatus,
lies behind recent work on public service provision and consumption (Peck, 2001). As we witness a variety of provision arrangements
emerging in different countries, between governments and private-sector companies, so tensions
over the defining and the use of terms such as
‘equity’ and ‘efficiency’ take on extra importance. What is meant by a ‘public service’? Who
has access to it and at what cost? These are
questions that currently unite those working on
the geographies of public services and those
working on issues of state restructuring, in different regions of the world and in different areas
of policy.
kwa
Suggested reading
Peck (2001a); Pinch (1997).
public space Space to which all citizens have
a right of access. Public space must be juxtaposed with private space, or space over which
private property rules are in operation.
Central to those rules is the right of owners
to exclude others from the use and enjoyment
of a space. Public space, conversely, is presumptively open to all. The archetypical public space is the plaza, street or park, the
‘traditional public forum’ characterized by
the US Supreme Court as those places that
have immemorially been used for public
assembly, debate and informed dissent. An
array of ‘semi-public’ spaces can also be identified, such as the airport or university.
To speak of public space is necessarily to
speak of the public sphere, the realm of collective opinion and action that mediates between
society and state. Most famously, Jürgen
Habermas characterized the public sphere as
the site of deliberative and rational communication, within which free, rational discourse can
occur between citizens (Habermas, 1989
[1962]; see also citizenship), distanced from
602
the particularities of the state, the economy
and the private domain (see private and public
spheres). While membership in the public has
long been constrained by exclusions of gender,
class and race, it still holds normative appeal.
Signalling a site of inclusion and acceptance,
outsiders have long struggled for membership
in the public sphere.
While the public sphere and public space
are not necessarily interchangeable – publics
can form in private space, as some feminist
geographers (Staeheli, 1996: see also feminist
geographies) have noted with reference to
the private home – in general, it is in public
space that the conversations and encounters
of public life become physical and real. For
Young (1990a, p. 240): ‘[p]olitics, the critical
activity of raising issues and deciding how
institutional and social relations should be
organized, crucially depends on the existence
of space and forums to which everyone has
access’. These spaces serve several valuable
political ends. The occupation of public
space, for Mitchell (2003a), is a crucial means
by which the boundaries of the public can be
remade. Street protests, for example, can
make visible the socially invisible. The physical designation and design of public space
itself can also become avenues for the negotiation of politics (Low, 2000) and forms of
public memory, as well as collective forgetting
(Burk, 2003). The encounters with difference that occur in public space can also foster
the formation of an inclusionary ethos, as we
learn to accommodate those people and interests beyond our own familiar contacts and
ways of life.
For one constituency, however, the very
diversity and unpredictability of public space
undercuts the value of publicness. The rising
homeless population (see homelessness),
combined with a law and order ethos, has
prompted regulation targeted at ‘disorder’ in
public space (such as panhandling). The
exclusionary logic of such intervention has
prompted some to posit the end of public
space. Scholars have also traced the privatization of public space in the Western city, worrying at its effects on political activity and social
life (Kohn, 2004).
nkb
Q
quadrat analysis A method of point pattern analysis widely used in ecology, particularly in the analysis of plant distributions and
adopted for geographical use. A rectangular
mesh is laid across an area and the distribution
of points in each rectangle counted. That distribution can be modelled using a variety of
procedures to assess whether it: conforms to
what would occur under a random allocation
process; is significantly clustered in some
portion of the space; or is more regular than
random. central place theory, for example,
predicts that the distribution of settlements in a
rural area would fall into the third of those
categories, whereas theories of agglomeration
suggest that industrial plants should be significantly clustered. (cf. categorical data analysis; poisson regression). Quadrat analysis can
generate local statistics, but artificial boundaries imposed around the study region at the
limits of each quadrat affect their utility: a more
sophisticated approach, taking a more continuous definition of space, is geographically
weighted regression.
rj
Suggested reading
Getis and Boots (1978); O’Sullivan and Unwin
(2002).
quadtree A procedure for compressing the
file size of geographical data sets that works by
splitting a study region into four quadrants –
as with the division of a rectangular area into
four smaller rectangles – and then recursively
splitting the quadrats until each is homogeneous on defined variables of interest that
it contains. Quadtrees are also used in geographic information systems to index
phenomena within an area – such as points,
lines and areas – according to their spatial
location. The approach assumes spatial autocorrelation in data sets and allows them –
especially those in a raster format – to be
efficiently sorted, explored and disseminated
(e.g. over the Internet).
rj
Suggested reading
Wise (2002).
qualitative methods Guidelines to frame
research questions, assess what counts as
authoritative evidence and knowledge, and
collect interpretable data, and distinguished
from quantitative methods. The discipline
of geography has a long tradition of qualitative methods, and it has been argued that the
prioritizing of quantitative methods, associated with the quantitative revolution of
the 1950s and 1960s, was an aberration within
the discipline’s history (Winchester, 2000).
Explicit calls for qualitative methods came in
the late 1970s from humanistic geographers, in reaction to what was perceived as the
economic determinism, one-dimensionality
and objectification of social life within spatial
science (Ley and Samuels, 1978). There were
(at least) two methodological strands to humanistic geography: an historical and hermeneutic understanding of the production
and meaning of landscape, and another
within social geography that drew upon
phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, and sought to understand social worlds
from insiders’ perspectives, often through participant observation or ethnography
(Limb and Dwyer, 2001). Through the
1980s, feminist geographies took up and
expanded humanist geographers’ concerns to
acknowledge and examine the values, politics
and ethics underlying all social research, and
the need to understand and document the
plurality of coexisting and divergent social
worlds in all of their affective intensity and
complexity. Feminists have been particularly
concerned to think through implications of the
positionality of the researcher and researched, the workings of power within the
research process and the responsibility of
using research to create social change. The
influence of post-colonialism and poststructuralism has furthered these preoccupations. Qualitative methods are now
common and seen as appropriate in all subdisciplines of geography, including economic
geography, migration studies, political
geography and health geography.
By the 1990s ‘a frightening array of philosophical, conceptual and theoretical terms
[were] embedded in the qualitative research
literature’, and neat links between philosophy,
theory and method were being ‘unpicked’
(Smith, S.J., 2001, pp. 23–4). Nonetheless,
603
QUALITATIVE METHODS
qualitative approaches tend to share some
common understandings about ontology and
epistemology: social worlds are dynamic and
not fully stable or predictable; social life is produced through human (and non-human)
agency; there are multiple social worlds, with
distinctive and sometimes competing social
meanings, competencies and practices; it is
important to understand social life as it is experienced; knowledge is situated and partial
(see situated knowledge); theory is to be
developed through empirical research rather
than tested empirically; the subjectivity of the
researcher and researched is a factor in every
stage of the research process; the production of
knowledge is an inter-subjective, relational process between researcher and researched; and
the researcher has ethical and social
responsibilities to the researched (Limb and
Dwyer, 2001). Smith argues that the choice of
qualitative methods goes beyond these issues of
ontology and epistemology, and is fundamentally a political decision: ‘We choose these
methods . . . as a way of challenging the way
the world is structured, the way that knowledges
are made, from the top down . . . We are . . .
adopting a strategy that aims to place nondominant, neglected knowledges at the heart of the
research agenda’’ (2001, p. 25; original emphasis). One part of this strategy involves making space for these other knowledges by
demonstrating the constructed nature of
dominant ones. Within science studies, for
instance, ethnographies of the production of
scientific facts trace a myriad of small translations from ‘the field’ to the laboratory
(e.g. Latour, 1999a: see also fieldwork). Critical GIS makes explicit the genealogy and limitations of the data on which GIS maps are
based. Another strand of this strategy involves
subjecting dominant institutions to ethnographic study to show them to be more improvised and less powerful than supposed;
Mountz’s (2003) ethnography of the Canadian
state is one example.
The debates about power, positionality, reflexivity and ethics are complex, and what
has been called a crisis of representation
began in the mid-1980s. Crang (2003) notes
that such debates have progressed beyond the
simplistic dichotomies between ‘insiders’ and
‘outsiders’ typical of earlier discussions to
more nuanced considerations of ‘betweenness’
or working ‘alongside’ research participants.
Concerns nonetheless linger that qualitative
researchers – like all researchers – unwittingly
rely upon class, colonial and/or racial privilege to gain access to informants and other
604
information, and to produce knowledge that
benefits mainly themselves. For instance,
Chari characterizes ethnography as ‘a process
of alienation, through which, for instance, ethnographers poach on working-class narratives
for very different ends: like getting a job or
tenure’ (2003, p. 171). Such criticisms have
provoked qualitative researchers to rethink
their research encounters, to experiment with
new ways of producing and judging knowledge
and truth, and to consider a broader range of
knowledges as useful and relevant. Reflecting
upon their work in Pakistan, Butz and Besio
(2004) consider the concept of autoethnography as one means of repositioning research
subjects as active transculturally knowing subjects rather than ‘native informants’. Autoethnography attends to the ways in which
research subjects actively produce and represent themselves within the terms of dominant
discourse, and complicates the boundary between authentic truth and manipulated (and
manipulative) self-presentation or performance. Butz and Besio describe how they have
organized their research to support their
research participants’ own projects of selfrepresentation, thereby ‘multiplying the communicative resources available to them’
(Smith, S.J., 2001b, p. 27). Nagar has entered
into another kind of collaborative research endeavour with eight development workers in
Uttar Pradesh, India. Calling themselves the
Sangtin Writers Collective, they have coauthored a book in which seven grassroots
workers write intimately and autobiographically about their lives. This book, first published in India in Hindi in 2004, and more
recently in the United States in English
(2006), has created controversy in India because of its detailed critique of the politics of
the non-governmental organization for which
these women worked, and has become a catalyst for organizing among other grassroots
workers. There are now many examples of
collaborations in participatory action research (Pain, 2004), which tends to be different from, and indeed can be at odds with, the
goals of applied geography (the latter is often
more closely aligned with the priorities and
perspectives of the state). More broadly,
Smith argues that ‘Qualitative research is a
mode of interference. If this interference is
‘‘wrong’’, such approaches should be discontinued; they must be unethical. If it is ‘‘right’’,
a lot more documentation and debate are
needed on where this interference is going,
whose interest it advances, what form it takes
and why it is important’ (2001, p. 27).
QUALITATIVE METHODS
There are many different qualitative
methods, and typologies for classifying them.
Winchester (2000), for instance, identifies
three categories of qualitative methods: oral
(e.g. unstructured interviews and interviewing, focus groups, and life histories), textual
analysis (see text and textuality) and participant observation (or ethnography). Despite the
diversity of qualitative methods used by geographers, Crang (2002, p. 650) notes a surprising tendency to favour interviews over
ethnography – surprising because ethnography
would seem to be more in line with field-based
geographical traditions. Yet Herbert (2000)
has calculated that only 3–5 per cent of journal
articles draw on ethnographic research. The
reasons for this are various, and include: difficulties in gaining access (McDowell, 1998);
challenges of doing ethnographic fieldwork
within existing institutional and funding
time frames (Cook, 2001b) and disciplinary
scepticism about the merits of ethnography
(Herbert, 2000).
Two further methodological omissions have
been noted. First, visual data tend to be
under-used, relative to oral testimony or text.
Crang (2003, p. 500) reasons that qualitative
researchers have been influenced by critiques
of vision as a medium for a detached, masculinist, objectifying gaze: ‘If copresence is the
privileged ground of qualitative truth claims, it
is against a foil of ‘‘bad’’ vision’ (see vision
and visuality). Especially given heightened
concerns about the politics of representation,
‘qualitative fieldwork almost turns away from
the visual to avoid accusations of ‘‘academic
tourism’’ and objectification’ (p. 500). Rejection of the visual is, however, by no means
complete, and non-representational theory and a focus on performance and the
body have generated many intriguing experiments with visual data and methodologies,
some of which are reviewed by Crang. In her
textbook on visual methods, Rose (2007
[2001]) provides an excellent overview of a
wide range of visual data; questions that can
be addressed through them; and a variety of
strategies for analysing them. An over-emphasis on discourse and representation
grounds a second concern about the limitations of geographers’ use of qualitative
methods: this is that too little attention has
been directed to how people do things, as
opposed to how they see the world or what
they say about it. Smith argues that this has
prompted a ‘second crisis of representation’
that focuses on the limits of representability
(Smith, S.J., 2001, p. 28), and the importance
of knowing through practice and recording
fully sensual, richly emotional, momentary
practices of social lives. Although qualitative
methods are now widely used throughout the
discipline, Thrift (2000a, p. 244) notes that
even ‘cultural geography still draws on a remarkably limited number of methodologies –
ethnography, focus groups, and the like –
which are nearly always cognitive in origin
and effect’. Large claims have been made of
the methodological implications of non-representational theory: it is ‘suggestive of nothing less than a drive towards a new
methodological avant garde that will radically
refigure what it is to do research’ (Latham,
2003, p. 2000). Writing in 2005, Lorimer
notes that ‘the creativity [promised by nonrepresentational theory] in research design
and method still needs to be unshackled’
(p. 89). Given the emphasis on knowledge
through practice, there is renewed interest in
symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and
ethnomethodology. As much as using radically different methods, it may be a matter of
re-examining the potential of existing ones; for
instance, to excavate everyday practices in
archival evidence, or to conduct, experience
and record interviews as fully embodied conversational performances in which subtle shifts
in affect, tone and bodily comportment are as
significant as what is said. And an argument
that social life exceeds discourse need not lead
researchers away from discourse; as Nash
(2000) has argued, even a practice such as
dance – one that drew a great deal of attention
in early formulations of non-representational
styles of thinking – is not excessive to discourse
but, rather, is a complex amalgam of discourse
and embodied knowledges. Language itself has
multiple relations to action: Chari (2003) draws
on linguistic anthropology to consider language as an indexical and not just referential
practice, and to consider the multiple relations
between language and action.
Given an enquiring attitude about what
counts as useful knowledge and recent interest
in performance and the ‘doing’ of social life,
qualitative researchers are reassessing what
counts as valuable research ‘products’, including relatively private and fleeting ones (Thrift,
2000). For instance, whilst conducting an ethnography in a village in Pakistan, a Muslim
community in which women supposedly disapproved of being photographed, Besio (Besio
and Butz, 2004) was asked by some of the
resident women to photograph them privately
in out-of-the-way places. Besio reads these
secretive photography sessions as expressions
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QUALITY OF LIFE
of resistance to masculinist community
norms. Her research thus generated a practice
of resistance that could not be made public,
at least at the research site. Pratt (2004,
p. 193) has urged that we consider the research process itself as an important research
outcome: ‘We might think of it as a space . . .
from which to speak and perform the unspeakable . . . The written traces, for example [academic] text, are but one outcome of a process
that far exceeds them.’ Writing and other
forms of representation (such as video or photography) can be a significant part of the actual research process in qualitative research;
representation is a means of doing the research, of making creative connections and
developing interpretations. Different ways of
understanding can be communicated through
different media (Berg and Mansvelt, 2000).
Despite the widespread use of qualitative
data, some scepticism remains about the credibility of qualitative data. Baxter and Eyles
(1997) are concerned that qualitative geographers often have not been sufficiently transparent about their methodology. There is a
danger of ‘mining’ qualitative interviews for
enticing quotes that selectively advance the
researcher’s interpretation, and of presenting
de-contextualized snippets of conversation.
There is also a risk of stereotyping respondents
by reading across interview transcripts to identify common themes rather than studying the
contradictions and complexity within individual interviews. There are many different strategies for analysing qualitative data (there are
43, according to Crang, 2005). Crang (2005)
distinguishes three broad approaches: developing grounded theory, analysing the formal
structure of the text or transcript or image, or
reading qualitative data as narrative. McDowell (1998) describes a process of repeatedly
reading her transcript data, first for plot and
then for representations of ‘self’ (also, for a
strategy for analysing narrative genres, see
Chari, 2003). One characteristic of the best
qualitative research is the immense volume of
data collected, and although there is no substitute for examining the data closely and
repeatedly, a number of computer software
packages are available to systematize transcript data and to assist in coding it (Peace,
2000).
Although qualitative methods have often
been conceived as opposite or even opposed
to quantitative methods, this is an unproductive way of conceiving the distinction. Critical
realism was one important moment for thinking of the two approaches as compatible:
606
extensive methods (often quantitative) were
seen to be especially useful for describing patterns, and intensive methods (typically qualitative ones) more effective for studying causal
processes (cf. extensive research; intensive
research). More recently, the call of mixed
methods has been tied to the concept of triangulation, which involves exploring processes
from different angles using different methods,
in order to assess the validity of each data
source and method, and more fully understand the process. Nightingale (2003) links
the utility of mixed methods to the concept
of situated knowledge: she suggests that a
mix of qualitative and quantitative methods
allows the researcher to better understand
the limits of knowledge acquired through
any one methodological approach. Different
approaches resonate with different audiences
– for instance, state funding bodies and policymakers are typically more convinced of the
‘scientific merit’ of quantitative techniques,
which they sometimes designate as ‘evidencebased’ research (Mountz, Miyares, Wright
and Bailey, 2003). Blending qualitative and
quantitative methods may allow a researcher
to reach different audiences in more authoritative ways.
gp
Suggested reading
Hay (2000); Limb and Dwyer (2001).
quality of life A concept linked to that of
social well-being, which is based on the argument that the human condition should be
evaluated on a wider range of indicators than
just income – whether at the individual level or
through national aggregates (such as gross
national product and gross domestic
product). Work on the quality of life was
introduced to geographers in the 1970s in
studies of territorial social indicators (Smith,
1973; Knox, 1975), which focused on separate dimensions of collective well-being, such
as income, wealth and employment, the built
environment, physical and mental health, education, social disorganization, social belonging, and recreation and leisure. maps of these
indicators, at a variety of spatial scales from
the international to the inter-urban, provided
evidence on geographical variations in wellbeing, with which researchers could address
the question of ‘who gets what, where?’
(Smith, 1977).
Other concepts, such as freedom (cf.
human rights) and happiness, are frequently
related to measures of the quality of life that
individuals and societies experience, although
QUANTITATIVE METHODS
much work on happiness shows that – to the
extent that it can be measured – it does not
increase above a certain threshold income:
people may be more content and live more
comfortable lives with higher incomes,
but they do not feel any happier (Layard,
2005).
rj
quango
An acronym for quasi-autonomous-non-governmental organizations. These
are established and financed by governments
to perform public functions in areas of policy
such as education and health care. Quango
members are appointed rather than elected,
and are drawn from private, public and third
sectors. Since the 1970s, quangos have grown
both numerically and in terms of the areas of
the world in which they can be found. This
growth reflects a general trend in national governments changing how they govern, involving
new forms of organizations in their activities.
The incorporation of these organizations into
the state apparatus raises issues of accountability, democracy and transparency in public
decision-making.
kwa
Suggested reading
Ridley and Wilson (1995).
quantitative methods Mathematics has always been a foundation of geographical practices. For many centuries, it underpinned the
development of cartography, providing the
techniques (notably geometrical and trigonometrical) deployed in map-making – in establishing exact locations (increasingly through
the universally adopted graticule of latitude
and longitude and the national surveying systems based on that matrix) and in portraying
those locations in map form. With the latter,
for example, much effort was (and still is)
expended on the development of map projections with which to portray a spherical reality
on to a two-dimensional surface. Increasingly,
however, this work has been separated from
academic geographical practices into separate
disciplines (such as geodesy).
Although, as with almost all changes within
a discipline, earlier exemplars can be identified, the post-1945 decades saw a major shift
in geographical practices associated with a
widespread adoption of quantitative methods
in human and physical geography – a period
widely known as the discipline’s quantitative
revolution and very much linked to the
adoption of an explicitly theoretical approach
to the discipline’s subject matter. This shift
was associated with scholars located at a
number of institutions, initially in the USA
and then also in the UK (Johnston and Sidaway, 2004a), but the dominant core was located at the Department of Geography in the
University of Washington, Seattle, in the early
to mid-1950s, when a number of graduate
students coalesced around two individuals –
Edward Ullman and, especially, William Garrison. Their core concern was the application
and development of location theory (especially that based in neo-classical economics), with quantitative methods identified –
as in other social sciences, notably economics
and sociology at the time – as a means of both
expressing theories in a formal language and
empirically testing hypotheses.
These two core activities drew on different
quantitative methodologies: the expression
of theories involved mathematical argumentation and representation (including modelling), whereas hypothesis-testing used
statistical procedures, expressing the outcome
of empirical research in probabilistic terms. In
some cases, mathematical modelling preceded
empirical work, providing the formal basis for
hypothesis generation; in others, statistical analysis was either based on more informal forms
of argument leading to some form of expected
empirical outcome, or involved exploration of
numerical data without any clear expectation
as to the likely outcome (cf. exploratory
data analysis). These two approaches (especially that involving statistical analysis) spread
rapidly through the 1960s and 1970s from the
core institutions in Seattle and other US
centres, alongside parallel and linked developments in the UK (Barnes, 2004b, 2008b;
Johnston, Fairbrother, Hoare, Hayes and
Jones, 2008): according to Burton (1963),
geography’s ‘quantitative revolution’ had succeeded by the early 1960s, although circumstantial evidence suggested that it never
dominated human geography (Wheeler, 2002).
Much of the mathematical modelling
underpinning quantitative work in human
geography has focused on either spatial patterns – such as the distribution of settlements,
as in central place theory – or spatial
interaction (notably various forms of migration and communication). The goal was to
express the subject matter under consideration
in mathematical terms. At the core of much
work on spatial interaction, for example, was
an analogy with Newton’s famous formulation, which posited that the volume of interaction between two places was positively
related to some index of the generating capacity at each place and negatively related to the
607
QUANTITATIVE METHODS
distance between them (the so-called distance-decay hypothesis based on assumed
frictions of distance). This could be expressed as a simple formula (as in the wellknown gravity model), but the formulation
was later extended to present a more realistic
representation through the adoption of
entropy-maximizing models. Similar approaches presented the spatial structure
being investigated as a system, with nodes
(such as towns) and links (transport routes).
They modelled various aspects of those systems – the optimum number and location of
warehouses in a distribution network, for example, or the shortest route involving visits to
three or more nodes on the network – using a
variety of mathematical techniques, such as
graph theory and linear programming (cf.
optimization models). Changes of and to
those structures were also analysed, notably
through models of spatial diffusion.
Many of these early approaches relied on a
relatively simple conception of spatial structure, in which distance was the foundational
variable to which many of the key relationships
were linearly related (albeit through nonlinear transformations in some cases: see
Cox, 1976). More sophisticated mathematical
modelling procedures were later adopted, incorporating non-linear relationships between
elements within the system (such as catastrophe theory and chaos theory).
Most statistical analyses undertaken by
human geographers are based on the general
linear model – notably those components
that identify either the relationship of one variable to another (regression, which indicates
the degree of change in one variable relative to
the amount of change in another) or the
strength of such relationships (shown by correlation coefficients). Their introduction – as
exemplified by the first textbook on using statistical methods in geography (Gregory, 1962)
– was initially presented by some simply as the
proper way to present quantitative material
and relationships (Gregory, 1971), with formal statements replacing the vagueness of
ordinary language (Cole, 1969: see also
process). But statistical procedures soon became the predominant means whereby analysts tested hypotheses about spatial patterns
and processes, with the findings expressed as
probability statements – the likelihood either
that what had been observed in a sample of
observations also held in the population from
which that sample was drawn (cf. sampling)
or that the relationship identified could have
occurred by chance rather than as the result of
608
some assumed causal sequence whereby
changes in x stimulated changes in y (where,
for example, x is the distance between a pair of
towns and y is the number of migrants between them). Thus applications of statistical
methods involved combining reasoning
methods that are both deductive (formal hypotheses regarding the size, strength and direction of relationships among variables are
stated and those expectations compared
against empirical data) and inductive (patterns are identified in data sets that suggest
ordered behaviour).
By the 1960s, some geographers had
become aware of potential difficulties of applying standard statistical procedures (such as
those derived from the general linear model)
to geographical data because of the issue of
spatial autocorrelation, whereby the assumed independence of observations could
not be sustained. Tobler (1970), for example,
had posited a ‘first law of geography’ that
‘everything is related to everything else, but
near things are more related than distant
ones’. Thus the value of an observation at
one place – the level of unemployment, for
example – might well be related to the value
at adjacent places, and incorporating all of
these values into an unadjusted regression or
similar model could violate its foundational
assumptions and generate unreliable estimates
– of, say, the relationship between unemployment levels and house values across a set of
counties. Techniques for analysing spatial data
that take such autocorrelation into account
and provide reliable estimates were thus developed – forming the basis of an approach to
spatial data analysis increasingly widely
adopted across the social sciences and known
as spatial econometrics. Those, and many
other, approaches have been increasingly facilitated by the development and availability of
geographical information systems.
By the 1970s, the approach to human
geography widely known as spatial science
or locational analysis was coming under
increasing criticism from a number of directions. Many were associated with the assumed
link between quantitative analysis and the
philosophy of positivism – the goals of spatial
science, it was argued, involved a search for
laws of spatial order, in terms of both patterns
on the ground and the behaviour that gave rise
to those patterns. Some of these criticisms
emanated from adherents to a marxist or radical geography, who argued that a focus on
the spatial superstructure (cf. infrastructure) ignored the true processes involved in
QUANTITATIVE METHODS
the creation/re-creation of geographies of uneven development and the (class-based)
power relations that underpinned them.
Other critiques emanated from what became
known as humanistic geography and the variety of approaches to social and cultural
geography that emerged in subsequent decades, which focused on spatial science’s implicit characterization of decision-making as
either deterministic (and thus denying the
free will inherent in human agency) or influenced by economic factors only, thereby ignoring the social and cultural contexts of
decision-making – not least those associated
with gender and ethnicity.
To some extent, these critiques were anticipated by geographers working with quantitative methods in the spatial science genre.
Many soon became aware that the complexity
of contemporary society meant that the relatively simple locational models that they were
applying were insufficiently sophisticated to
incorporate the wide range of contextual and
other variables that can influence spatial behaviour. They therefore shifted their focus
away from those models that portrayed a
rigid, geometrical spatial order towards more
general models of locational decision-making
that emphasized context – what became
known as behavioural geography. They
sought order – common patterns of decisionmaking – in non-deterministic situations,
much as suggested in the attempt through
structuration theory to eliminate the binary dualism between structure and agency.
Behavioural geography’s core argument is not
that people are irrational decision-makers but,
rather, that they are boundedly (as against
perfectly) rational: the boundedness reflects
the limits to their information, their ability to
process it and the utility functions that they
apply when evaluating options. This does not
mean that everybody has to be treated as both
unique (having characteristics that nobody
else shares in total) and singular (sharing no
characteristics with others), so that no general
patterns can be found and theories developed.
Rushton (1969) makes this point in contrasting studies of behaviour in space – for example,
mapping individual journey-to-work routes –
with those identifying rules of spatial behaviour,
the general patterns within all those choices
that can be uncovered from the individual
pieces of data using quantitative procedures,
to suggest common behavioural decisions.
The reasons for such commonalities can then
be explored by, for example, identifying
shared information underpinning such de-
cisions, as in Peter Gould’s pioneering work
on mental maps, the spatial depictions that
we use when evaluating the places we want to
visit, move to and so on (Gould and White,
1993 [1974]).
This general approach characterizes the
contemporary use of quantitative methods in
human geography. Although some have
claimed that such work is now virtually absent
from human geography’s portfolio and prospectus, much work using quantitative
methods continues to be reported in the discipline’s general and specialist journals. As
with its predecessors, it concentrates on aggregate patterns in space and their generating
processes: the description, explanation and
(in some cases) prediction of general patterns
of spatial behaviour and their reflection in the
landscape. (Note, however, the recent emergence of a ‘new economic geography’ within
economics, and the creation of a journal –
Journal of Economic Geography – to explore
commonalities between that approach and
the work of geographers who continue to
undertake theoretically inspired quantitative
work.)
Much contemporary work follows the behavioural geography rather than the original
spatial science paradigm, therefore. Most of
it is theory-driven, based on generalized hypotheses of how people behave, but much of
the analysis involves exploring data assembled
to identify patterns rather than explicit
hypothesis-testing. This very largely reflects
the ‘immaturity’ of such studies: our knowledge of how people make spatially relevant
decisions and behave is limited, and so the
best we can come up with at this stage is
broad expectations. In electoral geography,
for example, there are theoretical arguments
that self-interest influences how people vote,
with economic concerns underpinning that
self-interest. But it may be expressed in different ways: some may vote sociotropically,
according to their views of the national, regional and/or local economic situation (voting
for the governing party[ies] if they are optimistic about the economic situation but against if
they are pessimistic); some may vote egocentrically, according to their perceived personal
financial situation; and some vote altruistically, in the interests of their (geographical)
neighbours even when these don’t coincide
with their own (Johnston and Pattie, 2006).
Those theoretically based expectations generate testable hypotheses but – as with the gravity model – they cannot predict in advance the
size of the relevant coefficients for each type of
609
QUANTITATIVE METHODS
voting, because of the many other contingent
factors (some of them spatial in nature) that
influence electoral behaviour.
This example illustrates the dominant focus
within contemporary quantitative human
geography, not – as it was 50 years ago – on
the orderly arrangement of points and lines in
the landscape, and of people, ideas and commodities flowing through those spatial structures (as postulated by Haggett, 1965), but
rather on common patterns of behaviour in
similar contexts – or common realizations of
human agency within particular contextual
settings. The emphasis has shifted between
two of geography’s fundamental concepts,
from a focus on space to one on place. Within
that changed emphasis has come the adoption
of new quantitative procedures that emphasize
the important role of place as context – such as
geographical analysis machine, geographical explanation machine, local statistics,
geographically
weighted
regression,
multi-level modelling, the modifiable
areal unit problem, ecological inference
and the ecological fallacy.
Contemporary use of quantitative methods
in human geography entails exploring
patterns and processes involving large numbers
of decision-makers, seeking order in often
complex situations (Haggett, 1990). Even
when data are available on individual decisionmakers, the goal is to distil general patterns – as
in Rushton’s distinction between behaviour in
space and rules of spatial behaviour. Unlike
other approaches to human geography, therefore, spatial science is macro/meso in scale,
rather than micro – though it may deploy
micro-scale data in its search for macro/mesoscale patterns. Its findings might pose questions that can only be addressed by studying
individuals, but its core methodologies focus
on wholes rather than parts.
This approach is the only one possible given
certain subject matter. Patterns of (changing)
regional development and underdevelopment,
for example, can only be studied as statistical
aggregates – as can many indices linked to this
concept, such as inflation, unemployment
rates, land values, house prices, productivity
and so on. Aspects of our worlds are only accessible in such formats, and are sensibly analysed quantitatively. In other cases, whereas
individual-level data are available (or can be
obtained through bespoke surveys) – on illness, turnout at elections and so on – much
can be gained from aggregating them and
studying general patterns, of morbidity and
mortality rates, for example. Much work in,
610
for example, population, medical, social
and electoral geography is of this type –
though such sub-disciplines are not constrained to spatial scientific approaches.
A further justification for macro-/mesoapproaches lies in the probabilistic nature of
much of our understanding and representation of the world. It is generally accepted that
smoking causes lung cancer, for example, but
not all smokers get lung cancer and not all
people who get lung cancer have smoked. It
is a probabilistic relationship. Part of the reason why we cannot say that smoking causes
lung cancer without qualification is because
other variables can either accelerate or decelerate, even block, the processes involved;
part also reflects our incomplete knowledge
(constrained because of the difficulties of conducting controlled experiments). Similar arguments apply to a whole range of behaviours
studied by (physical and well as human) geographers: the processes involved are so complex
and difficult to unravel – because we cannot
conduct experiments (although a range of new
techniques may be of value in such situations:
Sherman, 2003; Dunning, 2008). Hence work
in spatial science is almost of necessity conditional: it represents the state of our current
understanding and can only be phrased in
probabilistic rather than deterministic terms.
The meso-/macro-patterns in many aspects
of contemporary society that are quantitatively
described and analysed by social scientists are
relevant to people’s daily lives and experiences
– the ‘meaningful nature of life’ explored in
other geographical practices. Levels of ethnic
segregation in urban neighbourhoods and
schools (see urbanization) provide contexts
within which not only lives are (partially)
lived, but also people’s life chances and
relationships are influenced. Geographical
concentrations of poverty similarly structure
many people’s life chances, while biased election results reflect the operation of the aggregation and scale issues underpinning the
modifiable areal unit problem (Johnston and
Pattie, 2006).
Alongside their intrinsic interest and importance to understanding spatial patterns
and behaviour, therefore, meso-/macro-scale
work is relevant to public policies – either
studies of their impact on geographies or
analyses of geographical patterns that call for
public intervention. Geographies of mortality, for example, may identify areas where
further investment of medical resources is
warranted. Much public policy has impacts –
direct and indirect – on topics of interest to
QUANTITATIVE REVOLUTION
human geographers and, although directed at
individuals, is delivered to areas, as with the
location of healthcare clinics: if the world operates through spatial aggregates, then it
should be analysed accordingly (though not
exclusively so).
Similarly, whatever the immense variety of
human spatial behaviour, the public policy
that intervenes in it in some way (and much
private-sector policy too) is almost invariably
phrased in aggregate terms. New highways are
planned to link places where demand either
currently outstrips supply or modelling suggests that it soon will. New commercial establishments are located where potential
(unfulfilled) demand is deemed greatest (and
usually implies some distance-decay pattern
in usage, as represented by the gravity
model): much applied geography (such as
that using geodemographics and other spatial
analytical procedures) is based on this aspect
of Tobler’s law.
Many aspects of the positivist approach
have long been abandoned by almost all spatial scientists: they adopt some of its precepts –
particularly that the things they study can be
observed and measured; that the statements
which they derive can be tested for their veracity; and that their studies can be replicated.
For them, knowledge-production involves
careful observation, measurement, analysis
and interpretation, generating statements that
identify synoptic patterns – the broad pictures
that might then be decomposed to see how
they are produced and what they mean for
the people who live in them. They do not –
as Fotheringham (2006, p. 239) puts it – ignore ‘all the emotions and thought processes
that are behind what is sometimes . . . highly
idiosyncratic behaviour’: they accept those as
valid topics for study, calling for different approaches. For spatial scientists, a whole range
of subjects can be addressed at the aggregate
level using quantitative methods, from which
valid generalizations can be drawn to illuminate aspects of the human condition. And these
can be linked to studies using non-quantitative
practices – as proponents of ‘mixed-method’
stress. Quantitative methods thus remain at
the core of the geographical enterprise.
rj
Selected reading
Fotheringham, Brunsdon and Charlton (2000);
Haggett (1990); Wilson and Bennett (1985).
quantitative revolution The ‘radical transformation of spirit and purpose’ (Burton,
1963, p. 151) that Anglo-American geography
experienced during the 1950s and 1960s following the widespread adoption of both inferential statistical techniques and abstract
models and theories. In the process, the dominance of an old idiographic geography characterized by a focus on areal differentiation
was displaced by a new nomothetic geography conducted as spatial science.
The quantitative revolution first emerged in
the mid-1950s as a series of local affairs crystallized around one or two key individuals. In
the USA, the Department of Geography at the
University of Washington in Seattle was key,
as was the University of Iowa in Iowa City. At
Washington, it was the presence of Edward
Ullman and William Garrison that was crucial,
and at Iowa, Harold McCarty. In 1954 Garrison gave the first advanced course in statistics in a US Department of Geography, and
the following year his Washington students,
nicknamed the ‘space cadets’, were among
the first on campus to make use of the new
IBM 604 computer (also a national first).
Those students subsequently proved critical
in diffusing the quantitative message, which
they did by quickly establishing themselves
and their research agenda at several prestigious US universities during the early 1960s,
including Chicago, Northwestern and Michigan. Outside the USA, Peter Haggett and
Richard Chorley in the UK (affectionately described by David Harvey as the ‘terrible twins’
of British geography) and Torsten Hägerstrand in Sweden were central in establishing
a European beachhead.
By the mid-1960s, a network was in place
that connected quantitative researchers and
Departments of Geography on both sides of
the Atlantic. Holding it together were two new
sets of geographical practices: technique-based
practices that included computerization, and
the study and application of ever more complex statistical and quantitative methods;
and theory-based practices that involved conceptualizing location and space in rigorously
abstract terms. Before the 1950s, human
geography was resolutely a-theoretical (see
also empiricism). The quantitative revolution
brought a cornucopia of theoretical models
typically imported from other disciplines.
From physics came gravity models and
later entropy-maximizing models; from economics, often by way of regional science,
came the models of a dispersed German
school of location theory; from sociology
came the urban models of the chicago
school, together with urban factorial ecology and the rank size rule; and from
611
QUEER THEORY
geometry via transportation studies came
networks and graph theory. And from the
philosophy and history of science came a
model of ‘the structure of scientific revolutions’ (see paradigm) that could be used, rhetorically at least, to legitimize the quantitative
revolution as a genuinely scientific revolution.
In the process the dominant stream of research
in human geography moved from a fieldbased, craft-form of enquiry to a technical,
desk-bound one, where places were analysed
from afar.
Peter Gould (1978), one of the revolutionaries, labelled the era of the quantitative revolution, ‘The Augean period’, after the mythic
Augean stables that – after thirty years of neglect – were cleaned all of a piece by Hercules.
Equating quantitative revolutionaries with
Hercules and an earlier non-quantitative geography with the Augean stables speaks to at
least two sociological processes marking the
revolution. (1) The heroic depiction points to
the quantitative revolution’s profound masculinism (and, arguably, to its whiteness too).
Initial proponents and expositors were all
men; there were virtually no substantive studies of women; and the disembodied, totalizing
knowledge produced was phallocentric (see
phallocentrism: see also situated knowledge). (2) The cleansing metaphor indicates
how desperately keen revolutionaries were to
quarantine themselves from the past. Partly
this was intellectual, but, as Taylor (1976)
argues, it was also for internal sociological
reasons. To move ahead, to secure early promotion and status, it was necessary to do
something different. For a group of very
bright, young, ambitious and competitive
male scholars, the quantitative revolution was
the perfect vehicle.
At some point in the late 1960s, or early
1970s, the grip of the quantitative revolution
on the discipline loosened. There are at least
two reasons. First, a different kind of world
was emerging that was more restless, and less
innocent than before. Great debates were happening around issues of poverty, civil rights,
the environment, gender and racial equality,
and war, but the quantitative revolution
seemed unable or unwilling to address them.
The ensuing relevance debate of the early
1970s left quantifiers flat-footed. As Harvey
(1973, p. 129) damningly put it, ‘There is an
ecological problem, an urban problem, an
international trade problem, and yet we seem
incapable of saying anything of depth or profundity about any of them. When we do say
something, it appears trite and slightly ludi612
crous. In short, our paradigm is not coping
well. It is ripe for overthrow.’ Second, an academic generation had passed since the first
quantifiers, and the time was ripe for change.
A new vocabulary was forged to mark off the
old from the new, in this case, one principally
derived from marxism (Harvey, 1973). There
were other, immediate contenders too, including a humanistic geography that sought to
develop human geography’s connections with
the humanities rather than the social sciences.
But the important point, and why the quantitative revolution remains a watershed in geography’s recent history, is that Marxism and its
successor projects persisted with a theoretical
vocabulary. (It is as well to remember that the
humanities are every bit as ‘theoretical’ in their
sensibility as the social sciences.) Certainly the
meaning of theory altered, as many different
avenues were explored, but the continuity of a
theoretical vocabulary has proven more important in subsequently shaping the discipline
than rupture.
tb
Suggested reading
Barnes (2004).
queer theory A panoply of always-questioning and destabilizing theoretical and intellectual movements that centre on the significance
and complexities of sexualities and genders. It
emerged in the 1990s (see de Lauretis, 1991)
within the humanities, but has travelled into
the social sciences, and so into human geography. By its very nature, the term resists
being pinned down or essentialized. Above
all, queer theory draws on both senses of the
term ‘queer’. It refers both to an array of nonnormative sexualities and/or desires (lesbian/
gay/bisexual/pansexual/asexual/transsexual/
transgendered (see psychoanalytic theory), and invokes the sense of challenging
norms of sexuality by referencing the curious, odd or strange (de Lauretis, 1991;
Jagose, 1996).
Two uses of the term are apparent. First,
queer theory is used loosely to describe any
theoretically inflected work in gay and lesbian
studies. Using the term in such a way frustrates queer theorists who valorize the perspective’s unabashedly and relentless push to
critique. Second, and more precisely, as an
instance of post-structuralism and postmodernism, queer theory epistemologically
challenges the ubiquity of heteronormativity
(see homophobia and heterosexism). It
perpetually and relentlessly destabilizes our
quotidian ideas by rejecting any fixed or stable
QUESTIONNAIRE
notions of sexuality and gender, their representations or their effects (see essentialism;
feminist geographies; performativity: see
also Jagose, 1996; Sullivan, 2003).
The dilemma with any dictionary definition
of this term is that it is meant to refuse fixing
or defining, or delimiting a research trajectory,
because such a move logically excludes facets
of sexualities, or strategies to rethink them.
This conundrum reflects the tendency of
dominant discourses to assimilate any moves
that resist or stand outside of them (see discourse). Thus there is a discernable anxiety
about whether the radical potential of this
term is being evacuated as its popularity
grows and it is stretched to cover any work
being done by or about gays and lesbians
(Sothern, 2004).
Queer theory’s relationship with geography
has been two-directional, if rather uneven.
Queer theorists demand that geographers recognize – and attend to – their own heteronormativity, but it also introduces the problematic
of homonormativity, which is to say, the disciplining effects of privileging and imposing any
sexuality or desire to the exclusion or stigmatization of others (Sothern, 2004). It has enabled geographers interested in sexuality and
space to maintain a focus on place, yet also
incorporate an appreciation and awareness of
movement, migration, placelessness and
multiple scales (e.g. Knopp, 2004). Geographers, historians and architects have tried
to point out that queer theory’s roots in the
humanities, often marked by a suspicion of
empiricism, and penchant for discourse analysis of literary texts, open it to charges of a
rather unqueer geographical imagination,
where the materiality of the world is sometimes lost in a sea of textuality. While
queer theorists have been willing to
appreciate the significance of spatiality and
nature–society
dualities
(Halberstram,
2005), they have been rather slow to acknowledge the work of geographers who themselves
are informed by queer theory.
mb
Suggested reading
Jagose (1996); Sullivan (2003).
questionnaire An instrument for collecting
data for survey analysis. Every respondent is
asked the same questions, in the same way and
in the same sequence. This differs from the
more open-ended, conversational format of
interviews and other qualitative methods.
Questionnaires can be used to collect information to classify respondents (e.g. gender,
income or age), to learn about their behaviour
(e.g. voting practices, number of hours of
television viewing per week or recycling behaviour) and to understand their attitudes.
Questionnaires may be administered faceto-face, over the phone or via the internet,
or they can be mailed and self-administered.
There are advantages and disadvantages to
each mode of administering questionnaires,
including cost, response rate, accuracy of responses and the level of detail that can be
obtained. One mode of delivery is not superior
to another: the advantages and disadvantages
are weighed in relation to the research question.
Because one of the strengths of survey research is the capacity to establish patterns over
large populations, questionnaires must be very
carefully designed so as to be unambiguous to
a large number of people. They must be unbiased and simply understood, with clear instructions of how to respond. There are
standard pitfalls to avoid, such as the inclusion
of double negatives and double-barrelled
questions. Nevertheless, there is no avoiding
the fact that questions are inevitably framed
from a certain perspective and, in the case of
face-to-face or telephone interviews, the presence of an interviewer will have effects that can
only be understood rather than removed (see
interviews and interviewing). A variety of
types of questions can be asked, including
open-ended ones. Closed-ended questions
standardize responses across a given set of
responses and are already structured for statistical analysis. Open-ended questions require
coding before statistical analysis, but are suitable if the full range of possible responses is
unknown, or the topic is a sensitive or complex
one that requires some explanation or qualification. Because questionnaire design is so difficult and so important, focus groups can be
used to understand interpretations of particular questions and questionnaires are always
pre-tested.
Questionnaires are considered by some to
be best suited for discovering patterns and
less helpful for studying causal relationships.
Marsh (1982) assesses these criticisms and
provides a careful guide for questionnaire design so as to enhance the utility of questionnaires for statistical causal analysis. This
involves collecting data on many different variables, beyond ones identified as independent
(causal) and dependent (effect) variables, including possible confounding, antecedent and
intervening variables. She also provides guidelines for asking people about their reasons for
doing things. This ‘reasons analysis’ involves
613
QUESTIONNAIRE
asking a series of questions that break the reasoning process down in such a way as to assist
the respondent in explaining their reasons.
Concerns are also expressed about the accuracy and truthfulness of survey research, and it
is as well to remember that some characteristics of the survey context promote truthfulness so as to emphasize these features. These
614
include underlining to the respondent the fact
that their completion of the questionnaire is
entirely voluntary, and that their responses are
a valuable contribution to understanding an
important research question.
gp
Suggested reading
Babbie (2001); Parfitt (2005).
R
race A historical means of social classification and differentiation that attempts to
essentialize political and cultural differences
by linking physical traits (i.e. skin, blood,
genes) and social practices (i.e. religion, violence, passion) to innate, immutable characteristics (see essentialism). Race as a concept
presumes that characteristics (tendencies,
behaviours, dispositions, interests) of an individual can be projected to understandings of
essential traits of a population or that the presumed traits of a population can be discerned
through the characteristics of an individual.
Though these assumptions have been widely
and exhaustively disproven, they still operate
as ‘common sense’ in society with powerful
and violent effects. As such, race is a social
construction but racism is a material fact.
The contemporary meaning of ‘race’ has
roots in older forms of hierarchy and classification, but its contemporary form as an innate
physiological or genetic means of differentiating individuals and populations is largely
the product of eighteenth-century social
relationships associated with the European
enlightenment and colonialism (see also
europe). Most scholars agree that earlier
forms of social differentiation and hierarchy
were different from modern ideas of race. In
the ancient world, for example, the Greeks
distinguished between the ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarous’, the Romans between freedom and
slavery, and the Christians between the savage
and the saved. But in all these cases difference
was not fixed: barbarians could become ‘civilized’ in Greek cities, Roman slaves were not
determined by inherited traits, and Christians
were offered the possibility of salvation
through conversion.
The most powerful antecedents to the contemporary notion of race can be found in the
Christian notion of the Great Chain of Being,
which depicted a hierarchy in the order of
things as immutably fixed by God, and the
idea of succession to kingship or royalty based
on a line of descent (or bloodline). These
notions provided the basis for identifying
populations through a fixed and defining feature such as blood. In the fifteenth century, for
example, it was deemed impossible for Jews to
convert to Christianity by virtue of their blood,
a doctrine that helped to define the notion
of a Jewish population that was supposedly
distinctive and unassimilable through its
shared immutable qualities. Similar appeals
to a naturalized hierarchy were made in
the sixteenth-century debates between
Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de
Sepúlveda, concerning the treatment of the
indigenous inhabitants of the Spanish colonies
in South America as either child-like human
beings (who could thus be converted to
Christianity) or ‘savages’ (whose exploitation
could be justified through their lower position
in the natural order of things). The Spanish
Empire developed a doctrine of ‘blood purity’
(limpeza de sangre) that allowed and even
required the differential treatment of those
who could not be converted because of the
supposed impurity of their blood, and the
subsequent hierarchical classification by
blood provided an influential precedent for
modern formations of race (Darder and
Torres, 2004).
The term ‘race’ came into English usage in
the seventeenth century and here too it was
most forcefully articulated through AngloAmerican projects of colonization in the
New World. In developing a concept of civilization that was supposedly coterminous
with the west, particularly in the eighteenth
century, Europeans and Americans fabricated cultural and behavioral (‘racial’) traits
that legitimized their own superiority and
exploitative colonial practices. But these
ascriptions were more than the product of
an expansive, exploitative and European project of modernity, and scholars such as Ann
Stoler (1995) and Paul Gilroy (2000a) have
sought to show that ‘race’ is constitutive of
modernity itself.
The modern notion of ‘race’ thus has a
complex genealogy, but it has been most
forcefully advanced through the claim that it
is a demonstrably scientific concept. As such,
‘race’ is inseparable from the development of
so-called ‘natural history’ in general and the
work of the Swedish scholar Carolus Linnaeus
(1707–71) in particular. Linnaeus is usually
regarded as the founder of modern scientific
systems of classification. He divided human
beings into four taxonomic sub-orders, whose
615
RACE
distinctive traits he directly linked to skin
colour. Thus the Europeaeus was supposedly
white, gentle, sanguine, inventive and ruled
by law, while Africanus was black, crafty,
negligent and governed by caprice. In developing this taxonomy, Linneaus effectively
subsumed cultural formations within the
taxonomical order of nature. In 1745, the
French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc
Buffon (1707–88) explicitly introduced the
term ‘race’ into natural history and, developing Linnaeus’ categories, divided human
beings into separate ‘races’. Although Buffon
acknowledged the artificiality of these divisions, they were subsequently reified by the
German anthropologist and physiologist
Johnann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–
1840), who developed a classification of
five human types based on cranial skull
measurements: this system served as the ‘scientific’ basis for racial classification for almost
200 years – and even though it has been
widely repudiated, it is still present in popular
culture today.
But it was through darwinism and populist
simplifications of Darwin’s ideas of ‘natural
selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ that the
most pernicious formations of ‘race’ were naturalized. Most notable was Francis Galton
(1822–1911), Darwin’s half-cousin, who
applied a version of Darwinian theories to
human society and in 1883 developed the
concept of Eugenics (‘good genes’) to encourage socially engineered heredity as a means of
improving the human race. In the USA, the
Eugenics movement found an appreciative
audience in the context of increasing immigration, poverty and violent labour politics,
where it seemed to offer a means not only of
social improvement but also of social control.
The initial focus was on ‘positive eugenics’
through birth control, selective breeding and
eventually genetic engineering to assure ‘better babies’; but a ‘negative eugenics’ was subsequently developed, which advocated forced
sterilization and segregation to preserve the
purity of the white race. These concepts
reached their hideous climax in Nazi
Germany under the banner of ‘racial
hygiene’, when ‘Aryan’ women were impregnated by SS officers, hundreds of thousands
of people who were declared unfit were sterilized, and millions more ‘undesirables’,
primarily Jews but also gypsies and homosexuals, were murdered to protect the ‘purity’ of
the Aryan race (see holocaust). Here,
616
modern biological racism was taken to its
‘logical’ end, in which some presumed innate
behavioral qualities and social status could
only be addressed through the extermination
of the biology of individuals who were considered the sources of the problem (Larson,
1995: cf. biopolitics).
Even after the widespread postwar repudiation of Nazi race science and Eugenics, the
claim that there is an innate scientific basis to
‘race’, fusing physiological features to social
behaviours, is still a common means of social
classification, and continues to be a powerful
strategy of dividing, ranking and controlling
people around the world. Newer efforts from
sociobiology, neo-Darwinism, evolutionary
psychology, some strains of evolutionary
anthropology and biology as well as some
versions of genetics continue to search for a
physical basis for ‘racial’ difference, while
state-sponsored systems of racial profiling
assume that such a basis has been found and
can be deployed as an effective weapon against
crime or terrorism.
The problem with the debates around race,
as W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out over a century
ago when he abandoned his efforts to show its
erroneous foundation, is that the very idea of
race has been so comprehensively woven into
the social and psychological fabric of society
that simply revealing the fallaciousness of
racial classification does little to expunge the
term or diminish its extraordinary power. He
wrote that ‘in the fight against race prejudice,
we were not facing simply the rational conscious determination of white folk to oppress
us; we were facing age-long complexes sunk
now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge’ (Du Bois, 1986 [1940], p. 296). This
realization that constructs of ‘race’ are embedded within the formation of modern human
subjectivity was developed by Frantz Fanon
(1925–61) who, in Black skin, white masks in
particular, emphasized how ‘race’ is implicated in both how one comes to know and
define a self and how that self is articulated
and transformed as it acts and is acted upon in
the world (Fanon, 1967 [1952]). These and
other critiques prompted a shift towards an
analysis of how ‘race’ comes into being though
law, popular culture and everyday practices of
racial formation (see also post-colonialism).
The critique of race-based cultural formations has been reinforced by parallel debates
within and, indeed, about the very ‘nature’ of
science. Most famously, Richard Lewontin
RACISM
and Stephen J. Gould challenged the biological and genetic basis of racial identification, arguing that there is more genetic
variation within a nominally ‘racial’ group
than between such groups. However, these
and other scholars effectively placed nature
outside the field of culture and politics, arguing either that ‘race’ was cultural and not natural or that genetic maps could not be
projected on to cultural behaviours (Haraway,
1989). As such, the debate often became
polarized between nature and nurture: Was
race a biological category or a cultural one?
Science was assumed to have the authority to
speak for nature and, as a result, the cultural
politics of the supposed ‘science of race’ was
left largely unchallenged. More recent scholarship in science and technology studies by
Donna Haraway (1989), Nancy Stepan Leyes
(1990 [1986]) and Ian Hacking (1999) has
help move away from the nature–culture dualism that underwrote these discussions, and has
shown that nature and the voices that speak for
and about race and the science of race are
always already bound up in politics.
These approaches to understanding race
have been echoed in contemporary black cultural studies, Chicano studies, ethnic studies
and critical race theory, which have
approached racial difference and affinities as
constructed through social struggles, shared
histories and everyday practices positioning
racialized subjects and their formation within
multiple relations of power. Rather than fixed
difference, ‘race’ is understood as a contingent
formation unevenly produced in different
times and places with no invariant meaning
or universal form (see, e.g., Hesse, 2000;
Fregoso, 2003; Moore, Kosek and Pandian,
2003). As such, many scholars of difference
have abandoned the term ‘race’ altogether,
moving ‘beyond race’ to address the multiple
forms and particularities of social relations,
and denying any overarching integrity or
coherence to race as an analytical concept
while still being attentive to the ways in which
racism(s) are a lived daily reality.
jk
Suggested reading
Essed and Goldberg (2002); Gilroy (2000);
Miles and Brown (2003).
racial districting An aspect of redistricting
within the USA intended to ensure that racial
minorities – notably African-Americans and
Hispanics – do not suffer from discrimination,
through such strategies as gerrymandering.
Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, states with
records of such discrimination are required to
get redistricting plans pre-cleared by the Department of Justice. This usually involves ensuring that there are sufficient ‘minority-majority
districts’ so that, for example, if 30 per cent
of a state’s population is African-American,
then 30 per cent of its Congressional Districts
should contain an African-American majority.
Such schemes remain open to challenge
through the courts on other grounds.
rj
Suggested reading
Kousser (1999).
racialization A historically contingent and
contested process through which racial meanings are extended in attempts to define or
redefine relationship, social practice, object, individuals or group. The term has become widely
used as a means of stressing that ‘race’ is a
social, economic, political and psychological
process that must be explained, rather than a
biological one that is determined by inherent
characteristics (Omi and Winant, 1996).
Although its origins date back to the late nineteenth century, its current use can be traced
to Frantz Fanon’s exploration of the relational
aspects of racial formation and physical
and social dimensions of European domination and colonialism (Fanon, 1967 [1961]).
More recently, many scholars have developed
reservations about the term because its overusage and vagueness has led to less rigorous
attention to the specific practices and dynamics of racial formation (Goldberg, 2002). jk
Suggested reading
Barot and Bird (2001); Essed and Goldberg
(2002); Miles (1993); Murji and Solomos (2005).
racism Any act that links tendencies, affinities, behaviours or characteristics to an individual or community based on innate, indelible
or physiological attributes, intended or not, is
an act of racism. Racism is also the prejudice,
hierarchical differentiation, discrimination
and so on that results from these essentialized
understandings of race as an innate factor
that determines human traits and abilities.
Racism may be manifest individually, through
explicit thoughts, feelings or acts, or socially,
through institutions and practices that reproduce and essentialize difference and inequities
(see essentialism; cf. apartheid).
617
RADICAL DEMOCRACY
Racism is now so extensively used in political discourse that it often gives the impression
of being a timeless universal concept. In fact,
the word did not exist in the English language
until the 1930s, and only slightly before in
German and French. Its rise coincides with
the specific context of 1930–40s Germany.
Specifically, ‘racism’ at the time was employed
as a political critique of the German biologized
understanding of race (see holocaust). Although the roots of the term have a much longer
and divergent history, racism as a phenomenon
was present in multiple forms before the use of
the term. Among these forms were the relational
differentiation of the Self and the Other in colonial practices, in which the securing of one’s
own positive identity was formed against the
stigmatization of the inferior characteristics
(often fixed through physical or biological characteristics) of an ‘Other’ (see colonialism).
However, some critics have become wary of
understanding racism as simply biological or
physical, asserting that culture or ethnicity
can be reified and naturalized to the point at
which they become ‘functionally’ equivalent to
biological understandings of race (Fredrickson,
2002). The idea of cultural racism was first
presented in 1952 by Frantz Fanon, who saw
the emphasis on cultural differences as a modern replacement of biologically based ideas of
different races (see Fanon, 1967 [1952]). Still
later, Martin Barker pointed to what he called
the ‘new racism’ that arose through the conservative political milieu in England in the late
1970s and 1980s, in which conservatives and
liberals alike would criticize biological ideas of
race only to naturalize ideas of community
and culture (Barker, 1981). Etienne Balibar
argues that this new racism in europe is actually ‘racism without race’, in which ideas of
immutable human difference are used to rigidify racial categories or assert the impossibility
of coexistence (Balibar, 1991b, p. 23; see also
Gilroy, 2000a). This concept of the ‘new
racism’ was taken up by other writers, most
notably a group at the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies in the UK,
who came to understand racism, or more
accurately racisms, as highly variable historical
formations with shifting meanings that are
temporally and spatially uneven and fiercely
contested. They, and later others, emphasized
the political importance of denying a universal
and essentialist understanding of race or
racism outside of the historically specific and
intimate contexts of their formations and practices (Hall, 1980, p. 336; Gilroy, 1987, 2000:
see also Goldberg, 1993; Stoler, 1995). These
618
understandings of racisms as spatially and
temporally variable, lacking any thematic
unity, or that challenge intrinsic characterizations of race, have been particularly important in contemporary understandings of new
forms of biological racism such as new genetic
determinism as well as historical and cultural racism, such as post 9/11 racism towards
Muslims, and neo-nationalist projects such as
the rise of nationalism in Europe.
jk
Suggested reading
Barker (1992); Fanon (1967 [1952]); Fredrickson
(2002); Gilroy (2000a); Miles (1993); Miles and
Brown (2003); Stoler (1997).
radical democracy A postmodernist or
post-structuralist rethinking of modern
democratic theory and practice. It takes a
broad-ranging and flexible perspective on
citizenship, emphasizing capacities to ‘be
political’ in a democracy rather than necessarily on rights-claims or formal membership
in a polity. It challenges two popular conceptualizations of the citizen. Rather than locating
citizenship as one identity or performance
alongside, but mutually exclusive to, others
(such as kin, worker, consumer etc.), as is
common in liberalism, or heroically elevating
it as the principal and optimal identity of the
individual, as is common in communitarianism, radical democracy rethinks citizenship as
a potential moment or dimension of any identity when it becomes politicized or contested
(Mouffe, 1993). Radical democracy is ‘radical’
because it refuses closure on the questions of
democracy everywhere, in all their forms. In
other words, it seeks to democratize all aspects
of politics, especially at sites of doxa, shared
assumptions, or where things are deemed
apolitical or pre-political
Radical democracy has important consequences for political geography. It has been
part of a turn towards a more encompassing
and theoretically informed way of understanding politics and the political. It has
helped geographers broaden their focus on
the state and sites of politics towards locations in civil society, public space and
the home, as well as hybrid spaces such as
the shadow state (Brown, 1997a). Barnett
(2004b) has cautioned, however, that the spatial rhetoric in radical democratic theory
desensitizes us to different temporal scales so
often at work in politics. He insists that we
must pay close attention to their complexity,
or else universalism will unintentionally creep
back into our thinking.
RADICAL GEOGRAPHY
Radical democracy also has implications
for social and cultural geography, given
its attention to multiple axes of power that
work through multiple subject identities (see
identity, subjectivity). How identities are
enabled and constrained as the subject moves
through space, for example, has been a point
of interest for radical democratic geographers
(e.g. Massey, 1995). Rejecting essentialism,
radical democracy implores a sensitivity to
the openness and fluidity of the subject. It
challenges the will for politics to fixate or
prioritize a single identity to the exclusion or
devaluation of others (e.g. where orthodox
marxism might privilege class struggle over
gender oppression).
This has been challenged by radical geography, which questions how one can have a
politics without at least some ethical or political commitments that must be treated as
essentialisms. A second criticism takes form
around the question of the constitutive outside
of the political. Simply put, even the most
post-structural of scholars has questioned
whether or not we can ever have a democratic
politics without some form of a constitutive
outside. Whenever there is a ‘we’ (or a ‘here’),
there is by definition, a ‘they’ (or a ‘there’)
who are ‘outside’ of deliberation or perhaps
even recognition. Yet logically such a border
itself might be quite anti-democratic. If the
promise is to always attack and render such
exclusionary political geographies, the political
issue at hand becomes deflected, and inevitably lost in an infinite regress of attending
to exclusions. Conversely, foreclosures and
boundaries around what is worthy of the
appellation ‘politics’ or ‘political’ are inherently anti-democratic since they leave no space
for those harmed by such foreclosures.
Addressing these paradoxes, political theorists advocate open, iterative and reflexive
standpoints in order to address these tensions,
but they admit these are by no means ‘solutions’ to the dilemma.
mb
Suggested reading
Mouffe (1993); Rasmussen and Brown (2002).
radical geography Approaches to geography committed to overturning relations of
power and oppression, and to constructing
more socially just, egalitarian and liberating
geographies and ways of living. The term
came to refer in particular to critiques of
spatial science and positivism in geography
during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and
to attempts to chart alternatives that were
socially relevant and sought fundamental
change. Many geographers were radicalized
by counter-culture movements and by waves
of political protest at the time; in particular,
struggles involving civil rights and against
the Vietnam War, imperialism, poverty and
inequality. They reacted against technocratic
approaches in geography that were unable to
speak to current pressing problems and that
served to support the status quo, and they
sought to study social issues from contrasting
viewpoints, especially those based on socialist,
feminist and anti-imperialist perspectives. The
establishment of Antipode: a Radical Journal of
Geography in 1969 by students and faculty at
Clark University, Massachusetts, provided an
important forum for Anglophone geographers,
with the opening issue declaring that it was
both necessary and possible to change university structures and ways of doing geography,
and to revolutionize the social and physical
environment
Early issues of Antipode were urgent, questioning, optimistic, combative in style and
diverse in content. Articles addressed issues
such as poverty, housing, services, planning,
research methodologies, imperialism, women
and war. The rediscovery of earlier radical
traditions of social concern in geography – in
particular, the anarchist geography of
Kropotkin and Reclus – inspired many. Others
conducted advocacy research and experimented with taking geography into the streets,
including through Bunge’s ‘geographical
expeditions’ that worked with low-income and
disenfranchised communities. Organizations
such as the Union of Socialist Geographers,
founded in 1974, advanced a radical presence
in the discipline. According to Peet, however,
early radical geography was ‘more relevant to
social issues but still tied to a philosophy of
science, a set of theories, and a methodology
developed within the existing framework of
power relationships’ (Peet, 1977b, p. 12).
Calls for overhauling the discipline’s theoretical
basis to address the deep causes rather than the
surface manifestations of problems led to a
‘breakthrough to marxism’ in the early to mid1970s, as the work of Harvey and others paved
the way for the analysis of capitalism and class
struggle (Harvey, 1973, 1999 [1982]).
Marxism became central to much radical
geography, which moved from an oppositional
and relatively marginalized position to become
a major force. Radical ideas and practices
developed within feminist geographies,
similarly committed to social change but critical of the gender-blindness of other radical
619
RANK-SIZE RULE
studies, became increasingly important.
Vigorous geographical debates were also
stimulated by post-colonialism and concern
with sexual liberation (see sexuality and queer
theory), as issues of cultural politics came
to the fore, with each of these approaches being
connected with political struggles inside as well
as outside the academy (Blunt and Wills,
2000). In an editorial marking the twenty-fifth
anniversary of Antipode, Walker and McDowell
(1993, pp. 2–3) signalled this diversity, arguing: ‘No single oppression or axis of social
life can be treated as merely secondary or an
afterthought of radical research or politics.
While socialism and Marxism remain central
to the vocabulary of the Left, we hold to no one
orthodox view of radical analysis.’
Radical approaches have become increasingly accepted and influential in the discipline,
yet much of the earlier optimism about the
prospects for fundamental social change has
receded. The idea of a ‘common vision’ or
project in geography has also been challenged.
Some have welcomed the pluralization of the
Left, but others have worried about its fragmentation and depoliticization, asserting that
while it is necessary to recognize the diversity
of current struggles, it is also important to find
points of commonality and unity between
them in order to enable political change.
Many now employ the term critical human
geography as a related and looser label for
ideas and practices committed to an emancipatory politics, and considerable discussion
has recently centred on the effects of institutionalization and professionalization within
the academy as well as on political commitment, on activism and on different ways of
contributing to progressive social change
(including through debates in Antipode about
‘what’s left?’; see also Castree, 2000). Initiatives
such as the conferences of the International
Critical Geography Group and the development of internet forums are providing new
means for developing and debating radical
perspectives, and for connecting different
forms of radical geography, which have their
own geographies and histories. Radical perspectives in geography are further being galvanized by current political struggles against
capitalism, imperialism, war and other forms
of oppression that underline the continuing
need for approaches that provide ‘[d]issentient
thoughts and norm challenging information’,
and that are prepared ‘to bring the undiscussed into discussion; to stray beyond established perimeters of opinion; to render the
familiar not only strange but, often-times,
620
unacceptable; and to explore the depths of
the meaning of ‘‘radical’’ itself as a conceptual
rubric’ (Castree and Wright, 2005, p. 2). dp
Suggested reading
Blunt and Wills (2000); Peet (1977, 2000).
rank-size rule An empirical regularity identified in the city-size distributions of some
countries and regions. Generally, if the cities
are ranked from 1 (the largest) to n (the smallest), then the population of any city – k – can
be determined from the equation:
Pk ¼ P1 =k,
where P1 is the population of the largest city
and Pk that of the city ranked kth. The steepness of the relationship between size and rank
is incorporated by raising k to the power b;
that is, kb. No convincing explanations for
the rule’s existence have been developed, however, nor for variations in the parameter b
between regions (e.g. why the fifth-largest city
is smaller, relative to the largest, in some
places than it is elsewhere).
rj
Suggested reading
Carroll (1982).
raster Raster is a GIS data structure akin to
placing a regular grid over a study region and
representing the geographical feature found in
each grid cell numerically: for example, 1 ¼
podsol, 2 ¼ clay and so on. Rasters are associated with remote sensing, image processing
and dynamic modelling, and are easily manipulated using map algebra (e.g. multiplying
geographically corresponding cell values in
two or more datasets) and neighbourhood
functions (e.g. returning the sum of values in
3 3 cell window). Rasters are simple but often
voluminous. Patterns in the data are therefore
compressed using run length encoding, quadtrees or wavelets.
rh
Suggested reading
DeMers (2001).
rational choice theory A normative theory of individual decision-making, claiming
that human action is motivated by getting the
most for the least. On the one hand, individuals strive to achieve an unlimited set of ends
where each end is associated with a different
level of satisfaction or utility, but, on the other
hand, they possess only a limited means to
realize those ends. The role of the rationality
REALISM
postulate is to ensure that the best ends – that
is, those yielding greatest individual satisfaction – are chosen given the constraint of limited means. Often couched in terms of the
mathematics of constrained maximization,
the problem of making the best choices is
formally shown to reduce to a formal set of
consistency requirements (Hahn and Hollis,
1979). Those requirements define rationality
in the sense that if any one of them is contravened, the choice is not rational.
The historical antecedents of rational choice
theory are with the British classical economists, but it is now most closely associated
with their successor, neo-classical economics, and a maverick strain of Marxism (analytical marxism). Within economics, it is not
just economic acts that are explained by
rational choice. The University of Chicago,
Nobel-Prize winning rational choice economist Gary Becker (1930– ) uses the theory to
explain all human acts from birth (the decision
to have a child) to death (choosing suicide)
and everything in between, including racial
discrimination, committing crime, going to
school, falling in love and filing for divorce
(Becker, 1976). Nothing falls outside the ‘lore
of calculated less or more’. The rational
choice assumption is deployed across the
social sciences, including sociology (rational
individuals choose their social class), political
science (scenarios of geopolitical brinkmanship modelled via game theory) and anthropology (cultures are ‘a collection of choicemaking individuals’; Burling, 1962, p. 811).
Within human geography, rational choice
theory is most frequently found in economic
geography and, in particular, in the formal
location theory associated with regional
science. Its role is to impose a determinant
order on spatial arrangements, allowing the
theorist to make scientific claims to precision,
exact inference and predictability.
There have been many criticisms of the
rationality assumption, and they frequently
focus on the unrealistic characteristics attributed to the rational actor (sometimes
described in the gendered language of Homo
economicus, or ‘rational economic man’): perfect knowledge; unyielding egoism; independent preferences; the ability and desire to
maximize utility (minimize costs); and pursuit
of a single goal (see satisficing behaviour).
Such criticisms are often moot, however,
because the rationality postulate by its very
construction is empirically untestable, a normative rather than a ‘positive’ theory, and
therefore charges of unrealism have little
purchase. More incisive are those criticisms
that tackle the normative character of the postulate by arguing that it offers an unappealing
vision of the world. Karl Marx (1818–83) (see
Marx, 1976 [1867], ch. 6) satirizes rational
choice by invoking the invidious character of
‘Mr Moneybags’, and the American institutional economist, Thorstein Veblen (1857–
1929) (see Veblen, 1919, p. 73), makes it
clear that ‘economic man’ is not even close
to human: he is a ‘homogenous globule of
desire . . . with neither antecedent nor consequent. He is an isolated, definitive human
datum, in stable equilibrium except for the
buffers of the impinging forces that displace
him in one direction or another’ (see institutional economics). Another line of attack is
to criticize the postulate’s intellectual origins
and consistency. Mirowski (1989) does this by
locating both the conceptual corpus of the
rational actor and its associated mathematical
techniques within the nineteenth-century
physics of energetics. In other words, the rationality postulate was brought to social science via
re-description: it is a metaphor. Apart from the
fact that energetics itself was short-lived and
quickly superseded, Mirowski argues that those
economists who took up the metaphor never
successfully transferred the core relations from
physics to economics. The gap is of two different
worlds, revealing a contradiction at the very
heart of the project.
tb
Suggested reading
Barnes (1996, chs 2 and 3).
realism Realism comes in many forms, and
realists vary widely in what they are prepared
to be realist about. At its most general, realism
entails belief in an external world that exists
and acts independently of our knowledge of it
or beliefs about it. The weakest form of realism simply asserts this belief, but is unspecific
about what exists. A ‘common-sense realism’
asserts the existence of everyday objects, such
as trees, stones or chairs. All of us are probably
realists at this level. In the humanities, realism
identifies a broad literary movement that identified art in general, and literature in particular, with the truthful representation of
the world through the meticulous and dispassionate observation of contemporary life. Its
central arch spanned the mid-nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries – from the novels of
Gustave Flaubert (who in fact rejected the
label) to those of Henry James – and some
writers later re-described the project as a
‘naturalism’. Thus Émile Zola argued that in
621
REALISM
matters of cultural criticism and literary
description ‘we must imitate the naturalists’.
It is this possibility of naturalism that has
propelled realism in philosophy, science
and the social sciences (Bhaskar, 1998 [1979])
‘Scientific realism’ asserts the existence of
various observable and unobservable entities of
which it claims to be capable of giving the best
representations. Many scientific realists subscribe to an ‘entity’ realism, which asserts the
existence of many, well-established theoretical
entities (various atomic particles, for example),
but not necessarily to a ‘semantic’ realism, or
belief in the truth of any one theory about such
entities that correctly represents or mirrors ‘the
way things really are’ (Hacking, 1983). There
are also profound differences amongst scientific
realists on notions of truth, reference, inference
and explanation (Psillos, 1999). Matters are a
little simpler in the social sciences in that a
particular version of realism, critical realism,
has become dominant and the focus of most
debate. This is a version particularly associated
with the work of Bhaskar (1986, 1989, 1998
[1979]) and Sayer (1992 [1984], 2000).
Early formulations of critical realism typically developed its main elements by asking
what reality must be like to make the existence
of science and its successes possible, which
leads to a critique of the impoverished assumptions underlying empiricism or positivism.
Critical realists reject the possibility of basing
science on a ‘flat’ ontology of atomistic sense
impressions. They make more complex ontological claims, distinguishing the empirical
(events that we experience), the actual (events
that happen whether we experience them or
not) and the real (a deeper dimension of
objects, structures and generative mechanisms
that produce events).
Critical realists also reject a restricted, positivistic view of causality as the constant conjunction of observable events (a ‘regularity
view’ of causation): ‘If A, then B’ (see law,
scientific). Critical realists point out that the
social sciences usually deal with open systems,
rather than closed systems that can be artificially produced in a scientific laboratory.
Although regularities are rare in such open
systems, this does not mean that causes are
not at work. Causes are thus best thought of
as tendencies of objects, with distinctive
powers in virtue of their essential structures,
to act in certain ways. However, it is contingent whether and how those powers are
activated in different combinations in different
contexts to produce varying effects. Predictive
success is thus difficult to achieve, but it may
622
be possible to identify the underlying causal
mechanisms beneath the flux of surface phenomena. The distinctive mode of inference
to such mechanisms is called variously abduction, retroduction or inference to the best
explanation.
Powers are also often ‘emergent’ in the
sense that the powers of objects or structures
to produce effects are not reducible to those of
their constituents (e.g. the powers of classes or
groups may be more than the sum of the
powers of their individual members). Reality
is thus stratified in the sense that powers and
mechanisms operative in one strata are not
simply reducible to those of a lower strata.
Critical realists also make an important distinction between necessary and contingent
properties or relations. Objects are necessarily
or internally related if they are what they
are by virtue of their relationships to each
other (e.g. the relationship between landlords and tenants – each requires the other
in order to be what it is). What we term
‘structures’ are made up of such networks of
internal relations and define positions to be
occupied by actors. However, it is often
contingent who occupies these positions
(landlords may be young or old, male or
female etc.). abstraction is defined as the
key procedure for identifying such structures
by disentangling what are necessary from what
are contingent relationships.
