INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
ROB KITCHIN National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA) John Hume Building, National University of Ireland Maynooth, County Kildare Ireland
NIGEL THRIFT University House, University of Warwick Coventry UK
AMSTERDAM BOSTON HEIDELBERG LONDON NEW YORK OXFORD PARIS SAN DIEGO SAN FRANCISCO SINGAPORE SYDNEY TOKYO
INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
ROB KITCHIN National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA) John Hume Building, National University of Ireland Maynooth, County Kildare Ireland
NIGEL THRIFT University House, University of Warwick Coventry UK
AMSTERDAM BOSTON HEIDELBERG LONDON NEW YORK OXFORD PARIS SAN DIEGO SAN FRANCISCO SINGAPORE SYDNEY TOKYO
Elsevier Radarweg 29, PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, The Netherlands Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8DP, UK First edition 2009 Copyright & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Science & Technology Rights Department in Oxford, UK: phone (+44) (0) 1865 843830; fax (+44) (0) 1865 853333; email:
[email protected]. Alternatively, you can submit your request online by visiting the Elsevier web site at http://elsevier.com/locate/permissions, and selecting Obtaining permission to use Elsevier material Notice No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein. Because of rapid advances in the medical sciences, in particular, independent verification of diagnoses and drug dosages should be made British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2007927349 ISBN: 978-0-08-044917-3 For information on all Elsevier publications visit our website at elsevierdirect.com
Printed and bound in Italy 09 10 11 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
SENIOR EDITORS Noel Castree Geography Discipline Arthur Lewis Building School of Environment and Development The University of Manchester Manchester UK Mike Crang Department of Geography Durham University Science Laboratories Durham UK Mona Domosh Department of Geography Dartmouth College Hanover, NH USA
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SECTION EDITORS Kay Anderson Centre for Cultural Research University of Western Sydney Penrith South DC, NSW, Sydney Australia Paul Cloke Department of Geography University of Exeter Exeter UK Jeremy Crampton Department of Geosciences Georgia State University Atlanta, GA USA Brian Graham University of Ulster Coleraine, N. Ireland UK Costis Hadjimichalis Department of Geography Harokopio University Athens Greece
Loretta Lees Cities Research Group Department of Geography King’s College London London UK Sara McLafferty Department of Geography University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign Urbana, IL USA Anssi Paasi Department of Geography University of Oulu Linnanmaa Oulu Finland Chris Philo Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences University of Glasgow Glasgow UK
Phil Hubbard Department of Geography University of Loughborough Loughborough UK
James Sidaway School of Geography University of Plymouth Plymouth UK
Robin Kearns School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Sciences The University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand
Katie Willis Department of Geography Royal Holloway, University of London Egham UK
Mei-Po Kwan Department of Geography The Ohio State University Columbus, OH USA
Henry Yeung Department of Geography National University of Singapore Singapore
vii
GUIDE TO USE OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA
Structure of the Encyclopedia The material in the Encyclopedia is arranged as a series of articles in alphabetical order. There are four features to help you easily find the topic you’re interested in: an alphabetical contents list, a subject classification index, cross references and a full subject index.
1. Alphabetical Contents List The alphabetical contents list, which appears at the front of the first volume, lists the entries in the order that they appear in the Encyclopedia. It includes both the volume number and the page number of each entry.
2. Subject Classification Index This index appears at the start of Volume 1 and groups entries under subject headings that reflect the broad themes of Human Geography. This index is useful for making quick connections between entries and locating the relevant entry for a topic that is covered in more than one article.
3. Cross-references All of the entries in the Encyclopedia have been exten sively cross referenced. The cross references which ap pear at the end of an entry, serve three different functions: i.
To indicate if a topic is discussed in greater detail elsewhere
ii. To draw the readers attention to parallel discussions in other entries iii. To indicate material that broadens the discussion Example The following list of cross references appears at the end of the entry IMPERIALISM, CULTURAL See also: Colonialism I; Colonialism II; Dependency; First World; Globalization, Cultural; Hegemony; Imperialistic Geographies; Neocolonialism; Orientalism; Postcolonia lism/Postcolonial Geographies; Poststructuralism/Post structuralist Geographies; Third World. Here you will find examples of all three functions of the cross reference list: a topic discussed in greater detail elsewhere (e.g., Orientalism), parallel discussion in other entries (Imperialistic Geographies) and reference to en tries that broaden the discussion (e.g. Postcolonialism/ Postcolonial Geographies).
4. Index The index includes page numbers for quick reference to the information you’re looking for. The index entries differentiate between references to a whole entry, a part of an entry, and a table or figure.
5. Contributors At the start of each volume there is list of the authors who contributed to that volume.
ix
CONTRIBUTORS
VOLUME 1 M B Aalbers Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
J Crush University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa
G J Andrews McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
C D’Ignazio The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, Waltham, MA, USA
H Asche University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany J O Bærenholdt Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark J Battersby-Lennard University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa J Beall London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
R J Das York University, Toronto, ON, Canada J Davidson Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada C Delano-Smith University of London, London, UK V Desai Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
K B Beesley Brandon University, Brandon, MB, Canada
J D Dewsbury Bristol University, Bristol, UK
K Besio University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hilo, HI, USA
J Dittmer University college London, London, UK
M Brayshay University of Plymouth, Devon, UK
H Fassmann Universita¨t Wien, Vienna, Austria
M M Breitbart Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA
C Gibson University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia
S Brentjes Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain
J R Gold Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
John R Bryson The University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
O Groza Universitatea Al.I Cuza, Iasi, Romania
H Buller University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
S W Hardwick University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
K A Butler University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA
M Harrower University of Wisconsin – Madison, Madison, WI, USA
K W Butzer University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA
H Hazen Macalester College, St Paul, MN, USA
S Chaturvedi Panjab University, Chandigarh, India
C Hughes Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada
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xii
Contributors
G T Jo´hannesson University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland
M Pacione University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
L Johnston University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
C Potter Imperial College London, London, UK
R J P Kain University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
R B Potter University of Reading, Reading, UK
R B Kent California State University, Northridge, Northridge, CA, USA
G Prevelakis University of Pantheon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Paris, France
M Kurtz Open University, Ottawa, ON, Canada M Kurtz Open University, Milton Keynes, UK R W Lake Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA R Le Heron The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand A A Lehtinen University of Joensuu, Joensuu, Finland Y Leung The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China
M Purcell University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA D Ramsey Brandon University, Brandon, MB, Canada S Reimer University of Southampton, Southampton, UK J Renes Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands, and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands V Rey Ecole Normale Supe´rieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Lyon, France M-C Robic CNRS, Paris, France
S Lloyd-Evans University of Reading, Reading, UK
U Rossi University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
J Lossau Humboldt-Universita¨t zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
P Routledge University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
A Malmberg Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
J Siemer University of Regina, Regina, SK, Canada
T Marsden Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
M W Skinner Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada
F Martinelli Universita` ‘Mediterranea’ di Reggio Calabria, Reggio di Calabria, Italy
T Slater University of Edinburgh, Bristol, UK
L Maxey Swansea University, Wales, UK D P McCormack Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford, UK
L M Takahashi University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA A Taylor University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia
P Merlin
M E Thomas The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
G A Myers University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
T M Vowles University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO, USA
R P Neumann Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA
A M Warnes University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
T Oakes University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
D Wastl-Walter University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
U Oslender University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
A Watson University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Contributors C Wilbert Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, UK
S D Withers University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
M Williams Oxford University, Oxford, UK
N M Yantzi Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON, Canada
xiii
VOLUME 2 H Aay Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, USA
V Chouinard McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
S C Aitken San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA and National Technical Norwegian University, Trondheim, Norway
H Couclelis University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
L Albrechts Catholic University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium G J Andrews McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada N Ansell Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK D Atkinson University of Hull, Hull, UK M Batty University College London, London, UK J Baxter University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada M Be´dard Universite´ du Que´bec a` Montre´al, Montre´al, QC, Canada D Bell University of Leeds, Leeds, UK D Bennett Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada
A Currah Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford, UK R J Das York University, Toronto, ON, Canada S Davoudi Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK E Delaney US Deparment of the Interior, National Park Service, Washington, DC, USA J Dempsey University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada S J Elliott McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada V Filippakopoulou National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece W Friesen The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand C Gibson University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia
U Best Technische Universita¨t Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany
A L Griffin University of New South Wales – ADFA, Canberra, ACT, Australia
J Binnie Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
J W Harrington, Jr. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
C R Bryant Universite´ de Montre´al, Montre´al, QC, Canada
M Hassler Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany
R Capello Milan Polytechnic, Milan, Italy
G Helms University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
R Carvalho Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK
J J Holloway Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
G Chapman Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
A Hughes Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
L Cheshire The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
M Jay University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
S Chilvers York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
N Kliot University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
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Contributors
H Koskela University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
C Philo University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
J Krygier Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH, USA
A C Pratt London School of Economics, London, UK
M S Kumar Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK
S Punch University of Stirling, Stirling, UK
B Lambregts University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
B Ramı´rez Universidad Auto´noma Metropolitana, Mexico City, Mexico
D Leslie University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada A Lester University of Sussex, Brighton, UK N Lewis The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand K D Lilley Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK T W Luke Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA L J C Ma University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA J Malczewski University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada D Martin University of Southampton, Southampton, UK E J McCann Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada C McIlwaine Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK K J Mee University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia S Millington Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK C J A Mitchell University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada D R Montello University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA M Morad London South Bank University, London, UK B Nakos National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece
G A Rice University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland K Robinson McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada R Rundstrom University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA S Rycroft University of Sussex, Brighton, UK N Schuurman Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada J P Sharp University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK D Sibley University of Leeds, Leeds, UK T Skelton National University of Singapore, Singapore F Smith Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK J Sundberg University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada J C Sweeney National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland W S Tang Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China T Tasan-Kok Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan, The Netherlands J-C Thill University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA
D O’Sullivan The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
J Tima´r Center for Regional Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Be´ke´scsaba, Hungary
J R Oppong University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA
P M Torrens Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
M Phillips University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
G Waitt University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia
Contributors J L Waters University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
F Wray Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
D Wood Raleigh, NC, USA
H van der Wusten Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
M Woods Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
C Young Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
VOLUME 3 T J Barnes University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
S Dall’erba University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
C Barnett The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
J Davidson Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
J Barnett University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
A Davies Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland
C J Barrow Swansea University, Swansea, UK
C Dixon London Metropolitan University, London, UK
G de Bastion Deutsche Gesellschaft fu¨r Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH, Eschborn, Germany
R Dowling Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
J V Beaverstock University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK S Bell University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada L D Berg University of British Columbia, Kelowna, BC, Canada L Bondi University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK A Bonnett Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
S Eden University of Hull, Hull, UK S J Elliott McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada G A Elmes West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA H Ernste Radboud University, Nijmegan, The Netherlands J Evans McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
L A Brown Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
J R Faulconbridge Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
R A Butlin University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
D A Fennell Brock University, St Catharines, ON, Canada
A Cameron University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
S Gopal Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
C Cocklin James Cook University, Townsville, QLD, Australia
S Hall University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
M P Conzen University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
E Hartwick Framingham State College, Framingham, MA, USA
K E Corey Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
S Healy Worcester State College, Worcester, MA, USA
T Cresswell Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
M Hess University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
C D’Alessandro-Scarpari Universite´ Lumie`re Lyon 2, Lyon, France
J Holloway Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
xv
xvi
Contributors
T Jazeel University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK R Johnston University of Bristol, Bristol, UK O Jones CCRI, Cheltenham, UK A Kalogeressis University of Macedonia, Greece A Kavanagh National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland M C Keane St Mary’s University College, Belfast, UK M Keating European University Institute, Florence, Italy J Kneale University College London, London, UK A Kobayashi Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada T Koch University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada B Korf University of Zu¨rich – Irchel, Zu¨rich, Switzerland M S Kumar Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK M Kuus University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada L Labrianidis University of Macedonia, Greece A Latham University College London, London, UK E Laurier University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK A A Lehtinen University of Joensuu, Joensuu, Finland
M Low London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK K McCracken Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia K McKittrick Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada P McManus The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia P Meth University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK J J Metz Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, KY, USA B E Montz Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, USA D P Nally University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK P M O’Neill University of Western Sydney, Parramatta, NSW, Australia C Pattie University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK N A Phelps University College London, London, UK D R Phillips Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong C Philo University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK A Pike Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK G H Pirie University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa P Plummer University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada
J I Leib Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA
M Power University of Durham, Durham, UK
N Lewis University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
P Rees University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
W Li Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
S A Royle Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK
D Linehan University College Cork, Cork, Republic of Ireland
A Schærstro¨m Kometva¨gen, Ta¨by, Sweden
L Lo York University, Toronto, ON Canada
R Scheyvens Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
R Longhurst University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
J W Scott University of Joensuu, Joensuu, Finland
Contributors D Seamon Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA
M Tykkyla¨inen University of Joensuu, Joensuu, Finland
E Sheppard University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
T Unwin University of London, Egham, UK
David Simon University of London, Egham, UK
E Warwick King’s College London, London, UK
V F S Sit University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China
H D Watts University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
E Skop The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs, CO, USA L Smith Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
D Weiner West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA
C Sneddon Dartmouth College, Hanover NH, USA
J Wiles University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
H Southall University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK
K D Willis Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
J Sowers Missouri State University, Springfield, MO, USA
M I Wilson Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
E Stam Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
R Wilton McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
D Storey University of Worcester, Worcester, UK
H Winlow Bath Spa University, Bath, UK
D Sui Texas A & M University, College Station, TX, USA J Sundberg University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
K E Till Virginia Tech University, Alexandria, VA, USA G A Tobin University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA S W Trimble University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA S Turner McGill University, Montre´al, QC, Canada
M Webber University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia G R Webster University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA
M Smith Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
E Swyngedouw Manchester University, Manchester, UK
M Watts UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
C W J Withers University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK F Wu Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK N Xiao The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA I Yamada University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA B S A Yeoh National University of Singapore, Singapore O Yiftachel Ben Gurion University, Beer-sheva, Israel E K Z Zygmunt University of Silesia, Sosnowiec, Poland
VOLUME 4 D Abbott University of Derby, Derby, UK
P Adey Keele University, Keele, UK
xvii
xviii
Contributors
P J Atkins Durham University, Durham, UK R Atkinson University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia G Benko Universite´ Panthe´on-Sorbonne, Paris, France P Bennett University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK L D Berg University of British Columbia, Kelowna, BC, Canada M Birkin University of Leeds, Leeds, UK S Blandy University of Leeds, Leeds, UK F J Bosco San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA S Bowlby University of Reading, Reading, UK H Bradley Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Limerick, Republic of Ireland P Breathnach National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland J Briggs University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK J E Castro Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK J Chapman University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK O Z Chaudhry University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK G L Clark Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford, UK G P Clarke University of Leeds, Leeds, UK K C Clarke University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA P Claval
´ Crowley U National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Co Kildare, Republic of Ireland C Desbiens Universite´ Laval, Que´bec City, QC, Canada P Dicken University of Manchester, Manchester, UK G Dijkink University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands I Docherty University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK M Duckham University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia M Duffy University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia S Elwood University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA M F Goodchild University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA D Goodman University of California – Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA M K Goodman King’s College London, London, UK M Goodwin University of Exeter, Exeter, UK L van Grunsven Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands J Ha¨kli University of Tampere, Finland E Hall University of Dundee, Dundee, UK D J Hammel University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA B Hendrikx Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands M Hess University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Universite´ de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France
J Hessler Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA
N M Coe University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
R Hudson Durham University, Durham, UK
M Cope University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA
M Huxley University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
David Crouch University of Derby, Derby, UK
L C Johnson Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia
Contributors R Kaiser University of Wisconsin – Madison, Madison, WI, USA
S M Otterstrom Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA
A Kealy University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
A Pa´ez McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
M J Kraak International Institute of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, Enschede, The Netherlands
M Pavlovskaya Hunter College – CUNY, New York, NY, USA
A Lagendijk Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands N S Lam Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA A Latham UCL, London, UK J Lee The University of Seoul, Seoul, South Korea Y Leung The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong A Leyshon University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK J Little University of Exeter, Exeter, UK J Lovering Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK C Lukinbeal Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA W A Mackaness University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK A Maddrell University of the West of England, Bristol, UK J C Marshallw University of Oxford, Oxford, UK D R Meyer Brown University, Providence, RI, USA V Miller University of Kent, Canterbury, UK C M Moreno San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA K M Morin Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA R Morrill University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA L Muscara` Universita` del Molise, Isernia, Campobasso, Italy T Nyerges University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA w
Deceased, 22 August 2007.
xix
Linda Peake York University, Toronto, ON, Canada M Phillips University of Leicester, Leicester, UK J Pollard Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK L Price Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK B Pritchard University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia M Purvis University of Leeds, Leeds, UK M Raco King’s College London, London, UK K N Rankin University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada J Raper City University, London, UK L T Raynolds Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA P Reuber University of Mu¨nster, Mu¨nster, Germany P Richardson University of Oxford, Oxford, UK S M Roberts University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA U Rossi University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy G Rushton The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA R B Sarma Cotton College, Guwahati, India A J Secor University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA J Shaw University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK T Slater University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK K Strauss Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford, UK
xx
Contributors
M Taylor Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Limerick, Republic of Ireland
S J Whatmore University of Oxford, Oxford, UK D C Wheeler Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
M Taylor University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
J Wiles University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
D Thien California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA
G Williams University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
J Tivers Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
K D Willis Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
Y Underhill-Sem University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand J Wallace University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
D Wo´jcik Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford, UK
F Wang Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA
X Yao University of Georgia, Atlanta, GA, USA
B Warf University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
H W-c Yeung National University of Singapore, Singapore
VOLUME 5 A G Aguilar Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico, Mexico City, Mexico J Agyeman Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA K Falconer Al-Hindi University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA N AlSayyad University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA G J Ashworth University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands S Asthana University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK P Barnett University of Otago, Christchurch, New Zealand R Barnett University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand D Bell University of Leeds, Leeds, UK J D Bohland Hollins University, Roanoke, VA, USA T Brown Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK I H Burnley University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia E Cameron Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
E P Campuzano Instituto Polite´cnico Nacional, Mexico City, Mexico F Celata University of Rome ‘‘La Sapienza’’, Rome, Italy M Chapin Center for the Support of Native Lands, Arlington, VA, USA K Chapman University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK S Chaturvedi Panjab University, Chandigarh, India E Clark Lund University, Lund, Sweden N Collins-Kreiner University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel J Corbett University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada G DeVerteuil University of Southampton, Southampton, UK M Dodge University of Manchester, Manchester, UK D Dorling University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK P J Duffy National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland
Contributors
xxi
J Dunn St Michael’s Hospital, Toronto, ON, Canada
R Hudson University of Durham, Durham, UK
R Fish University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
J S Humphreys Monash University, Bendigo, VIC, Australia
R Flowerdew University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
R D Jacobson University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada
R Foley NUI Maynooth, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland
J P Jones III University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
N Gallent University College London, London, UK
R Jones Curtin University of Technology, Perth, WA, Australia
C Gibson University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia
C Kelly University of Greenwich, London, UK
L Gibson Land and People Information Sharing Society (LAPIS), Parksville, BC, Canada
A D King State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, NY, USA
J Glassman University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
S Kirsch University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
A R Goetz University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA
A Kobayashi Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
A Golan University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
N Koch Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
W T S Gould University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
Z Kova´cs University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary
M Greenwood University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, BC, Canada
M-J Kraak ITC – International Institute of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, Enschede, The Netherlands
A L Griffin University of New South Wales – ADFA, Canberra, ACT, Australia
S de Leeuw University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, BC, Canada
L Guelke University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada
R Lewis University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
E Hague DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA
R Longhurst University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
R Haines-Young University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
D Mackinnon University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK
R Harris McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
S P Mains University of the West Indies-Mona, Kingston, Jamaica
F Harvey University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
J May Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK
G J D Hewings University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA
P Milbourne Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
R Honey The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
C Minca Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
R Howitt Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
J Mistry University of London, Egham, UK
M Hoyler Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
R Mitchell University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
xxii
Contributors
G Moon University of Southampton, Highfield, UK
M Shaw Bristol University, Bristol, UK
S Muller Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
D Simandan Brock University, St Catharines, ON, Canada
S Neal Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
J M Smith Texas A & M University, College Station, TX, USA
M E O’Kelly Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
K B Smith Monash University, Bendigo, VIC, Australia
K R Olwig Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, Sweden
M Sonis University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA, and Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
S Orford Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
M Sothern University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
M Pacione University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
R Sternberg University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany
M Parnwell University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
S Suchet-Pearson Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
B Parthasarathy International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India
I Tu¨reli Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
J Patchell Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China R Peet Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA T Peil Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia N A Phelps University College London, London, UK J M Powell Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia P Raento University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland G Rambaldi Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU, Wageningen, The Netherlands C Richmond The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada E J Roe Southampton University, Southampton, UK U Rossi University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy J Rutherford LATTS (Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Socie´te´s), Marne-la-Valle´e, France G Setten Department of Geography, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
J Tima´r Center for Regional Studies, Be´ke´scsaba, Hungary D P Tolia-Kelly Durham University, Durham, UK H Tunstall University of York, York, UK D Vaiou National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece S M Walcott University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC, USA J L Waters University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK G W White Frostburg State University, Frostburg, MD, USA K Wilson University of Toronto, Mississauga, ON, Canada G M Winder The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand G M Winder Ludwig-Maximilians-Universita¨t, Munich, Germany K Woodward University of Exeter, Exeter, UK R Wright Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA Y Zhou Vassar College, New York, NY, USA M Zook University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA
Contributors
VOLUME 6 B T Asheim Lund University, Lund, Sweden
R Edsall University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
A Aylett University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
F Eva Universita’ Ca’ Foscari, Venezia, Treviso Campus, Italy
A Bain York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
M Farish University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
T J Barnes University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
R Fincher University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
C Benner University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA M Brosseau University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada K Browne University of Brighton, Brighton, UK R A Butlin University of Leeds, Leeds, UK C A Calder The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA P Carmody Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland W Cartwright RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia P Collier University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK S Conti Universita` e Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy P Cooke Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK K R Cox The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA N Cressie The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA A Cumbers University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK D Delaney Amherst College, Amherst, MA, USA
S M Freundschuh National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA, USA G Garofoli Insubria University, Varese, Italy J Gaspar CEG, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal P Giaccaria Universita` e Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy E Gilbert University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada J R Gold Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK A E Green University of Warwick, Coventry, UK M Haldrup Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark F Harvey University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA A Herod University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA M Hesse University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg S Hoelscher The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA E Holland University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
M Dodge University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
B Hooper Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
J Dubow University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
P Hopkins Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK
C Dwyer University College London, London, UK
M W Horner The Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
xxiii
xxiv
Contributors
B van Hoven University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
J O’Loughlin University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
R Howitt Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
F Owusu Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA
B Hunt Santa Barbara, CA, USA
R B Parry The University of Reading, Reading, UK
J Ja¨ger University of Applied Sciences BFI, Vienna, Austria
M W Pearce Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA
P Jackson University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK A E G Jonas University of Hull, Hull, UK
C Perkins University of Manchester, Manchester, UK S Pinch University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
A Jones University of London, London, UK
´ Riain SO National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland
R Jones Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
G A Rice University of Helsinki, Finland
Cristo´bal Kay Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands
J-P Rodrigue Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, USA
G Kearns Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA
T D Rutherford Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA A Saito National University of Singapore, Singapore
G Kearns Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA
James D Sidaway School of Geography, University of Plymouth, UK
A Kerr National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland
T Skelton National University of Singapore, Singapore
J Krygier Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH, USA W Li University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA E Mac Gillavry Webmapper, Utrecht, The Netherlands J Mansvelt Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand F Mizuoka Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan
A Tay University of Bristol, Bristol, UK D P Tolia-Kelly Durham University, Durham, UK B L Turner II Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA H Winlow Bath Spa University, Bath, UK S D Withers University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA D Wood Raleigh, NC, USA
K M Morin Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA
P Wood University College London, London, UK
A T Murray Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
C Zhang University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
C J Nash University of Brighton, Brighton, UK
M Zook University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA
Contributors
xxv
VOLUME 7 S C Aitken San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA, and National Technical University of Norway, Trondheim, Norway D H Alderman East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA N Argent University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia S Bell University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada M E Bonine University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA W M Bowen Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH, USA P Boyle University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK G Bridge University of Manchester, Manchester, UK K M Brown Macaulay Land Use Research Institute, Craigiebuckler, Aberdeen, UK
K M Dunn School of Social Sciences, Penrith, NSW, Australia O J Dwyer Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN, USA R Earickson University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA T Edensor Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK C Cindy Fan University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA M Farish University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada J Flint Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK S Fullagar Griffith University, Nathan, QLD, Australia J R Gold Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK G Grabher University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany
G Burgel University of Paris 10, Nanterre, France
R N Gwynne University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
M A Busteed University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
D Hill University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
L Cadman University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK I Casas University at Buffalo – SUNY, Buffalo, NY, USA D B Clarke Swansea University, Swansea, UK N Clarke University of Southampton, Southampton, UK P Claval Universite´ de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France J Clayton University of Sunderland, Sunderland, UK P Cooke Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK N Curry Countryside and Community Research Institute CCRI, Cheltenham, UK
H Hoernig Universite´ de Que´bec a` Montre´al, Montre´al, QC, Canada P Holland University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand P Hubbard Leicestershire University, Leicestershire, UK R D Jacobson University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada W Jenkins York University, Toronto, ON, Canada O Jones Countryside and Community Research Institute CCRI, Cheltenham, UK R Jones Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
xxvi
Contributors
K Kafkoula Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece D H Kaplan Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA J Kenny University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA
J Penrose University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK C G Pooley Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK C Radel Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA Saraswati Raju Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
M J Kuby Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
S Ratick Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA
W Larner University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
T D Roberts University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
R Le Heron The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
G Schwarz Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota, DC, Colombia
Sang-Il Lee Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea K D Lilley Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK D Linehan University College Cork, Cork, Republic of Ireland J Lorimer King’s College London, London, UK G MacLeod University of Durham, Durham, UK
G Setten Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway K Simonsen Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark M Sioh DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA C J Smith University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY, USA
E J McCann Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada
M Tanskanen University of Joensuu, Joensuu, Finland
L McDowell University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
S Tierney University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA
S McDowell University of Ulster, Coleraine, UK
C D Upchurch University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA
A McGregor University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
M Walton-Roberts Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada
J H McKendrick Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, UK
M Watts UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
P Merriman Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
A Wearing University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
W E Murray Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
D W Wong George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
G Olsson Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
R Woodward Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
K R Olwig Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, Sweden
Y-M Yeung The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China
Contributors
xxvii
VOLUME 8 O Ahlqvist The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
M Dunford University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
S C Aitken San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA, and Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
S Elden Durham University, Durham, UK
G Backhaus Loyola College in Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA
R Flowerdew University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
A J Bailey University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
B Forest McGill University, Montre´al, QC, Canada
D Bennett Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada
A Franklin University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia
V Berdoulay CNRS and Universite´ de Pau, Pau, France
N R Fyfe University of Dundee, Dundee, UK
L Bondi University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
M Gren Ho´lar University College, Sauja´rkro´kur, Iceland
M Boyle National University of Ireland Maynooth, Co Kildare, Republic of Ireland E Chacko The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA X Chen Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA A O Chimhowu University of Manchester, Manchester, UK P Collier University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK D Collins University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada D Collins University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand K R Cox The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA T Cresswell Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
R Flowerdew University of St Andrews, Fife, UK
M Haldrup Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark P Hall University College London, London, UK S Harrison University of Exeter, Penryn, UK S Hickey University of Manchester, Manchester, UK M Huxley University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK J P Jones III University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA R Jones Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK M Kesby University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK F C Kessler Frostburg State University, Frostburg, MD, USA S Kindon Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
E Delmelle University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC, USA
A D King State University of New York Binghamton, Binghamton, NY, USA
J Dittmer University College London, London, UK
P T Kingsbury Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada
D P Dixon The University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK
A Kobayashi Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
xxviii
Contributors
L Koefoed Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark
C Perkins University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
U Kothari University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
M Perry Massey University (Wellington), Wellington, New Zealand
D M Lawrence Virginia State University and Virginia Union University, Richmond, VA, USA
J Nederveen Pieterse University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
R Le Heron University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand J Lea Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK J Lorimer King’s College London, London, UK D P McCormack Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford, UK
J D van der Ploeg Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands Saraswati Raju Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India R Sanders Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA V R Savage National University of Singapore, Singapore B-M Shantz University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
C McEwan Durham University, Durham, UK
S J Smith University of Durham, Durham, UK
C Minca Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
L A Staeheli University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
D Mitchell Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
J-F Staszak Universite´ de Gene`ve Geneva, Switzerland
F Morton Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow, UK
P E Steinberg Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
W E Murray Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand C J Nash Brock University, St Catharines, ON, Canada
D Storey University of Worcester, Worcester, UK L Sy´kora Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic A R Tickamyer Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA
R P Neumann Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA
K Walsh University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
A Nightingale University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
B Warf University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
J O’Loughlin University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
S Warren Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA, USA
P M O’Neill University of Western Sydney, NSW, Australia
G A Wilson University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK
A Paasi University of Oulu, Linnanmaa, Finland
M Woods Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
R Pain University of Durham, Durham, UK
K Woodward University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
E Pawson University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
G Yeung National University of Singapore, Singapore
Contributors
xxix
VOLUME 9 M B Aalbers Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
D W Edgington University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
M Abreu University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
C Fox Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
O Ahlqvist The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
M F Goodchild University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
J O Bærenholdt Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark
K H Halfacree Swansea University, Swansea, UK
T J Barnes University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
L M B Harrington Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA
R Billen University of Liege, Liege, Belgium R Black University of Sussex, Brighton, UK J S Boggs Brock University, St Catharines, ON, Canada G Bridge University of Bristol, Bristol, UK K Browne University of Brighton, Brighton, UK T Butler King’s College London, London, UK D Carr University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA M Charlton National University of Ireland Maynooth, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland
R Hayter Simon Fraser University, Byrnaby, BC, Canada A Holden University of Durham, Durham, UK J R L Howells University of Manchester, Manchester, UK R Johnston University of Bristol, Bristol, UK J-K Jung University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND M Kiese Leibniz University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany A Kobayashi Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada V Kolossov Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia L Kong National University of Singapore, Singapore
J P Clark Loyola University, New Orleans, LA, USA
A Lord University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
M Cope University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA
D MacKinnon University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK
A Cumbers University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
G MacLeod University of Durham, Durham, UK
J Cupples University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
K A MacTavish Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA
J Revilla Diez Leibniz University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany
J Mennis Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA
I Docherty University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
F Mizuoka Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan
M Doevenspeck University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany
A Nayak University of Newcastle, Newcastle, UK
M Dunford University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
H Neo National University of Singapore, Singapore
xxx
Contributors
P Nijkamp Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
I G Simmons University of Durham, Durham, UK
E S Norman University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
T R Slater University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
H G Overman London School of Economics, London, UK A Paasi University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
E W Soja University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, and London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
B Page University College London, London, UK
M Sokol Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK
J Pearce University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
M Tewdwr-Jones University College London, London, UK
R Peet Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA
F To¨dtling Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna, Austria
I M M Pires Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal V Preston York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
J Tomaney Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
N M Rantisi Concordia University, Montre´al, QC, Canada
M Torrado Maxwell School of Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
J M Read Maxwell School of Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
A Treivish Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia N Van de Weghe Ghent University, Gent, Belgium
P Robbins University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
B Werlen Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena, Germany
S Salamon University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX, USA
J Winders Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
H V Scott Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
M Woods Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
J Shaw University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK
N Wrigley University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
N K Shortt University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
VOLUME 10 A Albet Autonomous University of Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain
A Bebbington University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
T A Arentze Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
L Bian University at Buffalo – SUNY, Buffalo, NY, USA
R Atkinson University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia
E Casetti Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
M Azaryahu University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
G P Chapman Centre for Advanced Study, Oslo, Norway
M Azaryahu University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
M Coleman The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
Contributors T J Cooke University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
M Jones Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
T W Crawford East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA
C Kim University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA
M A de Souza Universidade de Sa˜o Paulo, Campinas, Brazil
R Kitchin NUI Maynooth, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland
A V Di Vittorio University of California – Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA M Duffy University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC, Australia N Duncan University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK S Elden Durham University, Durham, UK S Engel-Di Mauro SUNY New Paltz, NY, USA R Flowerdew University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
xxxi
A Kobayashi Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada E W LaFary The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand N S Lam Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA A Latham University College London, London, UK J Lee Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA L Lo York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
K E Foote University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
Y Lu Texas State University – San Marcos, San Marcos, TX, USA
J D Gatrell Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN, USA
S M Manson University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
C Gibson University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia
D McCormack Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford, UK
B Greenhough Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK
J McGarrigle Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
D A Griffith University of Texas – Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA
J Mohan University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
M Haldrup Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark
K Newman Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
A L Hansen Lund University, Lund, Sweden
M E O’Kelly The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
R Harris Hamilton, ON, Canada
J Oldfield University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
K E Haynes George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
R Panelli University College London, London, UK
P Howell University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
D Pinder Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK
R W Jackson West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA
M F Poulsen Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
A James Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK
M Ramutsindela University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa
B Jessop Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
G M Robinson Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, UK
Ron Johnston University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
S M Ruddick University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
xxxii
Contributors
G Rushton The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
C Tiwari The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
A Saldanha University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
D Turnbull ACSIS, Melbourne University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
N F Sayre University of California – Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
L Twigg University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK D J Unwin Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK
N Schuurman Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada
A C Vias University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
T Schwanen Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
M Williams Oxford University, Oxford, UK
D M Scott McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
K D Willis Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
D Sibley University of Leeds, Leeds, UK A Smith Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK
A C Winstanley National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland
Q Stevens University College London, London, UK
D W Wong George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
P Sunley University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
M Yuan The University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA
Eric C Thompson National University of Singapore, Singapore
P Zusman University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
VOLUME 11 C G Alvstam Go¨teborg University, Gothenburg, Sweden
D Delaney Amherst College, Amherst, MA, USA
D Banister University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
M Denil Washington, DC, USA
C Berndt Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
M Dijst Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
K Button George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA M Cawley National University of Ireland, Galway, Republic of Ireland G P Chapman Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK J Connell University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia M Cope University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA
B Doman´ski Jagiellonian Univeristy, Krakow, Poland T Edensor Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK J A Elliott University of Brighton, Brighton, UK W M Gesler University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA V Gidwani University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
T Cresswell Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
J Glassman University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
V J Del Casino, Jr. California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA
R Grant University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA
Contributors M Gren Ho´lar University College, Sauja´rkro´kur, Iceland
L Mu University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
J Gutie´rrez Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
D Mustafa King’s College London, London, UK
T Hall University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK
A Nightingale University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
M Henry Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
G Norcliffe York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
J Hine University of Ulster, Newtownabbey, UK
K O’Connor University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
J-Y Hsu National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
J O’Loughlin University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
S Huang National University of Singapore, Singapore
K Olds University of Wisconsin – Madison, Madison, WI, USA
P J Hugill Texas A & M University, College Station, TX, USA P F Kelly York University, Toronto, ON, Canada A Kent University of Manchester, Manchester, UK R D Knowles University of Salford, Greater Manchester, UK M Kurtz Open University, Ottawa, ON, Canada D Ley University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada R Lippuner Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Jena, Germany S Lloyd-Evans University of Reading, Reading, UK B P Y Loo University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China A Mace University of Westminster, London, UK T Marsden Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK C McEwan Durham University, Durham, UK Nick Megoran University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
xxxiii
D T Ory Federal Transit Administration, Washington, DC, USA U F Paleo University of Extremadura, Caceres, Spain R Phillips University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK D Pinder Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK J P H Poon University at Buffalo – SUNY, Buffalo, NY, USA R B Potter University of Reading, Reading, UK J M Powell Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia M Power University of Durham, Durham, UK J Preston University of Southampton, Southampton, UK G M Robinson Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, UK J Round University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK T Schwanen Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands J P Sharp University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
G Mohan The Open University – Milton Keynes, UK
S-L Shaw The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA
P L Mokhtarian University of California – Davis, Davis, CA, USA
M Sheller Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA
xxxiv
Contributors
F M Smith University of Dundee, Dundee, UK J M Smith Texas A & M University, College Station, TX, USA R G Smith Swansea University, Swansea, UK
C von Schilling University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, BC, Canada B Warf Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA B Werlen Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Jena, Germany
D Straussfogel Pennsylvania State University, DuBois, PA, USA U Strohmayer National University of Ireland, Galway, Republic of Ireland
P White University of Westminster, London, UK M Whitehead Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
A Sturt University of Westminster, London, UK D Thien California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA
D Wilson University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA
D J Unwin University College London, London, UK
J Zhang University of Minnesota, Tacoma, WA, USA
VOLUME 12 Fiona Allon Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia S Batterbury University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia M Batty University College London, London, UK D Bell University of Leeds, Leeds, UK G Bridge University of Bristol, Bristol, UK G Brown University of Leicester, Leicester, UK A Buttimer University College Dublin, Dublin, Republic of Ireland
M Davidson University of Western Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia B Derudder Ghent University, Gent, Belgium J Dodson Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia B Gleeson Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia M F Goodchild University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA K H Halfacree Swansea University, Swansea, UK M G Hatvany Universite´ Laval, Quebec City, QC, Canada
J Byrne Griffith University, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia
C Haylett University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
B Christophers The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
L Holt University of Reading, Reading, UK
G P Clarke University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
J Horton University of Northampton, Northampton, UK
A Cochrane The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
R Hudson Durham University, UK
D Conradson University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
M Jayne University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
G Crow University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
N C Johnson Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland
Contributors D Kay Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
C Milligan Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
I M Keighren University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
M Pavlovskaya Hunter College – CUNY, New York, NY, USA
P Knox Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA
L Peake York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
P Kraftl University of Leicester, Leicester, UK D Kunze Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA M Lauria Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA R Lee Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK K D Lilley Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK F MacDonald University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia S C MacKian Open University, Milton Keynes, UK V Mamadouh University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
xxxv
C Philo University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK G M Robinson Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, UK S Rodgers The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK T R Slater University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK E Street King’s College London, London, UK K Terlouw Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands C R Warren University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK M Watson University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK R K Whelan University of Texas, Arlington, TX, USA
C Mason University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
B Wisner Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, London, UK
G Mercier Laval University, Quebec City, QC, Canada
J Wolch University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
CONTENTS
Senior Editors
v
Section Editors
vii
Guide to use of the Encyclopedia
ix
Contributors
xi
Contents
xxxvii
Subject Classification
lxiii
Foreword by Mary Robinson
lxxv
Foreword by Rob Kitchin
lxxvii
VOLUME 1 A Activism
L M Takahashi
Activist Geographies
1
P Routledge
Actor-Network Theory/Network Geographies
7 G T Jo´hannesson and J O Bærenholdt
15
Affect
J D Dewsbury
20
Africa
G A Myers
25
Ageing and Health
G J Andrews
31
A M Warnes
36
Ageing and Mobility Ageism and Age Agglomeration Agoraphobia
L Maxey
42
A Malmberg
48
J Davidson
Agrarian Transformations
54 J Renes
Agricultural Land Preservation Agriculture, Sustainable
K B Beesley and D Ramsey
T Marsden
Agri-Environmentalism and Rural Change Aid
58
70 C Potter
79
V Desai
84
Ame´nagement du Territoire: Territorial Development Americas
P Merlin
R B Kent and K A Butler
Anarchism/Anarchist Geography
C Wilbert
Animal Welfare, Agricultural
H Buller
91 99
M M Breitbart
Anglo-American/Anglophone Hegemony Animal Geographies
65
M B Aalbers and U Rossi
108 116 122 127
xxxvii
xxxviii
Contents
Antarctica
S Chaturvedi
133
Anthropogeography (After Ratzel)
J Lossau
Anthropology and Human Geography Anti-Geopolitics
U Oslender
Anti-Urbanism
Applied Geography
159 J Battersby-Lennard
M Pacione
179
M Kurtz and A Watson
Art and Cartography
184
C D’Ignazio
Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems Asia
190 Y Leung
T Oakes
Atlases
225
M Purcell
Autoethnography
234
K Besio
Auto-Photography
240
M E Thomas
Avant-Garde/Avant-Garde Geographies Aviation
220
C Gibson
Autobiography
207 214
J Siemer and H Asche
Australasia
167 174
M Kurtz
Arctic
148 152
T Slater
Apartheid/Post-Apartheid
Archives
K W Butzer
140
244 J D Dewsbury
252
T M Vowles
257
V Rey and O Groza
265
B Balkans Barnes, T.
S Reimer
Beaujeu-Garnier, J. Becoming
273
M-C Robic
D P McCormack
Behavioral Geography Belonging
A Taylor
Berkeley School Berry, B.
J R Gold
277 282 294
M Williams
R W Lake
Biodiversity
275
300 305
R P Neumann
Biodiversity Mapping
H Hazen
308 314
Biopolitics
A A Lehtinen
320
Bobek, H.
H Fassmann
324
Body, The
L Johnston
326
Borderlands
D Wastl-Walter
332
Bowman, I.
J Dittmer
340
Brain Drain
J Crush and C Hughes
342
Brandt Commission Brown Agenda Buffer Zone
R B Potter and S Lloyd-Evans
348
J Beall
355
G Prevelakis
362
Business Services
John R Bryson
368
Contents
xxxix
C Capital and Space Capitalism
R J Das
375
R Le Heron
382
Capitalism and Division of Labor Care/Caregiving
M Brayshay
390
N M Yantzi and M W Skinner
Cartographic Animation
M Harrower
Cartography in Islamic Societies Cartography, History of
408
S Brentjes
414
C Delano-Smith and R J P Kain
Case Study Approach
402
428
S W Hardwick
441
Cassa per il Mezzogiorno
F Martinelli
446
Categorical Data Analysis
S D Withers
456
VOLUME 2 C Cellular Automata
P M Torrens
1
W Friesen
5
Census Geography Census Mapping
D Martin
Central Business District
G A Rice
Central Place Theory
18
J Malczewski
26
G Chapman
31
Chaos and Complexity Chicago School
12
D Sibley
Child Labor
40
S Punch
Children and Mapping
45 V Filippakopoulou and B Nakos
50
Children/Childhood
F Smith and N Ansell
58
Chinese Urbanism
L J C Ma
65
Chinese-Language Geography Choice Modeling
W S Tang
J-C Thill
Christaller, W.
78
R Capello
Christian Geography Chronic Disease Citation Geography Citizenship
84
H Aay
86
K Robinson and S J Elliott
92
M Batty and R Carvalho
97
V Chouinard
Citizenship and Governmentality, Rural City Marketing
72
E J McCann
107 L Cheshire and M Woods
113 119
City-Region
S Davoudi
125
Civil Society
C McIlwaine
136
Claval, P.
M Be´dard
Climate Change
J C Sweeney
142 147
xl
Contents
Cloke, P.
M Phillips
156
Cognitive Geography
D R Montello
160
Cohen, S.
N Kliot
167
Cold War
T W Luke
170
Colonialism I
A Lester
175
Colonialism II
D Atkinson
182
Colonialism, Internal Color, Mapping
R J Das and S Chilvers
189
A L Griffin
Commodity Chains
195
M Hassler
202
Communicable Diseases, Globalization of
J R Oppong
209
J Tima´r
214
Communist and Post-Communist Geographies Community
S C Aitken
Competitiveness
221
N Lewis
226
Complementary and Alternative Medicine
G J Andrews
Complexity Theory, Nonlinear Dynamic Spatial Systems Computational Human Geography Concentrated Deconcentration Conservation and Ecology Consumption
234 D O’Sullivan
H Couclelis
Corbridge, S.
251
M Jay and M Morad
259 268
J Baxter
275
M S Kumar
281
B Ramı´rez
Core-Periphery Models Corporate Responsibilities
286
A Hughes and F Wray
Corridor and Axis Development Cosgrove, D.
245
B Lambregts
D Leslie
Content Analysis
239
L Albrechts and T Tasan-Kok
K D Lilley
292 298 305
Cosmopolitanism
J Binnie, J J Holloway, S Millington, and C Young
307
Counter-Mapping
R Rundstrom
314
Counterurbanization Cox, K. Creativity
C J A Mitchell and C R Bryant
H van der Wusten
319 325
A Currah
327
Crime/Fear of Crime
H Koskela
334
Critical Cartography
D Wood and J Krygier
340
Critical Geography
U Best
345
Critical Geopolitics
J P Sharp
358
Critical GIS
N Schuurman
Critical Rationalism (After Popper)
363 D Bennett
Critical Realism/Critical Realist Geographies Critical Theory (After Habermas) Cross-Cultural Research Cultural Capital Cultural Economy
M Phillips
T Skelton
J L Waters A C Pratt
Andy C Pratt
369 379 385 398 404 407
Contents
xli
Cultural Geography
C Gibson and G Waitt
411
Cultural Materialism
G Helms
425
Cultural Politics
S Rycroft
431
Cultural Studies and Human Geography Cultural Turn Culture
D Bell
437
C Philo
442
K J Mee
Culture/Natures
451 J Sundberg and J Dempsey
Cumulative Causation
458
E Delaney and J W Harrington, Jr.
Cyberspace/Cyberculture
D Bell
464 468
VOLUME 3 D Darby, H. C.
R A Butlin
1
Darwinism (and Social Darwinism) Dear, M. J. Debt
H Winlow
4
A Latham
12
David Simon
Deconstruction
16
C Barnett
Defensible Space
23
E Warwick
Deforestation
31
J J Metz
De-Industrialization De-Localization Democracy
39
A Pike
51
A Kalogeressis and L Labrianidis
60
C Barnett and M Low
70
Demography
P Rees
75
Dependency
E Hartwick
91
Desertification
C J Barrow
96
Determinism/Environmental Determinism
H Ernste and C Philo
102
Development I
K D Willis and M S Kumar
111
Development II
B Korf
117
Developmentalism Devolution
M Watts
123
M Keating
131
Dialectical Reasoning and Dialectical Materialism Dialogism (After Bakhtin)
J Holloway and J Kneale
Diaries (Video, Audio or Written) Diaspora Dicken, P.
P Meth
K McKittrick
143 150
162 T Jazeel
L A Brown
Digital Data, Historical Geography and Digital Divide
137
156
J V Beaverstock
Difference/Politics of Difference Diffusion
E Swyngedouw
164 170
H Southall
T Unwin and G de Bastion
185 191
xlii
Contents
Digital Earth
G A Elmes, D Weiner, and C D’Alessandro-Scarpari
Disability and Chronic Illness Discourse
R Wilton and J Evans
T Cresswell
Discourse Analysis
198 205 211
L D Berg
215
Disease Diffusion
A Schærstro¨m
222
Disease Mapping
T Koch
234
Distance
G H Pirie
Dudley Stamp, L.
242
D Linehan
Dutch Human Geography Dwelling
252
H Ernste and L Smith
O Jones
255 266
E East Asian Miracle East/West
C Dixon
273
A Bonnett
280
e-Business and e-Commerce Ecological Fallacy Ecology
K E Corey and M I Wilson
D Sui
291
P McManus
Economic Crises
294
M Webber
Economic Development, Rural Economic Geography
285
304 D Storey
T J Barnes
310 315
Economic Geography, Quantitative
E Sheppard and P Plummer
328
Economics and Human Geography
J R Faulconbridge and S Hall
332
Economies, Alternative
S Healy
338
Economies, Borderland
M Tykkyla¨inen
345
H D Watts
354
Economies, Branch Plant Economies, Imagined
A Cameron
Economy, Informal
S Turner
361 367
Ecotourism
D A Fennell
372
Edge Cities
N A Phelps
377
Edge Effects
I Yamada
381
Education
N Lewis
Electoral Cartography Electoral Districts
A Kavanagh J I Leib and G R Webster
Electoral Geography Embeddedness
C Pattie and R Johnston M Hess
Embodied Knowing Emigration
B S A Yeoh
Emotional Knowing
399 405
429 434
J Davidson and M Smith L Bondi
M Power
Empowerment
396
423
R Longhurst
Emotional Geographies
Empire
389
R Scheyvens
440 446 453 464
Contents Enlightenment Geography Enterprise Discourse Entrepreneurship
C W J Withers
471
P M O’Neill
487
E Stam
492
Entropy-Maximising Models Environment
xliii
R Johnston and C Pattie
S Eden
499 505
Environment, Historical Geography of Environmental Hazards
S W Trimble, M P Conzen, and E K Z Zygmut
G A Tobin and B E Montz
517 521
Environmental Health
S J Elliott
528
Environmental Justice
A A Lehtinen
535
Environmental Policy
C Cocklin
Environmental Regulation
540
P McManus
Environmental Security
546
J Barnett
553
Environmental Studies and Human Geography Environmentalism
A Davies
Epidemiological Transition Equity
C Sneddon
565
K McCracken and D R Phillips
J Wiles and A Kobayashi
Error (Propagation and Modeling) Ethical Issues in Research Ethnic Conflict
580 S Gopal
586
R Dowling
595 601
L Lo
608
W Li and E Skop
615
Ethnicity and Resistance, Historical Geographies of Ethnography
Evans, E. E.
632 638
M Kuus
644 J W Scott
649
M C Keane
Evolutionary Algorithms
658
N Xiao
Existentialism/Existential Geography Experimental Design Exploration
E Laurier
J Sundberg
Europe of Regions
620 626
Ethnomethodology/Ethnomethodological Geography
Europe
D P Nally
K E Till
Eurocentrism
571
O Yiftachel
Ethnic Economies Ethnicity
558
660 D Seamon and J Sowers
S Bell
672
S A Royle
676
Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis Export Processing Zones Extended Metropolitan Region
666
S Dall’erba
683
F Wu
691
V F S Sit
697
VOLUME 4 F Factor Analysis and Principal-Components Analysis Fair Trade
L T Raynolds
F Wang
1 8
xliv
Contents
Famine
P J Atkins
14
Fatherland/Homeland
R Kaiser
Feminism and Work
21
J Pollard
Feminism, Maps and GIS
29
M Pavlovskaya
Feminism/Feminist Geography
37
L C Johnson
44
Feminist Geography, Prehistory of
S Bowlby and J Tivers
59
Feminist Groups within Geography
K M Morin
64
Feminist Methodologies
D Thien
Feminist Political Economy Fertility
R B Sarma
79
Y Underhill-Sem
Festival and Spectacle
87
M Duffy
Feudalism and Feudal Society Field Geographies
Fieldwork
91
H Bradley and M Taylor
D Abbott J Chapman
112
F J Bosco and C M Moreno
119
C Lukinbeal
125
Finance, Historical Geographies of Finance, Offshore
M Purvis
130
S M Roberts
Financial Centers, International Financial Exclusion
139 D R Meyer
146
A Leyshon
153 w
Financial Knowledge
G L Clark, J C Marshall , and K Strauss
Financial Risks and Management Firms
P Bennett
159 167
M Taylor
173
First Law of Geography First World
98 106
Field Systems and Enclosure
Film
71
M F Goodchild
179
K D Willis
183
Flaˆneur, The
A Latham
189
Fluidity–Fixity
P Adey
194
Focus Groups
A J Secor
200
Food Networks
P Richardson and S J Whatmore
Food Networks, Alternative Food Regimes Fordism
202
D Goodman and M K Goodman
B Pritchard
208 221
R Hudson
226
Fordism, Post-Fordism and Flexible Specialization Foreign Direct Investment
J Lovering
A Lagendijk and B Hendrikx
232 243
Foucauldianism
M Huxley
255
Fractal Analysis
N S Lam
263
Francophone Geography
G Benko and C Desbiens
Functionalism (Including Structural Functionalism) Fuzzy Set and Fuzzy Logic
w
Deceased, 22 August 2007.
Y Leung
J E Castro
271 277 283
Contents
xlv
G Gardens and Gardening Garrison, W.
David Crouch
R Morrill
294
Gated Communities/Privatopias Gay Geographies
R Atkinson and S Blandy
V Miller
Gender and Health
Gender in the City
302 309
J Little
315
Linda Peake
Gender, Historical Geographies of Genealogy and Family History
Generalization
L Price
328
S M Otterstrom
334 341
W A Mackaness and O Z Chaudhry E Hall
Gentrification
345 355
D J Hammel
Gentrification, Rural
360
M Phillips
Geocomputation
368
M Birkin
Geodemographics Geodesy
320
´ Crowley U
Genealogy Method
297
J Wiles
Gender and Rurality
Genetics
289
376
M Birkin and G P Clarke
382
J Hessler
390
Geographical Journals
L D Berg
394
Geographical Masking
G Rushton
402
Geographically Weighted Regression Geography, History of
A Pa´ez and D C Wheeler
A Maddrell
407 415
Geohistory
P Claval
429
Geomatics
M Duckham, A Kealy, and J Wallace
435
Geopolitics
P Reuber
441
Geopolitics and Religion
G Dijkink
453
X Yao
458
K C Clarke
466
Georeferencing, Geocoding Geospatial Intelligence Geovisualization
M J Kraak
468
German-Language Geography Gerrymandering Ghettos
M Hess
481
R Morrill
486
T Slater
492
GIS and Cartography GIS and Society
M F Goodchild
500
T Nyerges
506
GIS, Mobile and Locational Based Services
J Raper
513
GIS, Public Participation
S Elwood
520
GIScience and Systems
M F Goodchild
526
Global Commodity Chains Global Positioning/GPS Global Production Networks
L van Grunsven
539
J Lee
548
N M Coe
Globalization and Transnational Corporations
556 P Dicken
563
xlvi
Contents
Globalization, Cultural
K N Rankin
Globalization, Economic
570
H W-c Yeung
581
Golledge, R.
G Rushton
587
Gottmann, J.
L Muscara`
590
Governance
M Goodwin
593
D Wo´jcik
Governance, Corporate Governance, Good
G Williams
Governance, Transport
606
I Docherty and J Shaw
Governance, Urban
M Raco
Green Revolution
628
J Briggs
Greenfield Development
634
P Breathnach
639
B Warf
Grounded Theory
615 622
J Ha¨kli
Governmentality
Gregory, D.
600
644
M Cope
Growth Poles, Growth Centers
647 U Rossi
651
VOLUME 5 H Habitus
G Setten
Hagerstrand, T. Haggett, P.
1
R Flowerdew
4
R Flowerdew
9
Haptic or Touch-Based Knowledge Harley, J. B.
N Collins-Kreiner
Hartshorne, R. Harvey, D.
R D Jacobson
19
F Harvey
21
K Woodward and J P Jones III
Health and Development
13
S Asthana
24 28
Health Geography
G Moon
35
Health Inequalities
D Dorling and R Mitchell and S Orford and M Shaw, and H Tunstall
46
Health Services Restructuring
T Brown
Health Systems and Health Services Healthcare Accessibility Hegemony Heritage
J S Humphreys and K B Smith
J Glassman
R Jones G J Ashworth
Heritage and Identity
J D Bohland and E Hague D Bell
M Hoyler
High-Tech Industry
71
91
Heritage and Economy
Heteronormativity
58
80
C Kelly
Heritage and Culture
Hettner, A.
R Barnett and P Barnett
51
Y Zhou
98 104 109 115 120 122
Contents J Tima´r and Z Kova´cs
Hinterland Development
xlvii 128
Historical Geographies, Rural
P J Duffy
136
Historical Geographies, Urban
A Golan
146
Historical Geography
G M Winder
152
Historical Geography, Evolution of
J M Powell
158
Historical-Geographical Materialism
S Kirsch
163
HIV/AIDS in Developed Countries
M Sothern
169
HIV/AIDS in Developing Countries
W T S Gould
173
Home
T Peil
180
Homelessness
J May
Homelessness, Rural Housing
185 P Milbourne
191
M Pacione
196
Housing, Neighbourhoods and Health Housing, Rural
N Gallent
Hub Network Location
Human Rights
213
C Gibson
218
R Honey
232
Humanism/Humanistic Geography Human-Nonhuman
J M Smith
E J Roe
239 251
D P Tolia-Kelly
Hypothesis Testing
201 207
M E O’Kelly
Human Geography
Hybridity
J Dunn
258
R Haines-Young and R Fish
264
I Idealism/Idealist Human Geography Identity and Otherness, Rural Identity Politics Ideology
L Guelke
J Agyeman and S Neal
A Kobayashi
271 277 282
K R Olwig
287
Immigration I
J L Waters
297
Immigration II
I H Burnley
308
Imperial Cities
A D King
317
Imperialism, Cultural
S P Mains
Imperialistic Geographies Indian Ocean Indigeneity
322
G M Winder
S Chaturvedi
344
E Cameron and S de Leeuw, and M Greenwood
Indigenous Geographies
R Howitt and S Muller, and S Suchet-Pearson
Indigenous Health and Medicine Indigenous Knowledges Indigenous Mapping Industrial City
330
K Wilson and C Richmond
J Mistry J Corbett and M Chapin and L Gibson, and G Rambaldi
R Harris
352 358 365 371 377 383
Industrial Districts
F Celata and U Rossi
389
Industrial Location
K Chapman
396
xlviii
Contents
Industrial Organization Industrial Parks
J Patchell
S M Walcott
Industrial Restructuring Industrialization
408
R Hudson
419 R Lewis
433
A G Aguilar and E P Campuzano
Informalization
D Vaiou
Information Graphics
Informational City
459
B Parthasarathy
469
J Rutherford
475
R Sternberg
Input–Output Analysis
481
G J D Hewings and M Sonis
Institutionalism/Institutional Geographies Integrated Spatial Data Infrastructure Intensive/Extensive Research Interdisciplinarity
D Mackinnon R Foley
Intermodality
K Falconer Al-Hindi
529 R Peet
Internationalization of Education Internet, Economic Geography
536
J L Waters
548
M Zook
555
M-J Kraak
Internet-Based Measurement
562
M Dodge and M Zook
Interviews: In-Depth, Semi-Structured Investment Promotion
R Longhurst
N A Phelps
598
E Clark
Italian Language Geography
580
590
N AlSayyad and I Tu¨reli
Island Development
569
585
G W White
Islamic Urbanism
512
523
A R Goetz
Internet/Web Mapping
499
517
M Parnwell
International Organizations
491
507
P Raento
Intermediate Technology
446 454
A L Griffin
Information Technology
Irredentism
426
G DeVerteuil
Informal Sector
Innovation
413
D Simandan
Industry, Historical Geographies of Inequality
402
607 C Minca
Ivy League and Geography in the US
611 R Wright and N Koch
616
VOLUME 6 J Jackson, P.
C Dwyer
Japanese Geography Johnston, R. J.
1 A Saito and F Mizuoka
James D Sidaway
4 11
Contents
xlix
K Knowledge and Education, Historical Geographies of Knowledge Communities
S Pinch
Knowledge Intensive Business Services
P Wood
J O’Loughlin and E Holland
Kriging and Variogram Models Kropo´tkin, P.
15 25
´ Riain A Kerr and S O
Knowledge Economy
Kolossov, V.
R A Butlin
31 37 45
C A Calder and N Cressie
G Kearns
49 56
L Labor Control Regime Labor Flexibility
A E G Jonas
C Benner
Labor Geography
66
T D Rutherford
Labor Market
72
P Carmody
Labor Markets, Regional Labor Unionism
79
A E Green
85
A Herod
Lacoste, Y.
91
F Eva
Lamarck(ian)ism
97
H Winlow
Land Change Science
Land Rights
99
B L Turner II
107
J Ja¨ger
Land Rent Theory
112
R Howitt
Landscape
118
J Dubow
124
Landscape Iconography
S Hoelscher
Landscape Perception Language
132
K M Morin
140
R Jones
146
Language and Research
A Aylett and T J Barnes
153
Cristo´bal Kay
159
Latin American Structuralist School Law and Law Enforcement Learning Regions Leisure
D Delaney
165
B T Asheim
172
J Mansvelt
179
Lesbian Geographies Ley, D.
59
K Browne and C J Nash
P Jackson
Liberalism
193
E Gilbert
195
Life Course Approaches Literature Livelihoods
R Fincher
207
M Brosseau
212
F Owusu
219
Local Development
G Garofoli
Local Economic Development
225 S Conti and P Giaccaria
Local Economic Development, Politics of Local–Global
187
M Haldrup
K R Cox
233 239 245
l
Contents
Locality Debates
P Cooke
Location Analysis
M W Horner
Location Theory Logistics
256 263
A T Murray
270
M Hesse and J-P Rodrigue
277
Longitudinal Methods (Cohort Analysis, Life Tables) Los Angeles School of Post-Modern Urbanism Lowenthal, D.
S D Withers B Hooper
J R Gold
Lusophone Geography
285 293 298
J Gaspar
300
M Mackinder, H. J.
G Kearns
Malls/Retail Parks Map Hacking
309
G A Rice
312
E Mac Gillavry
318
R Edsall
323
Map Interactivity
Map Libraries and Archives
R B Parry
Map Perception and Cognition Map Types
S M Freundschuh
D Wood and J B Krygier
Mapping Agencies
329 334 339
C Perkins
344
Mapping, Commercial
B Hunt
351
Mapping, Cyberspace
M Zook and M Dodge
356
Mapping, Distributed
W Cartwright
Mapping, Non-Western
M W Pearce
Mapping, Philosophy
C Perkins
Mapping, Race and Ethnicity Mapping, Topographic Maps
H Winlow
P Collier
D Wood and J Krygier
Maps and Governance Maps and Protest
D Wood and J Krygier M Farish
Markov Chain Analysis
372 385 398 409 421
F Harvey
Maps and the State
368
431 436 442
W Li and C Zhang
455
Marxism/Marxist Geography I
A Cumbers
461
Marxism/Marxist Geography II
A Jones
474
Masculinism
A Bain
486
Masculinities
B van Hoven and P Hopkins
492
Massey, D. Material Culture
T Skelton D P Tolia-Kelly
497 500
Material, The
A Tay
505
McDowell, L.
A Jones
511
Contents
li
VOLUME 7 M Media
D B Clarke
1
Medical Geography
R Earickson
9
Medieval Geography
K D Lilley
21
Medieval Historical Geographies Mega-Cities
R Jones
Y-M Yeung
Meinig, D.
40
K M Dunn
48
Memorials and Monuments Memory
D H Alderman and O J Dwyer
S McDowell
Mental Health
64
S Bell
70
Me´tropole d’e´quilibre
G Burgel
Middle East and North Africa Migrant Workers Migration
76
M E Bonine
C Cindy Fan
P Boyle
96
Military and Geography Military Geographies
W Jenkins
116
R Woodward
122
J H McKendrick
P Merriman C G Pooley
J R Gold
157 R N Gwynne
Modifiable Areal Unit Problem Monte Carlo Simulation Moral Economies
169
S Ratick and G Schwarz
175
Multiculturalism
185
G Setten and K M Brown
Movies and Films, Analysis of Multicultural City
S C Aitken
H Hoernig and M Walton-Roberts J Clayton
Multidimensional Scaling
164
D W Wong
L McDowell
Moral Landscapes
144 150
D Linehan
Modernization Theory
128 134
Mobility, History of Everyday
Modernity
108
M Farish
Mixed and Multiple Methods
Modern City
82 89
Migration, Historical Geographies of
Mobility
51 59
C J Smith
Mental Maps
32
191 196 201 211
W M Bowen
216
N Nation
J Penrose
National Parks
223
N Curry
National Schools of Geography National Spatialities
T Edensor
229 P Claval
236 242
lii
Contents
Nationalism
D H Kaplan
248
Nationalism, Historical Geography of
M A Busteed
255
Natural Resources
G Bridge
261
Naturalistic Testing
R D Jacobson
269
Nature
K R Olwig
275
Nature, Historical Geographies of Nature, History of
P Holland and A Wearing
286
M Tanskanen
293
S Fullagar
298
Nature, Performing Nature, Social
N Argent
303
Nature-Culture
O Jones
309
Natures, Charismatic
J Lorimer
Natures, Gendered
C Radel
Natures, Postcolonial
331
M Sioh
Neighborhood Change
337
J Kenny
Neighborhood Effects
343
Sang-Il Lee
Neighborhoods and Community Neocolonialism
324
349
J Flint
354
M Watts
360
Neoliberal Economic Strategies Neoliberalism
R Le Heron
365
W Larner
374
Neoliberalism and Development Neoliberalism, Urban
W E Murray
379
W Larner
385
Network Analysis
M J Kuby and T D Roberts and C D Upchurch, and S Tierney
391
Network Regions
P Cooke
399
Networks
G Grabher
405
Networks, Urban
N Clarke
414
Neural Networks
I Casas
419
New Regionalism New Towns
G MacLeod K Kafkoula
New Urbanism NIMBY
423 428
E J McCann
438
P Hubbard
444
Nongovernmental Organizations
Saraswati Raju
Non-Representational Theory/Non-Representational Geographies Nordic Geography
K Simonsen
Nordplan and Nordregio North–South
450 L Cadman
456 464
G Olsson
469
A McGregor and D Hill
473
VOLUME 8 O Oceania
W E Murray
Oceanographic Mapping
1 D M Lawrence
14
Contents Oceans
liii
P E Steinberg
21
M Gren
27
Olsson, G. Oral History
M Boyle
30
Oral History, Ecological Orientalism
A Nightingale
34
M Haldrup and L Koefoed
37
Other/Otherness
J-F Staszak
43
Overlay (in GIS)
O Ahlqvist
48
Oxbridge Geographies
E Pawson
56
P Paasi, A.
R Jones
Pacific Rim
63
X Chen
66
Parenting/Motherhood/Fatherhood Participant Observation Participation
S C Aitken
K Walsh
77
S Hickey and U Kothari
Participatory Action Research Participatory Video Patriarchy
82
S Kindon and R Pain and M Kesby
S Kindon
Peet, R.
102 J D van der Ploeg
108
A Kobayashi
People’s Geography
114
D Mitchell
Performance, Research as
116
F Morton
Performative and Embodied Mapping Performativity
120 C Perkins
D P McCormack
Philosophy and Human Geography
G Backhaus
S Elden
Photogrammetry/Aerial Photography
137 145
P Collier
R Sanders
151 157
Physical Geography and Human Geography T Cresswell
Place Names
126 133
Phenomenology/Phenomenological Geography
Photographs
90 96
C J Nash
Peasant Agriculture
Place
72
S Harrison
163 169
V R Savage
178
Place, Politics of
L A Staeheli and D Mitchell
185
Planning, Urban
M Huxley
193
Plant Geographies
A Franklin
Point Pattern Analysis Policing
199
E Delmelle
N R Fyfe
Political Boundaries Political Ecology
204 212
A Paasi
217
R P Neumann
228
Political Economy, Geographical Political Geography Political Representation
D Storey B Forest
R Le Heron
234 243 254
liv
Contents
Polycentricity
P Hall
Polyvocality
260
Saraswati Raju
Popular Culture
J Dittmer
Population Geography
269
A J Bailey
Port-Industrial Complexes
274
M Dunford and G Yeung
Positivism/Positivist Geography Possibilism
265
285
D Bennett
295
V Berdoulay
Postcolonial Cities
312
A D King
321
Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies Postconflict Geographies Postdevelopment
C McEwan
J O’Loughlin
334
J Nederveen Pieterse
339
Posthumanism/Posthumanistic Geographies Postmodern City
J Lorimer
344
S Warren
Postmodernism/Postmodern Geography
355 C Minca
363
Post-Phenomenology/Post-Phenomenological Geographies Post-Productivist and Multifunctional Agriculture
J Lea
G A Wilson
L Sy´kora
Post-Socialist Cities
K Woodward and D P Dixon, and J P Jones, III
A O Chimhowu
Poverty, Rural
379
396 408
A R Tickamyer
Pragmatism/Pragmatist Geographies Pred, A.
373
387
Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies Poverty
327
416 S J Smith
421
B Warf
426
Pregnancy and Childbirth Private/Public Divide
E Chacko
429
D Collins
437
Privatization
P M O’Neill
442
Probabilism
R Flowerdew
448
Probability Models Projections Protest, Rural Psychoanalysis
R Flowerdew
451
F C Kessler
455
M Woods
474
P T Kingsbury
480
Psychoanalytic Theory/Psychoanalytic Geographies Psychotherapy/Psychotherapeutic Geographies
P T Kingsbury L Bondi
487 495
Public Good
K R Cox
501
Public Policy
M Perry
506
Public Space
D Mitchell and L A Staeheli
511
Public Spaces, Urban
D Collins and B-M Shantz
517
Contents
lv
VOLUME 9 Q Q Method/Analysis
P Robbins
1
Qualitative Geographic Information Systems Qualitative Spatial Reasoning Quantitative Data
M Cope and J-K Jung
R Billen and N Van de Weghe
M Charlton
Quantitative Methodologies
27
T J Barnes
Queer Theory/Queer Geographies Questionnaire Survey
12 19
M F Goodchild
Quantitative Revolution
7
33 K Browne
39
V Preston
46
R Race
J Winders
53
Racism and Antiracism
A Nayak
Radical Environmentalism Radical Geography
I G Simmons
65
R Peet
Radical Political Economy Railways
59
73
F Mizuoka
83
J Shaw and I Docherty
91
Rational Choice Theory (and Rational Choice Marxism) Reclus, E.
J P Clark T R Slater
M B Aalbers R Black
Regeneration to Renaissance
125
T Butler
130
J Tomaney
Regional Actors
136
M Tewdwr-Jones and A Lord
Regional Competition, Regional Dumping Regional Connectivity
111 117
Refugees and Displacement
Region
100 107
Redbrick University Geography in Britain Redlining
G Bridge
151
I M M Pires
M Sokol
156 165
Regional Development and Noneconomic Factors Regional Development and Technology
J O Bærenholdt
J R L Howells
181 187
Regional Development Models
M Dunford
192
Regional Development Theory
P Nijkamp and M Abreu
202
Regional Development, Endogenous
F To¨dtling
208
Regional Geography I
A Paasi
214
Regional Geography II
D MacKinnon
228
Regional Inequalities
M Dunford
Regional Innovation Systems Regional Integration
236
J Revilla Diez and M Kiese
A Cumbers
Regional Planning and Development Theories Regional Production Networks
D W Edgington
246 252
E W Soja
259 271
lvi
Contents
Regional Science
H G Overman
Regionalisations, Everyday Regionalism
279
B Werlen
286
J Tomaney
294
Regionalization/Zoning Systems
N K Shortt
298
J Pearce
302
Regression, Linear and Nonlinear Regulation
G MacLeod and A Holden
Relational Economic Geography Reliability and Validity
N M Rantisi and J S Boggs
320
L Kong
324
B Page
Remote Sensing
329
J M Read and M Torrado
Representation and Re-presentation Representation, Politics of Representation-Mapping
A Kobayashi
J Mennis
357
R Johnston
364
J Cupples
Resource Industries
370
Resource Management, Rural
Rio Summit
H Neo
R Hayter
Retail Geographies
347 351
Resource and Environmental Economics
Ritter, C.
335
H V Scott
Research Funding Bodies Resistance
314
O Ahlqvist
Religion/Spirituality/Faith Remittances
309
376 381
L M B Harrington
390
N Wrigley
398
E S Norman and D Carr
406
M Doevenspeck
River Basin Development Rural Communities
412 C Fox
414
S Salamon and K A MacTavish
423
Rural Geography
M Woods
429
Rural Populations
K H Halfacree
442
Rurality and Post-Rurality
K H Halfacree
Russian-Language Geography
449
V Kolossov and A Treivish
457
VOLUME 10 S Sampling
L Lo
Santos, M. Sauer, C. Scale
1
M A de Souza M Williams
15
N F Sayre and A V Di Vittorio
Scale Analytical
Scientific Method
19
T W Crawford
Science and Scientism, Cartography
Scott, A.
11
R Flowerdew
C Gibson
29 D Turnbull
37 43 46
Contents Second Homes
M Haldrup
Second World Segregation
lvii 50
J Oldfield
56
M F Poulsen
63
Segregation Indices
D W Wong
70
Segregation, Urban
R Atkinson and J McGarrigle
76
Selection Bias
T J Cooke
81
Self-Other
D Sibley
85
Semiotics
K E Foote and M Azaryahu
89
Sense of Place
K E Foote and M Azaryahu
Sensorium
D McCormack
Services, Professional Services, Rural Sexuality
101
A James
106
A C Vias
112
P Howell
Shift-Share Analysis Simulation
119 R W Jackson and K E Haynes
S M Manson A Kobayashi
138
D Pinder
144
Situationism/Situationist Geography
Slums
Q Stevens
151
R Harris
Smith, N.
157
A L Hansen
Social Capital
163
A Bebbington
165
Social Capital, Place and Health Social Class
L Twigg and J Mohan
N Duncan
Social Geography
Social Movements
185
K Newman
195
M Ramutsindela
199
Social Studies of Scientific Knowledge
S M Ruddick
217
A Latham
Soundscapes South Asia Southeast Asia
204 212
Sound and Music
Sovereignty
B Greenhough
S Engel-Di Mauro
Society–Space Soja, E.
171 179
R Panelli
Social Justice, Urban
Socialism
125 132
Situated Knowledge, Reflexivity
Situationist City
96
227
M Duffy
230
A Saldanha
236
G P Chapman
241
Eric C Thompson M Coleman
248 255
Space I
S Elden
262
Space II
R Kitchin
268
Space-Time
J D Gatrell and E W LaFary
Space-Time Modeling
M Yuan
Spanish Language Geography Spatial Analysis, Critical
276 286
A Albet and P Zusman
T Schwanen
296 302
lviii
Contents
Spatial Autocorrelation
D A Griffith
308
Spatial Clustering, Detection and Analysis of
Y Lu
Spatial Data Mining, Cluster and Pattern Recognition Spatial Data Mining, Geovisualization Spatial Data Models
T A Arentze
C Kim
337
A C Winstanley
Spatial Division of Labor
345
A Smith
Spatial Expansion Method
348
E Casetti
355
Spatial Filtering/Kernel Density Estimation Spatial Interaction Models Spatial Interpolation
G Rushton and C Tiwari
M E O’Kelly
369
N Schuurman
Spatial Science
377
Ron Johnston
384
Spatially Autoregressive Models Squatter Settlements
D A Griffith
396
K D Willis
403
M Jones
State Theory
359 365
N S Lam
Spatial Ontologies
325 332
L Bian
Spatial Databases
State
317
409
B Jessop
Statistics, Descriptive
416
J Lee
422
Statistics, Inferential
D M Scott
429
Statistics, Overview
G M Robinson
436
Statistics, Spatial Storper, M.
D J Unwin
452
P Sunley
458
Street Names and Iconography
M Azaryahu
460
VOLUME 11 S Structural Adjustment
G Mohan
Structural Equations Models Structural Marxism
1
P L Mokhtarian and D T Ory
A Kent
18
Structuralism/Structuralist Geography Structuration Theory
R G Smith
R Lippuner and B Werlen
Structurationist Geography Subaltern
10
B Werlen
C McEwan
30 39 50 59
Subalternity
V Gidwani
65
Subjectivity
J P Sharp
72
Suburbanization Superpower
A Mace J O’Loughlin
Surrealism/Surrealist Geographies Surveillance
77
M Henry
82 D Pinder
87 95
Contents Surveying
U F Paleo
Sustainability
100
T Marsden
Sustainability, Urban
103
M Whitehead
Sustainable Development
109
J A Elliott
Symbolic Interactionism
117
V J Del Casino, Jr. and D Thien
Symbolism, Iconography Systems
132
M Denil
138
G P Chapman
Systems Theory
lix
146
D Straussfogel and C von Schilling
151
T Taylor, G.
J M Powell
159
Taylor, P.
J Glassman
162
Technological Change
G Norcliffe
165
Technology and Regional Development Technology Industries
Territory and Territoriality
183 B Doman´ski
D Delaney
Theocracy
J M Smith
215
D Wilson
220
Nick Megoran
Therapeutic Landscapes Thiessen Polygon Third World
223 W M Gesler
229
L Mu
231
J Connell
Third World Cities
237
S Lloyd-Evans and R B Potter
247
U Strohmayer
256
Time and Historical Geography Time Geographic Analysis Time Geography
M Kurtz
259
M Dijst
266
M Gren
Time Series Analysis
279
G M Robinson
Time-Space Diaries
285
T Schwanen
294
T Edensor
Tourism, Rural
301
M Cawley
Tourism, Urban
313
T Hall
318
J P H Poon
324
Trade, International
R Grant
329
Trade, Transport and Communications, Historical Geographies of Transatlantic
196 209
Text, Textual Analysis
Trade Blocs
190
D Mustafa
Text and Textuality
Tourism
177
B Warf
Territorial Production Complexes
Thrift, N.
171
C G Alvstam
Telecommunications
Terrorism
J Zhang
M Sheller
338 345
Transcripts (Coding and Analysis) Transitional Economies
P J Hugill
J Round
M Cope
350 355
lx
Contents
Translation
F M Smith
361
Transnational Corporations in Developing Countries Transnational Elites
C Berndt
K Olds
376
Transnational Ethnic Networks Transnationalism
Jinn-Yuh Hsu
383
D Ley
388
Transnationalism and Labor Geography
P F Kelly
Transnationalism and Technology Transfer Transnationality
368
J-Y Hsu
S Huang
394 400 404
Transport and Accessibility
J Gutie´rrez
410
Transport and Deregulation
P White and A Sturt
418
Transport and Globalization
K O’Connor
424
Transport and Social Exclusion Transport and Sustainability Transport Geography
J Hine
429
K Button
435
R D Knowles
441
Transport, Public
J Preston
452
Transport, Rural
D Banister
460
B P Y Loo
465
Transport, Urban
Transportation and Land Use Travel and Travel-Writing
476
D J Unwin
484
A Nightingale
Tropical Geography Tuan, Y-F
470
R Phillips
Trend Surface Models Triangulation
S-L Shaw
489
M Power
493
T Cresswell
499
VOLUME 12 U Uncertainty
M F Goodchild
1
Underclass
C Haylett
6
Uneven Development
B Christophers
Uneven Regional Development Urban Architecture Urban Design
R Hudson
P Kraftl
Urban Habitats/Nature Urban Modeling
32 S Rodgers
40
J Byrne and J Wolch
M Batty
Urban Morphologies, Historical Urban Morphology
18 24
E Street
Urban Growth Machine
Urban Order
12
46 51
T R Slater
K D Lilley
66
M Jayne and D Bell
Urban Planning and Human Geography
59
70 J Dodson and B Gleeson
77
Contents Urban Policy
A Cochrane
Urban Regimes
84
M Lauria and R K Whelan
Urban Representation/Imagination Urban Village
P Kraftl and J Horton
G Crow
Urbanism
94
106
P Knox
112
Urban–Rural Continuum Utopian Cities
89
101
G Bridge
Urbanization
lxi
K H Halfacree
G Brown
119 125
V Venture Capital
C Mason
131
Vichianism (After Vico)
D Kunze
138
Vidal de la Blache, P.
G Mercier
147
Visuality
F MacDonald
Visualization, Feminist Voluntary Sector
M Pavlovskaya C Milligan
von Humboldt, A. Vulnerability
151 157 165
A Buttimer
171
B Wisner
176
W War
V Mamadouh
183
War, Historical Geography and Waste Management Water
N C Johnson
M Watson
Fiona Allon
Water Management
D Kay M Davidson
D Conradson
S C MacKian
Wetlands and Reclamation
215 222
R Lee and C Philo
Welfare Reform Wellbeing
207
S Batterbury
Welfare Geography
195 201
Waterfront Development Watts, M. J.
189
224 230 235
M G Hatvany
241
Whiteness
L Peake
247
Wilderness
C R Warren
254
Wilson, A.
G P Clarke
World/Global Cities World-System
B Derudder K Terlouw
Wreford Watson, J. Wright, J. K.
G M Robinson
I M Keighren
260 262 269 279 281
Y Youth/Youth Cultures Index
L Holt
283 289
SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION
CARTOGRAPHY AND GIS Art and Cartography Atlases Biodiversity Mapping Cartographic Animation Cartography, History of Cartography in Islamic Societies Census Geography Census Mapping Children and Mapping Color, Mapping Computational Human Geography Counter Mapping Critical Cartography Critical GIS Digital Data, Historical Geography and Digital Earth Disease Mapping Electoral Cartography Feminism, Maps and GIS Generalization Geodemographics Geodesy Geographical Masking Geomatics Georeferencing, Geocoding Geospatial Intelligence Geovisualization GIS and Cartography GIS and Society GIS, Mobile and Locational Based Services GIS, Public Participation GIScience and Systems Global Positioning/GPS Indigenous Mapping Information Graphics Integrated Spatial Data Infrastructure Internet/Web Mapping Map Hacking Map Interactivity Map Libraries and Archives Map Perception and Cognition
Map Types Mapping Agencies Mapping, Commercial Mapping, Cyberspace Mapping, Distributed Mapping, Non Western Mapping, Philosophy Mapping, Race and Ethnicity Mapping, Topographic Maps Maps and Governance Maps and Protest Maps and the State Oceanographic Mapping Performative and Embodied Mapping Photogrammetry/Aerial Photography Projections Qualitative Geographic Information Systems Qualitative Spatial Reasoning Quantitative Revolution Representation Mapping Science and Scientism, Cartography Space Time Modeling Spatial Databases Spatial Data Mining, Geovisualization Spatial Ontologies Surveying Symbolism, Iconography DEVELOPMENT GEOGRAPHY Aid Brain Drain Brandt Commission Brown Agenda Child Labor Civil Society Colonialism I Colonialism II Colonialism, Internal Commodity Chains Debt Deforestation
lxiii
lxiv
Subject Classification
Dependency Desertification Developmentalism Development I Development II Digital Divide East Asian Miracle Empire Empowerment Eurocentrism Export Processing Zones Extended Metropolitan Region Fair Trade Famine First World Global Commodity Chains Governance, Good Green Revolution Health and Development HIV/AIDS in Developing Countries Imperialism, Cultural Indigenous Geographies Indigenous Knowledges Informal Sector Intermediate Technology Latin American Structuralist School Livelihoods Locality Debates Migrant Workers Modernization Theory Neocolonialism Neoliberalism and Development Nongovernmental Organizations Orientalism Participation Postcolonial Cities Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies Postdevelopment Poverty Remittances Resistance Rio Summit* Second World Social Capital Squatter Settlements Structural Adjustment Sustainable Development Theocracy Third World Third World Cities Trade, International Transnational Corporations in Developing Countries Tropical Geography Vulnerability
DISCIPLINARY MATTERS Anglo American/Anglophone Hegemony Anthropology and Human Geography Chinese Language Geography Citation Geography Communist and Post Communist Geographies Critical Geography Cultural Studies and Human Geography Dutch Human Geography Economics and Human Geography Enlightenment Geography Environmental Studies and Human Geography Feminist Groups within Geography Francophone Geography Geographical Journals German Language Geography Historical Geography Human Geography Interdisciplinarity Italian Language Geography Ivy League and Geography in the US Japanese Geography Lusophone Geography Medieval Geography Military and Geography National Schools of Geography Nordic Geography Oxbridge Geographies Philosophy and Human Geography Physical Geography and Human Geography Redbrick University Geography in Britain Research Funding Bodies Russian Language Geography Spanish Language Geography Urban Planning and Human Geography ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY Agglomeration Business Services Capital and Space Capitalism Capitalism and Division of Labor Commodity Chains Competitiveness Consumption Core Periphery Models Corporate Responsibilities Corridor and Axis Development Creativity Cultural Economy Debt De Industrialization e Business and e Commerce Economic Crises
Subject Classification
Economic Development, Rural Economic Geography Economic Geography, Quantitative Economics and Human Geography Economies, Alternative Economies, Borderland Economies, Branch Plant Economies, Imagined Economy, Informal Embeddedness Enterprise Discourse Entrepreneurship Environmental Regulation Ethnic Economies Export Processing Zones Fair Trade Feminism and Work Feminist Political Economy Finance, Historical Geographies of Finance, Offshore Financial Centers, International Financial Exclusion Financial Knowledge Financial Risks and Management Firms Food Networks Food Regimes Fordism Fordism, Post Fordism and Flexible Specialization Foreign Direct Investment Global Commodity Chains Global Production Networks Globalization and Transnational Corporations Globalization, Economic Governance, Corporate Growth Poles, Growth Centers Heritage and Economy High Tech Industry Industrial Districts Industrialization Industrial Location Industrial Organization Industrial Parks Industrial Restructuring Industry, Historical Geographies of Informal Sector Information Technology Innovation Internationalization of Education International Organizations Internet, Economic Geography Investment Promotion Knowledge and Education, Historical Geographies of Knowledge Communities Knowledge Economy
lxv
Knowledge Intensive Business Services Labor Control Regime Labor Flexibility Labor Geography Labor Market Labor Unionism Learning Regions Local Development Local Economic Development Local Economic Development, Politics of Locality Debates Location Theory Migrant Workers Modernization Theory Natural Resources Neoliberal Economic Strategies Networks Political Economy, Geographical Privatization Public Policy Radical Political Economy Regional Integration Regional Production Networks Relational Economic Geography Remittances Resource and Environmental Economics Resource Industries Retail Geographies Services, Professional Services, Rural Spatial Division of Labor State Theory Technological Change Technology and Regional Development Technology Industries Telecommunications Trade Blocs Trade, International Trade, Transport and Communications, Historical Geographies of Transitional Economies Transnational Corporations in Developing Countries Transnational Elites Transnational Ethnic Networks Transnationalism and Labor Geography Transnationalism and Technology Transfer Uneven Development Urban Growth Machine Venture Capital HEALTH AND MEDICAL GEOGRAPHY Ageing and Health Care/Caregiving Chronic Disease Communicable Diseases, Globalization of
lxvi
Subject Classification
Complementary and Alternative Medicine Disability and Chronic Illness Disease Diffusion Environmental Health Epidemiological Transition Gender and Health Health and Development Healthcare Accessibility Health Geography Health Inequalities Health Services Restructuring Health Systems and Health Services HIV/AIDS in Developed Countries Housing, Neighbourhoods and Health Indigenous Health and Medicine Medical Geography Mental Health Pregnancy and Childbirth Social Capital, Place and Health Therapeutic Landscapes Voluntary Sector Welfare Reform Wellbeing HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY Agrarian Transformations Capitalism and Division of Labor Digital Data, Historical Geography and Environment, Historical Geography of Ethnicity and Resistance, Historical Geographies of Exploration Feminist Geography, Prehistory of Feudalism and Feudal Society Field Systems and Enclosure Finance, Historical Geographies of Gender, Historical Geographies of Genealogy and Family History Geohistory Heritage and Culture Heritage and Economy Heritage and Identity Historical Geographies, Rural Historical Geographies, Urban Historical Geography Historical Geography, Evolution of Imperial Cities Imperialistic Geographies Industry, Historical Geographies of Knowledge and Education, Historical Geographies of Medieval Historical Geographies Memory Migration, Historical Geographies of Nationalism, Historical Geography of Nature, Historical Geographies of Nature, History of
Oral History Oral History, Ecological Street Names and Iconography Time and Historical Geography Trade, Transport and Communications, Historical Geographies of Urban Morphologies, Historical War, Historical Geography and METACONCEPTS Africa Americas Antarctica Arctic Asia Australasia Balkans Community Diffusion Distance East/West Environment Europe Indian Ocean Landscape Local–Global Memory Middle East and North Africa Mobility Nature Nature Culture North–South Oceania Oceans Pacific Rim Place Scale Self Other Society–Space South Asia Southeast Asia Space I Space II Space Time Territory and Territoriality Transatlantic METHODS Archives Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems Autobiography Autoethnography Auto Photography Case Study Approach Categorical Data Analysis
Subject Classification
Cellular Automata Census Mapping Chaos and Complexity Choice Modeling Complexity Theory, Nonlinear Dynamic Spatial Systems Content Analysis Cross Cultural Research Diaries (Video, Audio or Written) Discourse Analysis Ecological Fallacy Edge Effects Embodied Knowing Emotional Knowing Entropy Maximising Models Error (Propagation and Modeling) Ethical Issues in Research Ethnography Evolutionary Algorithms Experimental Design Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis Factor Analysis and Principal Components Analysis Feminist Methodologies Fieldwork First Law of Geography Focus Groups Fractal Analysis Fuzzy Set and Fuzzy Logic Genealogy Method Geocomputation Geographical Masking Geographically Weighted Regression Georeferencing, Geocoding Grounded Theory Haptic or Touch Based Knowledge Hub Network Location Hypothesis Testing Input–Output Analysis Intensive/Extensive Research Internet Based Measurement Interviews: In Depth, Semi Structured Kriging and Variogram Models Landscape Iconography Landscape Perception Language and Research Life Course Approaches Location Analysis Longitudinal Methods (Cohort Analysis, Life Tables) Markov Chain Analysis Masculinism Mental Maps Mixed and Multiple Methods Modifiable Areal Unit Problem Monte Carlo Simulation Movies and Films, Analysis of
lxvii
Multidimensional Scaling Naturalistic Testing Neighborhood Effects Network Analysis Neural Networks Oral History Oral History, Ecological Overlay (in GIS) Participant Observation Participatory Action Research Participatory Video Performance, Research as Photographs Point Pattern Analysis Polyvocality Psychoanalysis Q Method/Analysis Qualitative Geographic Information Systems Quantitative Data Quantitative Methodologies Questionnaire Survey Regionalization/Zoning Systems Regression, Linear and Nonlinear Reliability and Validity Remote Sensing Representation and Re presentation Sampling Scale Analytical Scientific Method Segregation Indices Selection Bias Semiotics Shift Share Analysis Simulation Situated Knowledge, Reflexivity Sound and Music Space Time Modeling Spatial Analysis, Critical Spatial Autocorrelation Spatial Clustering, Detection and Analysis of Spatial Data Mining, Cluster and Pattern Recognition Spatial Data Mining, Geovisualization Spatial Data Models Spatial Expansion Method Spatial Filtering/Kernel Density Estimation Spatial Interaction Models Spatial Interpolation Spatially Autoregressive Models Statistics, Descriptive Statistics, Inferential Statistics, Overview Statistics, Spatial Structural Equations Models Subalternity Subjectivity
lxviii
Subject Classification
Text, Textual Analysis Thiessen Polygon Time Geographic Analysis Time Series Analysis Time Space Diaries Transcripts (Coding and Analysis) Translation Trend Surface Models Triangulation Uncertainty Visualization, Feminist NATURE/ENVIRONMENT Agrarian Transformations Agri Environmentalism and Rural Change Animal Geographies Biodiversity Biodiversity Mapping Climate Change Conservation and Ecology Culture/Natures Deforestation Desertification Ecotourism Environment Environmental Hazards Environmental Health Environmentalism Environmental Justice Environmental Policy Environmental Regulation Environmental Security Environmental Studies and Human Geography Environment, Historical Geography of Gardens and Gardening Green Revolution Land Change Science National Parks Natural Resources Nature Nature, Historical Geographies of Nature, History of Nature, Performing Nature, Social Natures, Charismatic Natures, Gendered Natures, Postcolonial Plant Geographies Political Ecology Radical Environmentalism Resource and Environmental Economics Resource Management, Rural Sustainability Sustainable Development Urban Habitats/Nature
Waste Management Water Management Wetlands and Reclamation Wilderness PEOPLE Barnes, T. Beaujeu Garnier, J. Berry, B. Bobek, H. Bowman, I. Christaller, W. Claval, P. Cloke, P. Cohen, S. Corbridge, S. Cosgrove, D. Cox, K. Darby, H. C. Dear, M. J. Dicken, P. Dudley Stamp, L. Evans, E. E. Garrison, W. Golledge, R. Gottmann, J. Gregory, D. Hagerstrand, T. Haggett, P. Harley, J. B. Hartshorne, R. Harvey, D. Hettner, A. Jackson, P. Johnston, R. J. Kolossov, V. Kropo´tkin, P. Lacoste, Y. Ley, D. Lowenthal, D. Mackinder, H. J. Massey, D. McDowell, L. Meinig, D. Olsson, G. Paasi, A. Peet, R. Pred, A. Reclus, E. Ritter, C. Santos, M. Sauer, C. Scott, A. Smith, N. Soja, E.
Subject Classification
Storper, M. Taylor, G. Taylor, P. Thrift, N. Tuan, Y. F. Vidal de la Blache, P. von Humboldt, A. Watts, M. J. Wilson, A. Wreford Watson, J. Wright, J. K. PHILOSOPHY AND GEOGRAPHY Activist Geographies Actor Network Theory/Network Geographies Anarchism/Anarchist Geography Anthropogeography (After Ratzel) Applied Geography Avant Garde/Avant Garde Geographies Behavioral Geography Berkeley School Chicago School Christian Geography Cognitive Geography Computational Human Geography Critical Geography Critical Rationalism (After Popper) Critical Realism/Critical Realist Geographies Critical Theory (After Habermas) Cultural Materialism Cultural Turn Darwinism (and Social Darwinism) Deconstruction Determinism/Environmental Determinism Developmentalism Dialectical Reasoning and Dialectical Materialism Dialogism (After Bakhtin) Ecology Ethnomethodology/Ethnomethodological Geography Existentialism/Existential Geography Feminism/Feminist Geography Feminist Geography, Prehistory of Feminist Political Economy Field Geographies Fluidity–Fixity Foucauldianism Functionalism (Including Structural Functionalism) Geography, History of GIS and Society Historical Geographical Materialism Humanism/Humanistic Geography Human Nonhuman Idealism/Idealist Human Geography Indigenous Geographies Institutionalism/Institutional Geographies
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Lamarck(ian)ism Local–Global Los Angeles School of Post Modern Urbanism Marxism/Marxist Geography I Marxism/Marxist Geography II Military Geographies Nature Culture Non Representational Theory/Non Representational Geographies People’s Geography Phenomenology/Phenomenological Geography Philosophy and Human Geography Physical Geography and Human Geography Political Ecology Political Economy, Geographical Positivism/Positivist Geography Possibilism Posthumanism/Posthumanistic Geographies Postmodernism/Postmodern Geography Post Phenomenology/Post Phenomenological Geographies Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies Pragmatism/Pragmatist Geographies Probabilism Probability Models Psychoanalytic Theory/Psychoanalytic Geographies Psychotherapy/Psychotherapeutic Geographies Quantitative Revolution Radical Environmentalism Radical Geography Radical Political Economy Rational Choice Theory (and Rational Choice Marxism) Regional Geography I Regional Geography II Regionalisations, Everyday Regional Science Science and Scientism, Cartography Self Other Semiotics Situationism/Situationist Geography Social Studies of Scientific Knowledge Society–Space Space Time Spatial Science Structural Marxism Structuralism/Structuralist Geography Structurationist Geography Structuration Theory Surrealism/Surrealist Geographies Symbolic Interactionism Systems Systems Theory Time Geography Vichianism (After Vico) Welfare Geography
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Subject Classification
POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY Activism Activist Geographies Ageing and Health Anti Geopolitics Apartheid/Post Apartheid Biopolitics Borderlands Buffer Zone Citizenship Citizenship and Governmentality, Rural Cold War Colonialism I Colonialism II Communist and Post Communist Geographies Critical Geopolitics Cultural Politics Democracy Devolution Electoral Cartography Electoral Districts Electoral Geography Empire Environmental Justice Environmental Security Ethnic Conflict Eurocentrism Fatherland/Homeland Feudalism and Feudal Society Geopolitics Geopolitics and Religion Gerrymandering Globalization, Economic Governance Governance, Corporate Governance, Good Governance, Transport Governance, Urban Governmentality Hegemony Human Rights Ideology Imperialistic Geographies Irredentism Liberalism Maps and Governance Military and Geography Nation National Spatialities Nationalism Nationalism, Historical Geography of Neoliberalism Neoliberalism, Urban Nongovernmental Organizations
Place, Politics of Political Boundaries Political Geography Political Representation Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies Postconflict Geographies Protest, Rural Public Good Public Policy Regionalism Regulation Representation, Politics of Socialism Social Movements Sovereignty State State Theory Superpower Territory and Territoriality Terrorism War War, Historical Geography and World System POPULATION GEOGRAPHY Ageing and Mobility Census Geography Demography Diaspora Emigration Fertility Genetics Immigration II Migration Migration, Historical Geographies of Population Geography Refugees and Displacement Rural Populations Segregation Transnationalism REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT Ame´nagement du Territoire: Territorial Development Cassa per il Mezzogiorno City Region Concentrated Deconcentration Core Periphery Models Corridor and Axis Development Cumulative Causation De Industrialization De Localization Edge Cities Europe of Regions Greenfield Development Growth Poles, Growth Centers
Subject Classification
Hinterland Development Industrial Districts Industrial Parks Informalization Island Development Labor Markets, Regional Learning Regions Local Development Me´tropole d’e´quilibre Network Regions New Regionalism New Towns Nordplan and Nordregio Polycentricity Port Industrial Complexes Region Regional Actors Regional Competition, Regional Dumping Regional Connectivity Regional Development and Noneconomic Factors Regional Development and Technology Regional Development, Endogenous Regional Development Models Regional Development Theory Regional Geography I Regional Geography II Regional Inequalities Regional Innovation Systems Regional Integration Regionalisations, Everyday Regionalism Regional Planning and Development Theories Regional Production Networks River Basin Development Territorial Production Complexes Uneven Regional Development RURAL GEOGRAPHY Agricultural Land Preservation Agriculture, Sustainable Agri Environmentalism and Rural Change Animal Welfare, Agricultural Citizenship and Governmentality, Rural Counterurbanization Economic Development, Rural Food Networks Food Networks, Alternative Food Regimes Gender and Rurality Gentrification, Rural Historical Geographies, Rural Homelessness, Rural Housing, Rural Identity and Otherness, Rural Peasant Agriculture
Post Productivist and Multifunctional Agriculture Poverty, Rural Protest, Rural Resource Management, Rural Rural Communities Rural Geography Rurality and Post Rurality Second Homes Services, Rural Tourism, Rural Transport, Rural SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY Activism Affect Ageing and Mobility Ageism and Age Agoraphobia Anthropology and Human Geography Apartheid/Post Apartheid Becoming Belonging Berkeley School Body, The Care/Caregiving Child Labor Children/Childhood Citizenship Civil Society Community Consumption Cosmopolitanism Crime/Fear of Crime Cultural Capital Cultural Economy Cultural Geography Cultural Materialism Cultural Politics Cultural Studies and Human Geography Cultural Turn Culture Culture/Natures Cyberspace/Cyberculture Diaspora Difference/Politics of Difference Digital Divide Discourse Dwelling Education Embodied Knowing Emotional Geographies Emotional Knowing Empowerment Equity Ethnic Conflict
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Subject Classification
Ethnic Economies Ethnicity Ethnicity and Resistance, Historical Geographies of Festival and Spectacle Film Gay Geographies Gender and Rurality Gender, Historical Geographies of Globalization, Cultural Habitus Heritage Heteronormativity Home Homelessness Homelessness, Rural Hybridity Identity and Otherness, Rural Identity Politics Immigration I Imperialism, Cultural Indigeneity Indigenous Knowledges Indigenous Mapping Inequality Land Rights Landscape Landscape Iconography Language Law and Law Enforcement Leisure Lesbian Geographies Literature Masculinism Masculinities Material Culture Material, The Media Memorials and Monuments Modernity Moral Economies Moral Landscapes Multiculturalism Nature, Social Orientalism Other/Otherness Parenting/Motherhood/Fatherhood Patriarchy Performativity Place Names Policing Popular Culture Poverty Poverty, Rural Private/Public Divide
Public Space Public Spaces, Urban Queer Theory/Queer Geographies Race Racism and Antiracism Religion/Spirituality/Faith Representation, Politics of Segregation, Urban Sense of Place Sensorium Sexuality Social Capital Social Capital, Place and Health Social Class Social Geography Social Justice, Urban Soundscapes Street Names and Iconography Subaltern Surveillance Symbolism, Iconography Text and Textuality Tourism Transnationality Travel and Travel Writing Underclass Visuality Voluntary Sector Water Welfare Geography Welfare Reform Wellbeing Whiteness Youth/Youth Cultures TRANSPORT GEOGRAPHY Aviation Ecotourism Governance, Transport Intermodality Logistics Mobility, History of Everyday Railways Regional Connectivity Tourism Tourism, Rural Tourism, Urban Transport and Accessibility Transport and Deregulation Transport and Globalization Transport and Social Exclusion Transport and Sustainability Transportation and Land Use Transport Geography Transport, Public
Subject Classification
Transport, Rural Transport, Urban URBAN GEOGRAPHY Anti Urbanism Cellular Automata Central Business District Central Place Theory Chinese Urbanism City Marketing City Region Counterurbanization Defensible Space Edge Cities Financial Centers, International Flaˆneur, The Gated Communities/Privatopias Gender in the City Gentrification Ghettos Governance, Urban Historical Geographies, Urban Housing Imperial Cities Industrial City Informational City Islamic Urbanism Land Rent Theory Malls/Retail Parks Mega Cities Modern City Multicultural City Neighborhood Change Neighborhoods and Community Neoliberalism, Urban Networks, Urban New Towns New Urbanism NIMBY
Planning, Urban Polycentricity Postcolonial Cities Postmodern City Post Socialist Cities Public Spaces, Urban Redlining Regeneration to Renaissance Segregation Indices Segregation, Urban Situationism/Situationist Geography Situationist City Slums Social Justice, Urban Street Names and Iconography Suburbanization Sustainability, Urban Third World Cities Tourism, Urban Transport, Urban Underclass Urban Architecture Urban Design Urban Growth Machine Urban Habitats/Nature Urbanism Urbanization Urban Modeling Urban Morphologies, Historical Urban Morphology Urban Order Urban Policy Urban Regimes Urban Representation/Imagination Urban Village Urban–Rural Continuum Utopian Cities Waterfront Development World/Global Cities
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FOREWORD
We should reflect more on the increasingly inter connected and interdependent world we live in. Places that a century ago would have taken months to reach by boat can be reached in hours on a plane and at a price affordable to many more people. Changes in financial markets on one side of the globe instantly ricochet around the planet. Decisions taken in one country or at a supra national scale affect jobs and well being in another. This is the world we have inherited sixty years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reminds us of the work still needed to implement those shared values. For while the Earth seems to be getting smaller in space and time, the relative differences between places are often growing apace. The situation in many de veloping countries is currently regressing with falling life expectancy, rising national debts, and weakening econ omies. In the developed North there continue to be large differences in the standards of living between rich and poor, core and periphery, rural and urban areas. Con sequently, the mobility of people is increasing around the globe with millions of labour migrants and refugees on the move, seeking better lives elsewhere. In addition, humanity is beginning to recognise and address the sig nificant global challenge of climate change which is in part created by the processes of development and glob alisation, but will require to be addressed with principles of climate justice. The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography documents and explains all of these issues, and many more besides. Focused through the spatial lens of a modern geography sensitive to how social, economic, political, cultural or environmental processes work within and between places, the entries cover the full spectrum of issues facing humanity today across the
planet. Together the essays provide a fascinating over view of the diverse, complex and sometimes paradoxical relationships between people, places and environments, written in a style accessible to students and interested parties. As well, the vast array of methodologies and theories employed by geographers and others is docu mented, to make sense of the developments now occur ring. Indeed, in the very fact that it contains 914 essays, written by 844 contributors from over 40 countries, it is itself a product of the way in which the geography of communication and cooperation has rapidly evolved in recent years! The challenges facing all of us, whether they concern the present global economic downturn, survival in a country at war, managing environmental change, and a host of other pressing issues, require a broad and deep knowledge of the fundamental processes shaping our future. The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography provides a comprehensive overview of that knowledge and points to the tools needed to build planetary citi zenship and to think through a more ethical version of globalisation. I hope that it will be used extensively by present and future generations so that, as the planet seemingly shrinks in size, so the problems we face and the differences between us shrink too.
Mary Robinson President of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalisation Initiative Honorary President of Oxfam International United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1997–2002 President of Ireland, 1990–1997
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FOREWORD
Over the past 100 hundred years or so, human geography has grown into one of the most vibrant university discip lines around the world. Expanding from its origins in the colonial pursuit of geographic knowledge, modern human geography has developed into a diverse collection of so phisticated, spatially inflected knowledges underpinned by a refined set of theoretical concepts and methodological tools. As a result, defining contemporary human geography is not an easy task, not least because what passes for geo graphic theory and praxis varies across time and space. For us, what marks the discipline from other social and natural sciences is its focus on the relationship between people and the world they inhabit, its core metaconcepts (such as space, place, landscape, nature, mobility, environment, and scale), and its use of geographically sensitive methods of data generation and analysis. Human geography, as the contents list of this encyclopedia amply demonstrates, fo cuses on key issues of the day, and opens up new and vital perspectives on questions that affect our everyday lives. It engages with and problematizes apparently unequivocal statements such as: planet is large; • the the teems with life; and • the planet planet is under threat. • Through the lens of human geography, these statements are revealed as equivocal and often paradoxical. What do we mean by ‘large’ in a period in which a scientific shift based on the discovery of fractals has expanded our perception of the length and complexity of lines at exactly the same time that transport and communications technologies shrink the world to such an extent that we can interact in real time with people on the far side of the planet and maps of the planet can be called up online by ordinary citizens and analyzed in diverse ways? What do we mean by ‘life’ in a
period in which we keep discovering more of it in more and more unlikely places, while scientific and cultural changes are continually expanding our definition of what ‘life’ consists of? What do we mean by ‘threat’ when we are unable to agree on the nature of a threat, let alone a so lution, when technologies that offer the promise of salvation all too often create new problems and when increasing populations offer new resources as well as consume them? Human geography seeks to answer such questions not only in order to understand the world but also to make practical interventions. Unlike many disciplines, it is built on unsure foundations without much in the way of a canon. Some might say that that is its attraction; that it has perennially been driven by the changing world around it. The discipline is willing to go where other disciplines fear to tread because its history is loosely connected, more like a conglomerate than a series of well defined strata – it has not been wed to a single or limited theoretical approach but rather it has explored and drawn together all manner of approaches in order to address issues geographically. Equally though, it is born out of a longing for a planetary citizenship, with that longing sitting alongside a radical appreciation of how all the differences that make up the discipline both com promise and strengthen that goal. Whatever might be the case, at the heart of this endeavor has been the notion that geography matters – the spatial configuration of events is not a mere add on to other somehow deeper, more abstract aspatial processes, but rather is central to how the processes unfold. These tensions between a discipline organized around understanding the world and a discipline consisting of and defined by its own approaches, are manifest in how geog raphy tells its own history (and how one might organize an encyclopedia). One way would be to trace the changing approaches, epistemologies, and concerns of the discipline.
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Thus one could track the multiple interpretations of the writing of Alexander von Humboldt, often cited as one of the key disciplinary ancestors. Alternately, one could chart the intellectual genealogies of ‘key’ texts, concepts, and places to provide counterpoints to more traditional chronological histories of various theoretical schools. Or, one could create accounts that organize the discipline via key processes and events in the world. To take other examples, there are presently attempts to write about differences in more satisfying and nuanced ways, ways that can bring about new means of living and experiencing the world through reinventing familiar categories like gender, race, and sexu ality, categories that have their own complex geographies which are a very part of the process of reinvention. There are efforts to reconceive cities taking account of the affective, the mundane, the ongoing incompleteness, fuzziness, and unpredictability that make up urban life, and there are at tempts to reimagine the economic as thoroughly infused with the cultural. Sometimes clumsy and awkward, some times plain inspired, these kinds of developments are surely worth following in a world too often characterized by div ision and despair. And follow them, this encyclopedia does.
The Encyclopedia The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography is a multinational attempt to capture and trace the state of human geography as a discipline and as a description of the world as it exists today and as it changes its shape in the future. Its ambition, in other words, is to provide a major and continually updated resource that provides an always temporary but hopefully authoritative means of answering questions of the sort posed above, and many others like them. This it does by taking on the venerable format of an encyclopedia which we can understand both in its original meaning as a course of education – in this case with the description ‘human geography’ – or in its more modern meaning as treating a particular branch of knowledge comprehensively through the medium of articles arranged alphabetically, by subject. Of course, producing an encyclopedia provides real opportunities, most especially the ability to stretch out explanations in a way not available in the more common dictionary form. Thus, our aim has not been to produce a portable, condensed summary or bite sized definitions of concepts, but rather clear, authoritative statements that set out the evolution and implications of geographic thought. Such an endeavor also produces some inevitable challenges. We want to use these challenges to explore how this encyclopedia has been put together, under standing that such challenges do not have to be under stood just as undesirable or unpleasant choices between alternatives. They can equally well be understood as producing the means to fuel productive encounters.
The first challenge is an obvious one. There is an in evitable degree of arbitrariness about what is included and what is not. We have made an honest attempt to cover the whole range of what can possibly be treated as human geography in terms of issues on the ground and traditions within the discipline. This has been achieved through an intensive, iterative process involving all the editors, worked through at face to face meetings, conference phone calls, and e mail. Inevitably, there will be topics, methods, and thinkers considered important by some that we felt did not justify a stand alone entry. Moreover, we fully expect that as some issues grow or decline in im portance – to the world and/or the discipline – we shall have occasion in the future to expand or contract the coverage in different fields. This dilemma of selecting what to cover brings with it other issues too. Foremost among these has been how to shape the coverage of each entry and title each entry in an informative yet pithy way. There are many bodies of conceptual and substantive knowledge that cannot easily be encompassed by a single term or phrase. The result is that some of the entries have somewhat contrived titles. Better that, though, than titles that are vague or oblique, especially in these days of vo luminous information accessible across the Internet. The second challenge is an authorial one. It was a guiding principle of this encyclopedia that we would attempt to extend authorship beyond the ‘charmed circle’ of Anglophone/Western geographers, both as a response to postcolonial critiques and as a response to the critiques of scholars from outside the Euro American zone who felt disenfranchised by what is possible to perceive as an Anglophone/Western ascendancy. We have then been attentive to the geographies of the discipline of geog raphy, not least since scholars in diverse locales see the world differently in terms of what processes seem most important and what traditions of interpretation they use. We have not always been successful in achieving our goal of wide international authorship, partly because the geographical establishment is simply larger in some countries than others and partly because human geog raphy still bears some of the marks of its own history, not least as a colonial enterprise. Inevitably perhaps, the historical geography of geography kept coming home to roost. Moreover, scholars from different locales had varying abilities to contribute due to issues of time, ac cess to resources, and language. As a result, we have not been able to include some topics and perspectives. That said, entries have been solicited from 844 scholars located in over 40 countries around the world working within different traditions and we have managed to describe the different ideas and practices of geography in many countries/language groups. Again, this is a project that will be added to, over the coming years. The third challenge was to draw on the expertise of the human geographical community in ways that ensured
Foreword
some degree of diversity. In particular, we are proud that we have been able to balance the voices of established scholars with those of younger writers. This has had salutary effects. For example, we have been able to trace the history of philosophical ideas in geography both from the point of view of those that have been deeply involved in the explosion of different conceptual possibilities that took place in the discipline from the late 1960s onward, as well as the point of view of younger scholars who have set out quite different agendas. The fourth challenge was to ensure a relatively con sistent standard of scholarship for each entry and to provide a balanced content with respect to ideas and geographical coverage. To that end, each entry was ini tially refereed by a section editor who had overall re sponsibility for a selection of related entries (e.g., political, urban, regional development, quantitative methods, people) and a senior editor. Each senior editor oversaw three sections in order to ensure sections were approximately commensurate in style, content, and length. To provide breadth as well as depth, authors were asked to draw on examples and traditions from around the world and not simply rely on charting an issue with respect to their own local circumstance. The fifth challenge was to use the Internet in pro ductive ways. One of the motivations for this encyclo pedia was the production of a platform upon which we might then build a future memory for human geography. It is an attempt to begin to produce a living, breathing archive which will gradually evolve, by using the powers of the Internet. Though in this first edition, both print and Internet editions exist side by side, in later editions the Internet edition will exist singly, opening the way to a vision of geography which is in keeping with the age in which we now live. Since the articles are on the web, it will be possible to update them on a regular, rolling basis without having to wait for the revision of every other article. Equally, they will have all kinds of extra resources associated with them – illustrations of all types, including more and more videos as well as maps and diagrams, ‘active’ reference links that will take the reader straight to the listed journal article, and so on. Then, more articles will be added at regular intervals, both filling in gaps and supplementing existing articles. All articles will be left in situ – old articles will not be deleted – so that, in time, we will be able to produce a ‘timeline’ for many subjects, making it possible to see how thinking has evolved, thereby producing a real sense of historical accretion. Over time, we hope that the encyclopedia will become an institutionalized memory of human geography. The sixth challenge was to produce an encyclopedia of human geography that was relevant to issues that must concern us all. We sought an encyclopedia that espoused responsibility to the planet and its people certainly. But we also became, however awkwardly and unsuccessfully,
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involved in thinking what that responsibility might mean. A difficult but ultimately productive instance of what this might entail – and how difficult it can be to think through – was provided by the proposed boycott of the encyclo pedia by some authors concerned at Reed International’s (a sister company to Elsevier) involvement in the arms trade, an affair settled when Reed withdrew from these activities. Here, we saw the same concerns being aired by many participants but radically different solutions being put on offer. We hope that the encyclopedia mirrors this diversity of response. Bringing these six, and especially the last three, points together we hope and trust that this encyclopedia will be counted as a contribution to the global commons of knowledge. The production of a discipline depends on the goodwill of many who labor over ideas, who dis seminate, review, and rework them. We are painfully aware that in the current global climate of academia, when what counts as valued academic practices is nar rowing, writing authoritative and scholarly articles for publications such as this venture provides few rewards and attracts little institutional support. However, it is a vital component in the reproduction and development of a discipline. Rather than simply being understood as the creation of canonical knowledge by authorial com munities we would like to thank all those who have written and reviewed material here for an activity that may be deemed a professional service but is one that, sadly, is seen as subverting the institutional priorities of a number of universities.
By Way of Conclusion This encyclopedia is an attempt to summarize knowledge of the discipline using the encyclopedia format. In time, we hope that this encyclopedia will build into a com prehensive resource which constitutes both an archive of the discipline and, of course, of what it knows about the world. That knowledge, what facts are arraigned to support it, and what theories and methodologies are used as a means of making it credible, is, of course, a movable feast. Think of the notion of the ‘world’, which it is easy to demonstrate has changed its form many times over the course of history, as the development of the map shows all too well as Denis Cosgrove noted: There is no single map of the world, but a vast range of images that present different facets of the globe and its contents. y A map of the world is a global cultural artefact, an extraordinary human accomplishment, pro duced by contributions from many cultures. It is a highly sophisticated scientific achievement, and each advance in the various technologies that coalesce within it renders it more detailed, flexible, and widely available. Google Earth is certainly not the last stage in its evolution.
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Yet even [a] cursory survey of world mapping y re veals that science and technology are only a part of the story. Of equal importance are such affective aspects as imagination, faith, fear, and desire. We spot them im mediately in the world maps of nonmodern cultures, and even in early examples of the modern world map. For us humans, the earth is always more than its physical form and nature; it is, indeed, a world. y Today that world seems wholly visible, even transparent. y Yet today’s world maps are as hued by the contingencies of our own times as any previous ones, and we are ‘mapped’ into them as surely as Xiuhtechitli was mapped into the fif teenth century Mesoamerican world. Because every ‘world’ is social and imaginative as much as it is material, our own world maps will in due course come to seem as quaint as Jain mandalas or medieval mappae mundi seem to us today. (Denis Cosgrove, 2007: 112 113)
Or, indeed, consider the idea of the encyclopedia it self. Encyclopedias are often thought to be an invention of the West. Specifically, the general purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia is usually considered to have been conceived in eighteenth century Europe with Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728), and the Encyclope´die of Diderot and D’Alembert (1751 onward). These volumes are often considered to be the first to take on a recognizably
modern form, with a comprehensive list of topics, dis cussed in depth and organized in what we would consider a systematic way. But, once we take a broader view in which places and times are not necessarily weighted by particular prejudices, a very different account hoves into view in which all manner of authors in different parts of the world revealed an encyclopedic instinct, and from much earlier on. For example, a tradition of encyclo pedia like volumes can be found in China from the eleventh century onward, and these were often massive undertakings involving as many as a thousand volumes. The point that these two examples make is that all we can be certain of is that the contours of knowledge will constantly change. There can be no absolute certainty about what will be included in and what will be excluded from human geography in times to come. But with this encyclopedia, we believe we now have a tool that will be able to trace this evolution as it happens. Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift
Further Reading Cosgrove, D. (2007). Mapping the world. In Akerman, J. & Karrow, R. (eds.) Maps. Finding Our Place in the World, pp 65 158. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
J Jackson, P. C. Dwyer, University College London, London, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Peter Jackson (Figure 1) has been a leading figure in social and cultural geography, playing a particularly prominent role in the emergence of a ‘new cultural geography’ in the late 1980s. He forged new directions for work on the social geographies of race and racism and masculinity and, through his research on geographies of consumption, has been central to the reorientation of economic geography. Jackson’s theoretical contributions revolve around his interest in the geography of identities, conceived as the sites of cultural and material struggles, and produced by social discourses and practices.
Figure 1 Professor Peter Jackson. Photo courtesy: Graham Allsopp.
Jackson did his first degree and doctorate at the University of Oxford. He was a lecturer and senior lec turer in geography at University College London from 1980–93. He moved to take up a chair in human geog raphy at University of Sheffield in 1993 and was appointed as director of research in social sciences there in 2004. He has been on the Council of the Royal Geo graphical Society (with the Institute of British Geog raphers) since 2003 and was elected to the Academy of Social Sciences in 2001. Jackson’s doctoral research on the social geography of Puerto Ricans in New York, completed in 1980, led him to question the dominant focus of social geography at that time, concerned as it was with mapping segregation and measuring spatial ‘integration’. Writing in collaboration with Susan Smith, Jackson challenged a social geography of ethnicity framed by the biological metaphors of the Chicago School of sociology, arguing instead for a theory which recognized ideologies of racism and challenged biological understandings of ‘race’. As such, ethnicity was understood as a product of social relations, as contingent and negotiated rather than essential. Galvanized by the contested racial politics of Britain in the early 1980s Jackson mapped an agenda for a social geography which prioritized understanding the geographies of racism and the dynamic cultural politics of race. At the heart of this work was a theorization of the social construction and contestation of ‘race’, and the making of racism and ethnic identities through specific histories and geographies. Jackson’s empirical work ranged from studies of rep resentations of ‘race’ in the media and advertising, dis cussions of studies of the racialization of labor in Britain and Canada, and the contested ethnic politics of carnival to a critical engagement with constructions of ‘whiteness’ in the geographical imagination. This mapped a theore tical agenda for research on geographies of race and ra cism, which proved highly influential. Jackson’s ongoing commitment to the production of antiracist geographies was marked by collaborations with school teachers and a focus on the teaching of geography through his role as a
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founder member of the Equal Opportunities Working Group at the Institute of British Geographers. Jackson’s work on the geographies of race and racism not only challenged the dominant focus of social geog raphy in the 1980s but, through its re theorizing of the concept of ethnicity as a dynamic social process, critiqued the theories which underpinned contemporary cultural geography. Jackson argued that cultural geography needs to move beyond a narrow, largely North American focus on the study of the visible landscape and urged an en gagement with social geography and an analysis of social interaction and social relations. He took inspiration from the burgeoning work of the new cultural studies in Britain, particularly the writings of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and research on subcultures pioneered by the Bir mingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). This call for a ‘new’ cultural geography was first presented in a co authored paper with Denis Cosgrove in 1987, which argued that geographers should expand their field of study to consider popular subcultural forms in their ‘specific material contexts’. In 1989 Peter Jackson published a major book Maps of Meaning, which set out a new agenda for cultural geog raphy. Central to the argument of Maps of Meaning was a shift in focus from culture, per se, to ‘the domain of cul tural politics’. As Jackson argued in his introduction to the volume: the approach adopted herey rejects a unitary view of culture as the artistic and intellectual product of an elite, asserting the value of popular culture both in its own terms and as an implicit challenge to dominant values. Culture emerges as a terrain in which economic and political contradictions are contested and resolved. (Jackson, 1989: p. 1)
In Maps of Meaning, Jackson outlines a geographical ‘cultural materialism’, drawing on the work of Raymond Williams and his understanding of culture as materially produced within specific historical (and geographical) contexts. His arguments are made both through an an alysis of the concept of ideology and discourse and ex emplified through chapters which map out a new agenda for cultural geography which encompasses gender, sexuality, race and racism, as well as language and popular culture. The book also, if implicitly, produced an expanded methodological repertoire for geographers, emphasizing ethnography as a means to access the con tested politics of culture. Maps of Meaning provoked im portant debates about the nature of the cultural in geography, and effectively signaled the beginning of a broader ‘cultural turn’ in human geography. In the con text of this, now widely pervasive, engagement with the cultural in human geography, it is worth recognizing the insistence with which Jackson understood the cultural as
social and political. As he emphasized in the conclusion of Maps of Meaning : It is an impoverished view of culture that stresses text, sign and discourse to the exclusion of contexts, action and structure. Meanings must always be related to the material world from which they derive. ( Jackson, 1989: p. 185)
In Maps of Meaning , Jackson’s discussion of geographies of gender emphasizes the social relations of gender and he urges geographers to focus on ‘‘relations between dominant and subordinate groups’’ (Jackson, 1989: p. 180). His own subsequent empirical work focused on the geographical constitution of mas culinity as well as the spatial constitution of ‘whiteness’. Work on masculinities and consumption led Jackson to develop a broader program of research on geographies of consumption. This research has focused on practices of shopping and local consumption cultures, on transna tional consumption cultures, and on food consumption and commodity chains. This work has been characterized by a multidisciplinary focus and involved collaborations with both anthropologists and sociologists. Jackson’s work on consumption cultures reiterates his interests in both the making of identities and the sig nificance of popular culture. Thus, consumption practices are a means to interrogate how individuals make meaning through materials of the everyday. This work is also an intervention in economic geography which goes beyond the argument that the economy is embedded within cultural framings or that the cultural must be part of any economic explanation to argue for a exploration of the ‘contested geographies of contemporary commercial culture’. This approach challenges the opposition be tween ‘the cultural’ and ‘the economic’ through an ex ploration of the complex circuits and networks within which commodities are embedded. While some critics have argued that Jackson’s emphasis on consumption and identity downplays the power relations inherent within geographies of production, Jackson remains insistent on a focus on the appropriation and transformation of the materials of everyday social and cultural life, ‘‘the maps of meaning through which the world is made intelligible’’ ( Jackson, 1989: p. 2) as political. Recent writing makes these links explicit as Jackson argues for ‘‘empirically grounded studies of the impact of ‘globalization’ on consumer cultures in different geographical contexts’’ ( Jackson, 2004: p. 166) and the ‘rematerialization’ of so cial and cultural geography. With this writing Jackson remains at the heart of debate in social and cultural geography, provoking discussion about the nature of materiality and the conception of commodities as well as raising important questions about writing critical geographies.
Jackson, P. See also: Commodity Chains; Consumption; Cosgrove, D.; Cultural Geography; Culture; Ethnicity; Race; Racism and Antiracism; Social Geography; Whiteness.
Further Reading Cosgrove, D. and Jackson, P. (1987). New directions in cultural geography. Area 19, 95 101. Jackson, P. (ed.) (1987). Race and Racism: Essays in Social Geography. London: Allen and Unwin. Jackson, P. (1989). Maps of Meaning. London: Unwin Hyman. Jackson, P. (1991). The cultural politics of masculinity: Towards a social geography. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 16, 199 213. Jackson, P. (1998). Constructions of whiteness in the geographical imagination. Area 30, 99 106. Jackson, P. (1999). Commodity cultures: The traffic in things. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 24, 95 108. Jackson, P. (2000). Rematerializing social and cultural geography. Social and Cultural Geography 1, 9 14. Jackson, P. (2002). Commercial cultures: Transcending the cultural and the economic. Progress in Human Geography 26, 3 18.
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Jackson, P. and Penrose, J. (eds.) (1993). Constructions of Race, Place and Nation. London: UCL Press and University of Minnesota Press. Jackson, P. and Smith, S. (eds.) (1981). Social Interaction and Ethnic Segregation. London: Academic Press. Jackson, P. and Smith, S. (1984). Exploring Social Geography. London: Allen and Unwin. Jackson, P., Stevenson, N. and Brooks, K. (2001). Making Sense of Men’s Magazines. Cambridge: Polity. Miller, D., Jackson, P., Thrift, N., Holbrook, B. and Rowlands, M. (1998). Shopping, Place and Identity. London: Routledge. Mitchell, D. (1995). There’s no such thing as culture: Towards a reconceptualisation of the idea of culture in geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, 102 116.
Relevant Websites http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/foodstories British Library ‘‘Food Stories’’ Collection. http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/geography/staff University of Sheffield, Geography Department, Academic Staff.
Japanese Geography A. Saito, National University of Singapore, Singapore F. Mizuoka, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Geopolitik A school of thought derived from geopolitics and developed during the inter-war period in Germany. Geopolitics is a long-standing area of geographic enquiry concerning the significance of space in understanding the nature of international relations and politics. In the twentieth century, however, it was utilized to justify imperialism and military aggression. In Japan, Geopolitik was interpreted and understood under the heavy influence of ethnocentric cultural and intellectual climate at that time. Shintoism The native religion of Japan which involves the worship of kami, kami gods. Some kami are local and can be regarded as the spiritual beings/spirits or genies of a particular place, but others represent major natural objects and processes: for example, the sun goddess, or Mount Fuji. Shinto is an animistic belief system. The word Shinto is commonly translated as ‘the way of the Gods’. Shintoism was the official state religion since Meiji until the end of World War II; but, after the war it lost its status. The Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere The name that Japanese government created to justify the attempt by Japan to create a sphere of influence over Asian nations in the interimperialist rivalry among the world powers that led to World War II. Under this name, Japan claimed to ‘free Asia from Western powers’; in reality, it aimed to extend Japanese frontiers of power. The attempt failed due to Japan’s defeat. Tokyo Higher Normal School A college established in 1902 as one of the national teacher training colleges to educate secondary school teachers. It provided free education and thus attracted many bright but poor students. Tokyo Higher Normal School was one of the most prestigious colleges before World War II, and its academic level was comparable to the university. It evolved into Tsukuba University, one of the most research-oriented Japanese universities, after World War II.
Introduction This article attempts to introduce the development of geography in Japan to the international audiences. However, it does not aim at presenting a tedious chron ology of its development without much conceptual
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import. Instead, several unique contributions to spatial or environmental conceptions developed by the Japanese geographers are selected from a wide range of human, economic, social, as well as critical geography with variegated political positions and ideological stances. In spite of the Tokugawa Shogunate (military) gov ernment maintaining watertight boundary controls, in 1713 Hakuseki Arai wrote Chorography of The World based on the deposition of an Italian missionary who had in truded illegally into Japan. In early nineteenth century, Tadataka Ino surveyed the Japanese coast and produced precise maps, using surveying technology that was de veloped indigenously. Japan opened the door to the West in the 1860s, when France made brief and futile attempts to bring the Sho gunate government eventually under its protectorate. It was intercepted by the British through supporting fief doms in southwest Japan, which led to the Meiji Res toration in 1868. Geography thus began to be established as an academic discipline under the Western influence. Physical geography and geology were the first to be established before the turn of the century at Tokyo Im perial University. The first academic unit of human geography was established in Kyoto Imperial University in 1907, in the Department of History (Ichiro Suizu). It became the core of the Human Geographical Society of Japan when it was established in 1948. Commercial geography was first taught in Tokyo Commercial School in 1886, aiming to achieve a comprehensive under standing of social/economic/political elements of a particular region/locale for trading purposes. In 1930, it developed into the first academic unit of economic geography at a college which is now Hitotsubashi Uni versity (Hiroshi Sato). Education in geography derived from a need to raise geography teachers for school education, in order to give pupils awareness of the ter ritory of the nation as well as a psychological affinity to it. Several teachers training colleges and normal schools were created, and research of geography was also con ducted there (Keiji Tanaka). In academic geography, Japanese geographers main tained a strong interest in the development of the dis cipline in the West, and they learned from the thoughts and key concepts of geographers in Germany, France, UK, and the United States and were often keen to introduce them into Japan. German Geopolitik School became hegemonic in political geography, particularly in the Tokyo area in the 1930s, and some location theories
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were brought into Japan in the pre World War II years. Yet, some geographers in Japan ventured to develop their own geopolitics (Saneshige Komaki). As for the political standpoints, it is fair to say that most of Japanese academic geographers remained con ventional, although Western Marxist began to influence the geographer’s circle in Japan as early as the 1920s. A notable exception was the post war period until the early 1970s, when, as the contradiction of capitalist society became apparent, a unique contribution was produced in the critical geographers’ circle in Japan (Noboru Ueno). However, after the oil crisis and the end of the post war rapid economic growth, critical schools waned and many of them converted into more conservative perspectives, sometimes even supporting the government land development policies. This situation necessitated more politically conscious Japanese geographers to engage in struggle in order to resurrect the critical heritage (Fujio Mizuoka) and to make positive contribution to the worldwide resurgence of critical geography since the 1970s.
Tanaka Keiji and the Concept of ‘Chorography’ Keiji Tanaka (1885–1975) was one of the pioneers of modern geography in Japan. He studied in the depart ment of geographic education in Tokyo Higher Normal School, and later studied in the US and Europe under the renowned contemporary geographers such as Davis, Vidal de la Blache, and Penck. His main academic achievement was the establishment of the concept of ‘chorography’ in Japan. Drawing upon Hettner and Hartshorne, Tanaka in sisted that chorography should be the foundation of geographical thought. Chorography is one of the oldest traditions of geographical thought and can be dated back to classic Greek civilization. It is derived from one of the fundamental human interests, namely the curiosity about knowing the place never visited; its main focus is to ‘describe’ the ‘parts’ of the world. This is quite different from another tradition which attempted to provide ‘a view of the whole’ by not describing the peculiarity of particular place but ‘mapping’ the entire globe. Never theless, Tanaka was not content with mere description, but attempted to give the concept of chorography the much desired dynamism that would make it a more systematic subject. Akin to the primitive version of Ha¨gerstrand, he postulated that there are three phases of ‘phenomena’ through which a geographical object de velops: (1) initial phenomenon or the process of pro liferation, (2) conspicuous phenomenon or the state of domination, and (3) residual phenomenon or the process of disappearance. The actual landscape was regarded as
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an overlapping multiple stratum of different geographical phenomena at different phases. In 1927, Tanaka also divided the Japanese archipelago into several regions based on natural boundaries and climate, which are in dependent of the administrative boundaries. He tried to understand the characteristics of a particular locality by analyzing the relationship between different human phenomena, and the interaction between man and nature in the local context. He also emphasized the importance and utility of the interviewing method and field work for data collection. His position as a professor at Tokyo Higher Normal School made him hugely influential among school teachers as well as his contemporary conventional geographers. He encouraged them to organize a com prehensive survey of their localities as a self discovering exercise which should also build a local pride and identity. This is shown in his book Our Land, first pub lished in 1929 which became seminal and continued to be read even during the 1950s. His theory and practice can be seen as parochial be cause locality tended to be treated in isolation and as a self contained entity, not in the dynamic interaction with the surroundings. His study as well as the attempt to bring dynamism into chorography, however, advanced chorography from a mere description of a particular place to the analysis of chronological relations of human phenomena and the human–nature interactions. At its best, by successfully synthesizing the detailed geo graphical knowledge, it could lead to a comprehensive, coherent, and holistic understanding of local character istics. He was instrumental in establishing the Chor ography School in the geographical community in Japan. After retirement from Tokyo Higher Normal School, he took up the position of professorship at Rissho University and contributed to the development of the geography department there to become one of the prestigious ones in Japan.
Saneshige Komaki and Japanese Geopolitics Born in a family of Shinto priests, Komaki Saneshige (1898–1990) was originally a historical geographer who was educated at Kyoto Imperial University. Komaki be came an advocate of the Japanese imperialism, using geopolitics as his conceptual base as he was promoted to the professorship at the Department of Geography of Kyoto Imperial University in 1938. He was initially in fluenced by the idea of Geopolitik in Germany, which was introduced into Japan in the 1930s. Hitler, who originally had an ambition to expel all the Anglo Saxon powers out of the entire Eurasian continent, planned to bring Stalin’s USSR into the group of Axis countries.
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Karl Haushofer gave academic glitter to Hitler’s ambition with his work Der Koritinentalblock. After Stalin rejected Hitler’s plot manifested in the Molotov– Ribbentrop agreement in 1939 and Hitler in turn com menced hostilities against the USSR in June 1941, Haushofer lost influence and Japan became isolated in the global politics. Komaki was insightful enough to discern that this new stage of interimperialist rivalry across the globe necessi tated a new ideological base that was independent of Europe. He attempted to establish Japan’s own geo politics to support its colonial venture over the other Asian countries ideologically. Komaki criticized Geopo litik as having a Eurocentric focus and an element of direct colonial powergame. He had a great antipathy toward Western imperialism and uniquely tried to es tablish Japanese geopolitics based on the Shintoism em bodied by the Japanese Emperor. He claimed that indigenous space in Asia, particularly in China, including Manchuria, should be emancipated from the Western colonial hands and recovered to Asia through the lead ership of Japan. His idea won great support from the Japanese military regime, which proclaimed the ‘Great East Asian Co prosperity Sphere’ under the paternalistic leadership of the Japanese Emperor. Komaki organized a nationalistic research group called Yoshida no Kai, which prepared the intellectual foundation for the Japanese imperialist ad vance to China and Southeast Asia. Yoshida no Kai gave, in exchange for affluent financial and material endow ments, geomilitaristic advice to Japanese armed forces about actual tactics in attacking major Asian cities (such as Singapore and Hong Kong) under European colonial powers. After the war, Komaki was severely denounced as having ideologically legitimatized Japanese imperialism and military aggression against its Asian neighbors. Komaki was purged because of his role in supporting the military regime, and he resigned from the Kyoto Uni versity. Later, he came back to the public life in 1957 to become the president of Shiga University, a position he held until 1965, although he never regained the leader ship he had once enjoyed. His idea is viewed in both positive and negative lights. On the one hand, his criticism of Western colonialism and the role geography played toward their imperialistic ventures is noteworthy. Particularly, his attempt to de construct the seemingly neutral and scientific notion of geography by uncovering its ideological bias based on supremacy of the Western imperialist powers can be noted from today’s vantage point. On the other hand, however, his alternative Japanese geopolitics was based on another imperialist notion in favor of the Japanese Em pire. It was mobilized to give legitimacy to Japan’s mili tary aggression, in the name of emancipation, from the
Western imperialist powers to establish ‘universal brotherhood’ under the Japanese Emperor.
Hiroshi Sato and Dialectical Wechselwirkung Hiroshi Sato (1897–1962) was one of the early Japanese geographers who specialized in economic geography. He graduated from the Department of Geography in Tokyo University and taught in Tokyo College of Commerce (now Hitotsubashi University) throughout his academic life. He served as the first president of the Japan Asso ciation of Economic Geographers, which was once the critical institution of geography in Japan. Though his main academic interest was around economic geography, he wrote extensively in other fields, such as political geography and even a popular essay. Sato also got in volved in the discussion of the definition and concept of ‘Landschaft (landscape)’ in the 1920s and 1930s. Sato’s main contribution to Japanese geography is in the area of environmental theory in economic geography. He rejected simple environmental determinism and emphasized dynamic interrelations between society and environment, by combining the concepts of two well known German geographers, Dietrich and Wittfogel. The critical concept of Wittfogel, then a member of the German Communist Party and critic of geopolitics, had been translated into Japanese before World War II by Seikan Kawanishi and was well known among Japanese geographers. Starting with their concepts, Sato devised a dialectical understanding of environment and economy based on historical materialism. He borrowed the chronological interpretation of Wechselwirkung (inter action) between human, nature, and development of culture from Dietrich, who had put forward that human beings try to change the environment and create a higher level of culture. Sato also learned the importance of the production process, from Wittfogel, as a crucial linkage between nature and economy. Particularly, he considered three elements as being the most important: labor force (human resources, skill, knowledge, organization), means of production (land, energy, etc.), and natural resources. On the basis of these two theories, he insisted that in order to understand the economic activity in relation to a particular place, it is necessary to analyze the way the production process is organized in the particular context of historical stages of cultural development and civil ization. As an example, he took a case of coal mining in the Kyushu region and explained its development as an industry not just by its environmental factors but as a social process involving human organization, production process, support infrastructure, and cultural institutions. He was also aware of the interdependence between dif ferent regions of Japan and even beyond the national
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borders to understand the nature of regional economy. For instance, the development of coal mining in Kyushu was intrinsically linked to the expansion and concen tration of heavy industries around Tokyo, and the phe nomenal urbanization of Tokyo in the twentieth century. His work represented one of the attempts by critical geography to free the Japanese geography from en vironmental determinism and introduce a greater di mension of socioeconomic activities. In particular, his articulation of the production process as a critical me dium between the environment and society is a useful contribution to advance the methodological foundation of economic geography. Unfortunately, he remained firm on the idea that the spatial differences could be under stood only through the differences in physical nature, and in a critical perspective he did not attempt to put the location theories, which explain spatial heterogeneity, out of the economic logic in relation to the homogeneous space. This task was left to Toshio Aoki, the successor to the professorship of economic geography at Faculty of Economics, Hitotsubashi University.
Ichiro Suizu’s Concepts of ‘Basic Region’ and ‘Regional Unity’ Ichiro Suizu (1923–97) was a social geographer. He taught geography at Kyoto University and Nara Uni versity. Born in Yamaguchi, Japan, Suizu completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in geography at Kyoto University. His research consistently considered ‘region’ as a tangible object, rather than a mental con struction, and he formulated the notions of ‘basic region’ and ‘regional unity’. In criticizing Durkheim’s placeless conception of primitive community, Suizu set out from the hypothesis that every community is inevitably place bound, forming a unity of society and place. Here ‘place’ is not limited to geometry of space, but includes a local system of ecology that is an integral part of a community, which forms a ‘regional unity’. Suizu gave special connotation to its smallest endogenously formed regional unity, which he called ‘basic region’, which roughly corresponds to a feudal village in Japan. Suizu went on to stress the dia lectical reciprocity between society and place: ‘regional unity’ is not merely society projected on ground, but it also works positively to form and change the society. The ‘regional unity’ also includes the spiritual unity, which works to unify the members of the community, often deploying physical and visible symbols. According to Suizu, these processes make the ‘basic region’ a tangibly integrated geographical object. This ‘regional unity’ was claimed to be found at various spatial scales. For larger scales, Suizu stated that it had some regularity of the nodal system of space as put
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forward by Christaller, although this system is sometimes distorted by various local factors. What was more im portant was that it is the socioeconomic structure that supported the spatial system, which in turn regulated the society. Suizu stated that this dialectics of the socio economic structure and spatial system manifested itself along various lengths of time, and the historical devel opment of regions was thus nothing but the unfolding of this dialectics. Suizu tended to see the ‘regional unity’ as a socially homogenous entity, and his arguments lacked the analysis of the class conflicts and other conflicts within a society. Rather, this shortcoming had a bizarre consequence when Suizu dealt with ‘regional unities’ at higher order scales. Drawing upon his pre War German mentors, Suizu re garded the ‘regional unity’ as an organic body, with its own mechanisms of motion and reaction to the society, without regard to the socioeconomic relations that actually regu late its motion within the ‘regional unity’. Suizu regarded a nation as well as an organism. It is a short step from this view to the former German and Japanese mystics of geopolitics that supported the wars of aggression. In spite of this shortcoming, Suizu’s conceptions, formulated by the early 1970s, were surprisingly close to such global intellectual currency of social geography in the late twentieth century as sociospatial dialectics. It is deplorable that there were only few Japanese geog raphers who inherited Suizu’s concepts and developed them further. Nevertheless, his conceptions were later developed in effect from a critical perspective by Noboru Ueno, to whom now we turn.
Noboru Ueno’s Concept of ‘Humanly Created Environment’ Noboru Ueno (1926–) was trained as a Marxian econo mist in his undergraduate and graduate studies at Kyushu University. Ever since he took up a teaching position (teaching geography education) at Miyazaki University, he got involved in the research on the arsenic poisoning problem in Toroku, a remote mining village in Miyazaki. Minamata, the site of notorious mercury poisoning, was not very far from Miyazaki as well. It is these experiences that led him to the formulation of his concept of ‘hu manly created environment’. In the 1960s, a considerable number of critically minded Japanese geographers developed original con ceptions of critical geography. It would be fair to say that Ueno’s conception, published in 1972, stood at the acme of the critical heritage that Japanese geographers’ circle once nourished. Ueno formulated his conceptions through critical re appraisals of Tetsuro Watsuji, a renowned Japanese phenomenological philosopher who wrote a book on
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humanistic climate, interpreting climate as an integral part of ‘brother like symbioses’ of society. Drawing upon him, Ueno stated that local environment had been sub sumed as an intimate part of his/her body, to form a ‘regional human group’ as a dialectical unity of society and environment. Here Ueno’s conception has similarity with that of Suizu; yet, Ueno was critical of Watsuji’s ignorance of conflicting class relations. Ueno stated that spatial unfolding of the capitalist labor process produced its own configuration of pro duction space and environment. This produced en vironment was often degraded, which alienated a part of the body and transformed that part into a hostile entity. The physical, degraded environment having been pro duced by a capitalist production process thus transformed the interpretation of the environment among the locals intersubjectively. For Ueno, the environment was an in tegral element of the human body; yet, it was not sym biotic, but contained dialectics and alienation that was generated by the capitalist production process. The locals, having realized the alienation, would set out to struggle against the environmental degradation, which inevitably transformed itself into the struggle against capitalist mode of production. Ueno went on to state that this dialectics had various manifestations depending on places, creating ‘localized human groups’ with variety, which Marxist chorography was to investigate. Ueno’s mentor in formulating this concept was Henri Lefebvre, who saw the physical environment as a base of praxis seeking alternative intersubjectivity. With Ueno’s contribution, critical geography in Japan stood at the forefront of critical geography across the globe in 1972, when it was not yet common among the Anglophone geographers’ circle to adopt the concepts of Lefebvre or the phenomenological philosophy into geography. Unfortunately, Ueno’s conception did not find any successors in the geographers’ circle in Japan. In the following year, when David Harvey published Social Justice and the City, Toshifumi Yada put forward his conception of ‘regional structure’ (chiiki kozo), by con demning Ueno as one of the advocates of ‘economic chorography school’. As the faction of Yada picked up in numbers, the critical heritage in Japan dwindled and gave way to more conventional empiricist geography, having a closer association with neoliberalism. Ueno’s conceptual achievement thus remains as a lofty peak in the heritage of geography in Japan.
Fujio Mizuoka and the Theory of Space Subsumption When Fujio Mizuoka (1951–) studied economics as an undergraduate, critical geography in Japan enjoyed its
heyday, whereas in the Anglophone world, it was about to emerge. The rapid economic growth had created prob lems in many localities, while universities still retained embers of student protests. Mizuoka studied, among others, Ueno’s book, Yada’s conception of chiiki kozo, and other works of critical geographers in Japan, as well as the work of David Harvey. Although Mizuoka initially joined the study group organized by Yada, he became increasingly skeptical of the critical nature of Yada’s chiiki kozo concept. Dis appointed, Mizuoka went to the United States to pursue his graduate study at Clark University, where members of the department were still engaged in Antipode, the first radical journal of geography in the Anglophone world. Mizuoka’s concept of space subsumption (Figure 1), which first emerged in his doctoral dissertation titled ‘Annihilation of space’ in 1986, was thus the mixed product of two academic heritages: critical spirit in geography having developed in Japan until early 1970s and rapidly developing critical conceptions in Anglo phone geography thereafter. The idea of space subsumption came out of the con cept of the ‘formal and real subsumption of labor’ by Marx as well as the two attributes of physical space, absolute and relative, quoted in Explanation of Geography by Harvey. Space, the indispensable element of society, is subsumed into society initially in its pristine form. Pristine absolute space has the propensity of the in finite and the contiguous, offering a container of the components of society; yet, it has propensity of equili brating anything contained within it, which undermines the presupposed independence of subject and social group. This contradiction of the formal subsumption has to be transcended by the process of real subsumption, or the production of a new element of space: bounding. It separates one social component from another, enabling each of social components to enjoy exclusive command over a territory. Relative space, on the other hand, has the property of position that identifies points of action; yet, it has prop erty of distance, which separates components of society, making interaction of each component difficult. This contradiction of formal subsumption has to be trans cended by the process of real subsumption: spatial inte gration or production of network of communication and transportation. It puts together separated components to create a spatially contiguous and integrated society. These processes bring about a new set of attributes: contiguity both in pristine absolute space and produced relative space, and separation both in pristine relative space and produced absolute space. Being the relation between absolute and relative attributes as well as pris tine and produced spaces, the space with this new set of attributes is called relational space.
Japanese Geography
Pristine space
Subsumption of space into society
Pristine space
Absolute space
Pristine Contiguity With free spatial interaction
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Configurations of relational space
Contiguity
Territorial integration
− Yet distanciation of each place to the nearest nodal point or transport line still remains uncontrolled
− Those in power to control the entire space configures the vertically overlapping layers of territories of various scales for domination and ‘after their image’
Bounding With borders ( Artificial separation) Separation
Relative space
Pristine Separation With distanciation
− Yet contiguity at higher spatial scale arising out of porosity of boundary still remains uncontrolled
Spatial Integration By means of communication and transportation ( Artificial contiguity)
Land-use coordination − Those in power to control the entire space configures the horizontal distribution of territories at one scale for domination and ‘after their image’
Figure 1 Production of spatial configurations through the subsumption of space into society.
It is relational space in crude form that society sub sumes in creating the configuration that supports the society. The real subsumption of relational space takes dual processes: territorial integration and land use co ordination. The configuration of space is then curved into ground as the built environment, which, as we know, creates obstacles once the social relation that created the built environment transforms itself.
Toward Resurrection As we have seen, Japanese geographers’ circle indeed had the intellectual power to create own conceptions; albeit the fact that the western geographical as well as philo sophical, sociological, and economic thoughts contributed considerably to these conceptions, they were original indeed. Some of them had insights which even stood further forefront to their counterparts in the west. Few of these contributions have become known to the com munity of global geographers, however, mainly because of the language barrier. After the late 1970s, Japanese social and economic geography became increasingly relegated to backwash position, as compared to the community of the Anglo phone geographers who rapidly developed highly cre ative conceptions of critical geography, which eventually became intellectual currency that is now common globally.
There are some rationales of disciplinary politics behind this drastic dwarfing of the intellectual creativity. First, in the economic geographers’ circle in Japan, at tempts to establish fiefdoms within the Japanese geog raphers’ circle took momentum by the faction effectively led by Toshifumi Yada. According to him, his own chiiki kozon ron (regional structure theory) was one of the leading theories of economic geography in the world. Partly because of this sort of academic arrogance, a ser ious attempt to adopt rapidly emerging new concepts of geography in the Anglophone countries was much delayed in Japan. Second, there was politics within geography depart ments of Japanese university campuses. In graduate schools of geography, students were asked strongly by professors to engage in empirical field research, whereas the study of philosophy and conceptions of geography was much discouraged. In carrying out the empirical studies, most of the graduate students borrowed the theory or conceptual framework from disciplines other than geography. This circumstance and the practice of ‘rehashes’ shunted young Japanese geographers away from serious study of critical philosophy, sociology, and radical political economics, which made them inept in appreciating conceptual import of new conceptions of Anglophone geography in its full breadth. As a con sequence, the critical concepts of geography developed by Anglophone geographers have been absorbed in Japan more readily and effectively by critical sociologists and
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Marxist economists who are more theoretically oriented than geographers. Some geographers in Japan who un consciously conformed to the common practice even played ‘second rehash’ – adopting the works of those Japanese sociologists who wrote papers based on the concepts of critical geographers in Anglophone countries in order to conduct their research and classroom teaching. Third, many Japanese geographers are inherently conservative and prefer to sell their discipline to the ruling government than to the oppressed grassroots. A former critical geographer even sought to join govern ment councils, which are normally controlled by the government bureaucrats. Fourth, there is also an element in the recent devel opment of Anglophone geography itself that provided these Japanese geographers a nice excuse for this prac tice. This is the advent of postmodernism, which relieved geographers of an often painful study of universal theory of critical social sciences. Few critical geographers in Japan have come to terms with the debates on the grand picture of global economy or new imperialism of their own at a higher spatial scale in the critical circle of Anglophone geographers. This deplorable trend needs to obviously change. There is a sign of this recovery as we saw in the last section; yet, it is still a long way to go until Japanese geography recovers the potential of intellectual creativity that existed decades ago. See also: Anglo-American/Anglophone Hegemony; Asia; Geopolitics; Imperialistic Geographies; Locality Debates; Region; Regionalization/Zoning Systems; Territory and Territoriality.
Further Reading Hall, R. B. (1978). Japanese Geography: A Guide to Japanese Reference and Research Materials. (University of Michigan Center
for Japanese Studies graphy: No. 6). Greenwood, MI: University of Michigan. Komaki, S. (1943). Nihon Chiseigaku Sengen (Declaration of Japanese geopolitics), (2nd edn.). Tokyo: Hakuyo Sha. Mizuoka, F. (1996). The disciplinary dialectics that has played eternal pendulum swings: Spatial theories and discontructionism in the history of alternative social and economic geography in Japan. Geographical Review of Japan, Series B 69(1), 1 2. http:// econgeog.misc.hit u.ac.jp/mizue/altergeog.html (accessed in May 2008). Mizuoka, F., (ed.) (2002). Keizai Shakai no Chirigaku (Geography of economy and society). Tokyo: Yuhikaku. Mizuoka, F. (2006). The demise of a critical institution of economic geography in Japan. In Mizuuchi, T. (ed.) Critical and Radical Geographies of the Social, the Spatial and the Political, URP Research Paper No.1, Osaka: Osaka City University. http://www. ur plaza.osaka cu.ac.jp/library/URP1.pdf (accessed in May 2008). Mizuoka, F., Mizuuchi, T., Hisatake, T., Tsutsumi, K. and Fujita, T. (2005). The critical heritage of Japanese geography: Its tortured trajectory for seven decades. Society and Space 23(3), 453 473. Okada, T. (2000). Nihon Chirigakushiron (History of Japanese geography). Tokyo: Kokon Shoin. Sato, H. (1967). Keizai Chiri (Economic geography). Tokyo: Shin Kigen Sha. Suizu, I. (1972). Chiiki no Ronri: Sekai to Kokka to Chiho (The logic of region: World, nation and local). Tokyo: Kokon Shoin. Suizu, I. (1980). Shakai Chirigaku no Kihon Mondai: Chiiki Kagaku e no Shiron (The fundamental issues of social geography: An essay on regional science), (rev. edn.). Tokyo: Taimeido. Takeuchi, K. (2000). Japanese geopolitics in the 1930s and 1940s. In Dodds, K. & Atkinson, D. (eds.) Geopolitical Traditions: Century of Geopolitical Thought. New York: Routledge. Tanaka, K. (1948). Warera no Kokudo (Our land), (new edn.). Tokyo: Kokon Shoin. Tanaka, K. (1958). Chiriteki Sogo Kenkyu: Kawasaki shi to Tokyo Koto ku, Tokyo (Comprehensive research in geography). Tokyo: Kokon Shoin. Ueno, N. (1972). Chishigaku no Genten (The ultimate origin of chorography). Tokyo: Taimeido. Yada, T. (1973). On economic geography. Keizai Shirin (The Hosei University economic review) 41(3, 4), 375 410.
Relevant Websites http://www.asia arsenic.jp The Asia Arsenic Network, where Noboru Ueno is the Director. http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp The Association of Japanese Geographers. http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp The Human Geographical Society of Japan.
Johnston, R. J. James D. Sidaway, School of Geography, University of Plymouth, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Anglo-American Human Geography A term used in the subtitle to a widely read textbook on Geography and Geographers by Ron Johnston (first edition 1979, five subsequent editions). It refers to the idea that–especially since 1945–there has been a transatlantic space of geographic scholarship; with nodes in the UK and USA. More often today the term Anglophone geography is utilized to signify a broader English language space of scholarly circulation. In recent years the putative hegemony of Anglophone geography has been a subject of heated debate. Electoral Geography the study of the spatial relationship between voting, constituencies, and political outcomes. Key questions addressed in electoral geography related to how the size and shape of voting tracts or constituencies might effect the outcome of parliamentary or local elections. Paradigm A concept associated with the work of Thomas Kuhn (originally published in 1962) on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In Kuhn’s view a paradigm constitutes a widely accepted philosophy and methodology. These are subject to change when anomalies accumulate that cannot be satisfactorily accounted for within the existing paradigm, thus science does not simply proceed in steady, incremental fashion, but through periods of relative paradigmatic stability punctuated by periods of rapid shifts in assumptions; so called scientific revolutions. The applicability of these ideas to human geography including their relationship to generational changes and the distinctiveness of the field has been extensively debated.
Johnston, Ronald John (1941–) Ron Johnston was born in the English provincial, ‘railway’ town, of Swindon, Wiltshire; just a few months after the Royal Air Force had repelled the Luftwaffe’s attempt to dominate the skies over southern England. Johnston’s subsequent scholarly trajectory took him to Manchester University (UK) at the close of the 1950s and into the early 1960s, Monash University (Australia) and Canterbury University (New Zealand) later in that decade, and then back to England in the 1970s. It has involved major administrative roles (he was Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Sheffield from 1988–1992 and Vice Chancellor of the University of Essex in the
1990s) and has produced a vast range of geographical scholarship in several fields. Johnston is undoubtedly the acknowledged authority on the twentieth century history of human geography as epitomized in the textbook Geography and Geography Geographers: Anglo American Geog raphy since 1945, (which has gone through six editions since it was first published in 1979, the last co authored with James Sidaway). His scholarship has also made very significant contributions to urban social geography, quantitative methods, and played a leading role in the study of electoral geography.
Johnston’s broad span of publications is probably unique in extent, especially in an age of increasing sub disciplinary specialization within human geography. Though frequently collaborative, much of the work is sole authored, and he is arguably the most prolific living geographer over the past four decades (of human geog raphers in the twentieth century perhaps only Richard Hartshorne or Dudley Stamp begins to match the mag nitude of his vitae). He has produced an extraordinary range of scholarship ranging from hundreds of refereed papers, through edited, co and sole authored mono graphs and textbooks (including the Dictionary of Human Geography, now in its fifth edition), to many dozens of book reviews and short commentaries. In addition he was
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editor for over 20 years of the journals Progress in Human Geography and Environment and Planning A and served on the boards of The Geographical Magazine and the Australian Geographer. This combination of prolific scholarship, journal editing, and senior academic management pos itions means that he has often been asked to serve as an advisor/evaluator and has de facto acted as a disciplinary gatekeeper/arbiter. This is acknowledged in a series of honors, including two Royal Geographical Society awards (the Murchison Award, 1985 and Victoria Medal, 1990), and an Association of American Geographers’ award (1991). For his outstanding contributions to human, political, and economic geography and for his work on the history and nature of geographic thought in 1999 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and a Foundation Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, and was awar ded the Prix Vautrin Lud by the Festival Internationale de Ge´ographie. Johnston began his training as a geographer in a provincial English University at a time when the com mitment to ideographic (although those who practised it would probably not have recognized that word) regional geography was still strong. He studied geography at the University of Manchester from 1959–1964 where he took Bachelors and Masters Degrees. He then moved to Monash University, Melbourne, Australia where he undertook a PhD, focusing on residential structure and urban morphology. This move to the southern hemi sphere coincided with a dramatic shift in Western geo graphical thought and approaches to geography as the ‘quantitative revolution’ was (to use some of the language it adopted) diffusing from its principal points of formu lation in Lund (Sweden), Seattle (US), Bristol and Cambridge, England. Amongst his first published papers (which appeared during his time based in Melbourne) are works on urban social geography that begin to adopt the then still relatively novel apparatus and approaches of quantitative geography. Johnston then worked as a Lec turer in Christchurch, New Zealand (where he came into contact with the radical, Wellington based, geographer Keith Buchanan) from 1967–74, before returning to England, as Professor in Human Geography at Sheffield University (1974–1992), as Vice Chancellor at Essex (1992–1995), and latterly at the University of Bristol. Despite the range of administrative responsibilities that these moves have precipitated, Johnston has retained a remarkable publication rate, developing four (fre quently overlapping) strands: relating to disciplinary histories, political geography (and electoral geography in particular); urban social geography; and quantitative methods. In relation to the former, Johnston’s work on the history of the discipline has focused both on institutional and contextual histories and the intellectual biographies of individuals. This has entailed attentiveness to the
institutional frameworks (changing university cultures and wider economic and political norms) within which twentieth century human geography evolved in the UK and North America. By interrogating the work of Tho mas Kuhn (1962), who had described the history of sci ence as one of the discontinuities characterized by periodic paradigm shifts, and in identifying the pivot of contemporary Anglophone human geography around a transatlantic (UK US space) centred on certain nodes/ departments, his early writing on the history of human geography has been regarded as enshrining a particular narrative in which disciplinary change is associated with individuals and networks of influence breaking through constraints of established norms to promote new world views (via paradigm shifts). Subsequent work on the history of the discipline has introduced more nuanced ideas about disciplinary transformations (drawing on a growing literature on the histories, politics, and geog raphies of science), but Kuhn remains a significant point of departure and Ron Johnston’s work has been key in evaluating its limits and utility and introducing its vo cabulary to the study of the recent history of human geography. Urban social geography was an earlier concern in Johnston’s work. Registering the wider shift (to use Kuhn’s terms, a ‘scientific revolution’ and ‘paradigmatic shift’) from descriptive regional geographies and urban morphologies to work informed by statistical procedures that coincided with his early career, this work has sys tematically interrogated census data, survey data and legal jurisdictions and rulings to understand socio spatial inequality and difference at the urban scale. This social geography research continues in the form of recent work on socio spatial and ‘racial’ segregation in housing and schooling (focused on the UK case). Both this and the work on elections are relatively distinctive in blending the insights of a human geography influenced by social and political theory (more often associated with radical geography and critical geography) with a command of and ongoing commitment to statistical analysis (indeed he has written extensively on the use of quantitative methods in human geography). His work in the field of electoral geography used spatial science techniques to illuminate debates over the process of political constituency defin ition (which in North America is termed redistricting and ‘gerrymandering’) in electoral democracies and the im pacts of local electoral campaigns. This expertise now finds practical application in his role as an assistant boundary commissioner in the UK. Johnston’s work has thereby become an essential ref erence point in electoral geography, particularly in the British context (but also in investigations of how the iniquitous distributions of public goods and favors – what in the US has been called ‘pork barrel’ politics–affect elections). Yet his influence is also inescapable in any
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account of the structure and recent history of Anglo phone human geography with his Geography and Geog raphers being a reference point against which all other disciplinary histories are judged. Both these and the other strands of his work illustrate Johnston’s commitment to the nuanced understanding of place(s) as a key point of departure for broader questions/intersections of power and space, and highlight a range of work that is perhaps unequalled in terms of its breadth and scope.
Johnston, R. (1979). Geography and Geographers: Anglo American Geography since 1945. London: Edward Arnold (five subsequent editions published). Johnston, R. (1980). City and Society: An Outline for Urban Geography. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Johnston, R. (1991). A Question of Place: Exploring the Practice of Human Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnston, R. (2003). Geography: A different sort of discipline. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28, 133 141. Johnston, R. J. (2006). The politics of changing human geography’s agenda: Textbooks and the representation of increasing diversity. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31, 286 303. Johnston, R. and Pattie, C. (2006). Putting Voters in their Place: Geography and Elections in Great Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Further Reading Jackson, A., Harris, R. J., Hepple, L. W. et al. (2006). Geography’s changing lexicon: Measuring disciplinary change in Anglophone human geography through journal content analysis. Geoforum 37, 447 454.
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Relevant Websites http://www.ggy.bris.ac.uk/staff/staff johnston.html Johnston’s homepage at the University of Bristol.
K Knowledge and Education, Historical Geographies of R. A. Butlin, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Chorography The knowledge of geographies of regions and particular places. Cosmography The study and description of the Earth and its wider relations with the whole universe or ‘cosmos’. Enlightenment A very broad term applied to the complex, and historically and geographically varying, processes of new (‘enlightened’) understandings of a wide range of knowledges, including science, law, morality, and religion, primarily (but not exclusively) associated with late-eighteenth-century Europe and North America. Natural Theology That part of Christian faith that is deemed to be understandable through common reason and philosophy, as opposed to special divine revelation.
actual dissemination, both to specialists and to those with more general interests. Approaches to the historical geography of geo graphical knowledge have changed dramatically during the last decade or so, with the general rejection of the notion of a single pathway or body of geographical knowledge in favor of a pluralistic approach which evaluates, as Teresa Ploszajska has indicated, ‘‘diverse sets of knowledges and understandings of the world which are constituted and transmitted through popular social and cultural practices as well as through the printed text.’’ The printed text includes textbooks for schools, which offer further scope for research, but limited space pre vents their consideration here, where the emphasis will be on individuals and institutions.
Origins and Development Introduction The historical geographies of the production and evaluation of various kinds of geographical knowledge, together with the spatial and chronological unevenness of geographies of other kinds of knowledge and belief and their dissemination by individuals and agencies, form a key part of the understanding of the human and physical geographies of the past, and they in turn inform some of our current knowledge of places and peoples. Geographical information and related ideas and concepts presented for elite and more general con sumption have been strongly bound up in contemporary societies, economies, political and cultural systems, technologies, gender relations, and understandings, together with dominant and minority philosophies and belief systems. Each has produced arrays of ideas, arti facts, and evidences, on the basis of which those systems can be understood and analyzed. Certain aspects of geographical knowledge, such as the history of explor ation and (re)discovery, are better understood than its
The varied sources of geographical knowledge go back at least two millenia, and developed within the contexts of the increasing spatial awareness and representational fa cilities of sophisticated prehistoric and early historical civilizations in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. New knowledge was produced by transglobal voyages of discovery in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, of which we know most about those originating from Europe, and their incorporation into cultural, belief, and mapping imageries (some of which maintained an imaginative and ‘fabulous’ character, others of a more authentic and scientific nature). This time of voyages of discovery was facilitated by better ships and navigation methods and motivated by religious, material, political, and scientific considerations, and linked to the intense intellectual and cultural curiosity and achievements of the Renaissance in Europe, the outcome being the in crease in accounts of far off places and their flora and fauna, in the number of maps produced, and in ambition for trade in exotic goods such as spices from Asia. There was no abrupt change in geographical knowledge, how ever, more of a transition from an older body of classical
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scholarship from Greek, Roman, and Arabic sources, to the new images brought back from the transglobal voyages. There were further changes in the eighteenth century, with the engagement of geography and geographical knowledge into the Enlightenment. As David Livingstone and Charles Withers have asserted, ‘‘geography’s pe rennial fascination with the far away, with mapping the world, with exhibiting and classifying knowledge, and with the imposition of European ways of thinking on global realms are all recognizably Enlightenment pre occupations,’’ and were evidenced by natural theological perspectives of the world, geographical imagery, natural histories of particular places, and the promotion and reception of further voyages of discovery and rediscovery over land and by sea. The historical geographies of the science and philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were however greatly varied and essentially regional in their manifestation, phenomena to be seen from a pluralistic perspective rather than as a single process. Voyages led by experienced naval captains such as Captain James Cook combined scientific enquiry with broader imperial and humanitarian issues. Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific (1768–71), promoted by the Royal Society and the Admiralty, had as a primary aim the astronomic observation of the transit of Venus across the Southern sky, but included seaborne explor ation to establish and map the location of what was thought to be a great southern continent, and also raised the added humanitarian issue of ways of dealings with indigenous people. In the three voyages (1768 71, 1772 75, and 1766 69) extensive samples of flora and fauna were collected and recorded. Collections and im ages of plants were made by artists, botanists, and nat uralists such as Joseph Banks, and the coastlines of Eastern Australia and the Torres Strait, of the two islands of New Zealand and of the islands of the Pacific were mapped. As David Livingstone has shown, there were problems with the credibility of the visual images of places, peoples, and animals which were made on these voyages, and different artists and botanists produced images in different styles to accommodate the varied requirements of different sections of the population at home. Cook’s voyages were paralleled by similar voyages from other European states, for example, the Trans Pacific voyage by the Frenchman Louis Antoine de Bougainville in 1768 69, as part of a global circum navigation. He reached Tahiti in 1767 and the Tuamoto Archipelago in 1768, returning to France in March 1769. Before leaving Tahiti, Bougainville formally took pos session of it in the name of France. The expedition by the Spaniards Alejandro Malespina and Jose´ Bustamente to the Pacific from 1789 94 reflected Spain’s political and commercial interest in its possessions in South America and the Philippines.
Overland Expeditions In addition to the sea based investigations there were also from the mid eighteenth century onwards European overland expeditions to investigate the hitherto largely unknown geographies (unknown to Europeans, that is) of a range of territories. Largely from trading contacts, an increasingly significant focus of investigation was to be Africa. Asian knowledge of Africa was greater than European knowledge. From the fifteenth century onward, European knowledge of the coastlines of Africa increased with voyages of discovery en route to the Indies and the Far East, through trade, including slave trading, and various European coastal settlements so that by the end of the seventeenth century the basic shape of the coast line of Africa was quite well known, but large inland areas were still largely unknown to Europeans. However, by the mid eighteenth century there was increased demand for geographical knowledge, partly through British op position to the slave trade and partly through aspirations for extending more legitimate forms of commerce with and beyond Africa. The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior parts of Africa (The African Association) was founded in London in 1788, its aim being to increase the geographical information about inland Africa, and to promote commerce, scientific knowledge, and humani tarian effort. The antislavery campaigner William Wil berforce was a member for one year. The association promoted exploration, focusing on north and West Africa. The explorer Mungo Park was supported by the Asso ciation in an expedition in 1794–95 from Gambia to Timbuktu, and among other discoveries established the course and direction of flow of the River Niger, and encouraged further British interest in commerce with West Africa. The Swiss explorer, J. L. Burckhardt, was engaged by the association and traveled in Syria, Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, and Nubia from 1809 15. With the foundation of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in 1830, the members of the association decided to merge with the RGS, which itself promoted exploration in Af rica and many other regions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries The production, representation, and dissemination of wide ranges of geographical knowledge and sources in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been ef fected through a miscellany of agencies, including talented, curious, and sometimes idiosyncratic indi viduals, and various amateur and professional societies, including the many geographical and related scientific
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and social societies that sprang up, mainly in the nine teenth and early twentieth centuries, first in Europe and then elsewhere. The dissemination of ‘geographical’ knowledge has taken, and still takes, many different forms, including public lectures (with different types of illustrations, including maps and lantern slides), publi cations, including the formal proceedings of learned so cieties published in their own journals, popular accounts in journals and newspapers and in book form, the pro duction of maps both as important means for describing the geography of places and for inscribing ‘new’ facts acquired through exploration, rediscovery and discovery, and many different kinds of display and exhibition. In addition, the growth of education systems, in cluding those for young pupils in schools and those for students in higher education establishments, incorpor ated changing geographical knowledge. Some of it was new, some of it badly out of date and reflective of rather limited cultural and geopolitical ideas. There were in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries strong con nections between national confidence and geographical knowledge, especially as deployed successfully or un successfully in major military conflicts, such as the Franco Prussian War (1870–71), at the end of which both sides bemoaned their respectively perceived inadequacies of geographical knowledge, notably accurate maps. The links between geographical knowledge and the promo tion of imperial and colonial ideals and settlements by European states (and later by the United States and Japan) were close but complex. Cultures of Exploration and the Dissemination of Geographical Knowledge Exploration and the acquisition and promotion of geo graphical knowledge became part of British and much Continental European and some colonial culture, ad vancing scientific understanding through measurement of such features as altitude, exact location of places and the nature of landforms, vegetation, and of human and ani mal inhabitants of distant places, in addition showing the confidence in a changing national identity closely tied up with the aspirations of imperialism and colonial settle ment. In the second half of the nineteenth century, not withstanding British involvement in India and the settler colonies of Australasia and North America, and increas ing French interest in Indo China, and of most of the European powers in the Pacific territories, Africa became a major focus of interest and ambition. As Robert Stafford has indicated, in his study of the geologist/geographer imperialist, Sir Roderick Murchison, it was in Africa. more intensely than anywhere else, [that] the explorer acted out the European longing to be challenged by nature in a wild and exotic setting. In so doing, he
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simultaneously verified the superiority of European civilisation, opened new frontiers for expansive capital ism, and provided an outlet for emotional impulses sti fled by industrialisation and urbanisation. (Stafford, 1989)
The interest of Europeans in the information brought back by explorers of Africa is evidenced in the attendance at public lectures given by the explorers, by the numbers of books sold that recorded their exploits, and the at tention given to them by newspapers. The image often presented is of heroic white males, countering many environmental and human hazards with the aid of a small amount of scientific equipment, some weapons, and a large number of indigenous ‘porters’. This general image requires much qualification. Apart from the wide vari ations in male experience, there were also female tra velers and explorers, such as Mary Kingsley, Gertrude Bell, and Isabella Bird, whose exploits gradually engaged the wider public and the attention of the geographical societies. In addition, the role of indigenous peoples in advancing geographical knowledge, often incorporated within or resulting from contact with European exped itions, has been greatly undervalued. The agencies for promotion of expeditions and of wider processes of collecting and disseminating geo graphical knowledge included departments of state, notably those with military or naval responsibility, sci entific societies (metropolitan and provincial), and other institutions with particular perspectives such as colonial and emigration societies. In Britain, significant insti tutions were the Admiralty, the India Office, the Colonial Office, the African Association, the RGS, other geo graphical societies in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Manchester, Liverpool, Hull, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Southampton. There were similar institutions in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Italy. The question of links with commerce is interesting, with the provincial societies in Britain, through prox imity to the aims of chambers of commerce and major merchants and traders as members, showing more interest than the RGS. The only attempt to establish a British Society of Commercial Geography (in 1884) was unsuccessful, but commercial geographical societies were founded elsewhere in Europe, notably France and Germany. In Britain a major promoter of expeditions and of geographical research and education at home and abroad was the RGS, founded in 1830. Like other scientific so cieties, its roles in the production and dissemination of geographical knowledge were varied, for the energy and priorities were not those of a monolithic entity but of a complex, often contradictory, and changing mixture of individuals and groups of members. The Society pro vided small grants, loans of instruments, training in surveying and mapping, and advice on preparation for
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hazardous travel and expedition, and later in the nine teenth century for more general travel, through its booklet Hints to travellers, first published in 1854. It also promoted a populist image of exploration through its lecture programs at its various locations in London, with the meetings addressed by famous explorers of Africa such as Stanley and Livingstone attracting large audi ences. Its officers were mainly aristocrats, military and naval officers, senior politicians and government ad ministrators, and it played a varied role in the promotion of geography within Britain and more widely through its award of medals and its exchanges of publication with other geographical societies around the world. Unlike many other geographical societies it excluded women as members (‘Fellows’) until 1913. On the whole it eschewed an overtly political, commercial, or imperial stance, un like sister societies in France and Germany, for example. It preferred to shelter, at least in a formal sense, behind its constitutional designation as a scientific society, but the affiliations of many of its Fellows meant an inevitable link with all these areas, with the exception of commerce. The Society’s officers were active correspondents on geographical aspects of national issues in the major newspapers, and its publications, including its Procee dingsyand Monthly Record of Geography, the Geographical Journal (from 1892), and more popular publications such as its Ocean Highways and later Geographical Magazine (from 1878). At the beginning of the twentieth century its journal showed a transition between continuing coverage of exploration and hunting in Africa, and scientific sur veys of Scottish lochs and of the human geography of individual English parishes. By the early twentieth century the major remaining areas for exploration were the Arctic and Antarctic, and European expeditions to both, but particularly the Ant arctic, attracted a very wide range of (often conflicting) attention and comment. The attention given to explorers such as Robert Scott (1868–1912), Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922), Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), and Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) was extensive. The Norwegian explorer Amundsen, who had navigated the infamous Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was the first to reach the Antarctic South Pole in December 1914, one month before Scott’s ill fated expedition, two epic journeys that received massive press attention and caused deep reflection on the efficacy of Scott’s logistics and on national pride. A detailed history of British geography and geo graphical knowledge after World War I through to the early twentieth century cannot be provided here for reasons of space, but in essence it involved the inter war and post 1945 expansion of university geography de partments, the continuing role of the RGS in the ad vancement of geographical research through exploration, encouragement of research, publication, and debate, the
foundation of the independent and highly influential Institute of British Geographers in 1933, the merger of these two institutions in 1995, progress in the teaching of geography in schools, and an increasing – yet still understated – presence of geographers in public affairs and debates. Major changes have occurred in the tech niques of measurement and evaluation of a wide range of data, including remote sensing and geographical infor mation systems, and also in the approaches to many old and new geographical issues, such as gender, develop ment, historical change, the philosophy and ideologies of geography, globalization, urbanization, economic change, and many others.
The Production of ‘Colonial’ Geographical Knowledge The history and geography of knowledge producing agencies in some European colonies is worth brief examination, reflecting issues that have a spatial dis tinctiveness and at the same time mirroring broader issues of common interest with ‘mother’ societies of the metropoles. The relative independence of future do minions throughout this period must, however, be rec ognized. The existing geographical societies in Europe had been joined, by the late nineteenth century, by many more in Europe and the Americas and by those that were founded in the European overseas empires, including Australia, North Africa, and parts of Asia. Most kept some kind of connection with the metropolitan societies and aired local geostrategic issues, but they also gave attention through their meetings, publications, excur sions, and sponsored expeditions to economic develop ment, population migration and settlement, labor forces, and environmental hazards. They exchanged publications with geographical and other scientific societies, thus promoting and receiving a wide array of information. Joe Powell has suggested that the geographical societies founded in Australia in the late nineteenth century ‘‘re flected the odd mixture of national and imperial senti ments which permeates so many Australian institutions.’’ This is demonstrated in the interests of branches of the Geographical Society of Australasia (itself founded in 1883, given a ‘Royal’ prefix in 1886, with largely au tonomous branches founded in 1883 in New South Wales and Victoria and in 1885 in Queensland and South Australia), in exploration of Australia itself and of New Guinea and the Antarctic, and indicates in part the sig nificance of webs and nodes of imperial and sub imperial connection, including the roles of colonial governors and senior religious and administrative figures who were often presidents of such societies. It should also be noted that competition from some local scientific ‘Royal Soci eties’, notably in exploration, sometimes overshadowed
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the activities of the geographical societies. There was overlap in membership, so the resolution of the exact roles of these societies is not easy. The South Australian branch of the Royal Geo grahical Society of Australasia (RGSA), based in Adel aide, organized meetings, published its proceedings, and sponsored expeditions, its constitution listing its main purposes as scientific, commercial, educational, and his torical (including the collection of historical records of geographical interest), and the compilation of data on the geography of Australia. The first president, from 1885 to 1894, was Sir Samuel Davenport, an English born, Adelaide based businessman and banker, major land owner and politician, who promoted the production of olive oil, tobacco, and silk, and was President of the Chamber of Manufacturers. The society supported the Elder expedition and the Calvert expedition of 1896–97. The Queensland Geographical Society was of similar composition and focus, but was, for obvious reasons of proximity, very much bound up with Australian attempts to persuade Great Britain to annexe the non Dutch part of New Guinea in the face of growing interest from Germany and France, and supported a number of expeditions to that territory whose outcomes were re ported in its publications, at its lectures, and in local newspapers. The surveyor, J. P. Thomson, who had previously worked in Fiji, was an influential officer of the Queens land Society. He published widely on Australian geog raphy, in local and in British and French geographical journals. The Society had 14 sub branches in Queens land in the 1920s and 1930s, though they were mainly short lived. It raised funds for Antarctic exploration and the exploration and conservation of the Great Barrier Reef, and like other geographical societies in Australia hosted visits by famous explorers, such as H. M. Stanley who addressed a meeting of the Society in Brisbane in 1891. One of the issues which was debated and published by the Queensland Society was that of the provision of an adequate agricultural labor force, notably for the sugar cane areas of the north, and this in turn reflected a wide range of opinion on color and race, and the roles and potential of Australian aborigines. South Africa represents a contrasting source of geo graphical knowledge in a much older colony. Settled by Europeans since the seventeenth century, it was a region of continuing conflict, substantially over land use and later mineral rights, between Europeans, notably the British and the Dutch based settlers – the Afrikaaners/ Boers – and the various groups of indigenous African peoples. The production of maps and written geo graphical accounts knowledge dated back to the time of European settlement, but the foundation of scientific societies in South Africa came somewhat later than in other colonies, and the first geographical society – The
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South African Geographical Society – was not estab lished until 1917. W. S. Barnard has described the context as one in which Two issues dominated the political discourse: the tussle between the English and Afrikaans white elites about South Africa’s place in the British imperial sun and the relationship between the country’s black and white in habitants. (Barnard (1999))
The new Geographical Society’s aims were To raise the standard of geographical education, to en courage geographical research in all its branches, and to arouse in the general public some enthusiasm in a subject which has a direct bearing on every day life.
This society had imperial links, and tended toward the British tradition, most of the published papers being in English, though membership was constitutionally open to all. It was not instrumental in the promotion of exped itions and had a small membership, but nonetheless at tempted to promote geography professionally at all levels of education and of research. However, there were no real reflections on the life and culture of black Afri cans, for whom much education, including higher edu cation, was limited, and which became worse after 1948. Afrikaaner culture and politics led to the establishment of an Afrikaans Society for Geography, and the two so cieties, each of which had published its own journal, merged in 1994 to form the Society of South African Geographers. Geography had been advanced in France in the eighteenth century, conspicuously in mapping and survey and infrastructural improvements by the Napoleonic inge´nieurs ge´ographes. As Anne Godlewska has observed, they mapped rivers, mountains, canals, towns, cities, roads and ways, monuments, and the movement of armies all over Europe from Italy, Piedmont and Savoy to Elba, Corsica, Bavaria, Austria, Russia, Spain and Egypt y They must have produced thousands of maps in the course of Napoleon’s reign. (Anne Godlewska)
This output included the mass of maps and surveys linked to the expedition to Egypt from 1798–1801. Most of these developments were closely linked to the devel opment of national identity and imperial ideology, and to an increasing tightening of the control of scientific knowledge by the French state. The Service des Missions, a government research council established in 1842, promoted French scientific missions within Europe and to overseas countries by the award of grants, and whose records show not only the extent and nature of the individual projects, but also what
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Michael Heffernan has described as ‘‘the petty rivalries, feuds and political struggles which characterized French scholarship at this period.’’ This was but one among a complex and changing sets of geographical knowledge which could be used in the contested projects of French imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among the institutions of science were the geographical societies. The Paris Geographical Society, had been founded in 1821, and this was followed by the foundation of 32 additional French geographical societies by 1894. In the French colonies geographical societies had been es tablished in Algiers in 1857 and revived in 1880, Oran in 1878, Constantine in 1883. In 1917 a Moroccan section of the Algiers Society was established in Tangiers, and an other society was founded in Casablanca in 1922.
Universities and Schools The knowledge promoted in teaching of geography in universities, schools, and other educational institutions naturally changed through time, with the earlier focus being on maps, basic geographical descriptions, and links to historical information, for example, the geographies and images of classical Greek and Roman times, and they also reflected strong influences from religious and other cultural systems. The basic science of exploration and navigation typical of the seventeenth century was re placed by a more sophisticated science of exploration, discovery, and recording in charts and maps by the late eighteenth century, as shown in the information brought back by voyages in the Pacific, some of which are de scribed above. The work of these and other important scientists such as the Prussian explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who had traveled in South America, brought together new analyses of human and environmental data and symbiosis, laid the foundations for a new kind of scientific geography, and gradually informed the kind of geographical knowledge that was taught in various educational institutions. Keltie, the RGS, and Geographical Education Geography in many different forms had been a part of the teaching of British universities in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and included mathematical geography, historical geography, cos mography, descriptive geography, astronomical geog raphy, and chorography, and often linked to theology. There were also geographers in the English and Scottish royal courts, and the subject was taught in schools and promoted by learned societies. The spread of new ideas and data in geography from the late eighteenth century onward was spatially uneven, reflecting both national and local traditions and
preferences. Within Europe, innovative geography ad vanced at a more rapid pace in France and Germany than it did in Britain, for example. This was clearly shown by the survey of geography teaching undertaken in the late nineteenth century for the RGS, which became increas ingly concerned with the minimal interest in geography within the British educational system, including the schools and universities, civil service, and the army and navy. In 1869 the society had instituted the award of ‘public schools medals’ for the promotion of geography, but the system was ineffective and discontinued in 1884. In 1884 the society commissioned a review of geo graphical education by John Keltie, appointed as its Inspector of Geographical Education. His report on ‘geographical education’ to the society in 1885, pub lished in 1886, marked a major step forward for the future development of the subject. Keltie visited schools, universities, and military academies in Britain and Continental Europe – Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Sweden – and obtained material from Spain and the United States. His visits in Britain were mainly to public schools which had competed for the society’s medals, the data supplemented with material from normal and primary schools, for which the state had responsibility, and in which geog raphy of a basic form had been made compulsory. His general view of geographical education in Europe was that it was less tainted by a reliance on textbooks than that in Britain. He was particularly impressed with the teaching of geography in the schools, military academies, and universities in Germany – (Germany provided ‘‘the model which all the other Continental countries are following, as far as their special circumstances will per mit’’). Studies commenced with Heimatskunde, the geog raphy of the home region, and proceeded to regional, historical, political, physical, and regional geography through middle to higher education and even into PhD level. He wrote about the rapid rate of progress of geo graphical education in France from 1871, the year in which a report to the Minister of Education had be moaned the lack of interest in geography. Generally similar progress was reported for Italy. From his visits and the additional information col lected, he concluded that Britain needed much more effort to develop the teaching of geography in uni versities and schools, conspicuously through stronger representation to government and education authorities, some financial support, the award of prizes, and displays of maps and other kinds of geographical apparatus. These proposals were followed up by the RGS, but less than a decade later, in 1893, a further step forward was made with the foundation of the Geographical Association, specifically intended to promote the improvement of il lustration in geography teaching. One of the proponents was Halford J. Mackinder, a talented and energetic
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geography teacher at Oxford, whose advancement of a ‘new’ geography was most influential from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Another was J. S. Keltie, by then Secretary and Editor at the RGS. In 1885 there were, according to Keltie, 12 chairs of geography in Germany, with two in the process of being added in Mu¨nster and Berlin (the second, in physi ography), eight in Austria Hungary, eight in France (three jointly with history), 12 in Italy, one in Switzerland, one in Belgium, and none in Sweden. In Britain, though geography had been taught in Oxford since the mid sixteenth century, significant pro gress was not made in the institutional development of the subject until after the mid nineteenth century, partly by the prompting by the RGS. H. J. Mackinder was ap pointed Reader in Geography in 1887, a School of Geography was established in 1899, but a professorial appointment in geography was not made until 1910. There was no honors school there until 1932. At Cambridge, similar representations had been made by the RGS for the development of geography, and an appointment was made in 1888. The first reader was appointed in 1898, and the Geographical Tripos was instituted in 1919. The first honors degrees were awarded in 1921, and the first professor of geography was ap pointed in 1931. A chair in geography was established at University College, London in 1903, and Britain’s first honors school of geography was established at Liverpool in 1917. From the 1870s, the Royal Scottish Geographical So ciety (founded in 1884) had pressed for more geography in local universities. In the case of Edinburgh University it was supported by the famous mapping company run by J. G. Bartholomew, and a post in geography was cre ated in 1908; a chair was eventually established in 1930. At Glasgow the first appointment in geography was made in 1909. The development of various types of geography teaching in schools goes back well into the seventeenth century in Britain, and was in part influenced by the types of geographical material available and by the dif ferent forms of school. In England and Wales there was state support for voluntary societies from 1833, including the churches and nonsectarian societies that ran schools, and from 1870 compulsory education was introduced at elementary level, with public provision for secondary education in England introduced in 1902. There are different histories for education provision in Scotland, where there had been an element of compulsory edu cation since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with strong church responsibility; major state provision for education was made from 1872. The work of the Geographical Association, and other geographical societies, helped geography accelerate as a subject in universities and teacher training colleges
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from the beginning of the twentieth century, and to become a significant part of the school curriculum. Characterization of a progression in school geography from rote learning of geographical facts and places (‘capes and bays’) to more interpretative and better il lustrated kinds of geographical knowledge probably underestimates the variety of information available from the later nineteenth century. Keltie’s report does suggest, however, that rote learning was an undeniable feature of some geography teaching. The contents of textbooks, and other kinds of literature available for young people, in cluding fiction, do reflect European characteristics of modernity, imperialism, nationalism, patriotism, citizen ship, and commercial advancement – and also, though more rarely, opposition to such processes. Another sig nificant feature is the extent to which geography texts and materials published for consumption by indigenous pupils in schools in the colonies failed for quite some time to adjust the material to local circumstances and interests. In extreme form it can be quite horrifying, as Teresa Ploszajska has shown in the context of racialist geography textbook coverage in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of aboriginal people in Australia. Geographical Education in France In France, promotion of different aspects of geographical knowledge was, as elsewhere, a complex process, in volving a wide range of individuals, institutions, and state policies. Progress was relatively slow in schools and universities. By 1880 chairs of geography had been es tablished at the universities of Lyons, Bordeaux, Caen, and Dijon; there was one at Lille in 1893 and at Rennes in 1899. L. A. Himly held a chair at the Sorbonne, and another chair – of colonial geography – was added in 1892. Geography was, however, also promoted at other higher level educational institutions, including the Col le`ge de France, various teacher training colleges, and the military academy at St. Cyr. Paul Vidal de la Blache was appointed to the chair at the Sorbonne in 1898. The teachings and research of E´lisee Reclus (1830–1905), Emile Levasseur (1845–1918), and Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918) were the foundations of the French School of Geography, partly influenced by German geographical ideas, but developing distinct character istics, including emphases on the regional components in spatial systems, reflected in their different personalities. Their ideas were taken forward by such scholars as Lucien Gallois (1857–1941), coordinator of the famous Ge´ographie Universelle, Emmanuel de Martonne (1873– 1955), and Jean Brunhes (1869–1930). In French schools the provision for the teaching of geography at primary level was quite limited before 1870, in spite of reforms of 1857 in primary education and in
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1864 in secondary education, with emphasis on descrip tive vocabulary of basic geographical features and some rote learning of names of objects and places. At secondary level the priorities and emphases first laid down by teaching by Jesuits and other religious orders dominated, as Paul Claval has outlined, in the Napoleonic schools and colleges, where classical history required some modest background knowledge of geography. In the universities there was limited geographical presence, with a chair at the Sorbonne, formerly of history and modern geography, becoming a chair of geography in 1812. From 1871, in response to the energetic attempts to revive French status and national pride, geography moved forward. This is evidenced in the publication in 1877 of the Tour de France de deux enfants, a book used as a primary text. Its focus is on two orphans who escape from the recently annexed Lorraine and travel in France looking for their uncle; the by product is a series of geographical descriptions and maps of France and its regions. In the same period there was a revival of regional novels, and wider provision of geographical information through travel and adventure novels and the production of guide books by the publishers Hachette. After 1870 there was reform in French geographical instruction, with priority given to better knowledge of France itself and its place in the changing world, and of the use of maps. Prior to this wall maps as teaching aids had been scarce, and their design and circulation were improved. At primary level children were introduced to the rudimentaries of geographical description and the use of maps, and the basic characteristics of the geography of France and the rest of the world. At secondary level, an improved pro gram for geography was introduced in 1872 and updated in 1890 and 1902, and included material on economic and political geography. A leading proponent for the teaching of new improved geography was the historian Ludovic Drapeyron (1839–1901), who founded the journal Revue de Ge´ographie, in 1877. Geography and Geographical Education in Asia It is important to bear in mind also the developments in geography in countries and cultures that are not Euro pean. Geography had been part of the Japanese epis temology of its early civilizations, but advanced in the nineteenth century with exposure to Western and Chinese ideas after the Meiji restoration in 1868 and the introduction of a compulsory educational system in 1872. Geography was employed in the attempts to create a strong national identity and a modernized state, and posts in geography were created from the late nineteenth century. Chairs of geography were established in the imperial universities at Kyoto in 1907 (within the Institute of History) and Tokyo (1911). A Tokyo
Geographical Society was founded in 1879. Geography was also bound up with Japanese imperial ambitions in the first half of the twentieth century, but after the end of World War II expanded to cover a wide range of geo graphical topics. Similarly geography in China has deep roots, dating from prehistoric and early historic times, reflecting in vestigation of the geography of China and of regions explored by the Chinese over land and by sea, including the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Hooson sug gests however, that when the western world (including the Russians) forced its way into China in the nineteenth century, it found a crumbling, still feudal empire that had forgotten its an cient civilization, including geographical knowledge. (Hooson, 1991: 31 32)
Thereafter, the pattern of development related to interchange with Western ideas and personnel, and the first university department of geography in China was established in 1928. Almost inevitably, Chinese geog raphy at all levels was then influenced by nationalist and communist ideologies. From 1949, with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, it was inextricably linked with an extreme cultural and political ideology, from which it is only just beginning to recover. In India the development of modern geography was also quite late, and tied in with the increasing intensity of British control from the mid nineteenth centuries, but it was built on much older and varied Indian geographical traditions, dating back to late prehistory, and including in early historical time the geographical material presented in Hindu ashrams and Jain and Buddhist viharas, and the map data from Arabic contact in the eighth century. The Bombay Geographical Society was founded in 1832, mainly on the initiative of naval officers of the East India Company – only 2 years after the RGS – of which, for 5 years, it existed as a branch. It published proceedings from 1837, and in 1873 merged with the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Kapur contends that: The British were the official couriers of the seeds of a segregated and defined discipline of Geography in India. For over a hundred years the British used the tools of this science to measure, collect, organize and document the geographical facts of India. But the study of geography in India did not find a habitat of teaching and research until the early 20th century. (Kapur, 2002)
The mapping of India from the late eighteenth cen tury by the Great Trigonometrical Survey was one of a number of survey and mapping institutions set up by the British, others including the Geological Survey of India (founded 1851), the Census of India (1861), The
Knowledge and Education, Historical Geographies of
Archaeological Survey of India (1861), and The Indian Meteorological Department (1875). In spite of this, and the establishment of universities in 1857 in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, in 1882 at Lahore and in 1877 at Allahabad, no geography was taught until 1920, in colleges linked to Lahore University, and sub sequently at Aligarh in 1924 and Patna in 1927. In 1925 there were 20 universities in India, none of them in cluding geography teaching, but by 1947 there were 37 universities, of which 17 taught geography. In the same time period the number of geographical societies and geographical journals increased from one to six. By 1970 there were 48 university departments of geography. A National Association of Geographers was established in 1978. The progress of geography in Indian universities does not, however, seem to have been matched by similar progress in schools, where geography is taught as part of a social studies curriculum that combines geography and history, and is often taught by those without specialist geographical knowledge. Geography in the United States and South Africa In the United States geography teaching and learning goes back to colonial times, but in its modern form ap peared from the mid nineteenth century, with major publications by George Perkins Marsh, William Henry Brewer, and others. Appointments were made at Princeton and Yale and geographical societies were founded at Philadelphia (1881), and Chicago (1898). Geography departments were introduced at University of California, Berkeley, and at Columbia University Tea chers’ College in 1898. There was a strong tradition of field survey which provided substantial foundations for the subject. W. M. Davis, who taught geography at Harvard from 1878–1912, made a major contribution to the investigation of landforms; other noted pioneers of geography included Mark Jefferson, Isaiah Bowman, Ellen Churchill Semple, and Albert Perry Brigham. The Association of American Geographers was founded in 1904. After World War I there was substantial progress in all branches of physical and human geography, and be yond World War II American geographers pioneered developments in a number of fields, including quantita tive geography. In South Africa, despite the absence of university geography departments and formal geographical soci eties, geography became part of the primary school curricula from 1839. From the mid nineteenth century it emerged at the secondary level, albeit with lowly standing, in the Cape Colony and in Natal, the Orange Free state, and Transvaal. Thereafter, the teaching of empire geography, notably in the Afrikaaner territories, served to promote British imperial ideologies, and that
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process accelerated after the Anglo Boer War, with geography of the British Empire as a key component in the draft matriculation certificate syllabus of 1913. There is little information at present of the views of the black population on contemporary geographical instruction, though it is clear that the use of geography by the British to justify the Anglo Boer War and its outcome was anathema to Afrikaaners. Wesso and Parnell have sug gested that while the founding of the South African Geographical Society stimulated geography in South Africa, produced its first journal, and generally helped to progress geography in tertiary education, the main in fluence was still British, with a strong incorporation of environmental determinism. The first chair in geography was created at Stellen bosch in 1920, the holder being Piet Serton (1888–1963) from the Netherlands. The first university geographers in South Africa were British or European trained, and some progress was made in the period 1920–60. Ideo logical differences were reflected in school and university admissions policies and curricula. The Extension of University Act of 1959 required that black students had to have special permission to study at white universities, or they could study at separate black university colleges, where they were often taught by Afrikaaners – so that, as Wesso and Parnell indicate, black geography students, a large proportion of which were student teachers, were confronted with a geography with strong ideological and environmental determinist undertones. (Wesso and Parnell, 1992: 186 199)
See also: Genealogy and Family History; Historical Geography, Evolution of; Imperialistic Geographies; Nature, Historical Geographies of; Nature, History of.
Further Reading Baker, A. R. H. (2003). Geography and history. Bridging the great divide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnard, W. S. (1999). Encountering Admastor: South African founding geographers and their regional geographies. In Buttimer, A., Brunn, S. D. & Wardenga, U. (eds.) Text and image. Social construction of regional knowledges, pp 192. Leipzig: Institut fur Landerkunde. Butlin, R. A. (2006). Geography Imperial and local: The work of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (Queensland Branch) 1885 1945. In Childs, I. R. W. & Hudson, B. J. (eds.) Queensland geographical perspectives, pp 217 241. Brisbane: The Royal Geographical Society of Queensland. Claval, P. (1998). Histoire de la ge´ographie Franc¸aise de 1870 a` nos jours. Paris: Nathan. Dodgshon, R. A. (1998). Society in time and space. A geographical perspective on change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Driver, F. (2001). Geography militant. Cultures of exploration and empire. Oxford: Blackwell. Godlewska, A. (1994). Napoleon’s geographers (1797 1815): Imperialists and soldiers of modernity. In Godlewska, A. & Smith, N. (eds.) Geography and empire, pp 31 54. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Godlewska, A. (1999). Geography unbound: French geographic science from Cassini to Humboldt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Graham, B. and Nash, C. (eds.) (2000). Modern historical geographies. Harlow: Pearson Education. Heffernan, M. J. (1994). A state scholarship: The political geography of French international science during the nineteenth century. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, NS 19, 21 45. Hooson, D. J. M. (1991). China (People’s Republic). In Dunbar, G. S. (ed.) Modern geography. An encyclopedic survey, pp 31 32. Chicago and London: St James Press. Hudson, B. (1977). The new geography and the new imperialism. Antipode 9(2), 12 19. Johnston, R. (2003). The institutionalization of geography as an academic discipline. In Johnston, R. & Williams, M. (eds.) A century of British geography, pp 45 90. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy. Kapur, A. (2002). Indian geography, voice of concern. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. Livingstone, D. N. (1992). The geographical tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. Livingstone, D. N. (2003). British geography, 1500 1900 an imprecise review. In Johnston, R. & Williams, M. (eds.) A century of British geography, pp 11 44. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy. Livingstone, D. N. (2003). Putting science in its place. Geographies of scientific knowledge. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Mayhew, R. J. (2000). Enlightenment geography: The political languages of British geography, 1650 1850. London: Macmillan. Peake Jones, K. (1985). The branch without a tree. The centenary history of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (South Australian Branch) Incorporated. 1885 to 1985. Adelaide: Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (Adelaide Branch). Powell, J. M. (1986). Approaching a dig tree: Reflections on our endangered expedition. Australian Geographical Studies 23, 3 25. Ploszajska, T. (1999). Historical geography research series no. 35: Geographical education, empire and citizenship: Geographical teaching and learning in English schools, 1870 1944. London: Institute of British Geographers.
Ploszajska, T. (2000). Historiographies of geography and empire. In Graham, B. & Nash, C. (eds.) Modern historical geographies, pp 121 145. Harlow: Pearson Education. Stafford, R. A. (1989). Scientist of empire. Sir Roderick Murchison, scientific exploration and Victorian imperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wesso, H. (1994). The colonization of geographic thought: The South African experience. In Godlewska, A. & Smith, N. (eds.) Geography and empire, pp 316 332. Oxford: Blackwell. Wesso, H. and Parnell, S. (1992). Geographical education in South Africa: Colonial roots and prospects for change. In Rogerson, C. & McCarthy, J. (eds.) Geography in a changing South Africa. Progress and prospects, pp 186 199. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Withers, C. W. J. (2001). A partial biography: The formalization and institutionalization of geography in Britain since 1887. In Dunbar, G. S. (ed.) Geography: Discipline, profession and subject since 1870, pp 79 119. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Withers, C. W. J. and Livingstone, D. (1999). Introduction: On geography and enlightenment. In Livingstone, D. & Withers, C. W. J. (eds.) Geography and enlightenment, pp 1 32. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Relevant Websites http://www.amergeog.org/ American Geographical Society. http://www.socgeo.org/ Ia Socie´te´ de Ge´ographie. http://www.hakluyt.com The Hakluyt Society. http://www.rgs.org/ Royal Geographical Society. http://www.ssag.co.za/ Society of South African Geographers.
Knowledge Communities S. Pinch, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Community A much-used term with little specific meaning but usually refers to a social group characterized by dense networks of social interaction reflecting a common set of cultural values. A community is often, but not necessarily, geographically concentrated. Community of Practice A group of people who form common values, norms, and understanding through their direct engagement in common tasks, often in the same organization. Similar to a knowledge community but involves direct engagement in common tasks. Epistemic Communities Groups of people who produce new types of knowledge, legitimated by a commonly accepted procedural authority, in pursuit of particular objectives. Knowledge Community A group of people, typically a professional, technical, or scientific group, unified by a common set of values, norms, and working practices, who produce knowledge for a given purpose. Networks of Practice Interfirm networks that can arise through workers with similar occupations sharing common understanding but without direct personal contact. Nonscalar Approach One that attempts to avoid conceptualizing social processes as bounded within particular spaces or levels. Sociology of Scientific Knowledge A complex and diverse body of work that considers the production of knowledge as a context-dependent social process resulting from the values, norms, and common understanding of communities of scientists and technicians. Tacit Knowledge Knowledge that is acquired by practical experience, is difficult to codify in written form, and which therefore often requires face-to-face demonstration to facilitate its transmission. May also include knowledge which the individual or group possesses but is not aware of or able to articulate.
What is a Knowledge Community? Within geography the term knowledge community has been applied most frequently to workers in particular industries who constitute a group of people, often in separate organizations, but united by a common set of norms, values, and understandings, that define the
knowledge and production trajectories of the economic sector to which they belong. However, the term know ledge community, together with numerous closely re lated concepts (i.e., various types of community or collectivity – aesthetic, epistemic, interpretative, learn ing, practice based, technical) is more widely applied in the social sciences to understand the knowledge gener ating activities of a wide range of other social groupings. This section will trace the evolution of the concept of knowledge communities, its main characteristics and uses, and some of the major controversies that it has generated within geography. We should note at the outset that concept of com munity is one of the most widely used and controversial notions in the social sciences. Most work on the idea of community has followed in the wake of the pioneering sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies, who made a distinction between Gemeinschaft – tight knit social relationships based around family and kin, characteristic of traditional, feudal, agrarian societies, and Gesselleschaft – the loose knit relationships manifest in urbanized capitalist soci eties. There followed much debate on the extent to which urban life really did lead to the destruction of close social bonds, with many citing the counterfactual presence of urban villages. With the growth of globalization and new electronic telecommunication systems, there has been debate over the extent to which close knit ties can be maintained across large distances. Hence, the term community has progressively become divorced from its earlier association with local neighborhoods. In particu lar, community has been used as a metaphor to analyze how various organizations operate.
Origins of the Concept of Knowledge Communities The concept of a knowledge community, together with related notions, represents the coming together of a number of strands of intellectual thought. The most important of these are the sociology of scientific know ledge (SSK), the social ethnography of work, and studies of the relationships between science, technology, and society. Although the various strands of the SSK vary considerably in approach, they share a common desire to avoid technological determinism – the view that tech nology is some independent, external, force acting upon society. Instead, they adopt a social constructivist ap proach that conceptualizes both scientific advances and
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Knowledge Communities
technological innovations as intrinsically social processes resulting from the operations of communities of scientists and engineers. Within a constructivist approach the acceptance or rejection of scientific ideas or technological innovations is to be found within the social rather than the natural world. It is argued that there is no natural logic to the world waiting to reveal itself; hence, there is usually enormous uncertainty surrounding new theories or sci entific developments – what is termed the period of in terpretative flexibility. Following this period, scientific and technical communities gradually form a consensus about the meanings of new developments and social closure takes place. However, scientific studies often fail to produce conclusive evidence and so social closure must be secured by the forging of discourses – shared sets of meanings about the nature of the evidence. Accord ingly, truth is not envisaged as something intrinsic to a statement but rather a form of representation that is forged through power struggles between groups of competing knowledge producers. Hence, the creation of knowledge is regarded as essentially a linguistic project, dependent upon forging a common language, identity, and purpose. This means that knowledge is always con text dependent or as is sometimes termed, socially embedded. Evidence for this interpretation of science is found in the localized nature of initial advances in knowledge, since these usually take place in particular research laboratories and scientific institutes. This geographic concentration is often ascribed to the need for specialized equipment and common understanding that involve a great deal of tacit knowledge (i.e., knowledge that is ac quired by practical experience, is difficult to codify in written form, and which therefore often requires face to face demonstration to facilitate its transmission – also commonly termed ‘know how’). For this reason it is sometimes difficult for scientists or engineers in distant locations to replicate experiments in the early stages of scientific advance because they lack the detailed under standings that are forged by the tight knit, innovating, community. Eventually, however, knowledge becomes codified and embodied in standardized equipment that is used in commonly understood ways and it is therefore widely disseminated. These perspectives have led to knowledge being regarded as not so much as a thing or a stock (as in the case of data or information) but as a social process. These social processes that lead to the formu lation of knowledge (or truth claims) are central to understanding how knowledge communities operate. Such perspectives on knowledge have been applied to other types of knowledge producers including occu pational groups in industry and commerce. Another powerful influence upon the concept of knowledge communities in this context has been the discipline of
economics in the form of New Growth Theory. This approach argues that that knowledge is now crucial in promoting economic growth. In particular, new forms of knowledge that are difficult to copy are a key element for competitive advantage for firms in the so called know ledge based economy. The knowledge based view of the firm argues that, rather than being conceptualized as a set of responses to information and transactions costs, as in neoclassical economics, the firm is better seen as a re pository of skills and knowledge.
Communities of Practice The immediate forerunner to the concept of the know ledge community is the concept of a community of practice. This idea releases the notion of community from a necessarily geographical background, although propinquity may be an element in its constitution. The concept was coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger following their work on how employees learn skills ‘on the job’ and published in their book Situated Learning. Their analysis was based on five remarkably diverse sets of people who all formed a community of practice through their extensive apprenticeships: Goa tailors, meat cutters, nondrinking alcoholics, Yucatan midwives, and US Navy quartermasters. Wenger subsequently popularized the notion, especially in business studies, by his influential book Communities of Practice. Wenger drew attention to the widespread processes of learning and identity formation that are fostered by participation in the practices of various social communities including families, workplaces, professional and voluntary organ izations. The crucial element in the formulation of a community of practice therefore is the mutual engage ment of the participants in common tasks – it is not sufficient to merely belong to the same social category, be part of the same social network, or be a member of a traditional community in the sense of a local neighbor hood. Communities must be engaged in knowledge production, much of which is tacit in character through demonstration, experiment, and trial and error. Wenger notes that communities of practice may be diverse in character (as with family members or work colleagues) and need not be consensual; indeed, they may be riven with tensions and conflict (again as in many families or workplaces). Although powerful external forces inevit ably shape these communities, they do, nevertheless, have to negotiate some shared sense of common purpose, together with a mutual recognition of responsibility and accountability. Underpinning a community of practice therefore is what Wenger terms a shared repertoire that includes routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories, gestures, symbols, actions, or concepts that the community has produced (see also Table 1).
Knowledge Communities
Table 1
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Identifying elements of communities of practice
1. Sustained mutual relationships harmonious or conflictual 2. Shared ways of engaging in doing things together 3. Rapid flows of innovation and propagation of innovation 4. Absence of introductory preambles, as if conversations and interactions were, merely the continuation of an ongoing process 5. Very quick set up of a problem to be discussed 6. Substantial overlap in participants’ descriptions of who belongs 7. Knowing what others know, what they can do, and what they can contribute to the enterprise 8. Mutually defining identities 9. The ability to assess the appropriateness of actions and products 10. Specific tools, representations, and artefacts 11. Local lore, shared stories, inside jokes 12. Jargon and shortcuts to communication, as well as the ease of producing new ones 13. Certain styles recognized as displaying membership 14. A shared discourse reflecting a certain perspective on the world Source: Adapted from Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wenger illuminates these ideas with insights into the work of insurance claims processors. As with many tasks, processing health insurance claims ‘by the book’ was unworkable – there were simply too many problems, anomalies, and time constraints. Instead, the personnel engaged in processing claims through various social interactions, devising numerous ‘quick fixes’ and working practices that made the job manageable. These ideas echo Orr’s pioneering work on photocopier technicians. The main problem facing this group was that new versions of photocopiers typically produced error statements that did not correspond to the solutions suggested in the early instruction manuals. Solutions to cope with mal functioning copiers were eventually devised through informal trial and error procedures, often the result ‘water cooler talk’ with colleagues. Both these case studies of insurance processors and technicians drew attention to how learning is a social process.
Knowledge Communities in Geography The concept of a knowledge community as oper ationalized in geography is very similar to that of a community of practice but it has a slightly different emphasis. In particular, there is less emphasis upon mu tual engagement in the same tasks, typically in the same organization, and more stress upon an underlying com munality of interest among a professional or occupational group within an industrial sector. Thus, in a knowledge community workers might never meet personally, yet, through various means – such as job transfers between companies, professional journals, gossip, and rumour – may come to share a number of common values, working practices, and aspirations. A knowledge community therefore has much in common with Brown and Duguid’s notion of networks of practice. These relate to interfirm networks that can arise through workers with similar occupations sharing common elements, but without
direct personal contact. There is currently extensive debate in the social sciences over the extent to which professional and occupational groups within firms con stitute either communities of practice or wider forms of knowledge community. For example, it has been argued that while in house product development teams within firms may form a community of practice, increasingly more common temporary project teams can constitute more of a knowledge community. The role of Internet based technologies in sustaining virtual knowledge communities is central to these debates. The concept of knowledge communities can be re lated to a number of other popular concepts in con temporary social theory. First, there is Anderson’s notion of an imagined community, which he used to explain the processes leading to shared notions of national identity among people who never formally meet. Knowledge communities also have links with notions of purified communities whereby some people may be excluded from membership. Professional knowledge communities, for example, frequently try to appropriate key knowledge assets so that they can command power and resources. Knowledge communities may also be similar to trans national communities – international migrants who maintain linkages with more than one nation. For ex ample, there is evidence from Silicon Valley (Palo Alto in California) that immigrant entrepreneurs in the elec tronics industry maintain various technical and com mercial links with their Taiwanese counterparts. Finally, the concept of knowledge communities is also closely related to the notion of epistemic communities. This concept has been used most extensively within the field of international relations to refer to groups of people who produce new types of knowledge, legitimated by a commonly accepted procedural authority, in pursuit of particular social goals. Examples are the diverse inter national environmental and poverty lobby groups pro viding new forms of understanding of problems such as climate change and Third World debt relief with the aim
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of changing policies in these spheres. The crucial elem ent here is the conscription of people toward attaining a common goal. Again, there is less mutual engagement than in a community of practice but the formulation of new ways of thinking, and new ways of validating this knowledge, are crucial. In this sense the epistemic community is related to Knoor Cetina’s notion of epi stemic cultures used to understand the working of sci entific communities. It has been suggested that a community of practice might be more concerned with the use of tacit localized knowledge, whereas an epi stemic community (like a knowledge community) is more likely to be involved with spreading codifiable knowledge. However, like most issues relating to know ledge, this is a questionable distinction.
Knowledge Communities and Industrial Agglomeration The main use of the concept of knowledge communities within geography has been as an explanation of industrial agglomeration – the tendency for firms (usually small and medium sized) to locate together in relatively close proximity in the same region. Initially, these agglomer ations (also termed industrial districts or new industrial spaces) were attributed to the post Fordist striving of firms for greater flexibility of production. This led to both vertical and horizontal disintegration (i.e., firms becoming both smaller and more specialized) as they engaged in more flexible relationships of subcontracting and strategic alliances. It was argued that the increased need for interfirm linkages gave advantages to firms who were clustered together; in this way they could help minimize the transaction costs involved in doing business with each other. However, later explanations for agglomerations gave prominence to the covert, informal, untraded exchanges of knowledge between firms which are seen as the essential glue binding them together in relatively close proximity in region. The activities of knowledge communities are seen as an important element in knowledge exchanges. An Illustration of the Workings of a Knowledge Community The operation of a knowledge community can be illus trated with the example of racing car engineers in the UK. About three quarters of the world’s advanced racing cars are designed in an industrial cluster in southern England, in what has often been dubbed Motor Sport Valley. Building a competitive racing car requires the product to be at the cutting edge of technology within the rules and regulations permitted by the particular racing formulae involved. The firms wish their products to be superior and the engineers therefore work in great
secrecy, yet the knowledge of how to construct com petitive cars seems to leak out of these firms quite quickly through a wide range of processes. The knowledge can vary from routine, ostensibly mundane, but nevertheless important practices, to radically new ways of doing things. Such is the competition for skilled engineers that there is a great deal of interfirm labor mobility that amounts to staff poaching. Many engineers will have worked with each other at certain times in their careers so they will have some insights into how former col leagues in other companies think. This interfirm mobility is enhanced by the very high rates of firm failure and new firm formation, often in the form of spin offs. However, knowledge is also spread through gossip and rumour, some of which is spread through diverse social networks. Various conventions, stories, and narratives about the best way to do things get established and manifest in the ra cing cars. These stories are not just ‘made up’ they have to work on the racetrack. However, given the many fac tors that can explain variations in car performance, there is typically great uncertainty about the best solutions at any given time. This means that other racing teams will rapidly copy solutions that seem to work in one team, even if they are not fully clear about the scientific or engineering principles involved. As with many other high technology industries, therefore, racing car engineers constitute a small specialized ‘world’ of pro duction centered on specific sets of knowledge. Although these engineers are usually not in direct contact with each other, they are engaged in a collective project with identical aims and objectives.
To What Extent are Knowledge Communities Scale Dependent? In Wenger’s analysis, communities of practice are con stituted by what people do rather than where they are located, although clearly being located in the same office or factory can be important. In contrast, although in volving less direct mutual engagement, the empirical applications of knowledge communities in geography have tended to focus upon their operation among a group of organizations in a regional setting. This difference has inevitably raised the issue of the role of geography in the formation of both types of epistemic community. A key debate in contemporary human geography, therefore, centers on the extent to which knowledge communities are rooted in particular places, such as offices, factories, cities, regions, and nations, or are spread out across the globe. One perspective, the ‘regionalist approach’, argues that certain forms of knowledge and especially that of a tacit character are ‘sticky’ and difficult to transfer across distances; hence, knowledge communities tend to be lo calized. The other approach, what might be termed the
Knowledge Communities
‘transnational networks perspective’, argues that it is re lational rather than geographical proximity that is crucial for knowledge generation and transfer – that is, similarity of attitude, disposition, and values. This latter perspective suggests that knowledge communities can be widely dispersed and reflects the desire for a nonscalar approach, that is, one that sees social processes as not confined within particular spaces. At first glance, there would seem to be a great deal of evidence indicating that knowledge assets can be located at particular scales. For example, at the level of the firm, many have ascribed the rise of the Toyota Motor Cor poration in the last 50 years to the distinctive knowledge assets possessed by this company. It has evolved superior knowledge of how to produce an enormous range of commercially successful vehicles in a fashion that many other car companies seek to acquire. If we look to the level of the region, then there is none better than Motor Sport Valley in the UK. While Toyota has been pro ducing millions of cars the small companies in this region have accumulated superior knowledge of how to build very small numbers of successful racing cars. And if we stick with the automotive theme and move to the level of the nation, while the products of the Italian motor in dustry might not have the reliability of Toyota’s products, there is little doubt that, in terms of styling, Italian car designers have left us with many classics. However, fur ther consideration reveals that the spatial dimensions of knowledge are quite complex. For example, although Toyota is heavily rooted in its home region in Japan, it has successfully exported its working practices and knowledge assets to many branch plants and associated suppliers around the globe. In the case of Motor Sport Valley, as well as being generated internally, the know ledge used in this region is imported and reconstituted from all over the world. Finally, the creations of Italian car designers are used by automotive manufactures in many different countries. One possible resolution of the local versus global as pects of knowledge exchange is to suggest that local ex changes of knowledge (sometimes termed buzz) are more conducive to the spread of radical innovations compared with global pipelines that tend to deal more with incre mental changes. However, there is within geography a growing awareness of the diverse configurations of net works through which knowledge of various types can circulate, and a reaction against such correlations of knowledge types with particular scales.
Future Directions in the Study of Knowledge Communities The concept of the knowledge community is one of the most important in human geography, helping to account
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for many features of the emerging space economy and sociospatial structure of contemporary society. However, it has been applied in so many different ways to such a variety of scientific, technical, professional, and occu pations groups, that the associated plethora of similar concepts raises a number of issues that require further study, both in terms of conceptual clarification and em pirical elucidation: What types of knowledge are generated, appropriated, • and used by these various communities (e.g., scientific
• • • • •
or technical, radical or routine, tacit or codifiable, epistemic or utilitarian, etc.)? How important are direct personal contact and mu tual engagement in common tasks in the creation of knowledge communities? What is the relevance of the various network per spectives in social science for understanding the op eration of knowledge communities? What is the role of advanced telecommunications systems in facilitating the creation and maintenance of knowledge communities compared with direct face to face contact? To what extent do knowledge communities operate within and across organizations (e.g., firms, scientific institutes, professions, occupational groupings, cities, regions, nations)? To what extent can knowledge communities, their members, knowledge, and activities, be mapped within geographical boundaries and to what extent is either a multiscale or nonscalar approach more appropriate in analyzing these factors?
See also: Actor-Network Theory/Network Geographies; Agglomeration; Competitiveness; Creativity; Discourse; Embeddedness; Habitus; Haptic or Touch-Based Knowledge; High-Tech Industry; Industrial Districts; Informational City; Innovation; Institutionalism/Institutional Geographies; Knowledge Economy; Learning Regions; Local-Global; Network Regions; Networks, Urban; Regional Actors; Regional Development and Noneconomic Factors; Regional Development and Technology; Regional Development, Endogenous.
Further Reading Amin, A. and Cohendet, P. (2004). Architectures of knowledge: Firms, capabilities and communities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bathelt, H., Maskell, P. and Malmberg, A. (2004). Clusters and knowledge: Local buzz, global pipelines and the process of knowledge creation. Progress in Human Geography 28, 54 79. Benner, C. (2003). Learning communities in a learning region: The soft infrastructure of cross firm learning networks in Silicon Valley. Environment and Planning A 35, 1809 1830.
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Brown, J. S. and Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and communities of practice: Towards a unified view of working, learning and innovation. Organization Science 2, 40 57. Brown, J. S. and Duguid, P. (2000). Mysteries of the region: Knowledge dynamics in Silicon Valley. In Lee, C. M., Miller, W., Hancock, M. & Rowen, H. (eds.) The silicon valley edge: A habitat for innovation and entrepreneurship. Palo Alto CA: Stanford University Press. Coe, M. N. and Bunnell, T. G. (2003). ‘Spatializing’ knowledge communities: Towards a conceptualization of transnational innovation networks. Global Networks 3, 435 456. Haas, P. M. (1992). Introduction: Epistemic communities and international policy coordination. International Organization 46, 1037. Hakanson, L. (2005). Epistemic communities and cluster dynamics: On the role of knowledge in industrial districts. Industry and Innovation 12, 433 463. Hildreth, P. and Kimble, C. (2006). Knowledge networks: Innovation through communities of practice. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Knorr Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lesser, E. L., Fontaine, M. A. and Slusher, J. A. (eds.) (2000). Knowledge and communities. Boston, MA: Butterworth Heinemann.
Lindkvist, L. (2006). Knowledge communities and knowledge collectivities: A typology of knowledge work in groups. Journal of Management Studies 42, 1189 1210. Loasby, B. J. (1998). Industrial districts as knowledge communities. In Bellet, M. & Harmet, C. L. (eds.) Industry, space and competition: The contribution of the economists of the past, pp 70 84. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Pinch, S. (1998). Knowledge communities, spatial theory and social policy. Social Policy and Administration 32, 556 571. Pinch, S. and Henry, N. (1999). Discursive aspects of technological innovation: The case of the British motor sport industry. Environment and Planning A 31, 665 682. Saxenian, A. and Hsu, J Y. (2001). The Silicon Valley Hsinchu connection: Technical communities and industrial upgrading. Industrial and Corporate Change 10, 893 920. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E., McDermott, R. and Snyder, W. M. (2002). Cultivating communities of practice. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Relevant Websites http://www.knowledgecommunities.org Knowledge Communities.