Critical realism also offers a distinctive perspective on familiar agency–structure dualisms
that bedevil human geography and, indeed,
the humanities and social sciences more generally (see human agency). Individual agency
presupposes a social structure, and vice versa,
but social structure and agency are ontologically distinct levels with different properties and
causal powers (e.g. social structures are enabling and constraining; individuals have selfconsciousness and reflexivity). Individuals
may reproduce social structures through their
everyday practices and understandings, but
the ‘critical’ moment in critical realism lies in
the belief that bringing underlying structures
and their unconscious reproduction to the
level of consciousness opens the way for emancipatory critique and social change.
Critical realism provides a philosophical
framework for social science, but it does
not prescribe a particular methodology. It is
compatible with a range of qualitative techniques and quantitative techniques that
can aid the identification of causal structures,
including hermeneutic and interpretivist
approaches.
RECONSTRUCTION
Realism contends with various forms of
anti-realism in the guise of postmodernism,
pragmatism and social construction. A key
focus of debate concerns the meaningfulness
of referring to a reality outside of the conceptual systems that we use to talk about it. From
a pragmatist angle, Rorty (1979) argues that it
is meaningless to talk about conceptual systems
representing or ‘mirroring’ an extra-linguistic
reality (see also representation). In the sociology of science, radical constructivists argue
that reality is not something existing outside of
scientific discourse, but is essentially a discursive construction (see social construction).
Critical realists typically respond to such
claims with the argument that although social
reality may be highly concept-dependent, this
does not mean that it is concept-determined in
such an idealist way.
The division between realism and antirealism runs through most areas of social
science, including marxism and feminism.
However, the divisions should not be exaggerated. A ‘realistic constructivism’ would recognize both the ways in which scientific discourse
is powerfully shaped by social interests and
cultural values, and the constraining role of
objective material realities. The relationship
between discourse and reality is an interactive
and reflexive one. At a more general level,
Sayer (2000) has argued powerfully that critical realism occupies a ‘Third Way’ between
the untenable extremes of empiricism on the
one hand and postmodernism on the other.
Certainly, critical realism was a vital intervention in the critique of spatial science and the
refinement of marxist geography in particular; it was also invoked to underwrite structuration theory. There was a lively debate
about ‘the difference that space makes’ to
explanation under the sign of critical realism
(Sayer, 1985). Spatial relations are clearly
important in analysing the contingent circumstances, the specific combinations of conditions under which causal powers might be
realized, but several geographers argued that
spatial relations also enter into the very constitution of the social structures involved (see
space). For a time, critical realism also held
out the prospect of a plenary geography,
drawing human geography into a conversation
with physical geography through a commitment to a common and recognizably ‘scientific’
programme. That was never achieved: by the
time most physical geographers had become
interested in realism, most human geographers
had started to ask critical questions about its
claims and consequences (e.g. Yeung, 1997),
and many of them soon moved on to explore
philosophies outside the confines of the philosophy of science, which were typically treated
as resources rather than rule-books.
kb/dg
Suggested reading
Brown, Fleetwood and Roberts (2002); Carter
and New (2004); Danermark, Ekstrom, Jakobsen
and Karlsson (2002); Sayer (2006).
recognition The recognition of rights and
needs tied to identity became a focus of
much social movement activity in the 1980s
and 1990s. This is known as identity politics,
and is associated with a proliferation and fragmentation of social movements around identities of gender, race, disability, ethnicity,
sexuality (amongst others), taken up by some
states as state-sponsored multiculturalism.
Criticisms of politics of recognition have come
from across the political spectrum. marxists
have expressed concern about the dissolution
of the unifying class struggle. Within feminism, Fraser and Honneth (2003) have drawn
a dichotomy between politics of recognition
and redistribution, arguing that the former
neglects political economic issues and geopolitical developments, as well as simplifying
and reifying group identities. (But see Butler
(1998) for the argument that this binary
misrepresents the complexity of calls for recognition insofar as they are typically intertwined with demands for redistribution.) In a
different register, feminists such as Grosz (2005)
advocate a politics of imperceptibility – a politics
that unleashes unexpected events and encounters without being identified with a person,
group or organization. Some European intellectuals criticize the politics of identity and difference within their national context as another
instance of American cultural imperialism.
Mitchell (2004b) considers how this last critique
converges with a growing conservative backlash
against ‘differentialism’.
gp
Suggested reading
Fraser (2000).
reconstruction Meaning ‘building again’,
reconstruction is generally used in the development community to refer to a cluster of
actions to restore or re-equip economies that
previously were developed or in transition to
sustainable economic growth. These are distinguished from actions aimed at stimulating
growth and good governance in the poorest
countries, those once described as underdeveloped. This distinction goes back at least as far
623
RECREATION
as the founding of the World Bank in 1944.
The modern World Bank contains two institutions: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the
International
Development
Association
(IDA). The IBRD made the first World Bank
loan: $250 million to France in May 1947 for
the reconstruction of its war-torn economy.
The IBRD continues to be active in middleincome and transitional economies, providing
loans for disaster relief purposes, in postconflict situations and to post-socialist
economies. Since 1991, The European Bank
for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)
has joined the IBRD in central Europe and
central Asia.
Reconstruction efforts sponsored by the
IBRD and the EBRD have not been without
their critics. Both institutions are committed
to what they describe as democratization
and market-led economic growth, and the
agendas of good governance or the new public administration feature strongly in their selfdescriptions. However, good governance was
not at the top of the reconstruction agenda
in Russia under President Yeltsin: the shock
therapy recommended by Yeltsin’s advisers –
including the Americans Jeffrey Sachs and
David Lipton – led not only to price decontrol
and currency convertibility, but also to the
wholesale transfer of state assets to private
monopolists. Sachs prefers to speak of ‘radical
reforms’ rather than shock therapy (2005,
p. 135) – but the shocking result of these
measures (shocking, at any rate, to some
mainstream economists) was a ruthless and
often violent struggle for power, assets and
territory. Far from providing an equitable
restructuring of the economy of the former
Soviet Union, reconstruction efforts have
too often led to what David Harvey (2003b)
calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (see
also primitive accumulation). Hugely widening inequalities in income levels and healthcare provision have been just two results of
reconstruction in Russia. Elsewhere, as in the
Czech Republic and Poland, less dramatic
reconstruction efforts have come closer to meeting the targets set by their governments and
their international counterparts.
sco
Suggested reading
Hoogvelt (2001); Ledeneva (1998).
recreation Pursuits or activities (even
inactivity) undertaken voluntarily outside paid
employment for the primary purpose of pleasure, enjoyment and satisfaction. Recreational
624
activities tend to be distinguished, in academic
studies, from sports as not involving formal
rules of competition. Such a division is also
problematic, as sports may be undertaken
non-competitively (e.g. one might play golf
without competing), and other activities
may involve more-or-less competitive elements with greater or lesser formalization (e.g.
multi-player computer games contain highly
formalized rules for competition, but would
rarely be considered a sport). Recreational
activities could be part of tourism, if occurring away from the place of domicile, or
leisure, if occurring while at home, and the
definitions of all the categories are very
porous. A number of distinctions are often
made regarding recreation’s orientation and
organization.
Formal and informal recreations are often
differentiated. Formal recreation involves
activities that are structured and organized
by an external body in prescribed times or
places. This would thus include clubs, hobby
societies and other organizations. Informal recreation refers to self-organized activities
occurring at times and/or places of the individual’s own choosing. Trends to formalize
more recreational activities have been linked
to their commodification and the increasing
sale of recreational goods – the production of
which has become a major industry in the
developed world. A further division often made
is between passive and active recreation –
playing in a band is active, while listening
to one is passive. This distinction imports
judgements freighted with normative values.
A variety of policy initiatives around health
have sought to encourage ‘active’ forms of
recreation to increase fitness. Likewise, moral
panics have often linked passive recreation to
fears of youngster’s becoming ‘couch potatoes’
or otherwise harmed by the passive enjoyment
of especially digital media. The assumption of
passive consumption is contestable, since
consumers may actively contribute to events
and participate in numerous ways – transforming events or goods through their interpretations and reactions.
Geographies of recreation have tended to
focus upon the effects on the environment and
our relationship with it, and then the way in
which spaces structure the availability and
nature of recreational opportunities. For
instance, the development of climbing fashions
both discourses and tactile or haptic ways of
knowing and valuing the environment (Lorimer
and Lund, 2003; Taylor, 2006b). Alternatively,
looking at environmental effects (such as
REDISTRIBUTION
footpath erosion; see Liddle, 1997) or social
impacts (such as contested claims and control)
of recreation upon spaces might be a focus.
Recreation can forge norms of appropriate conduct within spaces and lead to conflict, for
instance, in parks or green spaces if different
groups (in terms of age, ethnicity or sexuality) have clashing recreational practices. A
major strand of work has been disaggregating
the social and physical factors affecting access to
recreation in terms of income or disability or
more hidden social factors. For instance, periurban woodland may be more-or-less physically
accessible, but this may be compounded by fear
of crime differentiating access by gender
(Burgess, 1996). Work has looked to trends
such as the commodification of recreation or
the increasing spatial restrictions of children’s
access to spaces of informal recreation in light of
fears over their safety (Smith and Barker, 2001;
Valentine, 2004; Department of Communities
and Local Government, 2006). Recreation thus
has to be seen as linked to the wider production of space, production of nature and
changing practices of consumption, where
recent work has looked at recreational practices
of dance, moving from studies of subcultures to
discuss performance and body cultures, especially via non-representational theory. mc
are also characterized by an agglomeration of
off-street work in the form of ‘adult-oriented’
businesses, sex clubs, theatres and peep
shows. In some cities, these areas may coincide with spaces of male prostitution and gay
venues, although the visibility of these in the
landscape has typically been less pronounced.
The concentration of ‘vice’ and prostitution in
specific areas has long fascinated urban geographers and sociologists, with the pioneering
work of the chicago school of sociology
including several detailed ethnographies of
the lifestyles of those occupying these areas
of ‘immorality’ and deviance. More recent
work has suggested that these areas cannot
be understood merely as the outcome of supply and demand economics, but as the outcome of a complex interaction of moral codes,
legal strictures and policing practices that
encourage the containment of vice in innercity areas away from whiter, wealthier suburban populations (who, ironically, appear to
be the principal clients of sex workers:
Ashworth, White and Winchester, 1988;
Hubbard, 1999). However, recent efforts to
clean up vice areas, and the tendency for clients to contact sex workers via the internet
and mobile phone, means that red-light districts are becoming less numerous in Western
cities (Sanchez, 2004).
ph
Suggested reading
Hall and Page (1999); Lorimer and Lund
(2003); Prosser (2000); Valentine (2004).
recycling A process that reuses the materials
and energy components of an item to create
another product. In most waste hierarchies,
recycling sits below reducing consumption,
reusing an existing item and reprocessing,
and above disposal. Although recycling uses
energy, it can reduce waste for disposal and
the need for raw materials in production
processes. Recycling was used during the two
world wars, but not for environmental
reasons. Although contemporary recycling
may be undertaken solely for economic reasons
(if recycled materials cost less than raw ones), it
is usually represented as an environmental concern. Human geographers have investigated
people’s motivations for engaging in recycling
activities (Barr, Ford and Gilg, 2003).
pm
red-light districts
While sex work has
never been a solely urban phenomenon, it is
in specific areas of towns and cities that it has
been most visible. In most cases, these areas
are particularly associated with female street
prostitution, though in some instances, they
redistribution
A transfer of resources
between groups or places. Redistribution
may be progressive (reducing inequality) or
regressive (increasing inequality). Urban geographers emphasize the role of redistribution
in the early formation of urban settlements.
Harvey (1973), following the work of Karl
Polanyi, argued that redistribution is one form
of economic integration along with reciprocity
and market exchange. Early urbanization is
often assumed to have depended on the accumulation of an economic surplus, involving a
shift away from reciprocity and towards redistribution (with resources being transferred
from rural to urban areas).
Redistribution has been a core concern of
welfare geography with its focus on the
unequal socio-spatial distribution of resources. The goal of reducing socio-spatial
inequality was central to the development of
the welfare state which seeks to mitigate
the social inequality fostered by capitalist
accumulation by providing free or subsidized
services such as health care and education,
and cash transfers such as unemployment
benefits and old-age pensions. According to
Keynesian economic theory, such transfers
625
REDISTRICTING
had an economic as well as a moral rationale.
It was thought that by helping to maintain the
level of demand in the economy during
periods of slow growth or recession, redistribution would reduce the risk of a major crisis
of accumulation such as that associated with
the stock market crash of 1929 (cf. fiscal
crisis). In practice, the extent of the redistribution provided by specific welfare states
varied depending on their scope, the levels
of benefits provided and the balance between universal provision and means-testing
(Esping-Andersen, 1990). The rise of the
New Right in the 1980s saw sustained political
attacks in many high-income countries on the
idea of progressive redistribution in line with
the doctrines of neo-liberal economic policy.
Neo-liberalism has been associated with a shift
from the welfare to the workfare state, with the
continuation of redistribution conditional on
labour-market reform (Peck, 2001b). Work on
redistribution within political geography
has focused on the implications of the territorial restructuring of the state. For example, in
devolved and federal systems, redistribution
may involve ‘fiscal federalism’, in which the
central (federal) level of the state arranges
the transfer of resources between territorial
units at lower levels. However, under neoliberalism, a shift from managerial to entrepreneurial forms of urban governance has
seen local agencies increasingly having to
compete for a share of these redistributed
surpluses (Harvey, 1989a). The forms of
redistribution mentioned here mostly take
place within the framework of the nationstate, despite the fact that the greatest
inequalities in income and wealth are between
those living in high-income and low-income
countries. In development geography, a concern with redistribution at the international
scale is reflected in research on the politics
of aid.
jpa
Suggested reading
Harvey (1989a); Painter (2002).
redistricting The redrawing of the boundaries of electoral districts (termed redistribution
in the UK: see Rossiter, Johnston and Pattie,
1999). Redistricting can be manipulated to
promote one party’s cause over another’s, as
in malapportionment and gerrymandering.
In the USA, the former was ruled unconstitutional in the 1960s, and redistricting is
required after each decennial census (cf.
racial districting). In most states, this is
done by political parties, who deploy
626
gerrymandering wherever possible to promote
their cause. In the UK and some other countries, however, redistricting is undertaken by
independent, non-partisan commissions,
operating under legally defined rules.
rj
Suggested reading
Handley (n.d.).
redlining A mortgage lenders’ practice of
mapping high-risk neighbourhoods by encircling them with red lines. Lenders refuse to
extend loans in these ‘redlined’ areas because
of fears of default. Redlining discriminates
against ethnic minority, low-income, femaleheaded and ‘non-traditional’ households
because of the neighbourhoods in which
they live. The practice has been widely prohibited but still occurs informally (e.g. estate
agents/realtors ‘steering’ clients into select
neighbourhoods). Severe consequences ensue
for cities, including vacancy, dereliction and
neighbourhood decline (Darden, 1980).
Recent research suggests that lending discrimination is contingent on a combination of the
‘race’ of prospective borrowers and the characteristics of neighbourhoods in which they
hope to buy (Holloway, 1998).
em
Suggested reading
Darden (1980).
reductionism The methodological presumption that complex phenomena or events can
be explained by their reduction to simpler, more
fundamental entities. For example, rather than
to talk about human behaviour it is better to
talk about genes, or even more fundamentally
strands of DNA molecules. Or, rather than talk
about lightning, it is better to speak about an
electrical discharge, or more fundamentally
the flow of electrons. Reductionism as a strategy
is especially common in the natural sciences
that strive to decompose phenomena or events
into their most basic constituents or causes. For
example, under ontological reductionism, the
properties of matter are reduced to sub-atomic
particles, quarks and leptons. Or under methodological reductionism, the world, the universe
and everything else are reduced to a single
explanation, string theory.
Reductionism is also found in the social
sciences, including human geography. The
exemplar is methodological individualism.
In this case, the complexities of human behaviour are reduced to the single fundamental
cause and typically cast as individual rational
choice. While it might appear that the diverse
REFLEXIVITY
decisions involved around, say, choosing
where to live, or from which retailer to buy
or where to site a new factory have nothing
to do with one another, in reality, say methodological individualists, they all obey the
same fundamental logic of rational decisionmaking. The facts and circumstances of each
particular case can be eliminated because they
are reducible to a more elementary set of
formal axioms.
While reductionism as a methodological
strategy is powerful and productive, seemingly
yielding ever more secrets of nature and social
life, it has been criticized on a number of
grounds:
of context, attempting to keep geographical
facts intact rather than reducing them to
something else. This sensibility has taken on
greater theoretical momentum in the wake
of post-structuralism and postmodernism,
movements entering geography in the 1980s
and associated with an explicitly antireductionist agenda. Critiques of reductionism, and attempts to develop non-reductionist
research strategies, are found in feminist
geography (Pratt, 2004), cultural geography and economic geography (GibsonGraham, 2006).
tb
Suggested reading
Dupré (1993); Koestler and Smythies (1969).
(1) The relationship among phenomena is
holistic rather than reductionist. That
is, the system as a whole determines how
its parts behave. Reductionism therefore
necessarily fails.
(2) Some entities, by their very nature – such
as human motivations, emotions or
sparks of creativity – are simply not divisible into constituent parts; there is always
a ‘ghost in the machine’, to use Arthur
Koestler’s (1967) phrase. Humans cannot be reduced to Pavlovian salivating
dogs or Skinnerian rats in a maze.
(3) Some phenomena or events are characterized by the property of emergence; that
is, interactions of elements produce effects that cannot be predicted by examining the properties of those individual
elements themselves (see also contextual effect and compositional theory).
(4) There is often something important in
the original facts and setting that is lost
when it is reduced to a different form.
Translations are never perfect, and important contextual factors useful in explanation
may
be
lost
when
reductionism is applied.
In human geography, reductionism was
most strenuously applied during the period of
the quantitative revolution and spatial
science. Then the complexities of geographical landscapes were reduced to supposedly
more fundamental entities, such as the postulates of geometry or the axioms of rational
choice theory. Even after this period, reductionism remained important within the discipline. radical geography, for example, was
often characterized by economism; that is,
the reduction of spatial relationships to economic ones. Historically, however, the discipline has always emphasized the importance
reflexivity Reflection upon the conditions
through which research is produced, disseminated and received. Emphasis on reflexivity
often accompanies discussion of positionality. Debates on reflexivity have emerged from
feminist research (England, 1994; Rose,
1997b), associated in particular with Donna
Haraway’s argument that all knowledge is
situated knowledge (Haraway, 1991c), critiquing a ‘god-trick’ of disembodied, objective
scientific neutrality. Reflexivity entails consideration of a variety of factors: personal
biography, social situation, political values,
situation within the academic labour structure,
personal relationship to research respondents,
relations of authority within the research process and so on. Reflexivity is thus a complex
field, concerning epistemology, politics and
methodology. Rose (1997b) critiques claims
to ‘transparent reflexivity’, whereby an author
assumes that reflexivity can produce a full
understanding of researcher, researched and
research context. Rose argues that such an
approach risks playing a ‘god-trick’ of its
own: ‘we may be performing nothing more
than a goddess-trick uncomfortably similar to
the god-trick’ (p. 311). For Rose, attention
should instead be directed towards the uncertainties of research practice, and the emergence of difference through the research
process, reflexivity becoming ‘less a process
of self-discovery than of self-construction’
(p. 313). What might appear as failure from
a perspective seeking transparent reflexivity
becomes the spur to another mode of performative reflexivity, ‘webbed across gaps in
understandings, saturated with power, but
also paradoxically, with uncertainty’ (p. 317).
In emphasizing self-conscious reflection, the
term ‘reflexivity’ tends to downplay another
meaning of the term ‘reflex’, namely the
627
REFUGEES
Conroy Maddox, The Theorist, 1963, oil on board &
scissors, 24 30 in., 61 76 cm., Ferens Art
Gallery, Hull City Museums and Art Galleries
(Levy, 2003)
automatic or unthinking reaction to events.
Commentary on reflexivity and the situatedness of knowledge is not new, though the
vocabulary of such commentary may have
changed. In 1963 English surrealist painter
Conroy Maddox (Levy, 2003) produced
‘The Theorist’ (see figure), an oil painting
suggesting a particular attitude of mind, the
figure almost sculptured into the armchair, at
one remove from the external world, whose
relationship to that world is suggested by the
scissors forming the face. Maddox offers a
picture of a situated instrumentalist, with
theory a device through which the world can
be accounted for, itemized, cut-up. Maddox’s
image of the theorist personifies an outlook on
the world that has been the target of those
concerned to emphasize reflexivity, and the
situatedness of knowledge. In keeping with
surrealism’s interest in the unconscious,
Maddox captures a certain image of a theoretical unconscious, whereby one whose work is
defined by theory risks their mind being colonized by indoor abstraction. Maddox might
have found it ironic that reflexivity can itself
on occasion be couched through abstract
theoretical language.
dmat
Suggested reading
Rose (1997).
refugees The term ‘refugee’ is widely used
in popular culture, legal circles and humanitarian emergencies. Broadly speaking, it means
people who have been involuntarily displaced
from their homes and dispossessed of their
livelihoods, normally without the protection of
their own government. The media often refer
to environmental refugees displaced from their
land by soil erosion over time, economic
628
refugees fleeing conditions of poverty in their
home countries, or even refugees as people
within the borders of their home country displaced by natural disasters (e.g. Hurricane
Katrina in the American South in 2005).
In international humanitarian law, however, the term ‘refugee’ is more precise. It
refers to people from one country who flee
political persecution or violence to seek asylum in another country. The political persecution and exodus of the Protestant
Huguenots from France during the late seventeenth century is often described as the first
modern refugee movement. Since then, refugee movements have been related to postcolonial geographies (e.g. the partition of
Pakistan from India in 1947), cold war geopolitics between rival superpowers and their
allies (e.g. Cubans in the USA), geo-economic
conflict related to land and resources, and
wars of nationalism and independence.
Since the mass displacement of people in
Europe during the Second World War, the
concept of ‘refugee’ has taken on particular
legal meanings. The 1945 United Nations
Charter outlines a framework for the provision
of political and legal protection to refugees,
displaced persons and other vulnerable
groups. In 1951, the Convention Relating
to the Status of Refugees was drafted; it came
into effect in 1954. Along with the 1967
Protocol, these legal instruments represent
the pillars of international refugee law. The
1951 Convention definition includes anyone
who ‘ . . . as a result of events occurring before
1 January 1951 and owing to well-founded
fear of being persecuted for reasons of race,
religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his [sic] nationality and is
unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to
avail himself of the protection of that country;
or who, not having a nationality and being
outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or,
owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.’
While 147 nations are party to either the
1951 Convention or its 1967 Protocol (see
below), it remains both explicitly and implicitly Eurocentric (see eurocentrism). From
its conception, the Convention clearly demarcated geographical and historical limits. It
was designed to apply to refugees in europe
displaced by events that occurred prior to 1951.
The Convention is characterized by its
Eurocentric focus and strategic conceptualization. The Convention definition of refugee is
spatially coded as European. Substantively, its
REFUGEES
emphasis on persecution based on civil and
political status as grounds for refugee status
expresses the particular ideological debates
of postwar European politics, particularly the
perceived threats of communism and another
holocaust. In emphasizing civil and political
rights, the Convention has had the effect of
minimizing the importance of other rights.
The European geographical focus and
emphasis on civil and political rights in the
Convention have generated an exclusionary
geography of asylum that is the source of
contentious contemporary debate (Hyndman,
2000).
The Convention definition implicitly creates a hierarchy of rights, privileging political
and civil rights of protection from persecution
over economic, cultural and social rights and
scales of violence broader than individual persecution. The definition was also an expression of Cold War geopolitics, grounded in
relational identities of communist East and
capitalist West. Notwithstanding the objections of several delegates from developing
countries faced with responsibility for their
own refugee populations, the goal of the
Western states was achieved by limiting the
scope of mandatory international protection
under the Convention to refugees whose flight
was prompted by an event within Europe
before 1951. While states might opt to extend
protection to refugees from other parts of the
world, the definition adopted was intended to
distribute the European refugee burden without any binding obligation to reciprocate by
way of the establishment of rights for, or
the provision of assistance to, non-European
refugees.
The 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of
Refugees amended the 1951 Convention.
While it rescinded the spatial and temporal
restrictions of the Convention by lifting
the Europe-based, pre-1951 stipulations, it
merely created equal access for all member
nations to a legal instrument that remained
substantively Eurocentric in focus. In africa,
the perceived inadequacy of this pair of legal
instruments resulted in the drafting of a legally
binding regional policy by the Organization
for African Unity (OAU). The 1969 OAU
Convention Governing the Specific Aspects
of Refugee Problems in Africa not only broadened but also reformulated the definition
of refugee. It included the 1951 Convention
definition, but added the provision that generalized violence associated with colonialism
and other kinds of aggression as grounds for
seeking asylum.
In 1966, two legally binding human rights
instruments were created to protect civil and
political rights, on the one hand, and economic,
social and cultural rights on the other. The
International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights most closely expresses the emphasis of
the Convention. It ensures respect for democratic principles and non-discrimination. The
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights includes provisions that are more
applicable to developing countries than to highly
industrialized ones, such as the right to food,
shelter, and basic medical and educational
services. While the first covenant applies to individuals, the second refers to particular groups of
people.
In recent years, human geographers have
generated a considerable body of work on the
subject of refugees, probing the geopolitics
that displace them (Le Billon, 2008), the
governance/governmentality of international
humanitarian assistance that assists refugees
and manages their mobility (Hyndman, 2000),
and the politics of resettlement in a new country
(Black and Koser, 1999; Dahlman and
Ó Tuathail, 2005b). Those displaced by conflict
and threats of persecution, but not across international borders, are referred to as internally
displaced persons (IDPs). They are conceptually
and politically related to refugees, but are still
technically under the legal protection of their
home governments as nationals (see Brun,
2003). Geographers have been particularly
active in tracing refugee participation in transnational political, economic and social circuits
that traverse international borders (Al-Ali and
Koser, 2002; Bailey, Wright, Mountz and
Miyares, 2002; Nolin, 2006). Another emerging
research focus among geographers has been the
tactics of exclusion employed by states of the
global north [including Australia] to keep asylum seekers and other migrants at bay, away
from their sovereign shores on which they could
claim rights to seek asylum and other legal
entitlements: references to the ‘externalization
of asylum’ in Europe and the ‘Pacific Solution’
in Australia represent two cases in point
(Hyndman and Mountz, 2008). Related to
these tactics are geographies of containment in
which displaced persons find themselves
in ‘protracted refugee situations’ (PRS), spending years and sometimes decades in limbo, living
in camps and without legal status. The United
States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants
(2008) calls this widespread phenomenon,
which affects more than 8 million refugees,
‘refugee warehousing’. (See also camp; exception, space of.)
jh
629
REGIME OF ACCUMULATION
Suggested reading
UNHCR (2006).
regime of accumulation A historically distinctive and relatively durable form of
accumulation under capitalism, based on
complementary patterns of production and
consumption, together with a supporting mode
of regulation (an ensemble of organizational
forms, networks, and institutions, rules, norms
and patterns of conduct). Derived from French
regulation theory, the concept of regimes of
accumulation is most commonly associated
with the analysis of fordism, the post-Second
World War form of growth in North America
and Western Europe, based on mass production/consumption and ‘Keynesian-welfarist’
modes of regulation (see Boyer, 1990; Jessop
and Sum, 2006). Debates continue about the
shape of the successor (post-1970s) regime,
generically labelled post-fordism.
jpe
Suggested reading
Tickell and Peck (1992).
regime theory An approach to politics that
illustrates how different organizations interact
in a dynamic power relationship under the
umbrella of a larger project.
The term has become influential in urban
political economy in the emphasis upon
the management of interests shared between
the private and public spheres that coalesce
into the government of an urban unit (Stone,
1989). The particular nature of the regime
is a function of the continually changing
combination of institutions, their individually
changing goals, and the manner in which they
influence each other to attain self-interest
within a broader project. Urban regime theory
highlights the dynamic power relationships
between institutions within a regime and
between competing regimes. Growth is the
usual policy common denominator that brings
the regime together.
Geographers have offered constructive critiques of urban regime theory. Ward (1996)
highlighted the difficulty of applying the theory
in contexts other than the USA, where it was
developed, and called for consideration of
the mechanisms which provoke institutions
to form regimes rather than concentrating on
how they are maintained. Ward (1996) and
Hackworth (2000) critique the localism of initial regime theory, and call for consideration of
the role of the state apparatus at larger scales,
such as the federal state (see federalism) or
even the European Union (see regionalism).
630
Urban regime theory was a response to the
economism of previous state theory, but
as a result lacks consideration of how regimes
become agents of capital accumulation
(Hackworth, 2000). Consideration of environmental policy has drawn attention to why it
is easier to build regimes around particular
polices and not others (Gibbs and Jonas,
2000). neo-liberal policies have placed
greater emphasis upon governance at the
urban scale. Simultaneously, supra-state institutions such as the European Union have
required consideration of how regimes forge
links across scales.
Regime theory also applies to co-operation
between states and non-governmental institutions tackling problems beyond the purview
of one state. Environmental, trade and armscontrol issues are examples around which a
regime of legal connections and accepted
norms and behaviours are constructed. Concentration upon the idea of a global commons and common pool resources and how
they should be managed in an international
system of sovereign states (see sovereignty)
underlies this approach. Such a regime
involves a power dynamic in which the nature
of the norms and goals, and the means of
maintaining them, are continually negotiated
between institutions with differential power
capabilities. For example, Evans (2003) illustrates how the ASEAN Regional Forum has
adapted to the increase in China’s economic
and political capacities.
cf
Suggested reading
Lauria (1997); Rittberger and Mayer (1993).
region Most commonly used to designate:
(a) an area or zone of indeterminate size on the
surface of the Earth, whose diverse elements
form a functional association; (b) one such
region as part of a system of regions covering
the globe; or (c) a portion of one feature of the
Earth, as in a particular climate region or economic region. The concept of the region,
whichever meaning it has been given, has fallen
in and out of favour, sometimes simultaneously.
The region has been subject to much examination as to its epistemological and ontological
status (see epistemology; ontology). How
are regions to be known and represented? Do
regions exist in actuality? It is probably safe to
say that most geographers who have dealt with
these questions agree that regions are based on
socially constructed generalizations about the
world, that their delimitation and representation are artefactual but not purely fictions.
REGION
Few have disagreed, for example, that every
pinpoint on the surface of the Earth is unique:
the problem lies in looking past the uniqueness
of mere points to say something of note about
geographically bounded assemblages and distinctions and relations among assemblages
(see also idiographic). From this perspective,
the artefactuality of regions is not that they
are insubstantial (few geographers would claim
that they are pure abstractions) so much as
their definition demands disregarding certain
details. The region in this sense is a ‘way of
seeing’ that which exists, a device for organizing thought about the world; it is also, of
course, the focus of regional geography.
The above ideas have given rise to a set
of specific terms used to describe regions of
different kinds (see Grigg, 1965). Formal or
uniform regions are areas defined by one or
more of the features that occur within them;
for example, a region of Catalan-language speakers or a mining region in some part of the
world where mining dominates the economy.
Formal/uniform regions are interpretive
devices that some geographers have used to
make sense of a fundamentally heterogeneous
world. There are no purely objective measures, therefore, that dictate what proportion
of Catalan speakers in an area make it a
Catalan-speaking region. Nor are there universally agreed criteria about what would
define a mining region – The proportion of
mine workers to non-mine workers? Income
generated by mining compared with nonmining income? The land area covered by
mines? Criteria are set according to the purposes of designating such a mining (or
Catalan-speaking) region at all. The functional
or nodal region is a geographically delimited
spatial system defined by the linkages binding
particular phenomena in that area. Which
phenomena? It depends on what kind of system we are interesting in knowing about. The
paradigmatic example is the urban region, in
which there is posited a spatially delimited
network of transactions (e.g. trading) centring
on an urban core, or central place, and spreading out into and functionally incorporating an
urban periphery or hinterland. (The functional region bears a resemblance to the core
and periphery of world systems theory, and
shares some of its criticisms too.) A number of
other regional terms have been experimented
with, especially in the first half of the twentieth
century: single- and multiple-feature regions,
natural regions, cultural regions, generic and specific regions, and so on. The genealogy of the
region concept links it to related terms such as
the French pays. Most of these terms are not
used with particular fervour any more, at least
not in a disciplining defining sense, but the
region nonetheless remains a core concept.
Certainly, it has played a central role in suturing the different realms of human geography
and physical geography. And it remains a
generative force in the geographical imagination (Hart, 1982; Pudup, 1988; McGee,
1991; Paasi, 2003).
The region is also an embattled concept, as
Grigg (1965) pointed out several decades ago.
Features that may stand in geographical relation to each other rarely spatially co-vary
exactly. The grouping of different phenomena
together and the drawing of boundaries
around them are therefore by no means
obvious. (Although boundary mapping has
spawned a great deal of research, using the
quantifying tools of descriptive statistics,
factor analysis, and most recently geographic
information science.) There is the question
too of whether the region is too static a concept, insufficiently attuned to change in the
world, and whether regions have been understood too much in geographical isolation from
the world. Grigg took these criticisms to mean
that the region, especially its use by geography, needs always to be understood as a
means to an end and not an end in itself (cf.
Hartshorne, 1939). The point of ‘doing’ the
region is not ultimately to divide the world
into regions and rest content. It is rather, if
one wishes, to engage in classifying and
modelling geographical phenomena so as to
generate questions about their variability and
functioning with respect to other phenomena.
Indeed, for Grigg, whose essay appeared in a
seminal text of the quantitative revolution,
the region is a model.
In the 1980s and 1990s, some geographers
proposed to solve the problem of the region by
reframing the terms of study and ushering in
a ‘new regional geography’ (e.g. Pudup, 1988;
Thrift, 1994b; cf. Gregory, 1982). Spurred on
by an interest in structuration theory, social
theory, political economy and locality
studies, the goal was to see the region as a
medium and outcome of social practices and
relations of power that are operative at multiple
spatial and temporal scales, among which the
region might serve as a kind of fix. There was
also in the new regional geography an explicit
critique of an insufficiently spatialized social
theory and political economy. There has been
some debate as to whether the new regional
geography misconstrued the concept and uses
of the region during its heyday before the
631
REGIONAL ALLIANCE
Second World War, and specifically whether
regional geography was an atheoretical geography (see Holmen, 1995). For now, debate
seems to have settled down.
ghe
Suggested reading
Gregory (1982); Grigg (1965); Hart (1982);
Pudup (1988).
regional alliance An agreement between a
group of neighbouring political units facilitating cross-border co-operation. The term
is particularly identified with security cooperation between states. NATO is the strongest such alliance, with the commitment that
an attack on any one of the member states by
an external aggressor is deemed as an attack
against all of them. During the cold war, the
USA (NATO, SEATO, CENTO) and the
Soviet Union (Warsaw Pact) created rival
regional alliances. Since the terrorist attacks
of 11 September 2001 (see terrorism), the
USA has attempted to forge alliances with
many countries, but none of the recent efforts
have the intensity and breadth of the Cold War
era. Post-Cold War changes and the break-up
of the Soviet Union have catalysed new
regional initiatives to facilitate trade and economic development (Pinnick, 2005) as states
balance the promotion of economic interaction with cross-border security concerns,
and manage security concerns no longer
viewed as part of the Cold War conflict
(McNulty, 1999). The increased pressure
upon localities to be attractive to global
investment has also fostered local regional
alliances to build transport and other forms
of economic infrastructure that can not only
enhance economic growth but also facilitate
peace across international borders (Newman,
2005). The current geopolitical context shows
that regional security alliances are in flux as
NATO expands its border eastwards to
include former Warsaw Pact members (Oas,
2005), but at the same time the European
Union builds its own security apparatus that
at the moment is deemed to complement
NATO, but could succeed it.
cf
regional cycles
Fluctuations or cyclical
waves in the level of a variable in a region.
Techniques and models for analysing regional
cycles have been applied to both regional economic activity and to epidemics and the modelling of disease. Cycles in economic activity,
usually measured by industrial output or
unemployment rates, can be very long-term,
as with kondratieff cycles, or shorter-term,
632
reflecting both seasonal variations in the
demand for labour and the regional impact of
national business cycles of expansion and
recession. Some descriptive studies of regional
cycles were undertaken in the early years of
regional science, but more recent work has
focused on modelling the cycles. Economists
have built regional (e.g. the State of California)
and multi-regional (e.g. all the regions of
France) econometric models. These relate
macroeconomic variables of output, expenditure and employment at the regional level to
each other, and to national economic and policy
variables. Such models now exist for many
countries and regions. A second approach,
mainly by geographers, has studied the spatial
diffusion of regional cycles, tracing the timing
and cyclical amplitude for different cities and
regions.
lwh
Suggested reading
Glickman (1997); King and Clark (1978).
regional geography The study of the variable character of places in the world, usually
with an emphasis on their human geography.
Knowledge of world regional geography is
often seen as essential to general education
and a specifically ‘geographical literacy’,
which is why it forms a mainstay of introductory survey courses in many universities.
Critics frequently complain that such courses
are little more than a fact-driven whirlwind
tour, but regional geography has a long intellectual history and, like the larger discipline,
its role, objectives and methods have changed
over time. The authors of the better textbooks
are very well aware of these considerations,
and sensitive to the pedagogical possibilities
they allow and the responsibilities they impose
(e.g. Bradshaw, Dymond, White and Chacko,
2005; de Blij and Muller, 2007).
Regional geography is usually traced back to
Strabo’s conception of chorology as the disciplined description of the parts of the Earth.
As late as the seventeenth century, this continued to provide the model for what in early
modern Europe was called Special Geography,
founded – as Bernard Varenius (1622–50) put
it – ‘upon the experience and observations of
those who have described the several countries’. Studies such as these may have contributed to a privileged, civic education, but they
had larger purposes too. Just as Strabo’s
chorography informed the administration of
the Roman Empire, so did Varenius recognize
that Special Geography had a particular significance for both ‘statecraft’ and the world-
REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY
empire of merchant capitalism centred on the
Dutch Republic and the city of Amsterdam.
And both were haunted by their epistemological other: by the mathematical–locational
corpus of Ptolemy’s Geography and Varenius’
own ‘General Geography’. All three features
reappear in the subsequent history of regional
geography in Europe and North America:
the production and circulation of regional
descriptions for public audiences, the strategic
application of regional intelligence, and the
formalization of a spatial scientific dual to
regional geography.
In the eighteenth century, a European
geographical imaginary treated ‘europe’ as
the master-architect of an intellectual grid, a
sort of semiotic square (see table), in which
‘africa’, ‘asia’ and ‘america’ were placed in
distinctive and subordinate positions within a
matrix of difference (Gregory, 1998b). These
four cardinal orientations structured the production of regional stereotypes. These were in
the main the products of European projects of
exploration, whose results were circulated to
a wider public through exhibitions, illustrations and published accounts of travel. In fact,
travel-writing has been a vital source for
the production of regions as bounded spaces
possessing some sort of unity that makes them
distinctive, ‘special’ or unique. Within this
genre, regions are typically represented as distinctive zones set off from other regions, whose
essential nature – at once a matter of ‘identity’
and ‘authenticity’ – is conveyed through both
a narrativization of space (plotting the author’s
tracks) and an aestheticization of landscape
(producing a word-picture). Their imaginative geographies become sedimented over
time, so much so that many contemporary
travel writings by European and North
American authors continue to sustain an
elaborate textualization of regions as zones
that re-inscribe eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury stereotypes: ‘the tropics’ as a zone of
excess, of primeval nature and human abjection or plenitude and freedom (see tropicality); ‘the Orient’ as a liminal zone of mystery
and danger, eroticism and transgression (see
orientalism); and ‘the Arctic’ as a limit-zone
of solitude, silence and extremity (Lutz and
Collins, 1993; Holland and Huggan, 1999).
These are not (and never were) innocent representations, and similar ways of dividing up
the world into regions and identifying their
supposedly characteristic natures are activated
within other public discourses, including
the signature images associated by travel companies with places such as ‘India’ or ‘China’,
the stereotypes of ‘the middle east’ invoked
by European and American media organizations, and the partitional vocabularies of
‘balkanization’, enclaves and dominoes
(see domino theory) mobilized by contemporary geopolitics.
EUROPE
ASIA
‘a space of opposition’
AMERICA
AFRICA
‘the space of the future’ ‘a space of contradiction’
In the course of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the academic discipline
of geography was drawn to the region as its
central object of study. ‘Object’ is exactly the
word: the region was seen as one of the basic
‘building-blocks’ of geographical enquiry.
This metaphor clearly conveys the common
sense of regionalization as both partitional (the
world can be exhaustively divided into
bounded spaces) and aggregative (these spaces
can be fitted together to form a larger totality).
This sensibility applied both to traditional
regional geography and to the successor projects of spatial science. In the regional monographs written by French geographer Paul
Vidal de le Blache at the turn of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, for example, the
regions (pays) of France owed their identity
(or ‘personality’) to the local cultures that
impressed themselves on the local landscapes
(differentiation) and to their connections with
other places within the system of the French
nation (circulation; see also areal differentiation). In the austere lexicon of locational
analysis, regions were seen as cells within
spatial grids. Thus Grigg (1965) argued that
‘regionalization is similar to classification’, and
his account of the logic of regional taxonomy
provided the basis for a series of formal
region-building algorithms in which regions
were treated as combinatorial, assignment or
districting problems: in effect, as the product
of purely technical procedures. To Haggett,
Cliff and Frey (1977), therefore, the region
was simply ‘one of the most logical and
satisfactory ways of organizing geographical
information’ (see also classification and
regionalization).
The regional-descriptive and the mathematical–locational impulses were both channelled
into the production of regional knowledges
during and after the Second World War.
Indeed, one geographer claimed that ‘World
633
REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY
War II was the best thing that happened to
Geography since the birth of Strabo’, because
it placed renewed significance on regional
geographies and regional intelligence. In the
UK, a team of geographers was assembled
by the Director of Naval Intelligence to produce a series of country-by-country Admiralty
Handbooks, ‘the largest programme of geographical writing that has ever been attempted’
(Clout and Gosme, 2003). In the USA, geography’s central mission within the Research
and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic
Services was to provide ‘clinical’ accounts of
target regions, whose function was enhanced
by the development of area studies during
the cold war: in parallel, these regional studies
were complemented by a mathematical
‘Philosophy of Air Power’ that was connected
to the postwar development of a mathematical–
statistical macrogeography that heralded ‘a
new regional conception for geography’ that
was ‘given purpose as part of a broader landscape of militarism and war’ (Barnes and
Farish, 2006; see also Chow, 2006).
But the marriage between the regionaldescriptive and the mathematical–statistical
was a shotgun affair, and travel writing and
regional geography had little in common with
spatial science. In the first place, they both
placed a premium on fieldwork as the experiential ground for evocative prose, so much so
that Hart (1982) hailed regional geography as
‘the highest form of the geographer’s art’. How
many regional monographs ever reached
those commanding heights remains an open
question, but Lewis (1985) observed that even
if few academic geographers were trained as
painters or poets, there was no reason to boast
about it. Spatial science found its own aesthetic in the elegance of formal analytical
methods and models, and represented regions
as little more than convenient ordering devices
within an overwhelmingly abstract space. In
the second place, travel writing and traditional
regional geography sought to convey descriptions of both cultural and physical landscapes.
Vidal de la Blache had assumed an intimacy
between culture, landscape and region –
between paysan, paysage and pays in rural
France – that placed great demands on the
sensibilities of the geographer. In contrast,
spatial science was largely preoccupied with
functional regions or regional systems in which
the central organizing principle was to be
found within a society largely severed from
its physical landscape (see nodal region).
After the Second World War, for example,
Dickinson (1947) proposed a focus on the city
634
region as ‘an area of interrelated activities,
kindred interests and common organizations,
brought into being through the medium of the
routes which bind it to urban centres’, and ten
years later Philbrick (1957) argued that ‘the
functional organization of human occupance
in area’ should be analysed ‘independent of
the natural environment’ (emphasis added)
through a series of intrinsically geometric concepts: focality, localization, interconnection
and discontinuity. These proposals formed a
springboard for the subsequent leap towards
the formal spatial analysis of regions as ‘open
systems’ (Haggett, 1965, pp. 18–19).
Running in the depths of these different
literatures and transgressing the boundaries
they drew around regions was a sub-text that
threatened to interrupt and prise open their
compartments and closures. The journeys of
explorers and traveller-writers, the capillary
circulations that coursed through regions and
the thematization of regions as open systems
all spoke to the porosity of regional formations
(the networks of connection between places;
cf. contrapuntal geographies; power geometry) and to the poetics of regional description
(the conventional, ‘constructed’ nature of
boundary delimitation). These twin issues have
since received explicit and substantial critical
attention.
Even at its height, regional geography was
criticized for its closures. Vidal de la Blache’s
celebrated Tableau de la géographie de la France
(1903) was a portrait – some said a landscape
painting – of the individual regions of prerevolutionary France, produced through a
method that critics said had little purchase
on the post-revolutionary world. ‘The region
is an eighteenth-century concept’, Kimble
(1951) declared, whereas in the modern world
‘it is the links in landscapes . . . rather than the
breaks’ that matter. Similarly, Wrigley (1965)
argued that the intimacy of the bonds between
‘culture’ and ‘nature’ celebrated by regional
geography was ‘admirably suited to the historical geography of Europe before the industrial
revolution’, but ‘with the final disappearance
of the old, local, rural, largely self-sufficient
way of life the centrality of regional work to
geography has been permanently affected.’
These twin objections were marked both
by their European origins and a superficial
understanding of industrialization and the
dynamics of the capitalist space-economy
(which produces regional differentiations rather
than erasing them: see Langton, 1984; Storper
and Walker, 1989). In fact, Vidal’s later account
of France de l’est (1917) was an attempt to wire
REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY
the industrialization of Alsace-Lorraine to the
wider geopolitical structures of France as a
whole and, en passant, to challenge the legitimacy of its post-1871 occupation by Germany.
Recent attempts to situate regional formations and transformations as constellations or
condensations within more extensive networks
have been far more attentive to such concerns
and in the 1980s and 1990s many of them were
given a considerable fillip by world-systems
theory and the analysis of the capitalist world-economy (see, e.g., Agnew,
1987b; Dixon, 1991; Becker and Egler,
1992). These projects were distinguished by
a much greater sense of historicity – of place
and region as historically contingent process
(Pred, 1984; Gilbert 1988) – which in turn
made the ‘bounded spaces’ and ‘building
blocks’ of conventional regional genres seem
much less solid. To talk in this way is not
merely to invoke Marx’s description of capitalist modernity as a world in which ‘all that
is solid melts into air’, important though that
is, because the tensions between ‘fixity’ and
‘motion’ that spasmodically interrupt and
restructure regional formations are not the
exclusive preserve of capitalism, and are hence
not contained by its history alone. Our present
understanding of regions suggests that they have
never been closed, cellular, bounded spaces:
indeed, much of ‘traditional’ regional geography
may turn out to have been about inventing a
‘traditional’ world of supposedly immobile,
introspective and irredeemably localized cultures. Many anthropologists, geographers, historians and others now accept that non-capitalist
worlds have also always been actively engaged in
other worlds, and that they have also always
been constituted through their involvement in
trans-local and trans-regional networks.
In order to develop historical geographies of
regional (trans)formation that are open to
these possibilities, it is not enough to locate
regions within progressively larger global
frameworks or to identify the ‘regional’ as
one level within an interlocking system of different scales. One of the persistent difficulties
of such approaches is that regions become
products of processes that are located ‘on the
outside’ – in the absolute spaces of the containing frameworks and coordinate systems –
so that regions become surfaces that merely
register the impacts of globalization, of
successive rounds of capital accumulation
or the division of labour, or of cycles of
time–space compression that are seen as
enframing them. Against these ways of figuring the world, many scholars now argue that
such processes are also ‘on the inside’ –
indeed, that the demarcations between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ are deeply problematic
and made more so by what Hardt and Negri
(2000, pp. 194–5) call ‘Empire’, where ‘the
modern dialectic of inside and outside has
been replaced by a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridities and artificiality’. Whatever
one makes of this particular thesis, there is a
broad consensus within human geography
that regional formations are more or less
impermanent condensations of institutions
and objects, people and practices that are
intimately involved in the operation and outcome of local, trans-local and trans-regional
processes. For much the same reason, even
though the ‘regional’ has constantly been
hypostatized as the quintessential scale of
geographical analysis, many writers have
become much more attentive to the ways in
which these scalar distinctions have been
historically produced. It is through these productions, at once material and discursive, that
regional structures have become sedimented
in imaginative geographies, in material landscapes, and in public policy.
The theorization of regional formations as
partial, porous, hybrid condensations of
entangled networks between human and nonhuman actants, each of different spans and
with inconstant geometries, raises difficult
questions of representation. How are these
ideas and concepts to be redeemed in the
fabrication of regional accounts? Part of the
problem concerns the need to find ways of
conveying these theoretical constructs in
empirical solution: as Pudup (1988) observed,
‘Anyone trying to mesh theory with empirical
description [in regional geography] soon learns
that movement among abstract concepts and
empirical description is like performing ballet
on a bed of quicksand’ (see also Sayer, 1989).
To some writers, the metaphor of dance subsequently seemed peculiarly appropriate: one
implication of non-representational theory
is that all human geographies need to become
much more physically sensuous, much more
expressive in their poetics. In the specific case
of regional geography, there is clearly much to
learn from careful, critical readings of imaginative literature, film and video, and from contemporary travel accounts that have tried to find
the terms for the complex interpenetrations of
cultures: what Iyer (1989) epigrammatically
described as ‘Video night in Kathmandu’ (cf.
transculturation). In doing so, authors have
wrestled with some of the same demons that
haunted traditional regional geography, and
635
REGIONAL POLICY
above all with a sense of ‘belatedness’ – a sort of
elegy for the world we have lost – that, on
occasion, too readily modulates into what
Rosaldo (1989) calls ‘imperial nostalgia’
whereby ‘people mourn the passing of what
they themselves have transformed’.
These issues are thus not confined to
regional geography, and they admit of no easy
solution. They also indicate the importance of
developing an ethics of regional description
and analysis capable of addressing both the
subjects and the audiences of such accounts.
The authors of regional geographies have
an obligation to respond to questions of
adequacy, accountability and authorization:
What are their responsibilities to the people
whose lives they write about? And they also
have an obligation to convey places, regions
and landscapes as something more than the
lifeless parade of categories or the endless
tabulations of statistics that loom so large in
many textbooks of regional geography. There
is a need to represent places and their inhabitants in ways that compel their audiences to
care about them: which is why the ‘openness’
of regions – the sense of trans-local and transregional engagement and interconnection – is
important not only intellectually but also politically. Whatever else regional geography is
about, it surely ought to be about disclosing
our involvement with the lives and needs of
distant strangers.
dg
Suggested reading
Barnes and Farish (2006); Paasi (2002); Thrift
(1994).
regional policy Policy concerned both with
the regional (normally thought of as subnational) constitution and effectivity of economy, society, culture and polity, and with
the economic, social and cultural constitution
and effectivity of regions. These two aspects of
policy are not binaries: they are mutually constitutive of regional policy. However, although
always influentially co-present in policy initiation, design and implementation, their relative significance varies across space and time.
As objects of policy, regions are subjected
to attempted policy-led transformations
designed to ameliorate uneven development
for reasons of social justice, welfare and
economic efficiency. Whilst contemporary
emphases in regional policy are increasingly
preoccupied with a singular concern for
economic growth, these motives are not
mutually exclusive. Regional policy is rarely
purely redistributive. It is intended to be
636
transformative. Thus it may, for example,
involve bringing work to (unemployed/lowproductivity) workers or attempt to address
the uneven distribution of cultural facilities
(e.g. symphony orchestras, art galleries and
theatres) or the regional availability of educational facilities (such as university disciplines,
for example). Such policies are usually driven
and financed from outside the region – albeit
often with regional participation – by national
or supra-national state bodies. In terms of
policies attempting to address issues of welfare
and social justice, what is inescapable here is
fiscal redistribution and effort to direct the
geographical trajectories of the circuits of
value that make up economic geographies.
And, in addition, national macro-economic
policies are rarely region-neutral – as may be
illustrated, for example, in claims for and
against public expenditure in south-east
England and in debates around the political
and fiscal separation of the north from the
south of Italy – whilst a range of policies (e.g.
labour market policy, transport policy and
welfare policies) have pronounced regional
consequences even if articulated at the level
of the nation or supra-national state.
Alternatively, regional policy may stress
regional responsibilities for addressing uneven
development through regionally induced
supply-side transformations – involving
regional training, learning and innovation,
for example – designed to increase regional
economic efficiency, productivity and dynamism. It thereby places responsibility for these
transformations on local workers and firms –
albeit with some support and encouragement
(both positive and negative) of various kinds.
Local responsibilities may also be emphasized
through competitive bidding processes for
major international events such as the
Olympic Games, for licences to open and run
casinos, or for resources to finance cultural
renovation or the upgrading of institutions of
higher education, or for investment in new
or upgraded infrastructure – to encourage
regional capacities such as public transport or
cycling for a post-carbon age.
The claimed economic, political and social
formative role of regions underlies their roles
as subjects of policy. Economically, claims for
the significance of regional context and proximity in enabling the intense development of a
range of traded and untraded interdependencies
and the emergent role of trust in cutting the
transaction costs of economic activity, as
well as notions of ‘buzz’ based around personal and face-to-face contact in enhancing
REGIONAL POLICY
the effectiveness of circuits of value and the
incorporation of a wide range of local influences – including local institutions – enabling
dynamic processes of learning and innovation,
reveal the significance of regions in constituting productive circuits of value and hence
in constituting economic geographies (cf.
cluster). Here, policy is based on the
assumption of the critical significance of the
regions in forming economic geographies and
of creating the conditions of existence for the
enhancement of regionally based processes of
economic growth.
However, whilst such contextual effects
are doubtless formatively important, it is easy
to downplay the critical and inescapable – and
hence deeply formative – material imperatives
of economies and, more especially, the distinctive material objectives and dynamic geographies of capitalist circuits of value in
shaping regional economic geographies.
Accounts of regional development focused on
the geographies of global production networks
held down in place by various contextual
forces – including regional policy – begin to
capture the essential dialectic between these
two sets of forces (material and contextual)
that shape the economic fortune of regions.
Politically, strongly developed notions of
cultural and political identity – as revealed,
for example in contested relations between
Macedonia and the Greek provinces of
Makedonia, or in Basque and Catalonian
claims for independence in Spain, and in
Brittany or Corsica in France and the
Chiapas in Mexico – point again to the formative significance of regions as the subjects of
regional policy in wider political and cultural
relations. Policy here is devoted primarily to
the containment and regulation of regional
aspirations. However, the geography of
regional awareness, identity and imagination
is itself unevenly developed.
A number of overarching issues surround
the design and conduct of regional policy.
First, what is the region? Territories are often
contrasted to relational notions of regions.
Territorial notions view regions in absolute
terms – as containers – or in relative terms –
as
formatively
interacting
containers.
Proponents of the latter, relational view argue
that regions are porous, open and fluid. They
are shaped by relations of all sorts operating
in a multi-scalar universe in which scales
themselves are socially constructed, if often
powerfully defended in political terms. In this
view, regions are as much a product of external
relations (like flows of capital and ideas) as of
those internal relations (such as the relations
between people and nature that were the
focus of classical regional geography).
In fact, however, both notions of region are
mutually constitutive. Territories are themselves made up of a variety of networks, and
the ‘internal’ characteristics of territories are
simply the outcome of the historical geographies of relational links within and beyond
the region. In this way, time and path dependency (but not determinancy) comes to arbitrate between territory and relationality in
regional formation. At the same time, territories and regions are constructed by boundary
marking (often involving powerful relations of
domination and inducement) and by influential centres of calculation operating within
and beyond the state (e.g. in academia) constructing statistical definitions and accounts of
them. In such ways, regions may be invented
in much the same way that national economies
are invented through the technologies of their
description and analysis.
Thus the question of who speaks for the
region – who has voice in identifying the
region and regional policy – becomes critically
important. Given the widespread interest in
the region as a long-constituted expression of
distinctive and integrative social identity, it is
all too easy (or convenient) in policy formulation and assessment to assume a unity of purpose and a homogeneity in regions in which
diversity and contestation may be inherent.
Politico-religious and class-based regional
conflicts such as those in Northern Ireland
during the ‘troubles’, or class-based conflicts
of interests in regions such as the North
East of England, with a long historical
geography of social development based on
deeply held and long-standing class divisions,
reveal how simplistic such assumptions may
be. And, of course, speaking for the region
may emanate from outside the region (e.g.
from national or supra-national interests) at
least as much as from within. Voice – and
who has it – becomes even more significant
in regions with clear aspirations to autonomy
or independence.
Related to such questions around the construction of regional policy is the whole
complex of issues surrounding notions of
governmentality and the ongoing (or not)
legitimacy of the authority to govern. With
the spread of devolution around the world,
the region and regional policy are deeply
implicated in the emergence and negotiation
of multi-level patterns of governance. This
involves the legitimacy of different levels of
637
REGIONAL SCIENCE
government, and the distribution of resources
and responsibilities between them. Such
changes and the debates around them are
closely related to changing notions of government – including the move from the political
representation of individuals and places to the
economic, social, cultural and political
responsibility of individuals and places – as
the distinctions between the state, civil society and economy are dissolved and recombined in the attempt to maintain political
legitimacy in the face of such changes and
the globalizing geographies (see globalization) that shape them. But beyond this,
questions of governance open up the questions of how who gets to speak for regions
and how regional policy gets to take place.
Central here is the issue of expertise and the
establishment of policy norms and targetsetting, which enables governmental action
on regions and the possibility of the emergence
of creative capacity within regions. However,
just as such capacities (or the lack of them) do
not guarantee ‘success’ – whoever may define
it – neither does it enhance the possibilities of
more participatory forms of democracy. This
is, perhaps, especially true of regions long
suffering from economic decline and the withering of circuits of value. Hence the political
issue of the relations and modalities of power
between regional and national/supra-national
governance becomes central if the question
of uneven development is to be addressed
head-on in policy formulation. But, of course,
this does not mean that regional economic
policies, for example, will be based on the
pursuit of social justice rather than of economic effectivity.
Such norms and targets raise a fourth
overarching issue concerning the objectives
of regional policies. For example, economic policies are increasingly narrowly formatted around issues of competitiveness and
productivity as measured through profitability. Not only does this framing ignore a range
of issues such as the work that takes place and goes largely unmeasured – beyond the
capitalist economy, as well as the diverse
norms and social relations involved in materially effective circuits of value, including – but
not reducible to – the social economy lying
outside the mainstream, but it also tends
towards reductive notions of processes such
as innovation defined in terms merely of
contributions to profitability.
Finally, the long-standing significance of
the region as a focus of distinctive identities
and even loyalties – and this not least as a
638
consequence of the crucial role of historical
economic geographies in shaping a sense of
belonging, albeit contested and conflicting
belonging – combines in a potentially problematic fashion with the notion of the region
as a formative economic, social and political
entity and a constructed object of policy in
which regional responsibility for development
is stressed. Under these circumstances, in
which the region is perceived as a representation of meaning and practice, blame is all too
readily attached to the victim. However, this
tendency may be countered from the perspective of geographical political economy. This
way of understanding is capable of recognizing
not only the role of people in making their
own geographies (if not necessarily under the
conditions and constraints that they would
choose) and the genuine material constraints
on regional development (which mark the
economic, political, cultural and geographical
limits of regional responsibilities for the construction of geographies), but the political
possibilities in the pursuit of policies capable
of sustaining locally distinctive as well as
materially, socially, politically and culturally
effective regions.
rl
Suggested reading
Amin, Massey and Thrift (2003); Coe, Hess,
Yeung, Dicken and Henderson (2004); Hudson
(2007); Lovering (1999); Macleod and Jones
(2007); Regional Studies Association (2007);
Rodriguez-Pose and Gill (2004); Scott (1998);
Scott and Storper (2003).
regional science A hybrid discipline originating in the early 1950s that combined neoclassical economics and quantitative
methods to analyse spatial issues in economics, human geography and planning.
Regional science was the vision of a single
man, the American economist Walter Isard
(1919–). Isard roundly criticized the assumption of the a-spatial ‘pin-head’ economy found
in standard economic theory, and provided
an alternative version based upon location
theory, and in 1954 he convened the first
meeting of the Regional Science Association
in Detroit. Partly because of Isard’s indefatigable energy, and partly because of the movement’s fortuitous emergence in a period of
significant American regional and urban
growth, regional science rapidly expanded,
increasing its membership, forming new university departments, inaugurating journals
such as the Proceedings of the Regional
Science Association and then, in 1958, the
REGRESSION
Journal of Regional Science, initiating international branches (Europe in 1961, Asia in
1963) and attracting attention from cognate disciplines. One of those was economic
geography, and for a period in the 1960s –
the halcyon years of the quantitative revolution and spatial science – the agendas of
the two were symbiotically linked. The 1970s
began a reversal of fortunes, as former allies
such as economic geography increasingly
deserted regional science, its practitioners
caught up in the critique of spatial science,
the concomitant advance of political economy through the sub-discipline, and the emergence of an avowedly radical geography.
From the 1990s, competitors for the same
intellectual (and artificial) turf cultivated by
regional science emerged, such as the new
economic geography, and university administrators turned sour (Isard’s original Regional
Science Department at the University of
Pennsylvania was closed in 1994–5). Against
the backdrop of two decades of intellectual
and then institutional assault, regional science
moved to the margins of human geography
and the social sciences more generally.
tb
Suggested reading
Barnes (2004c).
As governments restructure under the pressures of neo-liberalism and globalization,
the politics of regionalism often does not
distinguish between the regional economic
policies and regional political identity. As
Paasi (2003) has pointed out, there is an
important difference between the identity of
a region, or the classification of a space by
government and other agencies, and the
regional consciousness of individuals, or the
degree and form of political regional attachment. Recent identification of a ‘resurgence of
the regions’ refers to both the creation of
regional economic spaces attempting to capture global investment by touting a regional
comparative advantage as well as the political movements, such as Lega Nord in Italy,
dissatisfied with membership in the existing
state. Jones and MacLeod (2004) caution
social scientists and policy-makers that there
is no necessary relationship between regional
economic spaces and regional political identity, which may cause problems for governments and the European Union promoting
regional policies. Furthermore, both regional
spaces and spaces of regionalism occur at
various scales, and must be viewed as a political process involving conflict and negotiation rather than fixed political geographical
entities. (See also regionalpolicy.)
cf
regionalism A term referring to both a form
of political identity and sub-national economic integration. Attempts have been
made to clarify the definition to delineate the
‘old’ regionalism of a political identity seeking
autonomy or separation from the state (see
secession) and the ‘new’ regionalism of economic integration at the sub-national scale,
which may include governmental administrative functions (Witt, 2005). Regionalism is
seen as a theoretical and methodological
vehicle to analyse new forms of governance
within the context of neo-liberal policies (see
neo-liberalism) and supra-state institutions
(O’Loughlin, 1996). Further clarification is
provided by Jones and MacLeod (2004),
who distinguish between regional spaces and
spaces of regionalism. Regional spaces are
regional economic geographies of technological spillovers and inter-firm agglomeration that produce a regional clustering of
economic assets (cf. cluster). Spaces of regionalism are the ‘(re)assertion of national and
regional claims to citizenship, insurgent forms
of political mobilization and cultural expression and the formation of new contours of
territorial government’ (Jones and MacLeod,
2004, p. 435).
Suggested reading
Allen, Massey and Cochrane (1998); Hönnighausen, Frey, Peacock and Steiner (2005).
regression A statistical relationship between
a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. The standard technique for
regression analysis fits a straight-line trend
through a scatter of points (as shown in the
figure), with the line placed to minimize the
sum of the (squared) distances between it and
the individual points. In the formula for a
simple regression (i.e. with one independent
variable),
Y ¼ a þ bX e,
Y is the dependent variable (shown on the
vertical axis); X is the independent variable
(shown on the horizontal axis); a is the intercept or constant term (i.e. the value of Y when
X equals zero); b is the regression coefficient (i.e.
the slope of the relationship, indicating the
change in Y for each unit change in X); and e
is the error term, indicating the degree of scatter of points around the line. The closer the fit
of the line to all of the points, the larger the
associated correlation.
639
REGULATION THEORY
regression
Multiple regression equations have the form
Y ¼ a þ b1 X1 þ b2 X2 þ . . . þ bn Xn e,
in which each of the independent variables
(X1, X2, . . . , Xn) has an associated partial
regression coefficient (b1, b2, . . . ) indicating the
amount of change in Y for each unit change in
the relevant X variable, assuming no change in
any other X. (See also general linear model;
geographically weighted regression; logit
regression models; multi-level modelling;
poisson regression.)
rj
Suggested reading
O’Brien (1992).
regulation theory A branch of contemporary political-economic theory, influenced by
marxism, which seeks to explain the growth,
crisis and transformation of capitalism, with
particular reference to historically, geographically and institutionally specific conditions.
Regulation theorists balance a Marxian
emphasis on the structures, ‘laws of motion’
and incipient crisis tendencies of capitalist
economies with an appreciation of (a) the variability exhibited in forms of economic
growth over time and space and (b) the complex of social and institutional forces that
serve to channel and sustain particular forms
of economic growth, and defer crises, over
periods of decades. Here, ‘regulation’ does
not simply denote laws and rules but, after
the French régulation, refers to processes of
social regularization.
The central concept in regulation theory is
the regime of accumulation, a historically
distinctive and relatively durable form of
640
growth, based on a particular nexus of production/consumption and a supporting ‘mode
of regulation’ (an ensemble of organizational
forms, networks, and institutions, rules,
norms and patterns of conduct, including a
distinctively capitalist state). Regulation theory rose to prominence in the 1980s, following
the French regulationists’ seminal analysis of
fordism – the regime of mass production
and mass consumption that prevailed in
North America and Western Europe during
the period between the mid-1940s and the
mid-1970s. Fordism was accompanied by a
‘Keynesian-welfarist’ mode of regulation
(including an interventionist nation-state,
a coordinated industrial relations system, a
managed regime of international trade and
finance, expansionist social welfare policies
and the generalization of mass-consumption
norms). Initially developed by Michel
Aglietta, these arguments became well known
in geography through the work of Alain
Lipietz, Robert Boyer and their pre-eminent
British ‘translator’, Bob Jessop.
Regulationist approaches became influential
in geography after the late 1980s, where they
were invoked in debates around the decline
and restructuring of Fordist manufacturing
industries (paradigmatically, automobile production) and – more controversially – in the
rise of putative successors to Fordism, such as
flexible specialization, flexible accumulation and post-fordism (see Scott, 1988a;
Tickell and Peck, 1992). For the most part,
regulationists prefer to remain somewhat
agnostic on the question of Fordism’s successor, despite the evidence of extensive experimentation in flexible production systems and
new forms of governance, since the criteria
for regimes of accumulation emphasize the
medium-term reproduction and interpenetration of these structures, most often
demonstrated through historical analysis.
Subsequent regulationist-inspired work in
geography has focused on emergent forms of
institutional regulation and governance,
which are evidently less centred on the
national state than had been the case in the
Fordist era (see MacLeod, 2001), in contrast
with the rather more economistic tradition of
the original French school (see Boyer and
Saillard, 2002). In turn, regulationist concerns
have shaped the growing body of work on
neo-liberalism, raising questions about the
character, origins and socio-economic implications of such market-oriented modes of
regulation. While strict adherence to regulationist principles has become increasingly
RELATIVISM
rare in economic geography, the approach
can be credited with helping to establish the
widely held view that economies are socially
embedded and institutionally regulated, rather
than being guided by some ‘hidden hand’ of
market forces.
jpe
Suggested reading
Jessop and Sum (2006); Peck (2000).
relational database Relational databases
allow tables to be joined using columns of data
common to the tables in which the various
data sets are stored. For example, if one table
has a list of countries and population size, and
a second the countries and their land areas,
then relating one to another by each country’s
name permits calculation of population density. In GIS, the vector data model is relational, storing the attributes and geography of
objects in linked tables: for example, place
named A [in table 1] has a boundary I [in table
2] that includes point 1 [in table 3] which has
location (x, y) [in table 4].
rh
Suggested reading
Longley, Goodchild, Maguire and Rhind (2005).
relativism Understanding the production
and justification of knowledge as relative to
the standards of the society and culture
within which it arises. In emphasizing the
social rather than individual variability of
ideas and beliefs, relativism gives explanatory
power to historical and geographical contextuality, and suggests that because knowledge
is dependent upon context, truth will itself
be relative. Relativism is opposed by universalism, which holds that true knowledge transcends context, and that reason can cut across
contextual difference to judge the truth of
knowledge.
human geography has been concerned
with both cultural and epistemological relativism. While explicit geographical arguments
for relativism are rare, the term has a positive
and negative presence in debate; as an
approach consonant with long-standing geographical interests in cultural difference, and
as an accusation levelled at those thought to
be subverting the foundations of geographical enquiry. Cultural relativism is evident in
anthropological enquiry concerned to understand the beliefs and practices of different
societies without reducing them to some common explanatory schema. Fierce debate has
proceeded over the moral and political consequences of cultural relativism. Geertz (1984)
argues for ‘anti anti-relativism’, criticizing the
argument that challenging universal standards
of cultural understanding and judgement
leaves one unable to provide moral or political
commentary on the world. Geertz understands the debate as an expression of anxieties,
‘rather more an exchange of warnings than
an analytical debate. We are being offered a
choice of worries’ (Geertz, 1984, p. 265).
Questions of cultural relativism connect to cultural geography, but also to epistemological
questions concerning reason, rationalism,
science and hermeneutics (Hollis and Lukes,
1982; Bernstein, 1983), often raised under the
heading of postmodernism. Relativism serves
as a marker in the psychology of theory.
Relativist worry is countered by the pragmatism
of Richard Rorty (1979), who suggests that
relativism is a problem only because of the
foundationalist vocabulary through which
orthodox philosophy condemns it. With a different vocabulary, relativism disappears as a
problem. Such an argument has been regarded
as political and moral evasion by those from
both the political Right and Left, who present
themselves as defending traditional standards
and/or maintaining positions for progressive
political judgement. Debates over postmodernism in geography reflect such tensions and
antagonisms.
Relativism has informed debates in the history of geography, and the geographies of
science. Relativistic understandings, from
paradigm approaches through to science
studies work, have presented science as a
social practice: Livingstone (1992) discusses
the consequences for the status of scientific
and geographical knowledge. Smith (2000a)
considers the implications for the geography
of ethics and moral geographies, showing
that relativism is a moral and philosophical
impulse with its own history and geography.
Whether this relativistic understanding of
relativism confirms or undermines relativism
is another matter. For many in human
geography, the means to address or side-step
such questions has been provided by arguments for situated knowledge, seen as a
means to negotiate the twin perils/demons/
temptations of relativism and universalism.
Clear resolution of such issues is unlikely:
indeed, pragmatist and/or postmodernist
arguments would suggest that searching for
resolution is futile, and desiring resolution
misguided.
dmat
Suggested reading
Geertz (1984); Smith (2000a).
641
RELEVANCE
relevance Concern over the relevance of
geography has been expressed since its foundation as a discipline; for example, in the promotion of geography as a practical science of
empire. Consideration of how relevance has
become a prominent word in geographical
debate at specific times shows how ‘relevance’
can act as a marker for disciplinary disputes.
In the early 1970s, economic crisis, environmental resource debate and international conflict shaped debate on relevance, along with the
sense that spatial science was becoming too
abstract to gain purchase on public policy
issues (Johnston and Sidaway, 2004, Ch. 9).
At the 1974 Institute of British Geographers
conference, IBG President J.T. Coppock,
building on earlier applied geography, outlined geography’s possible relevance for
governmental, planning and environmental
agendas (Coppock, 1974). Among responses
was David Harvey’s ‘What kind of geography
for what kind of public policy?’, questioning
how definitions of relevance had been shaped
by political and economic circumstances: ‘The
debate over relevance in geography was not
really about relevance (whoever heard of
irrelevant human activity?), but about whom
our research was relevant to and how it was
that research done in the name of science
(which was supposed to be ideology-free)
was having effects that appeared somewhat
biased in favour of the status quo and in favour
of the ruling class of the corporate state’
(Harvey, 1974b, p. 23). Exploring contradictions between policy demands and humanistic
scholarship, Harvey sought a dialectical
understanding of relevance: ‘The moral obligation of the geographer, qua geographer, is to
confront the tension between the humanistic
tradition and the pervasive needs of the corporate state directly, to raise our consciousness of
the contradiction and thereby learn how to
exploit the contradiction within the corporate
state structure itself’ (p. 24).
Relevance re-emerged as a marker for
debate in the late 1990s, prompted by concern
over geography’s cultural turn, and worries
that in a period of notionally social democratic
government in the UK and the USA, geography was missing a policy opportunity. A
1999 issue of the Scottish Geographical Journal
addressed relevance in terms of recent theoretical debates (Scottish Geographical Journal,
1999), Michael Dear discussing postmodernism and relevance as pertinence, political commitment, and policy application, while Susan
Hanson posed relevance as a feminist geographical concept, working within and across
642
different scales (see feminist geographies).
Martin (2001b), however, argued that particular uses of such theory were producing an
increasingly irrelevant geography. With an
element of envy at economists’ apparent
policy influence, Martin suggested that much
contemporary economic and social geography had little policy or social relevance,
due in part to the cultural turn. Martin presents a particular sense of relevance, and a
particular characterization, even caricature,
of ‘irrelevant’ and theoretically indulgent cultural enquiry. The terms of debate are further
explored by Staeheli and Mitchell (2005), who
address ‘the politics of relevance’ and ‘the
social practices that condition relevance’
(p. 357) through interviews with public space
researchers and analysis of Association of
American Geographers publications. The publication of Staeheli and Mitchell’s article in the
AAG’s Annals underlines how relevance
debates have proceeded through institutions
representing the discipline.
Those wary of instrumentalism in geography may in turn be wary of calls for relevance: pertinence may pass, commitments
may wane and the relevant may become the
untopical. It is important to appreciate and
critique debates on relevance according to
the temporality of their arguments, and to
consider how geographical work not seeking
immediate impact may nevertheless achieve
different kinds of political and cultural
influence.
dmat
Suggested reading
Johnston and Sidaway (2004); Staeheli and
Mitchell (2005).
religion Geographers approach the study of
religion in a number of ways, from examining
spatial patterns arising from religious influences, to the diffusion of religious beliefs
and organizations, the relationship between
religion and population, the impact of religion
on landscape and landscape on religion,
religious ecology, and the politics and poetics
of religious landscapes, community and identity (Kong, 1990, 2001a).
The relationship between religion and geography may be traced to early Greek geographers, in their concern with cosmological models
that reflected a world view shaped by religion
(see cosmology). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the main preoccupation
was ‘ecclesiastical geography’, the mapping
of the spatial advance of Christianity in the
world, propelled by the desire to disseminate
REMOTE SENSING (RS)
the Christian faith. ‘Biblical geography’ also
developed during this time, involving attempts
to identify places in the Bible and to determine
their locations. In the late seventeenth century, and particularly in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, nature was seen as a divinely created order for the well-being of all
life. Scholars adopting the physico-theological
stance ardently defended the idea that in living
nature and on all the Earth, there existed
evidence of God’s wisdom. In the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, following the lead
of Montesquieu and Voltaire, the influence
of the environment on religion was studied.
Geographers adopted a highly deterministic
approach when they sought to explain the
essential nature of various religions in terms
of their environments (see environmental
determinism). This changed in the 1920s,
when Max Weber’s writings marked a turning
point by inverting the earlier environmentally
deterministic doctrine to focus on religion’s
influence on social and economic structures,
and environmental and landscape change.
Further, in the 1960s and 1970s, with environmental and carrying capacity concerns,
interest focused on the roots of environmental
crisis, and a school of thought emerged that
degradation was the result of the Christian
belief that God gave humans dominion over
the Earth.
Geographies of religion were sporadic for
much of the twentieth century, and without
major breakthroughs in perspective and
approach, but especially from the 1990s
onwards, the field has been reinvigorated.
Kong (2001a) characterizes the emerging
body of work as framed by an interest in the
politics and poetics of sacred space, identity
and community. Such research acknowledges
that sacred space is contested space, just as the
sacred is a contested category. Similarly, religious identity and community are subject to
negotiations, embedded in relations of power,
domination and resistance. Kong (2001a)
urged geographers of religion to develop
‘new’ geographies of religion that emphasize
different sites of religious practice beyond the
‘officially sacred’ (churches, temples, mosques,
synagogues and the like); different sensuous
sacred geographies; different religions in different historical and place-specific contexts; different geographical scales of analysis; different
constitutions of population and their experience of and effect on religious place, identity
and community; different dialectics (sociospatial, public–private, politics–poetics); and
different moralities.
Since then, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (see
terrorism) have prompted new analytical
attention to religion: most obviously to the
rise of a distinctly radical or political Islam
(Watts, 2007) – and here it is important
to attend to the culturalist constructions of
what Mamdami (2004) calls ‘Good Muslim,
Bad Muslim’ – but also to the roles of
Christianity, Hinduism and Zionism in shaping both provocations and responses to political violence (e.g. Gregory, 2004b; Oza,
2007: see also just war). But this new interest
in religion is not only political: the so-called
‘moral turn’ in geography, towards a renewed
concern with ethics, has prompted Cloke
(2002) and others to reflect on the place of
the spiritual within human geography, and
Proctor (2006) and his collaborators to propose a new conversation between geographers
on religion.
lk
Suggested reading
Holloway and Valins (2002); Kong (2001).
remote sensing (RS) Literally, the sensing
(study) of an object using instruments of
observation that are remote from (not touching) the object. This includes medical scanning but, more commonly, the object is the
Earth, which aerial photography and satellitebased sensors are used to observe.
The basis of RS is that different types of
vegetation, landform and land cover can have
distinctive spectral signatures, meaning that
they emit and reflect electromagnetic radiation
in different ways. The truth of this is evident
by observing that features of the landscape
have different colours and temperatures.
However, RS involves more of the electromagnetic spectrum than our human senses allow
access to, using infrared detection, thermal
scanners, radar and microwaves, for example.
RS can be passive, detecting natural radiation
from an object; or active, targeting energy
(such as laser pulses) on to the object, from
the RS device.
RS has its origins with Gaspard-Félix
Tournachon, a French photographer and balloonist who took aerial photographs of Paris in
1858. It was developed during the twentiethcentury world wars and the cold war (a flashpoint of which was when Gary Powers’ ‘spy
plane’ was shot down over the Soviet Union,
in 1960) and today is used for environmental
analysis and monitoring as well as military
surveillance (see military geography;
war). In all cases, however, and despite the
authority of techno-science invested in them,
643
RENT
RS data can be ambiguous, requiring careful
interpretation.
One problem is that as RS signals pass
through (for example) cloud cover and the
atmosphere the signals are degraded. Second,
although commercial satellites now offer very
precise imagery (1–5 m resolution), if these
are unavailable and if an object is smaller than
the resolution offered by the sensor, then its
spectral properties will be mixed with others
around. Third, objects can be obscured by
others above; for example, vegetation below a
tree canopy.
In any case, human geographers may be less
interested in land cover per se and more concerned with land use, or the social meaning
given to places. A spectral signature is a coproduction of nature and science; the way in
which places are constructed and used is
infused with social praxis and signification.
There is no necessary one-to-one relationship
between the science and social science.
However, an interesting development
within RS has been to use methods of image
classification that incorporate geographical
thinking. Standard methods of classification
generally are probability based (and Bayesian,
notably the maximum likelihood approach:
see bayesian analysis). If it is known (from
direct evidence) where various land cover
types are located on some parts of the RS
image, then it is possible to extrapolate and
determine that the spectral signatures of
other parts of the image more likely indicate
one land cover type than any other. A more
geographical approach is to classify pixels
within the context of what is around them; to
extract information about spatial configurations and associations that may say more
about the land function than an aspatial analysis of land cover alone. Such techniques
include space syntax (related to graph
theory).
rh
Suggested reading
Campbell (2002); Hillier and Hanson (1989);
Lillesand, Kiefer and Chipman (2003).
rent Formally defined, rent is any payment
to a factor of production over and above
that necessary to keep it in its present use.
While any factor of production can potentially
accrue rent it is the analysis of only one factor
– land – that dominates the discussion of rent
within geography. This is partly because the
payment for land is pure rent (a consequence
of the fact that land costs nothing to produce,
and not the case for other factors), and partly
644
because land is bound to location, thus lending itself to geographical analysis.
Rent is the price of land, and because land is
differentiated by both quality and location,
each land plot will have a different rent level.
Two quite different approaches have been
deployed to explain differential land rents.
The orthodox view of neo-classical economics treats land as any other commodity, with
rents set by forces of supply and demand. Rent
is determined as in a giant auction, with
rational buyers and sellers of land meeting
to haggle over price. Those plots of land with
characteristics most demanded given the available supply will fetch the highest rents, and in
the process determine land use. In contrast,
marxist economics emphasizes the power of
different social classes in determining rent
levels. While land characteristics play a role
in setting rent, they are always subordinate to
a set of wider social relations characterizing
capitalism around the inequality of power
and resource ownership. Without inclusion
of this larger context, no analysis of rent is
complete.
Both traditions have provided analyses of
the role of land rent within explicitly
geog..
raphical settings. The von thunen model
is the best known within the neo-classical
tradition (Chisholm, 1979). Assuming that
agricultural crops are cultivated at varying
distances around a town, which is also the
sole market, a competitive bidding process
among farmers results in plots of land closer
to the town centre receiving differentially
higher rents than those farther away. In this
case, the spatial pattern of land rents is
explained by differential savings in transport
costs that allow farmers closer to the town to
bid higher rents than farmers farther out.
Rents are thus set by the supply and demand
for plots of land differentiated by location.
The von Thünen model has also been
extended to explain rents within the city.
William Alonso’s bid-rent approach (see
alonso model) draws upon differential transportation costs of commuting along incomes
to explain urban land rents and residential
land-use patterns.
The Marxist approach to rent is most associated with writings by David Harvey (1999
[1982]) and Neil Smith (2008 [1984]).
Harvey draws directly on Marx’s categories
of absolute and monopoly rent to stress the
role of class power in determining rent levels.
Landowners use their clout either to restrict
investment in the case of absolute rent, or to
constrain the supply of land in the case of
REPRESENTATION
monopoly rent, to raise rents artificially above
levels they would otherwise attain. Harvey initially applied the idea of monopoly rent to the
city, but it has been Smith who has systematically worked through a Marxist analysis of
urban rent. Key for him is the idea of the rent
gap, which represents the difference between
the actual rent charged for a given plot of land,
and the potential rent that could be charged if
that plot was developed according to its best
use. For Smith, the rent gap is a result of the
inherently uneven development of capitalism. Only when the rent gap is significantly
large will it be filled by landowners and capitalists colluding in a process of redevelopment,
and producing maximum potential rents. Rent
levels are not the consequence of unfettered
market forces, but the deliberative power of
social classes to intervene and manipulate for
their utmost gain.
tjb
Suggested reading
Sheppard and Barnes (1990).
rent gap The gap between the current rent
on a piece of land (the ‘capitalized ground
rent’) and its potential rent under another
use (the ‘potential ground rent’). Developed
by Smith (1979c) and emphasizing capital
flows in the production of residential space,
rent gap theory is a crucial element of the
analysis of gentrification. It suggests that
disinvestment in inner-city neighbourhoods
reduces capitalized ground rent. When this
rent is sufficiently lower than potential ground
rent, opportunities for profit-making through
reinvestment occur, leading to residential
change. The theory has been criticized, however, for downplaying the role of individual
gentrifiers’ choices in shaping inner-city
neighbourhoods (Hamnett, 1991).
em
Suggested reading
Clark (1995); Smith (1996).
representation A complex concept not only
because of the intricate disputes in art and
literature to which its traditional usage
refers, but also because of the variety of its
applications in modern and postmodern critiques of Western epistemology (see modernism; postmodernism). At its minimum,
representation is conventionally defined as a
symbol or image, or as the process of
rendering something (an object, event, idea or
perception) intelligible and identifiable. Bringing together the achievements of Renaissance
art (the ‘discovery’ of perspective) and
enlightenment language (scientific objectivity, classificatory order), this ‘naturalist’
or ‘realist’ theory of representation is characterized by the relationship between two
assumed metaphysical constants: the artist/
viewer (or universal, visual experience) on the
one hand, and nature (or the objects of external reality) on the other. From this perspective,
the history of representation is the study of
constant mutations reflecting the increasing
sophistication of artistic execution in relation
to the changing appearances of the world.
However, morphology and advancing technical
expertise are not by themselves history: indeed,
‘history is the dimension [this understanding
of representation] exactly negates’ (Bryson,
1983). Recognizing this, representation is
analogous to what Edmund Husserl (1859–
1938) calls the ‘natural attitude’, a perspective
whose increasingly fidelity to a reality ‘out
there’ is as much a scientific and aesthetic
practice as it is an epistemological premise.
‘It is the aim of the sciences issuing from the
natural attitude to attain a knowledge of the
world more comprehensive, more reliable,
and in every respect more perfect than that
offered by the information received by experience’ (Husserl, in Heath, 1972). It is Husserl’s
student, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), however, who most decisively equates representation with science/knowledge and posits it as
the foundation – and fateful flaw – of Western
philosophy. Manifest in what Heidegger
called the modern ‘age of the world picture’,
the representational model depends on the
construal of truth as ‘correspondence’ or
‘accordance’ (Heidegger, 1962 [1927]). Representation or ‘En-framing’ (Ge-stell) thus
not only assumes that the world is purely
‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden), an object to be
submitted to our pitiless and possessive gaze,
but turns it into a ‘standing reserve’ for our
technical domination and habitual instrumentalization. What such an attitude forgets,
however, is that the ‘world is never [that] which
stands before us and can be seen’ (Heidegger,
1962 [1927]). Rather, true experience for Heidegger is a matter of ‘uncovering’ the hidden,
of revealing what might be concealed rather
than accurately and anonymously representing
what appears to be.
But if Heidegger’s indictment of representation suggests a phenomenological critique (see
phenomenology), other analyses insist on the
historical specificity of representation and its
implication in the production of knowledge.
For Michel Foucault (1926–84), representation not only has a history but a precise
645
RESISTANCE
moment of epistemic formation coincident
with the onset of what he calls the Classical
Age (1600–1800). Before the end of the
sixteenth century, an age characterized by
a theory of ‘resemblances’ or ‘similitudes’,
Foucault argues, images and words were
understood as decipherable hieroglyphs, as so
many figural or iconic ‘signatures’ that bore
intrinsic affinities to the things of a divinely
ordained world. The result was an essential
seamlessness, a ‘non-distinction between what
is seen and what is read . . . the constitution of
a single, unbroken surface in which observation and language intersect to infinity’
(Foucault, 1977). For reasons that Foucault
unfortunately fails to explicate, the Classical
Age emerges when this unity is shattered by a
growing awareness of the binary nature of
representation; that is, of the discriminatory
judgement of identity and difference, of the
placing of things in differential relation to each
other as the means to describe and systematize
the manifold objects of the external world.
Knowledge now begins to occupy a new space.
It is the space within representation itself,
inside the tools of its language, classificatory
systems, and modes of naming and viewing.
Natural history and concomitant taxonomic
or tabular orderings of the world owe their
triumph precisely to representation so understood. Importantly, the only thing that is not,
and cannot, be included within this representational frame is the act of representation
itself. Indeed, it is only in the absence of the
viewing, naming and describing subject, that
representation can claim its authority as infallible knowledge.
With this analysis, and Foucault’s subsequent charting of the shift from a Classical
to a Modern episteme, in which language
becomes opaque as Man is arranged at the
centre of knowledge, the stage is set for understanding representation as a discursive practice, as a kind of work (see discourse).
Alternatively known as the social constructivist approach (see social construction), this
perspective recognizes that while concepts and
signs may have some material dimension (we
do, after all, emit sounds when we speak, paint
marks on a canvas, transmit electronic
impulses when taking a digital photograph),
the meaning of such things depends not on
any pragmatic quality but on their symbolic
and social function. It is for this reason that
Ferdinand de Saussure (1966) preferred the
word ‘signify’ rather than ‘represent’ for what
words and concepts do: they do not describe a
pre-existent reality, but constitute what counts
646
and is valued as reality. Influenced by
Saussarian linguistics and rehearsed within
various registers of post-structuralism, the
constructedness of representation is now a
chief interpretive principle cutting across a
wide sampling of contemporary theories,
including those of human geography. Indeed,
one can say that ‘geo-graphy’, in its etymological connection to ‘earth-writing’, holds
the idea of ‘representation-as-text’ at its practical and theoretical root (Cosgrove and
Daniels, 1988; Barnes and Duncan, 1992;
Duncan and Ley, 1993; Gregory, 1994).
However, acknowledging the constructed
nature of representation is one thing; investigating the inherent partiality and limitations
in anything constructed is another. Alongside
questions of who and what it is that ‘represents’ (i.e. what enunciative, rhetorical or
institutional position is involved in the act of
representing) attention also has to be paid to
the restrictions of the representational model:
to not only what it excludes, but also what it
inhibits in accessing the perceptual practices
of our sensory and somatic lives. In recent
human geography, the disappearance of the
textual dimension in so-called ‘non-representational theory’ offers one such address.
Concerned to close the distance between subject and object – the very distance implied by
representation as mediation, illustration or
derivative sign-language – non-representational theory attends to how certain spaces,
experiences and states act directly on the
body, addressing the manifold affects, sensations and, indeed, visibilities of the world
in the subject’s felt engagement with it. Here
the re of representation, or the substitutive
value that this re indicates, makes way for a
certain intensification of presentation, for an
immediacy of presence of which any secondary reproduction of the world can give no
account (Dewsbury, Wylie, Harrison and
Rose, 2002).
jd
Suggested reading
Elkins (2002); Evans and Hall (1998); Jay
(1993); Mirzoeff (1999).
resistance In human geography, resistance
has two distinctive meanings: political resistance, the more common usage, refers to resistance to domination or oppression; psychic
resistance refers to unconscious attempts to
maintain repressions of traumatic or dangerous memories (see psychoanalytic theory).
Pile and Keith (1997) discuss how the two
concepts work in relation to each other.
RESORT LIFE-CYCLE MODEL
Rejuvenation
Stagnation
Number of tourists
Debates about political resistance crystallize
key trends in critical human geography.
marxist geography has a long tradition of
studying collective organizing and everyday
resistance to class exploitation; and struggle
against patriarchy is well articulated in
feminist geographies. The geographical
embeddedness of political and cultural action
has been explored in work on social movements, highlighting: how particularities of
place influence the emergence, character and
strategy of movements (Routledge, 1993);
what geographical dilemmas labour unions
face in the age of global capital (Herod,
1998: and see labour geography); and the
importance of social movements in shaping
political and social geographies (Miller,
2000).
An interest in cultural politics and the
persuit of the cultural turn led to two developments in the geographical study of resistance. First, the interpretative frame was
enlarged to include myriad everyday symbolic
and material practices, which contested not
only class exploitation but also gender, racial,
sexual (and other) forms of domination and
oppression. James Scott’s Weapons of the weak
(1985) was a key text, in which he identified
foot dragging, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, arson, sabotage and
more as ‘everyday resistance’. These practices
required little or no coordination or planning,
made use of implicit understandings and
informal networks, and typically avoided any
direct or symbolic confrontation with authority (1985, p. xvi). However, when almost every
action is conceptualized as resistance, critical
distinctions between effective and ineffective
political resistance, and commitments to collective organizing and the coordination across
different forms of domination, may be lost
(Pile and Keith, 1997).
Second, resistant subjects were understood
as authoring their political identities in relation to multiple axes of power, and dominant
structures, discourses and actors within society (Castells, 1997). Identity formation is
thus complex in terms of both the multiplicities of identities negotiated by each individual and the hybridity of resultant resistance
practices (see third space; Pile and Keith,
1997). Concerns with the latter have been
influenced by Foucault’s (1990 [1976]) version
of post-structuralism, which views power as
insinuated throughout all social activity, inherent in practically all social and political relationships. The operations of power, domination
and resistance are seen as integrally rolled up
Consolidation
Decline
Development
Involvement
Exploration
Time
resort life-cycle model (from Butler, 1980)
in articulations of society and space, resulting
in the entanglement of resisting and dominating practices; for example, through the creation
of internal hierarchies, the silencing of dissent,
or how various forces of hegemony are internalized and reproduced within resistance practices (Sharp et al., 2000).
With the intensity of the processes of neoliberal globalization, concerns over the
ways in which the production of scale is itself
an outcome of political struggle (Smith, 1993)
are now turning to networked forms of politics
and resistance (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994;
Featherstone, 2003, 2005b; Routledge 2003;
Massey, 2004). This challenges the way in
which resistance has been previously theorized
through bounded versions of space and place,
and is crucial for engaging with the dynamic
transnational networks of opposition to globalization (see anti-globalization; transnationalism).
pr
resort life-cycle model
Originally developed by Butler (1980) (see figure), the tourist
resort life-cycle model depicts an almost inevitable pattern of development in five phases.
First, there is a phase of exploration characterized by small numbers of relatively wealthy
tourists ‘finding’ the destination. Second,
local capital and populations become involved
in developing the resort. Third, there is development as agglomeration effects lead to
increasing returns. Thus as visitor and business numbers increase, the knowledge and
skill base expands. More visitors mean more
capital, which means more investment in
facilities and accessibility, which makes the
destination more attractive, and so on. This
develops into a fourth phase of consolidation,
where competition among increasing numbers
of providers to gain large volumes of tourists
647
RESOURCE
entails cheap products, which in turn have low
margins and thus reduce further investment.
The effects of expansion may also destroy
the very qualities that once made the place
appealing. The resort may exceed its ecological or social ‘carrying capacity’, leading
to a fifth phase of stagnation.
mc
Suggested reading
Butler (1980); Smith (1992c).
environments can be considered to provide
‘resources’: recreational amenity, aesthetic
appreciation, moral worth and spiritual inspiration imply the attribution to the natural world
of a complex range of value systems (see
resource management).
Work on resources engages with questions
of value, knowledge, scarcity and sustainability that are at the heart of modern environmental geography. Three distinctively
geographical understandings of the nature
and function of resources have emerged.
resource A deceptively peaceable term that
conceals the profoundly political relations
through which humans attribute value to the
non-human world. ‘Resource’ is one of the
core categories of modernity: like ‘nature’
and ‘culture’, its origins lie in the revolution
of socio-natural relations associated with
the emergence of capitalism. The distinctions
and differentiations enabled by the category
of ‘resources’ – between productive, valued
assets and unproductive ‘wastes,’ for example – are closely bound to notions of development and state formation, and play a key role
in the organization of contemporary society.
The ‘productivist’ associations that adhere to
the term give it wide application beyond
environmental phenomena: technology, skills
and employees, for example, are frequently
described as resources. These applications
illustrate how the term captures a fundamentally social relationship: the attribution of
(economic) value by a dominant group to attributes and capacities that provide functional
utility for that group.
Traditionally, a ‘resource’ describes a product of biological, ecological or geological processes (game, soils, mineral ores, timber,
water) that satisfies human wants (see natural
resources). The utility of these environmental
goods and their contribution to human welfare
may be experienced directly – for example, as
material inputs such as food and shelter that
enable subsistence – or indirectly via its role in
exchange. In addition to these classic productive inputs, the category of resources also
includes a range of ecosystem services, such as
carbon sequestration, flood attenuation and
the maintenance of biodiversity, that are
now recognized as critical to the functioning
of the Earth’s life-support systems (Costanza
et al., 1997). Many of these provide important
‘sink’ functions by assimilating wastes produced during the use of environmental goods.
There is also a range of non-extractive
and non-utilitarian ways in which physical
648
(1) Resources: neither natural nor cultural.
At the core of geographical work on
resources is the recognition that resources are ‘cultural appraisals’ of the
non-human world. This idea, which can
be traced in the writings of nineteenthcentury political economists such as
Ricardo and Mill, is articulated most
clearly by Zimmerman’s (1933) aphorism that ‘resources are not; they
become’. In his World resources and
industries, Zimmerman argues against
the vernacular view of resources as
‘material fixities of physical nature’ and
proposes that ‘neutral stuff’ acquires the
status of a resource once it is recognized
as having some functional value. Work
by geographers has explicitly broadened
the category of resources away from a
restricted focus on physical stocks and
flows, situating resources as an interface
or boundary zone between societies and
the vast range of different materials that
biological, geological and atmospheric
systems produce. Burton, Kates and
White (1993) systematized this view of
resources as an interface between human
and physical systems, noting the symmetry between positive and negative
social appraisals of the environment
(‘resources’ versus ‘hazards’). Recent
work on life sciences and biotechnology questions altogether the categories
‘human’ and ‘physical’, and highlights
the need for non-dualistic modes of
thought within geography. To varying
degrees, then, geographers have insisted
that resources are hybrid forms, ‘socionatures’ that are neither purely natural
nor purely social (Swyngedouw, 1999).
By defying categorization as either
nature or culture, resources highlight
the insufficiency (and instability) of
many of the analytical categories on
RESOURCE ECONOMICS
which modern geography is founded
(see hybridity).
(2) Resources as relational. Recent work
by geographers starts from the premise
that resources can be more productively
analysed as a set of social relations between (often distant) groups rather than
as discrete ‘things’. This so-called ‘relational approach’ works against the reification of resources by turning the
analytical lens back on to society: What
is it about the needs and wants of a society, and the way a society is organized,
that transforms a component of the
non-human world into a resource in
a particular time and place? (See also
commodity.)
At its most general, a relational
approach de-naturalizes resources: it
draws attention to how what counts as a
resource is at least as much a matter of
social, political and economic conditions
as it is any intrinsic or inherent properties. More specifically, relational thinking
about resources can provide a potent
critique of popular assumptions that
scarcity is an external physical condition
setting the bounds of human possibility
(Harvey, 1974a). In the face of neoMalthusian claims about food, energy
and other material shortages (see malthusian model), thinking about the
social relations that define a resource
highlights how access and availability
are mediated by wealth and power: simply put, the rich and powerful do not
starve. This insistence on the limits to
resource availability being largely
(although not exclusively) internal to
the economy can be politically empowering, as it suggests how apparent shortages might be resolved not by increasing
supply, but by changing the way in which
resources are allocated within society, the
uses to which they are put, and cultural
expectations about the costs of use.
(3) Resources: fighting words. Resources have
long been recognized as objects of geopolitical struggle and intrigue: control
of water and oil, for example, are frequently tipped to be the battlegrounds of
the twenty-first century (Klare, 2002: see
conflict commodities; resource wars).
However, many of the most intractable
contemporary political tensions surrounding resources are not struggles over a stable
category, and it is the very definition of
lands as resources that is at stake. Thus
recent work considers the cultural, economic and political processes by which
parts of the non-human world are ‘coaxed
and coerced’ from settings where they
already may be valued in quite different
ways (Tsing, 2004). While chimpanzees
(laboratory experimentation), exposed
uplands (wind power sites) and tropical
agro-diversity (genetic diversity) are strikingly heterogeneous, what they share in
common is that their status as resources
(noted in parentheses) is achieved only in
the face of opposition and resistance.
The apparent objectivity and universality
of the ‘resource imaginary’ disguises its
particularity and the silencing of alternative conceptualizations of the non-human
world. For example, to describe bauxite
as a resource overlooks the pre-existing
land uses and land ownership that
must be undone to establish mines and
realize the exchange value of the
ore (Howitt, 2001b). It is for this reason
that a number of authors refer to the ‘violence’ of the resource imaginary, thereby
placing resources at the centre of human
geography’s encounter with postcolonialism (Braun, 1997; Peluso
and Watts, 2001).
gb
Suggested reading
Bakker and Bridge (2006); Emel, Bridge and
Krueger (2002); Rees (1991); Shiva (1992).
resource economics A practical art and field
of study that understands natural resources
as a particular class of the ‘scarce goods’
described by neo-classical economics, and
that seeks to understand the opportunities
and limitations of using markets as the primary
social mechanism for making collective
decisions about their production, allocation
and consumption. Although recognizing that
resource availability is finite in an absolute
physical sense, a core axiom of resource economics is that any meaningful measure of a
resource’s availability must understand its
relation to capital, labour and socio-technical
knowledge – relations that can be expressed by
reference to price (Barnett and Morse, 1963).
A normative goal of resource economics is to
improve utility maximization by attributing
prices to environmental goods and services. gb
Suggested reading
Tietenberg (2005).
649
RESOURCE EVALUATION
resource evaluation A component of the
resource management cycle involving physical, economic and/or cultural appraisal of
natural resources. Evaluation generates
knowledge about a resource that is used to
shape future strategies towards its use, conservation or management: it may, for example,
provide a ‘baseline’ against which to judge the
effects of human intervention; it may calculate
potential commercial values of a resource for
a range of possible uses; or it may be used to
review the consequences and effectiveness of
management strategies. Although often employed as a top-down administrative tool, participatory use of the techniques of resource
evaluation can challenge ‘expert’ assumptions
about the value, function and condition of a
resource.
gb
resource management
The knowledges
and practices associated with monitoring,
evaluating, decision-making and intervention
in environments, with the objective of ensuring that these environments produce goods
and services of value to society. Resource
management activities are undertaken by a
wide range of actors and institutions, including private-sector organizations, national and
local governments, community groups and
households. peasant studies and political
ecology highlight agriculture as the ‘original’
resource management activity: the farmer is a
land manager who makes (highly constrained)
decisions about inputs to and outputs from a
plot of land.
Etymologically, ‘management’ conjoins two
distinctive roles: the trainer or director (managgiare), and the careful housekeeper (ménager)
(Williams, 1983 [1976]). Resource management is the ‘applied science of possibilities’
(Hays, 1959): the task of the resource manager
is to ensure the orderly production of environmental goods and services over time and space.
The codification of this role – and the elevation
of resource management as a specialized
branch of knowledge – first appeared on
large European landholdings: von Thünen’s
work on land rent in The isolated state (1966
[1826]), for example, developed from a concern to determine optimal patterns of agricultural
.. land use on his Prussian estate (see von
thUnen model). Resource management science also developed as part of the colonial
project, as Europeans wrestled with unfamiliar
tropical ecologies and sought ways to attain
their control and maximize the yields of commercially valuable crops (Scott, 1998b). The
emergence of resource management as a
650
distinctive social task marks a historical disjuncture: it is the point at which scarcity and
abundance are recognized to be the product of
social organization, and society begins the
active production (‘husbandry’ or ‘stewardship’) of environmental goods and services that
formerly had been taken as ‘free’ inputs.
Recent efforts to develop planetary management regimes for global resources – biodiversity, global climate and the oceans – are an
explicit recognition of this ‘underproduction of
the environment’ and replicate a process that
occurred earlier at the national scale for many
productive resources such as timber, soils, water
and game (e.g. the Conservation Movement
of the early twentieth century in the USA).
Within geography, resource management
has been viewed as a promising vehicle for
achieving the integration of human and physical geography (Johnston, 1983). Although
geography programmes often contribute to the
teaching of conservation and resource/
environmental management, much recent
human geography is critical of the knowledgeclaims and ‘utilitarian, reductionist, technocentric and market driven’ practices of conventional resource management (Howitt, 2001b).
Encounters between resource managers and
indigenous peoples highlight the particularity
and ethnocentrism of the instrumentalist
‘resource imaginary’, and the way in which
conventional resource management works
to empower those who share its epistemology,
while disenfranchising (and often dispossessing) those who do not. Yet there are a stunning
array of other rationalities – aesthetic, spiritual,
communitarian – and indigenous environmental knowledges that may provide alternative criteria and values for management. Recent work
seeks to bridge the gap between expert and
indigenous knowledges via processes such
as stakeholder consultation, the development
of multi-actor management systems (that combine the interests of private, public and other
interested parties) and community-based natural resource management. (See also natural
resources.)
gb
Suggested reading
Bakker and Bridge (2006); Howitt (2001b).
resource wars Conflicts over the control of
natural resources are frequently simply
called resource wars. Through much of the
twentieth century, supplies of resources to
feed and fuel industrial states were a matter
of concern to war planners in many imperial
states. During the cold war, American
RESTRUCTURING
concerns over supplies of minerals and oil
were part of its military planning. A large literature has documented the relationship
between fights to control resources and geopolitics, although it has also pointed out that
simple conflicts over resources are less frequently a direct cause of warfare than simplistic Malthusian assumptions of scarcity leading
to conflict usually suggest (Le Billon, 2004: cf.
malthusian model). The recent growth of the
global economy and the ability to substitute
and invent new materials in industrial processes has substantially reduced the concern
with potential wars over many resources on
the large scale. However oil may yet turn out
to be the ‘resource war’ exception that proves
this rule.
Research in the 1990s gradually connected
resources with contemporary violence in
many states in the global south. It became
clear that in many places in the developing
world where there were large supplies of
natural resources, there was also a prevalence
of violence, corruption and in some cases
outright warfare (Le Billon, 2005). Research
has now documented how this ‘resource curse’
distorts development by making the political
elites who control the resource rents hugely
wealthy, and in the process frequently stifles
national economic innovation. It also makes
clear that there are large incentives to fight to
control the rent from resource extraction,
which, in the absence of a strong state and
available economic alternatives, frequently
fuels civil wars (Bannon and Collier, 2003).
At the largest scale, these matters are now of
concern in the discussion of global oil supplies
and the sometimes severely distorted political
structures of oil-exporting states, in particular
in the middle east. This now directly connects
resource curse arguments with the traditional
geopolitical themes of ensuring supplies for
distant markets. In particular after the Iranian
revolution, and during the subsequent war
between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, American
military power became increasingly involved in
the Gulf to control the flow of oil. This has
grown dramatically as a consequence of invasion of Iraq in 2003, where the US policy in
the region is now directly tied to enforcing the
flow of oil, with all the potential this has for
further violent conflict (Klare, 2004).
sd
Suggested reading
Klare (2004); Le Billon (2005).
restructuring Change(s) in and/or between
the constituent parts of a circuit of social
reproduction, emanating from the dynamics
of the circuit itself or from contradictions and
crises within it.
Such changes may represent a response to
changed conditions induced, for example, by
time–space compression, technical change,
or conflicts between labour and capital in
the workplace, or transmitted through the
competitive conditions endemic to capitalism. The inherently competitive social relations of capitalism generate a permanent
tendency to transformation or restructuring,
but the term has come to be more widely used
since the end of the long boom in the late
1960s and early 1970s (see crisis; modernity). For some, it is a process closely associated with the transition from one kondratieff
cycle to another or from one regime of accumulation to another or with the speed of the
circulation of capital and the increasing globalization of the world economic geography.
As such, restructuring may be thought to be
synonymous with development (Streeten,
1987), or at least with certain forms of development. But it goes beyond that. Thus
Laurence Harris (1988, p. 10) points out that
although there is ‘no easy, obvious way to
distinguish structural from other changes in
the abstract . . . some periods seem to see
greater and more significant shifts than
others’. He identifies four such periods in the
UK since the early nineteenth century: the
1830s and 1840s; the 1880s and 1890s; the
1930s and 1940s; and the 1970s and 1980s.
But what marks these out as periods of
restructuring? Apart from certain specific and
system-wide components of changes (e.g.
those identified by Harris, 1988, pp. 11–14),
restructuring involves not just quantitative
change but pronounced qualitative transformations of the ways in which consumption,
production and exchange take place and
relate to each other. Furthermore, as a set of
essentially qualitative changes operating on
the circuit of social reproduction, restructuring necessarily involves transformations of the
conditions in which such circuits create and
find their conditions of existence.
At an extreme of structural change, such as
occurred in the transformation of the former
state socialist societies during the late 1980s
(see post-socialism), the social relations
through which the dynamic, direction and
mode of evaluation of social reproduction are
shaped are themselves transformed and the
circuit of social reproduction comes to operate
on completely different principles, often associated with profound economic disruption and
651
RESTRUCTURING
profound social pathologies. The parallels
between perestroika in the former Soviet
Union and capitalist restructuring are marked:
Perestroika is inevitable when existing economic conditions do not respond to . . . the
needs of development of society and the demands of the future. Here it is necessary to
change the economic system, to transform
and renew it fundamentally. For this transformation restructuring is necessary not just
of individual aspects and elements, but of
the whole economic system. (Anganbegyan,
1988, p. 6)
This strategy for development – fatefully for
Soviet socialism – presumed uskorenie, an
acceleration of economic growth, and glasnost,
or openness, to be achieved by the spread of
democracy and local self-management.
The more insidious, continuous and widespread social and political consequences of
restructuring driven by the imposition of capitalist social relations and the norms, directions and criteria of evaluation that go with
them within the third world are dramatically
illustrated in Michael Watts’ (1992) harrowing
account of ‘fast capitalism’ and the exploitation of oil in Nigeria.
Less dramatic but still profound changes
may occur within the dynamics of particular
forms of social reproduction, such as capitalism (e.g. Harris, 1988). Manuel Castells
(1989, pp. 21–8) suggests that certain transformations of the capitalist mode of production on a global scale during the twentieth
century are structural in form. Certainly, they
serve to exemplify the point that restructuring
is qualitative as well as merely quantitative.
The Great Depression of the late 1920s and
early 1930s and the associated disruption of
the Second World War ‘triggered a restructuring process that led to a new form of capitalism very different from the laissez-faire model
of the pre-Depression era’ (p. 21). The new
model relied on restructured relations between capital and labour whereby stability in
capitalist production was exchanged by the
recognition of union rights, rising wages
and the development of welfare states;
Keynesian regulation and intervention in circuits of capital articulated primarily at the
national scale; and the creation of a new set of
international regulatory institutions around the
international monetary fund, underwritten
by the power of the economy of the USA.
The limits of this model – manifest, for
example, in rampant inflation, increases in
returns to labour and fiscal crises of the state –
652
were formative influences (for an attempt to
assess the articulation of these formative processes, see Yergin and Stanislaw, 1998) on the
creation and imposition of a restructured model
of the circuit of capital involving the appropriation of an increased share of the surplus by
capital based around increases in productivity,
changes in the labour process and restructuring of labour markets in terms of: deregulation
and reductions in the power of trades unions; a
shift in the role of states from intervention
to facilitation of capital accumulation; and further deregulation and opening up of local and
national spaces to global competitive processes –
not least through the increasing significance
of globally sensitive and active spheres of reproduction (see economic geography), acting
through global financial centres.
Restructuring may involve one or more of a
number of transformations:
. structural adjustment, which Streeten
(1987, p. 1469) defines as ‘adaptation to
sudden or large, often unexpected changes’
to an economic geography. Such changes
may, however, be forced by powerful
institutions such as the World Bank in,
for example, making aid dependent on
profound changes in macro-economic
policy. Structural adjustment programmes
have been designed to open up underdeveloped economies to the global economic
geography in order to maximize their potential for development. In this sense, they may
be viewed as a means through which the
social relations of capitalism may be spread
through the underdeveloped world in ways
that make them secure for the future by
insisting, for example on:
- transformations in the modes of coordination and exchange within circuits of
social reproduction (by, for example,
opening up economies to the pressures
of market forces and international competition) with the objective of removing
local rigidities and reducing vulnerability to shock through means such as
increasing the flexibility of markets, the
provision of productive infrastructure
and the development institutions orientated to export markets;
- switches of capital between forms of
investment (direct/indirect), sphere of
circulation of capital (reproduction/
production/realization) and sector (e.g.
deindustrialization);
- geographical switches of capital (here/
there – see new international division
RETAILING
of labour). Such changes clearly have
substantial implications for the uneven
development of places (re/dis)incorporated from circuits of capital (see Allen
and Massey, 1988; Allen, Massey,
Cochrane et al., 1998).
More narrowly, the restructuring of production (e.g. Graham, Gibson, Horvath and
Shakow, 1988) may have significant consequences well beyond production itself:
. changes in the process of production as a
consequence of economies of scale, the
concentration of centralized capital (see
marxist economics) or transitions from
one regime of accumulation to another
(see regulation school);
. changes in the organization of production
along the production chain (see Dicken,
1998, Ch. 1);
. changes in corporate organization – such as
those associated with forms of integration
within production, multidivisional organization and decentralization in the attempt
to combine corporate size whilst maximizing entrepreneurial initiative within the
organization;
. the development of tasking flexibility in
production based, for example, upon
economies of scope or temporal flexibility
based, for example, on just-in-time forms
of supply along the production chain;
. a redefinition of a firm’s core activities, so
redefining its sphere of activities, with profound implications for the size and status
of its labour force;
. a repositioning of the firm along the production chain to deal with downstream
service functions;
. a geographical reconfiguration to redefine
the role and functioning of individual productive units ; and
. an organizational restructuring involving
a redefinition of the firm’s internal and
external boundaries.
The restructuring of production in these
ways has implications for, or may be undertaken through, changes in the labour process
or the division of labour, but it relates to
wider processes of change within which labour
is necessarily caught up, and over which it has
less direct influence than changes in the immediate conditions of work.
Although restructuring is a term applied
mainly to economic transformation, and is
frequently driven by and is obviously manifest
in the activities of individual firms and capitals,
it cannot be restricted to the economic
sphere. It involves, and so is predicated upon,
responsiveness elsewhere in society. Nor is
restructuring reducible merely to economic
dynamics. It frequently requires the support
and or restructuring of the state or, as in the
case of perestroika or the market-based restructuring around the discourses of monetarism
in the USA (‘Reaganomics’) and, to a more
dramatic extent, the UK (‘Thatcherism’) or
New Zealand (‘Rogernomics’) cases, is driven
by the transformation of regulatory practices
instituted by the state and so generates a
range of ideological and political relationships and struggles (see, e.g., Walker,
1997).
rl
Suggested reading
Allen, Massey, Cochrane et al. (1988); Castells
(1989, ch. 1); Corbridge (1995, section 5); Walker
(1997); Watts (1992/6).
retailing The marketing and distribution of
commodities to the public. Retail geography
is conventionally defined as the study of the
interrelations existing between the spatial patterns of retail location and organization on the
one hand, and the geography of retail consumer behaviour on the other. Retail geography is often situated at the overlap of
related sub-fields, including economic geography, the geography of services and urban
geography
Work within retail geography appears to follow one of two broad trajectories. The historically dominant perspective is somewhat more
applied, and neo-classical (see neo-classical
economics; cf. special issue of GeoJournal, 45
(4) (1998)). Since the late 1980s, a selfdefined ‘new’ retail geography has emerged,
in clear opposition to the former. Initially
influenced by political economy perspectives, this has subsequently become responsive
to developing debates within cultural geography (for an overview, see Wrigley and
Lowe, 2002).
Mainstream retail geography has certain
general characteristics. Broadly speaking, neoclassical economic principles predominate, with
considerable emphasis placed upon the structuring role of individual consumer decisions.
This can be seen in the continuing influence of
central place theory (cf. Parr, 1995), the
refinement of which played an important role
in the quantitative revolution of the 1960s.
With strong links to marketing (Jones and
Simmons, 1993), retail geography is also
applied in its emphases. Retail geography has
653
RETRODUCTION
conventionally adopted a specific spatial focus,
with enquiry usually directed at the intra-urban
and, occasionally, at the regional scale. The
geographies of consumer behaviour and retail
organization are also frequently theorized as
some function of distance (distance decay),
actual or perceived.
This perspective has come under challenge,
as political economic and cultural perspectives
have been brought to bear on retail geography.
Initial insights were drawn from the allied field
of industrial geography, which saw the
import of Marxist perspectives into spatial–
economic analysis in the 1980s. One analysis,
by Ducatel and Blomley (1990), drawing from
Marxist insights into economic structure,
sought to re-theorize retail capital both as a
vital component of a larger capitalist system,
and as characterized by its own internal logic
(see marxist geography).
Although this re-theorization has been criticized (Fine and Leopold, 1993), the call for a
political economic perspective on retail capital
generated a response, particularly in the UK.
The ‘new economic geographies of retailing’,
as Wrigley and Lowe (1996) styled them,
paid particular attention to the phenomenon
of retail restructuring. More recently, geographers have explored commodity chains
and power relations between retailers and
suppliers (Hughes, 2005).
Over the past decade or so, the ‘new retail
geography’ has become more attentive to the
cultural geographies of retailing. In line with a
more generalized recognition that economic
processes are culturally coded (see cultural
economy), retail geographers have again
become interested in questions of consumption. However, consumption is not seen
simply as the unproblematic expression of consumer demands, but is understood as a critical
site for the expression, reproduction and contestation of various identities (see identity).
One question, in this regard, is the way in
which gender roles are formed in retail spaces.
Certain retail sites – notably the department
store and the mall – have received particular
attention (Blomley, 1996). However, it is interesting to see other retail spaces coming under
scrutiny, including the car-boot sale (Crewe
and Gregson, 1998). Excellent reviews of and
commentaries on this literature are provided by
Crewe (2000, 2001, 2003).
nkb
retroduction A mode of inference (particularly associated with realism) in which events
are explained by postulating (and then identifying) the mechanisms by which they are
654
produced. Those mechanisms realize causal
powers, the potential causes of events that
have to be activated (as with the striking of a
match and the creation of fire): those powers
may not be observable (as with gravity) and
their existence has to be retroduced from
appreciation of observed events.
rj
Suggested reading
Sayer (1992 [1984]).
retrogressive approach A method of working towards an understanding of the past by
an examination of the present (cf. retrospective approach). The term achieved wide
circulation through the work of Mac Bloch
(see annales school), who insisted that the
analysis of past landscapes required the prior
analysis of the present landscape, ‘for it
alone furnished those comprehensive vistas
without which it was impossible to begin’.
Likening history to a film, Bloch argued that
‘only the last picture remains quite clear’, so
that ‘in order to reconstruct the faded features
of others’ it is first necessary ‘to unwind the
spool in the opposite direction from that in
which the pictures were taken’ (see
Friedman, 1996).
dg
retrospective approach
A method, principally employed in historical geography,
the focus of which is understanding the present,
and which considers the past only insofar as it
furthers an understanding of the present (cf.
retrogressive approach). The retrospective
approach, much advocated by Roger Dion
(1949) in his study of French agrarian landscapes and similar to the historic-evolutionary
approach in classical German cultural geography, considers that an understanding of the
present landscape poses problems of explanation that can only be solved by a retrospective
search for their origins.
cw
The study of the past for the light it throws
on the present (cf. retrogressive approach).
The approach would make historical geography a prerequisite for contemporary analysis. Its most explicit advocate was Roger Dion
(see annales school), who believed that a
consideration of the present landscape poses
problems that can only be solved by a search for
their origins; but the approach can evidently be
extended beyond the analysis of the landscape
and has much in common with ‘genetic’ or
‘historical’ explanations more generally. dg
Suggested reading
Baker (1968).
RHIZOME
revealed preference analysis Statistical
methods, many based on multi-dimensional
scaling, for deriving an aggregate set of decision-rules from a series of individual decisions,
as in the choice of shopping centres by
consumers. The individual choices are termed
examples of behaviour in space and are particular to a given configuration (the distribution of
shopping centres in one town, for example).
The general rules, unconstrained by any
particular arrangement, are the revealed rules
of spatial behaviour (Rushton, 1969). Studies
of other behaviours – such as voting – use
similar approaches. (See also behavioural
geography.)
rjj
Suggested reading
Poole (2005).
rhetoric The term is classically defined as the
art of persuasion and eloquence. The history of
Western thought could be understood as a long
quarrel between serious reason and rhetoric.
From one perspective, enlightenment,
rationality and science overcome religion,
superstition and magic. A counter-narrative
sees in this process only the subordination of
visceral, creative pluralism to soulless reason.
The quarrel turns on a shared set of opposed
pairs: reason versus passion, fact versus opinion, neutral versus partisan – reason versus rhetoric. This opposition underplays the extent to
which rhetoric, as a classical discipline, was
concerned with the ways in which audiences
could be swayed through a combination of
both reason and emotion. The epistemological
significance of a consideration of rhetoric does
not, therefore, lie in completely debunking the
idea of truth. Rather, it requires a rethinking of
the idea that the task of knowledge is for
an observer to represent an independent external reality in a transparent medium: rhetoric’s
concern with the joint, shared aspects of gaining assent and persuading others suggests a
contextual account of the justification of knowledge and belief (see also epistemology).
In geography, rhetoric has become a focus
of attention in the wake of a more general
revival of interest in this topic in philosophy,
anthropology, linguistics, literary studies and
history (White, 1978; Clifford and Marcus,
1986; Nelson, Megill and McCloskey, 1987).
This engagement has led to a greater degree of
reflexivity towards the rhetorical strategies
prevalent in the discipline, and how these
inscribe particular orientations to audiences
and publics. But geography’s treatment of
rhetoric has tended to fall into the familiar
oppositional pattern noted above. The characteristic reduction of rhetoric to metaphor
reinstalls the world/word binary. Interest in
rhetoric has therefore been mainly restricted
to debunking of the truth-claims of various research fields, as a kind of renewed ideologycritique. On this view, the rediscovery of rhetoric helps us to see that all orthodoxies and
norms are really just contingent constructs,
whose reproduction is neither natural nor reasonable, but is really the effect of rhetorical
strategies as part of political agendas.
There remain two areas in which a consideration of rhetoric might still have a creative impact
on research agendas in human geography.
First, the rhetorical-responsive account of action,
practice and subjectivity developed by Shotter
(1993), and building on the tradition of Gilbert
Austin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke, Rom
Harré, Paul Ricoeur, Lev Vygotsky, Ludwig
Wittgenstein and others, retains its potential for
redeeming the concept of discourse from the
prevalent representational construal to which it
has been subjected in geography, by returning it
to a fuller sense of language-in-use and language-oriented-to-action (cf. representation).
This in turn would have implications for methodological analysis of both archival data and
talk-data generated in focus groups, interviews and ethnographic situations (see ethnography). Second, understanding rhetoric as the
effort to move and affect audiences through various modes of appeal and persuasion points
towards an alternative approach to the analysis
of public space that investigates the different
types of rhetorical force that are deployed to convene publics (Barnett, 2007).
cb
Suggested reading
Fish (1995); Smith (1996).
rhizome Botanically, a rhizome is an underground system of stalks, nodes and roots
through which a plant spreads horizontally and
sends out new shoots. The metaphorical use of
the term has been associated with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
(1987). For them, that which is rhizomatic is
counterpoised to that which is arborescent, or
tree-like. Unlike vertical and hierarchical arboreal structures, rhizomes are comprised of nonhierarchical networks within which there are
many ways to proceed from one point to
another. According to Deleuze and Guattari,
such rhizomatic networks are resistant to and
disruptive of ordered vertical and thus striated
spaces, such as those of the state (see also poststructuralism).
ajs
655
RHYTHMANALYSIS
Suggested reading
Bonta and Protevi (2004); Marston, Jones and
Woodward (2005).
rhythmanalysis A term coined by the
French Marxist Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) to
describe a mode of analysis characterized by
its receptivity to temporal dimensions, particularly moments, cycles, tempo, repetition
and difference (see time). Lefebvre (2004
[1992]) is concerned not merely with the analysis of rhythms – bodily, social, daily, seasonal,
lunar – but also analysis through rhythm. In
the latter case he is particularly interested
in the way in which the study of rhythms
can shed light on the workings of the modern
city, everyday life, the body and capitalist
production. Lefebvre shows how space and
time need to be thought together rather than
separately, and how a non-linear conception
of time and history is a crucial balance to his
famous rethinking of the production of
space. Lefebvre’s conception of rhythmanalysis may be contrasted with the more mechanical, high modernist conceptualizations of
Torsten Hägerstrand’s time-geography, but
also can be profitably related to Ermarth’s
(1992) account of the crisis of representational
time under postmodernism (cf. representation) and her own, quintessentially rhythmic
sensibility that emphasizes repetition and pulse
rather than linear sequence.
se
Suggested reading
Lefebvre (2004 [1992]).
ribbon development Development strung
along major roads within, on the edges of, or
stretching beyond urban areas. It is generally
associated with commercial establishments
looking for cheap, easily accessible sites with
high visibility to large volumes of passing
automobile traffic. Ribbon developments are
perhaps epitomized by the classic American
‘highway strip’, where development is often no
more than one block deep on each side of the
road. Celebrated by some as classic Americana,
as worthwhile vernacular architecture, or as the
spatial manifestation of market forces, ribbon
development is increasingly criticized as an
element of socially, economically and environmentally problematic urban sprawl.
em
rights A right is a power or privilege to
which one is justly entitled. Rights are often
distinguished from duties (i.e. the behaviour
expected of others, including the state) and
privileges (that which can be conferred or
656
invoked). Rights presuppose corresponding
obligations upon others to do something, or
to refrain from doing something. My right to
freedom of speech, for example, requires the
state to abstain from summarily repressing my
speech. Rights are capable of several meanings, depending upon the context within
which they are put to work. So, for example,
moral and formal/legal rights may differ.
Within national jurisdictions (cf. human
rights), formal rights can be subdivided.
Civil rights refer to those entitlements of personal liberty given to all citizens by law (such
as property rights, freedom of association,
religion, movement, and protection from arbitrary arrest). Political rights are those that bear
on the establishment and operation of the
state, such as the right to vote. Social rights
entail the entitlements of citizens to social
benefits, such as health or education. The
political priority accorded these different
rights and their intersection is, of course, a
crucial issue for any political community.
Debate also turns on which entities can be
legal rights-holders: Are we to include children? animals? The insane? Ecosystems?
Rights are central to both statecraft and social
life, and have become a standard feature of the
constitutional apparatus of the modern state.
Rights-claims carry special force: in ascribing
rights to certain social relations, we ‘shift them
out of the realm of the merely desirable and into
the domain of the morally essential’ (Jones,
1995, p. 4). For Laclau and Mouffe (1985), a
vocabulary of rights allows for the politicization
of power relations. That which had been cast as
subordination (i.e. as something that appeared
natural and unchanging) can be reframed as
oppression (i.e. unjust and contingent).
However, others worry at the ways in which
rights can cast political subjectivity in particular and limited ways, and reproduce contingent visions of the social and political world.
For this reason, argues one strain of critical
scholarship, we should be sceptical of the progressive potential of rights. Others counter by
arguing that rights are ‘protean and irresolute
signifiers’ (Brown 1997b, p. 86), whose varying and often expansionary meanings can be
put to work in diverse political sites.
What, then, of the geography of rights? It is
clear that space shapes the ways in which rights
are construed, contested and put to work
(Blomley, 1994; Blomley and Pratt, 2001).
Liberal rights (see liberalism), most particularly, help produce, and operate within, sharply
demarcated spaces. The way this ‘sociopolitical map’ (Walzer, 1984, p. 315) is produced
RISK
may affect the ways in which subjectivity is
produced, as well as shaping the political possibilities associated with rights (Marston, 2004b).
As Pratt (2004) argues, spatial representation can be used to close rights down as well
as open them up. Representations of the
spaces of the body, the public–private divide
(see private and public spheres) and the
nation can all serve to delimit or deny rights.
And yet, Pratt argues, activists seeking to
advance rights-based claims in defence of
Filipino domestic workers within Canada have
put other spatial representations – such as
scale, international human rights and the
‘empty space’ of liberal universalism – to productive work. At an extreme, the peripheral
and exclusionary locations to which marginalized groups have been assigned can also be
used as a space from which to contest and
challenge the ordering of rights (Chouinard,
2001; Peake and Ray, 2001).
The relation between rights and space takes
on a particular dimension when it comes to
public space. Public space is historically
predicated on particular and related forms of
territorial exclusion, with only certain subjects
being deemed appropriate rights-bearers in
relation, in part, to the degree to which they
were imagined as fully formed citizens (see
citizenship). Yet public space, Don Mitchell
(2003, p. 29) argues, is a site made through
political struggle, as outsider groups, such as
women, the working class and ethnic minorities, have fought their way into the public
realm. Such a struggle necessarily entails
rights. Again, rights can be used to deny public
space to certain populations or can be used as
a tool to pry public space, and thus, citizenship, open. Both rights and space, then, are
said to be co-produced: social action ‘always
operates simultaneously to influence the production of law and the production of space’
(Mitchell, 2003a).
It is because of the political valence of
rights, and their spatiality, that geographers
have become interested in rights in more than
a descriptive sense. Lefebvre’s (1996) call for a
‘right to the city’ has been invoked by those
who seek to articulate a normative vision of
space and social justice (Harvey, 2000b).
However, much of this work, while interesting
and even inspirational, remains under-theorized, and fails to engage the broader critical
literature on rights, their politics and their
geographies.
nkb
Suggested readings
Marx (1975); Purcell (2002).
risk In the first, technical, sense, risk refers
to the probability of a known event (which
may be a cost or a benefit) occurring. Such
probabilities assume that causes and consequences can be determined, mapped and predicted. This is a highly rationalist endeavour
characteristic of modernity and a belief in
controllability. Risk in this sense is about
knowing the world, and is therefore not subject to uncertainty or indeterminacy. In order
for such a probability to be calculated, the risk
must be first identified (e.g. failure of an aircraft engine, the development of lung cancer,
leakage of radioactive waste). The pathways to
the event also need to be identified, and the
likelihood of such pathways and events occurring needs to be calculated. The latter will
often require some element of technical knowledge, but also an understanding of the social
and institutional relations that surround a risk
(e.g. the ability of a regulatory body to police
possible risk pathways). In certain circumstances, probabilities can be calculated from past
events (the chances of developing lung cancer
from smoking can be estimated from population data). In other circumstances, where
events are uncommon or where new technologies mean that there are few if any precedents,
determining risk becomes more and more contentious. Not only are the occurrences or
manifest dangers/benefits difficult to secondguess, but the pathways to them may be
impossible to imagine prior to the event, and
the institutions responsible for regulating
behaviour may not be sufficiently established
or experienced. Meanwhile, given the geographical, material and social complexities of
everything from taking a drug to building a
nuclear power station, the ability to calculate
risk becomes ever more fraught with uncertainty and indeterminacy. The growing sense
of the non-calculability of risks feeds in to a
second, more qualitative, sense of risk. Here,
risk takes on a meaning that has more akin
with uncontrollability and danger. Most
effectively taken up in Beck’s Risk society
(1992) and Mary Douglas’ anthropology of
risk and blame (Douglas, 1992), risk becomes
a contestable issue in society at large. All
calculations become liable to re-calculation
or to rendering non-calculable. Controversies
over risk become more and more common as
various individuals and bodies contest each
other’s estimation of events and pathways,
and dispute the ability of responsible or
regulatory bodies to shepherd technologies,
processes and markets in such a way as to
minimize risk (the ongoing battles over the
657
RISK SOCIETY
environmental and human safety or otherwise
of genetically modified foods is a case in point)
(Bingham and Blackmore, 2003). The latter,
institutional, element to risk debates has been
taken up most effectively by those researchers
who have investigated the dynamics of
trust relationships between (expert) responsible bodies and (lay) publics (Wynne, 1992,
1996). At the same time, and partly on account
of the inevitably of ‘not knowing’, risk enters the
vernacular as something that should be encouraged, for if risks are not taken then nothing creative or new can be generated. Nevertheless,
as Douglas (1992) and Lupton (1999) have
argued, risk increasingly refers to the hazards,
dangers, threats and contingencies of actions.
(See also biosecurity; security.)
sjh
Suggested reading
Bingham and Blackmore (2003); Lupton (1999).
risk society An account of late modern society, developed by the German sociologist
Ulrich Beck in the mid-1980s (Beck, 1992),
emphasizing mid- to late-twentieth-century
shifts in (a) people’s awareness and experience
of uncertainties and dependencies, and (b)
the manner in which late modern societies
produce risks (see also modernity). Beck’s
Risk society was in no way meant to suggest
that life had become more dangerous; rather,
it was the manner in which probabilities and
uncertainties were generated and were handled that had changed. Life had become more
contestable, and contested – there were more
choices to be made, more matters to debate.
Macnaghten and Urry (1998, p. 254) provide
the following summary of these societal shifts:
(1) Public awareness of the riskiness of hitherto mundane aspects of daily life (e.g.
foodstuffs, travel, work life, reproduction) had intensified.
(2) There had been a growth in the degree of
uncertainty that surrounded those risks.
(3) People’s sense of dependency upon the
institutions and expertise responsible for
managing and controlling risks had grown.
(4) At the same time, the degree of public
trust in those institutions and in expertise to manage risks effectively had
diminished.
These experiential and individualizing aspects
of risk society, which have drawn on a critical
theory tradition and which have much in common with Anthony Giddens’ structuration
theory, have been readily taken up in sociology
658
and geography (Beck, Giddens and Lash,
1994). However, it is the account’s relevance
to late modern technologies and environment
that has perhaps had most geographical purchase (Beck, 1995). In the former, Beck’s use
of the term ‘reflexive modernization’ suggests a
society more aware of its conditions, more able
to deliberate on futures and their consequences. But this emphasis on the cognitive
capabilities of human societies is undermined
by another sense that Beck gives to reflexive
modernization. reflexivity here refers to the
‘reverberations’ that actions entail (Latour,
2003). It is the realization that any action discharges a series of consequences, only some of
which will be known or knowable prior to the
event. Instead of more mastery through greater
awareness, risk society signals a world in which
‘we become conscious that consciousness
does not mean full control’ (Latour, 2003,
p. 36). In this latter sense, Beck’s use of archetypal examples of risk society technologies,
including nuclear power (he was writing soon
after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986) and
chemical industries, emphasizes the shifts in
the reach of these returns (risks involve larger
swathes of space and time; they contribute to
globalization and affect future generations)
and the entanglements that exist between what
had hitherto been considered as separate
spheres of science and politics. It is here that
risk society might prefigure a more progressive
politics, not so much rooted in an inevitable
individualization of life choices, but generating
a sense of common matters of concern.
sjh
Suggested reading
Beck (1992).
rogue state A term coined in the USA in
the 1990s, referring to a country that is
believed to imperil world peace through its
violation of international rules and norms.
The US government claims to use the following objective criteria to identify a rogue state:
an authoritarian regime that violates human
rights; sponsorship of terrorism; and development of and trade in weapons of mass
destruction. Critics claim that ‘rogue state’ is
merely a rhetorical tool used to justify diplomatic and military action against a state that
challenges the geopolitical goals of the USA
(Hoyt, 2000), while others suggest that all
three criteria rebound on the recent past and
present of the USA itself.
cf
Suggested reading
Chomsky (2000); Klare (1995).
RURAL GEOGRAPHY
rural geography The superstructure of
modern academic geography was thoroughly
metropolitan – London, Paris, Berlin,
Chicago – but its foundations were in the
countryside. Paul Vidal de la Blache developed his regional geography through close
(though not exclusive) attention to the peasant
cultures of rural France, for example, while
Carl Ortwin Sauer’s vision of cultural geography focused on the evolution of rural and
agrarian landscapes in the Americas. Even
early location theory and spatial science
looked to the countryside for their origins:
von thÜnen’s model of agricultural land use
was based on records from his country estate,
Christaller’s central place theory was
rooted in a stable world of southern Bavarian
marketplaces rather than explosive urban–
industrial growth, and Torsten Hägerstrand’s
diffusion theory grew out of his studies of
the Swedish countryside. But the distinction
between city and countryside is a culturally
constructed one (Williams, 1973), and there is
an important tradition of historical geography in Europe and North America that
has long been concerned with reconstructing
its historical transformations (e.g. the work of
the Permanent European Conference for the
Study of the Rural Landscape, established in
1957: see http://www.pecsrl.org).
No less importantly, the distinction also varies over space. In Europe, and particularly in
Britain, rural geography has recently been
revivified as a response to a series of political
and cultural concerns: the ‘threat to the countryside’ and to wildlife posed by urbanization,
the transformation of agriculture and the
aggressive rise of agribusiness (see also agricultural geography), the rise of new modes
of recreation and the development of ‘second
homes’ in the countryside, the changing class
composition of rural communities, and the
ways in which all these issues are entangled in
wider debates about the politics and production of nature. These politico-intellectual
responses have challenged the concept of
rurality (Marsden, Murdoch, Lowe, Munton
and Flynn, 1993; Cloke, 2006) and increasingly treated the rural as a series of cultural
constructs rather than a set of geographically
bounded spaces (Murdoch, 2003). In North
America there have been comparable, historically sensitive studies of the exploitations and
oppressions embedded in the production of
agrarian landscapes (Mitchell, 1996) and of
the imaginative geographies through which
they have been domesticated, notably in
literature and film (Henderson, 1999),
though probably few of those responsible
would situate their work within a distinctively
rural geography. Similarly, some of the most
exciting work in political ecology and environmental studies in America – Kosek’s (2006)
analysis of New Mexico’s forests, Sayre’s
(2002) accounts of ranching in the Southwest,
Hollander’s history of the Everglades (2008) –
has taken as its theatre of operations the rural
broadly construed.
Still more generally, the classic agrarian
question has directed attention to the differentiation of rural producers, the contribution
of the rural sector to capitalist accumulation,
and the politics of class distinctions in the
countrysides of the global south. Here, the
vast literature on peasants has rarely
attempted to theorize rurality but has instead
preferred to focus on social differentiation, the
organization of work and household dynamics
(Bassett, 2001; Gidwani, 2008). Analysis of
the so-called urban bias (Lipton, 1977) and
of rural–urban linkages has been especially
fruitful in generating new questions about
the formation of complex, hybrid urban–rural
spaces (McGee, 1991) and about power,
patronage politics and differential forms of
accumulation across space (Hart, 2002;
Chari, 2004). The World Bank’s World
Development Report for 2008 notes that ‘three
out of every four poor people in developing
countries live in rural areas – 2.1 billion living
on less than $2 a day, and 880 million on less
than $1 a day – and most depend on agriculture for their livelihoods’. It also notes that
rural poverty has declined over the past
twenty years in East Asia and the Pacific,
largely the result of improving conditions in
the countryside rather than out-migration,
but that the number of rural poor has continued to rise in South Asia and sub-Saharan
Africa. A distinguishing characteristic of rural
poverty is its disproportionate toll on women
and the exposure of the rural workforce to
the fragmentation of labour markets, and the
impermanence and seasonality of labour contracts. Indeed, one of the central findings of
the Report is the extent to which agricultural
populations are dependent upon off-farm
income, in which the structure of the rural,
non-agricultural economy is crucial. The
questions that dominate rural geographies
in these regions include drought, famine
and global climate change (Watts, 1983a; see
global warming); the production of food
and access to water; dispossession and
the politics of development; the violence
of resource wars and other forms of
659
RURAL PLANNING
late-modern war; and the state regulation of
migrancy and mobility. These issues are
urgent reminders that the production and
transformation of the rural is by no means
confined to the global North and is everywhere enmeshed with globalization (cf.
Woods, 2007; McCarthy, 2008). Despite the
predictions of the imminent demise of the
peasantry in the global South and the depopulation of the countryside in the North, the
rural continues to be a site of political contestation, from debates over the agricultural policy
of the European Union to the resurgence of
rural protest in China.
dg/jl/mw
Suggested reading
Cloke, Marsden and Mooney (2006); Murdoch
and Marsden (1994).
rural planning The attempt to organize and
control the distribution of development and
resources across rural areas: concerns include
the management of land-use change (see land
use and land-cover change) in relation to the
built and some aspects of the natural environment, as well as economic and social issues.
Rural planning in the developed world has
two main functions: first, the strategic allocation of development through the production
of frameworks and principles for resource
distribution and conservation; and, second,
the control of the alteration, growth and
design of the built form (cf. zoning).
Tensions have frequently arisen in planning
for rural areas between the many demands
on rural land, particularly in the context of
the changing importance of farming and
food production. In addition, pressure from
counter-urbanization in many parts of the
developed world has introduced conflicts
within rural planning between the desire to
conserve the natural environment and provide
housing in desirable residential areas. In some
rural areas, land-use designations such as
national parks have sought to maintain tight
control on development and resource use in
the most valued environments. In developing
countries, emphasis is placed less on control
but, rather, on the generation of economic
660
growth in the distribution of resources and
the organization of agricultural development.
The study of rural planning during the
1970s and early 1980s was largely descriptive
and uncritical. From the late 1980s, however,
greater attention was paid to the power relations within which planning operated, including the influence of social class over the
allocation of resources and the broader strategic direction of the planning process (Cloke
and Little, 1990). Particular attention was
given to the role of environmental politics in
shaping planning agendas and outcomes
(Williams, 2001). More recently, these discussions have been set within understandings of
the shifting nature of governance within rural
communities and of the relevance of new
decision-making structures and responsibilities (Goodwin, 1998). Work on the emergence of new forms of rural politics has also
helped to inform contemporary research on
rural planning (see Woods, 2006).
jl
Suggested reading
Lapping (2006); Woods and Goodwin (2003).
rural^urban continuum A once-popular
hypothesized continuous gradation of ways of
life between rural areas and large cities. It
assumed a polarization of attitudes and behaviours between ideal rural situations, on the
one hand – characterized by communities built
around kinship, attachment to place and
co-operation (what Tönnies (1955) referred
to as Gemeinschaft) – and large cities, on the
other – characterized by societies dominated
by impersonal, especially market, relationships
(Gesellschaft). Although some empirical studies
found patterns consistent with the hypothesis,
it was largely demolished by studies – such
as Pahl’s (1965) – that identified village-like
communities within cities and urban traits
spreading into the countryside.
rj
rustbelt
A descriptive term for the area
of declining manufacturing industries in the
north-east of the USA, now more widely
applied to any area of industrial decline
(cf. sunbelt/snowbelt).
rj
S
sacred and profane space Sacred spaces are
sites imbued with a transcendent spiritual quality. They are characterized by the rituals people
practice at the site, or direct towards it. Mircea
Eliade, the scholar of comparative religion
most closely associated with the concept of
sacred space, proposed that it is with sacred
experience that sacred space is marked out from
profane space. Whereas profane experience
maintains the homogeneity of space, the sacred
disrupts that, creating non-homogeneous space
(which is why sacred space figures so prominently in discussions of urban origins).
Eliade (1959, pp. 26–7) identified three ways
in which sacred places are formed: when there is
a hierophany (an ‘act of manifestation of the
sacred’, such as a voice proclaiming the sacrality
of a place); an unsolicited sign indicating the
sacredness of a place (as when something that
does not belong to this world manifests itself); or
a provoked sign (e.g. using animals to help show
what place or orientation to choose in setting up
a village). Sacred places may also be made
through the relics of holy beings.
Sacred places may occur in bio-physical or
in built form. Animists, in particular, believe
that some form of the divine exists in nature,
though this is true too of some world religions.
Thus, rivers, trees and mountains are religiously interpreted, and invested with symbolic meanings. For example, the bodhi tree
is a sacred tree for the Buddhists, while the
Ganges River is venerated by the Hindus. In
built form, perhaps the most visible and obvious sacred spaces are the ‘officially sacred’
(Leiris, 1938) religious buildings, such as
churches, temples and synagogues, though
roadside shrines and home altars constitute
other examples of sacred spaces too. In
advanced technological societies, technoreligious spaces such as radio and television
broadcasts and internet-based communication also contribute to the making of sacred
experiences through live telecasts of prayers
and religious gatherings, for example, thus
creating new conceptions of sacred space.
Chidester and Linenthal (1995, p. 6) argue
that ‘nothing is inherently sacred’. Sacred
space is contested space. It is ‘not merely
discovered, or founded, or constructed; it is
claimed, owned, and operated by people
advancing specific interests’ (ibid., p. 15),
involving ‘hierarchical power relations of domination and subordination, inclusion and
exclusion, appropriation and dispossession’
(ibid., p. 17). In these power relations, four
kinds of politics are apparent (van der Leeuw,
1986 [1933]): a politics of position whereby
every establishment of a sacred place is a conquest of space; a politics of property whereby
a sacred place is ‘appropriated, possessed and,
owned’; a politics of social exclusion,
whereby the sanctity of sacred place is preserved by maintaining boundaries; and a
politics of exile, which takes the form of a
modern loss of or nostalgia for the sacred.
Sacred spaces need not always be sacred.
The same space may be sacred at one time
under one set of circumstances, but not sacred
at other times and circumstances. For example,
a house is ordinarily considered functional
space, but in its design and the rituals practiced within, it may become sacralized.
lk
Suggested reading
Dunn (2005); Kong (2001a,b).
sampling Sampling involves selection from
a greater whole and can be contrasted with
a full enumeration or a census. However,
even when a census has been undertaken, the
outcomes can still be regarded as a sample of
what could have occurred (another stochastic
realization) – for example, on other than census day – so the concept of sampling has even
wider applicability. It is an essential part of
extensive research designs and survey
analysis, but is also important when qualitative data are collected and interpreted (King,
Keohane and Verba, 1994). The most common reasons for sampling are the costs of
measuring an entire population and the unethical intrusiveness of doing so.
Any sampling strategy is concerned with
estimating an unknown parameter (such as
the proportion in poverty, the mean income,
or the total number in poverty) and its likely
error, and involves trade-offs among:
. Representation: the ability to generalize
from the sample to the (carefully defined)
wider population.
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SAMPLING
. Coherence: the degree that the measured
entity conforms to the theoretical construct being studied. This is particularly
important in qualitative research when
often necessarily small samples need to be
theoretically relevant (Mitchell, 1983);
consequently, for example, we need to define and sample the different mechanisms
that place people in poverty (exclusion
from the job market, divorce and separation, etc.) and make sure that each type
is recognized and studied.
. Bias: the degree to which the parameter is
accurately estimated, without systematic
error; for example an internet-based sampling strategy may seriously underestimate
the extent of poverty.
. Precision: the degree to which the parameter
is reliably measured and random, stochastic,
innumerable small errors are controlled.
. Efficiency and cost: efficiency is the relative
precision of an unbiased sample compared
to others of the same size. Concern with
precision can often be over-ridden by convenience, practicality and cost; moreover,
it is generally much better to do a welldesigned small-scale study than a botched
large-scale one.
A highly convenient sample design (often used
by commercial organizations) is the quota
method, in which, for example, an interviewer
approaches people on a shopping street until
the desired quota of 25 each of young and old
men and women is reached. This approach is
simple but also open to bias, as certain types of
people are not generally found in shopping
streets; there can also be interviewer bias, as
the interviewer may be resistant to approaching certain groups of individuals. Nonresponse is inevitably ignored in this approach.
Snowball sampling is when having found a key
informant (e.g. a drug user) they are asked to
recommend others. While useful with hardto-reach populations, there is again the potential for bias as isolated drug users may be
missed and one circle of users may not intermix with others. A systematic sample is when
respondents are chosen in an ordered way,
such as every fourth house on a street. Such
a design is highly convenient in an the field
and when the total population is not known,
but can produce biased results when the entity
being studied has a corresponding systematic
patterning, so that all even-numbered houses
on one side of a street are social housing,
but all odd-numbered houses are owner
occupiers.
662
All the designs discussed so far are nonprobabilistic. In probabilistic designs the key
feature is that neither the interviewer nor
the interviewed can affect the selection mechanism, which is done at random. With such
samples, the likelihood of being sampled is
knowable and non-zero; consequently we can
use statistical theory (based on the central
limit theorem) to guarantee unbiased, representative estimates and to estimate the degree
of precision in those estimates. Thus we can
say that the proportion in poverty is 25 per
cent and that we can be 95 per cent confident,
given our sample of 7,200 households, that
the true underlying rate lies between 24 and
26 per cent. Non-probabilistic sampling is not
necessarily biased and unrepresentative, but
we lack the necessary formal framework for
making any judgement.
There are three basic types of probabilistic
sample:
. Simple random sample (SRS) requires a
complete listing of the population (the
sampling frame) from which a sample is
chosen at random so that each and every
unit has an equal chance of being selected.
With such EPSEM sampling (equal probability of selection method) the standard
error, which defines the precision of the
sample estimate, is proportional to the
square root of the absolute sample size.
Consequently, the larger the sample (in
absolute terms, not as a percentage of the
population) the greater the precision but
there are diminishing returns, as the sample size must be quadrupled to halve the
standard error. This can be an expensive
design as in a national survey the interviewers will be required to travel the entire
country. In practice, quasi-random samples are often used; for example, the British
national birth cohorts of 1946, 1958 and
1970 were based on babies born in a particular week, while the ONS Longitudinal
Study uses record linkage of individuals
born on four days of a year, which equates
to some 1 per cent of the national population. Indeed, providing there is no periodicity in the sampled variable, systematic
sampling can be treated as quasi-random.
With probabilistic sampling, an effective
sample size of 10,000 respondents is
needed in order to be 95 per cent confident
of being + 1 per cent of the true value,
when that is 0.5. Typically, scientifically
credible national opinion polls contain
around 1,500 respondents. In student and
SAMPLING
other small projects, the absolute minimum is 100 and preferably 250 when subgroups (male and female; young and old)
are being analysed. The aim should be a
focused questionnaire to a lot of people,
rather than a long questionnaire to few, or
a recourse to secondary data.