Knowledge Economy ´ . Riain, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland A. Kerr and S. O & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
One of the most influential approaches to the under standing of contemporary socio spatial organization is that which emphasizes the emergence of a ‘knowledge economy’. The knowledge economy highlights the in creasing importance of the informational content of goods and services, the mobilization of knowledge in the production process, the occupational trends toward pro fessionalization, the commercialization of knowledge, and the sectoral shift from an economy based on the manufacturing of industrial goods by production workers to one based on the design of informational goods and services by knowledge workers. This informational form of capitalism is also linked to socio spatial change and particularly the rise of a global economy, spanning local and national borders and apparently operating on a planetary scale. Furthermore, this global informational capitalism is also characterized by new organizational forms, typically captured under the loose rubric of ‘network’ forms of organization, and new patterns of socio spatial inequality, linked in part to the ‘digital divide’ but reaching more broadly into the restructuring of work, employment, and social reproduction. We examine a number of key questions regarding this knowledge economy. First, we look at the origin of the concept as well as early attempts to define and map the knowledge economy empirically. Second, we examine a variety of perspectives on the socio spatial organization of the knowledge economy and approaches which link techno economic change and socio spatial organization. Building on a critique of these perspectives, we then go on to develop a view of a knowledge economy that is contested along each stage of the process of the pro duction, use, ownership and transformation of know ledge. We show that these struggles occur both globally and locally and are crucial forces shaping contemporary socio spatial organization. Finally, we briefly discuss the emergent patterns of socio spatial inequality associated with this politically constructed knowledge economy.
Origins of the Knowledge Economy: Empirical and Conceptual For many people the US was the first information/ knowledge economy. This view has its theoretical and empirical origins in the work done by Fritz Machlup and his study of the economic contribution of the knowledge and information industries to the US economy. Machlup recategorized national statistical data and found that
information industries accounted for almost 29% of the adjusted Gross National Product (GNP) in 1958 and that information occupations accounted for 32.4% of total employee compensation. Machlup has been credited with founding the ‘eco nomics of information and knowledge’ subdiscipline. For him information and knowledge were intrinsically re lated but nevertheless distinct, for while informing can bring about knowledge not all information is knowledge. He defined the production of knowledge as ‘‘any human activity effectively designed to create, alter or confirm in a human mind – one’s own or anyone else’s – a mean ingful apperception, awareness, cognisance or con sciousness of whatever it may be’’. His taxonomy of knowledge was broad and included knowledge outside the formal economy, although he admitted that he could not measure the contribution of such knowledge to the economy. Machlup’s approach was replicated by others and these early statistical studies of knowledge production highlight significant shifts in terms of employment and work from the late 1940s in the US and at varying times in other OECD countries. For Machlup and many others the growth of information industries and information type jobs was driven by technology, particularly com puter technology. For others the seeds of these changes were sown further back when the technologies of the industrial revolution, like steam and electricity, created a demand for communication and automated control. Overall early mapping studies of the knowledge economy were highly problematic in terms of their methodology and one must be careful when using their results. They also contained little theoretical or explanatory substance. More qualitative and theoretical work was done in the 1960s and 1970s by sociologists like Daniel Bell. Bell achieved widespread notoriety for this work on the ‘post industrial society’, a term he was later to use interchangeably with the information and the knowledge society. His examination of the social structure (defined as the economy, the occupation system, and technology) found that between 1947 and 1968 service employment grew by almost 60% while growth in manufacturing remained below 10% in the US. Within service em ployment Bell suggests that automation and technology were having an impact not only on the sectors in which people were working but also on what they were doing. For Bell these shifts signaled a fundamental change whereby economic activities no longer involved man struggling against nature but rather involved man and
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information. He also argued that theoretical knowledge was of growing importance as a source of innovation and for policy formation. Thus, Bell highlights the growing importance of one type of knowledge, ‘theoretical knowledge’ in the economy, and for him knowledge is defined as ‘‘what is objectively known, an intellectual property, attached to a name or a group of names and certified by copyright or some other form of social rec ognition (e.g. publication)’’. Bell’s work stands as one of the first attempts to offer an explanation for the development of a post industrial knowledge economy. His explanation rests on the importance of technology and the crucial role of ‘theoretical knowledge’. He has been accused of being a ‘technological determinist’ whose understanding of social change is too dependent on the role of technology and someone whose work was driven by an implicit assumption that economies would converge on the ‘most advanced’ model if the right technologies were adopted. Indeed, one of Bell’s central, and most criticized, points was his division of societies into preindustrial (Asia, Africa, Latin America), industrial (Western Europe, Soviet Union, Japan), and postindustrial (United States). How ever, he brought a vital focus on the specific importance of knowledge, albeit one particular type of knowledge. Attempts to take techno economic changes seriously were also evident within attempts such as Freeman’s to locate information and communications technologies within broader and more complex histories organiszed around successive ‘techno economic paradigms’, where new technologies became the basis of new products and cycles of investment and production, prompting eco nomic and social re organization. While there is a lin gering technological determinism in these studies, the historical locating of the knowledge economy and the opportunity for comparison with other techno economic paradigms was of great value in introducing a historical dimension that went beyond simple modernization perspectives. Increasingly, economists and policy makers today believe that technological change and investment in new knowledge are important sources of economic growth and key aspects of a knowledge economy. Patent data provide one indicator as to the level of new knowledge produced in an economy and according to one source it was not until the early 1980s and the 1990s that patent data in the US started to accelerate, particularly in new sectors like biotechnology and computing. In part, this may be due to a new more proactive and pro patent legal and regulatory regime, which by all accounts is another key feature of the knowledge economy, but in part it may also signal increasing investment in research and devel opment in those sectors. Many economists have become interested in the specific characteristics of information, and endogenous
growth theory has placed technological change at the heart of economic growth. These theorists place invest ments in human capital and research and development at the center of economic growth and suggest that these investments generate increasing returns to the spread of technical and business knowledge. Similarly, economists such as Douglas North have picked up Bell’s interest in the underlying logic of social transformation that is driving the growth of a knowledge economy. However, rather than focusing on shifting technologies as Bell did, they located the source of the knowledge economy in growing social and organizational complexity, creating a need for greater organizational integration of knowledge to manage transactions. Machlup’s challenge to take the expansion of a knowledge economy seriously has therefore been taken up, with efforts to identify the characteristics, dynamics, and history of such an economy. However, in the process, Machlup’s own emphasis on the location of commercial and bureaucratic knowledge within the broader range of knowledges that are produced everyday in social inter actions and institutions was lost. The ‘knowledge econ omy’ has come to be seen as unproblematically identified with specific industries, occupations, and technologies, rather than as a social and political construct.
Socio-Spatial Organization of the Knowledge Economy Bell devotes relatively little space to analyzing the rela tionship between knowledge, technology, and space. In recent years, however, the spatial organization of the knowledge economy has become a focus of much debate in human geography and beyond, with a variety of competing concepts of socio spatial organization.
Time–Space Distanciation Reich argues that new information and communication technologies make it possible and even necessary to re organize firms into ‘global webs’ and employees into global telecommuters. For Reich these webs operate smoothly, destroying constraints of space and social structure, moving in conjunction with the ever circling hands of the clocks on the walls of corporate offices around the globe. The global workplace is essentially a ‘virtual place’ where the constraints of space, social or ganization, and local institutional arrangements have been overcome. The politics of the workplace is replaced by a virtual space of knowledge sharing and creation, particularly for ‘knowledge workers’ such as software developers. Space is disembedded while control of the labor process is essentially cooperative.
Knowledge Economy
Reich’s analysis of the process of globalization is compatible with that of Giddens who argues that glob alization occurs through a process of ‘time–space dis tanciation’ – where time and space are universalized and ‘lifted out’ or made independent of their immediate contexts. For Reich the global workplace is disembedded from its temporal and spatial contexts and becomes a ‘pure’ space for communication and innovation among employees. Giddens’ analysis casts light on how this is possible. He argues that communication across distance depends upon the existence of expert systems, or systems of knowledge which actors understand and trust (such as the technical language of high tech industry), and upon symbolic tokens, or media of communication that can serve as coordinating mechanisms for long distance so cial relations where social cues and monitoring are absent or opaque (e.g., money). So for these analysts the knowledge economy and its technologies are central to both the content and circulation of the new economy. However, technological determinism once again rears its head in this work. For Reich, symbolic analysts get re warded fairly for their skills and knowledge, and all types of knowledge are evaluated fairly – the politics of the recognition and rewarding of knowledge are neglected. Giddens’ emphasis on symbolic media and expert sys tems opens up the possibility of analyzing how the or ganization of these media shape the knowledge economy itself. However, in Giddens’ work these are seen simply as carriers of information rather than as contested fields of socio spatial structuring of the knowledge economy. Time–Space Compression Other authors have portrayed a fundamentally different global workplace where ‘globalism’ – whether it is the ability to create virtual connections or to become in creasingly mobile across the globe – is distributed un equally. Harvey argues that time and space have not become distanciated as Giddens claims, but that mobile capital and corporations have colonized local spaces and time has annihilated space in a process of ‘time–space compression’. Corporations assert their control over technological change through shaping the trajectory of research and its goals, and protecting their ‘intellectual property rights’ and monopolies of the means of com munication. The promise of global communications creating an ‘electronic republic’ is undermined by commericalization, corporate dominance, and media concentration. Such a perspective rightly draws our attention to the critical importance of corporate power and capitalist social organization in shaping the knowledge economy, particularly given the growing global media oligopolies, the decline of public service media, and the commer icalization of the Internet. However, it blinds us to the
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ongoing dependence of capitalists themselves upon the knowledge production of workers and citizens, suggesting that there is a much greater field of struggle and con testation within the knowledge economy than these analyses suggest. An emphasis on time–space compression crucially directs our attention to corporate power in the knowledge economy but overstates the degree to which capitalists can secure control over knowledge and underestimates the various struggles and negotiations that are taking place within the knowledge economy. Time–Space Embedding Differ though they may on the degree of capitalist domination of the ‘space of flows’, both of these theories of time–space distanciation and compression agree that globalization is increasingly disembedding the globalized economy and workplace from their local contexts. Other theorists have argued, however, that the demands for increased flexibility and specialized learning in the knowledge economy actually make embedding the global workplace in local spaces even more critical. Efficient production and constant innovation require the con struction of shared physical spaces where workers can interact and communicate on a face to face basis and where shared goals and meanings can be created and maintained. Global competitiveness is therefore dependent on increased spatial embeddedness. The local spaces which can achieve this happy state of affairs will be able to buffer themselves somewhat from the demands of globalism because they possess territorially specific and unique institutional and cultural capacities – although the importance of social interaction will often promote new forms of global organization, such as transnational technical communities. Global workplaces are deeply embedded in these territorially and tempo rally specific contexts under a process that might be called ‘time–space embedding’. However, while recognizing the spatial embeddedness of the knowledge economy is a vital contribution, these perspectives tend to neglect how this spatial embedding is itself shaped by power structures around innovation and knowledge, and focus on the process of innovation and knowledge creation rather than the politics of real ising the returns to knowledge.
The Knowledge Economy as Embedded and Politically Contested This section argues for a view of the knowledge economy as organized, politically constructed, and contested through local and global networks and accountabilities. We suggest that it is crucial to examine the struggles along the entire chain of technology production and use
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and argue that two crucial dynamics of the knowledge economy are (1) the struggle between the ‘knowledge economy’ and the ‘knowledge society’ over the scope and boundaries of valuable and valued knowledge and knowledge work; and (2) the social shaping of technology production and use within the knowledge economy itself. How Does the Knowledge Economy Emerge from the Knowledge Society? We can identify a relatively distinct sphere of the knowledge economy, based around ‘knowledge embodied in commercialized media’ including silicon chips, soft ware programs, games, media broadcasts, consultancy reports, and other relatively cosmopolitan forms of knowledge. These commericalized forms and media of knowledge, and the activities associated with their pro duction and use, are the core of contemporary capital accumulation in the knowledge economy. However, they remain embedded in a wider process of knowledge pro duction that is intensified by the movement toward oc cupations based on working on people, relationships, organizations – work that was often in the past done within the household. At the core of the creation of the knowledge economy is a deep conflict over property rights – with a contest between what Weber and Bussell identify as a regime based on ‘property rights imperialism’ and one based on a ‘shared global digital infrastructure’. In the first, Peter Evans argues, ‘‘the Northern corporations that currently dominate global ownership of intangible assets success fully defend their politically protected monopoly rights while simultaneously extending those rights by trans forming into private property an ever larger set of ideas, information, and images previously considered part of nature or a shared cultural heritage. In the other scenario, property rights are restructured along the lines pion eered by the open source software community to create a ‘new commons’ of productive tools which allows for both a more egalitarian redistribution of intangible assets and a wider, more effective engagement of human ingenuity for creating innovative solutions.’’ The outcome of the conflict between these regimes is not a technologically determinist matter of whether in formation wants to be ‘free’ or ‘expensive’ – it is a matter of political contestation. A crucial component of analyses of the knowledge economy then will be the analysis of this contested terrain of global technology production and business networks, the growth of high tech regions and transnational technical communities, the role of new forms of state developmentalisms and the negotiation of intellectual property regimes through international in stitutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the EU’s Lisbon Agenda, and the role of the OECD in promoting the concept of the ‘new economy’.
What Are the Politics of Knowledge Production and Use? Robert Reich’s ‘symbolic analysts’ that produce the knowledge economy are as subject to the politics of the workplace as any other workers. These workers work in a variety of settings and their workplaces are subject to a variety of different conflicts – that may, crucially, shape the outcome of their work. These workers work within informal compromises, forged between the technical communities that develop the technological standards and innovations and the lead technology firms that hold the intellectual property rights to many of those innov ations. Such technical communities and cultures have long been central to processes of scientific development. However, despite the variety of studies of knowledge production, we lack an ongoing dialogue between stu dents of work, science and technology design that might articulate this more complex perspective on how the conditions of knowledge production shape knowledge itself. Similarly, social scientists from Adam Smith to Frederick Taylor and on to Harry Braverman have long viewed technology as a source of automation and de skilling, whether for better or worse. However, more complex understandings of technology use have emerged that emphasize how the politics of technology adoption and use shape and effect workers’ skill, knowledge and autonomy – and whether that work is in Zuboff ’s ter minology ‘automated’ or ‘informated’. Even within the knowledge economy itself, it is those clerical workers who do the routine testing and processing of programs and data that are most vulnerable to exploitation, while knowledge producers are more likely to combine em ployee involvement with performance pay structures. For many, these concerns with the social effects of technology in the workplace and beyond have led back to questions of design – and the crucial importance of user involve ment in the knowledge production process.
The Politics of Knowledge: Intensifying Time and Space? ´ Riain argues that the knowledge economy is charac O terized not by the disembedding of time and space but by ‘time–space intensification’. Interactions between ex ploitation and embedding ‘intensify time’ with more rapid rates of change in technologies, product markets, and organizational structures; increased turbulence, turnover, and mobility in the labor market; the import ance of deadlines in work organization; and a revolution in expectations of time and a shortening of time horizons. The ‘intensification of space’ is not just a matter of the increased importance of face to face interaction or of competition between places but of the increasing
Knowledge Economy
importance of the ability to mobilize space as a resource in social relations in the face of pressures from the cap italist market. While this mobilization of space can pro mote competitiveness in the market, it must also be protected from the pressures of marketization which will erode the very social relations upon which it is based. Ultimately, the intensification of space raises, over and over again in concrete social relations, the deep tension between market and society and opens up political spaces for contesting and reconfiguring capitalist social relations.
New Patterns of Social and Spatial Inequality Academics and analysts differ both in the role they at tribute to technology in the process of social change and in their assessment of the socio spatial implications of these changes. For Castells while some people in certain countries are networked and connected, many countries are predominantly disconnected from global networks. The continued dominance of developed countries and cities in the global knowledge economy is most evident in the global governance of the internet and the location of the governing body of domain names, ICANN, and 10 of the 13 top level domain name servers in the US. The fact that this situation remained unchanged following considerable opposition at the Tunis round of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) points to continuing inequalities in the global distribution of in formation and knowledge. While the distribution and control of knowledge is unevenly distributed, it appears that not all economies conform to the trajectory of development assumed by scholars from developed nations and even where there has been a shift to knowledge based industries and oc cupations the results are not always benign. Certain economies still exist which are largely dependent on agriculture and natural raw materials and in other places growth in information industries has been accompanied by significant growth in unemployment and under employment. Indeed, studies of knowledge work have found little change in the types of work or management of work carried out in these new industries despite the new labels. Further, studies point to the negative en vironmental impact of the production, consumption, and dismantling of knowledge goods and highlight the fact that these goods are extremely toxic and polluting. Despite such inequalities in terms of the global con trol and distribution of knowledge, the concept of the knowledge economy is widely used by corporations, policy makers, and international organizations to legit imate a particular ideological agenda. From the early statistical studies the knowledge economy has been heralded as a stage of development that all countries will
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or should attain and knowledge itself has come to be valued only in terms of the degree to which it can be codified, measured, owned, and traded. Further, it tends to place the focus on consumption and consumers rather than on citizens and users, on selling and buying rather than on informing and empowering. This is despite the fact that information networks, especially the internet, can empower receivers and decenter producers. However, producers have been greatly favored by the politics of the knowledge economy. Even dominant lead firms such as Microsoft and Intel were assisted by the global support of the US government in establishing Wintelism as a global standard. Shadlen et al. argue that an extensive and effective international institutional regime has emerged in software where the US, WTO, and other related institutions promote the protection of intellectual property rights in a wide range of countries, with uncertain and worrying consequences for innovation and deeply unequal global effects. Ultimately, an imperialist and economistic approach to knowledge production and con sumption not only limits and narrows our understanding of knowledge but threatens to devalue forms of knowledge and knowledge production which do not conform. See also: Competitiveness; Creativity; High-Tech Industry; Informational City; Innovation; Learning Regions; Regional Development and Technology.
Further Reading Arriaga, P. (1985). Toward a critique of the information economy. Media, Culture and Society 7, 271 296. Arthur, B. (1994). Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Barley, S. and Orr, J. (1997). Between Craft and Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Barnes, B., Bloor, D. and Henry, J. (1996). Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bell, D. (1974). The Coming of Postindustrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. London: Heinemann. Benner, C. (2002). Work in the New Economy. Oxford: Blackwell. Carroll, P. (2006). Science, Culture and Modern State Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Castells, M. (1997). The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge Mass: Blackwell. Dodge, M. and Kitchin, R. (2004). Atlas of Cyberspace. London: Addison Wellesley. Evans, P. (2005). The new commons vs the second enclosure movement. Studies in Comparative International Development 40, 86 94. Freeman, C. and Louca, F. (2002). As Time Goes by: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frenkel, S., Korczynski, M., Shire, K. and Tam, M. (1999). On the Front Line. Organization of Work in the Information Economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Giddens, A. (1991). The Consequences of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Godin, B. (2004). The new economy: What the concept owes to the OECD. Research Policy 33, 679 690. Hart, J. and Kim, S. (2001). The global political economy of Wintelism: A new mode of power and governance in the global computer
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Knowledge Economy
industry. In Rosenau, J. N. & Singh, J. P. (eds.) Information Technologies and Global Politics: The Changing Scope of Power and Governance. Albany, N.Y: SUNY Press. Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Jessop, B. (2000). The state and the contradictions of the knowledge driven economy. In Bryson, J. R., Daniels, P. W., Henry, N. D. & Pollard, J. (eds.) Knowledge, Space, Economy. London: Routledge. Kerr, A. (2006). The Business and Culture of Digital Games. London: Sage. Kumar, K. (2004). From post industrial to post modern society. In Webster, F. (ed.) The Information Society Reader, pp 103 120. London: Routledge. Machlup, F. (1962). The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McChesney, R., Wood, E. M. and Foster, J. B. (eds.) (1997). Capitalism and the Information Age. New York: Monthly Review Press. North, D. (2005). Capitalism and economic growth. In Nee, V. & Swedberg, R. (eds.) The Economic Sociology of Capitalism, pp 41 52. Princeton: Princeton University Press. O´ Riain, S. (2000). Net working for a living: Irish software developers in the global workplace. In Burawoy, M., Blum, J. A., George, S. & Gille, Z. (eds.) Global Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. O´ Riain, S. (2004). The Politics of High Tech Growth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O´ Riain, S. (2006). Time space intensification: Karl Polanyi, the double movement, and global informational capitalism. Theory and Society 35(5 6), 507 528. Oudshoorn, N. and Pinch, T. (2003). Users Matter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Perez, C. (2002). Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Porat, M. U. (1977). The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement. Washington DC: Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office. Powell, W. and Snellman, K. (2004). The knowledge economy. Annual Review of Sociology 30, 199 220. Preston, P. (2001). Reshaping Communications. London: Sage. Rantanen, T. (2005). The message is the medium. An interview with Manuel Castells. Global Media and Communciation 1(2), 135 147.
Reich, R. (1991). The Work of Nations. New York: Vintage Books. Rossiter, N. (2005). The world summit on the information society and organised networks as new civil society movements. In Servaes, J. & Carpentier, N. (eds.) Towards a Sustainable Information Society, pp 97 116. Bristol: Intellect. Saxenian, A. (1994). Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saxenian, A. (2006). The New Argonauts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shadlen, K., Schrank, A. and Kurtz, M. (2005). The political economy of intellectual property protection: The case of software. International Studies Quarterly 49(1), 45 71. Storper, M. (1997). The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. London: Guilford Press. Weber, S. and Bussell, J. (2005). Will Information technology reshape the north south asymmetry of power in the global political economy? Studies in Comparative International Development 40, 62 84. Webster, F. (1995). Theories of the Information Society. London: Routledge. Zehle, S. (2001). Virtual water: On the hydropolitics of IT development. Andere Sinema, 160(Fall/Winter) 36 49 (See also http:// lists.brunny.com/pipermail/fibreculture/2005 January/004335.html (accessed Oct. 2007)). Zook, M. (2005). The Geography of the Internet Industry. Oxford: Blackwell. Zuboff, S. (1984). In the Age of the Smart Machine. New York: Basic Books.
Relevant Websites http://incommunicado.info Incommunicado (Information Technology for Everyone Else). http://www.icann.org Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). http://www.itu.int World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Knowledge Intensive Business Services P. Wood, University College London, London, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Consultancy Business consultancy is a process that provides organizations with outside expertise and advice about many aspects of management. These may include finance; technology; production efficiency and competitiveness; markets, including international development; advertising and graphic design; the law; human resources, including training and recruitment; construction and engineering; and environmental and other public regulations. To be successful, this advice must be fully integrated into client activities, and requires close exchange, or ‘co-production’, with the client’s own experts. Not all outsourcing therefore necessarily involves consultancy. Its interactive nature also makes assessment of the economic impacts of consultancy difficult. Financial Intermediaries Private institutions dealing in capital exchange, including banks, mortgage companies, building societies, and other credit-granting agencies; insurance and pension fund managers; unit and investment trusts; securities broking and fund management; and the administration of financial markets. Global City Regions ‘Global cities’ are major urban centers, such as London, New York, or Tokyo, whose institutions control worldwide patterns of capital exchange, corporate ownership and trade, as well as aspects of cultural and political affairs. This influence has been particularly associated with the activities of international knowledge intensive business services (KIBSs). Global institutions tend to be concentrated into the centers of global cities, but they draw on the resources of their wider urban regions, for example, for skilled labor, international transport links, and high technology research and development. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) The dominant component of recent technological innovation, focusing on the design and development of computer-based information systems and electronic communications. It has transformed the volume, speed, and geographical reach of economic transactions. Multinational Companies (or Corporations) (MNCs) Enterprises that manage production or deliver services in many countries. The most dominant, increasingly including KIBS firms, operate in most continents and many countries. Offshoring Outsourcing by organizations to overseas centers, either to their own branch plants or other
agencies. Such moves depend on modern ICT, but the attractions of lower labor and other costs must be balanced against greater operational complexity and higher risks. KIBSs have supported offshoring trends since the late 1990s, both through their own international activities and in advising clients. Outsourcing An aspect of the division of specialized labor by organizations in which they go to outside agencies to ‘buy in’ specialized skills, usually within the same country, rather than using their own employees. The growth of KIBS is an important symptom of the modern expansion of such practices. Small–Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Companies whose employment or turnover falls below defined levels. These vary between studies, but the European Union adopts a standard of up to 50 employees for small companies, and 250 for medium-sized companies. In the USA, limits of 100 and 500 are generally applied.
KIBS Functions Knowledge intensive business services (KIBSs) are pri vate sector firms that offer specialist professional, busi ness, or technical expertise to other organizations. During the twentieth century, three KIBS functions expanded their influence, at first in the USA and UK and then internationally. Today many major KIBS companies offer all three: 1. Professional functions: What would now be called KIBS firms have provided regular professional advice to clients since at least the nineteenth century. For example, many of today’s major accountancy firms trace their origins back to when company law first required independent financial auditing. Businesses offering other forms of advice have also expanded, including specialists in investment, law, property, marketing, and employment practices. In general, they support established client procedures and goals, rather than seeking significantly to change them. 2. Consultancy functions: From the 1920s, some KIBS firms in the USA developed a more interventionist role, promoting scientific management techniques to moni tor and direct their clients’ commercial performance. They included such pioneering consultancy firms as AD Little, Booz Allen and Hamilton, McKinsey, and Arthur Andersen. Similar services developed in
37
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Knowledge Intensive Business Services
Europe, and American firms began to move into international markets after World War II. Management consultancy expanded rapidly during the 1960s, often as a profitable extension of professional service firms, especially accountants (e.g., Ernst and Whinney, Arthur Young, Peat Marwick, Price Waterhouse, Coopers and Lybrand, Deloitte, Haskins and Sells). From the 1970s, these functions underwent further rapid expansion as more clients sought advice in adapting to an acceler ating rate and unpredictability of commercial change. Multinational clients looked initially to multinational consultancies, which progressively merged into fewer, larger firms (Table 1). Information and communi cations technology (ICT) companies also expanded into consultancy activities to exploit their specialist skills. Further diversification occurred into other in novative sectors, including the financial services, con struction, architecture and planning, marketing and advertising, research and development, and human re source management. This also encouraged a boom in small–medium consultancies, which provided clients with specialist knowledge tailored to their individual needs, the more successful of which expanded into international markets. The rise of business consultancy thus marked a significant development in the creation, diffusion, and application of economic and technolo gical knowledge and expertise. It also transformed the ways in which local, regional, national, and inter national sources of such expertise interact.
Table 1 Leading 20 management/strategy consultancies (ranked by employee numbers, 2000) Rank
Consultancy
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Accenture CSCa Cap Gemini/Ernst & Young Price Waterhouse Coopers KPMG Consulting William M. Mercer Deloite Consulting Andersen Towers Perrin AMS Booz Allen Hamilton McKinsey & Company Watson Wyatt AT Kearney PA Consulting Cambridge Technology Boston Consulting Arthur D Little Bain & Company
a CSC is an IT firm but is involved heavily in consultancy related to management issues. From Jones, A. (2005). Truly global corporations? Theorizing ‘organ izational globalization’ in advanced business services. Journal of Eco nomic Geography 5, 177 200.
3. Outsourcing functions: Since the mid 1990s, many major business and computer consultancy firms have developed new markets, managing clients’ outsourcing of routine, but administratively and technically com plex, functions such as data processing, customer re lations, or payroll management. This allows KIBS firms to supplement high cost, project based consult ancy work with more regular, contract based income, and to become tied into closer and longer term col laboration with clients. From around 2000, some of these functions began to move offshore from de veloped economies to countries with educated, low wage workforces, such as India.
Definitions: The Emergence of KIBS Definitions of KIBS have evolved and become more re fined since the 1970s, often differing from one study to another. They generally rely on sector based classifi cations of firms, nowadays following the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC). The notion of KIBSs as a distinct category of activity dates only from the early 1990s. Before this, they were usually regarded as part of either producer services or business services, and were sometimes synonymous with professional ser vices. Table 2 summarizes two comparisons of producer service activities defined in this earlier research. In 1988, Marshall reviewed five studies published between 1966 and 1983. The numbers in brackets in the table indicate how many of these studies included each service category as a producer service. At this time, only knowledge based financial, accountancy, legal, real estate, advertising, and research and development could be separately identified, but some studies also included material based transpor tation and wholesaling. Other KIBS tended to be placed in residual categories with quite different types of ser vice. As KIBS grew during the 1980s, new activities be came separately identified, as shown in the similar comparison of 11 producer service studies between 1987 and 1995 by Wernerheim and Sharpe. These now often included computer, engineering, architectural, and management consulting services. About half the studies did not include financial and banking, however, because their profits primarily come from returns on financial assets rather than the quality of expertise alone. A mi nority of studies still included materials handling func tions, and a few even counted any activity with some business clientele, including hotels, restaurants, and tra vel companies. Producer services had at first simply included any service not wholly directed to consumers, usually in cluding materials handling functions as well as know ledge based financial and professional services. The title also implied that their most important role was to
Knowledge Intensive Business Services
Table 2
Comparative definitions of producer services
No.
Producer service activities
11 10 9 8
Accountancy (5); advertising (5); legal service (5). Computer services. Engineering services. Architectural services; employment agencies; management consulting. Financial services (nonbanking) (5); insurance services (5); real estate services (5). Banking services (5); research and development (5). Cleaning and maintenance; market research; security brokerage and services; transportation services (3); typing and copying services. Equipment rental; miscellaneous business services. Equipment repair; hotel and restaurant; purchasing; storage services; travel and accommodation; wholesaling (3).
6 5 4
3 1
Numbers of studies classifying listed activities as producer services, 1987 1995: (total ¼ 11) Source: based on Wernerheim, M. C. and Sharpe, C. (1999). Producer services and the ‘mixed market’ problem: Some empirical evidence. Area 31, 123 140. (In brackets) Numbers of studies classifying listed activities as producer services, 1996 1983: (total ¼ 5); Source: Marshall, J. N. (1988). Ser vices and Uneven Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
support manufacturing production, commonly viewed as the main driver of economic growth. Later, business services were defined as activities serving any form of business, including other services, and even public agencies. These also often included operational services, such as recruitment agencies and cleaning, security, secretarial or packaging services that are not primarily knowledge intensive. Emphasis on their knowledge in tensity emerged only in the 1990s, with growing interest in sources of high quality skills, especially to support business and technological change. Although financial services were often separated, their expanding consult ancy functions increasingly overlapped with other KIBSs. Nowadays, when employing modern industrial clas sifications, KIBS studies should if possible include and distinguish between the following sectors: 1. financial services, such as banking, insurance, and other institutions supporting capital management; (ISIC divisions 65–67); 2. professional services offering real estate (division 70), legal, and accountancy advice (classes 7411–7412); 3. business planning and strategy related services such as business and management consulting, market research (classes 7413–7414) and advertising (group 743); 4. computer and data management services (groups 721–724); and 5. technical services, including architecture and engin eering consultancy, and independent technical testing (group 742), and research and development services (division 73).
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Problems of KIBS Measurement In spite of their common use, sector based classifications are an inherently unsatisfactory basis for measuring service functions. They were intended mainly to be applied to manufacturing industries, and reflect the technical basis of production, not the markets they serve. Most of the KIBSs categories above, except busi ness planning and strategy related services, therefore serve substantial consumers as well as business markets. They include banks, insurance companies, lawyers, real estate agents, accountants, and even architects and computer services. Such KIBS firms themselves usually make a clear distinction between business and consumer markets. In large firms, they may be served by separate divisions, and they support quite different types of small–medium firms. Sector based data do not generally allow these distinctions to be made, and so cannot ac curately measure the scale of truly business oriented services. It is, however, possible to distinguish KIBS markets using another type of economic evidence, available from input–output tables, although usually only for whole countries, and for all KIBSs together. These tables provide estimates of the annual shares of each sector’s outputs in a country going to other sectors (as intermediate con sumption), and to consumers, government, exports, and investment (i.e., final consumption). Such tables are now regularly available for most developed economies. For KIBS they demonstrate the scale of their mixed business/ consumer markets. For example, Table 3 shows the major UK markets for so called financial intermediation in 2003. This designation is misleading, since all the KIBSs listed above are included, plus the renting of machinery. Only 62% of such KIBSs output goes to other business and public sectors (as intermediate consumption), while one quarter goes directly to consumer households. This share would certainly be higher for the financial and pro fessional services listed above (generally estimated at over 40%), and lower for the business and technical services. Also note that only about 10% of the direct market for KIBS is in the material processing activities, including manufacturing, construction, primary production, and the utilities, while over 8% goes to public administration, education, health, and the social services. During the previous decade, KIBS markets had also grown fastest among KIBS themselves, and in transport and distribution and the public sector. Table 4 shows that these were also the most intensive KIBS users. While such evidence may therefore suggest that sector based measures exaggerate the scale of truly business oriented services, it also dem onstrates the dynamic role played by KIBS in the modern information driven economy. Further, Table 3 shows that this role is extending to their international export con tribution. More difficult to assess, of course, are their
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Knowledge Intensive Business Services
Table 3
KIBS, UK Markets in other sectors, 2003 (d’000 million at purchasers’ prices)
Intermediate consumption by sector:
2003
% of all KIBS
% Change 1993 2003 (Highest bold)
Agriculture Mining and quarrying Manufacturing Utilities Construction Wholesale & retail Transport & communications KIBS (‘Financial intermediation, etc.’)a Public administration Education, heath, & social work Other services Not allocated to industriesb Total intermediate consumption Exports: EU Non-EU Gross capital formation, etc. Household consumption Total Consumption of UK KIBS Total UK Domestic Output
1.7 2.5 32.4 2.5 18.9 53.2 26.3 129.5 16.3 18.2 16.4 45.9 363.8 22.9 37.3 20.1 143 587.0 2061.9
0.3 0.4 5.5 0.4 3.2 9.1 4.5 22.1 2.8 3.1 2.8 7.8 62.0 3.9 6.4 3.4 24.4 100.0
106 125 147 192 220 283 296 290 236 249 198 234 243 309 301 212 184 228 177
a Financial intermediation, etc. includes banking and insurance, real estate, renting of machinery and equipment (including for households), computer related, legal, accountancy, market research, business, architectural and engineering consultancy, advertising, research and development. b i.e. ‘Financial intermediation services indirectly measured’ (FISIM), based on differences between the actual interest payable and a ‘reference’ base rate of interest. It represents the ‘risk premium’ earned by financial intermediaries above the pure cost of borrowing. Data from Office for National Statistics (2005). United Kingdom, Input Output Analysis, 2005 edition. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/Product.asp?vlnk=7640
effects on clients, and their wider economic significance, for example, in supporting innovation and competitive ness. This requires more intensive research on samples of KIBS and their clients.
The Modern Growth of KIBS and the Impacts of Consultancy The remarkable modern growth of KIBS reflects a much wider transformation in the organization, methods, and goals of capitalist business since the 1970s. These have been associated with the speed of technological, market, and other changes, which have increased the costs and risks of training and permanently employing specialist expert staff. Organizations thus examine much more closely whether they can support functions that are not directly involved in their core manufacturing or service production. Many now tend instead to buy in specialists from outside to perform such tasks when required, on a project by project basis. Individual project costs often appear high, but for the client they remain lower than the long term expense of employing their own specialist staff. KIBS firms also benefit from economies of scale in developing specialist expertise, through staff recruitment and training, investment in information systems, and
Table 4 Share of each sector’s consumption spent on KIBS, UK, 2003 (d’000 million at purchasers’ prices) Sectors
Consumption
KIBS % of total
Total
KIBS
Agriculture 11.9 Mining and quarrying 9.3 Manufacturing 256.1 Utilities 31.8 Construction 98.1 Wholesale & retail 143.9 Transport & 89.6 communications KIBS (‘Financial 205.6 intermediation’) Public administration 56.2 Education, heath, & social 85.0 work Other services 46.9
1.7 2.5 32.4 2.5 18.9 53.2 26.3
14.3 26.9 12.7 7.9 19.3 37.0 29.4
129.5
63.0
16.3 18.2
29.0 21.4
16.4
35.0
Data from Office for National Statistics (2005). United Kingdom, Input Output Analysis, 2005 edition. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/Product.asp?vlnk=7640
working with many clients. Competition may also stimulate the quality and innovativeness of their expert ise. For clients, if outside expertise is effectively man aged, its costs and quality may often be easier to monitor,
Knowledge Intensive Business Services
control, and vary as the need arises, than those of em ployed staff. At first, some argued that such externalization simply transferred services that remained essentially the same to lower cost providers. This may have been the case in some circumstances, especially for routine professional functions. Some growth after the late 1990s was also due to client outsourcing of routine functions. But, even in such cases, achieving the full cost and efficiency benefits would still require improved service quality and client management procedures. Since the 1980s, however, the fastest growing KIBSs have been engaged directly with the sort of strategic financial, managerial, and technical functions that in the past would have been kept strictly within client organizations, and even within their boardrooms. Consultancy has thus penetrated far deeper than simple efficiency based outsourcing, becoming as sociated with progressive changes in the very nature of management. The interaction of consultants and clients also often supports new functions that might never have been developed by the client alone. A further source of consultancy growth has come from the public sector (Tables 3 and 4). In many countries, led by the UK in the 1980s, neoliberal economic policies have required intensive restructuring of public agencies, including their privatization and its aftermath. Major resources have gone into KIBS support to transform them into private companies and adapt their management to more competitive market and financial conditions. Many other public services have also increased their use of outside contractors and consultants in attempts to control costs, improve quality, and monitor outputs. These rela tionships have more recently been extended in the UK to the development of various forms of public–private partnerships for major public investment projects.
International Variations in KIBS Development From the 1970s, KIBSs in the USA and UK initially tended to grow fastest in the financial and management services, but during the 1990s their work became in creasingly dominated by ICT developments. These sup ported a huge expansion in hardware, software, and systems work by the established consultancy giants. New multinational ICT consultancies also emerged, while many small–medium enterprises (SMEs) spun off com puter hardware and ICT applications companies, where their specialist staff had gained training and experience. These tended to serve particular markets by adapting specialist software and systems applications to their needs, such as financial data processing, information manage ment, web design, or logistical control. Many consultancy processes themselves have also been transformed by ICT.
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Some KIBSs employment is thus declining or geo graphically dispersing, while demand increases for more innovative skills, usually in concentrated urban regions. ICT developments have also created entirely new mar kets for KIBS, for example, supporting multimedia based entertainment, and e commerce. These patterns of growth have varied between major developed countries. This reflects different corporate norms, and the regulation of financial, fiscal, and other business services, especially accountancy and legal advice. In Germany and Japan, the traditional self sufficiency of the dominant production and financial conglomerates, and the continuing importance of manufacturing, has focused independent KIBS growth on technical, rather than business process consultancy. Even here, however, the globalization of markets and technologies has ex panded multinational business consultancy, and also supported the development of small–medium KIBS firms. The opening of new geographical markets has boosted demands for KIBS expertise. This was evident in Europe during the 1990s, as Mediterranean countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece liberalized their economies. More recently, similar growth has taken place in Eastern Europe, and India and China are now the fastest growing international KIBS markets. Wherever there is rapid economic change, demand for KIBS grows, and the profile of KIBS supply constantly shifts as a consequence.
Problems of KIBS Access and Evaluation The high costs and corporate focus of mainstream con sultancies generally deter their use by all but the most innovative SMEs. Many SMEs, valuing their own in dependence, also tend to resist seeking advice from con sultants. They mainly rely on routine accountancy, financial, legal, and other professional advice, often from small–medium KIBS firms, although this may extend to wider business problem solving. In many countries, pub licly supported national or regional business advice agencies have been established to encourage marketing, technological, or training innovation among SMEs, al though their services are often difficult to target effect ively. Relations between public agencies and commercial KIBSs also often encounter problems. Many public pro jects, for example, involving the introduction of ICT to tax collection, defense, health, or education administration, require complex and changing specifications, extending over long time scales. This makes it difficult to sustain the clarity of goals and commercial styles of interaction re quired for successful commercial consultancy. More generally, these essential processes of inter action with client capabilities make the value and ef fectiveness of KIBS particularly difficult to assess. Their worth can only be judged through their impact on clients,
42
Knowledge Intensive Business Services
but this also depends on how effectively clients com mission and implement their expertise. The contribution of consultancy therefore can seldom be independently measured, and it is often easy for clients to blame con sultants for perceived failure. Anecdote and hearsay thus sometimes support a poor image of consultancy. Never theless, their extraordinary modern expansion, and in creasingly common and repeated use by commercial and public organizations throughout the developed world, suggest that they must be having some net beneficial effect for their clients.
KIBS, Global Cities, and Regional Inequality The growth of KIBS has reinforced the dominance of information and expertise exchange within and between the major global urban regions, including the major cities of the USA, Europe, and Asia, especially New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Here they interact most intensively with their corporate cli ents, innovative SMEs, and public agencies. They also often closely collaborate with other professional and consultancy firms. The primary contribution of KIBS is to adapt generic technical and commercial knowledge, often drawn from international experience, to the re quirements of particular clients. Success depends on how effectively their skills are adapted to each new project, and global cities offer arenas within which expertise can be moved most flexibly across conventional corporate and sector divides. The international office networks of the major KIBS firms now largely define global cities. These include banking, finance and insurance, accountancy, commercial law, management consulting, ICT systems and software, engineering and architectural consultancy, and marketing and advertising. Such KIBS MNCs have also expanded into rapidly growing global market regions, including India, China, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, apparently reinforcing the control of the es tablished cities over international expertise exchange. By the nature of their work, however, as they have expanded internationally, multinational KIBS firms have had to adapt to more varied client expectations, and local eco nomic, legal, and cultural norms. Most have therefore devolved key client relations, management, and staff re cruitment functions to global regional offices. They have also established offshore, computer based operation centers, many in India, to serve their traditional core markets. The need for close contact with clients, and the benefits of offshoring, seems therefore to be loosening the grip of dominant global centers over international KIBS operations. More varied, devolved, and networked forms of international control are emerging, although within
management regimes that still attempt to impose cen tralized staff training and financial control to preserve the distinctive corporate cultures and the reputations of their global brands. The great majority of KIBS firms, however, are re gionally based SMEs, many with modest ambitions to offer professional support to other SMEs, developing familiarity and mutual trust through repeated projects. Some consultancy SMEs are more innovative, but usually depend on major clients. Their potential for growth de pends on the quality of this demand, and the wider competitiveness of their regional economies. This means that the highest concentration, variety, and quality of such KIBSs are found in global city regions. Here, access to large business markets encourages specialization and competitiveness. The primary sources of KIBS entre preneurship are often the experienced former staff of large firms. Working with corporate clients also enhances the reputations of KIBS SMEs, often promoting their growth in wider markets, including internationally. Outside these dominant city regions KIBS SMEs also tend to be urban focused, but are often constrained by lower levels of less specialized demand. Any significant growth commonly depends on developing interregional and national markets before undertaking international work. A critical mass of specialized regional demand and competition may encourage local KIBSs to specialize and thus compete in wider markets. This may be associated, for example, with specialist manufacturing, concen trations of research and development, high technology functions, primary production, transport nodes, or other tradable services such as finance and tourism.
KIBS Patterns within Cities Within cities, patterns of KIBS development follow and reinforce wider property development trends. Their need for close contact and regular knowledge exchange with corporate clients attracts major KIBS companies to prestigious city center sites or to major new office based developments nearby, including reclaimed docklands and rail yards. Their main requirements are for modern of fices, with access to expert labor drawn from a wide city hinterland. ICT has given such KIBS firms easy access to commercial information and contacts networks. Routine tasks, such as data processing or outsourcing, tend to be decentralized to more peripheral office parks, lower wage regions elsewhere, or even abroad. KIBS SMEs are usually found in more complex geo graphical patterns across city regions. Some, serving major companies, locate in high cost city centers, often collabo rating with major KIBS firms by offering contacts and close familiarity with local commercial conditions and business cultures. Many others, however, are primarily
Knowledge Intensive Business Services
oriented to the needs of regional businesses, in manu facturing, transport, trade, retailing, or the public sector, while some may also serve national and even international clienteles. They generally require low cost accommoda tion and easy access to other areas within and outside the city. Some even work from suburban homes. Others have also developed in more remote, nonurban regions, where modern communications enable highly qualified single entrepreneurs to establish KIBS firms, maintain contact with clients, and benefit from a good quality of life.
KIBS and Economic Growth Traditionally, manufacturing has for long been regarded as the basis for economic growth, with services playing a subsidiary role. The modern version of this argument is that manufacturing has a higher capability to improve labor productivity, and thus competitiveness, than ser vices, especially labor intensive KIBS. As we have seen, however, there are inherent problems in measuring the output and productivity of many KIBSs. Their rapid ex pansion has undoubtedly created circumstances in which they lead growth by providing key information, expertise and advice to clients at critical times. Such circumstances depend on the specific division of labor between them and client specialist functions in any project, and the outcome for client competitiveness. In manufacturing, for example, technological innovation may create new products or processes, but the management of their development and their subsequent marketing requires much wider techni cal, financial, organizational, marketing, or training skills. When the staffs of manufacturing companies lack such skills, success may depend on KIBS support. The in novative success of apparently high productivity manu facturing (e.g., in ICT) therefore necessarily depends increasingly on supposedly low productivity KIBS. We have also seen (Table 3) that manufacturing gen erally occupies only a small share of KIBS markets. Most are in other business, professional, consumer, and public services. In these, competitiveness or greater efficiency are just as likely to benefit from the management, marketing, training, and business skills of KIBS, as from the clients’ own expertise. This has been particularly the case for the various changes arising from new ICT, where KIBSs have been highly influential in supporting clients across the economy. KIBSs have, of course, adopted ICT innovations themselves but, with other services such as retailing, their major contribution has been in encouraging the success of these innovations in other sectors. There can also be little doubt about the contribution to economic growth of KIBSs in the urban regions where they are most concentrated. This cumulative concen tration has widened regional economic divides in many countries, especially in the UK, Southern Europe, and
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many rapidly developing economies. In others, such as the USA, Germany, and Northern Italy, the urban sys tems remain more polycentric. In France, policies to overcome the dominance of Paris have met some success, and cities such as Lyon, Toulouse, and Lille have de veloped as nodes of tradable KIBS. In general, however, KIBS growth nowhere favors the poorest regions. The clearest recognition of the economic potential of KIBS exchange is to be found in international negoti ations under the World Trade Organization to establish the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) since the early 1990s. As modern communications de velopments continue to foster the international exchange of expertise, whether measurable or unmeasured, service trade will be an increasingly significant subject of such negotiations and the economic development processes they seek to encourage. Meanwhile, this trade increas ingly supports the dominance of globally oriented cities within their own countries. Powerful KIBS supported processes are therefore making it even more difficult to reduce regional inequalities within countries than are uneven distributions of either manufacturing or high technology functions. KIBS have become key agents in the exchange of business and technological expertise between regional, national, and global sources of in telligence. Their activities augment and reinforce trends toward geographical inequality inherent in corporate globalization both within and between nations.
Future Research Agendas Geographical studies of KIBSs were stimulated in both the USA and UK during late 1980s and early 1990s by their unexpected rapid growth. The focus was on small– medium KIBS firms and the conditions that favored their success, especially in core urban regions. From the late 1990s, research attention shifted to the activities of multinational KIBS corporations which, as we have seen, also tend to favor such regions. Little is still known, however, about how KIBS firms and their clients interact at various geographical scales, and the consequences for uneven economic development in and between many countries. What is the significance of KIBSs in supporting regional innovation and competitiveness? How influential are they in speeding the pace of economic change, and thus creating problems and opportunities for community adaptation? As major players in the circulation of busi ness expertise, when do KIBSs follow or lead change? Such processes are increasingly important for the ways in which expertise is brought to bear on all forms of eco nomic challenge, from global competition to training labor forces, or adapting to environmental change. The difficulties of assessing the operations of KIBS means that their economic significance remains obscure, and yet
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Knowledge Intensive Business Services
their role is likely to grow as the application of special ized expertise becomes everywhere increasingly central to economic development. See also: Business Services; Finance, Offshore; Financial Centers, International; Financial Knowledge; Globalization and Transnational Corporations; Information Technology; Innovation; Knowledge Communities; Neoliberal Economic Strategies; Networks; Privatization; Services, Professional; Spatial Division of Labor; Telecommunications; Transnationalism and Technological Transfer; Uneven Development.
Further Reading Allen, J. (1992). Services and the UK space economy: Regionalization and economic dislocation. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers NS 17, 292 305. Castells, M. (1989). The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban Regional Process. Oxford: Blackwell. Gadrey, J. and Gallouj, F. (eds.) (2002). Productivity, Innovation and Knowledge in Services. New Economic and Socio Economic Approaches. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Gallouj, F. (2002). Innovation in the Service Economy: The New Wealth of Nations. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Gluckler, J. (2006). A relational assessment of international market entry in management consulting. Journal of Economic Geography 6, 369 393. Jones, A. (2005). Truly global corporations? Theorizing ‘organizational globalization’ in advanced business services. Journal of Economic Geography 5, 177 200.
Lindahl, D. P. and Beyers, W. B. (1999). The creation of competitive advantage by producer service establishments. Economic Geography 75, 1 20. Marshall, J. N. (1988). Services and Uneven Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Riddle, D. (1985). Service Led Growth: The Role of the Service Sector in World Development. New York: Praeger. Sassen, S. (ed.) (2002). Global Networks, Linked Cities. London: Routledge. Taylor, P. (2003). World City Networks: A global Urban Analysis. London: Routledge. Wernerheim, M. C. and Sharpe, C. (1999). Producer services and the ‘mixed market’ problem: Some empirical evidence. Area 31, 123 140. Wood, P. (ed.) (2002). Consultancy and Innovation: The Business Service Revolution in Europe. London: Routledge. Wood, P. (2006). Urban development and knowledge intensive business services: Too many unanswered questions? Growth and Change 37(3), 335 361. Wood, P. A. (1996). Business services, the management of change, and regional development in the UK: A corporate client perspective. Transactions Institute of British Geographers NS 21, 649 665.
Relevant Websites http://www.amcf.org/index.asp Association of Management Consulting Firms. http://www.cric.ac.uk/cric/compprojects/project 6.htm Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition. http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb5.html Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network. http://www.ibconsulting.org.uk/Landing Page 1.aspx?id=10:2396 Institute of Business Consulting. http://www.nesta.org.uk/taking services seriously/ National Endowments for Science, Technology, and Arts ‘‘Taking Services Seriously’’.
Kolossov, V. J. O’Loughlin and E. Holland, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Eurasianism A political and cultural ideology emerging in Russia in the nineteenth century and popular especially among Russia e´migre´s in the early twentieth century after the communist state was established. It posits that Russia is neither a European nor Asian state but has an ethnos and culture that has emerged from its geographical location and vast extent. It is now closely associated with political movements and ideologies that are anti-Western and especially anti-US, which it views as engaged in a hegemonic action to control Russia. Limology The study of political borders. Perestroika Literally ‘restructuring’ and refers to the attempts by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to reinvigorate the communist economy between 1985 and 1990. The ‘perestroika’ years constituted the last half decade of the Soviet Union. Pseudo-States (also Known as Quasi-States) Selfdeclared independent or autonomous political units that emerge from civil war ceasefires. Controlled usually by a territorially concentrated ethnic minority and supported by a strong external power, these entities have many of the trappings of statehood (flags, armies, police, border controls, public services, etc.) but little international recognition. Tensions with the state from which they are separated are tense and borders heavily controlled. Contemporary examples include Transdniester Moldovan Republic (Moldova), Abkhazia (Georgia), South Ossetia (Georgia), and Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (Cyprus). Slavophilism It is based on a pan-Slavic notion that there exists a singular Slavic ethnoculture with unique values and principles. Though strongest in Russia after its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, it had adherents in most Slavic states and was seen as the basis for political alliances and opposition to neighboring states (Ottoman Empire and Germany).
Kolossov, Vladimir (1953– ) Vladimir Kolossov has played a leading role in the de velopment of political geography in the international academic community for over a quarter of a century. A versatile and gifted scholar, Kolossov has contributed more than 250 published works addressing broad intel lectual questions within the field of political geography,
doing so with specific reference to Soviet/post Soviet territories. Just as importantly, Kolossov has made a sig nificant and lasting contribution to the development of political geography within Russia. In this capacity, he is recognized not only for his scholarly contributions, but also for his work in promoting political geography within domestic academic circles as well as serving a mentor and teacher to a new generation of Russian political geographers. Kolossov received his academic training at Moscow State University, matriculating into the department of geography in 1970. He completed his doctorate in 1979, writing on the electoral geography of Italy, and earned his Habilitation, also in geography, from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1992. He has held his position as head of the Center for Geopolitical Studies at the Academy of Sciences since earning this postdoctoral degree. He is currently (2008) vice president of the International Geographical Union (IGU). Kolossov’s work is truly international in scope. It has been published in his native Russian, as well as English, French, and Italian. Much of his research in Russia has focused on explicating the principles of political geog raphy for Russia’s domestic academic audiences. Kolossov has then applied these principles to geopolitical questions facing contemporary Russia. Books on geopolitics are quite popular in Russia, specifically when they focus on the country’s position in the post–Cold War order, and Kolossov has addressed topics similar to those written by more populist authors by primarily writing for the aca demic community. In contrast, his work in other lan guages has been broader in scope, discussing themes both important and emergent themes in political geography. While Russia and its environs serve as the primary spatial context for such research, the works’ theoretical signifi cance is equal to the contribution it makes to an em pirical, region specific literature. Kolossov’s contributions as a scholar are not limited to his research. He has contributed to political geography in a variety of forums. In Russia, Kolossov plays a leading role in the field, serving as head of the Center of Geo political Studies of the Institute of Geography for the Russian Academy of Sciences, founded in the 1990s. Functioning as an administrative center in the Academy with a number of specialists and doctoral students working on the political geography of Russia and the near abroad (the countries of the former Soviet Union), the center also acts as a focus for the still new science of political geography in Russia. Kolossov has written or
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Kolossov, V.
edited six general texts on the post Soviet political geography scene, one published in the UK, two in France, one in Italy, and two in Russia. These works supplement and distill his earlier endeavors to broaden the scope of politico geographic studies and their acceptance within the Russian academic community. As a prominent international academic, Kolossov serves on the editorial boards of a number of political geography journals. Moreover, he has played the role of ambassador for the discipline, holding short term academic positions in the UK, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and the US. Through these exchanges he has forged strong aca demic partnerships with scholars outside of Russia, contributing to the development of political geography through collaborative research. Kolossov also served two terms as Chair of the Commission on Political Geog raphy of the international Geographical Union (IGU) from 1996–2004, as well as vice president of the IGU. From the beginning of his career, Kolossov has played an important role in the development of political geo graphy in Russia. His early research, starting during the mid 1980s, was situated in the Soviet context, and reflected the political, ideological, and academic limitations imposed during that period. Despite these constraints, this work laid the foundation for Kolossov’s wider project, which has been aimed at promoting and cultivating political geography in the Soviet Union and in Russia after 1991. As its foremost scholar, Kolossov’s career mirrors the growth of political geography in this former communist country. To advance political geography in the Soviet Union, Kolossov’s early work specifically focused on situating political geography within the context of the Soviet sys tem. In his 1988 monograph, Political Geography: Problems and Methods, Kolossov conceptualized political geography as a scientific and academic discipline of relevance to Soviet scholarship. Before explaining some of the primary principles accepted and studied by political geographers, he set out to establish an explicit definition of political geography that emphasized its position within human geographical studies. He made specific reference to the importance of the spatial organization of political systems and the territorial distribution of political power and the economic means of production. Topics such as the role of national governments in the world system, the geo graphical bases of federal states, and electoral geography were then discussed in greater detail. In evaluating the contribution of this work, it should be emphasized that the book was produced in the last years of the Soviet Union. As such, Kolossov was constrained by party norms and regulations, and thereby focuses on the connection between political geography and Marxism. His other early works, aimed at noncommunist audiences, were also constrained by this closed political environment; for example, writing in the journal Soviet Geography in 1985, Kolossov discussed the need for electoral geography to
integrate a Marxist approach, yet situated this argument in Marxist theory as interpreted by the communist state. Despite the ideological and academic restrictions, his overarching intellectual focus remained centered on the promotion of political geography in the Soviet Union. In spite of his academically stifling surroundings, Kolossov grew in stature as a scholar interested in the changing politics of his own society and the changing world political map at the end of the Cold War. With the development of greater political openness in the last dec ade of the Soviet Union, his work distinguished itself from the entrenched paradigms imposed on Soviet scholarship and began to approach more intellectually independent research. The movement toward open elections in the USSR, spurred by nationalism among ethnic minorities and the resultant violence in places such as Nagorno Karabakh (an ethnic Armenian territory within the re public of Azerbaijan), galvanized not only the national communities within the USSR but also the whole tradition of intellectual scholarship in political geography. As the changing intellectual and political climate of the Soviet Union allowed in depth analysis of political choices for the first time, Kolossov and his colleagues at Moscow State University began work focused on specific political and electoral topics. The March 1989 parlia mentary elections served as the basis for Kolossov’s most important early academic project, and, after researching and analyzing the results of the elections, Kolossov and his colleagues Nikolai Petrov and Leonid Smirnyagin collaborated to produce Vesna ’89 (Spring ’89). This mono graph addressed the electoral geography of the March 1989 Soviet elections, with specific focus on the regional differentiation in electoral results, and with respect to the nascent position of democracy within the Soviet system. For the first time, data and results were available that illustrated the political will of the Soviet populace. These elections represented the first, tentative steps toward a democratic political system (though communists still dominated among the successful candidates). Spring ’89 engendered a number of questions from the politico geographic perspective. Fundamentally, what was the inherent importance of such elections for the Soviet Union? Could the data and results from these elections be used to precisely explicate the spatial vari ation of the perestroika political culture? What were the broader ramifications of these elections; were they the first step in the broader development of a democratic capacity within Soviet society? Using politico geographic methodologies, Kolossov and his co editors concluded that there was significant regional variation in electorates across the Soviet space, exhibited in each of the 11 electoral districts. This variation is connected to three implicit trends in voting behavior, associated with geo graphical and spatial differences between north and south and east and west, as well as the urban–rural divide. And
Kolossov, V.
while these conclusions are relevant, the historical value of this work is more significant; Spring ’89 was a definitive step toward the legitimization of political geography in the post Soviet academy. The idea that the March 1989 elections were indica tive of a broader political liberalization was borne out in the following years. For Vladimir Kolossov, the fall of communism opened up a variety of intellectual avenues as the post Soviet space has proved to be fertile ground for political geography research, both in terms of relevant topics and scholarly freedom. Since 1991, Kolossov’s oeuvre has addressed an array of topics of relevance in current politico geographic studies. This body of work is most clearly divided into two categories: work aimed specifically at the Russian domestic audience and re search on wider intellectual themes within political geography as they pertain to the post Soviet space. Re search in the former category has been centered on questions of significance to both the Russian academic community and the Russian populace more generally; these relate to Russia’s position as a geopolitical power within the post–Cold War order. At the same time, this work continues to underscore the importance of political geography by forwarding the academic development of the field in Russia. When examining more theoretical topics, Kolossov has emphasized subjects that are highly topical in post–Cold War political geography. In this literature, aimed at Western European and American academic audiences, Kolossov has discussed themes such as ethnic minorities, boundaries, and continued his work on Russian national identity. Vladimir Kolossov’s work that has been produced domestically for both scholars and average citizens has centered on Russia’s post–Cold War geopolitical position and forms of civic and political identity within the state. Kolossov and his co editors first discussed the nature of political identity in Spring ’89, with specific reference to the Soviet Union. In this work, they argued that the elections provided a medium for exploring how geog raphy affects political processes in the Soviet Union. In particular, the work made a case for significant regional differentiation within the Soviet state, and aggregates these differences into three distinct politico geographic subcultures, the Asian, the Western, and the Russian. In the Asian sphere, there is no historical basis for demo cratic government; there, political power has taken on a formal, functional structure. The Western subculture is small but influential, and is constructed around the pol itical viewpoints of the Baltic republics and the western portions of Belarus and Ukraine, where the traditions of democracy and political independence are more formally developed. These two traditions are, however, peripheral to the Russian political subculture. This outlook, ac cording to Kolossov, occupies a middle ground between the Asian and Western constructs of political society,
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where personal independence and populist dependence both play important roles. This conceptualization of Soviet political society was transferred over the next two decades to consider Russia in its post–Cold War context, with Kolossov recently extending this project to specif ically address political identification in Russia in two recent works: Russia’s Geopolitical Situation and The World through Russian Eyes. Kolossov’s international publications (mostly in French and English with a variety of col leagues) remained centered on post Soviet space, while addressing broader theoretical questions of relevance to the field of political geography. This research can be loosely grouped into three primary areas: boundaries and border studies; identity formation in Russia; and ethnic minorities in changing political environments. Since the breakup of the Soviet state, Kolossov has approached questions pertaining to boundaries from a number of theoretical perspectives. While holding a visiting scholar position at the University of Durham with the International Boundaries Research Unit in 1992, Kolossov collaborated with Olga Glezer and Nikolai Petrov on an initial study of boundaries and conflict in the post Soviet space. This work investigated the inter play between geography and borders, with specific ref erence to how these boundaries reified territorial based identities and supported ethnic conflict. It also served as a springboard for future research in border studies. A major commitment of his research since the 1992 project has been investigated border identities, border definitions, and border impacts and the interplay between such conceptualizations and state formation in Russia and its adjoining former Soviet neighbors. Collaborating with John O’Loughlin (University of Colorado), he has in vestigated territoriality and borders in the post Soviet spaces of Ukraine and Moldova using a world systems theory framework augmented by field work in these rapidly changing environments. Given that boundaries have been increasingly approached as a theoretical field of investigation in political geography during the last 10 years, Kolossov’s work underscores an important trend in the field. In 2005, he continued to promote the study of emerging borders and summarized the state of the field by conceptualizing limology (border studies) as a suc cession of stages characterized by specific content and achievement (historical evolution, typologies of borders, a functional approach to borders, the social represen tation of borders, and state policies and management of border regions). Kolossov has further extended the study of Russian political identity to the Western European and American academic audiences. This work has centered on Russian approaches to geopolitics in the context of the post 9/11 geopolitical environment, investigating through survey work how Russian citizens see their country on the world stage and how they view the US led ‘war on terror’ since
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Kolossov, V.
2002. His research, in collaboration with John O’Loughlin and Gerard Toal, has also served to more completely develop the ideas of Russian public intellectuals who have addressed the thread of Eurasianism that emerged in the nineteenth century and became evident again in Russian politics during the 1990s, as the country was forced to reposition itself geopolitically on the world stage in the wake of the erosion of its great power status. Other threads in Kolossov’s recent and ongoing re search have centered on the position of ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. This is a broadly scoped research agenda, including projects on the relation between ethnic identity and conflict in Transdniestria (Moldova) and post–civil war identities in Russia, especially in the tumultuous zone of the North Caucasus. The focus of the work is to identify the ter ritorial bases for nationalist mobilization and to probe the conditions for separatist demands. Further, the work describes the ‘in between’ nature of new political terri tories that have emerged as a result of the frozen conflicts in the space of the former Soviet Union, neither con trolled completely by the states of which they are nom inally a part nor recognized by the world community. Based on his fieldwork, a key part of his approach to the study of borders and nationalism, Kolossov has promoted the idea of ‘pseudo states’ as a new concept in world politics that evolve from the interplay of the local de mand for autonomy and geopolitical realities sur rounding the aims of the great powers. Vladimir Kolossov is one of the leading scholars in international political geography. His contributions, both in terms of research and service in a variety of national domains and in the journals and publications of numer ous countries with many collaborators, have significantly affected and promoted the development of the field in the post–Cold War decades. But undoubtedly, his most significant role has been to establish and legitimize political geography as an academic discipline in Russia after its disappearance for much of the 70 years of Soviet rule. See also: Borderlands; Critical Geopolitics; Ethnic Conflict; Political Boundaries.
Further Reading Brunet, R., Ekert, D. and Kolossov, V. (1995). Atlas de la Russie et des Pays Proches. Paris: RECLUS La Documentation Franc¸aise. Kolossov, V. (1985). Political geography in the service of the bourgeois state. Soviet Geography 26(2), 98 107. Kolossov, V. (ed.) (2000). Geopoliticheskoe Polozhenie Rossii: Predstavleniya i Real’nost’ (Geopolitical Situation of Russia: Representation and Reality). Moscow: Art Kur’er. Kolossov, V. (ed.) (2001). Collocazione Geopolitica della Russia: Rappresentazioni e Realta` (The Geopolitical Positioning of Russia: Depictions and Reality). Torino: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli. Kolossov, V. (ed.) (2003). Mir Glazami Rossiyan (The World through Russian Eyes). Moscow: Institute of the Fund for Public Opinion. Kolossov, V. (2004). American geography and the rise of political geography in Russia. GeoJournal 59(1), 59 62. Kolossov, V. (2005). Border studies: Changing perspectives and theoretical approaches. Geopolitics 10(4), 606 632. Kolossov, V. and Mironenko, N. (2001). Geopolitika i Politicheskaya Geografia (Geopolitics and Political Geography). Moscow: Aspekt Press. Kolossov, V., Glezer, O. and Petrov, N. (1992). Ethnoterritorial Conflicts in the Former USSR. Durham: IBRU Press. Kolossov, V. and O’Loughlin, J. (1998). New borders for new world orders: Territorialities at the fin de sie´cle. Geojournal 44, 259 273. Kolossov, V. A. (1988). Politicheskaya Geografia: Problemy i Metody (Political Geography: Problems and Methods). Leningrad: Nauka, Leningradskoe otd nie. Kolossov, V. A., Petrov, N. V. and Smirniagin, L. V. (eds.) (1990). Vesna 89: Geografia i anatomia parlamentskikh vyborov (Spring ’89: The Geography and the Anatomy of Parliamentary Elections). Moscow: Progress. O’Loughlin, J., O´ Tuathail, G. and Kolossov, V. (2004). Russian geopolitical storylines and public opinion in the wake of 9 11. Communist and Post Communist Studies 37, 281 318.
Relevant Websites http://www.homeofgeography.org IGU Home of Geography. http://www.colorado.edu/ibs/waroutcomes/ The Dynamics of Civil War Outcomes in Bosnia and the North Caucasus. http://www.cas.muohio.edu/igu cpg/ The International Geographical Union Commission on Political Geography.
Kriging and Variogram Models C. A. Calder and N. Cressie, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Cokriging Extension of kriging methods for multivariate geostatistical data. Geostatistics Class of statistical methods for the analysis of data generated from a continuously-indexed spatial process. Intrinsically Stationary Process A spatial process with a constant mean function that has the property that the variance of the difference of the process at any two locations is a function of the displacement between the two locations. Isotropic A property of a covariance function that indicates that the covariance of a process at any two locations is only a function of the distance between the two locations. Non-Negative-Definite A necessary and sufficient condition for a real-valued function to be a valid covariance function. Nugget Effect A non-negative quantity consisting of the measurement-error variance and any additional microscale variation that cannot be attributed to measurement error. Second-Order Stationary Process A spatial process with a constant mean function and stationary covariance function. Separability A property of a space-time covariance function that indicates that the covariance function can be factored into the product of a spatial covariance function and a temporal covariance function. Stationarity A property of a covariance function that indicates that the covariance of a process at any two locations is only a function of the displacement between the two location.
Introduction Kriging and variogram models are a set of widely used statistical tools for spatial prediction and interpolation. These tools are the fundamental components of a class of spatial statistical methods known as geostatistics. Geos tatistics has its origins in the mining industry and early methodological developments were motivated by appli cations such as estimating the amount of metal in an orebody and how to selectively mine the orebody based on a set of observations at known locations. One of the earliest papers in the application of statistics to mining
was written in 1951 by a South African mining engineer named D. G. Krige. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, G. Matheron, of the French Ecoles des Mines, developed spatial prediction and named the methodology after Krige. Further methodological advances were motivated by a variety of other areas of application, including analyses of environmental and agricultural data. Broadly, geostatistics refers to the class of statistical methods for the analysis of data generated from a con tinuously indexed spatial process Z(s), for s ADCRd defined on a domain DCR d . Observed observations of the process ZðÞ at a set of known locations {si : i ¼ 1,y, n} are called geostatistical data. The geos tatistical framework is appropriate for the analysis of data such as atmospheric concentrations of a pollutant meas ured at a fixed set of monitoring locations across a city. Such data can be viewed as the observations at a known set of locations of the continuous pollution process, which is defined over the entire city. The primary goal of a geostatistical analysis is often prediction of the spatial process at locations where the process is not observed. Spatial prediction can be performed on a fine grid covering the spatial region of interest and, therefore, can be used to produce an exhaustive map of predicted val ues. Given the nature of spatially dependent processes, geostatistics based predictions draw more heavily on nearby observations than on observations farther away. In addition, the uncertainty measure associated with the prediction of the process at an unobserved location depends on the proximity of observed values of the process. We note that the probabilistic nature of geosta tistical methodology distinguishes it from other more ad hoc methods of performing spatial prediction/ interpolation. In the remaining parts of this article, we first introduce the methodology known as kriging, which defines a class of optimal spatial predictors. Then, we review techniques for estimating the covariance structure of a spatial pro cess, which is needed for kriging. Sometimes it is easier to estimate a variogram, which can be used for kriging in a similar manner. Finally, we present an analysis of rainfall data and briefly introduce several extensions of the standard geostatistical methodology.
Kriging Consider a set of random variables fZðsÞ : sADCR d g, which we call a (random) spatial process. We define the mean function of the process ZðÞ to be E[Z(s)] mZ(s),
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Kriging and Variogram Models
The simple kriging predictor of Y(s0), Yˆ ðskÞ ðs0 Þ, is optimal in the sense that it minimizes the mean squared prediction error (MSPE), where
sAD, and the covariance function of ZðÞ to be CZ ðsi ; sj Þ covðZðsi Þ; Zðsj ÞÞ
for any si and sj AD. Note that both functions exist if we assume that var (Z(s))oN, for all sAD. Spatial processes of the sort given above form the basis for statistical analyses of geostatistical data. For example, let Z ¼ (Z(s1,y,Z(sn))0 ) be an n 1 vector of observations associated with known locations {si : i ¼ 1,y, n}. A clas sical geostatistical analysis of such data would seek to characterize the mean, mZ( ), and covariance, CZ( , ), of ZðÞ in order to obtain optimal predictors of the process at unobserved locations fs0 AD : s0 asi ; i ¼ 1; y; ng. In the following discussion, we develop kriging in the more general situation where the data are values of a spatial process ZðÞ that can be represented as the sum of a latent, or unobserved, spatial process of primary interest and a non spatial measurement error process. In this situation, the value of ZðÞ at any location sAD can be written as ZðsÞ ¼ Y ðsÞ þ eðsÞ
( ˆ 0 Þ ¼ l0 þ Yðs
covðeðsi Þ; eðsj ÞÞ ¼
0; s2e ; (
covðY ðs0 Þ; ZÞ ¼
for si asj for si ¼ sj
n X
) li Zðsi Þ : l0 ; l1 ; y; ln AR
Equivalently, we can view the MSPE as a function of l0 and the vector k (l1,y, ln)0 by writing MSPEðl0 ; kÞ ¼ E ðY ðs0 Þ
l0
k0 ZÞ2
½2
Then, we can find the values of l0 and k that minimize this expression for the MSPE to obtain the simple kriging predictor Yˆ ðskÞ ðs0 Þ. This minimization yields the simple kriging predictor Yˆ ðskÞ ðs0 Þ ¼ mY ðs0 Þ þ c˜Y ðs0 Þ0 R1 Z ðZ
lY Þ
½3
where the (i, j) element of the n n matrix RZ is equal to ( CZ ðsi ; sj Þ
CY ðsi ; sj Þ cov Y ðsi Þ; Y ðsj Þ ; si ; sj AD
(
2 i
i 1
for the process Y ðÞ. The measurement error process, e( ), is assumed to have zero mean so that E[e(s)] ¼ 0, for all sAD. We also assume that the e( ) process is in dependent across space, implying that for all si ; sj AD,
ˆ 0Þ Yðs
over the class of all heterogeneously linear predictors.
½1
Analogously to the process ZðÞ, we let E[Y(s)] mY (s), sAD, and
h MSPE E Y ðs0 Þ
CY ðsi ; si Þ þ s2e ;
if si ¼ sj
CY ðsi ; sj Þ;
if si asj
½4
and In addition, the MSPE, or simple kriging variance, is ðs ðskÞ ðs0 ÞÞ2 ¼ CY ðs0 ; s0 Þ
c˜Y ðs0 Þ0 R1 Z c˜Y ðs0 Þ
Recall that the simple kriging predictor of Y(s0) is derived under the assumption that mY( ) is known. We
ðCY ðsi ; s1 Þ; y; CY ðsi ; si Þ þ se 2 ; y; CY ðsi ; sn ÞÞ0 ;
if s0 ¼ si ; i ¼ 1; y; n
ðCY ðs0 ; s1 Þ; y; CY ðs0 ; sn ÞÞ0 ;
if s0 efs1 ; y; sn g
c˜Y ðs0 Þ
where 0rs2e oN. In addition, we assume that the pro cesses Y ðÞ and e( ) are independent. In this more general problem formulation, the meth odology known as kriging refers to the optimal linear prediction of the process Y ðÞ at a location s0 AD, given observations Z ¼ (Z(s1),y, Z(sn))0 , under the assumption that CY ( , ) and s2e are known. In deriving the optimal predictor of Y(s0), we first consider a special case known as simple kriging, in which mY ( ), the mean of the Y ðÞ process, is also assumed to be known. Because the process e( ) has zero mean, it should be noted that mY( ) ¼ mZ( ).
now consider the more general case, known as universal kriging, where the mean is specified as a linear model. In particular, we assume that mY ðsÞ ¼ xðsÞ0 b
where x(s) (x1(s),y, xp(s))0 is a p 1 vector of known covariates at location sAD and b (b1,y, bp)0 is a p 1 vector of unknown regression coefficients. We note that ordinary kriging corresponds to a special case of uni versal kriging when mY(s) ¼ m, where m is an unknown constant.
Kriging and Variogram Models
In deriving an optimal predictor of Y(s0) in the uni versal kriging setting, we restrict our attention to the class of homogeneously linear predictors that minimize the MSPE. However, now we impose the additional as ˆ 0 Þ ¼ E½Y ðs0 Þ. Since the generalized sumption that E½Yðs ˆ is unbiased, substituting least squares estimator of b, b, 0ˆ mˆ Y ðs0 Þ ¼ xðs0 Þ b for mY(s) satisfies this additional re striction. It turns out that this substitution is in fact op timal and, hence, it leads to the universal kriging predictor of Y(s0): Yˆ ðukÞ ðs0 Þ ¼ xðs0 Þ0 bˆ þ c˜Y ðs0 Þ0 R1 Z ðZ
ˆ X bÞ
½5
where X is an n p matrix with rows {x(si)0 : i ¼ 1,y, n}. Finally, it can be shown that the universal kriging vari ance is ðs ðukÞ ðs0 ÞÞ2 ¼ CY ðs0 ; s0 Þ
c˜Y ðs0 Þ0 R1 Z c˜Y ðs0 Þ
þ ðxðs0 Þ
0 1 0 1 X R1 Z c˜Y ðs0 ÞÞ ðX RZ X Þ
ðxðs0 Þ
X R1 Z c˜Y ðs0 ÞÞ
We note that s(uk)(s0)Zs(sk)(s0), as a result of the addi tional uncertainty due to the estimation of the mean of the Y ðÞ process.
Covariance Function/Variogram Estimation The kriging methodology discussed in the previous section was developed under the assumption that the covariance function of the process Y ðÞ, CY ð; Þ, and the variance of the process eðÞ, s2e , are known. Then from eqn [4], the covariance function of the process ZðÞ is known. Typically, however, these quantities will have to be estimated (also using the observed data Z) before kriging can be performed. Consider the covariance function of the process ZðÞ; CZ ðsi ; sj Þ ¼ cov Zðsi Þ; Zðsj Þ . Various simplifying assumptions can be made about the functional form of CZ ðsi ; sj Þ. For example, the covariance function of ZðÞ is said to be stationary if the covariance between the pro cess at any two locations is only a function of the vector connecting the two locations. Therefore, stationarity implies that CZ ðsi ; sj Þ ¼ CZ ðsi sj Þ. Further, if the cov ariance function only depends on the distance between pairs of locations, so that CZ ðsi ; sj Þ ¼ CZ ðjjsi sj jjÞ, the covariance function is said to be isotropic. A spatial process ZðÞ is said to be second order stationary if its covariance function is stationary and its mean function is constant (i.e., mY ðsÞ ¼ m, for all sAD). Rather than estimating the covariance function, it is common in geostatistics to work with the variogram function. Letting h ¼ si sj ARd be the displacement (or lag) vector from location sj to si, the variogram function
51
evaluated at h is defined to be 2gZ ðhÞ ¼ 2gZ ðsi
sj Þ var½Zðsi Þ
Zðsj Þ
assuming that the right hand side is indeed a function of the vector si sj . The function gZ ðhÞ is called the semivariogram. If, further, the mean function is constant, ZðÞ is said to be intrinsically stationary. Likewise, if the mean function is constant and the covariance function of ZðÞ satisfies CZ ðhÞ ¼ covðZðsi Þ; Zðsj ÞÞ, for h ¼ si sj , then ZðÞ is said to be second order stationary, and the covariance function is said to be stationary. Consequently, 2gZ ðhÞ ¼ 2CZ ð0Þ
2CZ ðhÞ
½6
for a second order stationary process. There is a math ematical requirement that CZ ðhÞ be non negative def inite and that the variogram, 2gZ ðhÞ, be conditionally non positive definite. A discussion of how this require ment can be guaranteed through the use of a parametric class of covariance/variogram models is provided below. For an intrinsically stationary process, the expected value of the difference between the process at any two locations is 0 and the variance of the difference is a function of the vector connecting the two locations. This class of processes can be shown to contain the class of second order stationary processes. Thus, intrinsic sta tionarity is a slightly weaker assumption than second order stationarity. Further, it can be shown that estima tion of the variogram is more stable than estimation of the covariance function directly. Therefore, when esti mating the covariance function of a spatial process, often the spatial trend is removed so that an assumption of a constant mean is reasonable. Then the process is taken to be intrinsically stationary and both the variogram and s2e are estimated from the observed data. Before discussing methods for estimating the vario gram, we describe several of its general properties. First, we note that gZ ðhÞ ¼ gZ ðhÞ and gð0Þ ¼ 0. We define the nugget effect to be the quantity, c0 ¼ s2e þ cms 0, where gY ðhÞ-cms as h-0. The quantity cms captures microscale variation in the spatial process that cannot be attributed to measurement error. In practice, unless re peated observations at certain locations can be obtained, only the sum, s2e þ cms , can be estimated, but neither component can be estimated individually. Often, as jjh jj-N; gZ ðhÞ-cs ; the quantity cs is known as the sill. If, in addition, the covariance function is stationary, CZ ð0Þ ¼ cs . Finally, for an isotropic variogram, the value cr such that gZ ðcr Þ ¼ cs , but gZ ðcr ð1 dÞÞocs for any d > 0, is called the range of the process. Empirical Variograms Empirical variograms are nonparametric estimators of the variogram of a spatial process. Assuming that ZðÞ is
52
Kriging and Variogram Models
intrinsically stationary, it can easily be shown that 2gZ ðhÞ ¼ E½Zðs þ hÞ ZðsÞ2 . Therefore, a reasonable empirical variogram, or moment based estimator of 2gZ ðhÞ, is 2ˆgZ ðhÞ
1 X ½Zðsi Þ jN ðhÞj N ðhÞ
Zðsj Þ2
where N ðhÞ fðsi ; sj Þ : si sj ¼ h; i; j ¼ 1; y; ng and jN ðhÞj denotes the number of unique pairs of locations in N ðhÞ. When ZðÞ is isotropic, the empirical variogram can be written as a function of the distance between pairs of observations. In this case, a powerful graphical tool for exploring the spatial dependence structure of ZðÞ is a scatter plot of the empirical variogram, 2gˆZ ðjjhjjÞ, against jjh jj. When data are not located on a regular grid, the number of pairs of locations separated by a particular distance will not be sufficient to provide a precise esti mate of the variogram. In this situation, distances be tween pairs of observations can be placed into bins centered at distances fl i : i ¼ 1; y; mg. Then the em pirical variogram can be calculated at each li by re defining N ðl i Þ to be the set of all pairs of locations whose distance apart falls into the ith bin. Finally, we note that the empirical variogram is not robust to outliers. As a result, a robust empirical vario gram
ðRÞ
2gˆZ ðhÞ
h P ð1=jN ðhÞjÞ N ðhÞ Zðsi Þ
1=2 i4 Zðsj Þ
0:457 þ ð0:494=jN ðhÞjÞ
has been proposed. This robust estimator is designed to downweight observations that are unusually large or small compared to neighboring observations.
Parametric Variogram Models One limitation of the nonparametric approach to variogram estimation is that the approach does not guarantee that the empirical variogram is conditionally nonpositive definite. Therefore, the empirical variogram tends to be used primarily as an exploratory tool in geostatistical analyses and is followed by a para metric approach to obtain a valid variogram/covariance function to use in kriging. The idea behind the para metric approach is to consider classes of valid variogram models, n o G ðPÞ 2g : 2gðÞ ¼ 2g ðPÞ ð; hÞ; hAY
Then, within this class of models, the goal is to find a ˆ is a ‘good’ ˆ for which 2g ðPÞ ð; hÞ value of hAY; h,
ˆ is a valid var estimate of 2gZ ðÞ. Notice that 2g ðPÞ ð; hÞ iogram, by definition. ˆ we Before discussing various methods of estimating h, introduce a couple of commonly used classes of isotropic and stationary (parametric) variogram models in R d . For pairs of observations separated by h jjh jj, the class of exponential power variogram models has the form ( g ðPÞ ðh; c0 ; a; bÞ ¼
c0 ; c0 þ a 1
r e jh=b j ;
if h ¼ 0 if h > 0
where a > 0; b > 0; c0 0, and 0or r2. This class of variograms is known as the exponential class when r ¼ 1 and the Gaussian class when r ¼ 2. The unknown par ameters can be estimated from the observed data using one of the methods discussed below. Another popular class of parametric variogram models is the Mate´rn class. The models in this class have a more complicated analytical form than the models in the ex ponential power class, but Mate´rn models have proved to be very flexible in describing the dependence structure of spatial data. The Mate´rn class is usually described in terms of its isotropic covariance function, although the corresponding parametric variogram model can be ob tained using eqn [6] and C ðPÞ ðh; c0 ; a; b1 ; b2 Þ ( c0 ; ¼ c0 þ 2 b2 1aGðb2 Þðjjh jj=b1 Þb2 Kb2 ðjjh jj=b1 Þ;
if h ¼ 0 if h > 0
where a > 0; b1 > 0; b2 > 0; c0 0; GðÞ is the gamma function, and Kb2 ðÞ is the modified Bessel function of the third kind of order b2. Again, the unknown parameters can be estimated using the techniques dis cussed below. Estimation of the unknown parameters in parametric variogram models is typically performed by one of two types of methods, a least squares based method or a likelihood based method. An advantage of the former is that it only requires mild distributional assumptions; however, it can be difficult to implement properly. On the other hand, a likelihood based method requires the specification of the joint distribution of the data, but es timation is straightforward using standard statistical software packages. The simplest type of least squares based method is ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation. Consider an empirical variogram 2gˆZ ðl i Þ, where i ¼ 1; y; m, and a parametric variogram model 2g ðPÞ ð; hÞ. The OLS esti mate of h is obtained by minimizing the quantity m X i 1
2gˆZ ðl i Þ
2gðPÞ ðl i ; hÞ
2
Kriging and Variogram Models
with respect to hAY. A better estimator can be obtained using generalized least squares (GLS), since it takes into account the covariance between the values at the dif ferent fl i g. In order to obtain the GLS estimate of h, first define
53
1 ˆ c bðyÞ; y log jX RZ ðhÞ 1 X j ; 2
ˆ with grespect to hAY, where bðhÞ ¼ ðX0 RZ ðhÞ 1 XÞ 1 1 ðX0 RZ ðhÞ ZÞ. The value of h that minimizes this ex pression is the REML estimate.
2ˆgZ ð2ˆgZ ðl 1 Þ; y; 2ˆgZ ðl m ÞÞ0
Rainfall Example 2g ðPÞ ðhÞ ð2g ðPÞ ðl 1 ; hÞ; y; 2gðPÞ ðl m ; hÞÞ0
and V varð2gˆz Þ. Then the GLS estimator of h is the value of hAY that minimizes
2ˆgZ
0 2gðPÞ ðhÞ V 1 2ˆgZ
2gðPÞ ðhÞ
½7
In all but a few special cases, obtaining V is difficult. Therefore, a compromise between GLS and OLS, known as weighted least squares (WLS), is often used; this es timator is obtained by minimizing eqn [7] with V ¼ diagðvarð2gˆ ÞÞ, a diagonal matrix with possibly nonequal variances along the diagonal. An approximation to this matrix, V Cdiagf2ð2g ðPÞ ðl i ; hÞÞ2 =jN ðl i Þj : i ¼ 1; y; mg, is often used, resulting in an estimator of hAY that minimizes m X i 1
gˆ ðl i Þ g ðPÞ ðl i ; hÞ
2 1 jN ðl i Þj:
Maximum likelihood (ML) methods for estimation of h usually rely on a Gaussian assumption for the sampling distribution of the data. Suppose that data Z have a multivariate normal distribution with mean Xb, where X is an n p matrix with rank pon, and variance RZ ðhÞ, where RZ ðhÞ fcovðZðsi Þ; Zðsj ÞÞ; i; j ¼ 1; y; ng de pends on h. Then maximum likelihood estimators of b and h can be obtained by minimizing the negative log likelihood function, n 1 cðb; hÞ ¼ logð2pÞ þ logjRZ ðhÞj 2 2 1 þ ðZ X bÞ0 RZ ðhÞ1 ðz 2
X bÞ;
To illustrate the kriging/variogram methodology, we present an analysis of a spatially referenced dataset performed using the geoR package available in the R statistical software environment. The data consist of total rainfall during the dry season (May–June) averaged over several years at a set of 143 locations in the state of Parana, Brazil. Figure 1 shows the locations and values of the rainfall data. Following other statistical analyses of these data, we first removed north–south and east–west trends in the data and then performed a variogram analysis of the residuals. Figure 2 shows a binned robust empirical semivariogram, as well as a fitted (using GLS) exponen tial variogram (i.e., the exponential power model with r ¼ 1) with estimated parameters: sˆ 2e ¼ 151:5; aˆ ¼ 1189:1; and bˆ ¼ 117:2. Using this fitted variogram model, we predicted the average rainfall during the dry season on a fine grid covering Parana using universal kriging. Kriging estimates (left plot) and kriging standard errors (right plot) are shown in Figure 3, along with the
bARp ; hAY
One drawback of the maximum likelihood approach is that the estimates of h will be biased, especially when p is large relative to n. As a result, a popular alternative likelihood based method known as restricted maximum likelihood (REML) can be used to obtain an estimator that is less biased than the ML estimator. A REML es timator of h can be obtained by finding a matrix of contrasts A such that A0 X ¼ 0. Then, if we let Z * ¼ A0 Z; Z * will be distributed normally with mean 0 and covariance A0 RZ ðhÞA. Minimizing the negative log likelihood function of Z * with respect to hAY is equivalent to minimizing
Figure 1 Circles indicate the locations of the average yearly rainfall during the dry season (May June) observations in the state of Parana, Brazil. The size and shade indicate the variation in total rainfall across the region (the larger and darker the circle, the higher the yearly rainfall).
54
Kriging and Variogram Models
locations of the observations (circles). Notice that in areas with relatively large numbers of observations, the standard errors are smaller than in regions with fewer observations.
Other Topics Multivariate Methods (Cokriging) A multivariate spatial (random) process ZðÞ of dimen % sion q is defined to be a vector whose entries are the univariate spatial processes Z1 ðÞ; y; Zq ðÞ, each defined over a region D. For example, a collection of air pollu tant processes, such as the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) six criteria air pollutants (ozone, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, carbon mon oxide, and lead), can be viewed as a multivariate spatial Robust semivariogram
process. This multivariate process is monitored by the EPA as a result of amendments made to the Clean Air Act in 1990, which required that monitoring networks be established to record the ambient concentrations of these pollutants over the country. The data collected by these monitors are an example of multivariate geostatistical data, and geostatistical methods can be used to predict the ambient concentration of one or several of these pollutants at unobserved locations. In particular, the methodology known as cokriging provides predictions of one pollutant based on the concentrations of all six pollutants in the surrounding area. In situations where there is substantial dependence among the different pollutants, as is the case with several of the criteria pollutants, predictions made using cokriging are more accurate than if they were made using univariate kriging.
Space–Time Kriging
1500
(||h||)
1000
500
0 0
100
200 ||h||
300
400
Figure 2 Small circles indicate the value of the binned empirical semivariogram for the residuals (after removing both north south and east west trends) evaluated at various distances. The smooth curve represents the fitted exponential semivariogram estimated from the observed data.
Kriging estimates
One straightforward extension of geostatistics in a d di mensional space is to (d þ 1) dimensional space–time geostatistical data. Geostatistical analyses of such data are based on space–time processes Zðs * Þ, where s * ¼ ðs; t Þ such that sAR d represents the spatial dimension of the process and t AR represents the temporal dimension. In practice, the covariance structure of a space–time process is often assumed to be separable. This assumption implies that the covariance function of the process CZ ððsi ; t i Þ; ðsj ; t j ÞÞ ¼ covðZðsi ; t i Þ; Zðsj ; t j ÞÞ can be fac tored into the product of a spatial covariance function, ðSÞ ðT Þ CZ ðsi ; sj Þ, and a temporal covariance function, CZ ðt i ; t j Þ. This restriction implies that the covariance between the process at any two locations does not depend on time and that the covariance between the process at two time points does not depend on location. Due to the restrictive nature of the separability assumption, classes of nonseparable Kriging standard errors
400 350 300 250 200
30 25 20 15
Figure 3 Kriging predictions (left plot) and standard errors (right plot) on a fine grid covering in the state of Parana, Brazil. The black circles indicate the locations of the observed rainfall values.
Kriging and Variogram Models
space–time covariance functions have been proposed re cently in the literature. Finally, we note that there has also been a movement in the spatial statistics literature to model space–time geostatistical data as a dynamic spatial process, or as a spatial process whose structure changes over time. This flexible alternative to standard space–time kriging is appealing from both a scientific as well as a computa tional perspective in a variety of areas of application. Nonstationary Models The assumption that the covariance function of a spatial process is stationary (i.e., CZ ðsi ; sj Þ ¼ CZ ðsi sj Þ) is often not an appropriate assumption for the dependence struc ture of spatial data. However, classes of nonstationary covariance functions are not readily available. As an al ternative to directly specifying covariance functions, a class of models known as process convolutions or spatial moving average models have developed. These models differ from traditional geostatistical models in that the covariance structure is defined in a constructive, as op posed to a functional, manner. For example, a Gaussian spatial process can be constructed by convolving a two dimensional kernel with a two dimensional white noise process. Nonstationarity can be introduced by allowing the parameters of the kernel function to vary over space. Another class of methods for modeling nonstationary geostatistical data are spatial deformations. These methods assume that the spatial process is stationary and isotropic only after some nonlinear deformation of the sampling space. This approach is conceptually elegant, but can be difficult to implement in practice.
using Bayesian methods is that all joint distributions of processes and parameters have to be specified, often via a collection of conditional distributions. Distributional as sumptions are not necessary in classical geostatistics, which require only the specification of means, variances, and covariances. Despite the need for more restrictive assumptions, a powerful advantage of the Bayesian ap proach is that it allows a deeper scientific understanding of the nature of the process Y ðÞ. See also: Spatial Interpolation; Statistics, Spatial.
Further Reading Banerjee, S., Carlin, B. P. and Gelfand, A. E. (2004). Hierarchical Modeling & Analysis for Spatial Data. New York: Chapman & Hall/ CRC. Cressie, N. (1990). The origins of kriging. Mathematical Geology 22, 239 252. Cressie, N. (1993). Statistics for Spatial Data (revised edition). New York: Wiley. Diggle, P. J. and Ribeiro, P. J., Jr. (2007). Model Based Geostatistics. New York: Springer. Journel, A. G. and Huijbregts, C. J. (1978). Mining Geostatistics. London: Academic Press. Matheron, G. (1963). Principles of geostatistics. Economic Geology 58, 1246 1266. Schabenberger, O. and Gotway, C. A. (2005). Statistical Methods for Spatial Data Analysis. New York: Chapman & Hall/CRC. Stein, M. L. (1999). Interpolation of Spatial Data: Some Theory for Kriging. New York: Springer Verlag. Stein, M. L. (2005). Space time covariance functions. Journal of the American Statistical Association 100, 310 321. Ver Hoef, J. M. and Cressie, N. (1993). Multivariable spatial prediction. Mathematical Geology 252, 219 239. Waller, L. A. and Gotway, C. A. (2004). Applied Spatial Statistics for Public Health Data. New York: Wiley. Wikle, C. K. and Cressie, N. (1999). A dimension reduced approach to space time Kalman filtering. Biometrika 86, 815 829.
Bayesian Methods Bayesian methods have become increasingly popular in analyses of geostatistical data in recent years. The Bayesian paradigm provides a coherent approach for specifying sophisticated hierarchical models for complex data, and recent computational advances have made model fitting in these situations feasible. The drawback to
55
Relevant Websites http://www.esri.com ArcGIS Geostatistical Analyst. http://www.mrc bsu.cam.ac.uk GeoBUGS. http://www.est.ufpr.br geoR Package.
Kropo´tkin, P. G. Kearns, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Peter Kropo´tkin (1842–1921) (Figure 1) was born into a wealthy landowning family in Russia; his father had several thousand serfs on his estate. As a youth, Kro po´tkin was sent to the court of the Tsar to be groomed for high office in the Russian state. He joined an elite group within the Russian army in much the way his father had hoped. However, Kropo´tkin’s grooming to be a Russian bureaucrat was flawed. His mother had died when he was very young and, being brought up by peasant servants, he retained a deep sympathy for the plight of Russia’s poor. In 1861, as Kropo´tkin embarked upon his military career, the Tsar, Alexander II, abolished the institution of serf dom. Although the peasants continued to be exploited economically, they were no longer subject to the in dignities of servility. At this same time, the Russian state was extending itself into Siberia and in this unglamorous, frontier region Kropo´tkin imagined that he might work as part of an enlightened administration. He went to Siberia in 1862 and hoped to be part of a general process
Figure 1
56
Peter Kropo´tkin (1842 1921).
of reform. He worked first on reports about the treatment of prisoners sent in exile to Siberia. These reports did not produce a change in policy from St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg newspapers, Kropo´tkin reported on the repression of Polish revolutionaries sent to Siberia, and in 1866 he resigned from the military after the government in Siberia summarily executed five such prisoners. Kropo´tkin spent increasing amounts of his time on ex ploration in the mountain regions between Russia and China. Now he turned to a career in the civil service but devoted much of his time to exploration. He worked on Arctic exploration, became a leading figure in the Russian Geographical Society, and through the 1870s published many reports on Siberia and Finland. In 1872 he resigned from the civil service to continue both with his work in geography and also with his new career as a political organizer among the working class. Kropo´tkin visited Western Europe in 1872 and deeply admired the socialist and anarchist organizations among the workers of Switzerland. He was struck by their principled commitment to socialist anarchism as both a means and an end. Back in St. Petersburg, under the name of Borodin, he worked with discussion groups among workers as he both taught and developed his ideas about socialism, Marxism, and anarchism. In 1874 the authorities connected Borodin to Kropo´tkin and he was arrested. In 1876 he made a daring escape from a prison hospital and fled, via Finland, to Britain. There, he took on the name of Alexis Levashov and made a scanty living writing reviews and translating articles for the Times, for Nature, and for the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. In the absence of a vibrant anarcho socialist movement, Britain was a lonely place for Kropo´tkin and, within a year or so, he began to spend most of his time in Switzerland and France, among anarchists, working mainly as a journalist and author. When political re pression on the mainland became, periodically, too dan gerous for him, he would return to England, but in 1882 he was arrested in France on a false charge of complicity in a series of strikes. Despite a petition signed by dozens of British academics and politicians, he languished in French jails until 1886. It was there that he wrote his passionate account of ‘What geography ought to be’. He came back to Britain and lived there until 1917 although he made brief visits to continental Europe and even to North America. He played a full part in the revival of socialist and anarchist organizations from the late 1880s and he was a prominent intellectual both in geography and the biological sciences. Some academics at
Kropo´tkin, P.
Cambridge even thought he might be suited to a chair in geography there but Kropo´tkin was unwilling to give up anarchist propaganda for the ‘ivory tower’ and it was not clear at least to him that he could follow both. When autocracy was relaxed in Russia from the mid 1890s, Kropo´tkin began to correspond with Russian revo lutionaries schooling them away from terrorism toward organizing mass movements. After the revolution of 1905, he was a leader among those in Britain protesting the violence of its repression by the Tsarist authorities. He saw World War I in nationalist terms and took sides against Germany, favoring instead any alliance that in cluded France, the source, to his mind, of progressive and revolutionary principles. Very many contemporary an archists rejected the nationalism of Kropo´tkin’s reading of the war. Kropo´tkin went to Russia in 1917 to work for his anarchist ideals in the new socialist state, but the Bolsheviks suppressed the anarchists and, despite a brief audience with Lenin, Kropo´tkin lived on in Moscow, tolerated but unheeded, until his death in 1921. Kropo´tkin’s earliest contributions were in physical geography. The Himalayas were mapped from its edges and Kropo´tkin was among the first to describe correctly its interior structure of folds and peaks. He was also early among the advocates of the claim that, at one time, all of Northern Europe was covered by a massive ice sheet. Finally, he proposed a general theory of the desiccation of Europe, with ice sheets giving way to lakes, and then lakes giving way to marshes. The retreat of lakes within the historic past was part of this drying out, rather than being an index of the progressive warming of Europe over the same period. Yet, he was always a student of nature rather than of physiography. It was in the Cosmos of Humboldt and in the poetry of Goethe that he found an echo of the feelings with which he contemplated the landscapes of his youth. In his autobiography, Kropo´tkin described the epiphany of his contemplation of the place of human labor in transforming the rural landscape of Finland. The labor that shaped the fields, planted the crops, and produced the food was unfree. The beautiful veil of nature obscured the crime of labor exploited and Kropo´tkin ever after abjured the guilty pleasures of a purely physical geography. This insight breathes passion into his manifesto, ‘What geography ought to be’. In 1886 John Scott Keltie was working to get geography established in British uni versities. As part of this campaign, Keltie had written a report on the comparative position of geography in the universities of Europe and had followed this up with a series of lectures in London to promote geography as a vital research discipline. Halford Mackinder’s ‘Scope and methods of geography’ was part of this campaign and made a case for the subject as a post exploration science for empire. Keltie sent a copy of his report to Kropo´tkin, then in a French prison, and from his cell Kropo´tkin
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replied with an article supporting the campaign, but with a very different politics to that articulated by Mackinder. For Kropo´tkin, the study of geography taught knowledge of other peoples, a knowledge that bred mutual respect rather than served imperial control. Indeed, the more we learned about the practices of other peoples, the less we could judge them as inferior and thus the less likely we were to patronize (or exploit) them with our en lightened domination. Many of Kropo´tkin’s contemporaries might fairly be called social Darwinist. They believed that Charles Darwin had taught that fitter forms survived the struggle for food and resources. They applied this insight not to the struggle between species and their environment or even between species within an environment, but, rather, to the conflict between classes, or between nations, or between races. They were able to persuade themselves that Darwin’s theory of evolution implied that the rich were simply fitter than the poor; and that the powerful nations and races had to fight the others to survive. This was indeed a bleak view of society and economy. It seemed to justify laissez faire capitalism, aggressive co lonialism, and even eugenic racial segregation. Kropo´tkin had a more optimistic view of nature. He thought na ture’s bounty was more than enough for all. Scientific agriculture and industrial technology could serve ample portions to all if only fairness governed the distribution of the social product. Kropo´tkin believed both that Darwin had been mis interpreted and that his ideas were incomplete. Kropo´tkin argued that individuals, classes, nations, and races had no biological status in Darwin’s theory. Evolution and the survival of the fittest related to species and to nothing else at all. In the second place, Darwin’s own ideas were in complete because he had, by and large, treated species as aggregations of individuals and had ignored the social aspect of their groupings. Competition prevailed between individuals only in the lower forms of life. The social factor was vital both in the development of higher order forms of life and in their ways of living. It was through cooperation that members of a species were fed and sheltered; no single bee could build a hive, as no lone wolf could chase down a bear. Social forces were at the heart of the development of language in animals and were most highly developed among the superior species. Kropo´tkin proposed that Mutual Aid was a central evolutionary force and had direct implications for social as well as biological evolution. In this respect, the antisocial stance of im perialists and free market economists was regressive. Kropo´tkin believed that cooperation implied reci procity and freedom. He was fundamentally opposed to coercive social and economic relations. He had faith that human energies would develop most fully when allowed to flourish most freely. This was the basis of his anarch ism. For Kropo´tkin, freedom was both a means and end to
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social and economic progress. This meant that he was opposed to centralization and indeed to the institutions of the state. He believed that the medieval commune was probably the largest human community that could be governed by direct democracy and thus it was the apex of social evolution. The development of centralized states thereafter reduced freedom, promoted private property, and resulted in the competitive geopolitical world order that was modern imperialism. His utopian geography was fundamentally cellular. Distinct communities using, in the main, local resources would trade only what is sur plus to local needs. They would not produce things primarily for exchange but for subsistence. Kropo´tkin’s ideas did not prevail in British or European geography but they were part of an anarchist tradition that remained a significant, if not dominant, presence in geog raphy and related disciplines such as sociology. The sci entific prestige of Kropo´tkin as a biologist and of Reclus as an encyclopedic synthesizer of geographical knowledge meant that in Britain, in Spain, in Italy, in Russia, in Germany, and in France, there were significant anarchist resources for geographers and significant geographical re sources for anarchists. Regionalism in geography long served as a refuge for ideas about federalism and local autonomy that were anarchist in tendency if not in purpose. Cooperation was important to the sociological thought of urbanists such as Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes and sustained developments such as the community colleges of both the United States and the United Kingdom. Within education, Kropo´tkin’s ideals were celebrated by thinkers such as Paul Goodman and Paulo Freire. Yet, in the main, it must be admitted that anarchist studies in geography remain a hope rather than a reality. With the radical turn in geography after the political and intellectual ferment that followed 1968, scholars began again to look at Kropo´tkin. He appeared to offer a radical vision more ecological and less state centric than the Marxism that drove the countercultural agenda in Anglo American geography, but the anarchist critique of Marxism was never developed with either the theoretical or empirical force of its radical rival and thus these di mensions are still underdeveloped in modern radical geography. There are few studies of the biogeography of Mutual Aid, the historical geography of medieval com munalism, and the economic geography of voluntary association. The legacy of Kropo´tkin has potential.
See also: Anarchism/Anarchist Geography; Cultural Geography; Darwinism (and Social Darwinism); Eurocentrism; Exploration; Gentrification; Humanism/ Humanistic Geography; Imperialistic Geographies; Lamarck(ian)ism; Mackinder, H. J.; Radical Environmentalism; Radical Geography; Radical Political Economy; Reclus, E.; Segregation, Urban; Socialism; State; Territory and Territoriality; von Humboldt, A.
Further Reading Campbell, J. A. and Livingstone, D. N. (1983). Neo Lamarckism and the development of geography in the United States and Great Britain. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 8, 267 294. Galois, B. (1976). Ideology and the idea of nature: The case of Peter Kropotkin. Antipode 8, 1 16. Hooson, D. J. M. (1968). The development of geography in pre Soviet Russia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 58, 250 272. Kearns, G. (2004). The political pivot of geography. Geographical Journal 170, 337 346. Kropotkin, P. (1885). Words of a Rebel. Montre´al, QC: Black Rose Books. [Reprinted 1992, Montre´al, QC: Black Rose Books.] Kropotkin, P. (1899). Memoirs of a Revolutionist. London: Creset Library. [Reprinted 1962, London: Creset Library.] Kropotkin, P. (1904). Modern Science and Anarchism. London: Freedom Press. [Reprinted 1912, London: Freedom Press.] Kropotkin, P. (1922). Ethics Origin and Development. New York: Tudor Publishing. [Reprinted 1947, New York: Tudor Publishing.] Kropotkin, P. (1955). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Boston, MA: Horizons Books. Kropotkin, P. (1978). What geography ought to be. Antipode 10, 6 15. MacLaughlin, J. (1986). State centred social science and the anarchist critique: Ideology in political geography. Antipode 18, 11 38. Miller, M. (ed.) (1970). P. A. Kropotkin: Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Walter, N. and Becker, H. (eds.) (1988). Act for Yourselves: Articles from ‘Freedom’ 1886 1907 by Peter Kropotkin. London: Freedom Press. Wise, M. J. (1986). The Scott Keltie Report 1885 and the teaching of geography in Great Britain. Geographical Journal 152, 367 382. Woodcock, G. and Avadumovic, I. (1950). The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin. London: Boardman.
Relevant Websites http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu Dana Ward’s homepage: Kropotkin Archive. http://www.marxists.org Marxists Internet Archive: Kropotkin Reference. http://recollectionbooks.com Recollection books used: Peter Kropotkin page from the Daily Bleed’s Anarchist Encyclopedia.
L Labor Control Regime A. E. G. Jonas, University of Hull, Hull, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Capital Mobility The propensity for branches of production to relocate; can also refer to the increasing rate of flow of investment from one place to another. Often associated with economic globalization. Cultural Hegemony A concept used by the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, to describe a variety of coercive and noncoercive economic strategies and cultural practices deployed by the dominant ruling class to control and regulate the behavior of the working class. Global Labor Control Regime A tendency is for labor control to stabilize around globally dominant spatial forms and practices. Can refer to the process of McDonaldization, as described by the sociologist Ritzer. Hegemonic Despotism Refers to a central feature of the contemporary labor control regime which is capital’s capacity to enhance spatial mobility as a mechanism to extract concessions from workers. Historic Bloc A period of sustained cultural hegemony. Labor Flexibility The intensification of the detailed division of labor around more flexible production processes than those typically found in mass production. More generally, can refer to the contemporary labor control regime. Labor Geography The study of workers and their organizations from a spatial perspective. Labor Market The place of recruitment and exchange of labor; can also refer to the institutions regulating the conditions under which workers acquire or develop requisite job skills, such as the labor market inside a given industrial sector. Labor Process The social and technological organization of labor including the detailed division of work tasks at the point of production. Labor Regulation The wider institutions of state and economy, which nationally or globally govern wage labor and the workplace.
Local Labor Control Regime The particular labor control practices dominating workers in a place or region. Spatial Divisions of Labor The variety of ways in which the division of labor in production is organized and unfolds across space.
The labor control regime refers to the social need in capitalism for employers to invest in means of integrating labor into the production system. This need arises from conditions peculiar to capitalism in which workers are ideologically free to sell their labor power to any em ployer for a wage, and yet they neither own for them selves nor exercise direct control over the means of production. If workers did own the means of production, presumably there would not be a need for labor control externally imposed on them by another class. Instead, workers would undertake necessary tasks and regulate the labor process to meet a self conscious material and social need rather than engage in patterns of work dic tated by capitalist conditions of competition and the restless search for profits. However, as things stand there is a considerable investment by capitalists (and state managers) in the socialization and integration of labor. Such investment is not so much a factor cost in pro duction as it occurs on a habitual basis through the de tailed organization of workplace practices governing the quality and quantity of labor available in the labor market and deployed in production. Over time, managers working in private or state run capitalist enterprises have developed a variety of means (directly and coercively, as well as indirectly and re ciprocally) of integrating the workforce into production systems and labor processes. From the standpoint both of the capitalist class and of the state, the integration of workers into production ideally occurs in a consensual fashion but, for a variety of reasons, this does not ne cessarily happen. Indeed, the process of labor integration is rife with conflict. Workers are potentially resistant to,
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and in fact often do resist, the time–space disciplines of industrial production. Place based labor control practices have emerged specifically to deal with worker unrest or the possibility thereof. These practices connect labor to the workplace in fundamentally a sociospatial manner. They even extend into the wider labor market and the sphere of labor reproduction. This spatial extension oc curs at times informally through, for example, business involvement in community activities, or formally, for instance by means of state regulation and provision of education and training, eventually producing a local labor control regime.
The Labor Control Regime in Historical Context Social science research on labor control builds upon the insights afforded by Karl Marx’s historical materialism and the writings of the early twentieth century radical thinker and political activist Antonio Gramsci. If Marx argued that wage labor in capitalism was not so much a natural condition as a social necessity, he also recognized that it was historically contingent whether workers were compliant and willing to exchange their labor power. This raised the question of how capitalists successfully integrate workers into production, given workers’ ten dency as a class to resist on a collective basis. Writing in the first part of the twentieth century, Gramsci began to reflect upon the role of economic and cultural barriers to organized working class resistance. During World War I, he was involved in organizing in dustrial workers in Turin, a major center of the auto industry in Italy. In the early 1920s, he became frustrated with the failures of the Italian socialist movement and founded the Italian Communist Party. In 1926, the Fascist national government imprisoned Gramsci for holding radical political views and engaging in activism against the ruling class. He experienced a deterioration of his already fragile health, eventually dying in 1937. During his time in prison, Gramsci compiled notes on why the working class struggle had failed to develop into a successful movement for socialism, eventually pub lished posthumously as Selections from the prison notebooks. In the Notebooks, he argued that the state and the ruling capitalist class deployed various coercive and non coercive economic strategies and cultural practices to control and regulate the behavior of the working class. This was Gramsci’s theory of ‘cultural hegemony’ and central to it was the rise of a ‘historic bloc’. This referred to a period of sustained dominance of the working class by the particular economic and cultural practices of the ruling class. In Gramscian terminology, a labor control regime is a particular form of cultural (and economic) hegemony. It
is the concrete expression of two fundamental historical– geographical tensions: (1) the latent tendency for the ruling class to develop cultural practices to prevent organized class struggle on a widespread basis, and (2) the particular economic conditions and cultural cir cumstances of worker integration or resistance in the workplace under a given production system. Gramsci was writing about cultural hegemony during the period of Fordist mass production in northern Italy under Fascism. However, it has been possible to identify historic blocs when other forms of labor control domi nated industrial and cultural landscapes. These forms would have been adapted to the specific organizational, technological, and social demands of workers and capitalists in a given period of industrial development. Modern labor historians and sociologists, such as Burawoy, describe relatively stable periods of industrial production in terms, such as factory regimes. The regimes are periods when particular conditions and methods of labor control and integration are dominant. For example, the Fordist industrial period incorpo rated various coercive or direct (e.g., surveillance through Taylorism) and noncoercive or reciprocal (e.g., corporate welfarism) labor control practices. It gave rise to a labor control regime, at the national scale built around collective bargaining and a culture of consensus, and locally around the particular management practices and workers’ con sumption habits found in numerous Fordist workplaces and communities. To a greater or lesser extent, Fordism dominated social conditions of production and con sumption in communities throughout much of the twen tieth century, dampening organized resistance in the workplace and labor’s class consciousness. With its socially extended means of labor control, Fordism supplanted earlier paternalistic factory regimes and direct owner capitalist surveillance and coercion of workers within the workplace. Paternalism was typical of the formative period of machinofacture in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It grew up mainly around company towns and other self contained communities dominated by a single industry or a private (often family owned) company.
Geographers and Labor Control Although labor scholars like Gordon in the early 1980s suggested there were important relationships between labor control and the spatial organization of production, it was not until the mid 1980s and 1990s that human geographers seriously tackled this question. The wider context was the crisis of mass production in Europe and North America and debates about industrial transi tion. Geographers contributed to these debates in a characteristically empirical fashion, grounding abstract theories of industrial restructuring and transition in the
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conditions of production and work in particular regions and territorial economies. Out of this emerged some key geographical statements on production, labor control, and territory, including Massey on the spatial division of labor, and Storper and Walker on spatial shifts in growth centers of capitalism. Massey drew some inspiration from the writings of labor scholars such as Braverman, who she nevertheless criticized for offering a teleological and functionalist analysis of labor control in mass production and the process of de skilling. Massey signaled what became a politically urgent research agenda for economic geog raphers, namely to bring knowledge of place and con tingency into a historical materialist approach to spatial structures of production and labor control. She identified a variety of ways in which the geography of production shapes the politics and culture of different places and regions, and how over time the differently constructed politics of places and regions influences the geography of production and labor integration. What was central to Massey’s ‘spatial divisions of labor’ approach was the understanding that employers are aware of the different ways in which places contribute to the development and stabilization of production and employment relations. Notably, places and regions comprise particular combinations of production strat egies and labor relations so that it is impossible to impute to local political conditions and outcomes an unmediated role for wider forces of production and cultural hege mony. If the study of cultural hegemony was not a central feature of Massey’s approach, the difference place makes to the ways such dominant economic and cultural pro cesses unfold in particular localities and regions was nevertheless of great theoretical importance. Labor scholars, including the economic geographers Storper and Walker, started to assign space a more central role in the labor control regime. For example, Burawoy argued that a new regime of labor control built around capital’s spatial mobility replaced consensus under Fordism. He called this regime ‘hegemonic despotism’. Under hegemonic despotism, labor susceptibility to the growing international mobility of capital is the source of capital’s power to extract concessions from workers and assert cultural hegemony over the workplace. Recogniz ing this tension between the workplace and capital mo bility is an important development in approaches to the labor control regime.
The Control and Regulation of Labor in Place In 1996, Jonas offered a spatial theory of labor control in a paper published in a special issue of Regional studies devoted to the governance of the local labor market. In
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the same year, the publication of Peck’s Work place rep resented the clearest and most comprehensive statement on the changing spatial conditions of labor regulation and control in the industrial core during the transition away from Fordist production and Keynesian state manage ment. The respective contributions of Jonas and Peck offer representative statements on the geography of the labor control regime. Despite a growing number of locality case studies of workplace politics and culture, there was no explicitly spatial theory of labor control. Jonas sought to address this lacuna by thinking through the spatial logic under pinning local labor control strategies, and mainly from the standpoint of the material interests of different lo cally dependent businesses. For Cox and Mair, businesses become locally dependent when they rely on particular place based social relations and networks for access to markets, resources, labor, and state support. These re lations and networks are not so readily available and reproducible elsewhere. Jonas drew on this insight to argue that when producing, investing, expanding, and competing firms deploy particular labor control strategies in place. In time, these strategies might be replicated across the landscape but only if firms expand spatially in response to problems of local dependence. Spatial ex pansion and replication occurs through the extralocal investment strategies of firms or via mergers and acqui sitions, involving enterprises based elsewhere. Given that production occurs at specific locations, Jonas argued that there is a tendency for labor control to stabilize around place specific social practices, which affect the social integration of labor inside the workplace but influence conditions outside it as well. When stability occurs, conditions are in place for a ‘local labor control regime’. Jonas further argues that some firms are pro foundly dependent upon places and their constituent labor control practices, and to such an extent as to pro duce, in effect, locally specific forms of cultural hege mony. This refers to the ways in which the properties of a local labor control regime infuse other workplaces and many aspects of local community and civic life throughout the locality or region. The resultant local political effects of a local labor control regime might (or might not) activate when the place or region experiences an external threat or undergoes a new round of inward investment, as Jonas demonstrated in the case of a manufacturing company based in the City of Worcester in central Massachusetts. The company was able to ward off an external competitor by drawing upon local social and political networks constructed around its local labor control practices. Peck’s particular contribution to the study of the geography of labor control involves in the first instance an analysis of macro scale modes and forms of labor regulation after Fordism–Keynesianism. Here Peck is not
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so much interested in the specifics of a local labor control regime as attempting to identify wider spatial structures and processes of labor regulation. In this extent, his work is consistent with the Gramscian intellectual tradition, which has undergone a revival through the work of state regulation theorists. Nonetheless, the primary emphasis in Peck’s work is on economic and political (i.e., state orchestrated) forms of labor regulation rather than cul tural forms per se. Such economic and political forms of labor regulation and control include training and enter prise schemes, temporary and part time forms of work, labor market intermediaries, and in particular (the threat of) capital mobility. These new spatial regulatory forms have emerged in the context of state withdrawal from the direct provision of support to workers and the un employed in the form of unemployment benefit, workers’ compensation, and welfare. The disciplining effect upon workers and those outside paid work only intensifies with globalization. In considering Peck’s contribution to the geography of labor, it is useful to draw a broad distinction between labor control and the ‘regulation of labor’. Although both concepts overlap insofar as they each refer to a process of socially integrating labor, they can be treated as heur istically different in that they entail different entry points into the labor market and its attendant institutions, agencies, spatial practices, and territorial scales. Local labor control refers to the particular processes by which workers are integrated into the workplace and become habituated to production and work in a given place or region. By way of comparison, labor regulation refers not so much to the relationship between the labor process and the labor market in situ as to the wider (national and international) social conditions (i.e., those external to a workplace or regional industrial cluster) structuring the supply and quality of labor in the labor market. Whereas the approach to local labor control outlined above extends from the factory or workplace into the wider labor market and the sphere of social reproduction (Figure 1), the analysis of labor regulation covers the wider institutions of state and economy, which nationally or globally govern wage labor and the workplace. Seen in this light, one of Peck’s major contributions is to give closer scrutiny to the distinctive spatial institutional ization of labor regulation around specific workplaces. In this respect, he recognizes that the appearance of locally
Labor control Workplace
→
Labor market
Labor regulation Labor market
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Workplace
Figure 1 Directions of causality in analyses of labor control and regulation.
distinctive labor control regimes represent contingent responses to regulatory dilemmas of a more enduring, nonspatially specific nature. From such an analysis of the wider spaces of labor regulation, it is possible to work back into the local or regional territorial production system and examine the local labor market, firms, workers, labor enclaves, and the ‘reserve army’ of labor (the unemployed, etc.). At this point in analysis, what are otherwise quite separately constructed control and regulatory processes start to converge around particular places, production systems, labor control strategies, and spatial scales. Yet the form of that convergence is a matter of historical struggle and spatial contingency. In this respect, both the mechanism of labor control and the form of labor regulation must be considered when studying the properties of a local labor control regime, albeit that as we will see later on labor integration can often occur outside formal (state) spaces of regulation. Peck saw the period from the early 1980s to mid or late 1990s as one of regulatory instability and ex perimentation with a new labor control regime. This regime involved various state strategies to lubricate the capitalist labor market around more flexible yet intensely coercive workplaces. This period also marks the dis mantling of centralized (national scale) forms of welfare provision and the substitution of these by territorially devolved (local scale) institutional arrangements, espe cially around workfare. As Peck forcefully argues, labor is not just regulated but also, in effect, put in its place. This occurs through various strategies of localization, including new economic modes of welfare provision and political forms of labor regulation. He sees this trend as symptomatic of the active construction of neoliberal regulation in capitalism on a global scale. Another way of thinking about this is that the forces of cultural hegemony reconstitute in post Fordism through practices associated with state workfarism, but that this is happening perhaps on a far more global scale than might have possibly been envisioned by the likes of Gramsci.
Geographies of Labor Control Human geographical studies of labor control are part of a wider disciplinary development known as ‘labor geog raphy’, the aim of which is to examine workers and their organizations (e.g., trades unions) in the economic land scape. If there is a difference between studies of labor geography and those of labor control, it is that whereas the former focuses on labor as an economic and political agent ‘for itself ’ the latter thinks more in terms of the structures and constraints under which wage labor exists ‘despite itself ’ (i.e., its subjugation to new rules in
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capitalism). This makes the study of labor control not only a distinctive theme within labor geography but also quite different to other branches of economic geography. Detailed empirical studies of after Fordist production systems have identified a number of additional geo graphical characteristics of the new labor control regime. Some have examined the role of ‘labor flexibility’ and ‘capital mobility’ in shaping the new regime. Others have questioned whether transition has occurred at all or been limited to the core. In the industrial core, post Fordism is most commonly associated with the emergence of flexibly specialized production systems and flexible labor markets. Typically, conditions of flexibility in work and production exist well away from traditional centers of Fordist production and flourish in places like the Silicon Valley or the Third Italy. However, labor scholars and feminist geographers such as Pollert, Hanson and Pratt, and Pollard question whether labor flexibility is a peculiar feature of post Fordist spaces of production or instead simply the his torical intensification of the labor process, especially as more and more women have entered the labor market in a variety of emerging sectors and places. This raises questions about the social and cultural means of inte grating a more flexible workforce into new economic sectors and the attendant gender divisions of labor in specific locations. There is some evidence that flexible labor control regimes thrive in particular labor markets such as those dominated by female, immigrant, casual, and part time labor. Moreover, flexibility exists in localities and regions where workers are less well organized and employers can experiment more freely with alternative management practices, new just in time supply systems, and less de marcated job categories, as well as subcontracting and flexible work schedules. All of these local characteristics of management and labor control might be essential conditions in the establishment of neo Fordist, post Fordist, or just in time spaces of production simul taneously at the local, regional, and global scales. For example, in his detailed study of the automobile industry in and around Paris, the capital of France, Samers shows how a form of labor regulatory ‘structured coherence’ developed around the recruitment of immigrant workers from the former French colonies. Presumably, aspects of this coherence have dissipated more recently as class conflict has intensified across the working class suburbs of Paris, as well as in other industrial cities with large spatial concentrations of immigrants. Knowledge of the geography of labor control explains the increasing spatial mobility of certain branches of industry and factions of capital. The rise of the multi locational firm involves the relocation of particular stages in the labor and production process to places where the requisite labor is more malleable and tractable. In the
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early and middle twentieth century, branch plants of national enterprises based in Europe and the United States tended to relocate to the suburbs and peripheral regions of host countries, where accordingly more rou tine aspects of production could expand. By the end of that century, such activities were increasingly likely to be located offshore to newly specialized centers of routine high technology functions and semiautomated pro duction tasks in the semiperiphery, such as call centers in Bangalore in India, or zones of maquiladora production in northern Mexico. These places, no less than those in the industrial core, now have had to confront problems of labor regula tion and control associated with rapid industrialization. Typical of such problems are underinvestment in ne cessary social infrastructure and support facilities for workers, failure to recruit and match necessary skills, and migration of skilled workers away to rival centers offering higher wages. Likewise, new social regulatory issues relating to the social integration of workers confront the maturing industrial agglomerations in the industrial core.
Globalization and Labor Control Yeung suggests that labor control is an important element in understanding how capital embeds within, or con versely becomes disembedded from, particular places. With respect to these disembedding processes, the soci ologist Ritzer argues the case for a tendency for par ticular technologies of labor control to become universal throughout all of society and its places. He suggests that modern society rationalizes under a single dominant labor control regime, a historical process he terms McDonaldization. Ritzer’s otherwise neo Weberian theory integrates the Gramscian notion of cultural hege mony into the rationalization of the labor process. He shows how the cultural integration of workers occurs not simply through the labor process but also around their consumption behavior and reproductive habits. This happens insofar as schools, hospitals, and restaurants as sume to operate along the lines of a McDonaldized labor system. However, it might be stretching the point to argue that there is a tendency toward a single and dominant ‘global labor control regime’ along the lines of McDo naldization. For a start, geographers might want to question whether place matters no more within such a regime. A problem harking back to Massey’s pioneering work is the danger of overgeneralizing from empirical regularity and observed tendencies. Geographers would not overlook the continuing importance of place based labor control practices to global processes of production and investment.
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National agencies
Corporate investors Factory workers
Labor organizations
Provincial governments
Municipal governments
Labor control regime
Industrial estate mgt corp Recruitment agencies
Village/ community leaders
Figure 2 Actors and institutions in the labor control regime. Reproduced from Kelly, P. F. (2001). The political economy of local labor control in the Philippines. Economic Geography 77(1), p. 7. Reprinted with permission of Clark University.
Research in the global semiperiphery highlights how social and economic conditions in place are very im portant in creating a labor control regime suitable for multinational corporate investment. Kelly examines the local labor control regime constructed around foreign direct investment in the burgeoning garment, textile, and electronic goods industry sectors in the Philippines. He finds that, far from there being a preexisting global re gime imposed by multinational corporations, a local labor control regime emerges from the activities of a variety of national and local actors. These range from those of the investing firms to labor organizations and recruitment agencies, and to local village and community leaders. Moreover, many of the practices and institutions involved in building the local labor control regime in the Philippines operate outside formal (state) spaces of regulation and global circuits of investment. Figure 2 is Kelly’s schematic representation of local labor control regime in the semiperiphery.
Conclusion In recent years, the labor control regime has emerged as a useful concept in economic geography. The 1990s was an especially productive period of research on this topic. However, the initial enthusiasm seems to have waned. In terms of pointing a way forward, it is worth noting that the labor control regime links into other branches of human geography including cultural and political geog raphy. For example, there have been relatively few de tailed studies of how Gramscian notions of cultural hegemony apply, both nationally in the context of pro moting flexible and open labor markets, and locally in terms of detailed knowledge of new place based systems
of labor control, forms of community integration, gender relations, and modes of consumption. Further research is required on how public, private, and third sector em ployers are engaged in new modes of cultural and eco nomic integration in the workplace, not least given a wider context of growing tensions around work–life balance, environmental and social sustainability, and the withdrawal of private and state supported pension ar rangements. Recent work by economic geographers such as Bauder potentially points to new ways of approaching and thinking through the relationship between culture, labor regulation, and the geography of labor control. The empirical study of local labor control regimes does present a number of methodological and ethical challenges. Published data on labor productivity and management techniques are unreliable and hard to come by. There are issues of access to corporate information, employers, employees, and private facilities. There are challenges to obtaining informed consent from inter viewees, not least workers subject to coercive manage ment practices. For these reasons, most empirical studies of the labor control regime have resorted to secondary sources, such as company and workforce histories and biographies, discourse analysis of local or national media, and state policy reviews and political discourse analysis. Primary research on labor control uses ethnography, participant observation, and interviews, and there is a focus upon not just formal regulatory processes but also informal relations between workers, recruitment agen cies, and the living place. Researchers have studied companies, recruitment agencies, and day labor sites, using interviews or surveys of managers, employees, and trade union representatives in a variety of industries, sectors, and places. Other important questions for labor control research include the unethical or racist treatment of immigrant workers by employers (state and private), workers’ involvement in living wage campaigns, and how in response to growing pressures employers and busi nesses attempt to manage the modern work–life balance. Information about some of these issues is freely available on various company, government, and labor and not for profit organization websites. In conclusion, analysis of the local labor control re gime has contributed to a shift in explanatory focus in economic geography away from the politics of ‘work’ places (i.e., firms and industries) to that of work‘places’ (labor practices cutting across pre given boundaries be tween firms, industries, labor markets, places, and the state). The local labor control regime remains an im portant concept, not just in terms of representing the entry point into the relations between production, work, and territory, but also because of the possibility to examine how workers and those outside paid work en gage in struggle and resistance to socially undesirable forces of social, technological, and cultural change.
Labor Control Regime See also: Capital and Space; Corporate Responsibilities; Feminism and Work; Fordism; Fordism, Post-Fordism and Flexible Specialization; Industrial Restructuring; Labor Geography; Labor Market; Labor Unionism; Migrant Workers; Spatial Division of Labor; Transnationalism and Labor Geography.
Further Reading Bauder, H. (2001). Culture in the labor market: Segmentation theory and perspectives of place. Progress in Human Geography 25(1), 37 52. Berberoglu, B. (ed.) (1993). The labor process and control of labor: The changing nature of work relations in the late 20th century. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York: Monthly Review Press. Burawoy, M. (1985). The politics of production: Factory regimes under capitalism and socialism. London: Verso. Castree, N., Coe, N., Ward, K. and Samers, M. (2004). Spaces of work: Global capitalism and the geographies of labour. London: Sage. Cox, K. R. and Mair, A. (1988). Locality and community in the politics of local economic development. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78, 307 325. Gordon, D. M. (1984). Capitalist development and the history of American cities. In Tabb, W. K. & Sawers, L. (eds.) Marxism and the metropolis, pp 21 53. New York: Oxford University Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hanson, S. and Pratt, G. (1992). Dynamic dependencies: A geographic investigation of local labor markets. Economic Geography 68, 373 405. Herod, A. (ed.) (1998). Organizing the landscape. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jonas, A. E. G. (1992). Corporate takeover and community politics: The case of Norton Company in Worcester. Economic Geography 68, 348 372. Jonas, A. E. G. (1996). Local labor control regimes: Uneven development and the social regulation of production. Regional Studies 30, 323 338.
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Kelly, P. F. (2001). The political economy of local labor control in the Philippines. Economic Geography 77(1), 1 22. Marx, K. (1976). Capital, vol. 1. Harmsworth: Penguin. Massey, D. (1984). Spatial divisions of labor: Social structures and the geography of production. New York: Methuen. Peck, J. A. (1996). Work place. New York: The Guilford Press. Pollard, J. S. (1995). The contradictions of flexibility: Labor control and resistance in the Los Angeles banking industry. Geoforum 26, 121 138. Pollert, A. (1988). Dismantling flexibility. Capital and Class 34, 42 75. Ritzer, R. (1996). The McDonaldization of society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Samers, M. (1998). ‘Structured coherence’: Immigration, racism and production in the Paris car industry. European Planning Studies 6, 49 72. Storper, M. and Scott, A. J. (1989). The geographical foundations and social regulation of flexible production complexes. In Wolch, J. & Dear, M. (eds.) The power of geography: How territory shapes social life, pp 21 40. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Storper, M. and Walker, R. (1989). The capitalist imperative: Territory, technology and industrial growth. New York: Blackwell. Warde, A. (1988). Industrial restructuring, local politics and the reproduction of labor power: Some theoretical considerations. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6, 75 95. Yeung, H. W. (1998). Capital, state and space: Contesting the borderless world. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers N.S. 23, 291 310.
Relevant Websites http://www.marxists.org Antonio Gramsci, Marxists Internet Archive. http://world.honda.com Community, Honda Worldwide. http://www.csreurope.org CSR Europe. http://www.employersforwork lifebalance.org.uk Employers and Work Life Balance. http://www.ilo.org International Labour Organization (ILO). http://www.livingwagecampaign.org Living Wage Resource Center.
Labor Flexibility C. Benner, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Employment Relationship between worker and employer, including management practices and compensation systems. Flexibility The ability to change or react to change with little penalty in time, effort, cost, or performance. Flexible Specialization Production system organized around use of skilled labor, computerized technologies, and networked firms in order to meet specialized often niche markets. Flexicurity Policy strategy that attempts to enhance the flexibility of labor markets, work organization, and labor relations on the one hand, and to enhance employment security and social security on the other hand. Functional (Internal) Flexibility It involves labor practices, such as multitasking, teamwork, and broad job descriptions, that increase the ability of workers inside the firm to adjust to changing demands. Mass Production Production system organized around large-scale enterprises, creating standardized products designed to take advantage of economies of scale in serving mass markets. Numerical (External) Flexibility It involves labor practices, such as outsourcing, subcontracting, and use of temporary workers, that allow firms to easily adjust labor deployment. Work Actual nature of the activities people do while engaged in the process of production.
Introduction In speaking about labor flexibility, former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich once remarked that ‘‘rarely in international discourse has [a term] gone so directly from obscurity to meaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence’’. Labor flexibility itself is not new. Indeed, neoclassical economists argue that the market itself is a pure form of promoting flexibility, while ex periences of fragility and mutability have characterized the experience of economic actors in many sectors and countries throughout the history of capitalism. But the notion of labor flexibility became nearly ubiquitous in the last decades of the twentieth century, as analysts tried to understand the dramatic economic changes that seemed to threaten the relative stability and predict ability that had come to characterize post World War II labor markets in the developed world.
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The concept of labor flexibility gained particular salience with the publication of Piore and Sabel’s The Second Industrial Divide. Their argument, in essence, was that the economic crisis of the 1970s was resulting in changes in the dominant mode of economic organization, with mass production systems increasingly being replaced by ‘flexible specialization’ systems that de pended on multiskilled labor often utilizing new com puterized technologies. Since then, the issue of flexibility has occupied a central position in debates on economic organization, regional development, new forms of eco nomic competition and capital accumulation, as well as the restructuring of labor markets. The debates have been particularly heated in relation to flexibility in the labor market, given the high stakes involved in shaping people’s livelihoods. While at least some forms of labor flexibility seem to be increasingly important for firms to remain competitive in today’s rapidly changing marketplace, all too often companies’ drive for flexibility is simply a desire for decreased deregulation and the freedom to hire and fire employees at will. Many workers, their advocates, and policy analysts, understandably, challenge the drive for flexibility, showing clear evidence that it results in in security, declining wages, and deteriorating working conditions for a large portion of the workforce. In addition to the unequal outcomes of labor flexibility, part of the problem also lies in the diversity of types of labor flexibility and the lack of clarity around the term itself. Labor flexibility can be associated with short term, cyclical, and temporary economic circumstances, as well as deeper structural changes, and is influenced by political forces and changing regulatory regimes, along with eco nomic changes. To understand the diversity of processes of labor market restructuring clearly requires a sophisti cated appreciation for differing historical and geographic trajectories, and a sensitivity to the dangers in simplifying complex social phenomenon under a term as ‘loaded’ as flexibility. Trying to understand these diverse processes solely under the term ‘flexibility’ is clearly inadequate. Nonetheless, rapid change and unpredictability is a key characteristic of contemporary labor markets, and thus understanding the nature of this labor flexibility has been of central importance in economic geography.
Economic Changes and Flexibility At the core of debates over labor flexibility are efforts to understand the changes in the global economy since the 1970s that have increased the level of instability or
Labor Flexibility
volatility workers can expect in the labor market. The most prominent of these changes include the following: Changing boundaries of the economy. Though a world • economy has existed since at least the sixteenth cen
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tury, in recent years there has been a rapid acceler ation in processes of ‘globalization’, with increasing globally integrated production chains, international trade, investment, and capital flows. This increasing globalization is made possible by the infrastructure created with the rapid development and diffusion of information technology. Though it may seem contra dictory, the economy is also typified by increasing ‘localization’. This phenomenon results partly from long term sectoral shifts in the economy, in which the share of the workforce in industries that serve only a local area (e.g., retail sales, social and health services, education, and so on) have increased. Economic lo calization is also rooted in the increasing importance, for the competitiveness of globally integrated in dustries, of ‘relational assets’ often rooted in the social interactions, sharing of tacit knowledge and develop ment of conventions, informal rules and common cultures that are built in region specific clusters of firms. Both globalization and localization are increas ing labor market volatility. Increased global com petition, the frenetic pace and harsh demands of global financial markets, and the mobility of pro duction processes greatly increase the pace of indus trial shifts and economic change. Increasing localization results in more people employed in the many, though not all, locally serving industries that have long had unstable employment patterns, such as retail sales and personal services. Changing industrial organization. Information technology has also enabled new forms of management and control, both within the firm and between firm boundaries, in office and service industries as well as manufacturing. The digitization of information makes possible the simultaneous, precise coordination of economic activity in multiple economic locations and across firm boundaries. This enabled corporations in the 1980s and 1990s to flatten management hierarchies, eliminating multiple layers of middle management, and to increasingly subcontract or outsource major components of their operations, both locally and around the globe. In addition, firms have restructured internal operations into distinct profit centers that blur firm boundaries by bringing market dynamics inside the firm. The result is the increased importance of constantly shifting networks, rather than individual firms, in the structure of economic organization, which increases changes in labor markets as well. Changing forms of competition. In the stable, mass pro duction markets that dominated the economy prior to
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1970s, firms competed primarily by improving their productivity, decreasing their costs, or trying to expand their market share within existing markets. With the development of an information economy, the ability of firms to effectively adapt to changing market conditions, identifying and capitalizing on new op portunities and successfully responding to new chal lenges, has become increasingly important, not just for competitive advantage but indeed for economic survival of many firms. Researchers from a variety of fields have extensively documented the critical im portance of this innovation in building and sustaining economic competitiveness. This constant drive for developing new products and new production pro cesses also contributes to the increased pace of change in labor market dynamics. While changes in all three of these areas have resulted in changing labor market dynamics and changing demands for labor, there is widespread disagreement about the best ways of understanding these labor market changes.
Analyzing Flexibility The most common way of analyzing flexibility in the labor market and in production systems is to start with firms as the unit of analysis. In this framework, firms can pursue both ‘internal flexibility’ and ‘external flexibility’ or, as it is sometimes put, ‘functional flexibility’ and ‘numerical flexibility’. Internal or functional flexibility involves a series of labor practices that increase the ability of workers inside the firm to adjust to changing demands. Some of these practices involve the skills and capacities of workers themselves, and may involve hiring people with more polyvalent skills or providing training to give existing workers more flexible capacities. Some of these practices also involve changing management prac tices that promote broader job categories (rather than highly constrained jobs with narrow job descriptions) and the promotion of more teamwork and collaborative labor practices. These practices all relate to internal firm processes. ‘External’ flexibility or numerical flexibility is a series of practices that allow firms to take advantage of external relations. Some of these practices may include accessing specialized skills and expertise, such as through hiring highly skilled contractors or entering into subcontracted business relations rather than hiring people internally. Other practices relate to quantitative changes or fluctu ations in labor demands, such as high levels of employee turnover, the use of temporary and part time employees, increased levels of subcontracting, or use of home work. In both internal and external relations, labor flexibility may also relate to linking wage rates and other forms of compensation more directly to output. This can include
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variable compensation schemes (piece rate, incentive schemes, and so on), stock options, or simply indi vidualized employment contracts. Using the firm as the key unit of analysis in under standing labor flexibility provides certain important in sights. The pressures on employers and their responses shapes much of the dynamics and structure of labor markets. Firms pay wages, determine hiring and firing decisions, and provide the bulk of training and career development opportunities. Public policy is most fre quently centered on how to influence the behavior of firms and the consequences of particular policies for the ability of employers to compete. Nonetheless, changes in the world economy since the 1970s have cast doubt on ideas that use the modern corporation as the central organizing principle in the economy. Within a broad neoclassical framework, an in creasing interest in transactions costs has opened up the examination of the firm as a governance structure and the relationship between firms and markets as means of economic coordination. Network theory moves beyond this market hierarchy spectrum, arguing that networks provide an entirely different form of economic govern ance and coordination. The firm itself is increasingly seen as a socio spatial construction embedded in broader discourses and practices – essentially serving as some times temporary platforms for organizing production. Relations of trust, ‘untraded interdependencies’, milieux of innovation, learning communities, firm culture – these are all analytical categories that have developed in recent years that recognize the fluid boundaries of firms while identifying sources of competitiveness that lie outside of firm activities. Thus, some analysts have increasingly argued that it is more useful to go beyond only using the firm as the fundamental unit of analysis in studies of labor flexibility. The wide spread use of telecommunications technolo gies means that many of the very tasks people perform on the job increasingly cut across firm boundaries, requiring workers to communicate more regularly with customers, suppliers, colleagues in other firms, and so on. Skills re quired on the job are arguably less firm specific and in stead require greater knowledge of trends in the sector or among customers. Thus, a framework that assumes strong firm boundaries in the nature of work activities fre quently misses these aspects of work. Similarly, em ployment relations stretch across firm boundaries and across multiple firms over time. Single worksites and production processes may include workers employed by multiple firms, such as when temporary, contract, and ‘permanent’ workers all are employed side by side. Entire supply chains have now become the object of manage ment’s attention. Workers themselves are arguable, moving more frequently from firm to firm. The skills and experiences that workers develop are built across
multiple organizational contexts. To understand these trends requires a greater attention to workers’ career paths and understanding the relationships that get built across these multiple employment contexts over time. A framework of labor market flexibility that does not ac count for these trajectories, with the ability to trace networks across firm boundaries, also is limited in its explanatory power. Finally, the attention to the boundaries of firms leads to a core periphery perspective, in which firms are seen to reduce the size of their core workforce, while accessing ‘noncore’ employment through the use of various external flexibility mechanisms. This approach, however, does not address the issue that much of the employment that is external to a ‘firm’ may in fact be quite central or core to an ‘industrial complex’. Some contingent workers, for example, have high wages, significant career mobility, and a clear preference for contingent employment arrange ments, and many of these roving specialists may provide crucial services to a string of individual firms at particular points in time, but would not be considered core to any single firm. On the other side of the coin, many workers are full time, permanent ‘core’ employees of certain firms whose activities could be described as ‘peripheral’ to an industrial complex. This includes activities such as building services, commercial security services, cafeteria services, landscaping services, and so on. Thus, an alternative approach to analyzing labor market flexibility is to make a distinction between flexibility in work and flexibility in employment re lations, recognizing that both categories cut across firm boundaries. The term ‘work’ refers to the actual nature of the activities people do while engaged in the process of production. It includes the physical and mental processes required, the tools and technology used, and the relations with other people – customers, co workers, colleagues from other firms, suppliers, and so on – that they engage in during the process of performing those activities. ‘Flexible’ work – rapid change in the arena of work with little penalty in time, effort, or performance – directly influences the demand for labor in the way often de scribed as numerical flexibility – fluctuating demand in the quantity of work needed in any particular enterprise. Flexible work also refers to changes workers experience on the job, the changing value of their skills and ex perience in the marketplace, the changing social rela tionships and patterns of communication required to be effective in performing their work, and so on. Work is distinct from employment. This term refers to the nature of the relationship with the employer, the pro cesses employers use in directing, motivating, and moni toring workers activities and the nature of compensation provided for the activities performed. Temporary em ployment, part time employment, self employment,
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independent contractors, and various compensation schemes that link compensation to performance (stock options, performance evaluations, etc.) are all issues related to flexible employment, but may or may not be directly linked with flexible ‘work’. For example, temporary em ployees at an electronic manufacturing services firm doing routine assembly work may be performing routine work (at least for a period of time) while being engaged in flexible employment.
Geography and Labor Market Dynamics Geography plays an important role, in particular, in shaping the dynamics of labor flexibility. Labor geog raphers have illuminated essentially three ways that geography matters for labor relations, providing par ticular insights into the complex and variable dynamics of labor flexibility. First, labor relations are embedded in spatial relationships that operate at multiple scales, from local to global. The geographical relationships within which labor market actors operate significantly shape the possibilities for social relationships, facilitating certain types of flexibility and constraining others. Thus, some thing as simple as workers being able to physically reach their workplace depends on a certain degree of territorial proximity, and is shaped by the quality of regional transportation systems, and spatial patterns of residential and industrial/commercial land use. Similarly, global production systems are dependent on the spatial infra structure of communication, transportation, and electric power distribution systems as well as the characteristics of labor quality and regulatory systems in any particular place. Labor flexibility, like all forms of labor relations, involves labor market actors connecting both ‘horizon tally’ within particular territories, and ‘vertically’ across multiple sites within complex spatial divisions of labor or migratory labor networks. The character of different places (including skills and demographics of the work force, regulatory and tax environment, and types and quality of necessary infrastructure) and the spatial di mensions of these labor relationships shape the types of flexibility different labor market actors try to pursue or are willing to tolerate. Furthermore, the strategic choices labor market actors make are not simply a result of an economic landscape, but also in turn shapes that land scape in an ongoing socio spatial dynamic. The economic landscape is a reflection of, as well as constitutive of, labor relations. Second, these economic landscapes are highly differ entiated spatially. The people, firms, and labor market institutions that shape labor relations come together in unique ways in different locations, related to the par ticular nature of their embeddedness in different hori zontal and vertical spatial relationships, ranging from
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local to global scales. Labor market actors seek to utilize this spatial variation to gain advantages and to minimize their vulnerability to labor restructuring. Again, the variation in these characteristics of particular places en ables certain forms of flexibility and constrains others, leading to highly differentiated strategic choices for labor market actors located in different places – choices that further reinforce this spatial variation. This is perhaps most obvious in comparing different national experiences with flexibility. Thus, for example, while short term em ployment relations, high use of temporary help firms, extensive subcontracting arrangements, and individual ized compensation may be widely accepted in the US, such arrangements may be staunchly resisted in Germany or France, which have stronger labor market regulations and higher levels of national level industrial bargaining. Yet such geographical differences also affect patterns of flexibility within countries. For example, regional differ ences in things such as levels of unionization, workforce characteristics, sectoral structure of the economy, or even cultural norms and expectations shape the forms of flexibility that labor market actors try to pursue. Finally, labor market actors’ decisions enfold over time, and the cumulative effect of their decisions is re flected in their spatial relationships. These spatial rela tionships maintain significant social importance often long after the time they were initially created. The economic landscapes that get ‘laid down’ in previous rounds of economic activity continue to shape how new relationships unfold, again shaping the types of flexibility that can be pursued in particular places. Thus, for ex ample, many territories that developed in the context of mass production systems, with factories employing large numbers of people in standardized, regular shift based employment, often have particular spatial arrangements of residential and industrial space, with particular transportation systems connecting them and particular social norms associated with regular work hours and separation between home and work life. Such spatial arrangements and cultural norms often constrain the development of production systems based on many dif ferent worksites employing smaller numbers of people (often in office and commercial environments, not in dustrial), with more varied work hours and constantly shifting employment relationships. It is important to note that with the development of new technologies along with cheaper global transporta tion and communications, firms have been generally more able than workers to take advantage of ‘spatial fixes’ to labor problems they encounter. Thus, in the simul taneously antagonistic and mutually dependent nature of the relationship between workers and employers, em ployers frequently have more power and are thus able to pursue forms of labor flexibility that meet their interests more readily than many workers.
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Labor Flexibility
Flexibility and Labor Market Policy The distinction between different types of flexibility is especially important when considering labor market policies and regulation. Since the 1980s, many govern ments, particularly in Europe, Asia, and the developing world, have sought to promote economic competitiveness by deregulating labor markets, thereby promoting greater ‘labor flexibility’. The arguments put forward are that lightly regulated labor markets, with low unemployment benefits, tight benefit conditionality, weak trade unions, and low coverage of collective bargaining, deliver higher levels of growth and employment than more regulated systems. In these ‘flexible’ labor markets, workers will arguably be more quickly redeployed from declining sectors or regions to growing sectors or regions. In es sence, the argument is that by enabling the labor market to respond more quickly, the risk of long term structural unemployment and investment in stagnant industries is minimized. The argument suggests that there is a direct tradeoff between promoting labor flexibility and pro moting social welfare, at least as it has been pursued through labor market regulation. Many studies, however, have challenged these con nections between lightly regulated labor markets and economic performance. Empirically comparing growth rates across Europe and North American, there is little correlation between growth rates and overall measures of labor market flexibility. Theoretically, many analysts point out that light labor market regulation and low so cial benefits may in fact ‘hurt’ growth. For example, workers with access to low unemployment benefits of limited duration may be forced to take ‘any’ job that happens to be available, when it would be better for them and the economy in general to wait longer, improve their skills, find a better match, work more productively and earn higher wages. Ultimately, the relationship between flexibility and security, on the one hand, and flexibility and growth, on the other hand, depends on what type of flexibility is being considered. Here, the distinction between work and em ployment is critical, as the simultaneous goal of promoting flexible work and employment security can be pursued through different means. In Europe, the concept of ‘flex icurity’ has taken increasing hold. Flexicurity has been defined as ‘‘a policy strategy that attempts, synchronically and in a deliberate way, to enhance the flexibility of labor markets, the work organization and labor relations on the one hand, and to enhance security – employment security and social security – notably for weaker groups in and outside the labor market on the other hand.’’ The ap proach has been particularly strong in Denmark and the Netherlands, but has also been taken up by the Inter national Labor Organization (ILO), the European Union, and a number of specific European countries.
The specific mix of policies in efforts to promote ‘flexicurity’ vary depending on the context. Promoting flexibility in work tasks often includes efforts to pro mote skill development and life long learning, as much as they do more flexible work tasks and mechanisms to improve labor market adjustment to changing com petitive conditions. Efforts to promote security include not just efforts to promote income or job security, but also efforts to improve social wage supports, re em ployment systems, and greater employability in the external labor market.
See also: Fordism, Post-Fordism and Flexible Specialization; Labor Control Regime; Labor Market; Labor Markets, Regional; Spatial Division of Labor; Transnationalism and Labor Geography.
Further Reading Arthur, M. and Rousseau, D. (eds.) (1996). The Boundaryless Career: A New Employment Principle for a New Organizational Era. New York: Oxford University Press. Auer, P., Cazes, S. and International Labor Office Employment Strategy Department (2003). Employment Stability in an Age of Flexibility: Evidence from Industrialized Countries. Geneva: ILO. Benner, C. (2002). Work in the New Economy: Flexible Labor Markets in Silicon Valley. Oxford: Blackwell Press. Bernhardt, A., Morris, M., Handcock, M. and Scott, M. (2001). Divergent Paths: Economic Mobility in the New American Labor Market. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Blank, R. (ed.) (1994). Social Protection versus Economic Flexibility: Is There a Trade Off? Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Cappelli, P. (1999). The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market Driven Workforce. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Carnoy, M. (2000). Sustaining the New Economy: Work, Family, and Community in the Information Age. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Freeman, R. (2005). Labor market institutions without blinders: The debate over flexibility and labor market performance. Working Paper No. 11286. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau for Economic Research. Herod, A. (2001). Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism. New York: Guilford Press. ILO (2004). World summit for social development. ILO High Level Meeting. Geneva: International Labor Organization. ILO (2005). Labor market flexibility, stability and security. 7th European Regional Meeting. Geneva: International Labor Organization. Massey, D. B. (1995). Spatial Divisions of Labor: Social Structures and the Geography of Production. New York: Routledge. Melvin, B. (1994). Labor market flexibility: A changing international perspective. Monthly Labor Review 117, 53 60. Muffels, R. (ed.) (2008). Flexibility and Employment Security in Europe: Labour Markets in Transition. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Neumark, D. (ed.) (2000). On the Job: Is Long term Employment a Thing of the Past? New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Ozaki, M. (1999). Negotiating Flexibility: The Role of the Social Partners and the State. Geneva: International Labor Office. Peck, J. (1996). Work Place: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets. New York: Guilford Press. Piore, M. J. and Sabel, C. F. (1984). The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity. New York: Basic Books. Pollert, A. (1988). Dismantling flexibility. Capital and Class 34, 42 75.
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Rainnie, A. and Herod, A. (2007). Spatializing industrial relations. Industrial Relations 38, 102 118. Rousseau, D. (1995). Psychological Contracts in Organizations: Understanding Written and Unwritten Agreements. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Scott, A. J. (1988). New Industrial Spaces: Flexible Production Organization and Regional Development in North America and Western Europe. London: Pion. Standing, G. (1999). Global Labor Flexibility: Seeking Distributive Justice. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
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Wilthagen, T., Tros, F. and Lieshout, H. V. (2004). Towards ‘flexicurity’? Balancing flexibility and security in EU member states. European Journal of Social Security 6, 113 136.
Relevant Websites http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/faculties/law/research/flexicurity/ Tilburg University: Tilburg Flexicurity Research Programme.
Labor Geography T. D. Rutherford, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Business Unionism A strategy practiced by many North American unions in the post-World War II boom era of narrowly focusing on advancing wages and benefits for their membership in exclusion of making links with wider social movements or engaging in aggressive organizing. This also meant accepting managerial prerogatives over business strategy, investment, and the workplace. Internationalism A strategy which involves unions and the labor movement organizing or engaging in solidarity across different nations. Dating back to the nineteenth-century internationalism has taken new impetus from globalization and increasingly involves networks of unions and labor activists organizing between advanced and developing economies not only over more traditional workplace issues but also trade, social, and environmental policies. Labor Market Intermediary Refers to institutions which match labor supply to demand. This can include public and private employment agencies, professional associations, and unions. Such institutions often play a critical role in urban or other local labor markets characterized by employment in turn characterized by high turnover not only in high-skill new-economy industries but also in services such as cleaning and catering. Spatial Division of Labor An important concept developed by Doreen Massey and Richard Meegan in which a region is viewed as the outcome of successive rounds of investment or accumulation reflecting the role the region has played in the wider national and international division of labor. It thus refers to the way different tasks in production are allocated to particular groups of people in particular locations. Thus, at any point in time the spatial division of labor is both the legacy of past investment and class relations and an influence on future investment and class relations. Spatial Fix A concept first developed by the Marxian research of David Harvey. It refers to the way in which the process of capital accumulation is spatially uneven and that capital seeks places in which the conditions for profit realization are superior to other locations for reasons of less competition, stronger market growth, and/or lower labor costs. Thus while capitalists may attempt to resolve any crisis of profitability via introducing new products or technology, work reorganization, and intensification, they may also do this by relocating to these places.
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Introduction Labor geography’s development from the mid 1980s onwards reflects debates and developments which oc curred both outside and within human geography. In social sciences generally and especially history and sociology, researchers such as E. P. Thompson, Herbert Gutman, and others were pioneers in recognizing the role of subaltern and working class agency in wider social change. In a context of increasing labor and social unrest which characterized advanced capitalism during the 1960s and 1970s, researchers in North America and the UK adopted a range of Marxian and radical theoretical frameworks, which challenged elitist or Whiggish inter pretations of history. Within human and especially economic geography, the adoption of structural Marxist perspectives on geo graphical and economic change lead to the development, by Doreen Massey, of meso level concepts such as the spatial division of labor. Although the spatial division of labor was principally firm focused, as this concept de veloped, the importance of labor and class relations in determining the form of local change was stressed. Moreover, increasing criticism of the often abstract and deterministic nature of structural Marxism leads to greater attention to the agency of workers and other actors in shaping change, especially in the UK where this shift was facilitated by a number of government funded research programs on the socioeconomic restructuring of localities. Thus, by the mid 1980s human geographers began a serious examination of the agency of labor in shaping capitalism. In the United States, Peet derived indexes of high and low class struggle states based on patterns of strike activity. Research also reflected concerns over the adverse impacts of economic restructuring and the in creasing adoption of neoliberal policies by advanced capitalist states. This emerging approach was best sum med up by Herod as a move from a geography of labor which was seen to characterize neoclassical and Marxian perspectives, to a labor geography, in which the con struction of place and space reflected the collective capacity of labor to impact change at different scales. The latter perspective recognized that the biological and so cial reproduction of labor was inevitably place bound. Since labor is relatively immobile in comparison to capital, it often places greater significance on the eco nomic viability of localities in ways that can militate against the development of a wider class consciousness. Nonetheless, labor’s struggles means that capital is not
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the sole agent in the construction of landscape and in deed workers are also capable of developing their own ‘spatial fix’. In theoretical terms labor geography became increasingly eclectic. Marxism still influences labor geography but many labor geographers adopt less es sentialist and sometimes poststructural positions in which labor is seen as more fragmented and differentiated. Whatever perspective is used, labor geography views the scaling and the landscape of capitalism as the outcome of conflicts between labor and capital’s different spatial fixes. Based on this broad consensus, labor geography grew quickly during the 1990s examining patterns of trade union organization, the role of working class agency in the creation of agricultural landscapes, and the rescaling of worker struggles especially internationally as global ization became more significant. Labor geographers published in all of the important journals in human geography with Antipode – the journal of radical geog raphy and a number of key edited collections from this journal, being an especially critical outlet. As labor geography developed, there was also an increasing rec ognition of the differentiated nature of labor in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity which challenged traditional workplace and hierarchical forms of union organization. This contributed to new forms of organization based on social movement unionism stressing greater links to communities not only within localities and nations but also internationally. Outsourcing and new forms of work organization such as lean production also attracted at tention as did worker organization outside of traditional manufacturing in services such as cleaning, catering, and hotels. All these themes will be explored in greater detail below.
Key Themes within Labor Geography Geographies of Trade Unionism In most labor geography the most important institution for worker agency in capitalism is the trade union. The trade union is a formal association for the collective representation of employee interests and it is usually organized on the basis of ‘locals’ representing workers in a given enterprise or firm. Typically, locals are part of unions representing workers in a particular industry or sector at a national and even international scale. Unions can be occupational or craft based, employer specific, organized industrially irrespective of occupation, or general in that they represent workers regardless of in dustry or sector. Because trade unions negotiate the terms and conditions of work with employers, they can have an important impact on the economic geography of capitalism. Moreover, the ability of unions to be organ ized and negotiate effectively can be highly uneven and often dependent on local factors. Thus, labor geographers
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including Herod on US dockers unions negotiating technological change and Mitchell who stressed how struggles over defining union organizers as part of the local community during migrant worker union organ izing in California in the 1930s have often explored how differences in local leadership, organizing traditions, and community institutions and economies contribute to an uneven geography of trade union organization. Many of the conditions of union organization are in evitably local, but labor geographers also stress how na tional and increasingly global factors play an often determining role on the impact of unions. Researchers in the 1980s and 1990s emphasized the importance of legal frameworks at state or provincial as well as national scales in regulating unions and overall employee–employer relations. More lately, geographers such as Peck, Herod, and Wills have engaged more directly with industrial relations perspectives, while arguing for the significance of geographic differentiation on how industrial relations systems operate. These understandings of unions assisted labor geog raphers to analyze how unions were undermined in the 1980s and 1990s by economic restructuring and the in creasing adoption of neoliberalism. Thus, research by Clark in the United States argued that a contributing factor to the post 1975 crisis of unions was the way in which the 1930s New Deal defined unions in terms of local interests and how National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decisions during the 1980s increasingly favored employers. In the UK, Sunley and Blomley also em phasized the role of changes in labor law in the defeat of the 1984–85 miners strike. They also analyzed regional patterns of decline and change, while Massey and Painter as well as Martin, Sunley, and Wills, debated whether unions had been able to maintain their core regional strength in the wake of restructuring and an increasingly hostile regulatory environment. During the 1990s, labor geographers studied organ izational innovations by unions as they responded to the challenges posed by neoliberal restructuring. The tradi tional workplace centered and often formal hierarchical orientation of unions was seen as vulnerable if not in creasingly irrelevant, as firms reorganized work via out sourcing networks (often on a global basis) and the share of unionized employees declined in most industrial na tions. The ending of the post war industrial relations consensus in the advanced economies meant that more bureaucratic ‘business unionism’ with its narrow focus on improving wages and benefits was also questioned. In creasingly, in confronting neoliberalism unions were also making links to wider community movements and coa litions not only to sustain investment and employment but also to protect overall social and environmental programs. While unions often had important links with their communities – for example, in the United States
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during the organizing drives of the 1930s and 1940s – contemporary community or social unionism challenged union structures and strategies. As documented by Wills and other labor geographers, unions shifted toward a more networked, if not heterarchic, organizational forms in which the traditional focus of unions around workplace wages and conditions was less important than broader coalitions with a range of social groups over a wider set of issues. Social movement unionism meant that while unions could draw on a rich legacy of organizational experience, they were increasingly involved in coalitions with diverse groups in which they might not exercise authority and leadership. These campaigns reflected a blurring of workplace and community interests – espe cially where this involved those traditionally more mar ginalized by unions such as women and workers of color. It could also involve international social movements as globalization led to protests against organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Inter national Monetary Fund (IMF).
Internationalism Internationalism became an increasing important strat egy for labor in the 1990s and 2000s. Yet as labor geog raphers revealed, this trend was marked by tensions and contradictions. Indeed, as Herod has documented unions had a long international tradition dating from the nine teenth century of involvement in various socialist inter nationals to the role of large US international unions during the Cold War period in organizing non Com munist unions in developing nations. With the end of the Cold War and as globalization developed, international ism took on a new dimension. As key sectors of manu facturing and later services began shifting to newly industrializing economies, workers and their unions in the advanced economies were confronted with dilemmas of how best to react to this challenge. In many instances they pressed their respective governments for protection of their industries from imports. As such, workers in developed nations might practice ‘accommodatory soli darity’ in which the spatial interests of advanced econ omy workers were protected although this went against stronger international solidarity with developing nation workers. Yet as research by Johns on US Guatemala union networks showed, workers could also develop ‘transformative solidarity’ strategies in which protecting class interests internationally prevailed. Despite tensions and overlap between these strategies, the struggle be tween the United Steel Workers in West Virginia and the Ravenswood Aluminum Company documented by Herod revealed that unions across a wide range of na tions could support the cause of workers and win by using the firm’s global networks against itself.
Globalization also raised the issue of how labor or ganized and fought campaigns. For many labor geog raphers such as Waterman and Wills, globalization undermined classical labor internationalism based on nationally oriented trade unions. Furthermore, as noted earlier, their hierarchical and bureaucratic nature and their narrow focus on a homogenous (i.e., male) working class subject made classical labor internationalism ill suited to participate in many contemporary struggles, whether they are anti globalization, or environmentally and community oriented. However, freed from the dead hand of Cold War politics, unions were seen as reacting to the threats and opportunities presented by global ization by developing a new labor internationalism, or global social movement unionism (GSMU). Thus, glob alization actually offers an important opportunity for unions in north and south to find common ground since both are increasingly confronted by the specter of rapid shifts in investment and neoliberalism. Like social movement unionism, GSMU is based less on official bureaucratic ties and more on direct contacts between shop floor workers and community and grass roots or ganizations and broader campaigns of solidarity between workers in North and South. As such, it is argued that this new international unionism is, like capitalism itself, becoming more network based and is one in which labor does not have a privileged role, but is nonetheless central to a broader struggle. However, there are great problems which confront any move toward GSMU. Thus, as Johns and Vural docu mented, clothing worker union’s campaigns with con sumer groups against sweatshop labor both domestically and in developing nations, while achieving some positive aims, also illustrated conflicts over tactics (boycotts ver sus organizing, protectionism versus greater trade open ness) between these different groups. Yet despite such tensions, attempts to develop international solidarity are not confined to fostering North–South links. Thus, Lambert and Webster show how unions in the Southern Hemisphere have connected democratic and independ ent unions struggles in South Africa and Australia and have coordinated a 1 day general strike by unions in South Africa, India, and Korea. Yet thus far continental economic integration such as the EU and NAFTA has advantaged capital rather than labor. Thus, Hyman, Wills, and Sadler have argued that European integration has contributed to the erosion of relatively strong national industrial relations systems, and newly created institutions such as European Works Councils (EWC) have provided more of a forum for an employer dominated corporate monolog to worker representatives than it has encouraged pan European unionism. However, there is some evidence that even though they are relatively weak institutions, EWCs have potential to create greater international collaboration
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between unions, while other research reveals that NAFTA’s North American Agreement on Labor Co operation (NAALC) can be used to expose poor labor standards and anti union practices. Despite evidence of a shift toward GSMU strategies, this is not simply a linear move from local to national to global scales. Because even global capital must of necessity locate somewhere, locally based union cam paigns can be effective if they are focused at strategic locations of TNCs. Moreover, in some cases national unions have developed over international ones even as globalization leads to increased economic integration. Thus in the mid 1980s, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) broke from their US based international union, the United Auto Workers (UAW). As Holmes and Rusonick’s study reveals this reflected not only insti tutions and leadership differences but increased uneven development between the US and Canadian automobile industries. Moreover, there is debate among unions and labor geographers that, with unions struggling to maintain themselves in their own national space, whe ther making global campaigns the principal strategy for labor is an effective use of their resources. Thus, Gindin argues that nationally based (as opposed nationally fo cused) unionism did not preclude global solidarity, but could be internationally progressive if by example it could show that labor could confront and defend its interests versus capital.
Gender, Race, and Ethnicity Initially, most research in labor geography focused rela tively exclusively on unions and often implicitly assumed a homogenous, white male subject. Yet both globally and increasingly in advanced economies not only were the great majority of workers not unionized, but they were mostly workers of color or were women who had tradi tionally not been strongly organized by unions. During the 1970s and 1980s, feminist writers and especially socialist feminists such as Rowbotham drew attention to the gen dering of work and the activism of women to address in justices to them not only as workers but as women and other identities. By the 1990s, labor geographers increas ingly stressed the differentiated and diverse nature of labor and the challenges confronting these workers in organizing who were often highly disadvantaged in the labor market due to their identity. In so doing, labor geographers often adopted feminist and poststructural approaches em phasizing identity and performativity which deepened and complicated the more traditional concerns of labor geog raphers with class. Feminist inspired research by Hanson and Pratt on workplace–domestic sphere relations in Worcester, Massachusetts revealed how women experi enced this differently than men and, along with ethnic
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diversity, helped determine patterns of occupational seg regation and shape attitudes toward unionization. Wright’s studies on the Mexican Maquiladoras revealed that sys tematic devaluation of women’s bodies and work by their male counterparts and employers contributed to high levels of violence including a wave of unsolved murders against women. The local community and unions were largely indifferent until as series of campaigns by women began to highlight this violence. These issues were further highlighted as labor geog raphers investigated workers organizing outside of the traditionally more white male industries of mining, automobiles and steel manufacturing, such as cleaning, catering and retailing, and other services characterized by predominantly female and non white workforces. For many of these groups identity struggles coincided and, in some cases, superceded more traditional union concerns in the workplace. The need to respect difference yet build sustainable coalitions between different groups also led to greater stress on workplace–community links such as the Justice for Janitors campaigns by a principally Latino workforce in Los Angeles documented by Savage, but also by Tufts and Wills respectively on hotel employees in Toronto, Canada, and London, UK. The fact that in many cases employees in these industries might also be illegal immigrants often increased their marginalization. Yet organizing these workers challenged unions in other ways. Often the predominantly white male leadership of unions was unable to connect with the identity, recognition, and in some cases the workplace struggles of their member ship. Unlike the mass workplaces of industries like auto mobiles, in catering and cleaning and other services, employees might be scattered in small groups over a host of workplaces and thus organizing drives required greater time and resources. This could also lead to innovations in union organizing as in the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles, in which the traditional model of workplace organizing was replaced by regional collective agree ments. Moreover, in developing stronger links with a di verse community unions might devote greater resources to nonwork ‘cultural activities’ examined by Houston and Palido and Tufts, such as staging plays, skits, sponsoring choirs, and participating in arts festivals. An important question was how to reconcile traditional union concerns with greater equality and redistribution with the need for greater recognition by these groups and whether in creasing the community orientation of unions by recog nizing different identities served to develop solidarity or weaken it.
New Forms of Work Organization A major theme in labor geography is the organization of work. Initially, labor geographers dealt with issues of
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work organization and new technology more as one factor influencing trade union organization – thus, for example, Herod’s research on the impact of container ization on US east coast unionism during the 1960s. During the 1990s, new forms of work organization and technology became a more central concern. As debates over the impact of Japanese production methods most notably lean production in such industries as automobiles began to intensify, labor geographers became increasingly interested in the labor process, how technology was utilized, and the social relations between workers and managers. This empirical concern coincided with at tempts to more deeply theorize work, labor markets, and the reproduction of labor under capitalism by researchers such as Hanson and Pratt noted above and later Peck. Work and labor market organization were recognized as a spatially segmented and uneven process which featured contests for the control of work between labor and capital and institutions which regulated skill formation and overall social reproduction. In understanding the impact of new forms of work and technology, labor geographers also emphasized the active agency of labor. Capital needs to control labor and also to gain its consent and develop its subjective capacity. Given this, workers and unions can assert influence in shaping and humanizing work, but the extent of this influence has weakened due to intensifying competition and volatility in labor markets as the ability of firms to access a global labor force has increased. Nonetheless, as Herod documented, workers and their unions could take advantage of new forms of production organization such as Just in Time (JIT) systems in the automobile industry which, through its reliance upon low inventories and tight delivery schedules, made firms highly vulnerable to employee in dustrial action. Similarly, labor geographers studied the adoption of lean production methods in the automobile and other industries which was often associated with an intensification of work and, as Leslie and Butz showed, led to increasing injuries to worker’s bodies. Yet other studies also revealed that lean production could be negotiated by unions that modified work practices in ways that go against a simple diffusion of a ‘one best practice’ as suggested in such management oriented publications as The machine that changed the world. As Rutherford and Gertler showed in a study of the Canadian and German auto industries, the ability of union locals to negotiate the adoption of lean production depended especially on national scale union resources and industrial relations institutions. Labor geographers have also researched the impact of new forms of work organization in nonmanufacturing sectors such as services. Thus, work intensification, out sourcing networks, in addition to increasing shares of contingent (part time/temporary and flex time) em ployees have become the hallmarks of many sectors such as financial services, the public sector, retailing, and
cleaning and catering. For example, Reimer examined the impact of privatization on catering and cleaning em ployees in the UK and a recent co edited Aguiar and Herod volume based on studies of cleaning workers in North and South documented the impacts of de regu lation, and new forms of work design and intensification on their struggles. More generally, as the traditional work domestic sphere divide has become a blurred and infor mation technology (IT) linked ‘work nexus’, as Allen and Henry drawing on Beck argue, risk (of unemployment, income loss, etc.) is being shifted from employer to employee. Similarly, in emerging cultural and creative industries such as new media, even high skilled employ ment is project based such that an employee’s tenure in any one workplace may not extend beyond an immediate contract. Labor geographers such as Christopherson note how this situation, coupled with a highly educated young workforce sometimes unsympathetic to collective bar gaining, makes new media, cultural, and information and communication technology (ICT) industries difficult for unions to organize. Yet as both Christopherson and Ben ner’s research reveals, some unions have adopted an older guild hall strategy to represent contract and other em ployees as labor market intermediaries by providing training, healthcare, pensions, and other benefits from which they are often excluded. Like in the Justice for Janitors campaigns these shifts coincide with a move from individual workplace toward regional or local bargaining strategies which match shifting patterns of employment. More generally, as national systems of industrial relations have either weakened or decentralized, unions in Ger many, Italy, and Scandinavia have developed a stronger regional and local orientation in part to deal with large firms outsourcing to SMEs and other suppliers on this geographical basis. Yet despite this rescaling of industrial relations governance, national systems still matter to employee representation and work organizations – thus even in new media, Swedish and German employees are much more likely to be part of a union or works councils than their North American counterparts. In the former nations, firms in both more traditional manufacturing and knowledge intensive new economy sectors also rely on these institutions for initiating and implementing innovation.
Retrospect and Prospects for Labor Geography Over the past quarter century, labor geography has made a vital contribution to the development of human geog raphy. In recognizing the agency of labor not only has it generated a wealth of empirical research but in so doing it has developed a greater sense of the dynamic in the development of the scaling and landscape of capitalism as
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a product of labor’s struggles. It has also recognized and provided insights into the differentiated nature of labor both within the workplace and the community in con tributing to the uneven nature of labor organization. Despite such an undeniable and rich legacy, several criticisms can be made of the approach. As an over re action to the earlier narrow focus on capital, at times labor geography has abstracted labor from the broader political economy of restructuring. While it is true workers have both individual and collective agency in creating their own spaces, this occurs within a broader context of capital accumulation. Thus, labor geographers need to be careful not to view labor or the spaces it creates, as the result of a purely autonomous agency. There has also been a general eschewing of the impli cations of labor’s struggles for the political economy of capitalism. The theoretical eclecticism of labor geog raphy has no doubt facilitated its ability to highlight difference and avoid essentialism, yet it may also fetter abstraction and synthesis. Also understandably, labor geography has focused on the scalar politics of worker struggles and distributional and solidarity issues rather than dealing with labor’s agency within production. Thus, despite the existence of a significant institutional and industrial relation’s litera ture on unions and innovation, little attention has been paid in the labor geography literature to the role that unions play in shaping technological change and firm innovation, or with a few exceptions such as DiGiovanna, cluster/industrial district governance. Similarly, while researchers such as Clark and Rutherford have focused on labor’s relationship with the state (especially national) and state policy formation, overall this has been a lacuna in labor geography. Furthermore, labor geographers have begun to engage more directly with industrial relations approaches, but because of the more empirical and loc alist tendencies noted above, they have not addressed labor’s role in, for example, the wider institutional pol itical economy of innovation. Indeed, some might question whether unions deserve the singular attention paid to them by labor geographers given the reality that in most advanced and developing economies only a minority (and a declining minority at that) of employees are unionized. Certainly, despite an increasing interest in wider community movements, there is a relative lack of research by labor geographers on professional and other associations in which workers are also involved. Indeed, for some observers, unions are seen as increasingly irrelevant in an individualized economy, which is no longer considered as characterized by the formal employment relation of capitalism. Post structuralist geographers such as Gibson Graham strongly imply that unions and those in the formal economy are incapable of generating anti capitalist movements and indeed by their very nature both
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discursively and materially reproduce capitalism. Rather, informal or diverse economies outside of the formal wage economy are seen as generating noncapitalist spaces and the communities around them are seen to challenge capitalism by developing alternatives to wage work. Yet, if Marx’s prediction of a revolutionary proletariat has thus far proved illusive if not illusionary, it can be argued that whatever insights Gibson Graham have produced into the diverse dynamic of informal econ omies; these often are directly linked via outsourcing and other networks to capitalism. Nor is it clear what strat egies this leaves for unions and the great majority of workers who are engaged in formal wage work. Indeed, the last two decades have witnessed the rapid expansion of the global wage labor force, not its decline. Evidence also suggests that rather than the decline of unions being the result of some objective structural shift in the nature of work, its causes are more fundamentally institutional and legal. Where enabling legal frameworks remain in place such as in Scandinavia, unionization levels have remained high if not expanded over the last 25 years – even in new economy sectors. Surveys cited by Boxnall and Hayes in the United States, where unionization has fallen the most precipitously, suggest that the represen tation gap – the difference between those wishing to be in a union compared to those that are – is at a historical high constituting between one third and one half of the employed workforce. There remain good reasons for labor geographers to focus on unions for although they are not the sole associational activity of employees, they are one of the few independent institutions for repre senting their interests as workers. Furthermore, Gibson Graham rightly maintain that productive activity is not confined to the formal capitalist economy, yet it is dif ficult to conceive of any progressive, much less revo lutionary change, without some kind of independent representation and organizational activity by wage la borers in capitalism – especially given their strategic position within the formal economy. Still, whatever strategic position unions and work place organizing may play in the labor geography an alysis, there remain questions about how best these struggles should link to the community and other social movements. Recent commentaries in journals such as Antipode involving Amin and Thrift and labor geog raphers such as Hudson show that there continues to be debate about whether unions and more traditional labor concerns should continue to play a strategic role in a contemporary heterarchical left. Thus while its contri bution to human geography is undeniable, for many labor geographers the theoretical and empirical challenge re mains as it was articulated by Sheila Rowbotham, Lynn Segal, and Hillary Wainwright over a generation ago – namely how to go beyond the fragments?
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See also: Fordism, Post-Fordism and Flexible Specialization; Labor Control Regime; Labor Market; Labor Markets, Regional; Spatial Division of Labor; Transnationalism and Labor Geography.
Further Reading Aguigar, L. and Herod, A. (eds.) (2006). The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global Economy. Oxford: Blackwell. Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2005). What’s left: Just the future. Antipode 37, 220 238. Boxnall, P. and Hayes, P. (2005). Employee voice in the Anglo American world: An overview of five national surveys. Labor and Employment Relations Association Series, Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting, 7 9 January, 1 12. Castree, N., Coe, N., Ward, K. and Samers, M. (2004). Spaces of Work: Global Capitalism and Geographies of Labor. London: Sage. Christopherson, S. (2002). Project media in context: Regulatory change and the new geography of media. Environment and Planning A 34, 2003 2015. Clark, G. (1989). Unions and Communities under Siege: American Communities and the Crisis of Organized Labor. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Gibson Graham, J. K. (1996). The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Oxford: Blackwell. Gindin, S. (2004). Globalization and labour: Defining the ‘problem’ paper presented at Brandeis University 24 April 2004. Herod, A. (ed.) (1998). Organizing the Landscape: Geographic Perspectives on Labor Unionism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Herod, A. (2001). Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism. New York: Guilford. Hudson, R. (2006). On what’s right and keeping left: Or why geography still needs Marxian political economy. Antipode 38, 374 395.
Johns, R. and Vural, L. (2000). Class, geography and the consumerist turn. Environment and Planning A 32, 1193 1214. Leslie, D. and Butz, D. (1998). GM suicide: Flexibility, space and the injured body. Economic Geography 74, 360 374. Massey, D. (1984). Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production. London: Macmillan. Mitchell, D. (1996). The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Peck, J. (1996). Work Place: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets. London: Guilford. Rowbotham, S., Segal, L. and Wainwright, H. (1981). Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism. London: Merlin Press. Waterman, P. and Wills, J. (2001). Place, Space and the New Labor Internationalisms. Oxford: Blackwell. Wills, J. (2001). Community unionism and union renewal in the UK: Moving beyond the fragments at last? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26(4), 465 483. Wright, M. (2001). A manifesto against femicide. Antipode 33(3), 550 566.
Relevant Websites http://laborstrategies.blogs.com/global labor strategies/global unionism/ index.html Global labor strategies. http://www.ilo.org/global/lang en/index.htm International Labor Organization. http://www.learningwork.ca/csew/wg/lcu Learning community unionism center for study of education and work University of Toronto. http://www.seiu.org/property/janitors/ Service Employees International Union Justice for Janitors. http://www.caw.ca/index.asp The Canadian Auto Workers.
Labor Market P. Carmody, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Agglomeration Economies Economic advantages derived from business activities being located close to one another. Apartheid System of racial segregation and domination operated in South Africa in the latter twentieth century. Bretton Woods System System of fixed exchange rates globally established after the World War II. Capital Regime The rules governing movement of money across borders. Corporatism A system of state–society coordination, based around organized interest groups such as employers, trade unions, and farmers. Decommodification Removing something from the market sphere of social relations. Labor Power The ability to do work. Lumpen Proletariat Unemployed and excluded underclass. Primary or Primitive Accumulation Process through which communal land or other assets are made private (theft). Relational Assets Economic advantages derived from links and interactions with other economic actors, such as knowledge exchange. Social Reproduction Functions State functions undertaken to ensure that society is able to reproduce itself, generally including healthcare and educational provision. Wage Goods Goods commonly consumed by workers. Welfare Regime Set of rules governing access to state welfare entitlements and benefits.
Introduction: The History and Social Construction of the Labor Market The labor market and private property are the two fun damental and interrelated institutions of capitalist eco nomic systems. In conventional economic theory, labor is considered as a factor of production along with capital, land, and knowledge. In this conception, labor is the people employed in the production of goods and services, as well as their skills and effort. A market is a set of transactions where a commodity or service is bought and sold. The labor market is then the set of transactions where the ability to do work is contractually exchanged,
either formally or informally. Markets have geographies and while some, such as the stock market, have tended historically to be concentrated in particular locations, given their foundational importance labor markets tend to be geographically wider. Conventional economic theory treats labor as a commodity: something produced through, and sold on, the market. However, labor power is not a commodity in the same way as apples are, for example, because it is embedded in workers who are sentient human beings. Consequently labor power cannot be produced and tra ded in the same way as inanimate commodities, as ownership of work is never fully exchanged, and it is consequently subject to ongoing social monitoring and regulation. Labor is not produced through market mechanisms but in the family, and through the social reproduction functions of the state, such as education. As a result, labor power is what some have called a ‘fictitious’ or ‘psuedo commodity’, dependent on nonmarket re lations for its production. The fact that the supply of labor power is consequently only partially subject to the price mechanism of the market also calls for social regulation. In the advanced (post)industrial countries most members of society are dependent on wages for their primary income, because they do not own sufficient assets to enable them to live off these alone. Thus the unequal distribution of property impels some people to put their labor power on the market to ensure their own repro duction. Private property was, in turn, partly created through a process of what Karl Marx called primary, or primitive accumulation, and geographer David Harvey calls ‘‘accumulation through dispossession.’’ This was where property owned by no one, or by the community as a whole, was made private. The most famous example of this was the enclosure movement in sixteenth century Britain, where communal lands were fenced off by pri vate landlords. The dispossession which accompanied this process compelled those who lost access to land to sell their labor power on the newly emerging labor market. Newly ‘freed’ labor was then compelled to sell its services to the highest bidder. Free labor, as a social relation, was therefore created through the widening of the institution of private property. Dispossession deep ened the market for commodities, rather than people continuing to be self provisioning. Thus the creation of a labor market helped widen the market for commodities more generally, despite being initially associated with widespread increases in poverty.
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The ability of employers to adjust the amount of labor power purchased in line with production needs and the (circumscribed) spatial mobility of labor, so that it can migrate in response to changed economic conditions in different regions account, in part, for capitalism’s dynamism, flexibility, and longevity. However, the labor market is imbued with power relations, as workers’ de pendence on wages and their inability to limit the supply of labor puts them at a disadvantage in relation to busi ness (capital), as does capital’s greater spatial mobility. However, workers are also socialized to want to partici pate in the labor market through family traditions and associations, for example, so that the supply of labor power is not accomplished by the compulsion of market forces alone. Capital may be attracted or repelled by the nature and quality of locally available labor. The rules governing labor markets are subject to contestation by different social forces. Workers may resist the introduction of new technologies and work practices which are labor displacing, or increase managerial con trol. Exposure to business strategies which treat labor power as a commodity encourage workers to cohere and to form associations to promote their rights – trade unions. Thus the fact that labor is a social relation, as defined by lack of property and control of the labor process, also encourages it to become a collective actor. Trade unions typically lobby and struggle for more state, and less regulation by the market, so that there are better and more remunerative working conditions for their members; that is the so called ‘decommodification of labor’. Labor may successfully impose limits on the spatial extent of labor markets to preserve its members’ interests, and agglomeration economies, and attendant labor shortages, may give workers leverage in their struggles with business in particular places. This is also the case where there are specific skill shortages. On the other hand, employer’s associations typically argue that state over regulation is contrary to the inter ests of society, because by raising wages above their free market price, employers will reduce their demand for it, leading to unemployment. Under the Bretton Woods System, which restricted capital mobility until the 1970s, higher overall wages created more demand in national economies and so led to increased employment. Wages thus serve a dual role in capitalist societies as a source of demand, and also as a cost of production. This dualism partly explains why labor markets are sites or structures of conflict and accommodation between business and workers. In the labor market employers tend to favor: (1) numerical flexibility, that is that they have the ability to hire and fire in line with market conditions; (2) wage flexibility, so that they can adjust wages up or down in line with market conditions; and sometimes (3) functional flexibility, so that they can move workers between jobs
within the firm if needed. Often employers wish to re duce wage costs, although it may be possible, in some cases, to raise profits by paying workers more, so that they work harder – an effort bargain based on the so called ‘efficiency wage’.
Segmentation, Local and National Diversity: Developed and Developing Countries Labor markets are constituted geographically, and by oc cupation. The rules which govern the buying and selling of labor power, and the area in which these apply can be thought of as a particular labor market – for example, the labor market for software engineers in the US, or in ‘Silicon Valley’ in California. These rules are created and governed not only by different social coordination mech anisms, particularly the state and the market, but also by civil society organizations, such as trade unions, and by international organizations, such as the International Labour Organization of the United Nations. Labor mar kets are also segmented or divided locally based on the structure of the economy, occupation, race, gender, labor demand, and other forms of social regulation; that is the different sections, regionally, operate according to differ ent rules. Different countries have different welfare and labor regimes, or sets of rules, which de commodify labor to varying degrees. The welfare regime mediates the extent to which people are impelled to put their labor power on the market. Labor is substantially more de commodified in Western Europe than in the United States. This is sometimes called the ‘European social model’. In Japan, until recently, a widespread practice among major com panies was lifetime employment in order to foster worker loyalty and attachment. In developing countries without substantive welfare states, labor markets are freer and more rapacious. The idealized vision of perfectly competitive labor markets does not operate, even in developed countries. One study in the US in the 1960s found that only one in five workers operated in unstructured, competitive labor markets. Within firms there are internal labor markets, where people are promoted internally. Even in sup posedly free labor markets, such as the California fruit harvest, the supply of labor is regulated by labor con tractors; while employer’s associations organize to min imize wage competition between businesses. More recent attempts to establish a guest worker program in the US show that while labor power is desired, the people in which it is embedded are often not, and should return home after yielding up their work. In Southern Africa under apartheid domination, a similar system which sought to displace the costs of social reproduction to
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women in rural areas was developed. Male workers often migrated to work in mines in urban areas, whereas women were left in rural areas to raise the next gener ation of labor. In many parts of the developing world, but particu larly in Sub Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, most people work in either agriculture or the informal sector. Some argue that the retention of com munal property ownership in parts of Africa under colonial rule, and the absence of free labor markets ac counts for the underdevelopment of the continent, as capitalist social relations were not generalized, and commodity markets remained shallow. The influential dual economy model, of Sir William Arthur Lewis, posed the problem of economic development in formerly col onized countries as one of the intersectoral labor market: moving labor out of low productivity agriculture into high productivity manufacturing. Policies based on this model encouraged younger and more skilled workers to migrate to urban areas, contributing to uneven develop ment. Some also argue that regulation in the formal urban economy (sometimes called the covered sector) deepened dualism in the labor market by creating a so called ‘labor aristocracy’ of insiders in secure, regulated employment and an excluded ‘lumpen proletariat’ in the informal sector. For instance, in some African cities today up to 80% of the labor force is employed in the informal sector. What defines informality is lack of state regulation of the labor contract, and the absence of tax collection, although some governments, as in Malawi, have recently attempted to collect taxes from informal street traders. Geographers and others have noted the functional nature of urban dualism, as the formal sector sometimes relies on the informal sector to provide cheap wage goods. Informal labor markets are often thought of as unregulated; however, there are social institutions, other than the state, which structure them, such as kinship connections, for example. Affective or family ties may blunt the tendency to take unfair advantage of other’s labor, although informal labor market institutions may be extremely exploitative. Given the widespread poverty and lack of alternative income earning opportunities, around the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda there is a system, Jaboya, where female fish traders may exchange sexual favors to be allowed to buy stock from fishermen; making it rational for people to expose themselves to the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. In this instance sex work is traded for access to commodities and markets.
Globalization and Labor Market Restructuring Since the 1970s the global economy has entered a period of accelerated globalization. This has been facilitated by
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policies of economic liberalization, pioneered initially in Chile under the military dictator (and geographer) Augusto Pinochet, and subsequently adopted by the governments of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ron ald Reagan in the US, and by the international financial institutions of the World Bank and International Mon etary Fund through their Structural Adjustment Pro grams (SAPs). These SAPs sought to bid wages down to their supposed market clearing level – to make them low enough to encourage employers to mop up unemploy ment. However, there are physiological limits to treating labor as a commodity, as workers must be able to afford to eat. These limits were often breached under SAPs in Africa, with disastrous social, and sometimes political, consequences. The Thatcher and Regan revolutions were funda mentally about restructuring the labor market. In their analysis, the sluggishness of the UK and the US econ omies in the 1970s was the result of overprotection of workers from dismissal and an overgenerous state, which gave them the option of not working if they so chose. In the ‘free market’ or neoliberal formulation, the excessive power of labor contributed to wage inflation, under mining national economic competitiveness. Thus, the objective was to abolish the existing wage bargain be tween big business, labor, and government, and replace it with flexible labor markets based on market regulation. The social policy concomitant to this was workfare, which withdraws universal rights to welfare and makes it conditional on work. Structural changes in the global economy have meant that in some areas, the young, old, and certain dis advantaged groups have become excluded from the labor market. Sometimes this is presented as weak attachment to the labor market, with a resultant so called ‘culture of poverty’. The purported solution is coercive attachment to the labor market through workfare. One of the main aims of neoliberal globalization is to increase insecurity in the labor market’ to eliminate the difference between primary (core, secure) and secondary (insecure) labor markets, and to make them operate on a single global market logic where commodification is the norm. Neoliberal globalization can be thought of as an attempt to create a single global market for commodities, including labor. It attempts to reduce the complexity of local social relations (the places of labor) to the spaces of capital. The role of the state in increasing labor market flexibility has been central in this. Attempts to create a global labor market are achieved through trade and capital regime liberalization, which facilitate strategies such as ‘whipsawing’, where corpora tions reduce wages and working conditions by moving their factories to low cost overseas locations, or extract concessions from their workers by threatening to do so. The spatial mobility of multinational corporations in
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terms of where they locate their plants; where there are low corporate tax rates, for example, enables them to engage in what has been called regulatory arbitrage; creating pressure to bid down corporate tax rates and regulations globally, although there are also counter tendencies at play driven by agglomeration and scale economies. Sometimes these bidding down pressures are called a ‘race to the bottom’. For example, some states in the Southern US (the high growth ‘Sun Belt’) have so called ‘right to work’ laws, which enable workers not to have to join trade unions if they do not wish to, and not to have to observe strikes. Another way to think of these laws would be as ‘right to compete’ laws, which may strengthen the power and discretion of employers. There have also been attempts to introduce the global labor market logic regionally through the controversial European Commission Services Directive which would enable consumers to contract workers under the rules pertaining in the country of origin, rather than in the country in which the work is undertaken. In Europe this is sometimes referred to as the ‘Polish plumber’ issue, and some fear it will contribute to a regulatory race to the bottom in terms of conditions of labor service. However, even if there is regulatory convergence, local labor markets would still be unique because of differences in labor quality and rates of mobilization. Labor is also an agent of globalization, and its global organization predates the emergence of transnational corporations. Yet labor’s relations with capital are con tradictory, as it wants to increase wages, but also maintain employment and hence competitiveness. In the US, what has been called labor’s ‘go global’ policy has often been pursued in collaboration with capital to facilitate the US geoeconomic interests, particularly market opening. In other cases, however, trade unions reject collaboration and a narrow focus on regional labor market issues in favor of attention to broader societal concerns: social movement as opposed to business unionism. Under conditions of economic globalization, it is the cost properties of wages which come to the forefront of government policy, as they seek to contain them and/or raise labor productivity to achieve, or maintain, inter national competitiveness. The greater mobility of capital under globalization has led to pressure toward convergence on the neoliberal Anglo American approach globally. As a result of regu latory arbitrage, there has been a shift in taxation away from capital toward less spatially mobile factors of pro duction: land and particularly labor. However, higher taxes on labor raise the cost of employing workers, encouraging more capital intensive production methods, thereby po tentially raising unemployment. It may however be pos sible to reduce taxes on both labor and capital, thereby attracting investment away from other locations, while raising the absolute amount of tax raised. In a European
context this is sometimes referred to as ‘social’ or ‘regional dumping’, as locations with higher tax rates have less employment and higher social security expenditure. In terms of tradable goods and services, almost everywhere is potentially in competition with every where else under economic globalization, linking wages in different places through trade and investment. The labor market and wages are also regulated through macroeconomic policy. In order to prevent what is seen as excessive wage inflation, central bankers in the advanced economies ensure that unemployment does not fall below a certain level. Sometimes governments attempt to lower wage costs by encouraging more im migration. Some argue that the state is anxious to maintain a ‘reserve army of labor’ to ensure continued private sector profitability, thereby displaying its pro business bias. Governments may also liberalize trade to reduce domestic prices and contain pressure for wage increases, using the global market to discipline labor. The increased skill intensity of production and the decline in demand for semiskilled labor in rich countries is related to changed trading patterns and technological development. In order to retain or develop capital within the national economy, there is pressure on governments to ‘vocationalize’ the education system; to focus on the production of skills which are of use to business. This is sometimes presented as a process of upskilling to enable movement into more advanced economic activities where there is less competition, and which are consequently more profitable. Private business tends to under invest in skills development, because workers can move to better paying employment after they have been trained. Where labor markets are competitively regulated excessive staff turnover may prove costly for capital. Consequently, it often falls to the state to invest in education to solve this collective action problem for business. ‘Active labor market’ or ‘activation policies’, which seek to reduce the mismatch between supply and demand for labor, through training and education, were pioneered in the Scandinavian countries. Government responses to the problem of skill production, in part, determine whether economies follow ‘high’ or ‘low road’ paths, where increasing labor productivity through better skills and technology characterize the former, and the bidding down of wages the latter. Skills are also fungible or ‘leaky’ across national boundaries. There is a (nested) global labor market for highly skilled labor, with a substantial proportion of engineers in Silicon Valley coming from India, for ex ample; part of the so called brain drain, where tax payers in poor countries subsidize skill development for the high income countries. Business can use restrictions on immigration to its advantage by relocating to lower cost labor markets, as evidenced in the software sector in India, for example, where engineers typically earn
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roughly a tenth of what they would in the US. Where business cannot relocate, because it provides nontradable services or because of geographically embedded re lational assets or agglomeration economies, low cost immigrant labor may be sourced to provide janitorial services, for example. There is a debate about the effects this type of immigration has on wages; particularly whether it results in job displacement of indigenous workers, or raises economic growth and demand, as in digenous workers would not undertake these types of low skill, tedious jobs. The balance of academic research favors the latter interpretation. Some argue that in order to sidestep social restrictions on its profitability, capital is now trying to detach itself from labor, by investing in globalized financial activities, such as currency speculation. For example, General Motors, the major US car manufacturer, earns much of its profits from its credit business, rather than the sale of cars per se. In order to reduce wage and control costs there is also an ongoing substitution of capital for labor in some industries, with robots now often undertaking much of the car assembly, for example. However, as robots do not consume commodities, a question is who will buy the cars produced in such a scenario? This is partly re sponsible for a shift of work toward the service and in formation sectors in rich countries.
The Gendered Geography of Labor Markets and Homeworking For some, the center of the labor market is the rela tionship between home and work, which is deeply gen dered. Women’s segregation in the labor market is closely related to what are perceived to be societally appropriate roles for them. Women in paid employment often work closer to home, in more spatially restricted labor markets than men as a result of obligations associated with social reproduction functions in the household. This spatial restriction on job search areas may partially account for pay differentials between genders (the gender pay gap), although lower wages may mean women cannot afford some modes of transport, such as private cars, which might enable them to travel further afield. However, re search in the US found that African American and His panic women commuted as far to work as their male counterparts and spent more time commuting than Euro Americans, perhaps because they are largely reliant on public transport. The greater flexibility of labor markets globally has been associated with greater female participation and weaker labor contracts. The number of women at work in the US doubled from 1970 to 1997, from 30 to 60 million as overall wages stagnated or fell, and a second family income became more important. Feminisation also
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occurred because employers sought out (female) non unionized labor, and because of women’s struggles for labor market inclusion. Greater labor market flexibility has also been associ ated with the resurgence of the nineteenth century phenomenon of hiring homeworkers to sew garments, for example. Homeworking reduces overhead costs, such as the need for factories and lighting, and monitoring and control costs, as women engage in self exploitation at home in order to eliminate paying childcare. It also has the other advantage for business of fragmenting labor as a collective actor, and is based on piece rates, where workers are only paid for the number of items they produce. Italy has the highest proportion of people self employed in the older EU states as a result of outsourcing to female homeworkers by companies such as the clothes manufacturer Benetton. Benetton combines nineteenth century work practices with twenty first century tech nology, such as electronic point of sales devices in its stores, which transmit data on purchases instantaneously to headquarters to facilitate individualized restocking.
Alternative Labor Market Responses to Globalization While most governments around the world have pro moted neoliberal market regulation of labor, there have also been alternatives. A European corporatist response to globalization has been social pacting, where unions, government, and employers agree to contain wage increases in return for tax reductions, protection against layoffs, or improved public services. The socialist government in France in the 1990s introduced a statutory 35 h work per week to redistri bute employment. For a time this was compatible with accelerated economic growth and reduced unemploy ment. However, it has been criticized on the basis of the ‘lump of labor fallacy’. According to critics, this fallacy posits that there is a set amount of work to be done in any society, and that this can consequently be redistributed without welfare losses. However, these critics point out that as people differ in their skills, one person will not necessarily be able to do another person’s job, or to do it with the same efficiency. Consequently they argue that it is erroneous to assume that work can be redistributed. Some argue that strong social security systems are needed to cope with the vicissitudes of globalization. One policy based on this theory, pioneered in the Nether lands, is called ‘flexicurity’. This aims to combine flexible labor markets, so that the economy is competitive, with strong social security protection. Others argue that there is a need to go further than this and to reconfigure welfare systems around basic income grants which would be given to all members of society to ensure social
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inclusion. Some also argue for more individualized and tailored interventions to enable people to move into employment with training and job placement, and the importance of ensuring sufficient demand in the econ omy so that jobs are created: ‘bridge building programs’. There have also been innovations in the developing world with the Employment Guarantee Scheme, which guarantees public work to workless households in Maharashtra State; recently extended to a national level by the Indian government, for 100 days a year at least. Although taking different forms, struggles to make labor markets less exploitative will continue to be important in the twenty first century, as they were in the twentieth. See also: Africa; Apartheid/Post-Apartheid; Brain Drain; Civil Society; Competitiveness; Economics and Human Geography; Economy, Informal; Europe; Feminist Geography, Prehistory of; Fordism; Globalization and Transnational Corporations; Human Geography; Inequality; Informal Sector; Informalization; Labor Control Regime; Labor Flexibility; Labor Geography; Labor Markets, Regional; Labor Unionism; Migrant Workers; Neoliberal Economic Strategies; Neoliberalism; Poverty; Regional Competition, Regional Dumping; Relational Economic Geography; Structural Adjustment; Third World Cities; Underclass.
Further Reading Custers, P. M. (1997). Capital accumulation and women’s labour in Asian economies. London: Zed. De Koning, J. and Mosley, H. (eds.) (2001). Labour market policy and unemployment: Impact and process evaluation in selected European countries. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Esping Andersen, G. (1999). Social foundations of postindustrial economies. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Glyn, A. (2001). Social democracy in neoliberal times: The left and economic policy since 1980. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Hanson, S. and Pratt, G. (1995). Gender, work, and space. London: Routledge. Herod, A. (2001). Labor geographies: Workers and the landscapes of capitalism. London and New York: Guilford. Paratian, R. and Dasgupta, S. (eds.) (2004). Confronting economic insecurity in Africa. Geneva: International Labor Organization. Peck, J. (1996). Work place: The social regulation of labor markets. London and New York: Guilford. Peck, J. and Theodore, N. (2000). Beyond ‘employability’. Cambridge Journal of Economics 24, 729 749. Portes, A., Castells, M. and Benton, L. (eds.) (1989). The informal economy: Studies in advanced and less developed countries. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Prugl, E. (1999). The global construction of gender: Home based work in the political economy of the 20th century. New York: Columbia University Press. Santos, M. (1979). The shared space: The two circuits of the urban economy in underdeveloped countries. New York: Methuen. Standing, G. (1999). Global labour flexibility: Seeking distributive justice. London: Macmillan. Standing, G. (2002). Beyond the new paternalism: Basic security as equality. London: Verso. Sunley, P., Martin, R. and Nativel, C. (2006). Putting workfare in place: Local labour markets and the new deal. London: Blackwell.
Relevant Websites http://www.iza.org Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA). http://www.ictur.org International Center for Trade Union Rights (ICTUR). http://www.icftu.org International Congress of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). http://www.ilo.org International Labour Organization (ILO). http://www.sewa.org Self Employed Women’s Association of India (SEWA). http://www.etes.ucl.ac.be The Basic Income Earth Network (BLEN), Universite´ catholique de Louvain. http://www.epinet.org The Economic Policy Institute (EPI). http://www.usbig.net The U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network. http://www.wftucentral.org World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU).
Labor Markets, Regional A. E. Green, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Employment Field The area in which residents of a specified area actually work. Labor Demand Jobs offered by employers and vacancies. Labor Market Arena where those who are in need of labor and those who can supply the labor come together. Labor Market Intermediaries Organizations and individuals which help in matching of labor supply and demand, and so in the functioning of labor markets. Labor Shed A line enclosing the area which supplies workers to a workplace. Labor Supply This consists of people who are employed, as well as those people defined as unemployed or economically inactive, who can be considered to be potential workers. Low-Skill Equilibrium A situation in which employers compete in low value-added markets and demand relatively low skills from employees, which is ultimately reflected in the supply of skills. Self-Containment The extent to which an area has cross-boundary flows. Travel-to-Work Area An approximation to a selfcontained labor market based on commuting-to-work patterns.
Introduction Debates on labor market structures, outcomes, and policies focus on national and supranational , national , regional , and local level developments. Drivers oper ating at all these scales have uneven geographical impacts, such that there are important variations in structures and experience at regional and subregional scales – hence, the importance of a geographical per spective on labor markets. This contribution focuses on the inherently geographical nature of labor markets and their operation and character at regional and local scales. This is in keeping with the emergence of the ‘region’ (and subregions) as a significant and extensive level of policy design, service delivery, and governance in many advanced economies. Following an introduction to conceptual issues under pinning spatial labor markets, this article outlines how regional and local labor markets are not merely functional entities or spatial containers, but are also socio institutional constructs. Traditionally, geographers are interested in
spatial patterns of employment and nonemployment. Some of the key dimensions of labor market change are high lighted and geographical variations in labor market op portunities are outlined in this article. Policymakers at regional and local levels are concerned about these vari ations and what they mean for the achievement of eco nomic competitiveness and social cohesion. Moreover, with increased mobility of labor and capital, local, regional, national, and international influences impact on the for tunes of regional and subregional labor markets and there are increasingly important links between labor markets in different parts of the world, although the focus of this article is on regional labor markets and formal (as opposed to informal) working in ‘Northern developed countries’. Before advancing further, however, it is appropriate to outline what a ‘labor market’ is. Building on the notion of a ‘market’ where buyers and sellers come together to exchange goods and services, a ‘labor market’ is an arena where those who are in need of labor (i.e., employers) and those who can supply the labor (i.e., workers) come together. Employers and the jobs they provide represent the ‘demand side’ of the labor market and workers represent the ‘supply side’ of the labor market. For the labor market to operate successfully, there needs to be a ‘match’ between demand and supply. Hence, employers need information on the character istics and location of workers, and (potential) workers need information on what jobs are available, the re quirements of those jobs, and where those jobs are. Labor market intermediaries, such as public employment ser vices, recruitment agencies, and training providers, play an important role in facilitating the operation of labor markets by bringing demand and supply together. Often, however, there is a degree of ‘mismatch’ between demand and supply. ‘Mismatch’ can take two main forms. First, ‘skills mismatch’ occurs when the skills that workers supply do not match those demanded by employers. Second, ‘spatial mismatch’ occurs when there are ‘jobs without workers’ in one area and ‘workers without jobs’ in another area. The influence that the changing geography of employment has had on the access to jobs by less skilled workers and others who are otherwise disadvantaged in the labor market is a primary concern of the spatial mismatch debate, especially in North American cities. Here the decentralization of employ ment from central locations to urban peripheries has posed particular problems for those left behind, and es pecially those reliant on public transport, since public transport networks tend to operate along radial routes to
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central nodes, and so are not often well suited to the economic geography of the twenty first century.
Conceptual Issues: Regional and Local Scales The references above to ‘the labor market’ are suggestive of a unity absent in practice. In practice, ‘the labor market’ is composed of a multiplicity of submarkets de marcated by various criteria – including occupation, in dustry, and, of particular relevance here, geographical area. Hence, the labor market is said to be ‘structured’ in accordance with particular labor market subgroups; al though these labor markets for particular subgroups are linked because labor moves between occupations, sectors, and geographical areas. The geographical subdivision of labor markets is largely a consequence of the monetary and psychological costs of extensive daily commuting journeys to work and the often greater costs of migration between different areas. These costs spatially subdivide a labor force that is already stratified occupationally, because by deterring migration and restricting commuting they tend to restrict the labor market to that geographical area which is ac cessible from a given residence. Most individuals seek work, and most employers seek most of their workers, within a limited geographical area. The area within which employers seek their labor is known as a ‘labor shed’, while the area in which residents of a particular local area work is termed an ‘employment field’. Here, it is worthnoting that the effective employ ment field is delimited by the employment opportunities that workers are aware of. These may only be a subset of all opportunities that are objectively within reach, because there may be spatial and social barriers that influence labor market perceptions, causing some workers to search for work in only a small geographical area or to discount some job opportunities that are, in fact, available. The term ‘local labor market’ is used to describe a relatively self contained area in terms of journey to work flows, within which the majority of residents work and the majority of jobs are filled by local residents. The principle of self containment underlies the definition of functional local labor market areas. In reality, however, the ‘boundaries’ are not ‘fixed frontiers’; rather they may be thought of as resistance points on a scale of mobility or as ‘zones of transition’ between different spheres of in fluence. Administrative areas (e.g., counties, local dis tricts, and municipalities) vary markedly in the extent to which they are self contained in terms of commuting flows, and so many administrative areas are not functional labor market areas, and therefore, some commentators argue, are not suitable spatial units for local labor market policy. In order to overcome such deficiencies, there have
been a number of attempts to define functional local labor market areas. One of the best known is the travel to work areas (TTWAs) in the UK and similar constructs in other ‘developed’ economies. These provide an indi cation of the catchment areas of labor markets, and of how residency relates to workplaces. Hence, they fulfill the aim set out for them of representing a spatial unit for policymaking that reflects the relationship between labor supply and demand within a local area. As commuting flows have become longer and more diffuse as a result of increasing car use and lower com muting costs, TTWAs have become very large, taking on a regional, as opposed to a local scale, in some instances. As they increase in size, they are increasingly likely to conceal concentrations of high unemployment. TTWAs have been criticized by some geographers and policy analysts on the grounds that they conceal differences between different subgroups of the population. Here, it is salient to note that the majority of commuting journeys remain relatively short: despite debates about the impacts of globalization and hypermobilities, the majority of labor markets are locally specific – reflecting the fact that labor is less mobile than capital. However, there are important differences in commuting patterns between different subgroups of the population. So, for instance, commuting journeys and so local labor market areas for women tend to be smaller than those for men, those for part time workers tend to be smaller than those for full time workers, and those for unskilled workers tend to be smaller than those for workers in professional occupations. The relative costs of commuting are higher for less skilled and part time workers, leading to shorter travel to work distances and less geographically extensive job search than for more highly paid workers. Consequently, those with higher level skills are likely to restrict their choice of jobs more than those who are less skilled. This means that the more skilled workers become the more likely it is that they will search over a wider geographical area. These differences between groups of workers are important in understanding the labor market behavior of different subgroups and are crucial for policymakers concerned with facilitating the matching of labor supply and demand (as discussed in more detail below). All of the considerations outlined above underline the fact that, in practice, ‘the local labor market’ is not unambiguously defined; rather, there is a mosaic of over lapping submarkets which are variable in their spatial extent.
Regional and Local Labor Markets as Socio-Institutional Constructs It is important that an emphasis on the spatial definition of labor markets as ‘spatial containers’ in the tradition of
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regional science does not lead to the importance of social and institutional factors in the formation and operation of labor markets being overlooked. A body of literature in economic geography adopting an institutional per spective on labor markets emphasizes that local and regional labor markets are socially embedded and con stituted institutional spaces, in which formal and informal customs, norms, and practices underpinning employ ment, working practices, labor relations, and wages are played out. They are the result of the interaction between employers’ practices, institutions, state policy, and re gional and local labor market histories. Place specific developments matter in understanding how local and regional labor markets evolve over time and how eco nomic actors, agencies, and individuals behave. So, alongside economic factors, social and institutional fac tors are important in understanding how labor markets operate and evolve over time. This is especially the case in relation to ethnic labor markets and informal working arrangements, which have typically been absent from consideration in regional science approaches to labor markets. Labor market intermediaries are key players in the social and institutional landscape of regional and local labor markets. They have always played a role in the operation of labor markets, although the nature and ex tent of that role has changed over time. Traditionally, the main role of labor market intermediaries was to obtain job placements for workers at local, regional, and national levels. With increased global competition, regional labor markets have grown more complex. Employers are more likely to engage in outsourcing than was previously the norm, some groups of workers have become more mobile within and across national boundaries, and some labor market intermediaries are acting on the global stage in transnational labor markets. Hence, there has been an increase in the scale and scope of activities of labor market intermediaries. Their traditional ‘jobs fair’ func tion has expanded to incorporate a ‘market maker’ role with impacts on both the supply and demand ends of the labor relationship. Labor market intermediaries are concerned to a greater extent now than previously with helping employers with the recruitment process and also with advancement and skill improvement for incumbent workers, thus helping improve business productivity and workforce outcomes. As labor market intermediaries have come to play a more prominent role in regional labor markets, their manifestations have become more varied. In the private sector, they include temporary help firms – which have long played a role in helping employers meet peak de mands for labor, and also consultant brokerage firms – which are concerned with the recruitment of skilled workers, especially to fill skill shortage vacancies. In the public sector, there are public employment services and
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associated agencies, professional employers’ associations, and trade unions. In recent years, there has been a growth in web based information provision and job sites, and to some extent these are replacing some of the more traditional labor market intermediaries. Finally, in the voluntary sector, there are a range of community based organizations which play an increasing role as labor market intermediaries, particularly for groups who are most distant from the labor market (i.e., those with poor skills and with other barriers to labor market entry) and also for growing numbers of migrant workers. It is important to note that labor market intermedi aries are not just economic organizations; they also play an important role as social networks. Among lower skilled workers who might otherwise lack ‘bridging’ social networks which are important in gaining work, they may provide new routes into work. For highly skilled workers, they can help strengthen high quality social networks that help support professional advancement and entre preneurial success. Indeed, by extending these social networks to other regions (sometimes on the other side of the world) highly skilled migrants can transplant the institutions and relationships of entrepreneurship in highly economically successful regions – such as Silicon Valley – to other parts of the world.
Geographical Variations in Labor Market Opportunities The quantity and quality of labor market opportunities at regional and local scales are the outcome of local, national, and international processes. Quantitative vari ations in numbers of employment opportunities are manifest in geographical differences in employment and nonemployment, whereas qualitative variations are reflected in the nature of employment opportunities available and prospects for labor market advancement. When and where labor markets are ‘slack’ (i.e., when demand for labor is insufficient to absorb the supply of labor), there is particular interest in ‘numbers’ of jobs in order to reduce mass worklessness. In circumstances of ‘tight’ labor markets (i.e., when demand for labor outstrips supply), there is an emphasis on attracting new sources of labor (e.g., older workers, migrant labor, and women returning to work after childbearing/rearing) into employment. Geographers have long been interested in spatial variations in the quantity of employment – which matter especially pronounced for those with poor skills and who are otherwise vulnerable in the labor market. However, over time, they have placed greater focus on the variations in the quality of employment and what these mean for regional and local economic de velopment and for the socioeconomic circumstances of individuals.
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For analytical purposes, employment is often dis aggregated by sector and by occupation. Traditionally, economic geographers have been most interested in sectoral variations in the composition of employment. Historically, there were marked geographical variations in key sectors, reflecting local concentrations of raw materials (especially in mining and extractive industries) and specialist manufacturing traditions, which in some instances are reflected in place/area names (such as ‘The Potteries’ for the Stoke on Trent area in England). Over time, however, sectoral differentials in employment structures over space have become less pronounced, such that regional variations in employment composition are less stark than previously. For example, rural economies now have a similar sectoral structure to urban ones. Since the 1970s, mass manufacturing, mining, and agriculture have undergone large job losses in many Western economies. The impact of deindustrialization, even a few decades ago, can remain relevant to con temporary patterns of spatial nonemployment. Many parts of the service sector – including financial and business services, distribution, hotels and catering, edu cation, and health – have experienced job gains. There has been an important shift in the structure of employ ment in favor of services. Transformation in the sectoral composition of jobs has had implications for the occupational and skills profile of employment. Changes in occupational structure within sectors have tended to operate in the same direction. The general picture has been one of rapid growth in numbers and shares of managerial, professional, and professional occupations associated with higher level qualifications in the so called ‘knowledge economy’. Employment has grown in personal service and sales and customer service occupations also, while for skilled trades, operatives and elementary occupations (i.e., manual workers) the picture is one of decline. Geographers have become increasingly interested in the shape, character, and implications of more ‘pro fessionalized’ employment structures and the so called ‘knowledge economy’ where such jobs predominate. Large metropolitan labor markets in core regions tend to be characterized by a greater demand for and a greater supply of highly skilled labor. As such, they are favored locations for ‘dual career households’ with two partners wishing to pursue labor market careers. Conversely, in peripheral rural areas the knowledge economy is more ‘shallow’, productivity tends to be lower and individuals face fewer and less varied employment opportunities. Although many regional and local labor markets have witnessed a loss of manual and less skilled jobs, in many areas a substantial number of employment openings re main at the bottom end of the labor market for indi viduals with limited skill requirements. However, in many instances, these jobs are associated with poor
working conditions and low pay. In some parts of the world, such jobs, which may be associated with varying degrees of precariousness, may be the only ones available at local/regional level, and individuals may choose, or be obliged, to work in two or more jobs in order to maximize their pay. Where a broader range of jobs are available, those associated with poor working conditions and low pay may be unattractive to many workers and are often associated with high rates of ‘churn’ between employ ment and nonemployment (and often concentrations of low skilled immigrants (whether temporary or perman ent)), poor labor market prospects, and low incomes.
Policy Issues and Perspectives Policymakers at supranational, national, regional, and local levels are concerned with raising and sustaining employment rates and enhancing productivity. Tradi tionally, the main emphasis of labor market policy has been on challenges of labor supply, encompassing both raising employment rates and ensuring that the (poten tial) workforce has the necessary skills and attributes to ensure employability in a global economy. The labor market is seen as playing a central role in social inclusion, and a lack of participation in the labor market being a key indicator of social exclusion. People with low or no skills are disproportionately concentrated among the socially excluded, as are older people, those from certain ethnic minority groups, those with disabilities, and those in areas of relatively low labor demand. Spatial variations in worklessness are greater than spatial variations in unemployment, and intraregional differences in work lessness are greater than interregional ones. They are a particular cause for concern because they represent an underutilization of local labor resources and can become ‘locked in’ to local economies, because even when eco nomic conditions improve the long term workless tend to remain at the back of the queue for jobs. In order to address these disparities, targets have been designed to steer policy in the direction of increasing employment rates among disadvantaged groups and in disadvantaged areas. Despite agreement on the need to address spatial concentrations of worklessness in order to foster both social inclusion and enhance economic competitiveness, there is considerable debate as to how spatial concen trations of worklessness at metropolitan levels can best be tackled. Proponents of a ‘segmented model’ of the labor market, who believe that the local labor market consists of a number of spatially defined submarkets, suggest that local concentrations of worklessness arise primarily be cause of deficiencies in highly localized demands for labor, and therefore conclude that worklessness’ rates will remain high in the absence of a renewed supply of
Low
Employer demand
High
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Skills shortage imbalance Mismatch caused by companies demanding higher qualifications than are available in the local workforce
High-skill equilibrium A local/regional economy with a strong demand for high-level skills, which has a positive effect throughout the supply chain on enhancing the aspirations and actions of individuals with respect to participation in education and training
Low-skill equilibrium Employers face few skill shortages in a predominantly low-skilled workforce, where there is no incentive to participate in education and training and raise qualification levels and aspirations
Skills surplus imbalance Mismatch caused by a workforce which cannot find local employment to match their skills and aspirations
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Skills surplus
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Figure 1 The relationship between employer demand and skills availability.
appropriate jobs within short commuting distances of the jobless – that is, they favor an approach of ‘taking work to the workers’. Conversely, proponents of a ‘seamless model’ of the labor market argue that city regions are single markets in which transactions between labor and capital take place regardless of the location of residence and employment sites. They argue that ‘taking work to the workers’ will only have a short term effect at best, because spatial labor markets are permeable and local residents will be subject to city region wide competition for jobs. Hence, the solution is to raise aggregate demand for labor and to upgrade the skills of the workless in order that they are better able to compete for the jobs available. This is because job growth does not necessarily ‘trickle down’ to local residents – even if local residents have the required skills, higher skilled workers can ‘bump down’ in the labor market and compete for lower skilled jobs: processes of mobility and job competition leave behind the weakest. In practice, over the years, a range of people based policies (including New Deal initiatives to up skill individuals and help them find work) and area based initiatives (such as Employment Zones) have been implemented. However, the key em phasis has been on supply side solutions to labor market problems. There is increasing recognition, however, that a focus on labor supply alone is likely to be insufficient to overcome economic problems of low pay and low prod uctivity in regional labor markets. Indeed, recent regional economic strategies, particularly in regions characterized by large scale economic restructuring with the decline of traditional industries, have pointed to the existence of a ‘low skill equilibrium’ and have identified the necessity of paying attention to labor demand issues, and to re tention and advancement in employment, for regional and local economic development. Typical characteristics of an economy in a ‘low skill equilibrium’ include a co incidence of relatively low pay levels, a preponderance of poorly qualified workers and an underrepresentation of jobs at the upper end of the occupational hierarchy,
reflecting an overreliance on low knowledge intensity sectors and a competitive strategy based on low cost. In the face of a lack of demand from employers for higher level skills, there is little or no incentive for individuals to participate in education and training and raise qualifi cation levels and aspirations. Hence, the demand for relatively low level skills is reflected, ultimately, in the supply of skills. This situation contrasts with a ‘high skill equilibrium’ situation in which a local or regional economy is char acterized by a strong demand for high level skills, which has a positive effect throughout the supply chain on enhancing the aspirations and actions of individuals with respect to participation in education and training. Hence, raising demand for skills has a key role to play in eco nomic development policies concerned with moving from a situation of ‘low skill equilibrium’ to one of ‘high skill equilibrium’ (see Figure 1). The policy challenge is to convert this into a ‘virtuous circle’ in which investment in education and skills helps drive competitive success and economic growth. Labor market intermediaries have an important role to play here in bringing together the demand and supply side of the labor market through improving labor market information, job brokering, and the promotion of effective recruitment and enhancing the way that agencies work together with employers and individuals.