. Stratified sampling groups the population
into strata so as to maximize similarity
within a stratum and maximize betweenstrata differences. This can considerably
increase the sample’s efficiency if stratification is based on a variable strongly related
to the estimate. If income is strongly
related to region, then regions could be
used for stratifying and reducing the standard error of the mean income estimate. We
can also disproportionately sample from
particular strata when there are important
groups of the population that are numerically small and so would yield only small
numbers if SRS were used within strata
such as ethnic groups (see ethnicity)
with the non-indigenous groups over-sampled to get more precise estimates. Such a
strategy requires detailed knowledge of the
sample frame in terms of an ethnic classification, and the analysis should be
weighted to get correct estimates.
. Multi-stage designs involve sampling in
stages. For example, a sample of constituencies may be selected at random (the socalled primary sampling units), then wards
within them, then households within
wards and individuals within households.
This design is often used for major scientific surveys, as it only requires a sampling
frame at each stage; thus at stage one only
a list of constituencies is required, while at
stage two, only ward names are required
for those constituencies already selected.
Another advantage is the cost reduction
resulting from basing a team of interviewers in the higher-level units. A variant is the
cluster design when at some stage all the
lower level units are sampled – everybody
in a ward is selected, for example. A problem with these designs is that there is a
tendency for people living in the same
place to be somewhat similar so that the
resultant sample is more alike than a random sample and standard statistical theory
gives overly precise results. Clustered data
lead to inefficiency and it is not unknown
for an SRS a third of the size to achieve
the same standard error. It is clearly vital
to measure this dependency (the intraclass correlation) and correct for it. The
development of multi-level models
allows this even when the sample is unbalanced with a different number of units
in each higher level unit. Consequently,
multistage designs are recommended
for studying variation simultaneously at a
number of different scales, with the population itself seen as having a hierarchical
structure, which is itself of substantive
interest (Jones, 1997). Indeed highly clustered designs are needed if survey information is to be gathered on individuals as
well as their peers. With such designs, it is
necessary to specify the number of units at
each level; Raudenbush and Xiaofeng
(2000) provide the necessary background,
which is put into practice by Stoker
and Bowers (2002) in their geographically
sensitive designs for surveying American
voting behaviour.
These three designs can be used in combination; the UK Millennium Cohort study,
unlike previous birth cohorts, is spatially clustered specifically to study neighbourhood
effects. Wards are disproportionately stratified to ensure adequate representation of all
four UK countries, deprived areas and areas
with high concentrations of particular ethnic
groups, and then all babies aged 9 months in
selected wards over a 12-month period. The
resultant sample includes 19,000 infants who
are being followed longitudinally.
Other probabilistic designs may be used
for different circumstances; they include
capture__recapture methods to estimate
population size with mobile populations, and
response-based sampling (see extensive
designs) when a numerically small but
important outcome is over-sampled. In geographical studies, the standard procedures
may be modified to ensure spatial coverage.
Methods of random, systematic and stratified
sampling of points on a map have been devised
using coordinate systems, for example, as have
methods of selecting transects (line samples)
across an area (Berry and Baker, 1968).
Increasingly, these designs are being used
adaptively (Thompson and Seber, 2002), so
that the degree of spatial autocorrelation
is being assessed as the survey proceeds and
there is increased sampling in areas where the
outcome variable is most varied and least spatially dependent.
When testing a hypothesis it is crucial to
assess and control for two types of error in a
probabilistic design. Type I errors, finding an
effect when there really is none, are controlled
663
SATISFICING BEHAVIOUR
by setting demanding probability levels in
confirmatory data analysis. Type II errors
– that is, having insufficient information to be
able to detect a genuine effect – are managed
by conducting a power analysis during the
design phase. Conversely, collecting too much
information is not only wasteful of resources
but can be seen as an unethical intrusion.
Statistical power is increased when there is
little ‘noise’ in the system; the effect is substantial when probability levels are set leniently and when the sample size is large, and
according to which statistical test is used
(parametric procedures being more powerful).
Consequently, researchers should choose
settings/contexts that maximize the ‘signal’ and
not as in a study of the effect of size of house
on price, sample areas where all the properties
are three-bedroomed ones. Power formulas
and software (such as G*Power) are available
but require an estimate of the size of the effect.
Cohen (1988) has defined small, medium and
large effects as the ratio of an effect to variation
for a very large range of statistical procedures
(e.g. a t-test in a multiple regression model).
Thus, to be able to detect a small difference
of 0.25 of a standard deviation between two
sample means with 80 per cent power and 5
per cent significance (both these percentages
being the most commonly used conventions)
requires 2*253 observations in the total
sample; while to be able to detect a large difference of 1.0 standard deviation requires only
2*17 observations. Unfortunately, academic
research has paid too little attention to statistical power with, for example, Sedlmeier and
Gigerenzer (1989) finding that even in a
reputed journal statistical power hovered around
50 per cent. If all these studies were replicated,
only half would result in an identifiable effect.
The problem is actually even more widespread
due to the use of non-probabilistic samples.
The way forward is to use simulation to
judge effectiveness and efficiency, as pioneered
by Snijders (1992) for snowball sampling.
Indeed, simulation is a general strategy that
permits great flexibility, not only allowing the
assessment of power as sample size increases
but also catering for missing data, nonlinearity, unequal variances and other specifications of an underlying model.
kj
Suggested reading
Barnett (2002); Dixon and Leach (1977); Kish
(1995); Lenth (2001); Sudman (1976). G*Power
for power calculations is available from http://
www.psycho.uni-duesseldorf.de/aap/projects/
gpower/index.html
664
satisficing behaviour Behaviour that meets
an actor’s minimum criteria for success. The
concept was developed by Herbert Simon
(1916–2001: see Simon, 1956) as an alternative to the presumed optimization of
rational choice theory, in which actors
always seek to make the best-possible choice
– for example, to maximize profits. Satisficing
behaviour may be appropriate either when it is
impossible to calculate the maximal outcome
or when actors are unprepared to make the
investment necessary to identify and/or pursue
that outcome (as argued by Pred, 1967, 1969).
Actors will then set their own criteria that will
represent a satisfactory return on their investment. (See also behavioural geography.) rj
Suggested reading
Gigerenzer and Selten (2001).
scale ‘Scale’ has no single definition, and
in recent years has been the object of much
theorizing (Howitt, 2003). The traditional
definition in cartography refers to map resolution. All maps represent the world by reducing the size and diversity of its component
spaces for visual display, digitally or on paper.
Cartographic scale expresses the mathematical
relationship between the map and the Earth,
usually denoted as a representative fraction.
For example, the small fraction, 1:500,000,
indicates that one unit of distance on the
map represents 500,000 units of Earth space.
Such a map would show large expanses of
terrain – much more than say, the larger fraction of 1:24,000. Hence the common confusion between large-scale (or large-fraction)
maps that show less space but typically more
detail, and small-scale maps that show more
space, but with less detail. Each type of social
and environmental diversity has its own ‘best
resolution’ in terms of cartographic representation; thus, the choice of cartographic scale
depends on the problem at hand. To visualize
US state variation in the enforcement of environmental policies, we need the familiar smallscale map of the country with state borders,
while determining whether point source
pollution released into a river caused downstream lymphomas requires a large-scale map.
The second major definition is operational
or methodological. This is the scale or resolution of data collection, with the familiar cascade from micro (body) to macro (globe).
Tied to this type of scale are various analytical
complexities, including the claims that:
(a) social patterns and processes can be sorted
according to their scale of operation and, as
SCALE
Globe
Continent
Nation-state
Province/state
Metropolitan area/region
City/district
Neighbourhood/ward
Household/dwelling
Human body
scale A cascade of hierarchical levels
a result, it is important to ensure an appropriate match between research questions and the
scale of analysis when developing a research
design (see ecological fallacy); (b) some
processes may operate at multiple scales at
once, and as a result, attention should be paid
to their operational distinctiveness at particular
scales and to the mechanisms that define their
modifications from one resolution to the next;
and (c) any scaled process can intersect with
other processes operating at any other scale,
often in complex ways that attenuate, amplify
or destabilize their operation. These sorts of
causal complications, in which processes are
conceived not only in their own terms but also
in terms of their scales of operation, form one of
the more powerful arguments for the necessity
of incorporating space into social science. It is
also here that one finds common ground
between human geography and physical
geography, for both deal with scalar shifts in
processes. In the study of coupled social and
natural systems, the complications of (a) to
(c) above may be operative.
A third aspect of scale is to recognize what
has been variously called its social production
or social construction (Smith, N., 1992b;
Delaney and Leitner, 1997; Marston, 2000).
In this view, spatial scales do not, as implied
above, rest as fixed platforms for social activity
and processes that connect up or down to
other hierarchical levels, but are instead outcomes of those activities and processes, to
which they in turn contribute through a
spatially uneven and temporally unfolding
dynamic (Swyngedouw, 1997). This recursive
relationship between social processes producing scales and scales affecting the operation
of social processes is one aspect of the sociospatial dialectic: the idea that social processes and space – and hence scales – mutually
intersect, constitute, and rebound upon one
another in an inseparable chain of determinations (see production of space). Over the
past two decades, this view of scale has generated some of the most productive and novel
research in human geography (Cox, 1997;
Herod and Wright, 2002).
Given the importance of the dialectic to
historical materialism (and the larger corpus of marxism) in general, and to marxist
geography in particular, it was capitalism
that was early on identified as the driver
behind the production of scale. From the formation of working-class neighbourhoods
whose residents defend ‘turf’ through misplaced parochialisms, to the elite spaces of
cosmopolitan jet-setters who shirk their ethical
responsibilities while working to expand the
world economy, the inherently uneven development of capitalism has been viewed as the
fulcrum of the production of scale. This
emphasis led Marston (2000) to critique this
body of research for its privileging of production and its relative neglect of social reproduction. There nevertheless remain several
key advances in this literature, including:
(a) an acknowledgement of the inherently political nature of scale production (Smith,
1996a); (b) the need to pay attention to state
formations and various resistance movements that both deploy and construct scales
(Miller, 2000; Brenner, 2004); and (c) the
need to re-theorize in more complex ways the
relationship between social processes and spatial outcomes as power comes to be understood as dispersed rather than centred. It is
in part through this last point that several
scale theorists over the past several years have
begun to turn away from purely hierarchical –
or, we might say, vertical – understandings of
scale to incorporate formulations that resemble the horizontal relations of networks
(Amin, 2002b; Brenner, 2004).
The latest debate revolves around the claim
that scale itself, while no doubt an organizing
moment in epistemology, has merely a transcendent status within the domain of ontology (Marston, Jones and Woodward, 2005).
In the view of Marston and her colleagues,
scale is an epistemology that, though potentially helpful in a methodological sense, is tied
665
SCIENCE/SCIENCE STUDIES
to a global-to-local continuum that underwrites the problematic view that social processes can be detached from the grounded
sites where people and objects concretely
reside and social practices take place (e.g. in
streets, bedrooms, boardrooms). They offer
in its place a flat ontology that resists conceptualizing processes as operating at scales that
hover above these sites (e.g. metropolitan
regions, nation-states). This view continues
to generate much debate (e.g. Leitner and
Miller, 2007; Jones, Woodward and Marston,
2007).
sam/kw/jpj
Suggested reading
Jones, Woodward and Marston (2007); Leitner
and Miller (2007); Marston (2000); Marston,
Jones and Woodward (2005); Sheppard and
McMaster (2004).
science/science
studies Science is an
‘essentially contested concept’ (Gallie, 1964)
in the sense that it defies specification in
terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.
Numerous candidates have been offered by
philosophy to discriminate science from
non-science – knowledge based on first-hand
observation, claims and procedures warranted
by predictive success, the inductive gathering
of empirical data, information satisfying the
principles of verification or falsification,
and so on. The efforts of Copernicus and
Galileo to base knowledge on causal explanations rather than Aristotelian syllogism,
Bacon’s plea for inaugurating the method of
induction, Newton’s rejection of speculative
hypotheses in favour of his own method of
deduction (see hypothesis), the Logical
Positivists’ emphasis on the logical structure
of theories (see logical positivism), and
Lakatos’ defence of what he called ‘the methodology of scientific research programmes’
constitute just a few of the proposals that have
been made to place science on secure foundations (Oldroyd, 1986). But none of these have
been adequate to catch the presumed essential
features of enterprises that stretch temporally
from Aristotle to Einstein, cognitively from
astronomy to zoology, and spatially from medieval Arabic geodesy to Enlightenment Scottish
chemistry. This recognition has led to what
Larry Laudan (1988) has aptly termed ‘the
demise of the demarcation problem’. Uncontested mapping of the border between science
and other forms of human cultural activity (see
culture) has simply remained elusive.
Nevertheless, the label ‘science’ does refer
to a suite of enterprises sharing some family
666
resemblance with the kinds of observational
and experimental practices that came to characterize natural philosophy during the period
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
(see scientific revolution(s)). And it was in
that era that the term itself began to acquire
a definition that linked it to a body of demonstrated truths and observed facts brought
into coherence by their adherence to general
natural laws. As Watts put it in 1725 (2, ii, §9),
the word ‘science’ was ‘usually applied to
a whole body of regular or methodical observations or propositions’.
geography’s engagements with the scientific
tradition have been multi-faceted. Terminologically, the label ‘scientist’ has close associations with geography via Mary Somerville,
whose Physical geography of 1848 firmly staked
geography’s claims to scientific status. In fact, it
was in a review of one of her earlier books that
the word ‘scientist’ was first coined by William
Whewell (that irrepressible neologist), although
it did not circulate into common currency until
the 1870s. Historiographically, insights from
the philosophy and history of science have been
used by a range of geographers to interpret
the evolution of their own tradition of enquiry
(see geography, history of). In particular, the
perspective of Thomas Kuhn on the structure
of scientific revolutions has been the subject of
discussion within the discipline as to the extent
to which it throws light on Geography’s lineage
(see also paradigm).
In two other substantive ways, Geography
and science are tightly interwoven. First, geographical practice has routinely – though certainly not universally – adopted scientific
techniques and vocabulary, and not just in
physical geography with its evident roots in
both field and laboratory science. Thus during the period of the Scientific Revolution, for
example, mathematical advances were used to
solve problems of map projection, and the
subject was routinely taught in association
with astronomy. In the same period,
Varenius’ Geographia generalis of 1650 advanced
his own version of the mechanical philosophy
to contest Aristotelianism, and William
Petty began to apply the methods of the new
natural philosophy to social phenomena with
his development of ‘political arithmetick’.
Navigational expertise, requiring computational skills and knowledge of observational
astronomy, was also often taught in geography
courses (Livingstone, 2003b). Such projects
firmly linked geography as an enterprise
to practical mathematics and the scientific
tradition, and this impulse has continued to
SCIENCE/SCIENCE STUDIES
animate various strands of modern geography.
During the 1960s, some geographers with
scientific aspirations turned to the language
of logical positivism to underwrite (after the
event, as a matter of fact) their project to
create a spatial science grounded in natural
laws of spatial relations and expressed in
numerical language (see locational analysis; quantitative revolution). Critics of this
trajectory accused its practitioners of indifference to questions of social inequity, a lack
of political engagement, and an inclination to
use mathematical vernacular as a shield to
deflect establishment suspicion of social science during the McCarthy era (Harvey,
1984) – though some of its advocates, such
as William Bunge, mobilized spatial statistics
for radical purposes.
More recently, geographers have begun to
bring science within the discipline’s scope
both by deploying the insights and methodologies of science studies and by enquiring into the
spatiality of science as itself a cultural practice (Livingstone, 2003a). As an enterprise,
science studies largely developed in the wake
of Kuhn’s rejection of purely logical models of
scientific development and his insistence that
scientific change was inherently discontinuous. By allowing a variety of social–communal
factors into the understanding of the evolution
of science, by emphasizing the underdetermination of theory by empirical data
and by highlighting the role of tacit knowledge
in scientific practice, Kuhn opened the door to
empirical studies of scientific procedure.
While he himself expressed concern about
more extreme versions of relativism, his work
did open the door to the social history of science. This project has taken various forms,
notably the so-called Edinburgh ‘strong
programme’ associated with writers such as
Steven Shapin and David Bloor, which sought
to locate the cognitive claims of science in its
wider social setting; the actor-network theory and ethnographic perspectives of figures
such as Bruno Latour, Michael Callon and
Steve Woolgar; and the interventions via feminism of figures such as Donna Haraway and
Sandra Harding (Hess, 1997; Golinski, 1998).
These, and numerous other strands of thought
from figures such as Simon Schaffer, Michel
Foucault and Joseph Rouse, have resulted in a
tradition of research working with the notion
of science as fundamentally local knowledge
(see local knowledge).
Geographers have engaged with these developments in several ways. Thus some have
turned to the proposals and methods of
science studies to interrogate geographical
knowledge itself. Barnes’ scrutiny of economic geography and the quantitative revolution (Barnes, 1996, 2004b), Demeritt’s
(1996) reflections on social theory, science
and geography, Thrift’s (1996) interest in the
social formations of knowledge, Whatmore’s
(2002a) elucidation of ‘hybrid natures’ and
Amin and Cohendet’s (2004) examination of
the ‘architectures of knowledge’ in firms and
economies are just a few investigations that are
deeply informed, in one way or another, by
these perspectives. At the same time, geographers have been in dialogue with practitioners of science studies in their enquiries
into the part played by space, place and
location in the production, consumption and
circulation of scientific knowledge itself
(Livingstone, 2003c). These latter currents in
the spatiality of science stem from an interest
in the role of venues such as the laboratory,
the museum and the field in knowledge production; the significance of location in the
reception of scientific knowledge; and the
ways in which the universality of science has
been accomplished through the management
of various circulatory mechanisms.
Several critical statements by historians of
science, such as Schaffer (2005), Ophir and
Shapin (1991: see also Shapin, 1998), Kohler
(2002) and Agar and Smith (1998), have firmly
placed space on the science studies agenda,
and this has been reinforced by the work of
geographers on the geographies of scientific
knowledge and on science as an inherently
hermeneutic undertaking (Livingstone, 2002b:
see also hermeneutics). The interface that
has been developing is proving to be fertile.
Geographers and others have thus been variously engaged in elucidating the ‘geographies
of science’ in a range of ways and at a range
of scales (see also geography, history of).
An indicative sampling of this work would
include examinations of the geographies of
enlightenment and scientific revolution(s);
the significance of museums, lecture halls
and botanical gardens in the production and
display of scientific knowledge (Naylor, 2002;
Johnson, 2006); the practices of making
science in the field (Withers, 2004; Lorimer
and Spedding, 2005: see fieldwork); the
geography of geographical knowledge itself
in the constitution of national identity
(Withers, 2001); the different ways in which
the glacier theory was construed in different
cognitive spaces (Finnegan, 2004); the role
of spatial practices in fisheries science
(Evenden, 2004); the social topography of
667
SCIENCE PARK
correspondence networks (Ogborn, 2002); the
significance of field trials in the production of
agricultural knowledge (Henke, 2000); the
reciprocal connections between buildings and
the building of scientific knowledge (Gieryn,
2002); and the geography of the commodification of bio-information (Parry 2004).
The list could be extended ad libitum. Special
issues of contributions by geographers to the
British Journal for the History of Science (2005)
under the guest editorship of Simon Naylor,
and of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (2006) on
‘putting science in its place’, bear witness to the
interdisciplinary richness of these developments.
In the light of all this, there are good
grounds for suggesting that science studies
can coherently be thought of as a branch of
historical geography. In keeping with this
sentiment, Simon Schaffer (2005) has recently
urged that it was the cartographic impulse
itself that helped construct what we think of
as modern science (see cartographic reason;
cartography). Courtesy of several ‘big picture’ accounts of science history (such as those
of Whewell, Bernal and Needham) that sought
to graphically chart scientific development, it
was – as Schaffer (2005) pointedly observes –
‘maps which invented what science was’. At a
more popular level, Simon Jenkins, writing in
the Guardian (Friday, 20 January 2006),
delivers confirmatory judgment, no less provocatively quipping that ‘All scientists are
geographers. That is why maps are the most
sacred tools of science.’
dnl
Suggested reading
Golinski (1998); Livingstone (2003c).
science park A particular form of growth
pole established by property developers or,
sometimes, research institutions to promote
technology transfer and investment in new
industries, usually in conjunction with a university and sometimes with regional and/or
local government support. The goal is to capitalize on knowledge clusters in scientific and
technological expertise by ensuring that innovations are developed locally, generating jobs
for the local or regional economy and contributing to the institution’s costs (see also knowledge economy).
sw
Suggested reading
Massey, Quintas and Wield (1991).
scientific instrumentation Scientific instruments are purpose-built material tools used
by investigators to disclose, measure and
668
represent aspects of the natural world. A subset of these devices devoted to surveying has
been used in cartography, astronomy, navigation, land survey, geodesy and related geographical practices. Dating back at least to the
activities of Vitruvius in the first century bce,
but particularly since the development of practical mathematics during the Renaissance,
such instruments as the astrolabe, compass
and theodolite were progressively refined until
they were substantially replaced by the more
recent use of signals from satellite systems,
which deliver immediate calculations of exact
locations (Bennett, 1987).
A useful distinction can be made between
instrumentation for geography and geographies of instrumentation. In the former case,
scientific instruments have been used in the
garnering of the globe’s geographically distributed data and, routinely, to produce maps.
Variations in terrestrial magnetism, for
example, were the subject of much concern
to Edmund Halley who, it was said, set about
‘the rectifying of geography’, by using his own
instruments to determine longitude and produce charts of magnetic variation (Fara, 2005,
p. 69). Similar matters occupied the attention
of Alexander von Humboldt, who travelled
through South America with a remarkable
range of instruments – chronometers, sextants,
dipping needles, a cyanometer (for measuring
the blueness of the sky), barometers, thermometers, rain gauges, aeromotors, theodolites –
and used the data they delivered to construct
his famous isoline maps, which were designed
to facilitate the interdisciplinary transfer of
data (Dettelbach, 1999; Godlewska, 1999).
The fundamental role of instruments in the
geographical project – and its colonial preoccupations – was enshrined, during the Victorian
period, in the Royal Geographical Society,
which began systematic courses on surveying
in 1879 (Collier and Inkpen, 2003). Of course,
these practices raised a range of epistemological problems, rotating around who could
be trusted to deliver reliable information (see
trust), how distant observers were to be
regulated and what were the appropriate
instruments to use in distant places. In an
attempt to address such problems, the
Society published its Guide to travellers in many
successive editions, in the hope of bringing
discipline and order to distant observers, and
thereby to secure testimonial credibility
(Driver, 2001b).
This latter concern about how to manage
the harvesting of global data for geography is
intimately connected with the whole subject of
SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION(S)
the geographies of instrumentation. The use of
survey instruments and the regulation of
observers in the production of geographical
knowledge can be thought of as an inherently
spatial strategy; it aims to conquer distance
by bringing together widely distributed data
and thereby integrating local knowledge into
global networks. Just exactly what goes on
as instrumental findings circulate from local
site to global space constitutes a crucial set of
questions in the geography of knowledge.
During the enlightenment, ships’ captains
collected magnetic measurements and
returned them to the Royal Society. In the
nineteenth century, atmospheric circulation
data returned from hundreds of ships to the
US Navy’s Depot Charts and Instruments
were used by Matthew Fontaine Maury to
construct his 1855 Physical geography of the
sea (Burnett, 2005). At such key venues –
centres of calculation, as Bruno Latour
(1987) calls them – universality is constructed
from particularity. But that conceptual circuitry is only achieved by industrious labour
and careful management. The need to calibrate instruments, to normalize fieldwork,
to discipline the senses of observers and to
ensure metrological standardization are all
procedures that are needed to turn instrumental readings in particular places into geographical patterns of worldwide scope (Livingstone,
2003c). And of course the standardized data,
calibrated apparatus and normalized procedures that emerge from centralized nodes in the
network are themselves, in turn, ‘assimilated
and interpreted in each local context’
(Golinski, 1998, pp. 138–9). It is therefore
noteworthy that historians of science have
begun to speak of the ‘geography of precision’
(Schaffer, 2002), which identifies the inherently geographical nature of instrumental epistemology and the means by which ‘universal
knowledge’ is made out of ‘local knowledges’
(see indigenous knowledge). Further geographical scrutiny of the role of instrumental
practice in the production of (geographical)
knowledge is urgently needed.
dl
Suggested reading
Bourguet, Licoppe and Sibum (2002); Livingstone (2003c).
scientific revolution(s) An abrupt cognitive
transformation in a tradition of scientific
enquiry that radically reinterprets existing
data, identifies new problems and methodologies, and establishes fertile lines of novel
enquiry. By thus emphasizing discontinuities
in the history of science, the idea of scientific
revolutions runs counter to the standard
cumulative understanding long championed
by positivists and others who insisted that scientific progress comes about through the
inductive accumulation of new data and the
routine application of scientific method (see
logical positivism; positivism). While the
idea of scientific revolutions was put forward
in the mid-nineteenth century by William
Whewell, its most celebrated advocate was
Thomas Kuhn, whose 1962 account, The
structure of scientific revolutions, advanced a
mechanism for understanding revolutionary
science. To Kuhn, scientific fields embody
paradigms – traditions with historical exemplars that express the standard theories, concepts and practices of a particular science. At
certain points in time a new paradigm arises
which is incompatible, and incommensurable,
with its predecessor on account of the truly
radical nature of the transformation. Kuhn’s
model has been challenged from various quarters, and while he himself insisted that it was
not applicable to the social sciences, it has
nonetheless been applied in various ways to
the evolution of human geography and, most
notably, by the architects of the quantitative
revolution that inaugurated spatial science
(Mair, 1986; see also geography, history of).
But the term may also refer to a particular
period in Western history, conventionally
described as ‘The Scientific Revolution’,
which has been widely regarded as of pivotal
significance in the emergence of modern science. The expression was introduced in the
1930s to give unity to the period centring on
the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when figures such as Galileo, René
Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon,
Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton transformed natural philosophy by their application
of mathematical principles and experimental
methods to understanding nature. Favouring
mechanical explanations, such figures championed first-hand observation of nature over
the scholastic authority of figures such as
Aristotle. This typification of ‘the scientific
revolution’, however, has been challenged
more recently by scholars stressing continuities with medieval metaphysics, diversities of
outlook exhibited by key figures in the period
and the continuing influence of a variety of
magical perspectives on practitioners of the
new natural philosophy. This has led some
historians to query whether there ever really
was such a thing as ‘the’ scientific revolution.
As Shapin (1996, p. 1) audaciously put it in
669
SEARCH BEHAVIOUR
the introduction to his revisionist account,
‘There was no such thing as the Scientific
Revolution, and this is a book about it.’
Geographers and others working on this
period have also come to stress the spatiality
of natural philosophy at the time, and the
different ways in which what has come to be
called The Scientific Revolution was constituted in different arenas (Livingstone and
Withers, 2005). At the global scale of East
and west, at the continental scale of
European regionalism, and at the micro scale
of dedicated scientific venues such as the
laboratory and observatory, the new science
was prosecuted in different ways. The influence of Chinese alchemy on medicine and the
significance of Islamic geodetic methods on
practical mathematics, the markedly different
rhetorical spaces of the Italian court and the
Royal Society, where scientific engagements
were staged, the contrasts between knowledgeproducing practices in the laboratory compared
with the field, and differences across europe
in styles of patronage, pedagogic traditions,
conduits of intellectual transmission and
expressions of religious devotion all conspire
to render troublesome the identification of
something called ‘The Scientific Revolution’
as an essential singularity. Scientific revolutions have their own histories and their own
geographies.
dnl
Suggested reading
Kuhn (1970 [1962]); Livingstone (2003c).
search behaviour The process of seeking
out and evaluating alternative courses of
action. In spatial decision-making, searching
– as in the selection of a new home – is often
constrained by the frictions of distance, so
that actors operate within spatially-delimited
search spaces containing a subset only of all
the options available to them.
rj
secession The transfer of political control of
a piece of territory from one polity to a new
or existing polity. Commonly, the term relates
to a region within an existing state aiming
either to become part of another state or to
function as an independent state. The process
may be peaceful or manifest itself through
terrorism and guerilla war. Contemporary
examples include northern Italy (Giordano,
1999) and Chechnya. Increasingly, the process has been explored at the local level as
local state units seek to secede from the
authority of metropolitan units (Purcell,
2001).
cf
670
Suggested reading
Macedo and Buchanan (2003).
Second World A term that emerged during
the cold war to describe the communist,
industrial states of the Warsaw Pact (formerly
the Eastern bloc) in contrast to the countries
of NATO. In time it came to refer to the
centrally planned economies and communist
party states of Central and Eastern Europe
(e.g. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Romania and Bulgaria), the Former Soviet
Union states from the Baltics to the Black
Sea (e.g. Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia,
Estonia, Moldova and the Ukraine), Russia,
the Caucuses and the former soviet states of
Central Asia (e.g. Kazakhstan), as well as
China and other Maoist and Marxist states
in the third world. With the widespread
collapse of communism since 1989, however,
the term has fallen out of favour. Former
‘Second World’ states are now members of
the European Union, experimenting with
liberal political and economic systems, or pursuing market socialism (see post-socialism:
see also Pickles and Smith, 1998; Smith,
2005).
jpi
secondary data analysis In contrast to
primary data analysis, this involves data collected by different researchers than those
undertaking the analysis. The advantages are
potentially a great deal of saving of time and
resources, and thereby it is possible to extend
the scope of a study well beyond the means of
a lone researcher or even small teams. The
disadvantage is that concepts may not be operationalized in the manner that the secondary
analyst would ideally like. There are a number
of sources of such data, which include
data collected for primary research that has
been subsequently made available to other
researchers (see data archive). It is increasingly a requirement of grant awarding that this
is done. Another source is when a large-scale
data collection is undertaken on behalf of the
wider social science community. Important
examples of these are the Panel Study of
Income Dynamics, begun in 1968, a longitudinal study of a representative sample of US
individuals and the family units in which they
reside, and the British Household Panel
Survey began in 1991 which is part of the
European Community Household Panel.
Geographers have been able to link neighbourhood data to the individual data from
the panels without compromising confidentiality (Bolster, Burgess, Johnston, Jones, Propper
SECULARISM
and Sarker, 2006). Researchers in the UK are
also fortunate to have the birth cohort studies, which follow individuals from birth; the
most recent Millennium Cohort has a clustered design so that local geographies can be
researched (www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/mcs/). Another
source is through record linkage of administrative data; this is likely to become of increasing importance as part of evidence-based
policy whereby data are collected and disseminated on small local areas; a substantial and growing example of this is the
Neighbourhood Statistics website (http://
neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/) which has,
for example, linked claimant count data to local
areas to provide an annually updated measure of
income poverty. The potential for such administrative data is immense but is challenging
because all sorts of bias are likely to be present.
An important recent development has been the
use of a model-based approach to the use of
records from different sources. Thus Jackson,
Best and Richardson (2008) were able to use an
overall multi-level model to combine detailed
individual survey data from the Millennium
Cohort Study with large-scale administrative
data from the National births register, elaborating the model to handle a range of biases.
In Britain, the UK Data Archive (http://
www.data-archive.ac.uk/) is the major repository of digital social science data; while in the
USA, this role is filled by the Inter-University
Consortium for Political and Social Research
(http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/); globally such
archives are organized into the International
Federation of Data Organizations (http://
www.ifdo.org/). All these websites have extensive search capabilities for identifying data
being sought. King (1995) has gone further
in his call that to ensure scientific integrity,
replication data sets need to be made available
that include all information necessary to
reproduce empirical results; including software code for the particular analysis that has
been undertaken. This is now being made
manifest in the Virtual Data Centre (http://
thedata.org/). Secondary analysis of qualitative data has been of less importance but its
use is growing (Heaton, 1998).
kj
Suggested reading
Boslaugh (2007); Heaton (2004).
section A territorial division of a country
associated with an electoral cleavage created
when a political party mobilizes support
there based on policies with particular local
relevance. The classic sectional cleavage
occurred in the USA, where for most of
the century following the Civil War the
Democratic party mobilized majority support
in the states that had wished to secede,
against the Republican party, which granted
equality of civil rights to African-Americans
and ended slavery.
rj
Suggested reading
Archer and Taylor (1981).
sectoral model A model of residential patterns developed by Homer Hoyt (1895–1984:
see Hoyt, 1939) for US cities, involving the
segregation of housing of different quality and
value into separate sectors radiating from the
city centre along major routeways. Changes in
the character of a residential area within a
sector involved a filtering process whereby
relatively affluent residents moved towards the
urban fringe, thereby yielding their homes and
neighbourhoods to lower-status in-migrants
(cf. invasion and succession). The model –
developed for mortgage-lending applications –
was presented as an alternative to the zonal
model and was later incorporated with it in
a multiple nuclei model (see figure for
that entry).
rj
secularism An ideology in which religion
and supernatural beliefs are not central to
understanding the world, both religious beliefs and religious institutions should not interfere with the public affairs of a society,
and are segregated from matters of governance. It is often associated with enlightenment in europe, with its turn towards science
and rationalism and its move away from religion and superstition. Secularism as a philosophy owes its origins to George Jacob Holyoake
(1860), who introduced the idea that life
should be lived by reference to ethical principles, and the world understood by processes of reasoning, rather than by reference
to God or gods, or other supernatural concepts. From the perspective of government
and governance, secularism refers to a policy
that separates religious authority from the
state. The opposite of secularism is usually
theocracy; that is, where religion has a major
role in government.
The secularist movement is split between
those who believe that secularism leads logically to anti-religious propaganda and activism, and those who do not. Most modern
‘Western’ societies today are thought to be
secular. Most would have near-complete freedom of religion. Religion does not officially
671
SECURITY
dictate political decisions, though it may
influence the actions of individual politicians
(but see Butler, 2008).
The divergent values of the secular state and
religious groups have been a source of significant conflict. The prohibition of headscarves
in schools in France is one example. At the
same time, different secular states are secular
to different extents and in different ways.
Thus, while the secular state in France prohibits headscarves, in Canada, the secular
state protects rights to wear religious markers
in public schools.
Geographers have mostly been concerned
about the intersections of sacred and secular
in the landscape, or how sacred and secular
ideologies impact on landscapes. Thus, in theory, a strictly secular ideology that underpins
urban planning principles would not support
the use of religious principles in the location
of religious buildings, for example. However,
in reality, different degrees of negotiations
between sacred and secular ideologies prevail
in most societies (Kong, 1993a,b).
lk
Suggested readings
Heelas (1998); Kong (1993a).
security Freedom from imagined or real
danger in the present or future. Geographical
orderings of security are constructed through
discourse and performance, and play an
important role in constituting political and
social geographies at a wide variety of scales.
Discourses of security are always highly politicized and often vigorously contested. They
involve the mobilization of imaginative geographies that swirl around notions of collective
identity to invoke political threats, political
change and political violence. As Dalby
(2002, pp. 163–4) has suggested:
Security is about the future or fears about
the future. It is about contemporary dangers
but also thwarting potential future dangers.
It is about control, certainty, and predictability in an uncertain world, and, in
attempting to forestall chance and change,
it is frequently a violent practice. [Security]
is about maintaining certain collective identities, certain senses of who we are, of who
we intend to remain, more than who we
intend to become. Security provides narratives of danger as the stimulant to collective
action but is much less useful in proposing
desirable futures.
Geographies of international relations
and the inter-state system are overwhelmingly
672
constituted and re-made through realist discourses of national and international security.
Through these, nation-states have traditionally
sought to reify and naturalize their existence as
‘security containers’ using discourses of
‘national security’ that depict them as singular
actors with incontrovertible national characteristics, homogenous populations and natural
borders (Katzenstein, 1996). Such geopolitical discussions about national security tend to
portray nation-states as facing existential
threats from the incursions or ambitions of
competing states and empires or – especially
in the post-Cold War period – from non-state
terrorist or insurgent groups. The Bush
administration’s ‘global war on terror’,
launched after the terrorist attacks on New
York and Washington on 11 September 2001,
is a dramatic example (Kirsch, 2003). Research
within critical geopolitics (Ó Tuathail,
1996b), critical international relations and
security studies (Campbell, 1998) has shown
how nationalism, militarism and war are
constructed and entangled through the invocation of such threats to ‘national security’.
Imaginative geographies enlisted in the service
of security typically represent the homeland as
virtuous and righteous whilst simultaneously
demonizing the space of the enemy. That space
is increasingly seen as transnational and multidimensional: at once a ‘security region’ that
requires monitoring and surveillance and, in
the case of the USA, a unified combatant command pre-assigned to military intervention
there (cf. middle east; Morrissey, 2008b;
2009), and also a complex non-linear ‘battlespace’ (see military geography).
These conventional imaginations of national
and international security have been sharply
criticized for the way in which they legitimize
military violence and neglect the environmental, social and biophysical underpinnings of the
security of all human societies. In a post-cold
war world dominated by resource depletion,
rapid population growth, intensifying urbanization and a series of deepening environmental
and ecological crises, all of them compounded
by highly uneven configurations of migration,
capital investment and environmental risk,
Dalby (2002) has called for conventional discourses of national security to be challenged by
broader notions of what he terms environmental security. Addressing the ecological foundations of political, social and economic security,
he urges that critical discussions about national
security ‘need a more explicit engagement with
the ecological conditions of contemporary
urban existence’ (p. 184; see also biosecurity).
SEGREGATION
The United Nations Development Programme
had already (1994) invoked the concept of
‘human security’ as a universally applicable
notion that, crucially, shifts the referent of security studies from nation-states to peoples. This
move focuses on the prevention and amelioration of a wide range of risks and hazards
facing people in all human societies within
what Beck calls a global risk society (Beck,
1998; see also Theranian, 1999).
These proposals are important, but they
also collide with a recent stream of work on
biopower, if they are understood to imply a
transition from geopolitical regimes that take
territory as their object to biopolitical
regimes that take population as their object.
Inspired by Michel Foucault’s lectures in
the late 1970s (translated as Foucault, 2007
[2004]), researchers are now asking urgent
questions about the biophysical and medicalized vocabularies in which security is being revisioned, and the ways in which governmental
technologies of contingency are entering into
the very construction of life itself (Dillon,
2008). In one sense, these more recent interventions reactivate and radicalize a stream of
work on the ways in which hazards, risks and
fear intersect in the constitution of everyday
life. In major metropolitan centres in the
global north and in the global south, the
police have become increasingly militarized,
and so has architecture – to such a degree,
indeed, that there is now a critical online ‘field
guide to military urbanism’ (Subtopia, at
http://subtopia. blogspot.com: see also
Caldeira, 1999; Low, 2004). The ‘securitization’ of everyday life has become so commonplace – so ‘normal’ – that one of the
most popular, and certainly one of the edgiest,
magazines on the role of technology in contemporary culture includes regular blogs on
national security (Danger Room: http://blog.
wired.com/defense) and on privacy, security,
politics and crime (Threat Level: http://blog.
wired.com/27bstroke6/). This brings us full
circle, to a point at which strategic sites in cities
are targeted by terrorist groups and these
threats are used in turn to legitimate widespread efforts to securitize cities through installing checkpoints, defensive urban and landscape
designs, and systems of intensified electronic
surveillance (Graham, 2004a; Gray and Wyly,
2007; Katz, 2007).
sg/dg
Suggested reading
Bialasiewicz, Campbell, Elden, Graham, Jeffrey
and Williams (2007); Dalby (2002). See also
Subtopia, at http://subtopia.blogspot.com.
segregation The phenomenon of segregation is said to occur when two or more groups
occupy different spaces within the same city,
region or even state. The types of patterns
identified as segregated go back to the beginnings of concentrated human settlement. Even
ancient cities, for example, were usually divided internally into quarters associated with
particular groups, and also characterized by a
sharp separation between urban (inside the
wall) and suburban (outside) groups. Human
settlements have always been socially stratified
and those designated as ‘others’ – whether
based upon religion, culture, economic status
or any other social division – have been relegated to specific, usually environmentally
poor, places (see also other/otherness).
That is, social marginalization is almost always
associated with spatial segregation.
The degree of segregation, or separation
between groups, varies. A group may be
more prevalent in one area than another: for
example, people of a particular religion
may have a tendency to live near their place
of worship but still live among people of
other faiths, so that the degree of segregation
is low. At the other end of the spectrum,
groups may be pushed into separate areas
and have their mobility curtailed, as in the
Jewish ghettos created by the Nazis during
the holocaust or the segregated districts
imposed by the apartheid regime in South
Africa. The process is not merely historical:
at the end of 2006, for example, several local
authorities in Italy decided to designate separate spaces for Roma (Gypsy) people, complete
with fences and gates regulating movement in
and out.
These examples highlight another crucial
element: segregation can arise from discriminatory forces outside a group and/or from
the social organization and predilections of
the group itself. The internal side of this
dynamic was first theorized by the chicago
school of urban sociologists, as they tried
to understand the nature of immigrant settlement in early-twentieth-century cities in the
USA. They believed that newcomers gravitated into enclaves specific to their cultural
group and that these segregated areas helped
people to come to terms with their new society. Gradually, as individuals adapted to
American culture by learning English,
upgrading their education and obtaining better
jobs, they would move to multi-ethnic (nonsegregated) neighbourhoods, typically in suburbs (see suburb/anization). Subsequent
critics charged that the Chicago School
673
SEGREGATION
ignored powerful forces of racialization
involved in the creation and maintenance of
enclaves generally, and that they particularly
downplayed the racism that forced AfricanAmericans into ghettos. A helpful intervention
distinguished between slums, neighbourhoods of poverty, and ghettos, places where
racialized groups are trapped in poverty, which
is transmitted intergenerationally (Philpott,
1979). Recent social geographers have been
far more attentive to the ‘constraint’ side of
segregation, perhaps to the detriment of understanding the degree of social organization
within marginalized communities.
The consequences of urban ethnic segregation have been discussed at length by geographers and sociologists. In early statements
by the Chicago School, enclaves were deemed
beneficial as long as individuals only resided in
them temporarily. Further, those who
remained in enclaves were seen as insufficiently assimilated (see assimilation) and
therefore at fault. Since then, assessments
have been more complex, with several basic
strands of thought. Some continue to see segregation as indicative of a reluctance to assimilate, and believe that enclaves and ghettos
reproduce social exclusion because their
inhabitants adopt a ‘culture of poverty’ associated with laziness, reliance on welfare, and
crime (cf. Lewis, 1969a). Another, more critical, interpretation focuses on the institutional
practices that perpetuate segregation and
therefore the harm that it causes (Massey
and Denton, 1993). From this point of view,
segregated landscapes are both the result of
inequality and also a mechanism for the reproduction of inequality. Other scholars have
sought to reconcile the classic view of the
Chicago School, that residents of segregated
areas gain certain benefits, with these later
critical perspectives, arguing that segregation
can have both beneficial and deleterious
effects (Peach, 1996; Logan, Alba and
Zhang, 2002). Moreover, planned dispersion
of marginalized residents of segregated neighbourhoods does not necessarily raise their
level of opportunity or standard of living
(Musterd, 2003).
The issue of segregation has become particularly charged in europe, where prominent
commentators have linked race riots in the UK
and France to the effects of segregated urban
environments (cf. Amin, 2003; Haddad and
Balz, 2006). Those affiliated with the political
right see concentrated minority/immigrant
neighbourhoods as the result of a deliberate
choice made by their inhabitants to embrace
674
cultural isolation, an attempt to lead lives
separate from mainstream society (for which
the term ‘parallel lives’ is invoked: Amin,
2002a), while progressive critics believe that
segregation is a response to racism and
economic marginalization. Regardless, sociospatial segregation is seen as an ingredient in
social unrest.
The link between racialization and class
division, which is so obvious in the riots just
discussed, is generally under-theorized in the
literature on segregation. To a large degree,
this omission reflects another legacy of the
Chicago School. Over the past century, in
geography at least, studies of segregation
have been dominated by a concern for
cultural forms of segregation rather than
class. However, socio-spatial divisions based
on class have been equally pervasive, and were
first theorized in the mid-nineteenth century,
as this famous statement by Friedrich Engels
testifies:
Every great city has one or more slums,
where the working-class is crowded together. . . . And the finest part of the arrangement is this, that the members of [the]
money aristocracy can take the shortest
road through the middle of all the labouring
districts to their places of business, without
ever seeing that they are in the midst of the
grimy misery that lurks to the right and the
left. (Engels, 1987 [1845], pp. 70, 86)
Arguably, the situation is exactly the opposite
in contemporary cities: poverty is exposed, but
affluence is hidden behind walls in gated
communities, protected by private security
systems and electronic surveillance (le Goix,
2005). As in the past, the privileged protect
themselves, though the mechanisms of this
process, and the detailed spatial patterns that
are generated, vary.
Recently, scholars have explored the relationship between different forms of segregation, such as socio-economic class and ethnic
origin (Clark and Blue, 2004). Research has
also shown the relationship between residential segregation and the educational system
(Burgess, Wilson and Lupton, 2005; Denton,
1996), and the fact that children raised in
highly segregated neighbourhoods experience
lasting difficulty as students, even when they
are in universities outside their home city
(Massey and Fischer, 2006).
dh
Suggested reading
Kaplan (2005); Massey and Denton (1993);
Peach (1996c).
SEGREGATION, MEASUREMENT OF
segregation, measurement of Social scientists have long tried to find ways of depicting
and measuring the degree of segregation
between groups in societies, especially cities.
In early discussions of this topic, such as the
classic studies by sociologists collectively
known as the chicago school, segregation
was portrayed in descriptive terms. Ernest
Burgess (1967), for example, included maps
that characterized areas of Chicago as the
‘Deutschland Ghetto’, ‘Little Sicily’ and
the ‘Black Belt’. But these terms were highly
generalized and none of the areas identified on
the maps held completely mono-ethnic populations. Over the past century, sociologists and
geographers have struggled to find more accurate ways to visualize and analyse segregation.
The social geography of a specific group is
usually depicted in maps that are either based
on standard percentage figures or as location
quotients (LQs). These maps show areas
where a group is concentrated, providing a
visual demonstration of the degree of segregation involved. A group that is fully integrated
into the population at large would be evenly
distributed across the territory in question
(with all LQ figures close to 1.0), while a
completely segregated (ghettoized) group
would be concentrated in a single area, with
low LQ figures throughout the map except in
the area of concentration.
While maps such as these are undoubtedly
an improvement over the impressionistic generalizations made in early sociological studies,
they remain ambiguous. More precise statistics designed to represent the degree of segregation of groups were first introduced in the
late 1940s and two gained ascendancy after
a crucial paper published in the mid-1950s
(Duncan and Duncan, 1955). The Index of
Dissimilarity is a measure of the degree of residential isolation between two groups and is
calculated as:
IDxy ¼
k
1X
[xi
2 i¼1
yi ],
where ID is the Index of Dissimilarity between
groups x and y; xi and yi are the percentages of
the two groups that reside in a particular spatial unit, such as a Census Tract, in a city
(note that the difference in these percentages
is taken as an absolute value and there are
no negative numbers used in the calculation
of the ID); and k is the number of spatial units
that make up the whole. Arithmetically, the
index shows the proportion of group x that
would have to change its location in order to
match the distribution of group y. An ID value
of 0 means the two groups are precisely colocated across the city or region in question,
while a value of 100 would mean that the two
do not overlap at all. The Index of Segregation
(IS) is calculated in much the same way, but
between an individual group and all other
groups in a society; IS values also range from
0 to 100.
Although the ID and IS have been the most
enduring measures of segregation, they share a
number of problems. First, there is no
straightforward way to decide when an ID or
IS value is significant. After considerable
debate, researchers have developed a consensus that values under 25 indicate little or no
segregation, while those over 60 are interpreted as indicating a high level of segregation.
Second, both indices are scale-dependent:
they tend to be higher when a city or region
is divided into a larger number of administrative units (Johnston, Forrest and Poulson,
2001). For this reason, comparisons of index
values over time or between cities are suspect,
unless the scale of spatial units is constant
(which is relatively rare, particularly in international comparisons; see Van Valley and
Roof, 1976). Third, index values for groups
with small populations tend to be higher than
those for groups that are large. Finally, indices
speak to the degree of isolation of a group but
do not describe particular spatial patterns.
For example, the IS for a group that is entirely
located in one inner-city neighbourhood,
which is the only group in that place, would
be 100. But the IS would also be 100 for a
group located in four different suburbs if it was
the only group in those areas. The reasons
for these segregated patterns could be entirely
different (the first group could be impoverished while the latter could be affluent), but
the IS values would be the same.
A number of efforts have been made to provide better measures of segregation. These are
summarized by Massey and Denton (1986),
who discuss five dimensions of segregation
(and measures associated with each). In addition to isolation or dissimilarity, they describe:
concentration versus dispersion; centralization
versus dispersion; clustering among groups (e.g.
individual European-origin groups may be
isolated from one-another, but all Europeanorigin groups could be in the same general
area of a city that is distinct from the location
of Asians, Hispanics etc.); and the degree of
exposure between groups (also see Lieberson,
1981).
675
SELF-DETERMINATION
Despite the proliferation of indices, the ID
and IS measures remain the most widely
used, perhaps due to their ease of interpretation and mathematical simplicity. Also, these
indices are adaptable to other types of study.
For example, the same logic and formulae can
be used to measure the degree of occupational
segmentation, and in this case the IS would
indicate the proportion of a group that would
have to change occupations in order to have the
same distribution in the labour market as the
general population (e.g. Hiebert, 1999).
dh
Suggested reading
Massey and Denton (1986); Peach (1975).
self-determination The perceived right of a
cultural group who identify with a particular
piece of territory to control their political
future. The concept falls within the broader
political ideology of nationalism, but has a
specific focus on the politics of overthrowing
what is seen as unjust control of territory by an
external power. Self-determination has been a
rallying cry against imperialism and colonialism, and is supported by the United Nations
Charter. Indigenous groups, such as Native
Americans and other ‘first peoples’, are contemporary advocates of self-determination
politics, following the wave of decolonization after the Second World War.
cf
Suggested reading
physical exclusion of those deemed to be
‘out-of-place’ (Cresswell, 1996).
Equally, much early work on senses of place
(e.g. Relph, 1976) subscribed at least implicitly to a particular historical narrative in
which supposedly authentic or original forms
of place-based community or dwelling are
seen as being progressively eroded by economic and cultural forces such as urbanization, industrialization and globalization.
These forces are understood as working to
occlude the distinctiveness of particular places
and cultures, so producing an increasingly
‘placeless’ world. But in explicit contrast to
such accounts, Doreen Massey’s (1994a) influential essay on a ‘global sense of place’ sought
to advance a conception of place as porous,
outward-looking and progressive, as opposed
to conservative, enclosed and unitary. The
development of a progressive sense of place,
for Massey, involves rejecting false nostalgia
for pre-modern singular and coherent places,
and embracing instead the culturally multiple,
dynamic and connective aspects of place in
a globalizing world.
While Massey’s work has opened up new
agendas for geographical research on senses
of place, older usages of the term, in which
senses of attachment and belonging are foregrounded as investigative objects, continue to
be productively elaborated and refined, most
notably in Feld and Basso’s (1998) North
American-based collection Senses of place. jwy
Macedo and Buchanan (2003).
Suggested reading
sense of place This term is usually taken to
refer to the attitudes and feelings that individuals and groups hold vis-à-vis the geographical
areas in which they live. It further commonly
suggests intimate, personal and emotional
relationships between self and place. Thus, in
early humanistic geography, a ‘sense of
place’ was understood largely in terms of positive affective qualities of place-attachment;
that is, senses of affection, attachment and
belonging and even ‘love of place’ (topophilia: see Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1977). Such work
belongs to a long-standing (and still influential; see Casey, 1998) phenomenological
tradition in which place is presented as the
meaningful, even potentially redemptive
counter to abstract, rationalist and unlocalized
notions of ‘space’. However, the more critical
approaches characteristic of social and cultural geographies from the 1980s onwards
have more often sought to highlight how such
positive senses of place and identity may in
fact often be based upon the symbolic and
676
Feld and Basso (1998); Massey (1994); Relph
(1976).
sequence analysis An exploratory data
analysis technique for analysing longitudinal data. Social behaviours, such as housing careers defined in terms of tenure and
price (Clark, Deurloo and Dieleman, 2003),
are likely to be patterned with many sequences
that are only trivially different across different
households. Unlike other techniques, such as
event history analysis, the aim is not to work
spell by spell, trying to account for the transition from one state to another. In contrast,
sequence analysis works holistically (Pollock,
2007), classifying ordered sequences into a
relatively few characteristic trajectories and
then seeking to examine what determines membership of a particular trajectory. Trajectories
can be defined in both time and space, so that
this approach can be used to identify common
time-geographic paths (Shoval and Isaacson,
2007).
SERVICES
A key part of the approach is that ordered
sequences are clustered into a data-driven
typology, according to some algorithm such
as ‘optimal matching’ (Abbott and Tsay,
2000), which grew out of techniques developed during the 1980s and employed by biochemists to analyse DNA sequences. This
works by measuring the dissimilarity of every
pair of sequences by calculating the relative
effort (the ‘cost’) needed to transform one
sequence into another. Transformations are
of three types – substitutions, insertions, deletions – and the user may attach a differential
cost to each type of change so that, for
example, moving from the rented sector to
owner occupation may be given a higher cost
than the opposite move. Dissimilarity is then
defined as the minimum cost of transforming
one sequence into another; the overall matrix
of dissimilarities between all pairs can then
be input to a cluster analysis, which groups
together similar paths (cf. classification
and regionalization). The popularity of the
approach can be expected to increase as more
longitudinal data and general-purpose software for quantitative analysis become
available (Brzinsky-Fay and Luniak, 2006). kj
Suggested reading
The publicly available software Transition Data
Analysis has facilities to undertake sequence analysis (http://steinhaus.stat.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/
tda.html).
sequent occupance ‘The view of geography
as a succession of stages of human
occupance . . . which establishes the genetics
of each stage in terms of its predecessor’
(Whittlesey, 1929; cf. settlement continuity). As this suggests, Whittlesey – like other
European and North American geographers in
the early twentieth century – was strongly influenced by biological models. He acknowledged
that the analogy between ‘sequent occupance
in chorology’ and plant succession in botany
would be ‘apparent to all’, but he insisted that
his own conception of cultural–historical geography was more intricate. While ‘human occupance of area, like other biotic phenomena,
carries within itself the seeds of its own transformation,’ such uninterrupted or ‘normal’
progressions would be ‘rare, perhaps only
ideal, because extraneous forces are likely to
interfere with the normal course, altering either
its direction, or rate, or both’ and ‘breaking or
knotting the thread of sequent occupance’.
Whittlesey’s thesis directly resembles Frederick
Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis: both men
came from the American Midwest, and the
transition from rural to urban societies
was within living memory for them and their
contemporaries. The idea was used more
loosely by later cultural geographers to refer
to little more than the claim that cultural
landscapes contain traces from the earlier
stages of settlement (cf. Broek, 1932, which is
usually regarded as the classic application).
The biological metaphor was in decline in
social science even as Whittlesey was writing,
however, and in some ways the popularity of
the thesis reflects the (then) isolation of human
geography among the social sciences in North
America (Herbst, 1961).
gk
Suggested reading
Whittlesey (1929).
services Services have historically been
defined as ‘activities which are relatively
detached from material production and which
as a consequence do not directly involve the
processing of physical materials. The main
differences between manufacturing and service products seems to be that the expertise
provided by services relies much more directly
on work-force skills, experience, and knowledge than on physical techniques embodied
in machinery or processes’ (Marshall, Wood,
Daniels et al. 1988, p. 11). Geographers have
produced a substantial and still growing corpus of work on services, one by-product of
which has been to confirm the difficulty of
working with these sorts of general statements.
It is clear that there is no single geography of
services, and there are diminishing conceptual
returns of thinking of services in this way.
Rather, there is a whole set of different geographies of services, which vary according to
the characteristics of the specific industry.
The most recent definitional work has used
binaries – either/ors – to produce more specific
definitions. So, terms such as producer services or consumer services, public services
or private services, and tradeable or nontradeable services have been used. While these
distinctions are an improvement on past generalizations, they pose their own problems.
How to move beyond oppositional definitions?
What is it that binds different services together
or distinguishes them? For some, rather than
seeing manufacturing and services as discrete,
as separate entities, there is a need to conceptualize the commodity chains or production
networks that link them (Henderson, Dicken,
Hess, Coe and Yeung, 2001). If we trace these,
then we generate a different set of insights into
677
SETTLEMENT CONTINUITY
the service component in ‘manufacturing’ and
the manufacturing component in ‘services’.
The most recent work on the geographies of
services has developed around four broad
themes (Dicken, 2006). The first is the internationalization or globalization of service
firms, with attention to why, how and to what
effect they are becoming international in
scope. In tandem with this emphasis on the
dynamics of geographical expansion has come
a widening in those industries in which geographers have performed empirical studies.
We know now more about what is going on
in more service industries. The second theme
is the intra-organizational dynamics of the service industries; in particular, on the strategies
of small and medium-sized firms. In some
parts of the world it is these types of companies, and not the largest transnational
corporations, that are behind the growth
of urban and regional economies. The third
theme is the emergence of the knowledge
economy: the rise of service activities as a
function of the production and circulation of
knowledge, and the growth of the knowledge
industries – accountancies, business schools,
consultancies of all types, law firms and so
on – directed towards the construction of
knowledge for economic gain. The fourth
theme is performance and, specifically, the
ways in which services are ’performed’, reflecting the imprint of the cultural turn on economic geography (Thrift, 2005b).
These re-definitions and conceptual elaborations are vital because services have
increased their absolute and relative importance in the economy (Bryson, Daniels and
Warf, 2004). Service industries now contribute significantly to the economic performance
of nations and cities and employ a growing
number of workers. While geographers, and
other social scientists, have been disputing
how best to define services, others have been
debating their economic importance, making
political cases for and against particular forms
of state intervention on the basis of projected
economic impacts. This emphasis on service
industries only reconfirms the importance
of the work of geographers in this area of
research.
kwa
Suggested reading
Bryson, Daniels and Warf (2004); Dicken (2006).
settlement continuity The continuity of
sites of settlement and systems of territorial
organization across periods of social transformation, particularly associated with the
678
arrival of new peoples and power structures
into an area (cf. sequent occupance). In historical geography, the term is most closely
associated with a debate over the situation
in Britain after the collapse of the Roman
occupation and the establishment of the
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. At one extreme is
the view that the sparse representation of
British place names reflects an equally sparse
Romano-British population that was rapidly
overwhelmed by Anglo-Saxon immigrants
who created their own distinctive landscapes.
At the other is the view that the Anglo-Saxons
were a small minority who rapidly acquired
political control without diluting the ethnic
identity of the British people. The latter is
less well supported than the former, although
evidence remains ambiguous for both sides of
the debate. There are many instances of preEnglish names adopted by the Anglo-Saxons
and toponymic evidence suggests some kind
of peaceful coexistence or cohabitation of
British and Old English speakers (Cameron,
1980). The nature of the links to the RomanoBritish past clearly varied from region to
region, but even in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom
of Kent (a Roman name), founded by the
middle of the fifth century, there is evidence
of continuity in urban settlement and the
estate structure in the countryside through a
distinctive system of lathes (county subdivisions) centred on royal vills (townships)
(Everitt, 1986). Similar systems are found
over wide areas of northern England, suggesting that it was very old indeed. In much of the
kingdom of Northumbria, the main units of
authority extended over areas of c.100 square
miles, centring on a royal vill to which all
the inhabitants owed dues. Indeed, a system
of this kind can be documented from later
sources to have extended over a continuous
belt from Wales across northern England into
Scotland. It is possible that such forms of territorial organization reflect the impress of a
Romano-British past that is also detectable in
Kent (Jones, 1976). However, such views also
have to confront the relative dearth of archaeological evidence for the Britons from the
period after ad 400 in the southern and eastern areas of England. Nonetheless, there are
few Anglian graves in the most northerly
English regions, which certainly remained
largely British. Furthermore, several AngloSaxon dynasties may have been partly British
in origin (Wessex), suggesting that early
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were often older
organizations that had come under invaders’
control, while the great majority of the
SEXUALITY
population stayed on to work the land
(Campbell, 1982).
rms
Suggested reading
Campbell (1982).
settler society A euphemism for brutal
processes of racialized dispossession, along
with the decimation or subjugation of local
populations. Occupation through conquest
has typically been justified in terms of doctrines of terra nullius (empty lands), and
assertions of progress and redemption.
Indeed, the society that is salient in the term
‘settler society’ is precisely that which excludes
racialized others. While this definition obviously encompasses huge swathes of the world,
the term is most often associated with British
colonial settlement (see colonialism).
Celebratory versions of liberal historiography have long been dominant in the production of knowledge about settler societies.
Challenging this stance, one influential strand
of scholarship argues that such societies are
best understood in terms of their incorporation within the capitalist mode of production (see capitalism). Denoon, for example,
recognizes ‘powerful strands of commonality’
(1983, p. 122) among the societies encompassed by his study – New Zealand, Australia
and South Africa, as well as Argentina and
Chile, from 1890 to 1914 – based on their
integration into the international market and
relations of dependency with imperial powers
(see imperialism).
A subsequent body of critical scholarship
insists on attention to articulations of gender,
race, ethnicity and class in the constitution
and transformation of settler societies. Stasiulis
and Yuval-Davis (1995), for example, bring
together studies that incorporate feminist and
post-colonial perspectives (see feminist geographies and post-colonialism) in order to
‘unsettle settler societies’. Yet the range of ‘settler societies’ encompassed by the book –
including the USA, Mexico, Peru, Algeria and
Israel–Palestine, in addition to Australia,
New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and
Zimbabwe – raises the question of what is not
(or has not been) a settler society. Indeed, the
editors concede that their extremely broad conception of settler society underscores the difficulty of drawing a clear line of demarcation.
More recent work draws explicitly on critical conceptions of spatiality. Where Stasiulis
and Yuval-Davis seek to unsettle, Sherene
Razack’s (2002) edited collection aims at
‘unmapping white settler society’ – in this
case, Canada. Focusing on the production of
different racialized spaces, the volume is animated by ‘the fervent belief that white settler
societies can transcend their bloody beginnings and contemporary inequalities by
remembering and confronting the racial hierarchies that structure our lives’ (Razack, 2002,
p. 5: see also whiteness). What is missing,
however, is attention to the practices of counter-mapping through which native people in
Canada have engaged in struggles for
repossession.
Struggles for redress in situations of racialized dispossession are extremely widespread,
and accelerating in some parts of the world,
including Zimbabwe, South Africa and
Aorteroa – New Zealand. They also underscore a crucial question regarding ‘settler societies’ – namely, whether and how the initial
processes of settlement remain politically salient in the present. A key to grappling with this
question is understanding historical geographies of racialized dispossession not as an event
(or set of events) that can be consigned
to some precapitalist or early colonial past,
but as ongoing processes that remain actively
constitutive of what Derek Gregory (2004b)
calls the ‘colonial present’.
mw
Suggested reading
Moore (2005); Sparke (2005).
sex The term has been used historically to
describe both sex differences – male/female –
which are assumed to flow from anatomy, and
a physical drive. Since the late 1970s both
these meanings of sex, which characterize it
as a biological given, have been problematized,
and it has been re-theorized in increasingly
complex ways. feminism (Women and
Geography Study Group, 1997) first introduced, and then troubled, the distinction
between sex (biology) and gender (social
meanings ascribed to biological differences).
Foucault (1978 [1976]) identified sex and the
related concept of sexuality as discursive constructions that are temporally and spatially
specific.
gv
sexuality In human geography, there has
been considerable interest in the mutual constitution of sexualities and space, so that most
studies have focused on the spatiality of the
construction of sexual identities and the sexuality of space. The earliest work on sexuality
and geography focused on heterosexual prostitution. In the 1990s a significant body of
research developed, initially on the geographies
679
SEXUALITY
of lesbian and gay men, and latterly, on queer
geographies (Bell and Valentine, 1995). This
was facilitated by the development of postmodern thought within human geography
that promoted a sensitivity to difference.
As a result of the impact of this research, the
study of sexuality and geography is often
assumed to be synonymous with the study of
lesbians, gay men and bisexual and transgendered people, yet there is a growing interest in
geographies of heterosexualities, and sexuality
is also important in geographical writing using
psychoanalytic theory. The complex theoretical links between sexuality and gender,
most notably in feminist theory, mean that
the two are commonly discussed in tandem.
Work on geographies of sexualities has been
most prolific within the sub-disciplinary areas
of urban, social and cultural geography,
but it is also gradually spilling out into other
parts of the discipline, including economic
geography, political geography and medical geography, in the form of research on
the pink economy, sexual citizenship and HIV/
AIDS, respectively (e.g. Bell and Binnie,
2000). The main strands of writing on sexuality and geography can be summarized as
follows:
(1) Geographies of lesbian, gay and bisexual
lives. Lesbians and gay men lead distinct
lifestyles – defined to a lesser or greater
extent by their sexuality and others’ reactions to it – which have a variety of
spatial expressions, creating distinct social and cultural landscapes in some
contemporary cities. A number of studies
have mapped gay commercial and resident districts. Knopp’s (1992) work on
gentrification by gay men particularly
contributed to analysing the role of
sexuality within the spatial dynamics
of capitalism. Studies of lesbian space
have suggested that women also create
spatially concentrated communities but
that these have a quasi-underground
character, although having a high level
of visibility among lesbians themselves
(Podmore, 2001).
‘Gay space’ – including gay commercial and residential districts (such as the
Castro District in San Francisco) as well
as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
(LGBT) parades, have been identified as
important sites of political claims-making (Johnston, 2001). Yet the very success of these LGBT claims has led to the
incorporation of these previously mar680
ginalized groups through the imaging,
branding and commodification of gay
space as a cosmopolitan spectacle for a
heterosexual market (Bell and Binnie,
2004).
While much of the work on geographies of lesbian and gay lives is located in
the urban, there is an upsurge of interest
in the structural limitations experienced
by those living in rural areas, and the
attempts of sexual dissidents to establish
utopian rural communities.
(2) The heterosexuality of everyday space.
Studies have highlighted the fact that
everyday spaces are commonly taken for
granted as heterosexual, and have explored the processes through which
spaces are produced in this way; and
the disciplinary practices that regulate
‘public’ performance of sexualities
(e.g. Valentine, 1993).
(3) Geographies of HIV/AIDS. Mapping the
transmission of the HIV virus has been at
the heart of medical geographers’ attempts to trace its origins and establish
global typologies. This work has been
criticized by sexual dissidents as irrelevant and politically dangerous. Brown
(1995) has played a key role in refocusing geographical research on HIV/
AIDS on to understanding sexual relations and issues of health and healthcare promotion.
(4) Queer geographies. These represent a
reaction against the early work about
the geographies of lesbians and gay
men, which adopted an uncritical, allembracing conceptualization of lesbian
and gay identity. Drawing heavily on
social theory from outside the discipline, queer geographies have attempted
to scrutinize the desirability of identity
politics and to challenge notions of fixed
identities, in particular by employing the
concept of performativity. Attempts
have also been made to utilize the insights
of queer theory to think about the production of space (Bell, Binnie, Cream
and Valentine, 1994) and to explore the
importance of mobility in queer quests
for identity (Knopp, 2004). There is
now an emerging body of work addressing queer identities from a postcolonial perspective – for example,
focusing on queer diasporic community
formation – and in the context of globalization and tourism (e.g. Hawley,
2001; Binnie, 2004). Here, geographers
SHIFTING CULTIVATION
have contributed to interdisciplinary
debates about the ‘queer tourism’ industry and the differential positionings of
racial, sexual, gendered and national
subjects (Puar, 2002).
(5) Geographies of heterosexualities. These are
most evident in historical and contemporary work on prostitution that has looked
at the role of moral representations, social
discourses and practices in regulating sex
work (Hubbard, 1999). Geographical
writing based on psychoanalytic theory
has drawn on accounts of psychosexual
development, sexual differences and desire, while also challenging the heterosexism evident in the writing of authors such
as Lacan (see homophobia and heterosexism). There is growing interest in
heterosexuality as an institution through
which links between the body, the home
and the public sphere are produced and
negotiated (Little and Leyshon, 2003;
Robinson, Hockey and Meah, 2004;
see also heteronormativity).
(6) Critiques of the discipline. Geographers
working on sexuality share many of the
concerns of feminist geographers about
the masculinist, heteronormative and
disembodied heritage of the discipline,
and about the operation of power within
the academy.
gv
Suggested reading
Bell and Valentine (1995); Binnie (2004); Brown
(2000).
shadow state A para-state apparatus comprising voluntary, non-profit organizations providing a host of goods and services. Although
the form of the shadow state varies over time
and between countries, it is commonly regulated and subsidized by public funds, simultaneously creating the ability to provide services
while controlling political activism. Neo-liberal
policies (see neo-liberalism) and decentralization of the state have increased the role of the
shadow state in social service delivery and
community development; provoking questions
about the implication of unequal access to the
shadow state for citizenship (Lake and
Newman, 2002), governance and social justice (DeVerteuil, Lee, and Wolch, 2002).
cf
Suggested reading
Wolch (1990).
sharecropping A form of land tenure in
which the landowners’ returns take the form
of a share of the farmers’ produce rather than a
cash or farm rent. Sharecropping is also
known by the French as métayage (Wells,
1984). Sharecropping arrangements involve
short-term contracts for the annual cycle of
production of a specific crop in which crop
raising is contracted out to labouring households, individuals or work gangs, who thereby
take on the large part of economic risks of
production. These arrangements have been
widely assumed to belong to the agricultural
past and interpreted as feudal or pre-capitalist in nature (e.g. Marx, 1964), but they
remain significant in contemporary agriculture, even in modern agriculture in, for
example, the USA. Sharecropping takes many
forms in different contexts, but all tend to be
associated with highly concentrated patterns
of landownership and exploitive labour relations; for example, in the cotton-growing
South of the USA between white landowners
and black farmers (Mann, 1984b), or between
landowners and Mexican migrant workers
in California’s strawberry industry (Wells,
1996).
mw
shift-share model A technique for describing the relative importance of different
components of growth/decline in a regional
economy, widely used in regional science.
Growth may be due to a region having a high
concentration of industries that are growing
nationally, for example; because of locational
shifts within certain industries towards that
region; or because of differential regional
trends within and across industries. Shiftshare analysis splits a region’s growth (in
employment, for example), relative to the
national norm, into: (a) a proportionality
shift, that proportion of the growth (decline)
associated with the concentration of relatively
fast(slow)-growing industrial sectors there;
and (b) a differential shift, that proportion reflecting local trends that deviate from the
national.
rj
Suggested reading
Armstrong and Taylor (1978).
shifting cultivation Minimally, shifting cultivation is an agricultural system characterized
by a rotation of fields rather than of crops, by
discontinuous cropping in which periods of
fallowing are typically longer than periods
of cropping, and by the clearing of fields
(usually called swiddens) through the use of
slash-and-burn techniques. Known by a variety of terms (including field-forest rotation,
681
SIGNIFICANCE TEST
predetermined and the observed statistic
located within it. Most analysts operate the
rule of thumb that if an observed outcome is
likely to occur less frequently than five times in
every 100 ways in which the data can be
organized, that is a statistically significant
result. Statistical significance should not be
confused with substantive importance, however; it says nothing about the importance of
findings and how they should be interpreted.
Statistical significance tests are used in two
ways. In confirmatory data analysis, they
assist hypothesis testing, indicating whether
an observed outcome in a sample (see sampling) is likely to characterize the population
from which it was drawn. (If the 80 neighbourhoods were a sample from 240 within
a city, a correlation coefficient statistically
significant at the 0.05 level would indicate
that the relationship between the two variables
in the sampled areas would almost certainly
be found if the whole population had been
studied.) In exploratory data analysis,
there is no sample involved and the test is
used to indicate the likely importance of an
observed relationship occurring: one that
would occur three times in every ten ways in
which the data are organized is probably less
important than one that would occur only
once in every 500 ways.
rj
slash and burn, and swiddening), shifting
cultivation is widespread throughout the
humid tropics, but was also practiced in temperate europe until the nineteenth century
(and sometimes later) (Conklin, 1962). It is
estimated that there are over 250 million shifting cultivators world-wide, with 100 million
in South-East Asia alone. Shifting cultivation
is enormously heterogeneous and subtypes
can be distinguished according to crops raised, crop associations and successions, fallow
lengths, climatic and soil conditions, field
technologies, soil treatment and the mobility
of settlement. Many distinguish between integral (shifting cultivation as an integral part of
subsistence) and partial (shifting cultivation
as a technological expedient for cash cropping;
see peasant) forms of shifting cultivation
(Conklin, 1962). In all shifting cultivation
systems, the burning of cleared vegetation is
critical to the release of nutrients, which
ensures field productivity. Shifting cultivation
by definition is land-extensive, and is threatened by population growth and migration,
and expanding land occupation (see carrying
capacity; intensive agriculture). Shifting
cultivation is often stigmatized as primitive or
unproductive, but it is typically predicated
upon a sophisticated understanding of local
environmental conditions – so-called indigenous knowledge – and exhibits considerable
flexibility and adaptiveness.
mw
Suggested reading
significance test
Blalock (1970). See also http://bowland-files.lancs.
ac.uk/monkey/ihe/linguistics/corpus3/3sig.htm.
A statistical procedure
for identifying the probability that an observed
event could have occurred by chance. Most
statistics – such as a correlation coefficient –
have an associated sampling distribution
identifying all possible values of the coefficient
for a given set of empirical observations. For
example, three observations can be rankordered in six different ways, so that if one is
correlating the rank-order of neighbourhood
death rates with the local levels of lead pollution, there would be 36 different ways in which
the two sets of three observations could be
organized, each producing a different correlation coefficient. Those coefficients form a
frequency distribution in which some values would appear quite frequently, others
more rarely. If the observed coefficient’s value
would occur only rarely, this outcome was
unlikely to occur by chance: it is then presented as a significant result, as a correlation
with interpretative value.
In studies involving large numbers of observations – 80 neighbourhoods instead of three,
say – the frequency distribution can be
682
simulacrum A term originally derived from
Platonic theory, but popularized by Jean
Baudrillard. Literally, the simulacrum is a copy
without an original. Baudrillard extended the
argument about the modern dominance of
images and ideology by suggesting an historical procession of the simulacra. First, there was
presence – people met and spoke – then technologies of writing allowed re-presentation of
those who were not present. Now media allow
the simulation of those who never existed. The
term gained wide usage in discussions of
themed environments such as Disneyland or
shopping malls. ‘Main street’, Disneyland
thus simulates a mythic idea of a small town
community hub that has no counterpoint in
reality (see disneyfication).
mc
Suggested reading
Baudrillard (1983).
simulation A heuristic device for solving
otherwise
intractable
mathematical
and
SITUATED KNOWLEDGE
statistical problems. There are two broad
types of application: the creation of ‘artificial
worlds’, and the use of simulation as part of
the estimation of quantitative models. An
early application of the former was Torsten
Hägerstrand’s work on the diffusion of
innovation. He treated this as a spatial stochastic process, in that while it had an
underlying
structure
(adoption
would
decrease with distance as social interaction
decreases) it could also turn out differently
each time. Monte Carlo procedures were used
to draw random numbers and innovation diffused outwards from initial adopters according
to a probabilistic mean information field.
Such simulation has grown rapidly in recent
years and it is at the core of micro-simulation
methods and agent-based modelling. Such
approaches have now developed to the extent
of the SimBritain project, where as part of
evidence-based policy the geographical
impact of government policies can be evaluated (Ballas, Clarke, Dorling and Rossiter,
2007).
The second use of simulation, statistical
model calibration, has also seen major recent
developments, which have been considerably
aided by increased computing power. One
aspect of this is a computer-intensive approach to confirmatory data analysis and
hypothesis testing, in which the observed
data are re-sampled to characterize the empirical distribution of a test statistic. More
importantly, a new method of estimation
called markov chain Monte Carlo simulation
has been developed that allows the estimation
of very complex models, including multilevel models. This methodology allows a
building block approach to estimation, so that
complex problems can be decomposed into
lots of small ones. It is especially important
for bayesian analysis, for it allows the estimation of previously intractable joint posterior
distribution (based on prior beliefs, data and
assumptions) by iterative simulation from the
much more straightforward marginal distributions (Davies-Withers, 2002).
kj
Suggested reading
Gilbert and Troitzsch (2005); Gill (2002);
Noreen (1989).
situated knowledge A term coined by the
feminist cultural critic of science, Donna
Haraway (1991, p. 188), to denote ‘a doctrine
of embodied objectivity that accommodates
paradoxical and critical feminist science projects’. Situated knowledge replaces the
traditional conception of science as the pursuit of a disembodied, inviolable and neutral
objectivity with a formulation of objectivity
that stresses corporeality, social construction and cultural politics.
Haraway argues that vision or sight is a
guiding metaphor for Western scientists in
carrying out their work: they see the world,
they make observations and collect evidence
(from the Latin verb, videre, to see) and they
write down its truths. This conceit carries over
into ordinary speech too when we say, for
example, ‘I see’, meaning ‘I understand’. The
language of knowledge production is saturated
with visual metaphors in both a technical–
scientific and an everyday sense. But
Wittgenstein reminds us that ‘the limits of
my language are the limits of my world’, and
in working within this language, in construing
vision and visuality in this way, scientists
limit their worlds by writing themselves out
of their own stories: failing to recognize their
constitutive role in world-making, they reduce
themselves to the status of ‘modest witness’
(Haraway, 1997, ch. 1). That presumption of
modesty, Haraway argues, is a direct consequence of the starting point of visuality. It
creates the illusory possibility of a disembodied science. She calls this illusion a ‘god trick’,
the idea that it is possible to have ‘vision from
everywhere and nowhere’ (Haraway, 1991,
p. 191). Moreover, it is just such a trick that
is the basis of one of science’s most cherished
ideas, objectivity, the belief in the possibility of
a single, final, detached and unmarked ordering of the world. For Haraway (1991, p. 188),
however, the ‘gaze from nowhere’, as she calls
objectivity, is really a rhetorical move that
hides and protects the interests of those who
propose and benefit most from it, typically
white Western men. ‘Modesty pays off . . . in
the coin of epistemological and social power’
(Haraway 1997, p. 23: see also epistemology). In this sense, then, being a ‘modest
witness’ turns out not to be very modest at
all. It is a strategy to promulgate a particular
kind of knowledge and to guarantee its
unassailable truth, which is often indelibly
marked by heteronormativity, masculinism
and racism (as her case studies from the life
sciences testify).
Haraway (1997, ch. 4) labels scientific
practices that masquerade under the cloak of
objectivity ‘fetishistic’ because such knowledge is represented as a thing rather than a
social process. Fetishism would not occur if
it were recognized from the outset that all
knowledge is embodied and partial; that is,
683
SITUATED KNOWLEDGE
‘situated’. And with that recognition comes
the possibility of ‘a usable, but not an innocent
doctrine of objectivity’ (Haraway, 1991c,
p. 189). This form of ‘usable objectivity’
depends upon the two terms that underpin it:
(1) Embodiment means recognizing that
knowledge is produced by specific bodies
that always leave traces. Moreover, embodiment is not only human but also
‘machinic’. Machines see and record
the world and, like humans, they are
more than passive observers; they construct it on the basis of particular algorithms and assumptions (cf. actornetwork theory). For example, software used in the computer programs of
geographical information systems
brings a systematic set of biases, hidden
assumptions and aporias. Printouts and
screenshots are not mirror copies of the
world, ‘the view from nowhere’ but always the view from somewhere. Further,
embodiment is collective not singular,
mobile not fixed. Haraway (1991,
p.195) writes: ‘feminist embodiment
. . . is not about fixed location in a reified
body . . . but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for differences in material-semiotic
fields of meaning’. Haraway’s objectivity
is constantly in motion, tugged and
pulled among the various nodes of its
constitutive field.
(2) Partial knowledge implies a recognition
that no one, except gods and goddesses,
possess full (objective) knowledge. There
are only partial perspectives, a consequence of our own circumscribed subject
location that makes us who we are, and
what we know. Haraway (1991, p.193)
writes: ‘the knowing self is partial in all
its guises, never finished, whole, simply
there and original; it is always constructed
and stitched together imperfectly.’
Embodiment and partiality are the conditions under which knowledge is acquired.
Only when they are recognized as such is there
hope of an attainable as opposed to a mythical
objectivity. These are also the conditions of
any politics. Embodied and partial knowledge
necessitates that people literally reach out to
one another and construct networks of affiliation: that is, they must engage in discussion,
deliberation and evaluation; they thus come to
recognize difference but also common beliefs
and shared responsibilities. Through these
684
‘shared conversations in epistemology’,
Haraway (1991, p. 191) argues, it is possible
to forge ‘solidarity in politics’. This does not
mean that the end result is unanimity, or even
that networks and conversations set us on a
collective trajectory towards some final agreement. To the contrary, that was the assumption
(and the failure) of the old type of objectivity.
Rather, ‘shared conversations’ are open-ended,
varied, sometimes inconsistent and paradoxical. But they are all we have, and the necessary
condition for both political projects, such as
feminism, and epistemological ones, such as
science. As a result, the traditional notion of
objectivity must be recast, conceived as an
incomplete process, not a final outcome.
Objectivity then becomes the process of working out difference and commonality, of struggling epistemologically and politically to make
connections, affiliations, and alliances. While
situated knowledge is often contradictory, it
contains the possibility of critical promise.
It is in exactly this spirit that Gregory
(1994) argues that visions of modern geography as an intrinsically European science
whose origins can be traced back to the late
eighteenth century, and in particular to scientific expeditions beyond the shores of europe
(see exploration), mask its genealogy as a
distinctively Eurocentric science. Geographical
knowledges, like any others, are always situated knowledges: their production often
involves travel, like Cook’s voyages into the
South Pacific or the orbits of Earth-sensing
satellites through space, and the products
themselves enter into complex circuits of
exchange, transfer and accumulation, but
they are always marked by the situations in
which and through which they are constituted
(see also ethnocentrism; eurocentrism;
orientalism). Merrifield (1995) treats quite
other, more recent and more radical ‘expeditions’ as exercises in the production of situated knowledge, while Cook (2001a, 2004)
has used Haraway’s proposals as a research
method, a pedagogy, a form of writing and
an exploration of material culture. In all
these cases, however, it is important not to
confuse situated knowledge with a form of
ideology-critique that subscribes to quite
traditional notions of objectivity. For, as Rose
(1997b) emphasizes, anyone claiming to fully
situate their own knowledge is practising precisely the same kind of god trick that they
criticize in others. All situated knowledge is
partial, including the situated knowledge we
have of ourselves and, of course, every entry in
this Dictionary (cf. local knowledge).
tb
SJOBERG MODEL
Suggested reading
Haraway (1991, ch. 9).
situationists/situationism The Situationist
International (SI) was a group of revolutionaries based in Western europe between 1957 and
1972, committed to transforming dominant
social and spatial relations. Their critiques of
capitalist as well as actually existing socialist
states owed much to Marx as well as earlier
avant-gardes such as Dada and surrealism. The
group launched an uncompromising attack on
the forces upholding what they believed were
the alienating conditions of ‘the society of the
spectacle’, characterized by the increasing
colonization of social life by the commodity.
They sought to encourage existing revolts
against hierarchical power by theoretically and
practically articulating forms of revolutionary
contestation. At the same time, they experimented with means of criticizing and freely
constructing daily life. Geography was central
to this endeavour, as they understood cities in
particular as both key sites in the reproduction
of social relations of domination, and potential
realms of freedom and possibility. The situationist Guy Debord thus argued that the ‘proletarian revolution is that critique of human
geography whereby individuals and communities must construct places and events commensurate with the appropriation, no longer just of
their labour, but of their total history’ (Debord,
1994 [1967], thesis 178).
The SI remained small, with a total membership of 70, from 16 different countries.
Developing their positions through a range of
texts and artistic, cultural and political activities, the situationists were highly critical of the
orthodox Left, and referred to undermining
rather than contributing to specialist arenas
of art and academia. They therefore rejected
the term ‘situationism’, claiming that it was a
meaningless invention by opponents who were
seeking to reduce their activities to a fixed
dogma. The influence of the situationists has
nevertheless been considerable and, after years
of marginalization, has been increasingly recognized and reassessed. Interest has focused
on their critique of the spectacle, and their
associated critiques of urbanism and everyday
life. Also influential have been practices of
psychogeography as means of exploring and
seeking ways to transform cities, and techniques of détournement, involving the hijacking
of materials to create new meanings and
effects (McDonough, 2002).
Situationist practices were utopian in their
attempts to transform space and society
through the ‘construction of situations’ and
the production of a ‘unitary urbanism’, which
found its most vivid expression in projects by
the Dutch artist Constant for a nomadic and
ludic New Babylon, and in their later concern
with political–theoretical critique in the name
of realizing what was hidden yet possible in
modern life. Returning to the SI’s utopianism
and its critiques of urbanism, is not only of
historical interest, it has been argued, but can
also serve to challenge how urban spaces are
imagined and constructed, and to encourage
struggles for alternatives (Pinder, 2005c; see
utopia). Resonances between situationist practices and contemporary political actions, especially over the production and contestation of
space and in opposition to spectacular power,
further demonstrate that, despite the ‘strange
respectability’ that aspects of their project have
recently accrued (Swyngedouw, 2002), they
remain politically highly charged.
dp
Suggested reading
Pinder (2005c). See also Situationist International
Online, at http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/.
Sjoberg model A model of social and spatial order of the pre-industrial city, first
expressed in Gideon Sjoberg’s book of the
same title (1960). Sjoberg’s model arises from
his desire to provide a critique of, and alternative to, the concentric zonal model of the city
offered by Ernest Burgess and, more generally,
of human ecology as applied by prominent
members of the chicago school. As such,
Sjoberg’s work was part of a larger project,
initiated by Walter Firey (1947), to replace
human ecology with structural functionalism as the central paradigm of urban sociology
(p. 12). The major factors used to explain
urban morphology in Sjoberg’s model are
social structure and technology.
Sjoberg begins by differentiating between
non-urban, feudal and industrial societies.
He is concerned with the second of these:
societies that utilize animate sources of energy,
and are literate and urbanized, including all
world civilizations prior to the industrial
revolution as well as non-industrialized
contemporary societies. He argues that feudal,
or pre-industrial, societies everywhere, and
through time, are characterized by similar
technological achievements and a three-tiered
class structure that includes a small ruling
class, a large lower class and outcast groups.
The ruling class, comprised of those in religious and administrative authority, establishes
a social order that reproduces its control
685
SKID ROW
over succeeding generations: urbanization
is both the outcome of social stratification
and a means whereby hegemony is perpetuated. The morphology of pre-industrial cities
reflects this interdependence between social
and spatial order: power is consolidated by
the ruling class through its residential location
in the city centre, the most protected and
most accessible district. Here, residents forge
a social solidarity based on their literacy,
access to the surplus (which is stored in the
central area of the city), and shared upperclass culture, which includes distinctive
manners and patterns of speech. Elite clustering in the city centre is reinforced by the lack
of rapid transportation.
The privileged central district is surrounded
by haphazardly arranged neighbourhoods
housing the lower class. Households in these
areas are sorted by occupation/income (merchants near the centre, followed by minor bureaucrats, artisans and, finally, the unskilled),
ethnic origin and extended family networks.
Merchants are generally not accorded elite
status, since power is achieved through religious and military control, while trade is
viewed with suspicion. The model is less
clear on the residential placement of outcast
groups (typically slaves and other conquered
peoples): some of these perform service roles
and are intermingled with the rest of the urban
population, while others live at the extreme
periphery of the city – frequently beyond its
walls.
In formulating this model, Sjoberg reverses
the logic used by Burgess – who placed commercial activities at the centre of the city, and a
succession of poor through wealthy residential
districts around it. Sjoberg notes that the
Burgess model is applicable only to industrial
cities, where production and commerce propel
economic growth and where capitalists are
accorded high social standing. Further, he
argues that human ecology incorrectly treats
urbanization as an independent social force,
when in reality urban growth should be seen
as a ‘dependent variable’, as it depends on the
distribution of social power, and on available
technology. Empirical investigations of the
Sjoberg model have been generally supportive,
but caution that the model cannot account for
the intricate details of urban development
across different cultural contexts. Others have
criticized the theoretical content of Sjoberg’s
work, especially his stress on the role of technology and his uncritical view of social power.
Sjoberg’s functionalist logic (which blurs distinctions between causes and consequences),
686
however, remains largely unnoticed and
unchallenged (see functionalism).
dh
Suggested reading
Carter (1983); Langton (1975); Ley (1983);
Morris (1994); Radford (1979); Wheatley (1963).
skid row Essentially a North American
term, ‘skid row’ traditionally referred to areas
characterized by concentrations of rooming
houses and accommodation for single men
working in the timber industry: over time,
the term has become a more general shorthand for areas where homelessness is evident.
Often offering hostel or temporary accommodation, skid rows are thus notorious as spaces
of rough sleeping, with temporary pavement
encampments or ‘cardboard cities’ offering
refuge for those who congregate in these areas.
In the larger skid rows, intricate social networks and relationships may develop within
the community, as well as between the
service-dependent and those service providers
who seek to assist them with welfare, alcohol,
drug and health issues (Rowe and Wolch,
1990). In many instances, dwellers of areas
described as skid row districts have fought to
contest this designation: despite this, the term
persists in the North American social imagination as a pejorative description of the social
margins of the city.
Studies by urban sociologists and geographers have suggested that the development of
skid row areas in North American cities has,
in some cases, been connected to policies of
containment designed to remove street homeless populations from wealthier locales. Yet
currently the number of skid row districts is
declining markedly, as corporate gentrification
of the central city squeezes homeless populations from sites that they have sometimes
occupied for decades – see, for example,
Smith (1996b) on the forcible removal of the
homeless and itinerant population from
Tompkins Square Park, New York. In such
instances, anti-begging ordinances and zoning
laws have been used to disperse visible homeless populations and ‘sanitize’ areas prior to
gentrification. Although the erasure of
such ‘landscapes of despair’ should not be a
cause for regret, it generates some significant
questions about how welfare providers
might best target resources to increasingly
dispersed homeless populations (Lee and
Price-Spratlen, 2004), as well as raising the
spectre of the increased privatization of public space. As such, the disappearance of skid
row areas is rarely taken as evidence of an
SLAVERY
improving urban quality of life, but is seen to
be symptomatic of societies where the disadvantaged have less ‘right to the city’ (Mitchell,
1997a).
ph
slavery
A condition of bondage and servitude in which one person owns another, forcibly exacts labour and services from them,
and excludes them from civil society.
Slavery has ancient roots in disparate parts of
the world and has taken multiple forms. But
up to the nineteenth century all empires were
slave-owning societies, and slavery has been
conceptualized by historians as a mode of
production that both preceded and coexisted
with feudalism and with capitalism. The
close connections between slavery and colonialism found their principal expression in the
transatlantic slave trade, which reached its
heyday during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, fed burgeoning European consumer
markets with sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice and
later cotton, and as Blackburn (1998) shows,
was driven more by private capital and mercantile initiative than by state sponsorship.
An estimated 11.8 million slaves – chiefly from
West Africa – were put to work on plantations,
and millions died of starvation and sickness
in the perilous sea voyage to America. A considerable literature on plantation life in
Brazil, the Caribbean and the American South
examines spatial strategies of power and resistance, modes of paternalism and hegemony,
and the role of gender, sexuality and African
culture in the making of slave and Creole
communities (see also transculturation).
The abolition of colonial – chattel – slavery
stemmed from both metropolitan and colonial
agitation, and cannot simply be explained in
economic terms (e.g. in terms of the declining
value of Caribbean sugar colonies). On the
one hand, the British and French represented
abolition as a distinctly Western triumph, and
strong public sentiment created what David
Brion Davis (cited in Lambert, 2005, p. 10)
describes as ‘a profound change in the basic
paradigm of social geography – a conceptual
differentiation between . . . a ‘‘slave world’’
aberration and a ‘‘free world’’ norm’. But the
formal demise of slavery also stemmed from
slave rebellions and struggles over citizenship
and human rights that articulated ideas of
race, nation and empire in complex ways
(Dubois, 2004). Such struggles had a much
greater impact on enlightenment thought
than has hitherto been recognized, and recent
historical and geographical work on the
mutual constitution of white and black
identity, and the diasporic and transnational
identities and communities shaped by slavery
(a ‘Black Atlantic’ based on a shared history
of commercial interaction and social degradation), demonstrates the need for more
integrated and ‘networked’ (less rigidly hierarchical) understandings of the exactions and
impositions bound up with this mode and
phase of colonization and European commercial outreach.
The distinction between slavery and other
forms of servitude has never been clear-cut,
and in spite of the nineteenth-century abolition of colonial slavery, slavery-like practices
have persisted, in systems of indentured
labour, and state servitude in fascist
Germany, communist China and the Soviet
Union. The United Nations currently extends
the definition of slavery to an array of widespread human rights abuses (forced labour,
refugee exploitation, prostitution, pornography, people trafficking and the use of children in armed conflict). Contemporary
globalization, like the colonial and imperial
globalizations that preceded it, depends on
transnational flows of labour: for millions,
however, the conditions of movement and
the coercion of labour has transformed them
into what Bales (2004) calls ‘disposable
people’. The crucial axis here is not racialization but, rather, gender and age: most of
them, perhaps 80 per cent, are female and
around 50 per cent are children. Many of
these victims have been induced into crossing
borders to escape poverty and find employment; in order to pay their traffickers, they are
required to work to pay off their ‘debt’ (many
never do) in return for elemental food and
shelter. Trafficking and slavery cannot simply
be folded into one another – the two are conceptually and legally distinct (Manzo, 2005) –
but it is clear that slavery may well occur in the
course of trafficking, and that both involve
extreme forms of exploitation, usually by
criminal gangs. Contemporary slavery cannot
entail legal ownership, but violence nonetheless establishes a regime of control, coercion
and dependence that amounts to effective
ownership. More than 40 per cent of the
victims are forced into the sex trades (cf.
Samarasinghe, 2005), while another 32 per
cent are domestic servants or construction
workers. In June 2006 the US government
estimated that 600,000–800,000 people
were subjected to such labour bondage each
year. The major destinations are Europe,
North America and the middle east. Many
millions more endure bonded labour as a
687
SLUM
means of paying off a debt or a loan in
their own countries, especially in India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. When these
are included, the International Labour
Organization estimates that the minimum
total of people enduring some form of forced
servitude is 12.3 million, while Bales (2004,
p. 8) puts the figure at 27 million: both estimates are more than the total number caught
up in the horrors of the Black Atlantic
(Epstein, 2006).
dcl
Suggested reading
Bales (2004); Drescher and Engerman (1998).
slum An area of substandard housing and
inadequate provision of public utilities (especially water and sanitation), inhabited by
poor people in high densities, who develop a
distinctive culture as a means of both survival
and self-respect. The term originated in
Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth
century. Labourers living in the countryside
endured wretched conditions too, but the
overcrowding of tenements in the central districts of industrial cities – the shock cities of
the age – and of capital cities such as London
was symptomatic of the slum. Life in these
communities became a central object of social
commentary and investigation, in studies such
as Engels’ Condition of the English working class
(1844) and novels such as Dickens’ Hard times
(1854). Areas of poor housing for poor people
had existed in many other periods and places
too, from imperial Rome to Georgian Bath,
but it was the connection forged between the
built environment and the ‘moral environment’ – by the close of the century, fears over
public order and public health were increasingly compounded by biopolitical theses of
‘urban degeneration’ (cf. Luckin, 2006) – that
was diagnostic of the politics of the slum on
both sides of the Atlantic. The connection was
both constructed and contested (Ward, 1976),
so that slums were not only the product of
intersections between housing and (often casual) labour markets but also of a particular
imaginative geography (Stedman Jones,
1991 [1974]; Mayne, 1993). Their modern
analysis has relied on recovering built forms
and material cultures, and analysing contemporary photographs and memoirs (Rose,
1997a; Mayne and Murray, 2001; cf. Roberts,
1990). Slums became targets for state intervention, including social regulation and urban
renewal in the nineteenth century – one of
the objectives of the Haussmannization of
Paris – and ‘slum clearance’ schemes in the
688
nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Wohl,
1977; Yelling, 1986, 2000).
The political salience of the term has been
revived by critics such as Davis (2006), who
points to the contemporary transposition of
slums from the global north to the global
south. Colonial cities were often bipolar,
with a cordon sanitaire between the European
districts (the ‘white city’) and the poor, overcrowded ‘native city’, but the slum is primarily
a product of class zonation rather than
the racial discriminations associated with the
ghetto. Class distinctions loom large in the
rapidly growing cities of the South, and it is
estimated that one-third of the global urban
population now lives in slums, the vast majority
of them in the South (Davis, 2006, p. 23). If the
overcrowding, poverty, human degradation
and exploitation are familiar from older
descriptions – ‘There is nothing in the catalogue of Victorian misery that doesn’t exist
somewhere in a Third World City today’
(Davis, 2006, p. 186) – the immensity of scale
is radically new. And unlike the nineteenthcentury slums of the North, most of these new
slums are on the edges of cities (not at the core)
and their production is wired to transnational
(not national) circuits of capital and to the
political–economic projects of neo-liberalism.
Finally, if slums have always been sites for the
warehousing of what Marx called a ‘surplus
army’ of labour, the new slums confront real
armies who foresee urban warfare swirling
around our ‘planet of slums’ (Davis, 2006,
pp. 202–6). Although this dystopian vision is
rhetorically powerful, however, it offers a
remarkably undifferentiated view of a far more
complex urban geography and it overlooks the
crucial contribution of progressive urban
social movements (Angotti, 2006). Indeed,
Roy’s (2003) incisive exposure of the politics
of poverty in Calcutta is explicitly staged as ‘a
satire on the very trope of the dying city’ and,
like Simone’s (2004) brilliant study of four
African cities, is a critique of the urban fantasies
(and fears) of abjection and failure projected
on to cities of the global South by planners and
theorists alike, and contained within the very
concept of a ‘slum’. (See also squatting.) dg
Suggested reading
Davis (2006); Philpott (1991 [1978]); Ward
(1976).
social area analysis A theory and related
technique for characterizing urban residential
neighbourhoods, linking changes in urban
social structure to economic development
SOCIAL CAPITAL
and associated urbanization (termed a
society’s ‘increasing scale’: Shevky and Bell,
1955). Increasing scale (not to be confused
with other uses of that term – see scale)
involves three interrelated trends:
. Changes in the range and intensity of social relations produced by greater division
of labour and reflected in the distribution
of skills and rewards within society – this
trend was termed social rank or economic
status.
. Increasing differentiation of functions within
society and its constituent households
generating new lifestyles and household
forms – termed urbanization or family status.
. The concentration into cities of people
from different cultural backgrounds – segregation or ethnic status.
The link between these three trends and residential differentiation was not clear in the original presentation. Shevky and Bell selected
variables to represent the three trends (the
percentage in certain occupations for economic status, for example), which were measured for the various census tracts in a city
and used to produce standardized indices for
each tract on each construct. The tracts were
then classified into a typology of social areas
depending on their values on the three indices.
Although the technique was soon superseded by the more inductive approach of
factorial ecology, and the theory was
largely ignored within urban geography, the
three constructs remained central to much
analysis of urban residential patterns.
rj
Suggested reading
Johnston (1969).
social capital The idea that access to and
participation in groups can benefit individuals
and communities – the nub of contemporary social capital scholarship – is a wellestablished sociological insight dating to the
nineteenth century writings of Karl Marx,
Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tonnies,
among others. The term itself was first
invoked (and then only once) by the economist Glen Loury in a 1977 article in which he
critiqued neo-classical theories of racial
income inequality. Loury contended that by
its commitment to methodological individualism, orthodox labour economics was
incapable of factoring how social context –
specifically, poorer connections of young black
workers to the labour market and their lack of
information about opportunities – impeded
intergenerational mobility and reproduced
race divisions rooted in economic inequality
(Loury, 1977).
The sociologist Alejandro Portes (1998)
attributes the first theoretically refined analysis
of social capital to Pierre Bourdieu, who
defined the concept as ‘the aggregate of the
actual or potential resources which are linked
to possession of a durable network of more or
less institutionalized relationships of mutual
acquaintance or recognition’ (Bourdieu,
1985, p. 248). Although Bourdieu’s note, initially published in French in 1980, remained
neglected within the English-speaking world,
the concept of social capital proliferated,
catalysed by a conjuncture of events. These
included the publication of an article in the
late 1980s by a leading American sociologist,
James Coleman, in which he explored the connection between aspects of ‘social structure’
and ‘human capital’ formation (Coleman,
1988). Although Coleman’s treatment of
social capital lacked the rigour of Bourdieu’s
formulation, it garnered far more traction.
Post-1989 market triumphalism, accompanying receptivity within and outside academia
(e.g. at powerful multinational institutions
such as the World Bank) to non-dirigiste
sources of economic development, and the
linked emergence of a ‘global civil society’
discourse (which conflated ideas of free society
and free market) undoubtedly contributed to
the popularity of Coleman’s thesis.
Since then, mainstream social science has
operationalized the concept of social capital in
a bewildering number of ways. The shared
impulse has been to parlay culture in a form
sensible to economics and policy science. This
importation of culture into the economic is
sorely inadequate (see cultural economy).
Of the three broad categories of empirical
approaches currently in vogue, the first evaluates how social relations might function as
collateral or assurance that an economic transaction will occur in the manner anticipated –
the distilled wisdom here is that social capital in
the form of trust minimizes the risks (and,
hence, costs) associated with transactions and
boosts economic competitiveness. A second
approach measures how social capital as density
of strong and weak social ties and group
membership acts as an insurance mechanism
during periods of need or crisis – the contention
being that social cohesion is positively correlated with the ability of individuals to shield
themselves from idiosyncratic risks. A third
approach conceptualizes social capital as a
689
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION
stock of accumulated obligations that can yield
economic returns to the individual holder,
either on an everyday basis or as investment in
social relations with expected returns in the
marketplace – hence, rendering the cultural into
a form that is fungible with the economic.
While Bourdieu also emphasizes the fungibility of different forms of capital (academic,
cultural, social, symbolic) and the reduction of
all forms ultimately to economic capital,
defined as accumulated human labour, his
writing also reveals that ‘social capital’ –
relations of abstract trust and reciprocity (displaying qualities of a quasi-public good) that
inhere in society and facilitate economic transactions – as a social resource is: (a) a positive
externality generated by a large number of
individuals able to pursue conduct that they
believe, given their semiotic universe, will earn
them social distinction; (b) an unintended
normative outcome that congeals through a
long history of repeated interaction, rather
than something that can be purposively manufactured in a relatively short time span (as
some policy-oriented social theorists and their
institutional backers are prone to claim); and
(c) always anchored to a place and a community, and as such, containing the potentially
coercive elements of social surveillance and
pressure to conform, backed by the threats of
social exclusion and excommunication
(Gidwani, 2002).
vg
Suggested reading
Bebbington, Guggenheim, Olson and Woolcock
(2004); Portes (1998).
social construction The idea that the social
context of individuals and groups constructs
the reality that they know, rather than an independent material world. Knowledge is always
relative to the social setting of the inquirers
(cf. relativism), the outcome of an ongoing,
dynamic process of fabrication (anti-realism).
Further, social construction applies as much
to forms of specialized understanding (e.g.
high-energy physics) as it does to everyday,
taken-for-granted knowledge.
Antecedents of social constructionism are
found in Plato, but it was Karl Marx (1818–
83) who established an intellectual agenda
with his claim that the interests of the dominant social class (the bourgeoisie) shaped individual beliefs (see ideology). Marx (1904,
preface) wrote: ‘It is not the consciousness of
men [sic] that determines their social being,
but, on the contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness.’ Antonio
690
Gramsci’s (1891–1937) theory of hegemony
developed Marx’s idea by arguing that even
seemingly humdrum commonsense thinking
was socially produced and, because they could
not think otherwise, resulted in the working
class consenting to their own domination.
But the most direct statement of social construction was provided in 1966 by two
American sociologists, Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckman. This was significant in
two ways. First, it provided a simple and
remarkably popular sketch of what they called
‘the social construction of reality’ (there were
more complicated versions: Luckmann was
keenly interested in Alfred Schütz’s constitutive phenomenology and the production of
the lifeworld). Second, it located social construction within the sociology of knowledge.
‘Insofar as all human ‘‘knowledge’’ is developed, transmitted and maintained in social
situations,’ Berger and Luckmann (1966,
p. 3) wrote, ‘the sociology of knowledge is
concerned with the analysis of the social construction of reality’.
Using the example of religion, Berger and
Luckmann argued that social interaction,
bolstered by associated institutions such as
the church, constructs knowledge, taking on
causal powers and entering everyday life routines. This insight was later applied by science
studies to the physical world, nature, rocks
and quarks (Pickering, 1984). On the surface,
nature appears fixed and constant, to be ‘out
there’, and not dependent upon social beliefs.
But science studies contend that scientific
knowledge is no different from any other kind
of knowledge. Social context operates by shaping the scientific techniques, equipment and
forms of reasoning used by scientists to erect
particular constructions of nature (and linking with situated knowledge that also
emphasizes the world-making constructions
of scientists and their technology). That scientific knowledge is socially constructed does not
make it wrong, however. What is wrong is
belief in a science that escapes the influence
of its social setting. Rocks and quarks do not
express themselves in their own terms, but
only in the terms of the scientists who speak
for them, and thus the social worlds that those
scientists inhabit.
Social construction has had a diffuse but, in
some respects, a widespread influence in
human geography. The first engagements
with Berger and Luckmann’s theses remained
close to their origins in sociology and were
confined to their implications for social
geography, particularly by those sailing under
SOCIAL EXCLUSION
the flag of a humanistic geography and interested in phenomenology, symbolic interactionism and the constitution of meanings in
the conduct of everyday life. The influence
of the sociology of scientific knowledge came
to the discipline much later, by which time it
was typically associated with postmodernism
and post-structuralism. The latter in particular introduced the concepts of discourse
and performativity, which directed attention
to the constitutive, ‘world-making’ effects
of the nexus of power, knowledge and practice. In this spirit, human geographers have
explored constructions of the economy
(Barnes, 2005), gender (Pratt, 2004), nature
(Castree and Braun, 2001) and sexuality
(Brown, 2000), to name but a few.
tb
Suggested reading
Hacking (1999).
social exclusion A situation in which certain
members of a society are separated from
much that comprises the normal ‘round’ of
living and working within that society. The
concept is chiefly envisaged in social terms,
identifying particular groupings that become
excluded, but it is also recognized that the
multiple factors involved in creating social
exclusion may combine spatially to produce
distinctive places of disadvantage and discrimination (Gough, Eisenschitz and McCulloch,
2005). Indeed, excluded groupings tend to be
found outside those spaces comprising the loci
of ‘mainstream’ social life (e.g. middle-class
suburbs, up-market shopping malls, prime
public space), congregating elsewhere as the
residents of spaces largely hidden from the
view of academics, politicians and policymakers (e.g. working-class estates, homeless
shelters, anonymous back streets).
The term ‘social exclusion’ has been popularized in policy-making across europe, if less
so North America, and has particularly featured in the social policies of recent UK governments. The definition favoured in the UK
is broadly thus: ‘the outcome of processes and/
or factors which bar access to participation in
civil society’ (Eisenstadt and Witcher, 1998,
p. 6). As a concept, social exclusion ‘does not
simply describe the static condition of ‘‘poverty’’ or ‘‘deprivation’’, but emphasises the
processes by which aspects of social marginalisation are intensified over time’ (Amin,
Cameron and Hudson, 2002, p. 17), and it
also embraces a diversity of economic, political, social and cultural dimensions. While
some are sceptical, others see social exclusion
as an advance over notions such as the ‘underclass’, originating in the USA, that effectively
blame people for irresponsible lifestyles
bringing their marginalized status upon
themselves.
‘[T]he debate on the causes and locations of
social exclusion, as well as proposed solutions,
has become cast in terms of geographicallydefined communities’, but there are snares in
this ‘new hegemony of the social as local’ arising from a neglect of broader structural forces,
whose malign impact on neighbourhoods is
unlikely to be reversed by local initiatives
alone (Amin, Cameron and Hudson, 2002,
pp. 19–22). Many considerations ripe for critical analysis emerge, including the articulations of social exclusion with the ‘social
economy’ of not-for-profit activity and also
the possible deployment of social capital,
all of which can be traced across what
Gough, Eisenschitz and McCulloch (2005)
term ‘spaces of social exclusion’ inescapably
skewered by the workings of both the local
and the global. Relatedly, attention is drawn
to the policies of social inclusion, designed to
counter exclusionary tendencies, and new
forms of citizenship, marked by the privileging of ‘active citizens’ supposedly able to
take responsibility for their own well-being,
circumstances and neighbourhoods.
An academic geographical concern for
socio-spatial exclusion pre-dates the current
policy interest, though, and can be traced in
a manner explicitly framed as such to Sibley’s
(1981) innovative Outsiders in urban societies.
Through substantive studies of ‘Gypsies’,
travellers and the North American Inuit,
Sibley anticipated a new tradition of research
into excluded minority groupings that has now
greatly extended the compass of social geography. All manner of peoples standing outside
of the mainstream, on whatever grounds, have
now had their ‘exclusionary geographies’
mapped, interpreted and critiqued, with sensitivity shown to both structuring forces from
without and felt experiences from within. It is
possible to identify works in this vein tackling
women, people of colour, refugees, sexual
‘dissidents’, children and elderly people, disabled and chronically ill people, welfaredependent and homeless people, and many
others (for accessible introductions, see Pain,
Burke, Fuller and Gough, 2001; Panelli,
2004). These are people who are excluded
because of who they are, how they look, and
what they do and think, and who are therefore
deemed ‘out of place’ (see also Cresswell,
1996) in a range of mainstream spaces that
691
SOCIAL FORMATION
they either choose to vacate (to avoid hostility)
or because they are compelled to do so (by
stigmatizing acts both symbolic and real).
Various studies conceptualize the roots of
such socio-spatial exclusion, notably Sibley’s
(1995) Geographies of exclusion, which borrows
from psychoanalytic theory to probe the
inherent will of ‘the Self’ to distance itself
from all that it perceives as ‘Other’ (as alien,
impure, polluting and ‘abject’). Sibley speculates that such psycho-dynamics, as inculcated
in individual psyches, translate into wider
socio-spatial configurations that materialize
lines of exclusion between selves who reckon
themselves to be essentially similar (the ‘same’)
and those cast out as fundamentally ‘Other’. cp
Suggested reading
Sibley (1981, 1995).
social formation In structural marxism, the
specific combination of social relations obtaining within a particular society at a particular
historical moment or conjuncture. The concept was derived from a reading of Marx’s
Capital undertaken in the 1960s and early
1970s by a group of French scholars associated with the Marxist philosopher Louis
Althusser. Whereas the mode of production
specifies structural combinations of relations
and forces of production in general terms,
identifying the diagnostic class relationships
involved in the production of surplus value –
hence, for example, feudalism or capitalism –
the concept of ‘social formation’ refers to
concrete forms of social relations at a specific
conjuncture (e.g. post-revolutionary France).
It also takes account of social relations and
forms that survive from previous conjunctures,
as well as non-class modes of social exploitation and oppression (e.g. patriarchy), and
seeks to identify their modes of articulation
with what is assumed to be the central grid of
class relations.
dg
social geography
The sub-discipline that
examines the social contexts, social processes
and group relations that shape space, place,
nature and landscape. The generality of this
definition indicates both the breadth of social
geography and changing emphases through
time, across various paradigms and also in
different national traditions. In France, for
example, social geography has sometimes
been regarded as having the range of human
geography itself, while in Germany it was
often associated more narrowly with the landscape indicators school (see the continuing
692
series since 2003 on national social and cultural geographies in the journal Social and
Cultural Geography). Three abiding theoretical
concerns in the sub-discipline have been the
relationship between spatial pattern and social
process; the question of determinism and
human agency; and the engagement with a
range of geographical scales.
Following the practice of human geography
itself, early work in social geography was dominated by an emphasis on landscape form and
spatial pattern. Innovative voices urging that
intellectual labour should move beyond
descriptive pattern studies to explanatory process included Wreford Watson’s seminal chapter (1957), Max Sorre’s (1957) productive
engagement with French sociology, and
Emrys Jones’ impressive monograph (1960)
on the development of social areas in Belfast.
Ironically, the new paradigm of spatial analysis in the 1960s did not significantly advance
the explanatory ambitions of social geography
but, rather, reinforced the emphasis on pattern
by borrowing from human ecology to establish more rigorous quantitative descriptions
of segregation patterns and classifications
of social areas. While often sophisticated,
only rarely did this work move into issues of
explanation – as, for example, in Peach’s
(1996) important research on ethnicity and
immigration, as he considered economic
and discriminatory explanations of segregation
and, in earlier work, the restricted social interaction that was associated with maps of social
segregation.
Akin to geomorphology’s transition from
form to process, social geography moved
decisively into process studies in the 1970s
with two significant developments. The first
was David Harvey’s (1973) paradigm-shaking
discovery of Marxist theory (see marxist
geography), leading to his claim that capitalism was the root cause of social–spatial
distributions, and the two-class system was
the fundamental expression of social groups,
a research programme that has helped to
shape a continuing and vital critical tradition
in social geography (e.g. Blunt and Wills,
2000). In contrast to such a political economy, the second development was a humanism that emphasized the experience and
construction of place, seeking inspiration
from a range of theoretical and philosophical
sources (Jackson and Smith, 1984; see humanistic geography). Humanism was not incompatible with some forms of Marxism, as
work in historical geography made clear,
but contemporary humanistic approaches
SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY
were much more attentive to issues of experience, identity and human agency in placemaking (Buttimer and Seamon, 1980). They
also continued earlier resistance to environmental determinism, though by the 1970s
the economic environment had replaced the
physical environment as the privileged context
of human action. By the 1990s, social constructionism (see social construction) had
become a dominant position, and several
important monographs used it to good effect
(e.g. Anderson, 1991b), though sometimes
risking a newer social determinism.
Humanistic and qualitative research were
much more attuned to ethnographic and
micro-scale studies, and attempts were made
to effect a theoretical convergence between
agency and structure and the micro- and
macro-scale, notably in the short-lived structuration perspective. While that scaffolding
has largely fallen away, the best work today
continues to attempt to marry agency and
structure, and micro- and macro-scale processes (e.g. Duncan and Duncan, 2004b;
Mitchell, 2004a).
A number of authors have associated the
explosive growth of social geography following
the social movements of the 1965–75 period
with the newly awakened desire for relevance
in human geography. Aside from the theoretical issues noted above, what was at stake
was also a liberal impulse towards social welfare and, for some, social activism. A wide
range of research topics came under scrutiny,
beneath the initial rubric of geographies of
social problems (Herbert and Smith, 1989).
Some of these, including the geography of
crime and policing (e.g. Herbert, 1997),
and especially health geography (Gatrell,
2002), are becoming sub-disciplines in their
own right. Other significant research topics
include poverty and deprivation, social polarization and social exclusion, education,
housing and, in the consumer age of neoliberalism, geographies of leisure, tourism,
sport and consumption. In David Smith’s
work, a challenging progression has taken
place from a consideration of welfare and
social justice to a more philosophical, but
still activist, examination of moral geographies and an ethic of care (Smith, 2000a).
The stratification of society in contemporary social geography follows topical as well as
theoretical categories. Class, variously defined, remains a major line of demarcation,
but it is far from alone. race and ethnicity
have been a significant focus of attention,
particularly with the growing cultural diversity
in gateway cities in the global north accompanying migration and refugee streams
from the global south. Geographers have
completed research on such topics as segregation and integration, immigrant reception and racism, transnationalism and
multiculturalism as a governance policy
(e.g. Anderson, 1991b; Peach, 1996a). feminist geographers have affected the field as a
whole (Pratt, 2004), engaging structures of
patriarchy and diverse expressions of gender
and sexuality, among other topics. But class,
race and gender are not the only divisions
recognized in society by social geographers.
The life-cycle offers its own distinctive
groupings, with studies of childhood, youth
and the elderly, as well as varied family configurations (e.g. Aitken, 2001: see also ageing;
children). Among cultural attributes, both
religious status and aboriginal status are experiencing revived emphasis as sources of group
formation (see aboriginality; religion).
disability studies have attracted a small but
active scholarship on the spatial experience of
differently abled groups (Park, Radford and
Vickers, 1998). In short, the range of the social
is substantial, and the postmodern attention
to multiple and decentred identities in cities
of difference ensures continuing multiplication of the social groups of interest to social
geographers (Fincher and Jacobs, 1998).
Institutions, too, are social formations with particular rules, hierarchies and cultures, and the
return of institutional approaches in the social
sciences (see institutionalism) has encouraged more systematic study of the involvement
of public and private corporations in shaping
people and place (e.g. Herbert, 1997; Ley,
2003b), reinvigorating the managerial or gatekeeper approach to place-making of the 1970s.
Social geography experienced a second
period of expansion in the 1990s, benefiting
from the renewal and expansion of cultural
geography. Indeed, the boundaries of the two
sub-disciplines are blurred, and strict demarcation neither possible nor necessary. Today,
social geography ranges widely – indeed, some
might say, too widely. Like geomorphology,
the preoccupation with process has sometimes
led some distance from recognizable geographies of space, place, landscape or nature.
Another trend has been the remarkable diffusion of qualitative methods as the primary
and often exclusive methodology of social
geography. There would seem to be advantages to more methodological diversity to
make use of large national surveys and databases that require modest quantitative skills,
693
SOCIAL JUSTICE
thereby offering a triangulation of methods
that extends the range of research outcomes.
These qualifications aside, social geography
as a sub-discipline has entered the new
millennium with considerable energy and
momentum, if perhaps a less coherent subject
matter.
dl
Suggested reading
Eyles (1986); Harvey (1973); Jackson and Smith
(1984); Knox and Pinch (2000); Ley (1983).
social justice A standard used to assess the
fairness of a society. Justice is a central moral
standard that requires the fair and impartial
treatment of all. Social justice differs from
other realms of justice, such as that relating
to the application of law, being centrally concerned with the fairness of a social order and
its attendant distributions of rewards and costs.
Determining how fairness is to be assessed,
and according to which principle, is an issue
of fierce debate. Different criteria, including
equality, entitlement, recognition or need,
yield different principles of justice. While
some scholars view social justice in essentially
descriptive terms, the literature within fields
such as geography has been more normative,
with an emphasis on using some definition of
social justice in the moral evaluation of prevailing social arrangements(see also ethics).
Social justice has long been a rallying cry for
many social movements. The arguments of
poor communities of colour that they are disproportionately burdened by environmental
externalities, the claim by unions for better
compensation or the democratization of the
workplace, or the organizing of anti-capitalist
globalization (anti-globalization) movements are all motivated, in part, by the powerful claim that prevailing social arrangements
should be fairer. The injustice of many social
relationships, distributions and arrangements
has long been the focus of a rich scholarly and
activist tradition (activism). Broadly, three
perspectives can be identified:
(1) The most extensive body of scholarship
is to be found in liberal political theory
that seeks variously to determine the
essential characteristics of a ‘fair’ society
(see liberalism). John Rawls’ (1971) A
theory of justice, for example, imagines an
original position, prior to the creation of
society. The just social order is that
which those in this original position
would agree to, he argues, if they did
not know in advance whether they
694
would be rich or poor in the resultant
society. From this, he derives a number
of yardsticks to assess social justice, of
which the most famous is his ‘difference
principle’, which holds that inequality
can only be justified if it benefits the
least advantaged.
(2) Particularly influential within geography
is a Marxist analysis of social justice
(departing from one strain of marxism
that sees social justice as an ideological
construct). Since his seminal Social justice
and the city, David Harvey (1973) has
been concerned with the topic, abandoning a liberal characterization as ‘a matter
of eternal justice and morality’ in favour
of a view of social justice as ‘contingent
upon the social processes operating in
society as a whole’ (p. 15). He judged
questions of spatial distribution not
according to the prevailing standard of
efficiency but, rather, according to some
measure of distributive justice. Social
justice was said to apply to the distributions of benefits and burdens, as well as
the social and institutional arrangements
arising from production and distribution
(including power, decision-making). In
sum, he sought ‘a just distribution, justly
arrived at’ (p. 98). In subsequent work,
Harvey (1996) has extended his scope to
include questions of environmental
justice. While he acknowledges the importance of social difference and positionality, he continues to argue from
political economy.
(3) A post-structuralist reading of social
justice supplements a Marxist emphasis
upon class and economic relationships
with the inclusion of multiple axes of
social differentiation – such as gender
and race. For example, while recognizing the injustices of class exploitation,
Iris Marion Young (1990a) constructs a
pluralist reading of oppression that
includes marginalization, violence,
powerlessness and cultural imperialism.
She advocates a politics that ‘instantiates
social relations of difference without exclusion’ (p. 227).
Social justice has been of occasional concern within geography since Harvey’s original
intervention. The collection edited by
Merrifield and Swyngedouw (1997) for
example, provides one example, as do recent
arguments by Don Mitchell (2003a). Drawing,
in part, from a Rawlsian analysis, David Smith
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
has also written thoughtfully on the topic. In
an important paper, Smith (2000b) constructs
a geographically sensitive argument for equality as a basis for social justice, and articulates
an argument for the morally significant aspects
of human sameness as a way out of the relativism of difference. Smith also considers
the injustices of an uneven geography of global
resource endowment as a basis for a territorial
social justice. In a more post-structuralist
vein, Kobayashi and Ray (2000) argue for a
pluralist notion of justice that embraces positionality. They eschew a calculus of rights,
with its logic of impartiality, arguing instead
for an emphasis upon risk (cf. Peake and
Ray, 2001). Noting that differently positioned
people face differential exposure to injustice,
they insist on the importance of geography to
social justice. That said, social justice demands more careful and sustained attention by
geographers. As Merrifield and Swyngedouw
(1997, p. 2) note, it has all to often been
relegated to the ‘hinterlands of academic
inquiry’. For while social justice is often
invoked, or implicit to much geographic work,
particularly of a critical bent (critical geography), it is all too often left untheorized
(although see the special issue of the journal
Critical Planning, 14, 2007, which is dedicated
to the theme of spatial justice: see http://www.
spa.ucla.edu/critplan/).
nkb
Suggested reading
Holloway (1998); Peake and Ray (2001).
social movements The organized efforts of
multiple individuals or organizations, acting
outside of formal state or economic spheres,
to pursue political goals. They are commonly
organized around either particular groups – for
example, the working class – or particular goals –
for example, access to health care. Their
demands may be focused on the state (e.g.
new laws), on economic actors (e.g. wage
demands), on society as a whole (e.g. the changing of norms relating to race or sexuality) or
on any combination of these. Social movements can radically transform society: consider
feminism or environmentalism. Yet as loose
networks of actors with many informal elements, they present methodological challenges: it
is often difficult to show that x protest or NGO
produced y effect; to determine whether a given
actor is part of a movement; or to predict
whether, when and how a movement will arise
from given social conditions.
Early, major approaches to social movement
theory conceived of social movements as
phenomena within civil society, a sphere
regarded as distinct from, but complementary
to, the state and the market, one containing
the informal norms and institutions necessary
to the ongoing reproduction of the economy
and the state, as well as forms of social participation and difference not strictly tied to
economic class or legal citizenship status
(see Urry, 1981). marxist theories saw social
movements, notably the labour movement,
as direct results and expressions of political
economic conflicts. Many early sociologists,
following Emile Durkheim, adopted functionalist perspectives that interpreted social
movements within organic, equilibriumoriented conceptions of society; social movements were spontaneous phenomena
produced by the need for individuals and
groups in the rapidly shifting geographies
and economies of modern capitalist societies
to continually rebuild informal norms and
institutions, create new relationships, and
bring their material existences and expectations into alignment. From the 1960s on,
liberal rational choice theories became
dominant: Mancur Olson and others analysed
social movements as collective action strategies
by which rational individuals pursued their
(calculable and known) self-interest. Interest
consequently shifted from why social movements existed and what effects they produced,
to a focus on how they pursued their goals.
Questions regarding how movements mobilize
resources and supporters, frame issues, identify
and exploit political opportunities, and change
over time dominated social movement theory
for the subsequent few decades.
More recently, the ‘new social movements’
(NSMs) that have appeared and grown
around the world since the 1960s have
become central topics in the field. Theorists
have argued that these NSMs, such as environmentalism and the peace movement, differ
from ‘old’ social movements in critical
respects. Posited differences include claims
that NSMs: are more issue-specific; cut
across class lines; use unconventional tactics;
express not only instrumental goals, but
meaning, identity and multiple subject positions; and are less likely to turn to established
political parties and channels to achieve their
goals. All of these claims warrant careful
scrutiny. Most recently, geographers have
begun to theorize how central geographic
concerns such as space, place and scale
matter in social movements’ formation and
operations (Miller, 2000; Wolford, 2004;
McCarthy, 2005).
jm
695
SOCIAL NETWORK
Della Porta and Diani (1999); Laclau (1985).
public servants. (See also actor-network
theory; network society.)
rj
social network The people – especially kin,
Suggested reading
friends and neighbours – to whom an individual is tied socially, usually by shared interests
and, in many cases, values, attitudes and aspirations. Most people are members of several
such networks, which may overlap only
slightly – in their home, family, neighbourhood, workplace and formal organizations, for
example. Such networks may be spatially concentrated, as both cause and effect: people
may chose to live close to others already
in their network(s), and may develop ties with
neighbours. Such networks are the main
medium for interpersonal interaction, and
therefore a core element of any social structure
– hence concerns regarding the potential
consequences of declines in their strength (cf.
social capital).
Social networks provide the matrices
through which much information flows and is
evaluated. As such they are central components in models of change that involve interpersonal interaction, much of which has a
spatial component (cf. contextual effect;
diffusion; electoral geography; neighbourhood effect). They are often modelled
formally as graphs, with individuals represented as nodes linked by ties along which
information flows (see graph theory): those
ties can be evaluated quantitatively according
to the intensity of interaction between the two
individuals. Such a representation enables
analyses of, for example, the key roles of certain individuals as nodes linking otherwise
separate networks and their potential to act
as change agents by channelling new information into a network. Research on such flows
has suggested that weak ties (Granovetter,
1973) are often more important than strong
ones as change stimuli. Strong ties usually link
people with much in common whereas weak
ties (links to acquaintances rather than friends,
for example) may connect people with less in
common, and therefore bring new information
and ideas to their contacts.
Within geography, the importance of social
networks has been recognized in the study of
economic organization and change, as in the
development of new high-technology industrial regions (such as Silicon Valley in
California: see Malmberg, 1997; Scott, 2006),
in electoral studies (Huckfeldt and Sprague,
1995), and also in work on the exercise of
power within policy communities, where interest groups interact with politicians and
Scott (1999); Sorenson (2003).
Suggested reading
696
social physics An approach that suggests
aggregate human spatial interaction can be
explained and predicted using theories and
laws from physics. H.C. Carey (1858) first
codified social physics when he proposed
that use be made ‘ . . . of the great law of
molecular gravitation as the indispensable
condition of . . . man [sic]’. But it was primarily John Q. Stewart (1950), professor of
astronomy and physics at Princeton
University, together with geographer William
Warntz (1965), who first systematically prosecuted social physics under the rubric of
macrogeography, a short-lived movement,
but one that helped pave the way for the subsequent success of spatial science within
human geography. The Newtonian gravity
model remains the best-known example, suggesting that humans interact over terrestrial
space as do heavenly bodies in the celestial
system. The model gives a good empirical fit,
but its predictions are less satisfactory, and
its causal explanation worse. The lack of
explanatory purchase, as Lukermann (1958)
pointed out in a early critique, is because the
assumptions made in the physical models are
not met in the human realm: ‘the lacuna is of
the order of two worlds’ (Lukermann, 1958,
p. 2). There is nothing wrong with analogies
per se, but for them to succeed there must be
certain core similarities between the analogy
and the analogized. For many critics of social
physics, the similarities between human and
celestial movements were not just hard to find,
they were simply not there to be found.
tb
Suggested reading
Barnes (1996, chs 4 and 5).
social reproduction The term encompasses
the daily and long-term reproduction of the
means of production, the labour power to
make them work and the social relations that
hold them in place. It includes the ‘fleshy,
messy’ and diffuse stuff of everyday life, as
well as a congeries of structured material social
practices that unfold in dialectical relation
with production. At its most rudimentary,
social reproduction is contingent upon the
biological reproduction of the labour force –
both day to day and generationally – through
the production, acquisition, distribution
SOCIAL SPACE
and/or preparation of the means of existence,
including food, shelter, clothing and health
care (Katz, 2001b). But any labour force is
historically and geographically contingent,
and so the notion extends to the reproduction
of a differentiated and differently skilled
labour force and the broad range of cultural
forms and practices that create, uphold and
rationalize these differences. Thus education,
the legal system and mass media are arenas of
social reproduction, helping to inculcate and
naturalize what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) called
the habitus.
Social reproduction is defined and secured
through a fluid assemblage of sources associated with the state, capital, the household
and civil society. The balance among these
varies historically, geographically and by
class, and its precise determinants are often
the outcome of struggles in the workplace,
community and home. If a social formation
is to continue, then consumption, production, circulation and exchange – of goods, of
knowledge, of values – must be ongoing.
While social reproduction implies endurance,
it should not be understood as stasis. Involving
the lively practices of everyday life and the
myriad efforts to secure these, social reproduction actively makes the conditions of ongoing
production (cf. resistance). In this way, social
reproduction is a critical concept: immanent
in its material social practices is the possibility
of rupture, renovation and transformation.
Social reproduction has political economic,
cultural and environmental aspects. The first
includes the reproduction of labour power, the
material social practices that sustain class and
other modes of difference, and the discursive
and other work that makes these distinctions
common sense. The cultural aspect of social
reproduction includes the production and
exchange of knowledge and skills, along with
the spaces in which they are carried out and
given meaning. This knowledge enables all
forms of work, but also contributes to identity and social group formation as well. The
environmental aspect of social reproduction
refers to the making and maintenance of the
forces and material grounds of production,
including tools, machinery and factories,
but also the environmental resources and
political ecologies that enable ongoing
production.
Social reproduction has been associated
with marxism, but much of the attention to
it has come from feminists working in – or
against – that tradition. This scholarship
brings into critical tension the social relations
of class, gender and sexuality, demonstrating the ways in which they build upon,
strengthen or undermine one another under
particular historical and geographical circumstances (e.g. Marston, 2000). Feminist
geographers have also revealed the ways in
which processes such as globalization,
labour migration and economic restructuring are reworked by incorporating social
reproduction in their analyses (e.g. Kofman
and Raghuram, 2006).
ck
Suggested reading
Dalla Costa and Dalla Costa (1999); Mitchell,
Marston and Katz (2004).
social space With some notable exceptions,
human geographers traditionally conceptualized space as a blank canvas upon which
human activities are played out. This led to
the adoption of a euclidian notion of space
and technologically astute attempts to map the
way space is territorialized via economic, political and social action. In the social sphere,
this reinvention of geography as a spatial science triggered multiple attempts to utilize
census data to identify where residents shared
similar characteristics or lifestyles, with techniques of social area analysis facilitating the
identification of more-or-less homogeneous
social areas. While some of this work perpetuated the ecological fallacy (implying that
all persons in a given area shared similar social
characteristics), more individually centred
methods of social network analysis provided empirical evidence of the way in which
individuals’ social worlds characteristically
revolved around a localized set of social
spaces. Here, the time-geography associated
with Torsten Hägerstrand and the Lund
School offered a different take on the spatiality of social practice, giving some important
clues as to how social activities are distributed
across time and space. Elsewhere, humanistic
geography explored the emotional and even
spiritual ties that bind societies to spaces,
albeit often talking about the construction of
place rather than the making of social space
(Cresswell, 2004).
Reacting against these types of analysis, the
historical and geographical materialism that
emerged in the 1970s ushered in a rather different interpretation of spatiality, whereby
space was deemed to be inherently caught up
in social relations, both socially produced and
consumed. Perhaps most influentially, Henri
Lefebvre (1991b) insisted that there can be no
‘pre-social’ or natural space, as, at the moment
697
SOCIAL THEORY
that it is occupied through social activity, it
becomes relativized and historicized space.
Inferring that every society – and every mode
of production – creates its own space,
Lefebvre further distinguished between the
abstract spaces of capitalism, the sacred
spaces of the religious societies that preceded
it and the contradictory and differential spaces
yet to come. In outlining this history of the
production of space, Lefebvre implied that
the division of the world into a mosaic of social
spaces is in no sense natural, but is a process
that needs to be understood critically (and
dialectically): in his words, ‘social space is a
social product’ (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 32: see
dialectic).
The idea that space is not passive in the
constitution of society is now dominant in
human geography, manifest in numerous
studies of the conflicts inherent in both the
production and consumption of social space.
Key here is the notion that these conflicts are
not necessarily between different groups, but
are between different forms or conceptions of
space (Shields, 1991). Adapting Lefebvre’s
terminology, it is suggested that spontaneous
and fully lived ‘spaces of representation’ may
often clash with official ‘representations of
space’, with the former occasionally breaking
through abstract capitalist logics to produce
differential spaces. Studies of spatial practices as diverse as skateboarding, tagging,
driving and free-running may thus point to
the possibilities of producing new social spaces
where human sociality is given full reign and
where play is privileged over work (Thrift,
2003; Latham and McCormack, 2005). In
this regard, the rise of non-representational
theories can be interpreted as an important
part of geographers’ ongoing attempts to elucidate the materialities rather than just the
meanings of social space.
ph
Suggested reading
Holloway and Hubbard (2001).
social theory This term refers to a constellation of theories about what Giddens (1984)
terms ‘the constitution of society’, specifying
the mechanisms or the forms of social power
that lend society some overall shape and coherence, however precarious, within given territorial limits (extending in some theories to the
whole globe). Callinicos (1999, p. 1) states:
Social theory . . . has concerned itself . . .
with the three main dimensions of ‘social
power’ – economic relations, which have
698
reached their furthest development in the
market system known as capitalism; the
ideologies through which forms of special
power are justified and the place in the
world of those subject to them defined;
and the various patterns of political
domination.
Social theory can be distinguished from
philosophy, which addresses epistemological and ontological issues pertaining
to the nature of knowledge that we acquire,
develop and relate about the world, its social
contents included. In practice, however,
social-theoretic and philosophical questions
run closely together, and in many reviews of
human-geographical theorizing the two are
presented in an entangled (and perhaps on
occasion confused) manner. Different social
theories embrace a raft of varying assumptions, arguments and models about how economy, politics and culture play out in social
power, and perhaps too bringing in claims
about psychology, mythology and many other
domains of human being and endeavour. All
manner of economic, political, cultural and
other theories abound, deriving from diverse
disciplinary fields, alongside theories about
how these different domains interrelate, influence or even determine one another in the
social. All of this complicated material comprises the ‘house’ of social theory that has been
repeatedly visited, borrowed from, critiqued
and reworked by geographers down the years.
The ‘predisciplinary history’ of social theory
can be traced to europe in the period 1750–
1850 (Heilbron, 1995), anchored in how the
enlightenment encouraged abstracted reflections upon the social character of the times,
but its origins are usually identified with several major thinkers who continue to cast a long
shadow over the contemporary academy. The
pantheon here includes the ‘big three’ of Karl
Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, the
key figures of so-called ‘classical social theory’,
as well as various others – Herbert Spencer,
Georg Simmel, G.H. Mead, Talcott Parsons,
the Frankfurt School theorists – bridging forward into ‘modern social theory’, and then
another cast-list – Anthony Giddens, Richard
Rorty, Ulrich Beck and various French
intellectuals – deemed, if a touch misleadingly,
exponents of ‘postmodern social theory’ (see
postmodernism: for equivalent periodizations, see Lemert, 1993; Callinicos, 1999).
The term ‘social theory’ was clearly in use by
the early twentieth century, and it appeared
in modern-sounding guise when Merton
SOCIAL THEORY
(1957) talked about ‘social theory and social
structure’.
The level of engagement between geographers and social theorists has been highly
uneven: Marx receiving far more explicit
attention than, say, Durkheim and Weber;
or the French ‘postmodernists’ (Baudrillard,
Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault) more than,
say, the Frankfurt ‘modernists’ (Adorno,
Habermas, Horkheimer). Through Giddens
(1979), a binary distinction is sometimes
detected between the social theories on
offer, cleaving a deterministic, structural–
functionalist pole of explanation from a
voluntaristic, interpretive–hermeneutic pole
of understanding, and this distinction has been
usefully mapped into critical accounts of
human geography’s underlying social-theoretic
allegiances (e.g. Thrift, 1983). In return, geographers have been injecting a spatial sensibility
into the heart of social theory, a project that,
while initially formulated within the latter by
Giddens (1979, 1984), has now announced
geography as a ‘player’ within social theory.
The Gregory and Urry (1985) and Benko and
Strohmayer (1997) collections indicate how far
and quickly this project developed after the late
1970s: contributions from the likes of Soja
(1989), Gregory (1994) and Massey (2005)
have also been pivotal; and many other geographers, both well-known and less-heralded,
have all worked on advancing space in social
theory (see geographical imagination). The
founding of the journal Society and Space in
1983, configured as a meeting-place between
social theory, human geography and cognate
‘spatial’ disciplines, embodies how something
new, social-theoretically driven, was to become
(for many) what necessarily lies at the heart of a
human geography escaping from disciplinary
isolation.
Unsurprisingly, the pantheon of social theorists listed above has attracted criticism, in
part from those objecting to a too-easy eliding
of social theory with the ostensible goals
and exclusions of Enlightenment: namely, its
trumpeting of (certain visions of) progress,
reason and scientific protocols, together
with the predominantly bourgeois, white,
male identities of the thinkers involved.
Alternative, anti-Enlightenment social theorists of the period are hence erased from the
history (Mestrovic, 1998), as too is the awkwardness that the original social theorists
often felt themselves about both the emerging
modern world and the intellectual tools
available to them. More starkly, the classed,
raced and gendered dimensions of social
theory,
embedded
within
a
EuroAmericanism, are now highlighted (Slater,
1992). Lemert (1993, p. 10) dissects the
issues here, linking with the ‘culture wars’
afflicting North America (and to an extent
elsewhere in the west too):
There are those who insist that, whatever
has changed, America and the world can
still be unified around the original Western
ideas that Arthur Schlesinger described as
‘still a good answer – still the best
hope’ . . . Schlesinger – white, male, Harvard,
liberal, intellectual, historian – is the most
persuasive of those in this camp. Against them
are others who say, ‘Enough. Whatever is
useful in these ideas, they don’t speak to me.’
Audre Lorde – black, feminist, lesbian, poet
and social theorist – put this opposing view
sharply in an often-quoted line: ‘The master’s
tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’
Between these two views, there is more than
enough controversy to go around. In large
part, the controversy is between two different
types of social theorists and over how social
theory ought to be done.
One result has been the rise of feminist,
anti-racist and post-colonial versions of
social theory, perhaps deriving from ‘other
regions’ (Slater, 1992), alert to the fundamental structuring of the social by the crisscrossing of unequal power relations at a range
of spatial scales and in/through a variety of
places. A further implication, resonating (if a
shade ironically) with the ‘postmodern social
theorists’, has been to challenge all versions of
social theory (old and new) by suggesting that
their claims are always too grand, totalizing,
inflexible and insensitive to the specificities of
(the ‘real’ histories and geographies of) everyday life (cf. grand theory). Consequently,
‘social theory is often seen in contemporary
intellectual debates as an outdated form of
understanding,’ which means that, ‘[t]hough
. . . no one has yet announced the end of social
theory, someone is bound to get round to it
sooner or later’ (Callinicos, 1999, p. 1). In
effect, such a move has occurred in recent
geographical texts, with calls for ‘minor theory’ (Katz, 1996) and ‘modest theory’ (Thrift,
1996), thereby leaving social theory in an odd
place, demonized but still indispensable, if
only as the ever-present horizon of what needs
to be argued against or at least around (the
spirit of Pryke, Rose and Whatmore, 2003). In
this fractured intellectual landscape, social
theory does not disappear: it is not wholly
redundant, but it does acquire a curious
character as a resource to be quarried for
699
SOCIAL WELL-BEING
cautious insights into this thing, society, that
is now acknowledged – much more than ever
before – as a complicated, provisional, neverfully-formed, always becoming object.
cp
Suggested readings
Benko and Strohmayer (1997); Callinicos
(1999); Giddens (1979); Slater (1992).
social well-being The degree to which a
population’s needs and wants are being met.
In a well society operated on market principles
(see economic integration), people have sufficient income to meet their basic needs plus
additional money to be used for discretionary
spending, are treated with equal dignity (see
human rights), have reasonable access to all
public services, and have their opinions heard
and respected (cf. democracy). Levels of
social well-being vary across groups and places
within societies. Measuring variations in those
levels was part of the social indicators movement initiated in the 1960s and taken up by
geographers with analyses of territorial social
indicators. (See also quality of life.)
rj
Suggested reading
Smith (1979a).
socialism Modern socialisms have their origin largely in nineteenth-century European
working-class struggles against the predatory,
unequal and degrading consequences of
industrial capitalism and twentieth-century
industrial and agrarian struggles against
imperialism. Thus, if capitalism is a social
and economic system in which ‘the ownership
and control of real capital are vested in a class
of private ‘‘capitalists’’, whose economic
decisions are taken in response to market
influences operating freely under conditions
of laissez-faire’ (Crosland, 1970, p. 33),
socialism seeks to change the ways in which
capital–labour relations are organized and
social surplus is distributed (see anarchism;
marxism).
Historically, the socialist allocation of social
surplus has sometimes been organized
through collective ownership or by the state
(state socialism), and has required planning
and control mechanisms to regulate the
economy. Since the nineteenth century,
some socialists have supported the complete
nationalization of the means of production,
others have been more interested in worker
democracy and decentralized ownership
(either in the form of cooperatives or workers’ councils), and yet others have proposed
700
selective nationalization of commanding
heights industries in the context of mixed
economies.
Recent neo-conservative and neo-liberal
theories and policies have greatly weakened
the popular legitimacy of socialism in many
parts of the global north, but political movements in the global south (notably in South
Africa, Venezuela and Bolivia) have renewed
commitments to socialist parties and principles. In countries such as Portugal, Spain,
Greece, Italy, Argentina and Mexico, socialist
movements have emerged deeply suspicious of
political projects that seek to seize the state
and, instead, have articulated new claims for
socialist autonomous political projects in
which vanguardist theories of social action
have been reworked and inflected with new
alignments of socialist theory with anarchist
and autonomous practices (what Derrida
(1994) called the ‘New International’ and
Hardt and Negri (2004) refer to as the new
communism). Partly as a result of these
broader movements in socialist practices and
stimulated by the consequences of increasing
integration into the global economy, reformed
socialism has also emerged in former (postsocialist) and current state-socialist societies
throughout europe and asia, perhaps most
notably in China. In Europe, discussions of
alternatives to neo-liberalism correspond
with strong debates about the possibility of a
social Europe, predicated on protections for
social rights, social cohesion and a social
market, while in China experiments with market socialism and Deng Xiao Ping’s advice that
‘To get rich is glorious’ are rapidly transforming the conditions of social life and environment throughout the country.
The impact of socialist thought and practice
among geographers has been significant, particularly in their analyses of the geographies
of social movements and socialist politics.
Geographers such as Peter Kropotkin, Élisée
Reclus and others were closely engaged in
debates about socialism and anarchism, while
others – such as the English socialist J.F.
(‘Frank’) Horrabin (1884–1962) – worked to
construct a socialist geography through the
Labour party, the Fabian Society and groups
involved in working-class education, such as
the Plebs League and the National Council of
Labour Colleges (Hepple, 1999). In the postwar era, particularly with the emergence of
strong civil rights, anti-colonial, anti-war and
anti-nuclear movements, socialist geographies
emerged in a wide range of arenas, generating
strong interest in the institutional and
SOCIETY
intellectual
development
of
socialist
approaches to geography (through the Union
of Socialist Geographers (started in 1974),
Antipode, the Socialist Specialty Group in the
Association of American Geographers, and
the
International
Critical
Geography
Conference) (see Dear, 1975). At the centre
of many of these developments in geography
has been the towering figure of David Harvey.
Since the 1970s, Harvey has systematically
argued for the importance of the geographical imagination for understanding capitalism and socialist (Marxist) critique. From the
1990s, he increasingly extended these efforts
beyond geography through his writing and
speaking engagements with the Socialist
Register, New Left Review, Monthly Review and
the Brecht Forum, among many others
(Castree, 2007).
jpi
society A widely used term whose meaning
remains frustratingly vague, but that describes the organization of human beings into
forms that transcend the individual person,
bringing them into relations with one another
that possess some measure of coherence,
stability and, indeed, identifiable ‘reality’.
The one-time UK Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher infamously declared ‘there is no
such thing as society’, offering a populist
version of a position in social science known
as methodological individualism (Werlen,
1993 [1988], pp. 40–52) that ultimately
lodges all social enquiry in the attitudes, goals,
decisions and behaviours of individual
human actors. Even within critical strands of
social theory/social science, however, the
notion of society remains curiously taken-forgranted, under-theorized and even an embarrassing guest that certain perspectives within
the contemporary theoretical landscape – various forms of post-structuralism, for instance,
or actor-network theory (ant) and nonrepresentational theory (nrt) – might wish
had never arrived.
Many concepts of society set it apart from
economy, politics and culture, such that it
(or something called ‘the social’) becomes a
distinctive ‘level’ for analysis, apparently made
of ontologically different stuff, with questions
prompted about whether it exists in relations
of influencing, co-influencing or being influenced by these other levels. More specifically,
notions such as civil society have been developed to distinguish a sphere of human concern
and activity that cannot be reduced to either
the dynamics of economic production or the
machinations of the state (Urry, 1981),
although debate then rages about whether a
‘capital-logic’ or ‘state-centric’ account of civil
society is more appropriate (a question that
arguably can only be answered by researching
particular forms of [civil] society found in particular times and places). Alternatively, many
social theories tackling what Giddens (1984)
terms ‘the constitution of society’ discuss how
dimensions of the economic, the political and
the cultural all bolt together to create society,
wherein society appears as the product, articulation or condensation of all of these dimensions rather than as something somehow
separate (and separable) in its own right.
Inevitably, though, different social theories
suppose differing balances between these constitutive dimensions of society, with some
leaning towards economic determinism and
others towards what might be called political
or cultural determinism. Other perspectives,
meanwhile, query the very construct of ‘society’, regarding it as at best a name for a loose
assemblage of objects – people, to be sure, but
also diverse non-human actors (books, bullets,
newspapers, telephones, hospitals, streets etc.)
– that have to be constantly enlisted by people
in practices that produce, sustain and render
with some semblance of ‘reality’ a patterning
that can be understood and re-presented (to
others) as ‘society’. Although proceeding with
different (post-structuralist and practiceattuned) theoretical tools, Thrift (1996,
pp. 30–5) draws out the implications of
Copjec’s (1994, pp. 8–9) psychoanalytically
informed insistence that ‘society never stops
realising itself, that it continues to be formed
over time’, a claim rebounding in various ways
on the static ontologies and epistemologies
inherent to many conceptualizations of society.
Thrift (1996, p. 56), reflecting upon his early
borrowings from Giddens’ social ontology,
still finds things here to praise but concludes
that ‘one cannot fill out all of a society in the
way Giddens sometimes . . . seems intent on
doing’. This being said, through his structuration theory, Giddens has arguably done
more than most to dissect the different elements that many writers, geographers included,
continue to take as indispensable for any
account of something called ‘society’. The
elements here include: the agency of individuals,
socialized into certain habits of thought,
conduct and action, if always possessing the
capacity to think and do things differently; institutions, entailing formal entities with written
constitutions, regulations, memberships and
so on (e.g. schools, firms, clubs) as well as
informal but enduring entities such as family
701
SOCIETY
and religion, reproduced every day by the
repeated practices of many individuals
(a notion of social reproduction); systems,
or regularized patterns of interaction between
individuals often but not always functioning
to keep institutions going (and in some vocabularies, ‘institution’ and ‘system’ become
interchangeable); and structures, or ‘deeper’
structural forces underpinning systems, institutions and (the being and doing of) individuals, often understood in terms of unequal
relations of power, status and influence traversing axes of social difference (notably of class,
ethnicity and gender, but also the likes of
ageing, sexuality and disability). In such
Giddensian theorizing, the focus is on how
society arises – is ‘instantiated’ – in the coming
together of agency and structure, made real by
actions mediated through institutions and systems, and there is also a recognition that time–
space relations are crucial to the precise
manner in which this coming together occurs
(Giddens, 1979, 1984; Gregory, 1981, 1994;
Thrift, 1983; Werlen, 1993).