Conclusion Geographers have long been interested in the inherently geographical nature of labor markets (a topic largely ignored by labor economists) and in regional and local variations in the volumes and characteristics of jobs and workers. This article highlights the importance of recognizing multiple geographies of the labor market and how the markets for different types of labor actually operate and are played out spatially. Looking ahead, geographers are increasingly emphasizing transnational
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links between regional labor markets. The migration of capital and labor is not a new phenomenon, but is now taking place at unprecedentedly high levels. Regional labor market impacts are especially pronounced in terms of the movement of Mexican labor to the USA, in creasing labor flows within the European Union, and from Africa and Asia to many parts of the world. The penetration of immigrant labor beyond traditional mi grant ‘gateways’ to smaller settlements and rural areas links regional and local labor markets transnationally to a greater extent than previously, and has implications for regional labor markets in both origin and destination countries. The increasing mobility of highly skilled workers and information, as well as the fragmentation of production in advanced technology sectors, has led to unprecedented opportunities for formerly peripheral economies to develop and compete in new economic sectors. The fortunes of regional labor markets are interlinked to a greater extent than ever before. See also: De-Industrialization; Industrial Restructuring; Labor Geography; Labor Market; Migrant Workers; Public Policy.
Coombes, M. G., Green, A. E. and Owen, D. W. (1988). Substantive issues in the definition of localities: Evidence from sub group local labour market areas in the West Midlands. Regional Studies 22, 303 318. Finegold, D. (1999). Creating self sustaining, high skill ecosystems. Oxford Review of Economic Policy 15(1), 60 81. Gilloth, R. P. (2004). Workforce Intermediaries for the Twenty first Century. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Goodman, J. F. B. (1970). The definition and analysis of local labour markets: Some empirical problems. British Journal of Industrial Relations 8, 179 196. Green, A. E. and Owen, D. (2006). The Geography of Poor Skills and Access to Work. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Hanson, S. and Pratt, G. (1992). Dynamic dependencies: A geographic investigation of local labour markets. Economic Geography 68, 373 405. Hepworth, M. and Spencer, G. (2004). A Regional Perspective on the Knowledge Economy in Great Britain. Report for the Department of Trade and Industry. London: Local Futures Group. Herod, A. (2001). Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscape of Capitalism. New York: Guildford Press. Martin, R. and Morrison, P. (2003). Geographies of Labour Market Inequality. London: Routledge. Massey, D. (1984). Spatial Divisions of Labour. London: Macmillan. Morrison, P. S. (2005). Unemployment and urban labour markets. Urban Studies 42, 2261 2288. Peck, J. (1996). Workplace: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets. New York: Guildford Press. Saxenian, A. L. (2006). The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vance, J. E. (1960). Labor shed, employment field and dynamic analysis in urban geography. Economic Geography 36(3), 189 220.
Further Reading Benner, C. (2003). Labour flexibility and regional development: The role of labour market intermediaries. Regional Studies 37, 621 636. Castree, N., Coe, N. M., Ward, K. and Samers, M. (2004). Spaces of Work: Global Capitalism and Geographies of Labour. London: Sage.
Relevant Websites http://www.statistics.gov.uk Map of 2001 TTWAs in the UK.
Labor Unionism A. Herod, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Fordist Economy Refers to the way in which the economy of the US and a number of other industrial economies were organized during the period from about 1945 to 1970. It is characterized by mass production of standardized commodities, mass consumption (often funded by easy access to credit), and an interventionist national government pursuing Keynsian macroeconomic policies. The archetypal business model was one in which, among other things, firms engaged in vertical integration, relied upon a full-time laborforce, and production chains were geographically extensive (with research and development occuring in one region and manufacturing in another). Politics of Scale Refers to the manner in which the spatial scales at which social life operates are constructed through political and economic conflict. Spatial scales, then, are social products, rather than naturally given ways for dividing up the world into various scalar units (‘the national’, ‘the regional’ etc.).
On the Structure of Labor Unionism It is hard to determine when the first labor unions (sometimes also referred to as trades unions) formed. Some have suggested that if we consider labor unions to be organizations whose members come together for mutual assistance in the face of their employers, then the history of labor unionism is very long, stretching back some two and a half millennia to when Greek artisans banded together to exert some modicum of control over their employment conditions. Likewise, during the Middle Ages in Europe workers like stonemasons joined together to form guilds, again to exert some control over their worklife. Modern unionism, however, really emerged in the late eighteenth century in Europe, be ginning with various ‘friendly societies’ (also sometimes called ‘benevolent societies’ or ‘mutual aid societies’) whose goal was to provide assistance to members, typi cally for burial. Unlike guilds, whose members were confined to particular professions, friendly societies’ members often worked in a variety of trades but came together around some commonality, such as a shared religion or political views, or the fact that they lived in the same neighborhood. Despite the fact that they were illegal in many countries – in Britain unions were pro scribed for much of the early nineteenth century under
the 1799 Combination Acts, for instance – the coming of the industrial revolution led to the growth of unions in mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Historically, unions have generally organized them selves on the basis of particular crafts, particular indus tries, or particular geographical areas. As the name suggests, ‘craft unions’ are those whose members belong to particular crafts – carpenters, plumbers, bakers, and the like – and it was these kinds of unions which were the earliest to form. In the twentieth century the rise of mass production encouraged ‘industrial unionism’ to emerge in many economic sectors, with workers in a particular industry – say steel – joining the same union, regardless of which specific job they did in the workplace. Finally, some unions have organized geographically to include all workers in a particular area within their ambit, regardless of the work they do (in the United States the nineteenth century Knights of Labor adopted such a model). Whereas many unions have focused upon workplace issues, others have also focused upon issues impacting workers’ lives beyond the workplace – such as the pro vision of union run housing for members. If unions may be distinguished according to whether they are craft, industrial, or geographically based, they can also be typed by the spatial level at which power is ex ercised – are they highly centralized or decentralized? – and by what functions they perform. With regard to the first matter, in most countries unions are made up of local branches and national level organizations. The key ques tion concerns the political relationships between these two levels. Thus, in the United States the model which has emerged since the 1930s has generally been one in which local union branches retain significant power vis a` vis the national body. In contrast, in countries like Germany na tional level union bodies have significant ability to enforce their will upon local union branches and to force them to accept national union policies. With regard to the function performed by unions, one of the most significant dis tinctions relates to whether such unions are ‘free’ or whether they are state run. ‘Free’ unions, though they may be connected to political parties which may even end up forming the government, primarily are supposed to fur ther the interests of their members. By way of contrast, state run unions typically function to ensure that gov ernment economic planners’ wishes are enforced – hence, the Soviet model of unionism envisaged unions as ‘transmission belts’ between the government and the shopfloor, with their role being to make certain that production quotas were met in the factory or mine.
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Although much recent writing concerning global ization has tended to ignore unions, it is important to recognize that they have a long history of acting inter nationally, going back to the mid nineteenth century. Such international activities have primarily been con ducted through two sets of international organizations: associations of unions working in particular economic sectors and associations of national union centers. The former – historically called International Trade Secretariats but more recently renamed Global Union Federations (GUFs) – cover a number of sectors, including metalworking, mining, journalism, education, and chemicals. Currently, there are ten GUFs, of which the International Metalworkers’ Federation, the International Transport Workers’ Federation, and the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, and General Workers’ Unions are some of the best known. Of the latter, the most influential in the past few decades has been the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), a body made up of over 230 national union centers (including the American Feder ation of Labor Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL CIO) and the British Trades Union Congress) from 154 countries representing some 155 million members. Although the ICFTU was the largest such organization, there are two others which have played similar roles, these being the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) – primarily made up of Communist and Arab unions during the Cold War and now largely moribund, though still claiming 129 million members in 130 coun tries (as of 2004) – and the World Confederation of Labor (WCL), which was initially constituted by Catholic trade unions in Europe but subsequently became more secular (as of October 2001 its membership of some 26 million drew from 116 – mainly developing – countries). (In 2006 the ICFTU and WCL merged, creating the International Trade Union Confederation.) Each of these has operated regional organizations (e.g., the ICFTU’s Organizacio´n Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores) and industry focused entities – the GUFs in the case of the ICFTU, a number of Trade Union Internationals in the case of the WFTU, and several International Trade Federations in the case of the WCL. Finally, in addition to such organ izations there are myriad other structures through which unions cooperate internationally, including the Inter national Labor Organisation of the United Nations, the World Social Forum, and entities such as the US National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador.
Geography and Labor Unionism Within the geographical literature, issues of unionism have been incorporated in a number of ways. For much of
the twentieth century unions were largely ignored and workers were only dealt with somewhat tangentially through being viewed as ‘factors of production’ – for instance, the famous industrial location model of Alfred Weber saw ‘labor’ only in terms of its cost to indus trialists. In response to this lacuna, in the 1970s and 1980s an engagement with Marxist theory led a number of geographers to reexamine the role of labor in the structuring of economic geographies. Thus, David Har vey sought to understand how the incorporation of living labor into the capital circulation process shaped the construction of capitalism’s landscapes, whereas Doreen Massey argued that capital produced particular spatial divisions of labor at different times and that these div isions subsequently affected how capitalism developed spatially, given particular locales’ geographical ‘path de pendence’. However, such approaches, while raising the question of how capitalists’ efforts to extract surplus labor from workers shaped the economic landscape’s genesis, tended to have a rather one dimensional view of labor, viewing it in terms of how its price, skill level, rates of unionization, and the like affected the decision making of capitalists – what has been termed a ‘geography of labor’ view. By the early 1990s, however, issues of workers and their organizations (such as unions) began to be reeval uated with the emergence of what some have called ‘labor geography’. Principally, a growing number of geographers sought to explore how workers’ lives are spatially constituted and how, in turn, workers (through their organizations) are active geographical agents whose practices have an impact upon the production of the geography of capitalism, at scales from the very local to the truly global. As such, labor geography was an attempt to counter both the taxonomic approaches to labor which had dominated in mainstream industrial location analysis and the capital centric approaches of early Marxist geography. Although the theoretical and political intent of labor geographers was to examine the spatialities of workers’ lives in toto and how the geography of capital ism (or other social systems) may both enable and con strain workers’ social praxis, in practice it has tended to focus upon the activities of unionised workers. Four reasons account for this. First, many labor geographers have actively worked with and/or have been members of unions, which has undoubtedly impacted their research interests. Second, while appreciating that unions are not the only organ izations through which workers may express their economic and political aspirations, many analysts nevertheless see them as being important vehicles for worker empowerment. Third, given that unions usually have highly formalized structures and rules for operating, they tend to be easier to research than are other, less formalized worker organizations – they tend to keep
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more archives, for instance. Finally, as with capitalists, workers’ ability to achieve their goals is usually greater when they act collectively than when they act indi vidually. The latter two points in particular are signifi cant because much of the focus upon unions has been not to understand them per se (although that is certainly important) but, rather, to use them as empirical exem plars to make theoretical interventions concerning how economic landscapes are made. Consequently, at the time labor geography was emerging as a subfield focusing upon such formally structured entities was seen as the most productive way of challenging the capital centrism of the then dominant modes of thinking and of per suading skeptics of the conceptual points labor geog raphers were trying to make – that the geography of capitalism is not the product solely of capital, that eco nomic landscapes’ spatiality shapes how workers behave socially (i.e., that space is constitutive of social praxis and not just reflective thereof ), and so forth. More recently, however, the focus of labor geography has begun to broaden to examine how the social practices of non unionized workers and those belonging to other types of social movements shape, and are shaped by, their spatiality.
Areas of Focus In terms of how the study of unions has been articulated within geography there are, at least, four (overlapping) areas of focus: (1) how labor law and state regulation influence the spatial structure of unionism; (2) how unions have shaped economic landscapes; (3) how spatial concerns affect the political geography of labor organ izing; and (4) how the particularities of place impact the nature of unionism. Labor Law and State Regulation Some of the earliest work within geography relating to unionism concerned how its practice was shaped by the regulatory framework within which unions have to op erate. A prominent writer in this regard was Gordon Clark, who was primarily interested in two issues – challenging traditional industrial location theory for its failure to account for how regulatory structures, specif ically the law, shape economic geographies, and ex ploring how labor law influences the geography of unionism. Focusing upon the United States, Clark argued that US labor law privileged ‘local’ systems of labor management relations and worker representation, in contrast to the more ‘nationally’ oriented systems in many European nations, and that such localism had made it more difficult for unions to develop national strategies through which to counter nationally and transnatio nally organized firms. Drawing upon such theoretical
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arguments, much of Clark’s work focused upon exam ining how the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – established as part of the 1930s New Deal and tasked with being an umpire between employers and unions – has helped fashion the economic landscape through its decisions. Following in these footsteps, others have examined how judicial decisions have shaped the geography of unionism, particularly in the context of multiple unions seeking to represent the same workers and jurisdictional disputes between unions over work. Thus, Andrew Herod detailed how rival dockers’ unions along the US East Coast battled each other for members during the 1950s and how the NLRB’s judgments determined the geog raphy of union representation in the industry, as well as how unions representing dockers and lorry drivers (‘teamsters’) engaged in protracted legal battles to de termine which was entitled to claim the work of packing and unpacking shipping containers after they began to be widely used to transport cargo. For his part, Christian Berndt has shown how the decentralization of union regulation in Germany in the 1990s has changed the traditional power geometry between capital and labor, in capital’s favor. Shifting focus to the international arena, Jane Wills has investigated how a number of GUFs have pressured transnational corporations to sign International Frame work Agreements under which they agree to respect workers’ rights and how European Union legislation concerning the establishment of works councils is im pacting the geography of unionism. Meanwhile, others have examined how the manner in which governments regulate unions has shaped international flows of capital and how international codes of conduct secured by unions are affecting corporate investment strategies. Unions and the Shaping of Economic Landscapes A second area of research has focused upon how unions’ struggles over work location and the right of workers to unionise have played active roles in molding economic landscapes. Herod, for instance, has recounted how a global corporate campaign by US steelworkers forced a multi billion dollar corporation to forgo plans to expand operations into Eastern Europe, together with how the AFL CIO worked hand in hand with US corporations and the government in the twentieth century to ensure that Latin American countries would open their markets to US produced goods, thereby actively shaping the geography of the global economy. Seeking to understand how unions are responding to the neoliberalization of the economy, Lydia Savage illustrated how unions in Boston played key roles in shaping the merger of two hospitals and how this allowed them to protect
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healthcare workers’ conditions of employment and re muneration. Others have shown how, for instance, women unionists have challenged new labor regimes in the Australian steel industry and how labor unions in Tor onto have quite literally constructed the urban built environment. In related fashion, a number of geographers have highlighted how unions have indirectly played a role in shaping the geography of capitalism as firms have sought to avoid areas of militancy. Thus, Brian Page demon strated how meatpackers relocated from Chicago to the Great Plains during the mid twentieth century, not to avoid unions per se but, rather, to seek out placid unions in rural areas – an avoidance of militancy which has had significant impacts upon that industry’s geographical structure. Likewise, Don Mitchell has illuminated how farmers’ efforts to restrict the spread of unionism in 1930s California played a central role in the development of the agricultural landscape. Equally, others have em phasized how the restructuring of the economic land scape shapes the possibilities for unionisation – Altha Cravey, for instance, has argued that the development of Mexico’s border region is initiating a new geography of unionism in that country as militant unions emerge in the ‘maquiladoras’ beyond the traditional industrial regions long dominated by more conservative unions. In sum, then, such research has sought to explore the dialectic between the social and the spatial and to show that the spatial context within which they find themselves both shapes, and is shaped by, workers’ and unions’ economic and political practices. Space and the Political Geography of Labor Organizing Given that unionization is a process of workers coming together over space, labor geographers have been par ticularly interested in how workers’ spatial contexts shape their organizational strategies. Research in this vein has intersected significantly with debates concerning ‘the politics of scale’. An early analysis in this regard was that by Roger Bivand, who looked at how support for the Polish union. Solidarity spread spatially from a number of local disputes to a national movement, a process through which it was constructed as a ‘national’ union (rather than as a series of loosely connected local branch unions). Likewise, Humphrey Southall illuminated how British workers’ migration between towns during the nineteenth century provided a means whereby ideas about unionism could be transmitted across space. This was important, he contended, because the differential geographical portability of work skills helped shape what types of unionism emerged in different industries – be cause each mine’s geology is often dissimilar, in the mining industry skills were not easily transferable and
locally orientated union consciousness was encouraged, whereas in other trades requiring less geographic ally specific knowledges (e.g., engineering), a spatially broader consciousness developed. Meanwhile, Nick Blomley’s analysis of the British coal miners’ dispute of 1984/85 showed how the Thatcher government set about limiting striking miners’ geographical mobility so as to ‘localize’ opposition to mine closures and prevent the exercise of worker solidarity across space. With recent transformations in the nature of global capitalism reworking the spatial organization of many firms, a number of researchers have questioned whether the models of union organizing that appeared appropri ate within a Fordist economy of highly vertically inte grated corporations need to be reexamined. For instance, Savage has appraised how janitors in California have developed new organizing modes, whereas Lee Berman showed how clerical workers at Yale University de veloped spatially sensitive tactics to challenge the ad ministration. In addition to assessing how unions are responding to the new spatial arrangements of work – both within and between workplaces – geographers have analyzed how unionists are building connections between the workplace and the broader community, especially in response to growing calls for unions to engage in ‘social unionism’. Hence, Rebecca Johns and Leyla Vural’s in vestigation of organizing in the US textile industry considered how unions have shifted their focus from pressuring employers directly in the workplace to en gaging in public shaming actions designed to encourage patrons to stop buying particular companies’ goods at retail outlets – moving the focus from the spaces of production to those of consumption, as it were. Others have explored unions’ involvement in campaigns to force employers to pay a ‘living wage’ – applicable to both unionised and nonunion workers in particular com munities – while some have suggested that the rise of new technologies like the internet are heralding new models of labor organizing. Thus, Peter Waterman has contended that the twenty first century is likely to be characterized by ‘network activism’ in which computer literate workers facilitate workplace to workplace con tacts without relying upon their union’s official organ izing departments. Finally, some writers have articulated how it is crucial to place unions’ goals when seeking to develop solidarity within a spatial context. Hence, do workers develop solidarity across space as part of a broader class response to capital or do they engage in such practices merely to help workers in other com munities improve their lot, thereby making it less likely that investment from their own communities will relocate elsewhere – that is to say, are they merely seeking to protect their own privileged spaces within the global economy by helping others price themselves out of the market?
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Place and the Nature of Unionism The fourth area of interest has focused upon how the resources of ‘place’ shape practices of unionism. Primarily this has concerned itself with how local labor markets are regulated in place specific ways and with how workers come to identify with particular places. Arguably, Jamie Peck has provided the most influential treatment of how local labor markets are regulated spa tially, showing how the particularities of locality have impacted labor market restructuring and thus the possi bilities for unions to organize – analyzing, for instance, how Australian garment unions have tried to come to terms with the stretching out of the contracting chain and the rise of industrial homeworking in urban immi grant communities. Others have shown how women’s domestic responsibilities constrain their mobility within the urban landscape, a factor which shapes their work choices and the likelihood they will be involved in union activities. The influence of workers’ ‘topophilia’ (‘love of place’) upon their political praxis has also been a central element in geographic analysis of unions. Hence, in their analysis of the British steel industry, Ray Hudson and David Sadler have argued that as mills closed during the 1980s workers began to shift from a class based politics to protect the industry as a whole to a place based politics designed to save ‘their’ particular mill. Similarly, Herod recounts how, in response to the threat of closure, unionists at a US glass manufacturing plant adopted a strategy which encouraged quiescence for fear that ‘their’ plant would be tainted as militant. The importance of considerations of place for shaping unionists’ political praxis has also been revealed by Peter Sunley, who ex plored the remarkable parallel between the geographies of support in British coalfields for the 1926 General Strike and the 1984–85 dispute, suggesting that place specific traditions of industrial relations can have long standing impacts upon unions’ activities. Similarly, in her analysis of British banking unionism Wills has high lighted how workers who are employed by the same firms, who belong to the same union, and who toil under the same nationally negotiated terms and conditions of work have adopted quite different practices of unionism, the result of the particular geo historical trajectories experienced by different parts of the country. As these and other studies have articulated, then, workers’ entrapment in particular locales and their feelings of loyalty to certain places can have significant impacts upon practices of unionism. Although such loy alty has often been decried as workers’ adoption of ‘false consciousness’, the fact that for many workers their spatial embeddedness means they feel there is little al ternative illustrates that workers’ practices and identities are geographically, as well as socially, constituted.
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The Future? During the past two decades unions in many parts of the industrialized world have experienced hard times, the result of deindustrialization, attacks by government, and a plethora of other factors. At the same time, the field of ‘labor geography’ has become a vibrant subdiscipline within geography. For the most part, the field’s prac titioners have focused upon understanding how labor unions are structured spatially and how they shape the production of economic landscapes through their actions. There have been good reasons for this attention, not least because through understanding how the geography of capitalism is being transformed by processes such as globalization many geographers hope to help unions develop structures and strategies which will better enable them to defend successfully workers’ interests. However, as the political environment within which workers seek to pursue their goals has been transformed, so are growing numbers of researchers also beginning to ex plore how workers and others are constructing organ izations to parallel unions (such as nonprofit entities designed to end child labor). As labor geography matures, it will undoubtedly expand its intellectual horizons to include research not just on unions and those workers fortunate enough to belong to unions, but also to the billions of workers worldwide who are denied access to unions and to the alternate organizations through which workers are seeking to satisfy their economic and polit ical aspirations.
Further Reading Berman, L. L. (1998). In your face, in your space: Spatial strategies in organizing clerical workers at Yale. In Herod, A. (ed.) Organizing the landscape: Geographical perspectives on labor unionism, pp 203 224. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berndt, C. (2000). The rescaling of labour regulation in Germany: From national and regional corporatism to intrafirm welfare? Environment and Planning A 32(9), 1569 1592. Bivand, R. (1983). Towards a geography of ‘‘Solidarnos´c´’’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1, 397 404. Blomley, N. (1994). Law, space and the geographies of power. New York: Guilford Press. Clark, G. (1989). Unions and communities under siege: American communities and the crisis of organized labor. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cravey, A. (1998). Cowboys and dinosaurs: Mexican labor unionism and the state. In Herod, A. (ed.) Organizing the landscape: Geographical perspectives on labor unionism, pp 75 98. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harvey, D. (1982). The limits to capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Herod, A. (1991). Local political practice in response to a manufacturing plant closure: How geography complicates class analysis. Antipode 23(4), 385 402. Herod, A. (1997). From a geography of labor to a labor geography: Labor’s spatial fix and the geography of capitalism. Antipode 29(1), 1 31. Herod, A. (ed.) (1998). Organizing the Landscape: Geographical Perspectives on Labor Unionism. Minneopolis: University of Minnesta Press.
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Herod, A. (2001). Labor geographies: Workers and the landscapes of capitalism. New York: Guilford Press. Hudson, R. and Sadler, D. (1986). Contesting works closures in Western Europe’s industrial regions: Defending place or betraying class? In Scott, A. & Storper, M. (eds.) Production, work, territory, pp 172 193. Winchester, MA: Allen and Unwin. Johns, R. and Vural, L. (2000). Class, geography, and the consumerist turn: UNITE and the Stop Sweatshops campaigns. Environment and Planning A 32, 1193 1213. Massey, D. (1984). Spatial divisions of labour: Social structures and the geography of production. London: Macmillan. Mitchell, D. (1998). The scales of justice: Localist ideology, large scale production, and agricultural labor’s geography of resistance in 1930s California. In Herod, A. (ed.) Organizing the landscape: Geographical perspectives on labor unionism, pp 159 194. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Page, B. (1998). Rival unionism and the geography of the meatpacking industry. In Herod, A. (ed.) Organizing the landscape: Geographical perspectives on labor unionism, pp 263 296. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peck, J. (1996). Work place: The social regulation of labor markets. New York: Guilford. Savage, L. (2004). Public sector unions shaping hospital privatization: The creation of the Boston Medical Center. Environment and Planning A 36, 547 568. Savage, L. (2006). Justice for Janitors: Scales of organizing and representing workers. Antipode 38(3), 645 666. Southall, H. (1988). Towards a geography of unionization: The spatial organization and distribution of early British trade unions. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 13, 466 483. Sunley, P. (1990). Striking parallels: A comparison of the geographies of the 1926 and 1984 85 coalmining disputes. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 8, 35 52. Waterman, P. (1993). Internationalism is dead! Long live global solidarity? In Brecher, J., Brown Childs, J. & Cutler, J. (eds.) Global visions: Beyond the new world order, pp 257 261. Boston: South End Press. Wills, J. (1996). Uneven reserves: Geographies of banking trade unionism. Regional Studies 30, 359 372.
Wills, J. (2002). Bargaining for the space to organise in the global economy: A review of the Accor IUF trade union rights agreement. Review of International Political Economy 9(4), 675 700.
Relevant Websites http://www.aflcio.org American Federation of Labor Congress of Industrial Organizations. http://www.global unions.org Global Union Federations. http://www.icftu.org International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. http://www.icem.org International Federation of Chemical, Energy and General Workers’ Unions. http://www.ilo.org International Labour Organisation. http://www.imfmetal.org International Metalworkers’ Federation. http://www.ituc csi.org International Trade Union Confederation. http://www.itf.org.uk International Transport Workers’ Federation. http://http://www.ictur.org The International Centre for Trade Union Rights. http://www.tuac.org Trade Union Advisory Committee to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). http://www.tuc.org.uk Trades Union Congress (Britain). http://www.wftucentral.org World Federation of Trade Unions. http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br World Social Forum.
Lacoste, Y. F. Eva, Universita’ Ca’ Foscari, Venezia, Treviso Campus, Italy & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Lacoste, Yves (1929– )
Yves Lacoste was born in 1929 in Fe`s, Morocco. He received his training as a geographer under Pierre George in a group that included, among others, Bernard Kayser, Raymond Guglielmo, and Franc¸ois Durand Daste`s. Lacoste left the Communist Party in 1956 when his support of Algerian independence put him at odds with the party line. Taking up lecturing in 1962, he was a pioneer in the study of the dynamics of underdevelop ment from the geographical perspective. He came to be recognized as one of the founders of a new democratic conception of geopolitics in Europe. Moreover, it is quite well known that in 1973 his ‘geographical reading’ of the planned bombing of North Vietnamese dams by the United States Air Force triggered international media coverage of its potentially devastating effects during the monsoon season. This resulted in their suspension. Significantly, Lacoste was the founder and editor of the magazine He´rodote, devoted to socio political geog raphy and geopolitics. Lacoste and the He´rodote staff took a critical position against so called traditional geography, which they regarded as the servant of the dominant classes. In a long interview appearing in the first issue of the magazine, Lacoste declared his interest in the ideas of Michel Foucault, who is attributed with having reopened the philosophical debate on ‘space’. In the second issue, he was highly critical of ‘a spatial’ Marxist historicism. He´rodote also revived (in 1976, 1981, and 2005) the legacy of nineteenth century French geographer and anarchist Elise´e Reclus, who Lacoste once defined (1984) as ‘the best French geographer’. In this respect, Lacoste’s conception of a ‘com prehensive’ (physical and human) geography can be
demonstrated to be in continuity with the radical French geography of the past. For example, also taking Reclus’ ideas, Lacoste proposed an analysis of spatial contexts as always being unique, for which reason it is necessary to individually decode their representations, identify the players behind their dynamics, and analyze their different levels, gleaning from them the different relationships at play. Rather than the traditional concept of scale, Lacoste proposes theoretically relationships of causality and dif ferent levels. In the 1970s, after the publication of his famous work La Ge´ographie c¸a sert d’abord a` faire la guerre (1976), Lacoste – partly through He´rodote – supported reintroducing the study of geopolitics after it had been discontinued in continental Europe after World War II because of the suspected connections of geopolitics with Haushofer’s and the Nazi’s Geopolitik. Lacoste became the point of reference of a new school of thought that aimed to spread a con ception of geography as applicable to concrete dynamics and not limited to the academic and/or theoretical realms. In the field of geopolitics, Lacoste thus drew a distinction between ‘external geopolitics’ (as commonly associated with international dynamics) and ‘internal geopolitics’, that is, the power struggle between different players vying for the control of local territory through territorial plan ning, which is incorrectly and ideologically presented simply as a bureaucratic procedure. Since 1984, Lacoste has said that geographers have a ‘‘social function,’’ that is, ‘‘they envisage space in such a way as to manage it more efficiently.’’ Their task, ac cording to Lacoste, is to put their knowledge at the disposal of society ‘‘in the interests of the nation to which they belong.’’ Meanings have since been attached to this reference to ‘nation’ that have been criticized by many ‘critical’ geographers (inside and outside He´rodote). His theoretical (and personal) shift toward institutional geography and the mass media was likewise the subject of criticism. As a geographer, Lacoste’s most important contributions include the concepts of territoriality and representation (i.e., perceptions and the collective im agination). His criticism of ‘spectacular geography’ (from tourist brochures to the mass media) and the national istic ideological approach of school textbook geography foreshadowed later discussion of the issue. It is also thanks to his work that today European geographers re gard geopolitics as not merely a by product of geography. In his opinion it is not good geography to consider geographical factors without taking into account their
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geopolitical context – it is important to consider mass dynamics and the balance of power between social, political, and economic players. For Lacoste, geography is not a science but a dynamic complex of factors relating to power in the broad sense – and not just economic power. This view places him on a collision course with Marxist ideas and, in particular, at odds with Roger Brunet, the best known and foremost exponent in the 80s of French Marxist geography (which he regards as Marxism’s final attempt to steer geography). Vive la Nation, written in 1998, provoked heated debate since, although complex, his positive concept of nation was seen as self criticism in light of his earlier geo graphical vision. A similar thing occurred when Lacoste supported the usefulness of dams in controlling river flows when the anti globalization movement was sup porting the people’s fight against them. Lacoste has also contributed to school textbooks and children’s books, reflecting his belief that geography should be taught from an early age. He continues to write and his works remain much in demand by publishers. He is an emeritus pro fessor at University of Paris VIII, Saint Denis and teaches at Institut Franc¸ais de Geopolitique. Unpredictably, Lacoste won the Prix Vautrin Lud (a very high level geographical award) at the International Geography Festival in 2000. During the same year he was awarded the title Chevalier de la Le´gion d’honneur. He has two sons, both geographers, but in different fields of geography. See also: Francophone Geography; Geopolitics; Marxism/ Marxist Geography I; Marxism/Marxist Geography II; Political Geography; Reclus, E.; Regional Geography I; State; Territory and Territoriality.
Further Reading Lacoste, Y. (1959). Les pays sous developpes. Paris: Puf.
Lacoste, Y. (1965). Ge´ographie du sous de´veloppement. Paris: Puf. Lacoste, Y. (1965). Ibn Khaldoun Naissance de l’histoire du Tiers Monde. Paris: Maspero. Lacoste, Y. (1976). La ge´ographie c¸a sert d’abord a faire la guerre. Paris: Maspero. Lacoste, Y. (1980). Unite´ et diversite´ du tiers monde. Paris: La De´couverte. Lacoste, Y. (1985). Contre les anti tiersmondistes et contre certains tiersmondistes. Paris: La De´couverte. Lacoste, Y. (1986). Ge´opolitique des re´gions franc¸aises, vol 1: la France septentrionale, vol 2: la fac¸ade atlantique, vol 3: la France du sud est. Paris: Fayard. Lacoste, Y. (1990). Paysages politiques. Paris: Livre de poche. Lacoste, Y. (1991). L’e´tat du Maghreb. Paris: La De´couverte. Lacoste, Y. (1993). Dictionnaire de geopolitique. Paris: Flammarion. Lacoste, Y. (1994). Dictionnaire geopolitique des etats. Paris: Flammarion. Lacoste, Y. (1996). La le´gende de la terre. Paris: Flammarion. Lacoste, Y. (1997). Vive la nation Destin d’une ide´e ge´opolitique. Paris: Fayard. Lacoste, Y. (2000). La le´gende de la terre. Paris: Flammarion. Lacoste, Y. (2002). L’eau des hommes. Paris: Cercle d’art. Lacoste, Y. (2003). De la ge´opolitique aux paysages. Paris: Armand Colin. Lacoste, Y. (2004). Maghreb, peuple et civilisation (avec Camille Lacoste Dujardin). Paris: La Decouverte. Lacoste, Y. (2006). L’eau dans le monde: les batailles pour la vie. Paris: Collection Petite Encyclopedie Larousse. Lacoste, Y. (2006). Geopolitique, la longue histoire d’aujourd’hui. Paris: Larousse. Lacoste, Y. (2006). Geopolitique de la mediterranee. Paris: Armand Colin. Lacoste, Y. and Giblin, B. (eds.) (1998). Geohistoire de l’Europe mediane. Paris: La Decouverte/Livres Herodote.
Relevant Websites http://www.denistouret.fr/geopolitique/Lacoste.html Conference in French language http://php.bm lyon.fr/video conf/detail.php?id=62 Conference in French language http://www.omegatv.tv/video environnement actualites environnement yves lacoste l impact des changements climatiques id601.html In French. http://www.canalc2.tv/video.asp?idEvenement=86 With others in French language
Lamarck(ian)ism H. Winlow, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics The idea that characteristics acquired over the lifetime of an individual, in relation to their surrounding environment, could be inherited by their offspring. Linear Progressionism Idea that species evolve through a progressive hierarchical sequence to ever more complex forms. This idea has been applied to biological, social, moral, and intellectual evolution. Mutual Aid An ecological theory that stressed the importance of cooperation between species in the struggle for existence. Organism Analogy The comparison of groups in society to the development of an individual organism at a variety of scales, for example, a city, a state, or the world. Recapitulation A biological and social evolutionary theory which suggested that the history of a species was reflected in the embryonic stages of development of each organism.
Definition Lamarckianism is a non Darwinian theory of evolution ary change which originated with Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829) in the early nineteenth century and influenced practitioners of science throughout the nineteenth century. In the 1890s, following the wide spread acceptance of the biological evolution of plant and animal species, a neo Lamarckian movement emerged in support of an alternative to Darwinian evolution. The two central elements of this movement, which repre sented only selected elements of Lamarck’s original theories, included: a belief in the linear progression of different species and the concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The alternative environmental evolutionary mechanism provided by neo Lamarckian ism was popular with scientists in the US and Europe until the 1920s, after which time modern genetic prin ciples were established and linked to natural selection, and Lamarckian theories of use inheritance were dis proved. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen turies, neo Lamarckian principles pervaded the work of biological and social theorists, including geographers. In many instances, an intermingling of both Darwinian and neo Lamarckian theories is evident. Lamarckian ideas were used to support a wide array of political
standpoints, including legitimation of imperial expansion and racial hierarchy, and social and political reform.
Historical Development Lamarck’s research into evolutionary theory culminated in the publication of Philosophie Zoologique in 1809, an in depth account of his biological evolutionary theories. Two major elements of this work included: first, the theory of acquired characteristics, which incorporated the notion of adaptive evolution; and second, the belief that all organ isms progress to higher forms of organization. In relation to the latter point, Lamarck emphasized the idea of separate lines of descent for different biological species, thus incorporating the preexisting idea of a progressionist hierarchy of biological forms. In Lamarck’s system, the stress on progressive evolution meant that species never became extinct but simply progressed to higher (and more complex) stages of development. Lamarckian pro gressionism influenced mid nineteenth century naturalists studying the fossil record. In Lamarckian theory fossils represented the remains of organisms which had been forced, by changing circumstances, to undergo biological modification. Lamarck argued that progressive species evolution occurred partly as a result of the efforts of individual organisms through spontaneous generation in the early stages of evolution. Within this wider evolutionary se quence, geographic environment was responsible for species diversity, and environmental stimulus could in duce the use or disuse of organs. The Lamarckian system left no room for random chance or stasis, in contrast to natural selection in which environmental and geographic differences allowed for the emergence of unique species. Lamarck’s system stressed continuous change and meant that even simple existing lifeforms could only be ex plained by a recent origin. Lamarckian doctrines were applied not only to bio logical species development but also to social evolution. There were two political social reasons for the popu larity of Lamarckian doctrines and opposition to random variation. First, random variation was perceived as ex cluding the idea of progressive improvement in human heredity and, without this, a substantial argument in favor of social change was lost. Second, Darwin’s ma terialist approach left little room for religious and philosophical questions about purpose and direction. Lamarckian concepts were used in support of social progress in the pre Darwinian and the post Darwinian
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eras. In 1830s London, a range of evolutionary theories gained support in radical working class circles. Lamarckianism was popular because the inherent notion of progress could be used to support a model of social transformation from below. Radicals perceived society as progressing through cooperation, education, emancipation, and technological advance. Lamarck’s emphasis on linear hierarchy, combined with the notion of acquired charac teristics, meant that individual effort could be portrayed as the driving force of evolution. This notion was also at tractive to liberals as it was a good basis for claims for a democratic society, as against the power of the aristocracy. The use of Lamarckian concepts in support of social change was later demonstrated by Peter Kropotkin in the early twentieth century, as discussed below. Besides this radical support, Lamarckian ideas per vaded the work of many mainstream scientists through out the nineteenth century. For example, Stocking has observed that the concept of acquired characteristics was stated or implied in the work of many different writers, reflecting a widespread popular scientific attitude rooted in Western European culture. In 1880s Lamarckian concepts came under ongoing attack from neo Darwinist August Weismann, who had developed the idea of the germ plasm as an explanation for genetic inheritance. Herbert Spencer – whose alternative gemmule theory asserted that physical adaptation could occur within the individual organism after birth – defended the doctrine of acquired characteristics and unilineal social evolution. He launched a counterattack against Weismann in a series of articles in Contemporary Review in 1893. This controversy resulted in the development of a self con sciously neo Lamarckian movement in the 1890s. This movement involved the selective revival of Lamarckian doctrines, which were combined with the principle of natural selection to create a distinctly non Darwinian evolutionary framework. This movement had the stron gest impact in the US, but neo Lamarckian concepts also had considerable influence in France, Britain, and Ger many, and appealed to those who were unhappy with the materialist philosophy of Darwinism.
Key Concepts Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics Lamarck’s overall impact on the development of evo lutionary science is hard to assess, as neo Lamarckians singled out only a small part of a more complex theory. The elements which scientists incorporated into their work in the late nineteenth century included that of the inheritance of acquired characteristics: the idea that characteristics acquired over the lifetime of an individual could be inherited by their offspring. Crucial here was the concept of use inheritance, with the classic example
cited being that of the giraffe who, over generations of stretching to reach leaves, had acquired a long neck. Activities engaged in by adults within their environment would become natural to their offspring, thus producing different behavior patterns through a process of adaptive evolution. The idea of use inheritance could also be squared with doctrines of degeneration, where the atro phy or reduction of organs could be plausibly explained through the disuse of organs. Darwinism offered no ex planatory mechanism for these changes. Linear Progressionism In contrast to Darwin’s branching tree metaphor of evo lution, Lamarck’s writing incorporated the notion of an evolutionary ladder where species developed from inferior to superior forms. Natural selection incorporated the no tion of haphazard, and not progressionist, development, and therefore lacked the driving force that explained why life continually developed to more complex forms. The Lamarckian and Darwinian metaphors of development are compared in Figure 1. In Philosophie Zoologique, Lamarck had incorporated the Enlightenment ideas of ‘The Great Chain of Being’, but he presented a branched chain as opposed to a single line, realizing that it was not possible to represent the whole animal kingdom in one linear continuum. Within this system, Lamarck suggested transmutation of humans from apes (previously classified together by Linneaus). Concepts of branching evolution ism were suppressed by the progressionist viewpoint in late nineteenth century race science and influenced the ories of social and mental evolution, not least because there was ideological pressure to justify the expansion of the white races. This idea of linear progressionism is clear in Haeckel’s comparison of the skulls of modern humans with older human forms (Figure 2).
Biological and Social Evolution Evolution of Mind As noted, Lamarckian concepts were applied to both biological and social theory. Two roles for the application of neo Lamarckianism to social evolutionary theory included: first, explaining the origin of human racial differences; and second, the provision of a link between social, intellectual, and organic evolution. Since the combination of progressionism and use inheritance meant that individual effort could influence evolution, the appearance of the human level of mental activity could be seen as an outcome of the laws of nature – just as the development of industrial society is the outcome of social laws. These elements were key to the work of British philosopher and social theorist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).
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Level of organization
Charles Darwin
Time (a)
Present Cro - Magno n
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Level of organization
Neanderthal ropus anth hec t i P
chimpanzee ung Yo
Time Present Key (b)
= Spontaneous generation = Extinction
Figure 1 Comparison of Lamarck’s and Darwin’s explanations of evolutionary progress. Lamarck’s model stresses progressive evolution and allows for spontaneous evolution in the present, but does not allow for species extinction. Darwin emphasized random selection and includes species extinction, and, in some cases allowed for reduction in complexity over time (indicated by a downward trend in some branches). Source: Humphreys, J. (1996). Lamarck and the general theory of evolution. Journal of Biological Education 30(4), 295 303.
In Spencer’s 1870–72 text Principles of Psychology, he argued that national characters had developed as a result of mental peculiarities caused by habit, resulting in dif ferent races. He argued that the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as well as explaining racial evolution and instinct, could be applied to the evolution of higher mental faculties. These faculties were associated with more advanced social organisms. In Principles of Sociology, published between 1876 and 1896, Spencer argued that only as societies grow and become organized can the powers of thought develop, and that primitive human groups could not evolve these higher faculties in the absence of a fit environment. Concepts of mental development were also addressed within literature. In an analysis of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, Rickard has argued that conflicting theories of mind were reflected within the text. In particular, elements of innate ideas or racial memory in Ulysses re flected the influence of a number of intellectual para digms, including Freudian, Jungian, and Darwinian
Figure 2 Skull of Pithecanthropus erectus, with skulls of a CroMagnon, a Neanderthal and chimpanzee superimposed. These are compared with a modern human skull and emphasize the idea of linear progression of ancestral forms. Source: Haeckel, E. (1898). Reproduced in Bowler, P. J. (1989). The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past. Oxford: Blackwell.
theories and theological and Lamarckian ideas. Among Joyce’s influences were: Henri Bergson, who developed the notion of e´lan vital which he regarded as a force of creative evolution, and which incorporated the La marckian notion that all forms of life move toward greater complexity; Samuel Butler who argued that fetal development and other unconscious processes were the result of an unconscious or racial memory; Carl Gustav Jung, who argued that the unconscious included the personal layer, dating to infancy, and the collective layer, associated with the pre infantile period and relating to innate ancestral knowledge; and George Bernard Shaw, who incorporated elements of Bergson’s e´lan vital in his plays, and developed a similar theory of life force. In Ulysses, memory plays a central role and the characters have a sense of involuntary motion toward preordained goals, reflecting some wider unconscious purpose. Ex plicit references are also made to evolutionary theory: for example, the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode is based on the idea of several parallel courses of evolution, including individual, linguistic, and wider biological evolution. This incorporates the idea of recapitulation, and reflects the idea that ontogeny recapitulates multiple phyl ogenies, concepts explained further below.
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Recapitulation A mixture of Darwinian and Lamarckian elements are evident in the work of Ernst Haeckel. Famous for his recapitulation theory of development, Haeckel published several evolutionary texts, including Generelle Morphologie in 1866 and History of Creation in 1876. His recapitulation theory included the idealist concept of life unfolding through a progressive sequence, and he coined the term phylogeny to describe hypothetical lines of descent. This theory was summarized by the phrase ‘ontogeny re capitulates phylogeny’: the idea that the individual re capitulated the growth of the history of the species, passing through stages representing adult ancestral forms – a popular, but erroneous, image. Haeckel’s social embryology was an example of biological determinism that reinforced notions of racial hierarchy, allowing comparisons between adults of supposedly inferior groups with children of superior groups. While incorporating notions of Lamarckian progressionism, Haeckel divided humanity into two major branches at an early stage after ascent from apes (as seen in his evolutionary tree in Figure 3). Haeckel ar gued that each branch then subdivided into separate races which (reflecting the influence of physical anthro pometry) could be aligned with hair type: the woolly haired people had collectively retained a lower level of evolution than the straight haired.
Geography and Neo-Lamarckianism Neo Lamarckian biosocial theories had a wide ranging impact on geography as an emerging academic discip line. Elements of neo Lamarckian discourse influenced geographers alongside other aspects of evolutionary theory, including Darwin’s natural selection and Men delian genetics. The influence of neo Lamarckian doc trines varied between geographical locations, and was influenced by wider political concerns. Discussed below are: first, the impact of Lamarckian doctrines on the work of US geographers; second, the development of mutual aid theories in Russia in relation to the work of Kro potkin; third, the influence of Lamarck’s doctrines on the regional geography of Vidal de la Blache; and finally, the association between neo Lamarckian doctrines and racial theory in the work of Herbert John Fleure in Britain, and Ellsworth Huntington in the US.
Influences in US Geography Early modern geography in the US reflected the influence of a powerful neo Lamarckian school of biology, which influenced figures in the public realm, including polit icians and academics. In the political sphere, neo
Lamarckian theories were played out in Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis. Turner reinterpreted the metaphor of the social organism to account for the unique qualities of the American nation as social and political responses to physiographical features. The frontier thesis incorporated the idea of a melting pot of biological and cultural types into a new American type, ideas central to the formation of American national identity and dem ocracy as separate from European heritage. Although it was possible to view neo Lamarckian theory from a possibilist perspective (in relation to life force and consciousness), US geography took a de terministic stance, drawn from a focus on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This is evidenced in the ap proaches of William Morris Davis (1850–1934), Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932), and Ellsworth Hunting ton (1876–1946). Davis is famous for his development of the cycle of erosion (first presented in 1889) for physical landscapes, where he interpreted the evolutionary metaphor in in organic terms. This geographical cycle began with an uplift of the land, which would gradually wear back to a peneplain, after going through a number of sequential forms. The theory influenced several generations of geomorphologists because of its simplicity and elegance. Livingstone has noted that Davis spoke of characteristics being persistently inherited wherever the environmental conditions had remained constant, reflecting the theory of acquired characteristics. Davis had studied at Harvard under Nathanial Southgate Shaler, who was a convinced neo Lamarckian. Shaler had worked under Louis Agassiz at Harvard in a transitional period in the development of biological and geological theory. His acceptance of neo Lamarckian doctrines allowed him to combine the tele ological views of Agassiz with more recent evolutionary insights. Semple’s 1911 text Principles of the Geographic En vironment preserved the neo Lamarckian element of Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie, which had stressed that the characteristics of social groups had occurred as local responses to environment. Semple argued that race had developed over time as a result of the different en vironments which had left their mark on the present race in the form of inherited aptitudes and customs. Like other neo Lamarkians, Semple was influenced by ‘environmental determinism’ in her conviction that geographical isolation was indispensable to organic spe ciation and advance. She argued that the environment most conducive to evolutionary advance was the land mass of Eurasia. These deterministic ideas of racial evolution were strongly reflected in Ellsworth Hunting ton’s 1915 book Climate and Evolution.
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Figure 3 Haeckel’s evolutionary tree. Unlike Darwin’s tree of life, this represents evolution as an inherently progressive process. Haeckel’s tree includes a main trunk running up to humanity at the top. Smaller divisions of this trunk represent the evolution of racial groups. Source: Haeckel, E. (1876). History of Creation. Reproduced in Bowler, P. J. (1989). The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kropotkin and the Mutual Aid Tradition Darwin’s theory of natural selection and his stress on Malthusian population controls met with resistance in Russia from the outset. Nineteenth century Russian academics and scientists, while divergent in political outlook, had a common response to Malthusianism and either de emphasized or denied its role. This national style resulted from, first, class structure and political traditions which shared a cooperative social ethos and,
second the geographic environment. Research under taken by naturalists in tropical environments, which emphasized overpopulation and competition, did not seem applicable to the northern latitudes of Russia. Russian geographer and anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) first questioned the struggle for existence while exploring Siberia, to where he accompanied a series of scientific and military expeditions between 1862 and 1867. At the beginning of this period, he was already a celebrated naturalist, and on these expeditions he
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developed an aptitude as a geologist and geographer. Kropotkin noted of his explorations in Siberia (with his companion Polakoff, a zoologist): We both were under the fresh impression of the Origin of Species, but we vainly looked for the keen competition between animals of the same species which the reading of Darwin’s work had prepared us to expect (Kropotkin, 2006: 7).
Kropotkin’s observations of the natural environments of Siberia and Northern Manchuria convinced him that underpopulation and paucity of life were distinctive throughout northern Asia, and that mutual aid was es sential to the preservation and evolution of each species. Todes has observed that in the same way that the idea of nature as a jungle had influenced Darwin in the writing of the Origin, the idea of nature as a Siberian expanse underpinned Kropotkin’s essays on evolution. For Russians, the seminal mutual aid theorist was Karl Kessler (1815–81), a naturalist, whose 1879 speech ‘On the law of mutual aid’ transformed widespread sentiment into a coherent intellectual tradition. Kropotkin read this speech in 1882 or 1883 and this motivated him to find further evidence of mutual support in nature. While his speech created a lot of enthusiasm, Kessler died 2 years later without having elaborated his ideas. In his speech, Kessler had argued that mutual aid resulted from the need for organisms to reproduce. He outlined examples of co operation (and sociability) among many species, including bees, ants, beetles, spiders, fish, reptiles, birds, and mam mals, and he viewed mutual aid as central to humanity’s material and moral progress. The mutual aid tradition put in place by Kessler offered only an ecological conception (a description of natural relations) and not an evolutionary theory. The concept was useful for describing anthills but not for the appearance of physical characteristics, such as stripes on a zebra (which could be explained through natural selection). When mutual aid theorists joined their ideas to evolutionary theory, they usually emphasized mechanisms other than natural selection, such as direct action of the environment, isolation, and the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Kropotkin made regular contributions to the British scientific journal The Nineteenth Century. His first article on mutual aid was published here in 1890, with others following over the next 4 years. It was Huxley’s 1888 Malthusian article on ‘The struggle for existence in human society’ which prompted Kropotkin into writing his 1902 treatise Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution in which he provided evidence of mutual aid among animal and human societies. The book advanced a biosocial law based on an analysis of the struggle for existence, and stressed the historical tendency toward cooperation in nature. Mutual Aid incorporated a progressionist neo
Lamarckian stance, not least evidenced in the structure of the narrative which began with chapters on mutual aid in animals, before discussing the evolution of human society through savage, barbarian, medieval, and finally modern industrial forms. While Kropotkin argued against the dominance of modern state apparatus in society, he stressed that human morality, expressed largely through mutual aid, had developed progressively over time, with its roots in prehuman societies. Central to Kropotkin’s mutual aid thesis was his concept of sociability. Kropotkin argued that the species at the top of the animal world and most similar to humans in structure and intelligence (such as monkeys and apes) were the most sociable. The concept of socia bility was seen as natural and was regarded as an acquired characteristic. Mutual Aid focused largely on societal development, with little focus on biological evolution. In later essays Kropotkin attempted to translate mutual aid from an ecological conception into an evolutionary the ory and published a number of articles in The Nineteenth Century between 1905 and 1919. The central arguments of Kropotkin’s alternative Darwinism were: species practice mutual aid during the struggle for existence; indi vidualistic animals decrease in numbers, while those which cooperate increase; cooperative species are more subject to the direct action of environment and variations are passed to the next generation through the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Throughout his writings Kropotkin praised Darwin’s theories and drew attention to the fact that Darwin had acknowledged the import ance of cooperation in The Origin. Kropotkin argued against the strict division of scientists into Darwinian and Lamarckian camps and against the distortion of the principles of their namesakes. Kropotkin’s evolutionary theory included a synthesis of French theories and Darwin’s ideas on the struggle for existence, while re jecting the Malthusian element. In a similar vein to proponents of Social Darwinism (and imperial expan sion) a naturalization of morality, and a biologization of political categories, occurred throughout Kropotkin’s work. However, his political convictions led him to use these ideas to argue for freedom and not subjection of human society.
Vidal’s Regional Geography The merger of Lamarckian ideas with the doctrine of possibilism is illustrated in the work of French regional geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache in works, such as his 1903 Tableau de la Geographie de la France. Central to Vidal’s work was the concept of the social organism. In regional geography, the idea of organic unity served as a unifying theme, which was also dominant in the work of Andrew J. Herbertson and Herbert John Fleure in Britain.
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Vidal had a naturalistic approach to geography and believed that the different parts of nature were mutually interdependent and part of a whole, and he regarded the Earth as an organism. Vidal split these interrelationships into two principal cycles, that of the inanimate world (geological and climatic factors) and that of the animate world (relationships between living plant and animal species). For human societies, the social organism in cluded social, political, and industrial factors. To begin with, social relationships between humans had inter dependencies with nature – as illustrated by Vidal’s lo calized genres de vie – but over time the social organism would begin to grow in areal extent (similar to Ratzel’s Lebensraum). Transport and communication links would develop and eventually cities would become established. Vidal argued that humans could eventually control the environment – natural features of geography thus influ enced, but did not determine, human activities. On a wider scale, these principles could account for the evo lution of regional and state organisms. Vidal viewed European imperialism and colonialism in a positive light, as examples of strong organisms reaching greater levels of advancement. Vidal’s theories reflected three Lamarckian elements: the self organization of animate objects; the importance of circulation for organic organization and development; and the general processes of evolution. Archer compares Lamarck’s emphasis on subtle fluids which unified parts of a biological organism with Vidal’s stress on circulation in unifying human individuals into greater social wholes. Similarly, while Lamarck argued that the internal cir culation of fluids was initiated by the organisms’ imme diate environment and that organisms would eventually stimulate their own evolution, Vidal argued that direct environmental stimuli were most important for the emergence of rudimentary social organisms, after which accelerated circulation between individuals and groups became more important. Vidal’s geography stressed the evolutionary process of organic organization, circulation, and evolution, an organicist approach which formed the basis of his general geography.
Environment, Race, and Heredity H. J. Fleure (1877–1969) is best known for his studies in regional geography and his anthropogeographical work on Welsh racial types. Fleure’s undergraduate study and teaching within the natural sciences convinced him of the importance of Darwinian scientism, but his geographical perspective emerged from the interface between Darwinian and Lamarckian elements. The influence of neo Lamarckism on Fleure’s work was illustrated as early as 1899, when, in a talk he rejected Weismann’s germ plasm theory, arguing instead for Spencer’s
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gemmule theory. Two years later in a talk on ‘The factors of organic evolution’ Fleure stressed the importance of acquired characteristics, arguing that experiments had revealed the susceptibility of the germ to environmental influence. Fleure’s emphasis on ‘possibilism’ fitted closely with the Vidalian scheme and Vidal’s stress on the relationship between genres de vie and place was reflected in Fleure’s anthropometric studies in Wales. However, Fleure de scribed his areas of study as human regions, stressing the importance of the social sphere, while Vidal (and Her bertson) stressed the existence of natural regions. In contrast to Vidal, Fleure perceived that overindustriali zation lead to a decline of physical and moral race character and the decline of cultural traditions (which he felt were central to the Welsh national character). He applied ideas of biological degeneration to cultural decline which reveal the influence of the Lamarckian biological theory of disuse. The admixture of Darwinism and neo Lamarckian concepts within Fleure’s work was further complicated by the development of genetic theories, such as Mendelism. The influence of hereditarian elements was a feature in his ethnographic studies of rural Wales. The interplay between environment and heredity in defining local race character is clear in his argument that ‘‘inherited char acters may persist for untold periods’’ and ‘‘many alter native inherited characters may be found side by side in one and the same population, some characters giving clues to immigration of the most varying periods, some probably suggesting to us features of inhabitants of the region in very distant times’’ (Fleure, 1922: 95). In a number of places Fleure argued that there was evidence for the existence of Neolithic survivals in the moorland areas of rural Wales. Thus, Fleure’s approach revealed a synthesis between environmentalism and Mendelian evolutionary ideas. Like Fleure, Huntington perceived himself as a Dar winist, as evidenced by the introduction to his 1907 book Pulse of Asia, where he claimed that the biological sci ences stood in utter confusion before Darwin. Although Huntington did not acknowledge it, neo Lamarckian elements were present within his writing. Pulse of Asia begins on the premise that the environment had deter mined the development of moral and mental traits in primitive societies, and that these characteristics were inherited by future generations. Huntington’s deterministic stance is clear in Civil isation and Climate, published in 1915, where he argued that the most advanced civilizations had developed in the temperate regions of the globe. However, Huntington’s later work includes greater reference to heredity. In Huntington’s 1924 text The Character of Races, he asserted that races should be defined on the basis of inherited characteristics, although he still accepted the importance
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of the social and physical environment. In World Power and Evolution, Huntington argued: For good or ill, each race has acquired certain charac teristics. These may be modifiedybut they can never be wholly destroyed.yThe Chinese, the Negroes, the Anglo Saxons, the Jews, and the Italians cannot be made alike either by the influence of the environment or by education and training. This we must recognise. Mankind is bound to change in the future, but it would be the height of folly for a nation on this account to incorporate into itself elements whose mental and moral aptitudes it does not now approve (Huntington, 1919: 185).
Incorporating neo Lamarckianism and more recent genetic theories Huntington argued that only certain races could, through acquired characteristics, adapt to new climatic conditions, a claim that could be used to restrict US immigration on a racial basis. These argu ments illustrate both a biased attitude toward specific racial groups and a weak understanding of concepts of heredity. This extract from Huntington illustrates how human geography in the early part of the century became a meeting point for evolutionary, environmental, hered itarian, and nationalistic thought, in the quest to interpret the relationship between nature and human society.
Conclusions These discussions have illustrated the widespread influ ence of neo Lamarckian concepts across national boundaries and in support of a range of biological, pol itical, social, and racial theories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – influences that were reflected in the work of the first generation of academic geog raphers. Campbell and Livingstone have noted that the eventual achievement of the neo Darwinian synthesis mostly removed the last vestiges of scientific support for neo Lamarckianism, but that this was not eliminated entirely. Gould and Oldroyd have argued that the area of human culture could still reasonably be viewed as La marckian, because every time a poem is written, or a new tool designed, or a new theory developed, a new char acteristic is acquired, which is transmitted to subsequent generations. Thus, while Lamarckian theory failed to provide a valid explanation for biological evolution, the idea of acquired characteristics can still be considered an applicable metaphor for explaining social and cultural development. See also: Anthropogeography (After Ratzel); Darwinism (and Social Darwinism); Kropotkin, P.; Mapping, Race and Ethnicity; Possibilism; Vidal de la Blache, P.
Further Reading Archer, K. (1993). Regions as social organisms: The Lamarckian characteristics of Vidal de la Blache’s regional geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83(3), 298 514. Bowler, P. J. (1986). Theories of Human Evolution. Oxford: Blackwell. Bowler, P. J. (1989). The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past. Oxford: Blackwell. Campbell, J. A. and Livingstone, D. N. (1983). Neo Lamarkism and the development of geography in the United States and Great Britain. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, N.S. 8, 267 294. Desmond, A. (1989). The Politics of Evolution; Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fleure, H. J. (1922). Some aspects of race study. Eugenics Review 14, 93 102. Gould, S. J. (1979). Another look at Lamarck. New Scientist 84, 4 October, 38 40. Humphreys, J. (1996). Lamarck and the general theory of evolution. Journal of Biological Education 30(4), 295 303. Huntington, E. (1919). World Power and Evolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jones, G. (1980). Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction between Biological and Social Theory. Brighton: Harvester Press. Kropotkin, P. (2006). Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (reprint of 1902 edn., with preface from 1914 edn.). New York: Dover Books. Livingstone, D. N. (1984). Natural theology and neo Lamarckism: The changing context of nineteenth century geography in the United States and Great Britain. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74(1), 9 28. Livingstone, D. N. (1992). The Geographical Tradition. London: Blackwell. Oldroyd, D. R. (1983). Darwinian Impacts: An Introduction to the Darwinian Revolution. Milton Keynes: The Open University Press. Rickard, J. S. (1999). Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1962). Lamarckianism in American social science: 1890 1915. Journal of the History of Ideas 23, 239 256. Todes, D. N. (1980). Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winlow, H. (1999). Cartographic Representations of Race: c. 1850 1930. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Queens, University Belfast, Belfast. Winlow, H. (2001). Anthropometric cartography: Constructing Scottish racial identity in the early twentieth century. Journal of Historical Geography 27(4), 507 528. Winlow, H. (2006). Mapping moral geographies: W. Z. Ripley’s races of Europe and the US. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96(1), 119 141.
Relevant Websites http://www.lamarck.cnrs.fr Oeuvres et rayonnement de Jean Baptiste Lamarck (Jean Baptiste Lamarck: Works and heritage, includes reproductions of publications, and biographical information). http://evolution.berkeley.edu Understanding Evolution (includes section on History of Evolutionary Theory).
Land Change Science B. L. Turner II, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Biosphere It is the intersection zone of the Earth’s land, ocean, and atmosphere systems that support life. Coupled Human–Environment System It is a bounded unit comprising a set of human and environmental relationships. Ecosystem Services These are resources and processes of ecosystems that benefit humankind. Spatial Econometrics It is the incorporation of spatial effects in quantitative and statistical methods addressing economic principles. Sustainable Land Architecture The pattern of land uses and covers that provision human uses and maintains a full range of ecosystem services. Sustainability It is provisioning humankind without threatening the functioning of the biosphere. Vulnerability It is the degree to which a system is likely to experience harm due to the exposure to a hazard.
Land change science (LCS) is a transdisciplinary field of study that seeks to observe and monitor land cover and land use changes and explain and model these changes as a coupled human–environment (or social–ecological) system. Land cover refers to the biophysical condition (e.g., forest, grassland, and paved surface) of some portion of the terrestrial surface of the Earth, and land use is the human intent or activity associated with that condition (e.g., reserve, pasture, and settlement). In addition to detecting and monitoring changes in land cover, largely from satellite information, LCS examines societal struc tures and individual behavior that determine land uses, the impacts of those uses on the structure and function of the biophysical subsystem, and the environment feed backs, foremost ecosystem (environmental) services, from that subsystem to land uses and the human subsystem. Understanding the coupled system through the medium of land cover and use not only provides insights about outcomes and processes in both subsystems, but also informs synthesis questions about the vulnerability and sustainability of human–environment relationships.
Development of LCS The question of global warming stimulated various sci ence agendas to improve understanding of the Earth system and the human impacts on it. The resulting
research efforts quickly realized that understanding the processes linking the terrestrial surface of the Earth, often addressed in terms of ecosystems, to the Earth system at large was incomplete without understanding the human induced changes on that surface (i.e., as they affect, for example, albedo and sources and sinks of carbon, or methane emissions), including the rates and trajectory of those changes. This need, in turn, required improved understanding of the human drivers (e.g., population or policy change) of land use. This use, however, is also affected by changes in the biophysical subsystem, either directly through land cover changes in the ecosystem services or indirectly through land cover impacts on the Earth system at large, such as global climate change. The importance of these dynamics in creased as concerns about global environmental changes enlarged from climate change to loss of biodiversity and ecosystems, land degradation, and ultimately, sustain ability. Land changes are critical to a range of issues that culminate in the maintenance of the biosphere (that portion of the Earth system sustaining life) and human well being.
Land Change in Global Environmental Change Given that humankind evolved as a land based species, it is not surprising that human impacts on the terrestrial surface of the Earth are ancient, traced back to the control of fire and perhaps the extinction of Late Pleis tocene and early Holocene megafauna. With each major technological epoch (stone tools fire, domestication, fossil fuels, etc.), the number, magnitude, spatial reach, and pace of land changes wrought by humankind enlarged. Estimates of human induced transformation (radical change) in land cover range as high as 50% of land surface of the Earth. If coadapted landscapes and indirect impacts through climate change are considered, virtually the entire land surface has been affected by human ac tivity. Much of this impact has changed the states of the Earth system, as in the 40% of the land surface in which forest, grasslands, and wetlands have been converted to agriculture. These and other land changes are the sec ond largest source (to fossil fuel burning) of human in duced carbon dioxide, and the significant source of methane, to the atmosphere. Land practices, through the use of fertilizers, make humankind the largest contributor to the global nitrogen cycle, surpassing nature. In add ition, about 85% of annual water withdrawals globally are
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taken for agriculture, with important consequences for the water cycle. Clearly, land change is the principal factor to date in changing the land states of the Earth system and, in doing so, has played an important role in changing the bio geochemical cycles that permit that system to function and sustain the biosphere. The magnitude and spatial reach of these changes raises serious questions about the sustainability of human uses of ecosystems, landscapes, and the Earth system.
Observation/Monitoring Satellite and air based sensors observing the Earth have proliferated over the last quarter century, providing a wealth of new and novel information about the changes in the land surface of the Earth. Improved seamless coverage of global land covers (e.g., forest cover) and high spatiotemporal resolution data on specific locales have helped to document such attributes of the terrestrial surface as increases and losses in the area of temperate and tropical forests, respectively, changes in above ground carbon sources and sinks, losses of ecosystems and biomes of high biotic diversity, urban expansion into agricultural lands, and changing phenology (e.g., timing of the flowering of vegetation) and primary productivity (e.g., photosynthesis). Refocusing on regions and locales, major advances in the development of land cover clas sification provide increasing detail of the land surface, capable of differentiating among forest types and phases of their successional growth as well as detecting invasive species, selective logging, and the buildup of fuel loads in fire prone forests, among other examples. It is precisely such detail that permits tests of various theories and concepts emanating in the social sciences relevant to understanding the human causes and consequences of land change. For example, smallholders throughout the tropical world employ slash and burn cultivation prac tices where land use decisions are affected by the stage of vegetative regrowth in crop–fallow cycles. Distinguishing these stages via remote sensing facilitates tests of theories of agricultural change, a major component of improving understanding of land dynamics in that part of the world.
Drivers/Causes of Land Change In global environmental change, the term driver denotes a forcing function on some part of the Earth system. Drivers can be both biophysical factors that change land cover (e.g., long term declines in rainfall) and human factors that change land use (e.g., population or policy change). Much social science work, however, treats dri vers as causes of land use and addresses them through theoretical and empirical assessments. The human
drivers or causes vary by the scale of analysis employed, and at lower spatial scales, by the context of the case examined. Over the long term and at the global scale, the PAT variables of the IPAT identity [I (environmental impact) ¼ P (population) x A (affluence or per capita consumption) x T (technology; efficiency of resource use and disposal)] are the only factors to track consistently with land change, perhaps because P and A serve as coarse indicators of the demand for ecosystem goods and services. Below the continental scale or for pan global land covers of specific types (e.g., tropical deforestation), the PAT variables need not capture demand, in part be cause economic globalization often disassociates the sources of demand from the extraction or production of resources to fulfill them. In such cases, the PAT factors may be operating, but they are not necessarily the most important for land change. The variance in drivers/ causes acting on specific types or cases of land cover change and the variance in land outcomes owing to the synergy of different drivers/causes may be so large that generalizations prove difficult. For specific areas of land change, however, a variety of research has demonstrated the roles of markets, policy, transportation and roads (infrastructure), nongovernmental market interventions, household life cycles, and resource governance, among other causes. Increasingly, attention is paid to nested or linked causes, hierarchically arrayed. For example, international policy affects national and local policies and programs, which, in turn, change resource governance and thus access to land or the income that can be gen erated from it, concomitantly changing land use and cover. Causes combined in explanations that consider both structural (i.e., sociopolitical organization) and be havioral (i.e., individual decision making) factors prove difficult to test, owing to data limitations, but, when possible, provide improved explanation of land changes.
Land–Cover Consequences LCS pays special attention to ecosystem goods and ser vices (e.g., water filtration, pollination, and food and fiber production) in their roles as resources traded in the market place and thus having a classical economic value (i.e., provisioning services as in food and fiber pro duction) and as factors maintaining the functioning of the biosphere and nature’s condition (e.g., regulating and supporting services, such as climate controls and nutrient cycling). The wide range of these goods and services (which also include cultural and preserving services as in, respectively, sacred places and maintenance of biotic diversity) has been examined at different scales of an alysis, demonstrating their importance to the mainten ance of the biosphere, from ecosystem to landscapes to the Earth system, and the consequences on these
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functions as the goods and services are drawn down by human activity and consumption. The interconnections between human driven changes in land cover and en vironmental dynamics have drawn considerable atten tion, demonstrating their implications for such far flung phenomenon and processes as the frequency and mag nitude of forest fires, regional scale precipitation chan ges, and exposing human populations to new disease vectors.
Modeling Global environmental change and sustainability science are found on experiments, tests, and the need to address the future through quantitative based forecasts. Model ing is essential in either case. Land change modeling has been served by advances in the geographical information sciences (GIScs) and its grounding in the use of and methods for spatially explicit data and products. For many, if not most of the questions addressed by LCS, knowing or forecasting the kind, magnitude, and pace of land change is insufficient; the location of the change is essential as well. The spatial arrangement of ecosystems and landscapes matters in regard to environmental functions, and hence the delivery of ecosystem goods and services that society expects. Likewise, the spatial ar rangement of the human uses of the same ecosystems and landscapes determine the consequences for goods and services and their feedbacks on land use. Given the prevalent use of remotely sensed data (Observation/ Monitoring above), the pixel in the imagery commonly marks the level of spatial explicitness that the models may take (e.g., about 30 m2, the most prevalent used imagery in LCS). A large range of models are employed, especially as they have emerged from spatial econo metrics and spatial analysis. Major advancements have been made in agent based, integrative assessment models – those that attempt to model agents’ (indi viduals’) land use decisions in the face of knowledge about changes in environment and institutions (rules of governance). The performance of these models in explaining and projecting the magnitude and location of different land types of change continues to improve, although the uncertainty in projections beyond a decade enlarges substantially.
Synthesis LCS attempts to integrate the knowledge gained from the various components of its study (Figure 1) to inform synthesis issues that typically carry both research and outreach application implications. Examples include various attempts to understand and identify areas vul nerable to or resilient in the face of environmental
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change (e.g., climate change) and ‘natural’ hazards (e.g., hurricanes) or sustainable in the face of increasing human uses. Drawing from risk hazard research and critiques of it, both of which focus on the vulnerability of people, and from ecological research focused on the re silience of ecosystem, LCS has developed an emphasis on the vulnerability–sustainability of the coupled human– environment system. This vision recognizes that hazards simultaneously affect both the human and environmental subsystems and that the synergy of the two subsystems determines the total system response to the hazard. The coupled system approach to vulnerability are illustrated by the recent hazard of Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 tropical storm that devastated coastal Mississippi (state) and the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. The ex posure and sensitivity of New Orleans and the wetland habitats between the city and Gulf of Mexico have been altered by hydraulic works designed to facilitate water borne traffic, permitting housing development in low lying terrain, and by constructing access canals to gas and oil pumps distributed across the Mississippi delta. The overall effect of canal and levee construction reduces the buildup of sediments that maintain wetlands in the delta, especially the cypress swamps. These losses reduce the barriers to storm surges surrounding New Orleans, and the canals serve to funnel storm waters into the city, stressing the levees intended to protect the metropolitan area. The vulnerability of New Orleans, therefore, was and remains the product of human–environment inter actions, and Katrina’s impact on both the city and eco systems of the delta was profound. LCS has addressed an array of other synthesis issues and questions. For example, increasing attention is paid to the efficacy of the boundaries of nature reserves and parks, especially in cases where significant land use sur rounds or people have the right to cultivate or collect resources within the reserves. In some cases, land changes outside the park, even at considerable distances from the park boundaries, affect biotic diversity within the park, especially where migratory animals are involved, raising the need for and design of biological corridors to facili tate the movement of biota. In other cases, the delimi tations of the reserve boundaries and the rules of land and resource uses within the reserve to serve both human and environmental concerns have proven beneficial to the success of the reserve. In another example, LCS ad dresses the political–economic conditions that facilitate a forest transition – or cases in which economic modern ization leads to a return of forest cover on lands once taken from forest. Drawing from lessons in environment development, LCS has also entertained real world ap plication, addressing the co production of knowledge and participatory programs for land management. The re sulting approaches can be found in formulizations such as the Drylands Development Paradigm.
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Land Change Science Ear th system
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T1. Dynamics of land systems T2. Consequences of land system change T3. Integrating analysis and modeling for land sustainability
Figure 1 Thematic concerns of land change science Global Land Project (2005). Science Plan and Implementation Strategy. Stockholm: International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Secretariat.
These and other synthesis activities raise concerns about sustainable land architectures. The entire terres trial surface of the Earth will soon be governed, leading to de facto or de jure designs of land uses and covers. These designs, commonly undertaken at the local or region level, invariably seek to provide a wide range of human uses and ecosystem services. The consequences of these designs for ecosystem services and human well being at ascending spatial scales of concern are largely unknown. The aggregation of local to regional designs to the con tinental and global scales may well produce negative consequences for people and the environment processes operating at the large scales. Understanding the societal and environmental implications of the patterns of land use and land cover at different spatial scales thus beckons as a grand challenge for LCS.
LCS in Geographic Context Geography has a long tradition of human–environment studies focused on land and landscape, the modern ori gins of which are registered by the nineteenth century German geographic traditions of landschaft (landscape), which can be linked to the search for ‘the unity in nature’ as articulated by Alexander von Humboldt and other students of natural history. The legacies of this vision,
some taken to detrimental extremes, range in orientation from the sciences to the humanities as exemplified by the nineteenth century French geography of Vidal de la Blache, and the twentieth century ‘geographic factor’ of Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington, the cultural landscape of Carl Sauer, and the human ecology and natural hazards of Harlan Barrows and Gilbert White. Perhaps the most direct links in contemporary human–environment geography to LCS reside in cultural and political ecology. Indeed, former cultural ecologists from geography and anthropology, steeped in systems based approaches to human–environment problems, helped to spawn LCS as a formal international research program linking with GISc and ecology and environ mental science to address land change in its own right as part of global environmental change and sustainability concerns. With interests in the politics and power re lations of problem framing and answers, political ecology (PE) shares many of the same topical themes with LCS (e.g., causes of land change and vulnerability), but has entertained them foremost through the concerns about environment and development. Global change and sus tainability, and environment development are, of course, intimately intertwined, and the potential for LCS and PE to inform one another is large, as in case of vulnerability research themes, and is beginning to take place across a
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large spectrum of shared topical interests. Indeed, in an increasing number of cases it is difficult to distinguish the methods used in and the outcomes of land based research themes carried out in either subfield. Examples include the complex connections between international policies, land uses, and drought as they affect desertification in the Sahel of West Africa; Brazilian policy shifts, market va garies, and largeholder–smallholder dynamics affecting the kind, amount, and pace of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon; and human–environment relation ships that need to be considered in order to establish effective biosphere reserves. Perhaps the main distinction between the two, serving as a modest impediment to more fruitful exchanges, resides in their explanatory foci: LCS anchored in post positive science and PE in struc tural and constructivist explanatory visions. Regardless of the distinctions among different inter ests in geography, LCS addressed through the coupled human–environment systems appears to be at the van guard of an emerging human–environment science that transcends traditional disciplines. The union of human, environmental, and geographical information/remote sensing research expertise is taking place in different programmatic ways that hold long term consequences for the human–environment traditions in geography. This union has begun to be matched by the newly minted schools and degree programs, especially in North America, that hold the human–environment conditions and the coupled system dynamics that create them, as the objects of their study. This development may be seen as reinventions, with a decidedly science orientation, of the human–environment intellectual traditions championed by Humboldt and of its LCS component as linked to landschaft. See also: Environmental Studies and Human Geography; Physical Geography and Human Geography; Political Ecology; Remote Sensing; Resource and Environmental Economics; Simulation; Vulnerability.
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Further Reading Global Land Project (2005). Science Plan and Implementation Strategy. Stockholm: International Geosphere Biosphere Programme Secretariat. Gutman, G., Janetos, A., Justice, C. et al. (eds.) (2004). Land Change Science: Observing, Monitoring, and Understanding Trajectories of Change on the Earth’s Surface. New York: Kluwer Academic. Kates, R. W., Clark, W. C., Corell, R. et al. (2001). Sustainability science. Science 292, 641 642. Lambin, E. and Geist, H. (eds.) (2006). Land Use and Land Cover Change: Local Processes to Global Impacts. Berlin: Springer. Liverman, D., Moran, E. F., Rindfuss, R. R. and Stern, P. C. (1998). People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). Ecosystems and Human Well Being: Synthesis. Washington, DC: Island Press. Reynolds, J. F., Stafford Smith, M., Lambin, E. F. et al. (2007). Global desertification: Building a science for dryland development. Science 316, 847 851. Turner, B. L. II. (2003). Contested identities: Human environment geography and disciplinary implications in a restructuring academy. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, 52 74. Turner, B. L. II, Lambin, E. F. and Reenberg, A. (2008). The emergence of land change science for global environmental change and sustainability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, 20666 20671. Turner, B. L. II, and Robbins, P. (2008). Land change science and political ecology: Similarities, differences, and implications for sustainability science. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 33, 295 316. Veldkamp, T. and Lambin, E. F. (eds.) (2001). Predicting land use change. Special issue. Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment 85(1 3), 1 6. Wu, J. (2006). Landscape ecology, cross disciplinarity, and sustainability science. Landscape Ecology 21, 1 4.
Relevant Websites http://www.globallandproject.org/ Global Land Project. http://www.igbp.kva.se/ International Geosphere Biosphere Programme. http://www.ihdp.unu.edu/ International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change. http://lcluc.umd.edu/ NASA Land Cover and Land Use Change Program.
Land Rent Theory J. Ja¨ger, University of Applied Sciences BFI, Vienna, Austria & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Accumulation The term refers to the growth of the stock of capital. It is commonly assumed to be an important prerequisite for sustained economic growth. Fictitious Commodity Goods which are not produced directly by a firm but are treated as a commodity such as land, labor, etc. Surplus It refers to the part of an output which is not used for the reproduction of labor in the form of wages. It is either obtained by capitalists in the form of profit or by landowners in the form of rent.
regulating the access to and the use of land, land rent regulates the distribution of income between different social groups or classes such as capitalists, landed classes, and workers. Therefore, land rent is crucial for ex plaining spatial developments and their relation with economic and social developments. Although land rent theory cannot build on one single paradigm, two broad lines of theoretical traditions are to be distinguished. The first type of theoretical approach treats land rent as a historical invariant institution which is interpreted as a natural mechanism. The second type of approach inter prets land rent as a specific historical institution which changes over time. Furthermore, within both paradigms numerous distinctions are observable. This makes the field of land rent theory a challenging terrain.
Definition Property markets play an important role in structuring geographic phenomena and processes such as the spatial distribution of economic activities or residential segre gation. Land is an important factor which has a crucial impact on economic activity and on the distribution of income between individuals and groups in society. The analysis of land markets is important for the under standing of landed property. Therefore, land rent theory is crucial for an understanding of these phenomena. Land rent is not merely about markets, but embraces a sys tematic analysis of the institutions, societal structures, and interests behind the market which constitute and structure it. In a narrow sense, land rent refers to the payment of a tribute to the land owner for the use of geographical space or natural resources in specific places. The total sum of capitalized future rent payments rep resents the land price. If the landowner uses the land himself or herself and, hence, no payment takes place, s/he implicitly benefits from the land. This implicit benefit is commonly also considered as rent. Land rent as a theoretical concept had originally been used mainly to explain agricultural rent but later was extended to analyze different spatial phenomena and urban structures and developments such as the location decisions of in dividuals and enterprises, suburbanization, gentrification, etc., within the urban and regional context. In a classical political economy perspective, prices for a produced commodity depend on the costs of production. As there is no capitalist process of production of land by a single firm, the factors which determine the price of land differ from those of an ordinary commodity. This means that land is a fictitious commodity. Furthermore, besides
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Historical Foundations of Land Rent Theory Although the above definition of land rent as a tribute to a landowner is generally agreed upon, the aim and scope of different approaches varies widely. Diverging aims and scopes explain many important but not all differences between the approaches. In order to provide a sound base for the understanding of land rent different concepts are examined in the context of their broader theoretical, but also historical background. Land Rent in Political Economy Rent theory was developed by classical economists. They built their concept of land rent on central categories which had been developed by forerunners such as Wil liam Petty in the seventeenth century and James Anderson in the eighteenth century. Starting with Adam Smith and continued by David Ricardo and Karl Marx classical political economists developed different con cepts of land rent. While French physiocrats had sup posed that land was the origin of surplus, Adam Smith argued that it was the human labor. One of the main concerns of classical political economists was to under stand the overall dynamics of growth and to explain the distribution of income among social classes. Land rent was understood as part of the surplus value obtained by the landed classes. In the context of a dominant role of agriculture in society, land rent theory developed by classical economists mainly focused on agricultural rent. Some of the central questions were whether the growth of industrial production was restrained by land rent and
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how the landed classes were affected by the process of capitalist accumulation. Smith developed a rather har monistic perspective regarding the interests of the landed classes and the capitalists, although at the same time blaming landlords for obtaining unearned income. Tak ing different conceptualizations of rent such as absolute rent and differential rent and having no coherent ex planation for the determinants of profit his statements on land rent resulted in contradictory perspectives. Ricardo had a much more coherent explanation of profit and based his rent theory mainly on the concept of extensive differential rent. In his perspective, land rent was a de duction of profit and determined by the difference in productivity/location between a specific land and the worst land used for production, as the conditions at the latter determine the price of the commodity produced (e.g., corn). Therefore, better land should yield a higher rental payment whereas no rent is obtained on the in ferior land. An expansion of capitalist production and population, in his opinion, leads to the inclusion of land of inferior quality with the consequence of increasing differential rent and, therefore, lowering overall profit. The fall in profit reduces investment, and the process of accumulation finally leads to crisis and stagnation. Marx (and Friedrich Engels) continued with the tradition set up by Smith and Ricardo but also criticized it. Combining classical political economy approaches with different types of land rent for explaining different phenomena they insisted on the social dimension of rent and argued against the naturalization of it. They did this by analyzing the historical emergence of modern capit alist forms of land rent. Modern landed property was assumed to presuppose a disentanglement of direct producers from land. They were supposed to be con verted into workers who are free to sell their labor but also free from the ownership of land which would have allowed a subsistence economy. That means that land was defined as private property within specific societal structures. Johann Heinrich von Thu¨nen’s Land Rent Theory Heinrich von Thu¨nen published his model of the isolated state in 1826. The second part of it came out in 1850. He was the first to explicitly bring land rent theory together with geography and in so doing explains the spatial structures of production within a coherent model. He took land rent in the form of differential rent as a key concept for explanation. This means that better land (in this case due to a more favorable location) allows the appropriation of higher rents because the conditions of production are relatively better. Von Thu¨nen provided a model of marginal productivity for the simple case of an isolated state with one city center. He assumed that all
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the agricultural products had to be transported to the market place in the center of the city. A second simpli fying assumption was the existence of a homogenous hinterland. He intended to trace back the causes of rent to the given conditions of production and to explain how and why rents are determined by transport costs to the city center. Furthermore, his model demonstrated how rent determines the type of goods produced at different distances from the center. This is represented graphically by the so called Thu¨nen rings.
Current Developments in Land Rent Theory Modern approaches to land rent theory build either on the broader and more heterogeneous political economy tradition or on von Thu¨nen’s model. While modern theories based on the latter linked their modeling to neoclassical theory, the modern political economy tra dition in land rent theory resulted in a relatively higher degree of heterogeneity. Land Rent in Neoclassical Economics and Urban Applications In general, the principal insights of von Thu¨nen’s theo retical model are still at the core of modern approaches to the analysis of transport costs as determinants of land use and rent. His key argument that at each location the good providing the highest rent is produced and, hence, spatial structure is determined, is still a central starting point of theory. In 1909, Friedrich von Wieser developed a model conceptualizing rent within a neoclassical framework. This took the form of monopoly rent, as suming that households’ demand, that is their capacity and willingness to pay for urban locations, differs. This was supposed to be a central mechanism to assign urban space to households. Nevertheless, this did not have a considerable impact on the debates that followed. The takeoff of land rent theory in the von Thu¨nen tradition is to be dated back to 1964, when William Alonso published his book on location and land use. He was the first to fully integrate von Thu¨nen’s approach into a neoclassical model. In so doing, he provided a spatial model of eco nomic activity and founded a new field of research branded new urban economics. Rent is considered as a payment for land or more precisely for urban space. Type and intensity of land use and rent are described as a function of distance from the Central Business District (CBD) which determines a general economic and spatial equilibrium. While von Thu¨nen’s model is directed toward the explanation of location decisions for the case of production, Alonso integrated into his model repro ductive activities, such as the location decisions of households. At the core of this neoclassical model stands
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the idea of rational utility maximizing behavior not merely that of firms but also that of households. The model assumes that households choose locations at a specific distance to the CBD and thereby maximize their utility. Living closer to the city center implies, on the one hand, lower transport costs (in terms of money and time) but on the other hand, less space for living due to higher rents. At more distant locations rents are lower but transport costs are higher. Given a budgetary restriction households have to make their location decision in ac cordance with their preferences. This is represented by the bid price function which is a set of land prices a household is willing to pay at different distances while maintaining a constant level of satisfaction. As a consequence, households’ preferences, budgetary re strictions, and transport costs determine rents and urban structure. The models based on Alonso provide a deductive explanation of rental levels and regional structures. Moreover, as rents are higher in the CBD and lower in the periphery they are often assumed to be a good ap proximation to reality. Nevertheless, these models fail to explain the often very different spatial structures between different cities. This is due to a high degree of inter dependence with a huge variety of relevant variables such as multiple forms of agglomeration benefits and costs which are difficult to be grasped in formal models. An other problem of such models is that they find it difficult deal with historical time, let alone the role of institutions, which are both crucial for the explanation of urban structures and their development. The models were used to argue that the maximization of utility or profits via the rent mechanism leads to an optimal structure of land use. The political conclusion, hence, usually was not to intervene in market forces. Nevertheless, the Alonso model has been refined since then. Relaxing the rigid assumptions has also led to more diverse conclusions for political intervention in urban and regional space. Some of the rigid assumptions were abandoned and other factors such as transaction costs and externalities were included by authors such as Masahisa Fujita. These refined models focus not only on the spatial implications of rent but also on the question of whether political interventions such as rent controls have negative con sequences on overall well being or not. While traditional Alonso type models usually conclude that any inter vention in the private market is harmful, the modernized versions depict a more heterogeneous picture. Never theless, as demonstrated in the Cambridge controversy in capital the theoretical base of the core of neoclassical theory is rather unsound. The controversy highlighted the fact that the neoclassical concept of capital and the idea of marginal productivity and the production function describing the relation between inputs of capital, labor, (and land) presupposes a distribution of income
among these factors. Therefore, it is theoretically in consistent to explain the aggregate distribution of income between factors of production with the concept of mar ginal productivity. This means neoclassical theory is characterized by a substantial inconsistency. Notwith standing, this theory continues at the core of new urban economics. Furthermore, it is frequently a criticism that the societal fundamentals of rent as well as the prefer ences of people are taken as given and, therefore, not subjected to reflection. While different empirical patterns of land use and rental structures are interpreted as resulting ultimately from a different set of individual preferences in market decisions, this is substantially dif ferent in modern approaches in the political economy tradition. Modern Political Economy Approaches An upswing in critical political economy theorizing has taken place since the end of the 1970s. This has provided an important stimulus for the further development of land rent theory. Compared to new urban economics, assumptions are less rigorous and theoretical approaches have a much higher degree of diversity. There are three main explanations for this: first, the political economy approach has a much broader scope in terms of the ex plaining phenomena related to land. This is due to the fact that political economy deals with economic, political, and social phenomena not in a separate manner but sees them as embedded into societal structures. Second, and related to the first point, the type of questions raised and the way in which they are answered is much more het erogeneous. Third, political economy itself is not one monolithic theory, such as neoclassical theory, but an approach with a broad diversity of theoretical paradigms. Most of the modern approaches in a broader political economy tradition were oriented toward urban questions and dealt with different types of rent which were often defined in diverging ways. Nevertheless, on a general level, absolute rent, monopoly rent, extensive differential rent, and intensive differential rent are to be dis tinguished. The different types refer to different ‘logics’ and usually are not understood as accounting tools but rather as analytical approaches to arrive at a more so phisticated understanding of the role of land. Absolute rent was a concept put forward by Karl Marx and refers originally to a land tribute which is due to a lower or ganic composition of capital in agriculture. This means that production is relatively less capital intensive. Mod ern theorists considered this to be a key feature in the construction industry. This notion of absolute rent is based on the value theory of labor which was criticized for its theoretical inconsistencies. Besides this interpret ation of absolute rent this type of rent was also con sidered as a class monopoly rent caused by the power
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of landowners to retain land from productive or repro ductive use. As a theoretical concept absolute rent was mainly applied for the analysis of agriculture and re sources. The concept of monopoly rent refers to the different capacities of different classes and social strata to pay for socially privileged space. Social groups which have more financial resources than others exclude the latter from their residential areas. Hence, monopoly rent is used to explain phenomena like urban segregation. Monopoly rent and its specific effects depend sub stantially on institutions such as rental contracts, housing policy, zoning, etc. Furthermore, monopoly rent is also used to explain spatial phenomena related to retail trade and service provision. Locations where higher income groups purchase or consume goods which have a mon opoly character (e.g., exclusive wines and exclusive rec reational areas) enable the seller to obtain surplus profit. This surplus profit due to monopolies is supposed to be converted into monopoly land rent. Extensive differential rent stems directly from the production sector and is a result of more favorable conditions of production at specific places. An example for this is retail space in prime sites which enables higher turnover and therefore reduces costs per unit. Surplus profits resulting from these privileged spaces are assumed to go into land owners’ pockets in the form of extensive differential rent. Both, monopoly rent and extensive differential rent were used to analyze demand driven developments in the urban case. Intensive differential rent and, in part, ab solute rent served to analyze the active role of the landed classes in general and the role of real estate developers and speculators in particular. Intensive differential rent is supposed to stem from a more intensive use of land compared to the prevailing norm. The introduction of multistory buildings is behavior by landowners or speculators which allows the attainment of intensive differential rent. Another way to obtain this form of rent is by changing the social value of certain spaces. This can take the form of gentrification or the production of gated communities in quarters which were formally occupied by social groups with a lower capacity to pay rent. Neil Smith’s rent gap theory represents a concrete approach to deal with a phenomenon caused by intensive differential rent. Instead of demand led explanations Smith proposed taking the speculators search for inten sive rent as a key variable to explain gentrification. Gentrification as a phenomenon and Smith’s explanation attracted the attention of numerous scholars and caused controversial discussions. He explained gentrification as a historical process which was linked via land rent to the development of capitalism. In so doing, he made a dis tinction between a site’s capitalized land rent and its potential rent. Capitalized land rent, conceptualized as a deduction from surplus value, was assumed to represent the actual quantity of ground rent that was appropriated
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by the land owner, given the present land use. Potential land rent was defined as the amount of rent that could have been capitalized under the land’s highest and best use. A reason for the difference between both values was seen in the disinvestment in certain places. This dis investment led to a reduction of the overall surplus ob tained at a plot of land and hence the actual rent. This mechanism was used to explain the deterioration of inner urban areas which was observable in many cities and went hand in hand with suburbanization. At the same time, the overall amount of capital applied to land in creased and potential rent was supposed to experience a similar development. The growing difference between the actually capitalized land rent and the potential rent was supposed to be the driving force of gentrification because it created the possibility of surplus profits through reinvestment in the plot. This theoretical ap proach to land rent theory was frequently applied to address empirically the phenomenon of gentrification. In general, rent gap, and in particular its theoretical core, the difference between capitalized and potential land rent caused considerable controversies on how to meas ure these values. Blair Badcock and Steven C. Bourassa questioned whether the rent gap was an empirically useful concept at all. Smith responded that the rent gap was criticized as a neoclassical theory although it had never been intended to be one. The apparently opposing views were not only the result of terminological prob lems but of a real theoretical disagreement over land rent. One of the main questions was whether land use affected land rent on a particular plot or land rent affected the type of use of land – a crucial question in land rent theory. Daniel J. Hammel entered the debate and pro posed a solution to that. He insisted that Smith’s rent gap theory represented a theoretically consistent explanation of gentrification although the treatment of the relation ship between land rent and land use was rather hidden in rent gap theory. Hammel pointed to the importance of scale in addressing this question. He argued that capit alized land rent had to be considered at least at two scales which he found in Smith’s cycle of devalorization and his discussion of capitalized and potential rents. In Smith’s approach, the neighborhood scale was crucial to explain potential land rent which was largely determined by lo cation. Hammel argued that potential rent was deter mined at the metropolitan scale while capitalized land rent was determined at the neighborhood scale. Specific forms of land use in a neighborhood might have limited capitalized land rent. This conceptualization allows re futing much of the critique formulated against it and allows solving the problem of whether land use deter mines land rent and vice versa by insisting on different scales. Furthermore, Smith’s rent gap theory was linked to his approach explaining uneven capitalist development in general. The geographical configuration of the
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landscape was assumed necessary for the survival of capitalism. Capitalism transformed space in its constant drive to accumulate larger quantities of social wealth. This was supposed to be associated with a dialectical interaction of a tendency toward differentiation and a tendency toward equalization of the levels and forms of production. In general, the rent gap theory is an important approach to land rent theory which helps to understand urban processes such as gentrification. Nevertheless, whether and how intensive differential rent is obtained depends heavily on the institutions regulating this type of rent seeking behavior. The neo Ricardian approaches to land rent were based on Pierro Sraffa’s systematization of David Ricar do’s political economy approach, for which he provided a formal model. Land rent is conceptualized as external and internal differential rent as shown by Heinz D. Kurz and Neri Salvadori. Based on a neo Ricardian frame work, Alan J. Scott developed a model for the urban context. He used Sraffa’s theoretical approach assuming that land rent was caused by scarcity (external differ ential rent) and the application of additional capital to land (intensive differential rent). He showed how a high density of housing in inner city areas and a relatively lower density of housing in suburban areas are produced by the land rent mechanism. In contrast to Alonso, he explained urban patterns without taking preferences and utilities into account. Extensive and intensive differential rents in addition to transport costs made up the main factors which determined urban structures. Scott went well beyond traditional neo Ricardian interpretations of land rent and argued that rent had to be seen in the context of the capitalist mode of production. Building on the work by Doreen Massey and Alejandrina Catalano he insisted that specific types of landowners constituted specific sorts of social fractions. Scott also tried to inte grate important urban phenomena such as urban plan ning into his framework. This made him exceptional in the neo Ricardian tradition, which, in general, was located at a relatively high level of abstraction and, therefore, abstracted from the analysis of institutional and political factors and their constitutive role for land rent. This was considerably different to the treatment of land in broader political economy traditions. The distinction among the broader approaches in the political economy tradition along nomothetic and ideo graphic lines of theoretical enquiry has been investigated by Anne Haila. The ideographic approach was charac terized by emphasizing the singularity of historical situ ations and social relations and by neglecting the existence of general laws. Michael Ball was one of the leading authors of this tradition. The merit of the ideo graphic tradition was that it directed the focus toward the analysis of concrete historical developments. Land rent was referred to as an act of payment of money and
therefore interpreted as circulation of revenues, but not explained by relating rent to the process of production. The explanatory value of any general rent theory was largely denied. This was criticized and stood in sharp contrast to the prevailing nomothetic approach which was characterized by the search for laws in land rent theory. David Harvey is considered to be the central author of this nomothetic tradition. He built heavily on the different types of rents distinguished above. Ac cording to him and other authors, land rent was supposed to become increasingly a financial asset. Along with that a merger between capitalists and the landed class was observed. It was assumed that the landed classes had abandoned their rentist behavior and, therefore, opposing interests to capitalist development were neutralized. As such, land was assumed not to be an obstacle to the process of capitalist accumulation anymore. On the contrary, land rent was assumed to fulfill a coordinating function by assigning land to efficient uses and thereby boosting capitalist accumulation. Land rent was no longer supposed to be determined exclusively by production, but was assumed to be dependent on (international) in vestment flows in the built environment. This led to the neglect of the relation between economic accumulation, the rate of profit and land rent, and hence, the question of distribution. Moreover, within a nomothetic tradition specified in the above way, there was no systematic space for the analysis of contradictory interests and the treat ment of politics left. Both, the ideographic and nomothetic theoretical traditions – although offering important insights – have considerable shortcomings. Johannes Ja¨ger proposed going beyond the nomothetic and ideographic traditions. He argued that the concrete context of rent should be analyzed and the fact that land rent represents a social relation should be taken seriously. Therefore, land rent was proposed to be analyzed embedded within the broader institutional context. In doing so, the specific historic interests and spatial dynamics related to land can be analyzed by building upon the different types of rent. Those different types of rent are assumed to be not in variant over time but to be changing according to their specific institutional embedding. In order to link land rent theory coherently to general developments it was proposed to integrate it into a medium range theory, in particular the regulationist approach. In regulation the ory, capitalist accumulation is considered to be charac terized by contradictions which temporally might be offset with an adequate regulation of its institutions or structural forms which land rent forms a part of. As land (or space) is required for any productive or reproductive economic activity it is necessary to have institutions such as land rent which regulate it. Patterns of urban devel opment such as urban redevelopment and segregation can be analyzed linking them to distributional struggles
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between capitalists, landowners, and workers. In general, such an integrative conceptualization allows us to link the dynamics of economic accumulation and political regulation to urban geography and vice versa.
Scope of Explanation and Critique Land rent is the particular institution which links the economy to geography and contributes to an under standing of urban and regional phenomena. Without doubt economic developments are crucial for the analysis of spatial structures and changes. Moreover, land rent is a category which helps to explain how geography, or the spatiality of economic activity itself, affects economic processes. There are two broad theoretical ways of dealing with land rent theory which differ substantially in scope of explanation, the underlying assumptions, and the conclusions drawn. On the one hand are the models based on von Thu¨nen and Alonso and the work in the context of new urban economics which demonstrates a higher degree of rigidity but its scope of analysis is relatively narrow. Based on a neoclassical theoretical base, household’s preferences, budgetary restrictions, and transport costs determine land rent and urban geography. While traditional approaches within this framework ba sically conclude that unregulated markets and land rent lead to an optimal outcome, more recent work, including externalities and market imperfections, arrives at more diverse conclusions. On the other hand, land rent theory in a political economy tradition shows a much higher degree of diversity at the cost of a higher heterogeneity between different approaches. It allows for a broader understanding of complex urban phenomena as it pro vides a comprehensive tool of analysis which links eco nomic and social processes and (class) agent’s strategies via different types of land rent to the production of geography. Taking the richness of land rent theory and its potential to explain urban and regional structures and development into account it is quite surprising that its use and further development in human geography is not very widespread today. At least in part this might be
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explained by the high degree of complexity of the dif ferent approaches. See also: Capital and Space; Economic Geography, Quantitative; Gentrification; Location Theory; Natural Resources; Radical Political Economy; Regulation; Segregation.
Further Reading Alonso, W. (1964). Location and Land Use. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Badcock, B. (1990). On the nonexistence of the rent gap hypothesis. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 79, 125 145. Ball, M. (1985). The urban rent question. Environment and Planning A 17, 503 525. Bourassa, S. C. (1993). The rent gap debunked. Urban Studies 30, 1731 1744. Fujita, M. (2003). Urban Economic Theory. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Haila, A. (1990). The theory of land rent at the crossroads. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 8, 275 296. Hammel, D. J. (1999). Re establishing the rent gap: An alternative view of capitalised land rent. Urban Studies 36, 1283 1293. Harvey, D. (1982). The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Blackwell. Jager, J. (2003). Urban land rent theory. A regulationist perspective. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27, 233 249. Kurz, H. D. and Salvadori, N. (1998). The ‘standard commodity’ and Ricardo’s search for an ‘invariable measure of value’. In Kurz, H. D. & Salvadori, N. (eds.) Understanding ‘Classical’ Economics. Studies in Long Period Theory. London: Routledge. Massey, D. and Catalano, A. (1978). Capital and Land, Landownership by Capital in Great Britain. London: Edward Arnold. Scott, A. J. (1980). The Urban Land Nexus and the State. London: Pion. Screpanti, E. and Zamagni, S. (1993). An Outline of the History of Economic Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, N. (1979). Towards a theory of gentrification. Journal of the American Planning Association 45, 538 549. Smith, N. (1984). Uneven Development. Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sraffa, P. (1960). The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Von Thunen, H. (1966). Von Thunen’s Isolated State, edited by Peter Hall. London: Pergamon Press. Von Wieser, F. (1909). Die Theorie der Sta¨dtischen Grundrente. Wien: Deuticke.
Land Rights R. Howitt, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Geographical Imagination Generally refers to the shared understanding of landscape, environment and social history and that provides a people or cultural group with a shared sense of territory and a common place in the world. In challenging the ways in which political values and environmental understanding affect geographical imagination, the discipline often seeks to nurture informed debate and misunderstanding. Indigenous Peoples The first peoples to live in an area with customary ties and relationships to particular territories and customary laws and cultural forms that institutionalise and govern those relationships. Indigenous Rights The passage of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples provides a common standard for recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples. While many key struggles of Indigenous Peoples relate to protection of basic human rights, there is also a set of claims based on pre-existing and persistent links between people and territories and unresolved claims by colonial states to have usurped specific rights that underpin claims of Indigenous rights. Postcolonialism Movements or studies that investigate, correct or mitigate the complex impacts and consequences of colonialism. It can also refer to independent governance arrangements in previously colonised states. Treaty Rights Many Indigenous Peoples claim specific rights that were settled in treaties with occupying or colonising forces. These rights are often seen as anachronistic by modern states but have, for example in Aotearoa New Zealand, provided a powerful foundation for renegotiating the terms of coexistence between Indigenous and settler societies.
Introduction The political movement advocating indigenous land rights has been an important element of postcolonial politics in many settler societies. The land rights move ment argued that returning land to its traditional owners was fundamental to changing the place of indigenous peoples in settler nation states and addressing the historical legacies of colonial displacement of first na tions. In many settler nations, indigenous peoples’ land rights have been a difficult and divisive political issue,
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challenging widely held assumptions about national identity and future trajectories. The idea of persistent indigenous rights to the land that forms the postcolonial nation state challenges ideas that lie at the heart of contemporary constructions of place, identity, and nation. In settler societies such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the USA – the four nation states which voted against the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the United Nations General Assembly in September 2007 – the land rights movement has been central to what Canadian scholar Michael Ignatieff characterized as the ‘rights revolution’ in 2000, which has redefined the idea of relationships between a nation state and its citizens since the 1960s. In this context, the political movement for indigenous land rights has often framed a profound challenge to Eurocentric assumptions about the relationships between territory, identity, and governance that have been so fundamental to recent debates in political and cultural geography. The roots for the contemporary relevance of the land rights issue, however, are to be found much further back in colonial histories.
Land, Law, and Identity: Historical and Legal Constructions Ideas about human territoriality have long been linked with the idea of possession of land. One of the chal lenging political questions arising from notions of terri toriality is who, or what, belongs to whom? Does the land belong to the people – or do the people belong to the land? For many indigenous groups in settler nation states, the claims of a special relationship to land are central to their claims of identity – but the dominant legal systems of settler nation states have typically re jected such claims as poorly founded in law. For indigenous peoples, the social expression of the rela tionship is likely to be constructed as collective rather than individuated responsibilities and rights. The docu mentation is more likely to take the form of genealogy (in Maori, whakapapa), ritual, or story rather than a centrally recorded document. The claim is more likely to be founded upon a sense of ‘time immemorial’ or ‘being born from the Earth’ rather than derived from a claim of sovereignty. Does this reduce the validity or influence of the claim? To answer that question, it is necessary to consider the histories of possession and dispossession that arose from colonial occupation of the settler states.
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Geographical expansion of European influence into the so called New World in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought European property systems, which were undergoing rapid change as a result of the emer gence of new systems of governance, the development of new wealth and the transformation of isolated kingdoms into externally oriented empires – into juxtaposition and often conflict with pre existing systems of property rights and access to land, resources, and wealth. The fate of precolonial property systems varied from place to place, but the treatment of property systems of indigenous and tribal groups, particularly nomadic peoples (whose fail ure to cultivate and subdue nature placed them on the wrong side of the biblical ejection of humanity from the Garden of Eden), is generally characterized by acts of denial, erasure, and removal. The universalizing claims of linear human progress that Christian Europe proclaimed as the basis of its own superiority to others, mixed with emergent notions in the nineteenth century with naı¨ve Darwinian notions of fitness and privilege to produce extraordinarily barbaric and genocidal treatment of indigenous groups, with frontier wars that aimed at in digenous peoples as peoples. Customary legal systems and ancient jurisdictions of the New World were often dismissed as primitive and inferior. Even in the heart lands of Europe, the treatment of rights derived from customary and common law systems in the transition from feudalism to capitalism produced violent clearances and enclosure of commons, with powerful and propertied lords usurping the rights of commoners and marginalized kinfolk. Thus, in both the heartlands and the frontiers, the history of colonization was often written, as Karl Marx colorfully proclaimed, in letters of blood and fire. Customary law property systems not based on the allo cation of separate and exclusive rights to identified and bounded spaces were often deemed by colonial powers too primitive to be considered equivalent to refined European notions of property and law. Consequently, these communal and collective rights were often simply denied, ignored, and erased as colonial systems developed.
Indigenous Property in the British Empire Highly racialized hierarchies of humanity allowed emissaries of church and state to proclaim particular peoples as so primitive that law and property were un known in their societies. This erasure by representation reached its zenith, perhaps, in the principle of terra nullius – land that belonged to no one. Australia, for example, was claimed by the British as property acquired not by conquest or cession but by settlement – because it was declared to be terra nullius by the occupying state power, in denial of the ancient jurisdiction already in place.
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Under the legal principle of terra nullius, entrenched in Australian colonial law by the mid 1830s – around the same time as the US Supreme Court was shaping the doctrine that defined the First Nations of the USA as ‘domestic dependent nations’ – the British Crown claimed to acquire absolute sovereignty over the entire continent of Australia. Australia’s colonial systems of property and resource rights were constructed as if Aboriginal peoples’ interests were simply absent from the landscape. In British North America, where claims of terra nullius would strain the truth too far, treaties were designed to achieve the same form of absolute possession. The American Revolution produced a series of new treaties, where First Nations provided treaties of peace and rec ognition that extended international recognition to the new republic. Western expansion of the United States produced more treaties – and more erasure of indigenous rights. Songwriter Buffy Sainte Marie captures the ethos in her powerful anthem My Country ‘Tis of Thy People Your Are Dying: Hear how the bargain was made for the West, With her shivering babies in zero degrees. ‘Blankets for your land’ so the treaties attest. Oh well, blankets for land, that’s a bargain indeed. (Buffy Sainte Marie, 1967 album)
In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Maori land wars, which threatened the expulsion of the British from the islands, saw the signing of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, in which the British Crown claimed that the Maori chiefs had ceded sovereignty (and retained kavanatanga (gov ernorship) to themselves). In Canada, massive British land grants in Quebec to the Hudson Bay Company were never secured by treaty nor confirmed by settlement – and yet the land involved was ceded to the Province of Quebec in 1912, conditional upon the making of treaties with the region’s traditional owners. Failure to settle treaties at that time produced problems later for devel opment of the area’s hydroelectric potential and triggered Canada’s modern treaty process with the negotiation of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement in 1975. Similar land grants, for example, in Sabah in East Ma laysia, provided the foundations for much more recent processes of dispossession through the operation of postcolonial government processes of planning, resource development, and land management. In the USA, despite recognition of treaty rights as the basis for a special re lationship with the federal government, systemic cor ruption of that relationship through the Bureau of Indian Affairs has produced a legal maze of treaty breaches, illegal relocations, deceitful contractual arrangements, and imposed underdevelopment.
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Indigenous Land Rights in the Twentieth Century In the early twentieth century, indigenous interests in the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand faced political and social marginalization. Entrenched anti indigenous racism ensured that indigenous people suffered unequal conditions in employment, housing, and education. For many indigenous groups, the best that could be expected was the cruel paternalism and grinding poverty of gov ernment reserves and reservations. Social policies were often more concerned with exercising control over in digenous people, separating children from families, and penalizing expressions of indigenous identity such as language, religious ceremony, or family relations. Re strictions on indigenous mobility, control over property, labor power, and wealth were all central to government programs aimed at removing indigenous peoples as separate and persistent entities in settler societies. Through the early twentieth century, treaties with First Nations were generally simply ignored by govern ments, treated as anachronistic in the modern indus trializing state. Breaches of treaty obligations were often compelled by government policies, and state bureau cracies often completely failed in the roles with which they were charged. These roles typically involved pro tection, welfare, and advancement or with managing the property and interests of people whom the dominant legal system defined as wards of the state, or as too primitive to hold status as full citizens. In settled areas, the twentieth century typically saw a microgeography of dispossession, characterized by unsurveyed reservation boundaries being encroached by farmers and cities; lost documentation on land grants to individual indigenous people; government agencies disposing of indigenous land and resource assets in unfavorable arrangements (often involving criminal negligence and corruption); and poverty and trickery swindling people out of land through insufferable credit and contractual arrange ments. The opportunity to retain, or secure, return of land in such circumstances was difficult. Decolonization after World War II left the question of indigenous rights in settler societies largely unaddressed. The fate of indigenous minorities in postcolonial states was considered an internal matter, largely immune to international comment or intervention. The enormous inequities between indigenous and settler populations in terms of health, education, employment, wealth, and well being reflected the failure of settler societies to place policies and practices that would distribute the benefits of national development to their indigenous citizens. In areas that were more remote from the metropolitan heartlands of the settler societies, government reserves and reservations often covered vast areas of little interest
to governments and commercial interests. It was often these areas of apparent wasteland that governments began to consider returning to some form of indigenous ownership when the liberalizing influence of the civil rights movement generally, and the land rights move ment in particular, began to shift the political landscape toward greater social acknowledgement of the persistent indigenous presence in the cultural landscapes of the settler societies. Ironically, however, by the early 1970s, these remote and isolated indigenous domains often became the target of resource explorers keen to acquire preemptive rights from governments, prior to any move to grant land rights to traditional owners of the lands. This period was widely seen as constituting a ‘new re sources war’ – a term coined by the US sociologist Al Gedicks in 1994. In more recent times, the coincidence of many indigenous domains with areas of high biodiversity and environmental value has heralded a new set of challenges with pressure to displace indigenous peoples from conservation lands, and limit their use of traditional resources. Inequality was reflected in most official statistics – where states included indigenous people in their counts and samples. By the 1950s, indigenous populations in wealthy societies were poorer, less well, more un employed, less educated, more incarcerated, and lived shorter lives. Such inequality always has a specific geography and a history. It arose in particular circum stances in which the disadvantage resulting from loss of land was entrenched across generations into the patterns of the dominant settler society. In the Australian case, which in many ways reflects indigenous experience more broadly, the response of the dominant political discourses has involved narratives of absence, erasure, and denial. Both physical and cultural landscapes were emptied of the indigenous owners, the traces of the ancient juris dictions have been erased, and the persistent presence of indigenous peoples and their rights in contemporary landscape denied. The lived cultural landscapes of settler societies are a complex reflection of the people to people and people to place relationships that structure everyday life. In multicultural, pluralist societies, which many of the set tler nation states have become, the values, perceptions, aspirations, and contributions of many groups shape those landscapes. Yet, the rights, interests, and values that predate the colonial state have proved difficult to ac knowledge and incorporate into these societies. The land rights movement has been one important element of the response. By the late 1960s, under pressure from broad pro cesses of societal change reflected in the civil rights movement, increasingly liberal social legislation, and discomfort with overt racism, formal legislative responses to indigenous peoples’ calls for land rights were
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considered. The land rights movement in Australia traces its origins deeply into the resistance and social justice movements supporting aboriginal and Torres Strait Is lander people throughout the nation’s colonial and postcolonial history. The post World War II movement traces origins to the strike of aboriginal pastoral workers in Western Australia’s Pilbara region in 1950, and the Gurindji people’s celebrated strike against appalling conditions and acquisition of their traditional land by the British company Vesteys in the Northern Territory in the early 1960s. In the Gove Land Rights case in the Northern Territory Supreme Court, Yolngu people from northeast Arnhem Land challenged the right of the Australian Government to grant land, which they felt was their own, as a mining lease to a Swiss aluminium company. While the 1971 judgment confirmed the prin ciple of terra nullius as a foundation of Australian law, it also acknowledged the sophistication and organization of Yolngu customary law. It did, however, reject the Yolngu claim, arguing rather the Yolngu system of rights (in which people belong to the land rather than land belonging to people). In the wake of that decision, however, the incoming government in 1972 undertook to draft legislation to return land to Aboriginal ownership in the Northern Territory. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1975 was finally introduced after much debate and protest. In the Australian case, Aboriginal people had established a tent embassy in the early 1970s to emphasize just how alienated they felt they were from the state. State and federal legislation was drafted in the early 1970s to return Aboriginal reserve lands in the Northern Territory and South Australia. In the case of the Northern Territory, the legislation also allowed for Aboriginal traditional owners to make claims to other lands, particularly Vacant Crown Lands – unused government lands – where they could demon strate that they met the requirements of the legislation. The provision of ‘land rights’ by legislation, however, has not produced equality – a matter that is seen as a failure of land rights by many critics. But in many cases, the postcolonial state’s continued claim to have usurped all resource and development rights that might have been available to traditional owners as full beneficial owners of land meant that the legislation involved often tightly prescribed the sorts of rights granted by the state – and ensured that there would be no threat to postcolonial sovereignty. For example, the NSW Land Rights Act of 1983 allowed Aboriginal people in New South Wales (NSW) to claim land that was not required for any other purpose. The patchwork of land open to claim included decommissioned waste disposal sites, inaccessible land, land cut off by road developments and many areas of no value and little traditional significance beyond its status as part of a much larger historical territory. Inalienable freehold title (intended to reflect traditional values of
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land as mother) often meant that ownership of land could not be used to raise finance, and without resources, using the land for productive economic, social, or cul tural purposes became difficult. In many places, exemp tions from land taxes or local government rates, intended to reduce the financial burden on impoverished com munities, was construed by local authorities to mean that local services were not provided. In remote areas, this sort of attitude embedded in entrenched patterns of structural racism and ingrained prejudice against in digenous peoples reinforces high costs, poor access to services, and poor economic and social outcomes. In other jurisdictions, the return of traditional terri tories to indigenous ownership and control has relied on a range of judicial, parliamentary, and policy based initiatives. The principle of self determination, which underpinned the decolonization process in the former so called Third World, was rarely acknowledged in the settler societies as relevant to colonized people of the Fourth World of indigenous and minority groups in the main settler societies. While that principle, along with the principle of indigenous ownership of their tra ditional estates, is now acknowledged in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, it remains unachievable in many jurisdictions.
Land Rights and Geographical Imagination In postcolonial periods, indigenous groups have pursued land rights as a central element of their claims for rec ognition. Acknowledgement that customary rights to their traditional territories existed prior to colonial oc cupation has been difficult to secure, not least because such acknowledgement is often understood to undermine the postcolonial state’s claims to sovereignty and may destabilize the legal foundations of government ad ministration of property, resources, and environment. In other words, the question of land rights underpins the social and geographical imaginary of the settler na tion state. The persistent presence of indigenous inter ests belies the heroic, self congratulatory narratives of nation building that underpin identity and politics in the modern pluralist democracies. In national economies where land and natural resources provide both historical and contemporary foundations for national wealth, the land claims of displaced, but surviving indigenous groups unsettles the assumption that wealth is a product of hard work and good luck. The broken treaties, the racist vio lence, the genocidal evil of eugenic social policies, and the current failures to resolve these issues affirm that theft and violence have also been the foundations for settler nation prosperity.
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In more recent times, following legal successes in establishing the persistence of Native title in Australia, resource rights in North America, and treaty rights in New Zealand, there has been a significant shift toward agreement making with indigenous groups, and the for mal protocols of the modern treaty process. More widely, the work of international representative and support groups in the nongovernment sector (e.g., IWGIA, Cul tural Survival, World Council of Indigenous Peoples, Inuit Circumpolar Council, etc.), the emergence of indigeneity as a significant identifier for marginalized peoples in many areas of Asia, South America, and Africa, establishment of a United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples and, after decades of deliberation and debate, passage of the Declaration on the Rights of In digenous Peoples, has focused attention on indigenous rights, including land rights. In many jurisdictions, the land rights struggle has emerged as a new focal point in the struggle for justice and identity. In the settler nation (nation states) states, it has been recognized that in both political and legal terms, indigenous rights may further unsettle the taken for granted narratives of settlement, property, and prosperity. New Zealand’s concessions around resource and environmental management, off shore marine resources, and geothermal energy resources and Canada’s new rounds of modern treaty negotiations, all suggest that the land rights issue continues to have wide currency in unequal societies. The emergence of new discourses around indigenous claims to saltwater country (i.e., claims to territorial waters of nation states), water, and resources that indicate the extent to which the issues that generated the land rights movements of the settler states remain unresolved. In the twenty first century, the issues of indigenous rights cannot be limited to questions of land rights, nor can governments expect the international community to accept that their treatment of indigenous peoples is a matter of internal affairs. No longer focused solely on the return of traditional lands, indigenous peoples’ movements challenge assumptions about human–nature relations; they highlight the importance of cultural diversity on a global scale, challenge the narratives of globalization, and their continued presence in their tra ditional territories and the cultural landscapes of the contemporary world challenge the geographical imagin ation to encompass much more than Eurocentric visions of development as the basis for understanding people’s places in shaping the planet.
Conclusion Indigenous peoples have often been overlooked in geo graphy’s consideration of place. Key texts by Soja have narrated a ‘cacophonous silence’ around First Nations’
place in the history of the United States. Yet, political movements advocating protection and return of in digenous land rights have provided and punctuated the development narratives of many nation states. Given the importance of the link between human territoriality, state sovereignty, and national identity, the lack of critical engagement with indigenous rights in the discipline of geography is perhaps surprising, but the establishment of an International Geographical Union Commission on Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledges and Rights in 2006 in dicates that this is emerging as a significant element in the discipline in the twenty first century. The orientation of that commission toward both research and advocacy further suggests the relevance of the discipline to in digenous futures. The interplay of legal, anthropological, and political discourses in delivering and/or denying indigenous peoples rights to their traditional territories has certainly been an issue that has affected the historical geographies of many settler states. Particularly in the former British colonies, land rights as legal argument, cultural relationship, social movement, political prop osition, and policy program has significantly influenced national identity and politics. The history of land rights opens up valuable lines of thought on key geographical concepts such as human territoriality, boundaries, cul tural landscapes, and human–nature relations. See also: Activism; Identity Politics; Indigeneity; Indigenous Geographies; National Spatialities; Place Names; Racism and Antiracism.
Further Reading Asch, M. (1997). Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada: Essays on Law, Equality, and Respect for Difference. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Blomely, N. (1994). Law, space, and the geographies of power. New Work: Guildford Press. Brody, H. (2000). The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre. Cant, G., Goodall, A. and Inns, J. (eds.) (2005). Discourses and Silences: Indigenous Peoples, Risks and Resistance. Christchurch: Department of Geography, University of Canterbury. Gedicks, A. (1994). The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Goodall, H. (1996). Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770 1972. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Howitt, R. (2001). Rethinking Resource Management: Justice, Sustainability and Indigenous Peoples. London: Routledge. Ignatieff, M. (2000). The Rights Revolution. Toronto: Anansi. Ivison, D., Patton, P. and Sanders, W. (eds.) (2000). Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jaimes, M. A. (1992). The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance. Boston, MA: South End Press. Johnson, J. T., Cant, G., Howitt, R. and Peters, E. (2007). Creating anti colonial geographies: Embracing indigenous peoples’ knowledges and rights. Geographical Research 45(2), 117 120. Sack, R. D. (1986). Human Territoriality Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Shaw, W. S. R., Herman, D. K. and Dobbs, R. (2006). Encountering indigeneity: Re imagining and decolonizing geography. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88(3), 267 276. Soja, E. W. (1989). Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. Stewart Harawira, M. (2005). The New Imperial Order: Indigenous Responses to Globalization. London: Zed Books and Huia Publishers. Wisner, B. and Stea, D. (eds.) (1984). Special Issue on Indigenous Issues. Antipode 16(2). Young, E. (1995). Third World in the First: Development and Indigenous Peoples. London: Routledge.
Relevant Websites http://www.pacificworlds.com Association of American Geographers Indigenous Specialty Group.
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http://www.yorku.ca Canadian Association of Geographers Native Canadians Specialty Group. http://www.cwis.org Centre for World Indigenous Studies. http://www.unl.edu International Geographical Union Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledges and Rights Commission. http://www.iwgia.org International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA, Copenhagen). http://www.inuitcircumpolar.com Inuit Circumpolar Council. http://www.ohchr.org United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). http://www.un.org United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples.
Landscape J. Dubow, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Cartesian The term refers to that dominant strand in Western thought which presupposes the essential independence and self-sufficiency of the rational human subject and argues for a theory of consciousness in terms of a detached, disembodied, contemplative knower. In this, it is a form of critical idealism which, based on the separation of mind and body, presents us with a model of reality which is rationally systematic but which fails to acknowledge the discontinuities between consciousness and the world. Cultural Materialism A critical approach which developed in Britain in the late 1970s and 1980s, it is a term allied to Marxism, but which, in the productive tension of its two constituent terms, is resistant to the rigidities of economic determinism. While it maintains that there is no crude material reality beyond culture, it simultaneously asserts that cultural forms are embedded within the historical and material processes which formed them and in which they play a central role. Esthetic First coined by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten and assigned high priority in European thought since the Enlightenment, ‘esthetics’ most commonly refers to the tastes, categories, and criteria used in both the evaluation of art and various kinds of perceptual experience and effect. While it often assumes a universal and timeless validity, the realm of the esthetic has a clear, albeit contradictory, relation to ethics, politics, and cultural specificity. Phenomenology A twentieth-century philosophical movement distinguished by a concentration on lived or embodied experience which reveals the sensory and perceptual ‘meanings’ of things that precede their abstraction in thought, knowledge, or theoretical interpretation. Exerting an immense influence on cultural and literary criticism, it has recently gained currency in cultural geography, especially in the field of landscape studies. Anti-Cartesian and anti-essentialist in impulse, it does not seek to understand the connection between an autonomous self (body) and an objective world, but rather the primordial encounter between them. Representation A complex term, 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. With application to the worlds of both arts and science, representation is now understood less as a process of reproducing or describing a preexistent reality but as a
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complex set of meanings which often constitutes what counts and is valued as reality. Ways of Seeing Coined in the 1970s by John Berger, a Marxist art theorist, the phrase refers not only to the perceptual relation between a viewing subject and viewed object but also to the historicity of this relation: the extent to which all visual experiences and representations are culturally and socially produced. The Renaissance ‘invention’ of geometric perspective, Cartesian notions of rational sight, and various forms of artistic and scientific naturalism, can thus all be analyzed in terms of their historical and ideological implications.
Introduction The complexity of the term ‘landscape’ is matched only by the clamor of competing theoretical and methodo logical positions which have sought to understand it. Deployed variously in cultural geography, art history, landscape architecture, environmental studies, and even the archaeology, sociology, and anthropology of regions, territories, and locations, the term seems to suffer as much from a definitional overload as it does from a nagging ambiguity. However, with its etymological ori gins in feudal polities of customary law, land control, and communal occupation (landschaft), its later adaptation by the seventeenth century Dutch genre painters (land schap), and its role within the continental European school of morphological analyses (landschaftsgeographie), landscape’s defining tension is summarily established: Is landscape the space in which we live, move, and have our being? Or is it the scenic framing of that space for our observation, contemplation, and appreciation? Al ternatively, does landscape belong to the domain of utility or esthetics, and of objective spatial formation or pictorial representation? Most importantly, what does such a categorical distinction consist in? What is the historical genealogy of the divide and the weight of its social, cultural, and political significance?
From Cultural Materialism to the Textual Turn From both a phenomenological and historical materialist perspective, Raymond Williams’ seminal definition still resonates: ‘‘a working country is hardly ever a landscape.’’
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Indeed, armed with the implications of a post Cartesian philosophy and with a Marxian understanding of mod ernity as coextensive with the development of industrial capitalism, Williams sees the philosophical separation of nature and art as the analog of the distinction between the spheres of production and consumption. Landscape, in this sense, is not only the process and product of certain property and social relations predicated on a commodity economy and its hidden practices of labor exploitation. Landscape is also a particular ‘way of seeing’ an estheticizing operation which solicits us to withdraw from a site, to ‘view’ it from afar: a distanciating move inseparable from a retreat to higher and safer ground, a rationalizing perception and a kind of refusal of whatever practical, political, or proximate involvements the scene might make on us. The implication, in short, is to understand landscape as a ‘visual ideology’. While as a physical form it is a concrete materialization of social contradictions (a land owned by a privileged economic class but worked and maintained by another), it is also a system of esthetic and conventional ordering useful in the management of such contradictions. Indeed, if landscape, as the term suggests, involves the cultural shaping or ‘scaping’ of the natural world and its sensed perception in order to render it politically functional, it has also relied on a host of related generic conventions. Chief among these is the tendency toward mimetic realism which, as Cosgrove notes, in composing space ‘‘according to the certainties of geometry’’ and the optical technologies of perspectival control, makes landscape the site of ideological mediation par excellence. So understood, landscape representation (as image, picture, or poetic and rhetorical trope) not only obscures the partiality of subjective vision in order to exhibit the world as an objective property of space, but it also effectively suspends the perceived scene from the flux of time and historical specificity to invest it with the (depoliticized) values of durability and duration. In short, what is at issue in such an account is how landscape as ideology functions to naturalize a scene, how it presents as given and inevitable all those events, actions, and accidents that constitute the ‘real’ structural dynamics of social relations and historical process. Accordingly, as Matless notes, for cultural materialists any critique of the idea of landscape involves lifting the ‘veil’ of idealized distortion, as John Barrell and Anne Bermingham do when they locate the ‘invention’ of the English rustic tradition in the context of the Enclosure Acts and the accompanying dispossession of the English peasantry which facilitated the rise and development of industrial capitalism. Alternatively, to critique the esthetic idealization of landscape, means being alive to the Marxian insight that ideology gains force to the degree to which its referents take material form, or to take seriously the injunction that culture is
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never more in evidence than whenever nature is announced. If landscape, as the antithesis of ‘land’ or its idealized imagining, is crucial to the mystifying operations of capitalism, then, so too is the way in which it is in separable from the production of specific social and subjective identities. Thus, for instance, Barrell draws on a cultural materialist tradition in literary theory to argue that the taste for the panoramic or ‘prospect’ position so favored in the eighteenth century landscape esthetics is productive of that subject of civic authority who is not only capable to observe or ‘frame’ a view but who, from his visionary prospect, is able to abstract ‘‘substance from accident’’ and so grasp objects in the ‘‘form of their re lations to each other.’’ As such, the landscape panorama does not merely denote a particular viewing position. It is, for Barrell, the very image of political liberalism. As a key move in the exercise of symbolic power, it attests to nothing less than that ideal figure who, possessed of a rationalizing distance, is thus capable of the unfettered mobility and disinterested generosity of true governance. Similarly, from an art historical perspective, Elizabeth Helsinger has argued the ways that the nineteenth cen tury landscape art of J. M. W. Turner does not just image a certain pictorial topography, rather, it represents an interlocking system of circulatory spaces associated with the dissonant class interests of burgeoning middle class tourism, the internal migration of a mobile labor force and a newly embattled hereditary aristocracy. In this, she argues, Turner’s English landscapes and the figures that populate them not only negotiate conflicting class interests but also reflect back, in turn, on the very claims to political representativity and national identity in the public sphere of the nineteenth century Britain. Over the past three decades, cultural geographers have sig nificantly elaborated the connection between class an alysis and its imaginative cultural expression. For Denis Cosgrove, tracing the genealogy of the ‘‘landscape idea’’ from its original emergence in a Renaissance imaginary to its later Enlightened, Industrial, and Modern articu lations, landscape ‘‘represents a way in which classes of people have signified themselves and their world through their imagined relationships with nature, and through which they have underlined and communicated their own social role and that of others with respect to external nature.’’ Similarly, for Stephen Daniels examining land scape designs and debates in Georgian and Regency England, the ‘duplicity’ of the genre resides in the extent to which it enfolds an individualized esthetic sensibility, on the one hand, and a carefully historicized class dis course, on the other. As Daniels sees it, the extent to which landscape, as a cultural image, compels the fiction of a sensual, organic unity with nature, is precisely the extent to which it conceals both the underlying material conditions of existence and adjudicates the separation
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that capitalist appropriation has brought between the human and natural worlds. For both Cosgrove and Daniels, however, an analysis aimed at reading what Anne Bermingham calls the ‘‘class view of landscape’’ is ineffective, and reductionist, unless linked to the self fashioning of the subject as the pro jector and receptor of that view. Indeed, the implicit understanding of cultural materialist analysis is that the ideological force of landscape, as well as of the various generic and narrative typologies in which it may be represented (e.g., panoramic, pastoral, georgic, the sub lime, and the picturesque), is not to be had simply by reading it as the product or record of the social relations that underwrite it. Instead, our attention is called to the kinds of spectatorial work, or the performative self pos itioning, evoked by a particular landscape site/sight at a particular historical moment. Landscape, in this sense, should not merely be placed in its correct periodized context in order to simply appreciate how a body of determinate signs may signify or reflect certain structures of cultural power, rather, landscape should be seen as itself a ‘cultural practice’, one that ‘‘makes history in both the real and represented environment,’’ playing a for mative role in the active production of subjects in both their material and textual engagement with the social world. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the growing ap preciation of landscape as a cultural and textual practice – or the ‘‘[changing] of ‘landscape’ from a noun to a verb’’ in W. J. T. Mitchell’s nifty phrase – began to take im portant lessons from the interpretative techniques of literary and cultural theory. In this, it further refined an earlier materialist critique by asking questions about readership, authorship, and the process of signification where such things refer to uncovering the hidden codes and unquestioned assumptions which structure how a landscape is communicated, experienced, and explored. While the move from a dominantly cultural materialist to textual ‘turn’ in geography is impossible to clearly dis cern – the recursive flow of intellectual movements being, of course, resistant to strict chronology or unprecedented insights – this interpretation of landscape was to en courage an even greater awareness of its discursive effects. That is, the extent to which all landscapes – whether material or imagined, physical or thought, the ‘world itself ’ or as its mimetic duplication – are con structed within a realm of signs and their unstable meanings. Rehearsed most fully in the anthologies of Barnes and Duncan’s book, Writing Worlds, and Duncan and Ley’s book, Place/Culture/Representation, the key epi stemological shift in these accounts was to insist that all landscapes as texts be understood as a system of culturally encoded signs. Following the post structuralist analyses of Roland Barthes, landscapes could now be seen as ‘intertextual’; that is, woven through and cross hatched
by a limitless force field of ‘‘citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, antecedent or contemporary,’’ which together construct a ceaseless ensemble and thus a ne cessary deferment of meaning. What intertextuality pronounces, in short, is not simply that landscapes are representations – the graphic, pictorial, or rhetorical reproduction of a real world ‘out there’ to which they refer. At its furthest reaches, a landscape is a ‘‘represen tation of something that is already a representation’’ (Mitchell, 2002: 14). Long before it becomes the subject of a picture, it participates in a world in which cultural meanings and values are already inscribed and which we behold with an eye that is already implicated in, and mediated by, an endless field of discursive practice. We might interpret Rene´ Magritte’s La Conditione Humaine in just this way (Figure 1). ‘‘This is how we see the world,’’ said the Surrealist artist Magritte of his work in which an easel painting of a landscape has been grafted onto the outside view it depicts so that the two are doubled and made indistinguishable. Indeed, in a painting in which representation as artifice is set against and folded into a representation as natural fact, Magritte seems to speak directly to the intertextual idea that what the optical eye sees in a physical landscape – its empirical, phenomenal data – is already presupposed by an entire network of discursive determinations which enable its visual recog nition. In short, here epistemology (what we know of the world) and ontology (the world itself) are neatly col lapsed and conflated: the view outside the window being
Figure 1 Rene´ Magritte’s La Conditione Humaine.
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constituted through the painted image of it and by an eye that recursively reads, and rereads, one entwined in the other.
Critical Landscapes: Political Economy and Gender If landscape names one of the ways in which spatial practices connected to deeper philosophical and histor ical movements, it also carries a particular political charge. The cultural materialism of Cosgrove and Daniels represents an expansive version of this critical acknowledgment, namely, the centrality of landscape esthetics not only to existing social processes but also to the complex operations of the economy. A more directly politicized version, offered by recalling an older foun dational Marxism, however, has sought to commit land scape to a model of social existence proceeding upward from material life and thus to a theory of culture based on the determining force of the economy centered on relations of production and their associated class inter ests. The cultural geographer Don Mitchell, elaborating on the work of other radical North American geog raphers such as Smith and Zukin, offers what is arguably the most systematically materialist interpretation of landscape processes, especially in context of con temporary American land and labor systems. Arguing against the analyses of landscape as pictorial or textual medium – indeed, seeing such a culturalist interpretation as its own form of ideological reification, abstracting the codes of landscape’s consumption from the actualities of its productive processes – Mitchell’s perspective thus returns landscape to classical Marxism’s first order priority; insisting that it is the underlying economic structure which – ontologically, epistemologically, and analytically – must form the basis for any landscape study. It is ‘here’ that the systemic conflict and violence of capitalist relations are centered – and, more import antly, ‘here’ that they may be contested. Mitchell’s work on California’s agricultural landscape thus focu ses particularly on exploitative migrant labor practices, the breakdown of familial and community networks caused by a seasonally and permanently dislocated workforce, the obstacles created to disallow any effective labor organization, and the extent to which the enormous profitability of Californian agriculture and the affluence of its suburban expression directly depends on the manifest alienation of the laboring body. While Mitchell’s concern is with the empirical specificities of the North American context, the objectivist import of his Marxian perspective, as well as his attempt to locate landscape study within a general societal analysis, means that the scope of his work relays to wider comparative net works and to questions raised by a longer genealogy of
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politically progressive scholarship. Thus his work on landscape has much to say, for example, to David Har vey’s materialist geographies of justice and difference, political ecology, theories of uneven development, and not least, to certain analyses of newly globalized social order. More than this, Mitchell’s understanding of land scape ‘‘constituted through a complex geography of violence’’ means that it reads, first and foremost, as call for a return to politics, conceived by him as form of intellectual labor embedded within the bigger picture of a liberatory materialism. Writing the relationship of landscape to politics is not, however, the preserve of Marxist cultural geography. Scholarly debates of geographers are inseparable from politics in the widest sense of the term. Thus, all the partially visible philosophical, historical, and strictly political baggage geographers bring with them to an academic arena; the wider contentiousness implied by their position taking; the broader experiential dynamics of place, location, and the body that inevitably shadow their concerns, have together helped frame the study of landscape over recent decades. Feminist geography has certainly supplied one of the most far reaching accounts of landscape, in this regard. At one level, feminist geog raphy concerned with the idea of landscape registers as one instance in the project of working through, and against, the binarized structure of a dominant cultural and geographic imagination – namely, the division be tween spaces of family, domesticity, and intimate life, on the one hand, and the performativities of a public and professional world, on the other. Related to this, feminist geography have been particularly concerned to reveal the material gendering of the industrialized urban landscape itself, which neither the available scripts of Marxism nor other materialist sociologies have adequately managed to address. Here, concerns ranging from the gendering of historical memory instantiated by the masculinist codes of public memorials and the differential spatiality of the workplace, to patterns of consumption and practices of mobility have all recognized the gendered nature of subjectivity and space while working hard to avoid the appropriation of an essentialist identity that the ‘de naturing’ charge of feminism is, after all, designed to attack. It is in the engagement with visual observation and representation, however, that feminist geography has offered a meditation on ‘landscape’ in precisely the dis ciplinary sense of the term; that is, as a ‘way of seeing’, a process of cognition, a genre of picturing making, and, not least, as a cultural practice constituted around the epistemic equivalence of the ‘male’ and the ‘gaze’. In formed by a generalized critique of the discursive transcoding of the male viewer as the bearer of reason/ culture and woman as pacified body/nature, and further refined by psychoanalytic analyses of visual pleasure and
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the repression of desire, feminist geographers have worked to untie the Gordian knot between landscape, vision, and the body, while, at the same time, have ex posed the gendered construction of the ‘landscape idea’ within the predominantly male legacy and logic of aca demic geography. Most productively, writers like Nash have sought to retain the ‘‘erotics, pleasure and power’’ of landscape esthetics, while reclaiming it for a feminist cultural geography that opens up a range of viewing positions and subjective positionalities that play on, but refuse the fixity of, normative gender identifications. From a feminist perspective, in short, landscape not only names the ability of a given social and cultural environment to consign some types of subjectivity to the margin, but also authorizes the alternative possibility of revisioning nature in terms of more complex, varied, and less determined lines of sight.
Other Landscapes: From the Nation-State to the Colonial Periphery Landscape, however, is not just the site where we rec ognize our historical, cultural, and perceptual investment in space, but also where we redefine it. A powerful per spective developed through the 1990s was to deploy landscape not only as a critical tool useful in the analysis of culture and society but also as an active site of identity formation within both the ‘invented tradition’ of the nation state as well the expanded field of its colonial and imperial articulations. Energized by the ferment of critical and philosophical ideas produced from the late 1960s onward by the post structuralist movement represented by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and further invigorated by the proliferation of postcolonial discourse analyses in the 1980s, the concepts of identity, language, space, and power breathed new life into understandings of how subjectivity might be thought and performed via specific landscape practices. Here, a concern with indi vidual places, histories, texts, and esthetic genres comes to be elaborated alongside wider discursive and epistemological questions, not least the interrogation of landscape itself as an exemplary site where systems of European knowledge, politics, ethics, and esthetics are formed. Informed, albeit implicitly, by key Foucauldian ideas of disciplinary and regulatory discourses embedded in particular spatial actions and activities, David Matless, for example, explores the connections between landscape, identity, and citizenship in the context of mid twentieth century England, focusing particularly on those em bodied practices (e.g., naturism, organicism, planning, the Boy Scouts, hygiene, and health and fitness movements) through which the entwined languages of landscape and
the self may be seen to work. Importantly, to see ‘land scape and Englishness’ in this way – that is, how the conduct of a particular historicized citizen subject is produced via the performance of particular landscape practices – means that neither term has recourse to any pregiven or original quality outside of its changing dis cursive articulation. Locating much of his work in the inter and postwar period, Matless is concerned to show how the bodily display of certain ‘authentic’ landscape practices – instantiated, for example, by the rustic ‘or ganic’ movement of the 1930s, or alternatively, by the figure of the planner preservationist ‘‘walking, cycling, camping, map reading’’ – is itself the means ‘‘whereby individual and nation might give form to itself environ mentally,’’ generating particular codes of moral and esthetic conduct necessary to a particular version of a proper, participatory, or ‘landscaped’ citizen. To the extent that an account, like Matless’, displays a dedication to detailed archival work and understands the English landscape, like the English subject, as the effect of historically specific spatial practices, the influence of Foucault is evident. However, it is perhaps only when one leaps the European fence to consider how landscape plays itself out beyond the metropolitan center, that a Foucauldian inflected account becomes most explicit. This is due in no small measure to the landmark work of Edward Said, which sought to recast a Foucauldian ac count of knowledge production into an analysis of European colonialism and imperialism. Thus, if at one end of the spectrum, the modern West has used land scapes to weave together regimes of value, morality, perception, and social power, at the other end, the history of military, administrative, territorial, and cultural ex pansion has placed landscape at the center of a post colonial critique. Indeed, we do not have to agree with the starkness of the assertion that ‘‘landscape is the [groundwork] and dreamwork of imperialism’’ (Mitchell, 1994: 8) to argue that looking at representation in the colonies is, perhaps, to have ‘‘privileged insight into what is most resilient, most dominant, and at the same time most politically constraining in the European landscape tradition’’ (Bunn, 1994: 128). Otherwise put, if we accept that landscape, as a way of seeing, depends on the controlling relation of sight to space, it is a relation that is necessarily compli cated, under imperial conditions, because of the associ ation between sight and surveillance. Allied to the critique of the older Enlightenment project of linking reason to illumination and sight to an ideal universal objectivity, much postcolonial writing has thus been concerned with how a certain surveillant gaze is implicit in the ways that European travelers, settlers, adminis trators, mapmakers, and artists attempted to comprehend a foreign landscape: evaluating its productive potential, classifying and categorizing its alien flora and fauna,
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inhabiting its spaces, projecting a future – and appro priating it for the European self. Numerous geographers have taken up Said’s Fou caldian inspired injunction to understand the colonial landscape as an ‘imaginative geography’, in particular through interrogating the discourses of exploration and scientific fieldwork, travel, cartography and navigation, pictorial convention, and, not least, geography itself as an institutional and intellectual project historically coincident with the imperial enterprise. At the same time, however, geographers have been careful to under stand the colonial landscape not merely as an empty repository for the admission of European visions, or as a tabula rasa that appears willing to be named and claimed by the presence of Western knowledge systems. Colonial space, is after all the site of radical difference, a ‘contact zone’ filled with competing indigenous meanings and fractured by local contests over material and symbolic power. It is, in this sense, a ‘‘site of regular ontological shock’’ (Bunn, 1994: 129). It is a space whose topo graphical strangeness not only has to be rendered familiar or coded according to the tastes and conventions of a European landscape idiom (e.g., the pictorial con ventions of the picturesque, the sublime, and the exotic). It is also a space in which the figure of the European confronts and negotiates its encounter with non European others. Here, Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ of the binary schema that underpins Western analytic dis tinctions and the metaphysical certainties and closures, preferences and repressions it enables, has been par ticularly useful to geographers concerned with destabil izing the hierarchical oppositions of West/East, self/ other, center/periphery. In short, while some cultural geographers have fo cused on the extent to which colonial landscapes are made legible and legitimate by the staging of various scientific, esthetic, and visual impositions, others have pushed the presumptions of Empire to its limits, pointing to the incoherences, absences, and instabilities immanent in the ideological and institutional system of imperialism itself. Thus, W. J. T. Mitchell, for example, has called for analyses of colonial landscapes that take account of ‘‘fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and un suppressed resistance’’, and Dubow, among others, has used a phenomenological account in order to recover the somatic, psychic, and existential aspects of a colonial view prior to the ascendant disinterest of an imperial gaze. In such cases, the point is to understand an alien landscape not only as a site of cultural exchange or esthetic transformation but also one in which the bodily and perceptual particulars of the viewing body may be scrutinized for its moments of desire, disarray, and breakdown – and so to trouble the very epistemology of the sovereign subject written into European knowledge, theory, and history.
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From a ‘Way of Seeing’ to a Bodily Encounter If analyses of imperial and colonial landscapes have emphasized the effects of power, subjectivity, represen tation, and visuality, while also pointing to the impossi bilities and failures of such abstractions, then a more recent development in cultural geography seeks to re insert landscape into the more empirical, embodied, and everyday aspects of how it is practiced and experienced, moved through, and lived in. Although not as far re moved from a post structuralist perspective as is some times supposed, nor indeed unrelated to a longer tradition of landscape writing itself (i.e., the vernacular landscapes of J. B. Jackson in the 1950s and 1960s), a return to the earlier twentieth century philosophical tradition of phenomenology has nonetheless opened the study of landscape to a range of reinvigorated agendas. Formally set in motion by a critique of that Cartesian ontology dividing the world between spirit and matter (or mind/body, subject/object, observer/observed) phe nomenology is distinguished by a concentration on the primacy of lived experience – and the description of that experience – which reveal the connections through which we are related to the world prior to the work of theoretical analysis or tutored interpretation. While, like all philosophical tendencies, phenomen ology involves a variety of contradictory strains, a key source of inspiration for recent landscape studies has been Martin Heidegger’s shift from ‘pure’ to ‘existential’ phenomenology with its insistence that human existence and understanding is more than rational cognition in its usual spectatorial or Cartesian sense. It is rather the process of a thoroughly ‘worldly’ agent in its living and affective engagement with the world – the living, af fective engagement with landscape, for example. Indeed, if the persistent priority of Western knowledge and cul ture maintains the gazing and thinking subject as the source of agency and objective authority, the significance of phenomenology for landscape studies resides in its understanding of the inescapably corporeal nature of human being and of ‘being in the world’. Here, the call is to reassert the subject’s direct or pre reflective contact with the object world; to assert that it is the living and perceiving body itself that forms the basis or pre condition of spatial experience and perception and not the work of a ‘mindful’ consciousness set over and against it. Accordingly, landscape is no longer rendered as static or mute matter capable of being observed by virtue of a detached distance, nor is its representation a matter of inert pictorialism capable of being ‘read’ via the codes of an abstract or derivative sign language. In this accounting, landscape is no longer a perspectival projection or a ‘way of seeing’ at all, nor is it a scene or setting within which a figure or form emerges and becomes culturally
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meaningful. Before or beyond any ordering in represen tation and epistemology, landscape is a space given along with what Maurice Merleau Ponty calls the primary ‘intertwining’ or ‘enlacing’ of body and vision. It is an intimate ‘lifeworld’ in which view and viewer, observer and observed, are indistinguishable from each other; an ongoing process in which self and space mutually con dition each other such that he/she ‘who sees’ and that ‘which is seen’ are immersed in intimate dialog. In this, it is not only the concept of landscape and its relation to vision which gets rethought but, also indissolubly, the ‘coming into being’ and ‘coming into seeing’ of the human subject itself. If, as previously discussed, both a cultural materialist and textual approach to landscape were concerned with unveiling its apparently ‘invisible’ social and symbolic orderings, then a phenomenological approach is in some senses a return to the foundational question of nature/ culture which underpins all landscape study. However, rather than posing the question as a problem of duality – of the separation of the material and the metaphoric, the real and its representation, interiority and exteriority, and the recursive tensions between them – phenomenology seeks to recover an understanding of landscape that precedes the work of such category distinctions. In this, however, it risks certain dangers. Vulnerable to a certain mythopoetic tenor which can invite a Romantic privil eging of the humanist subject, on the one hand, and the illusion of precultural perception, on the other, phe nomenological accounts of landscape have unsurprisingly drawn criticism from materialist, deconstructive, Fou cauldian, Deleuzian, and feminist geographers alike. Here, it is argued that a phenomenalist disavowal of social relations and its arrangements of power, or a reduction of this to the sensuously empirical, is a de politicized move in the characteristic manner of ideo logical thought. As ever, the issue is one of sensitivity and sophistication, of seeing the successive waves of land scape studies and the responses they engender as critical rather than (self) confirmatory interventions. Indeed, it is arguable that, in the most careful of hands, a phenom enological approach does not so much collapse the dis tinction between ‘land’ and ‘scape’ but, like the best of sort of radical or rooted critiques, provides a ‘‘means of communication between the space of the body and the realm of culture, between the determinations of nature and the weight of history.’’
Future Views and Other Avenues With this possibility in mind, several recent trends in landscape study are finding ways of relating the material event to discursive signification and of finding new research agendas for their interplay. The theme of
landscape and the politics of memory/memorialization is one such instance in which concepts of nationhood and experiences in identity are pressed close to the qualita tive densities of their historical ground, especially as these relate to the possibility of postcolonial, diasporic, and exilic self fashioning. Similarly, themes of bodily mobility, temporality, and their relation to biographic narrativity have creatively addressed the way that land scape animates the interconnectivity of environment, movement, history, and personal storytelling. In a related vein, the twinned forces of multisensory experience and its expression have come together in accounts of land scape which speak to the co constitution of self and space. Deeply localized, always contingent, empirically rich, and often archivally based, these are treatments in which landscape emerges as the perpetual doing and undoing of operations and objects, itineraries and maps, immediacies and mediations, sensations and ideas, things and thoughts. In this, it declares the affective enactments of both landscapes and their representations. In so doing, it brings into play landscape’s less determined particulars – its textures, moods, sounds, pacings, dimensions – and calls for a response in the geographer’s own performance – his/her grammars, poetics styles of thoughts, and forms of expression. If nothing else, landscape is precisely the space of this co constitution – and this tension. See also: Culture; Nature.
Further Reading Barnes, T. J. and Duncan, J. S. (eds.) (1992). Writing Worlds. London: Routledge. Barnett, C. (1998). Impure and wordly geography: The Africanist discourse of the Royal Geographical Society, 1831 1873. Transa ctions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 23(2), 239 251. Barrell, J. (1980). The Dark Side of the Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barrell, J. (1990). The public prospect and the private view: The politics of taste in eighteenth century Britain. In Pugh, S. (ed.) Reading Landscape: Country City Capital, pp 19 40. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bermingham, A. (1986). Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1940 1860. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Blunt, A. (1994). Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York: Guilford Press. Bondi, L. (1992). Gender symbols and urban Landscapes. Progress in Human Geography 16(2), 157 170. Bondi, L. (1998). Gender, class and urban space: Private and public space in contemporary urban landscape. Urban Geography 19(2), 160 185. Bryant, R. (2001). Political ecology: A critical agenda for change? In Castree, N. & Braun, B. (eds.) Social Nature: Theory, Practice and Politics, pp 151 169. Oxford: Blackwell. Bunn, D. (1994). Our wattled cot: Mercantile and domestic space in Thomas Pringle’s African landscapes. In Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.) Landscape and Power (2002, 2nd edn.), pp 127 73. London: Routledge. Clayton, D. (2000). Islands of Truth. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press. Cosgrove, D. (1984). Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
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Cosgrove, D. (1985). Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10(1), 45 62. Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds.) (1988). The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daniels, S. (1989). Marxism, culture and the duplicity of landscape. In Peet, R. & Thrift, N. (eds.) New Models in Geography, vol. 2, pp 196 220. London: Unwin Hyman. Daniels, S. (1993). Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Derrida, J. (1967). Writing and Difference, (transl. Bass A., 1978). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dewsbury, J. D., Wylie, J., Harrison, P. and Rose, M. (2002). Enacting geographies. Geoforum 32, 437 441. Domosh, M. (1996). Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth Century New York and Boston. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Driver, F. (2001). Geography Militant. Oxford: Blackwell. Driver, F. and Martins, L. (eds.) (2005). Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dubow, J. (2000). From a view on the world to a point of view in it: Rethinking sight, space and the colonial subject. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2(1), 87 102. Dubow, J. (2001). Rites of passage: Travel and the materiality of vision at the Cape of Good Hope. In Bender, B. & Winer, M. (eds.) Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place, pp 241 255. Oxford: Berg. Duncan, J. and Ley, D. (1993). Place/Representation/Culture. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1973). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. Gregory, D. (1994). Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gregory, D. (1995). Between the book and the lamp: Imaginative geographies of Egypt 1849 1850. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, 29 57. Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Helsinger, E. (1994). Turner and the representation of England. In Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.) Landscape and Power, (2nd edn., 2002), pp 103 125. London: Routledge.
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Kearns, G. (1997). The imperial subject: Geography and travel in the work of Mary Kingsley and Halford Mackinder. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 22, 450 472. Lorimer, H. (2003). Telling small stories: Spaces of knowledge and the practice of geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28, 197 218. Lorimer, H. (2006). Herding memories of humans and animals. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, 297 518. Matless, D. (1989). Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion. Matless, D. (1992). An occasion for geography: Landscape, representation and Foucault’s corpus. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, 41 56. Mitchell, D. (1994). Landscape and surplus value: The making of the ordinary in Brentwood, C. A. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12, 7 30. Mitchell, D. (1996). The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the Californian Landscape. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.) (1994). Landscape and Power (2nd edn.). London: Routledge. Nash, C. (1996). Reclaiming vision: Looking and landscape and the body. Gender, Place and Culture 19, 227 247. Pratt, M. L. (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Literature and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Pugh, S. (ed.) (1990). Reading Landscape: City Country Capital. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rose, M. and Wylie, J. (2006). Animating landscape. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, 475 479. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin. Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. London: Penguin. Smith, N. (1990). Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Williams, R. (1985). The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus. Zukin, S. (1991). Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Landscape Iconography S. Hoelscher, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Iconography The description and interpretation of images or symbols in an attempt to explore social relations, cultural meaning, and political–economic power. Image A two- or three-dimensional artifact that depicts or refers to something by having a similar appearance. Intertextuality A concept derived originally from poststructural literary criticism that refers to the ways in which any given text or visual representation derives its meanings by other texts. Representation The practices – both textual and visual – that create, communicate, and circulate meanings. Visual Culture An interdisciplinary field of study that examines the features of culture that rely on visual images.
A key methodology within contemporary cultural and historical geography, landscape iconography seeks to describe and interpret visual images of the world. It treats such representations as social constructions and situates them in their cultural, historical, and political contexts with the intention of revealing what are often hidden and symbolic meanings. The method, first developed in the field of art history, initially focused on painting, but has since broadened dramatically to investigate expressive media such as photography, maps, and film, as well as the built landscape itself. In every case, iconographic inter pretation demands a close formal reading of such cultural forms, a thorough understanding of the contexts sur rounding their creation and subsequent circulation, and a comprehensive knowledge of their impact, which often embodies relations of power.
Introduction The landscape iconography method in human geography traces its origins to the 1980s, when cultural and histor ical geographers began searching for new ways to in vestigate the humanly constructed world. Informed by Marxist cultural theory and the humanistic geography of the 1970s, these scholars had grown increasingly weary of what they saw to be the discipline’s over reliance on a morphological approach to landscape studies. Such an approach – first developed by Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School – understood landscape purely as a
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physical entity, as the sum of its morphological com ponents: all of an area’s buildings, population, and in frastructure. This ‘cultural landscape’ could be mapped to illustrate the distribution of certain landscape features such as types of houses, and to demonstrate the dir ectional flow of migrating cultural groups. The end re sult, for this kind of landscape study, was to show the ‘impress of the works of man upon an area’. By contrast, for several influential geographers writing in the 1980s, landscape was explored for its symbolic and ideological qualities. The concern for geographers like Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove was to show how landscape is a ‘‘cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring, or symbolizing surroundings’’. Landscape study, from this perspective, is less about the measurable features on the surface of the earth and more about landscape’s symbolic character, especially as they appear in mediated representations. Furthermore, this perspective highlights a landscape’s ideological associ ations, taking careful note of embedded power relations. Cultural landscapes, as explored from an iconographic methodology, are representations that inevitably serve someone’s interest and, in this way, are never neutral or value free. The result is a radically new and innovative way of investigating that most traditional of geographical con cepts – the surface of the earth, or cultural landscape. Cosgrove and Daniels, in their 1988 influential edited volume that formalized the iconographic approach to landscape, urged geographers to consider all cultural landscapes as representations, whether that represen tation consisted of paint on a canvas, of ink on a map, or of the earth, stone, water, and vegetation on the ground. A monument to fallen soldiers in a city park might be more tangible than a landscape painting or photograph, but it is no more real or less imaginary. By thus broadening the definitions of both landscape and representation, the iconographic approach demands that its practitioners search beneath the surface of a painting, photograph, or urban park to lay bare the conditions and ideologies that went into the landscape’s making. Such an approach does not deny the vast differences between types of repre sentations – the social conditions that go into making a poem and a hydroelectric dam, of course, are quite dif ferent – but that, in every case, symbolic landscapes are understood to be storehouses of cultural meaning. With cultural meaning comes politics. An icono graphic approach to landscape recognizes that there is a politics to representation and that unearthing the
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symbolic qualities to landscape often involves exposing the power relations that helped create it. While the earliest studies of landscape iconography focused on the influence of class relations in creating landscape repre sentations, more recent work has examined an ever expanding set of interlocking identities, including: nationalism, colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality. The fruits of this work are geographical investigations that are thoroughly interdisciplinary in scope, transnational in scale, and evocative of their subject’s complexity.
Borrowing from Art History: Toward an Iconographic Method With few available models to show how a geographer might investigate the symbolic imagery of a landscape, early practitioners turned to the well developed field of art history. The work of German art historians Aby Warburg, Ernst Gombrich, and Erwin Panofsky ap pealed to geographers like Denis Cosgrove, who strove to interpret visual images emerging from Italian Re naissance. Erwin Panofsky, in particular, proved espe cially influential as he laid out a clear articulation of an iconographic method concerned with the ‘‘subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form.’’ Such a formulation proved useful for geographers seeking to interpret a landscape’s multidimensional and contextualized meanings, instead of its morphological patterns. For Panofsky, meaning or subject matter could only be understood by illuminating the belief systems and social milieu that first gave rise to the artwork. By emphasizing the contextual interpretation of pictorial symbols, Panofsky’s was a project of historical recovery. In both his theoretical statements and in his own empirical work, he argued for assembling evidence about the symbols and signs that contemporary audiences would have known and used when viewing a painting. Such a prac tice, though painstaking and inevitably partial, proved necessary if a scholar was to lessen the distance between herself and her subject in the past. In a series of oft cited essays that date to the middle decades of the twentieth century, Panofsky spelled out his method of interpreting visual images. Like an archaeologist digging through the earth’s layers, he urged art historians to uncover the deep structures of cultural products. The first or primary level of visual interpret ation, though important, serves mainly to identity what is being depicted; clear observation and description are highly valued in this so called pre iconographic level. The secondary, or iconographic, level of interpretation recognizes that what is being depicted stands for some thing else, that it symbolizes something; hence, the Statue of Liberty is said to signify the American nation, or
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convention has it that a lamb in a Renaissance painting indicates Christ. However, it is only in the third or ico nological level of interpretation that scholars make use of interpretation to explore a visual image’s more general cultural significance. Here, at the deepest level of ‘in trinsic meaning’, the artwork is shown to be governed by ‘‘underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude’’ of a wide range of social forces, from the nation and social class to religion and philosophical perspective. Most geographers, in practice, conflate Panofsky’s three levels in their writing, referring to their method of landscape interpretation simply as ‘iconographic’. Nonetheless, the best of this scholarship implicitly rec ognizes the importance of thick, detailed description of what a scene depicts; it acknowledges the necessity of a systematic grounding in the historical context that gave rise of the image’s symbolic codes; and it insists that this historical grounding extends to all matters of society and culture. Such a historically grounded method is inter textual, in that it depends on understanding the diverse types of historical sources that inform this artwork’s creation. It is also interdisciplinary, in that it relies on the insights from complementary fields of knowledge. Panofskian Iconography: An Example from American Landscape Painting For an application of this method, we might look at a series of well known paintings by the American land scape artist, Thomas Cole (1801–48). Widely regarded as the founding father of a national school of American art, Cole was preoccupied with the question of how best to represent the values and ideals of the new republic, a country seemingly shackled to the Old World and bereft of its own culture and history. For Cole, as for con temporary writers like Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, landscape served not just as a setting for historical events, but as the principal means to express social and moral issues. An iconographic approach to Thomas Cole’s paintings would strive to unearth pre cisely those social and moral issues that found expression not only in canvas and paint, but also in the minds and attitudes of those who viewed his paintings in their ori ginal context. Stephen Daniel’s discussion of landscape imagery and national identity in England and the United States offers one such example. In preparing for his discussion of Thomas Cole’s paintings, Daniels mines a wealth of primary historical sources that demonstrate both their contemporary re ception as well as the various influences on the painter, from political philosophy and economic pressures to patronage and other artists. Chief among these sources are Cole’s own statements on national landscape and history in the form of letters, diaries, and public lectures. Daniels finds that in paintings like Cole’s, trees, water,
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and mountains acquire powerful symbolic qualities and each is made to stand in for a range of meanings or ‘associations’ that viewing audiences would have imme diately understood. Daniels then brings this rich histor ical context to bear on Cole’s epic, five part painting cycle of The Course of Empire, completed between 1833 and 1836. A firm advocate of a cyclical theory of civilization in which wealth and political liberty inevitably give rise to avarice and corruption, Cole devotes each painting to a stage in that cycle, all set in the same valley: the Savage State ; the Arcadian or Pastoral State ; the Consummation of Empire ; Destruction; Desolation. That valley appears to be a scene from classical antiquity, especially in the Pastoral State (Figure 1a). In this scene, as in all five panels, a serrated escarpment crowned with a boulder rises over the sea and serves as a symbol of natural permanence amid relentless cultural change. The importance of the escarpment becomes apparent only in the third and central canvas, Consummation (Figure 1b), where it stands as virtually the only reminder of civilization’s natural origins. Gone is both the close connection to nature and benign social relations, replaced now by abstract reason and power. The natural water inlet of the earlier panel has been diverted into ornate, artificial water fountains. Elaborate classical architecture hems in the busy harbor, in which Cole wanted his audiences to see an ‘‘a la mode New York.’’ Cole foreshadows this pompous and corrupt scene with the patently American symbol of expansion, the right foregrounded tree stump of the Pastoral State. The following two panels, Destruction and Desolation, vividly point to the decline of empire with violence and devastation. The series, Daniels notes, was an enormously am bitious undertaking for any American artist in the 1830s and resulted in a huge success for both Cole and American landscape painting more generally. Ironically, the public success of Cole’s historical series was premised on misunderstanding – both unintentional and willful. As Daniels makes clear, Cole’s underlying message was one of caution. Throughout his career, Cole remained am bivalent about the true nature of empire and the prospect of unfettered development. At the level of Panofsky’s intrinsic meaning, these paintings represented a cau tionary tale and one of inevitable imperial decline. Nevertheless, the governing elites who banked their fortunes on unlimited, upward progress saw the United States only in the first two panels, but resisted any suggestion that Consumption, much less Destruction or Desolation, represented speculation about America’s future. In this application of Panofsky’s iconographic method, we find an approach that bears striking similarities to the discourse analysis and ‘archeology’ as sketched by Michel Foucault. Although there are vast differences between
them – most notably in Panofsky’s view that his method would reveal ‘‘essential tendencies of the human mind,’’ a position that Foucault would find untenable – Panofsky’s iconography approaches Foucault’s intent in at least two ways. Both pinned considerable attention on the inter textual relationship between variously circulating texts and images. More importantly, both scholars demon strated the need to dig below surface appearances to find deeper truths about social conditions. Panofsky’s pursuit of ‘intrinsic meaning’, like Foucault’s use of the term ‘archeology’, demands that students of visual culture go beyond superficial readings of the scene before them to lay bare the relationships and knowledge that construct social and geographic realities. From such a perspective, it becomes clear that Thomas Cole’s real subject of The Course of Empire was American economic and political anxiety during the crucial nation forming decade of the 1830s – a point frequently denied by viewing audiences but one that is abundantly clear from a close icono graphic analysis.
Landscape as a Way of Seeing As decidedly American as Cole’s painting cycle surely is, it also derives much of its inspiration from previously established European techniques, including those developed during the Italian Renaissance. For Erwin Panofsky, this was a time of intense productivity in the visual arts, when elaborate compendia of symbols were written for artists and patrons and which could then be decoded by trained art historians. For geographers like Denis Cosgrove, the period meant something else en tirely. This was the time and place, along with northern Europe’s Low Countries, where an emergent capitalism put its stamp on how the world was constructed, both materially and visually. Here, in the fifteenth and six teenth century Venetian republic, a nascent urban mer chant class began deploying new theories of space and geometry – most notably, linear or three dimensional perspective – and improved surveying techniques to more accurately and convincingly map their land hold ings. New styles of painting also emerged from this ra tional and mathematical ordering of perspective, with the result being an entirely new way of depicting the world. This historically specific ‘landscape way of seeing’ be came an important tool for the appropriation of space, and thus a key concern for geographers deploying a landscape iconography methodology. In his now classic account of Italian landscapes, Cosgrove shows how this visual ideol ogy was available solely to one group: the urban merchant class that commissioned the paintings, surveys, and map pings. As depicted through realistically appearing paint ings, a landscape way of seeing became a powerful method to take control of potentially disputed land.
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Figure 1 (a, b) Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State 39 63 inches, 1834; and The Course of Empire : The Consummation of Empire, 51 76 inches, 1835 36, oil on canvas. By the New York Historical Society. Source: www.wikipedia.org
Understood in this way, the iconography of a painted landscape can be closely entwined with what it represents on the ground. Indeed, it is the very relationship between expressive media like paintings and the material world that demands close scrutiny and gives this research its political urgency. Representations of landscapes through Renaissance painting and mapping justified to governing elites the seemingly inherent correctness – the natural ness and taken for grantedness – of their claims to
property ownership. Furthermore, such a conception of land implies detachment and an ‘outsider’s’ way of knowing. It follows that peasants and other workers who shaped the physical land are typically rendered invisible and erased from the view, lending the countryside an appearance of being unworked, at precisely the time of massive economic change. As Cosgrove’s work clearly demonstrates, the resulting consolidation of power and property at this and other times of dramatic social
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transformation relied heavily on the visual appearance of landscapes.
Critical Themes in Contemporary Iconographic Research Contemporary scholars who deploy the landscape icon ography method have extended these insights into a wide range of geographical studies. The intensive nature of research necessary for successful iconographic inter pretation lends itself to a case study approach; depth of analysis is generally valued over breadth of historical and geographic coverage. Moreover, general recognition that landscape meanings are inherently unstable across time and between groups, and that they are always open to negotiation and contestation, means that an exceptionally broad focus risks generating unsupportable general izations. In this way, the landscape iconography method bears important similarities to an empirically grounded ethnography. Although geographers continue to examine paintings as objects of iconographic analysis, the forms of expres sive media available for iconographic interpretation have expanded well beyond this traditional medium. Virtually any component of visual culture may be probed for its competing symbolic meanings and, with this in mind, geographers have fruitfully explored film, television, sculpture, advertising, and comic strips. In every case, it is recognized that symbolic images do more than simply represent an external reality; rather, they are potent in struments in shaping that very reality. Among these, three stand out for their relevance for geographical re search: maps, photographs, and the built landscape. Maps Maps have long been central to the practice of geog raphy, of course, but only in recent years have they been subjected to the similar sort of iconographic analysis that we have seen in landscape painting. The traditional view of maps holds that they are transparent windows on the world, essentially objective visual depictions that stand above the messy realm of politics. Whatever inaccuracies that may exist, this view holds, are ones that can be explained simply by an earlier period’s technological backwardness. Potent as this traditional view of cartog raphy may be, it has been challenged by historical geographers, most notably J.B. Harley, who have shown how maps are better understood as social constructions that should be interrogated for both their intrinsic meanings and their ability to create knowledges designed to serve particular interests. Cartography, he argues, belongs to the terrain of the social world in which it is produced and should be approached iconographically.
Because maps operate behind a mask of seemingly neutral science – what Harley calls the map’s sly rhetoric of neutrality – they are especially power visual media that hide and deny their social dimensions at the same time that they legitimate those very social relations. This is an especially relevant insight when viewing maps that have historical associations with state formation, capit alism, and imperialism, such as Figure 2. This map, compiled by John Bartholomew sometime in the 1850s, depicts the British Empire Throughout the World, Exhibited in One View, and is indicative of the way that ‘‘maps were used to legitimate the reality of conquest and empire.’’ In order to understand a map like this, Harley suggests, it is imperative to attend closely its various iconographic elements including: stereotypical images of the empire’s inhabitants, with Natives of British Empire in Europe at its center and increasingly ‘exotic’ peoples at its periphery; lettering and coloring that present the British possessions engraved ‘‘in a bolder character and colored Red;’’ and quantitative population data in the margins that would seem to demonstrate the immensity and legality of its holdings. Photographs Photographs operate in much the same way and recog nizing the unique properties of this – and all – expressive media is fundamental to the iconographic method. Take, for example, this 1938 image of an isolated farm in the Texas panhandle by the American photographer, Doro thea Lange (Figure 3). At one level, it offers evidence of the sort of vernacular structures and agricultural patterns that have long interested cultural geographers. Pushing a bit further, a geographer might take notice of the abandonment of the dwelling and the particularly neat rows of contour plowed land surrounding it. Such descriptions, as important as they are, frequently neglect the fact that Lange’s photograph of Texas is y a photograph, a representation of a three dimensional reality. An iconographic approach to this image would thus take its objectness as a starting point. It would acknow ledge that Lange created this image with a specific agenda in mind, that it served her and other’s interests in competing ways, and that, over the years, it has been viewed in multiple contexts by different viewerships. As a key member of the President Franklin Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration (FSA), Lange was commissioned to photographically document the social and economic relationships of American agricultural labor. She became a severe critic of that system, using her photographs to expose its structural inequalities. This becomes evident when the photograph’s full caption, as Lange intended it, it matched to the image itself: ‘‘Tractored out: Power farming displaces tenants from the land in the western
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Figure 2 John Bartholomew Map of the British Empire Throughout the World, Exhibited in One View, 1:60 000 000, original size 26 49 cm, c. 1850s. The Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Call Number: G5730 185- .B3 TIL.
dry cotton area, Childress County, Texas Panhandle. June, 1938.’’ Far from a value neutral picture of a Texas landscape, Lange’s image simmers with indignation and moral conviction. Built Environment Just as a painting, a map, or a photograph may serve as a symbolic representation, so too can the built environ ment itself be examined for its iconographic properties. Landscapes throughout the world and through time have been constructed with specific ideals in mind, often by ideologically driven governing elites. By examining the individuals directly responsible for real estate develop ment, by delving into the social world of those indi viduals, and by closely attending to the broad cultu ral and economic conditions, geographers like Mona Domosh have showed how, in the nineteenth century, cities like New York and Boston achieved their very distinctive look. Representing very different visions of
urban life and culture, New York’s dramatic skyscrapers and Boston’s elite Back Bay became fundamental com ponents of the social, economic, and spatial structuring of each city. Even more dramatic is Vienna’s nineteenth century RingstraXe, a linear boulevard that encircles the Austrian capital’s medieval core. Constructed largely by a newly empowered liberal government eager to display both its power and bourgeois values of enlightened rea son and high culture, the RingstraXe encodes each of its major public structures with liberalism’s value structure. Each building was constructed in the historical style considered to be most appropriate to those particular values: thus, the Parliament building in the classical Greek, the Rathaus in massive Gothic, the Burgtheater in Baroque style, and the University as a Renaissance structure (Figure 4). Not all built environments are designed and con structed with such a clearly articulated representational system, of course. Nevertheless, even the most ordi nary, everyday, and taken for granted landscapes carry
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Figure 3 Dorothea Lange, ‘‘Tractored Out’’: Power Farming Displaces Tenants from the Land in the Western Dry Cotton Area, Childress County, Texas Panhandle. Silver nitrate negative, 4 5 inches. The Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, LC-DIG-ppmsc-00232 DLC.
Figure 4 Unknown Photographer, Vienna’s RingstraXe, c. 1890. The Perry-Castaneda Library, University of Texas at Austin. Source: ‘‘Wien: ein Spaziergang durch die Stadt und ihre Umgebung in 159 Bildern,’’ plate 54. (Wien: Verlag von R. Lechner, 1910). Copy held in the Perry-Castan˜eda Library, The University of Texas at Austin.
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symbolic meanings that can be interpreted for their iconographic intent and effect. American suburbs, for example, have long carried notions of the ‘American dream’ for both residents and developers alike, who have idealized the single family house and yard as embodi ments of gender stereotyped ‘family values’. But those same suburban landscapes may also be envisioned as prisons for women who feel confined by their relative isolation and as markers of exclusion that carry codes of social distinction and hierarchy. Not one meaning emerges from the complex array of suburban landscapes, but rather a multiplicity of understandings that entwine identity, race, gender, class, and politics.
Concluding Comments The landscape iconography method in human geography has evolved from the preoccupation of a handful of historical geographers in the 1980s into one of the dis cipline’s signature methodologies. Social, political, his torical, and especially, cultural geographers have expanded the scope of landscape inquiry dramatically with the recognition that representations of the world can have significant impacts on how that world works. In every case, an iconographic approach to landscape shows how people create their own worlds and, along the way, construct visual representations of their individual and group beliefs, values, tensions, and fears. See also: Archives; Critical Cartography; Ethnography; Movies and Films, Analysis of; Nationalism; Photographs; Representation, Politics of; Time and Historical Geography; Visualization, Feminist.
Further Reading Cosgrove, D. (1998). Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds.) (1988). The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Landscapes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daniels, S. (1993). Fields of Vision: Landscape, Imagery, and National Identity in England and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Domosh, M. (1996). Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth Century New York and Boston. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Duncan, J. and Duncan, N. (2004). Landscapes of Privilege: The Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb. New York: Routledge. Harley, J. B. (2001). The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harvey, D. (2006). Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge. Hayden, D. (2003). Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820 2000. New York: Vintage Books. Matless, D. (1998). Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion. Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.) (1994). Landscape and Power. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Panofsky, E. (1955). Meaning in the Visual Arts. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books. Rose, G. (2007). Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: Sage. Schein, R. (ed.) (2006). Landscape and Race in the United States. New York: Routledge. Schorske, C. (1981). Fin De Sie´cle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage Books. Schwartz, J. and Ryan, J. (eds.) (2003). Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination. London: I.B. Tauris.
Relevant Websites http://www.artcyclopedia.com/ Artcyclopedia. http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTHLinks.html Art History Resources on the Web. http://pro.corbis.com/default.aspx Corbis. http://www.maphistory.info/ Map History/History of Cartography. http://www.mediahistory.umn.edu/ Media History Project. http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/ National Media Museum. http://oddens.geog.uu.nl/index.php Oddens’ Maps. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html The Library of Congress American Memory. http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm The New York Public Library Digital Gallery. http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/ The Prints and Photographs Reading Room of the Library of Congress. http://www.rps.org/ The Royal Photographic Society. http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/helios/index.html The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Helios Photography Online. http://visualstudies.duke.edu/ Visual Studies Initiative.
Landscape Perception K. M. Morin, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Behavioral Geography A psychological turn in 1970s Anglophone human geography which emphasized the role of culture, cognitive processes, and decisionmaking variables as mediating the relationship between environment and spatial behavior. Landscape After James Duncan, an ordered assemblage of objects visible from a particular location, which acts as a signifying system through which a social system is communicated, reproduced, experienced, or explored. Perception Studies Focus on that portion of the total environment that is cognitively sensed and experienced, and that serves as a basis for decision making. Politics of Landscape Landscapes carry symbolic or ideological meanings that reflect back and help produce social practices, lived relationships, and social identities, and also become sites of claiming or contesting authority over an area. Spatial Science A quantitative approach to geography concerned with systematic observation and measurement of people, things, and events intended to enable the formulation of laws governing their spatial distribution. Subjectivity One’s sense of self. Humans perceive and ascribe meaning to places, develop emotional attachments to them, and interpret landscapes in highly subjective ways, that are, nonetheless, embedded within larger social structures.
Introduction: Terminology Landscape ‘Landscape’ is a basic organizing concept in Anglophone cultural geography, but is equally foundational in fields as diverse as art, architecture, environmentalism, planning, and in the Earth sciences. It is important to keep in mind that landscape traditions differ across disciplines and places, and even within Anglophone cultural geography the concept of landscape carries much ambiguity and complexity, with probably hundreds of nuances to the term. The term ‘landscape’ has been (confusingly) con flated with numerous other geographical categories such as region, area, nature, place, scenery (particularly the rural countryside), topography or landform, and environment.
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However, geographers have tended to emphasize the visual aspects of the physical world when they use the term landscape. Therefore, a useful way to begin thinking about landscape as distinct from these other geographical categories is as a portion of the Earth visible by an ob server from a particular position or location – both physical location and social location. This prevailing connotation of landscape as a particularly visual form of spatial knowledge that can be taken ‘in a single view’ derives from sixteenth century Dutch landscape paint ing, with its emphasis on scenery. Today landscape continues to connote this visuality, although it is no longer confined to the single framed view or esthetic pleasure, and also invokes a greater concern for viscer ality and experience. Thus landscape may be thought of in the first instance as a ‘thing’ – an area or the appearance of an area, and the particular ways component parts of that area have been arranged to produce that appearance. From this vantage point we can talk about ‘agricultural landscapes’, ‘urban landscapes’, ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ landscapes, ‘symbolic landscapes’, ‘ordinary landscapes’, ‘heritage landscapes’, and so forth. But as will be discussed below, landscapes have both material and ideological aspects, and, in that sense, help produce and reproduce social norms and relations. Landscapes are represented in various media (film, paintings, advertising), and in turn are representations of lived relationships. Especially over the past 20 years, Anglophone cultural geographers have come to recognize how important representational practices are to the production of landscapes and hence, to social relations and social structure. Perception ‘Perception’ is an equally amorphous term as it is used in Anglophone human geography. The concept primarily has been used within behavioral geography to refer to views of one’s environment developed through cognitive processes. Study of perception in this sense has strong ties to psychology. People construct views of their worlds and move through space based on cognitive processes that capture and organize direct and indirect knowledge, experiences, and information acquired through the senses. The outcome is generally referred to ‘environ mental perception’ (rather than landscape perception per se). Despite the fact that most perception studies in geography have focused on systematic observation and measurement of sensory activity, cognitive categories,
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and cognitive processes, this article takes a much broader view of landscape perception. ‘Perception’ of landscapes can be studied in much broader social terms than merely or only as a product of cognition. We perceive (view, observe, know, understand) landscapes based on our individual subjectivity and identity, as well as through social systems within which we are embedded, such as socioeconomic class and religious belief systems. Landscape perception study in this latter sense is more sociological in orientation than psychological. This article outlines two basic approaches to the study of landscape (not necessarily in the order they developed temporally): those whose methodology is quantitative and those more qualitative. ‘Quantitative approaches’ flourished and declined along with the spatial science revolution of the mid twentieth century, and are ad dressed first. ‘Qualitative approaches’ have in one form or another persisted throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty first, and are discussed second, in more depth.
Quantitative Methods Landscape Perception: The Behavioral Approach Mid twentieth century Anglophone human geography witnessed two important trends. One was a humanistic trend that stressed individuals’ subjective experience, values, attitudes, and meanings involved in constructing views of the world. The second was spatial science, a quantitative or statistical turn in geography that stressed the importance of discovering process laws (such as ‘central place theory’) to explain the distance, distri bution, and location of people, events, and things on the surface of the Earth. Behavioral geography can be understood as a subset or intersection of both of these trends: sharing spatial science’s goal for developing pre dictive process laws – for example, to explain perceptions of what constituted hazardous landscapes – yet laying stress on the individual’s subjective experience and worldview. Behavioral geography represented a psychological turn in human geography that emphasized the role of culture, cognitive processes, and decision making vari ables as mediating the relationship between environment and spatial behavior. Within human geography c. 1960–70, ‘perception’ referred to an individual or aggregated group understanding, interpretation, or view of the surrounding environment based on information acquired through the senses and subsequently filtered through a number of cognitive processes. Theories were developed by aggre gating individual surveys, interviews, questionnaires, and observations of behavior to the group level.
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One of the most important advances made in this research was a critique of the so called ‘rational eco nomic man’ upon which spatial science modeled human behavior. That is, that people’s perception of and be havior in space could not be accounted for by the dominant model of profit maximizing ‘rational’ thinking: why do people take risks, such as living on flood plains, that seem to go against their own best interests? Per ception studies emphasized personal preferences, super stitions, and other ‘nonrational’ mental constructs that are important variables in constructing world views. Kevin Lynch, in his 1960 landmark study, Image of the City, studied what people knew of the physical/spatial environment in three American cities: Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles. Using sketch maps and interviews, Lynch identified five categories of cognitive information that people hold in their minds of the physical en vironment: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks, which are in turn used by people to orient themselves and to navigate within a place or region. Image of the City was important not only because it focused new attention on the perception of cities as a part of cognition, but also because it gave geographers a conceptual framework to study perception of the built environment. Other studies, such as Downs and Stea’s 1973 Image and Environment, argued that cognitive images are com piled in part through behavioral patterns, such that one’s spatial orbit or activity space within the city helps form mental constructs of it – that is, one’s perception. In addition, the more firsthand information people have of their environment, the more detailed and comprehensive their images will be. The study of images of Los Angeles held by three different groups (residents of Westwood, an affluent neighborhood; Avalon, a poor, inner city neigh borhood; and Boyle Heights, a poor immigrant neigh borhood) found that those whose activity space was constrained within the city held considerably smaller and less detailed cognitive ‘maps’ of it than those with more extensive spatial orbits. Thus, socioeconomic status, culture, as well as personal characteristics influ enced spatial patterns and these in turn the cognitive perception. This work effectively argued that perceptions have important consequences. People draw on their cognitive perceptions, for example, in making decisions about migrating from one area to another. Many studies of the settlement of North America found that the changing images of the Great Plains and West – as alternately arid and unattractive, or fertile and hospitable – greatly in fluenced the settlement patterns in the nineteenth cen tury. Other studies similarly demonstrated the relative desirability of various locations in the US as places to live and work. Perception studies of this sort relied on a ‘superorganic’ or monolithic view of cultural influences (discussed momentarily). They were also based on the
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premise that it is impossible for an individual to see the environment as it ‘actually’ exists, since perception is filtered through cultural differences, the media, and the individuals’ own subjective experiences, values, and goals. That perceptions of landscapes are somehow ‘distorted’ representations of reality was a contentious assertion likewise debated within qualitative studies of landscape perception.
Qualitative Methods The Landscape School Qualitative methods for studying landscape perception were introduced into American geography in the 1920s by Carl Sauer, especially with his The Morphology of Landscape. Sauer reacted against the environmental de terminism of his day by arguing that it was collective human transformation of natural landscapes that pro duced what he called ‘cultural landscapes’. While Sauer himself was more concerned with ecological processes set in motion by humans which produced, for example, agricultural practices and patterns, his more enduring influence was on a whole generation of cultural geog raphers associated with the Landscape School (aka Berkeley School) who used his empirical observation method to study the morphological features of land scapes as evidence of cultural difference. For decades his followers tended to study, for example, cultural artifacts such as house types and barn types to trace cultural hearth areas and diffusion of culture groups. Mid twentieth century landscape studies in geog raphy were also greatly influenced by the English his torian W.G. Hoskins, who argued for detailed studies of landscape history, and the American geographer J.B. Jackson, who studied popular culture through vernacular landscapes such as trailer parks in the American South west. Jackson was founder of the popular Landscape magazine, published for 17 years beginning in 1951. In 1979 Donald Meinig edited a collection of works, The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, written by some of the most notable landscape geographers working at the time – himself and J.B. Jackson, Peirce Lewis, David Lowenthal, Marwyn Samuels, David Sopher, and Yi Fu Tuan. This collection demonstrated both the continued interest in ‘ordinary’, everyday landscapes in Anglophone cultural geography, such as churches and houses, as well as how landscapes revealed social and personal tastes, aspirations, and ideologies. To Meinig, landscapes themselves could be read as collective social ideologies and processes: ‘‘symbols of the values, governing ideas, and underlying philosophies of a culture.’’ The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes also demon strated one of landscape studies’ most enduring meta phors, that of reading and interpreting landscapes as
‘texts’. As texts, landscapes have elements arranged in a particular order that we can translate into language, grasp meaning, and ‘read’. This approach to understanding landscape became particularly useful for reading land scapes as ‘symbolic’ representations of relationships among people and between people and the physical en vironment. Symbolic landscapes can be understood as representing particular values and aspirations of the people who build them, whose meanings are conveyed to the public and read (interpreted) by them. For example, one might read the architectural features of Manhattan’s skyline, particularly the height of sky scrapers that comprise it, as symbolic of economic power, technological ingenuity, and modernity and progress. After the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, however, many commentators added to that list another set of more decentered understandings of what those skyscrapers symbolized – such as American greed, unjust foreign policy, and American vulnerability. The fact that these various meanings and interpretations coexisted simultaneously forced a recognition that not only could the same landscape carry vastly different meanings to different observers, but that the landscape itself was also a reference to a much larger set of social relationships, domestic and global, that required fine tuned contextualization. Detailed study of such signs and symbols – the ‘semiotics’ of landscape – would in many ways structure landscape perception studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Critical Social Theory One of the most significant developments in Anglophone landscape studies from the 1980s toward was that advo cated by the ‘new’ cultural geographers, a shift that began first in Europe within the context of an emerging cultural studies paradigm. The shape this discussion took was not so much a conversation between different approaches as much as it was a one sided rejection of the (old) Land scape School by adherents of the new. By the last two decades of the twentieth century, the textual metaphor helped usher in a number of new questions related to how perceptions of landscape me diate social relationships. Informed by critical social theory, some geographers began challenging the as sumption of their predecessors that cultural groups ‘collectively’ produced and read landscapes in the same way, as the preceding example of the lower Manhattan landscape illustrates. Perhaps the most far ranging cri tique of the Landscape School addressed its reliance on the ‘superorganic’ view of cultural influences on per ception, popular in American Anthropology when Carl Sauer came of age. This view holds that culture is an external force operating in a deterministic way on a plane ‘above’ the human, imposing values on individuals such
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that all members of a culture came to share a customary way of life (and viewpoint). This notion of a collective culture both shaping and being shaped by landscapes came under criticism in the 1980s, to be replaced by the notion that landscapes are neither collectively produced, nor interpreted/perceived in the same way by members of a culture group. Rather, landscapes came to be thought of as sites through which competing authorities, per ceptions, interpretations, discourses, and knowledges intersect. Thus, understanding the power of landscape to re inforce, challenge, or subvert the existing social order – the politics of landscape – has been of primary concern to many critical social theorists. They insist on acknowl edging the patterns and processes of hierarchical social organization responsible for the morphological features observed in landscapes. Denis Cosgrove, for example, in his Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, defined land scape as a ‘way of seeing’ associated with the rise of capitalist property relations. He argued that the land scape concept enabled an erasure of class difference via media such as landscape paintings of landowners and their country property. The works of James Duncan have been instrumental in clarifying the extent to which landscapes contain dif ferent meanings to different viewers, and how they act as ‘intertextual’ media through which often competing interpretations, discourses, and knowledges intersect. Critical social theorists such as Duncan have tended to highlight the extent to which multiple interpretations, or layers of meaning, are embedded within landscapes and their representations. This is important because land scape as a site of struggle for challenging the dominant social order often rests on effective interpretations. Therefore, it seems essential to recognize that meanings are not inherent in concrete objects or the physical world, but that they are socially ascribed to objects and that they change over time, and with the particular perspectives and social positioning of the viewer. While power and authority seems to lie with those who can ‘control’ how landscapes are to be read, there is always room for contestation of that authority. In this sense, more recent landscape studies include a decidedly political component as they highlight the social and cultural conflicts and relationships, especially unequal power relations based on race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, that are involved in the creation, repre sentation, and interpretation of landscapes. Landscapes of graffiti offer a useful example. Dominant or hegemonic readings of graffiti, such as those articulated by the mayor’s office or transportation authorities, might assert that graffiti is simply destruction of property, a crime against the city. But graffiti has also been variously understood as a means by those with no others to mark and stake out territory, or a means to challenge the
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existing social order by drawing visual attention to the situation of those economically and socially marginalized in the city. Alternative readings of landscapes always exist, and landscapes can always be read in ways not intended. Many graffiti makers think of themselves as creating art – an intention behind graffiti landscapes rarely acknowledged by more powerful voices. As the foregoing discussion implies, one fundamental aspect of the critical social theory approach is that landscapes always carry a set of ‘representational prac tices’. These refer to how people see, interpret, and represent the world around them as landscape, and how that represented landscape reflects and actually helps produce a set of lived relationships taking place on the ground. Representation of landscapes can take many forms – narrative descriptions, drawings, paintings, maps, plan ning documents, engravings, photographs, and films, among others. Trevor Barnes and James Duncan’s 1992 edited collection, Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text & Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, examined nu merous such forms of landscape representation. These authors asserted that landscape representation and in terpretation required contextualization of author and audience, an outline of the rhetorics and tropes (figures of speech) employed to convey meanings, and an analysis of the processes by which readers become convinced that meanings conveyed are the ‘natural’ order of things in the world. The largest monumental landscapes in the US, for example, carry laudatory messages about war heroes and military conquest. We can identify a set of social actors who produce such landscapes –historical societies, town planners, veterans groups, and so on. The messages de ployed by the monuments – a particular version of the past that celebrates masculinist cultural values – actively reproduce those values in the present and thus can shape social practice, such as by reproducing a culture of war. Of course, to reiterate, such values never go un challenged and can be undermined in numerous ways. The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC became a site for contesting the celebration of war, for example, as it highlights the suffering and loss of war rather than triumphal conquest. Much landscape work in recent years originating from a neo Marxian standpoint has highlighted questions about what exactly is the relationship between the con crete, physical, material world – the morphological as pect of landscape – and its representation. Don Mitchell has argued that landscape studies have relied too much on visuality, and he advocates, among other things, a focus on that which has been hidden from view, such as the histories of laborers whose work literally produces landscape. He worries that landscape studies that are concerned only with representations seem to leave the
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‘real world’ of landscape modes of production and re production behind as objects of study. In his way of thinking, meanings produced in and through language, texts, discourses, iconography, and symbolism neglect the ‘brute reality’ of landscapes and thus represent a ‘dan gerous politics’. To illustrate, Mitchell’s 1996 The Lie of the Land explores the role of labor within the expanding capitalist economy in southern California’s San Joaquin Valley. He shows how landscapes literally ‘get made’, as well as how they are then re presented as landscape: in this case, as an esthetic, pastoral depiction of thriving agriculture (but otherwise invisible, exploited labor). Mitchell’s argument notwithstanding, it must be kept in mind that we only perceive landscapes through our readings of them; that is, that there is always a cultural filtering process that brings the ‘reality’ of landscapes to us through language and discourse. As Denis Cosgrove explained in 2006, ‘‘landscapes have an unquestionably material presence, yet they come into being only at the moment of their apprehension by an external observer, and thus have a complex poetics and politics.’’ Thus, rather than set up a false dualism between the materi alism of the likes of Mitchell and the postructuralism of the likes of Duncan and Gregory, it seems more pro ductive to focus on the necessarily discursive constitution of the material world. Representations, then, are not reflective or distortive images of some real, pre interpreted reality, but they themselves materially constitute reality. Thus, ‘reality’ is indistinguishable from its representation, and in this sense the much more important question is how repre sentations of landscapes are produced and contested. In any case, this debate has subtly shifted in recent years to focus more on landscapes as fields of action, questioning how people are able to shape landscapes and be shaped by them, for instance, through control of legal systems. Epistemological differences remain between materialists and poststructuralists; though both ‘sides’ have moved beyond considering the question of the binary itself a departure point for analysis, there is little agreement on how to conceptually dismiss it. Among those who have been able in recent years to bridge the divide between the materialists and those more attuned to discursive analysis of landscapes are those working within feminist geography. Much of the feminist landscape scholarship focuses on how women’s relationships to landscapes (as experience, represen tation, or interpretation) differ from men’s; or how landscapes construct, legitimate, reproduce, and contest gendered and sexualized identities. Gillian Rose’s 1993 study of geography’s traditions in fieldwork and land scape analysis is one feminist critique that has found its way into more mainstream human geography. Informed by a larger feminist corpus that highlights the position ality of the researcher (or observer) and situated and
partial knowledges, Rose argues that geographical tradi tions in landscape study are deeply masculinist. To Rose, geography’s traditions involve a masculinist way of seeing landscape that is not just one of a relation of mastery or domination, but one of (white, bourgeois, heterosexual) pleasure in looking at landscape that has been constructed as feminine. Part of her commentary revolves around the same painting that Cosgrove deconstructed in his 1984 study, Thomas Gainsborough’s ‘Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews’, c. 1748, which codified a particular way of seeing the land that helped naturalize and celebrate capitalist property and the rights of owners. Rose, however, rightly claims that Cosgrove’s interpret ation misses the different relationships that men and women had to the surrounding landscape; the painting reminds us that only men were landowners, and women’s role was principally reproductive. In this and other landscape paintings, women appear passive or prostrate, as commodities of the male gaze. Not only do such landscape images themselves associate women with a feminized landscape, but as Rose points out, geographers reinforce sexism and masculinism by their inattentiveness to the impact that an analysis of gender roles and re lations plays in landscape representation. These are not innocent, detached representations but they refract and reinforce lived gender roles and relations. While much feminist work has demonstrated the mutual constitution of gendered landscapes and women’s gendered identities, a recent turn in landscape studies has directed attention to relationships between men, mas culinity, and landscape. Rachel Woodward, for example, examines the processes by which military masculinity and the landscape of Britain’s rural countryside are mutually constituted. Woodward examines five sources of information – Army recruitment materials, general publicity, basic training information and videos, mass market paperbacks about military adventures, and tele vision documentaries on military life. She shows how essential a particular construction of rurality itself is to the construction of ‘warrior hero’ – it is dangerous, rough, and hazardous. The rural countryside in the Army documentation is not that of idyllic community and na ture in harmony, but is rather a harsh, threatening landscape against which the new recruit is pitted, and out of which his requisite physical and mental attributes will arise through its ‘conquest’. Thus, this representation of the rural serves the duo purpose of articulating and le gitimating one hegemonic type of military masculinity, as well as constructing the rural itself as a legitimate place to bear arms. This kind of attention to how gender roles and re lations are produced in and by landscape provides a useful model for further work on ways in which landscape helps produce and mediate national, ethnic, and sexual differences.
Landscape Perception See also: Berkeley School; Landscape; Landscape Iconography; Representation and Re-presentation; Sauer, C.
Further Reading Barnes, T. and Duncan, J. (eds.) (1992). Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. London: Routledge. Cosgrove, D. (1984). Social Formation and Symbolic Landscapes. London: Croom Helm. Cosgrove, D. (2006). Modernity, community and the landscape idea. Journal of Material Culture 11, 49 66. Downs, R. and Stea, D. (eds.) (1973). Image and Environment: Cogni tive Mapping and Spatial Behavior, pp 120 122. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Duncan, J. (1990). The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, J. B. (1990). The house in the vernacular landscape. In Conzen, M. (ed.) The Making of the American Landscape, pp 355 369. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman. Leighly, J. (ed.) (1963). Land and Life: A Selection of the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, pp 315 350. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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Meinig, D. W. (ed.) (1979). The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, D. (1996). The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Monk, J. and Norwood, V. (eds.) (1987). The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Morin, K. M. (1998). Peak practices: Englishwomen’s ‘heroic’ adventures in the 19th century American West. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89, 489 514. Morin, K. M. (2003). Landscape and environment: Representing and interpreting the world. In Holloway, S. L., Rice, S. P. & Valentine, G. (eds.) Key Concepts in Geography, pp 319 334. London: Sage. Nash, C. (1996). Reclaiming vision: Looking at landscape and the body. Gender, Place and Culture 3, 149 169. Olwig, K. (2002). Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World. Madison, WI: University Wisconsin Press. Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sauer, C. (1925). The Morphology of Landscape. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Woodward, R. (2000). Warrior heroes and little green MEN: Soldiers, military training, and the construction of rural masculinities. Rural Sociology 65, 640 657.
Language R. Jones, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Bilingualism The ability to speak two languages. Geography of Languages An attempt to show how language use varies spatially. Language A system, which enables humans and other higher animals, as well as computers, to communicate with one another. Languages of Geography The way in which the practice of the discipline of geography – either in terms of teaching or research – is influenced by language. Monolingualism The ability to speak one language. Multilingualism The ability to speak three or more languages. Place Names The names that are used to identify particular places, features, or landmarks and which may incorporate and reflect identities, histories, and politics.
Introduction The study of language, languages, and dialects has been an important feature of geography since its emergence as a modern discipline in the nineteenth century and con tinues to be a significant object of enquiry, particularly in the subject areas of cultural and political geography. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the main academic focus has revolved around understanding what we may term ‘the geography of language and/or lan guages’. In its most straightforward guise, this work has attempted to map the spatial distribution of language use at a variety of different geographic scales, ranging from the local to the national and the global. Such research has also paid especial heed to the geographic shifts in lan guage use that have taken place over time. At the same time, some work on the geography of languages has sought to position language use within a broader set of questions relating to culture and individual and group identity. In this way, language use has been mapped as a way of enabling geographers to make broader claims concerning the (changing) geographic distribution and character of cultural or political groups. Fascinating work on the geography of languages continues to this day but it has been supplemented by two further, and related, areas of research. The first area of research is an academic interest in the language(s) of geography or, in other words, the way in which the use of a particular language influences the kind of teaching and/or research that is
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conducted by geographers. An emphasis is placed upon understanding how language use, and attendant cultures and identities, influence teaching and research cultures within the discipline of geography. Such themes have received the most sustained attention in recent years in terms of the ongoing debate concerning the dominant Anglocentricism of contemporary ‘human geography’, particularly in the context of allegedly ‘international’ research cultures. The second area of research, which has become important in recent years is a post structural academic interest in the connections between geography and language and which has focused in particular on issues relating to representation. Influenced by a so called ‘linguistic turn’ within philosophy and literary theory, a number of human geographers have begun to question the ontological certainties portrayed within the modern intellectual project. Derridean ideas concern ing the inherently subjective signification of meaning through language have been used by a number of post structural geographers to illustrate the uncertainties and politics associated with all forms of (geographic) repre sentation. Of course, there are important crossovers between these two more recent concerns. Both are grounded in post structural epistemological debates concerning the power laden qualities of language. I use this threefold division as a way of structuring the remaining sections of this article. I begin by discussing the work that has been conducted on the geography of language(s), focusing in particular on the research by geographers that has sought to map language use and to relate this to issues of identity and politics. Following on from this, I then elaborate on the research that has been conducted on the language(s) of geography. In particular, I discuss the way in which languages and their related identities are implicated in geographic research and teaching. The final substantive section discusses the link between geography and language and shows how post structural concerns about representation have drawn much of their academic justification from philosophical debates relating to language. As a way of grounding these debates, I focus briefly on the use of language within recent geographic research on race and geopolitics.
Geography of Language(s) Academic attempts to understand the distribution and relative characteristics of languages can be traced to the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries. During this period, comparative linguists sought to explain the linguistic
Language
characteristics of particular languages, their relationship to other cognate or different languages, and the geog raphy of language use. William Jones and Edward Lluyd, for instance, attempted to explain the linguistic character of the various Celtic languages – Scots Gaelic, Irish, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton – during this period. Efforts were made to delineate the inherent linguistic qualities of these various languages, as well as explaining their relationship with one another. At the same time, such studies were also implicitly attempts to understand the relative geographic distribution of Celtic languages. Efforts to map languages – in terms of their linguistic characteristics and their spatial distribution – also evolved into academic studies of the association between language and identity. To return to the example of Celticism once more, many commentators during the nineteenth century used the existence of the various Celtic languages as a means of justifying racist beliefs in the necessary cultural differences that existed between Celts and Anglo Saxons. Celtic speakers, in this sense, were deemed to display particular racial characteristics – being excitable, wild, and prone to unprovoked acts of violence – which marked them out as distinct from the allegedly rational and scientific Anglo Saxons. Linguistic differences were thus translated into much broader commentaries on the alleged intrinsic identities associ ated with different kinds of people. It is possible to witness these twin efforts – to map language use and to examine the link between language use and identity – in more recent geographic research on language. Work on the connections between language and identity politics, for instance, has attempted to demon strate the way in which language use can be enrolled as a powerful marker of national identity. A number of contemporary states, in this respect, have promoted the use of their national language in order to differentiate themselves from other nations and states. A good ex ample of the strong connections forged between language and national identity can be found in Ireland, where there has been a concerted effort to protect the Irish Gaelic language in the west of the country from further linguistic erosion through the designation of a Gaeltacht, in which support for the Irish language is supposed to be concentrated. The language’s significance, of course, is the way in which it is incorporated into Irish nationalism as a means of distinguishing the Irish nation from Britain, Ireland’s estwhile colonizer. The use of language as a marker of national identity is never straightforward, nonetheless, as a number of authors have shown. In one context, we need to consider the way in which the use of different languages within particular states can lead to cultural and political conflict. The case of Canada is an especially significant one in this respect. Many authors have noted the importance of linguistic divisions within Canada, which reflects and has
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the potential to exacerbate broader cultural and political differences within the country. The relationship between a French speaking Quebec and the remaining provinces of Canada, which are predominantly English speaking, in particular, has been uneasy. The group identity that has existed and been promoted in Quebec has been strongly associated with the French language (and Catholicism). Here, we witness the way in which languages are im plicated in broader cultural and political conflicts be tween different groups of people. In another context, we need to think about how various nationalist organizations confer different kinds of significance on language within the discourse of nation alism. In more geographic contexts, nationalist organ izations may designate certain places, landscapes, or territories as ones which fulfill the linguistic require ments associated with national identites, while other places, landscapes, and territories may be deemed to be marginal or irrelevant to the nation’s linguistic project. The role of the Gaeltacht within Irish nationalism, dis cussed above, alludes to the great significance that is placed upon this region for the way in which Ireland is imagined geographically; other areas, because of their linguistic geographies, become marginal within Irish nationalist discourses. Similarly, work on Wales has shown how particular areas, most notably the Welsh speaking ‘heartland’, assume a position of great significance within the Welsh nationalist geographic imagination, while oth ers are relegated to a secondary status (see Figure 1). But if language has been enrolled within nationalist discourse as a key marker of national distinctiveness, it is clear that it has also featured as an important badge of identity politics at other scales. Much work in cultural geography in recent years has examined how cultural and linguistic diasporas are leading to the emergence of new forms of cultural and political identity. Language is connected to the emergence of diasporic identities in complex ways. At one extreme, language may be viewed as something that both shapes and is shaped by the fluid and antiessentialist forms of identity that can be associ ated with diasporic communities. Bielenburg has argued that ‘‘diasporic identities, transnational and subversive in character, challenge the security of identities defined, but also limited, by national boundaries.’’ The multiple lan guages that are often spoken by diasporic communities, therefore, may both reflect and help to constitute these fluid and multiple identities. Conversely, some have argued that diasporic com munities are not necessarily based upon mobile and ‘multiple attachments’ of identity but, rather, may seek to emphasize the ‘‘essentialized notions of place and iden tity that they are supposed to transgress’’ (2005: 54). Carter’s research in the United States, for instance, has shown how essentialized and highly defined notions of Croatian identity reemerged within the Croatian
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Language
Inner Fro Gymraeg Outer Fro Gymraeg
Inner Fro Gymraeg = At least 80% of people born in Wales speak Welsh and at least 50% of the total population speak Welsh Outer Fro Gymraeg = At least 50% of people born in Wales speak Welsh and at least 33% of the total population speak Welsh
0
30 km
Figure 1 The differing interpretations of a Welsh-speaking ‘heartland’. After Jones, R. and Fowler, C. (2007). Where is Wales? Narrating the territories and borders of the Welsh linguistic nation. Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University.
diaspora at the time of the civil war in Yugoslavia. Sig nificantly, the leaders of the Croatian diaspora in the United States sought to garner popular support for their promotion of an increasingly exlcusive version of Cro atian diasporic identity through reference to the need to protect Croatian heritage, culture ‘and language’ from external pernicious influences. In this way, language has been enrolled as a marker of an exclusive group identity within the Croatian diaspora. At the same time, other work has considered how language is implicated in
the reproduction of more local or regional identities. Some of the more interesting research in this area has explored the significance of local variations in language or dialect as indicators of regional cultures. Working in a tradition of cultural geography that would have been familiar to Carl Sauer, geographers, such as Zelinsky, have attempted to illustrate the existence of different cultures or vernacular regions within the United States. Although the distinctions between the various regions are subtle, they do exist, and are sustained by a variety of
Language
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Atlantic
Northwest Northern
Northeast New England Eastern
Western
The Middle West
Pacific The South
Southwest
Gulf 0
500 km
Figure 2 The vernacular regions of the United States. After Zelinsky, W. (1994). Exploring the Beloved Country: Geographic Forays into American Society and Culture. Iowa City, IO: University of Iowa Press.
different factors, most notably language and dialect, along with religion, foods, folklore, architecture, politics, and other cultural categories (see Figure 2). One material marker of the connection between lan guage and identity is in the context of place names. Place names are important since they demonstrate how lan guage, as well as being a social and cultural practice, may also be inscribed onto the landscape. While the location of particular place names may be useful as a way of charting the existence of cultural and vernacular regions and linguistic shifts, it is equally pertinent as a means of illustrating the identity politics associated with language. Nash’s work is important in this respect. She has exam ined the way in which identity politics in Northern Ireland has been connected to debates about place names. Naming and renaming places have been long standing colonial practices, most notably in the context of the replacement of indigenous place names by ones that derive from the metropolitan culture. In postcolonial contexts, therefore, debates about place names become a key site of political struggle. These debates are especially contentious in places like Northern Ireland, in which Protestants (identifying largely with a Unionist politics) and Catholics (supporting an Irish Nationalist politics) coexist. Nash’s work is unusual, additionally, since she provides a more upbeat interpretation of the possibility for pride in local place names to act as linguistic ‘bridges’ between Protestants and Catholics within Northern Ireland. Work on the politics of place names has also examined the connection between the act of naming places and other kinds of group identity. Alderman’s research on the renaming of streets in commemoration of Martin Luther
King Jr., for instance, has illustrated a tangled politics of naming within the African American community. Al derman notes how ‘‘debates over the scaling of King’s memory revolve around the size of the named street, the street’s level of prominence within a hierarchy of roads, and the degree to which the street transcends the spatial confines of the black community.’’ What is significant about Alderman’s research is the way in which it dem onstrates how even seemingly uncontentious acts of commemoration through naming become hotly debated and politicised acts. His work, indeed, shows how nam ing, as an act of memory, ‘‘can become a point of division and contextyas activists seek to fulfill different political goals’’ (2003: 163).
Languages of Geography If politics and power have become important threads within the study of the geography of languages, it is clear that similar concerns have been significant considerations in the work that has sought to understand the con nections between languages and the practice of geog raphy as a discipline. In general terms, such work derives much of its impetus from Olson’s focus on a ‘linguistic geometry’, which structures the disciplinary engagement of human geographers with the world that they seek to study. Language and words, in this respect, possess a considerable cultural and political power to influence the kind of work conducted by geographers. Two interrelated areas of contemporary research within geography – at least in implicit terms – seek to take forward these ideas. The first area focuses on the influence of language(s) on
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the character of geographic research while the second examines the way in which languages are implicated in the learning environments created and reproduced within geography. There has been a growing interest in recent years in examining the way in which language affects the type of research that is conducted by geographers. In a broad context, we need to appreciate how the meaning of geography – not only as a discipline but also as a term – varies from one linguistic context to another. Brunn, for instance, has charted how the meaning of the term ‘geography’ is dependent, to some degree, on language. Admittedly, while many European terms for ‘geography’ are rooted in the Greek words ‘geo’ (earth) and ‘graphos’ (writing) and thus ascribe a common meaning to ‘geog raphy’, other languages’ terms for ‘geography’ betray a different understanding of the term. For instance, no terms exist to depict the concept of ‘geography’ in many native American languages. In other languages, such as the Yoruba, there are separate terms for the study of physical and human relationships and processes. The different meanings ascribed to the term ‘geography’ within different linguistic groups, of necessity, impacts on practitioners’ understanding of what the subject en compasses and affects the kinds of objects of enquiry that can legitimately be studied. In more specific contexts, the languages spoken by different groups can also affect the research process. Townsend, for instance, used a biographical approach as a means of understanding the geographies of women in the Mexican rain forest. Interestingly, she discusses the difficulties that she faced when trying to translate the women’s life histories from a range of Mexican languages into an English research context. A loss of meaning was apparent in the translation process, which meant that it was difficult to represent the research subjects’ actual experiences of living in the rain forest. Townsend’s study points to a broader issue concerning the cultural and political power associated with the English language in a contemporary human geography that is allegedly ‘international’ in character. A number of authors have commented on the increasing dominance of the English language and an Anglo American research agenda on the practice of human geography. In one regard, this dominance comes about as a result of Anglo American geographers’ linguistic and geographic parochialness. The following quote, although directed toward the field of cultural studies, is an equally valid commentary on the research priorities of Anglophonic human geographers: As a field, cultural studies remains too centred in Anglophone perspectives, traditions and disciplinary histories. These problems are exacerbated by the ap parent reluctance of many English speaking cultural
studies scholars to grapple with empirical social and cultural contexts with which they are largely unfamiliar. (Grossberg, 2002: 1)
In another context, we need to think about the dif ficulties faced by non Anglophonic geographers in en gaging in an academy that is dominated by the English language. Gutie´rrez and Lo´pez Nieva, for instance, have questioned the degree to which purportedly international journals in human geography are actually international in outlook. In addition, the mechanisms through which conferences are organized and papers are published, along with the more fundamental issues concerning the widespread lack of multilingualism among Anglophonic human geographers, mean that it can be difficult for non Anglophonic human geographers to make their voices heard on an international stage. The hegemonic domin ance of an Anglo American research agenda within human geography, and the connotations of intellectual imperialism that come in its wake, seem set to remain a key area of debate within the discipline. The dominance of an Anglophonic research culture also spills over into debates about the role played by languages within learning and teaching environments. Language, in this sense, influences how students engage with and acquire a range of geographical knowledges. Research on Wales, for instance, has shown how bilingual students, who study geography through the medium of English and Welsh, create a linguistic culture of geog raphy because of their shared experience of specific practices and politics in bilingual education. The exist ence of this linguistic culture of geography influences the kinds of geography consumed by students in various classes and the range of geographical knowledges that they produce, whether in terms of presentations, essays, or extended research projects. The fact that bilingual students speak a different language – Welsh in this case – marks them out as separate from their monolingual English counterparts within the degree scheme. Fur thermore, their bilingual status also enables these stu dents to challenge some of the norms associated with an Anglophonic human geography. Such research further reinforces the need to comprehend the impact of languages on the teaching and learning environments that are created within human geography. The need to understand the influence of language on the reproduction of geographic knowledge in students, indeed, is likely to increase given the current emphasis on the international mobility of students within higher education.
Language and Geography In this final section I consider the way in which philo sophical and literary debates concerning language have
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been incorporated into human geography as part of a post structural academic project. Post structuralist epis temologies have largely been developed through re course to philosophical debates concerning the character of language. Specifically, the main springboard for post structuralist thinkers was structuralist accounts of lan guage. Saussure, a Swiss linguist and structuralist thinker, sought to understand the structures that informed all forms of communication, including language. For Saus sure, ‘‘all languages [are] founded upon abstract regu lations that shape the ways in which they are played, or manifested in practice’’ (Dixon and Jones, 2004: 82). The underlying tenor of Saussure’s work is that the study of language provided a means of illustrating the sense of order and regularity that structured all forms of com munication and, by implication, society and space in general. Post structuralists – most notably Derrida – have taken issue with such ideas and have sought to draw attention to the power relations that underpin the sense of order that is seemingly apparent in language and so cieties more generally. Derrida, for instance, argues that the structural qualities of language depend upon a power laden definition of a center and margin. Post structuralists, following Derrida, have questioned the way in which centers and margins – not only in language but also more broadly – are defined. Who has the social power to define the center and the margin? Who is marginalized through this process of definition? The center/margin binary, so popular with structuralists, also has the potential to limit what can be conceived of the world; things are either part of the center or the margin and there is little opportunity to occopy the space in between. Finally, structuralist modes of thinking about language have been questioned by post structuralists for their faith in the ability of a signifier (a word) to represent the signified (a thing). Post structuralists maintain that the language used to signify a particular thing is ultim ately arbitrary and indeterminate, thus undermining any structuralist claim to a stability of meaning. The impact of post structuralist epistemologies has been significant within human geography. Human geog raphers have contributed much to post structuralist concerns about representation, namely, how the real world is socially mediated ‘‘through ever present pro cesses of signification.’’ Language and discourse more generally are said to represent the world in socially mediated ways so that it is impossible to know the world without recourse to these representations. Some have questioned the value of such ideas, since they can lead to a ‘crisis of representation’, in which any notion of ‘truth’, ‘objectivity’, or authorial identity and integrity is seem ingly lost. At face value, post structuralism would also seem to preclude strong evaluations or political inter vention since such acts would necessarily invoke notions of ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’. Others have countered by
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arguing that the post structural academic project is inherently political since it seeks to illustrate the constructed character of all authority claims, which may be implicated in discourses and practices of domination. Two brief examples will show the saliency of such claims. The first relates to the work conducted by post structuralist geographers on the idea of race. Racism is dependent upon the discursive construction of a center (usually white) and a margin or an other (usually non white). The aim of a post structural account of racism revolves around demonstrating how racial categories, far from being natural and given, are in fact socially constructed through the language used in political, academic, and popular discourse. Moreover, post struc turalists also seek to illustrate the way in which notions of ‘whiteness’ and ‘non whiteness’ are relational and inter dependent. In identifying ‘whiteness’ as a center, post structuralists are able to demonstrate and undermine the discourses and practices that help to promote and sustain white privilege. The second brief example refers to the varied body of work that has been conducted in the subfield of critical geopolitics. Much of this work, significantly, has been informed by post structuralist concerns about language and discourse. O Tuathail and Agnew (1992: 198), for instance, have argued that the foundational premise of a critical geopolitics is that ‘‘geography is a social and historical discourse which is always intimately bound up with questions of politics and ideology’’ or, in other words, that ‘geography is a form of power knowledge itself ’. One recent manifestation of the use of language to construct ‘power knowledge’ has been in the context of the ‘war on terror’. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States that took place in September 2001, President George Bush was keen to use a language and discourse appropriated from the culture of the American West, referring to the need to ‘smoke out’ terrorists ‘holed up’ in the caves of Afghanistan. Another key set of discourses revolved around notions of civilization and barbarity. The United States was described as a civilized country of freedom and democracy, while the states or peoples supporting terrorism were described in a variety of media as an uncivilized ‘other’. These brief examples demonstrate the key significance of language and discourse in ‘scripting’ geopolitical visions of the world.
Conclusions The study of language and languages permeates con temporary human geography in a variety of different ways. It has been and still is an important object of en quiry. Various efforts have been made to map language
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use and to connect language to various forms of identity: national, transnational, and local. At the same time, a focus on linguistic issues has also impacted on more epistemological discussions within human geography. At one level, the fact that human geography is taught and researched through the medium of a variety of different languages raises important questions about the variation in the discipline from one linguistic context to another. Relatedly, post structuralist’s attempts to work through the significance of language and discourse has been used as a means of challenging structuralist epistemologies and methodologies within the discipline. Taken together, the discussion shows the significance of linguistic con cerns for the practice of human geography in a number of different contexts. See also: Cultural Politics; Discourse; Identity Politics.
Further Reading Alderman, D. (2003). Street names and the scaling of memory: The politics of commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr within the African American community. Area 35, 163 173. Bielenburg, A. (2000). Introduction. In Bielenburg, A. (ed.) The Irish Diaspora, pp 1 16. Harlow: Pearson Education. Carter, S. (2005). The geopolitics of diaspora. Area 37, 54 63. Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Desforges, L. and Jones, R. (2001). Bilingualism and geographical knowledge: A case study of students at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Social and Cultural Geography 2, 333 346. Dixon, D. and Jones, J. P. (2004). Poststructuralism. In Duncan, J., Johnson, N. & Schein, R. (eds.) The Companion to Cultural Geography, pp 79 107. Oxford: Blackwell. Grossberg, L. (2002). A special editorial for 16(1). Cultural Studies 16, 1 2.
Gutie´rrez, J. and Lo´pez Nieva, P. (2001). Are international journals of human geography really international? Progress in Human Geography 25, 53 69. Johnson, N. (1997). Making space: Gaeltacht policy and the politics of identity. In Graham, B. (ed.) In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography, pp 151 173. London: Routledge. Jones, R. and Fowler, C. (2007). Where is Wales? Narrating the territories and borders of the Welsh linguistic nation. Regional Studies 41, 89 101. Kaplan, D. (1994). Population and politics in a plural society: The changing geography of Canada’s linguistic groups. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, 46 67. Kobayashi, A. (2004). Critical ‘race’ approaches to cultural geography. In Duncan, J., Johnson, N. & Schein, R. (eds.) The Companion to Cultural Geography, pp 238 249. Oxford: Blackwell. Nash, C. (1999). Irish placenames: Post colonial locations. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, 457 480. O Tuathail, G. and Agnew, J. (1992). Geopolitics and foreign policy: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy. Political Geography 11, 190 204. Townsend, J. (1995). Women’s Voices from the Rainforest. London: Routledge. 1995. Withers, C. W. J. (1984). Gaelic in Scotland 1698 1981: The Geographical History of a Language. Edinburgh: John Donald. Zelinsky, W. (1994). Exploring the Beloved Country: Geographic Forays into American Society and Culture. Iowa City, IO: University of Iowa Press.
Relevant Websites http://www.pobail.ie/en/ Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Ireland. http://www.ocol clo.gc.ca/html/index e.php Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, Canada. http://cymuned.net/blogsaesneg/?page id=21%22 Official website of Cymuned, the group campaigning to protect a Welsh speaking heartland. http://www.celticleague.net/ The Celtic League.