There has long been a relationship between
geographical scholarship and notions of society, and one simple point is that geographers
have often had a sharper sense than others of
the exact worldly spaces to which different
picturings of society commonly attach. On
one reading, this means nothing more than
recognizing that accounts of society are normally referencing particular territorial units
(Pain, Burke, Fuller and Gough, 2001, p. 3):
perhaps (nation-)states with known boundaries (i.e. ‘Bulgarian society’); perhaps commonly understood regions large or small
(i.e. ‘Mediterranean society’ or ‘Appalachian
society’); or perhaps still smaller, more local
areas (i.e. London’s ‘West End society’). The
implication of moving down spatial scales,
as here, is to reveal that dangers accompany
any identification of one society (with allegedly
distinctive features) occupying or filling a large
spatial extent, and that closer geographical
scrutiny will always require a more nuanced
portrayal of the different societies there
present. On another reading, geographers
have been prominent in acknowledging that
urban and rural localities possess different
sorts of societies, with the classic distinction
drawn by the German sociologist Ferdinand
Tönnies between Gemeinschaft (close-knit
society or community, based on repeated
face-to-face contacts) and Gesellschaft (weakly
bound society, based on impersonal, contractual relations) mapped on to, respectively,
the countryside and the city. Such a mapping
702
has to be treated with caution, however, and
many practitioners of urban and rural
geography would insist that any given urban
or rural area, wherever located, is unlikely
to possess just one, homogeneous, internally
consistent society. Crucially, what emerges is
the appreciation that society is not a singular
entity, undifferentiated from one place to the
next, and that scholars – not just geographers,
but all informed intellectuals – should think
in terms of many societies in the plural.
In works of geography, it is possible to find
countless casual references to ‘society’. As one
instance, Kariel and Kariel (1972) define
social geography as the ‘study of the spatial
aspects of characteristics of the population,
social organisation, and elements of culture
and society’ (p. v, footnote; emphasis added),
but never define nor explain what society
means for the remainder of their text (which
deals with the spatial patterns displayed by a
range of phenomena such as food, buildings,
language and religion). The lack of a definition
of society is also true of more recent social
geography texts (Valentine, 2001; Panelli,
2004), although the explicit concern here for
social groupings, categories and relations
means that the reader arguably emerges with
a greater sense of what the social entails. One
current text does provide a definition, however, noting how: ‘ ‘‘Society’’ denotes the ties
that people have with others. . . . Societies are
usually perceived as having a distinct identity
and a system of meanings and values which
members share’, (Pain, Burke, Fuller and
Gough, 2001, p. 3, box 1.3). It is possible to
find geographers leaning towards all of the
theoretical positions laid out above and more,
but many have been drawn to the loosely
Giddensian formulation, complete with its
alertness to time–space relations.
Finally, it is interesting to reflect upon how
different geographical traditions have worked,
unwittingly or more knowingly, with different
conceptions of society, and in the process
started to theorize in different ways the relations between society (the social) and space
(the spatial). Tracing such differences across
the twentieth-century history of human – or,
more narrowly, social – geography is the task
that Philo and Söderström (2004, esp. p. 106)
set themselves, probing ‘the work of geographers trying to make sense of ‘‘the social’’ by
their own means, including their own bricolage
of elements culled . . . from a diversity of
sources in social theory, other disciplines
and popular discourses’. Environmental,
regional, spatial, radical, humanistic and
SOFTWARE FOR QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
‘culturally turned’ geographies are all examined, drawing from Anglophone and French
literatures, and questions are asked about how
and why particular scholars on particular occasions have chosen to talk about society or the
social, and with what consequences for the
varieties of human geography practised.
More overtly, it is now possible to identify
diverse strands within human geography over
the past quarter century that have been explicit in seeking to theorize the relations between
society and space. Following Soja’s (1980)
statement of the ‘socio-spatial dialectic’, a
range of contributions, at first chiefly based in
a Marxian tradition, but subsequently enriched
by insights from feminism, post-colonial theory, cultural theory, psychoanalysis and elsewhere, have illuminated the problematic of
simultaneously articulating ‘the societal construction of space’ and ‘the spatial construction of society’ (see feminist geographies;
marxist geographies; post-colonialism;
psychoanalytic theory). In so doing, the
very referents ‘society’ and ‘space’ have been
subjected to intense questioning, in some
literatures being deconstructed to the point
at which the terms appear to be under permanent erasure; but they will persist, their
names will be invoked, and the problematic
of ‘society-space’ will continue as an unavoidable challenge to generations of geographical
theorists to come.
cp
Name
http://cran.r-project.org.
GEODA
https://www.geoda.uiuc.edu/
GeoBUGS
http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/
bugs/winbugs/geobugs.shtml
http://www.stat.uni-muenchen.
de/bayesx/bayesx.html
MLwiN
Giddens (1984); Philo and Söderström (2004);
Smith (2005c).
software for qualitative research Some
qualitative research methods generate large
quantities of ‘data’ for which computer-based
software has been developed. Most of the
available software packages focus on the analysis of textual (including transcribed interview) material and undertake various forms
of content analysis through a variety of userinformed coding schemes. Among the early
such packages, NUD*ist (Non-numerical
Unstructured Data [for] index searching and
theory-building) was particularly popular: it
facilitates indexing and the structuring of
indexes as well as rapid searches for words
and phrases and producing statistical reports
on, for example, word associations and allowing researchers to insert memos within the
text. More recent developments building on
that foundation include NViVo and XSight:
all privilege certain approaches to textual
analysis – focusing on associations and counting – and thereby to some extent constrain
if not direct the enterprise. As with software
for quantitative research, an increasing
number of freeware packages is available
for interrogating qualitative data – such
as those made available through CAQDAS
(Computer-Assisted
Qualitative
Data
Available from
R
BAYESX
Suggested reading
http://www.cmm.bristol.ac.uk/
Comments
R is a general system for statistical computation and
graphics: it offers facilities for data manipulation,
calculation and graphical display either through
built-in functions or add-on packages contributed
by users – this includes spdep, which has facilities
to create spatial weights, tests for spatial
autocorrelation, and procedures for spatial
regression.
This implements techniques for exploratory
spatial data analysis: descriptive spatial data
analysis, spatial autocorrelation tests, and some
spatial regression functionality.
This is a Bayesian based package that fits spatial
models and produces a range of maps as output.
This has a number of distinctive features including
handling structured and/or uncorrelated effects of
spatial covariates. It allows non-parametric, smoothed
relationships between the response and the predictors,
and does this for continuous and discrete outcomes:
it can manipulate and display geographical maps.
A comprehensive package for the analysis and display
of multi-level models, this uses likelihood and Bayesian
approaches to estimation: it includes spatial models.
software for quantitative analysis
703
SOFTWARE FOR QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS
Analysis) – and centres have been established
(such as Qualidata, part of the Data Archive at
the University of Essex) to promote the shared
use of qualitative data.
rj
Suggested reading
Crang, Hudson, Reimer and Hinchliffe (1997);
Gibbs (2002); Richards (2005). For CAQDAS,
see http://caqdas.soc.surrey.ac.uk/resources.htm
and http://www.lboro.ac.uk/ research/mmethods/
research/software/caqdas_primer.html. For Qualidata, see http://www.esds.ac.uk/qualidata/.
software for quantitative analysis Software, a term invented by the statistician John
Tukey, refers to the instructions executed by a
computer, as opposed to the hardware, the
physical device on which the software runs.
Over the past 40 years, statistical software
has revolutionized the way in which we
approach data analysis, by allowing a much
more computationally intensive approach.
This has led to working with much larger data
sets; using more realistic models (e.g. categorical data analysis; geographically
weighted regression; multi-level models);
and better ways of visualizing data sets and
models (see visualization) as part of an
exploratory data analysis approach.
However, Ripley (2005) argues that ‘software
availability now drives what we do, probably
much more than we consciously realize’: if
it is not readily available, we tend not to do
the analyses. This has been particularly
problematic in holding back development
and adoption of geographical modeling and
spatial analysis, because the widely used and
otherwise reasonably comprehensive software,
such as the Statistical Package for the Social
Sciences (SPSS#), has limited capacity in this
area. This is finally changing and a new generation of software (much of it ‘freeware’)
has these capabilities, as in the table on page
703.
kj
Suggested reading
Anselin (2000).
South, the Invoked implicitly or explicitly in
relation to its assumed opposite (the North),
the idea of the South emerged as an alternative
to the term third world for distinguishing
former colonies and less industrialized nations
from countries of the more affluent and industrialized North. South is preferred by those
who see Third World as connoting thirdranked, rather than its original meaning of a
non-aligned or third path, independent of the
704
capitalist First World and the socialist Second
World. However, the term ‘South’ is also problematic in that the countries of the South are
(a) defined through their location with respect
to the USA and Western Europe, and (b)
concentrated in the tropics and sub-tropics
of both the Northern and the Southern
Hemispheres. To avoid such binaries, some
scholars deploy the language of a ‘One Third
(1/3) World’ - typically in conjunction with the
notion of the ‘First World/North’ – and a ‘Two
Thirds (2/3) World’ in conjunction with a
‘Third World/South’ to represent the relative
fractions of global population based on quality
of life (Mohanty, 2003).
The popularization of the terms ‘South’ and
‘North’ is sometimes attributed to the
publication of two reports by the Brandt
Commission: North–South (1980) and The
common crisis (1983). Convened by Willy
Brandt of the then West Germany to study
critical issues arising from the economic and
social disparities of the global community, this
self-appointed commission highlighted a codependent relationship between the northern
nations, which relied on the poor countries for
their wealth, and the southern nations, which
depended on the wealthier North for their
development. With food, agriculture, aid,
energy, trade, financial reform and global
negotiations as their focus, the Brandt
Reports sought to promote ‘adequate solutions
to the problems involved in development and
in attacking absolute poverty’, while also
addressing issues concerning the environment,
the arms race, population growth and the
uncertain prospects of the global economy that
the commission viewed as common to both
North and South (Brandt Commission, 1980;
Porter and Sheppard, 1998, p. 26).
However, it is in the post-Cold War era that
the idea of the South became significant as a
metaphor to define the global landscape of
political and economic power. Throughout
the 1980s, the two rival cold war military
and political systems shaped development
possibilities in the Third World. While relations between either superpower bloc and
the Third World frequently provided only limited development opportunities for recently
decolonized nations and latin america,
Third World leaders did have some choice of
political economic system. This room for
manoeuvre was at times exploited by Third
World elites to resist capitalist or communist
incursion, and to develop social democratic
and welfare state systems (see capitalism;
communism). The period after 1989
SOVEREIGN POWER
witnessed the demise of the second world,
the rise of the USA as the dominant economic, ideological and military power, and the
hegemony of neo-liberal economic discourse
(see neo-liberalism). East–West rivalries
have been replaced by north__south tensions
around such issues as the power and role of
the world trade organization, the United
Nations and international finance institutions,
global civil society and donor-driven NGOs,
mobility of labour versus that of capital and
commodities, and public health crises related
to AIDS (Sheppard and Nagar, 2004).
However, Mamdani’s (2004, p. 250) point
that ‘the Cold War was largely not fought in
Europe but in what came to be called the Third
World’ serves as an important reminder that the
East–West politics have been at all times
North–South politics. Not surprisingly, then,
while the post-9/11 ‘anti-terrorism’ discourse
is couched in terms of West versus radical
Islam, the US war on terror has simultaneously
metamorphosed into an offensive imperial
war, in which southern nations are denied the
right to defend their sovereignty as well as the
right to reform (Mamdani, 2004, p. 260).
Two noteworthy fissures in the concept of
the South have emerged in this environment.
First, with the emergence of the so-called
newly industrializing countries (NICs), such
as Taiwan and South Korea, and growing
impoverishment, particularly in africa, the
countries of the South have become increasingly differentiated. Second, whereas East–
West rivalries predominantly played out at
the nation-state scale, North–South tensions
operate on multiple scales. As political and
economic elites in most countries of the Third
and erstwhile Second Worlds accepted the
tenets of neo-liberalism, they repositioned
themselves ideologically and materially alongside the more wealthy residents of the First
World. At the same time, ongoing socioeconomic polarization within the industrialized world (reinforced by post-9/11 reforms),
together with the devolution of responsibilities
for citizens’ welfare from nation-states to
regions and cities, has meant that livelihood
possibilities in marginal localities within the
former First World become more similar to
those of the less well off in the former Second
and Third Worlds than to the elites in their
own countries. In addition, multilateral and
supra-national agencies became increasingly
influential proponents of the neo-liberal
agenda of the global North, shaping development geographies within states (Sheppard and
Nagar, 2004).
In concert, donor-driven NGOs have facilitated the co-optation of radical left and feminist politics, even as they have helped to
popularize the concepts of empowerment and
equity in limited but critical ways. Not surprisingly, then, the proliferation of UN conferences on women in the post-Cold War era
has ‘undermin[ed] nation-specific resistance
in the name of international solidarity’,
while simultaneously creating ‘ ‘‘the new
subaltern’’ – the somewhat monolithic woman
as victim who is the constituted subject of
justice under (the now-unrestricted) international capitalism’ (Spivak, 2000, p. 305).
Thus, the global North is constituted
through the pathways of transnational capital
and networks of political and economic elites
spanning privileged localities across the globe
(Castells, 1996a; Mohanty, 2003). By contrast,
the global South, which theoretically inhabits
the ‘margins’, is to be found everywhere.
But this does not make all Souths ‘equal’.
Movements against neo-liberalism are
reminders of the ways in which convergences
and divergences on issues such as livelihood
alternatives shape the agendas of actors operating in multiple Souths, whose visibility, in
turn, is shaped by complex politics of sociogeographical locations (Glassman, 2002;
Hardt, 2002; Sparke, Brown, Corva, Day
and Faria, 2005).
rn
sovereign power A philosophical concept
arguing that power is the control over individual life. The concept is a challenge to established ideas of sovereignty that concentrate
upon political authority over territory.
Sovereign power focuses attention to the
scale of the body, the authority to classify
individuals in a particular way to grant them
life or death. The roots of the concept lie in the
work of Michel Foucault and his discussion of
biopower, regularization and biopolitics.
Foucault’s analysis of nineteenth-century
medicine and sexual behaviour described the
way in which individual bodies and sexual
practices were classified by state institutions
as healthy/good and unhealthy/bad. The manner in which this was done led to the regulation of individual behaviour, or biopower,
through classification and control, to the classification of groups of people (in terms of
race, nation, sexuality, gender etc.), the
political implication being that classification
of people as, say, sexually deviant can be used
in arguments limiting their political rights.
Usage of the concept ‘sovereign power’ has
been promoted by the work of Giorgio
705
SOVEREIGNTY
Agamben, who thought that the fate of the
Jews in the holocaust ran counter to
Foucault’s theory. Instead, Agamben argued
that at times individuals and groups may be
classified in such a way that their life is
deemed worthless rather than something to
be regulated. For Agamben, the Nazis identified Jews as ‘bare life’ – life that warranted
extermination. Agamben begins with the
Romans, and their classification of homo
sacer (from Roman law, an individual who
may be killed but not sacrificed). Homines sacri
may not be sacrificed as they are ‘beyond the
divine’, and hence meaningless to the gods.
They may be killed with impunity, however,
because homo sacer is beyond juridical law, and
hence has no value to the citizenry. While
Foucault examined how power disciplined
individuals to create a subject (a person
behaving within imposed rules and norms),
Agamben argued that sovereign power allows
for the elimination of particular subjects.
Foucault’s biopolitics tries to define who can
and should be included in a political community, while Agamben argues that sovereign
power excludes individuals and groups not
just from particular territorial political communities but from humanity itself.
Geographers have utilized the next logical
step in Agamben’s work, his identification of
spaces of exception (see exception, space of);
the geographical construction of borders outside which the rules and norms of established
legal and political order do not apply. It is in
these geographical zones that sovereign power
allows and enacts the killing of homo sacer with
impunity. The classification of territory in this
way results, for Agamben, in a mapping of
our world not into nations, but into ‘camps’.
In the context of the ‘war on terror’,
Agamben’s concept was used by geographers
to explain the slaughter of fighters and civilians by the US military in Afghanistan and
Iraq, the violence upon the Palestinians by
Israeli forces, and the incarceration of ‘terrorists’ at the US Naval Station at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, with no recourse to US or international law (Gregory, 2004b).
cf
Suggested reading
Edkins (2000); Gregory (2004b).
sovereignty A claim to final and ultimate
authority over a political community. The
Treaty of Westphalia (1648) codified modern
politics as a system of states: states have sovereignty over the land and people in their territories. The term implies that no external
706
political entity has the authority to enact laws
or exercise authority within a sovereign territory (Taylor, 1994c, 1995b). In reality, such a
condition of sovereignty has never existed and
has been particularly challenged by contemporary processes of globalization.
Sovereignty of states in an inter-state system
is the result of two interrelated processes.
First, internal sovereignty means that external
powers are excluded from exercising authority
within a state’s territory, and that the state has
authority over the whole of its territory.
A distinction must be made between legal
and effective sovereignty. A state may claim
sovereignty over the whole of its territory
but face strong opposition and resistance to
its rule in particular regions to the extent that
the state apparatus is ineffective and
ignored. Second, external sovereignty means
mutual recognition from other states in the
system, ultimately requiring endorsement by,
and membership of, the United Nations. For
example, Israel’s induction into the United
Nations in 1947, despite protest from Arab
countries, established the new state in the
inter-state system.
The sub-discipline of political geography
was initially focused upon issues of sovereignty, especially the precise location of the
borders that delimit states and their sovereignty, as well as the functional internal geography that facilitated the effective exercise of
sovereignty. In addition, the fact that state
sovereignty did not produce peace, as intended and expected, but has generated conflicts has also provided topics for political
geographers: inter-state conflicts, imperialism
and secession, for example. Furthermore,
sovereignty over the sea and inner and outer
space have emerged as important topics.
The most intriguing discussions of sovereignty have emerged in light of globalization, and the extreme argument, made by
some, that we are facing the end of state
sovereignty as it emerged in modern times
(Ohmae, 1995). Before discussing globalization and sovereignty two points must be made.
Sovereignty as per its definition has never
existed; there have always been interdictions
of external authority and challenges to internal
sovereignty. Second, globalization is not an
external force acting upon states, but a collection of economic, political, and cultural processes that are partially created and enacted by
states. The undermining of state sovereignty
by globalization is partly a result of the states
themselves. This has led to the definition of
‘quasi-states’, those that have limited effective
SPACE
sovereignty, often an outcome of postcolonial relationships (Jackson, 1990).
The inter-state, or even trans-state, character of globalization has weakened the ability of
states to manage their own economic affairs.
Currency values and interest rates within particular countries are partially set by the
decisions made by international markets
rather than through domestic policy, for
example. In other words, external influence is
felt within sovereign territory. The outcome is
a geography of ‘graduated sovereignty’, in
which state sovereignty is spatially differentiated within a sovereign territory (Park, 2005).
For example, special economic zones of
reduced taxes and tariffs are established within
countries that reduce the fiscal authority of
the state in order to promote trade and
investment (cf. enterprise zone).
Although states have ceded sovereignty
over economic processes, others, reacting to
public pressure, have focused upon social sovereignty (Rudolph, 2005), defined as the
states’ ability to define and control access to
a political community. Political citizenship
has been understood as a feature of territorial
sovereignty; citizenship was attached to a particular territorially-defined community, and
citizens gained rights and received duties
from the sovereign state. However, processes
of globalization have led to increased calls for
non-territorial forms of citizenship, in effect
granting sovereignty to institutions that transcend states (Russell, 2005).
Sovereignty is in a state of flux, as society
becomes increasingly organized around
networks rather than territories (Castells,
1996b). Consideration of graduated sovereignty is coupled to overlapping forms of sovereignty, akin to pre-modern times, whereby a
territory may be subject to a number of sovereign claims. Some of these claims may be
stronger and more appealing than others as
the ability to exercise authority may decline
with distance from a political centre (Lake,
2003). Currently, we live in a hybrid political
geography of varying forms of sovereignty
within territorial and network spaces.
cf
Suggested reading
Holsti (2004); Sidaway (2002).
space The production of geographical
knowledge has always involved claims to
know ‘space’ in particular ways. Historically,
special importance has been attached to the
power to fix the locations of events, places,
people and phenomena on the surface of the
Earth and to represent these on maps. The
extension of these capacities involved a series
of instrumental, mathematical and graphical
advances, but these innovations were also political technologies that were implicated in the
production of particular constellations of
power (Pickles, 2004; Short, 2004). As such,
they carried within them particular conceptions of space that were always more than
purely technical constructions (see also cartography, history of). This recognition of
an intricate connection between power,
knowledge and geography has transformed
the ways in which contemporary human
geography has conceptualized space. A suite
of theories and concepts has been assembled
to address what Allen (2003) describes as
both ‘spatial vocabularies of power’ (which
trace the mobilizations and effects of power
over space) and ‘lost geographies of power’
(which show how power is produced and
performed through space). These elaborations
have significant repercussions for concepts
such as place, region and territory, but in
what follows attention is directed towards the
more general, plenary concepts of space
within which these more particular concepts
may be convened.
These are matters of considerable importance. Many writers have argued that the nineteenth century was the epoch of time, the
twentieth century the epoch of space, and that
as ‘the modern’ yielded to ‘the postmodern’
so there has been a marked ‘spatial turn’
across the spectrum of the humanities and
social sciences that describes much more than
the play of spatial metaphors (e.g. Smith
and Katz, 1993; Soja, 1989). But others have
insisted on the imminent ‘end of geography’,
‘the irrelevance of space’ and the ‘death of
distance’ in ostensibly the same late, liquid or
postmodern world (e.g. Bauman, 2000a). It is
not difficult to reconcile these competing claims: everything depends on how ‘space’ is conceptualized (cf. modernity; postmodernity).
Hartshorne’s once influential enquiry into
The nature of geography (1939) occupies a
strange position within the history of the
discipline. His view of geography was
Kantian – Geography was concerned with the
organization of phenomena in space (see
areal differentiation; kantianism) – and
yet Hartshorne provided no systematic discussion of the concept on which his prospectus
depended. Even his subsequent account of
geography as one of the ‘spatial sciences’ (with
astronomy and geophysics) failed to elucidate
the conceptual basis of his claim. What
707
SPACE
preoccupied Hartshorne (1958) was the
recovery of a line of descent from Kant
through Humboldt to Hettner, and yet the
ways in which these writers conceptualized
space was never allowed to become a problem.
Hartshorne simply took it for granted that
space (like time) was a universal of human
existence, an external coordinate, an empty
grid of mutually exclusive points, ‘an unchanging box’ within which objects exist and events
occur: all of which is to say that he privileged
the concept of absolute space (Smith, 1984,
pp. 67–8).
Many of Hartshorne’s postwar critics fastened on the way in which he had taken a
specific concept of space and elevated it to
the single, supposedly universal concept of
space. Although Schaefer objected to the
exceptionalism of Hartshorne’s views, he
nonetheless agreed that ‘spatial relations are
the ones that matter in geography and no
others’. The difference was that spatial relations were now to be defined between objects
and events (not between the fixed points of an
external coordinate system) and thereby made
relative to the objects and events that constituted a spatial system or spatial structure. This
substituted a concept of relative space whose
elucidation required a more complex geometry, and for this reason spatial analysis –
the preferred research methodology of many
of Hartshorne’s critics – involved a process of
abstraction in which ‘physical space [was]
superseded by mathematical space’ (Smith,
1984, pp. 68–73). This intellectual project
promised to turn geography into a formal
spatial science, predicated on a key claim:
‘That there is more order than appears at first
sight is not discovered till that order is looked
for’ (Haggett, 1965, p. 2). This was used
to demarcate a new research frontier – a
‘new geography’ – whose explorer–scientists
believed that there was an intrinsically and
essentially spatial order to the world: that spatial science made it possible to disclose (to
make visible) the spatiality of the natural and
the social in ways that were literally overlooked
by the other sciences.
Yet many human geographers became
increasingly uncomfortable at what they saw
as both spatial fetishism (treating social relations as purely spatial relations) and spatial
separatism (divorcing human geography from
the humanities and social sciences). The critique of spatial science was many-stranded,
but many of the original objections revolved
around Olsson’s (1974) insight that the statements of spatial science revealed more about
708
the language that its protagonists were talking
in than the world that they were talking about.
The most general outcome was a movement
towards a process-oriented human geography
that explored the process-domains of political economy and social theory, and then
traced the marks made by these processes and
practices on the surface of the Earth. At the
time, several influential writers insisted that
concepts of space could not be adjudicated
by appeals to the philosophy of science, but
had to be articulated through the conduct of
social practices: ‘The question ‘‘what is
space?’’ is therefore replaced by the question
‘‘How is it that different human practices create and make use of distinctive conceptualizations of space?’’ ’ (Harvey, 1973, p. 14). This
introduced a relational concept in which space
is ‘folded into’ social relations through practical activities. This allowed not only for the
socialization of spatial analysis but also, crucially, for the spatialization of social analysis:
like simultaneous equations, each was incomplete without the other (Gregory and Urry,
1985; Soja, 1989). The international journal
Society and Space was founded in 1983 to foster the interdisciplinary conversations that
were emerging in this new discursive arena.
Many of the first attempts to re-theorize
‘society and space’ were indebted to Harvey’s
re-readings of Marx. Harvey argued that
Marx’s critique of political economy implied
a latent spatial structure that he never made
explicit: capitalism as a system of commodity
production also depends on the production of
a space-economy, and its spasmodic crises in
turn require a precarious ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey,
1999 [1982]). Others preferred to explore the
writings of later Marxist scholars, notably
Henri Lefebvre and his suggestive yet enigmatic account of the production of space
(Lefebvre, 1991b). Harvey had always acknowledged his interest in Lefebvre, and subsequently integrated his own work with some of
Lefebvre’s key propositions and, en route, diagrammed the implications of absolute, relative
and relational spaces for a revitalized historical materialism (Harvey, 2006a; see also
Gregory, 1994, pp. 348–416).
Later contributions pursued the spatial
implications of other thinkers with varying
degrees of success (Crang and Thrift, 2000).
Two diagnostics have repeatedly emerged.
The first is an unwavering concern with
ontology: with grasping the significance of
space not for the constitution and conduct of
capitalism alone, but for being-in-the-world.
Pickles (1985) was one of the first human
SPACE
geographers to provide a rigorous account of
the implications of existentialism and phenomenology for understanding human spatiality, and these themes have re-emerged in
later thematizations of space (e.g. Strohmayer,
1998). The second is a persistent interest in
concepts of space that are markedly less
orderly than those of spatial science and its
successor projects, sometimes through readings of outlaw Marxists such as Walter Benjamin (Latham, 1999; Dubow, 2004) and
sometimes through post-structuralism: the
most influential figures here have been Gilles
Deleuze, Michel Foucault (Crampton and
Elden, 2007) and Jacques Lacan.
Taken together, contemporary theorizations
of space in human geography (and beyond)
share the following features:
(1) The integration of time and space. Conventional social science privileged the first
term (so that time was seen as change,
movement and history) while marginalizing the second (so that space was seen
as the site of stasis and stability). Human
geography has abandoned the project of
an autonomous science of the spatial,
rejected conceptions of space as the
fixed and frozen ground on which events
take place or processes leave their marks,
and is now exploring the mobile, processual fields of ‘time–space’ (May and
Thrift, 2001; see time-geography;
time–space compression; time__space
expansion).
(2) The co-production of time and space. Time
and space are not neutral, canonical
grids that exist ‘on the outside’, enframing and containing life on Earth, but are
instead folded into the ongoing flows and
forms of the world in which we find ourselves. Thus Thrift (1996; see also 2008)
introduces the idea of spatial formations
to figure a sensuous ontology of practices and encounters between diverse,
distributed bodies and things. This is a
thoroughly materialist account, but it
operates through an analytics of the surface rather than the ‘depth models’ of
mainstream Marxism, and it refuses
the oppositions between ‘culture’ and
‘nature’ on which historical materialism is predicated. Time–space emerges
as a process of continual construction
‘through the agency of things encountering each other in more or less organized
circulations’ (Thrift, 2003, p. 96). Similarly but differently, Rose (1999b) draws
on feminist theory, and particularly the
work of Judith Butler, to insist that space
is not a pre-existent void or ‘a terrain to
be spanned or constructed’: it is instead
‘a doing’, a performance.
(3) The unruliness of time–space. Both spatial
science and conventional social theory
made too much of pattern and systematicity, labouring to solve what they called
‘the problem of order’, without recognizing the multiple ways in which life on
Earth evades and exceeds those orders.
The sense of partial ordering and incompletion is focal to many contemporary
theorizations. To be sure, space is not
infinitely plastic: ‘certain forms of space
tend to recur, their repetition a sign of
the power that saturates the spatial’
(Rose, 1999). And yet, while modalities
of power often work to condense particular spatialities as ‘natural’ outcomes
through architectures of surveillance
and regulation, Massey (2005) insists
that space is not a coherent system of
discriminations and interconnections, a
grid of ‘proper places’. She argues that
space necessarily entails plurality and
multiplicity. Hence spatial formations involve (and invite) ‘happenstance juxtapositions’ and ‘accidental separations’,
so that time–space becomes a turbulent
field of constellations and configurations:
a world of structures and solidarities, disruptions and dislocations that provides
for the emergence of genuine novelty.
‘Emergence’ is not necessarily progressive or emancipatory, of course, and the
argument may also be put in reverse:
contemporary spaces of exception (see
exception, spaces of) trade on paradoxical orderings of space whose very ambiguity is used to foreclose possibilities
for political action. Either way, however,
far from space being ‘the dead’, as one of
Foucault’s astringent critics once
claimed, it is now theorized as being
fully involved in the modulations of tension and transformation.
(4) The porousness of time–space. Constellations of power and knowledge are typically elaborated through a spatial system
of inclusions and exclusions, most generally through the demarcation of a ‘space
of the Same’ from which ‘the Other’ is
supposedly excluded (cf. imaginative
geographies). A common critical response to these measures is to call these
b/ordering processes to account – to
709
SPACE SYNTAX
denaturalize them by disclosing their
constructedness – and to break open (literally to de-limit) the ‘space of the
Same’. This involves recognizing the
presence of the Other within the space
of the Same: the ways in which the geographical knowledges brought ‘home’ by
European
explorers
relied
on,
appropriated and so smuggle in indigenous knowledges, for example, or the ways
in which the racialized, gendered and
‘pure’ spaces of colonialism were routinely disrupted and transgressed (cf. hybridity; transculturation).
Thinking about time–space in these ways
invites critical readings of the ways in which
landscape, maps and other conceptual
devices function as representations – as
orderings – of space, redescribing their naturalization as the product of political technologies and cultural practices, and calling into
question the discipline’s claims to know the
world by rendering it as a transparent space
(cf. situated knowledge). But they also
require other ways of grasping time–space,
and there are signs of experiments with the
performing, plastic and media arts to subvert
our taken-for-granted methods of representation, and to open new political spaces for
observant participation in the making of
human geographies.
dg
Suggested reading
Harvey (2006a); Thrift (2006).
space syntax An approach to studying the
spatial structure of cities using mathematical
tools to describe their complexity. For
example, the street system may be analysed
topologically by calculating the complexity
distance for each street – that is, the minimum
number of links needed (i.e. streets traversed)
to reach all other streets in the city (see topology). The measures extend beyond threedimensional descriptions of the elements of
the built environment themselves to assessments of how they are integrated – as in the
use of isovists to identify the area visible from
any point, either at street level or, say, from a
window on a building’s fourth floor. (In
geographic information systems these are
termed viewsheds.) Such representations,
using maps and graphs as well as numerical
indices, allow the city’s ‘navigability’ to be
assessed – how easy is it to move about and
to get from one point to another? – with techniques that can be applied at any scale (how
710
easy is it to get around an airport terminal, for
example?).
Using their syntactical representations of
the urban built environment, workers at the
Space Syntax Laboratory at the Bartlett
School of Architecture, University College
London have studied commuting and other
movements, linking flows to the urban structure and thereby providing means for predicting future traffic patterns and transport system
demands.
rj
Suggested reading
Hiller (1996); Hiller and Hanson (1984). See
also http://www.spacesyntax.org/
space-economy The idea that economic
processes extend across geographical space,
thereby influencing their operation and outcome. Walter Isard (1956) coined the term,
using it as the basis for his new discipline of
regional science. In his (much earlier) development of location theory, August Lösch
(1954 [1940]) had already shown that economic competition in space does not have
the same beneficial outcomes claimed in
standard economic theory, because competition is monopolistic in spatially extensive
markets (see neo-classical economics).
Location theory and regional science developed a series of related claims showing how
space makes a difference to economic theory,
making the term popular in the 1950s and
1960s. Within this tradition, spatial structures, a consequence of rational economic
decision-making, drive equilibrium outcomes
and social welfare implications that differ from
those of mainstream, a-spatial economic theory. Since 1990, with a revival of this tradition
of work in geographical economics, the term
has regained its popularity (Fujita, Krugman
and Venables, 1999; see also new economic
geography).
A parallel usage can be found within geographical interventions in marxism and political economy, particularly among theorists
whose intellectual socialization was influenced
by spatial science and location theory, and
who subsequently became highly critical of
these formulations. Thus Harvey (1999
[1982]) used the term to describe how the
geographical organization of capitalism
shapes its dynamics and evolution, calling into
question some core beliefs of the conventional
a-spatial Marxist critique of capitalism, and
Sheppard and Barnes (1990) took these
arguments still further in their analysis of the
capitalist space-economy. In this view, space
SPATIAL AUTOCORRELATION
qualitatively complicates the contradictions,
crises and class struggles that are characteristic of capitalism. The spaces and places
produced through accumulation and competition dynamics become barriers for future
accumulation; conflict between places can
cut across and undermine class struggle; and
individual agents find it all but impossible to
undertake actions that are in their long-term
as well as their immediate interests. Again,
taking account of the spatial extension of
economic processes requires adjustments to
conventional, a-spatial political economy. In
this case, however, in contradistinction to
regional science and location theory, analysis
focuses on the dynamical dialectical relation
between economic processes and the spatiality they shape and are in turn shaped by (see
dialectic), rather than on assumed spatial
structures and their impact on spatial economic equilibria.
As economic geography has subsequently
moved to a conception of economy that
emphasizes the inseparability of the economic
from other societal and biophysical processes,
thereby calling into question any theory that
seeks to separate or prioritize economic relative to these other processes, so once again
the term ‘space-economy’ has fallen out of
favour (see also cultural turn; institutional economics).
es
space^time forecasting models Statistical
models that attempt to forecast the evolution
of variables over both time and space (e.g. sets
of regions). These models are usually of the
general regression form and forecast the
future value of a variable and an observation
unit in terms of (a) lagged exogenous or
explanatory variables, (b) its own past values
and (c) the lagged values for neighbouring or
influencing spatial observation-units, thus
capturing the impacts of spatial diffusion.
These models have been used to forecast
both economic and demographic changes,
and in studies of epidemics and the modelling
of disease.
lwh
Suggested reading
Bennett (1979).
spatial analysis The application of quantitative methods in locational analysis
within human geography and sometimes used
as a synonym for that portion of the discipline
that concentrates on the geometry of the landscape (cf. spatial science). O’Sullivan and
Unwin (2002) present spatial analysis as the
study of the arrangements of points, lines,
areas and surfaces on a map, and of their interrelationships. Analyses of those separate components have deployed procedures adapted
from other sciences – nearest-neighbour
analysis and quadrat analysis, for point
pattern analysis; graph theory for lines;
and trend surface analysis for surfaces, for
example. Whereas many geographers have
undertaken analyses of the interrelationships
using techniques from within the general
linear model, others have argued that spatial
analysis poses particular statistical problems
because of the nature of spatial data (cf.
spatial autocorrelation), thus requiring
special techniques.
The development of geographic information systems is rapidly facilitating advances in
spatial analysis and the greater power of computers, together with software developments,
has significantly increased geographers’ ability
to work with large and complex spatial data
sets (cf. geocomputation).
rj
Suggested reading
Bailey and Gatrell (1995); Haining (1990).
spatial autocorrelation The presence of
spatial pattern in a mapped variable due to
geographical proximity. The most common
form of spatial autocorrelation is where similar
values for a variable (such as county income
levels) tend to cluster together in adjacent
observation-units or regions, so that on average across the map the values for neighbours
are more similar than would occur if the allocation of values to observation-units were the
result of a purely random mechanism. This
is positive spatial autocorrelation. Negative
autocorrelation is where neighbouring regions
are significantly dissimilar; more general and
complicated forms of autocorrelation can also
be defined. The presence of spatial autocorrelation is very widespread and indeed may be
said to lie at the core of geography, as
expressed in Tobler’s (1970) – light-hearted –
First Law of Geography: ‘everything is related
to everything else, but near things are more
related than distant things’.
However, the presence of spatial autocorrelation violates a basic assumption of
independence in many standard statistical
models. Thus for regression, there is an
assumption that the residuals are not autocorrelated. The issue of spatial autocorrelation
was recognized early in the history of inferential statistics, but it was not until the work of
Moran and Geary in the late 1940s and 1950s
711
SPATIAL ECONOMETRICS
that tests were devised, and it was the developments by Cliff and Ord that brought the
topic to prominence. A mathematical representation of ‘neighbours’ was a stumblingblock to computing the tests, and Cliff and
Ord reformulated Moran’s test to employ a
W-matrix of size N N, where N was the
number of regions or observations, and a cell
value wij of 1 indicated that regions i and j were
neighbours, and 0 if they were not (Cliff and
Ord, 1973). This idea opened up a whole field
of research, and spatial autocorrelation is now
a theme in many social sciences. Moreover, as
Tobler’s Law suggests, spatial autocorrelation
should not just be seen as a problem but also
as a reflection of spatial interaction and a
central aspect of spatial modelling, and this
has been the basis for the development of
spatial econometrics. The Moran test is a
global one, detecting whether there is autocorrelation on average across the set of regions; a
more recent development has been the disaggregation of this measure into local measures,
such as Anselin’s LISA (Local Indicators of
Spatial Association) to detect local clusters of
positive and negative autocorrelation (Anselin,
1995). (See also local statistics.)
lwh
Suggested reading
Odland (1988).
spatial econometrics An interdisciplinary
research field being developed by economists,
geographers and statisticians. The term was
invented by Jean Paelinck (Paelinck and
Klaassen, 1979), and the research focuses on
the construction and application of statistical
models and tests explicitly designed for spatial
(geographical) data, building on initial work
on spatial autocorrelation by Cliff, Ord
and others.
The field of econometrics was developed
throughout the twentieth century by economists to deal with the special statistical modelling issue posed by the non-experimental
context of economics and the social sciences,
often very different from the laboratory and
agricultural field-trials context for which much
statistical theory was developed. In particular,
econometricians constructed methods to deal
with time-series autocorrelation, time-lags
and dynamics in economic relationships and
simultaneity and feedback between different
equations
in
macroeconomic
models.
However, it is only in recent decades that
equivalent techniques for spatial data have
been developed. Amongst many contributors,
712
Luc Anselin’s work, and his computer package
SpaceStat, have been particularly influential in
developing both the methods and their application. The focus of the field has moved from
testing for spatial autocorrelation towards the
modelling of spatial interaction through
spatial diffusion, spatial lags or spillovers,
and endogeneity is a major focus in the construction of the estimators and tests.
lwh
Suggested reading
Anselin (1988, 2002, 2003).
spatial fetishism Any approach that treats
space as sufficiently autonomous to social processes that ‘no change in the social process or
spatial relations could alter the fundamental
structure of space’ (Smith, 1981b, p. 112).
The term was developed in the course of interactions between human geography and
marxism; by analogy with Marx’s critique of
commodity fetishism, in which the conditions
of production of a commodity are made invisible and the economy is reduced to exchanges
between objects rather than seen as a series of
unfolding social relations and practices, so it
was argued that approaches such as spatial
science conceptualized space as somehow
exogenous to and separate from social processes (cf. Soja, 1980) (See also spatial
separatism.)
es
spatial identity
The ways in which
identities are constituted, articulated and
contested in relation to space and place.
A wide range of research has explored the
territorialized spatialities of identity in relation
to, for example, a region, ‘homeland’ or
nation. Other research traces the deterritorialized – and reterritorialized – spatialities of
identity in terms of migration, diaspora and
borderlands. Whilst some research has
viewed space merely as a container for identity, or as a stage on which identities are
played out, other research – particularly since
the 1990s – traces the mutual constitution of
both space and identity and their multiple and
contested articulations (including Keith and
Pile, 1993). Rather than view spatial identities
in essentialist terms, this research – often
inspired by post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and post-colonialism – traces their
politicized differentiation. Although spatial
metaphors have been particularly important
in conceptualizing identity, geographers have
been concerned to ground and locate the
material spatialities of identity, which are often
closely bound up with ideas about situated
SPATIAL MISMATCH
knowledge, the politics of location, and the
spatial politics of identity (Yaeger, 1996; see
also positionality). In a wide variety of contexts, geographical analyses of spatial identity
thereby explore the metaphorical and material
relationships between space, identity and
power.
Post-colonial and feminist theorists have
been particularly influential in theorizing spatial identity. In his classic work, Orientalism,
Edward Said (2003 [1978]) explored the
imaginative geographies of ‘self’ and ‘other’
through the intensely politicized spaces of the
‘Orient’. Other post-colonial theorists have
explored the spatial identities bound up with
migration, diaspora and the contested
politics of hybridity, multiculturalism and
cosmopolitanism (including Hall, 1996a). In
feminist theory, a frequently cited essay by
Minnie Bruce Pratt (1984) traces her sense
of identity through multiple spaces of home
and memory. Other feminist theorists have
theorized the interplay of gender and other
identities in place, over space, and in shaping
the production of space and knowledge. In her
analysis of ‘locational feminism’, for example,
Susan Stanford Friedman (1998) explores the
critical interplay of space and identity through
different discourses of positionality. As part of
these discourses, ‘situational approaches’ not
only ‘assume that identity resists fixity, but
they particularly stress how it shifts fluidly
from setting to setting’, whereby ‘[e]ach situation presumes a certain setting as site for
the interplay of different axes of power and
powerlessness’ (p. 23).
ab
Suggested reading
Friedman (1998); Hall (1996); Keith and Pile
(1993); Pratt (1984).
spatial interaction A term popularized by
Edward Ullman (1980) to indicate the interdependence between geographical regions,
which he saw as complementary to the more
traditional emphasis on relationships (people
and their social context, people and environment) within each individual region. flows
of information, money, people and commodities thus lay at the heart of Ullman’s vision,
and he hoped it would provide a unifying
frame for geography. This has not happened, and few geographers now refer to
Ullman’s book or his specific ideas.
However, much work in human geography
in the past 30 years has taken up this theme
and many would see ‘spatial interaction’ as
central to geographers’ concerns and
contributions, without being aware of
Ullman’s work. This is true of both quantitative work on modelling spatial movements
and spatial spillovers and qualitative work on
local–global linkages and contexts.
lwh
Suggested reading
Ullman (1980).
spatial mismatch The notion that constraints on residential choice prevent members
of certain groups from adequate access to
employment (also referred to as the spatial
mismatch hypothesis). Urban economist John
Kain first used the term in the 1960s to
describe the impacts of residential segregation and housing market discrimination on
the employment opportunities and earnings
of black residents of Chicago and Detroit
(Kain, 1968). In a retrospective published
after his death (Kain, 2004), Kain noted that
he later extended the concept to include other
negative impacts, such as those on home
ownership and quality of education, and of
discrimination in the housing market.
Following Kain’s early lead, most research
on spatial mismatch has sought to understand
the extent to which the black–white disparity
in earnings can be explained by blacks’ inferior
spatial accessibility to employment. As
employment, and particularly manufacturing
employment, increasingly suburbanized after
the Second World War, access to such employment depended on a suburban residential
location; but a variety of discriminatory practices in the housing market prevented blacks
from moving to the suburbs. As a result,
blacks were confined to inner-city neighbourhoods, which were increasingly bereft of
manufacturing jobs.
Until recently, research on spatial mismatch
concentrated on comparing the residential and
employment patterns and commuting times
of black and white men; McLafferty and
Preston (1997) and others have shown the
importance of expanding such studies to other
racialized groups such as Latinos/Latinas, and
to women.
Evidence supporting the spatial mismatch
hypothesis was one factor that led the US
Department
of
Housing
and
Urban
Development (HUD) to initiate an experimental
programme, ‘Moving to Opportunity’, to help
low-income people from high-poverty neighbourhoods to move to racially integrated,
low-poverty suburban locations. Subsequent
studies have evaluated the extent to which
such residential mobility and the resulting
713
SPATIAL MONOPOLY
change in neighbourhood context and accessibility do indeed lead to improved employment
and educational opportunities (Clark, 2005c).
One interesting and unanticipated outcome
of this experiment has been that substantial
numbers of households have subsequently
moved back to their old neighbourhoods, places
with which they are familiar and are where their
families and friends remain (Clark, 2005). sha
Suggested reading
Holzer (1991); Preston and McLafferty (1999).
spatial monopoly Monopolistic control
over a market by virtue of location. The
usual meaning of monopoly is that one firm
or individual sells the entire output of some
commodity or service. This is normally the
final outcome of a competitive process taking
place under capitalist market conditions, in
which one supplier is able to produce and
sell the commodity at a price favourable
enough to consumers to force other suppliers
out of business. Spatial monopoly is a special
case, in which distance from competitors or
ways of bounding space give a producer monopolistic control over a section of the market.
Spatial monopoly can arise when a producer
is distributing a commodity from its point of
origin, and also when consumers travel to the
point of origin. In the first case, the operation
of an f.o.b. pricing policy, whereby the cost of
transportation is passed on to the consumer
(see pricing policies), will increase delivered
price with distance from the production point,
so that consumers close to the production
point can purchase the commodity relatively
cheaply; that is, more cheaply than from alternative suppliers. The greater the elasticity of
demand, or the sensitivity of the consumer to
price, the greater the likelihood of local monopoly. The area within which monopoly control exists (assuming that consumers buy from
the cheapest source) is bounded by a locus of
points where delivered price from the supplier
in question is equal to the price charged by a
competitor. In the second case, consumers
will tend to travel to the production point
which is closest in time, effort or cost. In this
case, too, the area of monopoly control will
be bounded by a locus of points of consumer
indifference as to whether to purchase from
one point to another.
Spatial monopoly can also arise from collusion between otherwise competing firms, who
may agree to a ‘carve-up’ of the market among
themselves. As in other situations of spatial
monopoly, this will enable suppliers to raise
714
prices and exact above-normal profits in the
area over which they exert exclusive control.
Distance provides no absolute protection of a
market, however, for some consumers may
choose to purchase from high-cost sources or
to travel to more distant outlets, out of preference, ignorance or other behavioural
considerations.
There may be other strategies for protecting
space over which monopoly control is exerted.
These include the imposition of tariffs
and restriction on the use of means of
transportation: suppliers may use coercion to
prevent competitors from entering a particular
city to sell their goods, for example, as has
happened in the former Soviet Union since
the collapse of socialism.
In some instances, spatial monopoly may be
a case of so-called natural monopoly, where
the market in question is best served by a
single firm because of the nature of the
production process. Some public utilities
are of this kind; for example, local water
supply. Such public spatial monopoly may
be turned into private monopoly by privatization.
dms
Suggested reading
Smith (1981).
spatial science The theoretical approach
associated with the quantitative revolution in Anglo-American geography in the
1960s that privileged spatial analysis. During
this period many human geographers turned
from the integrated, descriptive and idiographic analysis of specific places (i.e. the
traditional forms of regional geography) to
the specialized, theoretically inflected and
nomothetic analysis of spatial structures;
that is, spatial science. epistemologically,
this stream of work, the so-called ‘New
Geography’ of the 1960s, is usually associated
with the philosophies of logical empiricism
and logical positivism, the prevailing norms
in the natural sciences and the emergent best
practice in other social sciences after 1945.
By aligning itself with ‘normal science’, and
in another sense with ‘extraordinary research’
and ‘scientific revolutions’ (see paradigm),
geography successfully sought to enhance its
academic status (Ad Hoc Committee on
Geography, 1965; see also Billinge, Gregory
and Martin, 1984b). While rarely describing
itself explicitly as positivist, it was presumed
that reliable explanations could be achieved
by constructing universal deductive causal
explanations whose accuracy could be
SPATIALITY
assessed by reference to independently gathered observations (Harvey, 1969).
In human geography, this approach was
used to develop theories of the location of
human activities, the spatial interactions
between places and the spatial diffusion of
phenomena from one place to another.
Typically, research proceeded by constructing
mathematical–statistical models and then
comparing them to observations using spatial
analysis (spatial statistics and Monte Carlo
simulation). While some spatial science suffers
from spatial fetishism and spatial separatism, these are by no means inherent shortcomings. Both the social construction of space
and the theory-laden nature of observations
were recognized within spatial science.
Given this history, it is ironic that the term
‘spatial science’ first appeared in English in
Hartshorne’s programmatic statement of The
nature of geography (1939). This text was the
bête noire of spatial science: Hartshorne discussed location theory en passant but ruled
it out of geographical enquiry, and he located
geography alongside what he called other
‘spatial sciences’, such as astronomy (cf.
cosmography), only to insist that the intrinsic
exceptionalism of geography necessarily
relocated it with the idiographic sensibilities
of history rather than the theoretical and statistical modalities of the other, normal sciences.
When the term ‘spatial science’ reappeared, it
was not part of the rival prospectus of the
quantitative revolutionaries at all but, rather,
named their research as the object of critique:
thus the second chapter of Gregory’s Ideology,
science and human geography (1978a) was
entitled ‘In place of spatial science’.
Since then, spatial science has become a
catch-all characterization of forms of spatial
analysis and theorization associated with the
Quantitative Revolution and its derivatives. At
its most general, it describes a divide within
human geography and also between human
and physical geography that separates those
who see themselves as following the prescriptions of natural science from those who do
not. Since the 1990s, as GIS has reinvigorated
spatial analysis and as cognate social sciences
such as economics, with stronger allegiances
to the epistemologies of natural science, have
rediscovered geography (see new economic
geography), spatial science has gained new
adherents. Yet the divide is based on the supposition that natural science entails different
norms than the human sciences – a claim that
has been increasingly questioned in contemporary geography, philosophy and the
philosophy of science and science studies
(cf. Harrison and Dunham, 1998; Massey,
1999).
es
spatial separatism Any geographical theory
asserting that physical space is an independent
cause of human behaviour. Separatism has two
meanings here: separating space from social
processes, and separating human geography
from other social sciences. The term was
coined by Sack (1973, 1974b) to criticize
claims made specifically by Bunge (1966,
1973) in his prospectus for theoretical geography that geographical theories explain using
geometric laws, thereby giving geography an
exceptional status relative to the laws of other
social sciences. Sack, like critics of spatial
fetishism, argued that space is relational – an
emergent outcome of social processes – and
that this made such separatism untenable. es
Suggested reading
Sack (1974b).
spatial structure The organization of social
and biophysical phenomena in space. The term
was coined within spatial science to refer to
the spatial coherence, geometric order or systematic spatial pattern (particularly spatial
equilibria) generated by human activities. It
implied an order in geometrical–mathematical–statistical domains characterized by
degrees of symmetry, regularity and predictability. The term was subsequently used in a
less restrictive, less formalist sense in human
geography and in social theory to refer to
the interdependence of human agency and spatial structures, whereby agency responds to but
also reproduces and transforms its spatial templates (cf. Gregory and Urry, 1985). The term
is now used more eclectically still, to refer to
any more or less ordered spatial arrangement,
assemblage or system: the orderings through
which space is implicated in the operation and
outcome of social and biophysical processes.
The emphasis on ‘ordering’ rather than ‘order’
directs attention to the ‘folding’ of time and
space into the operation of processes in contingent, fluid and sensuous ways. This recognizes
that practices and performances evade and
exceed the symmetrical and/or logical orders
proposed by classical social theory (hence its
‘problem of order’) and by neo-classical spatial
science, and requires ‘order’ or ‘structure’ to be
treated as a process rather than a thing. es/dg
spatiality The mode(s) in which space is
implicated in the constitution and conduct of
715
SPATIALITY
life on Earth. There are four main senses in
which ‘spatiality’ has been used in human
geography and allied fields, but these increasingly interrupt and braid into one another:
(1) Drawing upon existentialism and
phenomenology, and in particular the
writings of European philosophers Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Pickles
(1985) proposed human spatiality as the
fundamental basis on which ‘geographical inquiry as a human science of the
world can be explicitly founded’. Pickles’
primary concern was ontology: with
understanding ‘the universal structures
characteristic of [human] spatiality as
the precondition for any understanding
of places and spaces as such.’ Pickles
objected to those views that regard the
physical spaces of the physical sciences as
‘the sole genuine space’. This sort of
thinking was typical of spatial science
but, in Pickles’ view, was wholly inappropriate for a genuinely human geography.
He urged in its place a recovery of our
‘original experiences prior to their thematization by any scientific activity’;
that is, a rigorous exposure of the
taken-for-granted world assumed
but left unexplained by spatial science.
One of its essential characteristics is
what Pickles called ‘the structural unity
of the ‘‘in-order-to’’ ’. Our most immediate experiences are not cognitive
abstractions of separate objects, Pickles
argued, but rather ‘constellations of relations and meaning’ that we encounter in
our everyday activities – what Heidegger
called ‘equipment’ – and which are
‘ready-to-hand’. Such a perspective reveals the human significance of contextuality. For human spatiality is
related ‘to several concurrent and nonconcurrent equipmental contexts’ and
‘cannot be understood independently of
the beings that organise it.’ Spatiality
thus has the character of a ‘situating’
enterprise in which we ‘make room’ for
and ‘give space’ to congeries of equipment. Put in this way, there are distant
echoes of time-geography, but Pickles
is evoking an intellectual tradition antithetical to the physicalism of Torsten
Hägerstrand’s early writings and which
fastens not on ‘objective space’ but on a
fully human, social space (see also
Schatzki, 1991).
716
(2) Drawing upon structural marxism of the
1960s and 1970s, a number of Francophone sociologists and economists suggested that concepts of spatiality be
constructed to identify the connections
and correspondences between social
structures (modes of production) and
spatial structures. French philosopher
Louis Althusser (1918–90) had argued
that different concepts of time or temporalities could be assigned to different levels
of modes of production – ‘economic
time’, ‘political time’, ‘ideological time’
– and that these had to be constructed
out of the concepts of the different social
practices within these domains. In much
the same way, it was argued that different
concepts of space or spatialities could be
assigned to different levels of modes of
production. Castells (1977) presented
the most detailed analysis of capitalism
in these terms, but insisted that it made
more sense to theorize temporality and
spatiality together and to speak of distinctive space–times (see Gregory 1994,
pp. 94–5).
(3) Drawing upon the broadly humanist
Marxism of Henri Lefebvre (1901–91)
and his account of the production of
space, Soja (1985) used the term spatiality ‘to refer specifically to socially produced space, the created forms and
relations of a broadly defined human
geography’. ‘All space is not socially produced,’ Soja continued, ‘but all spatiality
is’. In the course of his work as a whole,
Lefebvre provided critiques of existentialism and phenomenology and of
structuralism and structural Marxism,
and so Soja insists that his ‘materialist
interpretation of spatiality’ cannot be assimilated to either of the two traditions
summarized above. For to speak of ‘the
production of space’ in the spirit of
Lefebvre is to accentuate spatiality as
‘both the medium and the outcome’ of
situated human agency and systems of
social practices in a way that, so Soja
argued, was broadly consonant with
structuration theory. Transcending
his earlier claims for a ‘socio-spatial
dialectic’ (Soja, 1980), Soja (1985) now
concluded that ‘spatiality is society, not
as its definitional or logical equivalent,
but as its concretisation, its formative
constitution.’ And it is precisely this realization, so he subsequently argued, that
was characteristic of postmodernism
SPECTACLE
and its reassertion of space – of spatiality
– in critical social thought (Soja, 1989:
see also third space; trialectics).
Other human geographers working
under the sign of a critical Marxism
equally cognizant of Lefebvre have also
conceptualized spatiality as socially
produced space, and while they rarely
endorse Soja’s celebration of postmodernism they do accept that space is not
a mere reflection of but is rather constitutive of capitalism as a dialectical totality
(see, e.g., Sheppard, 2004; Harvey,
2006a). More than this, many of them
now recognize that this implication of a
produced space must incorporate nonhuman agency too: ‘the manifold biophysical processes and technologies
that shape the spatiality of the world’
(Leitner, Sheppard and Sziarto, 2008,
p. 158).
(4) Drawing upon post-structuralism – in
particular, the work of Michel Foucault
(1926–84) and of Gilles Deleuze (1925–
95) and Félix Guattari (1930–92), together with the post-phenomenology of
Alphonso Lingis (1933– ) and others – a
number of writers use spatiality to indicate the ways in which mobile constellations of power-knowledge and subject
positions are constituted through the
production and performance of space as
an ‘ordering’ rather than a fixed and
closed order (cf. Thrift, 2007, p. 55). Accordingly, they attempt to grasp space as
an ‘immanent spatiality’, through which
the world is registered as a ‘multi-linear
complex’ whose contingent intersections
and folds constantly open and present –
which is to say make present – the emergence of ‘the new’ (Dewsbury and Thrift,
2005). These developing conceptions of
spatiality, like those in the preceding
paragraphs, have important implications
for a geographical imagination that is
also a profoundly material imagination
(Anderson and Wylie, 2008) (see also
non-representational theory).
These four traditions cannot be assimilated
to any grand synthesis, but many writers
share a subterranean dialogue with figures
such as Marx, Heidegger and Foucault, and
there is increasing traffic between their conceptions of spatiality: for example, Sheppard’s
(2008) exploration of dialectical totalities
and assemblages. For all the differences
between them, all four traditions reject the
conventional separations between ‘society’
and ‘space’ (which can be traced to a persistent kantianism) and in this sense can be read
as four moments in the movement towards an
exploration of what Smith (1990) called ‘deep
space’: that is to say, ‘quintessentially social
space . . . physical extent fused through with
social intent’.
dg
Suggested reading
Dewsbury and Thrift (2005); Pickles (1985);
Soja (1989).
spectacle A term that often refers to a largescale cultural event, festival or celebration, or
to an urban scene or stage set presented for
visual consumption. It has been prominent in
analyses of the significance of image production and the management of appearance in
strategies of urban development in recent decades, with attention focusing in particular on
temporary cultural events such as carnivals,
International Expositions and sporting events,
including the Olympic Games (Gold and
Gold, 2005), as well as on more permanent
spaces of entertainment, ‘theme park urbanism’ and ‘cities of spectacle’. The use of spectacular events has a long history, from the
‘bread and circuses’ of ancient times to efforts
to promote European medieval city-states and
metropolises of the nineteenth century. Yet the
production of spectacles has become a common part of cultural strategies of economic
development more recently, with studies
exploring their implications for capital investment, cultural identity and tourism, and
drawing out their multiple and contested readings by audiences. Many critics argue that
such spectacles serve a diversionary function,
masking underlying social and economic
inequalities.
A key reference in critical discussions is Guy
Debord’s book The society of the spectacle, first
published in 1967. This is concerned less with
spectacles as cultural events than with the
spectacle in a critique of an alienated and
image-saturated world. Developing earlier
Marxist critiques of commodity fetishism
and alienation, Debord writes that the spectacle ‘corresponds to the historical moment at
which the commodity completes its colonization of social life’ (1994 [1967], thesis 42).
This new stage in the accumulation of capital
and the domination of social life by the economy is not simply the result of mass media
manipulation and visual technologies, he
stresses, for ‘the spectacle is not a collection
of images; rather it is a social relationship
717
SPONTANEOUS SETTLEMENT
between people that is mediated by images’
(thesis 29). urbanism takes on particular
importance within the spectacle as a technique
for reshaping space and ensuring the separation between people, although it is also a
terrain within which struggles against the spectacle and for different relationships between
people are forged.
As developed by Debord and the situationists, the concept of the spectacle was part of a
revolutionary project and was meant to be a
weapon with which to harm spectacular society. This has not prevented it from being
widely adopted within cultural, media and
urban studies seeking to characterize a new
cultural and mediatized era, and becoming ‘a
stock phrase in a wide range of critical and
not-so-critical discourses’ (Crary, 1989,
p. 97). Yet emphasizing its original analytical
force, the group RETORT (2005) insists that
Debord’s account speaks powerfully to a current ‘new age of war’, in which struggles over
images and the capitalist state’s concern with
the rule of appearances are of vital political
significance.
dp
(2)
(3)
Suggested reading
Debord (1994 [1967]).
(4)
spontaneous settlement A residential area
developed outside the formal economy by its
inhabitants, often after illegally occupying
the land, and usually found in developing countries. Both the housing and infrastructure
of public facilities are constructed outside the
usual market and public service mechanisms.
Although the term ‘spontaneous’ suggests
no forethought or planning, many such clandestine settlements are the result of ‘planned invasions’ by the initial occupants, who subdivide
the land on a pre-arranged cadastre and provide
a basic infrastructure (cf. squatting).
rj
(5)
Suggested reading
Lloyd (1979).
sport(s) human
geography has paid
increased attention to sports partly as a result
of the increased economic and cultural
importance given to issues of leisure and recreation, but most especially because insights
from cultural theory have been brought to
bear on the performance of sports. Studies
commonly take one of five approaches:
(1) The plotting of the economic connections and organizations of sports. This
follows the fortunes of ‘mega-events’
718
such as the Olympics or soccer World
Cup, and their linkage to patterns of
urban development, or the competition
over sport club franchises and stadia
location.
The diffusion and location of different
sports across the globe. This tracks the
relative popularity and adoption of different games, often as a cultural form in
berkeley school approaches to cultural geography.
The development and often hybridization of these sports in a colonial and postcolonial world (see colonialism; hybridity; post-colonialism). They become
examples of contestation of meaning and
adoption of cultural practices. Thus the
imposition of cricket ovals across South
Asia, its enthusiastic adoption and the
transport of the game to the West Indies
are used by C.L.R. James in his Beyond a
boundary to suggest that it offers both insights into colonizing cultures and a stylization of resistance to that process. The
postwar adoption of baseball in Japan also
offers moments of cultural contact, understanding and transformation.
A historical geography of the emergence and role of sports in varying social
milieu. The rise of organized mass spectator sports alongside industrialization, complementing or even replacing
other modes of regulation, is important
here, as is the construction of progressively more homogenized fields, arenas
and venues as forms of abstract space.
The rapid mediatization of team sport
and the culture of viewing has been related to the society of the spectacle,
where a televisual temporality and
dramatization is now driving sport.
The emergence on and off the pitch of techniques of the body that form exemplars of
disciplinary power and the mobilization
and channelling of collective affect to create an emotional geography of support,
loyalty, joy and suffering. The surging
crowd at a game, or indeed around a large
screen, enact changing performances of
emotionality, race and gender. Alternatively, the body cultures in recreations
and outdoor sports offer new ways to
think about people’s modes of engagement
with landscape.
mc
Suggested reading
Bale (2002); Cronin and Bale (2002); James
(2005); Roche (2000); Smart (2007).
SQUATTING
sprawl Dispersed, low-density development
on the edges of urban areas, characterized by
fragmented and ribbon development. It is
often associated with edge cities and with
bland, car-oriented and functionally segregated landscapes. While sprawl is often associated with a lack of planning, others suggest
that government policies and public agencies,
influencing decisions about road construction,
housing financing and zoning, for instance,
have shaped the rise of sprawling cities (e.g.
Wolch, Pastor and Dreier, 2004). ‘Sprawl’ is
also a highly political word, framing debate
over the loss of agricultural land and wildlife
habitat, the costs of automobile use, and
appropriate design and policy solutions
(Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck, 2000). em
Suggested reading
Wolch, Pastor and Dreier (2004).
squatting Dwelling in a home built on land
that does not belong to the builder, typically
without the consent of the land owner, in the
absence of formal planning and regulation. In
many countries in the world, a significant proportion of the population lives in squatter
housing; for instance, this is the case for
roughly half of the residents in Istanbul or
Delhi. Squatter housing is typically built
quickly to establish a de facto claim, and basic
infrastructure for water, drainage, sanitation, electricity and roads is at first missing.
Squatter settlements are often built on stateowned land, located on the periphery of an
urban area (though relative centrality can
change as cities grow up to and around them),
or on unproductive land such as swamps,
saline flats or steep hillsides. Although squatter housing exists outside private property
relations, it can be commodified and traded
(see commodity; market): over one-third of
squatter housing in Turkey is rented, and in
Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s the secondary housing market in squatter dwellings
bore a striking resemblance to the parallel legal
real estate market (Smart, 1986). Although
most of the world’s squatting occurs in the
cities of the global south, there have been
squatters’ movements in European and
North American cities, particularly in the
1970s and 1980s; at moments of housing
shortage, squatters occupied vacant buildings
without the consent of owners, to gain access
to affordable housing and often as a critique of
private property relations and urban restructuring (Pruijt, 2003: see also homelessness;
slum).
In the late 1960s, academics studying the
global South began to reassess the earlier view
that squatter settlements were a ‘cancer on the
carapace of the city’ (quoted in Gonzalez de la
Rocha, Perlman, Safa, Jelin, Roberts and
Ward, 2004) or evidence of dysfunctional
urbanism. Studying settlements that had
‘consolidated’ over time, they stressed the
existence of social networks in squatter
communities and began to conceive of them
as rational and viable responses to rapid
urbanism, as a solution to rather than a problem of massive rural to urban migration. This
view continues to inform Hernando De Soto’s
(1989) influential celebration of the entrepreneurialism and capacity for self-organization
within squatter settlements (now taken up by
the World Bank). De Soto recommends that
property ownership be extended to squatters
to facilitate their capacity to petition the state
for more services and to use their property as
collateral to obtain loans, which then can be
used to improve their property or invest in
small businesses.
A critical literature has arisen to argue, first,
that consolidation and stabilization of squatter communities can happen in the absence of
private property ownership (Varley, 2002)
and, second, that there are serious limits to
addressing issues of poverty and social marginalization through land titling and upgrades
to housing and urban infrastructure (Roy,
2005). Extending private property ownership
can lead to gentrification and displacement,
and the consolidation of patriarchal power
relations (given that land title is typically
granted to the male household head), and
there is little evidence that land title opens
assess to credit or alters employment conditions (Gonzalez de la Rocha, Perlman, Safa,
Jelin, Roberts and Ward, 2004; Roy, 2005).
Among scholars from latin america, there is
less optimism now about the prospects for
those living in squatter settlements. The
structural adjustment and austerity policies
of the 1980s followed by the neo-liberal
restructuring (see neo-liberalism) of the
1990s led to rising unemployment, declining
opportunities in informal sectors, the devolution of the delivery of social goods to nongovernmental organizations (see ngo), and
increasing – often drug-related – violence.
Perlman notes of Rio de Janeiro, ‘After many
decades of co-existence, Rio’s populous has
again begun to fear and shun the favelas due
to a sharp increase in violence. Although the
favelados [residents of squatter communities]
themselves are no longer considered marginal,
719
STAGES OF GROWTH
the physical territory of their communities
has become tightly controlled by the drug
dealers, who . . . are known locally as ‘‘the
marginality’’ or ‘‘the movement’’ ’ (Gonzalez
de la Rocha, Perlman, Safa, Jelin, Roberts
and Ward, 2004, pp. 189–90). In other contexts, there is more optimism about the
potential
for
squatter
mobilization
(Appadurai, 2001).
gp
Suggested reading
Gonzalez de la Rocha, Perlman, Safa, Jelin,
Roberts and Ward (2004); Roy (2005).
stages of growth The notion that societies, polities or entire civilizations pass
through stages or phases in their development,
growth or maturation has a long intellectual
lineage, and has been associated with very
different forms of theorizing. Within certain
forms of marxism, history as the succession
of modes of production or the need to pass
through particular stages of economic organization has a long pedigree (Cohen, 1978).
From a very different vantage point, the theories of Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) and
Joseph Spengler (1912–91) also contained
strong senses of historical progression through
epochs or stages. Within twentieth-century
sociology it was modernization theory that
exemplified the clearest instance of the suturing of evolution, teleology and economic
history as a predetermined progression
through stages of social, economic and political transformation along a path blazed by
capitalist powers in Western Europe. It was
from within this body of work that the notion
of modernization as the culmination of a succession of stages out of backwardness received
its fullest elaboration, and will be forever associated with the ideas of W.W. Rostow (1916–
2003) and his foundational text The stages of
economic growth: a non-communist manifesto,
first published in 1960 (see Rostow, 1971).
Like other modernization theorists, Rostow
believed that the world was constituted by a
fundamental rift between ‘traditional’ societies –
supposedly mired in anti- or non-market
mentalities, limited markets, pre-Newtonian
science and a belief structure antithetical to
self-sustaining growth – and modern societies
that emerged in their modal form in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century europe (see
modernity). Rostow drafted his book against
a backdrop of McCarthyism, a deep ideological and political cold war between
East and west, and a massive effort by the
USA to export development through USAID
720
and other foreign aid channels to an increasingly insurgent third world, led by a raft
of African and Asian post-colonial (or about
to become post-colonial) states (see
decolonization).
In Rostow’s iteration – a model explicitly
presented, as Rostow’s subtitle indicates, as
an alternative to the idea of socialist modernization and the account of development set out
by Marx and Engels in The communist manifesto (see historical materialism) – modern
history was the transformation of tradition via
a five-stage programme, through which all
societies were to pass. The first of the five
stages - the traditional society - is characterized
by ‘primitive’ technology, hierarchical social
structures (the precise nature of which is not
specified) and behaviour conditioned more by
custom and ascription rather than by what
Rostow takes to be ‘rational’ criteria. These
characteristics combine to place a ceiling on
production possibilities. Outside stimuli to
change (including, for example, colonialism
and the expansion of capitalism) are admitted
in the transitional second stage – the preconditions for take-off. Here, a rise in the rate of
productive investment, the provision of social
and economic infrastructure, the emergence of a new, economically based elite and
an effective centralized national state are
indispensable to what is to follow. In short,
the opportunities for profitable investment
presented by the preconditions for take-off
are unlikely to be ignored by capital and they
pave the way for the third stage: ‘takeoff’ into
sustained growth. Rostow describes this stage as
‘the great watershed in the life of modern societies’. It is a period of around 10–30 years
during which growth dominates society, the
economy and the political agenda (although
the social relations which facilitate this dominance are not described) and investment
rises, especially in the leading sectors of manufacturing industry. Self-sustaining growth
results in the fourth stage, ‘drive to maturity’,
which is characterized by diversification as
most sectors grow, imports fall and productive
investment ranges between 10 and 20 per cent
of national income. The increasing importance of consumer goods and services and
the rise of the welfare state indicate that
the final stage, the ‘age of high mass consumption’, has been reached (see also post-industrial society).
In some respects, the determinism of
Rostow’s model was not too different from
some of the worst excesses of structural
Marxist political economy. Whether it
STAPLES THEORY
constitutes a theory or is little more than
a taxonomy remains subject to debate,
although Rostow certainly did knit together
ideas that were found prominently among
his
contemporaries,
such
as
Albert
Hirschmann and Alexander Gerschenkron.
Yet his insistence on placing growth in a wider
historical and social context and on a disaggregated approach that reflects the uneven
nature of development (cf. uneven development) marks a substantial advance upon
abstracted and formal theories of economic
growth. And yet these same characteristics
expose its universalist cast: the model of economic development derived from the stages
is teleological, mechanical, a-historical and
ethnocentric:
. It is teleological in the sense that the end
result (stage 5) is known at the outset
(stage 1) and derived from the historical
geography of ‘developed’ societies, which
then form the template for the ‘underdeveloped’, which are thereby denied an
historical geography of their own.
. It is mechanical in that, despite the claim
that the stages have an inner logic ‘rooted
in a dynamic theory of production’, the
underlying motor of change is not
explained, so that as a result the stages
become little more than a classificatory
system based on data for fifteen countries
only, plus outline data for others.
. It is a-historical in that notions of pathdependency are ignored, so that it can be
assumed that the historical geographies of
the underdeveloped countries are unaffected by that of the dependent, and so
the intervention of the latter into the former is simply an irrelevance – this position
is also profoundly a-geographical, as it is
incapable of recognizing that geographical
relationships are continuously formed and
re-formed across the world.
. It is ethnocentric in espousing a future for
the world based on American history and
aspiring to American norms of high mass
consumption (see ethnocentrism).
Capitalist society is, following Rostow’s
logic, a necessary consequence of development.
By concealing the social production of the
stages, capitalist societies may be reproduced
and extended by apparently neutral policies
advocating apparently universal processes of
growth. History, in other words, is serial repetition (in the argot of the present: ‘there is no
alternative’). In the context of the 1950s and
1960s, the non-communist manifesto was
nothing short of an ideology for american
empire.
Rostow saw his academic work as part of a
political mission, and under Presidents
Kennedy and Johnson he held positions with
authority over US policy towards the Third
World (see Menzel, 2006). He was a brilliant
student – a Rhodes scholar in the 1930s – and
he gravitated towards imperial trade policy,
serving briefly, after a period on the Office of
Strategic Services during the Second World
War, as a professor of American History at
Oxford. He returned to the USA in 1947,
served as an assistant to Gunnar Myrdal at
the United Nations and at the tender age of
33 was appointed to the chair of Economic
History at MIT. It was here, during the
Korean War, that Rostow and a group of other
cold warriors developed a strategy for the economic containment of communism. Key to
this strategy, which emerged more fully in the
1960s, was the sense that containment was to
be achieved within the ‘emerging nations’ of
the Third World, that external foreign assistance was key to shift poor nations from stages
2 to 3 (the alternative was the fostering of
preconditions conducive to communism), an
alliance with robustly anti-communist modernizing elites, and a strong state enhanced
by a large military budget to push forward
the long march through the stages to selfsustaining capitalist growth. Of course, it all
went horribly wrong. The hubris of power
was radically compromised in Vietnam (in
which Rostow served a bleak and hawklike function under President Johnson: Milne
(2008) refers to him as ‘America’s Rasputin’),
in the collapse of the Alliance for Progress in
latin america and in the ‘blowback’ from
supporting various dictators and psychopaths,
from Mubutu to Marcos. While Rostow’s career was blemished by Vietnam, it is perhaps
true that his concern with the political preconditions for take-off – now the term of
art is ‘governance’ – is more relevant than
ever.
rl/mw
Suggested reading
Baran and Hobsbawm (1961); Keeble (1967).
staples theory The theory that national and
regional economic and social development is
based upon the export of unprocessed or semiprocessed primary resources (‘staples’).
Although the theory has historical antecedents, and different (frequently truncated)
versions of it have been presented (e.g. economic base theory), staples theory is most
721
STATE
closely associated with the work of the
Canadian economic historian Harold A. Innis
(1894–1952). In Innis’ account, and the basis
for the school of Canadian political economy, staples production creates economic
instability and hinterland dependency for
staples-producing regions. At least three
causes are at work:
(1) markets for staple commodities approximate more closely perfect competition
than do those for manufactured goods.
Staples regions are price-takers in markets
where unpredictability is the norm,
producing cycles of boom and bust.
(2) For a variety of reasons (technological
innovations that reduce resource inputs
for production, the growth of synthetic
substitutes, and low long-run income
elasticities of demand), the terms of
trade for primary commodities are increasingly less favourable to staplesproducing areas.