Language and Research A. Aylett and T. J. Barnes, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Deconstruction It is associated with the poststructuralist, Jacque Derrida, and represents a technique to reveal the inherent instabilities and uncertainties of language. Discourse A network of concepts, statements, and practices that collectively produce and authenticate particular knowledges and truths. Hermeneutics The study and clarification of meaning wherever it is located. Metaphor The transference of characteristics of one object to another, for example, waves in an ocean are like pulses of light. Naı¨ve Realism The idea that words are perfect representations of the world that they describe. Narrative A particular kind of story in which its different elements are integrated, and through their integration become understandable one to another as well as to the whole. Postmodernism A critical movement concerned to unseat the certainties of modernism by celebrating heterogeneity, openness, and novel forms of representation, including those found in language. Post-Structuralism A post-World War II intellectual movement associated especially with a group of French intellectuals, one of whose concerns is with the unstable nature of language and its role in shaping subjectivity and identity. Rhetoric The study of persuasive discourse: how words and expressions ‘‘influence men’s souls’’ as Plato put it. Text A cultural meaningful practice that can be interpreted and understood: from words to landscapes.
Introduction Language is inescapable. To think about the meaning of language is already to use it. Furthermore, like Moliere’s Msr. Jourdain who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, we use language all of our life, yet for the most part are unconscious of its operation. If we think about language at all, it is likely as a neutral and trans parent medium, a convenient means to connect the outside world of reality to the inside world of our mind. This larger view is known as naı¨ve realism: the belief that pieces of language adhere to thoughts and objects in
unassailable and essentially correct ways. Under this view, using language becomes simply the mechanical one of lining up words in the right order. All we need to know about a language is its vocabulary and rules of grammar. After that, it is like laying pipe, or electrical wire, ‘‘manual labor of the mind,’’ as the novelist John Gregory Dunne once expressed it. For much of the history of human geography, the disciplinary inclination has been either like Msr. Jourdain to avoid thinking about language, or to assert some form of naı¨ve realism. Admittedly, there exists a long standing cottage industry, especially within American cultural geography, concerned with the categorization and map ping of languages and dialects, but even here naı¨ve realism holds. Practitioners believe that language is like a material object, such as a barn or fence post, and its importance lies only in its physical geographical distribution. Such a view has begun to change over the last 30 years, however. Starting in the late 1970s with political economy and humanistic geography, and from the 1990s with postmodernism and post structuralism, there has been increasing recognition of the utter centrality and complexity of language. Rather than simply reflecting the world, or our thoughts, language is riddled with social power, cultural norms, political imperatives, duplicity, and non sequiturs. As a topic, language is potentially as large as the discipline itself. Here, however, we confine ourselves to only four issues: a brief intellectual history of geographers’ engagement with language; a discussion of various critical strategies used to reveal how language operates in geographical works; a review of substantive geographical studies of place, landscape, and language, frequently linked to issues of social power and identity; and finally, and perhaps the heir to those earlier cultural geography studies of the spatial distribution of languages, an assessment of the increasing hegemony of the English language as the de facto lingua franca of the discipline.
Geographers and Language: A Brief History In many ways, naı¨ve realism was made for geography. From its institutionalization in the late nineteenth cen tury, human geography was defined as descriptive, not explanatory, concerned with the concrete, and the par ticular, not the abstract and the general. Consequently, the naı¨ve realist view accorded perfectly with the prac tices of geographers as they named, sorted, classified, and
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shuffled around bits of the world on pieces of paper. The culmination was American regional geography, and given justification by Richard Hartshorne in his tome The Na ture of Geography. The discipline was defined there as a descriptive science of unique regions, and facilitated by a transparent language that could reflect without bias or distortion the exceptional character of the world. Even though regional geography gave way sometime in the late 1950s to a scientific approach, ‘spatial science’, stressing explanation, abstraction, and generality, some version of naı¨ve realism remained. Useful here is the distinction between natural and formal languages. Nat ural languages are organic and of the everyday, whereas formal languages are purposively designed for specialized ends. The quantitative revolution represented the re placement of an ‘imprecise’ natural language (hitherto used for describing unique geographical facts) by a more rigorous and exact formal language (used for general spatial explanation). Despite this, geographers still ad hered to naı¨ve realism. Language, albeit now as equa tions, numbers, and statistical formulae, mirrored reality. Indeed, the degree of correspondence could be scien tifically proven to one significant decimal place or another. The first signs of real change that geography might be ripe for a ‘linguistic turn’, which took language seriously, began in the 1970s, and associated with the introduction to the discipline of both political economy and a hu manistic approach. Political economy emphasized the political nature of language – its power sodden character. Drawing upon Marx, David Harvey in Social Justice and the City argued that language, including the language of geography’s quantitative revolution, was ideological – a smoke screen of words and symbols that obfuscated truth rather than revealing it. Harvey labeled such language ‘counter revolutionary’, contending that its purpose was only to forward the interests of a small elite at the ex pense of a large, powerless proletariat. For Harvey, lan guage was not transparent but opaque, not innocent but culpable, skewed to meet the ends of only those with power. Only after the Revolution could language be redeemed. In contrast, humanistic geography stressed less the issues of power and concealment than the fraught nature of establishing meaning within language. Drawing in particular on the German hermeneutic tradition, and rooting their substantive studies in ordinary places and landscapes, humanistic geographers in the important book Humanistic Geography edited by David Ley and Marwyn Samuels argued that interpretation was never straightforward; it was never merely reading labels stuck on the back of things. It was hard work, and, in the end, there was no end, and no final knock down interpre tation. Words could always be otherwise, but there was no alternative. Language was the only game in town, and its
perversity was what we were stuck with and stuck to. Moreover, unlike in Harvey’s account, for humanistic geographers, there would never be redemption. Language was always wedged in an awkward corner, and we with it. Gunnar Olsson drew brilliantly upon both political economic and humanistic positions to write geography’s first book length treatment about the problems of lan guage, Birds in Egg. Initially, an acolyte of the quantitative revolution, within a decade, however, Olsson was arguing that spatial science said less about the world it wrote about than the language it was written in. Like the hu manistic geographers, Olsson thought we had no choice but ‘‘to bump our heads against the ceiling of language,’’ but like the Marxists he thought that the resulting pain was distributed unevenly, favoring the powerful. His larger point: the language of geographers is neither naı¨ve nor realist. Language is used strategically less to repre sent worlds than to make them, and in some cases to make them unjust. Olsson’s work was an important segue to post modernism and post structuralism, which made language central during the ‘linguistic turn’ that followed during the 1990s. As well as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, on whom Olsson had drawn, other key writers drawn into this later discussion by geographers included Michel Foucault, Jacque Derrida, and Jean Beaudrillard. Also on the margins of this work was the acknowledg ment of a reinvigorated American pragmatism cham pioned by Richard Rorty. While there were enormous differences among the positions of these various figures, there was agreement that language went all the way down. It was all that we have. For geographers, this re sulted in an acute interest in how language worked, and its effects. Furthermore, to understand better the role of language, geographers began deploying techniques and methods from literary theory, such as discourse analysis and deconstruction. Such an interest was often combined with substantive studies concerned with showing how language operated in constructing especially place and landscape. In the process, geographers also pushed the limits of what counted as language, and thus what could be analyzed. There were written words, of course, but increasingly included were quite different texts such as equations and numbers, maps and atlases, and even architecture and building types. All were grist for the postmodern and post structural mill of analysis, inter pretation, and scrutiny.
Methods and Techniques of Language Analysis To understand how language operates, geographers have drawn upon a variety of literary and philosophical
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analyses. Four have been especially pertinent: rhetoric, metaphor, discourse, and deconstruction. Rhetoric Rhetoric is about understanding how words can be used persuasively. For the ‘truth’ of an argument does not necessarily win the day. It is the persuasive power of the language in which that truth is expressed that is critical. Specifically, under rhetoric, tropes such as metaphors, ironic asides, equations, jokes, citations, and anecdotes are the bases of authority and argument. This is in marked contrast to the belief of epistemology that avers, truth is established on the basis of a set of a priori, abstract criteria. For rhetoricians, however, truth emerges within only specific practices of persuasion on the ground, in discourse, and in conversation. References to rhetoric by geographers have often been implicit (although explicit analyses do exist). Rhetoric was originally deployed within an offshoot of humanistic geography, the geography of literature, and concerned with how creative writers manipulate language to invoke the genius loci of a particular place or region. With much more of an edge has been work on how rhetoric has been used by geographers in their own writing to bolster ar guments for maintaining the status quo or mounting in tellectual change. Peter Taylor, for example, provided a compelling argument that the quantitative revolution in geography was successful because of its proponents’ su perior rhetoric and couched as a formal language (a theme taken up in a debate in 1994 between Trevor Barnes and Keith Bassett in Environment and Planning A). Metaphor Metaphor is one of the key elements of rhetoric. Argu ments are persuasive when they are couched like an ar gument that has already been made in a different context. This is what metaphors do. They draw similarities be tween different contexts. The classic example is Isaac Newton’s invocation of waves – hitherto reserved for describing and explaining liquids – to describe and ex plain quite a different context: light. Newton’s larger strategy of likening one explanatory context to another is called ‘metaphorical redescription’. Through metaphorical redescription, scientists and social scientists establish large (meta) frameworks of explanation that understands one class of phenomena in terms of the understanding of quite a different class of phenomena. As an intellectual practice, metaphorical redescription is pervasive both in the sciences and social sciences. In the late nineteenth century, economists, for example, borrowed theories of physics to describe and explain the behavior of economic agents in rational choice theory. In geography, metaphorical redescription is found in
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theories of spatial interaction that likens it to gravity; in urban geography that, following the Chicago School, likens cities to plant biomes; and in industrial geography that likens economic regions to geological strata. A problem with metaphorical redescription, however, are hidden assumptions frequently conveyed within the metaphor: postulates that might make sense in the ori ginal context, but are inappropriate in its new use. Consequently, some geographers have begun to ‘exhume’ geography’s ‘dead metaphors’, inspecting them critically for their coherence, consistency, and compatibility in their new setting. Doing so often means scrutinizing the historical and material origins of the original metaphor that shaped its meaning. In this sense, taking metaphor seriously means ‘‘worlding them’’ as Neil Smith and Cindi Katz term it. Discourse The concept of ‘discourse’ further develops the analysis of language, especially its ability to create new truths and new worlds. Discourses are frameworks for understand ing and directing different domains of social action. They are composed not only of specific vocabularies and rhetorical techniques, but also modes of thinking, gram mars, rationalities, and even specific material practices that represent, interpret, and create new bits of reality. Although found in the structuralist works of Claude Levi Strauss, much contemporary discourse theory is based on the work of Michel Foucault that explicitly links power and language. Foucault argues that by establishing criteria by which truth is judged, discourse is the primary channel through which power flows within societies, social groups, and academic disciplines. Power, communicated through discourse, facilitates certain modes of acting and think ing, while limiting others. Moreover, discourse functions at the level of taken for granted presuppositions about reality. As a result, discourses produce a reality by es tablishing what an individual can think, say, or do. In his work on criminality, insanity, and sexuality, for example, Foucault argued that discourses are not simply re flections, representations, of social phenomena, but define them, thus giving them a reality. Further, those dis courses are held in place and given force by specific social institutions and practices of everyday life, as well as the physical sites (prisons, hospitals, and asylums) that embody them. As a vehicle for power, discourse is thus internalized by social actors, and supporting Foucault’s contention that power is diffused across a multitude of self policing social actors, rather than exercised by a sovereign center. Discourse analysis has been taken up across human geography, from political and economic geography to social, cultural, and environmental geography. It is
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possibly the most popular method of social analysis found within human geography. In every case, whatever the specific context, geographers are concerned to identify the constituents of the discourse, their origin, and most importantly their effects. The popularity of discourse as a critical concept, and the ‘linguistic turn’ more generally, has been criticized for sidelining the study of concrete problems on the one hand, and the continued role of capital and class in structuring power relationships on the other. Deconstruction Deconstruction is an approach to critical analysis de veloped from the writings of Jacques Derrida. Based on the Foucauldian argument that discourses are every where, deconstruction aims to destabilize them by a form of literary close reading that highlights their contra dictions, exceptions, and aporias. Always attempting to find within a given discourse the means for its own cri tique, deconstruction pays close attention to the tensions between a discourse’s stated meaning and the rhetorical techniques (underlying metaphorical assumptions, foot notes, and forms of argumentation) used to convey it. Deconstruction thus aims to reveal a text’s multiple and contradictory meanings rather than searching for a stable and unitary meaning that corresponds to a truth or reality outside of language. Denying the possibility of this type of transcendental signification, deconstruction is based on a Saussurian conception of language as a ‘sys tem of differences’ where, without a fixed center or truth to tether it, meaning can be made and remade through the infinite substitutions of ‘freeplay’. In this way, de construction also challenges and destabilizes the rela tionship between power and knowledge established by Foucault. There have been few sustained, focused studies making use of deconstruction in human geography in part because of the difficulty of such a task. Much more common is the invocation of deconstruction to identify contradictions within a given analysis, or a historical body of work and theory as in Derek Gregory’s Geographical Imaginations. Sometimes, the word is used even more loosely by geographers simply to mean critique. Criticisms of de construction have focused on its perceived nihilistic re jection of rationalism and truth, and in geography at least often made by those within political economy.
Place, Landscape, and Language In addition to these methodological reflections on lan guage by geographers, there is also keen interest in the role language plays in constructing real places and landscapes, and, in turn, about how those processes are bound up with social power and identity.
Even early in the discipline’s history, issues of lan guage were important in describing place and landscape. For example, the British geographer A. J. Herbertson (1865–1915) and the French geographer Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918) both believed that there was an art to describing both. Words needed to be crafted, not mech anically bolted. Representing a place’s genius loci in Herbertson’s case, or a region’s ‘personality’ in Vidal’s, required delicacy, a deft writing hand. Later work carried out from the early 1980s from both political economic and humanistic geographical tradi tions, however, was less concerned with the problems of using language to represent place and landscape than drawing upon literary theorists to understand how place and landscape were like a language – a text – that could be critically analyzed. Denis Cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape drew especially on Raymond Williams’ Marxist literary theory to argue that social formations produced particular kinds of landscape. Williams had used the idea of a social formation to understand in his case the changing symbolic character of literature. Cosgrove did the same, except he was inter ested in the changing symbolic (later dubbed ‘icono graphic’) form of the landscape. For example, the Italian Palladian landscape, or the landscape of English country houses, were symbols of an underlying social order based on private property and an associated inequitable dis tribution of power and resources. It was therefore ne cessary ‘to read’ the landscape, to decrypt its symbolic form, and grasp the social relations of power that lay beneath. Treating the landscape as a text to be read also emerged from the humanistic perspective and which later melded into post structuralism and postmodernism (Roland Barthes was especially influential). In this work, though, there was no deep social formation that the text reflected. Instead, the text of landscape was a cultural and political product that emerged recursively from the specific context in which it was embedded, and which varied geographically and historically. That con text might be late twentieth century inner city land scapes of Vancouver and two competing political visions, liberalism and conservatism, or the nineteenth century city of Kandy, Sri Lanka, and the dominance of a non negotiable religious order. As before, though, the point is to treat the landscape as a form of language. Consequently, its symbolism is readable through the prism of its larger context. In addition to these studies of landscape, there have also been attempts to understand place in terms of meaning and language. Yi Fu Tuan’s writing on Topo philia, and Edward Relph’s book on Place and Placelessness, are both about how places achieve, or not, significance and import. In addition, Nicholas Entrikin in The Betweenness of Place explicitly draws upon the idea of
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literary narrative to make sense of place. For him, places are forms of ‘emplotment’, that is, narratives or stories that possess coherence such that one is able to make sense of how their individual elements are connected and joined. Place is not a haphazard collection of items, but holds together like an integrated story. Places are nar ratives to be told, and require to be analyzed as such. Apart from attempts to analyze place and landscape as if they were a language, how people within a place and landscape actually use language has also attracted critical attention. Here language is treated as one of the inter esting constituent components forming place and land scape. Linguistic practices here act as a map of social divisions, structures of power, and forms of resistance situated within particular places. In his sociolinguistic geographies, Allan Pred, for example, shows how words both construct and reflect identities, occupations, and struggles that characterized the lives of particular people in particular places. Tracing changes in the lexicon of Stockholm’s working class as they dealt with economic modernization, or the way in which language is impli cated in the racist practices of modern day Sweden, he argues that linguistic practice is central to the processes, institutions, and forms of consciousness that socialize place. Words and worlds are intimately linked. Other works in this vein have shown how linguistic practices act within particular places and landscapes to create exclusion and intolerance. They have focused es pecially on gender, urban ethnolinguistic divisions, and racialized aspects of the cultural separation between rural and urban space. Politically, language is also deeply im plicated in an individual’s or community’s ability to claim citizenship, exercise rights, and participate in civil insti tutions. Reactions to these experiences of exclusion have led geographers to consider the formation of alternate, nonstate based, forms of political commitment and be longing, and operating across a variety of scales. Finally, there has been work on the way in which toponyms, that is, place names, reflect the interaction between culture, power, and place. Much attention has been given to changes in place names – whether in the nineteenth century Scotland, the West Bank, or in Latin America – and how it is bound up with power struggles over the control of place, meaning, and identity. Efforts to address these legacies by recovering and reinstating past place names have led geographers to consider the difficult questions around writing plural identities onto landscape.
The Language of Geography: English as lingua franca A final issue is the power laden and non neutral nature of language as it functions within the discipline. Specif ically, there is a debate around the use of English as the
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discipline’s lingua franca. At issue is the argument that the use of English within geography is not simply a neutral, convenient medium of communication. Rather, it is bound up with a specific worldview establishing flue ncy based geometries of power. That is, English as geography’s lingua franca produces particular perceptions and depictions of the world, and our relationship to others, which would be different if another language was used. The use of English as a spatializing practice has drawn the most criticism. While creating dominant spaces of communication centered in the English speaking world, the prevailing use of English also regulates academic practice beyond it through a deterritorialized and quasi universal system of norms and conventions. Specifically, within the English speaking community, a conflation is made between ‘English’ and ‘international’. Such a con flation, however, obscures the fact that access to the ‘international’ is in fact controlled by a small number of journals dominated by and published in the English speaking world. Such an iniquity is further reinforced by key pieces in the structures of professional academia such as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), where non English speaking countries supply only between 5.1% and 7.4% of journal contributions. The linguistic homogenization of the Anglo centric sphere of international academia also encourages an unwarranted conflation between English fluency and academic quality and legitimacy. In turn, this marginal izes the work of non English academics, and reduces their ability to shape agendas of publications and con ferences. Yet, another consequence of human geography’s ironic blindness to its own place based character is the promotion of a specific vision of academia, and a cul turally specific set of epistemological concepts and areas of research. Consequently, the language and supporting academic institutions couched within the vocabularies of Anglo American social science are then presumed to be universally applicable. Terms like ‘multicultural ism’, ‘immigrant’, or ‘postmodernism’ circulate with and deploy specifically situated visions of what they describe, but take on the appearance of universality, thanks to the wide use afforded to them by the broad circulation of the English language. Linguistic hegemony, and its associated disciplining practices of the kind we described, imagines and attempts to inscribe center–margin relationships between actors and locations, in this case, between an English Anglo America and a non English rest of the world. Such a model, however, has recently been called into question by issues of reception, resistance, and cultural significance, and which have shaped debates on cultural globalization more generally. Additionally, the core–periphery model has been troubled by the conscious adoption of English as a lingua franca by non native speakers, and used by them
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‘subversively’ to bridge multiple linguistic groups and to facilitate participation in broader economic, political, cultural, and academic spheres. Within this context, Claudio Minca argues that whe ther English operates as a tool of power or a bridge be tween diverse speakers is a question of volition. It is not the language itself but the contexts of power within which it is spoken that marginalize and homogenize. What is needed, he suggests, is the willingness to decontextualize and recontextualize knowledge and openness to sources of legitimacy outside the Anglo American tradition.
Conclusion Much has changed since the naı¨ve realist views of lan guage that characterized geography’s early engagements with language. As a consequence of the utilization of a variety of critical perspectives, human geographers no longer view language as a neutral vehicle, or simply verbal labels that adhere to the objects they designate. There is nothing simple about language or meaning. It is a vehicle for social power, a tool of persuasion, a means for representing, and producing particular realities, and central to a panoply of social institutions and practices that create space, place, and landscape. From these crit ical perspectives, and familiarity with the instruments of linguistic and textual analysis, geographers have under stood the symbolic content of space, place, and landscape, and the social and political process that have shaped them. Language has been brought into geography, and, in turn, it has helped to illuminate the linguistic character of the geographical.
See also: Deconstruction; Discourse; Humanism/ Humanistic Geography; Ideology; Landscape; Postmodernism/Postmodern Geography; Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies.
Further Reading Barnes, T. J. and Duncan, J. S. (eds.) (1992). Writing Worlds: Texts, Discourses and Metaphors in the Interpretation of Landscape. London: Routledge. Barnett, C. (2005). Life after Derrida. Antipode 37, 239 241. Cosgrove, D. (1984). Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. London: Croom Helm. Curry, M. R. (1991). Postmodernism, language and the strains of modernism. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81, 210 228. Doel, M. (1999). Poststructural Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Duncan, J. S. (1990). The City as Text : The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gregory, D. (1994). Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell. Minca, C. (2003). Critical peripheries. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, 160 168. Olsson, G. (1978). Birds in Egg. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. Paasi, A. (2005). Globalisation, academic capitalism, and the uneven geographies of international journal publishing spaces. Environment and Planning A 37, 769 789. Pred, A. (1990). Lost Words and Lost Worlds: Modernity and the Language of Everyday Life in Late Nineteenth Century Stockholm. New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, J. M. (1996). Geographical rhetoric: Modes and tropes of appeal. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86, 1 20. Smith, N. and Katz, C. (1993). Grounding metaphor: Towards a spatialized politics. In Keith, M. & Pile, S. (eds.) Place and the Politics of Identity, pp 67 83. London: Routledge. Valentine, G. and Skelton, T. (2007). The right to be heard: Citizenship and language. Political Geography 26, 121 140.
Latin American Structuralist School Cristo´bal Kay, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Keynesian Economics It refers to the body of ideas inspired by the British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) particularly as set out in the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in which he argued that it was the duty of governments to achieve and maintain full employment. In the economic development literature, his ideas are used to justify state intervention in the economy due to the existence of market failures and the limitations of markets for achieving certain developmentalist goals. Neoclassical Economics It originates largely from the writings of Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) and was subsequently developed in the twentieth century by John Hicks and Paul Samuelson, among many others. It believes in the economic rationality of individuals and in the efficiency of free markets. It argues against state intervention in markets (with some exceptions) as this leads to inefficiency and lower rates of economic growth. Today the term neoliberalism is more commonly used to refer to the promotion of free market economic policies. Terms of Trade An index calculated by dividing an index of export prices by an index of import prices. It measures the purchasing power of exports in terms of imports.
The Latin American Structuralist School is one of the first major attempts by scholars and development prac titioners from the developing world to systematically analyze the development processes and problems of their region from their own perspective instead of relying on those from the developed world. The foundational stone was laid by the Argentinean economist Rau´l Prebisch with a study on Latin America, which he wrote in 1949 for the then recently established United Nation Eco nomic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), later expanded to ECLAC to include the Caribbean. This document which created quite a stir at the time, due to the originality of its ideas and forcefulness of its policy recommendations, has had an enduring impact. Hirsch man refers to it as the ‘ECLA Manifesto’. In 1950, Prebisch was appointed as Executive Secretary of ECLA, which was located in Santiago de Chile. He gathered around him a group of young, bright social scientists (largely economists) from different countries of the re gion. The resulting studies on various development issues gradually gave shape to a new framework for analyzing
development problems, a new vision of development and a new set of policy recommendations for the region.
Influences on, and of, Structuralism The key ideas of what became known as the Latin American structuralist development school, usually shortened to ‘structuralism’, were formulated from the late 1940s to the 1960s, largely by ECLA staff. Latin American structuralism is also referred to as desarrollismo (‘developmentalism’ or ‘growthmongering’), the ‘center– periphery’ paradigm or cepalismo, that is, CEPAL (Comi sio´n Econo´mica para Ame´rica Latina) being the Spanish acronym of ECLA. During this period ECLA became increasingly influential not only in academic circles but particularly in government circles throughout the region. It provided a series of advisory services to government policy makers and trained hundreds of civil servants in development theory and policy, planning techniques, and economic and social statistics. Besides Prebisch, the main contributors to the Latin American structuralist school are the Brazilian Celso Furtado, the Chileans Anı´bal Pinto and Osvaldo Sunkel, and the Mexicans Juan Noyola and Victor Urquidi, all of whom are economists or political economists. Prebisch remained as head of ECLA until 1962. He then assumed the directorship of ECLA’s sister organization, the UN’s Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning (which goes by its Spanish acronym ILPES), which is located in the same compound as ECLA, until 1964. Subsequently, he was called on by the General Secretary of the UN to lead the United Nations Con ference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva, which he did until 1969. Upon his retirement, he continued to be associated with ECLA by becoming ‘in 1976’ the founder and first director of its journal CEPAL Review, an association which continued until his death in 1986 at the age of 85. He was undoubtedly the pillar of structuralism. Furtado, who worked for 8 years in ECLA from 1949 to 1957, was the second most distinguished contributor to structuralism. His prolific writings are distinguished by their historical dimension. Although most of his structuralist writings were produced after he left ECLA, his passage through it shaped much of his thinking and he continued to exchange ideas with many of the ECLA staff throughout his lifetime. Structuralist ideas are not confined to Latin America. Some elements of structuralism – such as the specific nature of underdeveloped regions and the problems they
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faced, the shortcomings of neoclassical theory, the prevalence of market failure, the need for state inter vention to overcome the limitations of the market and to stimulate a process of industrialization – can be traced back to thinkers active before or during World War II, as imaginatively done by Joseph Love. Love also pains takingly explored the possible origins of Prebisch’s ideas but much of this remains speculative, as Prebisch re vealed little about his sources either in his writings or in the few interviews he gave. Be that as it may, the fol lowing Northern development economists can be men tioned as influencing Latin American structuralism: Albert Hirschman, Michal Kalecki, Kurt Mandelbaum (later Martin), Ragnar Nurkse, Paul Rosenstein Rodan, and Tibor Scitovsky. Some had studied the development problems of pre war Eastern Europe, which shared some characteristics of underdevelopment with Latin America. Some of these economists might not describe themselves as structuralists, as they were largely a heterodox group of economists influenced by Keynesianism, insti tutionalism, or Marxism. Furthermore, in the post war period the works of development economists such as Nobel Prize winners Arthur Lewis, Gunnar Myrdal, and Jan Tinbergen as well as the writings of Hollis Chenery and Paul Streeten share some affinities with structural ism. Although mainly influenced by Keynes, Hans Singer became associated with structuralism through the Prebisch–Singer thesis on the terms of trade. Among the Anglo Saxon development economists, Dudley Seers is probably the one who most closely identified with, and contributed to, structuralism. His ex perience in ECLA from 1957 to 1961 transformed him from an economist specializing in economic statistics into a development economist who embraced structuralism and diffused it in the Anglo Saxon world and beyond. He was one of the first economists from the North to ap preciate the originality and importance of structuralist ideas as can be gauged from his assessment ‘‘that the social sciences of Europe, especially in the periphery and semi periphery, would benefit from drawing on those of the ‘Third World’, especially Latin America (which experi ences somewhat similar problems): these would be more useful than the social sciences of the ‘core’ countries.’’
The Role of ECLA and Leadership of Prebisch Structuralism grew out of the desire to overcome Latin America’s underdevelopment. The mainstream economic theories of the time, principally neoclassical and Keynesian, were found to be inadequate for this purpose as they did not reflect the reality of underdeveloped countries. In the ‘ECLA Manifesto’, Prebisch had already taken to task the classical theory of international trade
based on comparative advantages for being flawed in its analysis on the gains from international trade. Following such a diagnosis, it was deemed imperative to gain a better understanding of the structures and processes shaping the Latin American economies and societies so as to be able to design more appropriate development policies. Such an enterprise required empirical investi gations as well as new analytical categories and theories. While undoubtedly other critical social scientists in Latin America and beyond had reached similar conclusions, to ECLA’s credit it took the initiative to overcome this deficiency by systematically building a database for each individual Latin American economy as well as for the region as a whole, producing annual reports on the state of the economy and later on the social conditions of the region. ECLA’s analyses are firmly grounded in this empirical base and have fundamentally a practical pur pose, as its mission as one of the regional organizations of the United Nations was to advise governments on eco nomic and social policy. Thus, its mission differs from that of universities which have (or should have) greater freedom for critical thinking and whose role is more centrally concerned with the production of knowledge and theory. Being a United Nations organization imposes various limitations. For example, the studies of ECLA had to tread very carefully in their critiques of certain government policies such as the US. But Prebisch had the vision, enterprise, diplomatic skill, and intellectual clout to overcome as far as possible those limitations and to exploit the advantages afforded by an international or ganization belonging to the UN. He thus managed to build ECLA into the first major regional think tank as well as creating an epistemic community which gave birth to the Latin American structuralist school of development. The special working conditions at ECLA facilitated the emergence of structuralism with its broad regional and international vision. ECLA enjoyed UN backing with its reasonably generous funding relative to other spe cialized development research institutions in the region, good employment conditions, a location in Chile which was one of the most stable democracies in Latin America and which had experienced a variety of original devel opment models, and a multinational staff who shared both a common Spanish language (most Brazilian pro fessionals understand and speak Spanish) and a common Iberian cultural heritage. Under the strong leadership of Prebisch, the talents of the ECLA staff were able to flourish and coalesce around a common mission.
The Structuralist Method of Analysis To gain a better understanding of the Latin American development problem, the structuralists employed a
Latin American Structuralist School
method of analysis which was (1) historical – in the sense that to fully understand contemporary problems it was deemed necessary to explore their historical roots; (2) totalizing, as the analysis went beyond the local and national dimension to embrace the multiple links with the global and international system; and (3) structural, by arguing that the particular economic, social, and political structures of Latin America had been transformed by the colonial encounter and its characteristics and processes thereby differed from those of the developed countries. In this method, the notions of structure, process, and system are key elements in the analysis of the dynamics of underdevelopment and development. Structuralism, like development studies, also aimed to adopt an inter disciplinary or multidisciplinary approach. Although ECLA incorporated social issues in their studies, its failure to explore fully the class and political dimensions shaping the development process were due in part to the constraints of being a UN agency, which was supposed to remain neutral and confine its analysis and policy rec ommendations to the technocratic aspects. In the structuralist view, the underdeveloped and developed countries are partial, but interdependent, structures which form one world system. The principal difference between these partial structures is that the developed countries have a greater degree of autonomy in shaping their development process, while the under developed countries are far more constrained in their development options as their development process is partly shaped by the dominant developed countries. Thus, the interdependence is between unequal partners as their interlinkages mainly benefit the dominant partner. Thus, the structuralist approach differs not only from neoclassical growth theories but also from stage theories of economic growth as postulated by Walt W. Rostow and by sociology of modernization theorists for whom the underdeveloped countries are just at an inferior or earlier stage in their evolution than the developed countries. They thus postulate a similar path of development for the less developed countries to that taken by the more de veloped countries such as Great Britain or the USA. Meanwhile for the structuralists, the state of under development is part of the same global historical process which led to the development of the now developed countries. Therefore, underdevelopment is not part of a stage or of an evolutionary modernization process through which developed countries once also traversed, as both are part of the same process of global transformation. Underdevelopment and development are thus two faces of the same world historical process, as both pro cesses are historically simultaneous and interlinked. In this account, the development strategy of the under developed countries should aim to seek a more equal relationship so as to enhance their capability for
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transforming their economy and society in the pursuit of higher standards of living for the majority of the popu lation. The gist of these ideas was first formulated by Prebisch in his seminal analysis of the unequal ex change between the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery’ as he referred to the developed and underdeveloped countries, respectively.
Unequal Exchange between Center and Periphery The cornerstone of structuralism is Prebisch’s center– periphery paradigm. Prebisch argued in his seminal text, published originally in Spanish in 1949, that the world economy is composed of a small number of core indus trialized countries, which he labeled as the ‘center’, and a large number of weaker nonindustrialized countries, which he labeled as the ‘periphery’. While the center exported industrial commodities to the periphery, the latter exported primary commodities such as tropical agricultural products and mineral products to the former. According to the classical theory of international trade, such a specialization in production and international trade was to the benefit of both countries concerned as it exploited their respective comparative advantages. Fur thermore, according to this theory, the benefits of inter national trade would go mainly to the lower income countries and thus international trade would gradually close the income gap between the developed and the developing countries. However, Prebisch discovered that this was far from being the case. On the contrary, the income disparities between the center and the periphery were not only perpetuated but even widened through international trade. This situation arose largely because of the chronic long term tendency for the terms of trade of the primary producing countries of the periphery to deteriorate. This meant, for example, that over the years the periphery had to export an increasing quantity of primary products in exchange for the same amount of imported industrial commodities. There was thus a transfer of an economic surplus through the international market from the periphery to the center, the very op posite to what was argued by the theory of comparative advantages. According to Prebisch, this long term deterioration in the terms of trade is due to the different structural characteristics of the product, labor, and capital markets in the center and periphery. Furthermore, technical progress is more intense in the center as its occurrence is more common and easily achieved in the industrial sector as compared to the primary producing sector. However, the greater organization of labor as well as the higher degree of monopolistic or oligopolistic power of indus trial firms in the center means that both capital and labor
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are able to retain most of the benefits derived from the increases in productivity through higher profits and wages. By contrast, in the periphery the existence of surplus labor and its weaker bargaining power combined with the higher degree of competition among primary producing enterprises means that, even though technical progress is more limited, most of its benefits are trans ferred to the center countries which import those pri mary commodities. As a consequence, the price of the primary commodities exported by the periphery to the center falls in relative terms compared to the price of the industrial commodities exported by the center to the periphery. As Singer (1950) aptly put it: ‘‘while the developed countries have the best of both worlds, as they are able to retain the benefits of their own technological progress as well as capture the benefits of the techno logical progress of the developing countries, the opposite is the case for the developing which have the worst of both worlds as they do not benefit from the technological progress generated in the developed countries nor are they able to retain the benefits of their own technological progress.’’ Singer reached conclusions similar to Prebisch, but he mainly explained the deterioration as arising from the lower income elasticity of demand for primary products as compared to that for industrial products. Thus, as incomes rose in the center they spent a proportionally declining share of their increased income on importing primary commodities from the periphery, while in the periphery an increase in income resulted in an increasing share of this increase being channeled toward importing industrial commodities. Thus, the demand for industrial products rose faster than the demand for primary prod ucts as incomes increased. This, among other factors, led to an increase in the price of industrial commodities as compared to primary commodities. As both authors argued that the terms of trade de teriorated, a highly radical statement to make at the time as it was contrary to established international trade the ory, their analysis became known as the Prebisch–Singer thesis. They were fiercely criticized by orthodox econo mists. While the Prebisch–Singer thesis has its flaws, it has stood the test of time remarkably well, although subsequent research has shown that the deterioration of the terms of trade has been less than originally estimated and for reasons which differ in part from those originally given. It should be borne in mind that neither Prebisch nor Singer argued that the periphery derived no benefits whatsoever from international trade but that the benefits of international trade were unequally distributed and seriously hampered the development efforts of the periphery. When Prebisch became the secretary general of UNCTAD in 1964, which was his brainchild, he pro jected the structuralist ideas to the global stage. At
UNCTAD, he hoped to be able to negotiate a more equal distribution of the benefits of international trade through a new trade policy for development. The aim was to usher a ‘New International Economic Order’ that would stabilize and improve the prices of the primary com modity exports from developing countries, open the doors in the North to industrial exports from the South, dismantle the agricultural subsidies to farmers in the North as well as the protectionist measures for agri culture in the North, and regulate the behavior of multinational corporations so as to ensure greater bene fits for the host in the South. However, in 1969 Prebisch unexpectedly left UNCTAD as he felt increasingly frustrated with the inability of UNCTAD to make much headway toward creating a more equitable world due to differences between the countries of the South, but mainly due to the opposition from countries of the North, especially the USA, to measures which they perceived as being against their economic and political interests. Some of the structuralist thinkers developed during the second half of the 1960s the structuralist stream within dependency theory (the other being the better known Marxist variant); structuralism, as well as de pendency theory, had a major influence on world system theory which made use of the structuralist center and periphery terminology.
From an ‘Outward-Oriented’ to an ‘Inward-Oriented’ Development Process To create higher rates of technological progress as well as retain a greater proportion of the benefits derived from technological progress, Prebisch became an ardent ad vocate of the industrialization of the periphery. This was to be achieved through protectionism such as tariff bar riers which discouraged the import of certain industrial commodities so as to encourage their production locally. Such an industrialization process was referred to as ‘import substitution industrialization’ (ISI) as previously imported industrial commodities, principally consumer goods, were to be produced within the country. Other complementary measures, which largely involved state investment, were the development of the country’s in frastructure such as roads, ports, electricity, housing and sanitation, as well as the establishment of some industries, like steel plants, which supplied key inputs to the new domestic industries. Usually, a state development bank was established to supply cheap credit to the emerging industrial entrepreneurs, as well as a state development corporation and/or a ministry for industry with the function of supporting the industrialization process with planning, investment, and technical advice.
Latin American Structuralist School
In short, structuralists proposed a radical redirection in the region’s development process and strategy, shifting away from the ‘outward oriented’ development pattern which had existed since the colonial period toward an ‘inward oriented’ development pattern. Thereby the dy namics of the economy were to be redirected away from the production of primary commodities for the external market to the production of industrial commodities for the domestic market. Prebisch drew a lot of fire from the economic orthodoxy for daring to question their au thority, as well as from the establishment in the US and other developed countries who saw him as a dangerous man, as they believed that his ideas would jeopardize their industrial export markets and bring higher prices for their imports of primary commodities. However, Prebisch was no Marxist or communist and was far from advocating revolutionary or socialist changes. Rather he was a passionate defender of the interests of developing countries and saw the need to reform the capitalist sys tem to make it more egalitarian. Latin America’s development pattern did shift to an inward directed ISI process. Without in any way denying the influence of the structuralist school on government policy, which certainly embraced an ISI strategy, many Latin American economies had already begun such a process as a consequence of the Great Depression of the early 1930s. But the structuralists did provide a useful rationale for governments to accelerate this process. When during the 1960s the ‘easy phase’ of ISI had been achieved and the process was giving signs of ‘exhaustion’, the structuralists recommended that governments should implement land reforms to improve agricultural effi ciency. The resulting increase in food supplies would keep wages low as food prices would not rise, and in crease profits and thus investment. It would also improve income distribution in the countryside and raise rural living standards thereby widening the internal market for industrial consumer goods giving a new boost to industry. However, agrarian reforms were only implemented in a limited way in some countries and failed to live up to expectations. Structuralists also proposed to improve the efficiency of industry by the formation of regional common markets which would take advantage of economies of scale. Al though some regional integration schemes were estab lished, they generally failed to prosper. Structuralists were also early proponents of industrial exports so as to generate the necessary foreign exchange to import the required inputs for industry as well as for making it more competitive. But industrial exports failed to take off owing to insufficient government incentives, protectionist tariff barriers in the developed countries, and the lack of competitiveness. Governments failed to act on the warnings from structuralists about excessive protection ism and the lack of competitiveness of industry which
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they had already aired in the early 1960s. But by then the newly established industrial bourgeoisie had become too powerful and governments acquiesced to their continual demands for higher tariff barriers to protect their in creasingly inefficient domestic industry.
The Rise of Neoliberalism and the Renewal of Structuralism The mounting difficulties faced by the region’s indus trialization process together with the debt crisis of the 1980s and the failure of governments to control inflation facilitated the rise of neoliberalism. Neoliberal economic ‘structural adjustment’ policies were implemented in most Latin American countries during the 1980s, except for Chile, where they had already been introduced in the mid 1970s. Neoliberal policies focused on achieving macroeconomic stability by controlling inflation and re ducing government expenditure, by privatizing state en terprises which were regarded as particularly inefficient, and by liberalizing the economy by drastically reducing tariff barriers and opening the economy to the world market. Under neoliberal policies, the Latin American economies shifted back to an outward oriented devel opment strategy in which the world market would de termine the region’s comparative advantages. The rise of neoliberalism, which also finds expression in the ‘Washington Consensus’, has led to the decline of structuralism. However, structuralist thinkers, largely from current or past ECLAC stock, began to respond to the neoliberal challenge and by the 1990s a series of publications appeared outlining a neostructuralist pos ition. Neostructuralists take account of the new reality brought about by neoliberal globalization. They believe that through a state guided restructuring of the country’s links with the world market it is possible to achieve benefits for the majority of the population instead of ‘as at present’ for a privileged minority. This will require an internal restructuring of the economy and a major effort at technological innovation so as to achieve genuine and systemic competitiveness which is also sustainable, as it would not just rely on cheap labor and the export of unprocessed raw materials, as is currently largely the case, but on higher value added products. Thus, the state would have to undertake major investments in education and health so as to improve the quality and skills of the labor force as well as reducing poverty and promoting greater equity. Neostructuralist ideas are beginning to have some influence on several of the more progressive governments in the region. To what extent neostructuralism will emerge as a genuine alternative to neoliberalism, instead of being co opted as the human face of a reformed neoliberalism, remains to be seen. Many of the key ideas
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of Prebisch, who became a fierce critic of neoliberalism, and those of the structuralists continue to illuminate the present, especially as the agenda for a more equitable and just international economic order has become more ur gent than ever. In conclusion, the Latin American structuralist school has had important repercussions in theory and practice. It had the merit of opening the door to a critique of neo classical theory and made a major contribution to the emerging field of development studies as well as to de pendency and world systems theory. Structuralism or its current neostructuralist version might even offer the seeds for an alternative to the still hegemonic, although much questioned, neoliberal paradigm. See also: Dependency; Development I; Development II; Modernization Theory; Neoliberalism and Development; Structural Adjustment; World-System.
Further Reading Clarke, C. (2002). The Latin American structuralists. In Desai, V. & Potter, R. B. (eds.) The companion to development studies, pp 92 96. London: Arnold. Colclough, C. (1991). Structuralism versus neo liberalism: An introduction. In Colclough, C. & Manor, J. (eds.) States or markets?: Neo liberalism and the development policy debate. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Furtado, C. (1964). Development and Underdevelopment: A Structural View of the Problems of Developed and Underdeveloped Countries. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA. Gwynne, R. N. and Kay, C. (2004). The alternatives to neoliberalism. In Gwynne, R. N. & Kay, C. (eds.) Latin America transformed:
Globalization and modernity, pp 253 267. London: Hodder Arnold and New York: Oxford University Press. Hirschman, A. (1961). Ideologies of economic development in Latin America. In Hirschman, A. (ed.) Latin American issues: Essays and comments, pp 3 42. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. Kay, C. (1989). Latin American theories of development and underdevelopment. London: Routledge and New York. Love, J. L. (1994). Economic ideas and ideologies in Latin America since 1930. In Bethell, L. (ed.) The Cambridge history of Latin America, Vol. VI, Part 1, 1930 to the present, pp 393 460. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Love, J. L. (2005). The rise and decline of economic structuralism in Latin America: New dimensions. Latin American Research Review 40(3), 100 125. Prebisch, R. (1950). The economic development of Latin America and its principal problems. Lake Success, New York: United Nations. Prebisch, R. (1984). Five stages in my thinking on development. In Meier, G. M. & Seers, D. (eds.) Pioneers in development, pp 175 190. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rodri´guez, O. (2001). Prebisch: The continuing validity of his basic ideas. CEPAL Review 75, 39 50. Seers, D. (1983). The political economy of nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singer, H. W. (1950). The distribution of gains between investing and borrowing countries. American Economic Review 40(2), 473 485. Sunkel, O. (ed.) (1993). Development from within: Toward a neostructuralist approach for Latin America. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Toye, J. and Toye, R. (2004). The UN and global political economy: Trade, finance, and development. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Relevant Websites http://www.eclac.cl Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Law and Law Enforcement D. Delaney, Amherst College, Amherst, MA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction The relationship between law and human geography is both complex and, until recently, relatively unexamined. But the traces of legality are ubiquitous in landscapes. One need only consider the pervasiveness of official graffiti (the ‘no trespassing’ signs, ‘no parking’ signs, markers of juris dictional borders) and the density of legal rules and regulations that structure the spatialities of everyday life to recognize that law is everywhere. But, as we know, law is not everywhere the same. Elements of the legal, most obviously rules and rights, are among the primary social devices for giving spatial expression to significant di mensions of social difference. Further reflection on the legal constitution of property, home, public space, the city, the state, and ‘the international’ as entities that are in trinsically both spatial and legal is sufficient to suggest the thickness and complexity of legal geographies. The aca demic study of law and geography is primarily concerned with investigating the relationships of geographical or socio spatial phenomena to forms of social power and modes of meaning production associated with distinctively legal practices, institutions, ideologies, and forms of con sciousness. Insofar as geographers are interested in how human worlds are created, maintained, and transformed, the domain of the legal is of fundamental significance to the hows and whys of world making.
The Convergence of Law and Geography Defining the boundaries of the field of inquiry is some what arbitrary. In the absence of institutional structures, or specialized journals, ‘legal geography’ is a relatively ad hoc, loose collection of scholars who work in a number of disciplines. For present purposes this field will be defined as consisting of self identified scholars who are engaged in sustained research on the general topic. It includes both geographers and scholars in other fields who have made a significant contribution and who regularly cite the work of professional geographers. Within this amorphous cluster two principal orien tations can be identified. They are broadly distinguished by differing assumptions about the legal, the geographical, or spatial; implicit epistemological and methodological ap proaches; and normative or political commitments. These orientations will be identified as ‘conventional’ and ‘crit ical’ with no implication as to the relative merits of either.
Conventional approaches are so called simply be cause they operate within conventional understandings of law, geography, and scholarship. The objective of work in this vein is not to ‘problematize’ or ‘theorize’ so much as it is to describe. The methods are those of con ventional social science. Among its common tasks are identifying the geographical effects of changing rules or bringing to light differences among legal regimes through the methods of comparative law. This work may be reformist insofar as it seeks, through the methods of social science, to identify problems and propose more or less technical solutions. Such an approach is prominent in studies of land use, zoning law, and planning. Critical legal geography is characterized by a more self conscious engagement with social and legal theories and philosophies. It is oriented toward problematizing the (socio )legal and the (socio )spatial in terms of each other. It is often explicitly critical of existing social and political arrangements. This work is done by self identified progressive or radical scholars more interested in demystifiying legal ideologies than in proposing marginal technical adjustments. Until the 1980s the study of the connections between the legal and the geographic or spatial was undeveloped. That aspect of this relationship might be problematic or worthy of academic investigation or that intellectual engagement with this relationship might yield significant insights about human geography or law were simply not recognized. This was less the result of how the world was put together than of how knowledge about the world was organized. Legal scholars and human geographers had little in the way of common interpretive frameworks or vocabularies. This was despite the fact that legal schol arship and human geography each had strong inter disciplinary traditions upon which to build. The subfield organization of Anglo American human geography and its early articulated mission of synthesizing knowledge of history, politics, economics, and culture with space or place did not include a place for law. Likewise, at least in the United States, even though legal scholarship has had a robust tradition of ‘law ands’ (law and economics, law and sociology, law and politics, legal history, legal an thropology) going back to at least the 1920s, it did not recognize the value of geographical scholarship for ex ploring legal questions. In the 1960s the world changed, and the perceived tasks of scholarship began to change as a result. In the 1970s the disciplines changed. Beginning in the 1980s,
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and gathering steam since, these changes were sufficient to bring the concerns, resources, and debates of law and human geography into each other’s orbits. In the early 1970s the scope of geographical inquiry and the concerns of researchers expanded to include sustained engagement with social theoretical and philosophical resources that had previously been neglected. For present purposes the most significant development was the emergence of Marxist geography and other radical and critical streams of scholarship such as feminist geography that followed it. These streams brought issues of power, inequality, and social justice to the forefront of research agendas. They also built on well developed traditions of state theorizing. Important at this time as well were newer humanistic and phenomenological approaches to geographical inquiry. This strand eventually blossomed to include post structuralist and postmodernist modes of theorizing space. Significant here were increasingly sophisticated concerns with issues of meaning, interpretation, dis course, and problems of representation. As a result of these two new streams of thought, geographers began to engage with novel questions and made use of ever expanding theoretical and methodo logical resources to bear on what, by the late 1970s, we recognized as the problems with space; that social space was not simply found but made, constructed, or produced; and that the conditions and effects of how it was produced had everything to do with the problems of power. It is important to recognize that these new perspectives and practices entailed more than simply ‘importing’ the vo cabularies and debates of other disciplines into human geography. By re invigorating geographical inquiry, scho lars came to a heightened awareness of the difference that space makes to a wide variety of social phenomena and problems. This, in turn, contributed to what has been identified as ‘a spatial turn’ in other disciplines which had the further effect of forging new interdisciplinary links among scholars across the academy. These developments in human geography were par alleled by significant transformations in legal scholarship during the same period. While human geography was opening up to newer outside influences, so was Anglo phone legal theory. Of great significance was the emer gence of critical legal studies (CLS). Like radical and critical geographers, critical legal scholars took sustenance from the widening pool of critical social theorization and philosophy, including Marxism and post structuralism, and brought these to bear on legal analysis. As in human geography, issues of ideology, power and disempowerment, legitimation, and injustice became prominent in ways that departed significantly from conventional practices. Most importantly, critical legal scholars refused to accept the self legitimizing story about ‘The Law’ that orthodox scholars commonly told. Instead, they engaged in operations that they described as
‘trashing’, or revealing legal practices and artifacts to be quite the opposite of what they are conventionally de scribed as being. Far from the general, neutral rules promulgated for the public good by public servants in efforts to create order, serve justice, and promote liberty (‘the majesty of the law’ story), the products of legal machinery were more clearly identified as deeply com plicitous in structures of domination and subordination. Because the ordinary workings of liberal legal ideology frequently obscure this complicity, the intended result of trashing was de mystification. To the extent that liberal legal ideologies colonized everyday forms of social con sciousness, critique was oriented toward de colonization. Relying on a more sophisticated theory of ideology and legitimation than can be presented here, most critical legal scholars also rejected a crudely ‘instrumental’ view of law and its relation to oppression and exploitation that reduces law to a blunt object with which the ruling class subordinates others. Rather, as legal scholars, they rec ognized that the workings of power through law do not always map one to one with the immediate interests of the powerful against those of the powerless, and that the relatively disempowered may also successfully deploy elements of the law (albeit less frequently) against the relatively empowered. Reflecting the same broad social changes that resulted in the radicalization of some human geographers, other critical strands of legal scholarship, such as legal femi nism and critical race theory, broadened the field of critique and spawned important internal debates. CLS also grew out of and engaged with a re invigorated project of socio legal studies – or the sociological study of law from outside the legal academy. As a result, many sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and historians began situating research projects within the new critical paradigms. Some were also influenced by the simultaneous spatial turn in the human sciences. By the 1990s legal geography emerged as a more self con scious endeavor. The work of Gordon Clark, especially his 1985 book, Judges and the Cities, was extremely in fluential in bringing these streams of scholarship toge ther. Nicholas Blomley’s Law, Space and Geographies of Power, published in 1994, was another seminal contri bution. At present legal geography is less a subfield of either law or human geography than a trans disciplinary project as likely to be pursued by scholars outside either discipline as inside. It is also genuinely international. By early twenty first century there were a number of books, special issues of journals, symposia, an interdisciplinary reader, and countless articles and conference papers de voted to illuminating the complex interconnections and constitutive dynamics of the (socio )legal and the (socio ) spatial. This diffuse pluralism has been very productive. However, it does give this endeavor a strongly ad hoc flavor.
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Seeing the Legal in the Spatial It is perhaps easiest to begin to appreciate the en tanglements of the legal and the geographical through the simple observation of the density and complexity of formal legal rules that give form to the social spaces of everyday life. Consider ‘home’. Even when one brackets issues of property and ownership, there is a multitude of legal directives governing, for example, who can enter a home under what conditions, what is permitted and forbidden on the inside, what may happen to a person who violates these strictures, and much more. That is, ‘home’ is a complexly constructed legal space and legal place. In the United States some of these rules derive from interpretations of the fourth amendment of the US Constitution. Other jurisdictions may derive similar rules from common law, case law, or statutes. In Canada this is structured with reference to Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The fourth amendment, and the thicket of legal commentary and interpretations of it, proclaims rules about when the police may enter a home, when a warrant from a judge is required and not required, what constitutes a ‘search’ or ‘seizure’, what may happen to evidence obtained in violation of these more primary rules, and so on. These rules, of course, must be interpreted and, thus, are revisable through interpretation. As rules and exceptions are re interpreted, rights are redistributed and the legal meanings of social space vis a vis power are transformed. Other legal rules that constitute ‘the home’ as a legal space concern the actions of ‘strangers’ who are not state actors, for example, rules about trespass and burglary. Still other rules govern the intimate relations within home space, such as those relating to domestic violence (e.g., when the police may or must intervene, when a protective order is granted, and what the consequences of violating an order are) or child welfare. When one adds to these, the innumerable property regulations, rules gov erning aspects of the landlord/tenant relation, building codes, lending and insurance laws, civil rights legislation and more, the apparently ‘simple’ legal space of the home can be seen to be quite complex indeed. To some extent, these rules, and the spatial distribution of rights and powers that they effect, are obvious and well known. They are simply part of ‘legal common sense’. But many rules are not well known. They may be obscure, highly technical, and known by only a few specialists. They may be esoteric (as is ‘the castle doctrine’, or ‘the fruit of the poison tree doctrine’). They may be ambiguous or in tension with each other. This resolution, of course, re quires interpretation, and relevant meanings may be amenable to a number of plausible interpretations. This conditions the politics of legal and spatial interpretation. Lawyers may be involved in crafting interpretations,
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judges involved in validating or invalidating them, pros ecutors and the police in enforcing (or evading) them. Insofar as these practices are implicated in the inter pretive restructuring of social space, they are of interest to legal geographers. Generic and specific legal spaces (encompassing a wide range of instances, including property lots, muni cipalities, states, wilderness areas, drug free zones, in digenous reserves, and free trade areas) are configured in complex ensembles and constellations, and these con stellations – and the interrelations among spaces – are the products of legal spatializations. They are the out comes of specifically legal processes, practices, and per formances through which distinctively legal meanings are embedded in landscapes. Recognition of these processes raises questions concerning how, why, and to what effect such spatializations and re spatializations are accom plished. An orthodox approach to these issues might refer to the intentions of those who were empowered (or who empowered themselves) to lay down the rules and to inscribe legal meanings onto social space. For example, it is common to refer to ‘the intentions of the framers’ to protect privacy and the security of the home in expli cating fourth amendment restrictions on police searches as well as justifing exceptions to these same rules. Like wise, legislators are said to intend the regulation of protests in public space so as to preserve order. Obvi ously, any effort to stabilize the legal meanings of social space by reference to the intentions of actors who may be far removed in time and place is not without difficulties. A subtler legal geographical analysis might inquire into the ‘deeper’ meanings of socio legal space. The aim here is to explicate legal spaces and configurations less as the results of intentional practices of individuals than as ideologically informed political or cultural artifacts. In this regard, it might be noted that many of the rules that are encoded in legal texts (statutes, constitutions, judicial opinions, and so on) are themselves the products of social and political contests. They are often crafted by agents who have access to legal institutions to be used against adversaries who do not have access. Certainly, white people have used legal instruments to produce the spaces of racial subordination (segregated spaces, native re serves, and colonies), and capital has produced legal spaces against the interests of labor (in the workplace, as well as in public space). These legalized and spatialized power relations can be understood simply in terms of material interests and domination. But they can also be examined in terms of ideologies and broader, more dif fuse cultural meaning systems. Insofar as elements of the legal are deeply implicated in the arrangement and assembledges of heterogenous spaces across extensive segments of social landscapes, legal geographical investigations can reveal important processes and practices through which such spatial
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assembledges are configured and reconfigured. This ap plies not only ‘horizontally’ but also ‘vertically’ through the legal configuration of spaces and landscapes associ ated with differing scales of reference (e.g., the personal, local, national, international, and global). Just as the legal constitution of discrete spaces conditions the operation and circulation of power with respect to actors and events in or out of these spaces, so legal phenomena are im plicated in the social production of these more extensive, spatialized fields of power. These processes commonly operate through the adversarial construction of spatial ized fields of legal meaning. Social power, of course, takes many forms and has many social sources. Analytically economic, political, cultural, and other sources and expressions of social power are commonly distinguished from one another. The legal is, in important ways, distinctive from these. It is characterized by distinctive discourses, institutions, and practices. But it is not radically other than or entirely autonomous from these other structures of social power. Rather, distinctively legal forms of social power give expression to these other forms. One way this happens is through the redescription of power in terms of the dis courses and categories of ‘rights’. For example, forms of economic power are commonly translated into claims about property rights (i.e., the rights of investors, the right to strike, and consumer rights). But this is not simply a straightforward translation. As in many trans lations, some things are lost and some things are added. Frequently, what is added in advancing claims in terms of legal rights is a heightened presumption of legitimacy. Actions which have been deemed ‘legal’ through the ascription of rights are presumptively acceptable. An other characteristic that comes along with rights is en forceability: that is, the rights holder has presumptive access to the means of state coercion to enforce or protect these rights. Legal geography examines translation pro jects in connection with the geographical expression of social power. The distinctively legal can also be understood as ‘mediating’ competing forms of power; for example, forms of economic power (ownership) and political power (democracy). Understanding this relation in terms of either translating or mediating opens up possible lines of inquiry into the workings of the legal as conditioning the social constitution of geographies of power. For ex ample, if one is interested in the operations of geog raphies of capitalism (vis a vis patterns of investment and disinvestment, labor relations, class relations more gen erally, or in relation to the environment), it may be worthwhile to investigate the details of their construction and reconstruction through law at whatever scale of reference is relevant. Clearly one important point of in gress is through analyses of property: what ‘rights’ come with ownership? how are these rights created, regulated,
and enforced? how might property rights in a given case be understood as limited by other kinds of rights and duties, such as the rights to organize and strike, the rights associated with privacy, or the requirements of environ mental protection? Geographical reconfigurations take place through rights based practices, and contests among rights claimants shape the details of many political– economic spatial transformations. For example, much of the urban redevelopment in the United States takes place in the contexts of contests about the meaning of fifth amendment rules, rights, and procedures that govern the ‘taking’ of property by the state, and whether such ‘taken’ land can then give it to private corporate interests. To take another example, consider the legal con struction of geographies of race and racism. ‘Race’ is not a natural way of sorting different kinds of human beings but a dynamic, historical system of power that governs relations of domination, privilege, and subordination through processes of racialization. As examples as varied as apartheid, Jim Crow, White Australia, and indigenous reserves in different parts of the world demonstrate, racialization is commonly effected through processes of spatialization: separation, confinement, exclusion, expul sion, and forced removal. ‘Races’ (and the relationship among them) are also constituted by law, through the categories of legal discourse and the vectors of legal violence. One may investigate the politics of the legal constitution and reconstitution of these geographies of race and racism through analysis of the interpretive contests that aim to revise or reinforce them. In a South African context such legal instruments as the Group Areas Act of 1950, the various versions of ‘influx control’ legislation which regulated the rural to urban migration of Africans, the complex legal texts that constituted the ‘Bantustans’ (the fictive ‘homelands’ of Africans) were all subject to interpretive maneuvers. The results of these maneuvers had the material effect of opening up or closing off spaces and places to African people. In a North American context similar analyses could look at the Alien Property Acts that prohibited ‘Orientals’ from owning agricultural land, or the Major Crimes Act of 1885 which extended federal police au thority into ‘Indian Country’ (itself a legal construction), or Plessey v. Ferguson and other cases which validated the so called ‘separate but equal’ policies that underwrote the spatiality of anti black racism. These texts do not simply reference rules but invoke racist ideologies that are projected onto lived in landscapes and are legitim ized through specifically legal ideologies. Such analyses can be enriched by detailed empirical or archival re search into how actual persons navigated, accommodated, or resisted such spatio legal projects. Another important feature of legal geographies of power (as such, or legal geographies of race, class, gender, etc.) is the ‘sedimentation effect’. In common law
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jurisdictions the practical work of lawyers and judges frequently involves the interpretation of historical documents (constitutions, treaties, statutes, prior rulings, doctrines, contracts, deeds, and so on) that created or revised the legal meanings inscribed onto segments of social space. Contemporary disputes often turn on con tentious readings of these as they are imagined to be embedded in actual landscapes. For example, twenty first century legal arguments about the location, boundaries, and meanings of ‘Indian Country’ in the United States can turn on contested interpretations of the statutes that established a particular reservation in the nineteenth century, the executive orders that modified them, the treaties and contracts that were executed subsequent to these, prior cases that interpreted these and doctrines such as ‘the domestic dependent nation’, and the ‘plenary power’ doctrines that are key constituents of Federal Indian Law. Such traces of legality are imagined as ‘frozen’ in the past and, in a sense, embedded in the landscapes to which they confer legal meaning. Contemporary conventional interpretations are therefore imagined as constrained or compelled by claims about what various actors (colonial administrators, local settlers, ‘authorized’ indigenous people) intended or understood in the remote past. These posited ‘under standings’ of legal space are privileged over con temporary desires, needs, and values. Insofar as these historical understandings (whether accurate or not) arose in explicitly colonialist or racist socio spatial projects, such projects can be given continued effect even though the ideologies that inform them would not be acceptable now. These are all outcomes of distinctively legal ideologies. However, it is also the case that because of the openness or indeterminacy of legal discourse, such sedimented meanings may be repudiated (in whole or part, tacitly or explicitly) and the relevant spatial fields of power thereby reconfigured. Legal geographical analysis can help to exhume such meanings or reveal contingent aspects of their excavation by legal actors.
Doing Legal Geography Legal geography has three principal lines of inquiry: (1) How do distinctively legal practices shape or contribute to transformations of geographical phenomena? (2) How does geographical or socio spatial phenomena inform or condition the workings of the distinctively legal? (3) How can analysis of these reciprocal processes illuminate other questions of social research more broadly? With respect to the first line of inquiry, much depends on the particular understanding of the legal that we bring to the task and how deeply into the legal we go in search of explanation. One might limit analyses of ‘the legal’ to the rules and regulations that are promulgated by formal
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legal institutions: for example, the US Fair Housing Act of 1968; sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; and the Australian Mabo v. Queensland decision of 1988. But studies may be given greater sociological thickness through a more explicit examination of dis tinctively legal institutions and roles. Analysis of an issue or event can benefit from asking questions like: how do courts really work? What do judges and lawyers do when they argue or rule? What is policing or border patrolling really like? These kinds of questions can be addressed directly through empirical studies, including participant observation, or through engagement with relevant lit eratures. These thicker sociological treatments can be further enriched by more explicit investigation of dis tinctively legal discourses and ideologies that inform what these actors do. This kind of analysis need not be confined to formal, state legal actors. It can be extended to ‘popular legal consciousness’, that is, to how ordinary people think about, or through, the law. Important work along these lines has looked at property, at public space, and at the legal geographic construction of Israel/ Palestine. These distinctively legal images and dis positions can be extended or connected to more perva sive social ideologies, such as liberalism and its associated notions of self and community, or to prominent ideolo gies of statism and authority. These ideologies, in turn, may be connected to analyses of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and other relevant structures of power. Taking ‘the legal’ in varying degrees of ‘thickness’ helps to explicate the innumerable material practices and interventions that contribute to the formation and transformation of geographical phenomena. Such prac tices and ideologies participate in geographical trans formations in countless ways. Spaces are created, maintained, and revised through the often contested ‘inscriptions’ of abstract legal meanings (and associated images and ideologies) onto lived in places and land scapes. Borders are drawn and redrawn, people and places are put off limits, spatial identities are imposed or contested. Scholars in legal geography have pushed these lines of inquiry to explicate contexts and contests as di verse as those concerning political asylum, policing, gardening, homelessness, public housing, dissent, sexu ality, racial subordination, and land expropriation. Just as there are methodological issues regarding how deeply to go into the legal, there are questions about how deeply to go into the geographical. Some of the geog raphy of law and geography sticks fairly close to the surface of mappable or locatable phenomena. But the interpretive resources of human geography have ex panded enormously over the last generation and what is taken to be geography has grown accordingly. Studies of the legal in the spatial may engage questions of scale and scaling, dimensions of geographical imaginations, or the workings and effects of spatial representations and
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discourses. This brings us to the second principal line of inquiry: investigating the spatiality in and of the legal. There are some obvious connections between legal phenomena and conventional conceptions of space. The very idea of law is often structured or framed by spatial or geographical images. Most obvious is the image of territorial sovereignty and its inscription of an inside/ outside orientation to law. Sovereign space is imagined to contain, constrain, and limit the scope and reach of the law and, usually, to constitute a homogenous space over which the law of the land is operative. Basic order spatial images also condition such ‘internal’ dimensions of the legal as federalism, jurisdiction, and local government law. These are frequently described in terms of higher and lower levels of government and implicate con ventional notions of scale. Likewise, the international system of states constitutes a supra national space of reference for international law, and affects a global distribution of legal regimes. Inter national law traditionally pertains to treaties and con ventions with which member states of ‘the international community’ govern relations among themselves. But human rights activists and others have begun to make claims that international law implicates (and obligates) nonstate and so called ‘private’ international actors such as multinational corporations and nongovernmental or ganizations as well. Insofar as these claims are accepted and acted upon, international legality (structuring and structured by the spatiality of sovereignty) may be transforming into a global legality. That is, the spatiality of law on a planetary scale may be shifting toward a configuration in which the territorial state is merely one component among others. Both state and nonstate actors are resisting this posited de territorialization of law. These common sense spatial structures of the legal are frequently simply assumed by scholars and others. However, they are increasingly being challenged and problematized from a number of perspectives. With re spect to the fundamental image of territorial sovereignty, it is now commonly argued that while this conceptual device for imagining the space and geography of law may once have been accurate or serviceable, this is no longer the case. Whatever sovereignty once meant it means something quite different under conditions of global ization. That is, the foundational spaces of law (territorial states) are no longer the simple containers they were once presumed to be. To the extent that borders are increasingly understood as more ‘permeable’, elements of legality from ‘outside’ (such as regulatory authority or policing) may percolate into the insides. Whether ‘within’ or ‘without’ (or, indeed, the very framing of inside and outside), the spatiality of law in this sense has always been a matter of interpretation, and interpretations are always multiple and variable. For ex ample, some event that may appear to be a matter of
‘national’ (domestic) legality from one perspective can often be reinterpreted or reframed as being a matter of international legality (e.g., an event seen to implicate human rights). Likewise, what appears ‘domestic’ from one view can seem ‘foreign’ from another (e.g., an event concerning transnational flows). The same holds for taken for granted notions of federalism or the scaling of domestic law. Much recent work in human geography has critiqued inherited notions of scale and emphasized the social or political construction of scale. These ideas problematize conventional scalar conceptions of the spatiality of law. The political construction of scale often takes place through distinctively legal practices and in stitutions, most clearly in disputes about federalism or local government law itself. Legal geography tends to see space not as a self evident, objective matrix which con tains law or which unproblematically distinguishes among legal regimes (either as among sovereign states or as between the domestic and the international). Rather, spatialities of law are themselves understood as the ef fects of spatio legal interpretive frameworks and practices. As human geographers have increasingly attended to the significance of spatial and geographical discourses, representations and narratives, so legal geographers have relied on some of these more sophisticated interpretive resources in their analyses of the legal constitution of geographies of power. Social power and variable ex pressions of spatio legal consciousness and ideologies (e.g., property consciousness, forms of self and social consciousness associated with citizenship, privacy, pub licness, criminality, and punishment) are always bound up with each other. Spatio legal discourse analysis is useful in understanding the unfolding of many kinds of disputes and events that are shaped by the confrontation between contending ways of imaging power in these ways. Of special interest to legal geographers are the ways in which these ideologically loaded socio spatial images in legal thought itself are implicated in contests about ma terial spaces and lived in landscapes. The third line of inquiry seeks to extend the relevance or utility of legal geography to broader social and social theoretic concerns. Beyond exploring these lines of reciprocity or mutual constitutivity of ‘the legal’ and ‘the geographical’ efforts have been made to examine how understanding the terms of mutual constitutivity may illuminate the workings of power generally. There is very little that human geographers are interested in that does not implicate ‘the legal’ in one way or another. This does not mean that one must follow these lines of inquiry, just as one needn’t explicitly foreground ‘the economic’ or ‘the cultural’ in every re search project. But doing so may yield significant insights. Moreover, whether critical or conventional approaches are most appropriate depends on the task at hand. The
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worlds that human geographers seek to describe, explain, and assess are (at least as much) ‘made’ as ‘found’. The legal is deeply enmeshed in the processes, practices, and pragmatics of world making. Much about the world is contingent and much of this contingency is illuminated through analysis of distinctively legal practices and events. The legal itself is contingent: on different, con tending forms of social power, on conceptual or ideo logical constraints, on inherited spatialities, some of which are materialized in the built environment. Ex ploring the dynamics of law and geography can reveal degrees of openness that may exist as well as elements of closure and foreclosure that condition what it is like to be in the world. See also: Ideology; Radical Geography; Sovereignty; Policing.
Further Reading Blomley, N. (1989). Text and context: Re thinking the law space nexus. Progress in Human Geography 13, 512 534. Blomley, N. (1994). Space, Law and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guilford. Blomley, N. (2004). Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge.
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Blomley, N., Delaney, D. and Ford, R. (eds.) (2001). The Law and Geographies Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Chouinard, V. (1994). Geography, law and legal struggles: Which ways ahead? Progress in Human Geography 18, 415 440. Clark, G. (1985). Judges and the City: Interpreting Local Autonomy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Clark, G. (1989). The geography of law. In Peet, R. & Thrift, N. (eds.) New models in geography, pp 310 337. London: Unwin Hyman. Cooper, D. (1998). Governing Out of Order: Space, Law and the Politics of Belonging. London: Rivers Oram Press. Delaney, D. (1998). Race, Place and the Law: 1836 1948. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Ford, R. (1994). The boundaries of race: Political geography in legal analysis. Harvard Law Review 107, 1841 1921. Ford, R. (1997). Law’s territory: (A history of jurisdiction). Michigan Law Review 97, 843 930. Herbert, S. (1997). Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Holder, J. and Harrison, C. (2002). Connecting law and geography. In Holder, J. & Harrison, C. (eds.) Current Legal Issues, Vol. 5: Law and Geography pp 3 16. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kedar, A. (2001). The legal transformation of ethnic geography: Israeli law and the Palestinian landholder 1948 1967. New York University Journal of International Law and Policy 34, 923 1000. Mitchell, D. (2003). The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford Press. Mitchell, D. (2005). Permitting protest: Parsing the fine geography of dissent in America. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, 796 813. Zick, T. (2006). Speech and spatial tactics. Texas Law Review 84, 581 651.
Learning Regions B. T. Asheim, Lund University, Lund, Sweden & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Agglomeration Territorially concentrated location of economic activity exploiting external economies of scale (localization or urbanization economies). Industrial District Local production systems characterized by agglomerated and closely networked small and medium enterprises (SMEs) exploiting localization economies. Innovation Commercialization of inventions. Can be both new products and processes, as well as organizational innovation. Can be radical (new to the market) or incremental (new to the firm). Learning Economies New phase in the development of capitalism where continuous learning is of strategic importance to remain competitive due to the rapid changes in the globalizing knowledge economy. Localization Economies External economies of scale derived from co-location of industries belonging to the same or closely related sectors. Urbanization economies derive from external economies of scale from different sectors, typically found in urban areas. Regional clusters and industrial districts are examples of agglomerations exploiting localization economies. Post-Fordism Characterized by customized, batch production (flexible specialization) in contrast to the standardized, mass production of Fordism. R&D Research and development activities in order to develop innovations. Measured as R&D intensity by percent of turnover used for R&D. Carried out at universities, R&D institutes, and R&D department in firms. Innovation can however be based on other types of knowledge than R&D, for example, design. The knowledge base behind innovations is thus larger than R&D activities. Regional Innovation System Systemic and long-term relations between organizations and institutions supporting and promoting knowledge exploration, learning, and competence building and organizations (e.g., firms) exploiting and using knowledge, learning, and competence building. Technoeconomic Paradigm A technoeconomic paradigm describes a state when a new basic technology (e.g., information and communication technology (ICT)) has diffused throughout the whole of society, and has, thus, become the key technology of a society. Third Italy Concept developed by the Italian sociologist, Bagnasco, in 1977 to describe the Central
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and Northeastern parts of Italy, which in contrast to the First Italy’s (Lombardy, Piedmonte, and Liguria) Fordism had a regional economy of agglomerated SMEs in industrial districts characterized by post-Fordist production.
Introduction For more than 25 years a strong case has been made that territorial agglomerations are growing in importance as a competitive location of economic activities in post Fordist learning economies. The main argument for this is that territorial agglomeration (or clustering) provides the best context for the promotion of innovative firms based on sticky knowledge and localized learning. This view on the importance of the regional level can find support from modern innovation theory, originating from evolutionary and institutional economics, which points to the increased importance of regional innovation systems, industrial districts, and technological districts. In the perspective of innovation as culturally and institutionally contextualized, strategic parts of learning processes emerge as highly lo calized, as opposed to placeless. Thus, local contexts can represent important parts of the knowledge infrastructure of firms and regions, underscoring the role of historical trajectories. However, research on clusters and regional innovation systems has also revealed that the regional level is neither always nor even normally sufficient for firms to stay innovative and competitive. This is a con sequence of firms’ learning processes becoming increas ingly inserted into various forms of networks and innovation systems (at regional, national, and international levels), which increases the importance of firms’ absorptive capacity for accessing nonlocal knowledge. After years of influential research on the importance of territorial agglomerations for economic growth there is, thus, a need for an ‘unpacking’ strategy to disclose and reveal the contingencies, particularities, and specificities of the various contexts and environments where know ledge creation and innovation take place in order to obtain a better understanding of factors enabling or im peding these processes. So far, all the way from Marshall’s writing on industrial districts, it has been assumed that business interactions (from exploiting localization economies) and knowledge flows were co occurring (and co located) phenomena. Furthermore, it has been
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maintained that local interactions and collective learning processes, or what is sometimes called ‘local buzz’, largely take care of themselves by just ‘being there’, while building ‘global pipelines’ to knowledge providers lo cated outside the local milieu requires institutional and infrastructure support, as one cannot expect that it occur spontaneously. It is this idea of an almost automatic shaping of en dogenous learning and innovation capacity by just being co located in an agglomerated environment, which also lies behind Porter’s understanding of how competitive advantage is ‘created’. Recently, observers have ques tioned if cluster learning is a pervasive and ‘collective’ process only conditioned by territorial agglomeration as such. New research has shown empirically that there exists an uneven distribution of knowledge and selective interfirm learning due to the heterogeneity of firms’ competence bases, which cannot be fully compensated by regional universities or other parts of a region’s ‘col lective absorptive capacity’. Thus, it is an important question if more planned and systemic approaches are needed in a globalizing knowledge economy in order for regional advantages to be delib erately ‘constructed’. This argument is grounded in the fact that the contemporary globalizing knowledge economy – characterized by outsourcing/offshoring of both production and R&D, open innovation, dominating transnational cor porations (TNCs), and intensified competition from de veloping economies of which China and India are the ‘star’ examples – is becoming more knowledge intensive, and explicit, codified knowledge is consequently increasing in importance. Simply leaving the question of how con structed advantage is attained just to the market or the ‘territory’ in the Marshallian way, when tacit knowledge was most important, is probably not enough. This points to a new and more dynamic role for the public sector (including universities) generally and gov ernment and governance specifically in interaction with the private sector to promoting innovativeness and competitiveness. Governments and agencies at all spatial levels have increasingly become involved in seeking to stimulate innovation, and, consequently, innovation pol icy is put at the center of policies for promoting regional and national economic development. At the regional level supporting the formation of regional innovation systems, clusters, and learning regions have been looked upon as policy frameworks or models for implementation of long term, development strategies initiating learning based processes of innovation, change, and improvement.
What Is a ‘Learning Region’? In a newly published book The Learning Region: Foundations, State of the Art, Future, four articles are reprinted as
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representing the foundations of the concept of learning regions: Storper’s ‘Regional ‘worlds’ of production’ from 1993; Florida’s ‘Toward the learning region’ from 1995; Asheim’s ‘Industrial districts as learning regions’ from 1996; and, finally, Morgan’s ‘The learning region: insti tutions, innovation and regional renewal’ from 1997. This demonstrates that the concept of ‘learning regions’ is a product of the 1990s and reflects empirically the rapid economic development in places such as the ‘Third Italy’, which drew attention toward the importance of cooper ation between small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in industrial districts and between firms and local authorities at the regional level in achieving international com petitiveness. Theoretically, it reflects the definition of post Fordist societies as learning economies, where innovation is seen as basically a socially and territorially embedded, interactive learning process, which cannot be understood independent of its institutional and cultural contexts. Even if these contributions in many ways have a common view on how to understand ‘learning regions’, underlining the important role of innovation, understood as contextualized social processes of interactive learning, they also disclose interesting differences. One such dif ference can be identified between the American and European approaches. While learning regions in a North American context are associated with the importance of the quality of the knowledge infrastructure of leading universities and research institutions in a knowledge based economy, producing, attracting, and retaining highly skil led workers (e.g., Silicon Valley), in a European context of learning economies the focus is much more on the role social capital and trust plays in promoting formal and informal interfirm networks and the process of interactive learning (e.g., industrial districts in the Third Italy). The broadness in the different interpretations of learning re gions clearly also demonstrates that the concept can be fuzzy and the use of the concept both theoretically and practically rather flexible. In order to provide an analyt ically more precise understanding of the concept an at tempt of identifying three important building blocks of the concept is presented in the following section. The Building Blocks of the Concept of Learning Regions The concept of learning regions has thus been used in at least three different contexts. The concept was first introduced by economic geographers in the mid 1990s, when they used it to emphasize the role played by co operation and collective learning in regional clusters and networks in order to promote the innovativeness and competitiveness of firms and regions in the globalizing learning economy. The second approach expressing (more indirectly) the idea of learning regions originates from the writings of
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evolutionary and institutional economics on the learning economy, where knowledge is considered the most fun damental resource and learning the most important process, thus making the learning capacity of an economy of strategic importance to its innovativeness and com petitiveness. The concept of ‘the learning economy’ refers to the contemporary post Fordist economy dominated by the information and communication technology (ICT) related (information, computer, and telecommunication) technoeconomic paradigm in com bination with flexible production methods and reflexive work organizations (i.e., learning work organizations and functional flexible workers). In addition the learning economy is firmly based on innovation as a crucial means of competition, where innovation is understood as interactive learning in contrast to the previous hege monic linear model of innovation. The third approach, which conceptualizes learning regions as regionally based development coalitions, has been developed by representatives of action oriented organizational research taking their knowledge of how to form intra and interfirm learning organizations based on broad participation out of the firm context and applying it at the regional level. By the concept ‘development coalition’ is meant a bottom up, horizontally based co operation between different actors in a local or regional setting, based on a socially broad mobilization and par ticipation of human agency. When learning regions are defined in this way they resemble a regional innovation system broadly defined, incorporating the elements of a bottom up, interactive innovation model. The ‘innovation system’ concept can be understood in both a narrow as well as a broad way. A narrow definition of the innovation system primarily incorporates the R&D functions of universities, public and private research institutes and corporations, reflecting a top down model of innovation as exemplified by the triple helix approach. A broader conception of the innovation systems includes all parts and aspects of the economic structure and the organizational and institutional setup affecting learning and innovation in a region. This type of regional innovation system may be de noted as ‘territorially embedded regional innovation systems’, where firms base their innovation activity mainly on localized learning processes stimulated by geographical, social, and cultural proximity, without much direct interaction with knowledge creating organ izations (i.e., R&D institutes and universities). The best examples of ‘territorially embedded regional innovation systems’ are networks of SMEs in industrial districts. Thus in Italy’s Emilia Romagna, for example, the innovation system can be described as territorially embedded within that particular region. These territo rially embedded systems provide bottom up, network based support through, for example, technology centers,
innovation networks, or centers for real service providing market research and intelligence services. The definition of learning regions as regional devel opment coalitions is inspired by Scandinavian experi ences, which have shown that flat and egalitarian organizations have the best prerequisites of being flexible and learning organizations, and that industrial relations characterized by strong involvement of functional flex ible, central workers is important in order to have a working learning organization. Such organizations will also result in well functioning industrial relations, where all the employees (i.e., the (skilled) workers, as well as the managers) will have a certain degree of loyalty toward the firm. The way firms are organized also influences their capability to learn, and the change from hierarchies with vertical flows of information toward more flat or ganizations with horizontal flows of information is an important aspect of the learning economy. The organized form of bringing the society inside the firm through learning organizations based on broad participation, and supported by labor market legislation, as well as a strong tradition of cooperation between the labor market organizations, is in many aspects the op posite way of achieving a fusion of the economy with the rest of society than the industrial district model, in which the firm is contextualized through its embeddedness in spatial structures of social relations. These contrasting models of contextualizing the firm also reflect the alter native interpretations of social capital, that is, as rooted in the ‘civicness’ of communities and informal social net works (i.e., bonding) in the industrial districts of the Third Italy or as embedded in formal labor market’s organizations and institutions on the system level of so ciety (i.e., bridging) in the Nordic countries.
Critique of Learning Regions Taking into consideration the wide diffusion the learning region concept has attained, it is both quite natural and obvious that it has received quite a lot of criticism. The main criticism can be related to four topics: (1) regions cannot learn, only firms and organisations; (2) structural limits to learning in a capitalist global economy; (3) learning is only reproductive; and (4) social capital as an independent vari able. The criticism that only firms and organizations can learn and not territorial units is shared by people coming from a variety of disciplines ranging from economics to regional studies. They argue that learning is an activity that requires agency and that such agency is represented by people working in various organizations. The counter argument is represented by an innovation system per spective partly arguing that interactive learning is socially and institutionally, and, thus, territorially contextualized, and partly that the formation of, for example, regional innovation
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systems according to a triple helix model place firms in a broader alliance of actors, which are territorially embedded. The danger of this is of course that the instrumental ra tionality of firms is taken over by the regions resulting in a one dimensional focus on development ‘in’ a region, and ignoring the development ‘of ’ a region. This has clearly been the case in much of the research on endogenous, ter ritorial development, but especially the learning region ap proach has in many cases more explicitly also taken the social cohesion and welfare dimensions into consideration. The argument about structural limits to learning in a capitalist economy often has a reference to the neoliberal tendencies in the development of global capitalism, the last 25 years. This position, however, ignores the important research carried out by institutional economists and pol itical scientists on the ‘varieties of capitalism’. Their work has shown that it is not a question of only one type of capitalism, but of several (i.e., ‘varieties’), and even if they share the basic, structural characteristics of the capitalist mode of production, their historical, concrete appearance and development can be quite different. They make the simple dichotomy between ‘coordinated market econ omies’, which can be found in the Nordic welfare states, as well as in Continental Europe, and ‘liberal market econ omies’, which is the Anglo American model. The variety of capitalism approach argues that different national in stitutional framework support different forms of economic activities with different social outcomes due to different types of institutional complementarities. This perspective supports the argument that coordinated market economies can demonstrate synergy between equity and efficiency, while liberal market economies disclose a contradiction between equity and efficiency. The dominance of learning work organizations in the Nordic countries, which is re ferred to in the next section, is also an example of the possibilities of learning taking place in the context of global capitalism. The argument that learning can only be reproductive, that is, it only can imitate already existing phenomenon, ignores that learning also can be developmental and cre ative. The above mentioned learning work organizations show that autonomy of work of highly skilled workers provides a dynamic learning environment that also can be supportive of knowledge creation and innovation (see the next section). Finally, there is the criticism that the strong focus on social capital as an independent variable discloses important structural characteristics of the global capital ism. This position furthermore criticizes the view of social capital as a property of groups and regions, and prefers to look at it as a resource of individuals in struggle with others. Of course, social capital can be both, but if looking to the Nordic countries once again, European Union (EU)’s studies of social capital demonstrates a strong correlation between a high presence of social capital and trust of government, political authorities, and important
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societal institutions, which produces a strong social co hesion. This among other things shows up in more opti mistic attitudes in the younger generation, for example, toward globalization, than in other European countries with a lower presence of social capital. In addition, the presence of social capital both as bonding and bridging represents a strong tradition of cooperation, which also is important for innovation as interactive learning, and adds to the high level of human capital in the workforce in a synergistic way.
Learning and Innovation in Regional Economies According to the third perspective on learning regions as regionally based development coalitions, learning regions should be looked upon as a policy framework or strategy for formulations of long term partnership based develop ment strategies initiating learning based processes of in novation, change, and improvement. In the promotion of such learning regions the interlinking of learning organ izations ranging from work organizations inside firms via interfirm networks to different actors of the community, understood as ‘regional development coalitions’, will be of strategic importance. The attractiveness of the concept of learning regions to planners and politicians is to be found in the fact that it at one and the same time promises economic growth and job generation, as well as social cohesion. As such, learning regions may be analyzed as an answer and challenge at the regional level especially for regions with weak territorial competence bases to con temporary changes in the global economy, underlining the strategic role played by ‘social capital’s’ emphasis on the social and cultural aspects of regions facilitating collective action for mutual benefit. Thus, it is not accidental that this approach to learning regions was used by the Regional Innovation Strategies pilot actions of the EU Commission as part of new policy developments in Europe since the 1990s to promote less developed regional economies within EU through innovation. The concept of learning regions emphasizes the role of regional based learning organizations. The strategic role played by cooperation in a learning economy is underlined by the understanding of interactive learning as a fundamental aspect of the process of innovation. This broader understanding of innovation as a social, non linear, and interactive learning process (both repro ductive and developmental) puts new emphasis on the role played by sociocultural and institutional structures in regional development, highlighting the significance of building social capital in order to foster cooperation, as well as promoting the principle of broad participation in intra and interfirm networks. They are no longer ves tigial remnants of precapitalist civil societies. They are
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necessary prerequisites for firms and regions to be in novative and competitive in a post Fordist learning economy. Of strategic importance in this context is the capacity of people, organizations, networks, and regions to learn. The concept of a learning region can, thus, be used to describe a region characterized by innovative activity based on localized, interactive learning, and co operation promoted by organizational innovations in order to exploit learning based competitiveness. As al ready mentioned this implies a broad understanding of a regional innovation system as representing the territorial and institutional embeddednesss of learning organiza tions and interactive learning with a strong focus on competence building in addition to learning and innovation. Thus, knowledge and innovation should not simply be equated with R&D. Innovative activities have much broader knowledge bases than just science based R&D, and there are many examples of nations and regions demonstrating a rapid economic growth and a high level of living standard with an industry competing on the bases of non R&D based, incremental innovations (e.g., Denmark and regions in The Third Italy). Thus, a re gion’s knowledge base is larger than its science base, implying that arguing for an increasingly more know ledge intensive globalizing economy does not necessarily mean that innovation and competitiveness only become more dependent on R&D. The distinction between non R&D and R&D based (regional) economies, furthermore, implies the use of different modes of innovation. One the one hand, we can talk about a broad definition of the mode of innovation as D(oing), U(sing), and I(nteracting) relying on informal processes of learning and experience based know how in most cases resembling a synthetic (or engineering based) knowledge base and/or a symbolic knowledge base in coordinated market economies. Such a mode of innov ation is typically found in non R&D based learning economies (e.g., Denmark), mainly producing user driven, incremental innovations. On the other hand, in a R&D, knowledge based economy one finds a more nar row definition of the mode of innovation as S(cience), T(echnology), and I(nnovation) based on the use of co dified scientific knowledge, which could broadly be as sociated with an analytical (or science based) knowledge base. This mode of innovation more often generates radical (product) innovations than a broadly defined mode of innovation and is typically found in liberal market economies. These two modes of innovation will also be differently manifested with regard to regional specialization and clustering. However, on the firm levels these two modes of innov ation coexist, but are applied to different extent depending on the dominating knowledge base(s). Furthermore, re search shows that combining the two modes of innovation
seems to be most efficient, that is, firms that have used the STI mode intensively may benefit from paying more at tention to the DUI mode and vice versa. Thus, the dis tinction between these two modes of innovation helps on the one hand to avoid a too one sided focus on promoting science based innovation of high technology firms at the expense of the role of learning and experience based, user driven innovation. On the other hand, it also indicates limits of such innovation strategies and, thus, emphasizes the need for firms in traditional manufacturing sectors and services more generally to link up with sources of codified know ledge in distributed knowledge networks. Moreover, new research on the relationship between different types of work organization in EU and the im pact on job stress, worker satisfaction, labor market flexibility, learning, innovation, and patenting identifies four main forms of work organization: ‘learning’, ‘lean’, ‘Taylorist’, and ‘simple structure’. This study shows a clear north–south divide with regard to the dominating forms of work organization with Northern Europe dominated by learning forms of work organization, while Southern Europe has work organizations characterized by either Taylorist or simple forms. The learning form of work organization, found in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, does not only result in less job stress and greater worker satisfaction, it also implies more labor market flexibility, superior conditions for learning and innovation, and even a larger propensity for patenting. The autonomy of work and learning dynamics found in this type of work organization not only supports repro ductive or adaptive learning, but also underpins devel opmental or creative learning. The positive impact of this form of work organization on innovation is confirmed by another study reporting that ‘low road’ practices using short term and temporary contracts, having a lack of employer commitment to job security, low levels of training, and so on are negatively correlated with in novation. In contrast, it is found that ‘high road’ work practices characterized by ‘high commitment’ organiza tions or ‘transformed’ workplaces are positively correl ated with innovation.
Conclusions: Learning Regions in a Globalizing Knowledge Economy The continuous importance of the regional level for creating and retaining innovative firms in a globalizing knowledge economy is confirmed by results from a European comparative cluster survey, which shows that regional resources and collaboration are of major im portance in stimulating economic activity. In this study it was found that in many clusters, firms increasingly find relevant research activities and other supporting services inside the regional cluster boundaries.
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Furthermore, we have argued that, under the right conditions, interactive learning has the capacity to promote and sustain regional innovativeness and com petitiveness. At the core of these conditions are cooper ation and nonmarket and noneconomic factors, including social capital, trust, and a tissue of supportive institutions. Therefore, it can be maintained that there is a potential for establishing learning regions within regions with a weak knowledge infrastructure through the use of ap propriate policy instruments, promoting learning, in novation, and endogenous development ‘in’ as well as ‘of ’ regions. However, as a result of increased global competition from newly industrialized countries such as Taiwan and South Korea, and rapidly catching up countries such as China and India, as well as increased codification of knowledge due to the growing knowledge intensity of the globalizing economy, the need for firms in Europe to enhance their competitiveness by combining a focus on product differentiation/innovation toward high quality/ value added products with cost efficiency has become evident. Subsequently firms apply an open innovation model and thus rely on sourcing – sometimes globally – for the best talents and knowledge while at the same time outsourcing or offshoring standardized labor intensive activities, but also increasingly R&D and innovation, to low cost countries. These development tendencies rep resent a serious threat and challenge to the endogenous learning region approach, which is clearly illustrated by the development in, for example, the Third Italy. The policy implications of this is simply that while the for mation of regional innovation systems, clusters, and learning regions still represent very important policy measures for the promotion of innovative and com petitive firms and regions, such measures do not consti tute a policy panacea, but have to be applied within a context of a multilevel approach to innovation policy.
See also: Industrial Districts; Locality Debates; Regional Innovation Systems.
Further Reading Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (1995). Territoriality in the global political economy. Nordisk Samha¨llsgeografisk Tidskrift 20, 3 16. Asheim, B. T. (1996). Industrial districts as ‘learning regions’: A condition for prosperity? European Planning Studies 4(4), 379 400. Asheim, B. T. (2000). Industrial districts: The contributions of Marshall and beyond. In Clark, G., Feldman, M. & Gertler, M. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, pp 413 431. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Asheim, B. T. (2001). Learning regions as development coalitions: Partnership as governance in European workfare states? Concepts and Transformation. International Journal of Action Research and Organizational Renewal 6(1), 73 101.
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Asheim, B. T. and Coenen, L. (2005). Knowledge bases and regional innovation systems: Comparing nordic clusters. Research Policy 34(8), 1173 1190. Asheim, B. T. and Gertler, M. S. (2005). The geography of innovation: Regional innovation systems. In Fagerberg, J., Mowery, D. & Nelson, R. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Innovation, pp 291 317. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Asheim, B. T. and Isaksen, A. (2002). Regional innovation systems: The integration of local ‘sticky’ and global ‘ubiquitous’ knowledge. Journal of Technology Transfer 27, 77 86. Asheim, B. T., Coenen, L., Moodysson, J. and Vang, J. (2007). Constructing knowledge based regional advantage: Implications for regional innovation policy. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management 7(2/3/4/5), 140 155. Asheim, B. T., Isaksen, A., Nauwelaers, C. and Todtling, F. (eds.) (2003). Regional Innovation Policy for Small Medium Enterprises. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Bathelt, H., Malmberg, A. and Maskell, P. (2004). Clusters and knowledge: Local buzz, global pipelines and the process of knowledge creation. Progress in Human Geography 28(1), 31 56. Bellini, N. and Landabaso, M. (2007). Learning about innovation in Europe’s regional policy. In Rutten, R. & Boekema, F. (eds.) The Learning Region. Foundations, State of the Art, Future, pp 231 251. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Cooke, P. (2001). Regional innovation systems, clusters, and the knowledge economy. Industrial and Corporate Change 10(4), 945 974. Cooke, P. (2007). Regional innovation systems, asymmetric knowledge and the legacies of learning. In Rutten, R. & Boekema, F. (eds.) The Learning Region. Foundations, State of the Art, Future, pp 184 205. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Cooke, P., Boekholt, P. and Todtling, F. (2000). The Governance of Innovation in Europe. Regional Perspectives on Global Competitiveness. London: Pinter. Ennals, R. and Gustavsen, B. (1999). Work Organisation and Europe as a Development Coalition. Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Publishing. Etzkowitz, H. and Leydesdorff, L. (2000). The dynamics of innovation: From national systems and ‘mode 2’ to a triple helix of university industry government relations. Research Policy 29, 109 123. Fagerberg, J., Mowery, D. and Nelson, R. (eds.) (2005). The Oxford Handbook of Innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Florida, R. (1995). Towards the learning region. Futures 27(5), 527 536. Gertler, M. (2004). Manufacturing Culture: The Institutional Geography of Industrial Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giuliani, E. and Bell, M. (2005). The micro determinants of meso level learning and innovation: Evidence from a Chilean wine cluster. Research Policy 34(1), 47 68. Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology 91, 481 510. Hadjimichalis, C. (2006). Non Economic factors in economic geography and in ‘new regionalism’: A sympathetic critique. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30(3), 690 704. Hassink, R. (2007). The learning region: A constructive critique. In Rutten, R. & Boekema, F. (eds.) The Learning Region. Foundations, State of the Art, Future, pp 252 271. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Hudson, R. (1999). The learning economy, the learning firm and the learning region: A sympathetic critique of the limits to learning. European Urban and Regional Studies 6(1), 59 72. Isaksen, A. (2005). Regional clusters between local and non local relations: A comparative European study. In Lagendijk, A. & Oinas, P. (eds.) Proximity, Distance and Diversity: Issues on Economic Interaction and Local Development, pp 129 152. Aldershot: Ashgate. Jensen, M. B., Johnson, B., Lorenz, E. and Lundvall, B. A. (2007). Forms of knowledge and modes of innovation. Research Policy 36, 680 693. Lorenz, E. and Lundvall, B. A. (eds.) (2006). How Europe’s Economies Learn: Coordinating Competing Models. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Lorenz, E. and Valeyre, A. (2006). Organisational forms and innovative performance. In Lorenz, E. & Lundvall, B. A. (eds.) How Europe’s Economies Learn: Coordinating Competing Models, pp 140 161. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lovering, J. (1999). Theory led by policy: The inadequacies of the new regionalism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23(2), 379 395. Lundvall, B. A˚. (ed.) (1992). National Systems of Innovation: Towards a Theory of Innovation and Interactive Learning. London: Pinter. Lundvall, B. A˚. (2008). National innovation systems Analytical concept and development tool. Industry and Innovation 14(1), 95 119. Lundvall, B. A˚. and Johnson, B. (1994). The learning economy. Journal of Industry Studies 1, 23 42. Mitchie, J. and Sheehan, M. (2003). Labour market deregulation, ‘flexibility’ and innovation. Cambridge Journal of Economics 27, 123 143.
Morgan, K. (1997). The learning region: Institutions, innovation and regional renewal. Regional Studies 31, 491 504. Piore, M. and Sabel, C. (1984). The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity. New York: Basic Books. Porter, M. (1990). The Competitive Advantage of Nations. London: Macmillan. Putnam, R. (1993). Making Democracy Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rutten, R. and Boekema, F. (eds.) (2007). The Learning Region. Foundations, State of the Art, Future. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Storper, M. (1993). Regional ‘worlds’ of production. Regional Studies 27, 433 455. Woolcock, M. (1998). Social capital and economic development: Toward a theoretical synthesis and policy framework. Theory and Society 27, 151 208.
Leisure J. Mansvelt, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Carrying Capacity This embodies the notion of limits to resource use based on the premise that resource and land use can only sustain a certain number of actions/ uses by individuals, beyond which that use will have detrimental effects on the resource, the environment, and the user’s experience. Practically difficult to quantify and to conceptualize, it is now largely considered a chaotic concept. Commodification The process whereby more and more aspects of social life previously organized outside of the market assumes the commodity form. Recreations Viewed as a subset and expression of leisure, recreations are understood as activities which are undertaken in one’s leisure time. These involve the engagement of one’s body and mind in forms of leisure in recognized activities which may have both active and passive attributes. Examples of recreations include sports, shopping, reading, exercise, hobbies, and crafts. Early geographical research on leisure primarily focused on outdoor recreational pursuits. Residual Time Time available for discretionary use, after the time taken for subsistence and work-related activities is subtracted. Time-Budget Survey A survey of individual’s activities over a period of time which can be used to reflect on the balance between leisure and work in participants’ daily, weekly, or monthly routines.
Leisure encompasses a wide range of social and spatial practices, experiences, and meanings which are socially and materially constructed in specific time and place contexts. While many definitions of leisure have been formulated and debated, some common attributes exist. Leisure is frequently presented as a state of being or mind, an intrinsic condition in which a sense of agency is exhibited. The capacity to choose to be involved in particular forms of bodily and mental activity is also associated with leisure, as is some choice over the form and nature of one’s involvement. A pleasurable and/or playful quality of experience is also common to defini tions (Figure 1) though this may be expressed as a desire for, or be an outcome of, engagement – as in the sense of pleasure obtained after undertaking strenuous physical or mental activity, or the anticipation of an event. Leisure also involves voluntary or discretionary use of time. Though leisure is usually associated with free choice,
freedoms to engage in leisure may be relative – with preference, entitlement, access, availability, opportunity, and practice varying greatly between people and place. Leisure and recreation are often used as interchange able concepts but traditionally both recreation and tour ism have been understood as subsets of leisure processes, that is, as activities which embody characteristics of leisure but which are separated on the basis of the form and nature of activity. Recreations tend to be categorized as leisure pastimes (which may include formally organized sports), while tourism has emphasized pleasure oriented behaviors and recreations away from one’s home region. However, there is considerable overlap between these definitions. Any differences between tourism and leisure in local or distant spaces may be less significant than how such spaces are produced, negotiated, known, imagined, and experienced. The connectedness of tourism and leis ure is also reflected within the discipline of geography where a number of professional study groups, recently established journals, and publications combine studies of leisure and recreation with those of tourism.
Dimensions of Leisure Geographers have drawn on various dimensions of leis ure in their research and writing. These perspectives have not only provided different insights into the pro duction, expression, practice, and embodiment of leisure but have consequences for what processes, spaces, and peoples are included or excluded. Leisure as Residual Time Here leisure is understood as time spent in leisure after work and subsistence needs have been accounted for, with leisure measured in quantity terms through in struments such as time budget surveys and work life balances. Leisure is placed in binary opposition to pro ductive work, both different from, and a reward for work. Yet, time available for leisure does not equate to time spent in leisure. Restrictions on access to leisure forms and practices, fragmented leisure time, and a lack of in dividuals’ entitlement suggest the leisure–work binary is simultaneously problematic and revealing. A number of chronologies suggest that leisure became separated from work temporally and spatially with the Industrial Revolution. This separation was associated with the imperative for individuals to ‘sell’ their labor to those who owned the ‘means of production’ in locations away from sites of residence. Thorstein Veblen, writing
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Figure 1 Leisure as play. Leisure is seen as involving elements of freedom, pleasure, and play.
about the rise of an elite leisure class at the turn of the nineteenth century, linked leisure to the class based division of society necessary for the material and social reproduction of capitalism. He noted the emergence of a wealthy class able to spend time in engaging in plea surable consumerist pursuits suggesting that leisure should be seen as nonproductive consumption of time. A view of leisure as residual time is underpinned by a Eurocentric and modernist trajectory of historical change, locating leisure’s meaning and spatiality in the specific changes which preceded and followed the In dustrial Revolution, and understanding them in terms of Marxian analysis. Conceptualizations of leisure as residual time have also been associated with leisure’s substantiation as an un earned privilege for those not engaged in the formal labor market including the unemployed, retired, and unpaid family or care workers. A lack of entitlement has spatial expressions, with research in Anglo American contexts revealing the home for women in particular is a complex site of leisure and work, and one in which leisure practices were not easily separated or experienced from daily work tasks occurring within and outside home space. It has also been suggested that the negative construction of the leis ure concept through its association with play and con sumption has been a factor in the relative neglect of leisure as a significant topic of geographical inquiry. Leisure as Activities When leisure is viewed as activities as in tourism, shopping, sport, recreations, hobbies, it is the characteristics and form
of activity that are emphasized. This may include cat egorization of provision (public, private, voluntary); the nature of activity (engaging the body actively or passively); its spatiality (locations of engagement); and form of par ticipation (individual, collective, involving production and/ or consumption of artifacts, experiences, etc.). Emphasis is on the product rather than the process of leisure. Reading or watching television, for example, may be classified as passive leisure forms, yet they may actively engage both mind and body, and may produce both pleasurable and anxious, sensations, feelings, and emotions. Despite difficulties in categorization, much leisure research in geography has drawn on a view of leisure as activities. Places have tended to be seen as the location in which they occur, though recently more attention has been given to how spaces have a role in shaping leisure practices. A view of leisure as activities has underpinned surveys on leisure participation rates and land use. Leisure activities have also formed the basis of govern ment policy interventions based on equitable distri butions of and access to leisure, sustainable management of land, and healthy living campaigns. Understanding leisure in terms of activities has been instrumental in highlighting how leisure may assume particular functions or roles in society. Leisure activities may have a role in legitimating and sustaining state he gemony, in promoting continued social and material production, and in the surveillance of its citizens. States for example, may regulate, provide, or facilitate various leisure activities, legislating against unacceptable activ ities and promoting desirable recreations. Leisure activ ities can have a role in disciplining bodies – producing
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healthy citizens, occupying the ‘idle’, socializing children, and providing compensation for the unemployed. They have also been used to stimulate social change and eco nomic growth. In Britain in the 1980s, for example, leisure and tourism activities were promoted by central and local governments as instruments of urban regener ation, a means of improving quality of life for residents, and of stimulating employment through private sector business growth, inward investment, tourism. Initially geographers have tended to focus on com modified and/or public leisure pursuits and active rec reations. Focusing on leisure activities tends to privilege those more easily categorized which can have the effect of obscuring the significance of passive, private, mundane, relational, and even deviant leisure experiences in everyday life. Leisure as Experience Understanding the form and nature of leisure activities reveals nothing of the quality of experience and intrinsic value for the individual. Drawing initially on humanistic research into outdoor, urban, and home based recre ations, this dimension of leisure highlights how space is made meaningful and knowable through experiences of leisure, emphasizing the creative and active potential of leisure regardless of its characteristics as activities. Leisure is a subjective and reflexive part of being, be coming, knowing, and making meaning in the world. Geographers have implicitly drawn on this notion in researching how leisure activities (such as surfing the net, going to rave dance parties, or gardening) operate as mediums for the production, consumption, and negoti ation of identities. Reflecting on leisure as a subjective quality of ex perience enables one to consider how leisure activities and places have come in turn, to be objectively and ex ternally constructed, a means of considering how tem poral, social, and spatial categorizations of leisure are formed, and how these may operate to define acceptable and deviant, inclusive and exclusionary practices, sub jects, and places (Figure 2). In colonial nineteenth century New Zealand, for example, the concept of leisure emerged primarily from a British/European co lonial heritage, resulting in some early settlers assuming indigenous activities such as ‘weaving’ were a form of leisure activity rather than a significant form of Maori material culture linked to communal livelihood and identity formation. Leisure as Practice A final dimension of leisure is its constitution as a practice and encounter between people as embodied subjects and place. This perspective draws on
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nonrepresentational and post structural theories to argue that leisure experiences and encounters are not simply understood via the mind (as a particular gaze or sub jective experience) but through the body. This helps overcome the tendency to conceptualize individuals as constrained ‘users’ of space, instead viewing them as active and sentient subjects engaged in bodily, repre sentational, cultural, and economic practices. Hegemonic constructions of power are both affirmed and resisted in the practicing of leisure, and leisure practices/encounters become mediums for shaping experience, ritual, emotion, memory, knowledge, and action in the making of places and identities. This approach has been significant in so cial and cultural geographies of leisure and tourism in recent years by providing a way of connecting changing socialities, spatialities, and subjectivities. A view of leisure as practice has challenged the primacy of the visual in creating tourist landscapes and experiences, for example, arguing that tourist subjects, places, and place meanings are not simply inscribed through a particular ‘gaze’ but are negotiated and shaped powerfully in the doing of tourism/leisure.
Recent Social and Spatial Transformations in Leisure Changes in society and space continue to inform understandings of what leisure is and how it is manifest. Since the end of World War II a number of social and economic changes have been suggested as contributing factors in the expansion of leisure industries and spaces. These factors include: continued urbanization; increasing mobility of capital; labor and populations; technological change; car and home ownership; increasing standards of living and discretionary spend; shorter and more flexible working hours. In the West, statistics indicate that over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries hours of weekly work have been reduced and become more fragmented and flexible. An increase in paid holi days and shifts toward service based economies led commentators in the 1970s and 1980s to predict the ar rival of a postindustrial society, one in which leisure would be prioritized over work. The continued social, political, and economic dominance of paid work, the existence of the income rich–time poor, and unevenness and disparity in the geographical extent of these trans formations has meant the predictions of the arrival of a leisure society have not been realized. However, processes of globalization have brought other transformations, resulting in more complex webs of economic, cultural, and political leisure activity con necting people and places across nation states and pro ducing new forms of material and discursive connection. The growth of international sex tourism, environmental
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Figure 2 The social construction of leisure: Maasai women in Tanzania doing bead work. Maasai women wear elaborate beaded necklaces, armlets, and earrings, etc.; easy to assume such practices are leisure, but those being made here are for sale to tourists. Credit: Regina Scheyvens.
impacts of resource and land use, and the formation of electronic ghettos are just some of the issues which reflect how people and places tied into complex and uneven relationships across a variety of scales. Though spaces, activities, and forms of leisure have altered over time, leisure remains a site for the production and expression of power, and a key marker of identity and difference. The widespread availability of a range of mass produced and niche commodities; the development of new consumer products, services, and sites linked to particular lifestyles and identities; rituals associated with possession, repair, display, and use of commodities have meant leisure activities are increasingly subject to commodification.
Global media conglomerates dominate coverage of major sporting events and the numbers of individuals employed in leisure, tourism, sport entertainment industries globally are growing. The growth of media, communication and information technologies has also meant greater exposure – though not necessarily personal access – to a range of new leisure practices, spaces, lifestyles, and identities. In some countries neoliberal forms of govern ance have seen the marketization of government provided leisure services with subsequent changes in delivery, cost, and access to leisure facilities and spaces. Though predictions of a leisure society have not been fulfilled, leisure spaces are a visible part of landscapes in
Leisure
many contemporary societies. Their presence is often connected to commodified leisure practices with many of these spaces operating as sites of public though often privately owned leisure in the form of shopping malls, exhibitions, tourist spaces, theme parks, and multiplex cinemas (Figure 3). However, an emphasis on spectacular spaces and narcissistic, commodified, ostentatious leisure practices obscures the significant ways in which leisure also occurs in private and home spaces, and how mundane leisure practices such as eating, listening to music, or sharing time with friends are also productive of meaning, identities, social relations, and geographies which may extend beyond the locality in which they occur. Relations of gender, sexuality, class, disability, ethnicity, and age are also performed and expressed powerfully through leisure and social and spatial heterogeneity continues to be a feature of leisure practices and sites. Thus it is important to see many of the trends outlined here as generalizations, some with a much longer historical trajectory than their visibility as twentieth or twenty first century phenom enon might suggest.
Leisure Geographies The development of leisure geographies – of scholarship within the geography discipline – can be linked to changing theoretical perspective and conceptualizations of leisure, as well as the social and spatial transformations outlined previously. While a broad chronology can be identified it should not be seen as rigid, with the different strands of research extending beyond the period in which they are identified and to different extents in different
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places. Positivist research, for example, was much stron ger in the US, than in Europe. In Europe and the United Kingdom prior to 1980s tourism studies dominated leisure research, while in North America the emphasis was on recreation. In the German speaking world scho lars have been as prolific as those in Anglo American countries with both the former West and East Germany following different research paths. The work of geog raphers outside European and Anglo American contexts has been less visible, with the consequence that leisure geographies themselves appear to have been dominated and framed through a small core of geographers working in First World contexts. There has also been a sub stantive volume of geographic work in tourism and rec reation occurring outside formal academic departments which has contributed significantly to public policy, pri vate sector, and government expertise.
1930s–1950s Though leisure research has been undertaken by geog raphers from the 1930s, it has not had a strong presence within the discipline. Much of the early work constructed leisure as activities, primarily recreational pursuits based in the ‘countryside’ with a concern for issues of scenic amenity, supply, and demand. It is perhaps not surprising that landscapes and sites of leisure have long been a focus of studies in leisure. Early research was largely descriptive and focused on inventories of recreational use with em phasis on land management, planning, carrying capacities, resource use, and the mapping of aggregate spatial patterns.
Figure 3 Outdoor pedestrian shopping mall, Brisbane. Commodified shopping spaces as sites of leisure.
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However, it was not only rural recreation activities which attracted geographers’ attention. The development of tourist and coastal resorts and the economic contri bution of recreation and tourism activities to regional development were also explored as were geographies associated with these such as traffic patterns and the purchase of second homes. Models adapted from eco nomic and industrial geographies were applied to rec reation and tourism using quantitative methodologies and techniques to explain patterns and behaviors. Examining leisure as activities occurring in places en abled mapping of land use and behavioral patterns which were often framed in relation to public policies con cerning regulation and management of land, recreation, tourism, and health. In the decades following World War II, increasing urbanization, mobility of populations, discretionary in come, greater personal access to the motorcar, and availability of time and money for travel meant rural recreations and the effect of leisure participation on the landscape continued to be a focus of recreation research. 1960s–1970s A bibliographic survey of literature on outdoor recre ation in 1964 noted that research in the field still sat on the margins of geographical enterprise. The perceived frivolity of leisure research was a recurring theme in disciplinary reflections during the next two decades. Nevertheless leisure research began to have a more vis ible and vocal presence within the discipline during this period, influenced by increasing tension and awareness of the politics of resource, land, and consumer demands. More attention was given to recreational activity in urban areas and to the theorization of economic, behavioral relationships and perceptions, along with further work on resource and management implications in context of growing affluence in the Western world. During the 1960s and 1970s greater numbers of geographers identified themselves as leisure specialists and a number of text books on leisure and recreation were produced. Though post positivist theoretical approaches and qualitative re search methods began to impact geography, research underpinned by positivist philosophy dominated leisure geographies until the 1970s. Speculation about increasing significance of leisure in individuals’ lives, increases in discretionary income, and decades of investment by governments in leisure services as part of welfare state policies meant there was optimism that leisure research might make a major contribution to society and geography. However, as many economies entered recession in the late 1970s and 1980s the future of leisure as a predominant sphere of social and academic life appeared less certain. Calls for the emergence of a distinct geography of leisure remained and by the late 1970s
attention was shifting toward understanding leisure as experience as part of human need, desire, self actual ization. Research informed by humanistic perspectives emphasized leisure as a qualitative and subjective experi ence important to the construction of place, informing explorations of leisure’s relationship to lifestyle and social identity, and studies of ‘micro’ spaces such as home and garden. 1980s–1990s In the early 1980s research on ‘leisure lifestyles’ coincided with acknowledgment that leisure was important in con tributing to quality of life and to a quality of place. Though the effects of global recession impacted countries unevenly, they did stimulate research on the economic impacts of investment in leisure, recreation and tourism, sports geographies, and in particular their role in ameli orating some of the undesirable consequences of economic change. The early 1980s also brought explicit recognition of inequalities and deprivation in leisure provision. Access to and involvement in leisure was linked to functional rationales, with the social, spatial, political, and economic significance of state provision, voluntary leisure involve ment, private sector leisure industries, and the pro fessionalization of sport highlighted. Differential access to and uptake of leisure activities led to research on leisure constraints imposed externally to or internally by the in dividual. Much attention was given to the gendering of leisure, particularly in relation to Western women’s ex periences of raising nuclear families in the home, though it was scholars outside the geography discipline that con tributed most to analyses of gender and leisure during this time. These early feminist studies also provided a critique of work–leisure binary recognizing its location in struc tures of production and paid work. Attention to leisure constraints and relative freedoms in leisure were also informed by Marxian theorizing in which leisure could be conceptualized as part of the sphere of social reproduction, a means of creatively spending time to address alienation experienced as a consequence of the separation of one’s labor from its products. Growing commodification also signaled the importance of the leisure sphere in stimulating purchase of commodities – a necessary part of the continuation of the capitalist mode of production. Leisure geographies broadened to include a whole range of spaces and places and much more attention was given to urban and home based spaces of recreation. The role of leisure as part of consumer and tourist landscapes, its significance in the development of cultural economies and in economic development was also explored. A small but significant body of work on sport emerged, research which continues to reflect on the economic and cultural significance of sporting practices and spaces.
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1990s–2000s The last decade of the twentieth century saw a more sus tained engagement by geographers with leisure, especially with regard to its relationship to consumption (particularly through shopping, eating, and music). However these studies simultaneously pointed to the dangers of considering the connection between consumption and leisure as a necessary one, highlighting the ways in which leisure meaning, ex periences, and practices are shaped across numerous spaces, practices, discourses in commodified and noncommodified moments. Shopping, for example, may be an act of mundane necessity and of commensality not necessarily the pleasur able, private, identity ridden, and superficial practice linked to a postmodern condition. The emergence of the ‘new cultural geographies’ has to some extent reinvigorated the theorization of leisure and its place within both society and the academy. While studies continue of leisure economics, patterns, and recreational land use, attention has also shifted to debates about ‘environments’ and landscapes as sites of social exclusion and sustainability. Renewed attention has been given to the theorization of leisure as a site of practice and encounter. This new emphasis has seen geographers engage with a range of theoretical approaches including post structural, postcolonial perspectives and actor network approaches. This has included examinations of the ways in which people and places are connected materially, dis cursively, and differentially in the production, consumption, and representation of leisure spaces and subjects, and in processes of identity formation, subjectivity, embodiment, and performativity.
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One of the impacts of the new cultural geographies has been to highlight how leisure practices are not functions of singular and undifferentiated categories such as gender. Rather, leisure is shaped through practices which may involve complex intersections, formations, and narratives of gender, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, age, and socio economic status. These practices and encounters in turn create a range of landscapes in which people are both subject to and subjects of discourses. Though represen tation of leisure activities, choices, spaces, and times may be a significant aspect of contemporary leisure practice, attention to the role of leisure as practice in geography also acknowledges the importance of the body and emo tion in construction and expression of leisure processes and places. In the twenty first century there is continued emphasis on leisure in disciplining and inscription of the body through activities as diverse as eating (Figure 4), body piercing, exercise, outdoor recreations, and holidays in a wide variety of contexts: the Internet, gym, street, shopping mall, gardens, beaches, resorts, theme parks, mountain and national parks, sports venues, homes, spaces of travel, and in rural areas. Space is no longer viewed as a location for leisure but is part of the way in which both place and leisure practice are shaped materially and metaphorically. This more fluid construction of space has enabled researchers to make linkages between scales previously seen as separate domains. The role of leisure in shaping responsible nation state citizens, for example, can be linked to particular practices at other scales – home provisioning, gardening, or listening to music. Scholars have also recognized the need to broaden examination of
Figure 4 Restaurant diners. In recent years geographers have focused on more mundane practices of leisure and the social, cultural, and material contexts in which they are shaped.
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leisure to other contexts – to increase visibility of research undertaken of leisure in spaces outside Anglo American and World War I contexts and to continue to focus on a range of commodified and noncommodified spaces and practices of encounter. Through research on activities, encounters, land scapes, and experiences of leisure, geographers have highlighted the role of leisure as a meaningful place making activity. Because leisure is expressed through many spaces, practices, imaginings, and experiences it provides a means of reflecting on and contesting par ticular binaries: between cultural and state politics, so cial and individual, public and private, material and representational, economic and cultural, production and consumption. While leisure geographers initially made a small contribution to human geography, the resurgence of both academic and empirical studies in the twenty first century mean leisure should be considered a sig nificant theoretical and political sphere, providing valuable insights into relationships between society and space. See also: Consumption; Feminism/Feminist Geography; Humanism/Humanistic Geography; Marxism/Marxist Geography I; Marxism/Marxist Geography II; NonRepresentational Theory/Non-Representational Geographies; Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies; Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies; Surveillance; Tourism.
Further Reading Aitchison, C. (2006). The critical and the cultural: Explaining the divergent paths of leisure studies and tourism studies. Leisure Studies. 25(4), 417 422. Aitchison, C. (2003). Gender and leisure. Social and cultural perspectives. London: Routledge.
Aitchison, C., MacLeod, N. E. and Shaw, S. J. (2000). Leisure and tourism landscapes. Social and cultural geographies. London: Routledge. Brown, B. (2004). Hotdeskers and tourists: Geography as an everyday practical concern in work and leisure. Geography 89(1), 71 77. Butler, R. (2004). Geographical research on tourism, recreation and leisure: Origins, eras and directions. Tourism Geographies 6(2), 143 162. Crouch, D. (2000). Places around us: Embodied lay geographies in leisure and tourism. Leisure Studies 19, 63 76. Crouch, D. (ed.) (1999). Leisure/tourism geographies. Practices and geographical knowledge. London: Routledge. Hall, C. M. and Page, S. J. (2002). The geography of tourism and recreation. Environment, place and space. London: Routledge. Haywood, L., Kew, F. and Bramham, P. (eds.) (1995). Understanding leisure, 2nd ed. Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes. Kelly, J. R. and Freysinger, V. J. (2000). 21st Century leisure. Current issues. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Kreisel, W. (2004). Geography of leisure and tourism research in the German speaking world: Three pillars to progress. Tourism Geographies 6(2), 163 185. Terreell, S. (2004). Access to geography series: The geography of sport and leisure. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Veblen, T. (1899). The theory of the leisure class. New York: Augustus. Wolfe, R. I. (1964). Perspective on outdoor recreation: A bibliographic survey. Geographical Review 54(2), 203 208.
Relevant Websites http://www.academyofleisuresciences.org Academy of Leisure Sciences. http://www.anzals.org.au ANZALS, Australian and New Zealand Association for Leisure Studies. http://www.geog.nau.edu Commission on the Geography of Tourism, Leisure and Global Change, International Geographical Union. http://www.nrpa.org Journal of Leisure Research, National Recreation and Park Association. http://www.tandf.co.uk Leisure Sciences, Taylor & Francis Group. http://www.tandf.co.uk Leisure Studies, Taylor & Francis Group. http://www.tandf.co.uk Tourism Geographies, Taylor & Francis Group. http://www.worldleisure.org World Leisure Organization.
Lesbian Geographies K. Browne and C. J. Nash, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Lesbian This label is a contemporary or modern term often taken to refer to women who identify with or are identified as ‘lesbians’ within particular political, social, and/or cultural contexts. This usually pertains to their sexual and emotional practices, desires, relations, and relationships with women. However the category may be deployed even though the individual may not now be, or ever have been, engaging in same sex relationships or sexual practices. The concept of ‘lesbian’ and its relevance as a coherent or even useful category has come under close scrutiny by post-structural feminist and queer theorists. Queer Critically examines the creation of normativities and looks to deconstruct these usually, but not solely, by investigating the normative links between gender, sex, sexuality, desire, primary relationships, and sexual practices. Queer theory has critically addressed homonormativity and heteronormativity using thinking that is nonessential, relational, and contingent in nature. Strategic Essentialism Is the use of identities such as woman, man, lesbian, gay, or queer to represent what are heterogeneous groupings of individuals in order to effect social change for these groupings. Strategic essentialist actions usually involve individuals and groups uniting for a common cause even though their experiences of being a woman, man, lesbian, gay, etc. may be different, hierarchical, and contradictory.
Introduction Lesbian geographies refer to scholarly research on the ways in which lesbians organize themselves in both rural and urban landscapes. These geographies are not coherent or fixed and have changed through time and are different across different spaces. Arguably, lesbian geographies ini tially emerged in response to the male dominance of early work on the geographies of sexualities. Work on lesbian geographies spans the subdisciplines of feminist geog raphies and geographies of sexualities. It often queries the heterosexuality of some feminist geographies and the male dominance of geographies of sexualities and more recently queer geographies. In contesting the normative positioning of white, middle class gay men in geographies of sexu alities research, recognition of multiple social differences, including gender, that constitute the hierarchical
sexualization of space has begun to surface. Recently, the very subject of enquiry – the lesbian – has come under scrutiny as scholars have engaged with feminist, post structuralist and postcolonial analytic frameworks. The querying of lesbian geographies and the unfixing of gen dered binaries within discussions of sexualities has prob lematized the gendered analysis of the sexualization of spaces. In this article we will outline the urban beginnings of lesbian geographies within the context of lesbian social movement politics within and beyond geographies before moving on to consider ruralities. The article will then examine the destabilization of ‘lesbian’ as an identity and the challenges posed by queer analyses to lesbian geog raphies and to gendered discussions of sexualities more broadly.
Lesbian Politics and Key Debates Lesbian political activism and grassroots organizing has taken diverse and varied forms and has played a key his torical and cultural role in the emergence of lesbian geographies and in research expressly directed at under standing lesbian spatial organizing. Lesbian political ac tivism includes lesbian interventions in the broadest political spheres as well as the micro politics of lesbian spaces and engagements. Prior to examining various les bian geographies, it is important to place these political activities within broader feminist and lesbian contexts. The relationship between this political activism and the constitution of lesbian geographies has been addressed by geographers, such as Valentine’s examination of lesbian separatism in rural areas (see below) and Nash’s dis cussions of queer women’s bathhouses. However, there are many debates that occurred in other disciplines regarding lesbian politics that have yet to be addressed in geo graphical research. This is in part, because, work on les bian geographies emerged after these debates had occurred in wider feminist political and academic circles. One of the key feminist debates, occurring in the late twentieth century, concerned the need to recognize the diversity of the social category of ‘women’. Feminist politics often used a homogenous understanding of ‘women’ and ‘women’s needs’ that was actually based on knowledges grounded in white, heterosexual, middle class, able bodied women’s understandings. The homo geneity of women was contested by women of color, working class women, disabled women, and lesbian women who argued that the experience of being a woman was not the same for all women, rather gender was
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mediated by other social differences that could not simply be ‘added on’ to the category ‘woman’. Instead these social differences, they argued, fundamentally re created gendered experiences. These internal divisions were often seen as a threat to the calls for equality that required a shared female identity under the sign ‘woman’. This shared identity could be seen as fragmented and existing only for the advancement of specific causes, for example, equality legislation. Uniting for the purpose of advancing a par ticular agenda, whilst still recognizing the problems of essentializing and homogenizing the category ‘woman’, is called strategic essentialism. This can be seen in the geographical writings of early feminist geographers who argued for the inclusion of women in geography without addressing diversity between women. Yet it let to an invisbilization of lesbians in early feminist geographies. In feminism more broadly, some scholars argued that heterosexuality itself was an inherent aspect of patri archal social relations. Scholars and others engaged in feminist politics chose to engage in lesbian relationships in order to contest the heteropatriarchy of institutions such as marriage as well as address inequities between men and women in interpersonal relationships. This is termed as lesbian feminism and is associated with lesbian separatism where women chose to live in all female communities and communes, a form of spatial organizing constituting distinctive lesbian geographies. These sep aratist communities sought to establish different ways of living that were not hierarchized or based on individual family units. Relationships of power were critically ad dressed as women moved outside what was/is understood as the patriarchal dominance of men and the family unit as a site for the (literal) reproduction of this dominance. The fragmentation of identities and categories such as ‘women’ and ‘lesbian’ associated with queer and other post structural conceptualizations of identities (see below) has had a dramatic effect on lesbian politics and wider engagements with gendered structures of power. Although there is some evidence of lesbian strategic essentialism, queer activism and political action has challenged the essential identities of ‘woman’ and lesbian that lesbian separatists and lesbian feminists have deployed. Never theless, there continues to be lesbian direct action groups, such as the lesbian avengers, and lesbian separatist com munities and festivals continue to run, particularly in the USA. Lesbian geographies are only beginning to engage with the complexity of the historical and contemporary politicization and contestation of lesbian identities.
Urban Beginnings Research on lesbian spatial organization surfaced in the scholarly literature considering the evolution of gay male
residential and commercial districts in the post World War II period. Preliminary research focused on the spa tial organization and location of gay bars and commercial establishments in several cities in the United States. The first major consideration in geographical work of gay male organization in urban landscapes was undertaken by Manuel Castells and Karen Murphy in their study of the gay male population in San Francisco. Although Castells and Murphy acknowledged that lesbians were present in the gay male neighborhood in San Francisco, Castells noted that lesbians did not organize spatially in the same way as gay men. He speculated that the ‘inherent dif ferences’ between men and women themselves consti tuted the foundation for their seemingly distinctive relationships to urban spaces. Castells and Murphy claimed that unlike men, women rarely have these ter ritorial aspirations: their world attaches more importance to relationships and their networks are one of solidarity and affection. In this, gay men acted ‘first and foremost as men and lesbians as women’ (1983:139). Subsequent geographical research quickly challenged this ‘innate territoriality’ theory with some scholars arguing that the lack of lesbian urban spaces was because society reacted differently to gay men. Gay men, they claimed, experi enced different forms of oppression, making territorial strength and control an imperative for gay men. For others, the lack of lesbian defined territories ac tually reflected men’s and women’s different economic and social circumstances. Lesbians, operating outside the accepted gender roles of wife and mother were arguably less able to compete economically and socially than men. Gay men, as men, however, were more financially and socially capable of organizing spatially and upgrading neighborhoods. The lack of visible, spatially based les bian community had less to do with lesbians being ‘less territorial’ than gays and more to do with the gendered economic realities of the marketplace, including limited access to capital and other resources. Research on lesbian spatial organization in urban areas began to emerge in the late 1980s. Some of the earliest work was on social organization of working class lesbian communities in the 1950s and the 1960s and documented highly organized butch/femme cultures in cities such as Buffalo, New York and Toronto, Canada. This working class lesbian visibility seemed to reflect the fact that it was more socially acceptable for working class women frequent downtown taverns and restaurants than middle or upper class women. At the same time, women’s em ployment opportunities were also more restricted, lim iting access to the economic resources needed for home ownership or business start up. Other research also demonstrated that women may not have been visible in the gay male ghetto or village due to overt hostility to the presence of women in gay male space. In Toronto, in the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, gay male restaurants
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bars and taverns often charged women a higher cover charge for admission, insisted on women having a male escort, and requiring women to wear skirts or dresses. Dress codes were designed to exclude ‘butch lesbians’ from gay male spaces as they were thought to be trou blemakers and prone to starting fights. Geographical research focusing on newly emergent lesbian residential organization began in the early 1990s. Initial research sought to examine lesbian residential concentrations and to compare these sociospatial patterns to those of gay men. This research was particularly interested in considering whether the absence of a pub licly identifiable lesbian neighborhood reflected inherent gender differences in interests, needs, and values or re flected differences in the resources available to gay men and lesbians. Identifiable lesbian residential neighbor hoods did exist although they did not have the associated lesbian controlled, commercial focal point. Research demonstrated lesbian neighborhoods tended to be found in downtown cores in countercultural or alternative neighborhood and by comparison, were much less visible than similar gay male areas and did not have the degree of territorial control and affiliated political and social activ ism. Researchers concluded that far from being less ter ritorial than gay men, lesbians, as women and as primary caregivers, had different concerns about the kinds of areas that they occupied. City centers were not, in general, at tractive locations for women because of safety concerns for both themselves and their children. Downtown areas were more economically attractive, containing lower cost housing, good public transit, and access to social services. Arguably, lesbians also did not have the financial cap ability to be involved in the gentrification process to the same extent as gay men – a specifically gendered and class related reasoning that draws on and reconfigures questions of sexual preference or orientation. In addition to the obvious social and economic con straints on lesbians as women in terms of their locational choices, scholars also argued that lesbian politics in the 1970s and 1980s was closely allied with the women’s movement and their ideological leanings were more global and less restricted to representation in the existing political system. Scholars argued that lesbians were less focused on controlling space for political power and more interested in addressing broader theoretical issues out side of the existing social structure. Nevertheless, re search on urban spaces did demonstrate that lesbians used a number of different strategies for negotiating urban spaces and appropriating opportunities for social izing and political activism. Academics began to rethink their approach to understanding the evolution of distinctly lesbian spaces starting with the basic premise that gay and lesbian spaces have evolved through completely distinctive processes and function in distinctive ways. Lesbians can
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appropriate and use public sites in visible ways, yet not have a territorial presence. Julie Podmore, for example, argues against the tendency of lesbian geographies to focus on the absence of women in heterosexual space or their seeming lack of expressly territorial clusterings. Arguably, how lesbians use public sites for interactions and communality may not fit within the territorial paradigms of urban geographies. Podmore demonstrates how women who exist outside heterosexuality, clearly use and experience ‘heterosexual spaces’ in ways that may not ‘fit’ traditional geographical investigations. From this perspective, research on lesbian geographies dem onstrates a plethora of ways by which space is appro priated, used, negotiated, resisted, and recreated. Spatial appropriation and recoding through music, clothes, and language, as well as more political activities (such as ‘dyke’ marches) and desiring enactments (expressions of same sex desire) mark the resigning of space outside of heterosexual norms.
Lesbian Ruralities Although initial work on lesbian geographies focused on urban areas, other work has considered the spatial or ganization of lesbians in rural communities. These studies have explored migration from rural areas to urban areas as well as lesbian lives in rural arenas. To date this work is less developed then the urban literature and this remains the case despite calls within rural geographies to explore those who are excluded when considering ‘rural idylls’ within dominant framings of sexuality, gender, class, and disability. Although there remains a lacunae in understanding lesbian spaces beyond urban territories, some work has been undertaken. Valentine showed how some lesbian separatists in the 1970 saw the rural as an escape from ‘man made’ cities and an opportunity to develop com munities away from patriarchy and exist closer to ‘mother nature’. These separatist lesbian feminists appropriated the ‘rural’ as an ideal which allowed them to live separate from men in a self sustaining way. This also had symbolic and spiritual resonances with ‘mother nature’ and engaged with what can be understood as ‘essential’ women’s qual ities (caring, nurturing, and mothering) and other forms of ecofeminism. Valentine, however, problematizes these generic models of ‘woman’ and considers the divisions within these lesbian separatist communities. Despite the ethos of inclusion and equity that contested man made cities, there were and are issues of exclusion within these rural lesbian communes. For example, some communes had environments and workloads which were solely for mulated for able bodied women. Other studies considering rural lesbian lives examined gentrification by lesbians who were engaging in processes
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similar to nonlesbian migrants in terms of migration and rural gentrification. These point to the problematic as sumptions of difference associated with ‘otherness’ in ruralities, where lesbians may engage in similar patterns of accumulation and capitalist consumptions practices. These studies emphasize clustering and lesbian com munities. They thereby replicate earlier urban work that assumed particular forms of territorialization as the sole focus of lesbian urban geographies. There has been a dearth of enquiries that have focused on rural lesbian lives and their spatial practices outside of the urban arena as well as a failure to explore the mutual constitution of urban and rural spaces beyond migrations to urban arenas. The underdevelopment of rural lesbian geographies can perhaps be explained with reference to the critiques of urban literatures. Alongside, the focus on visible ter ritories in cities, in particular the examination of ‘gay ghettos’, there is often an underlying assumption that cities are places of tolerance and acceptance. This exists in contrast to what are perceived as hostile rural spaces. The migration literature, in discussions of lesbian and gay sexualities, often contends that lesbians and gay men leave rural spaces for the safety of cities. Their partici pance in these studies tend to be men and women who have left rural areas in order to live in cities (often with identifiable ‘gay’ areas). Although these stories are per tinent and clearly have importance in the discussions of lesbian and gay geographies, there is a need to examine sexualities in the rural arena and perhaps beyond ‘citified’ identities such as lesbian and gay. Where lesbians are often rendered invisible in dis cussions of urban landscapes, the absence of discussions of female appropriation and use of rural spaces is un surprising. The dearth of investigations that address rural lesbian lives may also be due to the emphasis on the ownership and use of public spaces more generally. Interestingly, examinations of rural homosexualities have looked at public sex spaces and men who have sex with men. These studies have pointed to how identifications such as ‘gay’ can be read as urban and unrelated to sexual practices. This troubles the ubiquitous use of these cat egories as common identifiers of sexual identities and recognizes their spatial contingency, which in this case can differ between the urban and the rural. In recognizing the spatial associations of identity categories these writers have engaged with emerging work that is deconstructing and spatializing sexual identities and identifications.
Questioning ‘Lesbian’: Theorizing Sexuality and Identity in Space Early work took a fairly untroubled view of the subject position ‘lesbian’ and of the spaces and places associated with those experiencing same sex desire. By the early
1990s, the geographical literature began developing a more nuanced and critical view of the complex inter relationships between identities, subjectivities and the constitution, maintenance and transgression of spaces. Much of this work drew on the work of Michel Foucault and postmodernist and post structuralist theorizing on the nature of identity, subjectivity, and the spatial. Feminist based research drawing on this work con ceptualized a more nuanced and historically and cul turally specific perspective on gendered and sexualized identities in circulation in specific places. Scholars have demonstrated how the subjectivities and identities of women identifying as ‘lesbians’ have varied considerably in the period after World War II and that these various and shifting subject positions closely par alleled changing political and social activism. In this context, the previously taken for granted category of ‘lesbian’ could no longer be taken as the unproblematic starting point for geographical enquiry. Applications of postmodernist and post structuralist analytics also com plicated geographical thinking on the nature and con stitution of space itself. Scholars began theorizing the heterosexual nature of both public and private spaces and the ways in which power relations work to inscribe spaces with disciplinary discourses normalizing heterosexual gendered and sexual behaviors and practices. Normative expectations about gendered and sexual behavior in public spaces ensured that alternative sexual identities were rendered invisible or overtly eradicated from the landscape. Appropriation and occupation of urban spaces by non normative sexual and gendered groups such as gays and lesbians was reconceptualized as forms of transgression and resistance within relations of power. A focus on the operation of various modalities of power highlighted the uneven social relations within gay and lesbian spaces not only along gender but along class, race, age, and ethnic lines as well. This prompted a greater appreciation of the ways in which lesbian geographies offered not only the possibility of resistance from nor mative heterosexual inscriptions of place but contained their own internal limitations, exclusions, and re pressions. Recent work has illustrated how a dominant gay and lesbian political agenda has resulted in the constitution of homonormative spaces in which particular political, social, and economic ways of ‘being’ gay or lesbian are privileged over others. In questioning identity categories, those from the majority world have queried the ubiquitous use of the term ‘lesbian’ (as well as gay and queer) in understanding same sex relationships and non normative sexual lives. Geographical variations in how sexuality and gender are understood and lived have led scholars to argue that ‘lesbian’ (along with ‘gay’ and ‘queer’) as a minority world concept(s). We use the term majority/minority worlds here as what is termed the ‘third/developing’ world is
Lesbian Geographies
actually the majority world in terms of population, pro duction etc., and to question the geographical accuracy of the term ‘Western world’. This term is used also to challenge the hierarchization of terms such as ‘first world’, ‘third world’, and so on (see First World, Third World). Thus, ‘lesbians’ can be a concept that is located in the minority world (as well as a historical specific one) and one that may, or may not be acknowledged or understood in different historical periods and across the world. In some countries, such as Indonesia for example, although same sex relationships and sexual practices occur among women, lesbian (and gay) identities are seen as dangerous and ‘not Indonesian’. These relationships can conform to certain gender roles regarding male and female responsibilities but as Wieringa has shown, these gender roles are not fixed within the boundaries of nor mative sexed bodies in Indonesian gender relations. ‘Butch’ women can engage in gendered relations such that relationships are not read as ‘deviant’ or ‘lesbian’. From a post stonewall ‘out’ generation of minority world lesbian and gay activists, this is often read as ‘repression’, ‘denial’, and ‘closeting’, however, these terms need to be critically assessed in relation to geographical specificity and globalizing power relations. They rely on specific conceptualizations of sexualities built on particular forms of minority world identity politics. The identity politics and identifications within the category ‘lesbian’ are also historically, as well as cultur ally, specific. Faderman documents how the identity category of ‘lesbian’ has only been recognized recently as an identity category. Tracing the existence of same sex desire and love relationships from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, Faderman argues for the need to contextualize lesbian identities within particular his torical periods and cautions against reducing love rela tionships and same sex enactments to twentieth century conceptualizations of identities. More recently, trans women and transmen have been reclaiming identifi cations that were once historicized within a ‘lesbian’ paradigm, in particular cross dressing and women passing as men have come under scrutiny. These gender variant lives are the site of some contestation and are arguably not properly understood within contemporary con ceptualizations of gender variance and sexual identities. Yet, there continues to be a need to address the invisi blization of gender variant and women’s same sex histories.
Queering Identities Lesbian geographies, whether conceptualized as inherent or socially constructed, tended to presuppose a co herence and unity within the category ‘lesbian’. In the last decade or so, scholars drawing in newly emergent
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analytical frameworks captured in the term ‘queer the ory’ further complicate understandings of both lesbian identities and geographies. Here, the term ‘queer’ in questioning hetero/homonormativities can harbor a variety of sexual and political articulations including lesbians, gays, bisexuals, bois, grrls, tranny boi’s, trans women, transgenderists, transsexuals, transvestites, cross dressers, and drag queens. The ‘queering’ of lesbian geographies has involved the questioning of the category of ‘woman’ as embodied in a seemingly fixed biological body and therefore a collective sign under which female same sex desires, practices, and relationships could be placed. In fact, the body itself can become the literal site of physical reworking in ways that eradicate any clear correspondence between bodies/subjectivities and iden tities. With these rearticulations of bodies and gender and sexual performances of identities and subjectivities, les bian geographies can no longer be understood as places occupied by unproblematic female bodied ‘women’ act ing on same sex desire. Queer spaces, unlike their pre viously understood ‘lesbian’ spaces, contain and maintain a variety of differently embodied persons whose sexual and gendered as well as race, class, and ethic articulations are understood as transit and unstable. Queer theorizing, in deconstructing the normative boundaries of gender and sexuality, questions the very possibilities of coherent female identifications under the sign ‘woman’. This has been read by some as contesting the very possibilities of ‘lesbian’ just as this (and other) identity categories were beginning to gain recognition and possibilities of engagements with hegemonic power structures. Whilst playful forms of gender transgression are celebrated in queer theories and writings, there continues to be a tension between lesbian feminist sep aratists and transwomen in particular. These tensions are often reduced to discussions of ‘essentialist’ lesbian feminists and the celebration of gender variant identities. Essential ideals about sex and gender that link biological sex with womanhood have been questioned, yet there are still those who argue that social constructs have dis empowered women and these draw on biological norms that are different from trans experiences of womanhood. In these discussions the boundaries of sex, and con sequently, lesbian bodies and identifications are both contested and reestablished. This clearly has implications for how ‘lesbian’ is de ployed, contested, recuperated, and reinscribed. Although queer is sometimes used to describe the breadth of les bian, gay, bisexual, trans, questioning, unsure, and gender variant, this is contested where queer is seen as anti normative. In this context, replacing the term ‘lesbian’ with ‘queer woman’ in order to recognize the fluidity of female embodiments, sexualities, and acknowledge the importance of gendered power relations in the con struction of lives, identities, and spaces is problematic.
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This potential impasse, it could be argued, has led to a lesbian lacuna within queer geographies literature. Re cently, research has begun to focus on intersection of gender and sexuality in public space. Some scholars argue that, in fact, it is gender transgression, as well as sexual orientation that is the marker for regulation and exclusion in pubic spaces. Research examining public washrooms and trans gressive female embodiments has argued that contesting gender identities also problematizes categories of sexu alities. These categories can be recuperated at multiple sites from the repositioning of bodies that are read as male into categories of ‘abnormal female’ to public washrooms where the boundaries of gender are policed through the ‘checking’ of gender identities. What is interesting in this work is that it extends discussions of performative geographies to include gender and sexu ality. Specifically, this work argues that gender and sex (along with sexualities) are constituted through different spaces. In taking on DeBeauvoir’s call that one becomes a woman, this work contends that women (and men) are remade in part through the spaces they inhabit and the policing of these spaces. These spaces include lesbian spaces where women described being asked to leave be cause they were read as ‘straight men’.
Conclusion Engagements with lesbians in geography came slightly after the advent of gay geographies and examinations of gay (male) ghettos. There still continues to be a dearth of lesbian rural geographies but perhaps the biggest chal lenge to this area of enquiry is the birth and growth of the subject position ‘queer’ as well as the evolution of queer theories and practices. This is augmented by the use of deconstructive theoretical moves that contest both the sign ‘woman’ and the possibilities of ‘lesbian’. Al though gender continues to be a salient category of an alysis, those who are lesbian identified can feel ‘under siege’ in academic and queer circles. The privileging of ‘queer’ gender and sexuality orientations and identifi cations particularly in youth cultures can render those who paved the way for such cultures, and particularly lesbian feminists as ‘out of date’ and ‘passe´’. This can be read as a dangerous move where queer engagements in creasingly question gender boundaries and yet the
gendered power relations that construct geographies and lived spatialities are underexplored. See also: Gay Geographies; Heteronormativity; Queer Theory/Queer Geographies.
Further Reading Adler, S. and Brenner, J. (1992). Gender and space: Lesbians and gay men in the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 16(1), 24 34. Bell, D. and Binnie, J. (2004). Authenticating queer space: Citizenship, urbanism and governance. Urban Studies 41(9), 1807 1820. Bell, D., Binnie, J., Cream, J. and Valentine, G. (eds.) (1994). All hyped up and no place to go. Gender, Place and Culture 1(1), 31 47. Browne, K., Lim, J. and Brown, G. (2007). Geographies of Sexualities. London: Ashgate. Castells, M. and Murphy, K. (1983). City and Culture: The San Francisco Experience. The City and the Grass Roots: A Cross Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. London: Edward Arnold. Davis, M. D. and Kennedy, E. L. (1993). Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Penguin Books. De Beauvoir, S. (1949). The Second Sex. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Faderman, L. (1981). Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendships between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. Holcomb, B. (1986). Geography and urban women. Urban Geography 7, 448. Knopp, L. (1990). Some theoretical implications of gay involvement in an urban land market. Political Geography Quarterly 9, 333 380. Knopp, L. and Lauria, M. (1985). Towards an analysis of the role of gay communities in the urban renaissance. Urban Geography 6, 152 169. Morgan, R. and Wieranga, S. (2005). Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Female Same Sex Practices in Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Nash, C. J. (2001). Siting lesbians: Sexuality, space and social organization. In Goldie, T. (ed.) In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context. Arsenal Press: Vancouver. Nash, C. J. and Bain, A. (2007). Reclaiming raunch: Spatializing queer identities at Toronto women’s bathhouse events. Social and Cultural Geography 8(1), 16 42. Podmore, J. (2001). Lesbians in the crowd: Gender, sexuality, and visibility along Montreal’s Boulevard St. Laurent. Gender, Place, and Culture 24, 191 217. Rothenburg, T. (1995). And she told two friends: Lesbians creating urban social space. In Bell, D. & Valentine, G. (eds.) Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexuality, pp 165 181. London: Routledge. Tattelman, I. (2000). Presenting a queer (bath)house. In Boone, J. A. (ed.) Queer Frontiers: Millenial Geographies, Genders, and Generations, pp 222 257. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Valentine, G. (1993). (Hetero)sexing space: Lesbians perceptions and experiences of everyday places. Environment and Planning, D: Space and Society 11, 395 413. Valentine, G. (1993). Negotiating and managing multiple sexual identities: Lesbian time space. Transactions 18, 237 248.
Ley, D. P. Jackson, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Ley, David (1947–) David Ley was born in Swansea and educated at Windsor Grammar School before going to Oxford University to study geography at Jesus College, graduating in 1968 (Figure 1). He did his PhD with Peter Gould at Penn State University in the US and now teaches geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He has reflected on the way these people and places have shaped his career in a fascinating autobiographical essay in 2006. As an urban geographer who focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of city life, Ley’s work has been widely acknowledged for its theoretical and empirical contribution. Empirically, his work has dealt with issues of inner city housing and gentrification, immigration and ethnicity, with a particular interest in Canadian cities. More widely, he has contributed to geography’s growing interest in social theory and to the discipline’s recent ‘cultural turn’ with a particular interest in cultural rep resentation of landscape and place. In many ways, his work has mirrored – and in some cases prefigured – changes within the recent intellectual history of human geography, from behavioral to humanistic approaches through Marxism and radical geography to questions of cultural representation and postmodernism. Ley’s work demonstrates a strong commitment to social justice, a blend of quantitative and qualitative research, and a belief that theory should be empirically accountable. All of these characteristics were evident in his PhD research on the social geography of inner city Philadelphia. The study was informed by current behavioral approaches to en vironmental cognition and mental mapping – including some fascinating maps of gang territoriality, urban stress surfaces, and spatial interactions within and between neighborhoods. It included survey data and analyses of secondary sources. However, the most original and com pelling aspects of his research were rooted in ethnographic traditions of first hand fieldwork where his work was truly pioneering. His analysis of violent incidents between rival gangs demonstrated the close relationship between prox imity and aggression but also gave a human face to these abstract spatial relationships. As part of this project, Ley mapped the distribution of urban graffiti as a marker of gangland territoriality. He recorded the exploits of rival gang members, where the more brazen the behavior the greater the return in status, and he studied the inner workings of a local community association. Published as The Black Inner City as Frontier Outpost: Images and Behavior of a
Philadelphia Neighborhood (1974), it was one of the first studies in human geography to employ this kind of ethnographic approach, addressing serious social issues such as racism, gang violence, and urban regeneration through intensive fieldwork and a commitment to understanding people’s subjective experience of place. The study came to be re garded as a ‘classic’ in human geography, celebrated as a turning point in the development of urban social geography, written with the authority of direct experience. David Ley was appointed to the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1972 where he began a collaboration with Marwyn Samuels which led to the publication of an influential collection of essays on humanistic geography (1976). The book offered an alternative to the then current emphasis on spatial analysis which, Ley argued, threatened to impoverish the subject, reducing it to ‘a geography without man’. Drawing on a range of theoretical and philosophical sources, Ley proposed an approach to human geography that was rooted in three principles: anthropo centrism (where every object is an object ‘for a subject’), intersubjectivity (the sharing of meaning contexts within
Figure 1 David Ley.
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social groups), and the idea that social constraints impinge on individual human agency. It was at this juncture that Ley began to express his opposition to structural Marxism, bringing him into conflict with leading figures in radical geography such as David Harvey – see, in particular, his controversial paper with James Duncan. Ley’s commitment to a theoretically informed and ethnographically grounded human geography resulted in the publication of a ground breaking textbook on urban geography (A Social Geography of the City, 1983). This commitment was also apparent in Ley’s evolving research agenda which moved on from issues of racialized urban inequality to new interests in inner city gentrification and the emergence of the ‘new middle class’. This work brought him into heated debate with Neil Smith and others over whether the determinants of gentrification were primarily supply or demand led. Ley argued that Smith’s supply led explanation, based on the identification of a ‘rent gap’ in urban housing markets, was insufficient to explain the processes observed in a range of cities across North America. Ley’s work sought to balance supply side explanations with an understanding of housing demand from those with a postmodern taste for ‘sensitive urban placemaking’. Ley’s work in this field has been character ized by detailed empirical analysis of census data, sup plemented by more qualitative studies of urban lifestyle. Indeed, unlike many of his contemporaries, Ley writes that he has never been persuaded that ‘interpretation’ and ‘measurement’ are in some manner incompatible. Having played a pioneering role in geography’s break with positivism and behavioral geography, Ley was also at the forefront of geography’s so called ‘cultural turn’, exploring questions of discourse, representation, and cultural politics. He wrote a powerful editorial on cul ture’s geographies with Derek Gregory and demonstrated the potential of this approach to the study of landscape spectacle and urban consumption through an analysis of world’s fairs with Kris Olds. Ley has subsequently played a prominent role in the ‘Metropolis’ project, serving as the director of UBC’s Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis (1996–2003). The project demonstrated the value of academic research on a highly charged and politically sensitive topic, focusing in par ticular on Chinese immigration to Vancouver and on the economic, political, and cultural conflicts associated with this process. This work has also led to more general commentaries on the nature of transnational space, criti cizing the ‘global city’ thesis for its economistic tenden cies, the suppression of political and cultural domains, and the underdevelopment of human agency and everyday life. David Ley’s work is characterized by a strong sense of morality. It is theoretically informed and based on exacting
standards of empirical scholarship. In recognition of his contributions to geography and social science, he has re ceived numerous awards and distinctions. He has been a member of the Royal Society of Canada since 1998 and currently holds a Canada Research Chair in Geography, focusing on issues of urbanization and cultural diversity. See also: Cultural Geography; Gentrification; Humanism/ Humanistic Geography; Segregation, Urban; Territory and Territoriality.
Further Reading Duncan, J. S. and Ley, D. (eds.) (1993). Place/Culture/Representation. London: Routledge. Gregory, D. and Ley, D. (1988). Culture’s geographies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6, 115 116. Jackson, P., Palm, R. and Ley, D. (1998). Classics in human geography re visited. Progress in Human Geography 22, 75 80. Ley, D. (1974). Association of American Geographers, Monograph No.7: The Black Inner City as Frontier Outpost: Images and Behavior of a Philadelphia Neighborhood. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Ley, D. (1980). School of Geography, Research Paper No. 24: Geography Without Man: A Humanistic Critique. Oxford: School of Geography. Ley, D. (1983). A Social Geography of the City. New York: Harper and Row. Ley, D. (1987). Styles of the times: Liberal and neo conservative landscapes of inner Vancouver 1968 1996. Journal of Historical Geography 13, 40 56. Ley, D. (1988). Interpretive social research in the inner city. In Eyles, J. (ed.) Research in Human Geography, pp 121 138. Oxford: Blackwell. Ley, D. (1995). Between Europe and Asia: The case of the missing sequoias. Ecumene 2, 187 210. Ley, D. (1996). The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ley, D. (2004). Transnational spaces and everyday lives. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 29, 151 164. Ley, D. (2006). Places and context. In Aitken, S. & Valentine, G. (eds.) Approaches to Human Geography, pp 178 183. London: Sage. Ley, D. and Duncan, J. S. (1982). Structural Marxism and human geography: A critical assessment. Annals, Association of American Geographers 72, 30 59. Ley, D. and Olds, K. (1988). Landscape as spectacle: Worlds fairs and the culture of heroic consumption. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6, 191 212. Ley, D. and Samuels, M. S. (eds.) (1976). Humanistic Geography: Problems and Prospects. London: Croom Helm. Ley, D. and Smith, H. (2000). Relations between deprivation and immigrant groups in large Canadian cities. Urban Studies 37, 37 62. Ley, D. and Tuchener, J. (2001). Immigration, globalisation and house prices in Canada’s gateway cities. Housing Studies 16, 199 223.
Relevant Websites http://www.geog.ubc.ca/~dley/ (David Ley’s Homepage) http://www.riim.metropolis.net/ Metropolis Enhancing Policy Through Research.
Liberalism E. Gilbert, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Biopower A form of regulation exerted by the state or by institutions which attends to individual bodies and lives in ways that are designed to enable the protection of the population and the maximization of their quality of life. Biopolitics Governance that is exerted through biopower, that is, through techniques of control targeted to individual lives and the population. Citizenship The formal relationship between citizen and the state that in its ideal form denotes political membership comprising rights, responsibilities, and a sense of community belonging. Democracy A form of government that is presumed to reflect the will of the people by way of popular representation, in which all citizens are purported to have equal rights and equal access to participation. Freedom In liberalism, an ideal state of being whereby the individual, state, or market is able to act unhindered by constraints of any other individual, state, or market except perhaps when the safety of another is threatened. Governmentality The practices through which subjects are governed, by themselves and by others, and which include techniques of power and expertise, such as accounting and mentalities or rationalities of rule. Liberalization The loosening of regulations, often those enacted by the state, with respect to the governance of the market and social welfare. Neoliberalism A form of governance that resurrects aspects of classical liberalism to affirm that individual liberty is achieved through expanded market competitiveness, a weakened state, and the ’responsibilization’ of individuals and families for social welfare. Post-Structuralism A loose term that captures a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches that have sought to destabilize totalizing narratives of truth, power, reason, and structures of meaning.
much critical work has sought to undermine liberalism’s key tenets. In part, the hegemony can be attributed to the scope and breadth of the concept, which refers at once to a philosophy, a political doctrine, and a political tradi tion, and includes theories of human nature, governance, and economy. To simplify greatly, liberalism champions individual ‘liberty’, for an individual conceived of as ra tional, egalitarian, and perfectible. How to limit the im position of authority, particularly in the guise of state rule, is a key concern. So too is the role of the market, so much so that the legacy of liberalism today rests on the twin principles of individual and market freedoms, and how best to reconcile them when they diverge. Alongside these fundamental principles are powerful and pro grammatic ideals such as equality, freedom of expression, tolerance, universality, human rights, self government, liberal democracy, citizenship, public and private spheres, a free press, competition, private property, private en terprise, free trade, open markets, and the rule of law. There is no definitive coherence to liberalism, how ever. It is complicated, confusing, and often contradictory. Liberalism has varied greatly over time and place, in ways that are often theoretically or practically consistent or reconcilable. It is also continually being reinvented and reimagined, often in light of that which has come before, lurching between elitism and radicalism. Thus, it is useful to follow Michel Foucault’s approach which, rather than trying to define a singular concept, asks how liberalism aspires to govern. To what kind of ‘liberty’ do liberals aspire? For whom? From whom? Even with these ques tions in mind, liberalism’s full complexities cannot be captured here. Three key concepts are thus considered – the individual, governance, and the market – and the ways that they have been used to secure and mobilize the governing of the population, as well as how they have been resisted. These concepts overlap, and are not easily separable, but doing so here provides an overview that is not simply historically linear or descriptive, but which gestures toward the variety of liberalisms across time and place even as its origins in the Anglo West are stressed. The importance of liberalism to geography and geog raphers is emphasized.
Introduction
The Liberal Individual
The impact of liberalism on geography has been perva sive and profound. It is hardly an exaggeration that no area of Western, Anglo human geography has been left untouched, although from the late twentieth century
If individual liberty is the foundational concept to lib eralism, this begs the question: which individual? what liberty? These are the issues that this section will address; first, by examining four foundational principles of the
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liberal self – individualism, rationalism, egalitarianism, and ameliorism – before turning to the critiques that geographers and others have raised, drawing upon the ories such as post structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marx ism, feminism, and postcolonialism. Liberals have tended to presume that individuals are born free, and possess natural, inalienable, and usually God given rights. Humans thus have a prior ontology and epistemology: people are fully formed, self reliant, and capable of knowing and of governing themselves. John Locke, per haps the most influential early contributor to liberal philosophy, helped shape this modern view. His Treatises on Government, written at the end of the seventeenth century, presents the individual as free and reflexive, in a state of nature much more harmonious than Hobbes’s characterization of life as ‘‘nasty, brutish and short.’’ Jean Jacques Rousseau also emphasizes human goodness and freedom; he worries, however, in The Social Contract (1762) that although ‘‘men are born free [y] everywhere they are in chains.’’ Rousseau and Locke diverge with respect to how those chains could be loosened, but they both place the sovereign individual at center stage of their worldviews. John Stuart Mill also insists on an a priori principle of free individuals in On Liberty, which shaped his antipathy to authority and government. Secondly, for liberals, reason provides both the basis for which the claim to individual liberty can be made, and the mechanism through which liberty can be realized and governance of the self justified. Even into the late twentieth century, reason prevails. In John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice he posits an original position – a re working of the mythical state of nature wherein humans are free, rational, and good – to provide a normative theory of the just society and its political institutions. In this ideal original position, individuals assume a rational impartiality because their self interests are surmounted, which leads to a consensus around social governance. Similarly, Ju¨rgen Habermas’ model of communicative action suggests that a just society will emerge out of the dialog of rational individuals in the public sphere, where individuals transcend all traces of their individuality. In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant had argued that reason was the best means to transcend one’s passions. For Rawls and Habermas, however, it is not just indi vidual liberty at stake, but that of the body politic. Thirdly, the model of the rational individual infers a disembodied universalism that as we shall see has been extensively critiqued. It also, however, has provided the basis for an ethics (if not practice) of egalitarianism, used to expand the concept of natural rights across the population. Questions persist as to how to deal with pluralism. Wendy Brown outlines the ways that the concept of ‘toleration’ has been mobilized to this end, from the Reformation onward, and in figures as diverse as Spinoza and Milton. Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration
appeals for the acceptance of religious difference, albeit not including Roman Catholics. His argument rests on a crucial differentiation between civil and political society: religion was deemed an individual and private matter, and hence tolerable because separate and distinct from the public sphere of common truth. Thomas Paine’s agitation against slavery rests on similar principles of equal rights and tolerance. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft argues that woman’s in ability to reason or to achieve liberty was because they were not given the opportunity to do so, not because of an innate incapacity. The distinction between public and private was retained, however, as she affirmed that woman’s natural role was as wife and mother. Underlying the arguments for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery is a fourth principle, that of human progress and individual ameliorism. Nineteenth century utilitarians such as Mill and Jeremy Bentham enthused over the role of science and education in the perfect ibility of the self and of society. Rousseau’s semifictional E´mile describes the best education for young men and women to fulfill their social roles, albeit again resting on a gendered differentiation of public and private spheres. Science and education were thus held out as progressive, even as they were used to reinforce discriminatory practices. There is also an implicit sense that the indi vidual is self knowing and self knowable, and open to transformation. Into the twentieth century, the ethos of perfectibility has morphed into an emphasis on self improvement, one that entails a responsibilization of the individual (and the family) with a limited role for society or the state. The model of the autonomous, rational in dividual – ostensibly equal but needing improvement – continues to predominate, although as we will see below, in a more nefarious incarnation in the neoliberal homo economicus. The liberal self has thus come to be associated with individualism, rationalism, egalitarianism, and ameliorism. Anglo geography has largely cohered with this model, for example, the universal, ‘rational man’ of positivism, and even the individualism celebrated in humanism. In the last several decades, however, attempts have been made to dislodge this construction of the self, and to problematize the appeals to liberty upon which liberalism is founded. The role of post structural theory, which gained ground in the discipline in the 1980s, has been central. The techni ques of deconstruction associated with Jacques Derrida were wielded to reveal a narrative’s inherent contra dictions by uncovering how meanings are produced through binary oppositions, and the gaps and supplements to the text. This deferral of meaning and play of signifiers unsettles liberal presumptions of logic, truth, and certainty and the possibility of a rational, self knowing self. Indi vidual autonomy is further challenged in that identity is conceived as relational, constituted in reference to an
Liberalism
‘other’. The self is hence neither natural nor free; nor is there a single truth or reason through which liberty can be realized. Rather, post structuralists and postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard and Jean Franc¸ois Lyotard cele brate disorder and disruption as they herald the death of the Enlightenment metannaratives of order, truth, reason, and logic that underlie liberal subjectivity. The challenge to singular truth resonates with the much earlier writings of Friedrich Nietzsche who de scribes truth as ‘‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms.’’ In works such as Beyond Good and Evil, his attack extends still further to include self consciousness and free will; he remarks that the subject is but a ‘grammatical fiction’. Drawing upon Nietzsche, Foucault’s archeological studies displace the centrality of the human subject by turning to structural histories of medicine and the social sciences. In The Order of Things, he reflects upon the very recent history of the autono mous subject, and draws attention to the discursive contingency of the subject as an effect of power and discipline. These tactics are perhaps most clearly evident in institutions, whether for the ‘insane’, as Hester Parr and Chris Philo have examined, or the poor house de scribed in Felix Driver’s work. Spaces such as Chinatown work in still different ways, as Kay Anderson has re vealed, to constitute marginal and dominant subject positions through racialized and gendered discourses. Psychoanalytic theory has also unraveled the unity of the rational individual. Sigmund Freud’s theory of the tripartite structure of the psyche into ego, superego, and id, undermines the certainty of a transparent self. Desires are repressed, denial and displacement are endemic, and dreams are laden with symbolism. Freud and his former colleague Jacques Lacan both suggest that identity for mation is relational and conflictual, whether produced through the Oedipus complex, or during the ‘mirror stage’. But Lacan takes issue with Freud’s talking cure in that it extends the possibility of the restoration of a co herent self. He argues instead that the ‘unconscious is structured like a language’, an assertion that speaks to the complexity of the subject who cannot possibly be trans parent to himself, but troubled with symbolism. Only a few geographers such as Liz Bondi, Heidi Nast, Steve Pile, and Gillian Rose have explicitly engaged with psychoanalytic theory to problematize the spatial con stitution of bodies, sexuality, desire, and trauma. If post structural and psychoanalytic theories de center the autonomous and transparent liberal self, Marxist analysis redirects attention to the social consti tution of the individual, enmeshed in the class based structures of capitalism. For Marx, liberal appeals to egalitarianism are impossible to realize in a private property system where ownership conveys power and influence. This invective informs David Harvey’s seminal Social Justice and the City which argues for moving away
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from ‘Liberal formulations’ – the title of the first section of his book – to a revolutionary Marxist critique that will address social injustice by abolishing private property. The book thus positioned a new critical human geog raphy in opposition to liberalism. Marxism, however, paid little explicit attention to the constitution of the subject and subjectivity. It could be inferred from the discussions of class, which shaped the intimate relations between the bourgeoisie and working class, that individuals are always social and political beings, situated at a particular his torical moment – and not a priori, autonomous beings. But only with the writings of Marxist structuralist Louis Althusser does a more compelling critique of the self emerge. Drawing upon Freud and Lacan, he argues that the self is an ideological construct. His article ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, asserts that the self and citizen are made meaningful through their interpolation in social structures. The individual is thus produced through, constrained by, and even managed through such institutions. Understanding the social constitution of the self was also the object of Anglo feminist geography of the 1970s, although much of the early work was resolutely liberal. The emphasis inside and outside the academy was on the extension of rights to women and the affirmation of women’s place in the academy both as researcher and as research subject. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) galvanized popular interest in the suburban an omie experienced by full time homemakers in the post World War II suburbs. Feminist geographers began to provide a more politicized critique of the public–private divide, often by drawing upon Marxism, although its relationship with feminism has often been uneasy. Suzanne McKenzie and Damaris Rose, among others, identified the centrality of the home and unpaid domestic labor to the material and ideological reproduction of capitalism. Addressing the public private divide that is inherent to liberalism – and the power politics of this differentiation – has been a key facet of feminism, as captured in the popular slogan ‘the personal is political’. A more embodied feminist research has also emerged, attuned to subjectivity and positionality. Bodies them selves have become a focus of study as geographers work to unsettle conventional dualities between male/ female and mind/body, as with Rachel Pain’s exploration of women’s fear of violence in public spaces. Isabel Dyck and Pamela Moss have also challenged the ableist presumptions of much social science research that disregards disability and illness. Research on the body has also informed studies of sexuality. David Bell, Jon Binnie, Glen Elder, Larry Knopp, and Gill Valentine have all examined gay and lesbian spatialities, and the impact of the visibility of bodies in the public sphere in an era when gay and lesbian activists were taking to the streets.
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Research on the body has thus drawn attention to a wide range of subjectivities that are obscured by a liberal universalism that presumes a rational, disembodied self. Studies of race have made similar interventions, while activist scholars such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde have assailed feminist approaches that idealize the concept of ‘woman’ and ignore class and racial privilege. In contrast to Friedan’s ‘feminine mystique’, hooks’ moving piece on home as a site of resistance unpacked the suburbs as both the site of heterosexual, normative family and the de pendence of this kind of family structure on black labor. Geographers Alastair Bonnett, Ruth Gilmore, Peter Jack son, and Laura Paulido have examined the ways that race is produced and reproduced in social and legal spaces such as schools and prisons. They challenge the liberal narratives of progress and ameliorism that govern these institutions and their imposition of dominant forms of subjectivity on the marginalized. The spatiality of racism needs to be in terrogated, Linda Peake and Audrey Kobayashi argue, not only to reveal the hypocrisy of liberal universalism and its underlying racist practices, but also to illustrate that race is a human construction, with no biological justification, produced and reproduced through space. The collection, This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldu´a, records the tensions between liberal aspirations to pluralism and egalitarianism and the structural inequities that persist in the United States arising from its history of slave labor and dis possession from the land. The contributors demand a radical restructuring that can address this racism, not an integrationist liberalism that subsumes cultural differences, depoliticizes private cultural identities, obviates politics, and tries to remake the ‘other’ in one’s own image. No less has been demanded by anticolonial and postcolonial wri ters. In the 1950s, legendary revolutionary and registered psychiatrist Franz Fanon railed against the internalization of the colonial subjugation by the colonized. From another perspective, Edward Said examines how Eurocentric im aginative geographies of the East as ‘weak’ and ‘effeminate’ were used to rationalize colonial and imperial expansion. His book Orientalism examines how discourses of the ‘other’ constitute the colonizing subject, whereas Fanon had suggested that colonial subjectivity was negated. More recently, postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Robert Young, Ann Laura Stoler, and Anne McClintock have drawn upon post structuralism and psychoanalytic theory to frame the relations between colonizer and col onized in a more nuanced way that eschews binary op positions, and explores the complexities of desire, eroticization, transgression, and hybrid subjectivity. But the question that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak poignantly raises, as to whether the subaltern can find a voice given her interpolation in colonial and patriarchal discourse, is left hanging. The egalitarianism to which liberalism aspires never seems to be realizable for the marginalized.
Identity politics associated with studies of race and gender has raised important issues regarding the ex clusionary practices of liberalism. At times, however, there has been a tendency to reinstate a liberal individualism, and the values of the perfectible and transparent self. Queer theory, by contrast, has sought to unsettle these narratives, while also raising opportunities for resistance. The attention to the social construction of the categories of gender, sex, and sexuality have challenged essentialized notions of identity and the identity politics that have emerged around fixed concepts of class, gender, and race. Judith Butler posits that the self is in a process of be coming, whose undoing is always possible. Butler’s analysis of performativity reveals how gender is assembled through routine: subject positions are created, not just imposed, albeit enacted in a context of external constraints. She identifies the possibility of transgression, though humor and irony, for example, or resistant performances such as drag. Identities are thus fluid and in flux, not fixed, au tonomous and self knowing, as conceived by liberalism. For some, the possibility that identities are complex, dy namic, and hybrid is cathartic because of the potential for reconstitution and reconfiguration that this holds out. For others, however, this characterization is too playful, too transient, and too partial to tackle material injustices. Along different lines, Katharyne Mitchell cautions against the ‘hype of hybridity’ because the aspiration to trans formation and subversion can and has been co opted in the interests of capitalist accumulation. Nonetheless, the trope of hybridity persists. In an other strand of research, geographers have engaged with the concept to raise moral and ethical questions about the relation between the human and the nonhuman and to encourage a dissolution of those binaries. Donna Haraway’s model of the cyborg, a technological hybrid of human and machine, works to complicate the distinctions between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, and nature and culture. Actor network theory (ANT) and scholars such as Michael Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law draw from the philosophy of science, economy, and sociology to argue that agency (and power) are constituted in and through networks held together by immutable mobiles that help to make the networks durable. In this formulation, agency, albeit muted, is a capacity of both the animate and the inanimate. Sarah Whatmore has drawn upon ANT, Haraway, and the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to push toward a reconceptualization of the ‘autonomous self ’ that acknowledges a world woven together by human and nonhuman elements. Her work on ‘becoming elephant’, for example, addresses the performativity of the elephant subject in the recursive processes negotiated between actor and network. This attention to the ‘more than human world’ speaks to a broader contemporary anxiety around the constitution of the human subject.
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The new work on hybrid natures unravels the binary opposition implicit to the concept of a liberal self which presumes that agency, rationality, egalitarianism, and ameliorism are uniquely human capacities. Identity pol itics, by contrast, has criticized the liberal individual because it is modeled on a white, masculine, and dis embodied self who is idealized as rational, self interested, self maximizing, and self knowing. In some instances, critique has been used to expand liberal categories to make them more inclusive of marginalized populations, in effect, using liberalism’s aspirations to universalism and egalitarianism against itself. Others, however, argue that paradox and prejudice are intrinsic to liberalism, so that it must be overthrown. Geographers have engaged with these debates from all sides, and they continue to challenge foundational liberal constructions such as the public–private divide, and the naturalization of gender and race. More cross cultural research could identify alternative epistemologies, for example, an aboriginal worldview or Chinese Buddhism, which each in quite different ways offer a more holistic and less individual ized epistemology. Such comparisons might bring even closer into focus the liberal paradox whereby freedom from domination is emphasized at the very same time that material and discursive stratification is being re inforced. Liberalism’s tenacity, however, speaks to the popular appeal of its claim to individualism, and the concepts of liberty that it promotes.
Governing through Liberty If individuals are presumed to be free, rational, and perfectible, then how can society be ordered to maximize these qualities? Liberalism tends to argue that self rule is the best mechanism for ensuring the autonomy and freedom of the individual, and is a due right of rational beings. At the same time, classical liberalism suggests that maximizing individual freedom is also in the best inter ests of all, which requires a social ordering that is both individualizing and totalizing. A persistent question has been how to balance individual rights and social relations. Political liberalism is usually traced back to seven teenth century England when social hierarchies were disrupted by the Glorious Revolution of 1640–88 which loosened the grip of religious authority, and bolstered popular sovereignty and parliamentary democracy. The aristocracy of the Whig party, heirs to liberal values after the English revolution, supported government through choice and consent – alongside personal and economic freedoms, and even religious toleration – although only for the propertied classes. The resonance with Locke’s social contract is clear. Individuals agree to their political rule because although there is equality in the state of nature, social conflicts over natural rights, for example,
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property, need to be mediated. A state is thus a social necessity, although it needs to be limited, as outlined in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s programmatic volume, On the Limits to State Action. John Stuart Mill suggested that the only legitimate justification for state constraint was to prevent harm, to the individual or to others. Liberal thought thus arose alongside a breakdown in traditional authority and struggles to place power in the hands of the (propertied) people. It bore both progressive and conservative proclivities. What this has meant with respect to the role of the state has been of key interest to political philosophers. Writing in 1958, Isaiah Berlin differentiated between ‘negative’ freedom (freedom from coercion) and ‘positive’ freedom (freedom to self realize). Although it has since been argued that these freedoms coexist, liberals tend to emphasize one or the other. As noted above, classical thinkers such as Locke and Mill argue from the vantage of negative freedom: individual liberty is construed as freedom from state intervention, with the state playing only a minor role in the economy, only a little more of a role in matters of security and civil liberties, and almost no role in the private sphere. As we will see in more detail below, these ideas have been re vived by neoclassical liberals such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman who argue that less state and more individual freedom is in the best interests of all. By contrast, the predominant liberalism of the early twen tieth century, with a little nod to Rousseau, has em phasized positive freedoms. T. H. Green, L. T. Hobhouse, and John Rawls promote the state provision of social rights and services as a means to ensure that each member of the population has the same opportunities. Under welfare liberalism, resources are redistributed and services such as education and healthcare are provided to encourage a minimum standard of living. The social benefits and social security of this model are touted as egalitarian, even as redistribution helps to make capitalist inequities more palatable and hence more durable, to the advantage of the propertied class. In both positive and negative models, liberalism is territorialized onto the nation state. Locke’s writings, for example, and those of other contemporary liberal thin kers such as Thomas Paine, were formative to the push for national independence in the eighteenth century. The American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) were grounded in the natural rights of the individual and variants on Locke’s life, liberty, and property, even as they took on different dimensions. US liberals trumpeted the importance of individual rights over class, whereas in Britain economic liberties were promoted. In France, the 1789 revolution’s attack on the monarchy, aristocracy, and the Roman Catholic Church led to an emphasis on secularism and democracy. Lib eralism also infused other national movements in Europe,
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enshrined, for example, in Spain’s first constitution of 1812. In the Americas, Haiti declared its independence from France in 1791, drawing upon the aspirations to liberty of the French revolutions, just as the Spanish example would influence the South American wars of independence led by figures such as Sı´mon Bolı´var and Jose´ de san Martı´n. Liberalism has thus been pivotal to movements for national independence. In turn, the nation state has be come ‘the’ political container within which liberalism operates and within which individual rights and freedoms have been made achievable and understandable, even as it exhibits an antipathy to state rule. This is one of the key paradoxes between liberal ideals and forms of gov ernment. By and large, geographers have tended to re inforce the assumption that nation states are, as Neil Brenner has put it, the locus of power and economic management, although this has been challenged by globalization and neoliberalism. Some recent works, however, interrogate this assumption. Matt Sparke’s In the Space of Theory, for example, draws upon antifoundational critiques of the production of truth and knowledge to challenge the mapping of social theory onto the nation state. As Clive Barnett and Murray Low remark, however, only in limited ways have geographers examined the connections between liberalism and democracy or dem ocratization. Their collection, Spaces of Democracy, begins to attend to this lacunae, at the same time that it examines other scales of governance. Foucault’s work has been crucial to rethinking the state, governance, and power. He has instigated a strain of research on ‘governmentality’, that is ‘the conduct of conduct’, or how and why people govern themselves and others. Foucault identified in the liberal state a shift away from an emphasis on territorial sovereignty, to an interest in biopower, in the population and its govern ance. How to regulate life, rather than how to threaten death, is the object of the modern liberal state. Matt Hannah examines how the population is made knowable and calculable through discourses and techniques, for example, census and statistics, in late nineteenth century United States. As his work demonstrates, it is not that concerns for the population completely supplant sover eignty, but that governmental rule is reoriented toward ensuring the health, wealth, and happiness of the popu lation. The state strives for social security, but it is also through this security that the state governs. Foucault also argues, however, that this rationality is not only dis seminated by the state, but becomes internalized within the population. Individual and social institutions – the family, the workplace, nongovernmental organizations, etc. – all strive to maximize their quality of life, and assume responsibility for optimizing their own potential. Freedom is both a condition of and the outcome of this responsibilization.
Foucault identifies a two pronged strategy through which liberal technologies of power are deployed. The first, as noted above, entails the protection of the popu lation from risks associated with the industrial economy (e.g., health programs, education reform, etc.), so that they can optimize their quality of life. The second is a more nefarious wielding of ‘racial hygiene’ whereby the popu lation is assessed and ruled according to its perceived capacity to achieve responsible autonomy. Disciplinary power is applied both to reform those who do not meet the norms, and to excise those who are considered to be ir redeemable, for example, in institutions such as asylums or prisons. The propagation of those elements of the popu lation deemed most at risk, and hence risky to others, is hence limited. As the term ‘racial hygiene’ denotes, there is an inherently racial dimension to this social ordering, as racial differences are identified and mapped onto the population through techniques such as racial profiling and ghettoization. Foucault’s analytic framework identifies the illiberal ism upon which the liberal state’s rule of its population is founded. Other scholars have turned to examine the transnational dimensions of ‘racial hygiene’. With echoes of Said’s ‘Orientalism’, David Theo Goldberg illustrates that liberal governance manages its own population by identifying ‘uncivilizable’ populations beyond the state, largely codified through race. Geographers have been complicit in this process; at the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, environmental determinist Ellen Churchill Semple classified populations with respect to their land use and propensity to violence, naturalizing social relations in terms of geographical distribution. Liberals have also been, as Uday Singh Mehta documents, among the most ardent advocates of empire. British co lonial India was a favorite laboratory. John Stuart Mill, who worked for the British East India Company for 35 years, approved of colonial rule because, he argued, In dian ‘barbarians’, were incapable of governing themselves. Thus, as Mariana Valverde has remarked, while Mill was progressive with regards to the expansion of rights at home, for example, to women, he had no compunction in rationalizing despotic rule for populations elsewhere. In settler societies, the consequences were often violent. Indigenous peoples were deemed ‘uncivilizable’ and were corralled onto reserves, or removed from their families and placed in residential schools as in Canada and Aus tralia. These strategies were part of the bifurcated at tempts to both discipline and train other populations through spatial segregation. Geographers have been sensitive not only to this wider colonial history, but also to the complicity of the discipline. Felix Driver and David Livingstone have provided broad overviews of this participation, while others have addressed geographic tactics of rule and dispossession through maps, spatial segregation, and
Liberalism
urban planning. The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in Britain sponsored a number of expeditions by figures such as Charles Darwin, David Livingstone, Richard Francis Burton, Ernest Shackleton, and Sir Edmund Hillary. The explorers often had administrative impact. Livingstone, for example, opened up central Africa to missionaries who brought with them a form of biopoli tical care and control with their plans for health, edu cation, and work. New forms of geoeconomic empire reared their head when the RGS merged, after some controversy, with the academic based Institute of British Geographers; Shell’s sponsorship of the new institution was contentious, largely because of its oil capitalism in Africa. In the early twentieth century, geographers played a significant role in international affairs. The heartland theory of Halford Mackinder, which he submitted to the RGS in 1904, proposed a reworked geopolitics that placed Europe at the center of a nascent global worldview. Control of Eastern Europe, he argued, was necessary to world domination, which informed international and US containment policies. Almost his contemporary, geog rapher Isaiah Bowman, who directed the American Geo graphical Society for 20 years, played a parallel role in the US where he acted as presidential advisor first to Wood row Wilson and then to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In American Empire, Neil Smith uses the figure of Bowman to critique US aspirations to hegemonic globalism and the victory of liberalism over geography. This was the dawn of a new empire, being built on a global assertion of economic and moral liberalism. Although the new, internationalist drive appeared to triumph over space, it required the careful management of global geography. Area studies programs of the post World War II era, with their direct links to the military and foreign analysis, thrived in the impetus for knowledge of the world. These academic policies and programs reinscribed the polarity between the domestic and the foreign, all the while enclosing the world within a liberal integrationist order. Domestically, Western states introduced a varying degree of redistributive welfare programs. Social security enabled the positive freedoms celebrated in the writings of T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse, as liberalism re invented itself as a superior moral force within the new geopolitical order. The international infrastructure that was created, including the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, was used to promote Western liberal economic and moral values around the world. The increased mobility of the population in this same era, however, revealed underlying social and cultural tensions. Hannah Arendt drew attention to the wave of displaced and stateless peoples in the aftermath of the two world wars, and the impact on people bereft of political status as a result of
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ethnic cleansing. When citizenship rights are grounded in the nation state where does that leave those whom the state has refused to recognize? This is one of the para doxes of liberal citizenship that Hannah Arendt exposed. Universal values appear to transcend the nation state, yet citizenship depends upon exclusionary practices that separate those with ‘legitimate’ claims to the state from the rest, internally and externally. To put it somewhat differently, as Barbara Cruickshank has done, citizenship is a technology of state through which the population is governed and deemed governable (or not). Feminist scholars such as Ruth Lister and Iris Marion Young have examined the persistent gendering of citizenship that harkens back to the public–private divide of the social contract. Despite the expansion of programs post World War II, rights were dependent on workforce participation, a proviso that meant women were largely excluded except in their status as dependents of male breadwinners, while children still continue to be con sidered only citizens in the making. Citizenship, Daiva Stasiulis and Abigail Bakan forcefully insist, needs to be understood in terms of capitalism’s uneven power relations whereby the rights and responsibilities associated with Western citizenship are predicated on the labor and sub jugation of the Global South. This kind of analysis is especially important given the ongoing political contro versy in the US around undocumented workers. Geog raphers have also examined these citizenship paradoxes, with attention to mobility and borders, as with Jennifer Hyndman’s analysis of refugee camps in post war Africa, and Alison Mountz’s work on the smuggling of Chinese migrants into Canada. Ongoing research has also affirmed that formal citi zenship does not necessarily entail substantive rights. Drawing upon critical race theory, Yasmeen Abu Laban insists that bias is inherent to political participation, representation, and the allocation of resources, which perpetuate marginalization and discrimination. Multi cultural ‘tolerance’ also reproduces and naturalizes dif ferences: cultural traditions – for example, food and dance – are celebrated in the public sphere, but political structures remain intact, regulated by a universalized liberal reason. At the same time, however, the adherence to community, the rhetoric of tolerance, and the logic of egalitarianism have been used to expand citizenship claims for minority populations. Charles Taylor and Will Kylimcka have even proposed that group rights, for ex ample, aboriginal citizenship, are possible within the liberal nation state, as a means for reconciling demands for subnational self governance. At the transnational scale, the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 has projected tolerance into the international arena, even if it remains very much state based in its application. Immanuel Kant suggested that a cosmopolitan world order, with internationalized human rights, would ensure
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‘perpetual peace’, an ethos that infused the early post World War II period. Yet, the reality has been quite the opposite. Violence and insecurity have long been con stitutive elements of liberalism, rather than what happens when liberalism fails, as we have seen above with respect to the history of colonialism. If there is a coherence across liberalism, it is its tendency toward illiberalism – and the violent imposition of liberalism – in the name of liberty. The sovereign’s power to render subjects as homo sacer, that is to remove their political rights so that their death can be ordered with impunity, brings violence to the fore. In particular, and compellingly for geographers, Giorgio Agamben’s work in this area draws attention to those spaces of ‘exception’ where subjects are rendered into bare life: the quintessential example is that of the Nazi concentration camp. But, he argues, it is not simply that exception is located or locatable in particular spaces, but through the exception that the law is constituted. This reinforces the idea that politics, law, and violence are not separate but continuous realms, a perspective that further undermines the liberal premise of the neutral state. Derek Gregory develops Agamben’s remarks to consider Guanta´namo Bay as a state of exception. Gre gory’s analysis, however, situates Guanta´namo within an international (not just national) politics and thereby at tends to the colonial histories and international juris prudence in which it is embroiled. He argues that it is not the law that is absent, but rather the application of human rights, a point which drives home the long legacy of practices of ‘racial hygiene’. In the current ‘war on terror’ questions around human security are pressing, and have materialized themselves particularly at borders where the power of the nation state is highly visible. But even when formal war is not decreed, rights are suspended. Gerry Pratt documents the legal abandonment of women sex workers and domestic laborers, who because of their gender are outside the rational public sphere and con sequentially more easily, and more surreptitiously, ren dered into bare life. With the closing of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Francis Fukuyama teleologically declared The End of History and the Last Man. Liberal capitalism, he argued, was now ascendant as the last, best model of social ordering and human political achieve ment. By contrast, Michael Hart and Antonio Negri argue in Empire that the moment of liberal democracy has passed, that it has undergone a crisis of legitimacy be cause of the military overreach of the United States. Writing before 9/11, their comments on new imperial forms seem especially prescient given the imposition of parliamentary democracy in Iraq in 2005, following the American led invasion, and the continuing violence there. The specter of older forms of colonialism and imperialism looms large as Western states impose their liberal norms and ideals in a reinvented world order. The
Fukuyama style rhetoric that casts liberalism as the one rational choice, as morally superior, and as the quint essence of liberty is precisely that which enables violence to be perpetuated in liberalism’s name.
Liberal Economies If a key question of liberalism is how the individual is to be ruled (or not) within a just society, so too is the question of how the economy can best be governed (or not) to maximize individual liberty. Two key liberal economic principles are private property and free trade. For Locke, property is one of the three foundational natural rights alongside life and liberty. Property is deemed an inalienable, natural right because it arises out of labor over nature. Since people are autonomous, owners of themselves, they are also owners of their own labor and its products. It is to guarantee this right that people assent to being ruled, with the polity’s chief role the preservation of one’s property against the claims of others. Some notion of property rights have been en shrined in state laws since the American and French constitutions, and are now more universally recognized with the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Property holders, it is argued, possess special social status, and an implicit moral and political authority, which is used to rationalize their dispossession of the land. This logic informed the push for enclosure that accompanied the changing farming economy of Britain and later, industrialization and urbanization. Common land was appropriated for private use, which reinforced the discrepancies between the landowning and the landless, who often rioted. In the colonial context, the result was an unreserved land grab. In settler colonies, where indigenous peoples did not share this concept of property rights and tilled the soil more lightly, land was routinely dispossessed. Capitalist claims to property rights thus not only externalized nature as that to be owned, but allocated resources in the interest of the bourgeoisie, an argument developed by Neil Smith in Uneven Development. Nicholas Blomley has examined more explicitly the continuing violence of liberal law which, constituted as it is through boundary making (e.g., frontier, survey, and grid), reinscribes the colonial geog raphies out of which it originates, and the differences between colonizer and colonized, and the owners and the landless. In the contemporary context, petro capitalism plays out a new kind of imperialism that is laced with violence, as Michael Watt describes, as the oil industries and local communities jostle over the land and its resources. Free trade is a second foundational principle in liberal economics. Eric Sheppard notes that, despite historical– geographic differences in implementation, the arguments
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for (and against) free trade have remained largely con tinuous for over 200 years. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, David Hume and Adam Smith, resisted the mercantilism of their day and its protectionism, and ar gued that free trade would stimulate economic growth. The pursuit of individual self interest in a competitive market, Smith asserted, would produce efficiencies that would benefit all society. The market would naturally regulate itself by an ‘invisible hand’. The only role for the state was to provide some security, legal infrastructure, and limited public works to ensure that individuals could freely pursue their own economic interests. David Ricardo also was opposed to mercantilism. He argued vehemently against the British Corn Laws, in place since 1815, which protected the price of domestic grains against foreign imports. This subsidization, he argued, prevented the country from benefiting from open com petition with other markets, and maximizing its pro duction in terms of comparative advantage. The shift away from mercantilism and toward liberal, laissez faire economics underpinned the development of free market capitalism in Britain. Interest in free trade also emerged elsewhere in Europe, for example, with the writings of Jean Baptiste Say in France and Anders Chydenius in Finland, and in the United States and Canada where a reciprocity treaty was in place between 1854 and 1866. By the late nineteenth century, however, a neoclassical economics had emerged. Drawing upon the economic liberalism of Smith and Ricardo – and re taining the principles of individualism, private property, and self adjusting markets – economists sought a scien tific model for supply and demand, and production and consumption that would be in the best interests of all. Theories of consumer behavior were expounded based around a rational individual whose choices, it was as sumed, would maximize their utility. The paradigm was thus rooted in liberal rationalism and perfectionism, with a nod to utilitarianism. Economic liberalism, however, was contested. Socialist thought was percolating across Europe, particularly in Britain and in France. In Glasgow, Robert Owen promoted forms of collective living, and argued that the individual was a product of society, not an autonomous figure. The Chartist movement galvanized the working class to expand the franchise and their claims on the state. In France, socialism was promoted by Comte Saint Simon, who criticized social inequities and argued against both indi vidualism and laissez faire markets. Pierre Joseph Proud hon promoted anarchy, and called the ownership of property theft. Most famously, Marx criticized capitalism’s internal contradictions, and the (creative) destruction wrought by capital investment and disinvestment. He ar gued that the state was not neutral, but rather protected bourgeois interests such as private property. His alter native vision involved shared ownership of the means of
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production, which ran counter to the individualist, laissez faire, private property thrust of the capitalist economy. Marx was also wary of free trade: he feared that the abolishment of the Corn Laws was a ruse by manu facturers to drive down food prices and hence wages. Marxist and socialist thought informed the radical geography of the 1970s, when there was also a brief re vival of the anarchism of geographers Peter Kropotkin and E´lise´e Re´clus. New research emerged on the spatial dimensions of capitalism in the urban landscape, drawing upon the methodologies of historical materialism. This rich body of work sought to depose economic geo graphy’s cohesion with liberalism, from its idealized model of liberal ‘man’ as rational, productive, and self maximizing, to its affirmation of private property. Bill Bunge, David Harvey, and Neil Smith examined the urban inequities of capital accumulation, from the de investment in inner cities, to the politics of reinvest ment as part of gentrification. Feminist scholars, such as Doreen Massey and Linda McDowell, addressed the social structures underpinning the gendered dynamics of urban space. Recent work also attends to the con temporary reconfiguration of the nation state under globalization (and especially free trade) and neoliberalism. The nation state, contra classical liberal theory, played a significant role in the economy at the beginning of the twentieth century, partly as a response to the radical critiques, but also because of all the accom modations demanded by the propertied classes. The sweeping changes of World War I and the Depression, when the failures of laissez faire liberalism were stark, gave further impetus to nationalist protectionism. Alter native ways of conceiving individual and economic lib erty around ‘positive’ freedoms, which had previously been relegated to the background, were now being championed. In Britain, T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse advocated a qualified role for the state to maximize in dividual potential. The provision of basic necessities, argued John Dewey in the United States, would in turn contribute to the ‘public good’. John Maynard Keynes provided the economic rationale for an expanded state role, by reorienting analysis to questions of employment. He argued that state intervention at times of high un employment could help to stimulate consumption or investment, and thus help maximize individual and social freedoms. In the post World War II era, with varying degree, social welfare was implemented in Western lib eral states. In Europe, a model of state planning, social programs, and public ownership was predominant, while in the US, Roosevelt’s ‘new deal’ ushered in a series of federal programs for ‘relief, recovery, and reform’. ‘New deal’ liberalism was configured around social liberalism, whereas in England liberalism was distilled through the Liberal Party and Prime Minister William Gladstone, a conservatism echoed in much of Europe.
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In the post World War II era, nation states thus loomed large as they carved out a certain degree of economic autonomy. But they also participated in the creation of an international political order through multilateral institutions such as the UN, the Bretton Woods agreement, GATT, the IMF, and the World Bank. Political scientist John G. Ruggie described this as ‘em bedded liberalism’ in that a ‘grand bargain’ was struck between state autonomy and external regulation, with an eye to social and political security. Although World War I had challenged the liberal premise that international interdependence would preempt war, the idea that a more open trading system would bring peaceful relations was revived. GATT was part of the program for post war economic recovery, and ushered in a nascent free trade, later expanded under its transformation into the World Trade Organization (WTO). These international and multilateral post war agreements consolidated a new globalized economic order, which by the 1980s would be underpinned by a revival of classical liberalism that has taken shape as ‘neo’liberalism. By the 1970s Keynesianism was being challenged by the dissolution of Bretton Woods; the oil crisis; and the shift to more open, internationalized markets. The Chi cago School economists, drawing up on the Ordoliberals of 1930s Germany and the works of Friedrich Hayek in particular, refuted Keynesian interventionism. They at tributed the crisis to fiscal policies, national debts, and government failures. Milton Friedman’s advocacy of ‘negative’ freedoms – a minimal role for government in the economy, a prioritization of monetary policy over fiscal policy, and a general emphasis on individual liberty – began to gain acceptance. With the elections of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, laissez faire capitalism was revived. Unions were attacked, individualist economics were promoted through tax breaks and the reduction of social programs, and in the UK, industry was denationalized. Programs such as workfare, as Jamie Peck has detailed, began to replace rights based access to income support with a stress on individual self sufficiency. With neoliberalism, the primacy of the individual was reinstated. But, as Graham Burchell argues, neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism in that it is not about de termining the kind of government that is best able to optimize the ‘natural’ freedom of the individual. Rather, the object of neoliberal governance is to ‘produce’ the free individual – an individual who not only embodies all the liberal qualities of autonomy, rationalism, ameliorism, and egalitarianism, but also personifies market principles such as self maximization, efficiency, accountability, profit ability, productivity, competitiveness, and entrepreneur ialism. The revamped individual at the center of neoliberalism is homo economicus. Moreover, market values and expectations are also projected onto social and
political institutions, such as governments and schools, which themselves become quasi enterprises whose ‘prod ucts’ (e.g., knowledge) can be consumed by their ‘con sumers’ (e.g., students). The cost–benefit calculations demanded of these enterprises require additional forms of regulation. As Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell have pointed out, neoliberalism entails not just a succession of rollbacks (withdrawal or disinvestment), but also a rollout of regu latory forms that need more management and supervision. The workfare policies that Peck has examined, for ex ample, require a de regulation of labor, but in a highly regulated way that is enforced by the disciplinary and penalizing measures of the state. The use of disciplinary and punitive measures reveals yet another duplicity. Liberals have consistently claimed that liberalized economies engender peaceful relations, certainly at the state level. John Stuart Mill argued that commerce would bring about peaceful international re lations, while anti Corn law proponent Richard Cobden proposed that free trade would help ensure peace (and hence prevent war). Increasing security cooperation be tween states after World War I and World War II was also infused with commonplace rhetoric that liberal states were less likely to wage war on one another. In a twist to this logic, Milton Friedman argued that free markets and indi vidual freedoms would precipitate the fall of totalitarianism. But, as Thomas Friedman has recently suggested, the ‘hidden hand’ of globalization and corporate capitalism is only made possible by a ‘hidden fist’, in this case that of the US military. Liberalism often requires the use of force and generates insecurities, even within the domestic population. This is clearly in evidence in Chile where General Augusto Pinochet’s Chicago inspired market reforms of the 1970s were implemented with the firm hand of the military state and thousands were killed and tortured. More recently the reconstruction of Iraq, which has been promoted as an opportunity to rebuild infrastructure and facilitate dem ocratization, has been shot through with violence. The Coalition Provisional Authority, working with the US De partment of Defense and UK authorities, has introduced new orders of council that liberalize the Iraqi market, in cluding privatization, tax cuts, and openness to foreign in vestment (e.g., by US company Halliburton), in ways that were inimical to the previous Iraqi constitution. As the increasing violence and dissent there suggest, the liberal ization of the economy has been far from successful, and the lives of the population are far from secure. Privatization has also generated other kinds of in securities. Natural resources have been especially im pacted, although as James McCarthy and Scott Prudham reflect, little attention has been paid to the impact of neoliberalism on the environment, even as attacks on Keynesian spending and national investment have undermined the environmental legislation implemented in that era to limit unheeded development. They point
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out that forms of life are increasingly becoming com moditized through patents, genetic engineering, biopi racy and bioprospecting, private property rights around pollution, and user fees, all of which rely upon and ex pand a Lockean concept of individualized private prop erty rights upheld by the state. This commoditization is transforming human–nature relations, but also concepts of the human. A new kind of biological citizenship is emerging, Nik Rose and Carlos Novas suggest, to rec oncile the deterritorialization of the state, recalibrations of human life and value, new forms of biopolitical gov ernance, and struggles and claims to biological rights premised on the very insecurities that these transforma tions entail. Free trade has similarly generated insecurities, as the expansion of export processing zones (EPZs) suggest. EPZs allow free trade under preferential terms to en courage the relocation of manufacturing: limited bur eaucracy, reduction or elimination of taxes, and the removal of import or export tariffs. As Melissa Wright has documented with respect to Mexican maquiladoras, however, the impact of these highly liberalized economic zones can be devastating on the employees. To attract investment, wages are reduced, unions are prohibited, and the rights of workers denied. Women have been made especially vulnerable, their labor cheapened, their lives devalued, and their agency denied. National borders have also become sites of human insecurity, even as free trade facilitates the movement of goods and capital. In tandem with the introduction of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, was Operation Gatekeeper, a border security initiative im plemented in several US states. Joseph Nevins describes the regulations, border control agents, and surveillance techniques that were all deployed against ‘illegal’ Mex ican immigrants. At the same time, NAFTA opened borders for professionals who best met the criteria of the marketized homo economicus: accountability, profitability, self scrutiny, and entrepreneurialism. These hierarchical policies are being reinscribed into the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership of 2005. As I have argued elsewhere, this NAFTA plus program exacer bates social insecurities in that it encourages greater private sector participation in the deepening integration and harmonization of economic and security sectors, but allows only limited mobility rights, either through ex panded temporary work programs or in preregistered security programs for professionals. The entrepreneurial rationality of neoliberalism, and its extension into social and political spheres, may generate a more secure field for trade and privatization, but creates more insecurities and anxieties for the population. Al though Wendy Larner’s caveat against universalizing and totalizing neoliberalisms must be heeded, some general izations around private property and free trade orthodoxies
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can be made if only because of the ways that they have been imposed internationally by the post World War II infrastructure. Richard Peet has identified the ways that, since the Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s, the institutions of the Washington Consensus have become much more interventionist with respect to industrializing economies. The ‘unholy trinity’ of IMF, World Bank, and WTO has institutionalized ‘poverty’ and ‘underdevelop ment’ with its tonic of ‘stabilization’ and ‘structural adjustment’ programs that have imposed currency de valuation, privatization, de regulation, and free trade. For much of the Third World this has entailed a hollowing out of the nation state as credit and investment are made conditional on privatization, de regulation, tax reform, trade liberalization, and fiscal discipline. In Africa, James Ferguson describes, the rollback of the state has exacer bated political crisis and has led to more unrest, insecurity, and violence. Opposition to neoliberalism and globalization is gaining ground. The post Washington Consensus, spearheaded by former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz, has sought to ‘bring the state back in’ through the backdoor of good governance, transparency, and ac countability. Socialist governments in Latin America have opposed the Western imperialism of the Washington consensus and US foreign policy, although governments such as President Lula’s in Brazil have found it difficult to implement anti neoliberal policies. The expansion of free trade has prompted extensive protests by civil society. The Zapatista uprising of 1994, in the wake of NAFTA, has been followed by the Battle in Seattle in 1999, in opposition to WTO negotiations, and at the Quebec City Summit in 2001, where discussions around the Free Trade Area of the Americas were taking place. In each of these instances, the protests have been met with intensive securitization and violent suppression, a reminder of the ongoing twinning of economic security with human in security. The opposition has had some success, even if incremental. Protests against this encyclopedia’s pub lisher Elsevier, for example, prompted the company’s disinvestment from arms fairs. Elsevier had argued that the defense industry is ‘‘necessary to the preservation of freedom and national security’’ and that ‘‘its exhibitions assisted in ensuring there is a licensed, regulated and open market.’’ Academics, however, raised concerns about this deepening interpenetration of the university with securitization and militarization, and the com promise of academic and ethical integrity. The protests provided an opportunity to debate the deepening inte gration of universities into the military–industrial com plex, an ongoing issue that needs to be addressed as liberal economies expand, security and military indus tries privatize, personal insecurities increase, and liberal expectations of the public sphere – of freedom of speech and political participation – are denied.
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Conclusions Geography has and continues to be complicit with lib eralism in many ways: as an academic discipline, and with respect to teaching and learning. The discipline is en trenched in a history of colonialism, and has provided the science, techniques, and experts required to make empire possible and the dissemination of liberal values. Education is saturated with a principle of individual ameliorism. Universities have internalized neoliberal entrepreneurialism, embracing the categorization of students as consumers and teachers as learning providers. As an economy, the university is embedded in the mili tary–industrial complex, from its research programs through to its pension plan schemes. The academic en terprise itself embodies liberal ideals, with individual scholarship and invention valorized alongside reason, universalism, and egalitarianism (albeit often in terms of a meritocracy). Academics, however, have come to question this complicity, and have challenged the pre sumptions invested in the liberal self, liberal rule, and liberal economics. Geographers have engaged in many of these debates, with a particular emphasis on how situated knowledge and localized research reveal the contra dictions and complexities at the heart of the liberal project. This situated research helps to undermine the universalizing narratives of liberal hegemony, of the fault lines that have emerged in the wake of Fukayama’s totalizing claims to liberal ascendancy, Samuel P. Huntington’s narrative of a ‘clash of civilizations’, or Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld. With the war on terror launched after September 11, 2001, the political imperatives of undermining these reconfigured ‘Orienti alist’ discourses are all the more pressing. Continued attention to the challenges to equality, universality, pol itics, citizenship, economies, etc. as globalization and neoliberalism reterritorialize the domestic and inter national landscape, will illuminate the ongoing paradoxes of a shape shifting liberalism that constantly reconfigures itself in light of what has come before, and imagines itself anew. See also: Gender, Historical Geographies of; Governmentality; Marxism/Marxist Geography I; Marxism/
Marxist Geography II; Neoliberalism; Patriarchy; Queer Theory/Queer Geographies; Sexuality.
Further Reading Abu Laban, Y. (2002). Liberalism, multiculturalism, and the problem of essentialism. Citizenship Studies 6(4), 459 481. Barry, A., Osborne, T. and Rose, N. (eds.) (1996). Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo Liberalism and Rationalities of Government. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Baumeister, A. T. (2000). Liberalism and the ‘Politics of Difference’. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brown, B. (2006). Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cruikshank, B. (1999). The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Dean, D. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In Burchell, G., Gordon, C. & Miller, P. (eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp 87 104. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Hall, S. (1986). Variants of liberalism. In Donald, J. & Hall, S. (eds.) Politics and Ideology, pp 34 69. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hindess, H. (2004). Liberalism what’s in a name? In Larner, W. & Walters, W. (eds.) Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, pp 23 39. London: Routledge. Locke, J. (2006). John Locke: An Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings on Law and Politics, 1667 1683. Oxford: Clarendon Press, first published in 1689. Mehta, U. S. (1999). Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Mill, J. S. (2006). On Liberty; and The Subjection of Women. New York: Penguin, first published in 1859. Ramsay, M. (1997). What’s Wrong with Liberalism? A Radical Critique of Liberal Political Philosophy. London: Leicester University Press. Richardson, R. L. (2001). Contending Liberalisms in World Politics: Ideology and Power. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Publishers. Smith, S. (2005). The Endgame of Globalization. New York: Routledge.
Relevant Websites http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook18.html Internet Modern History Sourcebook. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/339173/ liberalism#tab=active~checked%2Citems~checked&title= liberalism%20 %20Britannica%20Online%20Encyclopedia Liberalism in the Online Brittanica Encyclopedia. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/ ‘Liberalism’ in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Life Course Approaches R. Fincher, University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Geography of the Lifeworld The interconnected lived experiences of individuals, over long time periods in particular locales. The everyday activities of the resting or moving body are a particular focus, along with the notion of ‘dwelling’ – the idea that one makes one’s life in a place with reference to the history of that place and the rhythms of its environment. Intergenerational Geography The transitions people make between their own life course phases, and/or the interactions between people in different life course phases or generations. The geographic element is in the manner in which these transitions and interactions are shaped by experiences of place or space. Life Course The concept of a life as an enactment of certain phases one after the other but always with blurred temporal boundaries. The phases or stages through which people pass are defined and given meaning by social events in the time and place of relevance. Geographies of the life course always emphasize the spatial or place-based situatedness of the life course stages. Life Cycle The concept of a life as a series of stages defined socially, but with an emphasis on the biological or age-related nature of the stages. Family-forming stages of the life cycle might be studied, or stages marked by reaching retirement age. Because birth and death mark the beginning and end of the life cycle, stages in between may be seem as developments toward an endpoint in a way that is more marked than in other concepts of lives. The New Social Studies of Childhood The study of how children actively negotiate their lives in different contexts, thus creating their childhoods rather than these being imposed upon them.
Life course approaches in human geography take the view that lives are experienced by people in stages, and in particular that lived experiences are influenced strongly by people’s presence in certain locations, environments, places, or spaces. Research in this tradition presents the realities of people’s lives in line with these expectations of life stages and environmental situatedness, whether the people whose lives are described make such claims, or not. Life course approaches demonstrate as well how stage of life is a social and spatial construct, something created in social environments by institutions, traditions,
and the general expectations of families and com munities, and which we as people living a life course can come to take for granted. In its emphasis on how spatial and environmental contexts influence people’s lives directly and precisely, and the attention paid to describing this empirically, geographic work on the life course differs from research on life stage processes and contexts in other disciplines, which do not have this same contextual emphasis. Per haps like other disciplines, though, in contemporary human geography there is not a large focus on studying lives in their entirety. Rather, in geographic approaches to the study of lives situated in times and places, attention is paid by researchers primarily to particular life stages (like youth, childhood, and older adulthood). In addition, in many areas of human geographic work there are assumptions made about life stages rather than those life stages themselves being the principal focus of the analysis. What can we think of as the origin of life course studies in human geography? Who began analytically to situate lives, whole lives made up of stages and recog nizable twists and turns, in times and places? The be ginnings of this conscious focus in human geography may be found in the 1970s when phenomenological geography of the lifeworld began to explore in detail the lived ex periences of individuals over time in particular locales. In the work of David Seamon and Graham Rowles, though there was a strong focus on describing the everyday ac tivities of the resting or moving body grounded in par ticular spaces and routines, two other matters of importance were introduced. One was the notion of ‘dwelling’ – the idea that one makes one’s life in a place with reference to the history of that place and the rhythms of its environment. The other was the finding that memory, particularly in older people, links lives over lifetimes to places. Both these matters refer to the life courses of people, individually or grouped, and introduce the notion of people’s whole lives as being somehow coherent when one conceptualizes their placement in time and space. Geographical research on the life course also had its beginnings in the development of time geography in the 1970s, to which the work of the Swedish geographer Torsten Ha¨gerstrand made considerable contributions. Interested in the life biographies possible for individuals in certain local environments, in which facilities were of course timetabled to be accessible only at certain times (e.g., during business hours), research in this tradition
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analyzed the time budgets of different individuals and groups of people, showing in this way their life paths in time and space. Carlstein, Parkes, and Thrift edited a three volume collection of essays about time geography, in which volume 2 contains useful accounts of the Swedish work. Like phenomenological geography, how ever, time geography looked less at whole lives, and more at daily lives or shorter sections of lives Both phenom enological geography of the lifeworld and time–space geography were developed as a critical response to geographic research of the time on environmental per ception and cognition. In turn, upon (or in reaction to) these twin pillars of intellectual innovation in human geography in the 1970s, feminist geographers and those applying new forms of social theory in the discipline have built their analyses of lives and life courses.
Conceptual Distinctions Two conceptual distinctions allow us to single out the geographic pursuit of life courses. First, how does life course differ from the other terms by which the periods of people’s lives have been described in social science, such as life cycle, life span, and life history? Being clear about what these various terms mean, and how they have been used, helps define the approach generally being followed to produce geographies of the life course today. Second, if life course approaches have been used more frequently in other disciplines than geography, what has geography’s precise contribution to understanding the life course been? The different terms used in social science (including human geography) about lives offer a variety of ways of seeing the relationship of the individuals living their lives, to their contexts. Life course, our main concern, sees a life as an enactment of certain phases one after the other but always with blurred boundaries, in which the phases are defined and given meaning by social events in the time and place of relevance. There is no assumption here that every individual or particular group, even in one time and place, will experience the important events of that time and place in exactly the same way, and shape or time their actions identically. Nevertheless, general claims can be made from observations of many lives in certain contexts, so that overall a particular interpretation of life stages is given indicating that most people ex perience things that way. So – lives, in the life course approach, are produced in a particular time and space, and guided by particular events. They are socially (and, especially in geography, locationally) defined and rooted. Often, research has taken a major event as its starting point – like a World War – and examined the way that event and its social aftermath have appeared in the lives of people involved in that event.
Life cycle, a different term, has more explicit bio logical roots. (The term life span is the same.) Though still posing lives as a series of stages defined socially, life cycles are more explicitly age related, and there is a beginning with birth and an end with death to mark the cycle. Much emphasis is placed on the age related question of biological reproduction, with men’s and women’s life cycles differentially staged with reference to this. (Of course reproduction and the family are important matters for life course analyses as well, but are not defined so precisely with respect to age and the biology of aging.) In addition, policies like the age of retirement, or the age at which voting or driving a car are permitted to occur, are predicated on a view of the life cycle that sees maturity as occurring at a certain age, or (in the case of retirement) the end of one’s useful working life as occurring at a certain age. Of course these age related judgments are assumptions based on the average situation across a large group; any one individual may differ markedly from this average. Life history is yet another term from which to sep arate life course and life cycle. It is the biography of an individual. A life history is the property of an individual, and cannot be generalized to a population. It is evidence collected or reported about a life that might make ref erence to biological, historical, and place based events and stages. It could, however, take either a life cycle or a life course approach. The concept of the life course is distinct from those of life cycle (or life span) and life history. But it is fair to say that echoes of all three concepts appear in most uses of any one of them. Different disciplines and theoretical perspectives have been associated with varied uses of these three terms about the study of lives. Developments in historical demography have advanced through work on the life histories of ordinary people in specific times and places. Developmental psychology, also, has used life histories to associate maturation stages more sensitively with aging. Research in the sociology of aging has dem onstrated the various ways that advancing through life stages, thus forming a life course, occurs in the context of different opportunities being presented and taken up or foregone. In important reviews, such as that by the sociologists Giele and Elder, of the social scientific use of the concept of life course, which has grown since the 1980s, the discipline of geography is rarely mentioned as a major contributor. Though the importance of lives being situated in various ‘times and places’ is often stressed, environments, places, and spaces are often subsumed in other disciplinary accounts as part of a person’s or group’s history. Other disciplines do not have the commitment to detailed investigation of environ ments or places as contributors to life courses, in the way that human geography does.
Life Course Approaches
Contributions of Contemporary Geography on Life Courses The contributions of contemporary geography to re search on the life course come from its attention to the embeddedness of lives in sociospatial as well as temporal settings. How this embeddedness actually plays out, for people in places, is its focus. As mentioned already, rarely do we see in contemporary geographic work an account of the entirety of lives. Rather, certain segments of lives – such as childhood, adolescence, retirement – are singled out for analysis of their particular situatedness in a place– time. Advocates of longitudinal studies of whole lives would probably term contemporary studies of parts of lives cross sectional, seeing these studies as taking a temporal snapshot rather than considering the whole phenomenon of a life. But life histories, recounted as stories in an analysis to ground it in time as well as space, do also often give a longer perspective. This occurs particularly in contemporary geographic research on the contexts of women’s adulthoods and their caring re sponsibilities, in geographies of children and childhood, and in the recognition that our public institutions make assumptions about life course stages that may not be accurate, socially or spatially. These are three areas of human geography in which a life course approach is being pursued successfully, as the following comments will attest. In their pioneering collection from the 1990s Full Circle : Geographies of Women over the Life Course, Cindi Katz and Janice Monk record their conscious attempt to consider women’s whole lives, not only across the full time span of those lives but also in terms of the range of experiences and activities that interact to form those lives. Their book seeks to include links between women’s work of production and reproduction in a range of countries from different parts of the world of varying degrees of wealth. ‘‘This attempt to craft the fullness of lives in their precise locations,’’ say Katz and Monk, ‘‘is opening up new ground for human geography.’’ For their review of human geography to that time had found it failing to consider more than specific periods in women’s lives (for example, ignoring the links between women’s adolescence, middle years, and older age but rather fo cusing on the years of early adulthood). They had also found human geographies of women’s lives concentrating disproportionately on matters like employment possi bilities for women in Western countries (often cities). Some of that lack of attention to the life course, as a set of linked and situated stages in life made up of interactions between a range of activities, is now being remedied, as we will see. But it is important to note that the body of work on women’s adulthoods of caring along with paid work among myriad other responsibilities, even if it only implicitly references the life course as a
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conceptual basis, has been profoundly important in shedding light on the spatialities of this life course stage, and sometimes the transitions to and from that stage. It has revealed as well the variations in the allocations of caring tasks between families in different times and places. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Katz and Monk’s book, in which the tasks of women working for an economic livelihood ensuring social reproduction are situated both in numerous locations (in frontier farming areas of Colombia, in the rural Caribbean, as well as in small towns and major cities of the indus trialized West) and in relation to transitions to and from other life stages. It is interesting to ponder why it is that feminist geography, or geographies concentrating on the lives of women, are the places in our discipline in which matters of life course have appeared most frequently. Perhaps this is because of the manner in which the life cycle echoes through all life course research – with the stress of the life cycle concept on age related stages in life and their particular biological implications for childbearing and the production of families. Women’s lives in many set tings remain affiliated in policy and public expectations with childbearing and rearing, even if this is not the reality of every young adult woman’s life. Men’s lives do not seem to be studied from this point of view, in human geography. Another area of recent geographic writing on the life course has been within what has been termed, by human geographers like Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine, the new social studies of childhood. Geographers partici pating in this intellectual endeavor to articulate how children actively negotiate their lives in different con texts, thus creating their childhoods rather than these being imposed upon them, are having their concepts of spatiality taken up in the work of a range of other social scientists. Drawing on the accounts of Holloway and Valentine, it is evident how geographic understandings of the importance of place in the creation of children’s lives may be illustrated, for example, by Katz’s comparison of childhoods in the environments of rural Sudan with those of New York City, in which in some ways the former is freer for play than the latter. At a different scale, the situatedness of children’s activities may be examined through studying children’s use and production of everyday spaces, for example, in streets, homes, and schools, where limits and possibilities are negotiated daily by children. In addition, prominent spatial dis courses in a locality, for example, statements made by a city council to encourage young people to use certain facilities or spaces, may create opportunities which pre viously had been unimaginable. In her important book about homeless youth in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, Susan Ruddick describes just such a situation, in which service providers managed to make homeless youth an
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Life Course Approaches
accepted presence in that municipality. As do Holloway and Valentine, it is important to acknowledge the work by geographers over several decades on children’s spatial cognition and perception, on which the new (more sociological than psychological) social studies of child hood build. Moving to the societal rather than the individual scale, changing norms about youth and aging, even childhood, are basic to an evolving set of capitalist re lations. Ruddick has shown how the mantle of desirable youthfulness has been given, by institutions of marketing and public policy, to certain workforce situations and practices such as secondary labor market status and the need for lifelong learning and reskilling. This introduces the third contribution of human geography to life course studies – the identification of institutional assumptions about life courses, that are then able to be challenged if this is necessary. Often implicitly or without fanfare, assumptions about the appropriate life course that individuals should follow guide the policies and institutional practices of govern ments, firms, and other organizations. This affects the opportunities and lives of individuals, groups, and places. Continuing to think of childhoods, the absence of chil dren’s voices from urban planning has been remarked upon, in research emerging around the world (following a recent United Nations report) on child friendly cities. As already noted, Susan Ruddick has pointed out the con temporary pervasiveness of views of the desirability of youthfulness in labor forces, and the economic rationale of this in an expanding capitalism. In another vein, looking at the institutions and in stitutional actors shaping the physical form of major cities, reference should be made to a pathbreaking 1970s study of great relevance to urban geographers: Everything in Its Place : Social Order and Land Use in America by the urban anthropologist Constance Perin. Perin found in the 1970s that urban planners, real estate agents, and developers viewed the suburbs and the inner cities of America as appropriate residential sites for people of particular life cycle stages. These city building pro fessionals created housing and community services in urban locations according to such views. One sees similar assumptions at work in the marketing and building of luxury, inner city, and high rise apartments in major Western cities to this day. Fincher has written on this topic recently. In the 1990s, urban geographers analyzed the creation of residential settings exclusively for older residents in a number of American muni cipalities, and the ethics and consequences of this. A particular contribution has been made, then, by geog raphers examining the institutions that help shape the physical and social features of particular places, exposing the assumptions about appropriate life courses that these institutions put into practice.
Issues for Continued Attention What issues can be signaled as requiring further atten tion, in extending geographies of the life course? On the one hand, life course stage and life course transitions have generally been neglected in the studies of the social construction of difference pursued in human geography. Life course characteristics have often been assumed as present, but left relatively unexamined, in studies made of the spatialities of gender, ethnicity, and class. The call made by Katz and Monk in the early 1990s to focus on life courses, in their case the life courses of women, has not really been heeded, other than implicitly, in exam inations of difference. But on the other hand, there are two particular issues, within work that does focus on the conceptualization of age and life related stages and timing, that deserve to be mentioned here. One has been eloquently argued by Vanderbeck, in a call for what he terms intergenerational geographies. Quite validly, Vanderbeck claims that age related re search in geography has tended to focus on particular age groups, usually the young or the old (though research on the group of adult women combining paid work and caring, on whom considerable focus by feminist geog raphers has been made, should be added). The transitions between life stages, much studied in the life course ap proaches used in other disciplines, have been less a concern to geographers. What this means is two things, says Vanderbeck: first, that intergenerational activity is not studied, and second, that societies and places are emerging in which generations, and age groups, are separated in much of their acti