(3) resource extraction or production tends
to be undertaken by large, often foreignowned, transnational coroporations.
Spry (1981) argues that this is a direct
consequence of the large capital expenditures and production indivisibilities associated with staples. The presence of such
firms in staples regions creates a number
of potential problems for the region including: the appropriation of economic
rents because of the undervaluing of resources by the local state in order to
induce investment; the failure to process
the staple prior to export (and where
value-added occurs) because resource extraction is only one stage within a vertically integrated corporation that for
reasons of internal control locates manufacture elsewhere; the low levels of technological innovation and development;
the lack of local control; and finally, a
weakened ability to control trade through explicit policy because of the high
degree of intra-corporate transfers.
For Innis, there is thus a direct relationship
between the type of trade in which a staples
region engages and its level of social and
economic development. This contradicts the
orthodox neo-classical theory of trade (see
neo-classical economics), which would
maintain that a staples nation such as
Canada benefits from specializing in and
exchanging those commodities in which it possesses a comparative advantage, namely
722
primary resources. But in drawing upon this
theory, as Innis (1956 [1929], p. 3) wrote in
the late 1920s, economists ‘attempt to fit their
analysis of new economic facts into . . . the economic theory of old countries . . . The handicaps of this process are obvious, and there is
evidence to show that [this is] . . . a new form of
exploitation with dangerous consequences.’.
To circumscribe such exploitation, Innis
developed his theory in such a way that it
was peculiarly suited to the economic facts
of staples regions. He brought together three
types of concerns: geographical/ecological,
institutional and technological (Barnes,
1996, ch. 8). Innis argued that when the right
technology came together with the right geography and the right institutional structure, the
result was accumulation of ‘cyclonic’ frenzy.
In this way, virgin resource regions were
transformed and enveloped within the produced spaces of the capitalist periphery.
Such intense accumulation, however, never
lasts, and because of the very instabilities of
staples production, sooner rather than later
investment shifts to yet other staples regions,
leaving in its wake abandoned resource sites
and communities. As countries such as
China and India rapidly industrialize, drawing in immense flows of staples commodities,
transforming regions and creating shudders
across the world’s resources sites, Innis’ theory has never been more relevant (Hayter,
Barnes and Bradshaw, 2003).
tb
Suggested reading
Barnes (1996, ch. 8); Drache (1995).
state A centralized set of institutions facilitating coercive power and governing capabilities over a defined territory. No one
definition of the state is adequate given the
way that states have varied in their form and
function over time and space. However,
Michael Mann (1984a) has identified the definitional need to incorporate both institutional
and functional concerns, or what the state
looks like and what it does. His subsequent
definition can be summarized as follows:
(1) a set of institutions and their related personnel;
(2) a degree of centrality, with political decisions emanating from this centre point;
(3) a defined boundary that demarcates the
territorial limits of the state; and
(4) a monopoly of coercive power and lawmaking ability (Jones, Jones and Woods,
2004, p. 20).
STATE
These four points must be complemented by
understanding that the state is defined in relation to two other spheres of modern life, the
market (or economic activity) and civil society. The functions of the state reflect the need
to facilitate economic growth that generates
the tax base to support a state apparatus
(Tilly, 1990a), the provision of infrastructure and other goods to maintain a population
that can serve as a workforce, the maintenance
of internal order, and the capacity to defend
the population from outside aggression
(Mann, 1984a). The need and ability to carry
out these functions constantly varies; hence
the geographical variety of states and the elusiveness of a precise definition.
One approach has been to show how states
have changed over time, which often falls
into the developmentalist trap of assuming
that states that came into existence as a result
of twentieth-century decolonization can and
should take on the same form and function as
the established European states that imposed
their colonial subjugation. Alternatively, a
structural approach defines a geographical
variation in the form of the state, and differential ability to undertake the standard functions, as a product of the state’s position
within the hierarchy of the capitalist worldeconomy (Flint and Taylor, 2007 [1985]).
States in the wealthy core of the worldeconomy have the ability to provide for most
of their population and so to maintain their
cohesion and strength. States in the impoverished periphery face internal challenges to
their legitimacy. In the former, the state can
maintain its authority through creating political consensus regarding its legitimacy. In the
latter, coercive power and unstable internal
politics are more common.
The geographical variation in the form of
the state can be conceptualized as differences
in the manner by which the state interacts with
the market and civil society. feminist geographers discourage an understanding of the
three spheres as separate. Instead, ‘the market
and civil society involve actors and processes
that help constitute the state; the procedures
and actors of the state similarly influence
the market and civil society’ (Fincher, 2004,
p. 50). The important conclusions are that the
state is multi-faceted and contested. The state
is manifest in the actions of the police, in the
prosaic sense of imposing guidelines and laws
over the way people can act (e.g. seat-belt
laws and smoking regulations: Painter, 2004),
taxation and the military. The relative power
and efficacy of these and other manifestations
is a product of a politics between social groups
who seek to control or influence the institutions of the state for their own interests. In
terms of coercive power, the control of the
military and police may be contested between
class fractions or ethnic groups (see ethnicity). The size and direction of redistributive
programmes is the product of conflicts
between the owners of capital who seek to
limit the state’s taxation of their wealth and
disadvantaged groups seeking security from
the vagaries of capitalist economies. Of course,
this is not a simple equation, as capital
requires enough state involvement to allow
for social reproduction (via schools, hospitals and housing subsidies) as well as transport infrastructure and some regulation of
economic activity. Feminist geographers highlight that such politics entwine the ‘private’
spaces of the household, the traditional site
of unpaid women’s work, with the maledominated ‘public’ sphere in such a way that
they cannot be considered a dualism (see private and public spheres).
ideology is a central component of maintaining states. The state is a normative ideological construction in both a general and
particular sense. First, the belief that states
are legitimate universal institutions with a
‘right’ to wield power over individuals is,
generally, unchallenged. Second, the history
of particular states is constructed to give them
a ‘naturalness’ and historical permanency that
is a political fiction (Krishna, 1994). The
Marxist scholar Antonio Gramsci also points
out that the politics within states results in a
ruling class that is able to dominate through
constructing an ideological consensus around
its ‘right’ to rule and a perceived value for the
whole population of decisions that greatly
benefit a small elite, thus minimizing the need
for coercive power (see hegemony).
The state comprises institutions at various
scales linking central and local government.
The precise form varies across space and time,
but the central government can use local
states, with their sense of connectivity to a
local population, as means to legitimate itself.
On the other hand, local states may challenge
the authority of the central state if it is believed
that the latter fails to serve local needs (see
regionalism: Kirby, 1993). globalization
and neo-liberalism have put greater responsibility on local governments to carry out state
functions and generate their own revenue.
New forms of local state governance are
being identified that attempt to attract global
investment by creating entrepreneurial local
723
STATE APPARATUS
institutions and organizations through which
state power is exercised. The state apparatus
serves three broad functions: manufacturing
social consensus; securing the conditions of
production by facilitating investment and the
reproduction of the labour force; and creating
social integration by promoting the welfare of
all social groups. The suite consists of manifold
institutions and organizations including the
police, the health service, education, fiscal
regulation and elections. Neo-liberal policies
(see neo-liberalism) have required changes
in the relative power of different institutions
to promote economic growth at the expense
of welfare, with consequent geographies of
uneven life opportunities (Peck, 1996).
cf
literally as a specific time or place, the state of
nature serves as a kind of imagined historical
geography corresponding to an anarchic society, absent the rule of law and without a modern state (Smith, M., 2002b). However, the
phrase is also quite telling. It points on the one
hand to an emergent, modern (european) society concerned with distinguishing and elevating itself in relation to prior and/or culturally
‘Othered’ non-European peoples of the time
(mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries), with disquieting implications vis-à-vis
imperialism. At the same time, the phrase
points to a preoccupation with defining ‘modern’ society by separating people from nature,
presumably (and in Locke, for instance, quite
explicitly) legitimating the domination of
nature. In addition to the telos of temporal
progress, there are definite spatialities of
movement invoked here, not least from the
modern, colonizing core to the savage, premodern periphery, as well as from the country
to the city (Whatmore, 2002a, esp. pp. 64–5;
Anderson, 2003: see also modernity; primitivism). Contemporary attempts to rethink
nature/culture binaries may be informed by
considerations of how and why this very binary
was considered by early liberals to be foundational to modern societies, and how the same
binary is constitutive of the emergence of a
distinct body of ‘social’ theory (minus the
[human] body, of course!).
sp
Suggested reading
Suggested reading
Clark and Dear (1984).
Locke and Peardon (1952 [1690]).
state of nature This
stochastic process A mathematical–statistical
states in which many functions traditionally
performed by the state are now the purview of
private companies or non-state institutions
(Ward, 2005b; see privatization). The result
is a reduction in central state power, as states
are not so much losing power as a result of
globalization but redefining their form and
function in a new climate of capital accumulation (Sassen, 1996).
cf
Suggested reading
Brenner, Jessop, Jones and MacLeod (2003);
Clark and Dear (1984); Painter (1995); Van
Creveld (1999).
state apparatus The interacting suite of
phrase featured
prominently in the writings of early liberal
political philosophers, including most famously Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baruch
(Benedictus) Spinoza and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (see liberalism). All were concerned with establishing in their own fashion
the moral basis of governance and a civil order
based in part on their assumptions about what
life in the state of nature was like. The phrase
points to a kind of reference point or natural
(universal) order from which to theorize about
the social (Barry, 1999), but it also marks a
boundary (imagined and real, historical and
geographical) between a condition of being in
or of nature to one of being outside of or apart
from nature. Emergence from this state of
nature, so these discourses suggest, establishes
the need for a ‘social contract’, while the particular character of the state of nature (benign,
violent etc.) also shapes the character of the
required social contract. When taken less
724
model in which a sequence or pattern of
outcomes is described and modelled in probabilistic terms (Bartlett, 1955). A stochastic
process is one in which the outcomes are
not simply independent or random draws,
but a process through time or across space
in which the outcome at one time-period or
location is in some way dependent on the outcomes at previous time-periods or, for a spatial
stochastic process, in neighbouring locations.
A markov process is an elementary example
of such a process. Stochastic process models
have been used in spatial time-series analysis,
in disease modelling and epidemiology and
in spatial econometrics.
lwh
Suggested reading
Bennett (1979); Hepple (1974).
structural adjustment A series of economic
measures, often imposed on governments
STRUCTURATION THEORY
receiving loans from the international monetary fund or the World Bank, designed to
encourage exports and increase the resources
that governments have available for dealing
with short-term balance-of-payments crises.
Typical structural adjustment programmes
include measures such as reducing government spending, cutting or containing wages,
liberalizing imports and reducing restrictions
on foreign investment, devaluing the currency
and privatizing state enterprises (see also
neo-liberalism; privatization).
jgl
Suggested readings
Bello (1994); Payer (1974).
structural functionalism A tradition of
social theory most closely associated with
the American sociologist Talcott Parsons
(1902–79), whose central proposition was that
the structure of any social system cannot be
derived ‘from the actor’s point of view’, but
must instead be explained by the ways in
which the ‘functional imperatives’ necessary
for the survival of any social system are met
(Parsons, 1951: see also functionalism;
system). Parsons insisted that the analysis of
any social system requires the conjunction
of static (‘structure’) and dynamic (‘function’)
components, and constantly accentuated the
need to grasp the dynamics of social systems.
He attributed crucial importance to the interchanges between systems and between subsystems, and in his later formulations developed a
more formal cybernetic model of society
that drew upon biology as much as it did
classical social theory.
Parsons’ influence on modern social theory
was extraordinary, even though his views were
subjected to a sustained and at times devastating
critique. For all his interest in dynamics, it
proved difficult to incorporate structural transformation into his model. For all his interest in
generalization, his model of the social system
seemed to be based on the USA as global exemplar. Today, Parsons’ influence is perhaps greatest in Germany, where Luhmann (1981) and
Habermas (1987) have made critical yet creative appropriations of some of his ideas.
Parsons’ shadow over human geography has
been much shorter. Systems analysis and systems theory in geography had quite other
sources, usually far removed from social theory.
Even so, Parsons loomed large in Duncan’s
(1980) critique of the ‘superorganic’ in Sauer’s
cultural geography and world-systems
analysis has been criticized as ‘Parsonianism
on a world scale’ (Cooper, 1981).
dg
Suggested reading
Alexander (1983); Duncan (1980).
structuralism A set of principles and procedures originally derived from linguistics
and linguistic philosophy that seek to expose
the enduring and underlying structures
inscribed in the cultural practices of human
subjects. There have been various structuralisms, all of them dominated by ‘French’ (or at
least Francophone) theory, and particularly by
Roland Barthes (1915–80) in literary theory,
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908– ) in anthropology
and Jean Piaget (1896–1980) in psychology.
The ideas of all three were introduced into
Anglophone human geography in the late
twentieth century: Harvey (1973) briefly toyed
with Piaget en route to a more vigorously
materialist analysis of the structures of the
space-economy of capitalism; Gregory
(1978a) drew upon Lévi-Strauss in his search
for a mode of ‘structural explanation’ to displace the positivism on which spatial science
relied; and Duncan and Duncan (1992) used
Barthes as a way-station in their journey
towards reading landscape not as morphology but as text.
As these descriptions suggest, human geography’s engagement with structuralism was
short-lived and functioned as a transition to
other approaches that were explored in much
more depth. In the most general terms, Peet
(1998, p. 112) argues that ‘the move towards
structuralism, never complete in geographical
thought, represented a search for greater
theoretical coherence and rigor’. But it did not,
in itself, provide a satisfying solution to the
problems of empiricism that provoked human
geographers to pursue it in the first place. They
turned, instead, towards various forms of marxism, including a structural Marxism derived from
the writings of Louis Althusser (1918–90) and
Nicos Poulantzas (1936–79), whose analytics of
power and process left its marks primarily in
economic, political and urban geography;
towards the philosophy of realism, whose
modes of structural explanation were more sensitive to historical and geographical specificity
than any structuralism; and towards various
forms of post-structuralism, which promised
a more incisive analysis of desire, discourse
and subjectivity.
dg
Suggested reading
Peet (1998, pp. 112–46).
structuration theory A social theory developed by the British sociologist Anthony
725
STRUCTURATION THEORY
Giddens (1938– ) that seeks to elucidate the
intersections between human subjects and
the social structures in which they are
involved. Giddens’ original purpose was to
solve the classical problem of social order. In
his view, explanations of social life typically
privileged either ‘agency’ (the intentions,
meanings and actions of subjects) or ‘structure’ (the logics, limitations and systems of
society). Instead, Giddens proposed to treat
the production and reproduction of social
life as an ongoing process of structuration.
In this view, ‘structure’ is implicated in every
moment of social interaction – ‘structures’
are not only constraints but also the very
conditions of social action – and, conversely,
structure is an ‘absent’ order of differences,
‘present’ only in the moments of social interaction through which it is itself reproduced
or transformed (Giddens, 1979, 1981,
1984).
Three concepts were crucial to this model:
(1) Reflexivity: The production of social life
is a skilled accomplishment on the part of
knowledgeable and capable human subjects (see human agency).
(2) Recursiveness: ‘Structure’ is both the medium and the outcome of the social practices
that constitute social systems: rules and
resources are drawn upon by actors from
structures of signification, domination and
legitimation, and these structures are in
turn reproduced or transformed through
those social practices (see figure).
(3) Regionalization: The continuity of social
life depends on interactions with others
who are either co-present in time and/or
space (time–space routinization; cf. timegeography) or who are absent in time and/
or space (time–space distanciation).
Giddens argued that these propositions make
it possible to analyse the interconnection of
routinized and repetitive conduct between actors with long-term, large-scale institutional
development in a depth that is denied to
both classical social theory and historical
materialism.
Giddens fashioned structuration theory
through a wide-ranging series of philosophical
and theoretical critiques of other writers.
Some of his critics complained that it was
impossible to rework such radically different
ideas into a coherent synthesis; others noted
that Giddens worked at such a high level of
abstraction that it was far from clear how
his general ideas could be brought to bear on
empirical enquiry (Gregson, 1989). Although
the same agency–structure dualism bedevilled
human geography, most human geographers
sought a more historically and geographically
inflected version of structuration (Thrift,
1983; Gregson, 2005). Aware of parallel
debates in social history, and usually more
sympathetic to marxism than Giddens, they
mapped the variable and differential intersections of ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ in the production and transformation of specific places,
regions and landscapes (Gregory, 1982;
structuration theory 1: System and structure
726
SUBALTERN STUDIES
Pred, 1985; Harris, 1991). For, as Hannah
(2006a, p. 243) put it, ‘neither term of the
structure-agency duality is of much analytical
use in the unmarked, abstract, universal form’:
The important thing about subjects striving
to make lives and worlds is not the abstract
philosophical principle according to which
we are all competent actors always able to
do otherwise, but the concrete, positioned
and marked performances through which
we (re)produce or transform specific social
meanings. And the important thing about
the structures that prevent differently positioned subjects from doing or being just anything we want is not their general presence
and effectivity in every social formation
but their specific characteristics as contested
and contestable social constructions, often
originating with dominant social groups.
The central term that most human geographers derived from Giddens’ project was
that of practice, at once situated and embodied,
and this continues to inform much research in
the field. But the concept has been extended
through ideas of performance and the incorporation of affect to such a degree that most
human geographers have travelled a considerable distance from the formal corpus of
structuration theory (see, for example, nonrepresentational theory). In fact, it was
always more of a ‘sensitizing device’ than a
research programme, providing a high-level
view of different positions within modern
social theory – a sort of panoramic mapping –
rather than a hierarchy of concepts that could
inform ground-level studies. Giddens’ work is
now valued less for its abstract formulations
than for its substantive identification of two
issues that continue to haunt the world in the
early twenty-first century. His early insistence
on the significance of political violence for
the conduct of political and social life was
remarkably prescient (Giddens, 1985: see also
war), while discussions of globalization and
the prospects for social democracy continue to
be informed, at least in part, by his argumentation sketches of the contours of what he
called ‘high’ modernity (Giddens, 1990). dg
Suggested reading
Gregory (1994); Gregson (2005).
subaltern studies A body of historiography
initiated in the late 1970s by Indian and English
historians critical of ‘colonialist and bourgeoisnationalist élitism’ in the writing of Indian
history, specifically from the Cambridge
School (Guha and Spivak, 1988). Under
Ranajit Guha’s founding editorship, the editorial collective included Shahid Amin, David
Arnold, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman
and Gyanendra Pandey, later expanding with
Gautam Bhadra, Dipesh Chakrabarty and
Sumit Sarkar, all of whom had written important monographs. The first edited volume,
Subaltern studies: writings on Indian history and
society, was published in 1982. The collective
drew on British social history and its renovation
of Antonio Gramsci, from whom the concept
‘subaltern’ was adapted.
The timing of this critique of Indian
nationalism (particularly Marxist nationalism) – after the suppression of the Naxalbari
peasant insurgency and its ‘Maoist’ urban
allies, and after Indira Gandhi’s 1975–7 dictatorial emergency – is crucial. The first volumes
the collective produced explored peasants’
conscious agency and autonomous subaltern
politics (which Cambridge historians had
ignored in their emphasis on vertical ‘factions’
in Indian nationalism), a comment on the
bankruptcy of institutionalized Indian marxism. From rumour and militancy under the
paternalist mantle of Gandhianism to mismatches between elite and subaltern notions
of political community to the disruptive effects
of mill workers’ religiosity on industrial discipline, the first four volumes of Subaltern Studies
energized debate within Indian history on
class, subaltern/elite boundaries and popular
politics (Ludden, 2002).
By the late 1980s, shifts between insiders
and outsiders in the collective moved subaltern studies into a second phase of historiography, concerned less with a sphere of
subaltern politics than with the construction
of subaltern power/knowledge and critique of
‘the enlightenment Project’. While one former insider, Sumit Sarkar, bemoaned ‘the
decline of the subaltern in Subaltern Studies’,
others saw it as serious response to outsider
critiques of ‘subaltern autonomy’, as well as an
exploration beyond Gramsci to Michel
Foucault’s conception of the subject of power,
and to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction
(see Chaturvedi, 2000).
These intellectual shifts, combined with the
edited collection by Guha and Spivak (1988),
brought subaltern studies to a US – and hence
global – academic audience; Edward Said’s
introduction to the collection ushered its
arrival as the most prolific strand of postcolonial thought. Volumes to follow heightened critique from insiders and outsiders on
727
SUBJECT/SUBJECTIVITY
gender, caste, untouchability, charges of bias
towards the Bengali intelligentsia, law, violence, literary and oral traditions, diaspora
and South India. The collective is now more
intellectually eclectic than ever: it continues to
be read and responded to from across the
world, with a breadth of readership rare for a
school of thought emerging from the south.
To be sure, this is partly a consequence of the
visibility of key diasporic Indian intellectuals.
Subaltern studies has breathed new life into
debates over colonial governmentality, postcolonial nationalism, representation and
popular histories of the present (see colonialism; post-colonialism). As one instance of
reception, Frederick Cooper (1994) argues
against the idea of an abstract, generalized,
binarist colonial rationality and for a dynamic
conception of subalternity that ‘put[s] the process of making history into the picture’
(p. 1516). The persisting question is whether
the collective remains engaged with subalterns
in the noun form used by Gramsci, while also
developing more sophisticated tools for
engaging subaltern as an adjective, as in ‘subaltern power/knowledge’. The interaction
between the first two phases of the collective
remains a useful and potentially radical device
in understanding spatially layered politics
today in the shadows of twentieth-century
empires and nationalisms, and their twentyfirst-century successors.
sc
subject/subjectivity
This grounds our
understanding of who we are, as well as our
knowledge claims. All geography presumes
some notion of subjectivity: even ‘objective’
spatial science rests on a theory of subjectivity as a foundation for ‘objective’ knowledge.
But different theories of the subject provoke
different geographical narratives (and vice
versa). marxism assumptions about the centrality of class to subjectivity have prompted
studies of geographies of labour organization,
as well as homeownership, residential segregation and suburbanization, many of the latter aimed at understanding the dissolution of
class consciousness in Anglo-American countries in the twentieth century. humanistic
geography, with its emphasis on the ethical
responsibility for human agency and the fullness of human experience beyond economic
calculation, invites studies of the social construction of meanings in different landscapes,
and the inauthenticity/authenticity of particular landscapes. Until recently, much of social
geography involved locating stable, coherently formed identities (such as ethnicity or
728
race) in particular places. This was the explicit objective of social area analysis. The
influences of identity politics and poststructuralism from the mid-1980s led geographers to be attentive to a wider range of
identifications (e.g. disability; gender; sexuality) and problems of overgeneralization.
Within feminist geographies, for example,
there is now more sensitivity to how the
experiences of different groups of women vary,
within and across space. From the perspective
of post-structural theories of the subject, this
focus on multiplicity is not enough; identity
politics (which receives credit – or takes the
blame – for the proliferation of politicized
identifications through the 1980s and 1990s)
has been criticized for taking the fact and stability of identities for granted, and for failing to
problematize the processes through which
identities are created and differentiated (see
recognition). The subject is even more fully
de-centred in actor-network theory, with
the emphasis on the agency of non-human
actants and ‘a distributed and always provisional personhood’ (Thrift, 2000a, p. 214).
Criticizing actor-network theory for an
account of subjectivity that flattens human
powers of imagination and processes that
are not readily reducible to an object
world, Thrift (2000a) has articulated a nonrepresentational style of thinking that
focuses not on individual agents, but on ‘a
poetic of common practices and skills’ (p. 216,
original emphasis) in which ‘persons become,
in effect, rather ill-defined constellations rattling around in the world’ (p. 220). A very
different rendering of the subject through psychoanaltic theory has also received more
attention since the mid-1990s, in what some
have labelled the ‘psychoanalytical turn’ in
geography (Philo and Parr, 2003). Callard
(2003) has argued, however, that geographers
have tended to assimilate psychoanalysis as yet
another version of social construction to a
disciplinary culture that values agency, resistance and liberatory cultural politics, and have
missed what is most valuable and distinctive
about psychoanalytic theory; namely, a theory
of the ‘intractability of the unconscious and its
imperviousness to political goadings, and the
anarchic and implacable movement of the
drives’ (p. 300).
Debates about the human subject are vast;
they lie at the heart of twentieth-century
Western philosophy. They are, then, difficult
to summarize (for one attempt, see Pile and
Thrift, 1995). One organizational device is
to distinguish between humanist and
SUBJECT/SUBJECTIVITY
anti-humanist conceptions of subjectivity
(Soper, 1986). In geography, this distinction
is often articulated through debates about
agency and structure (see structuration theory). Emphasizing human agency, humanist
versions of subject formation take identity as
given in experience. ‘Man’ (some feminists
argue that the gendering of this term is by no
means incidental: see masculinism; phallocentrism) is at the centre of the world and, in
order to be fully human, has the ethical
responsibility to act autonomously, to claim
his agency (e.g. Ley and Samuels, 1978).
Anti-humanists de-centre the subject insofar
as they interpret subjectivity as an outcome
of subjection to societal ideologies or regulatory techniques, and question the capacity and
the authority of individuals to direct their
actions self-consciously and autonomously.
In the most influential anti-humanist structuralist account of subjectivity, Althusser argued
that subjectivity, especially notions of individuality and citizenship, are ideological constructs (see ideology; structuralism). We
are interpellated or ‘hailed’ as particular subjects through the institutions of the family,
education, religion and state, and through
our own daily practices in relation to them.
Subjectivities are built up through these practices of subjection, but these are multiple and
sometimes conflicting, always constituted in
particular contexts. Despite the seeming role
for geography (as context) in Althusser’s
account (Probyn, 2003), in the discipline of
geography his theory of the subject often has
been rejected as narrowly economistic. In
cultural studies, particularly film studies,
Althusser is credited with exactly the opposite
effect, for opening a realm for ideology separate
from the economy. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Althusser posited a more psychologically
complex subject for Marxist theory.
There is considerable variation among poststructuralist theories of subject formation, but
they have two broad characteristics: they view
subject formation as an effect of power relations; and they posit the boundaries that
define identity as intertwined with processes
of disidentification, such that the effect of
identification is a fragile and contradictory
achievement. To give a sense of the former,
in Foucault’s post-structuralist anti-humanist
history of Western subjectivity, subject positions are seen to be constructed within and
through discourse. He argues that, from the
eighteenth century, discourses of sexuality
and individual rights have altered our perceptions of subjectivity and society, and have
acted as techniques of disciplinary control
(see disciplinary power). They introduced
new identities (e.g. the homosexual, the pervert, the hysterical woman), territorialized
bodily pleasures as sexual, and brought the
individual into new relations with the social
through biopower.
The intertwined processes of identification
and disidentification work differently in different theories. Psychoanalytic theories have
offered rich resources for thinking about the
difficulties of recognizing difference, traced
from a young child’s initial difficulties of registering sexual difference from a loved parent.
From the perspective of post-colonialism,
theorists such as Homi Bhabha have drawn
on Freud’s notion of the fetish (which functions as a mechanism for both recognizing and
disavowing sexual difference) as a way
of interpreting the ambivalences of colonial
discourse and relations between colonized–
colonizer. The concept of abjection, which
describes a process by which what is reviled
in oneself is denied and relocated in another,
offers another means for theorizing stigmatizing discourses of orientalism, racism, ableism and homophobia and heterosexism. If
psychoanalytic theories draw our attention to
the processes whereby what is unbearable or
disallowed in oneself and our loved ones is cast
outside and used to stigmatize others (but
imperfectly – our identity is constantly
haunted and destabilized by what is disavowed
or abject), deconstruction offers a reverse
perspective, of the way in which identity is
always defined in relation to and inhabited
by what it is not (the constitutive outside).
Recognizing the exclusions that found every
identity, and the necessity of keeping this process of boundary construction and the purification of space in view (Sibley, 1995), have
been important ideas for recent theorizing
about citizenship and radical democracy
(see private and public spheres).
Anti-humanist accounts have been criticized for closing off the possibilities and
responsibilities of agency, rights, ethics and
politics. Four responses suggest the opposite.
First, discourses are polyvalent: they structure
identities without determining them. The
identity of ‘homosexual’ can become a
resource for persons thus identified when they
demand rights in the name of this identity. So
too, the meaning of the term ‘queer’ has been
reworked, from a stigmatizing identity to a
critique of heteronormativity (see queer
theory). Second, individuals are subject to
multiple discourses and subject positions,
729
SUBJECT/SUBJECTIVITY
and it is at the disjuncture between various
subject positions that agency can be located.
Third, identities arise through repeated performates, and this opens possibilities for variation and change, ones that are closed off
by positions that see identities as stable (see
performance; performativity). A fourth
response is that psychoanalytic theories that
explore the effects of the unconscious widen
responsibilities insofar as they call into question our responsibilities for actions of which
we are not conscious, such as racism and heterosexism (Culler, 1997).
A key area of contemporary theorizing
explores the possibilities for new processes of
subject formation whereby we come to understand ourselves and others without creating
stigmatized others and hierarchies of difference (in which some groups are seen to be
superior to others). The concepts of cyborg
and hybridity are two ways of disrupting
ideas of pure identities and rigid boundaries.
Non-representational thinking offers another
model in which: ‘intermediaries and mediaries
multiply, so that the ‘‘human’’ ‘‘subject’’
migrates on to many more planes and is mixed
with other ‘‘subjects’’ in increasingly polymorphous combinations’ (Thrift, 2000a,
p. 220; see also assemblage). Theorists of
radical democracy, such as Mouffe, are sceptical about such possibilities and place
emphasis instead on a continual questioning
of the inevitable process of boundary construction that must, they argue, necessarily
exclude. To evade these exclusions is impossible, but we can insist on a public sphere in
which the lines that discriminate inclusion
from exclusion are actively contested (for a
summary of these arguments, see Pratt,
2004). Others emphasize the need to shift theorizing from ‘the’ subject to intersubjectivity
(Rose, 1999b; Probyn, 2003). For Probyn,
this draws us back to the ‘hard facts’, such as
material inequality, that make such relations
and connections difficult.
If theories of subjectivity have always
informed geography, what is perhaps newer is
the extent to which geography is now woven
into theories of the subject. Probyn (2003)
notes the interrelations between the retheorization of space and subjectivity: ‘[t]hinking of
subjectivity in terms of space of necessity
reworks any conception that subjectivity is
hidden away in private recesses . . . Thinking
about how space interacts with subjectivity
entails rethinking both terms, and their relation to each other’ (p. 290). Where one is
located is constitutive of (and not incidental
730
to) perceptions of self. Thus for Foucault
(1980d), the designs of European schools
and homes were both reflective of and instrumental in creating the sexualized nuclear family. And one may see oneself differently in
different places: Blunt (1994) has argued
that nineteenth-century British bourgeois
women travellers were defined predominantly
in terms of (a rather frail) femininity at home,
but in their travels – in Africa, for example –
their gendered identity receded (and their
health improved), and their race and class
positions came to the fore. Constructing a
stable boundary for one’s self is an achievement: Davidson (2001) describes the fragility
of this construction for those suffering agoraphobia. The construction of coherent places
and identities are intertwined social processes: Anderson (1991b) describes how the
construction of chinatown as a stigmatized
place apart from the rest of Vancouver was
instrumental in cohering a white British
Columbian identity. Non-essentialist readings of subjectivity, in which identifications
are conceived as the outcome of power-laden
social processes (i.e. not as natural), thus
have been read back into the production of
space. Places are conceived as open-ended
sites of social contestation, and spatial politics
involve attending to the moments of closure
whereby the identitites of places are stabilized
and particular social groups claim a natural
right to that space or are entrapped within
them. This can involve a dense layering of
different subject positions: Anderson (1996)
reworks her earlier argument about the production of Chinatown by considering how
gender discourses underwrote discourses of
nation and race in early-twentieth-century
British Columbia.
Geographies are also at the centre of recent
efforts to think about new subject formations
of hybridity, multiplicity and flexible borders.
Spatial metaphors of nomad, mobility, travel,
borderland, third space, networks, connectivity and viscosity, space-off and paradoxical space are some of the terms used to
conceptualize these subjectivities. In some of
these discussions, geography functions only as
metaphor, but the prevalence of geographical
terminology in discussions of identity also
reflects processes of transnationalism and
globalization, and increasingly complex
geographies of subject formation, which may
lead to pluri-local identifications (distributed
across and located in different places) or, ironically, the intensification of localized identities
(Watts, 1991).
SUBURB/ANIZATION
Theories of subjectivity have led geographers to rethink epistemology, methodology,
theory and representational strategy. Calls for
reflexivity reflect the understanding that
knowledge is a social construct contingent on
social location: theories of the unconscious
indicate the limits of self-reflexivity and the
limits of knowledge (Rose, 1997b). Theories
of mobile, fragmented identities have encouraged different mapping and writing strategies
(Massey, 1997; Pred, 1997). Emphasis on
affect and non-cognitive aspects of experience within non-representational styles of
thinking have led to many suggestions for theoretical and methodological innovation
(Thrift, 2000a; see also qualitative methods).
Her engagement with psychotherapy has led
Bondi (1999) to read differently: she draws
the distinction between intertextual and experiential reading practices.
gp
Suggested reading
Culler (1997); Pile and Thrift (1995); Probyn
(2003).
subsidiarity The principle that authority
should be exercised at the most local level
consistent with effectiveness, and that higherlevel institutions should have only ‘subsidiary’
functions. The idea originated in Catholic
social teaching and became a central concept
in theories of federalism. In European Union
law and politics, it refers to the division of
powers between the EU, member states, and
regional and local authorities in a system of
multi-level governance. Federalists argue
that subsidiarity implies increased devolution
to regional bodies. In EU law, however, it
mainly protects the rights of national governments vis-à-vis the EU’s supranational institutions.
jp
Suggested reading
Jordan (2000).
subsistence agriculture A form of organizing food production such that a group (household, village, society) secures food sufficient
for its own reproduction over time (see social
reproduction). Subsistence production,
which includes not only crop production but
also hunting, fishing and pastoralism, is typically understood to be based on the direct
exploitation of the environment, as opposed
to manufacture (Neitschmann, 1973).
Subsistence also suggests production for use,
as opposed to for exchange, although subsistence groups might share food and other
resources for ritual, ceremonial or social reciprocity purposes. Subsistence agriculture can
thereby be seen as a form of cultural adaptation by which social groups adapt to and
regulate ecosystems of which they are apart
(see cultural ecology). In marxist economics, subsistence production without market involvement of any sort is referred to as
primitive economy, the earliest stage of economic development: household subsistence
producers with some degree of production
for sale, or who purchase some goods in markets are generally referred to as peasants.
Because production of surpluses and/or partial
commoditization is often associated with the
over-exploitation of both nature and direct
producers (Blaikie, 1985) (see political
ecology), subsistence societies appear to be
more egalitarian in their social relations, despite the fact that their organization might
be highly patriarchal. Although subsistence
production is rare in the modern world, it
allows for the possibility of substantive group
autonomy from both state and market. For
that reason, it is occasionally conjured up as
a utopian ideal among communards, or
invoked as something that ought to be protected in traditional societies (e.g. NorbertHodge, 1991).
jgu
substitutionism The products of agriculture present special obstacles and barriers for
industrial production. food, with its necessary
links to health, well-being, sociability and
culture, represents impediments to the simple notion of replacement of foodstuffs by
industrial products (appropriationism). But the
growth and maturity of the food industry has
witnessed a discontinuous but permanent process to achieve the industrial production of
food. Goodman, Sorj and Wilkinson (1987,
p. 2) refer to the rising proportion of valueadded attributable to industrial production in
the food system and the gradual replacements
of agricultural by non-agricultural products
(e.g. of sugar derived from sugar cane, by
synthetic sugars) as the twin characteristics of
what they call substitutionism. (See also
agrarian question; agro-food system.) mw
Suggested reading
Walker (2005).
suburb/anization Suburbanization is a process whereby people, housing, industry, commerce, and retailing spread out beyond
traditional urban areas, forming dispersed
landscapes that are still connected to cities
731
SUNBELT/SNOWBELT
by commuting. These are comprised of diverse
suburbs with a variety of social, economic and
landscape characteristics and have, as a result,
been interpreted in a variety of ways. In terms
of their culture and design, they have frequently been criticized for their blandness, lack
of community and segregation. These critiques are paralleled by concerns about the
environmental impact of suburban landscape
forms and ways of life (see edge city;
exopolis; ribbon development; sprawl).
Low-density, automobile-oriented suburbs
are increasingly common features of urban
regions across the globe and certain elements
of the suburban form, such as gated communities, are springing up in numerous
countries (Webster, Glasze and Frantz,
2002). The process of suburbanization is
differentiated somewhat by the local or
national conditions in which it operates.
Lemansky (2006), for instance, describes
the character of suburbanization and the
creation of master-planned gated communities in post-apartheid South Africa and
notes the complex patterns of proximity,
social exclusion and connection that exist
between wealthy and poor residents of suburban Cape Town. Zhou and Ma (2000), for
their part, emphasize the importance of suburbanization in a number of Chinese cities.
They argue that it is at a much less developed stage (with suburbs still dominated by
central cities) than in the ‘classic’ case of the
USA. They also suggest that the role of the
strong Chinese state in shaping suburbanization has a great deal to do with the distinctiveness of this case.
Yet, the US case is worth considering as a
specific and by no means easily generalizable
example of the political economy of suburbanization. The US suburbanization process
accelerated in the 1920s with the explosion of
automobile ownership in the 1920s.
‘Automobile suburbs’ such as the low-density
Country Club District in Kansas City,
Missouri, which included the first car-oriented
shopping mall, emerged in the 1920s as private developers sought to profit from
increased automobility. The Depression of
the early 1930s dampened the housing market, making it an unattractive investment for
private developers. The state’s subsequent
intervention sought to stimulate and regulate
the development industry while bolstering the
ideological pre-eminence of the private property system (Walker, 1981). By the early
1960s, half the country’s urban population
lived in suburbs. This trend in residential
732
suburbanization has been paralleled by
manufacturing, commerce and retail, which
have all suburbanized. Contemporary authors
emphasize the increasing autonomy of US
suburbs from traditional central cities, and
speak of a ‘postsuburban’ situation (cf. Zhou
and Ma, 2000).
Suburbanization is, then, a process that
both reflects and constitutes the political
and economic geographies of contemporary
cities. It is also a focus of those interested in
social and cultural questions, particularly
around race and gender. Ethnic suburbanization is raising important questions about
the validity of arguments about the social
homogeneity of suburbs and is also emphasizing the global connectedness of these
places (Li, 1998). Nonetheless, suburban
geographies are still marked by significant
discrimination (see redlining; urban managers and gatekeepers). The shaping of
gender roles and relations in and through
suburban space is also a major focus of geographical enquiry. In the postwar period,
suburban domesticity became a hegemonic
idea through which to reinforce traditional
gender relations and connections between
women and waged work. Analysis of contemporary relationships between gender,
suburbia and work has entailed, among other
things, a focus on gender differentiation
in travel patterns and accessibility to
waged work and public facilities (England,
1993).
em
Suggested reading
Bourne (1996); Walker (1981).
sunbelt/snowbelt A popular term describing the polarization of the US space-economy
from the 1960s on: it contrasts areas of relative
economic decline (especially in manufacturing
industry) concentrated in the country’s northeast (the ‘snowbelt’, or ‘frostbelt’: cf. rustbelt) with those, largely in the south and west,
experiencing rapid economic and population
growth. This change in the inter-regional division of labour reflects the comparative
advantage and competitive advantages
enjoyed by sunbelt states through relatively
cheap and non-unionized labour, their attractive physical environments, and substantial
federal government investment there – as in
the aerospace and other defence industries.
The term is now frequently applied in other
countries: the M4 motorway corridor extending west from London through Swindon to
SURVEILLANCE
Bristol is sometimes referred to as the UK’s
sunbelt.
rj
Suggested reading
Markusen (1987).
sunk costs Incurred costs that are invariant
with output (unlike variable costs) and cannot readily be recouped. In economic geography, sunk costs include those made by a
firm in a particular location which, because
they cannot be recouped, act as a disincentive
to either or both of restructuring and
relocation – that is, for the firm exiting either
the activity or the place (cf. exit, voice and
loyalty). Clark and Wrigley (1995) identified three types of sunk cost: set-up sunk costs
(initial investments in plant and machinery,
for example); accumulated sunk costs (normal,
unrecoupable, costs of doing business); and
exit sunk costs (such as those involved not only
in abandoning premises and plant, but also in
making workers redundant and paying for
their pensions). They identify three types of
exit strategy that involve acceptance of sunk
costs that might not be (fully) recovered:
strategic reallocation – using the resources for
different activities, which will incur costs
(re-equipping a plant, for example, and
retraining workers); restructuring, which
may involve either or both of plant closure
and staff redundancy; and corporate reformation, which may involve bankruptcy or
liquidation.
Clark and Wrigley (1995, p. 210) present
15 separate propositions regarding sunk costs
and their importance to their ‘belief that the
management of sunk costs across a variety of
competitive domains is a vital component in
any explanation of the spatial patterns of
restructuring’. The accumulation of sunk
costs can reduce a firm’s flexibility and thus
its ability to respond to the changing pressures associated with globalization. Firms
are rarely able to respond costlessly to those
imperatives, but those that economize on
their sunk costs should be better placed to
respond to changing patterns and geographies of supply and demand.
rj
Suggested reading
Baumol and Willig (1981); Clark and Wrigley
(1997).
surface A surface is the exterior side of
something, or the conceptual boundary
from the outside to the inside of a three-
dimensional object. The Earth is an irregular spheroid; its surface (of elevation) is
ground or sea level. The surface is continuous but, within a study region, sampling
height everywhere is impossible. Instead,
the surface can be approximated by a series
of discrete (x, y, z) data tuples (e.g. x and y
are longitude and latitude; z is height
above mean sea level), or as a mathematical
model (e.g. a trend surface). The z is not
limited to elevation, however: statistical
surfaces are also used to visualize ‘hot spots’
of crime, disease, etc., for which local
statistics and methods of local interpolation (such as population surface modelling:
Martin, Tate and Langford, 2000) are
important.
rh
Suggested reading
Burrough and McDonnell (1998).
surveillance The observation or monitoring
of social behaviour by individuals and institutions. Typically, surveillance straddles or
compresses the geographical distance between
its subject(s) and the person(s) tasked with
undertaking the monitoring (cf. time–space
compression). Virtually all social relations
involve elements of surveillance. However, initiatives involving mass or institutionalized surveillance are most often legitimized as a
purported means to minimize risk or to
enforce some notion of normalization or discipline over a population or place portrayed as
hazardous, deviant or pathological (see also
security).
human geography has shown a growing
recent interest in surveillance and its imbrications with modernity. A key stimulus has
been the writings of French philosopher
Michel Foucault, and in particular
Surveillir et punir (1975), translated into
English as Discipline and punish (1977a
[1975]). Through an analysis of Bentham’s
panopticon and history of French prisons,
Foucault argued that distinctively modern
societies were dominated by what he called
disciplinary power. This operated through
spatially partitioning societies into prisons,
workhouses, clinics, barracks, schools and
so on. At the same time, architectural techniques were applied to these institutions
that allowed persistent visual inspection
and control by supervisors. Foucault’s crucial point was that by internalizing this
possibility of scrutiny, subjects became
‘normalized’ by monitoring, moderating
and controlling their own behaviour.
733
SURVEY ANALYSIS
Since the nineteenth century, these ‘fixed’,
architectural models of panopticism have
been complemented by a widening range of
surveillance machines, many of which now
routinely include diffused, interconnecting,
computerized devices. Human geographers
and others have thus addressed the saturation of contemporary societies with sites of
continuous, machinic surveillance. Early
research emphasized the social implications
of geographic information systems
(Pickles, 1995a) and the proliferation of
Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras
to monitor public spaces (Koskela, 2000).
The significance of these practices is not
confined to the political and commercial:
they also have important military applications. Late-modern war places a premium on
persistent surveillance from aerial and spacemounted platforms, including Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or ‘drones’ that
transmit real-time imagery to command and
control centres and ground troops:
these images can feed directly into the identification and execution of targets through
what Graham (2009b) calls the ‘algorithmic
gaze’.
These practices have spiralled far beyond
their initial spheres of application, and an
important emerging strand of work in surveillance geography analyses how everyday life
in highly computerized societies is coming to
be constituted through a burgeoning range of
interlinked, digital surveillance systems. This
‘calculative background’, as Thrift (2004b)
terms it, is increasingly automated, internationalized and organized through the active
agency of computer code. This means that
the geographies of life chances, mobilities,
access rights, border crossings and service
privileges are now sorted through largely
invisible systems of digitized surveillance,
working simultaneously across multiple geographical scales (Graham, 2005). This happens through sites as diverse as call centres,
supermarket checkouts, TV viewing, digital
CCTV cameras, neighbourhood GIS systems, mobile phones, webcams, web sites,
computerized automobiles, and national border or airport security checkpoints. Rather
than emerging as some all-seeing electronic
‘Panopticon’ or some dystopian ‘Big
Brother’ drawn from Orwell’s classic novel
1984, however, these systems of surveillance
remain fragmented and operate instead as
multiple ‘Little Brothers’. Oligoptic rather
than panoptic, they do not monitor all spaces
and behaviours at all times. Instead, their
734
geographies overlap, cross-cut and intersect
in complex ways that are currently poorly
understood.
sg
Suggested reading
Levin (2002); Lyon (2006). See also Surveillance
and Society, an open access journal at http://www.
surveillance-and-society.org.
survey analysis The various procedures
involved in the collection and analysis of data
from individuals, almost invariably using some
sort of questionnaire. As such they are a type
of extensive research design.
A survey involves several stages. The first is
definition of the research problem, including
the formulation of hypotheses and identification of the needed information. The second
includes determining the population to be
studied, which includes deciding what form
of sampling is needed. The next stage
involves deciding how the hypotheses will be
tested (including the analytical techniques to
be employed), and is followed by development
of a questionnaire (which should include pretest stages and pilot investigations).
After administration of the questionnaires
the data are prepared for analysis: quantitative
data are readily dealt with; qualitative information (such as reported occupations and
responses to open-ended questions) has to be
handled through the development of coding
schemes, increasingly through the use of
sophisticated computer software for textual
analysis. To ensure statistically reliable results,
it is unusual for the number of separate categorical codes (such as social class) to exceed
ten, and is typically five or under. The data are
then usually entered into a computer database
and checked for consistency and gross errors
(‘cleaning’ the data set) before the analyses
are conducted, although increasingly the
responses are entered directly to a computer
by the interviewer (whether at a face-to-face
interview or in an interview by telephone).
The analysis of surveys consists of four
quantitative elements that need to be undertaken simultaneously:
. Evaluating the size effects between variables and by doing so taking account of
other variables – what Rosenberg (1978)
calls the logic of survey methodology;
. Testing as part of confirmatory data analysis whether the observed effects could have
occurred by chance, or whether the lack of
an effect is due to inadequate statistical
power;
SURVEY ANALYSIS
. Taking account quantitatively of the complex design of the survey; and
. Dealing with non-response and missing
data.
To appreciate the issues concerning size of
effects and the interplay between variables,
consider the following 2 2 table in which
there is a single outcome (happiness) and
explanatory variable (age), each being measure on a binary scale:
Explanatory variable
Young
Outcome Unhappy A
Happy
C
Total
AþC
Total
1 showing that there is no relationship
between age and happiness; the apparent
relationship is an artefact of the relationships between age and gender (i.e. they are
confounded) and gender and happiness. The
following set of 2 2 tables tells a different
story:
(a) Aggregated data
Young
Unhappy
200
Happy
200
Total
400
Old
200
200
400
Total
400
400
800
(b) Relation for males
Young
Unhappy
170
Happy
190
Total
360
Old
40
80
120
Total
210
270
480
(c) Relation for females
Young
Unhappy
30
Happy
10
Total
40
Old
160
120
280
Total
190
130
320
Old
B
D
BþD
AþB
CþD
N
The odds ratio calculated as (A/B)/(C/D) gives
the degree of association between the variables: if it is 1 there is no relationship; greater
than 1 means that younger people are unhappier; less than 1 suggests that younger people
are more likely to be happy. However, these
results should not be taken at face value and
there needs to be model elaboration (Davis,
1986) to see how the relation changes as
account is taken of other variables. This can
be clearly seen by examining the following set
of 2 2 tables:
(a) Aggregated data
Young
Unhappy
140
Happy
50
Total
190
Old
120
90
210
Total
260
140
400
(b) Relation for males
Young
Unhappy
120
Happy
30
Total
150
Old
40
10
50
Total
160
40
200
(c) Relation for females
Young
Unhappy
20
Happy
20
Total
40
Old
80
80
160
Total
100
100
200
In (a) there is a clear relationship in that the
odds ratio of 2.1 suggest that younger people
are twice as unhappy as the old. However, in
(b) and (c) when the same data are disaggregated to examine the relation for men and
women separately, each odds ratio is exactly
In (a) the aggregate relation shows no effect as
there is an odds ratio of 1, but in (b) and (c)
when the analysis is done separately by gender,
the odds ratios are 1.79 for males and 2.25 for
females. In this case, the effect between age and
happiness has been masked by not taking
account of gender. The analysis can of course
be extended to more than three variables and to
include continuous variables (see categorical
data analysis) but the underling logic of model
elaboration remains the same.
Analysis also has to guard against the Type I
error of finding a relation when it does not
exist, and the Type II error of not finding a
genuine relation (cf. sampling). For the former confirmatory data analysis is used to test
for the significance of a relation and to examine confidence intervals; the key here is the
absolute sample size. Thus the estimated odds
of 2.1 for the relation in the first aggregate
analysis has 95 per cent confidence intervals
that lie between 1.38 and 3.21, so there is little
chance that the aggregate relation is really 1,
which would indicate no effect. When no significant relationship is found this may be an
outcome of too small a study. If this is the case
we can perform a retrospective power analysis
(Cohen, 1988) to see if the sample size was
large enough to detect an effect. It would have
been better, however, to do an initial power
analysis before sampling.
735
SURVEY ANALYSIS
Many surveys have a complex sampling
design involving clustering, stratification and
disproportionate sampling. These attributes
should be taken into account during analysis
so as to avoid biased estimates of standard
errors and increased likelihood of Type I
errors. Clustering, or multi-stage selection of
sample units, typically generates dependency
so that there is less information than appears.
multi-level models estimate and correct for
the degree of dependency even when there are
more than two sampling stages. Their results
can also be substantively interesting, finding
for example that members of the same household tend to vote together (Johnston, Jones,
Sarker, Burgess, Propper and Bolster, 2005).
Stratification involves grouping the sampling
frame into believed-to-be homogeneous
groups and thereby reducing standard error.
Often there is disproportionate sampling of
strata so that having grouped primary sampling units into strata based on percentage
ethnic minority population, ethnic areas are
over-sampled. This requires at the analysis
stage that the over-sampled ethnic areas are
down-weighted to their correct population
proportion. Sturgis (2004), using data from
the 2000 UK Time Use Survey, shows how
these factors should be incorporated into the
estimates and illustrates the threats to inference if ignored. longitudinal data analysis
faces its own particular analytical problems
arising from the analysis of repeated measures
over time.
Non-response is a growing problem with
surveys. The best approach is to ensure
detailed follow-up so that the issue is minimized at the design and collection phase; this is a
problem where doing nothing is doing something, and where prevention is better than any
cure. We can distinguish between full, or unit,
non-response and item non-response, the latter
being when the respondent has only answered
some questions. For the former, differential
weighting can be used to reduce bias by boosting the effective size of subgroups (such as
young men) that are under-represented in the
survey, but their relative size is known from
other large-scale surveys or censuses. There is
a danger of increasing standard errors, however, when the variance of the weights is large.
Most software for quantitative analysis
automatically excludes the entire respondent
when any values are missing and this is known
as complete case analysis. If the data are missing completely at random (MCAR: Rubin,
1976) this will not bias the results if the observations are excluded but it will reduce the
736
effective sample size. If the data are missing
at random (MAR) but the ‘missingness’
depends on recorded information, then complete case analysis can be used, but the determinants of the ‘missingness’ must be included
in the analysis to avoid non-response bias.
This suggests that at collection phase, variables that should be easier to collect are
obtained alongside those that are thought to
be difficult (e.g. income may be difficult so
also collect information about property value).
If the ‘missingness’ depends on unobserved
predictors, even after accounting for information in the observed data, then the data are
said to be not missing at random (NMAR). In
this case, complete case analysis is likely to
produce biased results.
There are two main approaches to ‘missingness’, either explicit modelling of the underlying mechanism generating the missing data
or some form of imputation (or ‘guessing’) to
replace the missing values. A number of ad hoc
procedures can be used for the latter, such as
carrying the last observation forward, creating
an extra category for the missing observation,
or replacing missing observations by the mean
of the variable used. All can give unpredictable
results. Consequently, the only practical, generally applicable, approach for substantial
datasets is multiple imputation whereby each
missing value is replaced by several (typically
less than five) imputed values which come from
an imputation model which also reflects sampling variability. A sensitivity analysis can then
be undertaken to investigate the robustness of
the estimates to differential ‘missingness’.
Survey analysts are aware of criticisms that
see quantitative approaches as imposing
meaning on people’s attitudes and behaviours.
Consequently, as Marsh (1982) argued in her
defence of the survey method, researchers
have been highly attentive to just such issues,
and developments continue to be made. One
set of issues relates to whether respondents,
particularly from different cultures, understand questions in different ways, or if
researchers mean one thing and respondents
think they mean something else. Analytical
approaches to this treat survey questions as a
function of the actual quantity being measured
along with an element of interpersonal incomparability that is potentially different for each
respondent. The new idea is to use anchoring
vignettes as a common reference point (King,
Murray, Salomon and Tandon, 2004; King
and Wand, 2007) to measure directly and then
‘subtract off’ the incomparable portion.
Respondents are asked for their own response
SUSTAINABILITY
to the concept being measured along with
assessments, on the same scale, for each of
several hypothetical benchmark situations
described in the vignettes. Interpersonal
incomparability is the only reason the response
can differ, as the vignettes are literally the
same. Statistical models have been designed
to require only a small random sub-sample to
correct the respondent’s reply for the personal
element.
kj
Suggested reading
Groves, Fowler, Couper, Lepkowski, Singer and
Tourangeau (2004); King, Honaker, Joseph
and Scheve (2001); Little and Rubin (2002);
Skinner, Holt and Smith (1989). Excellent practical advice on missing data can be found at
http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/msu/missingdata/index.
html and the Anchoring Vignettes website is at
http://gking.harvard.edu/vign/.
surveying To survey is to assess or study
a place or population, the salient features
of which might then be mapped or recorded.
From a cadastral (land ownership) perspective,
surveying is to apply the principles of mathematics (geometry and trigonometry) to determine points on the Earth’s surface delimiting
a land boundary. Alternatively, a physical scientist might apply the principles of physics,
chemistry or biology to survey a site, whereas
a polling company uses techniques of statistical
inference to survey a population by means of
a sample (see survey analysis). Geographical
research includes not only mathematical/
scientific conceptions of surveying but also
qualitative methods.
rh
Suggested reading
Aldridge and Levine (2001).
sustainability Sustainability, like sustainable development, is becoming increasingly
difficult to invoke with any critical weight. In
fact, it would be fair to say that in critical
circles, and among those interested in progressive or radical environmental politics in particular, use of the word will almost certainly
elicit a cringe. This may point to an abiding
cynicism, but it probably also reflects the proliferation of this term as a form of discursive
gloss over disparate material and political projects, including no shortage of mobilizations
in corporate ‘greenwash’ campaigns. Indeed,
while sustainability as a buzzword does much
work to enhance environmental awareness,
it may just as easily be viewed as evidence
of an increasingly promiscuous convergence
of capital accumulation and certain kinds of
environmentalism (Katz, 1998). To this may
be added the concern that this word – and
much more so sustainable development – has
become hopelessly co-opted by an instrumentalist and administrative connotation
that takes from it any edge as a challenge to
prevailing ways of thinking about and relating
to one another, and to the non-human world.
It is in fact difficult to argue that that any
serious progress is being made in the name of
this term when, by any reasonable definition
and notwithstanding rosy portraits of
dematerializing industrial economies, the
global political economy and ecology – what
Luke (2005) provocatively calls a system of
‘sustainable degradation’ – is characterized
by more and more aggregate material and
energy throughput, and by greater and
greater social inequality (Harper, 2004) (cf.
political ecology).
There are nevertheless good reasons to take
this word and some of what it conveys seriously, and in particular to differentiate the
word from the term ‘sustainable development’. For one thing, sustainability is much
less easily and intuitively grafted on to development orthodoxy aimed at sustaining little
more than economic growth. Sustainability
continues to function more as an ambiguous
mantra than as a new paradigm of a postcolonial development agenda, the latter a
critique levelled at the institutionalization of
sustainable development (Escobar, 1995).
Instead, sustainability has been more successfully mobilized in ways that challenge conventional development paradigms – including, for
example, in the notion of sustainable livelihoods – and in directing attention towards
‘satisficing’, or meeting basic needs (Sneddon,
2000).
Sustainability is also deployed more concretely in scientific and technical parlance.
This includes efforts to develop sustainability
indicators (O’Riordan, 2004) to be used as
benchmarks, fixed goals by which the
abstraction and obfuscation so typical of sustainability discourses might be reined in. It
also includes the use of the term in policyoriented or more applied ecological sciences
(e.g. conservation biology) seeking to develop
and apply notions of specifically ecological
sustainability, particularly when both human
and non-human systems exhibit uncertain
behaviour. As thin as this literature typically
is in conceptualizing human behaviour, important principles such as adaptive management
and precautionary action have taken hold
737
SUSTAINABILITY
(Walters and Holling, 1990: Walters, Korman,
Stevens and Gold, 2000) (cf. ecology).
Attempts to define and implement principles of sustainability in planning and development policy have sometimes been pursued
through the so-called ‘three pillars’ of sustainability, namely economic, social, and environmental or ecological. This is, for instance, a
feature of local and regional planning for sustainability as pursued in the UK (Haughton
and Counsell, 2004). True, the condition of
sustainability in this context is still tethered
(legislatively) to the maintenance of economic
growth. But one advantage of at least recognizing disparate connotations of sustainability,
in terms of these three pillars or otherwise, is
that it leaves open the possibility that tradeoffs must be made, and that not all efforts to
achieve sustainability can be achieved via the
win–win optimism that has been a predominant gloss on sustainable development since the
Brundtland Commission, and certainly since
the 1992 Rio Summit (Adams, 1995). Critical
work remains to be done on the governmentalizing dimensions of particular sustainability programmes, specifically the ways in
which new political subjectivities and modes
of governance arise around the institutionalization of sustainability (see governmentality). This comprises one way to bring
politics into discussions and analyses concerning sustainability.
In fact, this speaks to a bigger problem of
politics when it comes to sustainability and
sustainable development. Seemingly endless
rounds of defining the terms leads to an overriding idealism in policy and academic literatures that can actually obscure attention to
changing genealogies, as predominant connotations evolve shaped in part by prevailing
power relations. Put another way, and in the
spirit of Michel Foucault, tracking the changing meaning of the term must always be situated in relation to the capacity of power to
produce these changing meanings. And this
is what frustrates many of a critical bent in
encountering this word; it seems to preclude
or leave unexamined in most iterations questions of power and politics. Revisiting the
three pillars noted above, for instance, it is
not clear where politics enter and how.
Thus, as opposed to more and more
attempts to define the term and pin it down,
it might be more useful to consider what questions it invokes. One of these, as Drummond
and Marsden (1999) argue, is why sustainability literature is so much characterized by
‘line drawing’ exercises rather than more
738
critical analyses of systemic tendencies for
lines to be transgressed. This echoes early
critics of both sustainable development and
sustainability, who argued that both require
direct challenges to capitalism itself as an
inherently unsustainable form of economic,
social and political organization constituted
by and productive of profound social inequalities, and predicated on the mobilization of
energy and raw materials increasingly commodified for the purposes of an expanding
and inherently expansionist economy
(Redclift, 1987; O’Riordan, 1991; Benton,
1994).
A second question concerns the ways in
which sustainability needs to be operationalized as disparate challenges in relation to the
so-called environmentalism of the poor versus
the environmentalism of the rich (MartinezAlier, 2002). This would allow affluence to
be challenged, while recognizing that the
poverty and environmental degradation nexus
requires distinct approaches (including not
just policies aimed at fostering socially equitable and environmentally benign growth
policies, but redistribution via genuine third
world debt relief and reparations for colonial plunders).
A third question concerns examination of
real-world trade-offs and complex political
ecological dynamics involved in the institutionalization of specific programmes aimed at
enhancing sustainability, moving past mantras
to ask the kinds of hard questions that lend
themselves to social science. What, for
instance, are the scaled social and environmental implications of reforestation programmes,
particularly vis-à-vis reinforcing logging pressure in faraway places (Robbins and Fraser,
2003)? What happens to local level social
relations, property rights and land-use practices under the influence of international fair
trade and organic standardization regimes
(Mutersbaugh, 2004)? (See also forestry.)
What are the social and environmental effects
– again across scales – introduced by regimes
such as ‘food miles’ that stigmatize distance
travelled, particularly as these effects ripple
through complex commodity chains linking
First World markets and Third World agricultural systems (Friedberg, 2004)? While such
critically minded, theoretically informed and
empirically oriented engagements with realworld instantiations of sustainability oriented
policies and programmes might seem to take
some of the wind out of sustainability’s sails,
they also help ensure that sustainability conveys more than a lot of hot air.
sp
SYSTEM
Suggested reading
Adams (2001); Dobson (1998); Ostrom, Burger,
Field, Norgaard and Policansky (1999); Redclift
(1987).
sustainable development The concept of
sustainable development has become ubiquitous in global debate, but like sustainability,
different actors use the phrase to express different visions for economy, environment and
society (Adams, 2001). The Brundtland
Report of 1987 famously defined sustainable
development as ‘development that meets the
needs of the present without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their
own needs’. This cleverly captures the central
paradox of the impact of economic growth
on the environment, and yet the need for such
growth to alleviate both present and future
poverty (often spoken of as intra- and intergenerational equity).
Radical critiques of the unsustainable nature
of development have included calls for zero
economic growth and critiques of industrialization, consumerism and free market economics. However, mainstream thinking about
sustainable development has centred on
‘market environmentalism’ and continued
economic growth, adapted to ensure that the
capacity of the planet to provide raw materials
and absorb wastes is not overstretched (Low
and Gleeson, 1998). This is to be achieved
through the ‘greening’ of industry and society,
‘green’ consumerism and efficient production
systems that minimize wastage, pollution and
negative social impact. Under market environmentalism, growth and consumption are
the engine that drives the creation of sustainable environments and livelihoods.
Such changes demand ‘ecological modernization’, the pursuit of rational, technical
solutions to environmental problems and
more efficient institutions for environmental
management and control (Hajer, 1995). This
involves new partnerships between state and
private enterprise, including market-based
incentives, self-regulation by business, strong
government and an efficient state bureaucracy.
The feasibility of this approach is limited by the
erosion of state power by globalization and
free trade. Many developing countries in particular display significant weaknesses in governance, and powerless civil society institutions.
Mainstream thinking about sustainable
development became established at the
United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development (UNCED, or simply the
‘Rio Conference’), held at Rio de Janeiro in
Brazil in June 1992 (Chatterjee and Finger,
1994). This meeting produced a vast encyclopaedia of ideas in Agenda 21 (over 600 pages
long), the Convention on Biological Diversity
(http://www.biodiv.org/default.shtml) and the
Framework Convention on Climate Change
(http://unfccc.int/2860.php).
At Rio, sustainable development was interpreted primarily in terms of global environmental change (biodiversity depletion and
climate change), reflecting the agenda of
industrialized Northern countries. Complex
and controversial issues of global poverty or
north–south inequality were discussed
less effectively). However, this emphasis
changed at the World Summit on Sustainable
Development (WSSD), in Johannesburg,
South Africa, in 2002. This followed the
United Nations Millennium Summit in
September 2000 and agreement on a series
of Millennium Development Goals (www.
developmentgoals.org/). Poverty was central
to debate at Johannesburg. The Johannesburg
Plan of Implementation addressed the eradication of poverty as well as issues such as
unsustainable patterns of consumption and
production, the protection and management of
the natural resource base of economic and
social development, globalization and health
(www.johannesburgsummit.org/).
wma
symbolic interactionism A social theory
that focuses upon the social construction
of the self and objects through interaction with
others. Based on the theoretical formulations
of the philosopher G.H. Mead (1934), its
sociological implications were developed by
Herbert Blumer (1969) and others. The theory posits that the self and social organization
more broadly are formed by an ongoing process
of the interpretation of meanings. As such, the
theory is opposed to notions of structures, which
are not reducible to ongoing interaction. More
structurally inclined theorists have accused it
of being individualistic and voluntarist. antihumanism in geography criticizes its primary
emphasis on human interaction.
jsd
Suggested reading
Prus (1995).
system A set of elements organized so that
each is either directly or indirectly interdependent on every other, usually in some form
of network (cf. graph theory; social network). Many analysts argue that systems must
have a function, goal or purpose – even if this
is only the maintenance of the system itself
739
SYSTEM
(see functionalism; structural functionalism). Some have a clear, separate existence
and function – as with a central heating
system – but many geographical studies
involve the pragmatic isolation (or abstraction) of linked parts from a larger whole (such
as a metropolitan area): where such abstractions are somewhat arbitrary, the system studied may yield few valuable conclusions (and be
categorized as a chaotic conception).
Systems analysis involves four main decisions
regarding the object of study:
. Whether it is to be conceptualized as open or
closed. A closed system has no links to a
surrounding environment – either as a
source of energy (as in ecosystems) or as
a receptacle for by-products of its operation (as in pollution): an open system
(which is by far the commonest condition)
interacts with its milieu.
. Whether it can be divided into subsystems, comprising separate clusters of interdependent
elements weakly linked to each other.
. Whether the links involve flows and causal
relationships, or are presented as black boxes.
Systems of flows involve the movement of
materials, ideas and people (as in trade,
migration and commuting); causal sys-
740
tems involve links that transmit clearly
defined consequences (as in A generates
B; e.g. assuming constant demand, an
increase in the supply of a good leads to
a reduction in its price): a black box
incorporates links that may be causal, but
for which the processes involved are not
understood.
. Whether the system involves feedback,
either positive or negative.
The concept of a system and the formal
protocols of systems analysis (many of them
derived from engineering) were introduced to
geography during its quantitative revolution, and were seen by some as providing both
substantive and methodological links between
human and physical geography (see also
ecology; general systems theory; human
ecology; political ecology). More generally, the concept of a system is applied descriptively in a wide range of contexts to refer to
sets of interdependent phenomena, without
adopting any of the more formal concepts
associated with systems analysis.
rj
Suggested reading
Bennett and Chorley (1978); Huggett (1980);
Wilson (2000).
T
taken-for-granted world The realm of
everyday life, frequently unreflective, where
convention and routine prevail, leading to the
accumulation of the attitudinal norms and
habitual practices that define a subculture.
The taken-for-granted world was inspired
by humanistic geography through ethnographic and other interpretative methods
inspired by the philosophical traditions of
German constitutive phenomenology and
American pragmatism (Ley, 1977). Also relevant is Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus,
with its emphasis on class-based subcultures
with varied resources to bring to everyday
social projects. The centrality of power in
everyday life has been also been drawn out
more fully by the French philosophers
Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre.
dl
Suggested reading
Werlen (1993, ch. 3).
tariff A tax levied by a government on the
importation of a commodity made abroad.
Governments impose tariffs on foreign-made
imports for multiple reasons, including to
protect domestic producers from foreign competition, to correct a trade deficit, to give preference to imports from certain countries over
others, or, contrarily, to retaliate against another country’s preferential tariff regime.
Preferential tariffs designed to privilege or
punish particular exporting countries date to
imperial trading practices, which were often
organized within networks of ‘imperial preference’. But it was in the context of nineteenthcentury imperialism that British industrialists
began the rhetorical inflation of free trade
and the political struggle to reduce tariffs
(Sheppard, 2005): they wanted to sell their
products to foreign and domestic markets,
and also saw the advantages of tariff-free food
imports for feeding and maintaining a cheap
workforce (Merrett, 1996). Early economists
such as David Ricardo helped the industrialists
make their case with academic arguments
about the gains from trade, and until the
1930s, the cause of free trade and tariff reduction spread around the world, albeit within
limits created by inter-imperial struggles (including the immense upheaval of the First
World War). During the Great Depression,
however, in the rush to protect their domestic
capitalists from the global crisis of over-accumulation, governments imposed steep tariffs
on foreign imports. The resultant ‘tariff walls’
drastically reduced world trade and created
much more autarchic or self-contained national economies: this territorialization of
economies set the geographical pattern for the
distinctively national regimes of accumulation based on fordism that characterized the
mid-twentieth century (see Lash and Urry,
1987; Harvey, 1989b; Mitchell, 1998, 2002d).
The Fordist pattern of economic nationalization was also influenced by global politics,
the rise of communism and, most notably, the
national mobilizations forced by the Second
World War. However, as the war drew to a
close, the cause of free trade was launched
again with the American-led meetings at Bretton Woods, which led to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or GATT in 1947.
Some joke that GATT in fact stood for the
General Agreement to Talk and Talk, because, despite unending American pressure
and resulting rounds of talks, other countries
were reluctant to quickly remove their tariff
walls, as they faced the prospect of rebuilding
their war-torn economies. The USA, by contrast, had emerged from the war with its economy unscathed and eager to expand markets
for its products worldwide. American negotiators pushed for a more open global free trade
system that could absorb the US trade surplus,
and slowly but surely they prevailed: the
crowning achievement was the establishment
of the world trade organization in 1994
(Peet, 2003). However, by the 1990s the US
trade surplus had turned into a large and fastgrowing deficit; thus, in the years since its
inception the WTO has had to deal with increasing complaints by developing countries
that the USA is abandoning free trade and –
ironically albeit unsurprisingly – imposing tariffs on foreign products (Wallach and Woodall,
2004).
ms
Taylorism A set of workplace practices
developed from the principles of ‘scientific
management’ by the American engineer
Frederick W. Taylor (1911) from his
741
TELEOLOGY
systematic time-and-motion studies of the
labour process in American factories. The
core principle involved breaking down production activities into their simplest, standardized components and linking them in precisely
coordinated, closely supervised sequences.
This imposed a strictly disciplined choreography on the workplace, a sort of mechanized
ballet, and workers often resisted its introduction. Taylorism was designed to enhance overall efficiency by reducing the scope of activity
of individual workers and optimizing the performance of individual tasks, but the logic of
distinguishing between close supervision and
standardized activities also accentuated the
separation of conception and execution of
tasks in the workplace.
For this reason, analysts such as Braverman
(1974) have associated the widespread introduction of Taylorist principles with the deskilling or degradation of work. The result is a
distinctive occupational division of labour,
in which unskilled workers execute simple,
repetitive shop-floor fabrication functions,
while skilled technical and managerial staff
perform functions related to research, product
design, process and quality control, coordination, finance and marketing. The economic
outcomes for workers depend on the wider
social and political context in which the production systems are embedded. Under the
terms of classical fordism in the USA and
western Europe, for example, the array of institutions governing collective bargaining and
wage determination increased the likelihood
that even unskilled workers might enjoy a decent living and enjoy tolerable working conditions. The application of Taylorist principles
elsewhere, in parts of asia, africa and latin
america, was not normally accompanied by
such institutional frameworks, however, leading to a more ‘primitive Taylorization’, based
on the ‘bloody exploitation’ of labour (Peck
and Tickell, 1994, pp. 286–7).
As Clark (1981) and others have observed,
during the postwar period, in which Taylorist
principles gained their widest acceptance,
large firms organized along Taylorist lines
would often segregate skilled and unskilled
functions in separate plants, producing a
spatial division of labour defined by the preexisting geography of labour supply, wage
rates and social relations (see also labour
geography). Subsequent methods of work organization associated with post-fordism are
generally regarded as having reversed the task
fragmentation and separation of conception
and execution characteristic of Taylorism.
742
But Schoenberger (1997) and others suggest
that organizational innovations such as
just-in-time production were developed
by eliminating wasted time in production
through the use of precisely the same tools of
time-and-motion study pioneered by Taylor
himself.
msg
teleology
Teleological enquiry is motivated by the belief that there is an ultimate
purpose or design at work within the world,
and that all elements and events, whether we
are conscious of it or not, are pre-configured
to realize that purpose or design. The teleological end reaches back to explain everything
that precedes it. The origins of teleology lie in
Greek philosophy, especially the writings of
Aristotle and the concept of a final cause,
which proposes that phenomena take on their
peculiar properties because they enable some
final end or purpose (telos) to be met. To use
Aristotle’s own example, humans do not see
because of a series of prior biological processes
that produce eyes; rather, eyes are produced in
order to meet the purpose of seeing. The
teleological end of seeing arranges biological
conditions such that eyes eventuate. As
Aristotle had it, ‘Nature adapts the organ to
the function, and not the function to the
organ.’
Teleology as a form of argumentation is
found in a diverse range of enquiry. It is perhaps best known within Christian theology –
from St Thomas Aquinas’ (1225–74) five
proofs of God’s existence, to recent (unsuccessful) arguments in the US court system to
justify classroom teaching of ‘intelligent design’. Within the humanities and social sciences, the teleological writings of the German
philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) have
been pivotal, in large part because of their
influence on others, especially Karl Marx
(1818–83). Hegel argued that human history
was teleologically directed to the unification of
spirit (Geist) and proceeded through a dynamic process of negation and contradiction
(the dialectic). At some historical juncture
(which Hegel said happened to be his own
time), the negations and contractions were
finally comprehended by individual human
minds as a unity, at which point the mandate
of history was fulfilled; history’s teleological
purpose was reached. Marx invoked a similar
teleology in his own historical scheme, also
propelled also by negation and contradiction.
But in Marx’s view, history was moved not
by contradictions of spirit becoming unified,
but by a set of contradictory physical–social
TERRA NULLIUS
relationships within successive modes of
production, and unification occurred not
within individual minds but very much outside
in the world of people’s material lives and practices. Marx argued that history’s teleology was
marked by distinct stages of completion, with
capitalism, the epoch in which Marx lived,
merely the penultimate one. History’s ultimate
purpose, the negation of all negation, would
manifest in what necessarily came next, the
final stage, the end of history, communism.
Teleological arguments are criticized on many
grounds, including: they are not empirically testable and are thus unfalsifiable; they reverse the
temporal sequence of cause and effect (effects
determine causes); causal mechanisms are either
absent or not well specified; and they deny
human beings free will, confining them within
an iron cage of historical inevitability. Nevertheless, teleological arguments can be found in two
distinct bodies of work in modern human geography. The first was in studies of modernization in the 1960s that were (mis)informed by
Rostow’s (1960) stages of growth model to
depict – and predict – the inevitable spatial diffusion of modernization across the landscape of
a developing economy (Gould, 1969b). The second was in the early writings of some Marxist
geographers who saw capitalism’s crises as inevitable way-stations towards the end point of its
final destruction and overthrow (Smith, 2008
[1984]).
tb
terms of trade
A name in economics for
the ratio between a price index of a country’s
exports and a price index of its imports.
Amongst advocates of export-led development, ‘improving the terms of trade’ traditionally meant increasing the ratio of profits from
exports vis-à-vis the costs of imports. As such,
it was part of the Washington consensus
amongst development economists that export
surpluses were better than import substitution
for developing countries. But now, in the context of increasing dissensus over such axioms,
a second, more literal, meaning of ‘terms of
trade’ has come to the fore as critics of neoliberalism have sought to decode the ways in
which the terminology of recent global and
regional trade agreements obscures how they
entrench neo-liberal norms of government
across wide swathes of social, political and
even ecological as well as economic life (Peet,
Borne, Davis et al., 2003; McCarthy, 2004).
Terms-of-trade legalese such as TRIPs (which
in the world trade organization (wto)
stands for agreements on Trade Related
Intellectual Property) and TRIMs (Trade
Related Investment Measures) have thereby
been debunked as elements of a narrow neoliberal, free-market fundamentalist agenda
that sets constraints on democratic governance over everything from food safety to
development policy by giving private corporations quasi-constitutional rights to sue governments (Sparke, 2005). ‘Because its terms
are so broad,’ argue two critics of the WTO’s
terms of trade, ‘the WTO has managed to
intervene in domestic policies all over the
planet’ (Wallach and Woodall, 2004, p. 2).
Countering this takeover, Wallach and
Woodall point out that the neo-liberal project
therefore involves repeatedly expanding what
were originally meant to be simple agreements
on free trade into neo-liberal legal rules governing practically everything. This termsof-trade overreach, they note, is ironically
marked in the terms themselves such that
‘you can identify which WTO agreements
have least connection to trade by which have
the ‘‘Trade Related’’ label slapped on them’
(ibid., p. 2). It remains a credit to the critical
wisdom of Marx and Engels that they foresaw
precisely this terms-of-trade takeover in the
Communist manifesto, when they described the
wholesale transformation of medieval life
through the free trade fetish of the capitalist
business class. ‘The bourgeoisie,’ they
thereby argued, ‘has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous
enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism,
in the icy water of egotistical calculation.
It has resolved personal worth into exchange
value, and in place of the numberless
indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up
that single, unconscionable freedom – Free
Trade’ (Marx and Engels, 2002 [1848]). ms
terra nullius A legal doctrine enshrined in
eighteenth-century European law that legitimized the annexation of ‘uninhabited lands’ by
settlement as an acknowledged means, alongside
conquest and secession, for the proper conduct of
colonization by ‘civilized’ nations. Such lands
were not literally uninhabited; rather, the colonizers cast their existing inhabitants as too
‘primitive’ to merit political recognition (cf. primitivism). Terra nullius was instrumental in the
European dispossession of indigenous peoples in
so-called settler colonies, such as Australia, which
has been the subject of political colonialism;
struggle and legal redress ever since. (See also
colonialism; settler society.)
sw
Suggested reading
Simpson (1993).
743
TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY
territorial integrity A term in international
law and, increasingly, critical geopolitics,
that has two main meanings: territorial preservation and territorial sovereignty. Its meaning of
territorial preservation establishes a right to
the preservation of a state’s existing boundaries, and prevents secession or territorial
conquest by other states. Territorial sovereignty or inviolability allows a state to exercise
its power within those boundaries, without
intervention or prohibition from external actors (see Akweenda, 1989). Both senses of the
term are enshrined and protected by key
clauses of Article 2 of the founding Charter
of the United Nations.
While there is an element of necessary fiction in the idea that states are in control of,
and therefore exercise sovereignty over, their
entire territory, this has provided a framework within which international law has operated. The norm of territorial preservation
conditioned decolonization in africa, and
helped to frame the international context of
the break-up of the Soviet Union. Territorial
sovereignty has been held as a guiding principle of the international system where, for
actions that do not have an effect beyond its
borders, a state has been held to be sovereign.
This is what the European Union calls internal
competence. Thus international law is built
around three core principles: sovereign equality of all states; internal competence for domestic jurisdiction; and territorial preservation
of existing boundaries. What this means is that
any challenge to the ‘monopoly of legitimate
physical violence’ that states are held to have
within their territory is necessarily a challenge
to territorial integrity by infringing on the spatial extent of their sovereignty.
Territorial integrity in the sense of territorial
sovereignty has come under increased pressure
in recent years, with humanitarian intervention
or the ‘responsibility to protect’ civilian populations legitimating external intervention in internal jurisdiction. The doctrine of ‘contingent
sovereignty’ promoted by the Bush administration in the ‘war on terror’ (Elden, 2006: see also
terrorism; war) held that state sovereignty
is dependent on adherence to codes of behaviour – notably not harbouring terrorists
or pursuing ‘weapons of mass destruction’ –
and violation of these norms legitimates
pre-emptive action (Elden, 2005, 2007a,c).
Yet at the same time territorial preservation
has been held as a dominant organizing principle, with a widespread reluctance to support
independence secession movements or rethink
the boundaries of existing states.
se
744
Suggested reading
Elden (2005); Zacher (2001).
territorial justice The territorialization of
the principles of social justice. This involves
examining the conditions under which wealth
and social well-being are produced, distributed and consumed (Perrons, 2004). Hence,
social justice can only be giving meaning in the
context of a particular set of social relations.
Using territorial justice to make judgements
over the justness or otherwise of societies is
complicated in three ways: first, there are the
difficulties posed by the ecological fallacy;
second, there are issues over the appropriateness of the spatial definition of the territorial
units; and, third, the achievement of territorial
justice has to be set against what this might
mean for other forms of justice (Smith and
Lee, 2004).
kwa
Suggested reading
Smith and Lee (2004).
territorial sea A jurisdictional zone of the
ocean, extending a maximum of 12 nautical
miles from the baseline (United Nations,
1983, Article 3) and including air space,
sea bed and subsoil. The territorial sea is
the ocean zone most exposed to human pressure and resource use. The 1982 United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
(UNCLOS) extends the sovereignty of coastal
states to include the territorial sea. Within the
zone, other nations have few prerogatives beyond the right of ‘innocent passage’, which recognizes the transit right of foreign flag merchant
vessels provided that it is peaceful and not
prejudicial to the good order or security of the
coastal state concerned.
sch
Suggested reading
Valega (1992).
territoriality Either the organization and exercise of power, legitimate or otherwise, over
blocs of space or the organization of people
and things into discrete areas through the use
of boundaries. In studies of animal behaviour, spatial division into territories is seen
as an evolutionary principle, a way of fostering
competition so that those best matched to
their territory will have more surviving offspring. With human territoriality, however,
spatial division is more typically thought of as
a strategy used by organizations and groups to
organize social, economic and political activities. From this viewpoint, space is partitioned
TERRITORIALIZATION
into territorial cells or units that can be
relatively autonomous (as with the division of
global space into territorial nation-states) or
arranged hierarchically from basic units in
which work, administration or surveillance
is carried out through intermediate levels at
which managerial or supervisory functions
are located to the top-most level, at which
central control is concentrated. Alternative
spatialities of political and economic organization, particularly hierarchical networks (as
in the world-city network) or reticular networks (as with the internet), can challenge or
supplement the use of territoriality.
Theoretically, territoriality can be judged as
having a number of different origins including:
(1) as a result of explicit territorial strategizing
to devolve administrative functions but maintain central control (Sack, 1986); (2) as a secondary result of resolving the dilemmas facing
social groups in delivering public goods (as in
Michael Mann’s, 1984b, sociology of territory); (3) as an expedient facilitating coordination between capitalists who are otherwise in
competition with one another (as in marxist
theories of the state); (4) as the focus of one
strategy among several of governmentality
(as in Michel Foucault’s writings); and (5)
as a result of defining boundaries between
social groups to identify and maintain group
cohesion, as in the writings of Georg Simmel
(Lechner, 1991) and Fredrik Barth (1969),
and in more recent sociological theories of
political identity (Agnew 2003b). Whatever
its origins, territoriality is put into practice in a
number of different if often complementary
ways: (1) by popular acceptance of classifications of space (e.g. ‘ours’ versus ‘yours’);
(2) through communication of a sense of
place (where territorial markers and boundaries evoke meanings); and (3) by enforcing
control over space (by surveillance, policing
and legitimation).
There are important cultural and historical
dimensions to territoriality. Churches and polities (states, empires, federations etc.) have
been the most important users of territoriality.
Some churches (such as the Roman Catholic
Church) and some states (such as the United
States) have more complex and formally hierarchical territorialities than others. Today,
transnational corporations and global businesses erect territorial hierarchies that cut
across existing political ones. So, even as
some users of territoriality fade away, others
emerge. Though varying in precise form and
complexity, therefore, territoriality seems
always to be with us.
ja
Suggested reading
Amin and Thrift (1997); Brenner, Jessop, Jones
and Macleod (2003).
territorialization The dynamic process
whereby humans and their affairs are fixed
territorially in space, by a range of actors but
primarily by states. On the contrary, deterritorialization signifies a growing tendency for
states, in the context of global capitalism, to
encounter and often encourage an uprooting
of people and things with massive social,
psychological, and political consequences.
Reterritorialization is the reverse of this
process.
In some usage, particularly that of Deleuze
and Guattari (e.g. 1972), employment of
deterritorialization seems to simply refer to
the breakdown of territoriality in thought
and practice. epistemologically juxtaposing
‘State philosophy’ with ‘nomad thought’,
Deleuze and Guattari associate territorialization with the former and deterritorialization
with the latter. ontologically, however,
there could be quite different territorial systems at play over time as, for example, with
pre- and post-colonial contact between colonizers and natives leading to the breakdown of
one system, followed by a period of deterritorialization before the imposition of a new territoriality. Crucial to the concept of
deterritorialization with Deleuze and Guattari
is the claim that ‘Processes are becomings, and
aren’t to be judged by some final result but by
the way they proceed and their power to continue, as with animal becomings, or nonsubjective individuations’ (Deleuze, 1995,
p. 146).
More typically, two other approaches tend
to dominate contemporary usage. In the first
case, territory is posed as a physical ‘base’
for human activities and deterritorialization is
viewed as either the lessening importance of
local constraints or the weakening of the impact of physical distance on everyday life.
The increased speed of financial and other
transactions, the so-called conquest of space
by time (cf. time__space convergence) and the
advent of cyberspace are frequently invoked
to explain what deterritorialization is held to
describe. Such ideas are part and parcel of
much discussion of economic globalization.
In the second case, territory is perceived as a
spatial assemblage of power relations and
identity strategies. From this perspective,
such ideas as the ‘end of territory’ and the
rise of network space are linked to the recent
onset of a worldwide deterritorialization
745
TERRITORY
(e.g. Badie, 1995; Hardt and Negri, 2000:
cf. network society). Others tend to see
deterritorialization in terms of the weakening
of territorial identities in the face of globalization (e.g. Mitchell, 2000) or the creation of
‘non-places’ (Augé, 1992).
Though frequently used as a stand-alone
term, deterritorialization makes most sense
when used in the context of territorialization.
For example, the ‘disappearance’ of territory
at one scale can see its recomposition at
others (Brenner, Jessop, Jones and Macleod,
2003). At the same time, deterritorialization
undoubtedly has metaphorical currency (see
metaphor) when applied, for instance, to the
fading of intellectual boundaries, and some
descriptive utility when used as a synonym
for the instability and unravelling of territorial
space. Notwithstanding the ambiguities inherent in the terms, in a world in which evidence
for both territorialization (e.g. the Israel–
Palestine Separation Barrier) and deterritorialization (e.g. the European Union Schengen
passport zone) is not hard to come by, their
usage suggests a dynamism to the forms of
territories and territorialities that some writers
have been all too willing to deny.
jaa
Suggested reading
Brenner, Jessop, Jones and Macleod, (2003);
Doel (1996).
territory A unit of contiguous space that is
used, organized and managed by a social
group, individual person or institution to restrict and control access to people and places.
Though sometimes the word is used as synonymous with place or space, territory has
never been a term as primordial or as generic
as they are in the canons of geographical terminology. The dominant usage has always
been either political, in the sense of necessarily
involving the power to limit access to certain
places or regions, or ethological, in the sense
of the dominance exercised over a space by a
given species or an individual organism.
Increasingly, territory is coupled with the
concept of network to help understand the
complex processes through which space is
managed and controlled by powerful organizations. In this light, territory is only one type of
spatiality, or way in which space is used,
rather than the one monopolizing its employment. From this perspective, territoriality
is the strategic use of territory to attain organizational goals.
Territory is particularly associated with the
spatiality of the modern state with its claim to
746
absolute control over a population within carefully defined external borders (Buchanan and
Moore, 2003, p. 6). Indeed, until Sack (1986)
extended the understanding of human territoriality as a strategy available to individuals
and organizations in general, usage of the term
‘territory’ was largely confined to the spatial
organization of states. In the social sciences,
such as sociology and political science, this is
still mainly the case, such that the challenge
posed to territory by network forms of organization (associated with globalization) is invariably characterized in totalistic terms as ‘the
end of geography’. This signifies the extent to
which territory has become the dominant geographical term (and imagination) in the social
sciences (Badie, 1995). It is then closely allied
to state sovereignty. As sovereignty is seen to
‘erode’ or ‘unbundle,’ so goes territory
(Agnew, 1994). From this viewpoint, territory
takes on an epistemological centrality (see
epistemology) in that it is understood as
absolutely fundamental to modernity. As
such it can then be given an extended meaning
to refer to any socially constructed geographical space, not just that resulting from statehood (Scivoletto, 1983; Bonnemaison, 1996;
Storper 1997a). Especially popular with some
French-language geographers, this usage often
reflects the need to adopt a term to distinguish
the particular and the local from the more
general global or national ‘space’. It then
signifies the ‘bottom-up’ spatial context for
identity and cultural difference (or place)
more than the ‘top-down’ connection between
state and territory.
The territorial state is a highly specific historical entity. It first arose in europe in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since
that time, political power has been seen as
inherently territorial. Politics take place only
within ‘the institutions and the spatial envelope of the state as the exclusive governor of a
definite territory. We also identify political territory with social space, perceiving countries as
‘‘state-societies’’ ’(Hirst, 2005, p. 27). The
process of state formation has always had two
crucial attributes. One is exclusivity. All of the
political entities (the Roman Catholic Church,
city-states etc.) that could not achieve a reasonable semblance of sovereignty over a contiguous territory have been delegitimized as
major political actors. The second is mutual
recognition. The power of states has rested to
a considerable extent on the recognition each
state receives from the others by means of
non-interference in so-called internal affairs
(see sovereignty). Together, these attributes
TERRORISM
have created a world in which there can be no
territory without a state. In this way, territory
has come to underpin both nationalism and
representative democracy, both of which depend critically on restricting political membership by homeland and address, respectively.
In political theory, control over a relatively
modest territory has long been seen as the primary solution to the ‘security dilemma’: to
offer protection to populations from the threats
of anarchy (disorder: cf. anarchism), on the
one hand, and hierarchy (distant rule and subordination), on the other. The problem has
been to define what is meant by ‘modest’ size.
To Montesquieu (1949 [1748], p. 122), the
enlightenment philosopher, different size territories inevitably have different political forms:
‘It is, therefore, the natural property of small
states to be governed as a republic, of middling
ones to be subject to a monarch, and of large
empires to be swayed by a despotic prince.’
Early modern Europe offered propitious
circumstances for the emergence of a fragmented political system primarily because of its
topographical divisions. Montesquieu (1949
[1748], pp. 151–62) further notes, however,
that popular representation allows for the
territorial extension of republican government.
The founders of the USA added to this by
trying to balance between centralizing certain
security functions, on one side, and retaining
local controls over many other functions, on
the other (Deudney, 2004). The recent history
of the European Union can be thought of in
similar terms (Milward, 2005).
Human activities in the world, however,
have never conformed entirely to spaces defined by proximity as provided by territory.
Indeed, and increasingly, as physical distance
proves less of a barrier to movement, spatial
interaction between separated nodes across
networks is an important mechanism of geographical sorting and differentiation (Durand,
Lévy and Retaillé, 1992). Sometimes posed
today in terms of a world of flows versus a
world of territories, this is better thought of in
terms of territories and/or networks of flows
rather than one versus the other. Territories
and networks exist relationally rather than mutually exclusively. If territorial regulation is all
about tying flows to places, territories have
never been zero-sum entities in which the
sharing of power or the existence of external
linkages totally undermines their capacity
to regulate. If at one time territorial states
did severely limit the local powers of transterritorial agencies, that this is no longer the
case does not signify that the states have lost
all of their powers: ‘Territory still matters.
States remain the most effective governors of
populations. . . . The powers to exclude, to tax,
and to define political rights are those over
which states acquired a monopoly in the
seventeenth century. They remain the essentials of state power and explain why state sovereignty survives today and why it is
indispensable to the international order’
(Hirst, 2005, p. 45).
jaa
Suggested reading
Agnew (2005, ch. 3); Anderson (2002); Hirst
(2005); Paasi (1996).
terrorism Organized violence that deliberately targets civilians and that is intended to
sow fear among a population for political purposes. It is a deeply contested term, because
many writers restrict the term to non-state
actors and exclude the state from the (direct)
use of such violence; they argue that since the
state lays claim to the legitimate use of physical force, then by definition it is incapable of
the deliberate targeting of a civilian population, which is an offence under international
humanitarian law (see just war). It then follows that all violent challenges to the authority
of the state, including armed resistance to
military occupation (see occupation, military), risk being identified as terrorism.
Against this, others argue more persuasively
that states have often used violence to intimidate populations, either their own or those of
other countries, through a systematic assault
on ‘enemy, ‘alien’, ‘dissident’ or ‘subversive’
bodies and their associated places. Indeed, the
term originates in the Reign of Terror carried
out by the Committee of Public Safety in
1793–4 to purge the revolutionary French republic of its ‘internal enemies’. Modern state
terror includes both: (i) the exemplary violence of colonial wars and counter-insurgency,
Stalin’s campaign of terror against dissidents
in the 1930s, the German Blitz over London,
the holocaust, the saturation bombing
of German cities such as Hamburg and
Dresden, and the nuclear bombs dropped on
Nagasaki and Hiroshima during the Second
World War (Hewitt, 1987: see also ethnic
cleansing; genocide); and also (ii) more insidious forms of violence that work to extend
the envelope of fear within their target populations through arbitrary detention, disappearance and torture (including the campaigns
perpetrated by authoritarian regimes in
Central and South America in the 1970s and
1980s, often with the support of the USA)
747
TERRORISM
(Hewitt, 2001: see also exception, space of).
In addition, and making a distinction between
its own actions and those of those states, the
USA has identified selected states as ‘sponsors’ of international terrorism – notably
Iran, Syria and North Korea.
In both cases, non-state and state, ‘terrorism’ functions as what Münkler (2005) calls a
‘term of exclusion’: its use is intended to exclude specific acts of political violence from
the sphere of political legitimacy. It follows
that the public attribution of the term depends
on the successful mobilization of imaginative
geographies that deny legitimacy (even humanity) to those who perpetrate such acts of
violence (Coleman, 2004). But terrorism is
itself deeply invested in public acknowledgement: it seeks to spread fear among a much
wider group than those who are its immediate,
physical objects of attack. It is thus a communicative strategy: ‘Terrorism is a form of warfare in which combat with weapons functions
as a drive wheel for the real combat with
images . . . The most important feature of the
recent wave of international terrorism is this
combination of violence with media presentation’ (Münkler, 2005, pp. 111–12; see also
RETORT, 2005). Hannah (2006b, p. 627)
argues that fear has become such a powerful
international weapon in our late-modern world
because the threat of indiscriminate, indeterminate violence at once ‘acknowledges and
feeds off the modern biopolitical responsibility
of states’ to protect the welfare of their own
populations: in short, terrorism is now a biopolitial strategy (see biopolitics, biopower).
Compared to mid-twentieth-century terrorism, the terrorist organizations that Münkler,
Hannah and others have in mind have been
able to launch far more destructive attacks, to
act across far greater distances and to make far
larger political demands. The 2005 Human
security report calculated that ‘significant’ international terrorist attacks increased from
seventeen in 1987 to more than 170 in 2003,
with a similarly clear, if uneven, upward trend
in numbers killed and wounded (but see
below). Terrorism continued at other scales
too, and local and regional terrorist campaigns
continued to kill and maim victims around the
world: people in africa, asia, europe and
South America had been living with terrorism
long before 11 September 2001, and domestic
terrorism in the USA also plainly pre-dates
9/11 (Nunn, 2007). But as in many other
fields, the closest analytical engagement of
human geography with terrorism was
prompted by the extraordinary reach of
748
al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon on 9/11, and subsequent
attacks by al-Qaeda and its affiliates around
the world (see figure). Three geographical responses can be distinguished:
(1) A more or less ‘popular’ geographical
imaginary cast those responsible for terrorist attacks outside any space of reason,
so that to try to explain their actions was
to exonerate them. No cause could justify such violence: the only response to
barbarians hammering at the gates of
civilization was to meet their violence
with greater violence. The cry was taken
up by others who dismissed any opposition to the enlarged powers of the security state as itself a form of terrorism, and
who enlisted the rhetoric of the ‘war on
terror’ as a means of legitimizing and
intensifying the apparatus of repression.
At its worst, this slid into an overt racism
that fanned the flames of hostility to
Arabs and Muslims in North America
and Europe. This geographical imaginary conjured up a series of ‘wild spaces’,
‘their’ spaces where deviant others supposedly scurried away in the interstices
and beyond the bounds of ‘our’ spaces
(cf. Coleman, 2004; Gregory, 2004b).
(2) An ‘expert’ or ‘managerial’ response
drew on geographical technologies
(that were also political technologies)
to profile, predict and manage the threat
of terrorism as an enduring mode of latemodern government heavily invested in
logics of security. The emphasis
was on geographies of risk assessment,
on geospatial data management and
modelling, and on the vulnerability of
biophysical and built environments to
terrorist attack (Cutter, Richardson and
Wilbanks, 2003; see also Sui, 2008).
This geographical imaginary worked to
transform ‘our’ spaces into ‘safe spaces’:
the domain of homeland security
(cf. Kaplan, 2003).
(3) A more critical response was to map the
connections between ‘their’ spaces
and ‘our’ spaces, and to unsettle the
partitions between them. This involved
explorations of the changing political
and theological ideologies of terrorist
organizations, which often involved
locating potential targets within distinctive geographical imaginaries (Hobbs,
2005); analyses of the relations between
material conditions, recruitment zones
TEXT
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Nairobi, Kenya – 7 Aug 58
Dar as Salaam, Tanzania – 7 Aug 58
Offshore of Aden, Yemen – 12 Oct 00
New York, NY – 11 Sept 01
Washington, DC – 11 Sept 01
Ciorba Island, Tunisia – 11 Aug 02
Karachi, Pakistan – 8 May 02
Karachi, Pakistan – 14 June 02
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Offshore of Aden, Yemen – 6 Oct 02
Kuta, Indonesia – 12 Oct 02
Zamboanga, Philippines – 17 Oct 02
Manila, Philippines – 18 Oct 02
Mombasa, Kenya – 28 Nov 02
Davao, Philippines – 14 Mar 02
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – 12 May 02
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Casablanca, Morocco – 14 May 03
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – 8 Nov 03
Istanbul, Turkey – 15 Nov 03
Istanbul, Turkey – 20 Nov 03
Madrid, Spain – 11 Mar 04
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – 21 Apr 04
Khobar, Saudi Arabia – 29 May 04
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
Tashkent, Uzbekistan – 30 July 04
Jakarta, Indonesia – 9 Sept 04
Taba, Egypt – 8 Oct 04
London, England – 7 July 05
Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt – 23 July 05
Kula, Indonesia – Oct 05
Amman, Jordan – 9 Nov 05
terrorism Major terrorist attacks attributed to al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations, 1998–2005
(after Hobbs and Salter, 2006)
and the locations of terrorist attacks
(Enders and Sandler, 2006; Simons and
Tucker, 2007; Watts, 2007); reconstructions of the fluid and fractured networks
through which regional and transnational terrorist groups are organized
(Ettlinger and Bosco, 2004; Hastings,
2008), including investigations of the remittance networks that have been used
to scapegoat potential sources of terrorist
finance (de Goede, 2003, 2007; Amoore
and de Goede, 2008); and examinations
of the effects of counter-terrorist strategies on the representation, built form
and everyday life of cities (Coaffee,
2004; Graham, 2006; Gray and Wyly,
2007; Katz, 2007). These contributions
are closely connected – material conditions shape but do not determine terrorist networks, for example, while
transactions monitoring infiltrates multiple spheres of everyday life – and intersect with more general critiques of the
‘war on terror’ and its extensions (e.g.
Gregory, 2004b).
The most recent Human security brief (2007)
argues that the global incidence of terrorism
has dramatically declined since 2003. Other
reports and databases suggest the opposite,
but the authors of the Brief claim that this is in
large measure a result of their inconsistent definition of ‘terrorism’. While those other surveys
count as victims of terrorism large numbers
of civilians killed by non-state actors in Iraq’s
civil war, they exclude large numbers of civilians killed by non-state actors in sub-Saharan
Africa’s civil wars (so-called ‘new wars’). They
trace this back to the US State Department,
which identifies ‘foreign terrorist organisations’ as those that threaten the security of US
citizens or the national security of the USA.
This dispute focuses attention on the controversy identified in the first paragraph, and on
the vexed distinctions between (for example)
terrorism and insurgency. These are innately
contested terms precisely because they are performative: naming political violence in these
and other ways has acutely real consequences
for recruitment and support, legitimation and
response.
dg
Suggested reading
Coleman (2004); Flint (2003b); Gregory and
Pred (2007).
text The term ‘text’ is used in human geography in both its literal sense and also in
a metaphorical sense, but the boundaries between the two usages are far from clear-cut.
749
TEXT
Like all academic disciplines, human
geography involves the interpretation of texts,
understood as a corpus of written or printed
material: first-order texts such as census records, diaries and transcriptions (conventionally called ‘sources’ – but this is misleading,
since they are complex transcriptions and codings, whose origins lie elsewhere, and they are
as often as not sedimentations of multiple,
sometimes contradictory layers of meanings);
and second-order texts (articles, monographs,
dictionaries) that offer competing interpretations of those interpretations. This may seem
commonplace, but it is not: ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ are not often included in discussions of
methodology, yet they are central to the practice of geographical enquiry. They also have
their own geographies, and Livingstone
(2005a) has argued for an historical geography
of textual circulation and interpretation.
Influenced by actor-network theory, he describes written texts as ‘immutable mobiles’,
which means that ‘knowledge does not move
around the world as an immaterial entity’.
Livingstone argues that the production and reception of texts are practices that take place in
material spaces, and that geographers should
attend to the geographical conditions of the engagement between texts and readers that transform interpretations and exclude as well as
include audiences. In another sense, of course,
this makes texts highly mutable mobiles: they are
constantly subject to new interpretations and
produce new effects (Ogborn, 2007).
These ideas have been extended still further
to treat all productions of material culture
as texts, including maps and landscapes.
This work has been influenced by poststructuralism and sees cultural productions
as unstable practices of meaning-making. Attention is focused on a multiplicity of competing meanings: hence ambiguity, volatility and
a politics of interpretation. The core argument
is that the principal characteristics of written
discourse also describe social life: meaning
in written texts is concretized through inscription, so social practices are concretized in
the material landscape; as authors’ intentions
and the reception of texts often fail to coincide, so social practices become detached from
the consciousness of agents whose collective
actions constitute such practices; written texts
are reinterpreted under changing circumstances just as social events are continually reinterpreted; and as the meaning of written texts is
unstable and dependent on interpretations of
readers, so social action and institutions are
open to a multiplicity of interpretations.
750
Post-structuralism has had a considerable
influence on the reading of maps as texts
(Harley, 1989; see cartography, history
of), but readings of landscape as text have
a more complex genealogy (Duncan and
Duncan, 1988). Although cultural geographers have long regarded landscapes as palimpsests of culture–nature interactions to be read
by specialists, notably themselves, many of
those who have adopted the metaphor of
landscape as text have eschewed the role of
the ‘expert decoder’ in favour of an ostensibly
reciprocal approach to landscape interpretation that moves in a hermeneutic circle. A
key influence here has been the recovery of
multiple layers of meaning through the thick
description of American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) rather than their destabilization through the deconstruction of
Derrida. Geertz’s hermeneutic–ethnographic
approach to culture as text has guided the
recovery of multiple readings proffered not
by experts on the history of a generic landscape type but, instead, constructed by people
who inhabit a particular landscape and who
mobilize different readings as part of a politics
that is central to its lively production and
transformation (Duncan, 1990). And yet the
recovery, reproduction and transmission of
those constructions and contestations for a
wider public audience is hardly the work of
non-experts: not only do ‘first-order’ and
‘second-order’ texts bleed into one another,
but the composite textualizations provided by
Geertz may be read as the articulations of ‘an
invisible voice of authority who declares what
the you-transformed-to-a-they experience’
(Crapanzo, 1986, p. 74; see also Gregory,
1994, pp. 147–8).
Many geographers have questioned the usefulness of the text metaphor altogether, arguing that it leads to an over-emphasis on
communication, intentionality and the discursive rather than the material or unintended
(cf. non-representational theory). Defenders of the metaphor respond by arguing that
cultural productions with text-like qualities
(such as landscapes) are heterogeneous, material realities that are mutually constitutive
with reading practices and interact with other
non-human processes. It is also argued that
landscapes are normally read inattentatively
or subconsciously, so that the norms and values that shape the landscape become naturalized and unconsciously absorbed. There are
further differences of opinion on the degree
of fluidity or stability of cultural practices
and productions, and on the extent to which
THEORY
interpretations are constrained by discourses.
However, an expansive definition of text
need not assume in advance of empirical
investigation any particular degree of stability,
instability or constraint. Fluidity versus
stability is a matter of emphasis, not an
either/or question.
jsd/dg
Suggested reading
Barnes and Duncan (1991); Duncan (1990);
Ogborn (2007).
textuality In many versions of post-structuralism, ‘textuality’ refers to the expansion
of the term ‘text’ to include cultural practices
and material productions such as architectural
forms and landscapes that may be read for
meaning, connotation and contestation (cf.
Barnes and Duncan, 1991; Duncan and
Duncan, 1998). Such meanings are regarded
as inherently unstable and incessantly
recontextualized so that defined in this way
textuality is indecidability. To investigate the
textuality of the world is to investigate the
performativity of discourse: the ways in
which meanings and objects are produced,
contested, negotiated and reiterated. To view
the world textually is also to see cultural productions as becoming detached from their
authors and reinterpreted and recontextualized by interpreters as their relations to those
productions change in often complex and unexpected ways. A textual approach thus brings
into play indeterminancy, and involves both
the denial of an unmediated access to the
world and a critical questioning of notions of
authenticity and essentialism. It focuses attention on the relations between texts and between their multiple contexts of production,
reception and reinterpretation: on the play of
intertextuality through which texts draw on
other texts which in turn draw on other
texts . . .
Textuality is sometimes seen to be compromised by the danger of textualism. This
concern has two proximate sources. First,
Said’s critique of orientalism has been
immensely influential in human geography,
not least in expanding and ‘worlding’ texts,
and asking what these cultural productions –
these ‘doings’ – do in the world. Said uses the
term ‘textuality’ in an opposite way to that
described above, however, to disparage an
over-emphasis on the mechanics of the text
at the expense of the mechanics of the material
world outside the text (cf. Smith and Katz,
1993). Second, Derrida’s famous remark
that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ has
often been used to accuse him of precisely
this sort of textualism. To the contrary,
however, Derrida’s point was that there can
be no pre-discursive, non-contextual and
non-intertextual understanding of the world:
context is vital to his method of reading texts
(see deconstruction). Worries about textualism are real enough, and serious questions
have been raised in human geography about
the limits of the text metaphor and the privileges that it smuggles in to critical enquiry
through its focus on cognition, meaning and
interpretation (see non-representational
theory).
jsd
theory
The term ‘theory’ is used in various
senses in the humanities and social sciences.
At its broadest, theory can be understood as any
set of statements and propositions used in
explanation or interpretation. From the perspective of various versions of positivism, theory is subordinated to the tribunal of empirical
validation – theories generate hypotheses that
are tested against evidence, with the aim of
generating general laws. In this tradition, the
value of a theory lies in its predictive ability
and explanatory power. In geography, this
notion of theory was associated with the
quantitative revolution, and was distinguished by the attempt to develop uniquely
geographical theories as the hallmark of a distinctively spatial science. The development of
various post-positivist approaches has led to a
shift in the meaning of theory in the discipline.
These approaches all share the view that there
can be no theory-neutral observation, and
that the validation of any theoretical proposition
is underdetermined by empirical evidence.
Rather, theories are viewed as at least partly
constitutive of the objects of empirical study
(cf. discourse). This leads towards forms of
grounded theory, wherein empirical observation,
concrete analysis and abstraction are combined
in ongoing dialogue with one another (Sayer,
1992 [1984]).
Since the 1980s, there has been a veritable
explosion of theory in human geography.
Graff (1992, p. 53) argues that theory breaks
out in disciplines when ‘what was once silently
agreed to in a community becomes disputed,
forcing its members to formulate and defend
assumptions that they previously did not even
have to be aware of’. This idea of theory
‘breaking out’ is particularly pertinent to the
increasing presence of cultural theory in
human geography (see cultural turn). This
is both a mark of heightened division within
the discipline around methods and objects of
751
THEORY
research, but also of an opening out to other
disciplines. The interdisciplinary or even postdisciplinary nature of the theory circulating
through human geography has become increasingly evident in the past two decades: if
in the 1980s the agenda of marxist-inflected
human geography focused on the spatialization
of social theory, since the 1990s the heightened geographical imagination of other disciplines has generated original contributions to
the theorization of traditional topics such as
landscape, place, space and scale (Gregory,
1994).
This pluralization of the sources of theory
has also been associated with increasing
attention to the politics of theory. From within
geography, the growth of post-positivist approaches was closely associated with Harvey’s
(1973) distinction between revolutionary,
counter-revolutionary and status-quo theories.
Geographers have also used Habermas’
(1987a) analysis of the different forms of
human interest sustained by distinct types of
theoretical knowledge, with its explicit argument that ‘critical theory’ best serves the
causes of human emancipation (see critical
theory). Human geographers’ treatment of
the relationship between theory and politics
has, however, developed beyond this idea
that some theories harbour inherent political
virtues in themselves, towards a more reflexive focus upon the forms of authority embedded in the practices of ‘doing’ theory. Three
related issues have attracted attention:
(1) Geographers have been sensitive to the
phenomenon of travelling theory. A
great deal of theory now circulating in
geography has been ‘imported’ from
other disciplines, and this in turn allows
geographers to talk across sub-disciplinary divisions and out to other scholars.
But this raises contentions questions
about expertise, competence and the external validation of positions staked internally within the discipline. Theory
also has a real geography of its own. For
example, most theory in the humanities
and social sciences is actually produced
and published in the USA, and more
broadly in ‘the West’ (Barnett and Low,
1996). Other parts of the world are often
not accorded value as sources of theoretical insight, being relegated to the status
of sites for empirical investigation. This
raises the challenge of ‘learning from
other regions’, where this refers to the
acknowledgement of versions of theoret752
ical work belonging to traditions beyond
the confines of Western Europe and
North America (Slater, 1992: see also
ethnocentrism; eurocentrism; situated knowledge).
(2) Building on this first issue, there is a set
of concerns about the types of interpersonal authority embedded in the prevalent modes of theoretical commentary in
human geography. Theory, and not least
cultural theory, is associated with forms
of mastery that construct patterns of closure, emulation and influence that belie
overt claims to political radicalism (cf. masculinism). feminist writers have been
particularly creative in developing new
styles of theoretical writing that challenge
these prevalent forms of academic reasoning (Katz, 1996: see also minor theory).
(3) In its self-consciously ‘critical’ forms in
particular, theory is often understood as
a tool for exposing the contingent, constructed qualities of phenomena, as an
instrument for debunking ideologies,
mythologies and misrepresentations. In
turn, theory is often assumed to be an
essential aspect of any practical politics
of radical social transformation. This is
indicative of a deeply rooted ‘scholastic
disposition’, whereby it is assumed that
the detached insights accorded to sceptical academics provide a privileged
entry-point for changing the motivations
of ordinary people and the mechanics of
worldly processes (Bourdieu, 2000). In
response to this sort of scholastic attitude, Thrift (1999a, p. 304) recommends
what he calls modest theory, understood as
a ‘practical means of going on rather
than something concerned with enabling
us to see, contemplatively, the supposedly true nature of what something
is’. non-representational theory is
meant to exemplify this notion of modest
theoretical practice. However, its characteristic modes of presentation reiterate
many of the rhetorical devices of distinction and exclusion associated with conventional forms of grand theory.
geography remains a discipline deeply suspicious of theory, heavily invested as it is in
notions such as ‘the field’, ‘empirical work’,
‘politics’ and ‘practice’. These notions are
often invoked to sustain their own forms of
authority, closure and exclusion. Debates
about relevance in the discipline often take the
form of arguments that there is too much theory
THIRD SPACE
in geography, or too much of the wrong sort of
theory. When faced with such arguments, it is
always best to remember a simple dictum: ‘Hostility to theory usually means opposition to
other people’s theories and an oblivion to one’s
own’ (Eagleton 1983, p. viii).
cb
Suggested reading
Bourdieu (2000, chs 1 and 2); Gallop (2002);
Garber (2001); Hammersley (1995).
thick description A term coined by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1971) and introduced
into the humanities and social sciences by the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973b), ‘thick
description’ refers to rich ethnographic descriptions based on intensive investigations of
informants’ actions and their interpretations
of their own practices placed within their cultural context. It is an intrinsically hermeneutic method that recovers and represents
the researcher’s interpretation of informants’
interpretations.
Thick description is contrasted with ‘thin
description’ based on the tenets of behaviourism, where a detailed description of the informants’ contextualized meaning systems is
considered unnecessary (cf. behavioural
geography). Thick description is usually produced through grounded, long-term ethnographic research, based on (principally)
qualitative methods applied to small-scale
settings (see ethnography), but it has also
been used in intimate, archive-based historical
research with considerable success (Darnton,
1985). Thick description is not simply about
collecting details: it is about uncovering the
depth of multiple, intersecting webs of meaning within which individual actors understand
their own actions. Geertz conceives of individual behaviour as informed by complex, situated conceptual structures that are culturally
and historically produced. As such, behavior is
best interrogated contextually to reveal the systematic quality of ‘cultural patternings’ that are
‘extra-personal institutionalized guides for behavior’. These are emphatically not ‘essences’
of broader cultures studied in a microcosm, the
‘Jonesville is America writ small’ model that
Geertz dismisses as ‘palpable nonsense’. An
important implication of this cultural patterning is that social life has a public, text-like
quality to which all who share in a culture
interpret, negotiate and contribute. It then follows that ethnographers and other like-minded
scholars must ‘read over the shoulder’ of those
whose culture they study. Cultures as meaning
systems intertextually infuse all forms of social
practice, and Geertz also saw cultural texts as
literary texts to be looked at critically and not
just through. Such a textual orientation (see
textuality) made him an important early
figure in the cultural turn across the social
sciences, and in opening up conversations
between the social sciences and the humanities. Geertz’s influence spread well beyond
anthropology into the work of the New
Historicists in literary studies and the work of
the New Cultural Historians (see historicism). In cultural geography, his writings
influenced Duncan’s (2004) interpretation of
the symbolic/political system of the Kandyan
kingdom in Sri Lanka.
Geertz’s ‘cultural patterning’ perspective
has been critiqued in anthropology for allowing little space for the inner, private, noncultural components of the self. Thus while
Geertz was instrumental in shifting anthropology from a focus on social structure to the
interpretation of meanings, his analysis remains somewhat structural. However, this is
not to say his approach is at all reductionist
or determinist. He rejects tight arguments
and conceptualizations ‘purified of the material complexity in which they are located’.
He sees structures of meaning as historically
specific, fluid, fragmentary, negotiated and
situational. The researcher’s interpretations
are interpretations of the interpretations of
others and thus are always open to contestation and deeper grounding in ongoing, changing cultural meanings systems. That said,
among human geographers the textual conception of culture that underpins Geertz’s project has been critiqued by Gregory (1994,
pp. 148–8) for its structural stasis and by
Rose (2006) for its emphasis on representation, meanings and consciousness (cf. nonrepresentational theory).
jsd
Suggested reading
Geertz (1973a,b); Rose (2006).
third space A space produced by processes
that exceed the forms of knowledge that divide
the world into binary oppositions. Bhabha
(1990b) argues that third space is a consequence of hybridity, suggesting that certain
forms of post-colonial knowledges challenge
the division of the world into ‘the west
and the rest’ by producing third spaces in
which new identities can be enacted (see
post-colonialism). For Bhabha, third space
is a position from which it may be possible ‘to
elude the politics of polarity and emerge
as others of ourselves’ (1994, p. 39). Some
753
THIRD WORLD
geographers have used the term to displace
oppositional categories in geographical analysis, such as the opposition between academic
theorizing and political activism (Routledge,
1996b; see also Pile, 1994; and see activism).
Hyndman (2003) argues that feminist geopolitics represents a third space in the context of the war on terrorism, beyond the
binaries of either/or, here/there and us/them
(see feminist geographies). Rather than promote an oppositional stance in relation to particular political principles or acts, the third
space attempts to map the silences of the dominant geopolitical positions and undo these by
invoking multiple scales of enquiry and
knowledge production.
Third spaces also challenge conventional
understandings of the world by reconceptualizing ways of thinking about space. For
Soja (1996b), drawing on Lefebvre (1991b),
the notion of third space disrupts many of the
binaries through which geographers have often
conceptualized space itself (see also production of space). The third space is simultaneously material and symbolic, and also
eludes the distinction Soja detects in much
Western philosophy between dynamic time
and static space. For Soja (1996b, p. 11),
third space is ‘simultaneously real and
imagined and more’. This ‘more’ is where
Soja locates the critical potential of third
space: it is more because it both contains binary ways of thinking about space but also
exceeds them with a lived intractability to
interpretative schemas that allows for potentially emancipatory practices. However, third
spaces are not always emancipatory formations: Gregory (2004b) argues that detention
camps such as Camp X-ray at Guantanamo
Bay are extraterritorial – liminal places that are
within sovereign states yet outside of those
states’ judicial norms.
pr
Third World
A term first used by French
economist Alfred Sauvy in 1952 to locate a
group of countries not formally aligned with
the USA or the Soviet Union in the cold war,
and not always attached to capitalism or socialism as defining economic models. The
first Prime Minister of independent India,
Jawaharlal Nehru, was a key figure in both
these projects. He played a leading role in the
Non-Aligned Movement, whose inaugural
meetings were held at Bandung in Indonesia
in 1955. He also called for a ‘third way’ of
promoting economic development – that of
planning under a system of democratic socialism – long before ideas of a Third Way were
754
popularized by US President Bill Clinton and
British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The initial concept of a Third World as a
new Third Estate has been consistently
reworked since its introduction into public discourse (Mintz, 1976; Pletsch, 1981). Many of
its initially positive connotations were diminished in the 1960s. They were replaced by an
idea of the Third World that located a group of
countries in asia, africa and latin america in
terms of certain presumed absences. These
countries were lacking in infrastructure,
lacking in education and healthcare systems,
lacking in fiscal resources or foreign exchange,
lacking in skills and so on. As such, they
needed to be mended, both by their own governments and by donor agencies and military
personnel from the First and Second Worlds.
This conception of the Third World has
fallen from favour over the past thirty years.
Peter Bauer, an economist associated with the
counter-revolution in development theory and
policy, argued consistently in the 1970s that
the giving and receiving of foreign aid invented
the Third World. Worse, in his view, it turned
the Third World into a supplicant (Bauer,
1974). It deprived African and Asian countries
of the motivation to pull their own peoples out
of poverty by means of market-led economic
growth. In the 1990s this argument was given
fresh legs by Arturo Escobar, one of the leading theorists of post-development. Escobar
(1995) argued that the Third World had
been invented by American aid programmes
and Cold War geopolitics. It had been infantilized and pathologized by a ‘discourse of
development’ that ‘discovered mass poverty’
throughout this apparently uniform geographical and social space. Large parts of it had also
been turned into battlegrounds in the struggle
between the USA and the Soviet Union (literally so in various proxy wars).
Escobar recognizes that some Third World
countries have turned this form of identification to their own advantage, not least through
the politics of Third Worldism. This is a common strategy of subaltern social groups and it
found expression in the 1970s in Southern
demands for a New International Economic
Order. Escobar, however, is more inclined to
think outside the confines of the ‘Third World/
Third Worldism’ categories. In his view, it is
important to create new spaces for social
and economic action in what he calls ‘the less
economically accomplished countries’. Others
have suggested that the Third World should be
renamed as the Two-Thirds World, and that it
should not be restricted to the ex-colonial
TIME
world. If poverty is a defining feature of the
(Two-)Third(s) – or ‘majority’ - World, it is to
be found in countries across the globe and not
just in the global south.
sco
Suggested reading
Gilman (2003); Power (2003).
Tiebout model An argument for dividing
an area among local government units that
compete for land users through the range
of ‘service-taxation packages’ offered (see
competitive advantage). Charles Tiebout
(1924–68: see Tiebout, 1956) argued that
inability to respond to the diversity of demands for public goods and services (and
differing willingness to pay for them) generated by a heterogeneous population makes
large
local
governments
inefficient.
Fragmentation of local government within
urban areas is more efficient: each unit tailors
the services offered and its taxation demands
to a particular population sector and people
choose which they prefer (cf. fiscal migration). The model assumes full information
about the range of ‘packages’ on offer and
no mobility constraints – which considerably
limit its empirical applicability. Fragmented
local government systems are frequently manipulated by the affluent and powerful to create ‘tax havens’ from which, however, the less
well-off are excluded (cf. zoning).
rj
Suggested reading
See http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/VIP/
Tiebout.html and http://www.csiss.org/classics/
content/43.
time The concept of time has been relegated
to an implied and secondary status in discourses about the philosophy of geography
ever since the path-breaking work of Immanuel
Kant in the second half of the eighteenth century. Arguing that both time and space are
distinct and necessary a priori notions, rather
than substances, for any understanding of
human experience, Kant paved the way for
the creation of separate academic disciplines
addressing spatial rather than temporal questions in the nineteenth century. Advances in
many of the sciences during the twentieth
century questioned both the validity and the
wisdom of a categorical distinction between
space and time, however, notably the work on
‘spacetime’ by Hermann Minkowski (18641909) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955), and
on ‘lived time’ by Jean Piaget (1896-1980),
and paved the way for more relativist and
relational accounts. Although in practice the
Kantian separation between time and space
advocated by Hartshorne (1939) never hindered concrete geographical research (see historical geography), a theoretical attempt to
reconcile both was not launched until the
1970s and early 1980s as ‘time-geography’.
Emanating chiefly from Sweden but gaining
wide acceptance especially in Anglophone
human geography (Carlstein, Parkes and
Thrift, 1978), time-geography originated in
the work of Torsten Hägerstrand (1970). At
its roots is the realization that the spatiotemporal choreography of individual paths
through everyday life is constrained in a variety of forms; their visualization becomes a
first heuristic step towards dissecting concrete
power relations operating within society. The
broad appeal of time-geography can be measured by its incorporation into the framework
of structuration theory (Pred, 1984).
The interrelationship between space and time
can be seen in many cultural practices. It was
clearly demonstrated by the establishment of
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in 1675,
which set a marker for many subsequent geographical designations and culminated in the
binding arbitration of global time zones in
1884. The fact that such a system, which was
both locally and globally applicable, was centrally involved in colonial conquests, the rise of
capitalism or in the gendering of social relations, is now well documented (Adam, 2006).
Knowing where one was at any one given time
was a prerequisite to ordering, hierarchically
structuring and eventually commodifying daily
routines, flows of goods and capital and something as mundane as travelling from A to B.
The standardization of time is connected
with the rise of railroad technologies in the
nineteenth century. At the beginning of that
century time was still measured locally, and
thus more accurately, but by the beginning of
the twentieth century most nations had
adopted some national time or time zones (although calendars remain mired in cultural traditions to this day). Structurally akin to similar
attempts to de-localize or de-nationalize spatial measurements – to wit, the standardization
of the metre in 1889 – such developments
ultimately paved the way for the all but universal adoption of ‘clocked time’, which has
since held sway over modern experiences, and
has perhaps most poignantly been criticized by
Charlie Chaplin in his 1936 film Modern times
(Glennie and Thrift, 2005, 2009: see also
modernity). However, globalization, and
the changing geographies brought about by
755
TIME-GEOGRAPHY
the spread of the Internet, have both altered
the geographical experience of time and arguably led to new geographical realities. To some
extent irrespective of geographical location,
the experience of simultaneity may be shared
by people living in most ‘core’ urban areas
of the world – and is used by stock market
traders on a 24/7 basis to further their economic gains.
us
Suggested reading
Adam (2006); May and Thrift (2001).
time-geography An approach to human
geography treating time and space as resources directly involved in the constitution
of social life. It was developed by the Swedish
geographer Torsten Hägerstrand and his associates at the University of Lund during the
1960s and 1970s (Hägerstrand and
Lenntorp, 1974). Time-geography is not supposed to be a theory, but rather an ontological contribution focusing on how
different phenomena are mutually modified
because they coexist in time and space. As
such, Hägerstrand attributed a certain naturalism to the approach, characterizing it as a
‘topoecology’ designated to grasp a society–
nature–technology constellation. He acknowledged an affinity with phenomenology but
still argued for a physical approach to the social world (Hägerstrand, 1982).
Time-geography was developed in relation
to empirical work and an intensive involvement
in Swedish planning. Its basic element is connections between continuous trajectories of
individual entities in time–space. From these,
descriptive concepts were developed, such as
paths, stations, projects, prisms, time–space bundles
and time–space domains. They constitute a
world view on the human condition stating
that everybody is subject to confinement in
time–space within the limits formed by the
bounded capacity of individuals to engage in
more than one task at a time, by the speeds at
which it is possible to move and assemble individuals, tools and materials, and by regulations
of access and modes of conduct within domains of local order. Most well-known is the
translation of this view into a non-linguistic
notation system representing possible configurations in time–space (see figure). It proved a
useful tool in planning and was heavily used
also in early feminist geographies of time–
space constraints in women’s everyday life.
While time-geography’s representational potential is widely acknowledged, its metaphysical
basis has been severely criticised. Two streams
756
time-geography Hägerstrand’s web model
of criticism have prevailed. One points to a
problematic relationship to social theory,
and especially how the naturalism or ‘physicalism’ of the approach leads to a defective conception of human thought-and-action and
erodes the possibility of developing a social
understanding of time–space (Gregory,
1985). The other line of criticism charges
time-geography with masculinism (Rose,
1993). It regards time-geography as a visual
strategy that renders space objective and transparent (see vision and visuality). Furthermore, the moving bodies of time-geography
are seen as ‘imaginary bodies’; ‘universal’ and
deprived of social and cultural markings of
‘race’, gender and sexuality.
Some geographers have sought to develop
more socialized versions of time-geography.
In the 1980s, these attempts often relied
upon a convergence with structuration theory. Perhaps the most prominent of these
attempts came from Allan Pred (e.g. 1986),
who studied agrarian and urban change in
nineteenth-century Sweden as an interaction
between social restructuring, everyday routines and the production of meaning. Since
the 1980s interest in time-geography has been
renewed on two levels. First, its descriptive
capacity has been developed through GISbased technologies and 3-D visualizations
of human activity patterns. Second, Hägerstrand’s emphasis on encountering, events
TIME–SPACE COMPRESSION
and human/non-human connectivity resonates with new ontologies with a naturalist
twist, such as actor-network theory and
non-representational theory.
ks
Suggested reading
and twentieth centuries, and what he called ‘aesthetic distance’ was in its turn compressed by a
corresponding stress on ‘immediacy, impact,
sensation and simultaneity’ that was characteristic of the cultural formations of modernism.
Harvey took this account further by:
Dyck (1990); Hägerstrand (1985).
time^space compression An increase in the
speed of social life and a diminution in the
constraining effects of distance on human activities. Processes of this kind have a long and
varied history, but when David Harvey
(1989b) first proposed the term, his primary
purpose was to designate the product of what
Marx saw as the compulsion to ‘annihilate
space by time’ under capitalism. Marx famously described capitalist modernity as a
world in which ‘all that is solid melts into
air’, but Harvey showed how this extraordinary volatility – the accelerating rhythm of social change – is connected through the restless
expansion of capital accumulation to farreaching transformations in the structures of
an increasingly global space-economy.
Harvey explained that he deliberately used
the word ‘compression’ because ‘a strong
case can be made that the history of capitalism
has been characterized by speed-up in the
pace of life, while so overcoming barriers that
the world sometimes seems to collapse in
upon us’. These are ‘processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and
time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in
quite radical ways, how we represent the world
to ourselves’. Harvey thus intended the concept to have an experiential dimension that is
missing from related concepts such as timespace convergence and time-space distanciation. He paid particular attention to the
ways in which time–space compression dislocates the modern habitus that gives social
life its precarious coherence: implicated in a
crisis of representation (‘how we represent the
world to ourselves’), the consequences of
time–space compression are supposed to be
disturbing, even threatening; time–space compression is a ‘maelstrom’ and a ‘tiger’ that
induces ‘foreboding’, ‘shock’, a ‘sense of collapse’ and even ‘terror’ that, at the limit, translates into a ‘crisis of identity’ (Harvey,
1989b, 1990, 1996).
Harvey was radicalizing an argument proposed by the conservative critic Daniel Bell in
The cultural contradictions of capitalism (1978).
In Bell’s view, ‘physical distance’ was ‘compressed’ by new systems of transportation and
communication at the turn of the nineteenth
wiring cultural crises of representation to
basal crises of capital accumulation (see
crisis); and
reading the cultural formations of postmodernism as symptoms of the heightened
intensity of a new round of time–space
compression produced by a regime of
flexible accumulation at the close of
the twentieth century (see Gregory, 1994,
pp. 406–14).
Harvey’s theses have been subjected to both
critique and development:
(1) Some feminist geographers have been
sceptical of Harvey’s view of time–space
compression as threatening, and seen his
‘cartographic anxiety’ as symptomatic of a
challenge to the confident masculinism of
mainstream theorizing (Deutsche, 1996a)
(cf. cartographic reason). This has fed in
to a recognition of the multiple registers
through which time–space compression is
socially differentiated, and Massey (1993)
proposed a comprehensive grid of agency
and affect, position and power that she
called the ‘power-geometry of time–
space compression’ (cf. Bridge, 1997).
(2) These objections intersected with alternative theorizations of place. Some
critics complained that the containing
metaphor of time–space compression
represented place as a bounded site
whose ‘essential identity’ is hollowed
out by the powerful forces of capitalist
globalization. To Gibson-Graham
(2006a [1996]), this scenario enacts a
‘rape- script’ that ‘normalizes an act of
non-reciprocal penetration’: all noncapitalist forms are construed as ‘sites of
potential invasion, envelopment, accumulation’, victims awaiting their violation. This
evidently militates against the very politics
that Harvey is concerned to advance
(but cf. Harvey, 1996, pp. 291–326).
Others argued that the original metaphor distracted attention from the production of more open, so-called ‘global’
conceptions of place in which the intimate and the impersonal, the virtual and
the corporeal, the near and the far are
757
TIME–SPACE CONVERGENCE
reassembled in new constellations. In a
parallel series of essays that centred on
the technical transformations in the circulation of money that lie at the heart of
Harvey’s theses, for example, Thrift
(1997a) showed that ‘new forms of electronic detachment have produced new
forms of social involvement’: that contemporary processes of time–space compression still depend on the intimacy of
interpersonal contact.
(3) These contributions emphasize that
time–space compression is spatially differentiated. Harvey’s original account of ‘the
shrinking world’ focused on the global
north and was insensitive to the multiple and compound geographies of
time–space compression, but since then
he has provided more nuanced discussions that pay closer attention to the
global south and to the politico-military
carapace of contemporary accumulation
by dispossession (Harvey, 2003b, 2005;
cf. Agnew, 2001; see primitive accumulation). Harvey continues to emphasize
the political economy of time–space
compression, and while it is not necessary to accept Massey’s (1993, p. 60)
characterization of this as an ‘economism’, time–space compression does
have other vital dimensions that are connected but cannot be reduced to the
logics of capital. Late-modern war
emphasizes the enhanced power of military violence over time and space, for
example, and the formation of transnational public spheres reveals the importance of global flows of images and
information to the formation of network societies. All of these dimensions
have their own hierarchies, margins
and exclusions – hence the crucial importance of positionality (Sheppard,
2002) – and these variable topologies
imply that time–space compression operates alongside processes of time–space
expansion.
dg
Suggested reading
Agnew (2001); Harvey (1989b, chs 15–17).
time^space convergence A decrease in the
friction of distance between places. As this
definition suggests, the concept originated
within spatial science, where it was first
formulated by Douglas Janelle (1968). He
defined the convergence rate between two
758
locations as the average rate at which the
time needed to travel between them decreases
over time: the measure was supposed to be
‘mathematically analogous to velocity as defined by the physicist’.
Janelle (1969) attributed time–space convergence to technical change: ‘as a result of
transport innovation, places approach each
other in time–space’. Janelle showed that
time–space convergence is usually discontinuous in time – convergence curves are typically
jagged, corresponding to pulses of technical
innovation – and uneven over space: ‘Any
transport improvement will tend to be of
greatest advantage to the highest-ordered
centre that it connects’ (Janelle, 1968). Forer
(1974) noted that the converse is also true –
that time–space convergence is partly a function
of the hierarchical structure of the settlement
system – so that Janelle’s model of ‘spatial
reorganization’ entailed a double movement in
which ‘places define spaces’ and spaces in turn
progressively ‘redefine’ places.
Other geographers distinguished distanceconvergence from cost-convergence and identified
a pervasive tendency for the friction of distance to decrease under the sign of modernity. Since the friction of distance is a
fundamental postulate of classical central
place theory, diffusion theory and location theory – it is, after all, what makes the
identification of spatial patterns possible –
time–space convergence was supposed to
‘scramble’ and ‘play havoc’ with these standard geometric models (Falk and Abler, 1980).
Time–space convergence was thus linked to a
concept of plastic space: ‘a space defined by
separation in time or cost terms, a space
which the progressions and regressions of
technology make one of continuous flux’
(Forer, 1978).
These were simple but suggestive ideas, yet
Forer (1978) suggested that most contemporary geographers had paid little attention to
them because they addressed ‘the larger canvas of economic history and the long-term
development of society’. Ironically, however,
it was precisely those links that turned out to
be most important. Pred (1973) had already
provided an imaginative reconstruction of the
changing time-lags within the circulation of
public information through major newspapers
published on the eastern seaboard of the
USA between 1790 and 1840. Although his
studies mapped the geography of time–space
convergence and its hierarchical structure,
and made explicit reference to Janelle’s contributions, Pred was more interested in the
TIME–SPACE DISTANCIATION
time–space convergence
politico-economic and cultural implications of
time–space convergence than in the geometric
structures that preoccupied the original architects of the concept. For much the same reason, calibrations of time–space convergence
are now more likely to be situated within the
conceptual field of time__space compression
that directly addresses such concerns.
dg
Suggested reading
Brunn and Leinbach (1991); Janelle (1969).
time^space distanciation A term proposed
by British sociologist Anthony Giddens to describe the ‘stretching’ of social systems across
time and space. The concept played a central
role in his critique of modern social theory
and the development of his rival structuration theory. Giddens argued that conventional social theory was strongly influenced
by forms of functionalism, which assumed
that societies are coherent and bounded
systems, and by models of social change that
presumed that the basic structural dimensions
of societies are internal to those systems.
Time–space distanciation was intended to confound both claims: ‘The nexus of relations –
political, economic or military – in which a
society exists with others is usually integral to
the very nature of that society’ and, indeed, ‘to
what ‘‘societies’’ are conceived to be’ (Giddens,
1981). Today this is a commonplace in most
of human geography, though it has been
developed in ways that have moved far from
Giddens’ own formulations, but there are
nonetheless affinities between time–space
distanciation and concepts of time__space
compression and time__space convergence.
There are also two significant differences.
(1) ‘Time–space distanciation’ draws attention to the capacity for social life to extend
over time as well as space in ways that are
not limited to the contemplation of a
759
TIME–SPACE EXPANSION
modern world in which ‘all that is solid
melts into air’, and where a dizzying spiral
of accelerating change sustains the ‘vertigo of the modern’ as a cultural dominant. For Giddens also emphasized the
importance of archives, record-keeping
and surveillance to the conduct of social
life, so that (in principle, at least) time–
space distanciation connects more directly the roles of governmentality and
memory in late modernity than either of
the other two concepts.
(2) Giddens offered an outline sketch of the
historical trajectory of time–space distanciation that was also intended to be an
analytical map of different types of society. In contrast, discussions of time–space
compression have largely been limited to
its role within contemporary capitalism,
while time–space convergence is a purely
formal concept concerned with calibrating convergence rather than examining its
constitution within different societies.
Giddens claimed that tribal societies are characterized by low levels of time–space distanciation – the capacity for social memory is limited
and most interactions are localized – and by
little substantive distinction between ‘political’
and ‘economic’ power. With the emergence of
class-divided societies such as those of European
feudalism, the level of time–space distanciation increases, largely through the political
powers extended to and through the state.
The transition to the class societies of capitalism
is achieved through the greater prominence of
economic power, especially through industrialization, and is marked by much higher levels
of time–space distanciation. In his early texts,
Giddens (1984, 1985) emphasized the mobilization of systems of writing, recording and
surveillance (modalities of ‘political power’)
and systems of monetization and commodification (modalities of ‘economic power’), but in
his later texts he became much more interested
in the constitution of contemporary or ‘high’
modernity. There, Giddens (1990, 1991) distinguished between:
expert systems, which ‘bracket time and
space through deploying modes of technical knowledge which have validity independent of the practitioners and clients
who make use of them’; and
symbolic tokens, which are ‘media of exchange which have standard value and thus
are interchangeable across a plurality of
contexts’.
760
Together, these constituted abstract systems
which, so Giddens argued, penetrate all aspects of everyday life and in so doing undermine local practices and local knowledges;
they dissolve the ties that once held the conditions of daily life in place and recombine
them across much larger expanses of space
(cf. globalization).
Giddens’ argumentation-sketch has been
subject to several criticisms. The most common
objection is that it lacks sufficient historical
and geographical specificity (cf. Harris,
1991). In treating space as a gap to be overcome, it represents space as a barrier to interaction – as a void to be transcended,
incorporated and subjugated – and in doing
so activates conventional conceptions of place
and space (cf. contrapuntal geographies)
and repeats the characteristic movement of
Western master-narratives more generally to
recover what eludes them as lacunae, margins,
‘blank spaces’ on the map. This intersects with
sustained objections to the eurocentrism of
Giddens’ formulations. The trajectory of
time–space distanciation traces a move away
from the immediate and the intimate, but this
is an implausible view of non-modern societies
and, as Giddens subsequently conceded, it
also fails to recognize the continued importance of face-to-face interaction and intimacy
in late modernity. Finally, time–space distanciation, like structuration theory more generally, privileges modalities of political and
economic power and fails to explore the significance of the cultural formations that have
been centrally involved in processes of globalization and the constitution of modernity. dg
Suggested reading
Giddens (1984, chs 4 and 5); Harris (1991).
time^space expansion A concept proposed
as (1) the corollary and (2) the dual of
time__space compression.
(1) Dodgshon (1998) proposed time–space
expansion as the corollary of time–space
compression. The modern world may be
one of intensifying change and volatility,
as Harvey’s (1989b) original account of
time–space compression suggests, but
this entails more than an emphasis on the
transient, the fleeting, the ‘now’: for the
modern science that powers many of those
transformations has also produced a
heightened awareness of the immensity
of time and of human history. For the
privileged, the modern world may be
TOPOGRAPHIC MAP
increasingly frictionless, even ‘flat’ as
global travel and communication increases, but in consequence ‘what was
once thought to be an experience of the
geographical world in its totality has been
re-proportioned into what is simply local’.
In sum, Dodgshon (1998, p. 117) insists,
time–space compression means that ‘culturally, we are now more aware of time and
space as dimensions that have extension’.
(2) In contrast, other writers treat time–space
expansion as the dual of time–space compression. They recognize that powergeometry is highly variable, and in particular that the power to compress distance is also often the power to expand
distance. The unidirectional logic of
time–space compression requires distance to contract under the spasmodic
compulsions of global capitalism to
reduce circulation time, but images of
‘the shrinking world’ have become so
powerful and pervasive that they can obscure the ways in which, for millions of
people, the imperatives of globalization
can force their world to expand in ways
that threaten to become unbearable. Katz
(2001a) draws on her experience in
‘Howa’, a village in Sudan, to argue that:
From the vantage point of capital, the world
may be shrinking but, on the marooned
grounds of Howa, it appeared to be getting
bigger every day. After a gruelling decade
and a half of structural adjustments and
political upheaval in Sudan, people in Howa
survived by maintaining a semblance of the
patterns and practices of production that had
long sustained them . . . But this was only viable now if carried out over an extended
physical arena. The terrain of social production and reproduction had expanded from
perhaps five kilometres in 1980 to two hundred kilometres by 1995, the distance men
routinely travelled to participate in the charcoal trade. Time–space expansion also
represented a transformation of the old constellation of activities that involved men’s
long absences from the village. People still
farmed (but also worked as agricultural laborers up to a hundred kilometres away),
kept animals (by sending them out with relatives to distant pastures) and cut wood (but
now in areas of the South targeted for deforestation as part of the northern government’s
war effort). (Katz, 2001, p. 1224)
For Katz, therefore, ‘time–space expansion embraces, reworks and plays into the
altered geographies of globalization’.
Contemporary capitalism involves dialectical torsions of time–space compression
and time–space expansion (see dialectic)
that produce spirals of advantage and
marginalization: ‘If in one way the known
world expanded for people in Howa, in
others their place in it receded as their village
was increasingly marginalized’ (p. 1225).
Time–space expansion happens not only
within a relative space punctuated by the
differential geographies of time–space compression, however, but also through the proliferating partitions of an intrinsically colonial
modernity. ‘If global capitalism is aggressively de-territorializing, moving ever outwards
in a process of ceaseless expansion and furiously tearing down barriers to capital accumulation, then colonial modernity is intrinsically
territorializing, forever installing partitions
between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ ’ (Gregory, 2004a,
p. 253). Those who live under military occupation (see occupation, military) know this
very well, as they are caught in curfews or
lockdowns and wait in line at checkpoints:
time seems to stop, punctuated by one emergency after another, and the ordinary paths of
everyday life are blocked or redirected. In
occupied Palestine, for example, ‘as the illegal
settlements are wired ever more tightly into
Israel, Palestinians are made to undergo an
intensified spasm of time-space expansion:
families, friends and neighbours cut off
from one another; farmers separated from
their fields and their wells’ (Gregory, 2004c,
p. 604). Those who try to flee the politicoeconomic deformations described by Katz and
the politico-military oppressions described by
Gregory are peculiarly vulnerable to the despair
of time–space expansion. ‘The globe shrinks
for those who own it,’ Bhabha (1992, p. 88)
remarks, but ‘for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is
more awesome than the few feet across borders
or frontiers’ (cf. Hyndman, 1997: see also
migration; refugee).
dg
topographic map A large- or intermediatescale map describing the most important physical and cultural features of a place or region.
Largely a product of national or provincial governments, topographic maps support national
defence, economic development, environmental science and growth management as well as
providing data for compiling less detailed,
smaller-scale maps. Typically compiled from
aerial photography, they use contour lines (see
isoline) to describe the land surface and
761
TOPOGRAPHY
abstract symbols to represent roads, railways,
political boundaries and hydrographic features
such as rivers, streams and lakes (Collier, Forrest
and Pearson, 2003). Toponyms (place names
and feature names) reflect local usage as well as
government efforts to standardize spelling and
nomenclature (Monmonier, 2006).
mm
Suggested reading
Forrest and Kinninment (2001).
topography The detailed study and description of a place as much as to the materiality of its features or landforms more
generally. In recent years, topography has
been mobilized as a research method, ‘to
carry out a detailed examination of some part
of the material world, defined at any scale
from the body to the globe, in order to understand its salient features and their mutual and
broader relationships’ (Katz, 2001, p. 1228).
In this sense, it has been used in critical
human geography to delineate the social production of localities as much as the knowledge
about them, understanding both to be the
contested outcomes of particular interests
and actors. The intent is to discern the sedimented process of place-formation from the
locality itself and in so doing, situate ‘places
in their broader context and in relation to
other areas and geographic scales’, thereby
offering a means of understanding structure
and process simultaneously (Katz, 2001,
p. 1228). Just as topographic maps connect
sites of equal elevation through contour lines,
so too can particular relationships across localities be revealed and examined using topography. That is, the trace or effects of
particular processes on various places can be
demonstrated through this methodology to
suggest their translocal bearing. This understanding led to the notion of ‘counter-topographies’, which are seen as a way to theorize
the connectedness of disparate places by virtue
of their relationship to a particular political–
economic or social process, such as democratic inclusion, privatization or gentrification. Focusing on the de-skilling of young
people, for instance, Katz (2001a) produced
a counter-topography linking New York City
and rural Sudan. The connections drawn are
analytical rather than homogenizations.
Counter-topographies are concrete abstractions that offer a means of recognizing
the historical and geographical specificities of
particular places while also enabling the inference of their connections in relation to specific
material social practices. The intent in linking
762
different places analytically is to produce an
alternative geographical and political imagination that might work translocally in the name
of common interests (cf. Pratt, 2004; also contrapuntal geographies). The geographical
imagination associated with topography as a
method and the political possibilities of counter-topographies as concrete abstractions have
been best realized by feminist geographers.
Looking at political transformation in Mexico,
Lise Nelson (2004) drew out a topographical
analysis to examine the historical experiences
of rural women engaging in regional and even
national commerce, and the ways in which
their engagements led to reconfigurations of
their subjectivities along with the contours of
their political practices. Her work demonstrates how ‘the shifting norms and practices
of gender and citizenship’ in a single place
both propel and are propelled by changing
local–global dynamics. Telling far ‘more than
a ‘‘local’’ story’, the renegotiations of subjectivity reveal as they alter the social relations of
power and difference across scale (Nelson,
2004, pp. 180–2). Pratt and Yeoh (2003)
use topography as a means of examining
transnationalism with greater specificity
and attentiveness to difference. Revealing the
‘multistranded connections transnational subjects make’ as they move across space and
scale, they develop the notion of ‘comparative
transnationalisms’, and theorize their diverse
but interconnected manifestations on the
ground (Pratt and Yeoh, 2003, p. 164).
ck
Suggested reading
Katz (2001); Nagar and Swarr (2005).
topology A field of mathematics studying
the spatial properties of an object or network
that remain true when that object is stretched.
These include connectivity and adjacency.
Imagine stretching a rubber band between
two fingers. Likening the band to a vector
line segment, then the start node (the one
end) remains connected to the other despite
the stretching. Treating the band as a polygon,
the one side remains to the left of the other
throughout. Topological encoding is useful in
GIS for error trapping and spatial queries.
networks may be represented as graphs and
analysed using graph theory.
rh
Suggested reading
Wise (2002).
topophilia A term coined by geographer
Yi-Fu Tuan (1974, p. 4) to describe the
TOURISM
‘human love of place’ (see place) or ‘the
affective bond between people and place’
(cf. affect). Tuan argued that this bond
varies in intensity among individuals and in
its cultural expression, and suggested that
such attachment can be based on aesthetic
appreciation, memory, pride of ownership or
dependence on a place for one’s livelihood or
security. Topophilia is not only a response
to place, Tuan insisted, but also actively
produces places for people. Its converse,
topocide, was proposed by Porteous (1998)
to describe the annihilation of those bonds
and the places to which they are attached
(cf. urbicide). Topophilia is closely associated with the humanistic geography of the
1970s.
jsd
tourism
Tourism has been defined as ‘the
activities of persons traveling to and staying in
places outside of their usual environment for
not more than one consecutive year for leisure,
business and other purposes’ (UN World
Tourism Organization, 1994). This relational
definition positions tourism as contrasted to
other travel and leisure practices. Thus travel
for pleasure without staying tends to be defined
as leisure, whilst organized activities for pleasure at home tend to be called recreation.
Travel without return is migration, whilst
temporary travel leading to residence for work
over a year is to be a sojourner. The utility of
this definition is enabling the counting and
mapping of tourist flows – arrivals, stays and
departures. However, this a very limited approach to tourism. First, as a typology of travel
it tidies away a wealth of practices that elide the
differences of these categories. Second, there are
distinctions among tourists. Third, it fails to
capture the dynamic of the relationship of tourists to the people and places that they visit.
The first problem is that the practices and
organization of tourism exceed its categories.
It may be the largest industry on the planet,
but it is a very diffuse industry. Thus tourist
attractions may also serve local populations –
facilities that serve tourist needs (such as restaurants or hotels) may serve local needs as
well. Amidst what tourists do, there are a
wealth of different interests and activities.
Thus much tourist time may well be pursuing
‘normal’ activities (such as child care, cleaning
or cooking). Equally, the edges of what is tourism are very fuzzy, so that local people might
approach their local environment for pleasure
like a tourist. Meanwhile, tourism has been
said to develop from, and as a secular form of,
pilgrimage, leaving questions over whether we
would count these spiritual practices as ‘tourism’ or whether we would deny any spiritual
dimensions to any forms of tourism.
The second problem is that the general definition obscures differing types of tourism.
One recurrent response has been to produce
typologies of tourists usually defined by their
motivation for travel. Popular distinctions
among tourists often start by dividing them
in terms of a hierarchy of serious mindedness,
where the explorer charts the unknown (see
exploration) and the traveller seeks to encounter difference, whilst the tourist follows
the beaten track. The distinctions between
these cultures of travel are social ones that
are about status and cultural values.
John Urry (2002) suggests contrasting
romantic and collective cultures of tourism.
The latter is that which celebrates togetherness in visiting, which focuses on enjoyment
and activities amongst and between visitors
rather than between visitors and the environment. The former